Bolan retrieved the motorcycle and kicked it to life

“I thought…you do not…fight cop.”

“I don’t. I clotheslined a cop. Hang on.”

Bolan aimed the bike toward the on-ramp, nearly losing it as Ramzin sagged to one side and toppled to the pavement. The Executioner spun the bike to a stop and jumped off.

The Russian’s mouth hung slack. Clear fluid leaked from the corners of his eyes. His pupils were blown. Major Pietor Ramzin was gone.

Mack Bolan gazed down at one of the most dangerous men he had ever faced. The truth would be covered up. Bolan knew Ramzin would be crucified posthumously.

But there was one thing that couldn’t be taken from the man, even in death. Bolan took Ramzin’s Hero of the Soviet Union medal and pinned it to the dead veteran’s chest.

Mission: Apocalypse

Mack Bolan®

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to

Charles Rogers for his contribution to this work.

The Old Testament teems with prophecies of the Messiah, but nowhere is it intimated that that Messiah is to stand as a God to be worshipped. He is to bring peace to the earth, to build up the waste places—to comfort the broken-hearted…

—Olympia Brown

1835–1926

Gavi Arkhangelov is no messiah. Bring peace to earth? He seeks war. Build up waste places? He plans to level cities with nuclear bombs. Comfort the broken-hearted? The man intends to sow pain and sorrow. But the best-laid plans can be destroyed. And they will be.

—Mack Bolan

For my friend, Billy C.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

State of Sinaloa, Mexico

The Executioner’s fist crashed across the sentry’s jaw.

Guard duty was dull duty the world over. The man had spent more time and attention lighting his cigarette than he had the darkness around him. The flare of the lighter had instantly killed his night vision. In the same instant Bolan was on him. Teeth and tobacco went flying. In the sentry’s defense he was deep in his homeland, deep in the desert, the roads were all watched and all military and police units in the area had been thoroughly penetrated and bribed to alert his organization to any movement.

No one was expecting a single, hostile American to come floating down out of the sky six hundred miles south of the border into Mexico.

Bolan hit the guard again. This time his open hand chopped into the side of the sentry’s neck like an ax. The Executioner raised his hand for a third blow but the man was already falling unconscious to the ground with a concussion and half of his carotid arteries and nerves crushed. Bolan let him fall and caught the man’s rifle before it could clatter to the pavement. The G3 assault weapon was Mexican Army issue and probably stolen. The man was most likely ex-Mexican Army issue, as well. Bolan knelt over the sentry and found that he was indeed wearing Mexican military dog tags beneath his windbreaker. Gasca, Victor, was a private. Private Gasca was out of uniform. Mexican military officers and enlisted men moonlighting to do work for the cartels was as old as the war on drugs. Gasca was also wearing a white card key around his neck. Bolan removed the key and ran it through the lock on the warehouse door. The light on the lock blinked green. Bolan pulled his night-vision goggles down over his eyes and slid inside into the darkness. The light-enhancing optics took the barely discernible glow of the stars shining through the skylights and magnified it thousands of times, turning the inky blackness of the warehouse interior into a harsh, grainy, gray-green world.

Bolan subvocalized into the microphone taped to his throat. “I’m in.”

Fourteen hundred miles away in Virginia Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman sat in Stony Man Farm’s Computer Room and gazed at satellite imaging of Bolan’s position in Sinaloa. “Copy that, Striker. Begin radiological survey.”

“Copy that. Commencing survey.” Bolan pulled the Geiger counter out of his web gear and powered it up. The IDR-Monitor 4 was a simple Geiger-Müller type that measured alpha, beta, gamma and x-radiation and was about the size of an old style walkie-talkie. The device’s main component was a tube filled with argon gas. Argon was inert, but it would briefly conduct electricity when a particle or photon of radiation passed through it. The tube amplified the current into a pulse. The pulse was what created the typical clicking, static sound Geiger counters made. The faster, uglier and more staticky the sound was, the more radiologically uglier the ambient environment was.

