Don Pendleton: Savage Rule

Seconds later another grenade arced through the air and detonated against a truck at the end of the column, blowing it apart. A quick glimpse revealed that the vehicle’s heavy tires had flattened two of the gunners who had crouched next to it as the burning circles of rubber had become airborne missiles.

The Executioner shucked the spent grenade, fed another into the launcher and punched a third HEDP grenade into one of the troop carriers. The angle wasn’t good, but his goal was to create confusion and chaos. As the first group scattered, unaimed bursts of return fire began, and Bolan knew he had succeeded.

Unslinging his M-16, the Executioner stalked forward into battle.

Hell had come to Honduras.

Don Pendleton’s

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war.

—Haile Selassie,

1892–1975

I don’t see color when I see a man. What matters to me is whether his intent is good or evil. If he’s a good man, then he is a good man, and that’s it. If he’s a predator, I’m going to put him down.

—Mack Bolan

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

EPILOGUE

Mack Bolan, the soldier still known to a very few as the Executioner, crouched low and was perfectly still. His senses, attuned to the sounds of the jungle through long experience, picked out the telltale sounds of men and equipment some distance off. Some barely conscious part of his mind easily separated these from the ambient, natural noises of the beautiful—and deadly—terrain surrounding him.

The enemy wasn’t far away.

He finished hiding the crumpled, night-black HALO chute, burying it quickly and quietly with a few shovelfuls of moist earth and a handful of undergrowth. Then he silently folded the entrenching tool and replaced it on his small battle pack, next to his machete in its strapped-on scabbard. The pack had been specially prepared for him, at his request, by Stony Man Farm’s armorer.

The Executioner paused at movement near the toe of his combat boot. A four-inch tarantula crawled quietly over his foot and continued on, oblivious to the hell that was about to be unleashed. It wasn’t the largest specimen Bolan had seen, by a wide margin. He silently wished the creature a safe journey as he continued on in the opposite direction. An old joke echoed through his mind, a parody of a rallying cry: Forward, toward the danger.

Smiling grimly under the dark tiger stripes of black-and-green combat cosmetics smearing his face, Bolan made a mental inventory of his equipment. He was clad in his customary combat blacksuit, a close-fitting garment bearing multiple slit pockets. The web belt around his waist bore pouches for extra loaded magazines for his weapons. Grenades of varying types were clipped to the belt and to the web harness over his shoulders, to which his pack was also secured. Over this, in a ballistic nylon shoulder holster designed to withstand the humid climate, he carried a Beretta 93-R with a custom-made sound suppressor attached. The machine pistol, like the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle in a Kydex holster inside his waistband behind his right hip, had been specially action-tuned by John “Cowboy” Kissinger. Kissinger had served as the Stony Man Farm’s armorer for so long that few of the weapons carried within the covert facility or taken into the field by the action teams hadn’t felt his touch or undergone the scrutiny of his gunsmith’s eye.

The rifle in Bolan’s fists and secured by a single-point sling was a well-worn M-16 A-3. The 5.56-mm NATO weapon was capable of full-auto fire, and this one was equipped with an under-the-barrel 40-mm M-203 grenade launcher. Across the soldier’s chest was a bandolier of 40-mm grenades, as varied and lethal as the handheld bombs strapped to his person.

Also attached to Bolan’s web harness was a pair of truly lethal-looking blades, Japanese-style fighting tools manufactured by an American importer. The smaller blade had a single cutting edge over eight inches long, with a textured, guardless handle and a needle tip. The larger knife, a staggering weapon almost the size of a short sword, was also single edged, with a pronounced curve and a killing point, fully thirteen inches in the blade. Both wicked-looking knives were useful for only one purpose: killing people.

The Executioner was going to give them a workout.

He had been dropped here, in the dead of night, near the Guatemalan-Honduran border, for that purpose. The call from the secure phone in Hal Brognola’s Justice Department office in Washington had been clear enough, reaching Bolan as he rested between missions at Stony Man Farm. The big Fed, director of the Sensitive Operations Group, had wasted no time telling Bolan that the request for SOG intervention had come straight from the President.

“The Man,” Brognola had said, “wants us to stop an invasion of Guatemala.”

That had gotten Bolan’s attention.

Brognola had gone on to explain that in Honduras, a recent series of military coups had deposed two governments in six months. The beleaguered people of Honduras were no strangers to this type of governmental turbulence, but this time was worse than in the past. A new strong-arm dictator, “General” Ramon Orieza, had seized power, waging an ironfisted campaign of murder and intimidation to keep the terrified Honduran people under his control.

“It’s bad, Striker,” Brognola had said, using Bolan’s Farm code name. “Orieza has turned Honduras into an armed camp. He’s completely coopted the Honduran military, and he has a cadre of shock troops camped outside the capital. We’ve received reports of roaming death squads, political assassinations, even mass graves. Orieza makes Pol Pot look like an amateur.”

“There’s more to it than that, I’m guessing,” Bolan said. He knew only too well that, as extensive as its resources could be, SOG couldn’t pursue every injustice on foreign soil; it simply wasn’t possible. For the President to involve Stony Man directly meant that something far worse was implied—something with international implications that also threatened the security of the United States.

“When the coup took place and toppled first one, then the second local government,” Brognola explained, “I had Barbara put Aaron’s team on alert.” “Aaron” was Aaron “the Bear,” Kurtzman, the Farm’s wheelchair-bound cybernetics whiz and head of the team of computer experts at Stony Man. “Barbara” was Barbara Price, the Farm’s mission controller. Bolan and the honey-blonde, model-beautiful Price had a romantic relationship based on respect and desire. That was as much as either could offer the other. And it was enough. These thoughts flashed through Bolan’s mind unbidden as Brognola went on. “It turned out to be worse than just the usual military posturing, and it warned us of the threat to Guatemala. Bear’s people intercepted several coded communiqués between Orieza and the president Gaspar Castillo of Mexico.”