Silent Running

by Don Pendleton

  “CHIEF,” Juan Gomez called as he stormed into Diego Garcia’s office, “I’m getting reports that someone’s attacking our outposts in town.”

  Garcia ignored him and asked, “Do you have anything on Elena yet?”

  Her body had been found an hour ago along with that of Delmonte, and Gomez had half a mind to drag the corpse back and lay it on Garcia’s desk. The bitch was dead, and she was still causing him trouble. But he knew that the situation was too critical to have his superior distracted any more than he already was.

  “Considering what’s going on,” he said, “I can only believe that she fell victim to whoever is shooting up our outposts. I’m sure that if she was alive, she would have returned by now.”

  Garcia rubbed his temple. “I never should have let her go out alone last night. She is a soldier of the people, but she is still a woman and she should have been escorted.”

  “Comrade Colonel—” Gomez could hold it back no longer “—we have a mission of great importance to accomplish here, and every one of us is expendable except you. If Comrade Martinez has fallen, you must follow the example of our glorious leader and march past her body without looking back and concentrate on the job at hand so the people will emerge victorious.”

  A look came over Garcia’s face Gomez had never seen before.

  “Do you dare question my judgment of what is important? Our leader himself chose me to lead this operation, so are you questioning him? Only he himself has the power to instruct me, and he is satisfied with what I have done so far. We will be victorious, and the Yankees will suffer as they have never suffered before. If they think that attack in New York was a great blow, when I am finished with them they will never stop weeping.”

  “I meant no disrespect, Comrade,” Gomez said quickly.

  Garcia leaned forward, his eyes glittering. “If you ever say such a thing like that to me again, I will have you taken out and shot like a dog, Gomez. Your life is valuable to me only as long as you are serving the cause and carrying out your orders faithfully. As our president himself said, the faithful must never waver in their devotion to the duties they are given by their leaders.”

  Gomez was a dedicated Cuban Communist, and his entire life had been spent in service to the Cuban people. No one had ever talked to him in that manner, and it was only his years of rigid obedience to those appointed over him that kept him from killing Garcia where he sat. The mission did come first, but when it was over, Garcia would pay for this. Gomez wasn’t a man who ever forgot an insult.

  “As you command, Comrade,” he said as he stiffly turned and left the room.

  LIEUTENANT SIMON VILLA had positioned his men on the flat land at the northern end of the peninsula in double quick time. Pushing his points well out in front of his main body, they had run almost all the way along the trail through the jungle at the neck of the peninsula. When they reached the bottom of the bluffs, he moved into a defensive position and called a ten-minute rest break.

  While his nineteen men drank from their canteens and checked over their gear, Villa broke them down into five-man hunter-killer teams. That was their usual tactical grouping and it should work as well here as it did in the jungle.

  At the end of the break, he dispatched one team to the Caribbean side of the peninsula, one to advance up the lagoon side and the other two to come right up the middle. Their mission was to kill any terrorists they saw without getting into a major firefight. If it got too heavy for them to deal with, they were to retreat to the hills.

  After making a short report back to his colonel, Villa took command of the fifth team himself and headed off toward a golf course he could see in the distance. He didn’t expect to find too many terrorists playing golf, but you never could tell what the bastards would be up to.

  Terrorists of any and all stripes were the lieutenant’s avowed enemies. One of his cousins had been caught up in a bank robbery being conducted by one of Mexico’s so-called Marxist liberation front gangs and had been killed in the cross fire. At the funeral, he had vowed to his aunt that he would devote his life to getting revenge for the death, and he had done so.

  When they got closer to the green, Villa was pleased to see an open-top SUV with three gunmen inside and a machine gun mounted in the back drive onto the course and park. The terrorists had good fields of fire out there in the open, but he had no intention of getting too close to them. Ranger school had taught him the value of making a long-range kill. He had several trained marksmen in his platoon, and his best was in his team this day.

