had turned on him, scourging his flesh and sanity. He also had a hint, a feint trace of another loss, a beautiful golden angel.
That pushed Rojas forward, and he staggered on, hearing the lilt of music and bubbling laughter of joy. He knew the sounds of the creatures who had left him to suffer unspeakable horrors.
What Rojas hadn’t seen were his fellow brainwashed assassins, two more men and two young women, all wielding machetes. The five of them charging toward the surf camp’s sounds. Rojas had been programmed to ignore them, his psyche masterfully twisted so as to allow Morrot’s killers to work in groups without attacking each other. Injected with amphetamines and twisted by a multimedia assault that filled them with false memories of a living hell, the people were no longer human. They were dedicated attack dogs, no longer possessing pause or reason.
The trees and foliage between Rojas and his prey were little impediment to him. Despite branches and blades of tall grass gouging his chest and legs, he barreled through the undergrowth. The others were slower, or simply taking the path of least resistance.
Nothing would keep him from the bloody revenge he sought.
Not even the man who charged out of the water, naked except for surfer shorts and a black sheath on his leg.
Rojas opened his mouth, releasing a wild screech, raising the machete to attack.
CHAPTER FOUR
Any doubt that Mack Bolan possessed that the machete-wielding Latino was reduced to an animalistic state disappeared when he released an unholy howl that split the air, turning the heads of a half dozen kids lounging and listening to music on the sand. Running through water and in wet sand felt like trying to pull his feet out of the tendrils of a hungry octopus, but his long legs gave him enough of a stride to reach the edge of the water.
The attacker’s maniacal eyes flitted toward the prone children who weren’t aware of their danger. Bolan knew he only had a few moments to stop him.
“Over here!” he called, the boom of his voice pinning the drugged man’s dead, cold eyes to him.
Another bestial hiss erupted from him and he swung his machete toward Bolan. In any confrontation between human and terrain chopper, the foot-and-a-half-long blade won every time, so Bolan didn’t bother with blocking. He sidestepped, avoiding the swing that started from above the attacker’s head and ended up slicing only air.
Bolan considered drawing the Atomic dive knife, but he could see that his opponent was young and despite his scratches and blank gaze, it was possible that he was an American. It didn’t take much more than a gauge of his age to realize that this could be one of the kidnap victims, and as such, one of the many innocent lives that he’d sworn to protect.
In the Executioner’s world, there was no such thing as an acceptable loss. Once the machete reached the nadir of its arc, Bolan lunged, putting both hands around his opponent’s forearm. With a hard yank, Bolan pulled the man’s face into his left shoulder, letting the uninjured joint take the brunt of the collision. Jaws snapped shut with a sickening crunch and the drugged maniac’s eyes rolled in their sockets.
Such chemically enhanced foes were mostly immune to the pain of conventional punches, bullets and blades, but the Executioner was a master of all manner of combat. As such, he knew the weak points of the human body, and the trunk line of nerves just under the ear and behind the jaw was one such place that even in a haze of painkilling amphetamines would stop a person with one blow. The would-be killer jarred into submission, Bolan turned his attention toward disarming him.
A shriek from behind—the spine-chilling wail of a terrified child—turned him away from his attempt to render his attacker harmless. Two more figures rushed into view, blades held over their heads. Suddenly the Executioner found himself outnumbered, and his concern for the suffering of his opponent disappeared. With both hands holding the man’s forearm still, he knifed his knee into it. With a snapped ulna and humerus, the man’s grip on the machete disappeared.
That accomplished, Bolan released the limb and brought his left elbow up hard, another crashing blow across the man’s jaw that threw him into the sand, senseless and barely mobile.
He turned to see a growling young woman with ratty black hair rushing in pursuit of a ten-year-old boy, her intent to bury her blade in the kid’s back. Her rage was so focused on the youth that the Executioner was able to catch her by surprise, hammering his right forearm across her throat in a clothesline maneuver. The healed stab wound released a spike of complaint, and it felt as if the young woman had run headfirst into his ribs, but at the end of the collision, she was flat on her back and Bolan still stood.
She screeched in frustration, her blank, feral gaze locked on the man who’d stopped her. She still held on to her machete, but Bolan hopped over her and landed one heel hard into the inside of her elbow. The joint popped loudly, and she, too, was disarmed, but clawing, jagged fingernails sliced into the warrior’s right thigh, planing off ribbons of dermis.
Bolan cracked his heel against the young woman’s jaw, feeling it dislocate under the force of his back kick, and while it cut off her animalistic growls, she was still reaching up with her left arm to hook her gnarled fingers into his crotch. He sidestepped her effort to geld him and gave her another kick, this time to her temple. Even as he did so, he caught sight of his male attacker in his peripheral vision, bursting up from the sand in a rampaging rush.
The Executioner turned and met the man’s charge with his right elbow striking him in the collarbone. Through his arm, Bolan could feel the snap of his opponent’s clavicle, and the drug-crazed killer stopped as if he’d struck a brick wall. Even stunned from Bolan’s countermeasure, the man lashed out blindly with his left hand, fingers reaching for Bolan’s face where they could tear skin and burst one of his eyeballs. The soldier straightened his right arm, a palm strike deflecting those blinding fingernails as he hit the man’s other forearm hard.
A wail of frustration all but split open Bolan’s right eardrum, leaving the soldier wide open for his attacker’s next tactic. The Executioner grimaced as teeth tore into the skin of his right shoulder, splitting flesh and releasing a torrent of blood down his biceps.
With a grimace, Bolan brought up his left palm, jamming the heel of his hand between the eyes of the attacker. It took every ounce of precision not to strike the man in the nose and drive splinters of bone into his brain, but even so, the young Hispanic was going to feel the effects of his concussion for a long time. The blow literally lifted his attacker off Bolan’s shoulder and sent him crashing into the sand.
The young woman he’d clotheslined took the brief moments of scuffle as an opportunity to rise into a crouch. Her hand was nearly around the haft of her machete. Bolan regretted the need to cripple her, but she was determined to carve up a fellow human being. He kicked her in the wrist, snapping it like a twig and knocking her into the sand. Her howl was not of pain, it was too forceful, and her bared teeth were poised to rip open Bolan’s calf. He pivoted and snapped his heel into her forehead with the same force he’d use to kick open a locked door.
If she survived, she’d need plenty of physical therapy to use both of her hands again, and Bolan wasn’t certain he’d restrained himself enough to avoid giving her brain damage. She was still, for now, and that was all that mattered because there was a third killer on the loose, a fourth and a fifth now in view.
It was as if someone had released a pack of velociraptors onto the beach, bestial shrieks filling the air. Bolan was already bleeding, though no arteries had been bitten, and he’d only dealt with a young man and an even smaller woman. He watched Spaulding wrestling with one of the
