Don Pendleton: Run to Ground

The convoy was a hundred yards away when Elmo put the cruiser into gear and coasted down the sandy bank to park the vehicle on the center stripe of the road. He flicked on the high beams, left the engine running and had his door wide-open before the leader of the convoy saw them and slowed down from sixty-something to a crawl, eventually coasting to a halt no more than twenty feet away.

"Let's take it nice and easy," Elmo muttered, climbing from behind the wheel. Before he straightened up, he had the safety strap unfastened on his swivel holster, just in case.

Roy Jessup did the same, his thumb looped through the gun belt, close enough to quickly draw the Smith & Wesson magnum if he had to. Feeling foolish, knowing his precautions were in vain, he thought about the shotgun underneath the driver's seat, and left it where it was.

The lead car had its four doors open, and Jessup noted that the dome light must have burned out because he still had no clear view of passengers beyond the headlights. Sudden apprehension caught him by the throat as dark men started piling out on either side of the vehicle, but Elmo was the senior officer and he apparently saw nothing wrong with what was happening.

"You fellas musta missed the interstate," his partner said, chuckling, playing with them, knowing they could not have taken such a tiny, piss-ant road by accident. "I'd like to welcome you to the United States. Of course, I'll have to have a look inside your cars, you understand."

They understood, all right, but Elmo clearly didn't, and the darkness prevented him from catching sight of the rising weapons as they locked on target. There was no way he could have missed the muzzle-flashes, but he had no time to think about them as converging streams of autofire from several weapons blew him backward.

Jessup's apprehension turned to all-out fear and he bolted for the car, his mind consumed with visions of the radio, the riot gun, escape. If he could put the cruiser in reverse before they shot the tires off or inflicted damage on the engine block, he had a chance. He never gave a second thought to Elmo Bradford, who had obviously been very dead before he hit the ground.

Ten feet or less separated him from the vehicle and he was close enough to taste it when a voice behind him said, "Don't hurt the car." What kind of crazy fucking thing was that to say when you were killing people? Jessup had no time to mull it over because a giant fist slammed home below one shoulder blade, and he was falling, falling, with the echo of another gunshot ringing in his ears.

He tried to move, to reach his service pistol, but his flaccid arms would not respond to orders from his brain. Behind him came the sound of footsteps closing in the darkness, crunching over gravel, clicking on the blacktop. One of them was wearing taps, and he could not believe that anybody went in for that macho bullshit anymore.

Rough hands reached out and turned him over, lighting flares of agony along his spine. Above him, silhouettes like looming towers blotted out the stars.

"He's still alive," one of them said.

Another stooped in close, his stainless-steel automatic pistol filling Jessup's field of vision,

"Wanna bet?"

His car had given up the ghost at 2:20 a.m., and Bolan had been walking ever since. Three hours, give or take, and yet it felt like days on end. The fading darkness was his only proof of passing time, his movement and the constant pain the only proof that he was still alive.

The highway was a quarter-mile due west and running parallel to Bolan's track. Remaining with the car or following the asphalt ribbon would have been a suicidal gesture, worse than useless, but he kept the highway fixed in mind, just visible in his peripherals. Cars had passed on three occasions, their headlights lancing through the early-morning darkness, and the wounded man had lurched for cover, knowing they would not have picked him out without a spotlight, still unwilling to reveal himself. The highway and its destination were his secrets of survival. They could also get him killed... assuming that Bolan was not dead already.

There was no sign of Rivera or his gunners yet, but they would be along. They couldn't let him go, could not allow the fates or Mother Nature to complete the job they had started earlier tonight. Mack Bolan now knew enough about Rivera's operation to burn his friends on both sides of the border, and before it came to that, he knew, those friends would sacrifice Rivera in a bid to save themselves.

Unless Rivera found a way to plug the leak, and quickly.

It had been hot all day and warm all evening, but the predawn chill was biting at him. It never ceased to puzzle Bolan that the desert, baking like an oven in the daytime, could become a vast refrigerator after nightfall. Shivering, he blamed it on the chill, refusing to accept the thought that the loss of blood had sapped his strength and made him more susceptible to cold. If he allowed himself to dwell on failure, he might fall, and if he fell, the soldier was not convinced that he could rise again.

Nightbirds whistled round him, unintimidated by his presence. Beyond the range of Bolan's night vision, desert animals occasionally scuttled through the sagebrush, making Bolan hesitate, his free hand clutching at the weapon on his hip. Each time it was a false alarm, but he could not allow himself to grow complacent, take the safety of the night for granted. He was alone and badly injured, poorly armed, with hunters on his track. Surviving past the sunrise would be an achievement. Winning any sort of final victory would be a miracle.

The Uzi had been empty, useless weight, and he had left it in the car. The shoulder rigging for his Beretta 93-R had prevented him from keeping pressure on his wound, so Bolan had discarded it as well, although the pistol and its extra magazines now filled the pockets of his trench coat. Underneath the coat, his AutoMag, Big Thunder, rode the warrior's hip on military webbing, perfectly concealed but still accessible at need.

The bullet wound was in his side, and despite the dizziness and pain, he knew he had been lucky. The slug was in-and-out, from front to back, and had avoided bone and vital organs. Two more inches toward the center and it would have ripped open his stomach. Any higher, and the bullet might have shattered ribs, glanced off and into one of Bolan's lungs. He had been lucky, except that he was bleeding profusely and could not keep sufficient pressure on both wounds at once. His injuries might prove fatal if he did not find a medic soon. Rivera might just kill him yet, if he could keep the Executioner in motion, on the run, until he bled to death.

The target of his strike had been Rivera's rancho, thirty rugged miles due west from Nogales, equidistant from the Arizona border. The Sonoran desert was Rivera's best defense, but he did not rely exclusively upon geography. The sprawling rancho boasted barbed-wire fences, mounted sentries, motorized patrols, as well as a ranch house that was fortified like something from the Siegfried Line. The helipad and airstrip were patrolled around the clock by men equipped with automatic weapons, in case the federates felt compelled to stage a showcase raid without sufficient warning. If an enemy approached by land, Rivera had the option of escaping in his private jet, which sat protected from the desert sandstorms in a hangar near the airstrip.

Bolan's target had not been the hangar or the fortress ranch house. After icing careless sentries on the north perimeter, he concentrated on the Quonset huts where heroin, cocaine and marijuana were prepared for shipment into the United States. Rivera's chemists and assorted flunkies sometimes worked around the clock to get a shipment ready, but the sheds were dark that night as Bolan had approached to lay his plastic charges, placing the incendiary packs for maximum effect. He would have been content to torch the goods and pick off Rivera another day, and he was prepared to disengage, when fate and refried beans had intervened. A sentry long on flatulence had made an unexpected run for the latrines, encountering a black-clad specter in the process. He was dead before his bowels let go, but not before his dying finger loosed a warning shot and brought down the whole damned army on Bolan's head.