Grave Mercy

One part of Bolan wanted to kick his surfboard out past the breakers and carve some more waves, but the Executioner was already mentally organizing a map approximated from the missing fishermen and tourists’ last-known locations. He’d call to confirm his estimations, either pulling in favors from local law enforcement, or in a last resort, taking his inquiries electronically to the Farm to get the cyberteam’s assistance. The only other snarl in his plans to take war to the mystery kidnappers was that most of his gear had gone back to the States with Jack Grimaldi while Bolan recovered from his wounds. All he had with him right now was an Atomic Aquatics titanium dive knife in a sheath strapped to his right calf. The closest thing to firepower that he possessed were two 9-mm Beretta pistols in a lockbox, hidden from view of both children and gun thieves looking to make some money on the black market. Normally, Bolan would have tried to keep the discreet little Beretta PX4 Compact concealed, but shirtless and without a belt for his drawstring-waisted surfer shorts, he had no options.

Luckily for Bolan, among surfers, dive knives in calf sheaths were about as common as cell phone holsters in New York City.

It still wasn’t the kind of arsenal that the Executioner would need to blitz a piracy operation, but Bolan could take his first steps, making do with weapons acquired from his enemies. Low supplies did little to slow a Bolan blitz, such as when he was living hand to mouth with barely enough money to buy gunpowder to make his own ammunition.

Another wave broke over his thighs, Bolan and the board bobbing in the water. A few more waves wouldn’t hurt, and in fact, they’d complete his regimen of exercise for the day. Then, after toweling off, the soldier would have a chance to begin his research and equipment assembly for this night’s stalk. He’d be done in time for sunset, the Executioner’s time. Then he could hunt through the shadows, using darkness as his most powerful ally in dealing with the foes who outnumbered him, but rarely could outfight or outplan him.

For now, the sun was out, and as a wise man had once said, there was no disinfectant like daylight. Any effort to find the parasitic hijackers and kidnappers during normal hours would prove to be inefficient.

The Executioner admonished himself. Too often, professionals had found themselves in deadly situations, bleeding and or dying because they were “in the white,” a level of awareness that was a total lack of preparedness or consciousness of surroundings. Living that way was a sure means of finding oneself in the path of a knife or a bullet. Bolan had only survived all these missions, all these wars, because his mind was sharp, his senses peeled and his reflexes primed to go.

Movement had tripped Bolan’s instincts, the preliminary rustle of foliage indicative of a man crashing through a forest. Peripheral vision and hearing had picked up on that, and to Bolan, they were as obvious as signal flares. He turned to spot the source of the crashing—a haggard-looking figure that emerged onto the sand.

Bolan took in the details of the man, and with spine-stiffening realization, he saw the machete dangling in the newcomer’s hand.

With a kick, Bolan freed his foot from the board’s leash. He speared into the surf with lightning quickness. Even as he swam to shore, powerful chest and shoulder muscles exploding with force that thrust him to land, another detail came to the forefront of his thoughts.

The man’s eyes.

They were blank, unfocused, even though his lips were peeled back from his teeth in an enraged rictus.

Bolan had encountered chemically reprogrammed opponents before. They were driven by their orders, sanity ripped from their drugged minds. The poor, brainwashed zombies felt little pain and even less restraint, using every ounce of their strength at such a rate that even when they recovered from their altered mental states, their bodies were wrecks.

Because of that wild abandon, their strength pushed beyond their normal limits.

Even at his strongest, Bolan was hard-pressed to deal with these blank-eyed murderers.

The Executioner dug his feet into the sand, pushing toward the man. He would make no excuses for failure.

Not when children were in the path of a machete-wielding maniac.

THE CREATURE THAT HAD once been Guillermo Rojas winced as the first rays of light poured in from the opened doors of the shipping container on the back of the truck. With that first touch of day, he burst through the door with savage fury and speed. He didn’t notice the harsh gravel that sliced the soles of his feet.

What he was aware of was the extra weight in his right hand. Memories were few and far between in his chemically landscaped brain, but he recognized the object as a fearsome weapon, almost as long as a sword. He didn’t know the word for it—he had no more words for anything. He did remember the depthless joy he felt when he had sunk such a thing into human flesh, a cathartic jolt of vengeance that rolled through him.

