Killpath

by Don Pendleton

  The two pops drew attention from the troops by the crater, but the Executioner whirled swiftly, emptying the other four cylinders at the assembled Soldados. Sprays of buckshot showered the men. As the first burst erupted from the muzzle of the Milkor, the Soldados were scrambling, seeking cover. Those too slow were peppered with copper-jacketed projectiles. Some were killed instantly, but mostly, Bolan found that he was hindering his opponents with shrapnel injuries.

  He preferred not to leave people to suffer, but right now, the odds were so heavily stacked against him that he needed to use the buckshot to slow down the enemy as well as to eliminate several of them. He’d finish the job with the M60, but for now, the MGL had done exemplary work. He shouldered a bandolier of buckshot grenades for the M4’s grenade launcher, slung the rifle and brought the Pig to his shoulder. Through the smoke and haze, the warrior made out the shapes of armed men and began tapping off short tri-bursts.

  Within moments, the remaining Soldados were running for their lives. Bolan squeezed 7.62 mm NATO rounds out of the barrel in pairs or trios. Because Bolan was using the M60 as a rifle, the gun didn’t recoil enough to draw rounds off target. As a result, each shot hit home at full impact, meeting flesh and bone and tearing through everything in its path.

  Thanks to the confusion and the smoke, Bolan was able to empty the entire two-hundred-round belt, leaving dozens of men on the ground, dead or dying in the initial rampage.

  Since he hadn’t gone all out with the light machine gun, the M60 hadn’t produced a massive muzzle flash, especially with the flash hider he’d installed on the Pig’s muzzle. With little to give his position away, Bolan was still relatively hidden against the enemy.

  The SNC troops were growing more confused by the minute. Men who had been following their comrades down to the river began to open fire. Rifles crackled, sending rounds in Bolan’s general direction. Many of these shots continued on toward the group at the crater, and the Colombians who were by the safe house site lost even more composure and discipline as they realized that they were facing both enemy and friendly fire.

  Bolan ducked his head low as RPG shells zoomed within feet of his foxhole. From his covered position, he watched as the Soldados, caught up in the fog of war, chewed at each other, the survivors giving in to panic and confusion.

  Bolan wasn’t going to let his enemy do the whole job, though. He replaced the belt in the M60 and took a few more moments to reload the Milkor MGL with more buckshot rounds. There was no way he was going to leave these thugs in any position to continue their predation on the people of Cali.

  Closing the breech of the Milkor, the Executioner checked which side was doing better, and rose, hammering the winners of the exchanges between the confused Soldados de Cali Nuevos.

  His mission was almost complete. The Executioner had all but dismantled the SNC, but he wanted to make certain that the survivors remembered the crushing defeat he handed to them today.

  15

  One moment, Los Soldados de Cali Nuevos were unleashing hell on a level that would have made the forces invading Normandy proud. Under Carbonez’s orders, the Soldados had concentrated high explosives on a single target, obliterating it. The attack had been swift and sudden. Even if the Witch and the American had some kind of eye in the sky, they would only have had minutes to prepare.

  Then the first of the grenades landed on the flatbed truck, and the tables turned on the SNC. Again.

  Carbonez watched that first series of violent explosions unfold, then a second, then a third. Pallets of extra shells for the mortars were shaken so hard they detonated. The explosions surged and flowed, growing into an even greater rumbling set of blasts, fire and shrapnel sweeping away from the destroyed trailer bed, killing and maiming dozens of men around the vehicle. From his position in the command room, looking through the eyes of his ScanEagle, the general watched his victory snatched away and hurled into the jaws of defeat.

  Somewhere, under the cover of a column of dust and smoke churning the sky, making the ground and river invisible to the drone, the American and the Witch were working their devilish magic, combining their powers in a counterstrike that was at once merciless and surprising. Veins stood out on Carbonez’s forehead.

  “General…” the drone operator began.

  “Don’t say a word,” Carbonez growled through gritted teeth. He turned to the radio. “Get people out to the river. I need troops flanking, now!”

