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  De Lorenzo had been a cop long enough to know where the commando was coming from and had to admit that he was right. Senior government bureaucrats weren’t exactly his first choice for men to make up a strike force, either. He had no idea what the three of them alone would be able to accomplish, but he, too, was Latino and he had to do something.

  “Give me a moment,” de Lorenzo said, “and I’ll try to explain it to them so they’ll understand.”

  “Make it quick.”

  The Mexican hesitated. “And if I can get their sacred word to go to the south end of the island and hide, can I turn them loose?”

  Brognola nodded and Bolan handed over the key. “Tell them to give us a good head start.”

  The two Americans heard raised voices, and de Lorenzo wasn’t smiling when he came back. “I’m going to take a lot of grief for that when this is all over.”

  “If they come out of this alive,” Bolan said, “they’ll get over it.”

  “If any of us do,” de Lorenzo added.

  BOLAN CLEARED the plaza in front of the jail before he let Brognola and the Mexican come out. “Let’s get these bodies inside,” he told them.

  After concealing the corpses, Bolan disabled the SUV and the machine gun as a matter of covering their rear.

  “You said you last saw this Garcia guy in a hotel?” Bolan asked de Lorenzo.

  The Mexican nodded. “Yes, the Hotel Maya. It’s where we were holding the conference.”

  “How far is it to that hotel?” Bolan asked.

  “About three miles,” de Lorenzo replied.

  “Let’s get moving.”

  On the other side of the jail plaza, a few more streetlights had been left on, giving the deserted resort a surreal look. Cancun was a 24/7 kind of town, and thousands of young men and women should have been crowding the streets looking for a good time in paradise. Many of them would simply find Tequila-fueled oblivion along that route, but that was part of Cancun’s fabled charm. But not only were the streets and bars devoid of carousing tourists, the Mexican nationals who lived and worked in the town were gone, as well.

  “Do you think that he ran off all the locals?” Brognola asked, turning to de Lorenzo.

  “I doubt it. I don’t think he has enough men here to make a sweep like that. They’re probably just holed up in their houses and shops waiting for this to blow over. It’s in the blood of the Mexican people to keep out of the way of revolutions.”

  “Smart.”

  “They’ve had a lot of practice.”

  The sound of an approaching vehicle sent the trio into cover around the side of a building as an open-top SUV drove past with three men in the back guarded by two gunmen. The three prisoners looked to be tied up.

  “It’s heading for the jail,” Brognola observed. “We’re about to be made.”

  “This way,” de Lorenzo said as he led them down an alley off the main street.

  The three men faded into the darkness.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Richard Spellman and Mary Hamilton kept to the shadows as they quickly made their way across the open area around the pier where the Carib Princess had been tied up. Spellman had no idea where they might be able to find safety from whoever had taken over the ship, but he knew they had to get as far away from it as they could. A few blocks from the pier, they entered the dense downtown area of Cancun, packed with bars, eateries, tourist shops and strip malls.

  They were surprised to find the area dark and completely deserted, all the shops closed. “Everyone’s gone,” Hamilton said. “What do you think’s happened?”

  “I don’t know—” Spellman looked around slowly “—but it doesn’t look good, and it may have something to do with the hijackers. I think we’d better keep out of sight until we can figure this thing out.”

  He took her arm and started down one of the side streets. He had absolutely no idea where he was going, but vaguely hoped to find some signs of life and someone who might take them in for the night.

  BOLAN, HAL BROGNOLA and de Lorenzo kept to the side streets as they made their way north to the Maya Hotel. So far, the only signs of the terrorists they had encountered had been the occasional SUV patrol. Pausing to clear an intersection, they spotted two figures a block away moving furtively in the dark.

  “Those don’t look like Garcia’s men,” de Lorenzo commented. “Not wearing white clothes like that. They might be local hotel workers.”

  “Let’s see if we can catch up with them,” Bolan said. “They might be able to fill us in on what’s been going down around here.”

