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  Why was he living in the middle of the jungle?

  Something else she didn’t care about.

  Her next coherent thought formed as a question: would the helicopter’s landing hasten or delay her fate? If it was off-loading supplies, she guessed that Braga’s men would be too busy and distracted for the moment to attend her public execution. On the other hand, if Braga had invited other witnesses to watch her being torn apart, she might be running out of time.

  I’m running out of time, regardless, she decided, fighting back a fresh cascade of tears.

  What could she do about it? Nothing, in regard to breaking out. She’d never picked a padlock in her life and couldn’t reach the one outside her door, in any case, even if there had been no guard on duty. There was nothing in the shed that might prove useful as a weapon, other than the slop bucket Braga had left for her sanitary needs. Mercy supposed that she could fling its contents at the men who came to fetch her, maybe swing the stinking bucket like a club, but they would easily disarm her and exact revenge for being soiled.

  Ruin their show, she thought. But when her mind turned back toward suicide, she had no means to do the job. Holding her breath was useless, even to the point of passing out, since she would simply start to breathe again once she lost consciousness. If she undressed, her shirt or jeans might possibly be turned into a noose, but there were no convenient hooks or rafters in the shed from which to hang herself. Likewise for bleeding out, since no sharp objects were available.

  Mercy had read about a man imprisoned by the Inquisition who had bitten through his wrists, the veins and arteries, to kill himself. The mental image sickened her, but Mercy knew it would not hurt as much as being tortured, possibly for hours, while a crowd of savages stood by and cheered through her misery. A little courage, just a bite or two, spit out the salty blood...

  Not yet.

  She’d given up on praying for release and for a boost in courage, but she had not given up on faith. Not quite. Abner would not be coming to her rescue; obviously she could write him off. But Mercy still held out a slender hope that Matt Cooper might be living. And if so, she knew he would find his way to Braga’s camp.

  It was the only reason she had ever met him in the first place. He had come for Joaquim Braga and the rest.

  And if he couldn’t save her, there was still a chance she would be avenged.

  * * *

  MACK BOLAN FINISHED one last circuit of the camp’s perimeter while Braga’s men began unloading the BLACK HAWK. He watched them carrying the shrink-wrapped kilos of cocaine into a prefab building twice the size of Mercy’s prison hut and caught a quick glimpse through its open door, where wooden pallets kept the cargo several inches off the plain dirt floor.

  The cocaine wouldn’t stay here very long, he realized. Braga needed to cut it and repackage it for retail sales, which likely meant another airlift in the Mi-24 to some other secure location. Cáceres, he supposed, would be the nearest city of appreciable size, boasting its own domestic airport and free access to Mato Grosso’s limited network of highways. A cutting plant in Cáceres, or even in the state capital at Cuiabá, would have access to all of Brazil’s major markets and others outside the country.

  But this load wasn’t going anywhere. If it was Bolan’s final act on earth, he meant to send it up in smoke.

  A quick glance at his watch told him Grimaldi should be arriving anytime now. Since there’d been no call reporting complications, he assumed Grimaldi was on schedule and on course, closing the last few miles before he started raining hellfire onto Braga’s home-away-from-home. Whatever happened after that, the coke was history—and Braga, too, if Bolan had his way.

  As for Mercy...

  Play it as it goes, he thought. The usual.

  Bolan scanned the camp for Braga, found him standing with the man who’d briefly entered Mercy’s cell before the BLACK HAWK had landed. They were clearly talking business, each man nodding in his turn; whether negotiating or confirming terms already understood, Bolan couldn’t say, but he did know that none of the authorities had an undercover operative in Braga’s camp. Logging one more VIP onto his hit list, Bolan used the Steyr’s Swarovski 1.5x telescopic sight to frame the stranger’s face and bring it into close relief.

  No recognition there, but he was clearly someone worth eliminating. Not a problem, since the master plan involved eradicating everybody in the compound. Failing that, if any stragglers managed to escape, they could serve Bolan as his messengers, spreading the word of Joaquim Braga’s downfall far and wide.

