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  Rojas sounded a bit confused with the next question. “How the hell did you convince them that I wasn’t able to walk?”

  “I made a dummy out of some panty hose, plastic bags and duct tape,” Bolan replied.

  “Duct tape,” Rojas murmured. “Listen, if you don’t have things all set up, you might want to hurry,” Rojas warned.

  “Thanks for the concern. Keep me updated on anything new,” Bolan said.

  “Will do.”

  Bolan retrieved another piece of Colombian military equipment, some more ordnance that had “fallen off of an army transport.” This was an M60 general-purpose light machine gun. It was a classic old design, having been replaced by the even more veteran FN MAG in the United States military, but the Executioner was skilled and familiar with the Pig, as it was nicknamed, and he could handle the extra weight.

  Firing five hundred and fifty NATO rounds per minute, the M60 was everything Bolan needed in terms of raw stopping power and enemy suppression. He knew the recoil intimately, so he could adjust his aim to remain on target for long bursts. He also had a second-nature familiarity with the trigger, allowing him to put out two- and three-round bursts to make the most of each belt without having to reload.

  If the SNC were ready to unleash every ounce of firepower they could arrange, then the Executioner was going to need the very best of his own arsenal.

  He checked his PDA.

  Sure enough, Kurtzman had gotten ahold of an official, active-duty Colombian ScanEagle. It was circling at nineteen-thousand feet over the safe house, and its cameras relayed the sight of an armed convoy of pickup trucks, SUVs and other vehicles. The pickups had improvised machine gun mounts, and there was a flatbed tractor-trailer with an array of 60 mm and 81 mm mortars on the back.

  “Is it go time, Bear?” Bolan asked.

  “Yeah. We estimate it’ll take them about five minutes to set up and start slamming you,” Kurtzman replied. “We’ve been listening in on your conversation with Rojas, too. She’s telling you the truth about what she heard on the radio, according to our translations.”

  “Thanks, but I didn’t doubt her,” Bolan said.

  “You would have been chewing me out if I didn’t confirm it for you,” Kurtzman countered.

  Bolan managed a smile. “Those mortars are what worry me the most. I wasn’t expecting them.”

  “It looks like Carbonez called in some favors from the FARC or some other communist insurgent group,” Kurtzman informed him. “That’s where the artillery came from.”

  “Well, I inspired them with my own heavy explosives assault,” Bolan noted. “I reap what I’ve sown.”

  “I’ll let you get moving, then. The live feed will keep for as long as you need it. The ScanEagle was just launched, so it’s got at least 20 hours of staying power,” Kurtzman promised.

  Bolan thanked him, then piled his M60 and the ammunition belts on to a drag bag and crawled back into the exit ditch. It didn’t take long for the enemy to begin their assault. He was three quarters of the way through the hidden tunnel when the ground shuddered with the first detonations of high-explosive mortar shells—60 mm and 81 mm artillery rounds were capable of amazing devastation in an antipersonnel role.

  Right now, Bolan had to play a waiting game. He hunched inside the passageway, watching from the ScanEagle footage on his PDA the destruction unleashed by the New Soldiers’ convoy. The crews were simply hammering the safe house.å

  The building was swallowed up by a black cloud of smoke as the ambush force cut loose without any warning. The earth shook around the Executioner in his foxhole. He recalled that concentrated mortar fire was often more than sufficient to clean out packs of enemies dug into tunnels, that the lighter 60 mm mortars had been used to deadly effect in World War II.

  That was in the ’40s, and the SNC had twenty-first century ammunition. Bolan hoped that here, seventy yards away from the safe house, he was not going to catch a shell right on top of him. Fortunately, the Colombian artillery crews didn’t seem interested in bombing anything more than the building itself. Bolan continued slithering along, stopping when he reached the end of the tunnel. He peered left and right along the shore. He could have checked with the ScanEagle, but it offered a less than ideal view of the riverfront.

  Besides, Bolan didn’t want to come to rely on technology completely. Part of the reason why he was so effective was that he could switch between his own senses and advanced electronic optics. That flexibility was exactly how he could outthink and outmaneuver the enemy. He didn’t treat any problem the same way because each situation came with its own context and contingencies.

