Savage Rule

In truth, that worried Bolan more, and he could tell it worried Brognola just as much. The new regimes in both Honduras and Mexico posed threats to United States security, or Bolan wouldn’t be making this daring raid on first one, then another national government. But Castillo was the more direct threat, and only the Farm’s understanding of the Orieza-Castillo operational timeline had made the Guatemalan border Bolan’s first strike.

Then, too, there was the fact that just because Orieza was struggling to maintain the nationalized equipment so recently stolen didn’t mean that would always be the case. Technicians capable of understanding what OPP had built here could be hired, for a price. There were plenty of former Soviet Bloc scientists currently on the market in any of several fields related to mining and oil drilling, selling their knowledge to whoever had the cash. Bolan supposed that someday the fallout from the end of the Cold War would finally stop affecting the world counterterrorism landscape, but he really could not begin to imagine when.

He followed a memorized route through the maze of machinery: a right here, a left there, straight through a tunnel of sorts, formed by arching tubes of heavy steel. As Bolan moved deeper into this man-made maze, the sound of the pumping, chugging, churning equipment grew louder. Soon, it was so loud that he wouldn’t be able to hear an enemy coming. The advantage he had, he knew, was that no enemy would be able to hear him, either.

He reached the office complex, some distance from the drill house. From his vantage point behind a large piece of equipment whose purpose he couldn’t guess, he watched the flurry of activity around the small building. Armed men rushed here and there in what appeared to be complete confusion. A Klaxon began to sound from somewhere in the complex, belatedly, but that didn’t alter the disorganized rushing. It seemed the men within were too late to do anything effective about what they probably thought was a full-scale invasion. That was good. That was how a one-man raid of this type was supposed to go.

Bolan let his rifle fall to the end of its sling, drew his Beretta and made sure the suppressor was securely affixed. He braced the weapon with his other hand, curling his fingers around the folding metal foregrip, and flicked the selector to single shot. Then he waited.

It didn’t take more than a couple of seconds for several frantic soldiers to run past his field of fire. He took each of them in turn, his honed, veteran sniper’s reflexes serving him well. Each muffled shot, no louder than hands clapping, was lost in the din of the poorly attended machinery cranking and churning all around him. The soldiers fell like dominoes, one after another, each a clean head shot. A single 147-grain 9-mm hollowpoint bullet sent each man to the beyond before he even knew his life was threatened.

Scratch four more of Orieza’s blue-tagged bullyboys, Bolan thought.

There was no way to know how long to wait, or if there would be more guards, so Bolan simply stepped out across the opening in the piping fields, moving toward the metal door of the office enclosure. He could see as he approached that the door was barred, crudely, with a section of steel strut. It was wedged into elbows of piping that had been equally crudely welded to metal supports on either side of the door. All of it looked as if it had been sectioned from the machinery of the terminal, burned through inexpertly with whatever torch had been used.

The jerry-rigged barrier, lockable only from the outside, gave the Executioner hope that the OPP employees lost in the takeover of the plant might still be alive. After all, if there were no prisoners, there would be no need to lock the offices to keep them inside it. Bolan reached out with his free hand and pulled the spar—a piece of sharp-edged pipe four inches in diameter, he saw once he hefted it—away from the door. He let it fall to the paving slab on which the office building had been set. Verdant plumes of weeds were already pushing up through cracks in the cement.

A guard with an M-16 appeared from the far corner of the building. Pressed against the wall as Bolan was, the angle was bad, and there was no time for a proper sight picture. Bolan extended his arm and triggered the Beretta, almost not looking at the man. It was a reflex, a point shot performed from long familiarity. The hollowpoint bullet took the gunman in the throat. He fell to his knees, gurgling. Bolan stepped back, turned and extended his machine pistol, firing off a suppressed mercy shot that plowed a furrow through the dying man’s brain.

Bolan turned his attention back to the door to the offices, planting the sole of his combat boot against it and kicking it in. He followed the Beretta in, crouched low, moving his gun this way and that, covering each angle.

The hallway leading into the offices was empty, except for quite a bit of litter. He stepped through this, kicking in a flimsy, hollow-core connecting door. This took him into a waiting area with a desk counter that could have been for a receptionist, though it was more likely some sort of coordination area. A large schedule grid on a whiteboard against the wall behind the counter was half-smeared and hopelessly out-of-date.

