скачать книгу бесплатно
“Stop that, Jose!” snapped a woman, slapping the weapon aside. “Did you not see the grenades?”
“Live, I assure you,” Bolan said, beaming a friendly smile.
“I assumed,” she said, cocking back the hammer on the Colt Commander semi-automatic pistol in her grip. The weapon looked very old, but it was spotlessly clean and shone with fresh oil.
She was a beautiful woman, and not even the long jagged scar bisecting her face could affect that. Her figure was tight and firm, as befitting a leader of combat soldiers. Her camouflage-pattern uniform was patched, the boots old, but everything was clean.
More important, she stood with the calm assurance of a leader. Clearly, this was the person in charge of the operation. The government called her Sergeant Gato, Spanish for “cat.” But giving your enemy a silly nickname to make them sound weak was one of the oldest tricks in the book.
“What do you want here?” the woman demanded, the pitted barrel of the handgun never wavering.
“You,” Bolan replied. “You, your men and that warship you’ve been secretly building for the past ten years.”
A collective gasp from the rebels told Bolan he’d made a direct hit.
A burly man with a large black mustache frowned. “How did you find us?”
Bolan gave a small shrug. “A friend of a friend.”
“I want names, gringo! Names!” the man demanded.
“Look, amigo. If I wanted you dead, I would have sold the information to the government,” Bolan said bluntly. “And right now, this base would be getting firebombed out of existence from what the president laughingly calls an air force.”
That yielded a small chuckle from the soldiers, but none of the weapons shifted direction, and the woman did not respond.
“We can leave and shoot you through the tent walls,” she said. “Use one grenade, or two.... But you would die, and we would simply be out a tent.”
“Absolutely true,” Bolan said. “But I’m here to cut a deal. Shoot if you want, but it’s a good deal.”
“Amnesty?” sneered a rake-thin teenager, his hands nervously twisting on the wooden grip of an old Browning automatic rifle, now topped with a state-of-the-art Zeiss long-range sniper scope. A bandolier of shells crossed his chest, and an optical range finder was tucked into a shirt pocket.
A fellow sniper? Good to know. “Fuck amnesty,” Bolan said. “I’m talking about missiles.”
“Missiles?”
“Missiles. Carl Gustav, LAW, Sidewinders, Redeye, Loki, Javelin—a truckload of them. Enough to tip the fight in your favor.”
“And what is the cost of this largesse?” asked the woman coolly, her eyes narrowing.
“Your rebellion is not going very well,” Bolan said, choosing his words carefully. “For more than five years, you’ve been doing a major overhaul on an old Mexican cargo freighter, formerly a Canadian steel freighter.”
Nobody said a word, but nervous glances were exchanged.
“You’ve added firewalls and armor below decks, modified the engines, reinforced the main deck, tacked on torpedo tubes and missile launchers.” Bolan smiled. “All of which is carefully out of sight.”
“Supposing what you say is true,” Sergeant Gato said slowly.
“It is.” Bolan interrupted.
She scowled. “Supposing so, you wish to do what, exchange your imaginary stockpile of missiles if we give you this vessel?”
“Oh, hell no. I merely want to rent it for a while. Maybe a few weeks, possibly longer.”
“Rent?” A young girl laughed. “You wish to rent the...” She closed her mouth with a snap.
“I never could find out the name, much less the location,” Bolan admitted. “You security is good. Damn good.” He proffered the grenades. “That’s why I had to go to such an extreme measure.”
“Rent.” The burly man shook his head in disbelief. “You have cojones, I’ll give you that, dead man.”
“I’ll pay with a hundred missiles...and a name.”
“What did you just say?” The man gaped.
“In exchange for renting the warship, I will pay you one hundred missiles per month, until the end of my mission.”
“Per month?”
“Or twenty-five a week. Whichever you prefer.”
“Madre mia,” a bald man exhaled. “With such ordnance....” Abruptly, his face took on a terrible expression. “Bah, it’s a trick! Just more lies from the president, eh? Everybody out of the tent. I will handle this pig personally.”
“Thank you, Miguel, but not this time,” the commander said, lowering her weapon. Her actions were slow but deliberate. “There is no fear in the eyes of this man, and his words carry the ring of truth.”
“But—”
“Let him talk for a little more,” she said, dragging over a folding canvas chair. “Let us see if the strength of his words equals the strength of his hands.”
“Sure as hell hope so,” Bolan said.
Leaning forward, she rested both elbows on her knees. “A hundred missiles per month, you said?”
“Plus a name. The name of a traitor in your organization. A paid police spy.”
“Davido?”
That caught Bolan by surprise. “Yes, Davido Sanchez.”