This night, gamma radiation was the subatomic particle of choice.

Gamma radiation was always around. It was constantly bouncing around the cosmos, but usually in amounts a human being would consider infinitesimal. However, gamma rays were the most dangerous form of radiation emitted during a nuclear explosion. Unlike solar radiation, gamma rays were not stopped at the skin level. They passed completely through the body like a freight train, damaging every cell in their path and creating breaks in the DNA strands. Victims of exposure suffered horribly before they died, and survivors would pass on their damaged DNA in the form of birth defects to their children. You didn’t need a nuclear explosion to get gamma radiation. It was emitted from spent nuclear reactor fuel at very lethal levels. Mixed with conventional explosives, nuclear material would go on killing long after the effects of the explosives had been dealt with.

Gamma radiation was the “dirty” in dirty bombs.

Bolan muted the audio signal on the IDR-4 and began running his sweep through the warehouse. He waved the counter slowly over and around each pallet and crate, keeping his eye on the tiny dial to see if the needle jumped. It was barely twitching, but it was twitching. “Bear, I have slightly elevated levels of gamma radiation.”

“Give me a count,” Kurtzman replied.

Bolan watched the needle tremble at the very lowest end of detection. It was far less than the exposure one would get from an X-ray imaging at the doctor’s office, but it was still abnormally high for a nonmedical or nonindustrial warehouse in the middle of Sinaloa. “I’ve got ten kV.” Bolan shook his head. “Maybe less.”

Kurtzman echoed Bolan’s thoughts. “It’s residual. The material has moved.”

“Continuing sweep.” Bolan slid from pallet to pallet and stack to stack. Ostensibly the warehouse was used in the transshipment of beans and soya out of the Mexican highlands to the south. Bolan knew that any dope-sniffing dog worth his salt would be doing backflips from the scent of the residual Mexican brown heroin and Colombian cocaine that had spent the night on its way to the United States border. Gun-sniffing dogs would have recognized the scent of Cosmoline, Russian military lubricants and high-explosive blocks. As far as Bolan knew, there were no uranium-sniffing dogs, and if there were they had very short life spans. But the needle of the electrical sniffer in his hand began to twitch like a nose as it scented the air. “Reading getting stronger.”

“Maintain safety protocols, Striker,” Kurtzman warned.

“Readings still far below danger levels.” Bolan knelt on the warehouse floor as the needle shook like a leaf in the wind. His eyes narrowed beneath his night-vision gear. The needle was still vibrating against the low-end peg. He traced his fingers on the outline in the floor where pallets had obviously rested for years. Bolan passed the IDR-4 over the scratched square, and the needle twitched up a hairbreadth. Something radioactive had indeed rested here. The fact that there was still a distinctive radiation signature told Bolan that the bad guys had either breached the original containment vessel or they had transferred the materials to a new container whose shielding was not up to spec. “Confirmed, material was in the warehouse, and has since been moved.”

Kurtzman’s silence spoke volumes. Nuclear material had gotten within six hundred miles of the U.S. and was still presumably heading north.

They both knew there was only one option left.

“Bear, I’m heading up to the hacienda for some Q and A.”

“Copy that, Striker. Will advise the Man.”

Kurtzman was going to inform the president that the mission had progressed from reconnaissance to search and destroy. Bolan finished sweeping the warehouse, but the strongest reading continued to be the suspiciously empty space. He stepped back over the stricken sentry. The man was alive but wouldn’t be raising the alarm anytime soon. Bolan’s boots crunched on the gravel road as he moved up toward the house. In the distance the Tamazula River gleamed with reflected starlight. Oswaldo “Pinto” Salcido seemed an unlikely trafficker in nuclear materials. He had gotten his nickname for the continent-shaped wine stains that streaked his left cheek and temple and had a vicious reputation in an already vicious line of work. He was still lower echelon, a regional warlord who exploited his locals and took a taste of goods moving through his territory rather than a major player in the Mexican crime cartels. If he was moving nuclear material, then he had moved up to the big leagues.

