is bullshit,” Dever said. “My training officer would have had an aneurysm if he’d been told to let those bastards shoot at him without returning fire.”
“Hey. Washington doesn’t have a spine anymore. They’d rather beat their chests in a foreign country, but let the psychos next door do as they please,” Hogan snarled.
Dever took a long, deep breath, then got out a digital camcorder with a low-light optical filter on the lens. At least they could document any efforts by the neighboring nation’s military in breaking international law.
Dever’s brow furrowed.
“What’s wrong?” Hogan asked. He eyed the M-4 carbine locked in its clamp against the dashboard. It, and the Heckler & Koch .40-caliber pistol on his hip, would give any opponent a run for his money, if only his trigger finger hadn’t been restrained by insipid rules of engagement. The official attitude was to not spark a border war, but apparently the men wearing army uniforms and carrying Mexican-issue rifles were under no such restriction.
Several Border Patrol agents had been injured in increasingly tense encounters across the past few years. It was only a matter of time before the bastards had collected the final breath of an American law-enforcement agent. Some had called for the end of the Border Patrol due to its failure to control or act against foreign invaders. Others had wanted the National Guard to step in. Still more took their own weapons and camped out at major thoroughfares for migrating illegal aliens, seeking to take the law into their own hands. The fact that the American Minutemen were looking only to turn back illegal aliens, and not gun down unarmed intruders who were coming merely to seek jobs had kept the situation from surging to a flash-point of violence.
It had come close a couple of times. Military forces and federal agents had dealt with a crisis for the then-new Mexican president as powerful smuggling alliances actually engaged in brutal assault on American lawmen. Only the actions of people who existed in whispered rumor had prevented a second Mexican-American war from ripping the continent apart.
Hogan sighed. He hoped that the men who didn’t exist would make their presence felt again to push back the encroaching and increasingly bold and deadly smugglers.
Dever looked at the feed on the screen. “Something is moving out in the desert behind the trucks, but I can’t quite make it out. It might be a person. It’s about the right mass, but it doesn’t…No, it disappeared.”
Hogan chuckled nervously. “Maybe you saw a Chupacabra.”
“Not too many goats for a goat-sucker to feed on out there, Dan,” Dever returned. “Nothing. I just see bupkis.”
Hogan nodded. “We’ll review the DVR later. Maybe image enhancement will—”
“Down!” Dever shouted, and Hogan’s head slammed against the driver’s window. The windshield cracked violently as something crashed into it. Plings and plunks of rifle fire sounded on the Bronco’s metallic skin. Dever had his double-action-only USP .40 out, but instead of rising above the dashboard, he stayed hunched over the younger agent.
“Damn bureaucrats are going to murder us,” Dever snarled.
“They will if we don’t shoot back,” Hogan said. He felt a knot rising on his battered skull, but he was in no more of a mood to rise and engage the enemy than Dever.
M-16s and the Heckler & Koch pistols were hot stuff against poorly trained “coyotes” armed with AK-47s. The human smugglers couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn at one hundred yards, while both the Border Patrol’s chosen pistol and rifle could score head shots at that same distance. Unfortunately, the enemy gunmen across the border were three hundred yards out. The short-barreled M-4s came up as inferior at that distance when compared to the older but vastly more powerful Heckler & Koch G3 battle rifles. The G3’s 7.62 mm NATO bullet could kill at over eight hundred yards. Only the armor plating and the heavy engine of the USBP Ford Bronco had managed to stop the high-powered slugs from drilling into the two agents.
The windshield finally gave up the ghost and disintegrated into diamondlike cubes of broken glass that rained down upon the pair.
“Damn!” Dever shouted.
Suddenly, from across the border, another weapon discharged. It was deep and powerful, thundering across the plains. The Mexican rifles stopped firing.
Dever poked the camera up over the dashboard, the LED screen rotated so that he could use it as an electronic periscope. G3 rifles crackled again from the trucks, but the tongues of muzzle-flashes licked out into the desert behind them.
Someone else had entered the fray.
MACK BOLAN HAD INTENDED to make his incursion against the alleged Mexican military forces covertly, but the lives of two American lawmen were on the line. The Executioner rapidly pulled the suppressor off his Barrett M-98 rifle and mounted the muzzle brake. He was going to need to make noise to redirect the murderous gunmen’s attention.
With his first pull of the trigger, the M-98 spit a .338 Lapua Magnum round into the head of one of the riflemen. The result was instant decapitation as the 300-grain slug detonated the Mexican’s skull with hydrostatic overpressure.
Sprayed with gore, stringy brain mass and bone fragments, the other gunmen in the truck were struck momentarily numb. Bolan’s first target slid over the rail of the truck, plopping to the desert sand below.
There was no doubt now that the enemy soldiers knew where the rifle shot came from. The Lapua Magnum round was designed to kill humans at over a mile and a half away, or punch through the engine of a lightly armored vehicle at closer range. That kind of power was accompanied by a throaty roar and a flash like lightning.
Just to make certain, the gunman right next to the first target caught a second Barrett round at the center of his clavicle. Windmilling backward as a fountain of blood vomited through the .338-inch hole in his upper chest, the Mexican was dumped next to the first target in the sand. G3s ripped to life, but the Executioner was in motion, leaving the area he’d fired from.
The semiautomatic Barrett punched out another slug as Bolan fired from the hip, catching a third smuggler through the center of his torso. The dying Mexican folded like a cheap shirt, collapsing as a grapefruit-size crater formed when the Magnum bullet excavated two vertibrae through the skin of his back.
Panic and screams had taken over the smuggling crew and one of the trucks fired up its engine. Bolan shouldered the Barrett and tapped off two .338 rounds which smashed through its grille. The engine seized up as the heavyweight slugs tore through gears and pistons. A commanding voice cut through the howls of fear.
“Track and fire! Split up! We’re too easy a target in the trucks!”
Bolan slung the mighty Barrett and drew his Beretta 93-R machine pistol from its spot under his left armpit. Suppressed, its muzzle-flash would disappear in the desert battleground. Now that he had their attention, he needed stealth and the protective curtain of nighttime shadows. The foregrip lever folded down, and he flipped the selector to 3-round burst. A snarl of silenced Parabellum rounds coughed from the end of the Beretta’s can, ripping into a man standing nearest to the leader shouting orders.
The leader of this group reacted not as a frightened smuggler but as a cold-blooded professional, pulling Bolan’s quiet kill in front of him as a human shield. Whether the Mexican had been dead or alive, his commander had deemed his own existence more important. Bolan popped off another triburst that forced the enemy headman