  “Can you take him out, Paco?” he asked his designated shooter.

  The Mexican sniper grinned. “Do beans go with tortillas, Lieutenant?”

  Villa laughed. “Let’s do it.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  With Lieutenant Villa acting as the sniper’s spotter and security man, the two Mexican soldiers crawled onto the golf course to a nearby depression in the green that gave the shooter adequate cover, as well as a good line of sight to his intended victims.

  When going up against a machine gun position, a sniper always liked to take out the gunner first with a shot to the head before doing the security men. That would be easy this time since the gunner was standing in the truck next to his gun, his back turned to the wind. Had he been checking out his surroundings instead of focusing on trying to light a cigarette, he might have lived a little longer. Not much, but maybe a couple more seconds.

  As it was, the sniper had a clear shot of the back of his target’s head and squeezed it off. The 7.62 mm slug took the gunman at the base of the skull as he was taking his first drag on the smoke. He didn’t get a second.

  That done, the startled driver was next as he frantically cranked the engine of his vehicle. It had just caught when the shot sent him slumping over the wheel.

  The third gunman dropped his AK in panic and made a run for it across the grass. But, as Paco knew, it was stupid to try to run from a sniper, you’d only die tired. This man went down, too, before he made it more than a few yards.

  “First blood, Colonel,” Villa reported to Mendez, who was with the troops of the bridge diversion unit in the village. “Three gunmen and a machine gun in an SUV on a golf course. So far that’s all we’ve encountered, but we’re not into the built-up area yet.”

  “Keep going,” Mendez sent back. “We’ve found a way to cross the lagoon, and I need you to keep them busy up there.”

  “Can do, Sir.”

  Villa got on his radio and told his other hunter-killer teams to try to draw fire. “When you get a good fight started, though,” he cautioned, “break contact, pull back and start another one somewhere else. I don’t want anyone to get tied up with these bandits because I can’t come and get you.”

  He put the radio back and turned to his sniper. “Let’s go hunting.”

  “WE HAVE A REPORT of a force moving in from the north,” Juan Gomez reported to Diego Garcia. “Somehow they got through that range of hills without a road.”

  The Matador leader’s hand went to his temple. Damn those people! His plan was working so well, but he’d only expected to encounter small pockets of resistance, not an entire Mexican army unit that wouldn’t obey their orders from Mexico City. He didn’t have enough troops to fight an offensive battle against them, but he could mount a good defense. Plus, this was where the hostages would turn the battle in his favor no matter what the odds, and he had no shortage of them to expend. If he was forced to, he’d send truckloads of women and children to the hot spots to see if the Mexicans were willing to gun them down as they advanced.

  “How many of them are up there?” he asked.

  “We don’t know at this time,” Gomez said. “I sent a truck patrol up there to take a look, but I can’t raise them on the radio so they might have gotten into trouble. The enemy also has another small group trying to come up the coastline, and we’re engaging them now.”

  Garcia went to the map on the wall. “Pull a third of the men from the hotels in
the south and send them to the north. Have them take up defensive positions around the two hotels up there and tell Del Gato to use the hostages as shields. I don’t want to lose any of our people in stupid gun battles.”

  “What about the men who have been shooting at our people downtown?”

  Garcia knew that the unknown gunmen attacking within the built-up area weren’t Mexican Army troops. They were hitting and running away like cowards, and that wasn’t the way regular troops fought. More than likely, they were the same men who had escaped from the jail. And, if that were the case, they were being led by that Yankee bastard Brognola. It had been a mistake not to have killed him from the outset rather than trying to keep him as trade bait.

  The Cuban had made relatively few mistakes during his career, and this one galled him. Had he done what he should have when he’d had the chance, he wouldn’t be dealing with armed men operating inside his perimeter. More importantly, Elena wouldn’t have gone out last night and would still be with him to help him fight.

