Blood Vortex

by Don Pendleton

  Alert to any sign of movement up ahead, the colonel edged past his point man, knelt and turned the body over far enough to glimpse its ruined face.

  The dead eye of Captain Zavala stared through him, the corpse’s mouth agape and leaking crimson, likely from a punctured lung.

  And now Pérez saw other bodies scattered on the pathway, cut down fleeing from a fight they’d realized could not be won.

  Cowards! If they were truly men, Pérez expected that they should have stood their ground, fighting and dying, rather than retreat in disarray.

  With any luck at all, their killers might still be nearby, still reachable before they slipped away into the night.

  “Come on!” he snapped at his remaining troops. “Their deaths must be avenged, the honor of SEBIN upheld!”

  And at that moment, automatic rifles blazed away at him, driving the colonel facedown into the grass, praying to long-forgotten deities for rescue from his enemies.

  West Wing

  Boko Haram members Namadi Giwa and Dele Okonji were advancing on the northwest parking lot, in search of any vehicle that could facilitate their exit from Las Palmas, when their plan went suddenly, horrifically, awry.

  First, there were raucous sounds of battle from the general direction of the parking lot, prompting the two jihadist militants to stop and reassess their chosen course of action. By the time they’d whispered back and forth, deciding they had no recourse except finding a car for their escape, the gunfire had subsided and they forged ahead, clutching the weapons furnished to them by their erstwhile military guards.

  “Remember, Dele,” Giwa cautioned, “from now on until we leave this cursed country, we can trust no one besides each other.”

  “I have no doubt,” Okonji answered.

  They moved on together, cautiously, watching and listening for any sign of an impending ambush, then stopped short a second time when they beheld a group of soldiers from SEBIN, headed in the same direction but some thirty yards ahead of them.

  Sidestepping into a recessed stairwell, Okonji asked Giwa, “Should we turn back now?”

  “No,” Giwa replied. “There are no other vehicles we know of, other than the ones ahead. If they pass on, we can obtain one when they’re gone.”

  “And otherwise?” Okonji prodded him.

  “Then we must take them by surprise, eliminate them, take their weapons and proceed as planned.”

  Dele Okonji clearly was not thrilled by the prospect of ambushing a dozen soldiers armed with automatic weapons, when he and Giwa had only pistols on their side. Still, he raised no objection, likely understanding that surrender was no option and they could not show their faces in Nigeria again as spineless traitors to their cause. His head bobbed in a grudging nod, and Giwa craned his neck to watch the soldiers move out of sight, proceeding to the parking lot that was attracting people as a magnet draws iron filings from the soil.

  “A little farther then,” Giwa whispered, “and we shall know when—”

  Before he could finish what he’d planned to say—it is time—more gunfire popped and crackled up ahead, the SEBIN troops shouting in Spanish and returning fire from gunmen the Boko Haram terrorists had yet to see.

  “What now?” Okonji queried, trying to suppress a tremor in his voice.

  “While they’re distracted,” Giwa answered, “take advantage of it. Follow me, Dele!”

  * * *

  Geller ripped a burst of 5.56 mm rounds into the first soldiers she saw advancing toward the ambush site she’d staked out with Cooper, gutting one of them and punching him into a fetal curl, tagging the other with a shoulder wound as he retreated, pitching him headlong into a bed of cultivated ferns.

  Beside her, to her left, the American cut loose with his Steyr AUG and dropped two of the Venezuelan riflemen, their weapons clattering onto the pavement from their twitching, dying hands. By then, the other SEBIN troops were firing back with everything they had, assault rifles and submachine guns laying down cover for the squad’s precipitate retreat.

  And then something entirely unexpected happened. At the rear of the disorderly SEBIN column, at least two pistols opened up in rapid fire, unloading on Geller’s enemies and forcing them to scurry every which way as they ran for cover in the cross fire.

  Knowing that she had no other allies at Las Palmas, other than Cooper, she concluded that the rearguard shooters had to be members of one terrorist legation or another, she resolved that anyone who stood before her—never mind his garb, language or armament—had to be an enemy.

  And none of them was fit to live.

  Off to her left, Cooper whispered, “Grenade!” Geller ducked as he was winding up his pitch and did not watch the olive-green ovoid as it was airborne, dropping off its safety lever in midair, before it fell among the scrambling troops.

  Two seconds later, give or take, a blast ripped through the SEBIN squad and Geller heard its shrapnel whickering through space, some of the fragments slapping into flesh, while others scored the stems of decorative palms, gouged divots in the nearby walls or shattered windows on impact.

  She came up firing, cursed in Hebrew when her M4A1 carbine’s magazine ran dry and switched it out as fast as she could manage with bullets swarming around her, humming in the air like angry hornets. Any second now, one of those rounds might find her, take her down. And there was nothing she could do about it but attempt to slaughter everyone she saw before one of them had a chance to do the same for her.

