Devil's Playground

Overloaded with men, it swayed as it made a wild turn back to its base, but the low center of gravity won out, keeping all the wheels on the ground. Bolan yanked the lifeless driver out of the cab. The Mexican riding shotgun with him was slumped, coughing up blood from lethal injuries. There was no way that Bolan could treat the horrific wounds inflicted by the powerful rifle. He unleathered the Desert Eagle and ended the gunman’s suffering with a 240-grain skull smasher. He pushed the corpse out of the cab and started the truck.

The Border Patrol agents, hundreds of yards away, had gotten out of their vehicle, watching in consternation. They’d just seen nearly a dozen men who’d tried to kill them left dead or wounded on the desert sand, their black-clad savior commandeering the Mexican truck to take up pursuit.

Bolan hated to leave the patrolmen in the lurch, their vehicle destroyed. He opened his satellite phone, linking up to Stony Man Farm.

“Bear, send a recovery team. We have two Border Patrol agents who’ll have a long walk unless they get a new ride,” the Executioner said. He slipped on a pair of night-vision goggles so that he could watch the road without resorting to headlights, which would betray to the escaping enemy that they were being hunted.

“We’re on it. Satellite imagery is following the remaining truck, if you should lose it,” Aaron Kurtzman responded.

“Not likely,” Bolan returned. “I put the fear of hell itself into them. The enemy driver is plowing up countryside as if there were no tomorrow.”

“ETA for the pickup on your agents is about five minutes. Satellite imagery shows that they’re unharmed. Both are moving around normally.”

“Great news,” Bolan said. “I hated to blow the element of surprise, but I couldn’t just stand by and let two lawmen be murdered.”

“Now we get to see where the rabbits hole up,” Kurtzman told him. “You were right, though, Striker. They couldn’t be easier to track if they had a neon sign on them.”

The Mexicans’ truck bounced and charged across the terrain several hundred yards away from Bolan’s vehicle. Finally, the two-and-a-half-ton truck swerved. It almost tipped again, two wheels rising a couple of feet into the air, but the driver recovered the vehicle’s balance.

“They’re on a road now, Striker,” Kurtzman informed him.

Bolan eased his “borrowed” ride onto the road with far more grace than his quarry. Though the road was paved, there were no lights along it, or even rails on either side, just soft, gravel-filled shoulders. The fewer lights, the better. He didn’t need his terrorized prey to realize that he was still with them. As it was, he let off the gas enough to increase the gap.

Judging by the speed and distance traveled, they’d already gone twenty miles past the Arizona-Mexico border. The G3 and the powerful Barret M-98 rested on the bloody seat, in case he was being drawn into a trap. It was hours from dawn. Hopefully, he’d arrive at his intended destination before sunrise so that he could make a covert insertion.

If not, Bolan would do the best he could, even in broad daylight, though he doubted that his quarry had much farther to go. Already, they had dropped from nearly eighty miles an hour to half that. Bolan matched their speed, and saw them turn onto another road. There was a sign at the intersection. The Executioner paused long enough to read that the road led to an Army base.

“What’s the status on this base?” Bolan asked, reading off the name to Kurtzman.

“It’s fully active, Striker. It’s mostly a supply and transport depot, and according to reports, it’s been on the bubble as far as closing. There isn’t enough money to keep it going, with rising gasoline prices and the Mexican government just barely out of the red,” Kurtzman explained.

“So they’re taking odd jobs to keep the gates open?” Bolan asked.

Kurtzman sighed. “Sounds like it. A little dilemma.”

“No dilemma at all,” Bolan replied. “They tried to kill American lawmen. I’ve fought enough top-secret U.S. groups funded by drug money who murdered anyone in their way and shut them down. Slaughtering people and selling addictive poison isn’t a valid option for any group to fund itself.”

“Not everyone on the base is in on the cocaine cowboy rodeo,” Kurtzman stated.

“I’ve got a face and a voice,” Bolan returned. “When I cut off the head, the rest will die. I’m closing this connection now, Bear. Places to go. Things to break. Catch you later.”

He turned off the sat phone and pulled the truck off the road as he saw the supply depot’s lights in the distance.

The rest of this trip was going to be on foot.