  Sure enough, the warrior saw a small squad making its way along the embankment. They had their own hands-free sets. He switched his device over to the frequency they’d gotten from the captured radios at the livery. This group was patrolling for any hiding spots their quarry might have retreated to.

  That meant that sooner or later, they would stumble upon this tunnel. However, since they were in radio contact with the home base, or at least the artillery crews, Bolan had to be careful in dealing with them. He eyed the Cauca river. It was thick and murky enough that he could sneak up on them, submerged.

  Bolan crept out of the ditch and added the M60 to his cache of weapons in the bushes. He had the Desert Eagle and suppressed Beretta with him, as well as an assortment of knives—the ideal arsenal for eliminating opponents silently, in close quarters.

  As the nearby group of Colombian gunmen stood watching the high explosive shells rain down on the safe house, Bolan sliced into the foul waters of the Cauca, disappearing beneath the surface like a crocodile.

  It was time to take some prey.

  14

  Brunhilde Rojas continued to monitor the conversations between Carbonez and his troops with a bud in one ear as she made her way through the streets of Cali.

  The city was no stranger to violence erupting in its neighborhoods, but right now, with aircraft bombing office complexes, grenades smashing into trucks and buildings, and helicopters dropping from the sky in flaming fireballs, the world seemed to have come unhinged.

  She and Cooper had arrived in the city, and all at once, there was a storm breaking loose. She couldn’t even begin to consider how many people they’d killed over the past two days. Yet here she was, with a couple of handguns, listening to the pulse of operations among Los Soldados de Cali Nuevos as they stormed the safe house.

  And they were pulling out all of the stops. She’d buzzed Cooper after she heard about some mobile artillery loaded onto a flatbed truck. Real artillery, 81 mm and 60 mm mortars borrowed from insurgents. La Brujah and the American had done their absolute best to throw the SNC into panic mode.

  She glanced at her smartphone, then sent a message off to the mysterious operators on the other side. Cooper had told her to text “the Farm” if she needed any help in the field when they were separated.

  Any way to locate the origin of the radio chatter?

  Been working on it since radios acquired.

  Progress?

  Have coordinates for you.

  A link appeared, and she clicked it, opening an aerial map of Cali. She examined it, then frowned. She knew the place. It was formerly a JUNGLA barracks which had been shut down, thanks to a wave of bombings which had convinced the Colombian army to move the unit’s headquarters to a more secure location.

  Naturally, the bombings had been planned so that the infrastructure of the base was left intact for the very purpose of usurping that facility. Rojas bit her lower lip.

  Maybe, just maybe, she could get the drop on the base. No, she wouldn’t be able to stage another assault like the one on the livery. But she could get a nice preview of whatever Carbonez hadn’t thrown at Cooper and the safe house. Still, it was a risky proposition, and it wouldn’t do either her or Cooper any good if Carbonez welcomed her to his headquarters with a bullet to the brain—or worse.

  “Cooper’s given you more than enough help,�
�� Rojas muttered. “You’re out of jail, you’re back in Colombia and you’re armed. Time to take some initiative.”

  She thought about Cooper’s orders. Get to the other safe house.

  Their backup would have more guns and another car. She smiled.

  She’d go to the other safe house and build up her arsenal, then swing back to Cooper’s location and help mop up. After that, they’d hit Carbonez’s compound together.

  Rojas broke into a jog. She intended to get to the fallback site within ten minutes.

  * * *

  THE MEN ON the shore did not seem to have a clue that Bolan was creeping up on them. He had improvised a snorkel with a piece of tubing, and he’d slipped on protective goggles to keep his vision clear and his eyes safe from possible infection as he swam. Using a silent crawl stroke, he caught up to the patrol group and made his way slowly up the incline of the shore. Fortunately, he didn’t have anything to fear from local creatures, either catfish or crocodiles. The water was rank and polluted, and when he rose from the murky muck, he knew that he’d bear a distinct odor as he eased into position behind the nearest Soldado.

