Buch lesen: «Payback»

PROLOGUE

The South American jungle

Five years ago

The undergrowth rustled in the darkness about twenty yards ahead. Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, raised his fist to signal the rest of the squad to halt. The heavy foliage had made the movement almost imperceptible, but he was certain he’d seen something through his night-vision goggles. Exactly what, he wasn’t sure. An animal, perhaps? They were in the jungle, after all. Or could it have been a man? Was someone up there waiting for them? Their nighttime insertion by truck along the twisting, mountainous road and the subsequent mile-long hike had been treacherous and lengthy, but supposedly assured the element of surprise. It should have been impossible for anyone to shadow or precede them. Unless they were expected.

Bolan kept his eyes on the area ahead. There was no more movement, but it was still one more tiny crack in the ops plan that he’d been given.

The Executioner didn’t feel totally at ease with this mission. Even its tag name, Operation Cat’s Cradle, bothered him. He remembered the childhood game of looping string around your fingers. He also remembered the Kurt Vonnegut novel by the same name, with the repeating refrain, “See the cat? See the cradle?” Like characters in the book, Bolan never thought the configuration resembled a cat or a cradle.

Things hadn’t seemed quite right at the onset of this op, either. Maybe it was the degree of absolute assurance the Colombians had given them during the briefing. An overweight army colonel who looked as if he’d never missed a meal had smiled throughout the presentation, explaining first in Spanish for Captain Carlos Cepeda and his men, and then making a deferential show of adding a sentence in English for the benefit of Bolan and the two DEA agents, how perfectly crafted and secret the operation planning had been. “Un plano muy perfecto. A perfect plan,” he’d said. “Nothing can possibly go wrong.”

Bolan knew better. Something could always go wrong. Murphy’s Law had taught him that: If anything can go wrong, it will. This wasn’t the soldier’s kind of mission, and how he’d let Hal Brognola talk him into wet-nursing this Colombian army special ops team on some namby-pamby extraction detail was beyond him. If it weren’t for the two DEA agents, Chris Avelia and German Salamanca, who’d been helping the Colombian army locate the De la Noval cartel for the past ten months, Bolan would’ve declined. Avelia had assisted the soldier in a previous mission and he had come to like the kid.

The temperature had dropped a few degrees from the overwhelming heat of the day, but the humidity was still like a wet blanket. Bolan felt the sweat running down his sides and neck. And there was no letup from the ubiquitous mosquitoes. They buzzed constantly in his ears, occasionally landing on a patch of bare skin and stabbing his flesh. He felt itchy in several places. The soldier had told the rest of his team to keep their sleeves rolled down. It was hotter, but meant less exposure to the environment.

He heard someone approach his position from the rear, and crouch. Captain Cepeda and Chris Avelia moved up beside him.

“¿Qué pasa?” Cepeda whispered.

Even though Bolan spoke Spanish, he let Avelia translate for him.

“Movement up ahead,” Bolan replied, once again surveying the area through his night-vision goggles, while the two men did the same. The hanging overgrowth was so thick and the trail so obscure that the flat, two-dimensional image through the green-tinted lenses yielded little. “I see nothing,” Cepeda said in his limited English.

“I don’t either, now,” Bolan told him, flipping the reticules back up on his forehead to recover his depth perception. “Could De la Noval know we’re coming?”

Avelia fell into step, translating each man’s words into the appropriate language.

“Impossible. Even my men didn’t know until we departed.”

“How far are we from the Cathedral?” Bolan asked.

That was the code name for Vincente De la Noval’s isolated mansion. From the surveillance photos the satellites had sent back, the place looked more like a fortress than a church. It was so isolated and so large that De la Noval purportedly felt safe enough to let his guard down to party until he dropped. The special informant had told the Colombian government that this was scheduled to be one of those “heavy party weekends.”

Cepeda checked the readings on his GPS monitor and puckered his mouth. “Quizás quinientos metros, no más.”

* * *

PERHAPS FIVE HUNDRED YARDS, no more. That was according to Cepeda.

Bolan paused to take another compass reading and orient himself on his map. He never liked to totally rely on GPS systems. Murphy’s Law liked to tinker with them, too. The squad was moving parallel to the solitary access road leading up to the main gate of the huge house. It was purported to be surrounded by a twelve-foot-high, chain-link fence, and the main entrance was covered by an armed guard at all times.

The rest of the twenty-five-man squad was bunching up behind them now, and Bolan knew that wasn’t good.

“Have the men spread out and wait,” he said to Avelia. “I’ll move up and take a look.”

The DEA agent nodded and whispered in Spanish to Cepeda. They talked for a moment and then one by one the team began to melt into the darkness, although their noise discipline needed some work.