She shrugged. “Killed him last week.” Then she smiled. “But nobody knows that yet.”
A tense minute passed in silence, then another.
“So, my intel was good,” said Bolan.
“Good, but late. Still, I like that you offered his name without a price,” Sergeant Gato said. “And a hundred missiles seems a fair price for the....”
Bolan waited.
“The Constitution,” she finished.
“Good name,” Bolan said. But remember, you get the warship back afterward.”
“Perhaps. And if we do not? If it sinks or is stolen or damaged beyond repair?”
“Then I help steal you another. But I want the Constitution.”
“Why, if you can so easily steal another warship? Probably something even better than what we have.”
“Because your ship will not look dangerous,” Bolan stated bluntly. “But it actually will be. I’ll need that to get close to my target.”
“A covert attack?”
“Exactly.”
“I see,” the commander said, leaning back in the chair. “So, we each have something the other wants. But can we trust each other?”
“No.”
“Good answer. Let me think on this,” she said, pulling out a cigarette pack. She tapped it on the bottom and one jumped up. She caught it between her lips then offered the pack to Bolan.
“Thanks, but I quit years ago,” he said. She shrugged, lit a match on the sole of her boot and inhaled. The rest of the rebels just stood there, watching him intently, waiting for the next order from their commander.
The muscles in his arms were starting to become warm, but Bolan was no longer likely to let go of the grenades. There was still plenty of time to negotiate. The rebels were poor but proud. They never would have accepted charity, or even a gift, naturally assuming there would be strings attached. But a deal, a trade, this they could accept. Besides, he would need a crew, and who better than the people who knew every nut and bolt in the vessel?
“What is your name, Yankee?” she asked out of the blue.
“Colonel Brandon Stone. And I am addressing...?”
“Major Esmeralda Cortez.”
Bolan nodded. “Major.”
“Colonel,” she replied in kind. “So, do you have a crew for our ship?”
“Nope.”
She paused. “Us? You also want us?”
“Who better than the people who built it?”
Major Cortez took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. “That would require additional funding.”
“I expected as much. More missiles?”
“No, assault rifles. AK-47s with grenade launchers. And ammunition.”
“Not a problem. But the new model AK-101 is much better. Longer range, less ride-up, easier to clean.”
“Easier to clean.” She laughed. “Yes, you are a soldier. Politicians talk about firepower. Soldiers talking about keeping their weapons clean.”
“Damn straight.”
Major Cortez took another long, slow drag, then dropped the smoldering cigarette butt to the ground, crushing it under a boot heel. “You will be watched, and closely.” She rose from the chair. “At the first hint of treachery, you will be killed.”
“Accepted.”
“Then we have a deal.”
“Good.”
“Who is it you wish to kill? This enemy that you must get close to using...guile?”
“Captain Ravid Narmada, the leader of a pirate fleet that usually operates somewhere in the Atlantic.”
“Somewhere?” the balding rebel laughed scornfully. “Usually?”
Bolan shrugged.
“So you will draw him to you using the Constitution as bait,” Major Cortez said.
“Exactly.”
“This is intolerable,” one of the soldiers began with a worried expression.
“Jose, with the profit from selling half of the missiles delivered to us—”
“If they exist!”
The major gave a curt nod. “Yes, if they exist. But if they do, we could soon buy a second warship. The Russians are selling off their old diesel submarines very cheaply these days.”
“A submarine!” the burly rebel exclaimed.
Major Cortez gave a feral smile. “Imagine the surprise, Lieutenant Esteele, when a submarine rises from the middle of the Bay of Montevideo and uses its torpedoes to pave the way for the big gun of the Constitution, eh?”
From the expressions on the faces of the rebels, Bolan could see they liked the idea a lot.
“Two warships,” Major Cortez replied, using her fingers to brush back a loose strand of ebony hair. “A lion and a lamb. For the sake of the nation, I am willing to accept this risk.”
“Done,” Bolan said.
“Lieutenant Esteele,” the major said, “your new duties include watching Colonel Stone day and night. Guard him from harm, but one wrong move on his part, and you have my full permission to blow off his head—anywhere, anytime.”
“Yes, Major.”
“First order of business is to help me get these arming pins back in place,” Bolan said.
Pushing back his cloth cap, Lieutenant Esteele frowned, then bent over to retrieve the pins from the dirt and slid them back into the grenades.
Passing one of the deactivated grenades to the lieutenant, Bolan got a roll of tape from his pocket and lashed down the arming lever on the one he still held. But when he reached for the other, he saw that the lieutenant had already secured his grenade with a heavy rubber band and was slipping it into a pocket of his fatigues.