  A throbbing in the air distracted Bolan from his study of the stranger’s craggy, almost handsome face. He recognized the chopper’s sound and smiled. Add this one to the list of missions where Grimaldi had not let him down.

  Bolan imagined the Huey skimming the rain forest canopy, homing on target and loaded for bear. He could picture Jack Grimaldi’s face, smiling, ready for anything the other side might throw at him. Indomitable. Always spoiling for a fight, regardless of the odds.

  Bolan knelt in the shadow of a looming giant tree, steadied his AUG, focused on the BLACK HAWK, and started counting down the doomsday numbers.

  Waiting for the sky to fall.

  Chapter 13

  Jack Grimaldi’s satellite photos of Braga’s compound had been fairly detailed, but they’d lacked the close-up quality of skimming in at treetop level, landing struts a few yards higher than the tallest giants of the forest canopy. Suddenly the trees were gone, a clearing some two hundred yards in length and half as wide laid out below.

  Ground zero.

  There wasn’t any signal from the ground, no final order to attack. Bolan and Grimaldi had planned the sequence in advance. Once he had been called to make the air strike, if the raid was not aborted prior to his arrival on the target, Grimaldi was clear to fire at will.

  The old joke automatically repeating in his mind was, which one is Will?

  They all were.

  One quick lap around the clearing, still at treetop level, and faces were turning up to stare at him, two hundred feet and change below Grimaldi’s chopper. He could see men scrambling for weapons, some already drawing pistols, and he knew there was no more time to waste looking at the “before” picture of Hell.

  The Hind gunship was at the top of Grimaldi’s hit list. Circling, he framed the camo-painted chopper with his M60 reflex sight and pressed the trigger for the rocket launcher. His M21 weapons subsytem fired two rockets automatically, one from each side of the aircraft to keep it in balance, their smoke trails converging below as Braga’s men saw hellfire coming and sprinted away from its intended target.

  Two high-explosive warheads blew on impact, shattering the Mi-24 and instantly engulfing it in flames. The five blades of its main rotor went sailing off in various directions through the compound, cutting down some of Braga’s soldiers like scythes slicing through cornstalks, finally hammering into the tree line surrounding the camp. The Hind’s three fuel tanks—941 gallons in all—went up next, wafting a mushroom of fire and oily smoke skyward, past Grimaldi’s ship, beyond the treetop canopy.

  Welcome to Hell.

  Ground fire was crackling toward him now, still poorly aimed. His Huey was not armored, although the fuel tanks were self-sealing, but Grimaldi wasn’t backing off. Instead, he raked the compound with his miniguns, firing in tandem, watching spurts of sod shoot up as his 7.62 mm NATO rounds hacked their way across the teeming camp. Bodies seemed to explode on impact, the 150-grain full-metal-jacket slugs traveling faster than twenty-eight hundred feet per second before striking flesh and bone. Skulls exploded, arms and legs were severed, torsos gutted by the humming rain of death.

  First pass and he saw crimson trails festooned across the camp, painting the grass and soil where green and brown had been the color scheme just seconds earlier. Not everyone who took a hi
t would die, but the survivors just might wish they had, as shock set in behind the initial white blur of agony.

  Wondering where Bolan and the woman were, if they were safe, but still far from finished with the little men who scampered for their lives below him, Grimaldi heeled over and swooped for another attack.

  * * *

  AS SOON AS Grimaldi’s twin rockets struck the Mi-24 gunship and blasted it to scrap, Bolan sent his first rifle grenade hurtling toward the BLACK HAWK. It struck the tail assembly, with its twin Lycoming T55 turboshaft engines detonating with a bang that sounded almost muffled by comparison with Grimaldi’s two HE warheads.

  Still, it did the job.

  The ninety-eight-foot cargo chopper carried some thirty-seven-hundred gallons of fuel in its tanks for extended range, and the flash from Bolan’s grenade set it off, raising a second epic fireball over Joaquim Braga’s compound. From the base of it, a human torch ran screaming, trailing sparks across a stretch of open ground, then vanished into shadows past the tree line on the outskirts of the camp.

