Silent Running

by Don Pendleton

  It had been a long time since she’d been around a man like him, and it was almost a shame that she was going to have to kill him.

  She left the hotel through one of the side doors and slipped into the warm night. Once in the dark, she mussed her hair and carefully tore the bodice of her dress to expose half of one breast. If she was going to claim that she’d been manhandled, she had to look the part. Men were such fools.

  She hurried toward the jail, keeping in the shadows as she knew Brognola would be doing. She hadn’t pegged him as having had much military experience, but even a rookie cop knew enough not to walk down the middle of a deserted street in enemy territory.

  JUAN GOMEZ DIDN’T trust that Martinez bitch as far as he could throw her. She and her big tits had the chief eating out of the palm of her hand. And, for all his brilliance and dedication to the Revolution, Diego Garcia was an absolute fool when it came to women. The fact that Gomez swung the other way predisposed him to not trust any woman, but that particular woman was pure poison and he hated it that a man he admired couldn’t see her for what she was.

  He went back into his makeshift command center, spotted Jésus Delmonte, one of his top field operatives, and called him over.

  “The chief wants me to let the patrols know that the bitch Elena is loose on the streets,” he said quietly. “She’s supposedly going after the Yankee bastard who got away from the jail.”

  “Why is she doing that?” Delmonte asked. “We have our men out looking for him already.”

  “Damned if I know, but I don’t like it,” Gomez growled. “I want you to follow her, find out what she’s up to, who she meets and if possible what she says. I don’t trust the bitch, and if it looks like she’s playing the traitor, kill her.”

  “But—”

  “You will do as I say,” Gomez snapped. “And if it comes down to that, so be it. I’ll tell Diego that the Yankee killed her.”

  Delmonte’s heart really wasn’t in this, but he knew better than to even try to cross Gomez. Those who thought that homosexuals were soft had never seen him kill a man with his bare hands. Rather than end up dead himself, the operative grabbed his weapon and his radio and headed out.

  “Keep me updated,” Gomez called after him.

  “Yes, Comrade.”

  Outside the hotel, Martinez had already disappeared and none of the guards had seen which way she had gone. Delmonte figured, though, that she had probably headed south in the direction of the jail, and he started running that way. She was moving quickly, but two blocks on he caught sight of her when she passed close to one of the streetlights that was still burning. In that red dress, she stood out enough that he should be able to keep her in sight.

  Slowing so she wouldn’t hear his running footsteps, he closed to within half a block of her right as she turned off of the main street and plunged into the crowded buildings of the side streets.

  ELENA MARTINEZ watched from the shadows as Hal Brognola and the two men with him moved north down a side street. As she had suspected, he had to be gallantly heading back to the hotel to “rescue her.” It was a magnanimous gesture given the circumstances, but she wasn’t the kind of woman who needed any man’s help. She was surprised to see the other two men with him and didn’t like the odds. She figured, though, that she should be able to cut Brognola out of the pack, take care of the other two and return the American to Garcia.

  She mussed her hair some more and started breathing heavily. As soon as she was panting, she dashed out of the shadows, looking back over her shoulder as if she were running from someone.

  FROM HALF A BLOCK away Jésus Delmonte saw Elena Martinez break into a run and, without thinking, took off after her, pulling his pistol as he ran. If she was meeting someone, he had to find out who it was.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Bolan heard running feet approaching and spun to see a woman in a red party dress break out of the shadows. He was covering her with his H&K when Brognola IDed her.

  “Hold your fire,” he said. “It’s Elena, the woman at the dinner I told you about.”

  “Elena!” he called as he stepped into the open. “It’s Hal! Over here!”

  Hearing the shout, the woman turned and raced for their protection.

  Now that she was closer, Bolan could see that her dress was torn, her hair was disheveled and she kept glancing over her shoulder as she ran as if she were being pursued. Sliding his aiming point past her shoulder, he went to his night optics and saw a man running after her. He had a pistol in his hand, but it wasn’t aimed at the woman. When he stopped and brought it up, Bolan fired.