  The four men chuckled and cheered, watching their comrades pound the safe house with artillery shells. The quartet were acting like they were at a futbol match, not in the middle of a military operation.

  The Executioner was about to end the celebration. He drew the suppressed Beretta and rose from the Cauca river. In one smooth movement, he executed one of the gunmen with a 9 mm pill to the base of his skull, the sound of the shot easily lost in the rattle and roar of angry mortar shells.

  There was now a crater where the safe house had been. Carbonez was not taking any chances with the people who had shot his helicopters out of the sky and decimated his troops. Still, the barrage was lasting much longer than necessary to destroy a simple shack by the river.

  One of the patrolmen noticed his friend topple face-first to the ground, the back of his head a bloody crater from the impact of a 9 mm slug. The Colombian started to turn, but Bolan popped him through the left ear, a sizzling quick slug scrambling that man’s brains.

  Two troopers down, Bolan reholstered the Beretta and drew his combat knife. The transition was swift as he closed in on the Colombian gangster manning a radio. The Soldado finished reporting another wave of direct hits and lowered the handset from his lips. Bolan clamped one hand over the man’s mouth, wrenching his head back as hard as he could. In the next moment, he brought down his wicked combat blade, spearing the man through his throat, sharp steel carving like a guillotine through his windpipe and major blood vessels in one savage slash.

  The last of the quartet whirled around, noticing the sudden violent act in his peripheral vision. He started to bring up his rifle as Bolan dumped aside the radio man. With a sharp snap kick, Bolan drove the fourth guy’s own rifle into his stomach. The wind knocked out of him, the Soldado bent over, gasping, no longer in control of the gun. With another quick step, Bolan snatched a thick handful of the Colombian’s hair, stabilizing his head. The Executioner brought down his combat knife again, this time plunging six inches of lethal steel into the back of his enemy’s neck. His spine severed instantly, the gangster collapsed first to his knees, then facedown in the mud.

  Four down. And an entire army to go.

  Bolan took to the shore and ran back for the Milkor launchers at full speed. Even if the mortar crews were aware that the patrol team had been taken down by the very target they had intended to reduce to his component atoms, they continued hammering at the safe house.

  He skidded to a halt by the grenade launchers and double-checked their loads. The buckshot-filled MGL was a direct line of sight shotgun that was meant for slashing apart groups of enemy soldiers. The HEDP rounds were better for indirect fire. He consulted his PDA again, making certain that the flatbed truck hadn’t moved. Sure enough, the mortars were still emplaced, though the live feed from Kurtzman’s ScanEagle showed that they’d stopped firing.

  Maybe they were out of ammunition. Even so, the pickup truck technicals were cutting loose with their heavy machine guns.

  Nope. Carbonez was not leaving anything to chance. Luckily, the embankment and the position of the terrain made it so that Bolan was not in direct line of sight. That was no problem for the Milkor, though. He had the range, and he had the necessary familiarity with the multi-shot launcher to do what needed to be done.

  Bolan fired three rapid shots, left to right, shifting only slightly. He wanted to make sure he’d covered the mortar crews. The flight time of the arcing shells would give him the opportunity to adjust aim and fire three more grenades. These three were intended for the technicals with their mounted heavy machine guns—weapons that would overwhelm even the most talented and experienced of warriors, if he entered their line of fire.

  He consulted his eye in the sky again, but it turned out to be an unnecessary step. The flatbed truck took a direct hit from Bolan’s first three grenades. Within moments, the roar of explosions reached his ears. What had once been a mobile artillery platform was now shredded by detonating 40 mm shells and the secondary explosions of stored 60 mm and 81 mm mortars.

  The trailer ignited in a roiling cloud, lit from within by the hot, angry orange flames. Men screamed and scrambled away from the erupting chaos. A few seconds later, Bolan’s fourth shell struck, rocking one of the pickup trucks violently. Bolan glanced at his PDA. Compared to the flatbed, this explosion was nothing to write home about, but to the machine gunner on the back of the technical, it was lethal. The gunner was gone in a puff of smoke, body parts littering the ground around the vehicle.

