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  But where was he?

  Bolan thought it over, conscious of the time he was losing in the process, and decided that the missionary must have gone to run some errand. With no settlements nearby, what was the logical conclusion? Further clean-up chores, which might require fresh water.

  Bolan looked around for tracks and found the bare earth of the mission beaten flat by human feet. No great surprise. Abner and Mercy had been here for two years, give or take, serving a native congregation that presumably traveled on foot. Three minutes into circling the perimeter, he found a path that led southward, wide enough for two people to pass if they were slim and rubbing shoulders.

  Bolan followed it for something like a hundred yards and came out on a river’s bank. That solved the water problem, but there was no sign of Abner Cronin on the shore or in the river. He was close to turning back when something caught his eye, just at the water’s edge. A hint of faded color, rippling with the gentle current.

  Moving closer, Bolan recognized a well-worn towel half in the water, half on shore. Beside it lay a bar of soap, some lather still adhering to its surface.

  Bath time, maybe, but the bather had departed. He had either dressed before he left, or tossed his clothes into the river’s flow and let them go downstream. That made no sense to Bolan, and he didn’t think Abner would lather up his bar of soap before undressing, either. The conclusion: he’d been interrupted, not by something that had snatched him from the river while he bathed, but by someone, who’d come upon him from the landward side and gave him time to clothe himself before they left together.

  More of Braga’s men?

  A further search along the riverbank confirmed it to his satisfaction. Footprints of a hunting party, call it twenty strong, approached the spot where Abner left his soap and towel, then retreated in the general direction of the drug lord’s forest compound. After ditching Bolan and his wife last night, the preacher had been caught again.

  Which ruined everything.

  Grimaldi would soon be prepping the helicopter, doing his preflight checks, and Bolan had no time to search for Abner, rescue him once more, double back for Mercy and proceed with them to either of the LZs in time to meet with Grimaldi. Bolan would have to scrub the airlift yet a second time, then see what he could do for the infuriating preacher. Bolan would try to save that life if he could manage it—or Mercy’s, at the very least—and still keep his appointment with the cocaine shipment flying in this very afternoon.

  Tick-tock.

  He frankly wasn’t sure if Abner rated any further effort, but that wasn’t Bolan’s call. He still felt duty bound to try. And after that?

  Hell, you could only save a man so many times, if he was bent on suicide. Beyond a certain point, it was both futile and ridiculous.

  But he would give it one more try.

  The trail was plain for him to follow, Braga’s people making no attempt to hide their tracks. They had their prize and would be hurrying back home to show it off.

  Unless the Executioner could stop them first.

  Chapter 9

  Northwest of Cáceres

  Jack Grimaldi took the sat phone call at an altitude of fifteen thousand feet above the jungle canopy. Bad news again—the pickup scrubbed—but his frustration barely registered beside his concern for Bolan. When the Executioner flipped into Sergeant Mercy mode, he never actually lost his focus on the mission, but he rearranged priorities within a heartbeat, veering off on tangents that Grimaldi sometimes feared were detrimental to the greater good.

  Not that he’d ever bitched about it, much less challenged Bolan’s choices. This was Mack for-God’s-sake Bolan, after all. He’d never scrubbed a mission and had absolutely never dropped the ball on any job he undertook. But it was tough on those around the battle zone’s periphery, watching him deviate from course to save a damsel in distress or keep some clumsy bystander from checking out ahead of schedule.

  That was part of what made Bolan who he was, for sure—but damn, it could be nerve-racking.

  Grimaldi didn’t mind the flying back and forth—the cost of fuel would be reimbursed from Stony Man—but when some yokel he had never met put Bolan’s life in danger on a stupid whim, it pissed Grimaldi off. The rambling preacher should have thanked Whomever he believed in that (a) he had Bolan on the ground trying to help him, and (b) he wasn’t anywhere within arm’s reach of Grimaldi right now.

  Sometimes Grimaldi thought, a nice brisk beating did a world of good for idiots.

  So he was heading back to Várzea Grande and Marechal Rondon International, his morning wasted on a false alarm. On touchdown he’d refuel the Huey and keep it ready, hang out at the airport for the call to come and try again. Next time perhaps he could complete the babysitting run and settle down to business for the main event.

  He’d have to call the consulate, as well, alert them to the fresh delay. That wouldn’t win him any friends, but Grimaldi had already established his ability to pull rank with the Feds in Washington, and he could always flex those guns again if necessary. He got no kick from spoiling anybody’s day—except the bad guys; he loved that part—but right was right, and red tape wouldn’t strangle Bolan on Grimaldi’s watch, if he had anything to say about it.

  Somewhere down below the forest canopy, his best friend in the world was risking everything for people who, it seemed, were cavalier about their lives and any danger they posed to others. Grimaldi, given the choice, might have allowed them to go skipping off a cliff, but that call wasn’t his.

  Lucky for them.

  He hoped that someday, somehow, they would recognize the gift they’d been given when their troubled path crossed Bolan’s in the wilderness, where no one else could help them and the only other folks around wanted them dead.

  If not, given the chance, he would be glad to spell it out for them in no uncertain terms.

