Rogue Force

by Don Pendleton

  Their break — if break it was — had been provided by a peasant whom they'd met by accident along a highland trail. The man had been hysterical with shame and rage, but Rafael Encizo's gentle questioning had pried his story loose. The terrorists had killed his brother, carrying away the dead man's wife and teenage daughter to provide themselves with some diversion on the march. He had pursued the killers, empty-handed, knowing it was useless, and had found the women where they had been left to die beside a mountain stream. His brother's wife had been dead already when he had reached her, but the peasant's niece had lived long enough to tell him of their ordeal… and to mention that the savages had named their destination. They were bound for La Mesa del Diablo — the Devil's Table — on an errand of such urgency that they had botched the job of murder, leaving her alive to reveal their secret.

  Katz believed the peon's story, but that didn't mean he believed their enemies were waiting for them on La Mesa del Diablo. The terrorists had never settled anywhere for more then two or three days at a time, and they could easily have moved again before the Phoenix warriors overtook them on the Devil's Table. It would be a long shot, certainly, but it was still the only shot they had, and Katzenelenbogen realized that they couldn't afford to pass it by. If nothing else, another campsite might provide some indicator of the killer team's next target or their intended destination. And with that in hand, the men of Phoenix Force could be in place and waiting for them when the show began.

  "That's twenty," David McCarter said. "Let's move it out."

  Katz rose and flexed his shoulders, double-checked the metal tongs that were his strong right hand. The flesh-and-blood original had been a casualty of other wars, a different battlefield; its various prosthetic stand-ins served him ably and well. The current model was a stainless-steel clamp, mechanically articulated and controlled by Katzenelenbogen's biceps, honed to razor-sharpness on the "knuckles" to provide him with a lethal backhand. None of the Israeli's various acquaintances had ever dared to think of him as "handicapped."

  They were approaching the Devil's Table from the south and running parallel to the direction of their enemies. According to the charts McCarter carried in his pack, the mesa's flattened summit covered slightly more than three square miles, its mottled woodland punctuated near dead center by a mountain lake. On colored maps it offered the impression of a blue eye, peering from the wilderness in vague confusion; on the black-and-whites, the tableland looked more like a doughnut. Or an asshole, Calvin James had pointed out: the perfect place to plant your nozzle for a 5.56 mm enema, reserved for terrorists.

  In lieu of splitting up and covering the mesa individually, with all of its attendant risks, they would be making for the lake directly. Katz had reasoned that their quarry would prefer to camp near water, and if the Phoenix commandos found no spoor along the lakeside, they could always institute a wider search.

  But they were getting close. The big Israeli felt it in his gut now as they hit the trail. It might have been a hunter's instinct, or a warrior's nose for carrion, but he could almost feel the bastards now, could almost smell them as Phoenix Force broke the crest of La Mesa del Diablo.

  Here, the land began to level out beneath their feet. The upthrust soil was rocky, but it hadn't prevented trees and shrubbery from sprouting in profusion. They were covered well enough for now, unless their enemies had posted pickets, wired the game trails with grenades or satchel charges, maybe stocked up on the various security devices that were currently available. If they were dealing with professionals, as Katz believed, there might be foot patrols, or snipers posted in the trees.

  In short, they would accomplish nothing short of suicide by charging pell-mell across the Devil's Table. Caution was required, and doubly so as they drew nearer to their enemies. Each member of the Phoenix team was conscious of the fact that death for one might doom them all.

  It took another hour to reach the lake, a glacial pocket gouged from the earth before some other geological spasm had hoisted the plateau a mile above sea level. Fed by rains and possibly by springs from underground, the lake was full year-round and stocked with fish no longer found in lakes and rivers of the lowlands. Time had been arrested here, for all that fish and birds and reptiles knew, but man knew better. In man's eye, the past was dead and gone, the present veering dangerously into an explosive confrontation with the future. When they met, it would be time for Mother Earth to stand aside and wait to claim her dead.

