Killpath

by Don Pendleton

  He pulled a fragmentation grenade and loaded it into his under-barrel launcher. He signaled to Rojas to take cover, then fired the shell at the chain link around the livery. They both dove into a drainage ditch just in time to avoid the spray of high-velocity shrapnel and broken chain link.

  As soon as the bomb popped, Bolan rose, M4 loaded, scanning for further targets through the hole in the fence.

  More men were screaming and bleeding on the tarmac, their flesh punctured and lacerated by the shattered fence and Bolan’s fragger. He saw a gunman reach for his fallen weapon with a bloody hand. The Executioner put three rounds through his head with the carbine, swiftly and surely.

  Rojas was blasting away beside him. He spared her a glance, and she looked to him, as if seeking approval. He was satisfied with La Brujah’s display of precision and finality when it came to cutting down the Cali assassins.

  “Good. Clean,” Bolan said, nodding.

  A few moments later, the area grew quiet, the flames of the most recent explosion dying down and all the men in sight down for the count.

  “This…seems disappointing,” Rojas said, reloading her rifle. “For as dangerous as these guys were, for all the people they’ve hit for the cartels…”

  “Down!” Bolan snapped, catching a glint of light from the corner of his eye.

  With lightning speed, he whirled and ripped off a burst in the direction of the flashy, nickel-plated .45 in Herrera’s fist. Bolan and Herrera both shot at the same time, and Rojas let out a grunt as the .45 clipped her in the upper chest. The Executioner cored the Soldados captain through the heart with three rounds. The tri-burst sent the Colombian crashing to the ground in a messy heap.

  Bolan turned back toward Rojas, moving quickly to her side as she lay, holding her chest.

  “Even with body armor, gunshots hurt,” Bolan said, reaching down to take her hand.

  Rojas blinked, grimacing. “No cry of worry?”

  “You were either dead, and anything I said would have been meaningless, or the armor protected you, and taking time to tell you something could have gotten you killed,” Bolan answered.

  She rolled her eyes as Bolan pulled her to her feet.

  “We need to make certain this area’s cleared,” he said. “Scavenge magazines and any gear you think you won’t mind carrying back to the car. Avoid getting too close to any of the vehicles we blitzed—they could still ignite.”

  They split up, setting about their task quickly. As he cleared the ground level, Bolan heard Rojas calling him.

  “Cooper!”

  He ran outside and picked up the unmistakable sound of rotors in the sky, getting closer.

  “Get in here,” Bolan told Rojas.

  She raced into the garage. “Herrera was barely ready…”

  “But Herrera wasn’t the man in charge of the whole cartel,” Bolan returned. “Carbonez knew we’d be coming after Herrera at some point…I guess he figured out we decided to change up our schedule.”

  Rojas nodded.

  The roar of two helicopters made it deadly clear that Los Soldados de Cali Nuevos were on top of their game. And Carbonez was moving in for the kill.

  11

  Mack Bolan had to give the leader of the SNC some respect. The man had thought ahead far enough to prepare a flying squad in order to bring down the hammer on Bolan and Rojas the next time they attacked. In less than twenty-four hours, Carbonez had lost several major portions of his Cali operations, including Macco’s force, over a dozen street-level assassins and Herrera’s entire livery crew.

  Herrera had obviously passed on the Executioner’s grim warning.

  Bolan didn’t tend to underestimate the intelligence or ability of his opposition. Though he hadn’t expected Carbonez to move in with quite this much speed and strength, he’d also been hoping to draw the general out, to gauge what kind of rapid response the criminal could summon. And if Herrera’s warning hadn’t been enough, Bolan knew the explosions at the livery would have been audible for miles.

  “You were expecting them to come,” Rojas stated.

  Bolan nodded. “Thinking ahead of the enemy. Isn’t that what kept you on top in New York?”

  “Absolutely.” Rojas smiled.

  Bolan had a live grenade in the breech of the 40 mm tube attached to his carbine. The warhead on the little canister was High Explosive Dual Purpose, capable of producing antipersonnel effects, but also more than strong enough to punch through a wall or the shell of a lightly armored vehicle.