  * * *

  DJALMA BARBOSA WAS a happy man. He’d found one of the missionaries who’d escaped the day before. The woman wasn’t with him, but the preacher had explained that. He had left her somewhere in the jungle, stupid wretch that he was, and had gone back to the mission by himself.

  To keep her safe, he said, which made Barbosa think he was crazy. When was any Anglo woman safer in the jungle, on her own, than with a man?

  Maybe that Sheena from the movies. Now the missionary’s poor wife, on the other hand...well, she could easily be dead by now. And what did that make him? A little man who had indulged himself and chased his superstition while the woman he had sworn to love and cherish died alone and terrified.

  In fact, Barbosa didn’t care what Mrs. Missionary might have suffered; that was all beside the point. He simply hated cowards and was always glad to see one punished, tormented, humiliated.

  On the other hand, he owed the preacher a debt of gratitude for being such an idiot that he let Barbosa capture him, thereby causing Barbosa to earn o chefe’s praise and possibly some lucrative reward. Barbosa could explain the missing woman. Leaving her behind was just the sort of thing one might expect from a religious lunatic. With them, it was all “God this” and “God that,” while people who depended on them got the short end of the stick.

  Barbosa could not picture any of o chefe’s enemies lifting a finger for a piece of garbage like his prisoner. It must have been coincidence, he thought, that Mr. Missionary and his wife had happened to be along when the annihilators had struck Aranha’s squad. It perplexed him, granted, that whoever did the killing had allowed two witnesses to live, but that was not Barbosa’s problem. He’d been sent to search the mission and had bagged one of the runaways. Job done.

  But as they marched back toward the compound, he remained alert, on edge. The bastards who had taken out Aranha and his men were still in the vicinity, no doubt preparing for their next move. And from the far-off gunfire that Barbosa had heard e
arlier, perhaps that move was underway. If so, the blow had fallen on somebody else, and he was not in a position to assist them.

  Just as well.

  If there was fighting to be done, he hoped it would be at the compound, with the rest of Braga’s soldiers present and the camp’s full arsenal available. Barbosa didn’t relish being ambushed in the forest, possibly outnumbered and outgunned by enemies he couldn’t even see. That kind of combat was uncivilized, something for savages. Barbosa liked an urban jungle best, and failing that, a fortified position he could defend.

  For now, he was a winner in the game, returning with his prize. O chefe would be pleased, and the Colombian who’d come to visit them should also be impressed. The fact that he was bringing home a sort of human sacrifice did not disturb Barbosa in the least.

  It made him smile.

  * * *

  THE TRAIL WAS not particularly hard to follow. Braga’s men were in a hurry, it appeared, and not concerned with covering their tracks. Bolan couldn’t be sure what kind of lead they had on him, but simple logic told him that the hunters would have started their patrols at daybreak, more or less. Knowing the distance from their base camp to the mission, Bolan calculated that they must have captured Abner Cronin sometime in the past hour to ninety minutes.

  He had a chance to overtake them yet.

  Braga would have recruited city boys, much like himself. Assuming some—or most—of them had military training in their backgrounds, they could navigate through the rain forest, but they weren’t a part of it. All things being equal, twenty-odd guerrillas, with a frightened captive in their midst, would move more slowly than a single seasoned jungle fighter following behind them. If he caught the squad before it reached the compound, Bolan thought he had a decent chance of pulling Abner out a second time.

  Decent, but far from guaranteed.

  Once the battle had been joined, he knew that anything could happen. Telling someone to expect the unexpected was an oxymoron, but it fit the grim reality of combat. Anything that could go wrong, most likely would go wrong. The best of weapons sometimes jammed when they were needed most. Vehicles stalled and died. The weather turned and washed away your best-laid plans. A sentry sneezed and wound up dead because of it.

  Bolan was a master at adapting, going with the flow, but he could not predict the future. Couldn’t have foreseen that Abner would desert his wife and run off to be snatched by Braga’s soldiers for a second time. Had no idea if one more rescue bid would spell the end of Bolan, his mission, everything.

  But he was bound to try.

  Bolan was simply wired that way.

  He knew he was gaining on his quarry when his ears began to pick up noises from the snatch team. Bolan had no doubt that he was tracking seasoned killers, but they obviously weren’t elite commandos. Green Berets or Navy SEALs would never have talked to each other as they led a hostage through the jungle. They would not have let their gear and weapons rustle through the undergrowth in passing. Silence was the order of the day for true professionals, until the killing started.

  Which it would, any minute now.

  From sound alone, he estimated that the hunters were about three hundred yards in front of him and still on course for Braga’s camp. Ten minutes later, he had cut their lead by half, and he could smell his adversaries now—gun oil and sweat, together with the cheap cologne some foolish member of the team had splashed over himself that morning.

  Stupid.

  Bolan could have tracked them by that scent alone, but with the rest of it, and all their noise, it was the next best thing to having one of them rigged with a homing beacon.

  Bolan slung his Steyr AUG and drew his SIG Sauer P226. The nearly silent pistol had already served him well this morning, and he saw no reason not to use it once again. As soon as he was close enough to start picking the shooters off, he would begin.

