Devil's Mark

“Good man,” Bolan said. “I’m going to grenade them as they come in range. I want everyone else to hold fire except Fausto. Fausto, you just do what comes natural whenever you feel it.”

The old man took an ancient canvas bandolier full of clips off the back of his chair and walked to one of the slit windows. He shoved a handful of sunflower seeds into his mouth and began cracking seeds and spitting shells as he peered toward the mouth of the canyon. Bolan got the distinct impression this wasn’t the first time Fausto had defended Fort Goat.

“Bree, how about being my grenade wench?”

Smiley grinned, and despite the tan skin and black hair he could see the Irish smiling in her eyes. “I’m your girl!”

Bolan gave her the basic rundown, and Smiley started loading clips and clicking grenades on muzzles. Wang and Villaluz began emptying gear bags, laying spare clips, extra pistols and hand grenades on the table. Villaluz glanced down at Gomez and took the precaution of binding his ankles together. The gangster shuddered on the adobe floor. “La Bestia…La Bestia…he comes…for us all…”

“Shut him up,” Bolan ordered.

Gomez earned himself a strip of duct tape across the mouth. He blew snot over his gag and shook.

Villaluz shot Bolan a look. “This is not right.”

“No.” Bolan’s skin was crawling as it had the other night on the streets of Tijuana before the attack. “No, it’s not.” He stepped to the door with a grenade-mounted rifle in hand. “I’m going to step outside. I’ll need a bucket brigade. Keep them coming.”

Bolan stepped out of the pueblo and the Mexican sun hit him like a hammer. He gazed out at the canyon mouth. It was around 1:00 p.m., and heat baked everything. The salt flats in the distance were one vast kiln of shimmering mirages, a promise of the water that turned the plains into a lake in the good years. Bolan glanced at the enemy’s trajectory as they came in. The road was defensive, as well. It had wrecked the BMW, and it turned and twisted away from the main track a hundred yards from the entrance to the canyon. It would funnel the enemy straight in. Bolan started to suspect this little box canyon had fought off Aztecs, conquistadors and cowboys as well as federales and drug lords in its time.

Bolan lifted his binoculars. He made it eight vehicles, SUVs of various makes, 4x4s and all either black, dark blue or dark green with tinted windows. They were bee-lining for the hidden box canyon like the outriders of the apocalypse.

The soldier eyed the canyon mouth once more. “Fire at will, Fausto!”

“Sí, señor! I wait for the good shot! As you!”

Bolan’s heart sank at the sound of a turboprop engine somewhere out above the salt flats. “Bree! Take this!” Bolan tossed his weapon back.

“Fausto! Give me your gun!”

Smiley caught the grenade-loaded assault rifle. Fausto made an unhappy noise, but the Garand sailed out of the slit window like a harpoon at Bolan. He caught it and strode out to the goat corral. A red-and-white Beechcraft Twin Bonanza broke the canyon rim and soared over to take a good look at the pueblo. Bolan snapped the rifle to his shoulder, and the ancient weapon bucked in his hands as he tracked and fired. The Bonanza dived. The Garand spoke five more times, then pinged as it racked open on empty and spit out the empty 8-round clip. The aircraft sailed out of sight over the mountain rim.

Bolan tossed the empty Garand back behind him. “Feed me!” He caught the grenade-mounted assault rifle that came looping over his shoulder.

“Well, that was effective,” Smiley commented.

“The plane is their spotter, and all they spotted was one man with a rifle, and I want them to come in a rush.”

“Oh.”

Chickens squawked and scattered as he took over the shade of the low adobe wall. Vehicles filled the mouth of the box canyon. The lead was a black Hummer H3T pickup that filled the single lane dirt path. The other seven 4x4s bounced and bucked like broncos over the bumps and ruts to either side. Fausto’s rifle began cracking in slow, aimed semiauto fire. The Hummer slowed and stopped as the other seven vehicles surged on. No gunmen hung out the windows or the sunroofs. They came on as if they intended to ram the pueblo. Bolan had scoped the approach with the eyes of a trained sniper. A tumbleweed beyond Wang’s beleaguered BMW was Bolan’s marker. He waited for the enemy to reach the magic sixty-meter mark. A gunmetal Chevy Suburban was first across the finish line.

Bolan sent him the big payoff straight from the People’s Republic of China with love.

The stubby assault rifle slammed against Bolan’s shoulder as the 70 mm rifle grenade spigotted off the muzzle and spiraled in straight and true. The elongated green football of the warhead punched through the Suburban’s windshield and turned its interior into a blast furnace. Bolan flicked his selector switch to full-auto as he swept his assault weapon onto a Toyota Landcruiser and burned all thirty rounds from the magazine into the windshield. It cracked and raddled but didn’t break. Bolan tossed the smoking, empty weapon behind him as the Suburban smoldered and died.

“Feed me!”

