great power and popularity will bring unfair criticism.”
“I suppose,” Orieza said, his forehead knotting. “I simply do not understand—”
The intercom buzzed. Del Valle, grateful for the distraction, pressed the button before he could continue, and made a mental note of the fact that some people had been far too free in their conversation with Orieza. Roderigo would determine who the general had been listening to, and would make sure those persons disappeared permanently. Orieza was asking far too many inconvenient questions.
“Yes?” he said, leaning over the intercom.
Orieza’s secretary spouted a stream of apologies for interrupting, and then begged their pardons, but could Commander Del Valle take an urgent call from the field? One of his men had been trying to reach him for some time, she said, and she had delayed connecting the call for as long as she thought prudent.
“Yes, yes,” Del Valle said testily. “Put it through.” He picked up the large receiver. “Yes?” he said again in Spanish.
“Commander,” stated one of his field lieutenants, whose name escaped him at the moment. The soldier was out of breath, or frantic in some way, as if he was frightened or had run to reach the phone. “Sir, I must sound the alarm urgently, sir! There is great trouble here at the terminal!”
“The pipeline terminal?” Del Valle demanded.
“Yes, Commander, yes!”
“Well?”
“Sir…it…”
“What, damn you?” Del Valle roared. “Spit it out, or I will wring your neck!”
“Sir, the terminal burns.”
“What?” Del Valle shouted. “What are you talking about?”
“Sir—” The voice was cut short by a loud clap of sound, a noise Del Valle couldn’t escape.
“Report!” he yelled. “Report, damn you!”
The muffled click of the receiver being replaced in its cradle was the only reply.
CHAPTER FIVE
Thick undergrowth between closely packed trees gave way to the blade of Mack Bolan’s machete, ending abruptly at a large clearing that was dominated by the pipeline terminal. This, too, was concealed beneath camouflage netting, but the NSA’s satellite surveillance had easily picked out the facility with thermal imaging. Bolan was no expert on the technology used for oil drilling, but he gathered that this nationalized plant had been an innovative one before it was essentially stolen from its owners by Orieza’s regime.
Intelligence operatives posing as interested parties from the United States government’s international trade commission had interviewed key employees of O’Connor Petroleum Prospecting, according to the files sent to Bolan by the Farm. They had provided blueprints of the proposed plant layout, which Bolan consulted on his phone’s muted screen. There were supposed to be changes made to these preliminary plans, alterations that would be filed on-site only. If there had been any major departures, he couldn’t see them as he surveyed the terminal.
Of particular interest to him were the office buildings, a collection of interconnected, prefabricated sheds south of the pipeline cluster. The cluster—it was designated as such on the plans—was a complicated mass of piping, tributaries of some sort that came together at a junction of the oil line. That pipeline, constructed by Orieza’s people after the takeover, stretched off into the distance, the way Bolan had come. It ended, he knew, at the advance camp he had just destroyed.
There had been no point in targeting the pipeline itself, for it was far longer than Bolan could deal with. Destroying portions of the line would slow the progress of Orieza’s invading teams, but Bolan didn’t believe in chopping off tentacles when he could attack the head of the monster. The OPP terminal had to be destroyed, if the pipeline project was to be ended effectively. Destroying the equipment would deny Orieza’s regime access to the oil, which, in Bolan’s relatively limited understanding of petroleum prospecting, wasn’t accessible without the new technology OPP had brought to the project. Once the terminal was eliminated, there would be no point in continuing to invade Guatemala in order to bring the pipeline through to Mexico.
That was the plan, anyway.
Brognola had told Bolan that the employees present when the facility was nationalized had been killed or taken hostage. The Orieza regime had said nothing about them publicly, nor had the communications between the two nations intercepted by the Farm’s intelligence sources included any mention of them. This was likely because the human beings caught in the power play cooked up by Orieza and Castillo meant very little to the two leaders. It was Bolan’s hope that those OPP employees were still alive. If they were, the most likely location to hold them would be those offices, if the hostages were still on-site. The cyber team at the Farm had analyzed the available data and come to the same conclusion.
Bolan consulted another file on the phone, this one the instructions provided by OPP management for shut ting down the drill house and its pump valves. The deep-ranging equipment was connected to a series of turbines heated with geothermal energy, the briefing explained. Tapping this power helped make a project on the scope of the OPP operation possible, and it was the reason the company had managed to find oil where none had previously been detected. Bolan skipped over the technojargon elaborating on that. The gist was that if he shut down the pumps and valves in the order specified by the company’s technicians, then reversed the turbines, overrode the safety circuits and instructed the drill equipment to perform a self-cleaning procedure with the pump power at maximum, a mechanical disaster would occur.
The OPP technicians had been very clear on that point. A self-cleaning operation reversed the drills and drew full power from the pumping network. If the safeties were disengaged and the procedure implemented with the turbines also at full reverse, the harmonic vibrations created by the drills would shake the casings apart. The turbines, disconnected from the shafts and overdriving the pumps, would then overheat and explode, shattering the pumps. What was left of the terminal would be torn to pieces by the shrapnel. Any of the equipment still functioning would be so much scrap metal, useless to anyone without the associated high-tech equipment. With the valves shut beforehand, any environmental damage would be minimized; there would be no spewing geysers or burning plumes of oil smoke.
Bolan snapped his phone shut and stowed it. The immediate problem was how to penetrate the facility. It was heavily guarded by Honduran troops who, he could see through his field glasses, wore the blue epaulets of Orieza’s shock forces. They patrolled the fenced perimeter of the terminal, a chain-link affair to which strands of razor wire had been added. He could tell the wire was new because it hadn’t yet begun to discolor or corrode in the tropical climate, while the chain-link fence itself already looked much older than it could possibly be. No doubt Orieza’s thugs had beefed up security once they’d seized the terminal.
The men walking sentry duty in twos carried M-16 rifles. Bolan observed the guards for half an hour, timing them and judging the gap between patrols. It wasn’t a large one, but it was there. Orieza’s gunmen had become complacent. They would regret that—but not for long.
Bolan gathered himself for his charge. He didn’t have the advantage of darkness now. Once he began to fire on the shock troops, the element of surprise would be lost and full-scale combat would commence. There was no room for error.
He counted down the numbers. When he hit zero, he ran.