  The helicopters came into view, two UH-1 Hueys followed by an MH-6 Little Bird. The Hueys were traditional and reliable workhorses able to carry up to a dozen men into action if the ships were stuffed to the gills. Thankfully, neither bird had door gunners, but the smaller, nimble teardrop-shaped chopper behind them did have weapons pods hanging off the side. The craft was just as versatile as a Huey—if not more so. The Little Bird was often used as a rapid deployment aircraft, getting small squads into areas where the heavier Hueys would have trouble landing, and they were equally practical as improvised air-to-ground attack ships.

  Bolan pushed Rojas back inside the garage before diving in himself. The tarmac where they’d been standing was torn up by dozens of rounds raining from the sky. A few yards to their left, more rounds blasted apart a section of wall, leaving a ragged opening in the structure.

  “What the fuck was that?” Rojas snapped, shocked at the sudden appearance of a hole large enough to drive an SUV through.

  “Heavy firepower,” Bolan said. “Stay in cover over there, by the tool lockers. Let the fight come to you.”

  “And you?” Rojas asked.

  “I’m going into my element,” the Executioner returned.

  In an instant, Bolan was through the hole blasted in the wall.

  The dual Hueys hovered as their backup bird orbited the livery, ready to lay down even more cover fire. Ropes dropped from the troop ships, unraveling and twisting from the open side doors as the Colombian pilots steadied their charges. The MH-6 circled, and a door gunner fired rounds into the sides of the garage.

  The commandos on the Hueys slid deftly down the heavy cords. With the gunship providing close air support, it was clear to Bolan that none of the sixteen men felt vulnerable on their descent.

  Despite the heavy firepower wielded by both the Little Bird’s gunman and the chopper’s 23 mm chain guns, Bolan was banking on a simple fact working in his favor. They wouldn’t be prepared for the Executioner’s unconventional tactics.

  He’d seen the rapid rain of lead coming down from the door-mounted minigun, which meant that he definitely couldn’t waste a second. The MH-6 was loaded and ready, and he led the high-flying aircraft by a few degrees of windage and fired the grenade launcher on his rifle. The gun chugged against his shoulder.

  For a moment, he couldn’t tell if the shell had made contact. Then, two hundred feet up, the detonation of the HEDP round against the side of the Little Bird gave him all the proof he needed. Smoke began billowing from one of the engine cowlings, which wasn’t ideal. He’d been hoping to hit the passenger cabin. Even so, the flight of the MH-6 was erratic, the pilot struggling to keep the bird airborne. And there was no sign of the door gunner.

  Bolan turned and saw Rojas in action, putting rounds into the first two of the Colombian gun thugs through the garage doors, 5.56 mm rounds slicing across the distance between them in the blink of an eye.

  She’d waited until they were inside, just as he’d ordered her to. From his vantage point, he was well out of her line of fire, and she was safe from any of his shots. Bolan put the M4 on full-auto and cut loose with a long burst into the crowd of startled commandos still milling around in the driveway. As they’d been stacking up to storm Rojas and anyone else who might be assisting her inside, they’d made themselves vulnerable to the Executioner’s angle. The carbine snarled out its deadly message at eight-hundred rounds per minute, 5.56 mm rounds slashing through the Soldados.

  Bolan swept the g
roup with a figure eight that emptied half of the magazine, and as soon as he let off the trigger, he shifted his focus back to the gunship. The Little Bird was still in the air. It had only been a few seconds since he’d hit it with the grenade, but the men on board seemed to have lost interest in laying down cover fire for the troops below. Bolan ejected the empty casing from his grenade launcher and fed in another 40 mm blaster, priming the rifle in one fluid motion.

  Now it was time to take care of the other helicopters.

  Bolan’s aim was much more certain this time. He pulled the trigger, and a heartbeat later, the cockpit of one of the hovering Hueys disappeared in a bloom of fire and black smoke. The chopper lurched violently, and without anyone to control it, the disabled aircraft was at the mercy of the still-spinning rotors.

