Devil's Playground. Don Pendleton

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      “Me. Colonel Munoz. The gate guards on duty. And the dozen or so unloading the truck,” the officer stated.

      The answer sounded plausible, and the tremors in his captive’s voice had added a sense of truth to the confession.

      The Executioner tugged his forearm tighter against his captive’s throat. “Let the survivors in your little bunch know that there’s an American who disapproves of your moonlighting.”

      He jammed his thumb under the ear of the captive, pressing hard on the carotid artery long enough to render the smuggler unconscious without imparting any long-term harm.

      Bolan turned the unconscious soldier around and deposited him on the seat of the toilet. He paused long enough to use a strip of plastic tape to take the man’s thumbprint, preserving it by pressing it to a three-by-five card for later scanning.

      He had business to attend to.

      Fourteen men were unloading heroin from the truck, several pushing a rolling pallet toward the depths of a storage building. Others worked on cleaning the blood spatter off their vehicle and picking up Munoz’s executed victim.

      Bolan followed silently and stealthily after the quartet with the heroin. There were more than two hundred kilos on the pallet, meaning that Munoz’s declaration of half was either an understatement or he was delivering for more than just the Juarez Cartel.

      The Executioner made a mental note to get that information out of the colonel before he died.

      One straggler in the group had hung back. His task had to have been rear security, and since he gripped a rifle in both hands, he was Bolan’s first target. In two long strides, the wraith in black clamped a crushing hand around the throat of the soldier, cutting off any voiced protests just before spearing the seven-inch blade of his combat knife into the base of the gunman’s skull. Speared right through his brain, the major trunk of his central nervous system destroyed by the razor-sharp edge, he instantly turned into dead, dangling weight in the Executioner’s hand with only a whispered “squelch” of steel grating on bone betraying the swift kill.

      The blade whipped out of the dead man’s neck, and Bolan shoved the corpse against one of the two men pushing on the trolley, both bodies collapsing to the ground as the warrior closed in behind the second drug pusher. Slick blood was the only thing glinting on the nonreflective battle knife, and even the dully glistening fluid disappeared when the Executioner plunged the unyielding steel into the Mexican soldier’s right kidney. A tortured sputter of pain was all that the smuggler had time to release before renal shock killed him. With a twist and a hard slice, the blade was free as the remaining pallet pusher grunted, shoving his lifeless friend off of him. There was a moment of complaint about the fool “playing around” before the Mexican realized he was complaining to a corpse.

      He whipped his head around, but he only saw the waffle-tread of Bolan’s combat boot filling his world. The side kick smashed the Mexican smuggler’s nose flat, driving bone fragments back into his brain even as his neck snapped under the thunderous force of the blow.

      The sickening crack that signaled the pallet pusher’s death alerted the man at the lead of the group and he whirled, reaching for a handgun in a flap holster.

      Only the Executioner’s battle-honed reflexes gave him the advantage in beating the trooper’s quick draw. The black commando-style Bowie knife whistled through the air like a shard of night come alive. The gunman had snapped open his holster and stopped, fingers clawing up to the handle of the weapon jutting from his windpipe. Lips worked noiselessly as the last of the transport crew suffocated with an inch-and-a-half width of steel cutting off his air.

      Bolan ripped a smaller, ring-handled knife from an inconspicuous sheath on his harness and charged in, two fingers through the loop base of the blade. A two-and-a-half-inch wedge of steel raked across both of the choking smuggler’s eyes, the stocky knife swung with enough force to splinter bone and carve a furrow in his forebrain. Bolan took the handle of the commando knife as the Mexican soldier slid off the black-phosphate blade to flop to the floor.

      In the space of a few moments, four men lay dead, blood spreading in puddles on the concrete.

      Bolan had to deal with the two hundred kilograms of heroin on the pallet, without resorting to a fire that would alert the remaining smugglers or Munoz in his office.

      It took only a short time to locate a janitor’s closet, and bring back several cartons of cleaning supplies. He sliced open the necks of the bottled bleach, then punched air holes in their bottoms and upended them onto the packets of heroin. The air holes would allow the bleach to drain into the heroin more quickly to soak it into a useless morass of chemical paste. The perfectly squared blocks of black tar heroin deformed and swelled under the bleach’s assault. It wouldn’t take long for most of the remaining heroin to be ruined. And with the loss of the drugs near the border, the cartels that Munoz did business with would be enraged.

      Though Munoz wouldn’t live to see the morning, the thought of losing a million dollars in heroin to the incompetence of the Mexican army would slow the cartels in doing further business with them. It was a small pause, a tiny impediment. But in the long run, it would give the DEA and the Border Patrol time to shore up their defenses against this particular batch of smugglers.

      In the meantime, Bolan had a visit to pay and information to get.

      BLANCA ASADO HATED to admit it, gripping the handle of the AK-47, but she was back in her element. Dealing with the emotional crush of her sister’s murder had kicked her around until she couldn’t think straight. In a way, she wanted to thank the faceless marauders who were swarming Armando Diceverde’s small motel room. She thrived on conflict, and because of that she was able to spend years struggling, alongside her sister, rising through the ranks of Mexican law enforcement before she quit and became a private security contractor.

      Dread and sorrow were things she couldn’t control, but gunmen coming after her was something she did know how to handle. It would put the agony of losing her sister on hold for a while.

      The sight of another masked gunman focused her and she ripped off a short burst from the AK, a row of bullet wounds blossoming from his belt to his throat as she zipped him up the center with the assault rifle. With the stock welded to her shoulder, the recoil was controllable. No ammunition wasted, and through her peripheral vision over the top of the sights, she was able to see other targets popping into view.

      Unfortunately, an explosion threw her off as a grenade detonated just outside the door. Diceverde toppled backward, taking the brunt of the concussion, and Asado had to take a couple of steps to regain her balance. Her ears rang, and she cursed herself for not equalizing the pressure in her skull with a loud shout.

      Another pair of gunmen appeared in the doorway, expecting their stun grenade to have flattened all opposition within. They were cocky, and their weapons were held low, fingers off the trigger, staring at the flattened photojournalist as he struggled to recover his senses.

      “Easy pickings,” one man said.

      “So you think,” Asado growled, pulling the trigger on the AK-47 and letting the weapon buck and kick against her shoulder. She held on tight, though, fighting against the muzzle’s rise just enough to keep from emptying rounds into the ceiling, slicing the cocky gunman up through his torso with a stream of 7.62 mm leaden scythes. The shooter slammed into his partner, giving Asado a moment to release the trigger, shift her aim and then tap it again. A trio of bullets spit into the face of the staggered second assassin, his hair and scalp flying back as though someone had thrown open a trapdoor.

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