More thoughts coalesced in his fevered mind, clearing through his fog of madness. Pain and terror washed over him in unyielding waves, phantom memories of injuries inflicted at the hands of people—blacks, whites, men, women, adults and children. All of their faces and appearances were associated with agony and impotent horror. His only anchor was a single voice cutting through the omnipresent nightmare.

“Kill them!” the resonating voice boomed. “Kill them and end the fire in your blood!”

Rojas understood only two words, but they were all he really needed now. He had to lash out and destroy everyone because they were all a part of the torture he’d been subjected to. All the addled medical student knew was that humanity as a whole had turned on him, scourging his flesh and sanity. He also had a hint, a feint trace of another loss, a beautiful golden angel.

That pushed Rojas forward, and he staggered on, hearing the lilt of music and bubbling laughter of joy. He knew the sounds of the creatures who had left him to suffer unspeakable horrors.

What Rojas hadn’t seen were his fellow brainwashed assassins, two more men and two young women, all wielding machetes. The five of them charging toward the surf camp’s sounds. Rojas had been programmed to ignore them, his psyche masterfully twisted so as to allow Morrot’s killers to work in groups without attacking each other. Injected with amphetamines and twisted by a multimedia assault that filled them with false memories of a living hell, the people were no longer human. They were dedicated attack dogs, no longer possessing pause or reason.

The trees and foliage between Rojas and his prey were little impediment to him. Despite branches and blades of tall grass gouging his chest and legs, he barreled through the undergrowth. The others were slower, or simply taking the path of least resistance.

Nothing would keep him from the bloody revenge he sought.

Not even the man who charged out of the water, naked except for surfer shorts and a black sheath on his leg.

Rojas opened his mouth, releasing a wild screech, raising the machete to attack.

CHAPTER FOUR

Any doubt that Mack Bolan possessed that the machete-wielding Latino was reduced to an animalistic state disappeared when he released an unholy howl that split the air, turning the heads of a half dozen kids lounging and listening to music on the sand. Running through water and in wet sand felt like trying to pull his feet out of the tendrils of a hungry octopus, but his long legs gave him enough of a stride to reach the edge of the water.

The attacker’s maniacal eyes flitted toward the prone children who weren’t aware of their danger. Bolan knew he only had a few moments to stop him.

“Over here!” he called, the boom of his voice pinning the drugged man’s dead, cold eyes to him.

Another bestial hiss erupted from him and he swung his machete toward Bolan. In any confrontation between human and terrain chopper, the foot-and-a-half-long blade won every time, so Bolan didn’t bother with blocking. He sidestepped, avoiding the swing that started from above the attacker’s head and ended up slicing only air.

Bolan considered drawing the Atomic dive knife, but he could see that his opponent was young and despite his scratches and blank gaze, it was possible that he was an American. It didn’t take much more than a gauge of his age to realize that this could be one of the kidnap victims, and as such, one of the many innocent lives that he’d sworn to protect.

In the Executioner’s world, there was no such thing as an acceptable loss. Once the machete reached the nadir of its arc, Bolan lunged, putting both hands around his opponent’s forearm. With a hard yank, Bolan pulled the man’s face into his left shoulder, letting the uninjured joint take the brunt of the collision. Jaws snapped shut with a sickening crunch and the drugged maniac’s eyes rolled in their sockets.

Such chemically enhanced foes were mostly immune to the pain of conventional punches, bullets and blades, but the Executioner was a master of all manner of combat. As such, he knew the weak points of the human body, and the trunk line of nerves just under the ear and behind the jaw was one such place that even in a haze of painkilling amphetamines would stop a person with one blow. The would-be killer jarred into submission, Bolan turned his attention toward disarming him.

A shriek from behind—the spine-chilling wail of a terrified child—turned him away from his attempt to render his attacker harmless. Two more figures rushed into view, blades held over their heads. Suddenly the Executioner found himself outnumbered, and his concern for the suffering of his opponent disappeared. With both hands holding the man’s forearm still, he knifed his knee into it. With a snapped ulna and humerus, the man’s grip on the machete disappeared.

