flopped twitching to the tiles.
“Gal!”
Bolan fired his last shot the other way to keep H down and reloaded. “Najelli! Covering fire.”
Busto swung just enough of her body around the landing to aim and began to fire, her Ruger discharging rounds methodically. Bolan marched across the foyer and down the short hall as the woman’s shots made little sonic booms in passing. She stopped as Bolan stepped into the line of fire. He took up the slack and touched off tribursts from the Beretta as he entered the vaultlike living room.
The best cover that had line of sight on the stairs was the wet bar. Bolan shot out the mirror behind it and was rewarded as H screamed. H’s pistol snaked over the top of the bar and popped off several blind shots. The Executioner took a heartbeat to steady his aim and squeezed off a burst that sent the pistol and several fingers spinning away across the bar. H shrieked and what remained of his hand disappeared. Bolan fired off two more bursts at the top of the bar, and his Beretta racked open on a smoking empty chamber with a conspicuous clack!
“I heard that!” H lurched up. He was big and bald and had a machete in his good hand. “You’re dead, motherfucker! You’re…” H’s rant tapered off as he stared down the loaded .50 in Bolan’s other hand.
Bolan idly wondered what kind of people kept machetes behind the bar, but the obvious answer was that drug dealers did. A smart drug dealer would have stocked his bar with shotguns. “Yo, H.” Bolan motioned with the Beretta while he kept the Desert Eagle on the man. “Come on out. We need to talk.”
H stumbled out from behind the bar.
“Leave the machete,” Bolan advised.
The machete clanged to the tiles.
“You want to live?” Bolan asked.
“Yes.”
“Where are the keys to the speedboat?”
“What?”
“The speedboat, at the dock. Where are the keys?”
Fists began pounding on the front door. Busto whispered, “We have company!”
Bolan put the front sight between H’s eyes. “Keys.”
“In the kitchen! By the door!”
Bolan jerked his head. “Najelli! Go!”
Busto ran for the kitchen. The fist blows turned into the thuds of men hurling themselves against the heavy oaken door. Dominico leaned against the foyer with his Uzi pointed at the front door. “It won’t hold!”
Busto skidded back into the room waving a key attached to a little yellow float. “Got it!”
“Memo! Najelli! Run for the docks.” Bolan nodded at H as they ran past. “You did good.” Bolan pistol-whipped him to his knees as the front door failed. He reloaded the Beretta and roared at the top of his lungs in Spanish, “Upstairs! They’re upstairs! They have the boss!”
Bolan hightailed it as more than a dozen men flooded in through the foyer. It was time to break contact. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a white-phosphorous grenade. The cotter lever pinged away as he reached the kitchen and Bolan tossed the grenade onto the kitchen island as he went out the door. Dominico and Busto had tripped the motion sensors as they made their escape, and Bolan ran out into the lunar glare. He holstered the Desert Eagle and slid the Beretta’s folding stock from its shoulder sheath. The Willie Pete detonated behind him, and the kitchen window blew out in streams of white smoke and burning phosphorus element. Bolan extended the stock with a snap of his wrist and clicked it onto the butt of the machine pistol as he ran. At the dock two 500-horsepower diesels roared like dinosaurs arising from their ancient sleep. Busto waved at him frantically. Bolan had closed the door behind them but men were coming over the walls. Busto banged off return fire, but the range was long for the woman and her handgun.
Bolan had transformed his machine pistol into a carbine.
He dropped to one knee and flicked the selector switch to semiauto. Two men were straddling the western wall and trying to bring Mexican Army rifles to bear. Bolan shouldered the Beretta and put the glowing dot of the front sight on the closer man’s chest. He squeezed the trigger and the rifleman jerked, dropped his rifle and pulled a Humpty Dumpty as Bolan’s bullet opened his throat. The Executioner tracked his sights as the second man on the wall exchanged fire with Busto. The throttles on the cigarette boat suddenly cut back ominously. Bolan ignored the dock and aimed. He squeezed the Beretta’s trigger, and the man on the wall dropped back like a shooting gallery target. Busto was running down the dock shouting Dominico’s name.
Bolan rose and ran.
The men at the western wall had ceased their siege.
The guys at the eastern one were just getting into gear. A bullet cracked past Bolan’s head as he ran. He cleared the back lawn, and boards thudded beneath his boots as he ran down the dock. Dominico was sprawled backward in the cigarette boat. Blood painted the white leather of the driver’s seat and fiberglass of the cockpit. Busto was bent over him.
“Go! Go! Go!” Bolan boomed.
Busto looked back over her shoulder desperately. “I don’t know how to drive a boat!”
Bolan took three more running steps and jumped as bullets whined and whipped past him. The cigarette boat lurched and the fiberglass floor made an ugly crackling noise as Bolan hit. He hauled Dominico out of the driver’s seat and rammed the throttles forward. The cigarette boat shot ahead like an arrow and screamed down the river. “Get down!”
Bolan dropped down and negotiated the next hundred yards of the river from snap memory. He had discouraged the men in the western house from attempting the wall. Now the cigarette boat took a broadside of lead in passing. Bullets walked across the prow, shot out the windscreen and tore into the stern. One of the diesels shrieked as something big enough to tear into the engine block gutted it. Bolan rose up as gunfire crackled, but the hull no longer shuddered with bullet strikes. He rose up just in time to violently swerve the boat away from the bank and aim it westward. The port diesel clanked and howled and died as Bolan throttled it back. The starboard engine still had five hundred horses, and Bolan kept the hammer down. Gunfire still crackled and sirens wailed along the river. Bolan could see the blue-and-red flashes of police lights strobing through the trees, but they were all heading east toward Amilcar’s house.
Bolan burned westward for the sea.
CHAPTER FIVE
Altata, Sinaloa, Mexico
Dominico had bled up a storm. A bullet had ripped through his left bicep. The local tissue destruction was minimal but it had zipped through close to the bone and had nicked his femoral artery. Bolan’s medical kit was minimal, but he had managed to clamp it and close it. Now he was closing the entry and exit wounds. Busto applied pressure above the wound as Bolan stitched beneath the light of the veranda’s bare 100-watt bulb. Dominico lay back in a hammock and drank tequila straight from the bottle with his good arm. They had checked into a camp that consisted of a cluster of adobes along the beach. Each had a reed-covered patio and was less than ten yards from the water. Altata was one of Sinaloa’s hidden gems. Most tourists beelined for Mazatlán. Altata was a sleepy little fishing village in Ensenada de Pabellones. Only the most ardent tourists reached