  “When we get close enough,” de Lorenzo said, “I’ll call out so they don’t think we’re with the bad guys.”

  The trio was a hundred yards away and closing fast when a half dozen black-clad gunmen burst from the shadows in front of the fleeing pair, their weapons at the ready, and surrounded them.

  A woman’s scream cut the night. “Richard!”

  “They’re Americans!” Brognola said.

  Bolan and Brognola moved into action with de Lorenzo right behind them. “Take the right flank and wait for my shot,” Bolan told the Mexican.

  De Lorenzo held his borrowed M-16 at port arms as he ran. He had no idea how the rifle was sighted in, but at that range, an inch or two off of battle sight zero wouldn’t really matter. As he’d told the commando, he’d been on the National Police pistol team, but he’d also been through the assault tactics course with the M-16 and had fallen in love with the shooter.

  They had covered half the distance when the guy who looked to be in charge of the squad of thugs stepped forward. He had some kind of club in his hand and drew it back to strike one of the people in white. Bolan paused and snapped off a shot from his Desert Eagle. The roar of the big .44 slug echoed as it took out the back of the thug’s head.

  Like the other gunmen, the two Americans in white froze.

  Bolan shouted, “Get down!” When they dropped, clearing the field of fire, the killing began in earnest.

  Brognola was still a little far away for accuracy with his pumpgun, but since firepower conquered all, he ripped off a couple of blasts of double-O buck anyway. De Lorenzo halted to get a better firing platform and snapped out controlled 3-round bursts.

  The gunmen had been stunned by the unexpected intrusion, but they reacted fairly well. Their main problem was that they weren’t experienced night fighters and the targets were running. Also, the AK was notoriously difficult to control in bursts of sustained autofire.

  One guy did know what he was doing, and a well-controlled short burst of tracers sliced through the air inches in front of de Lorenzo’s head. The Mexican dropped into a crouch and put a well-aimed 3-round burst into him.

  Bolan had accounted for two more with the Desert Eagle when the last two thugs finally realized their mistake and made a break for the shadows. The Executioner acquired the lead runner in his sights and put a .44 bullet in the middle of his back, slamming him facefirst into the dirt.

  Brognola got the last one with a double pump from the Remington.

  When the firing stopped, the two Americans got to their feet and looked around in shock. When one of them turned out to be a woman, Brognola cradled the smoking Remington in his arms as he walked up.

  “It’s okay now,” he said. “You’re safe.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” Mary Hamilton sobbed as she hugged him. “They were going to kill us and you saved us.”

  “I can’t say that you’re completely safe now, though,” Brognola said as he gently disengaged himself. “We think the entire peninsula is under the control of some kind of terrorist organization.”

  “Who are you two and what are you doing here?” Bolan asked.

  “I’m sorry,” the man replied. “I’m Dick Spellman and she’s Mary Hamilton. We were on the Carib Princess for a medical society meeting, and the ship was hijacked as we were leaving the Panama Canal. Mary and I were eating in one of the little cafés below deck and I spotted gunmen with a
utomatic weapons in the passageway as we were leaving. Not knowing what was going down, I found a place for us to hide and…”

  Spellman quickly recounted their hiding in the storage room behind the café.

  “That was real quick thinking.” Brognola praised him. “Good work.”

  “So you never had a chance to really find out who those men were or how many of them were involved?” Bolan asked.

  “No,” Spellman replied, “I’m sorry. It happened too fast and all I could think of was getting out of sight.”

  “Do you know how many people were on the cruise?” Bolan kept pumping for information.

  “At least 750 according to the handout we got when we came on board.”

  “And they’re all doctors?”

  “Mostly medical researchers and their families, and they’re from all over the world.”

  Bolan and Brognola exchanged glances. Next to having an equal number of widows and orphans, a boatload of doctors and their families was about the best bunch of hostages a terrorist could ask for.