Bolan was about to give Pinto some big-league attention.

The Executioner raised his night-vision goggles and unslung his SCAR rifle. The weapon had a 40 mm grenade launcher mounted and loaded beneath the barrel, but he reached over his shoulder into his pack and drew forth a GREMs barricade breaching rifle grenade and clicked it on his muzzle. Salcido’s place was standard twentieth-century Mexican crime lord. High pink adobe walls surrounded a sprawling hacienda. Bolan closed within twenty yards of the automatic iron gate, peered through his rifle’s optic and fired. The assault rifle bucked against his shoulder as the rifle grenade flew from the muzzle. The grenade slammed into the gate’s locking plate and ripped the entire wrought-iron fence right off its tracks and left it twisted and lying in the driveway. Bolan squinted as the hacienda’s security floodlights snapped on and threw the entire front of the house into shadowless glare. The front door flew open and three men with AKs charged down the steps. Bolan leveled his rifle but pulled the trigger on the grenade launcher. Pale yellow fire belched from the 40 mm muzzle, and a bee swarm of buckshot expanded and enveloped the charging men in an invisible cloud of lead ball bearings that passed through their bodies like a withering wind. The three men twisted and fell.

Bolan raised his rifle and fired six quick bursts into the arc of floodlights, and the front and sides of the hacienda plunged back into darkness. He pulled his night-vision goggles back down, jacked a tear gas grenade into his launcher and slid a fresh magazine into his rifle.

Within the hacienda men were shouting, women were screaming and dogs were barking.

A man leaned out of an upstairs window and sprayed the grounds with submachine-gun fire, but he was firing blind into the darkness. He showed up perfectly in Bolan’s optics and the Executioner’s burst blasted him from the window and dropped him down to the patio below. Bolan sent his tear gas round spiraling through the vacated window and sent a second one through the front door into the house a few seconds later. He took a moment to don his gas mask and clip it to his night-vision gear. Bolan moved up to the hacienda. Ignoring the open front door, he stepped onto the patio, picked up a wrought-iron patio chair and hurled it through the French windows. Shattered shards of glass cascaded to the tiles. Fresh feminine screaming broke out, as well as several gunshots, but none were aimed at Bolan. He jacked another buckshot round into his grenade launcher.

Glass crunched beneath his boots as the Executioner entered Casa de Salcido.

The gas was spreading nicely from room to room. Bolan went to the kitchen and took the stairs into the basement. He raised his rifle and burned a magazine on full-auto in the fuse box. The rest of the Salcido household plunged into darkness. Bolan strode back upstairs. Everything was chaos. People ran throughout the house shouting, screaming, choking and cursing. He could see everyone and everything through his optics, but to the inhabitants of the house he was just one more dark shape in the gloom and gas. Men with guns, Bolan shot. Men without guns, Bolan gave a lick with the butt of his rifle and dropped them. He grasped women firmly by their shoulders, told them “Get out” in Spanish and shoved them toward the closest exit. No one Bolan had encountered so far matched Pinto’s description. The soldier finished sweeping the ground floor of the hacienda and began to suspect Señor Salcido was upstairs.

Bolan went to find him.

Things were slightly more organized on the second floor. Flashlight beams were sweeping wildly about while someone—Bolan suspected Salcido—was bellowing orders at the top of his lungs. A man appeared at the head of the stairs waving a flashlight and a pistol. Bolan stitched him with a burst and he tumbled down the steps. The rest of the gunners upstairs finally found some focus, and salvos of gunfire erupted and tore across the top of the landing. Bolan drew two flash-bang grenades from his bandolier, pulled the pins and lobbed the bombs over the landing. He prudently closed his eyes beneath his goggles and stuck fingers in his ears. Twin incandescent flashes lit up the upstairs landing and twin booms rocked the house like thunder.

Bolan came to the top of the stairs.

