Savage Rule

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“Then I have nothing to worry about, do I?” Castillo said. “So I’m moving my people into position earlier than we discussed. It means little, provided the pipeline does go through. And, frankly, if you fail, Ramon, I will not be held back by your weakness. The Race demands more. It deserves more.”

“Just tread carefully,” Orieza said. “Remember what I have said.” He looked up at Del Valle as his adviser snatched the receiver and slammed it down on the cradle.

“That miserable pig!” Del Valle hissed. “He could ruin everything!”

“Roderigo…” Orieza said hesitantly, gazing directly at him for the first time since he’d entered the room.

“You look terrible. Are you all right?”

“I am fine,” Del Valle said sharply. He softened his tone, catching himself. “Please, General, think nothing of it. All is well. There are simply many things to monitor, many things I must keep a watchful eye on.”

“Yes, I suppose that would be so,” Orieza said, sounding unconvinced. “But who is it that attacks us? Have they done us much harm?”

“No, no, General.” Del Valle spread his hands, smiling broadly. “You know that a man like Castillo must always try to impress others with his great power. If he makes us believe he thinks us weak, he gains an advantage. We are in no danger, and our plans progress according to schedule. Our dream for our great nation progresses accordingly. There is no need to worry.”

“But, Roderigo, I have doubts. I have heard from some of the men that the people are angry.”

“Angry? Who told you that?”

Orieza shrugged. “One hears things from the staff. Is it true that the elite guard are interrogating our own people?”

“My men? Your bodyguards? That is absurd,” Del Valle lied. “Really, General, you must give this no thought. These are the kinds of rumors spread by the bored, the idle and the envious. You must know that your great power and popularity will bring unfair criticism.”

“I suppose,” Orieza said, his forehead knotting. “I simply do not understand—”

The intercom buzzed. Del Valle, grateful for the distraction, pressed the button before he could continue, and made a mental note of the fact that some people had been far too free in their conversation with Orieza. Roderigo would determine who the general had been listening to, and would make sure those persons disappeared permanently. Orieza was asking far too many inconvenient questions.

“Yes?” he said, leaning over the intercom.

Orieza’s secretary spouted a stream of apologies for interrupting, and then begged their pardons, but could Commander Del Valle take an urgent call from the field? One of his men had been trying to reach him for some time, she said, and she had delayed connecting the call for as long as she thought prudent.

“Yes, yes,” Del Valle said testily. “Put it through.” He picked up the large receiver. “Yes?” he said again in Spanish.

“Commander,” stated one of his field lieutenants, whose name escaped him at the moment. The soldier was out of breath, or frantic in some way, as if he was frightened or had run to reach the phone. “Sir, I must sound the alarm urgently, sir! There is great trouble here at the terminal!”

“The pipeline terminal?” Del Valle demanded.

“Yes, Commander, yes!”

“Well?”

“Sir…it…”

“What, damn you?” Del Valle roared. “Spit it out, or I will wring your neck!”

“Sir, the terminal burns.”

“What?” Del Valle shouted. “What are you talking about?”

“Sir—” The voice was cut short by a loud clap of sound, a noise Del Valle couldn’t escape.

“Report!” he yelled. “Report, damn you!”

The muffled click of the receiver being replaced in its cradle was the only reply.

CHAPTER FIVE

Thick undergrowth between closely packed trees gave way to the blade of Mack Bolan’s machete, ending abruptly at a large clearing that was dominated by the pipeline terminal. This, too, was concealed beneath camouflage netting, but the NSA’s satellite surveillance had easily picked out the facility with thermal imaging. Bolan was no expert on the technology used for oil drilling, but he gathered that this nationalized plant had been an innovative one before it was essentially stolen from its owners by Orieza’s regime.

Intelligence operatives posing as interested parties from the United States government’s international trade commission had interviewed key employees of O’Connor Petroleum Prospecting, according to the files sent to Bolan by the Farm. They had provided blueprints of the proposed plant layout, which Bolan consulted on his phone’s muted screen. There were supposed to be changes made to these preliminary plans, alterations that would be filed on-site only. If there had been any major departures, he couldn’t see them as he surveyed the terminal.

