Читать книгу Pirate Offensive онлайн | страница 20

“What do you want here?” the woman demanded, the pitted barrel of the handgun never wavering.

“You,” Bolan replied. “You, your men and that warship you’ve been secretly building for the past ten years.”

A collective gasp from the rebels told Bolan he’d made a direct hit.

A burly man with a large black mustache frowned. “How did you find us?”

Bolan gave a small shrug. “A friend of a friend.”

“I want names, gringo! Names!” the man demanded.

“Look, amigo. If I wanted you dead, I would have sold the information to the government,” Bolan said bluntly. “And right now, this base would be getting firebombed out of existence from what the president laughingly calls an air force.”

That yielded a small chuckle from the soldiers, but none of the weapons shifted direction, and the woman did not respond.

“We can leave and shoot you through the tent walls,” she said. “Use one grenade, or two.... But you would die, and we would simply be out a tent.”

“Absolutely true,” Bolan said. “But I’m here to cut a deal. Shoot if you want, but it’s a good deal.”

“Amnesty?” sneered a rake-thin teenager, his hands nervously twisting on the wooden grip of an old Browning automatic rifle, now topped with a state-of-the-art Zeiss long-range sniper scope. A bandolier of shells crossed his chest, and an optical range finder was tucked into a shirt pocket.

A fellow sniper? Good to know. “Fuck amnesty,” Bolan said. “I’m talking about missiles.”

“Missiles?”

“Missiles. Carl Gustav, LAW, Sidewinders, Redeye, Loki, Javelin—a truckload of them. Enough to tip the fight in your favor.”

“And what is the cost of this largesse?” asked the woman coolly, her eyes narrowing.

“Your rebellion is not going very well,” Bolan said, choosing his words carefully. “For more than five years, you’ve been doing a major overhaul on an old Mexican cargo freighter, formerly a Canadian steel freighter.”

Nobody said a word, but nervous glances were exchanged.

“You’ve added firewalls and armor below decks, modified the engines, reinforced the main deck, tacked on torpedo tubes and missile launchers.” Bolan smiled. “All of which is carefully out of sight.”