Bolan didn’t even have to look back. Another grenade-mounted assault rifle fell into his hands as if he was running a timing pattern. He put his front sight on the Landcruiser and squeezed the trigger. The Toyota went up like a torch as shrapnel tore open its gas tank and superheated gas and molten metal detonated it. The RAV4 next to it went up on two wheels from the blast. Bolan burned his mag into the windshield. The RAV wasn’t armored, and the bullets swarmed through the glass. The driver died and the RAV rolled ugly. Bolan tossed his exhausted weapon back.

“Feed me!”

The bucket brigade sent another grenaded weapon into the Executioner’s arms. He aimed and fired, and a Ford Bronco burst apart like a beer can full of firecrackers. He put thirty rounds into a Lincoln Navigator, but it came on with a total disregard for life and limb.

“Feed me!”

Bolan caught his next weapon and cracked the Navigator open like an egg. There were only two vehicles left, but they were uncomfortably close. A Porsche Cayenne wasn’t a typical suicide sled, but the Porsche came on with its gears grinding and its engine snarling like a panther. Bolan’s rifle brutally bucked against his shoulder as it slammed its two-pound payload airborne. The Porsche managed to crumple, expand and burst into flames all at the same time. Bolan dropped to a knee as flaming Porsche parts peppered the pueblo.

“Feed m—” Bolan rose as an ancient Ford F-150 came on like the Devil himself was on its heels. “Smiley! J.W.! Hammer him!” The old Ford’s straight eight engine roared like a dinosaur, and it thundered in at ramming speed. Bolan emptied his clip into it.

Rifle grenades thudded right and left. The Ford went sky-high. Bolan dropped prone. The low adobe wall cracked and spit orange dust as something very heavy with a lot of pepper behind it crashed against it. A smoking steel bumper scythed overhead and slammed into the pueblo. Bolan waited as bits of truck rained down and popped up as the last of the scrap metal clattered to the ground. “Feed me.”

Bolan caught a rifle and gazed across the sea of burning hulks. Gravel crunched behind him as the rest of the team emerged. The box canyon was an automotive graveyard in which most of the occupants had unwillingly been cremated. Tortured metal popped and ticked. The F-150’s fiery demise had happened at nearly point-blank range, and it had liberally sprayed Wang’s BMW with burning gasoline and flying auto parts. The luxury sedan was just starting to burn in earnest. Only the RAV-4 wasn’t burning, but it lay on its back with a broken spine. The windshield was gone, and the two bullet-riddled passengers in front hung motionless and broken by their seatbelts.

Fausto clapped Bolan on the shoulder and cackled happily. The ancient redoubt of his ancestors had survived another siege. “¡Bueno!”

Wang stared inconsolably at his burning BMW. “Fuck.”

Shell-shocked goats and chickens staggered about, making odd noises.

Smiley and Villaluz fanned out on either side of Bolan, their rifles at the ready.

Bolan eyes went beyond the smoldering SUVs and coolly observed the command vehicle. The Hummer H3T held position near the mouth of the canyon, its engine running, black paint gleaming. The tinted windshield stared at Bolan in opaque hostility. “What’s the max range on these bad boys, J.W.?”

“Like I said, maximum effective range is seventy-five meters,” Wang said. “They’ll go a might farther but, it’s all Kentucky windage after that.”

“Mmm.” Bolan nodded. He snapped up his weapon, took a moment to raise his sight about a foot over the top of the Hummer and fired. The 70 mm munition spiraled off across the canyon. It fell about fifteen meters short and another ten wide. Red desert dust vomited upward in a column as it detonated, and shrapnel sparkled off the Hummer’s sides. The staring match continued. The range was too long for rifle grenades, but for a rifle it was spitting distance. Bolan peered down his sights. “Let him have it.”

The rifle rattled as the Executioner held down the trigger. Smiley, Wang and Villaluz added their weight of shot on full-auto, as well. Fausto’s big rifle boomed as he joined the fusillade. The Hummer suddenly looked as if it were in a wind-tunnel full of fireflies. Sparks streaked off the grille and hood and glass chips erupted in geysers from the windshield. But the Hummer just wasn’t affected by the Chinese assault rifle rounds. Fausto’s big bullets didn’t seem to bother it much either. The big, black 4x4 was armored up well beyond normal levels of executive protection.

Everyone’s rifle racked open on empty nearly at the same time.

Bolan slapped a fresh magazine into his weapon. The dark Hummer just sat there observing them with what seemed to be impassive evil.

Smiley shook her head as she reloaded. “Whoever these guys are, they’re really starting to creep me out.”

“Feed me,” Bolan said. Smiley went to the doorway and scooped one of the two remaining grenade-mounted weapons. Bolan nodded and took it. “Go check on Balthazar. Sit on him, and keep the last grenade for yourself. Nuke anything that gets past me.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going for a walk to see if our friends out there talk, run or let me get close enough to blow them up.”

