Devil's Horn

by Don Pendleton

With one hand grasping the frame of the doorway, Bolan bent and pulled the AutoMag out of his belt. Then he looked into the cab.

  There he found Torquemandan. The head cannibal's empty stare looked up at Bolan. Torquemandan's head lolled at an impossible angle to his body. A broken neck, just as the King Rat had said.

  Davis was crumpled up in a heap of misery against the passenger door. He showed Bolan his palms. "P-please. It's all over! Can't you see?"

  Bolan sighted down the AutoMag. "I can see just fine."

  "No-o-o-o! You can't! They forced me! They made me kill those men! You saw them do it! No-o-o-o!"

  The Executioner pulled the trigger. Big Thunder bucked once.

  And Davis died. Just as he had lived. Like shit.

  Now there was just one more thing to do.

  One last house on this trail of horror that needed torching.

  Epilogue

  By midafternoon the next day Bolan and Grimaldi reached the harvested poppy fields. The sentries who had been assigned to guard the reserve supply of raw heroin were greeted by swift and merciless execution. As Grimaldi steered the jeep toward the poppy fields, Bolan opened up with the .50-caliber maneater. About a dozen mercenaries attempted to flee across the barren poppy fields, but their race to outrun Bolan's tracking hellfire was in vain. The Executioner shredded the remaining troops with two HE rounds from the MM-1.

  Then Bolan and Grimaldi set about their final task.

  The cleansing flame.

  It took the better part of two hours, but Bolan and Grimaldi torched the barren fields, the reserve heroin, the prison and, finally, Torquemandan's palace. With flamethrower and whatever gasoline they could scrounge up from the fuel depot and ignite, they turned the valley into an inferno.

  Scorched earth.

  Topping the crest of the hill that had been the site of their capture, Bolan and Grimaldi stood side by side. Silently, they watched the fire blaze across the acres where poppies had flowered and yielded a harvest of death.

  Bolan was tired. A bone-numbing ache threatened to knock him off his feet. He knew Grimaldi was just hanging in there now, too. The pilot was a walking skeleton, who would carry the scars of this grim campaign for the rest of his life. And so would the Executioner.

  Bolan watched as individual conflagrations in the fields mounted and merged into a wall of raging flames.

  Flames that ate into soil that had soaked up so much blood.

  How many had died over the years, here in this hell? Mack Bolan wondered.

  He would never know.

  He was not even sure he wanted to know.

  Sure, once again, they had lopped off a few tentacles of the Hydra.

  But another Torquemandan, another Kam Chek, another Kan Khang, Bolan knew, would rise up to replace the dethroned savages.

  And there were plenty of Ronny Brennans, too.

  Too goddamn many.

  Bolan saw the black thunderheads sweeping across the sky from the west. The flames would die out soon enough, but the storm would douse the fire mountain completely, keep it from spreading beyond this valley.

  Bolan turned and looked at Grimaldi.

  They had both lived through hell. Again. They had survived.

  Bolan read in Grimaldi's punished gaze the same thing he was thinking. He was sure of it. He had known the guy too long not to be able to finger the afterthoughts on a campaign like this.

  There would be other killing fields. Bet on it.

  "Let's go home, Jack," the Executioner said, as the fire roared toward the darkening sky.

  "I'm with you, Striker," came the weary reply.