  The lake was dark and deep, though not particularly large — two hundred meters, perhaps, from north to south, and half again as long. There was no means of estimating depth, and Katzenelenbogen didn't care in any case. His quarry wasn't in the lake, but rather camped along its southern shore.

  Against the tree line, safe from aerial reconnaissance and difficult enough to spot on foot, a dozen tents of camouflage material had been arranged in tandem, open flaps all facing toward the placid lake. The noonday cook fire had been doused already, wisps of steam still rising from a ring of blackened stone while several guerrillas cleaned their mess kits at the water's edge. Katz made a rapid head count, coming up with twenty-three; it fit the tents, provided one of the commandos slept alone or with a stockpile of equipment. That made twenty-five, to start; a troop of civil guards had gotten lucky three weeks earlier and had dropped a pair of terrorists as they were fleeing from the scene of an attack in Puntarenas.

  "Twenty-three."

  McCarter's whispered confirmation came from Katzenelenbogen's left. The others were spread out along a firing line to the Israeli's right, concealed by rampant undergrowth. The enemy whom they had stalked for better than a week was fifty meters away.

  "We need to flank them," Gary Manning said, his voice inaudible beyond the screen of ferns that sheltered him and his companions.

  "Catch 'em with their backsides to the water," Calvin James agreed.

  "No time to lose." There was a special urgency in Rafael Encizo's voice, and Katz glanced down the line of faces, picking out the Cuban's profile. Something in his eyes, perhaps, the grim set of his mouth…

  No time to lose. Encizo was correct on that score. The terrorists might begin to break camp at any time, and once they were in motion, setting up an ambush would be doubly dangerous. It could be done successfully, but Katzenelenbogen hadn't reached his present age by courting needless risks.

  He was prepared to give the order when a distant, droning sound distracted him. The others caught it simultaneously, frozen where they lay, eyes swiveled skyward toward the source of that familiar sound. An aircraft was approaching from the north and running low enough to beat the Costa Rican government's outdated radar gear.

  McCarter spied it first, his index finger stabbing skyward toward the north end of the lake. The aircraft was a seaplane, fitted out with fat pontoons, and there could be no question now of a coincidental overflight. The terrorists had picked their bivouac with care, the lake performing double duty as a landing strip for their expected contact. Katzenelenbogen said a silent prayer of thanks — to providence, the fates, whatever — that they hadn't been delayed by hours or days to miss the covert rendezvous on the Devil's Table.

  North meant Nicaragua or Honduras with a plane that size, and Katz was betting on the former point of origin. The pilot might be dropping off supplies or picking up evacuees, delivering fresh orders from Managua or retrieving battlefield intelligence collected by the terrorists along their bloody trek.

  The plane touched down, white plumes of spray erupting underneath its wings as it began to taxi, slowing, veering sharply toward the line of tents on the shore. The pilot killed his engine as he reached the shallows; he could wade from there, provided he intended to come ashore at all. Two guerrillas were already splashing out to meet their guest, prepared to catch his mooring lines.

  The cabin door swung against the fuselage, and Katzenelenbogen had the glasses firmly in his claw before a smiling face emerged. Its owner wore OD fatigues with military webbing wrapped around his
waist, and he had a holstered automatic pistol on his hip. The stenciled name tag just above his heart read BAKER. He tossed an anchor line down to the members of his welcoming committee, waited while they made it fast, then joined them in the shallow water for a hike to shore.

  "American?" McCarter's whisper was a rasp drawn roughly over Katzenelenbogen's nerves.

  "Too early to be sure," the gruff Israeli answered. "Let's move out."

  "But if he is American…"

  "We're wasting time." His tone immediately canceled further argument. McCarter frowned but held his tongue, already moving out to flank the terrorist encampment. Calvin James was on his heels, Encizo following as closely as a shadow.

  Gary Manning crouched at Katzenelenbogen's side, prepared to join the rest in taking up positions on the firing line. "It was a Yank," he said. "You know it was." And he was gone.