  The officers replied, and through the smoke he saw a group take off as fast as they could. Grenades still sailed into the SNC ranks. The technicals, with the heaviest of the firepower—Browning .50 caliber machine guns—were hit. Two of them, at least.

  Carbonez estimated the speed of his flanking group. After a minute, when the grenades stopped flying, he knew that the small group wouldn’t be enough. “Send another platoon to cover them. Fast!”

  Another group broke contact. In the meantime, gunners continued to lay down fire, even though they didn’t have a good angle on the riverbank.

  The leader of that group of shooters came over the radio. “On station at the embankment. Subjects have taken cover. Cannot make visual confirmation. Proceeding with caution.”

  “Backup is approaching. Wait for them to join you,” Carbonez ordered.

  “I see a hole in the embankment…it looks like—”

  Over the radio, the screams of the patrolmen rose to a crescendo, punctuated by three thunderous booms. Mines? A sniper?

  Carbonez heard more distant blasts over the radio, coinciding with a break in the haze on the live feed that showed Soldados falling or running for their lives.

  Riflemen and machine gunners opened up, spraying into the smoke, trying to give cover to their injured comrades and those seeking to rescue them.

  Then more bodies began to drop, struck with authority by some unseen weapon.

  “What the hell is he hitting us with?” one of the Soldados called over the radio. As the man spoke, Carbonez could make out double and triple thumps of a heavy weapon. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say that was the sound of an M60 or M240 light machine gun, but the bursts were too short.

  Unless…

  Carbonez ground his molars. “He’s using a light machine gun as a precision weapon.”

  “What, sir?” the drone operator asked.

  “Can you get the UAV lower? Under the smoke and haze? See where that muzzle flash is coming from?” Carbonez demanded.

  “I’m swinging it low as it is. The mortars put too much debris into the air,” the operator told him.

  “It’s a stolen machine. Forget about safety! Your brothers are dying down there!” the general pressed.

  “It might crash into them while I can’t see to steer!” the operator replied.

  Carbonez trembled with rage. With shaky hands, he reached out for the man’s neck, and the operator turned back, pushing the ScanEagle into a dive.

  That saved the peon’s life.

  “He’s not at the riverbank. He’s somewhere in the middle. We can’t see him from above. Does anyone have a muzzle flash? Anything?” Carbonez asked his troops.

  “Nothing here on the ground,” an officer responded. “We hear the booming of his gun, but…”

  Suddenly, more fire blazed to life.

  “More shooters in the smoke!” the officer shouted. “Open fire!”

  A rocket slammed into the line of troops, causing more death and mayhem. The Soldados ripped off long bursts and their own rockets. “Muzzle flashes! We have muzzle flashes! Target them!”

  As the officer said that, Carbonez felt his stomach drop. He slapped the drone operator’s shoulder. “I need to see what’s going on, now!”

  “I’m getting it down to see!” the man replied.

  Suddenly, instead of smoky haze, the video from the ScanEagle turned to snow and static. The operator blinked.

  “What happened?” Carbonez snarled.

  “The drone…went down,” came the answer. “I said we s
houldn’t bring it down too…”

  Carbonez’s vision went red. A moment later, his hand was throbbing in agony, and he looked down to see the drone operator lying on the floor of the command center, head bent at a horrible angle. Blood only trickled from a laceration received on his way to the floor. His eyes remained open, unblinking.

  “You…killed him,” Carbonez’s bodyguard, Guerro, spoke up. “You broke his neck.”

  “He questioned my orders,” Carbonez growled. He glared at the bodyguard. “Are you questioning me?”

  Guerro shook his head. “He got what was coming to him, sir.”

  “Good,” Carbonez said. “Things have gone to shit out there. Somehow, those bastards got our people shooting at each other. And now, the radios are out. And it isn’t because I broke them…we’re just getting static.”

  Guerro looked as if he were about to say something but remained quiet.

  That’s right. You keep your mouth shut, Carbonez thought. His eyes were wide, his breathing heavy, the roar of blood loud in his ears. He knew that his temper and blood pressure had risen out of control. His rage at the impotence he now felt, at the failure of the drone and the radios, was threatening to burst blood vessels.