  The woman screamed at the shot and ran to Brognola. “Oh, God, Hal!” she panted as she clung to him. “He was trying to kill me.”

  Martinez didn’t know who the man’s victim was, but he had to be one of Gomez’s men sent to check up on what she was doing. The Matador security chief was the one man in the organization she had never been able to work with at all. The fact that he enjoyed rough sex with teenage youths probably had a lot to do with it.

  She could also see that she wasn’t going to make much headway against the two men who had hooked up with Brognola. She had met de Lorenzo before the dinner and knew that he wasn’t a fool. The other man with him had the look of a Special Forces operator, probably from their famed Delta Force, and he wasn’t going to go along with her program, either. She didn’t like what she saw in his eyes.

  This created a problem for her. She could let herself be “rescued” and continue on with them in the hope of finding a better opportunity, or she could go out in a blaze of glory right here and now. She didn’t have a death wish, but she had never failed on a mission and wasn’t about to now. Brognola was a big man in Washington, and his loss could only help the plan.

  “Please—” she swayed as if weak in the knees “—I need to sit down.”

  Brognola put his arm around her. “There’s a bench over there.”

  Martinez allowed herself to be led to the decorative wooden bench in front of a small garden plaza. The trees above them threw deep shadows and, if she played it right, she should be able to quickly take out Brognola and escape through the garden.

  She pretended to stumble and went down to one knee. When Brognola bent to help her to her feet, her hand came out from behind her neck, the thin blade of her razor-sharp stiletto poised.

  Bolan caught the flash of steel out of the corner of his eyes and had his 93-R in his hand without even thinking about it. The 9 mm round went into her right shoulder, the blow knocking the knife away as it spun her, sending her to the ground.

  “¡Tu Madre!” she spit as her left hand went down toward her thighs and came up filled with steel. Bolan fired again and this time the round took her between the eyes.

  Brognola stood in shock.

  “That’s some dinner date, Hal,” Bolan said as he walked over and picked up the stiletto from the ground. It was a professional assassin’s tool, not a woman’s date-rape hideout piece.

  “It’s a good thing that Garcia broke up your little party the other night before she talked you into taking her back to your room. If you had, you’d be wearing this thing between your shoulder blades.”

  De Lorenzo was also in a state of shock at the near assassination of his friend. “I swear on my mother,” he said. “I did not know anything about this, Hal. She was recommended to me by the state governor as being a woman of high standing and character and he told me she was a looker, not an assassin.”

  “It’s not your fault, Hector,” Brognola said. “I’ve always been a sucker for a pretty pair.”

  “And for a setup,” Bolan added. “This wasn’t an accident. Someone wanted you out of the picture. Now that your damsel in distress’s no longer in play, you want to go home?”

  Brognola didn’t even hesitate. “Not on your life, Striker. I’m really pissed now. I don’t like being set up and I want Garcia’s ass.”

  “You know—” de Lorenzo bent over the corpse of the Cuban
who had been following Martinez “—if we’re going after Garcia, we need to know how he’s got that hotel defended. This guy’s about my size so what about my borrowing his uniform and making a recon of the place?”

  “Won’t your Mexican Spanish give you away?” Brognola asked. “You said that all of his top men sounded like they were Cubans.”

  De Lorenzo smiled wolfishly. “There’s a side note to my résumé you might have missed, Hal. I served at the Mexican consulate in Havana for a couple of years after it opened in the early nineties. I can speak Spanish with a good Cuban accent.”

  Bolan smiled. The only thing the Mexican could have been doing in Cuba was spying, so he would have needed to speak the local dialect fluently. Mexico had diplomatic relations with Castro’s Cuba, but the DGI wasn’t above making the spies of even friendly nations disappear if they could catch up with them.

  “You sure you’re up to this?”

  “As you gringos like to say,” de Lorenzo said with a grin, “been there, done that.”

  “You’ve got the lingo, partner, I guess you’re elected then.”