  Bolan mounted a second grenade onto the Steyr’s launcher, raised the AUG to his shoulder and shifted his aim toward the prefab structure where Braga’s workers had been stacking the coke they’d unloaded so far. Drifting smoke obscured his view of the target, but Bolan saw enough of it to send the grenade on its way, already up and breaking toward a new position as it punched through the storage shed’s thin aluminum wall, then detonated.

  This time, smoke from the explosion came out mixed with drifting powder, blanketing a few of Braga’s soldiers as they reeled from the impact of the shock wave. Whether it would get them high or simply blind them was a toss-up, but the Executioner was off and running toward a new location, before anyone could track the source of the grenades.

  So far, it didn’t seem to be a problem. Grimaldi’s arrival on the scene, as planned, had all eyes focused skyward while he strafed and rocketed the compound. Bolan used the thunderous distraction to circle westward, moving toward the shed where Mercy Cronin was confined. He’d never have a better chance to spring her from the lockup than right now, while Braga’s soldiers focused on a fight to save themselves and their commander.

  Firing from the camp was escalating, but the guns were pointed up, trying to drill Grimaldi’s Huey as it swooped and circled overhead, blasting the camp with rockets and its brace of miniguns. This pass, strafing from east to west, a burst of 7.62 mm slugs, peppered the trees that shielded Bolan from the open killing zone. He hit the deck, letting the storm pass by, then vaulted to his feet again and put on speed.

  He saw his destination through the drifting smoke and thought something was wrong with it, but he couldn’t pin it down at first. A few more loping strides and Bolan nailed it down. The shed’s door stood wide open, bullet scarred, its hasp and padlock blown away. Its walls were perforated, likely with a burst of FMJ rounds from Grimaldi’s chopper on the flyby.

  Nothing Bolan could do about it till he reached the shed and peered inside. Bracing himself, he left the tree line, sprinting over open ground.

  * * *

  MERCY CRONIN HAD dropped to the floor of her cell when the first explosion shook its metal walls. Without a window, she could not be sure exactly what was happening, but simple logic told her that the latest helicopter to arrive was firing into Braga’s camp. That made her think of Matthew Cooper, the flight he’d been trying to arrange for her and Abner; but she had no time to wonder whether this was all his doing, as the compound popped and crackled with expanding waves of gunfire.

  Aiming at the helicopter overhead?

  That seemed to be the case, when Mercy heard no bullets rattling past her shed, but she had barely formed that thought when she was proven wrong. There came another roar of aircraft engines overhead, and then a searing stream of slugs ripped through the prefab building that confined her, gashing in its walls and roof, one of them plowing hard-packed dirt within a foot or less of Mercy’s face. She lay prone, cringing, until the sudden storm swept past, then dared to raise her head and look around her aerated prison.

  Just in time to see the punctured door swing slowly open of its own accord.

  It had to be an accident, the padlock being shot away. Mercy could not believe that any pilot would be capable of aiming so precisely—or, in fact, that he would know she had been locked inside the shed.

  Impossible. And yet it seemed dumb luck had saved her from captivity.

  Not quite, she thought, before hope had a chance to rear its head in earnest. There was still a war raging outside that open door, and whether Mercy left the shed or not, the recent strafing run had shown she could be cut to ribbons, either way.

  So why not go for it?

  Why not, indeed.

  Mercy began to rise, then reconsidered as another thunderous explosion rocked the camp, accompanied by screams and more gunfire. Trembling, she crawled across the dirt floor to the yawning exit, peering cautiously around the doorjamb for a worm’s-eye view of the compound outside.

  From her position, she saw two helicopters burning. One was larger than the other, with two sets of rotors, one at either end, but neither of the aircraft would be flying any longer. Both were shattered, bright flames leaping from their wreckage, spreading oily smoke throughout the camp. The smaller of the helicopters had the aspect of a broken toy; the larger still retained a semblance of its shape, with its long blades drooping at either end while fire burned around them.

