sprint across the clearing to the fenced perimeter carried him between the two closest pairs of sentries. He knelt, brought his rifle to his shoulder and waited, aiming in the direction from which the next team would come. The two men rounded the corner at the far end of the perimeter.
They saw Bolan and froze.
It was all the Executioner needed. In the fraction of a moment that the gunmen’s brains failed to process what their eyes saw, he fired a single round through the face of the man on the left. Bolan rode out the mild recoil of the 5.56-mm NATO round, acquiring his second target smoothly without delay. He squeezed the trigger, completely at ease, completely relaxed. The second shot was echoing as both bodies hit the ground.
Bolan let go of the rifle, trusting to his sling to keep it with him. He plucked a grenade from his combat harness, pulled the pin and let the spoon spring through the air. He threw the bomb underhand at the chain-link fence, just beyond what he judged to be a safe distance. Then he hit the dirt and covered his head with his arms.
The explosion did more damage to the ground than to the barrier, pelting Bolan with clods of moist earth. He drew himself into a crouch, bringing the rifle up again, and wasn’t disappointed. Armed men were running for him, firing as they went, spraying their weapons blindly.
The Executioner added his own weapon to the cacophony. While his enemies’ shots went wide and wild, his own precise bursts were true. First one, then another, then a third of the Honduran shock troopers went down. Bolan pushed to his feet and made for the opening torn in the fence.
He squeezed through with just enough room to spare, despite all the equipment he carried. Once on the other side of the fence he quickly dropped and rolled aside. Lines of automatic gunfire ripped into the dirt where he had stood, again spraying him with debris.
At the awkward angle he now lay, Bolan couldn’t bring his rifle to bear. Instead, he let it rest beside him, tethered to its sling, and drew the Beretta and Desert Eagle from their holsters. With a weapon in each hand, he waited, and when gunmen moved into view, he started shooting.
The .44 Magnum Desert Eagle bucked in his hand. The Beretta machine pistol chugged 3-round bursts with each press of the trigger. Like cattle driven to slaughter, the shock troopers kept coming—and kept dying.
There was a pause and Bolan took advantage of it, moving deeper into the pipeline terminal, stepping over bodies as he went. He swapped magazines in his pistols and then holstered the guns once more, bringing his rifle back into play.
He could hear shouting in Spanish and even hear a few bursts of rifle fire, but whatever the men were shooting at, it wasn’t Mack Bolan. Most likely it was more panic fire. The urge to do something, anything, when death was at a man’s doorstep was a powerful impulse not easily ignored. Bolan had the benefit of many years as a guerrilla fighter, many years on the front lines of a private war that was if not of his choosing, then of his making. Orieza’s shock troops were no doubt feared by the citizens of Honduras, but they had proved to be little threat to the Executioner.
There were three battered military-style jeeps parked near the entrance to the small complex. He took note of these and ducked under a large, steel-gray pipe that was mottled with rust spots. Everywhere around him he could see, as he passed by machinery that dwarfed him, that the climate was having an effect on the largely untended OPP equipment. It was possible that in time, without the technical expertise to run the facility, Orieza’s regime wouldn’t be able to pump the oil at all. The people of Guatemala, however, didn’t have the luxury of waiting out the Honduran hard-liners. Nor was it acceptable to let an emboldened Castillo, drunk with the thought of coming oil riches, continue to terrorize the Southwest United States by proxy.
In truth, that worried Bolan more, and he could tell it worried Brognola just as much. The new regimes in both Honduras and Mexico posed threats to United States security, or Bolan wouldn’t be making this daring raid on first one, then another national government. But Castillo was the more direct threat, and only the Farm’s understanding of the Orieza-Castillo operational timeline had made the Guatemalan border Bolan’s first strike.
Then, too, there was the fact that just because Orieza was struggling to maintain the nationalized equipment so recently stolen didn’t mean that would always be the case. Technicians capable of understanding what OPP had built here could be hired, for a price. There were plenty of former Soviet Bloc scientists currently on the market in any of several fields related to mining and oil drilling, selling their knowledge to whoever had the cash. Bolan supposed that someday the fallout from the end of the Cold War would finally stop affecting the world counterterrorism landscape, but he really could not begin to imagine when.
He followed a memorized route through the maze of machinery: a right here, a left there, straight through a tunnel of sorts, formed by arching tubes of heavy steel. As Bolan moved deeper into this man-made maze, the sound of the pumping, chugging, churning equipment grew louder. Soon, it was so loud that he wouldn’t be able to hear an enemy coming. The advantage he had, he knew, was that no enemy would be able to hear him, either.
He reached the office complex, some distance from the drill house. From his vantage point behind a large piece of equipment whose purpose he couldn’t guess, he watched the flurry of activity around the small building. Armed men rushed here and there in what appeared to be complete confusion. A Klaxon began to sound from somewhere in the complex, belatedly, but that didn’t alter the disorganized rushing. It seemed the men within were too late to do anything effective about what they probably thought was a full-scale invasion. That was good. That was how a one-man raid of this type was supposed to go.
Bolan let his rifle fall to the end of its sling, drew his Beretta and made sure the suppressor was securely affixed. He braced the weapon with his other hand, curling his fingers around the folding metal foregrip, and flicked the selector to single shot. Then he waited.
It didn’t take more than a couple of seconds for several frantic soldiers to run past his field of fire. He took each of them in turn, his honed, veteran sniper’s reflexes serving him well. Each muffled shot, no louder than hands clapping, was lost in the din of the poorly attended machinery cranking and churning all around him. The soldiers fell like dominoes, one after another, each a clean head shot. A single 147-grain 9-mm hollowpoint bullet sent each man to the beyond before he even knew his life was threatened.
Scratch four more of Orieza’s blue-tagged bullyboys, Bolan thought.
There was no way to know how long to wait, or if there would be more guards, so Bolan simply stepped out across the opening in the piping fields, moving toward the metal door of the office enclosure. He could see as he approached that the door was barred, crudely, with a section of steel strut. It was wedged into elbows of piping that had been equally crudely welded to metal supports on either side of the door. All of it looked as if it had been sectioned from the machinery of the terminal, burned through inexpertly with whatever torch had been used.
The jerry-rigged barrier, lockable only from the outside, gave the Executioner hope that the OPP employees lost in the takeover of the plant might still be alive. After all, if there were no prisoners, there would be no need to lock the offices to keep them inside it. Bolan reached out with his free hand and pulled the spar—a piece of sharp-edged pipe four inches in diameter, he saw once he hefted it—away from the door. He let it fall to the paving slab on which the office building had been set. Verdant plumes of weeds were already pushing up through cracks in the cement.
A guard with an M-16 appeared from the far corner of the building. Pressed against the wall as Bolan was, the angle was bad, and there was no time for a proper sight picture. Bolan extended his arm and triggered the Beretta, almost not looking at the man. It was a reflex, a point shot performed from long familiarity. The hollowpoint