  Alone, Katz double-checked the action on his Colt Commander, setting the selector switch for automatic fire. He knew, all right, but he refused to even think about the implications of that knowledge yet before he had more evidence to work with. An American in touch with terrorists was one thing; there were mercenaries everywhere, prepared to fight for nearly any cause that paid their tab. But an American supporting Sandinista terrorists was something else entirely… like a blend of oil and water, gasoline and open flame. Considering Managua's hard line on Americans, the two could never coexist, unless…

  He squelched the train of thought before it could go any farther. He was needed on the firing line just now; there would be ample time for sorting theories later if they pulled the ambush off successfully. If not, then someone else could sweat the problem out another day. If Katzenelenbogen's ambush failed, the men of Phoenix Force wouldn't be cracking any mysteries in Costa Rica. They would simply be among the dead.

  Katz wriggled backward through the clinging undergrowth to join his comrades on the razor's edge.

  4

  Rafael Encizo sighted down the barrel of his M-16, one finger curled around the trigger. From his new position in the middle of the firing line, he had an unobstructed view of seven tents and the men who moved around them with their weapons casually slung. It would be simple to annihilate them, hold the automatic rifle's trigger down and sweep from left to right, then back again, reloading and resuming fire until no one remained alive. So simple, yes… but he would wait for the Israeli's signal to begin.

  Encizo felt an eerie hollowness inside, a kind of vacuum, and within that vacuum icy fingers gripped his heart. At some point, which he couldn't specify, his burning hatred for the animals in human form had died. In place of hatred there was only bitter cold: a grim, implacable desire to see the bastards dead before they could promote some new atrocity.

  He knew the savages instinctively, although their paths had never crossed before this moment. Rather, Rafael Encizo knew their breed: the jackals born to prey upon society, devouring the weak, the helpless, forming packs to terrorize innocents at will. Devoid of conscience, any inkling of humanity was foreign to the cannibals who lived for violence. They were addicted to the thrill of murder, thirsty for the blood of victims they would never even recognize by name. They were beyond redemption, and the only way to exorcise their evil was through cleansing fire.

  Encizo knew their breed from Cuba, where another "people's revolution" had been undermined, subverted from within by venal men who saw an opportunity to seize the reins of power. His parents and older brother had been murdered by the "freedom fighters" in an incident that was dismissed by Castro's courts as "self-defense." Encizo's two sisters and younger brother had been sent to "reeducation" centers, but Rafael had escaped to the United States. Along with thousands of other Cubans, Encizo had participated in the doomed Bay of Pigs operation. When air support was inexplicably withdrawn by Washington, the Cuban patriots had fought on against the odds and had been slaughtered like fish in a barrel. Wounded, Rafael had endured torture and extreme privation in Castro's prisons until he had finally escaped.

  Stateside once again, Encizo had worked at various occupations — scuba instructor, professional bodyguard, insurance investigator — before joining Phoenix Force. No longer pledged exclusively to liberation of his Cuban homeland, Rafael would take on the jackals when and where he found them, using every means at his disposal to eradicate them from the earth. And if he had the opportunity to do some jackal-killing here, well, that was gravy on the side.

  But he would wait for Katzenelenbogen's signal, and while waiting, there was time to think about the pilot of the seaplane. He was almost certainly American, and Rafael was conscious of a sour feeling in his stomach as he pondered the implications of that fact. Of course, there was no special pedigree for treason, and America had yielded up its share of Judases in recent years: the mercenary smugglers of arms to Libya's Khaddafi and the ayatollahs of Iran; the turncoat bastards who delivered classified material to agents of the KGB for cash or twisted "moral reasons" of their own; the neofascist crazies who pursued their "master race" philosophy with armed attacks against the media and law-enforcement officers. The cannibals had never been in short supply, and motives were primarily irrelevant to Rafael Encizo. It had always been enough to simply recognize the animals for what they were and act accordingly.

  Encizo checked his watch again and burrowed deeper into his bed of moss and ferns. The signal should be coming any moment now, unleashing him against his enemies.

