guarding the southwest machine-gun emplacement.
The camp came alive. Searchlights on the towers buzzed to life and began sweeping the no-man’s-land around the base, while somewhere inside, a hand-cranked siren slowly worked its way to a gravelly, mechanical wail. Bolan could hear the shouts of alarmed soldiers grow in intensity. He pictured them finding the dead soldier behind his sandbags, next to his machine gun. Their fears confirmed, they would reach for the Claymore detonator nearby, if not clutched in the dead man’s hand….
The thumps of the Claymores detonating were followed by screams even more horrifying than those that had stopped coming from the interrogation building in the midst of the camp. They would be from the Honduran soldiers responding to the alert—where Bolan had reversed the Claymore mines he had found, the shaped charges directing their deadly ball-bearing payload inward over the machine-gun emplacements rather than outward from the palisade.
Blind reaction fire erupted from several locations outside the camp and from within the perimeter. The noise was deafening. Several other Honduran soldiers triggered their own Claymores, apparently fearing an unseen enemy was advancing on their positions. Bolan, well clear of the mines from his location beyond the no-man’s-land, was in no danger. This was the moment of frenetic panic he required—and the moment he had engineered.
He methodically loaded and fired the M-203. It was a difficult shot, but his first 40-mm fragmentation grenades struck true, blowing apart the crow’s nest of the watchtower closest to his position. He worked his way out, dropping a grenade into the midst of the camp, then annihilating another of the guard towers.
Bolan fired a grenade into the middle of the no-man’s-land. He was rewarded with the thumps of Claymores again. He sent another 40-mm payload downrange, but there were no more explosions; the Claymores had been fired, and now the way was clear. He moved easily through the darkness, avoiding the wild firing of the machine guns as he slipped through. As he had expected, Third World soldiers who were brave when facing out-gunned opponents were quick to break discipline and give in to fear when faced with a determined aggressor. Gaining and keeping the battlefield momentum, the initiative in an engagement, was Bolan’s stock in trade. He was very good at what he did.
He leveled his rifle and sprayed bursts of 5.56-mm fire into the guards manning the nearest machine gun. They didn’t appear even to notice him, until it was too late. Their attention was focused inward, on the base itself. Bolan loaded his grenade launcher once more and blew a hole in the palisade large enough for him to enter the camp.
The explosion drew fire, but the Executioner ignored it, throwing himself through the splintered gap and rolling with the impact. He came up firing, stitching the confused, surprised shock troopers he encountered. As he ran, he yanked smoke grenades from his harness and threw them. The plumes of dense, green-yellow smoke added to the confusion and helped further cover his movements.
Working his way through the camp, he exhausted his supply of 40-mm grenades, blowing apart as many pieces of equipment and protective structures as he could, while always avoiding the roughly centered prefab hut he had dubbed the holding cell. He finished destroying the watchtowers and punched several holes in the protective palisade. There was nothing to be gained by destroying the wooden walls themselves, but no harm in allowing it to happen, either.
Resistance was ineffectual, as he had expected it to be. Most of the troops from the advance camp had, as was only logical, been assigned to the raiding column massing at the border. This base was, after all, the staging area that permitted the raiders to do what they had come to do. A token force had been left behind to guard it, but it was clear they had expected nothing serious by way of retaliation.
If they had been alerted by their loss of radio contact with the raiding party, nothing about their reaction to Bolan’s assault indicated so. It took him a little while, nonetheless, to work his way through the camp and eliminate any stragglers. He took down several men wearing the blue epaulets of the shock troopers, some of them in the act of fleeing, while others stood their ground in the smoke and flames and tried to take him. It didn’t matter, either way. These men might be the elite of Orieza’s killers and the best the dictator could field, but they weren’t in the same class as the Executioner.
Thinking of radio contact reminded him to check the radio room, which he recognized by the small, portable transmitting array jerry-rigged to the top of a corrugated metal shack in the northwest corner of the palisade’s interior. Inside, Bolan expected to find a man or men desperately screaming for help, but the shack was empty. The radio equipment was undamaged, so the big American emptied the last of his rifle’s ammo into it. He dropped the magazine, slapped home a spare, then picked his way through the wreckage of the base interior once more. As he moved he was mindful of the dangers, for there still could be men hidden between him and the holding cell.
Nevertheless, the man who threw himself from concealment next to a burning military-style jeep almost managed to take Bolan by surprise. He was incredibly fast, with a sinewy build that translated into a painful blow as the tall man drove a bony elbow into Bolan’s chest. The Executioner allowed himself to fall back, absorbing the hit as he let his rifle fall, and moved to draw one of his knives….
The man surprised Bolan by leaping over him and continuing to flee. The Executioner rolled over and regained his footing, snapping up the rifle and trying to line up the shot. He caught a glimpse of the thin, hatchet-faced man as the evidently terrified Honduran soldier bolted through the smoke, running as if the devil himself were close behind. Bolan didn’t bother to try for the shot; the angle was bad, and too much cover stood between him and the rapidly fleeing trooper. Just as he had been unconcerned with a radio distress call, the Executioner wasn’t worried about a soldier or two running for help. By the time Orieza’s forces could muster a relief effort, Bolan would be long gone.
A bit chagrined despite himself, he was even more vigilant as he advanced on the holding cell. A heavy wooden bar set in steel staples secured the door. He lifted the bar and tossed it aside. The door couldn’t be opened from the inside, which meant there would be no guards within—unless their own people had locked them inside with the prisoners.
“Step away from the door!” he ordered in Spanish, careful to stand well aside. He let his rifle fall to the end of its sling, and drew both his Beretta and his portable combat light, holding the machine pistol over his off-hand wrist. There were no answering shots from within, so he chanced it and planted one combat boot against the barrier. The heavy door opened, and Bolan swept the dimly lit interior.
What he saw hardened his expression and brought a righteously furious gleam to his eyes. There were half a dozen men and women, ranging from their late teens to quite old, hanging by their wrists from chains mounted in the ceiling. They had been repeatedly flogged. A leather whip was hanging in the center of the room, from a nail set in a post that helped support the corrugated metal ceiling.
“Señor,” an older man called, his eyes bright. He fired off a sentence in Spanish so rapid that Bolan couldn’t catch it.
Bolan went to him. “Easy,” he said. “I’m going to let you down. It’s over. Ha terminado.”
“You are American?” the man asked in English.
Bolan looked at him, pulling the pin that secured the chains. The old man fell briefly to his knees before Bolan helped him up. “I’m a friend,” he said.
“You are sent from God.” The old man smiled. “And you are an American.”
Bolan didn’t answer that. Instead, he said, “Can you walk?”
“I can walk.” The man nodded. His lightweight clothes were bloody and ragged, stained a uniform dirty brown, and clearly, he