  “But I don’t understand,” Hamilton said. “Why was the ship taken over?”

  “Well,” Brognola explained, “it’s real simple. It was taken over so the terrorists could hold you all hostage to protect themselves from a retaliatory attack. We don’t know what their ultimate plan is, but it has to be big. The Mexican government has been taken over, and we’ve also had problems at our southern borders, so this is larger than just the capture of the tourists here at Cancun and your ship.”

  Spellman didn’t think to ask these three mystery men who they were or what they were doing; he just saw them as their only hope of salvation. “Can you help us get out of here?” he asked.

  “The President has a rescue force on the way.” Brognola told the lie smoothly. “They should be hitting the beach in a little over twenty-four hours.”

  “The Marines?” Spellman brightened.

  “Yes. If you can find a place to hide until they get here you’ll be safe.”

  Since he was familiar with the area, de Lorenzo stepped forward. “We don’t know how much of the area the terrorists are controlling,” he said. “But if you head south along the beach you should run into other people who are also hiding, and they will take you in. Just be on the lookout for gunmen in black. They’re the terrorists.”

  Spellman had been hoping that these men would be able to do more for them, but obviously they were on some kind of mission against the terrorists. “We’ll be careful,” he said. “And thanks a lot.”

  “Good luck.”

  IN HIS COMMAND POST in the Hotel Maya, Diego Garcia went over the printouts of the latest reports from his Matador groups in Mexico. It was amazing how easy it had been to bring the country to its knees with just a few hundred men in the right places. Even the takeover of the presidential palace and the National Assembly had been child’s play and had required very little killing.

  Gaining control of the Mexican military forces had been a bit more of a problem, but select officers in positions of high authority had been deep-cover Matador agents. The army’s chief of staff had met with an unfortunate accident, but his successor was part of the Matador team. The air force and navy had come under his control just as easily, and only a couple of so-called counterterrorist battalions deployed against guerrillas along Mexico’s southern border weren’t under Matador control.

  With the military’s aviation assets either grounded or controlled by his operatives, however, those few units wouldn’t present much of a threat at this point. Once the army had been properly purged, he’d use them to neutralize the few holdout units.

  The Yankees had finally reacted to the invasions of their southern borders, but the damage had already been done. The estimates were that between eighty and a hundred thousand people had flooded into the border states and it would take months, if not years, to run them all down. Not all of them had been Matador operatives by any means. But all it took was for a couple of his men to aim the mobs against high-value targets and turn them loose to do the damage he wanted accomplished. The Yankee news reports of widespread looting and arson told him that the plan was working as he had intended. With the Yankees tied up in their own backyards, they wouldn’t be interfering in Mexico’s internal affairs.

  “Comrade Colonel,” one of the Cuban’s subordinates said as he hurried into his office. Diego Garcia wasn’t a colonel, but he liked the sound of the military title. “Someone killed the guards at the jail and freed the prisoners.”

  Garcia didn’t believe what he was hearing. The town’s police force had been disarmed and locked up along with all the private security guards employed by the various hotels. The only people in town with weapons were his men. “How did this happen?”

  The man shrugged. “No one knows, Chief. We were delivering another group of prisoners and found the bodies of our men had been dragged inside. It looks like they were caught by surprise.”

  “How many dead?” The Cuban had planned this operation down to the last round of ammunition and operative. He had enough men to completely cordon off the peninsula and to guard his thousands of hostages. He also had a fair-size reserve force. But he wanted to keep his reserves free in case a situation came up that required reinforcement.

  “All of them are dead, Comrade, all eight.”

  “And the prisoners?” He was holding only a few men in the jail, but they were important hostages.

  “All of them escaped, Colonel,” the man said. “And it also looks like they took some of the police weapons to arm themselves.”

  “Does it look like they had outside help?”

  The man shrugged. “There is no way to tell, Comrade Colonel. None of our men fired their weapons, so it looks like they were taken by surprise.”