Of particular interest to him were the office buildings, a collection of interconnected, prefabricated sheds south of the pipeline cluster. The cluster—it was designated as such on the plans—was a complicated mass of piping, tributaries of some sort that came together at a junction of the oil line. That pipeline, constructed by Orieza’s people after the takeover, stretched off into the distance, the way Bolan had come. It ended, he knew, at the advance camp he had just destroyed.

There had been no point in targeting the pipeline itself, for it was far longer than Bolan could deal with. Destroying portions of the line would slow the progress of Orieza’s invading teams, but Bolan didn’t believe in chopping off tentacles when he could attack the head of the monster. The OPP terminal had to be destroyed, if the pipeline project was to be ended effectively. Destroying the equipment would deny Orieza’s regime access to the oil, which, in Bolan’s relatively limited understanding of petroleum prospecting, wasn’t accessible without the new technology OPP had brought to the project. Once the terminal was eliminated, there would be no point in continuing to invade Guatemala in order to bring the pipeline through to Mexico.

That was the plan, anyway.

Brognola had told Bolan that the employees present when the facility was nationalized had been killed or taken hostage. The Orieza regime had said nothing about them publicly, nor had the communications between the two nations intercepted by the Farm’s intelligence sources included any mention of them. This was likely because the human beings caught in the power play cooked up by Orieza and Castillo meant very little to the two leaders. It was Bolan’s hope that those OPP employees were still alive. If they were, the most likely location to hold them would be those offices, if the hostages were still on-site. The cyber team at the Farm had analyzed the available data and come to the same conclusion.

Bolan consulted another file on the phone, this one the instructions provided by OPP management for shut ting down the drill house and its pump valves. The deep-ranging equipment was connected to a series of turbines heated with geothermal energy, the briefing explained. Tapping this power helped make a project on the scope of the OPP operation possible, and it was the reason the company had managed to find oil where none had previously been detected. Bolan skipped over the technojargon elaborating on that. The gist was that if he shut down the pumps and valves in the order specified by the company’s technicians, then reversed the turbines, overrode the safety circuits and instructed the drill equipment to perform a self-cleaning procedure with the pump power at maximum, a mechanical disaster would occur.

The OPP technicians had been very clear on that point. A self-cleaning operation reversed the drills and drew full power from the pumping network. If the safeties were disengaged and the procedure implemented with the turbines also at full reverse, the harmonic vibrations created by the drills would shake the casings apart. The turbines, disconnected from the shafts and overdriving the pumps, would then overheat and explode, shattering the pumps. What was left of the terminal would be torn to pieces by the shrapnel. Any of the equipment still functioning would be so much scrap metal, useless to anyone without the associated high-tech equipment. With the valves shut beforehand, any environmental damage would be minimized; there would be no spewing geysers or burning plumes of oil smoke.

Bolan snapped his phone shut and stowed it. The immediate problem was how to penetrate the facility. It was heavily guarded by Honduran troops who, he could see through his field glasses, wore the blue epaulets of Orieza’s shock forces. They patrolled the fenced perimeter of the terminal, a chain-link affair to which strands of razor wire had been added. He could tell the wire was new because it hadn’t yet begun to discolor or corrode in the tropical climate, while the chain-link fence itself already looked much older than it could possibly be. No doubt Orieza’s thugs had beefed up security once they’d seized the terminal.

The men walking sentry duty in twos carried M-16 rifles. Bolan observed the guards for half an hour, timing them and judging the gap between patrols. It wasn’t a large one, but it was there. Orieza’s gunmen had become complacent. They would regret that—but not for long.

Bolan gathered himself for his charge. He didn’t have the advantage of darkness now. Once he began to fire on the shock troops, the element of surprise would be lost and full-scale combat would commence. There was no room for error.