Two men with rifles staggered like drunks in half-blind, half-deaf disorientation. Hundreds of winking, pyrotechnic aftereffects flitted about like fireflies. A third man was holding himself up with one hand on the wall and desperately shaking his head to clear it from the effects of the stun grenade. In the gray-green world of the night-vision goggles the wine stains on the man’s face looked black. Bolan put a burst into each of the riflemen and put them down. Salcido pushed himself away from the wall and tried to raise a pistol.

Bolan closed in three strides and snapped the butt of his rifle on Salcido’s wrist. The man screamed as his wrist fractured and the pistol thudded to the carpet. Whipping the butt up, Bolan cracked Salcido across the cheek. As his adversary staggered back under the assault, the Executioner slung his rifle and buried his fist into the man’s guts. The drug lord doubled over and then screamed and stiffened like a board as Bolan dropped his fist across each kidney as if he were hammering nails. The big American seized him by the collar and belt, and marched him into the master bedroom. More French doors opened onto a balcony. Pinto howled as Bolan accelerated from a fast walk to a run and gave him the bum’s rush right off the balcony.

Salcido screamed as he plummeted through the darkness.

His screams were cut short as he hit the swimming pool with a splash. Bolan climbed over the balustrade, hung by his hands for a moment and then dropped down in the backyard below. He went to the pool and hauled Salcido out by the hair and hurled him onto the pool deck. Bolan unslung his rifle and aimed at Salcido’s face. He activated the tactical light mounted on the side of his rifle and strobed Salcido with 75,000 candlepower at sixty blinks per minute. Salcido moaned and tried to raise his hands in front of his face. Bolan kicked them away, killed the light and planted a knee on Salcido’s chest. “Pinto, where is it?”

“Where’s…what?” Between the flash-stun, the beating, the impromptu skydive and swim and the strobing, Salcido was at an all-time moral low. “Where’s what? I got money, I got drugs…. Whatever you want.”

“I want the material.”

Salcido gasped. “What…material?”

Bolan frowned beneath his mask. It was possible that Salcido had no idea just what had been stored in his warehouse. “You had a very important consignment in the warehouse. Now it’s gone.” Bolan leaned more weight into his knee. “Where is it now?”

“Shit…I don’t know. I was just paid to sit on it until pickup.”

“Who picked it up?”

“I don’t know, some guys. I didn’t know them.”

Bolan sighed inwardly. Unfortunately he was fairly certain Salcido was speaking the truth. “When did the plane leave the airstrip?”

Salcido suddenly became reticent.

Bolan dialed the light up to 150,000 candlepower and hammered Salcido with the strobe. The man groaned and twitched feebly. At this level some individuals were known to have seizures and the drug lord had already had a hard night. “They left by truck! They took the road north!”

Bolan killed the light. “How many men?”

“Three.”

“Who were they?”

“I told you! I don’t know!”

“Describe them.”

“One was Mexican. He did all the talking, and he didn’t talk much. The other two were white boys.”

Bolan cocked his head. “Americans?”

“I don’t know…I don’t think so.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t say anything, but they acted all cool and European and shit. They were all dressed down, but you could tell they were suits.”

“How long ago did they leave?”

“This morning.”

Bolan nodded. He might have caught a break. It was 650 miles to the closest point of the border. That was a long haul through a lot of rural Mexico. “What kind of truck?”

“I don’t know what kind of truck!”

A man lurched onto the back patio coughing and hacking. He carried a revolver in one hand and machete in the other. Salcido screamed as Bolan put a burst into the interloper’s chest and hammered him back into the hacienda. Bolan waited a moment to make sure he stayed down and then returned his attention to Salcido.

“What kind of truck?” he repeated.

“I don’t know!”

“Describe it.”

“I don’t know! A flatbed! Like farmers use! The cab was blue!”

“How big was the load?” Bolan persisted.

“It was like six packing crates.”

“How big?”

“Like the size of coffins. I didn’t ask any questions. I got paid not to ask questions. My men loaded it up and they took off.”

“How was it loaded?”

“In a pyramid, three on the bottom, two in the middle and one on top. They’re tied down and have a tarp over them.”

“Were they heavy?”