  * * *

  Bolan watched as the blast from his M26 grenade tore through the SEBIN ranks, then came on hard and fast behind it, milking short bursts from his Steyr AUG.

  Each time he squeezed the rifle’s trigger, bodies dropped or staggered out of frame from his Swarovski telescopic sight, wounded and limping into cover if it could be found. He tracked some, knocked them down, let others go in preference to marking a new target for his 5.56 mm NATO rounds.

  And in the middle of it all, with soldiers reeling, dropping, bleeding out and dying, two strangers appeared, clearly not part of the SEBIN squad that had wandered into Bolan’s waiting trap. Both men were black and carried pistols, casually dressed, but wearing colorful aso oke hats resembling soft fezzes made of cotton, velvet or damask, popular throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

  The gunmen came on brazenly through ranks of Venezuelan soldiers, firing randomly to left and right, clearing a path for themselves toward the parking lot-turned-junkyard for disabled rides. Some of the SEBIN men were firing back at them, but they seemed too rattled by the unexpected gunplay from behind them to score any hits.

  No problem.

  Bolan framed the taller of the Africans with his Swarovski reticle and fired three rounds from fifty feet. One struck his target in the upper chest and stopped his forward progress, while a second drilled his throat below the Adam’s apple and his third shattered the gunner’s left cheek, eyeball exploding from its socket into flight.

  And that left one.

  The second African looked panicked now but wasn’t letting that delay his progress. What did slow him down was one SEBIN soldier firing a round into his hip, which staggered him and almost dropped him, but against all odds, the guy kept lurching forward.

  Bolan put a stop to that with two quick 5.56 mm rounds to center mass that punched him over backward, landing on his bloodied backside as he died. Then the Executioner swiveled to his right and nailed the soldier that had shot him first.

  Another spray of crimson mist, and there was one less player on the board.

  Maybe half a dozen left alive and fit for battle. And when they were gone...?

  Then it would be time to go hunting for the rest.

  * * *

  Colonel Pérez had seen enough. He’d watched as his soldiers were massacred, had been wounded himself—although the slug had only grazed one arm—and he was done with all of it. He’d had a c
hange of heart. He had no intention of going down fighting, and he planned to try to avoid that shallow grave that most likely awaited his survival of this debacle.

  If he could find a way, if it was not too late for him, Pérez was getting out by any means available.

  No matter if it meant a hike through rugged woodlands with no special goal in mind, that would suffice. If he could reach a settlement close to Las Palmas, steal a car and drive until he reached a border crossing, Pérez thought that his credentials might secure safe passage to Colombia. Beyond that, who could say?

  The timing would be tight, requiring him to outrun reinforcements from Caracas who might spread the word of his desertion, brand him as a traitor to his president, and require police to mount a search for him.

  But first things first. If he could not escape from the resort, all other problems on his list were rendered academic and meant nothing after all.

  The time to move was now, when any more delays were perilous.

  The colonel began by crawling on his hands and knees, his Orinoco submachine gun clenched beneath one arm. He hoped to reach the parking lot and try its vehicles first thing if he could manage that, before he set off on a jungle trek that would take hours at the very least, and maybe days. Without a compass or a GPS, he knew that getting lost was a real possibility, and one that he could ill afford.

  A few more yards, creeping along the north wing’s outer wall, and he could almost smell the asphalt now, with something else intruding on his nostrils.

  Gun smoke and the sharp, metallic tang of blood.

  When he was close enough to risk rising and running for the lined-up vehicles, Pérez lurched to his feet and lumbered forward, halting at the curb when he discovered that the cars were all disabled, slumped with two flat tires apiece.

  “You missed your chance,” a voice said from behind him, forcing him to turn.

  In fact, a pair of enemies stood facing him, a man and woman, both with automatic rifles leveled at his chest. Colonel Pérez saw death on both their faces, wondering if he could bring down one of them at least, before the other finished him.

  “You did all this?” he asked, sincerely curious.

  “We couldn’t let your plan go through,” the woman said.

  “Not my plan, señorita,” he replied. “Give credit where it’s due, at least.”

  “You mean El Presidente,” the man said.

  “Who else? He speaks for Venezuela and the rest of us obey.”

  “You should have reconsidered that,” the man suggested.

  “Now you tell me,” Pérez replied.

  He was laughing as he raised his submachine gun, groping for its trigger, nowhere close to reaching it, when the assault rifles spoke out in unison and he was falling backward, backward, into darkness everlasting.

  * * *

  Somewhere behind him, in the distance, Bolan heard more weapons firing as the summit meeting’s final delegates clashed with the soldiers that were formerly their bodyguards. In front of him, leaking blood onto the parking lot he’d died to reach, another corpse was making the transition from a normal 98.6 degrees to match the fading warmth of its surroundings.