  Whatever happened next came down to skill, luck—and, perhaps, a dash of fate.

  Condor Acampamento

  BRAGA’S MEN HAD caught a scorpion and a tarantula, putting the two of them together in a cage made out of chicken wire and betting which one would survive the fight. The spider was not large, by jungle standards, but the scorpion still seemed intimidated by the hairy legs it raised in warning, curved black fangs erect. Bored spectators had started prodding the would-be combatants with twigs, through the wire, when a shout went up from the camp’s eastern perimeter.

  Joaquim Braga left his air-conditioned quarters, followed closely by Hugo Cardona. Oswaldo Ramos met them near the middle of the camp, a half smile on his face. “Ribeiro’s team has found the woman,” he announced. “Her husband was not with her.”

  “So, what happened to him?” Braga asked.

  “Sérgio says he left her in the forest.”

  Braga laughed at that. These “godly” people were hilarious. Molesting children while they forced the natives to wear clothes, collecting money for their missions in the Amazon and spending it on mansions in the States. Such hypocrites and they still called him a criminal for selling drugs to people who desired them. Unbelievable!

  “No word yet from the other teams?” he asked, as if Ramos would not have told him instantly.

  “Not yet. But Sérgio heard gunfire half an hour before he found the woman.”

  “He did not investigate?”

  A quick head shake came from Ramos. “He believed delivering the prisoner was more important.”

  Braga agreed. The other squads he had dispatched could take care of themselves—at least in theory. Ribeiro might have lost the woman if he’d deviated from his basic plan, and they would be no better off than when they’d started.

  “Very well. Bring her to me.” As Ramos left, Braga told the Colombian, “We’ll get some answers now. Or have some fun, at least.”

  Cardona grunted, keeping his opinions to himself, and followed Braga back inside the air-conditioned bungalow. A moment later, Ramos returned with Sérgio Ribeiro and the missionary’s wife, the woman rightly looking terrified. If she had known what lay in store for her, Braga imagined she might have lost her mind entirely.

  “Sérgio,” he said, “you’ve pleased me well. You are promoted to lieutenant for your work this day.”

  Ribeiro beamed and bowed his way out of the bungalow, repeating, “Obrigado, senhor,” until the door closed behind him. Such a simple thing to make him happy. Keep him loyal.

  Braga studied the disheveled woman. Eyes red rimmed from crying. Small cuts on her face and arms, rips and mud smears on her clothing—all apparently from rushing headlong through the forest in a panic.

  “Were you lost when my men found you?” he inquired, breaking the ice in English.

  “I suppose so,” she replied.

  “Without your husband?”

  “Sim.”

  “You speak our language?”

  “Só um pouco.”

  “We’ll use yours then. Why did your husband leave you in the jungle?”

  Now she hesitated, thinking of the answer that would serve her best. At last, she said, “To do his work.”

  “What work is that?”

  “Helping the natives find their way to God.”

  “While you, his wife, he leaves to die alone. Is that the Christian way?”

  “He has a calling,” she replied defiantly.

  “Ah. Um fanático. I know the kind.”

  “You’re wrong. God’s calling takes priority over all earthly things.”

  “I think it was not God who rescued you and killed my soldiers yesterday.”

  “Can you be sure?”

  “Does he use a machine gun?” Braga asked.

  “He uses people in accordance with His will.”

  “And you will tell us who he used on this occasion,” Braga said. “Or you will
suffer greatly for defying me.”

  * * *

  MACK BOLAN STARTED with the last man in the marching column, dropping him with a Parabellum round between the ears, then ducking off to the left side of the trail. When the next soldier in line glanced back, then shouted to the rest, Bolan was ready. Met him with a silent slug that drilled his left eye socket as he came back to investigate the noise his pal had made while dropping dead.

  Fear rippled down the whole length of the column, and someone barked an order from the front. “Abrir fogo!” Eighteen surviving shooters opened fire in all directions, automatic rifles ripping up the undergrowth without a clear-cut target, hot brass showering the forest trail.

  Bolan stayed low and let the death wind fan the shrubs and ferns above him, dropping tattered bits of camouflage over his prostrate form. He waited till their magazines ran dry, and when the first few started to reload, he made his move.

  No hand grenades with Abner in the mix, and he still liked the silent SIG for close-up work, keeping his targets guessing even as they died. He stayed away from double-taps to keep it simple, make the SIG’s twenty-round magazine stretch over the duration of the fight, and he moved each time he fired so that his adversaries couldn’t get a fix on where he was. It must have felt as if they were surrounded, bullets slashing through their ranks from this and that direction, each one taking down a soldier who’d been standing seconds earlier.

  At last, only two men remained. One of Braga’s men held a pistol to Abner’s head, moving in jerky little circles as he tried to watch all sides at once. “Show yourselves!” he shouted in Portuguese. “If you don’t, I’ll kill him!”

  “Sorry,” Bolan told him from the shadows. “I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  Spinning toward the sound of his reply, the gunman barked, “Come out and show yourself! I kill him otherwise!”