He counted down the numbers. When he hit zero, he ran.

Bolan’s sprint across the clearing to the fenced perimeter carried him between the two closest pairs of sentries. He knelt, brought his rifle to his shoulder and waited, aiming in the direction from which the next team would come. The two men rounded the corner at the far end of the perimeter.

They saw Bolan and froze.

It was all the Executioner needed. In the fraction of a moment that the gunmen’s brains failed to process what their eyes saw, he fired a single round through the face of the man on the left. Bolan rode out the mild recoil of the 5.56-mm NATO round, acquiring his second target smoothly without delay. He squeezed the trigger, completely at ease, completely relaxed. The second shot was echoing as both bodies hit the ground.

Bolan let go of the rifle, trusting to his sling to keep it with him. He plucked a grenade from his combat harness, pulled the pin and let the spoon spring through the air. He threw the bomb underhand at the chain-link fence, just beyond what he judged to be a safe distance. Then he hit the dirt and covered his head with his arms.

The explosion did more damage to the ground than to the barrier, pelting Bolan with clods of moist earth. He drew himself into a crouch, bringing the rifle up again, and wasn’t disappointed. Armed men were running for him, firing as they went, spraying their weapons blindly.

The Executioner added his own weapon to the cacophony. While his enemies’ shots went wide and wild, his own precise bursts were true. First one, then another, then a third of the Honduran shock troopers went down. Bolan pushed to his feet and made for the opening torn in the fence.

He squeezed through with just enough room to spare, despite all the equipment he carried. Once on the other side of the fence he quickly dropped and rolled aside. Lines of automatic gunfire ripped into the dirt where he had stood, again spraying him with debris.

At the awkward angle he now lay, Bolan couldn’t bring his rifle to bear. Instead, he let it rest beside him, tethered to its sling, and drew the Beretta and Desert Eagle from their holsters. With a weapon in each hand, he waited, and when gunmen moved into view, he started shooting.

The .44 Magnum Desert Eagle bucked in his hand. The Beretta machine pistol chugged 3-round bursts with each press of the trigger. Like cattle driven to slaughter, the shock troopers kept coming—and kept dying.

There was a pause and Bolan took advantage of it, moving deeper into the pipeline terminal, stepping over bodies as he went. He swapped magazines in his pistols and then holstered the guns once more, bringing his rifle back into play.

He could hear shouting in Spanish and even hear a few bursts of rifle fire, but whatever the men were shooting at, it wasn’t Mack Bolan. Most likely it was more panic fire. The urge to do something, anything, when death was at a man’s doorstep was a powerful impulse not easily ignored. Bolan had the benefit of many years as a guerrilla fighter, many years on the front lines of a private war that was if not of his choosing, then of his making. Orieza’s shock troops were no doubt feared by the citizens of Honduras, but they had proved to be little threat to the Executioner.

There were three battered military-style jeeps parked near the entrance to the small complex. He took note of these and ducked under a large, steel-gray pipe that was mottled with rust spots. Everywhere around him he could see, as he passed by machinery that dwarfed him, that the climate was having an effect on the largely untended OPP equipment. It was possible that in time, without the technical expertise to run the facility, Orieza’s regime wouldn’t be able to pump the oil at all. The people of Guatemala, however, didn’t have the luxury of waiting out the Honduran hard-liners. Nor was it acceptable to let an emboldened Castillo, drunk with the thought of coming oil riches, continue to terrorize the Southwest United States by proxy.

In truth, that worried Bolan more, and he could tell it worried Brognola just as much. The new regimes in both Honduras and Mexico posed threats to United States security, or Bolan wouldn’t be making this daring raid on first one, then another national government. But Castillo was the more direct threat, and only the Farm’s understanding of the Orieza-Castillo operational timeline had made the Guatemalan border Bolan’s first strike.