  Since the Cuban hadn’t been carrying a rifle, the Mexican left his M-16 with Brognola. He did, though, switch his Ka-bar fighting knife to his waist belt under his borrowed black combat jacket. The Cuban’s field belt with the holstered Makarov pistol went over the jacket.

  “Let’s see if we can get down there before dawn breaks.”

  THE MORNING SKY didn’t dawn clear over the Caribbean, and it didn’t dawn as much as the sky ever so slowly grew lighter. It also wasn’t the usual overcast, gray coastal day that occurred occasionally even in paradise. The sky had a strange, solid, yellowish cast. The air was dead-still, and the flocks of seabirds that normally cruised above the surf line had all but disappeared.

  Bolan, Brognola and de Lorenzo had moved to within sight of the Hotel Maya. Dressed in the black uniform of the dead Cuban officer, the Mexican was ready to make his probe of the hotel.

  “We have a hurricane coming,” the Mexican announced as he cast his eyes skyward. “It’s a little late in the season for a storm like that, but it looks like we’ve got a big one moving in.”

  “How’s that going to affect this place?” Brognola looked concerned.

  “Cancun’s built to take the storms,” de Lorenzo replied. “The developers knew full well what the weather’s like around here, and the major buildings should ride it out okay. About the worst thing that will happen is that the waves will swamp the seaside restaurants and the rain will wash out the dirt roads on the mainland, flood the fields and trash a few farmers’ huts.”

  “And give us good cover,” Bolan added. “If we wait till the storm hits, the opposition’ll be ducking for cover in the hotels, and they’re not going to be out looking for us to be mounting an assault.”

  “And where are we going to find cover from it?” Brognola didn’t like what he was hearing at all. He was a man who usually rode out storms, natural or manmade, in the snug surroundings of an operations center and watched the relay on real-time satellite imagery. Hiding out in the open while Mother Nature did her best to eradicate him wasn’t his modus operandi.

  “We’ll just stay low and hang on to a tree if we need to,” Bolan replied.

  Brognola turned to de Lorenzo. “Just how hard are those winds going to be blowing, anyway?”

  The Mexican shrugged. “Well, with a real good storm, we can get up to two hundred kilometers, that’s about one hundred and twenty of your miles an hour or so. When the coconuts ripped off the palm trees are flying parallel to the ground, that’s about two hundred klicks. But when they start going up into the air like rockets, it’s more like—”

  “I don’t want to know,” Brognola said.

  “Don’t worry, Hal,” de Lorenzo said, grinning. “I’ll let you know when you need to grab on to a tree. And,” he added, casting his eyes skyward again, “I think I’d better get going while we still have time.”

  “Good luck,” Brognola said.

  De Lorenzo gave a mock salute.

  HECTOR DE LORENZO walked up to the Hotel Maya as if he owned the place.

  Diego Garcia had placed a pair of gun jeeps in front of the entrance and a gaggle of AK-armed thugs were lounging around smoking and drinking beer out of bottles.

  De Lorenzo got a couple of hard looks from the guards, but ignored them as there was almost no chance that the gunmen could know who he was. He continued on with the studied arrogance of the Latin officer class and entered the foyer. Inside, he was just one of many functionaries scurrying around trying to look busy.

  He nonchalantly turned left at the decorative fountain by the reception desk and headed for the bank of elevators. The door was closing on his car when a gunman reached out to stop them.

  “Comrade,” the man said, nodding as he got in the elevator.

  De Lorenzo nodded back without speaking as even a Cuban revolutionary officer would. He punched the button for the rooftop restaurant on the eighteenth floor and was surprised when the gunmen did not select a floor for himself.

  At his floor, the man held back while de Lorenzo stepped out ahead of him. Still playing the officer, de Lorenzo continued to ignore the man and walked onto the observation deck outside the restaurant. The deck extended around all four sides of the pyramid and would gave him a good viewing point to look down on Garcia’s defensive positions and guard posts below.

  He was checking out the beach side approaches when he heard the guard walk up to him. He turned slowly as the gunman halted a pace away from him, his AK held at port arms.