  “Pull one of the squads from the eastern end of the bridge and tell them to replace the jail guards,” the Matador leader commanded. “And tell the comrade at the bridge to make sure that the explosive charges are ready to be set off.”

  “Sí, Comrade Colonel.”

  “And track those people down,” Garcia ordered. “All of them. There’s no way for them to escape and I want them back. Tell the comrades not to worry, though, if they have to kill a few of them. Except,” he quickly added, “I need that Yankee alive at all costs. And, if they can, the Mexican de Lorenzo, as well.”

  “Sí, Comrade.”

  As soon as the Matador officer left to carry out his orders, Elena Martinez came out from the back room of the office. She had changed out of her party dress and was wearing Matador black.

  “I didn’t think Brognola had it in him to do something like that,” she said. “He seemed just like all the rest of those Yankee political flunkies.”

  “There’s something about him that doesn’t fit with what I was told,” Garcia said. “Unlike the others, he wasn’t at all concerned about being taken hostage. He taunted me like he was a man who had no fear of the future. You know, I think he escaped so he could try to kill me and disrupt the plan.”

  Martinex was all too aware of Garcia’s growing paranoia. He was a brilliant planner and his thirst to bring grief to the Yankees drove him relentlessly. Of late, though, he seemed to have slipped into very self-centered thinking. She had reported her concerns to the Cuban leader, who had ordered her to keep an even closer eye on him.

  She didn’t know how much closer she could get to him than sharing his bed, but much was riding on the success of this Matador operation. Garcia was the architect and driving force behind the project, but if it looked as though he was losing contact with reality, her orders were to eliminate him. If that became necessary, Nguyen Cao Nguyen would step in to take the plan to its conclusion, and she would step up to the second-in-command position.

  It would be poor payment for Garcia’s years of faithful service to the Revolution if he had to be removed. But the Cuban people deserved only the best and if a man, any man, was not up to the job, he was expendable.

  “Let me
go out to look for him,” she suggested. “I should be able to bring him back.”

  “Tonight? You’ll get shot by our own patrols.”

  “Not if I wear the same dress I was wearing when I was ‘captured.’ You can tell our men to be on the lookout for me and if the Yankee sees me, he’ll think that I managed to escape, too.”

  “It’s a big town.”

  “But if he’s coming here like you think, he’ll be somewhere between here and the jail.”

  “I’d rather you stayed here and guarded me,” he replied. “I have to oversee the plan and if I am killed, it will surely fail.”

  “I will not let him get close to you,” she promised soothingly. “But to do that, Diego, I have to have complete freedom of movement, you know that.”

  The rational part of Garcia’s disintegrating mind did realize the truth of what she said. Elena was one of Cuba’s most effective operatives, and her personal kill list was impressive even by Mossad standards. As a favor for the PLO, she had even taken out one of Israel’s superspies in Spain. A soft Yankee bureaucrat like Brognola wouldn’t stand a chance against her.

  “Good idea,” the Cuban finally agreed. “But see that Juan knows that you are leaving the headquarters so he can increase the security on me.”

  “Certainly.”

  Elena quickly changed back into the red fiesta dress she had worn at the dinner. She’d positioned the thigh holster for her silenced Makarov pistol on her left leg and her stiletto sheath down the back of her neck. She would have preferred to pack her Czech Skorpion machine pistol, but that wouldn’t fit her cover of a woman needing rescuing.

  She had no doubts that if Hal Brognola was coming back to the hotel, he would be coming for her; he was that kind of old-fashioned man. It had taken her a little longer than usual to get a read on him at the dinner and had been surprised when she did. She’d been prepared to have him start pawing her over the shrimp cocktail, the usual response she got from men his age, particularly Americans. Surprisingly, though, he had turned out to be the prefect gentlemen companion, comfortable with himself, urbane, witty and well-mannered.