pained look that crossed Roldan’s face was confirmation.
“Roldan, I’m here to wipe out La Neta, Los Macheteros and anybody else who wants to decide the fate of Puerto Rico with a gun rather than a vote. You in or out?”
“I’m—” Roldan spent several moments controlling his temper “—in.”
“If you boys are done, we got stuff to do,” Gustolallo stated.
Just then Bolan took out his phone as it vibrated in his pocket. Kurtzman’s text message scrolled across the screen.
striker, you have company
The phone’s screen took up just about all of its length. Bolan’s thumb moved across the touch screen, and a real-time satellite image of his house and the surrounding neighborhood appeared. Half a dozen vehicles denoted by red outlines were surrounding the building. Armed men were deploying out of them. The image wasn’t perfect but he saw nothing bigger than automatic weapons. “We have company. Platoon strength. Coming in on all sides.”
Roldan pulled an M-16 from his rifle bag and Ordones unwrapped his BAR and deployed the bipod. Bolan pulled a tab off the left wrist of his jacket to expose a Velcro panel. He slapped his phone onto it and took up his Thompson.
A voice out on the street called out in Spanish. “Give us Nacho!”
“He isn’t worth it!” Bolan called back. “I promise you!”
Nacho looked like he was about to say something, but Gustolallo pantomimed ramming the steel strut of her folding-stock shotgun into his elbow and he thought better of it.
“And the Yanqui!” the voice shouted. More followed but the Puerto Rican slang was too fast and too furious for Bolan to get more than the gist of it, but that was enough. They wanted Nacho and they wanted him now. Everyone else in the house was a traitor to Puerto Rico. Unless they stood down, both they and their families would die. The voice switched to English. “Hey, Yanqui! Go home! You can live! Don’t make me come in there!”
Ordones laid the BAR across the table and aimed it at the front door. Bolan cupped his hands and called out, “Door’s open!”
Dozens of automatic weapons opened up out on the street. Plaster fell from the ceiling, and the ancient brick walls chipped and cracked beneath the barrage of lead. Bolan noted that the weapons sounded as though they were 9 mms, and they all had the same firing signature. He pushed Nacho to the floor and then glanced at the screen of his phone. “Ordones! I got about six men behind a car directly across the street from the front door!”
Ordones nodded and the thudding of the big .30-caliber machine gun eclipsed the sound of the submachine guns out on the street. The 30-06 rifle bullets sailed through the front door, the car across the street and the men taking cover behind it. Bolan saw four men fall on his screen and two more run headlong for the beach.
Kurtzman text messaged him.
heat signatures behind you
Bolan looked at his wrist and saw the bright flickering on the infrared filter. Five men were running crouched alongside a car, making their approach down the alley behind the house. Each man held something that was burning—Molotov cocktails. Four more gunners trotted behind, blasting away with weapons as they came. “Ordones! I got a vehicle coming directly behind us! Roldan! Gustolallo! Watch the front!”
Ordones turned and rammed the muzzle of his BAR through the kitchen window glass and started firing. Bolan kicked open the kitchen door and brought his Thompson to his shoulder. Bullets hailed against the back of the house, but the soldier kept his sights on the firebombers. A bullet slammed into Bolan’s side but his soft body armor held. His return burst took off the top of the gunman’s head. Rum bottles filled with gasoline and detergent sailed through the air.
Bolan raised his sights and began touching off bursts from the Thompson and broke apart bottles in the air like a skeet shooter busting clays. Sheets of fire fell across the alley and across the hood of the Cadillac as it rolled on. Bolan took out three of the four projectiles, and his weapon clacked open on empty as the fourth sailed on in a near-perfect football spiral.
Ordones snarled and yanked himself aside as the flaming bomb flew through the kitchen window a foot from his head. Nacho screamed as the Molotov cocktail sailed across the room and broke apart at his feet. Bolan slammed a fresh magazine into his weapon and kept firing. “Gustolallo!”
Gustolallo yanked up the ratty kitchen rug and jumped on top of Nacho. She swore a blue streak as Nacho howled and flailed while she tried to smother the fire. The BAR continued, tearing through the Cadillac as if it didn’t exist, and Bolan shot any gangster who exposed himself. Bolan slammed in a fresh magazine as the Caddy’s front fender scraped against the alley wall and it rolled to a halt. The gunfire in the back of the house came to an abrupt end. Puddles of fire were everywhere. Flame licked up the walls of the alley, and the Cadillac burned like a fallen tombstone. The alley resembled a side entrance to hell.
Bolan heard the thump and hiss of ignition. The Cadillac was riddled with high-power rifle holes, and the jellied fuel of the firebombs was crawling all through it. Bolan slammed the kitchen door shut. “Down!”
The Cadillac’s fuel tank detonated like a bomb. The door rattled on its hinges, and heat blasted through the shattered kitchen window hot enough to singe skin. Nacho screamed, his right foot kicked out from under the rug and clocked Gustolallo in the face. She rolled backward, stunned as Nacho got to his feet and ran screaming out of the kitchen with bits of fire still flickering on his feet.
Gustolallo kneeled and snarled past her bloody lips and nose. “Bastardo!”
Bolan shoved down the barrel of her shotgun.
Roldan’s M-16 fired on rapid semiauto from the front of the house. “More firebombs out front! We got—” He stared back in surprise as Nacho ran screaming past him. Bolan made a quick throat-cutting motion. Roldan caught it and let Nacho get past. When the Executioner motioned with his own weapon to shoot high, Roldan’s M-16 snarled on full-auto and he roared, “Get back here, you son of a bitch!”
Nacho sailed straight through the front window and onto the porch. Bolan advanced, firing. One of the three firebombers out front fell with one of Roldan’s bullets in his chest. The other two threw their bottles, but Roldan cracked one in flight and the other fell short and broke apart on the cobblestones in front of the house. Bolan checked his screen. Three of the four surviving vehicles were pulling out and driving away. Men on foot were fleeing in all directions. Nacho was heading due north and didn’t look like he was going to stop until he hit Bermuda.
The back of the house was beginning to burn in earnest.
Ordones rose, reloaded and handed his handkerchief to Gustolallo. She ruefully held it up to her bloody nose and stared over it at Bolan. “You’re just gonna let the little son of a bitch go?”
Roldan glared over his shoulder from his position covering the front. “Yeah! What the fuck was that all about?”
Ordones, on the other hand, glanced at Bolan slyly. “You’re tracking our little friend, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.” Bolan shrugged. “I put a bug in his sling while I was binding him up. I figured I’d like to see where he runs to.”
“He will run to his big brother, El León,” Ordones suggesed.