  The Huey began spiraling toward the ground, and the other pilot pulled up hard, swinging his helicopter around to avoid a deadly crash. It was a deft bit of evasion and skilled flying, but the dangling ropes were still attached to the aircraft, and the spiraling ship snarled into them.

  As the disabled helicopter became tangled in the other Huey’s ropes, the rotors tugged in one direction while the tail of the bird whipped the opposite way. The twin engines of the functioning chopper revved higher, much higher, and the ropes snapped, sending the disabled bird into its final plummet.

  The pilot hadn’t been ready for that. The engines were working overtime, and the pilot had been trying to fly the chopper higher to avoid being dragged down with its counterpart. As the ropes came apart, the remaining Huey suddenly upended, looking for a moment as if it were standing on its tail before succumbing to gravity.

  The first troop ship hit the livery lot, its rotors shattering into a million pieces as it sliced at the ground. The already flaming chassis produced a secondary explosion, the engines receiving a traumatic impact that tore fuel lines. Gas met overheated metal, and in moments the helicopter spread out a perimeter of flame, a wall racing outward at hundreds of miles an hour and sending the paramilitary force scrambling for cover.

  “Rojas!” Bolan called out.

  “Damn! What did you—”

  That was all Rojas had time to say before they were cut off from each other by the hammer blow of the second Huey slamming itself into the ground.

  Bolan ran around the corner of the garage, pausing to reloaded before bringing the M4 up to his shoulder. Over the front sight, he made out the strewn and scattered survivors of the fast-rope team, still recovering from the mayhem of two crashing and burning helicopters.

  Bolan punched short bursts into those who were on their feet, weapons still in hand, precision rounds tearing through heads or slashing through hearts and rib cages.

  Carbonez’s counterattack would have overwhelmed any force that hadn’t expected it. Fortunately, the Executioner had planned for this contingency. He’d been counting on it, wanting Los Soldados de Cali Nuevos to come back and try to hit him with everything they had.

  The Soldados had thought they could take their quarry by surprise, but using cover and years of marksmanship skill, Mack Bolan had come out on top.

  And yet, for all the carnage he and Rojas had wrought, the Little Bird was still limping along. The craft, bleeding off smoke and fire, swung into view. A body dangled from one side of the helicopter. It was the door gunner in his harness; he had either been taken out by shrapnel or by smoke inhalation. The aircraft wobbled, struggling to stay straight as the chain gun on the far side of the craft roared in defiance. 23 mm shells smashed into the garage roof, shearing huge chunks out of it.

  Bolan spotted Rojas racing toward him, darting around falling debris.

  “I thought you were good with that thing,” Rojas complained. She was smeared with dirt, her short hair wild and scraggly.

  “The gunner’s out of commission,” Bolan said. He pushed another 40 mm shell into the launcher and tracked the teardrop-shaped helicopter as it circled back again.

  Bolan fired another HEDP shell into the windshield of the little gunship, and this time, the glass bubble burst. The helicopter rocked as its pilot was obliterated by a sheet of molten copper. The grenade tore into the back of the aircraft and trashed the engine compartment. Bolan grabbed Rojas’s hand, and they sprinted inside the garage. As damaged as the livery building was, it was still the best protection from the gutted gunship as it nosed into the tarmac, erupting in an earth-shaking blow that almost rocked Rojas off her feet.

  Bolan held on to his ally, keeping her upright.

  She leaned against him, eyes wide.

  “You do this often?” she asked him.

  “Only on days that end with Y,” Bolan returned. “Though, this was particularly hairy.”

  “You have a gift for understatement,” Rojas returned, pushing away so she could stand on her own. Through the open garage doors, she observed the wreckage of one of the three helicopters. “I hope Carbonez was in there.”

  “I doubt we’re that lucky,” Bolan answered. “He sent out a death squad, and these boys weren’t coming in light, despite how fast we took them down.”

  “Fast,” Rojas murmured.

  Bolan could tell that she was experiencing the dissonance between intense violence and perception of time. Over the years, he’d developed an easy familiarity with the heightened sense of awareness and sharp reflexes necessary to survive in battle. He understood how, in combat, time seemed to stretch and warp, allowing a trained mind to capture nuances that were normally imperceptible. But countless battles had honed Bolan’s internal clock.