Salcido considered this. “My boy Chivo says it felt like they were loaded with rocks.”

“Any of your boys feeling sick?”

Salcido seemed confused by the question. “Sick? No, no one is sick. Why?”

Bolan ignored the question. “You say you don’t know who picked the load up or where they went?”

“No.”

“Who sent it?”

Salcido got reticent again.

Bolan strobed him.

“Hey! Shit! Man! I—”

“Talk to me and you live.” Bolan was implacable. “You don’t, I shoot you and ask someone else.”

“I don’t know who sent it! I’m just part of the pipeline!”

“Who was the part behind you?”

Salcido trembled. Bolan gave him a bit more knee in the sternum.

“King Solomon! He sent it up from Mexico City!”

It was a name Bolan had heard of in Mexican crime. He heaved Salcido to his feet and handcuffed him. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“A walk? Where?”

Bolan gave him an encouraging shove. “Into the hills.”

“Aw, shit, aw, shit…you promised. You promised!”

Bolan marched Salcido whimpering, blubbering and begging for mercy into the Sinaloan night. By the time they had gone two miles the drug lord had fallen five times and thrown up twice. Once out of fear and the second time out of exhaustion. Bolan stopped at the drop point. “On your knees.”

“Por favor, amigo! Please! Plea—”

Bolan kicked Salcido’s legs out from under him and swiftly manacled his feet and hog-tied him. Bolan stripped out of his raid suit and pulled on jeans and a leather jacket, then put most of his weapons and gear into a large duffel. He clicked on the GPS transponder. A pair of Sinaloan CIA assets would come and pick up Salcido and the gear. They would get descriptions of the three men in the truck and get police sketches out and sit on the drug lord. Bolan heaved up the BMW Dakar motorcycle he had jumped with and kicked it into life. The nuclear materials were heading north. The Executioner had only one lead, and it was forcing him to turn south. Back to Mexico City.

Back to where the whole thing had started.

CHAPTER TWO

Culiacán

Bolan plugged his laptop into his satellite link and typed in his codes. Lights blinked on the link and told him the line was secure. Moments later Aaron Kurtzman, Stony Man Farm’s genius in residence and lord of the Computer Room, blinked into life on an inset screen in real time. “What have you got for me?”

“A name,” Bolan replied. “King Solomon.”

“Guillermo ‘King Solomon’ Dominico?” It was a name Kurtzman was familiar with. He clicked keys on his side of North America and brought up DEA and FBI files. “Smuggling nuclear materials seems to be a bit out of his normal purview.”

Bolan had never personally run up against Dominico, but he knew him by reputation. “I would have said the same thing about Pinto Salcido, but Geiger counters didn’t lie and when he and I had our little talk I don’t think he was, either.”

“Well, as drug dealers go he’s a pretty interesting cat,” Kurtzman stated.

Bolan scanned the DEA files and they agreed with what he’d heard. Guillermo Dominico had appeared on the smuggling scene literally out of nowhere with a couple of planes and respectable war chest of seed money to start his business. His father had been a crop duster in the State of Nayarit who went on to buy some land and become a fairly successful grain farmer. Dominico had taken the skills he’d learned from his father and earned a reputation as a daredevil pilot who could land a plane anywhere. From the very beginning he had liked to spread his money around in the string of little towns he operated out of. Rather than a trafficker of poison he had been regarded as a kind of Robin Hood figure who snuck under the FBI’s and the DEA’s noses and brought back wealth for the people. The corrido musicians had written dozens of songs about him and turned him into a folk hero.

It wasn’t long before he had moved up into management.

“King Solomon” Dominico had become famous for his biblical and, by drug-smuggling standards, merciful judgment and punishment of those who transgressed against him. Most drug dealers simply slaughtered anyone who got in their way, and threw in some torture and atrocity to add fun and fear to the mix. Dominico had an Old-Testament, eye-for-an-eye, yet live-and-let-live philosophy. Anyone who stole from him? He cut off their left hand. Second time? Their right. Third time? Their head. To date there was no record of a second or a third transgression. If you informed on him, he tore out your tongue with tongs. As for DEA undercover agents or informants, nothing pleased him more than kidnapping them, keeping them as guests for a week or two at one of his haciendas deep in the desert and then dropping them off on the northern side of the border naked and hallucinating from violent heroin withdrawal.