  “Tell everyone south of here to shoot on sight, kill anyone they see on the streets. Armed or not, Yankees or Mexicans, kill them.”

  “Sí, Jefe.”

  THE RISING WIND BROUGHT the sound of gunfire from the north and Bolan focused on it. “We’ve got company,” he told Brognola. “And that’s not just two or three guys lone-wolfing it. That’s disciplined firing, and there’s a couple dozen weapons involved.”

  De Lorenzo also heard the distant gunfight. “Maybe the bastards don’t have complete control of our army, after all,” he suggested. “I know that some of our Ranger units have been working counterterrorist ops in the border regions, and their officers aren’t the kind who will give up without a fight. If they got word of what was happening here, they’d be sure to come and investigate.”

  “In another circumstance, that’d be good,” Bolan said. “But it’s going to make it difficult for us to move against Garcia as we’d planned. With your people attacking, the Cubans are going to be hunkering down and expecting trouble.”

  “Damn!” de Lorenzo said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “What size are these units that’re working the border?” Brognola asked.

  “Most of them are light battalions of jungle fighters,” the Mexican replied. “Maybe five, six hundred men all told. But they usually only deploy a couple of companies at a time on routine patrols. If they get lucky and run into a concentration of guerrillas, they call for the rest of the unit to join them.”

  With this new addition to the mix, Bolan realized that it was time to rethink the program.

  “Hal,” he said, “why don’t we head up that way to see if we can contact those Mexican troops? With Hector being the senior government official on the scene, I think he can be of use to their commander. At the least, the army needs to know the extent of the hostage situation here, so they don’t attack the hotels.”

  “Damn,” Brognola said, “I hadn’t thought of that. If they start lobbing shells into those buildings, the collateral damage issue isn’t going to play well on TV back home.”

  “If you can get me close enough to them,” de Lorenzo suggested, “I think that if I go in alone, I can get them to accept my surrender. Garcia has my wallet and ID card, but I’m wearing dogtags that give my rank and position in the government.”

  “Are you sure you want to risk that?” Brognola said. “You’ll be moving into a free-fire zone.”

  The Mexican grinned. “If I recollect, I’ve already been shot at a couple of times.”

  “And, Hal,” Bolan stated, “as soon as Hector makes contact, I want you to go with the Mexicans, too. Now that they’re here, it’s too dangerous for you to be playing commando with me. When the shooting starts getting serious, it’ll be no place for freelancers.”

  “Including you,” Brognola pointed out.

  “As long as you let them know that I’m out here, I can still do something useful.”

  “He has a point, Hal,” de Lorenzo said. “It won’t look good if you’re accidentally killed by Mexican troops. Your President will not be happy with us.”

  With the Mexican troops having dealt themselves a strong hand, the game had changed and Brognola realized that it was time for him to retire from the field. Someone else would have to take care of Garcia.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

  “Then we’d better get a move on,” Bolan told them. “If you haven’t noticed, the sky’s not looking too good and the wind’s picking up.”

  From horizon to horizon, the sky over Cancun had turned a dull lead gray. The usual gentle offshore breeze was starting to gust as the storm approached. The palms flanking the boulevard were swaying and discarded bits of paper and plastic bags were dancing in the air.

  De Lorenzo took a weather gauge himself. “You’re right, it’s coming in. And it’s going to be a good one.”

  VILLA HAD MOVED his hunter-killer team south a quarter mile and was set up between the golf course clubhouse and the first of the big resorts on the strip. This hotel apparently had been designed with some kind of jungle paradise theme and was surrounded by a lush, overgrown tropical garden on the three land sides. The foliage was a perfect place for terrorists to hide defensive positions.

  The sniper was scoping the area directly in front of his position when he saw something white on a stick waving back and forth about three hundred yards to his left front.

  “I think I’ve found a guy who wants to surrender,” Paco radioed to Villa.

  “Wait one,” the officer sent back. “I’ll be right up.”

