Don Pendleton - Oblivion Pact

“Obviously!” Greene sighed, savoring the thick rich smoke.

“So tell me about your latest kill?” Greene questioned.

Removing his own cigar, the general laughed. “You heard about that, eh? It was our biggest haul ever in drugs and hardware. Nineteen tons of heroin, and six more helicopters. Six!” Turning slightly at an angle, Dias looked out the window at the airfield. “This gives me a combined total of nine helicopters, eighteen assorted gunships and one submarine.”

“No! Really?”

“Honest to God. Plus more Hummers, trucks and APCs than I can remember.”

“Wow. You are a credit to our nation, sir,” Greene said, gesturing with his cigar.

General Dias shrugged. “It is my job.” But his tone said something different.

Glancing about as if to make sure they were alone in the office, Greene pulled a small black box from his pocket. “Now, this is something you may find very interesting,” he said, working the controls. A light flashed green on the box, then changed to red.

“What is it?” Dias asked, puffing away contentedly. “Some new form of radar jammer?”

“Oh, no, sir, something much more simple than that,” Greene replied, pressing the light.

Instantly, the box burst open and something lanced across the desk to wrap around the general’s neck.

“This is my own invention,” Greene boasted. “A new form of limpet mine designed to take out a moving torpedo. Watch what happens next, eh?”

Fighting to breathe, Dias clawed for the alarm switch on the intercom. But the linked segments of metal around his neck rapidly tightened until blood began to ooze out from underneath, and he dropped to the desk, his face purple, his eyes bulging.

“The more advanced version has explosive charges included,” Greene said, puffing contentedly on the cigar. “But I need this to be done quietly. Sorry about that.”

Shuddering, the general rolled over and went still. A moment later, there was a soft crack as his spine was crushed.

Saluting the general for a job well done, Greene went to the window. He smiled at the sight of the police cars parked at different locations across the military base, his people standing in a cluster on the grassy field reserved for drills and marches.

Here we go, he thought.

Changing the settings on the transmitter, Greene waited until the red light turned white, then he pressed it again and ducked.

The entire base rocked to the hammering concussion of all eight police cars exploding, their cargoes of dynamite and plastic explosives combining into a devil’s brew of annihilation. To the few survivors, the cars had seemed to simply vanish in a deafening fireball, the blast spreading out to flatten buildings, and send hundreds of soldiers flying high into the air in tattered pieces.

Even before the blast completely died away, the members of Daylight removed their earplugs and surged into action. Using their police revolvers to gun down any unharmed soldiers, the terrorists quickly reached the armory and upgraded to M16 assault rifles, M203 grenade launchers, Armbrust rocket launchers and flamethrowers.

Now the terrorists did a fast sweep of the burning base, ruthlessly exterminating anybody found alive. Some of the soldiers tried to fight back, others ran and a few begged for mercy, but it made no difference. The white supremacists of Daylight removed the Mexican soldiers with brutal efficiency.

Striding out of the main office, Greene headed for the airfield firing his 10 mm Falcon Magnum at several scurrying military officers. The unarmed men died bloody, still trying to escape. An older sergeant managed to get his pistol out, and Greene coldly emptied the entire magazine into the man, the 10 mm Magnum rounds blowing gaping holes.

Still smoking the cigar, Greene sauntered onto the tarmac and paused to reload. Several of his people were already at the airfield, the only section of the base that hadn’t been damaged in any way by the booby trapped police cars.

“Report!” Greene demanded, around the cigar.

“The executions are done,” Layne reported, easing a fresh clip into his exhausted weapon. The Barrett XM-25 rifle was a recent acquisition and fired 25 mm shells. At short range, the shells punched through the chest of a man, and at long range the chemical warhead detonated with enough force to blow the victim to hamburger.

“Perhaps, perhaps not,” Greene muttered, holstering the revolver. “Miss LoMonaco, if you were hiding from an invasion force such as ours, where would you go?”

Scratching the treble-clef tattoo on the inside of her wrist, the woman paused in thought. “Grease pit in the garage with a car parked on top,” LoMonaco said at last. “Or inside the water tank on top of the roof, or inside an oven in the galley kitchen.”

Pleased at the quick response, Greene smiled. “Take twenty men and check those locations. We need to be sure there are no survivors.”

“Not a problem,” LoMonaco said, resting the warm barrel of the Neostead shotgun on a shoulder and starting forward.

“Alpha Team, follow LoMonaco!” Layne bellowed, and a squad of armed men surged after the diminutive beauty.

The garage proved to be empty, as did the water tank, and the ovens. But checking the freezer, LoMonaco found a suspiciously large pile of frozen beef in the corner. “Surrender or die!” she yelled, working the pump action on the weapon.

“Please, I surrender!” a young private replied, scrambling into view with both hands raised. “Please, don’t shoot, I’m just the cook!”

Amused, LoMonaco burst into laughter. “Sorry, but I saw that movie.” She blew the head off the cringing teenager.

Heading back to the airfield, LoMonaco had a strange smile on her face, and her eyes sparkled with excitement. The other members of Daylight noticed that, but said nothing, deciding that discretion was the better part of keeping lead out of their heads.

“All clear, Mr. Greene,” LoMonaco reported, pulling a fat Cuban cigar from a pocket and applying the flame from a butane lighter to the tip.

“Excellent! Thank you, Samantha,” Greene said, and went to join the others on the busy tarmac. “How is it going, Victor?”

With one boot resting on a crate of air-to-air missiles, Layne looked up from a clipboard. “Perfectly, sir! We now have eight Apache gunships, fully fueled and armed. Plus four Cobras and ten Black Hawks.”

“Are all the Blackhawks transports?” Greene asked as a man handed him an M249 Minimi machine gun.

“No, sir. Five are transport, four are being packed with spare fuel and munitions, and one is a mobile medical bay.”

“Any radar defusers?”

“Yes, sir. Plus radio jammers.”

“Excellent,” Greene said around his cigar. “Most excellent. My compliments, Victor!”

“It was your plan, sir,” the man said with a shrug. “By the way, how did the limpet function?”

“Perfectly!”

Somewhere across the base, a man screamed, an assault rifle chattered, and a burning building started to collapse in ragged stages, thick black clouds of smoke rising high into the morning sky.

“Now what about all of those F-14 jetfighters?” LoMonaco asked, brushing back a loose strand of hair. The action left a streak of blood across her face.

“Nobody in Daylight can fly a jet aside from the two of us. They only know helicopters,” Greene growled. “Besides, a jet would only get in the way of the next mission. Low and slow is the key, not death-from-above as the Americans like to boast.”

“Such a shame.” LoMonaco sighed, looking longingly at the nearby hangar, a sleek F-14 Tomcat sitting in the entranceway fueled and ready to go.

Unexpectedly, a bright flash erupted from the roof of the base library, and a fiery dart lanced across the decimated base to slam directly into the Tomcat. The multimillion-dollar jetfighter thunderously exploded inside the hangar, the spreading fireball set off the next jetfighter and the next. The entire airfield was hammered by a long series of strident detonations that continued for an obscene length of time.