Devil's Playground. Don Pendleton

to a flash-point of violence.

      It had come close a couple of times. Military forces and federal agents had dealt with a crisis for the then-new Mexican president as powerful smuggling alliances actually engaged in brutal assault on American lawmen. Only the actions of people who existed in whispered rumor had prevented a second Mexican-American war from ripping the continent apart.

      Hogan sighed. He hoped that the men who didn’t exist would make their presence felt again to push back the encroaching and increasingly bold and deadly smugglers.

      Dever looked at the feed on the screen. “Something is moving out in the desert behind the trucks, but I can’t quite make it out. It might be a person. It’s about the right mass, but it doesn’t…No, it disappeared.”

      Hogan chuckled nervously. “Maybe you saw a Chupacabra.”

      “Not too many goats for a goat-sucker to feed on out there, Dan,” Dever returned. “Nothing. I just see bupkis.”

      Hogan nodded. “We’ll review the DVR later. Maybe image enhancement will—”

      “Down!” Dever shouted, and Hogan’s head slammed against the driver’s window. The windshield cracked violently as something crashed into it. Plings and plunks of rifle fire sounded on the Bronco’s metallic skin. Dever had his double-action-only USP .40 out, but instead of rising above the dashboard, he stayed hunched over the younger agent.

      “Damn bureaucrats are going to murder us,” Dever snarled.

      “They will if we don’t shoot back,” Hogan said. He felt a knot rising on his battered skull, but he was in no more of a mood to rise and engage the enemy than Dever.

      M-16s and the Heckler & Koch pistols were hot stuff against poorly trained “coyotes” armed with AK-47s. The human smugglers couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn at one hundred yards, while both the Border Patrol’s chosen pistol and rifle could score head shots at that same distance. Unfortunately, the enemy gunmen across the border were three hundred yards out. The short-barreled M-4s came up as inferior at that distance when compared to the older but vastly more powerful Heckler & Koch G3 battle rifles. The G3’s 7.62 mm NATO bullet could kill at over eight hundred yards. Only the armor plating and the heavy engine of the USBP Ford Bronco had managed to stop the high-powered slugs from drilling into the two agents.

      The windshield finally gave up the ghost and disintegrated into diamondlike cubes of broken glass that rained down upon the pair.

      “Damn!” Dever shouted.

      Suddenly, from across the border, another weapon discharged. It was deep and powerful, thundering across the plains. The Mexican rifles stopped firing.

      Dever poked the camera up over the dashboard, the LED screen rotated so that he could use it as an electronic periscope. G3 rifles crackled again from the trucks, but the tongues of muzzle-flashes licked out into the desert behind them.

      Someone else had entered the fray.

      MACK BOLAN HAD INTENDED to make his incursion against the alleged Mexican military forces covertly, but the lives of two American lawmen were on the line. The Executioner rapidly pulled the suppressor off his Barrett M-98 rifle and mounted the muzzle brake. He was going to need to make noise to redirect the murderous gunmen’s attention.

      With his first pull of the trigger, the M-98 spit a .338 Lapua Magnum round into the head of one of the riflemen. The result was instant decapitation as the 300-grain slug detonated the Mexican’s skull with hydrostatic overpressure.

      Sprayed with gore, stringy brain mass and bone fragments, the other gunmen in the truck were struck momentarily numb. Bolan’s first target slid over the rail of the truck, plopping to the desert sand below.

      There was no doubt now that the enemy soldiers knew where the rifle shot came from. The Lapua Magnum round was designed to kill humans at over a mile and a half away, or punch through the engine of a lightly armored vehicle at closer range. That kind of power was accompanied by a throaty roar and a flash like lightning.

      Just to make certain, the gunman right next to the first target caught a second Barrett round at the center of his clavicle. Windmilling backward as a fountain of blood vomited through the .338-inch hole in his upper chest, the Mexican was dumped next to the first target in the sand. G3s ripped to life, but the Executioner was in motion, leaving the area he’d fired from.

      The semiautomatic Barrett punched out another slug as Bolan fired from the hip, catching a third smuggler through the center of his torso. The dying Mexican folded like a cheap shirt, collapsing as a grapefruit-size crater formed when the Magnum bullet excavated two vertibrae through the skin of his back.

      Panic and screams had taken over the smuggling crew and one of the trucks fired up its engine. Bolan shouldered the Barrett and tapped off two .338 rounds which smashed through its grille. The engine seized up as the heavyweight slugs tore through gears and pistons. A commanding voice cut through the howls of fear.

      “Track and fire! Split up! We’re too easy a target in the trucks!”

      Bolan slung the mighty Barrett and drew his Beretta 93-R machine pistol from its spot under his left armpit. Suppressed, its muzzle-flash would disappear in the desert battleground. Now that he had their attention, he needed stealth and the protective curtain of nighttime shadows. The foregrip lever folded down, and he flipped the selector to 3-round burst. A snarl of silenced Parabellum rounds coughed from the end of the Beretta’s can, ripping into a man standing nearest to the leader shouting orders.

      The leader of this group reacted not as a frightened smuggler but as a cold-blooded professional, pulling Bolan’s quiet kill in front of him as a human shield. Whether the Mexican had been dead or alive, his commander had deemed his own existence more important. Bolan popped off another triburst that forced the enemy headman behind the cover of his vehicle, 9 mm rounds eliciting jerks from his human shield.

      A grenade sailed high and wide of the Executioner’s position, but he wasn’t going to stay upright. The minibomb detonated, shrapnel singing through the air in a sheet of razor wire over his fallen form. Bolan sighted on the legs of another rifleman and chewed his kneecaps off with another burst. The gunman howled in agony, collapsing facefirst in the sand. Strangled sobs of pain resounded from the fallen soldier.

      “Aqui!” a Mexican rifleman shouted. Bolan rolled quickly out of the path of a salvo of bullets, triggering a trio of 9 mm slugs into the shooter’s chest.

      Bolan took a momentary disadvantage and profited from it, grabbing the fallen rifleman’s G3 and a bandolier of ammunition off him. He dumped the magazine and slapped a 20-round box into the battle rifle. A Mexican rushed toward Bolan, too close and too fast for the Executioner to shoot, but the heavy wooden stock was as lethal as any bullet. With a sickening crunch, the heavy rifle butt caved in the gunner’s jaw on its way to splitting his palate and facial structure. Shards of jagged bone speared the unfortunate thug’s brain, dropping him instantly into a pile of dying human meat in the border sand.

      A second man burst into view and Bolan brought the stock down hard into the side of the newcomer’s neck. The gunman’s neck released a wet, stomach-churning snap as it failed to absorb the lethal impact. Spine crushed, the Mexican collapsed at the Executioner’s feet.

      Another truck engine turned over, and the Executioner whirled, burning off a half dozen slugs through the driver’s door. The wheelman jerked violently as bullets exploded through sheet metal and soft flesh. A river of blood poured from his lips as he slid out the door.

      “Fall back! Fall back!” the enemy commander shouted. He jumped from the bed of the driverless vehicle toward the third truck. He laid down a sheet of covering fire to keep the Executioner at bay, but Bolan didn’t want to cut off the last vehicle.

      Instead, he waited, letting the commander and the remnants of his group pack into the back of the remaining vehicle. A mad roostertail shot from under the wheels as the truck sought traction, driver in a panic and applying too much gas. Finally the treads bit into the sand and the vehicle lurched away from the death grounds.