Don Pendleton - Whipsaw

One more turn, this time waddling under the dolly weight of the minigun, and he was ready, except for the lights. He couldn't leave them intact. He had little enough edge as it was. If he sat there under the sudden siege of illumination, he'd be a sitting duck. As it was, after the first startling seconds of his onslaught, somebody was bound to figure out where he was. The LAW's would give him away, or the flashes from the Minigun. But at least he'd be a shadow in a sea of other shadows, no more substantial than a wave in an ocean full of them. And no less elusive.

Grabbing his rifle, Bolan moved quickly to the mess hut, following the fence. If he was right about the layout, that's where the main power supply was. The generator was the key. Disable it, and he would have the night and its friendly darkness as an ally. At the back of the mess hut, he pried the screen loose and crawled in through the open window.

In a corner of the modified field kitchen, the generator sat like a hulking dinosaur crouched on stubby legs. He played the flashlight across its surface until he found the main cable. Socketed and screwed in, it was just a simple matter to unscrew the sleeve and pull the plug. Just to be sure, he slashed at the cable and severed the end. They could pull an the switches and throw all the levers they wanted. With the main cable down, the camp would stay black.

After slipping back out the window, Bolan retraced his steps along the fence. One final adjustment occurred to him. He strung the LAW's along the fence, about ten feet apart. Now he could fire one and move. Let them scorch the air behind him all they wanted he'd be long gone.

For a second he thought about Marisa and Carlos, sitting there in the dark. He wondered what they would think at the first explosion. There was no way he could have told them, because he hadn't known what he was going to do, and the time for warning them was long past.

It was time to go to work.

The first rocket left the tube with a throaty growl. It streaked across the compound, a thin stream of smoke trailing behind it, and slammed into the nearest hut. Dead on target, it punched through a screen and crashed out a window. A single mushrooming flame speared up through the ruptured roof. Pieces of the tarpaper shearing and long slivers of wood cartwheeled through the air, starkly outlined by the brilliant yellow flash. A fraction of a second later the baritone crump of the detonation rolled across the yard.

Gouts of flame spouted up through the broken roof. By the time the ball of smoke gave way to a slender column, Bolan was already on the move.

The second rocket went off with the same result, and added its lights to the growing illumination.

The first shouts started, little more than confused bellowing, as the third LAW found its target. Bolan chucked the empty and useless tube away and moved to the fourth.

Zeroing in through the bluntly utilitarian sight, he saw a door fly open two huts down from his target and shifted his aim. The rocket homed in and knocked a string bean of a man off his feet as it grazed him before entering through the open doorway. It took out the back wall, and the slender man, wearing nothing but khaki shorts, spun out through the door, carried along by the force of the explosion.

In quick succession, Bolan let fly with three more before the first sporadic fire cracked. None of the slugs came near him, and even the noise of the gunfire seemed tame under the deepening roar of the burning buildings. As nearly as he could tell, the men still had no idea of Bolan's firing location.

Stunned by the suddenness of the attack and the terrible destruction already inflicted, the surviving members of the Leyte Brigade started to stretch a ragged blanket of fire across the compound.

Several of them sprinted into the shadows between the undamaged huts. They would be coming for him, Bolan knew, but there was still time to take out the rest of the buildings.

Staying close to the ground, he rolled from rocket launcher to rocket launcher. Bolan took out two more buildings, catching the supply shed as well as another barrack hut. Secondary explosions, probably gasoline or kerosene, tore the supply dump to pieces as easily as if it had been made of cheap cardboard. Great slabs of the wall pinwheeled away from the huge balloon of liquid flame and tumbled to the ground. It looked as if a house of cards had been set on fire. The flammable liquid in drums kept exploding, and every blast spewed scorching flame, spreading the blaze and setting fire to the hut on either side.

Bolan let his last LAW loose and crawled to the Minigun on its tripod. He scanned the dancing flames, holding fire until he had something real to shoot at. The flames twitched and twisted, tossing strange, gnarled shadows at one another, letting some fall on the ground and ooze out toward him as the flames grew taller.

At the far end of the compound, he spotted something, but the distorted light wouldn't let him focus on it long enough to make out what it was. A second later a spray of fire whistled across the compound toward him. It happened in a split second, but he could see it so clearly and his instincts were so perfectly attuned that he rolled away from the long, jagged burst even before he realized it had been fired.

Someone in the darkness had seen him, and that someone had a machine gun, an M-60 from the sound of it. Only four buildings remained intact. He had left the arsenal by design, and there had been no need to take out the mess hut. The remaining two looked almost transparent. The roaring holocaust heated the air and it surged and swelled like a translucent curtain. Things shimmered as if they were sculpted of Jell-O instead of wood and metal. The men who dashed back and forth behind the wall of flame themselves looked as if they had melted, strangely curled and fluid, like candles left out in the sun.

Bolan rolled back to the Minigun and swung it toward the knot of men against the far fence. He couldn't see them, but he knew they were there. The fire from the far end had stopped, and Bolan opened up with the Mini.

He played it across the compound, chewing at the wreckage and ripping everything in its path to pieces. Hunks of burning lumber flew into the air. Charred timbers suddenly exploded in showers of sparks, then toppled over.

Short bursts of return fire, mostly from automatic rifles and a couple of handguns, started to chip away at the ground on either side. The fence behind him rattled, and he heard several wires sing as they parted like snapped piano strings. They were getting the range, and he couldn't see them.

The Mini was almost as much a liability as an asset. It was too awkward to move, and he sure as hell wasn't going to try to carry it in some headlong charge across the open ground. He ripped one more sustained burst across the flames, letting off the trigger only long enough to spare the arsenal, then dodged away from the gate into the diminishing dark.

Along the fence, the flames still cast little more than stray patches of orange light, and Bolan was following it when a to slab of shadow suddenly detached itself from the night and screamed toward him. It took a second to realize it was a jeep. The steady fire from a rear-mounted M-60 sieved through the fence right behind him as he ran, then arced its way off into the jungle night.

Swinging the M-16 around, he held it in his left hand and fired back as he ran. The chattering of the M-60 grew intermittent, as if the gunner couldn't keep his hand steady and his finger on the trigger.

The jeep's headlights speared out at him all of a sudden. He felt for a moment like a butterfly pinned on a mat.

Bolan spun about and dropped to one knee. With the M-16 on his hip, he sliced across the front of the charging jeep. Both headlamps blew, each pulsing once briefly and brightly, then dying in a shower of glass and sparking filament. The jeep's radiator had been punctured, and watery steams geysered through a dozen holes. A small cloud ballooned up around the hood, but the jeep kept coming.