Savage Rule. Don Pendleton

his large blade singing through the backs of their boots. The heavy knife chopped through the nylon and leather, slicing the left leg of the first man, both legs of the second and the right leg of a third, severing the Achilles tendons. The three folded, collapsing on limbs that could no longer bear their weight, and Bolan’s knives were the last things the shooters felt in life.

      From the perspective of the opposing gunners, it was as if a line of men simply disappeared into the flickering shadows and chaos, falling away in unison. They sprayed out their magazines, firing in all directions. Bolan flattened himself to the ground as bullets buzzed above him.

      Crawling out of the immediate zone of crazed fire, he paused. Before him, in a small clearing where two dozen troops were arrayed, was a giant of a man. The sleeves of his fatigues had been ripped off and the muscles of his arms bulged impossibly, the result of what could only be steroid abuse. The big Honduran, who wore an officer’s rank, was crushing the throat of one of his fellow soldiers in the thick fingers of one ham-size hand.

      The men surrounding him were trying futilely to remove their comrade from the hulking officer’s grip. Each time any of them moved in, shouting, the big man shoved them back. There was a sickening crack as the officer brought up his free hand, in which he clenched a wooden-handled entrenching tool. He wielded the shovel like a battle-ax, swinging the blade through the jaw of the closest soldier.

      As Bolan watched, sheltered in the lee of one of the burning trucks, the massive Honduran made short work of his own soldiers. Like a wounded animal lashing out in pain and rage—Bolan saw blood trickling down the man’s forehead, the crease in the side of his head an obvious bullet graze—he smashed them with his bloody, swollen fist, hacked at them with the shovel and stomped them under the heels of his heavy leather boots, which weren’t the lightweight jungle footwear the rest of the troops wore. Bolan raised an eyebrow, amazed at the man’s ferocity. The giant smashed the last two soldiers together and tossed them aside like broken dolls before fixing one bloodshot eye on the Executioner himself.

      Something like recognition, perhaps realization, flitted across the bigger man’s face. Bolan could see the wheels move in the big soldier’s mind, even as the chaos of the miniature civil war Bolan had incited continued to swirl and rage around this temporary pocket of abrupt stillness. The officer was putting it together: Bolan wasn’t one of his men, wasn’t wearing a Honduran military uniform and wasn’t supposed to be where he clearly was, a knife in either hand. The madness that had enveloped the raiding party had suddenly become, for the big man, the result of enemy action rather than bad luck or coincidence. His expression lost its mad, frenzied, berserker cast and hardened into something else. Bolan had seen the expression before and knew it only too well.

      It was murderous determination.

      Whatever firearms the officer had carried weren’t with him. A flap holster on his belt was open and empty; he had lost his rifle, if he ever had one. If he hadn’t simply lost it in the melee, he had probably fired it empty and discarded it. Bolan saw the behemoth of a man grope left-handed for the weapon, which would have looked like a toy in his fist if he’d had it. He stopped, remembering that the gun was gone, and instead clenched the wooden handle of the shovel.

      Bolan could have dropped his knives and gone for one of his weapons, such as the assault rifle on its sling, but that would have defeated the purpose of his creep-and-shoot, crawl-and-stick campaign. He wanted these troops so terrified of their own shadows that they continued to fire at one another, doing his work for him. No one man could take on this many soldiers alone, not directly; to succeed, Bolan had to make them fight one another. He flexed his fingers around the grips of his knives, crouched low and, nodding once, waited for the big man to attack.

      The giant Honduran took the nod as the challenge he was meant to see. He bellowed and charged, raising the entrenching tool above him for a killing blow. There was no way Bolan could meet that mad dash head-on; the man was a freight train of muscle powered by berserker rage. Bolan let him come.

      At the last moment, just before the Honduran came within range with his shovel, Bolan feinted with his long blade. The soldier made as if to slip past the blade, barely altering his stride. Bolan, rather than completing the slash, fell onto his back in the blood-soaked loam.

      Bolan’s combat boots came up, and he shoved out with both legs. The waffle soles of his boots pressed some of the air out of the giant’s stomach on contact, but not nearly enough. Feeling the muscles in his legs straining, Bolan continued to push, carrying the giant over his body. The big Honduran landed on his head in the dirt beyond. The Executioner thought he could feel the earth vibrating, ever so slightly, as the large man crashed to the ground.

      The American swiveled and surged to his feet, closing the distance between him and his opponent. The big Japanese-style blade flashed downward—

      The Honduran’s hand snaked out and grabbed Bolan’s wrist.

      The shock hit Bolan like an electrical charge. Pain shot up his forearm as the big Honduran crushed it in his meaty palm, as if trying to grind the bones within his grasp.

      Bolan brought the shorter knife over and down for a killing blow, but the giant blocked with the shovel. Metal struck metal with a sound like a cymbal’s crash.

      The noise was drawing attention.

      The Honduran dropped his shovel and managed to get a grip on both of his adversary’s forearms, squeezing for all he was worth. The pain was stunning in its sudden intensity. Some men might have passed out from that alone; Bolan could see spots swimming in his vision. Even as his mind raced to find a way out of this situation, he realized that the soldiers nearest them were falling back to brace the giant—and gasping in shock as they realized that the man held in the big man’s grip was not one of their number, after all.

      Bolan, with no other options, rotated his wrists. The blades of his knives came down, the reversed, smaller one doing a more thorough job than the other, but both edges slicing deeply into flesh. The giant Honduran screamed in agony and surprise as Bolan carved his way free from his grip.

      Then the Executioner stepped in and drove his longer blade through the man’s neck.

      The big American didn’t wait to see his enemy fall. He wrenched the big knife free, reversed it and slammed the bloody blade home in its Kydex sheath, also resheathing the smaller off-hand blade. Then his fingers curled around the grip of his M-16 A-3.

      Weapons were coming up and seeking target acquisition as he blazed his way through the entire 30-round magazine on full-automatic, mowing down the first row of encroaching soldiers. He dropped the mag and inserted another, but not before triggering a buckshot round from his 40-mm grenade launcher, shredding more of the enemy.

      It didn’t take him long, working amid the Hondurans and in the fitful shadows of the burning night, to bring his manufactured chaos once more to a fever pitch. Again he shouted in Spanish as he ran, misleading one man, targeting another, misdirecting a third. He poured on the firepower as the answering guns of the dwindling raiding party increased their own pitch. The jungle came alive as staccato bursts of orange-white muzzle blasts mingled with the fires consuming the vehicles, and men screamed and died by the dozens.

      As abruptly as this dance of death had opened, it drew to a close. The last pockets of resistance managed to wipe out one another, either through sheer determination or with Bolan’s help. Finally, the night’s darkness began to close in once again. The muzzle-flash blooms of illumination were few and far between, and the fires licking at the scorched hulks of the vehicles, though they showed no signs of truly dying, began to subside. Once more holding his rifle by his side on its single-point sling, Bolan drew the suppressed 93-R and began to administer mercy rounds to the dying.

      Then, finally, nothing moved.

      Bolan made two complete circuits of the raiding party’s camp, making certain. The Executioner had walked many a battlefield and ended the lives of countless gunmen…but it would never be a casual thing to him. He didn’t dismiss them as he walked among them. He was careful to check those who might be shamming, too, using his small combat light. He would illuminate a body here, toe a corpse for reaction there, always moving