  Suddenly, new footage came to life on the monitors. It looked like the image from their ScanEagle, but it wasn’t; this drone swooped over the wreckage of the lost UAV. Everyone in the command center realized the implications of this.

  “The American and the Witch had their own aerial unit,” Guerro said. “They saw us coming…”

  “It’s how they could target the mortar trucks with such precision,” Carbonez added. “And now, they’re on our frequency. Maybe they always knew we were coming. That we had a drone in the sky watching them.”

  “Then…they know we’re here. They can trace our communications, and they’re using them to rub the defeat of those men into our faces,” Guerro added.

  Carbonez looked to his bodyguard. “If that’s the case, we’re done. He’s taken the SNC apart. The only way out of this is to wait for him to come to us, and stop him here.”

  “What?”

  “Take a look at the carnage out there. We sent over a hundred men. With rockets, machine guns and artillery to stop him. That doesn’t even count two helicopters with airborne commandos, a gunship, three motorcycle teams and two SUVs full of troops,” Carbonez said. “We’ve shown weakness on every single front.”

  Guerro’s jaw went slack. “If we run, we’ll never stop running. The only way we get out of this is to kill him.”

  Carbonez shook his head. “The best way to get out of this is to kill him. There are other ways out of this mess, but they all involve death, slavery, mutilation and other degradations.”

  Guerro nodded, frowning at that assessment. “The only way we get out of this is to kill him,” he repeated.

  Carbonez began to scowl but understood what the bodyguard was saying. To think of any possibility of defeat would be self-sabotage.

  Carbonez watched his own people succumb to confusion, confronting each other as enemy forces. Unable to communicate with them, he pulled out his gun and destroyed the monitor. There was no value in seeing any more of this slaughter.

  He had a war to finish.

  * * *

  AFTER FIRING A SALVO of buckshot rounds, the Executioner had dropped heads for long enough to rise from his foxhole with the M60 and rush along the length of the old tunnel. Just as he’d calculated, there was another hole torn in the camouflage of the ditch, and he dove into it while the Soldados continued their back and forth, shooting at each other. As of right now, with their communications thrown into disarray, the Colombian gangsters were acting in self-defense against their own, except when Bolan tore more chunks out of their numbers with the 40 mm Milkor.

  Those thunderous blasts had trimmed things down enormously. What had once been a force of a hundred and twenty to a hundred and forty Soldados had been whittled down to what Bolan estimated to be fewer than fifty men still in fighting condition. Savage explosions and precision gunfire on the Executioner’s part accounted for at least forty to fifty dead and dozens more wounded. The Colombians themselves, in the mash of anger, confusion and panic, had maintained their marksmanship and taken out another two dozen of themselves.

  From his new vantage point, Bolan saw that the rest of the tunnel was fairly intact all the way to the crater where the safe house had once stood. A few holes in the camouflage would give him different points to engage the enemy and then retreat to cover.

  Bolan had come to Colombia with the intention of utterly annihilating Los Soldados Nuevos de Cali, and so far, his plan had been going swimmingly. But that didn’t mean he could grow sloppy, trading fire with superior forces as he stood, M60 in one hand, shouting in the middle of an empty field.

  That kind of foolish bravado could be left to the movies.

  Groups of men continued firing and maneuvering. Some were disciplined, cutting loose with short bursts, while others leaned on the trigger and emptied their guns in one ragged discharge.

  Bolan shouldered the M60 and concentrated on the professionals, tapping off two- and three-round salvos at those conserving their ammunition. Bodies struck by high-velocity rounds crumpled, the Executioner’s canny marksmanship and familiarity with the machine gun allowing him to turn it into an army-destroying weapon.

  The horsepower of the bullets and the precision fire through the long barrel combined to knock down Soldados as quickly as they appeared in his sights. Tri-bursts cored torsos and smashed skulls, ejecting clouds of crimson spray. Gunmen fell into heaps of mangled flesh, rapidly expiring, if not killed instantly by the powerful rounds.