BLANCA ASADO PUSHED HER auburn hair off of her forehead, kneading the skin below her hairline as she looked at the photograph of her twin sister lying on the morgue table. She squeezed her brow until it felt as if her skull was going to crack under the pressure, her eyes burning with tears. A swirl of sickness spun in her guts and air in the room felt unbreathable, despite the open window and the fact that Armando Diceverde wasn’t smoking.

“Blanca…” Diceverde began. “Blanca, are you okay?”

“I don’t know,” Asado replied. Rosa’s eyes had been closed, but she could tell by the way they had been shut that the force of a .38 Super slug to the brain had nearly disgorged the orbs from their sockets.

Diceverde wasn’t a tall man, and he only came up to Blanca Asado’s shoulder. The fact that Blanca was looking at the remains of her sister and best friend only made him feel spiritually smaller. A choked sob escaped Asado’s lips and she shook her head.

“Rosa wasn’t into making money with drugs. We’ve both seen what that shit does to good people,” Asado explained.

“You’re preaching to the choir, Blanca,” Diceverde replied. “She’d been flagging things for me to look at. We’ve both noticed something new burrowing into Acapulco’s drug scene. Someone has been giving the Juarez Cartel a real knocking.”

“And this is why Rosa was killed? Brujillo and his wife have been working hard together to end the hold that the cartels have over Acapulco. Rosa told me that she was investigating all forms of threats detected against Madame Brujillo.”

“And on the surface, they seemed to be antigovernment attacks, but Rosa was curious about the sheer ferocity levied against the first lady,” Diceverde replied. “She sent me copies of her research into a new player on the drug scene, organized around a Santa Muerte cult.”

Blanca wrinkled her nose at the mention of the death cult, a popular subreligion that had sprung up in the underworld. Loosely based on Santería, Santa Muerte was a more ethically flexible religion, its morality open enough to allow drug dealers and murderers with faith issues to make amends for their wrongdoing with prayer and sacrifice, without hindering their more bloodthirsty and highly profitable activities. Suddenly the sins of dealing poison or mowing down another human being could be washed away with a moment’s contrition without renunciation of their previous crimes. Congregations sprung up in destitute slums and prison blocks across Mexico, and followers came from every walk of life, from the lowest gutter urchin to the most powerful drug baron.

“So if Rosa was picking up leads about Santa Muerte cultists taking over the state’s drug scene and trying to kill the governor and his wife…” Blanca began.

“The cultists have never made an attempt against Señora Brujillo,” Diceverde countered. “They have been hitting the Juarez Cartel and the smaller organizations hard, so much so that the Juarez group has been importing help from overseas.”

“So why would they accuse my sister of being part of this Santa Muerte cult and its takeover bid?” Asado asked. “Or of trying to murder the first lady?”

“We might never know,” Diceverde answered. “Maybe she saw something during the hit. There was a sighting of two men escaping the resort after the gunfight. An evidence technician I know also told me, off the record, that he was ordered to eliminate evidence of two 9 mm submachine guns from the battle scene.”

“Two 9 mm SMGs?” Asado asked. She did some mental arithmetic, looking at the reports of the fight. “The assassins were using Mexican-issue G3 rifles. The bodyguards had .45 and .38-caliber handguns and submachine guns. The first lady shot several assassins using a .38 owned by one of the protection detail…”

“And she shot your sister in the head,” Diceverde punctuated.

Asado took a deep breath. “After my sister might have been responsible for at least four dead assassins.”

“Too many shell casings to match with slugs,” Diceverde countered. “But you know Rosa and her baby Detonics .45s.”

“She was deadly with them,” Blanca replied. Her brow furrowed and her eyes began to sting. “Rosa wouldn’t have tried to shoot the first lady, even if she was responsible for a fake assassination attempt on herself. She wouldn’t have pulled a gun on her!”

“Everything that First Lady Brujillo is saying contradicts the hints that Rosa and I had been gathering,” Diceverde replied. His lips pulled into a tight line across his mouth. “Unfortunately, someone got to Rosa’s copies of the records when she died.”

“Someone on her protection detail who hadn’t been killed at the resort, most likely,” Asado said, her mind focusing on the problem.

“Not likely. The first lady liked to keep her personal staff close by. Anyone severed from her service usually ended up going somewhere far away,” Diceverde explained.

