Payback. Don Pendleton

A perfect plan,” he’d said. “Nothing can possibly go wrong.”

      Bolan knew better. Something could always go wrong. Murphy’s Law had taught him that: If anything can go wrong, it will. This wasn’t the soldier’s kind of mission, and how he’d let Hal Brognola talk him into wet-nursing this Colombian army special ops team on some namby-pamby extraction detail was beyond him. If it weren’t for the two DEA agents, Chris Avelia and German Salamanca, who’d been helping the Colombian army locate the De la Noval cartel for the past ten months, Bolan would’ve declined. Avelia had assisted the soldier in a previous mission and he had come to like the kid.

      The temperature had dropped a few degrees from the overwhelming heat of the day, but the humidity was still like a wet blanket. Bolan felt the sweat running down his sides and neck. And there was no letup from the ubiquitous mosquitoes. They buzzed constantly in his ears, occasionally landing on a patch of bare skin and stabbing his flesh. He felt itchy in several places. The soldier had told the rest of his team to keep their sleeves rolled down. It was hotter, but meant less exposure to the environment.

      He heard someone approach his position from the rear, and crouch. Captain Cepeda and Chris Avelia moved up beside him.

      “¿Qué pasa?” Cepeda whispered.

      Even though Bolan spoke Spanish, he let Avelia translate for him.

      “Movement up ahead,” Bolan replied, once again surveying the area through his night-vision goggles, while the two men did the same. The hanging overgrowth was so thick and the trail so obscure that the flat, two-dimensional image through the green-tinted lenses yielded little. “I see nothing,” Cepeda said in his limited English.

      “I don’t either, now,” Bolan told him, flipping the reticules back up on his forehead to recover his depth perception. “Could De la Noval know we’re coming?”

      Avelia fell into step, translating each man’s words into the appropriate language.

      “Impossible. Even my men didn’t know until we departed.”

      “How far are we from the Cathedral?” Bolan asked.

      That was the code name for Vincente De la Noval’s isolated mansion. From the surveillance photos the satellites had sent back, the place looked more like a fortress than a church. It was so isolated and so large that De la Noval purportedly felt safe enough to let his guard down to party until he dropped. The special informant had told the Colombian government that this was scheduled to be one of those “heavy party weekends.”

      Cepeda checked the readings on his GPS monitor and puckered his mouth. “Quizás quinientos metros, no más.”

      * * *

      PERHAPS FIVE HUNDRED YARDS, no more. That was according to Cepeda.

      Bolan paused to take another compass reading and orient himself on his map. He never liked to totally rely on GPS systems. Murphy’s Law liked to tinker with them, too. The squad was moving parallel to the solitary access road leading up to the main gate of the huge house. It was purported to be surrounded by a twelve-foot-high, chain-link fence, and the main entrance was covered by an armed guard at all times.

      The rest of the twenty-five-man squad was bunching up behind them now, and Bolan knew that wasn’t good.

      “Have the men spread out and wait,” he said to Avelia. “I’ll move up and take a look.”

      The DEA agent nodded and whispered in Spanish to Cepeda. They talked for a moment and then one by one the team began to melt into the darkness, although their noise discipline needed some work.

      Avelia grinned at Bolan and whispered, “I’m sure glad you’re here leading us, my friend.” The kid’s grin was infectious. Technically, Bolan was there in an “advisory capacity only,” but he felt a kinship with this group of Colombian soldiers. The Colombians and the DEA had been tracking drug kingpin Vincente De la Noval and his brother, Jesús, for the better part of three years, and this was the closest they’d come to closing the noose, thanks to an informant inside the drug lord’s ranks.

      When he’d heard that, Bolan couldn’t help but recall his own past war against organized crime, and decided they could use a helping hand. Hopefully, their dedication would be rewarded this night.

      He finished moving though the undergrowth, and peered through a shelf of drooping fronds. The mansion lay about a hundred yards away. The shrubbery had been extensively cleared and trimmed to form a buffer zone devoid of cover or concealment leading to the fence. Between the fence and the house was perhaps another fifty yards of lush, well manicured grass. The huge mansion was dark except for a few sparse lights in the first level. No noise. No movement. And no guard at the gate. Maybe he’d left his post to take a leak or to have a smoke.

      Bolan listened intently for any noises and sniffed the air for telltale odors.

      Nothing so far, he thought, but there wasn’t much of a breeze, either.

      Then he saw a spot of red and used his night-vision goggles again to get a clearer look. A man in jeans and a T-shirt and a woman dressed to kill in a short, revealing dress were locked in a standing embrace about twenty feet from the guard shack. An AK-47 with a collapsible stock was slung carelessly over the man’s left shoulder, the muzzle pointing toward the ground.

      The woman laughed as he brought a cigarette to her lips. She inhaled deeply, causing the tip to glow again. Instead of exhaling, she held her breath, and pressed the cigarette to the man’s lips now. They were smoking a joint. Another flash appeared, as he inhaled. She slowly blew out her breath and the man smiled. They whispered together and then kissed before they made their way toward the darkened shadows by the house.

      A sentry high on marijuana and on his way to getting laid, Bolan thought. Not a bad scenario leading up to a raid. But he wondered again at the accuracy of the intel they’d received. De la Noval was supposedly a strict disciplinarian, to the point of using deadly force on those he considered untrustworthy. This night he seemed to be running a pretty loose ship, considering that the sentry appeared to be leaving his post to collect seven minutes of heaven.

      Of course, this lapse could help facilitate their mission, another aspect of which floated in the “trouble” section of Bolan’s mind. The Colombian colonel had given Cepeda and his men explicit instructions that the drug kingpin be taken alive, at all costs. Bolan naturally took that with a grain of salt, as he did all orders given by higher-ups who liked to lead from behind a desk. Following an order that would hamper those in the field wasn’t how Bolan liked to operate, but he was, after all, just there observing. And if the drug lord could be captured, it would put a serious crimp in the cartel’s operations, not to mention enhance the potential for future intel.

      The De la Noval cartel was rumored to be expanding its operation to Mexico. Bolan knew he and the DEA agents were there to make sure that the drug lord was captured alive and extradited to the United States, preferably on the same plane as he and the other Americans.

      The brush rustled about twenty feet to the soldier’s right. Bolan pivoted with his M-4 to face the threat.

      A small deer scurried through the underbrush as a jaguar leaped from a nearby tree, narrowly missing it. The cat glanced toward Bolan and then disappeared into the jungle, as well.

      Guess we’re not the only hunters out tonight, he thought, as he turned and crept back toward Cepeda and his men. Once there he briefed them on what he’d observed.

      “That movement I saw looks like it was a jaguar trying to get some dinner.”

      “Bueno,” the captain said. “We have the advantage of surprise. We must move. Ahora.”

      Bolan nodded, still feeling slightly uneasy, but shook it off. Cepeda sent two of his men forward to cut a hole in the fence, one doing the cutting and one providing cover. They accomplished the task in short order and the rest of the team moved up. The area between the fence and the house was a long stretch, perhaps forty or fifty yards devoid of cover. It was, in effect, a perfect kill zone. They’d have to cross that section fast. The