Then, too, there was the fact that just because Orieza was struggling to maintain the nationalized equipment so recently stolen didn’t mean that would always be the case. Technicians capable of understanding what OPP had built here could be hired, for a price. There were plenty of former Soviet Bloc scientists currently on the market in any of several fields related to mining and oil drilling, selling their knowledge to whoever had the cash. Bolan supposed that someday the fallout from the end of the Cold War would finally stop affecting the world counterterrorism landscape, but he really could not begin to imagine when.

He followed a memorized route through the maze of machinery: a right here, a left there, straight through a tunnel of sorts, formed by arching tubes of heavy steel. As Bolan moved deeper into this man-made maze, the sound of the pumping, chugging, churning equipment grew louder. Soon, it was so loud that he wouldn’t be able to hear an enemy coming. The advantage he had, he knew, was that no enemy would be able to hear him, either.

He reached the office complex, some distance from the drill house. From his vantage point behind a large piece of equipment whose purpose he couldn’t guess, he watched the flurry of activity around the small building. Armed men rushed here and there in what appeared to be complete confusion. A Klaxon began to sound from somewhere in the complex, belatedly, but that didn’t alter the disorganized rushing. It seemed the men within were too late to do anything effective about what they probably thought was a full-scale invasion. That was good. That was how a one-man raid of this type was supposed to go.

Bolan let his rifle fall to the end of its sling, drew his Beretta and made sure the suppressor was securely affixed. He braced the weapon with his other hand, curling his fingers around the folding metal foregrip, and flicked the selector to single shot. Then he waited.

It didn’t take more than a couple of seconds for several frantic soldiers to run past his field of fire. He took each of them in turn, his honed, veteran sniper’s reflexes serving him well. Each muffled shot, no louder than hands clapping, was lost in the din of the poorly attended machinery cranking and churning all around him. The soldiers fell like dominoes, one after another, each a clean head shot. A single 147-grain 9-mm hollowpoint bullet sent each man to the beyond before he even knew his life was threatened.

Scratch four more of Orieza’s blue-tagged bullyboys, Bolan thought.

There was no way to know how long to wait, or if there would be more guards, so Bolan simply stepped out across the opening in the piping fields, moving toward the metal door of the office enclosure. He could see as he approached that the door was barred, crudely, with a section of steel strut. It was wedged into elbows of piping that had been equally crudely welded to metal supports on either side of the door. All of it looked as if it had been sectioned from the machinery of the terminal, burned through inexpertly with whatever torch had been used.

The jerry-rigged barrier, lockable only from the outside, gave the Executioner hope that the OPP employees lost in the takeover of the plant might still be alive. After all, if there were no prisoners, there would be no need to lock the offices to keep them inside it. Bolan reached out with his free hand and pulled the spar—a piece of sharp-edged pipe four inches in diameter, he saw once he hefted it—away from the door. He let it fall to the paving slab on which the office building had been set. Verdant plumes of weeds were already pushing up through cracks in the cement.

A guard with an M-16 appeared from the far corner of the building. Pressed against the wall as Bolan was, the angle was bad, and there was no time for a proper sight picture. Bolan extended his arm and triggered the Beretta, almost not looking at the man. It was a reflex, a point shot performed from long familiarity. The hollowpoint bullet took the gunman in the throat. He fell to his knees, gurgling. Bolan stepped back, turned and extended his machine pistol, firing off a suppressed mercy shot that plowed a furrow through the dying man’s brain.

Bolan turned his attention back to the door to the offices, planting the sole of his combat boot against it and kicking it in. He followed the Beretta in, crouched low, moving his gun this way and that, covering each angle.

The hallway leading into the offices was empty, except for quite a bit of litter. He stepped through this, kicking in a flimsy, hollow-core connecting door. This took him into a waiting area with a desk counter that could have been for a receptionist, though it was more likely some sort of coordination area. A large schedule grid on a whiteboard against the wall behind the counter was half-smeared and hopelessly out-of-date.

There was a dead man slumped over the desk.

