Don Pendleton - Savage Rule

The last line of defense around the camp itself was a rough palisade apparently built from the materials cleared for the base, and topped by razor wire. Four small watchtowers, made of prefabricated metal struts, with what looked like metal-bucket crow’s nests at their tops, were placed at the corners of the square perimeter.

Even at this distance, Bolan could hear screams.

The faint sounds of human torment carried to him on the night breeze, which would have been refreshing in the Honduran undergrowth if not for those chilling noises. Bolan could just make out, through his field glasses, the blue epaulets on the uniforms of the men guarding a prefabricated metal hut near the center of the advance camp. These would be, according to the Farm’s briefing, Orieza’s shock troops. They formed the vanguard of Orieza’s campaign of terror within Honduras, according to the information in Bolan’s files.

It stood to reason; that was a common enough tactic among strong-arm dictators and their ilk. Creating a cadre of loyalists whose powers exceeded those of the regular military fostered a sense of fear among the lower echelons of a dictator’s power base, while shoring up—through preferential treatment and a sense of elite status—the core of men willing to fight and die for their leader. This had been, after all, the theory and concept behind Iraq’s Republican Guard, essentially a special-forces unit tasked with protecting Saddam Hussein’s regime as well as with the dictator’s most critical military operations. Republican Guard recruits were volunteers on whom many material perks were lavished. They’d enjoyed their often cruel jobs and were well rewarded for them. There was every reason to believe that Orieza’s shock troops were every bit as brutal and every bit as highly motivated.

Out here on the border, it was unlikely the prisoners were Honduran citizens. They could be Guatemalan troops lost in the previous forays made by Orieza’s raiders. They might even be Honduran soldiers accused of disloyalty, real or imagined. Hard-line regimes like Orieza’s were notorious for their paranoia, Bolan knew. It didn’t matter. The advance camp had to be destroyed, and completely, for the Executioner’s daring one-man blitz through Honduras to succeed. It was merely the second step in a chain of raids that would take him, before he was done, to the heart of Orieza’s government… But first things first. Whoever the prisoners were, Bolan would make sure they were freed. And before he was done, their torturers would answer in full for what had been inflicted upon those captives screaming in the night.

Bolan crept along the brush line until he found a suitable target: a sentry who had ranged just a little too far from his sandbag nest, smoking a truly gigantic, cheap cigar that was producing large volumes of blue smoke. From the banter being exchanged in stage whispers between the sentry and his compadre still in the machine-gun emplacement, it was clear that the fumes were objectionable to the second man; hence the smoker’s distance from his post. Bolan listened to them trade vulgar insults in Spanish. There were at least a few threats. Both men, if Bolan heard them correctly, were vowing to stab each other. Shaking his head and questioning his fellow soldier’s parentage, the sentry with the cigar grudgingly moved a few paces farther.

Perfect.

Bolan removed a simple fork of carbon fiber from a ballistic nylon pouch on his belt. He unsnapped the wrist brace and attached a heavy, synthetic rubber band to the two posts of the fork. Then he produced a small ball bearing from the belt pouch, placed it in the wrist-brace slingshot he held and stretched the band taut.

The sentry turned away, sucking in a deep mouthful of smoke. When the tip of the cigar flared orange-red, Bolan let fly.

The ball bearing snapped the man in the neck, hard. The sentry swore and slapped at the spot. His cigar fell down the front of his uniform, spraying dull orange sparks, and he slapped at them, as well, cursing quietly. He was reasonably discreet nonetheless. No doubt he would be disciplined, perhaps harshly, for drifting from his post to enjoy a late-night smoke.

“Come here!” Bolan whispered in Spanish, beckoning from the cover of the brush and hoping the man could see his arm despite the damage the burning cigar would had done to the sentry’s night vision. “You have to take a look at this. Hurry!”

“What?” the man whispered, confused. “Tomas?” He stepped forward hesitantly.

“Hurry up!” Bolan urged.

The sentry’s curiosity, and perhaps some overconfidence characteristic of Orieza’s raiders—who, after all, had met little resistance from the disorganized Guatemalan troops—got the better of him. He groped for his cigar, picked it up and hurried forward, firing a series of whispered questions in Spanish. Bolan couldn’t catch it all, but he gathered the sentry thought this was some practical joke played by a friend in his unit, the “Tomas” he kept naming.

Up close, Bolan could see this man wore the blue epaulets of the shock troops. The joke was on the sentry, all right.

Once he was in range, Bolan struck. He reached for the man as fast as a rattler uncoiling, and grabbed him by the shoulder and the face, his fingers jabbing up and under the sentry’s jawline. The sudden move brought a gasp of surprise from Bolan’s target as the man hit the ground like a sack of wet cement. The big American lifted his hand from the man’s jaw and slashed down savagely with the smaller of his two fighting knives, silencing the sentry forever.

Wiping the gory blade on the dead man’s uniform, Bolan searched him and found what he wanted: the sentry’s radio. Then he drew the suppressed Beretta 93-R, crouched to brace his elbow against his knee, and waited for the sentry’s cigar-hating fellow trooper to pop his head up over the sandbags. The fact that an alarm hadn’t already been raised was proof that nobody had seen the Executioner grab the man in the shadows. Now, when the cigar-smoking soldier was nowhere to be found, it shouldn’t take long for the other soldier to wonder where he went.

It didn’t. The curse in Spanish was another loud stage whisper, and when the Honduran soldier propped himself up above the sandbags to call to his wayward comrade, Bolan put a silenced 147-grain 9-mm hollowpoint through the man’s brain.

Working his way in the darkness across the cleared perimeter as far as he dared, he found Claymore mines placed at intervals to cover the dead soldiers’ position at the southwest. No doubt there were more mines similarly spaced all around the advance camp. He kept an eye on the crow’s nest of the tower on that corner of the base as he crawled back the way he’d come. The guard appeared to be slumped in his metal enclosure, possibly napping.

The combat clock was ticking, now. The Executioner had no idea on what schedule the perimeter guards called in, or if they did at all, but it was standard military procedure to do so. He worked his way around the perimeter of the camp as stealthily as he could. When he faced the north side of the camp, he was ready. He picked up his stolen radio, keyed it twice, then started groaning into it.

Answering chatter in Spanish came immediately. Bolan keyed the mike a few more times, as if having trouble with it, and then muttered something about dying. He managed to dredge up the appropriate terminology, again in Spanish, and hissed into the radio as if with his dying breath, urging his brave comrades to activate the mines guarding the southwest machine-gun emplacement.

The camp came alive. Searchlights on the towers buzzed to life and began sweeping the no-man’s-land around the base, while somewhere inside, a hand-cranked siren slowly worked its way to a gravelly, mechanical wail. Bolan could hear the shouts of alarmed soldiers grow in intensity. He pictured them finding the dead soldier behind his sandbags, next to his machine gun. Their fears confirmed, they would reach for the Claymore detonator nearby, if not clutched in the dead man’s hand….