Bolan nodded at Fausto. “Get back in your window. Cover the canyon mouth and keep an eye on the rims. J.W., Inspector, you’re with me, but fan out wide. If the doors on that truck open up and hardmen come out, I want them in a cross fire.”

Bolan went for a walk.

The rutted, pitted dirt path up to the pueblo was like the yellow brick road as it wove between the burning carcasses of cars that were sending the nasty black smoke of burning oil, upholstery and human flesh a hundred feet into the sky. Blackened bits of metal, glass and rubber littered the canyon floor. The sides of the canyon were littered with boulders and rock falls. Wang and the inspector moved swiftly from cover to cover. Bolan walked straight down the middle toward his impending appointment with his rifle at port arms. At ninety yards he began considering the shot. He could discern nothing through the tinted windshield, but he sure as hell felt himself being scrutinized and the scrutiny was decidedly unfriendly. At eighty yards Bolan’s finger slid onto his trigger. It didn’t matter if the man behind the glass was Satan’s favorite son and his pickup was armored up to endangered diplomat levels. No windshield was going to withstand two pounds of Chinese shaped charge warhead.

And Bolan was getting tired of playing defense.

At eighty-five yards all-terrain tires buzz-sawed into the dust in Reverse, and the Hummer suddenly shot backward the way it had come. Whoever was driving was good. He kept it in Reverse at an engine-burning twenty-five miles per hour and kept it on the path even as it bounced. Bolan watched as the Hummer disappeared in its own dust cloud. “Inspector?”

“¿Sí?”

“Let’s get license plates on any vehicle that’s still legible, then let’s take a look at the people in that flipped over RAV. Photos, fingerprints, anything we can work up real quick. J.W.? Fade back and spell Bree on Balthazar. Send her out. I want her agent’s eye and take on everything we find. Tell Fausto I want to move out of here in half an hour, and tell him I’m hoping he has a plan.”

“You betcha.”

Villaluz came out of cover and began snapping photos of the nearest hulk with his cell phone. Bolan did a lap around the Lincoln doing the same, but he suspected it wouldn’t do much good. He found blackened bodies and black rifles that had been blackened further. He didn’t find any plates and knew they had been removed. It would be hours before the wrecks were safe enough to prowl through, and Bolan didn’t have much hope of finding any VINs inside. Bolan ambled over the RAV and slung his rifle. He drew a pistol and squatted beside the driver’s shattered window. A Mexican man with a head covered with more ink than hair hung in his harness. About ten of Bolan’s rounds had gone through his chest. Bolan pushed back the man’s ear and scowled at the 666 tattooed there.

Villaluz was doing the same on the passenger side. “I have a marked man, amigo.”

“Same here.” Bolan went through his corpse’s pockets but all he found was ammo and enough knives to justify the word fetish. “You know we lit them up like the Fourth of July and they still kept coming.”

“Yes, I noticed.”

Bolan stood and waited for Smiley to bring the small forensics kit they had packed. “You ever seen that kind of zeal here in Mexico?”

“To be honest, no. One hears of such stories, but only during the Mexican Revolution. Men charging the cannons and the Gatling guns.” Villaluz rose up creakily and looked at Bolan over the RAV’s chassis. “But I will tell you, I am not as young as I once was, and like many men my age, more and more I find myself watching the History Channel on cable TV.” Villaluz shrugged. “I swear, like senility, it is unavoidable.”

Bolan let the man talk.

“And one sees many such stories on the History Channel. The kamikazes of the Japanese Air Force. The juramentado, oath takers during the Moro Wars in the Philippines. The assassins of ancient Persia during the Crusades. All with a single trait in common.”

“Fanaticism,” Bolan said. It was something he had run into too many times before.

“Yes, fanatics,” the inspector agreed. “Utterly willing to die in the attempt to kill the enemies of their god or emperor.”

“And our fanatics all bear the mark of the beast.”

“Yes, and I will tell you something else. This is Mexico. We have you yanquis beat on occultism. Santeria, Aztec worship, voodoo, even satanism. I have seen it all. But these cultists are mostly interested in orgies, drugs and playing dress-up. Once in a great while their foolishness gets someone killed. But I tell you, they do not load up into SUVs by the bushel and make suicide assaults on pueblos in the Laguna Salada they have no business knowing about.”

“So what do you think?”

“I do not know what to think. All I can tell you is that this situation is new, anomalous, and, as Señorita Bree said, it is beginning to…creep me out. To be honest? I will tell you. I am scared.”

Bolan regarded Villaluz over the RAV. It took a lot for a man like him to say something like that. The Executioner wasn’t scared. He had seen things far darker than this. But this situation was promising to get darker still, and he was willing to admit to being profoundly troubled. “We have to get Balthazar Gomez to the States.”

“We are in agreement. However we are in a box canyon without transportation.”

“I’m really hoping Fausto has something up his sleeve.”

Villaluz smiled very tiredly. “I could tell you stories about the cornucopia of things Fausto has had up his sleeves.”

“Over beer and shots, in the States, on me.”

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