  “This was only a few minutes. About fifteen, since we started hammering Herrera’s cars up on that hill,” Bolan told her. “It might have seemed longer…”

  Rojas’s mouth dropped open.

  “Let’s get moving. It’ll take us a minute to get back to the car,” Bolan said. “Grab magazines and whatever else you think will work well for us.”

  Rojas nodded.

  Bolan replenished his ammunition, then glanced up. The columns of smoke rising from the smoldering helicopters and all the other vehicles they’d blown up on this lot would be visible for miles. The day was clear, blue and bright, and now the greasy smears drifted upward, bearing silent witness to the destruction that the Executioner and La Brujah had wrought.

  Bolan scanned the sky for aircraft but didn’t see anything. He knew the smoke could obscure a high-flying ship, though, so he listened for the slap of rotors or the drone of a plane.

  All was quiet for the moment, so he and Rojas returned to their rental vehicle. Rojas had loaded up a bag with 5.56 mm ammunition, and she had found several hand grenades which hadn’t been destroyed in the conflict.

  She had also taken a couple of tactical radios off of the dead commandos. Bolan smiled at her prescience, as he’d grabbed one, as well. The frequencies and encryption might be changed soon, but for now, they could listen in on Carbonez’s radio network.

  Bolan plugged an earpiece in and listened to the chatter. Though he understood enough Spanish to get by and could pass on simple messages, the men on the line were going a mile a minute.

  Rojas chuckled.

  “What’s funny?” Bolan asked.

  Rojas pointed to her radio. “Carbonez is losing his mind. He’s trying to get more details and is becoming frustrated by ground crews who’ve lost contact with the ships.”

  They were nearly to the car when they heard distant sirens.

  The fires in the livery complex were growing and spreading, and Bolan hoped that Villanueva had warned the Cali fire department about the possibility of tertiary explosions at the site, due to cooked off ammunition.

  It was time to return to the safe house.

  12

  By the time Bolan spotted the drone, it was too late. They were already halfway back to the safe house when a flicker, a shadow crossing the sun, caught his eye. The drone had been flying too high to be spotted back at Herrera’s livery, especially with all the smoke in the air.

  Villanu
eva hadn’t indicated that the SNC possessed drones, but it wasn’t unheard of for cartels to get their hands on that kind of tech. Ironically, Colombia’s National Police often used UAVs specifically to interdict drug trafficking. Every once in a while, though, a Boeing ScanEagle would “fall off the back of a truck”—if the price was right and the cop was willing to look the other way.

  If this was indeed a ScanEagle on their tail, the good news was that it was just a camera. The ScanEagle was too small to mount air-to-surface missiles.

  “Something wrong?” Rojas asked.

  “Los Soldados have a drone, and it’s following us.”

  Rojas poked her head out the passenger side window, shielding her eyes as she scanned the skies. “Damn it.”

  “That’s one thing you could say about it,” Bolan commented. “I’m going to drive somewhere with a little more clutter between us and the drone. When I say so, you get out and fall back to the secondary safe house.”

  “What about you?”

  Bolan considered the possibilities before answering. “We let them hit the safe house. With me in it.”

  “That’s suicide, isn’t it?” Rojas asked. “After all—”

  “After all, it’s one of me against a bunch of them,” Bolan cut her off.

  “I’m only trying to show some concern,” she snapped. “I’m worried what kind of contingencies you have in place if you get killed.”

  Bolan smirked. “Wondering if I’ll send someone else after you? You’re in Colombia, where half the cartels in the country sent hit men to greet you at the airport.”

  “Those I’ll be expecting,” she retorted.

  “Listen, you’ve risked your life four times since yesterday morning. You’ve paid your dues…”

  “For every murder?” Rojas pressed.

  “Enough that if we get through this, no one else—no one in the States, at least—will come after you.”

  “Fine. But if the Soldados take you out of the game, how am I supposed to finish what we started?”