Judging from the smell and the state of the body, the man had been dead a long time. A pool of dried blood soaked the counter space beneath him and the floor below that. Empty casings littered the floor, and bullet holes pocked the walls. A computer, dead several times over, sat silently in the corner, its monitor and casing full of holes small enough to be made by 5.56-mm NATO, the same rounds Orieza’s men used. Well, that figured.

Bolan’s nose told him further what he didn’t want to know, but he wouldn’t give up without making certain. He found the connecting door, the one leading to the main suite of office cubicles, and tested the knob. It was frozen shut, perhaps simply by rust. The handle itself was of steel and mottled with oxidation. Another kick made short work of the barrier.

The charnel stench of death, only too familiar, made Bolan flare his nostrils. The room was a slaughterhouse.

He realized, then, that the bar outside the door hadn’t been to keep prisoners in. It had simply been a way to seal off the offices, an unwritten warning to any of Orieza’s men stationed at the terminal that there was nothing good within. The office enclosure had been turned into a mausoleum, the OPP employees left to rot where they’d been shot down. Bolan counted them silently, checking the adjoining cubicles and another little storeroom beyond. With the one at the counter, the number was exactly right. He had just accounted for all the potential hostages.

His jaw set in righteous anger, he backtracked. He stopped at the outer door, waiting and listening, but the roar of the pumping operation was far too loud for him to learn anything of use. He did hear gunfire in the distance, cutting through the white noise of the machinery. It was sporadic and seemed to be coming from all directions. It was likely that Orieza’s men were shooting into the trees beyond the terminal. Sooner or later, they would realize they had no targets. A reasonable field commander would then dictate an internal search, to find whoever had penetrated the plant. While Bolan hadn’t been very impressed with the caliber of Orieza’s people so far, it would be prudent to assume they could figure out that much. He would have to hurry.

He consulted the digital plans on his phone one last time, then stowed the device before holstering his pistol and shouldering his rifle once more. Then he threw open the door, ducked out quickly and hit the cracked paving slab hard.

He had anticipated trouble and he wasn’t disappointed. Gunmen, probably noticing the bar removed from the office door, had been waiting for him to show himself. Their automatic fire raked the air above him and pounded the door and wall beyond.

Bolan fired from the prone position. The soldiers were exposed, no doubt counting on the element of surprise. The Executioner gave them credit for understanding what the missing bar meant, and responding to the threat in a methodical, patient manner without really knowing what that threat entailed. But that wasn’t enough.

Bolan fired, tracked left, fired again, tracked right and fired once more. He squeezed measured bursts from the rifle, not rushing, taking quick but precise aim each time. The soldiers collapsed before him, their weapons falling from their hands.

On his feet once more, the Executioner broke into a jog, his eyes scanning left and right. Twice an enemy presented himself, and twice he snapped up the rifle on the run and triggered a short burst into the soldier. As before, he could hear the sounds of unaimed, misdirected panic fire from several points around the terminal. What the Honduran guards thought they were accomplishing, he couldn’t say.

He found the drill house. Logically, the building should have been heavily guarded, but if men were stationed here, they had left their posts in reaction to Bolan’s attack on the facility. He paused just inside the door, found a rusting metal desk not far away that had been inexplicably pushed into the corridor and shoved the desk in front of the door. It wasn’t much of a barrier, but it would have to do.

He followed the directions he’d been given and made his way to the control center. There was dried blood on the floor, and some bullet holes in the walls, but no bodies. Apparently any OPP employees murdered here had been dragged into the offices. It made sense, and was the lazy man’s escape. Why dig graves when you can throw the bodies into a room and bar the door?

The control panel was as it had been described. Bolan set to work. He began throwing levers and turning dials to shut down the pumps and close the valves, all done according to the order specified by OPP management. Next, he reversed the turbine controls. Red warning lights began to flash—he noticed that at least two of the lamps were burned or shorted out—and he pushed the safety overrides all the way up. Another Klaxon began to squawk. He set all the turbines to maximum power.