  From somewhere to his right came the hollow crump of a grenade exploding, followed instantly by ragged screams, the telltale rattle of a Colt Commander spitting 5.56 mm tumblers. Before his targets could react, Encizo opened fire from ambush, milking short precision bursts out of his M-16. Downrange, the startled straw men toppled and sprawled in awkward attitudes of death. His armor-piercing rounds sliced through their tents as if they had been made of tissue paper.

  Half a dozen fell before the others went to ground, returning fire with something less than perfect accuracy. After stitching one more line of lethal tumblers across their front, the Cuban knew that he would have to move before they found the mark. A few rounds had come dangerously close already, and Encizo had no wish to die here on the Devil's Table.

  Shifting crablike to his left, he scuttled through the undergrowth on hands and knees while angry hornets swarmed above him, sometimes dipping close enough to singe him with their heat. The new perspective offered Rafael a different line of fire, but while the terrorists were furiously pumping rounds into his last position, he wasn't prepared to show himself just yet.

  He fed the M-16 another magazine, then slipped a frag grenade from his waist. He yanked the pin, still holding down the safety spoon while calculating angles and marking the obstruction formed by overhanging branches. When he had set the move up in his mind, Encizo cocked his arm and lobbed the lethal egg, already lining up his rifle on the enemy before his pitch touched down.

  Three seconds.

  Two.

  One of the tents erupted in a muffled thunderclap, hot shrapnel slicing into shrubbery and human flesh. There was an ugly writhing in the undergrowth before him, punctuated by the sound of panting screams, and Rafael began unloading on the wounded, knowing that a rabid dog was rabid until he died. There was no quarter asked or given in the hellgrounds, where the only mercy issued from the muzzle of a gun.

  Encizo held the trigger of his rifle down, dispensing mercy to the cannibals.

  * * *

  Katz released the trigger for a moment, his elusive targets having gone to ground behind a drift of fallen trees. Three crumpled figures lay between them in the no-man's-land that separated hostile lines, and there were others to the left where his grenade had served as an explosive overture to the attack. Surprise had let him take out half a dozen of the terrorists before they knew what was happening, but others had escaped his raking fire, and one of them had been the seaplane's pilot.

  The Israeli wanted him alive, if possible, but there was little chance of taking any prisoners whe
n you began with odds of more than four to one against you. It was not unheard of, but Katzenelenbogen knew from grim experience that any prisoners taken today were likely to be wounded and unable — or unwilling — to survive a rough interrogation. Maybe if they had an opportunity to check the plane there might be some solutions to the nagging questions in his mind.

  A bullet clipped the fern that stood next to his face, and Katz ducked a second round, returning fire to keep the enemy in their place.

  A terrorist erupted from behind the makeshift barricade, knees pumping as he broke for other shelter somewhere down the firing line. Katz led his target by a yard, sucked in a breath, released half of it, held the rest. His trigger stroke was gentle, and the three-round burst was gone almost before he felt its recoil. Forty yards downrange the gunner seemed to stumble, throwing out his hands as if to catch himself, except that he was spinning now, legs tangled in the undergrowth and going over backward.

  The gunner might be dead, or merely wounded. Either way, he had effectively been neutralized until a mop-up party could be organized.

  On the Israeli's left, incessant automatic weapon fire was battering the tree line, the guerrillas standing firm against their unknown adversaries. There were fewer of them now, however, and increasingly the stutter of their submachine guns or Kalashnikovs was overridden by the guns of Phoenix Force. Grenades were exploding along the battle line, a giant's fireworks peppering the undergrowth with shrapnel, and there seemed to be less hostile fire each time the thunder died away.

  Katz freed a can of thermite from his harness rigging and held it in his left hand while he used his claw to jerk the pin. It was an awkward pitch, with an allowance for the slope that separated the Israeli from his target, but he didn't hesitate. A looping overhand, a burst of automatic fire to keep their heads down, and he watched the can thump down on target just behind the barricade of logs.