Don Pendleton - The Libya Connection

Bolan in penetration had gone undetected thus far — except by those who were dead — and if Bolan could dust them all without their fingers finding triggers.

Which is when it happened.

And all secrecy was blown to hell by the hammering roar of the second tommygun.

Having nowhere to go but back, a defender had braced himself against the door he was guarding and gotten his chopper leveled at Bolan before two final bullets from the Beretta tagged him out of this reality.

But the dead man's finger had already tightened on the Thompson's trigger as death snatched him. The dying motion carried through. The dead merc sprayed off a wildly random, deafening burst. The whistling .45 slugs riddled the dirt floor of the passageway and ricocheted off brick walls, adding to the cacophony in those close confines. Then the guard's body collapsed and the brief burst ceased.

Far too late for Mack Bolan.

The echo of the reports still rang in his ears when the piercing sounds of an alert siren began sounding from upstairs and outside.

Sounds of confusion and movement carried with it.

It would be less than a minute before they found him down here. And his only way out was up that stairwell behind him.

The mission had gone hard. So be it.

And the moaning sounds continued from behind the door.

Bolan hurdled across the bodies on the floor. He sloped to holster his Beretta and snatch up one of the dropped Thompsons. Then he flung himself to the brick wall next to the door. The moaning sound was all he could hear. Something terrible was happening to a human being in there.

Bolan sent two hundred pounds of enraged kick into the wooden panel and followed through, storming in fast with the Thompson ready.

Into a living nightmare.

The room was a chamber of horrors, rank with the stink of torture. It was low-ceilinged, dominated by a surgical table with a bright light overhead throwing down a pitiless glare upon the thing that was strapped to the table; something... that had once been human.

Everything else was murky shadow.

Jericho had not waited to give her to Shahkhia. Not after things had gone wrong in the desert tonight. Jericho had needed to know immediately what Eve knew; he needed to know how endangered this operation was, and in how much danger he was putting himself by remaining here at the Aujila base, waiting for Colonel Shahkhia's cautious arrival. So he had turned her over to Santos for questioning.

The Butcher had worked fast.

Only the victim's long lustrous black hair, cascading over the end of the surgical table, denoted her identity. All else was a mutilated red slime, naked to the harsh overhead light.

Eve had been skinned alive from her head to toe.

Both eye sockets were hollowed bowls of gore.

But she lived!

She had no perception of Bolan's entry, or anything else.

The moaning sound came from a ghastly hole that had been her mouth.

Bolan took this in as he burst through the doorway. He dodged into the deepest shadows near the door.

Gunfire lanced out at him from the darkness beyond the table. A slug whistled harmlessly to his left.

The torture master had fired a too-hasty round and identified his position.

Bolan's Thompson submachine gun chattered off a full half clip, cutting to shreds whatever the room held... including an obese blob of human fat in a plastic apron stained with fresh bits of human crud.

Santos.

The Butcher was blasted into the circle of light as the heavy .45 slugs tore him apart, flopping his bloated body against the surgical table, then to the floor where it did not move, a rapidly spreading dark pool forming beneath him.

Santos would butcher no more.

But he had butchered this one...

Bolan felt so many emotions tearing at him as he turned toward the victim on the table that he thought he would explode.

The living dead spoke to him.

"Q-quiero... please..."

It was a voice from the grave.

Bolan felt hot tears in his eyes.

"Eve... my God, Eve..."

"Please..." whispered a scratchy voice from that pitiful, butchered, ravaged person. "Quiero... Dios.. . let me die ..."

The moaning started again.

Bolan heard footfalls and equipment clanking as soldiers approached on the run from upstairs.

"Go with God," he bade her softly.

He ended her living hell, granting her last wish with a mercy round placed inches above the mouth-hole in the gory, skinned stump. And all he could think of was how beautiful she had looked that time on Lake Douglas...

The moaning ceased.

A soul was released to Infinity.

And a bellow of blind rage screamed up from his warrior's soul, bursting forth, erupting into this foul torture room.

Bolan the human being lost all conscious track of time and action then. He would never recall exactly what happened during the next fifteen minutes.

A machine does not think in such a contemplative fashion.

And Mack Bolan had become a killing machine.

The thunder of approaching footfalls grew louder as they came into the HQ building overhead. A pause as the bodies in the CQ room were discovered. Seconds later, bootsteps came clattering down the stairwell.

The killing machine stepped out through the doorway, leaving the torture chamber behind, into the narrow passage.

Three soldiers charged around the dogleg at the bottom of the stairs.

The killing machine was waiting.

The Thompson stuttered in fury. Hammering bullets, on a sizzling firetrack of flame and smoke, blew away three rebels into piles of dead matter.

The killing machine moved on. Back up the stairs.

He reached for the small triggering device in his pocket.

As he emerged from the stairwell into the main hallway of the HQ building, he activated the detonator.

The night shuddered with sound and fury. A rapid series of explosions thudded from the direction of the armament and equipment stored on the tarmac across the parade field. A simultaneous blast from the armory blew out one wall into the hallway and shuddered the building to its foundation.

The HQ corridor, filled with billowing smoke and dust, now boasted four Libyan rebel troopers who had heard the gunfire from downstairs and were advancing two abreast toward the stairwell. The killing machine stepped out to meet them.

The guards had been ready for something, but the explosions from the armory room and outside still rumbled in their eardrums. The guards had glanced off in the direction of the noise. But they did not miss seeing the figure in combat black. They only missed the chance to do anything about it.

The killing machine hit the deck. The tommy-gun blazed.

All four rebels died from a stitching figure-eight hail of steel-jacketed shredders that pulped the men into oblivion. It came from a being of cold eyes and hot aim. The enemy had no hope in hell.

The Executioner was up and moving out along the hallway in the same direction as he had entered, emerging moments later from the back door of the building, into the night.

The Executioner jogged a bee-line away from the admin building, toward the private residence that stood across five floodlit yards to the southwest.

A klaxon siren continued to blare.

Fires raged out of control from across the parade field where he had placed explosives amid the Soviet war machinery.

That equipment was now an inferno of golden tongues licking at the dark heavens.

The commotion of running men and shouting filled the night.

Most of the Libyan troops were breaking formation around the two Huey helicopters on the parade field and were rushing toward the fire.

A cluster of Leonard Jericho's mercs maintained guard around Doyle's chopper carrying the Strain-7, their Galils and Largo Star machine guns held ready as the mercs warily scanned the night around them.