Asado frowned. “So that’s why the Feds want to talk to me.”

“If they’ve been fooled into thinking that Rosa was dirty, they might want to know how much she told you,” Diceverde added.

Asado took a deep breath. “I need to talk to someone about this. I know some people who know some people.”

“How many trust you enough to give you that kind of wiggle room?” Diceverde asked.

Asado’s shoulders fell.

The room was hot and cramped, bugs rattling against the rapidly disintegrating screen on the window. A small, naked bulb in a desk lamp glowed, throwing light on the reporter’s copies of Rosa Asado’s notes.

“The dent in the Juarez Cartel’s activity came when Governor Brujillo was elected,” Asado noted. “And it’s only become larger the more the governor cracked down on the cartel.”

“Circumstantial evidence. Nothing that would stand up in a court of law,” Diceverde admitted, regret weighing his words.

Bugs fluttered en masse from the screen, buzzing away into the night, drawing Asado’s attention. Something had frightened the tiny, sensitive creatures. Her hand slid under the loose tail of her blouse and she pulled out a hammerless .357 Magnum snub-nosed Ruger.

Diceverde’s eyes widened at the sight of the revolver. “What—”

Asado put a finger to her lips and shook her head. The journalist fell silent, hazel eyes going to the window. She pushed him to the wall and guided him to sit, protected by brick and masonry.

“I didn’t even see that,” Diceverde whispered.

“Well, if you had, then it wouldn’t be doing the job I wanted it to,” Asado replied. “Shush.”

A fist punched through the tattered windowscreen, an ugly, lime-shaped object locked in it. Asado clamped her hand over it, clenching it tight, and jammed the muzzle of the Ruger up into the wrist attached to it. Two thunderbolt blasts ripped through the confined room, the sheer power of the Magnum pistol enough to sever the appendage.

A howl of pain cut through the night and she hurled the disembodied hand back through the screen. A heartbeat later the brutal little round object exploded, rocking the walls and ceiling hard enough to rain dust in the room. Diceverde winced from the grenade blast, but realized that if the mysterious hand had let go of the bomb, the two of them would undoubtedly have been killed instantly.

Curses sounded outside and Asado swept the files off the table, stuffing them into Diceverde’s briefcase. “Come on, Armi.”

The journalist wasn’t waiting for a second invitation. He was up and on the woman’s heels in a flash. He paused long enough to retrieve a nickel-plated Colt 1911 from a drawer and thumbed the hammer back, short fingers wrapping easily around the slender autoloader’s grip. He jammed two spare magazines loaded with .38 Super rounds into his offside pocket.

Though it was against the law for civilians to own guns in Mexico, that didn’t stop people from breaking the law. As well, Diceverde had made enough enemies across his career as a reporter to know he needed a powerful and reliable handgun. They didn’t get much more powerful and reliable than the Colt in .38 Super.

Asado grabbed a handful of Diceverde’s shirt and shoved him through the door as an assault rifle poked through the window frame. She opened fire on the weapon in the portal, her pistol blazing like the sun. Bullets chopped just an inch over Diceverde’s head, letting him know just how close he had come to dying. His stocky legs propelled him through the doorway and the front door to the building opened, a black shadow appearing in front of him.

The journalist saw the unmistakable profile of an AK-47 in the man’s hands, and Diceverde triggered the Colt twice. The .38 Super roared in the darkness, creating bright strobes of light. The rifleman jerked, and Diceverde wasn’t sure if he had scored hits or not.

A muzzle-flash flared from the mouth of the AK, but it was stretched and elongated. Having been present for enough gunfights, the little reporter knew that the shots had been discharged into the ceiling. Diceverde triggered the Colt twice more, cracking out 125-grain hollow-point rounds at well over 1300 feet per second, aiming just behind the origin of the muzzle-flash. He was glad he’d spent the money on having night-sights installed on the shiny pistol. By following the vibrant neon-green dot hovering in the distance between the more indistinct yellow rear dots, he knew exactly where he was aiming.

A strangled cry filled the air and the rifle clattered to the floor.

Thunderbolts launched from behind Diceverde and he jerked his attention to another figure in the door, which was writhing as Magnum projectiles speared through his body, soft, exposed lead peeling apart on contact with fluid biomass and tunnelling horrendous cavities through the chest of another gunman.