  “There is still a fight to finish,” Geller said, dropping her carbine’s empty magazine, replacing it with a fresh one.

  “I wonder,” Bolan said.

  “Explain.”

  “You hear what’s going on,” he said. “It ends one of two ways. Either SEBIN wipes out any remaining evidence of what went on here, or a handful of the terrorists break out and try to reach the border on their own, while being hunted all the way.”

  “And so?”

  “Maybe we leave them to each other,” he suggested. “Let them finish wiping up and get the hell away from here.”

  “Leaving the job unfinished?” Coming back to that theme in her mind.

  He shrugged, feeling a bit surprised to find he was indifferent. “One way it goes, the president’s people finish mopping up the terrorists, either right here, or while they’re scrambling around for some way to get out of Venezuela. If a single one of them escapes, that means a breach in his security and bad news coming down the road, as soon as someone blows the whistle.”

  “And the second way?” she asked.

  “If SEBIN keeps the lid on here, they’ve still got trouble. When the president sees how badly this went off the rails, he has to figure someone in the ranks will have it in for him, planning another coup like South America is famous for. He’ll want a new broom cleaning house, and in the process, he’ll make enemies. Fact is, they’ll need him gone, in order to survive.”

  “And with a push from one or both of our respective governments...”

  “You’ve got it,” Bolan told her. “But that isn’t my department.”

  “So, you’re leaving now? Right now?”

  “Hoping to beat the rush,” he said. “You need a ride, or what?”

  She thought about it for another moment, listened to the gunfire already beginning to lose steam, and said, “I guess I do, at that.”

  Epilogue

  Simón Bolívar International Airport, Caracas

  Bolan half expected extra security swarming the concourse but found none in place. On balance, he supposed that made good sense.

  Troops would have been diverted to Las Palmas first, of course. And, he supposed, the Venezuelan president’s team would want to keep the lid on any breaking news until things were handled from the boondocks upward to the capital, first cleaning up the remnants of the government’s failure in Aragua State, then making sure there were no stragglers in the wind and trying to escape.

  Bolan had dropped off his vehicle and hardware with Zach Thomas, the same FBI agent who’d set him up with his equipment on arrival. They’d exchanged a parting handshake and a few words. A nondescript sedan with diplomatic plates dropped Bolan at the airport’s terminal for international departures and wheeled off again on other pressing business, the Bureau’s brief visitor presumably forgotten.

  What remained of his assignment in the outfit’s local files or stateside in the vaults at Langley? Purging that would be a job for Stony Man, and Bolan doubted that he’d ever hear of it again—at least, if all went well.

  Adira Geller found him in Departures, on the far side of the airport’s passport desk and passenger screening. Bolan almost had to smile at that, imagining the propaganda generated about slow lines helping weed out terrorists and other criminals.

  “All set?” he asked her when they found a pair of neutral seats midway between his airline’s gate, departing for someplace in Texas, and the one where she would board Air France for transit home the long way, via Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport. “No hitches?”

  “None so far,” she granted. “Unless someone turns up as I’m boarding, I suppose.”

  “Smart money says we’re good.”

  “And where to next for you?” she asked and then caught herself and smiled. “Forget that question, will you?”

  “What question?”

  “All right, then.”

  Both of them were silent for a moment before she said, “If you are ever in my neighborhood...”

  “Drop in and have a drink or three?” he teased.

  “I don’t advise that, obviously,” she replied. “I was about to say, ‘Be careful. Trust no one.’”

  “Now, that’s more like it.”

  “Will you tell your people everything?”

  “I almost always do,” Bolan told her.

  “Almost.”

  “Well...”

  “I know how that is, all too well.”

  A disembodied robotic voice, approximately female, called first boarding for Geller’s flight.

  They stood together and shook hands like casual acquaintances who’d met by chance after a period of years apart. Her part
ing smile was almost warm.

  Almost.

  “Until that day,” she said.

  “Until that day,” he echoed, and released her hand.

  Bolan watched her recede into the milling crowd, saw no one tailing her or paying her undue attention in the crush of passengers. He had another thirty minutes until his own departure, if the airline was on time and nothing else went wrong. Just time enough to hit a nearby bookshop and acquire something to read in flight.

  He thought it might be nice to try somebody else’s life for size today, if only for a little while.

  At home, his War Everlasting was waiting, and he knew the next call he received from Stony Man was likely in the works already.

  World without end, right.

  Until somebody got it right at last or dropped the ball and smashed it all to bits.

  * * *

  Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Michael Newton for his contribution to this work.

  ISBN-13: 9781488076213

  Blood Vortex

  Copyright © 2020 by Harlequin Books S.A.

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