  When three quarters of the two-hundred-round M60 belt were spent, Bolan noticed the battlefield grow quiet. The occasional gunshot sounded, but no more weapons blazed on full auto, no more rockets flew. The Pig had feasted well, tearing through the ranks of the SNC, and few were left to fight back.

  Bolan set down the M60, trading it for the more nimble, handy M4. He emerged from the foxhole, scanning for movement in the settling smoke. He hadn’t gone ten yards before he saw the first of the dead, a Cali soldier who had been hit in the upper chest with a tri-burst of 7.62 mm NATO.

  Once more, the close range destruction of the Pig had provided graphic evidence of its power and mastery of the battlefield. The war grounds were quiet, abandoned. Those who could walk or run had already fled the rampant destruction. The Executioner stalked along, wary for armed foes, listening for the moans of those suffering and in need of a mercy shot.

  “Cooper?” Rojas called over the hands-free radio.

  “Are you at the safe house?” he asked.

  “I’m in the car I found there,” she told him. “Your friend, the Bear, has located the headquarters of the enemy.”

  “So you’re coming to pick me up and take me there?”

  “Sorry about disobeying orders, but even halfway across town, we’ve been hearing things. Now, it’s a lot quieter, so I figured you were done, or almost done,” Rojas told him.

  “Almost,” Bolan returned, keeping an eye out for trouble. In case he encountered a substantial resistance, the grenade launcher on his rifle had one of the buckshot rounds in its breech, ready to spit out a wall of damnation that would peel flesh from bone. Anything less would be dealt with via a tri-burst from the M4.

  “Just hang on, I’m five minutes out,” Rojas said.

  Bolan grunted an affirmation. “I’ll make good use of the time.”

  “I’m bringing fresh guns and clothes, too,” Rojas told him. “Need any medical assistance?”

  Bolan checked himself over, but other than some bruises and a few cuts on his hands from knife work against the forward observers on the riverbank, he was in good condition.

  “Disinfectant. I took a dip in the Cauca river…”

  “La caca,” Rojas said. “Pardon my pun, but that’s a pretty shitty place for a swim.”

  “Amusing,” Bolan
deadpanned.

  “I hope you have your shots,” Rojas said.

  “You’ll have some boosters for me in the first aid kit.”

  As the words left his lips he caught a flicker of movement to his left. As Bolan began to react, the ambusher appeared.

  The Soldado was blood-drenched, pieces of gore sticking to his face, but from the way he lunged, Bolan could tell he had no serious injuries. The man must have been standing too close to one of his comrades when he took a devastating hit. Bolan stepped to the side, pulling the M4 up to open fire, but the foe was swift and had a machete in hand, jolting upward and swinging the length of blackened steel down with savage velocity.

  In order to keep his torso from being sliced open, the Executioner sacrificed the M4. The machete’s unyielding edge slammed hard into the barrel and receiver of the carbine. The lashing machete severed the sling that bound the weapon to the warrior, but the momentum of the impact didn’t tear it from Bolan’s hands.

  Instead of losing the rifle, he pushed forward with it. His opponent’s blade was snagged in the fiberglass and metal of Bolan’s weapon. With a powerful twist, he wrenched the machete from the thug’s fingers, and shoved the steel collapsing stock of the carbine into the man’s jaw. The crunch of cartilage was punctuated by an ugly splitting noise as the Soldado’s mandible shattered.

  The Colombian staggered backward half a step, fighting to stay on his feet, his carnage-soaked features twisted in rage undimmed by the blow to his jaw. The Executioner didn’t pause in his counterattack, lashing out with his right leg and catching the man in his knee. Two hundred pounds of Bolan’s lean, powerful might was focused behind the heel of his combat boot, obliterating the kneecap in a single kick. The Soldado toppled.

  Bolan let the stunned gangster flop to the ground, taking advantage of the moment to rip his Desert Eagle from its quick-draw holster. The Executioner put his .44 Magnum right between the Colombian’s eyes and pulled the trigger.