Devil's Playground. Don Pendleton

motor pool, overladen with soldiers. All it would take would be one grenade to eliminate the smuggling military men, but before Bolan took out the enemy commander, he needed to get answers out of the man. A grenade might not leave enough left of the traitorous military leader to question, and an open gunfight would result in a conflict with soldiers whose duty was the defense of the base, not pushing heroin across the border.

      Stalking closer, a shadow among shadows, Bolan closed on the group as soldiers disgorged from the truck.

      He got within ten yards of the milling soldiers, his comprehension of Spanish more than sufficient to understand what was being said.

      “We lost a third of the heroin,” one of the men reported.

      “Juarez is going to be mad as hell,” the commander replied. “What the hell are we going to do?”

      “We? You’re the one who ran away from one man,” the subordinate countered.

      “Is that so?” the commander asked.

      “Wait. Munoz…Hold on…”

      A muzzle-flash lit up the accuser’s face an instant before it dissolved into a crater of spongy gore. Munoz lowered his .50-caliber Desert Eagle and looked around. “Any of the rest of you want to accuse me of running away?”

      “No!” came the unanimous response.

      “Good,” Munoz replied. “I’ll be in my office, contacting the cartel about the difficulties we’ve had tonight. In my version, we were struck by a significant force. It seemed as if they were Santa Muerte cultists.”

      The soldiers nodded.

      “Get the heroin stored away for our next trip. We’ll see if the part of the shipment left behind was touched. I doubt it. The Border Patrol wouldn’t cross two hundred yards into our territory to take out 150 kilos of Mexican Brown,” Munoz concluded. “Remember—Santa Muerte cultists ambushed us.”

      It was one way for the commander to save face. The punctuation of his statement remained the dead man, his skull hollowed out by a thundering 350-grain bullet. Any deviation and the corpse would be joined by more. And apparently Munoz was in such a position of power that he could get away with burning his own men to the ground with impunity.

      “I’m going to hit the bathroom,” another man said. His authority among the others was sufficient that he was able to slack off menial tasks to take care of biological functions, and the minions below him didn’t dare do more than grumble under their breath.

      Bolan decided to shadow the loner instead of going right to Munoz. Kurtzman would contact him via his vibrating pager if anything of urgent interest were reported. The Farm undoubtedly had hacked into the phone system to spy on any communications coming in or going out, sifting for nuggets of gold in the streams of data running along fiber-optic wires.

      The second in command had stepped into the latrine and begun to relieve himself when the Executioner snapped a powerful arm around his throat, pressure on his larynx strangling off a cry of dismay. Bolan rested the sharp edge of his commando knife across the Mexican’s brow and cheek.

      “If you make a sound other than to answer my questions, I’ll carve out your left eye and saw off your nose in one slice. Comprende?” Bolan inquired.

      “Yes,” the Mexican soldier rasped softly in English. Facial mutilation, especially the threat to his eye, had cowed the smuggler for now.

      “How many on the base are in on the heroin pipeline?” Bolan asked.

      “There used to be a dozen more,” the man began.

      A hard push and blood trickled from the officer’s brow into his eye. A strangled whimper escaped.

      “Minus them,” Bolan advised.

      “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