That accomplished, Bolan released the limb and brought his left elbow up hard, another crashing blow across the man’s jaw that threw him into the sand, senseless and barely mobile.

He turned to see a growling young woman with ratty black hair rushing in pursuit of a ten-year-old boy, her intent to bury her blade in the kid’s back. Her rage was so focused on the youth that the Executioner was able to catch her by surprise, hammering his right forearm across her throat in a clothesline maneuver. The healed stab wound released a spike of complaint, and it felt as if the young woman had run headfirst into his ribs, but at the end of the collision, she was flat on her back and Bolan still stood.

She screeched in frustration, her blank, feral gaze locked on the man who’d stopped her. She still held on to her machete, but Bolan hopped over her and landed one heel hard into the inside of her elbow. The joint popped loudly, and she, too, was disarmed, but clawing, jagged fingernails sliced into the warrior’s right thigh, planing off ribbons of dermis.

Bolan cracked his heel against the young woman’s jaw, feeling it dislocate under the force of his back kick, and while it cut off her animalistic growls, she was still reaching up with her left arm to hook her gnarled fingers into his crotch. He sidestepped her effort to geld him and gave her another kick, this time to her temple. Even as he did so, he caught sight of his male attacker in his peripheral vision, bursting up from the sand in a rampaging rush.

The Executioner turned and met the man’s charge with his right elbow striking him in the collarbone. Through his arm, Bolan could feel the snap of his opponent’s clavicle, and the drug-crazed killer stopped as if he’d struck a brick wall. Even stunned from Bolan’s countermeasure, the man lashed out blindly with his left hand, fingers reaching for Bolan’s face where they could tear skin and burst one of his eyeballs. The soldier straightened his right arm, a palm strike deflecting those blinding fingernails as he hit the man’s other forearm hard.

A wail of frustration all but split open Bolan’s right eardrum, leaving the soldier wide open for his attacker’s next tactic. The Executioner grimaced as teeth tore into the skin of his right shoulder, splitting flesh and releasing a torrent of blood down his biceps.

With a grimace, Bolan brought up his left palm, jamming the heel of his hand between the eyes of the attacker. It took every ounce of precision not to strike the man in the nose and drive splinters of bone into his brain, but even so, the young Hispanic was going to feel the effects of his concussion for a long time. The blow literally lifted his attacker off Bolan’s shoulder and sent him crashing into the sand.

The young woman he’d clotheslined took the brief moments of scuffle as an opportunity to rise into a crouch. Her hand was nearly around the haft of her machete. Bolan regretted the need to cripple her, but she was determined to carve up a fellow human being. He kicked her in the wrist, snapping it like a twig and knocking her into the sand. Her howl was not of pain, it was too forceful, and her bared teeth were poised to rip open Bolan’s calf. He pivoted and snapped his heel into her forehead with the same force he’d use to kick open a locked door.

If she survived, she’d need plenty of physical therapy to use both of her hands again, and Bolan wasn’t certain he’d restrained himself enough to avoid giving her brain damage. She was still, for now, and that was all that mattered because there was a third killer on the loose, a fourth and a fifth now in view.

It was as if someone had released a pack of velociraptors onto the beach, bestial shrieks filling the air. Bolan was already bleeding, though no arteries had been bitten, and he’d only dealt with a young man and an even smaller woman. He watched Spaulding wrestling with one of the attackers, a screeching little woman with dirty blond hair and thick legs that had wrapped around his torso.

The surf camp owner’s face was a crimson mask, and his wobbly legs betrayed severe blood loss or head trauma—perhaps both. As it was, Spaulding was still fighting, holding one at bay while the other two, both young men, were on the rampage. A fourteen-year-old boy stood his ground between one of the assailants and two eight-year-olds. His courage was admirable, but the machete severed his right hand as he held it up to the drug-crazed berserker.

Bolan didn’t have time to make choices, he charged the would-be killer who was about to take more body parts away from the teen. Three long strides turned into a leap, and Bolan hooked his arm around the head and neck of the machete swinger. Two hundred twenty pounds of lean muscle and hard-forged combat skill combined to make the flying tackle into an impact that hammered both men into the ground. Sand flew as the drugged assassin broke Bolan’s fall, and perhaps more than a few ribs.

