Bolan smoothly ejected the spent round
Seconds later another grenade arced through the air and detonated against a truck at the end of the column, blowing it apart. A quick glimpse revealed that the vehicleâs heavy tires had flattened two of the gunners who had crouched next to it as the burning circles of rubber had become airborne missiles.
The Executioner shucked the spent grenade, fed another into the launcher and punched a third HEDP grenade into one of the troop carriers. The angle wasnât good, but his goal was to create confusion and chaos. As the first group scattered, unaimed bursts of return fire began, and Bolan knew he had succeeded.
Unslinging his M-16, the Executioner stalked forward into battle.
Hell had come to Honduras.
Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war.
âHaile Selassie,
1892â1975
I donât see color when I see a man. What matters to me is whether his intent is good or evil. If heâs a good man, then he is a good man, and thatâs it. If heâs a predator, Iâm going to put him down.
âMack Bolan
Mack Bolan, the soldier still known to a very few as the Executioner, crouched low and was perfectly still. His senses, attuned to the sounds of the jungle through long experience, picked out the telltale sounds of men and equipment some distance off. Some barely conscious part of his mind easily separated these from the ambient, natural noises of the beautifulâand deadlyâterrain surrounding him.
The enemy wasnât far away.
He finished hiding the crumpled, night-black HALO chute, burying it quickly and quietly with a few shovelfuls of moist earth and a handful of undergrowth. Then he silently folded the entrenching tool and replaced it on his small battle pack, next to his machete in its strapped-on scabbard. The pack had been specially prepared for him, at his request, by Stony Man Farmâs armorer.
The Executioner paused at movement near the toe of his combat boot. A four-inch tarantula crawled quietly over his foot and continued on, oblivious to the hell that was about to be unleashed. It wasnât the largest specimen Bolan had seen, by a wide margin. He silently wished the creature a safe journey as he continued on in the opposite direction. An old joke echoed through his mind, a parody of a rallying cry: Forward, toward the danger.
Smiling grimly under the dark tiger stripes of black-and-green combat cosmetics smearing his face, Bolan made a mental inventory of his equipment. He was clad in his customary combat blacksuit, a close-fitting garment bearing multiple slit pockets. The web belt around his waist bore pouches for extra loaded magazines for his weapons. Grenades of varying types were clipped to the belt and to the web harness over his shoulders, to which his pack was also secured. Over this, in a ballistic nylon shoulder holster designed to withstand the humid climate, he carried a Beretta 93-R with a custom-made sound suppressor attached. The machine pistol, like the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle in a Kydex holster inside his waistband behind his right hip, had been specially action-tuned by John âCowboyâ Kissinger. Kissinger had served as the Stony Man Farmâs armorer for so long that few of the weapons carried within the covert facility or taken into the field by the action teams hadnât felt his touch or undergone the scrutiny of his gunsmithâs eye.
The rifle in Bolanâs fists and secured by a single-point sling was a well-worn M-16 A-3. The 5.56-mm NATO weapon was capable of full-auto fire, and this one was equipped with an under-the-barrel 40-mm M-203 grenade launcher. Across the soldierâs chest was a bandolier of 40-mm grenades, as varied and lethal as the handheld bombs strapped to his person.
Also attached to Bolanâs web harness was a pair of truly lethal-looking blades, Japanese-style fighting tools manufactured by an American importer. The smaller blade had a single cutting edge over eight inches long, with a textured, guardless handle and a needle tip. The larger knife, a staggering weapon almost the size of a short sword, was also single edged, with a pronounced curve and a killing point, fully thirteen inches in the blade. Both wicked-looking knives were useful for only one purpose: killing people.
The Executioner was going to give them a workout.
He had been dropped here, in the dead of night, near the Guatemalan-Honduran border, for that purpose. The call from the secure phone in Hal Brognolaâs Justice Department office in Washington had been clear enough, reaching Bolan as he rested between missions at Stony Man Farm. The big Fed, director of the Sensitive Operations Group, had wasted no time telling Bolan that the request for SOG intervention had come straight from the President.