Diceverde ran to the door and pressed his broad back to the wall to the side. He took the momentary break to drop his half-empty magazine and pocket it, feeding a new stick of nine shots into the Colt.

He heard the clicking of metal as somewhere in the shadows, Blanca Asado reloaded the partially spent AK-47.

“We’ll need the firepower,” Asado stated.

“Blanca…” Diceverde began.

The words he intended to say were ripped from his memory as the wall suddenly exploded behind him, concussive forces hurling him to the floor, his vision blurring.

CHAPTER TWO

The Executioner snipped chain links in the fence with his multitool, a sharp, powerful vise for cutting wire set at the base of the folding pliers. The circle of fence fell away, and he crawled through the hole.

He’d left his Barrett and the confiscated G3 behind in the truck, knowing that going in, he needed stealth and their added bulk would make his large, powerful frame even more noticeable. Still, he had the wicked Beretta 93-R machine pistol with its 20-round capacity and blunt suppressor under his arm, and the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle riding on his hip. Both handguns had been chosen by Bolan for their power and range. The Desert Eagle had proved itself a killer at out to two hundred yards, and the Beretta 93-R was a match for any submachine gun in his skilled hands, out to one hundred yards.

Though it was the Executioner’s plan to bring a fatal, final judgment to the commander of the smuggling forces who’d returned to the base, there was the possibility of uninvolved, honest Mexican soldiers staffing this facility. Opening fire without proper identification would put innocent blood on Bolan’s hands.

Luckily, aside from his pistols, Bolan also had various knives, garrottes and impact tools, truly silent means of delivering death. He saw the last of the trucks pull toward the motor pool, overladen with soldiers. All it would take would be one grenade to eliminate the smuggling military men, but before Bolan took out the enemy commander, he needed to get answers out of the man. A grenade might not leave enough left of the traitorous military leader to question, and an open gunfight would result in a conflict with soldiers whose duty was the defense of the base, not pushing heroin across the border.

Stalking closer, a shadow among shadows, Bolan closed on the group as soldiers disgorged from the truck.

He got within ten yards of the milling soldiers, his comprehension of Spanish more than sufficient to understand what was being said.

“We lost a third of the heroin,” one of the men reported.

“Juarez is going to be mad as hell,” the commander replied. “What the hell are we going to do?”

“We? You’re the one who ran away from one man,” the subordinate countered.

“Is that so?” the commander asked.

“Wait. Munoz…Hold on…”

A muzzle-flash lit up the accuser’s face an instant before it dissolved into a crater of spongy gore. Munoz lowered his .50-caliber Desert Eagle and looked around. “Any of the rest of you want to accuse me of running away?”

“No!” came the unanimous response.

“Good,” Munoz replied. “I’ll be in my office, contacting the cartel about the difficulties we’ve had tonight. In my version, we were struck by a significant force. It seemed as if they were Santa Muerte cultists.”

The soldiers nodded.

“Get the heroin stored away for our next trip. We’ll see if the part of the shipment left behind was touched. I doubt it. The Border Patrol wouldn’t cross two hundred yards into our territory to take out 150 kilos of Mexican Brown,” Munoz concluded. “Remember—Santa Muerte cultists ambushed us.”

It was one way for the commander to save face. The punctuation of his statement remained the dead man, his skull hollowed out by a thundering 350-grain bullet. Any deviation and the corpse would be joined by more. And apparently Munoz was in such a position of power that he could get away with burning his own men to the ground with impunity.

“I’m going to hit the bathroom,” another man said. His authority among the others was sufficient that he was able to slack off menial tasks to take care of biological functions, and the minions below him didn’t dare do more than grumble under their breath.

Bolan decided to shadow the loner instead of going right to Munoz. Kurtzman would contact him via his vibrating pager if anything of urgent interest were reported. The Farm undoubtedly had hacked into the phone system to spy on any communications coming in or going out, sifting for nuggets of gold in the streams of data running along fiber-optic wires.

The second in command had stepped into the latrine and begun to relieve himself when the Executioner snapped a powerful arm around his throat, pressure on his larynx strangling off a cry of dismay. Bolan rested the sharp edge of his commando knife across the Mexican’s brow and cheek.