The crash was hard enough to spin the machete out of his hand, but that only meant that he had a meth-fueled wrestler on the other side of this fight. Bolan didn’t see the looping left that whipped around and struck him in the back of his head. It was an eye-crossing blow, and because he hadn’t loosened up to roll with the punch, it felt as if his brains were sloshing around inside his skull.

Despite the recent impediment, Bolan could see the berserker’s right fist heading straight to his face. He lowered his head swiftly, swinging it into the onrushing knuckles like a wrecking ball. Fingers cracked as they struck the hard curve of bone at his hairline. That was why the Executioner had used the heel of his hand and his foot on the foreheads of his prior two opponents—the head was a tough mass of bone while knuckles were relatively fragile. Even though his foe’s right fist was now a useless jumble of bent fingers, Bolan felt the clawing fingers tearing at his nape and the back of his head. The short wisps of black hair back there were drenched with blood as nails tore skin.

“Enough,” Bolan grunted as he brought up his knee and twisted his opponent down so that he took the kick between his shoulder blades. The heavy vertebrae around his spinal cord was more than enough to prevent the man from ending up crippled, but not by much. Breath escaped his lungs in a fetid explosion.

Bolan took that brief second to slam his elbow into the attacker’s sternal notch. He tried not to let his anger over a crippled boy color his response, but the elbow chop struck the former machete marauder in his xyphoid process, another juncture of nerves and muscle that when struck properly could render a man helpless and breathless until he passed out. Too hard, and the target would die. Too soft, and with lungs full of air, it would just hurt.

The man bent backward over Bolan’s knee froze, his mouth stretched like a landed fish’s as it tried to suck in air, but foiled by unresponsive nerves and muscles. The soldier shoved the marauder off his knee and dropped him in the sand. His first instinct was to tend to the fourteen-year-old whose agonized screams echoed in his conscience, but there was another maniac on the loose with a wicked blade. He moved away from the Jamaican boy reluctantly. He had to locate the fifth of the attackers.

The Executioner turned when a strangled death cry escaped Spaulding’s throat. The dirty-blond psychotic was fighting to rip her chopper out of Spaulding’s skull where it had gotten stuck. Bolan charged toward her, knocking her off the latest addition to his collection of the friendly dead. She couldn’t have been half of Bolan’s weight, so when he shoulder-blocked her in the upper chest, it was like a freight train flattening a compact car. She flew off Spaulding, landing ten feet away, not in much condition to do anything more than gasp for breath.

He took a half of a second to evaluate her condition. Her hands were folded up into the air, twitching at the end of her forearms. Any movement now consisted of involuntary spasms as he’d knocked her completely senseless.

That would do, for now. Bolan had one more menace to stop.

A strange pop filled the air, and the Executioner turned to see Rudd holding his surfboard up, the fifth attacker’s bloody machete lodged in its body.

Bolan broke into a hard run, his long legs pistoning against the sand. Blood rushed, a torrent of thunder rolling through his brain at the same breakneck speed he charged the man attacking Rudd. It was a battle of wills between the two. The machete had been rammed into the surfboard’s fiberglass frame, and the drugged killer was trying to rip it free. It would be only instants before the assassin decided that the struggle wasn’t worth it, and he’d go at the surfer with teeth and nails.

Bolan had been on the receiving end of those savage attacks. He didn’t doubt that Rudd would end up with his throat chewed out or his eyes burst.

At the last moment, the soldier lowered his head and shoulder-blocked the drugged berserker in the small of the back, the force of his impact hurling the brainwashing victim ten feet past Rudd, landing him in the surf. The splash of water over his body didn’t do anything to clarify the killer’s mind as he leaped back to his feet with unnatural speed and strength. Bolan knew that a tackle like he’d given this man would have left anyone else writhing in pain. Even Bolan’s shoulder ached from that contact.