Avelia grinned at Bolan and whispered, “I’m sure glad you’re here leading us, my friend.” The kid’s grin was infectious. Technically, Bolan was there in an “advisory capacity only,” but he felt a kinship with this group of Colombian soldiers. The Colombians and the DEA had been tracking drug kingpin Vincente De la Noval and his brother, Jesús, for the better part of three years, and this was the closest they’d come to closing the noose, thanks to an informant inside the drug lord’s ranks.

When he’d heard that, Bolan couldn’t help but recall his own past war against organized crime, and decided they could use a helping hand. Hopefully, their dedication would be rewarded this night.

He finished moving though the undergrowth, and peered through a shelf of drooping fronds. The mansion lay about a hundred yards away. The shrubbery had been extensively cleared and trimmed to form a buffer zone devoid of cover or concealment leading to the fence. Between the fence and the house was perhaps another fifty yards of lush, well manicured grass. The huge mansion was dark except for a few sparse lights in the first level. No noise. No movement. And no guard at the gate. Maybe he’d left his post to take a leak or to have a smoke.

Bolan listened intently for any noises and sniffed the air for telltale odors.

Nothing so far, he thought, but there wasn’t much of a breeze, either.

Then he saw a spot of red and used his night-vision goggles again to get a clearer look. A man in jeans and a T-shirt and a woman dressed to kill in a short, revealing dress were locked in a standing embrace about twenty feet from the guard shack. An AK-47 with a collapsible stock was slung carelessly over the man’s left shoulder, the muzzle pointing toward the ground.

The woman laughed as he brought a cigarette to her lips. She inhaled deeply, causing the tip to glow again. Instead of exhaling, she held her breath, and pressed the cigarette to the man’s lips now. They were smoking a joint. Another flash appeared, as he inhaled. She slowly blew out her breath and the man smiled. They whispered together and then kissed before they made their way toward the darkened shadows by the house.

A sentry high on marijuana and on his way to getting laid, Bolan thought. Not a bad scenario leading up to a raid. But he wondered again at the accuracy of the intel they’d received. De la Noval was supposedly a strict disciplinarian, to the point of using deadly force on those he considered untrustworthy. This night he seemed to be running a pretty loose ship, considering that the sentry appeared to be leaving his post to collect seven minutes of heaven.

Of course, this lapse could help facilitate their mission, another aspect of which floated in the “trouble” section of Bolan’s mind. The Colombian colonel had given Cepeda and his men explicit instructions that the drug kingpin be taken alive, at all costs. Bolan naturally took that with a grain of salt, as he did all orders given by higher-ups who liked to lead from behind a desk. Following an order that would hamper those in the field wasn’t how Bolan liked to operate, but he was, after all, just there observing. And if the drug lord could be captured, it would put a serious crimp in the cartel’s operations, not to mention enhance the potential for future intel.

The De la Noval cartel was rumored to be expanding its operation to Mexico. Bolan knew he and the DEA agents were there to make sure that the drug lord was captured alive and extradited to the United States, preferably on the same plane as he and the other Americans.

The brush rustled about twenty feet to the soldier’s right. Bolan pivoted with his M-4 to face the threat.

A small deer scurried through the underbrush as a jaguar leaped from a nearby tree, narrowly missing it. The cat glanced toward Bolan and then disappeared into the jungle, as well.

Guess we’re not the only hunters out tonight, he thought, as he turned and crept back toward Cepeda and his men. Once there he briefed them on what he’d observed.

“That movement I saw looks like it was a jaguar trying to get some dinner.”

“Bueno,” the captain said. “We have the advantage of surprise. We must move. Ahora.”

Bolan nodded, still feeling slightly uneasy, but shook it off. Cepeda sent two of his men forward to cut a hole in the fence, one doing the cutting and one providing cover. They accomplished the task in short order and the rest of the team moved up. The area between the fence and the house was a long stretch, perhaps forty or fifty yards devoid of cover. It was, in effect, a perfect kill zone. They’d have to cross that section fast. The only saving grace was that there was an uphill grade, probably to allow drainage for tropical rains. The slight incline could provide them a modicum of cover, but was a double-edged sword: they’d be making an uphill trek, and this was no treadmill in some plush gym.

Avelia crawled forward and stopped next to Bolan. “I can’t say I like this setup much.”

The soldier surveyed the expanse again. “Me, either. This will be the trickiest part.”

Avelia grinned and Bolan caught a flash of the kid’s white teeth in the ambient moonlight. The sweat dripped off his camo-blackened face like dark tears.

“Let’s just hope our element of surprise holds up,” Bolan whispered, and gave Avelia a thumbs-up.

The DEA agent nodded.