  “Comrade?” the man said.

  “What is it?”

  “The colonel gave orders that no one but the sentry is to be allowed on the observation deck,” the man said. “I will have to report to my watch leader that you were here.”

  “My friend,” de Lorenzo said with a smile, stepping forward and placing his right hand on the gunman’s shoulder. “I like to see a man who does his duty. For the Revolution to be successful, we all have to do our duties no matter what they are. I commend you on your zeal to follow orders.”

  The gunman swelled with pride. This man wasn’t a stuffed shirt like most of them were. Maybe he should forget that he had seen him in the forbidden area. After all, he was one of the Matador officers.

  De Lorenzo’s right hand clamped down on the muzzle of the man’s AK as his left flashed out from behind his belt. The point of the fighting knife went in under the man’s rib cage and slid up into his heart.

  The dutiful sentry gasped, shuddered and died with a puzzled look in his eyes.

  De Lorenzo lowered the body to the ground and wiped the blade of his knife on the corpse’s shirt. Who said that growing up in a rough part of Mexico City didn’t have its advantages? His uncle had been one of Mexico’s most famous knife fighters and had taught him how to survive with a blade. Now, to get rid of the evidence.

  The restaurant had one of those stainless-steel carts the waiters used to serve fresh carved prime rib at the diner’s table. It was at least six feet long and had a round, hinged metal cover over the top. A perfect place to hide a body.

  Being careful not to get any of the man’s blood on his uniform, de Lorenzo dragged the body over to the cart and opened the cover. As he had expected, the inside serving area had been emptied and cleaned after the previous night’s meals. The hapless guard was stuffed into it, his knees drawn up to his chest to make room. Since he didn’t want anyone to find the guard’s AK and ask awkward questions, he put the weapon in with him. Even a deluded Marxist deserved to go out with his gun at his side.

  After rolling the cart back into place in the kitchen, he went to the sink and washed a small bloodstain from his left sleeve with cold water. After patting it dry, he went back to scoping out the hotel’s defenses. He wasn’t sure what the three of them alone would be able to do once they got inside. The commando seemed to be capable of infiltrating by himself, but if their goal was to kill Diego Garci
a, he and Brognola would be useful as a diversionary force to make it easier for him to get in. This half-assed “revolution” had to be stopped in its tracks, and killing the Cuban was probably the fastest way to put an end to it. This kind of organization was always run with top-heavy leadership, so to take out Diego Garcia should disrupt whatever their plans were. If the majority of the Cubans were as stupid as that sentry had been, de Lorenzo thought it shouldn’t be too much of a chore.

  After storing the enemy’s dispositions in his mind, he took the stairs back down. Every couple of floors, he left the stairwell and went to the small observation point at the end of the hallway to see if he could spot more details of the security positions.

  Rather than go back out the main entrance, he rode the elevator to the first basement level. Finding it empty, he explored the passageways until he found a door leading onto the grounds. Keeping clear of the Cuban positions he had spotted from above, he made his way back to where the two Americans were waiting.

  “HE’S GOT A LOT of people there,” de Lorenzo reported when he rejoined Bolan and Brognola. “But the Maya’s not going to be that difficult to infiltrate. I mean, it’s a hotel and there are several ways to get into the main building that he doesn’t have well covered.”

  He eyed Bolan’s silenced H&K subgun. “With your silenced hardware, you should be able to get in and make the hit. I think that if Hal and I provide some fireworks from out front it might make it easier for you to zip in and out.”

  “Where will I find him?”

  De Lorenzo knelt in the dirt and began to sketch a map of the lobby. “He’s taken over the manager’s office suite, and it’s not hard to get to if you come in from the back. There’s a basement tunnel here…”

  Bolan watched the Mexican sketch a plan of the ground floor of the hotel and asked a few questions before mapping it in his mind.

  “Actually,” the Executioner stated, “that’s not a bad plan if we wait for the storm to add to the confusion. With you two drawing their fire, I should be able to get in and out of there with a minimum of hassle.”