“If you make a sound other than to answer my questions, I’ll carve out your left eye and saw off your nose in one slice. Comprende?” Bolan inquired.

“Yes,” the Mexican soldier rasped softly in English. Facial mutilation, especially the threat to his eye, had cowed the smuggler for now.

“How many on the base are in on the heroin pipeline?” Bolan asked.

“There used to be a dozen more,” the man began.

A hard push and blood trickled from the officer’s brow into his eye. A strangled whimper escaped.

“Minus them,” Bolan advised.

“Me. Colonel Munoz. The gate guards on duty. And the dozen or so unloading the truck,” the officer stated.

The answer sounded plausible, and the tremors in his captive’s voice had added a sense of truth to the confession.

The Executioner tugged his forearm tighter against his captive’s throat. “Let the survivors in your little bunch know that there’s an American who disapproves of your moonlighting.”

He jammed his thumb under the ear of the captive, pressing hard on the carotid artery long enough to render the smuggler unconscious without imparting any long-term harm.

Bolan turned the unconscious soldier around and deposited him on the seat of the toilet. He paused long enough to use a strip of plastic tape to take the man’s thumbprint, preserving it by pressing it to a three-by-five card for later scanning.

He had business to attend to.

Fourteen men were unloading heroin from the truck, several pushing a rolling pallet toward the depths of a storage building. Others worked on cleaning the blood spatter off their vehicle and picking up Munoz’s executed victim.

Bolan followed silently and stealthily after the quartet with the heroin. There were more than two hundred kilos on the pallet, meaning that Munoz’s declaration of half was either an understatement or he was delivering for more than just the Juarez Cartel.

The Executioner made a mental note to get that information out of the colonel before he died.

One straggler in the group had hung back. His task had to have been rear security, and since he gripped a rifle in both hands, he was Bolan’s first target. In two long strides, the wraith in black clamped a crushing hand around the throat of the soldier, cutting off any voiced protests just before spearing the seven-inch blade of his combat knife into the base of the gunman’s skull. Speared right through his brain, the major trunk of his central nervous system destroyed by the razor-sharp edge, he instantly turned into dead, dangling weight in the Executioner’s hand with only a whispered “squelch” of steel grating on bone betraying the swift kill.

The blade whipped out of the dead man’s neck, and Bolan shoved the corpse against one of the two men pushing on the trolley, both bodies collapsing to the ground as the warrior closed in behind the second drug pusher. Slick blood was the only thing glinting on the nonreflective battle knife, and even the dully glistening fluid disappeared when the Executioner plunged the unyielding steel into the Mexican soldier’s right kidney. A tortured sputter of pain was all that the smuggler had time to release before renal shock killed him. With a twist and a hard slice, the blade was free as the remaining pallet pusher grunted, shoving his lifeless friend off of him. There was a moment of complaint about the fool “playing around” before the Mexican realized he was complaining to a corpse.

He whipped his head around, but he only saw the waffle-tread of Bolan’s combat boot filling his world. The side kick smashed the Mexican smuggler’s nose flat, driving bone fragments back into his brain even as his neck snapped under the thunderous force of the blow.

The sickening crack that signaled the pallet pusher’s death alerted the man at the lead of the group and he whirled, reaching for a handgun in a flap holster.

Only the Executioner’s battle-honed reflexes gave him the advantage in beating the trooper’s quick draw. The black commando-style Bowie knife whistled through the air like a shard of night come alive. The gunman had snapped open his holster and stopped, fingers clawing up to the handle of the weapon jutting from his windpipe. Lips worked noiselessly as the last of the transport crew suffocated with an inch-and-a-half width of steel cutting off his air.

Bolan ripped a smaller, ring-handled knife from an inconspicuous sheath on his harness and charged in, two fingers through the loop base of the blade. A two-and-a-half-inch wedge of steel raked across both of the choking smuggler’s eyes, the stocky knife swung with enough force to splinter bone and carve a furrow in his forebrain. Bolan took the handle of the commando knife as the Mexican soldier slid off the black-phosphate blade to flop to the floor.

In the space of a few moments, four men lay dead, blood spreading in puddles on the concrete.