As Bolan had suggested earlier, Cepeda sent two of his men forward across the expanse to take up secure positions under the overhanging balconies of the mansion. Once they’d ensconced themselves there, the rest of the team began moving through the fence line. The next step would be to secure the entrances, and then hit the house using stun grenades and 30 mm rounds containing a high concentration of pepper gas. Once they had the premises and all occupants secure, they’d call for their extraction.

But first we have to take the house, Bolan thought. He looked at Cepeda, who motioned for his men to move toward the planned positions to secure the front and sides of the mansion. They had just started their quick trot toward the structure when the darkness suddenly evaporated as spotlights from various positions flooded the grounds with light. Several bursts of staccato gunfire pierced the night, and a voice came over some loudspeakers, in Spanish, followed by accented English.

“Buenos días, mis amigos,” the voice said. “Mis amigos americanos también.” A guttural laugh pierced the air as more gunfire erupted. “Did you think I would not be expecting you?” The speakers emitted another hard laugh.

Bolan flattened himself on the ground just as a line of shots tore up the sod a few feet in front of him. He saw a series of muzzle-flashes on the upper levels of the mansion, then more from the side of the big house. More shots echoed in the night as he saw a group of at least ten men running from the rear of the building toward the fence line.

They’re moving to flank us, Bolan thought.

He twisted to fire a burst at the running figures. Several of them twisted and fell as they ran. More shots rang out, sending Bolan to the ground again, but the problem was there was no real cover. Cepeda swore and rose, firing his M-4 on full-auto. Bolan started to reach up to pull the man down when more hostile rounds zipped over their position. Cepeda cried out in pain and gasped as he fell. Bolan loosed a burst and checked the captain. The round had hit him in the neck, and blood gushed from the bullet hole.

“Got it,” Avelia said as he slapped a combat dressing over the wound. He applied pressure with his left hand as he fired his rifle with his right.

“Conserve your ammo,” Bolan said, as he shot a quick, 3-round burst.

Avelia nodded and ceased his aimless firing, but the rest of Cepeda’s men looked to be in danger of losing their combat discipline.

“We’ve got to get out of this kill zone,” Bolan yelled. “Lay down suppressing fire so we can move up.”

“Mis amigos,” the voice on the loudspeaker yelled through the cacophony of gunfire. “Let me introduce you to my little friend.”

A few seconds later a man appeared on the balcony holding an M-16 with an M-203 grenade launcher attached under the barrel. The man cut loose, and Bolan caught a brief glimpse of the incoming projectile. He barely had enough time to flatten out before the explosion ripped the night apart. Bolan knew the shrapnel would most likely explode up and out, so he worried less about the explosion than he did the concussive wave. It swept over their position like an invisible tsunami.

His hearing gone, Bolan struggled to take a breath. Through the hazy cloud of settling dirt he could see the figure on the balcony readying the M-203 once again. Another grenade would just about finish them. The man had to be taken out.

As Bolan raised his weapon, the man’s head suddenly jerked back in a cloud of mist, and he disappeared from sight. The Executioner narrowed his gaze as a new group seemed to appear out of nowhere on their right flank, moving forward and firing over the heads of the prone Colombian soldiers. De la Noval’s men, who’d been trying to outflank them, suddenly collapsed to the ground. Several of the new combatants rushed past them. Some paused, kneeling next to the stunned soldiers, pulling them back toward the fence line.

Bolan felt someone grab his shoulders and drag him back. The man was big, and strong, too. His face had a chiseled, rugged cast, and his upper lip was decorated by a dark Fu Manchu mustache. They stopped in a depression, and the man dragging him raised his radio and spoke into it. Bolan’s hearing had not yet returned, but he could tell his rescuer was directing some sort of assault on the mansion.

Who the hell were these guys? he wondered.

The guy with the Fu Manchu turned toward Bolan and said something. The Executioner still could not hear, but was able to partially read his lips: We’re Americans. Here to assist.

Beyond them the mansion shook with a series of explosions and its interior erupted in yellow flames. The big guy with the Fu Manchu got up and raced toward the burning building with the speed of a fullback running in for a touchdown, the muzzle of his weapon barking flame. Bolan felt his senses returning. He glanced around and saw that Cepeda had been laid next to him. Bolan reached over and placed his palm on the dressing to apply pressure. It was already sodden with the captain’s blood.

Sounds of another explosion ripped through the night. More flames shot out of the mansion, and Bolan saw the new group of men, their saviors, pumping rounds into the burning structure. The cavalry had arrived, and they weren’t taking any prisoners. No one was getting out of there alive. As his hearing slowly returned, Bolan was suddenly cognizant of the syncopated beating of helicopter rotors in the distance.