“Well, come on!” Bolan shouted at the blank-eyed man. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, but he appeared to have been on a football team. The youth in front of him was as big as the Executioner, and had a thicker musculature, making the soldier think of a linebacker. Tanned and blond, he was undoubtedly an American, and this one would be strong enough to twist Bolan’s head off his shoulders thanks to the chemical cocktail that had reduced him to a feral, froth-mouthed berserker.

Bolan had tried muscle, and ended up slamming into a brick wall, jarred himself by the very impact that had saved Rudd. Pure strength wasn’t going to be enough to end this conflict because if he struck any harder, he’d kill the young man. It was time to outfight, using his intellect. He summoned up his best “drill sergeant” voice and taunted the berserker again. “Kill me!”

That order spurred the linebacker-size attacker to charge, blind rage spurring him on. Bolan threw himself at the charging drug-crazed assassin, but he aimed low, striking the man across the thighs and flipping him head over heels. The berserker tumbled into the sand, throwing up a cloud, and the thud that resounded from his fall was a powerful drumbeat. The big killer’s eyes were now unfocused, dazed from the crash, and Bolan didn’t waste a single moment, scissoring his legs around his neck.

With all the leverage and strength of his calves and ankles pressing on either side of the marauder’s neck, Bolan had him locked in a true sleeper hold, not pinching the windpipe shut but pressing the knots of bone around his ankles against blood vessels that fed the brain. Deprived of fresh oxygen, the killer’s fevered brain faltered, losing consciousness even as the berserker clawed at Bolan’s shins.

The soldier grimaced, but with a proper sleeper hold applied, the would-be murderer was slumped, out cold in the sand.

“What the hell is going on?” Rudd asked, his voice shaky.

“Check on Antoine. One of these crazies chopped off his hand,” Bolan ordered.

Rudd paused, blinking at the bloodied and battered Executioner in front of him.

“Move it!”

Rudd’s senses returned to him and he rushed to the badly wounded teen’s side. Bolan knew that he’d have to find some form of cord to apply a tourniquet to the stump; direct pressure wasn’t going to work.

Luckily, the maniacal assassin had a belt on. Bolan whipped it out of the unconscious brute’s belt loops and started to stagger to Antoine’s side.

The only warning that the Executioner had of an attack were the grunts and pants of the attacking woman. For Bolan and his finely tuned reflexes, that was more than enough. The young woman had murdered Spaulding, so a gentle response wasn’t in the cards. She was within a few feet when her throat released the shrill beginning notes of an animalistic howl, but Bolan cut it off with a raised elbow that exploded her nose and tore her cheek open.

She hit the ground, and Bolan sighed. He’d let his emotions get the better of him, and now a brainwashed young woman was disfigured, bleeding and unconscious in the sand. He tore himself away from his self-reproach.

A boy needed medical attention, and Bolan’s battlefield first aid was going to keep him from bleeding to death.

BEFORE BOLAN returned his attention to the flattened, defeated machete-wielding marauders, he’d already encountered a terrible death toll in this attack. Spaulding was one of course, but there was a mother and two children slain in the violent rampage. The woman, named Anna, and her eight-year-old son were hacked apart, Anna’s life given as she provided a living shield against the rising and falling edge of the murderer’s blade. Her courage and sacrifice were in vain, sadly, as the machete’s merciless steel severed her left arm as it shielded her son’s head, taking off the limb and crushing a cruel crease in the boy’s face.

Bolan looked at the horrific carnage, his gut filled with bitter defeat. He didn’t look too hard, but he realized that he couldn’t tell where mother ended and son began, their dark, crimson-stained skin torn apart, muscle and bone so pulped and splintered that it was as if a demonic elephant had stomped a puddle into their bodies. Dread and loss were crippling emotions, but the Executioner was far too human, too humane, to be able to bottle up and dispose of those feelings. Instead, he buried them, making them the spurs that stuck into his soul that would be there to prod him along should his strength begin to fail.

Dread and loss were abstract, unfocused ideas that he couldn’t use. Pain and righteous anger, however, were the flint and steel that would ignite Bolan to go one more step, endure one more injury, throw one more punch. The horrors of this morning turned from peace to panic were the kindling, the firewood that would fuel his hunt for justice.