  Bolan’s next shot missed the other technical, but it landed between two shooters who were lying prone beside it, emptying their rifles into the chaos around them. Shrapnel swept across the riflemen, ending their lives with high-velocity steel severing arteries and destroying vital organs.

  The sixth round was on target for the pickup truck serving as a third improvised machine gun nest. A 40 mm fist of high explosive ordnance slammed into the pickup, and once again, gunner and the heavy machine gun were turned to ground meat and scrap metal. The thunderbolt was more than sufficient to cause the pickup to collapse on its rear axle, wheels broken off the shaft. Even if the driver had survived, he wouldn’t have been able to retreat with the truck.

  As the explosions subsided, enemy RPGs and rifles flared to life again in the distance. Still, Bolan could see from the ScanEagle feed that the force had lost much of its superior firepower. Now, the once-disciplined ranks were showing signs of panic. Still, the Soldados continued shooting, hoping to dig out the enemy with gunfire. Above him, thanks to the artillery barrage and countless fires, smoke formed a hazy, thick canopy, blotting out the sky over Bolan’s position.

  It was a good start, but there was still more work to be done. He opened the Milkor, fed in a new load of six 40 mm grenades and closed the action. He knew approximately where the enemy lines were, and how they had been staggered and broken apart by the initial destruction of their mortar platform.

  This time, instead of HEDP rounds, he was going with fragmentation grenades, and he fired them off, spacing each shot by thirty yards. By now, smoke and fire rising from the SNC’s ranks made it much more difficult to gauge the effects of the initial volley on the convoy. Bolan was firing to add to their confusion as much as to cut down the opposing force.

  The final cleanup was going to be an effort by much more direct lines of fire, at closer range. For that, he’d use the buckshot-loaded Milkor, the M4 and his M60.

  He grabbed both weapons, and now that he’d destroyed the SNC’s remaining artillery shells, he returned to the tunnel. He loaded his arsenal on to the drag bag and reentered the passageway, which had remained relatively intact despite the assault on the safe house.

  Surely, the enemy would have had some indication of where Bolan had been firing from, and if not, the sudden, quiet deaths of four of their forward observers would have them moving their atten
tion to the river’s edge. He reserved most of his strength and both hands for crawling through the tunnel, loops around his shoulders and battle harness allowing him to bring along forty-seven pounds of high-impact weaponry, not including belts of ammunition and spare grenades.

  He reached a section of the tunnel where the ceiling had been blown off and the passage had partially collapsed, making it difficult to squeeze through. Bolan grabbed several handfuls of dirt and rubbed it into his hair and over his face. Then he raised his head slowly, through the hole in the ceiling. The sun-baked soil would provide him with camouflage, and easing into view rather than making a sudden move would prevent him from catching a Soldado’s eye. With the smoke hazing up the sky, there was little danger of being spotted by Carbonez’s drone. He glanced at his own PDA to confirm the lack of visibility from the murky sky.

  At ground level, he had good lines of sight. And the scattered Colombian gangsters had regrouped. Several men were walking toward the smoldering crater that used to be the safe house. Anything left inside had been hammered into dust during the merciless artillery barrage. Even so, the troopers approached cautiously.

  They had already been stung by a rain of fragmentation grenades and didn’t want to make the mistake of underestimating the opposition. In his earbud, Bolan heard the broadcast of a platoon of men at the riverbank, some thirty yards back.

  The SNC had discovered the dead patrolmen.

  The Executioner had found a nice vantage point, allowing him to observe both the river and the smoldering safe house site. Bolan drew out the Milkor with its six-shot cylinder bearing buckshot loads. He calculated the drop to the river. It was simple to measure and estimate where to aim to achieve the most devastation.

  With a surge, Bolan rose high enough to clear his foxhole with the MGL and fired two bursts of buckshot down to the riverbank, right at the platoon. The men hadn’t yet spread out to search the shoreline, and one blast hurled four men off of their feet, each guy riddled with dozens of .24 caliber holes, the payload of hundreds of projectiles creating a deadly swarm of flesh-destroying balls. The second blast tore the arm off another man as he and the rest of his squad were inundated with buckshot.