  Villa crawled up to the sniper’s hideout and took out his field glasses.

  “Left front—” the sniper took the range through his scope “—a little less than three hundred meters.”

  “Got it.”

  Villa focused on the moving stick and saw the top of a man’s head. Occasionally the man would pop up for a quick look. Taking a piece of note paper from his map case, he stuck it on the muzzle of his M-16 and raised it up high enough to be seen as a sign.

  The would-be surrenderee spotted it and pumped his white flag up and down three times to acknowledge the return signal before stepping out in to the open.

  “Cover him,” Villa told Paco.

  The man, a civilian by his clothing, emerged and started for them. “Hurry man!” Villa called, waving him forward. “Run!”

  The man started running hunched over as if expecting a bullet in the back. He walked the final few steps, his hands high in the air. “God,” he said in Spanish, “am I glad to see you people.”

  Villa pulled the man down under cover and held his pistol on him while Paco patted him down.

  “Okay, who the hell are you?”

  “I’m Hector de Lorenzo, the attorney general from Mexico City.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” Villa laughed. “I’m General Santa Ana.”

  “I’m serious.” De Lorenzo kept his voice calm. “Let me take out my dogtags. They’re inside my shirt.”

  Villa backed off, but kept the muzzle of his pistol aimed at the man’s head. “Real slowly. I’m not having a good day.”

  In deliberate slow motion, de Lorenzo reached his hand under his collar and pulled out his dogtag chain.

  “Take them off and toss them to me.”

  De Lorenzo pulled to break the chain and tossed them underhanded. Rather than take his eyes off his prisoner to catch the chain, Villa let it fall at his feet before crouching to retrieve it. The metal tag read that this guy was who he was claiming to be, the attorney general of the Republic of Mexico. That’s what the tag said, but Villa wasn’t convinced. They could have been stolen.

  “If you’re who this says you are,” he said, “what in the hell are you doing in Cancun?”

  De Lorenzo shrugged. “Mexico City was hosting the bi-annual meeting of the Organization of the Justice Departments of the Americas at the Hotel Maya, and we were in the middle of dinner when the Cuban terrorists broke i
n and captured us. Me and my—”

  That got Villa’s undivided attention. If there was anyone the young officer really hated, it was the Cubans. Even though Castro was no longer a force in the region, he continued to arm and support any bandit and narco group he could find. “What Cubans?”

  “The terrorists who are behind this outrage are led by Cubans.” De Lorenzo gave him a brief rundown of the events of the past couple of days.

  Villa listened to the story, but still wasn’t buying it. “You say that you were with the American A.G. and were rescued from jail by some kind of American commando?”

  “Not the A.G.,” de Lorenzo replied, “but a special advisor to the American President. The commando was sent by their President to get him out and they decided to take me with them when they escaped.”

  “This sounds like a plot from some gringo movie with Bruce Willis or one of those guys.”

  De Lorenzo really didn’t blame the young officer for being skeptical. It did sound a bit farfetched. But, he was tired, short on sleep, food and patience, and was weary of this game of twenty questions.

  “I’ll tell you what, Lieutenant,” he said. “Why don’t you put me in contact with your commanding officer so I can tell him what’s going on in downtown Cancun? Something tells me that he’d really like to have some recent field intelligence. Then, when I’m done with that, you and I can go back to playing stupid games about which action-adventure movie this situation reminds you of.”

  Villa didn’t hesitate, but whipped out his radio. After explaining the situation to Mendez, he handed it to de Lorenzo. “It’s Colonel Pablo Mendez.”

  “This is Hector de Lorenzo,” the A.G. said. “You’re the CO of the Panther battalion, right?”

  “I am,” Mendez replied.

  “Well, your predecessor, Raul Domingo, was a good friend of mine when I was in the National Police.”

  “Oh, you mean old Paco. Man, that guy sure loved his mescal, didn’t he?”