  Were there men inside?

  Mercy was startled to discover that she didn’t care.

  She spent a moment watching Braga’s men run every which way, panic driven, many stopping here and there to fire their weapons at the sky, when she heard yet another helicopter roaring overhead. Mercy supposed it was the one that had come close to killing her, and fear drove her to wriggle through the open doorway of her recent prison, turning left and starting toward the nearby tree line.

  A strong hand clutched her hair and yanked her backward, while a gun was shoved against her cheek.

  “Not so fast, cadela,” growled a man, his voice speaking into her ear. “You don’t want to miss the party.”

  * * *

  JOAQUIM BRAGA THOUGHT he might lose his mind. Within a few short moments, out of nowhere, a demented madman in a helicopter gunship had transformed his day of triumph into tragedy. The suddenness with which it had transpired amazed Braga, had his brain reeling as he sprinted toward his bungalow to arm himself.

  He had a pistol tucked under his belt, of course, as always, but that would not be enough. The rockets that destroyed his army surplus Mi-24 had shown him that he would have to flee on foot if he intended to escape the living hell his compound had become. Whether he’d have the time to rally any of his soldiers was a question still unanswered, but if necessary, Braga thought he could make it on his own.

  As long as he was suitably prepared.

  In fact he had a bug-out bag prepared for just such an emergency. It contained two days’ worth of dried food and bottled water, water purification tablets, a satellite phone, a first-aid kid, a map and compass, matches in a waterproof plastic box, a bush hat and poncho, a survival knife and flashlight, spare ammunition for his sidearm and fifty thousand dollars in crisp American bills. The bag—or pack, rather—was waiting for him in a closet of his bungalow, together with an IMBEL MD-2 carbine with folding stock and a bandolier of spare magazines.

  That pack contained all he needed to survive and forge his way through the jungle to Cáceres, where a phone call would have cars and soldiers waiting to receive him. First, however, he would have to flee the compound, maybe take a couple of his soldiers with him, but no more. On second thought, with limited supplies, he might be better off alone.

  But what about his guest from Medellín? He had not seen Hugo Cardona since the shooting had started, didn’t know if the Colombian wa
s still alive or lying somewhere in the compound, blown to pieces. Nor, just now, did Braga really care. This was a situation where each man was called upon to look out for himself, and devil take the hindmost.

  Braga burst into the bungalow and ran directly to the closet where he kept his gear. He donned the bandolier and pack in seconds flat, then checked the MD-2, jacking a 5.56 mm round into its chamber.

  Ready.

  If he met Cardona on his way out of the camp, by chance, Braga would have a choice to make. Should he attempt to rescue the Colombian and thereby jeopardize himself? Or should he take the necessary steps to rid himself of one more burden?

  Wait and see, he thought.

  Braga had almost reached the doorway of his bungalow when an explosion rocked the building, hurled its roof askew and slammed him to the floor.

  GRIMALDI’S HUEY MADE another swooping run as Bolan cleared the tree line, breaking toward the prison hut. The chopper came in firing rockets and its miniguns, scattering bodies in its wake while Braga’s soldiers tried to bring it down with rifle fire. Bolan joined in the deadly ruckus, squeezing off a three-round burst that dropped a shooter who’d run between Bolan and his destination; then he reached the hut and quickly ducked inside.

  The place was trashed by strafing from Grimaldi’s miniguns, some of the holes in its aluminum walls perfectly round, while others were long narrow slashes. Daylight intruding through the open door helped Bolan scan the dirt around him, seeking bloodstains, but he found none. It appeared Mercy Cronin had survived the near miss, then departed under cover of the gunfire and explosions roaring through the compound.

  So where was she now?

  Barely five minutes had passed since Grimaldi’s arrival on the scene, but fear was a great motivator for speed. If Mercy’s luck held, and she’d kept her wits about her, she could have reached the tree line within seconds of leaving the hut and from there...