There was a dead man slumped over the desk.

Judging from the smell and the state of the body, the man had been dead a long time. A pool of dried blood soaked the counter space beneath him and the floor below that. Empty casings littered the floor, and bullet holes pocked the walls. A computer, dead several times over, sat silently in the corner, its monitor and casing full of holes small enough to be made by 5.56-mm NATO, the same rounds Orieza’s men used. Well, that figured.

Bolan’s nose told him further what he didn’t want to know, but he wouldn’t give up without making certain. He found the connecting door, the one leading to the main suite of office cubicles, and tested the knob. It was frozen shut, perhaps simply by rust. The handle itself was of steel and mottled with oxidation. Another kick made short work of the barrier.

The charnel stench of death, only too familiar, made Bolan flare his nostrils. The room was a slaughterhouse.

He realized, then, that the bar outside the door hadn’t been to keep prisoners in. It had simply been a way to seal off the offices, an unwritten warning to any of Orieza’s men stationed at the terminal that there was nothing good within. The office enclosure had been turned into a mausoleum, the OPP employees left to rot where they’d been shot down. Bolan counted them silently, checking the adjoining cubicles and another little storeroom beyond. With the one at the counter, the number was exactly right. He had just accounted for all the potential hostages.

His jaw set in righteous anger, he backtracked. He stopped at the outer door, waiting and listening, but the roar of the pumping operation was far too loud for him to learn anything of use. He did hear gunfire in the distance, cutting through the white noise of the machinery. It was sporadic and seemed to be coming from all directions. It was likely that Orieza’s men were shooting into the trees beyond the terminal. Sooner or later, they would realize they had no targets. A reasonable field commander would then dictate an internal search, to find whoever had penetrated the plant. While Bolan hadn’t been very impressed with the caliber of Orieza’s people so far, it would be prudent to assume they could figure out that much. He would have to hurry.

He consulted the digital plans on his phone one last time, then stowed the device before holstering his pistol and shouldering his rifle once more. Then he threw open the door, ducked out quickly and hit the cracked paving slab hard.

He had anticipated trouble and he wasn’t disappointed. Gunmen, probably noticing the bar removed from the office door, had been waiting for him to show himself. Their automatic fire raked the air above him and pounded the door and wall beyond.

Bolan fired from the prone position. The soldiers were exposed, no doubt counting on the element of surprise. The Executioner gave them credit for understanding what the missing bar meant, and responding to the threat in a methodical, patient manner without really knowing what that threat entailed. But that wasn’t enough.

Bolan fired, tracked left, fired again, tracked right and fired once more. He squeezed measured bursts from the rifle, not rushing, taking quick but precise aim each time. The soldiers collapsed before him, their weapons falling from their hands.

On his feet once more, the Executioner broke into a jog, his eyes scanning left and right. Twice an enemy presented himself, and twice he snapped up the rifle on the run and triggered a short burst into the soldier. As before, he could hear the sounds of unaimed, misdirected panic fire from several points around the terminal. What the Honduran guards thought they were accomplishing, he couldn’t say.

He found the drill house. Logically, the building should have been heavily guarded, but if men were stationed here, they had left their posts in reaction to Bolan’s attack on the facility. He paused just inside the door, found a rusting metal desk not far away that had been inexplicably pushed into the corridor and shoved the desk in front of the door. It wasn’t much of a barrier, but it would have to do.

He followed the directions he’d been given and made his way to the control center. There was dried blood on the floor, and some bullet holes in the walls, but no bodies. Apparently any OPP employees murdered here had been dragged into the offices. It made sense, and was the lazy man’s escape. Why dig graves when you can throw the bodies into a room and bar the door?

The control panel was as it had been described. Bolan set to work. He began throwing levers and turning dials to shut down the pumps and close the valves, all done according to the order specified by OPP management. Next, he reversed the turbine controls. Red warning lights began to flash—he noticed that at least two of the lamps were burned or shorted out—and he pushed the safety overrides all the way up. Another Klaxon began to squawk. He set all the turbines to maximum power.

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