Over the course of the last decade and a half he had carved himself a somewhat small, but tidy and quite profitable corner in Mexican organized crime.

He was big on Mexican pride and insisted on selling his wares north of the border. Anyone who worked for him who he caught selling locally received his judgment. Even other drug dealers liked and respected him and on several occasions “King Solomon” had been called upon to mediate disputes between the cartels. Dominico was a walking anomaly, a drug kingpin who had a code and actually walked his walk as he talked his talk. Bolan looked at the DEA file photo that Kurtzman had brought up on the screen.

Dominico bore a disturbing resemblance to a smiling, Mexican Sylvester Stallone with a beer gut.

Kurtzman was right. Smuggling nuclear materials for terrorists was not the sort of thing Guillermo Dominico would normally be involved with. Drugs, guns and kidnapping were things to be inflicted upon the yanquis, his neighbors north of the Rio Grande. For Dominico, Mexico was holy ground. Bolan just couldn’t see him trafficking in radioactive poison even if it was heading north. The other very interesting thing was that unlike most crime lords who ended up in prison or dead, according to the FBI Dominico appeared to have gone into retirement several years ago, left the state of Sinaloa and moved to Mexico City.

“I think maybe I need to go have words with King Solomon.”

Kurtzman had been afraid of that. “Well, here’s something about the boy you might not know.”

“Do tell.”

“Many people believe that King Solomon the drug lord was once the masked wrestler Santo Solomon.”

Bolan raised a bemused eyebrow. “Really.”

Bolan knew just enough about the wonderful world of Lucha Libre, or Mexican professional wrestling, to know that the original masked wrestler named Santo ran a close second to Jesus as most popular person on Earth with the previous three generations of Mexican citizenry. Untold legions of luchadors had attached the name Santo to themselves to ride his rep.

Kurtzman called up more files. “At first he called himself Silver Solomon, and his gimmick was to come into the ring tossing peso coins to the crowd as he made his entrance.” He pulled up a grainy screen capture from Mexican cable television. A man in silver tights and a silver mask stood atop the second rope of a wrestling ring. His fists were cocked on his hips and his chin lifted like Superman as he absorbed the adulation of the crowd. He was wearing a silver cape. A twenty, a five and a one peso coin were sewn in descending order on the forehead of his mask with the one set between the mask’s stylized eyebrows. He was strong-looking, with impossibly broad shoulders, but was built more like a gymnast than his freakishly muscled wrestling counterparts north of the border. Mexican luchadors engaged in a lot of high-flying maneuvers and needed a higher power-to-weight ratio.

“So then he started dedicating matches to this church, or that charity or this orphan,” Kurtzman went on, “and people started calling him Santo Solomon.”

“So what happened to him?”

“The Santo Solomon gimmick just disappeared. Some people say the guy behind the mask took on a new persona, others say he got injured and had to quit. Being unmasked is a grave dishonor in the ring, and a lot of these guys retire without anyone knowing their true identities.”

“If it’s true he’d have the seed money to buy his own planes and start his own business. Can you link them?”

“I’m working on it.”

“You say Dominico is currently in Mexico City?”

“Nice little house in the hills.”

Bolan nodded. The nuclear material was still on its way north. He didn’t have much time. “I’m on a plane.”

Mexico City

KING SOLOMON’S KINGDOM was humble by most drug-lord-estate standards. It wasn’t the usual Latin crime-king sprawling rancho or fortresslike hacienda. It was a modest Eichler-style house of mostly glass walls and open floor plan. The most opulent thing about it was the prime hillside real estate it rested upon. The altitude put it above the horrendous air pollution and afforded a sea-of-stars view of urban Mexico City below. The house itself didn’t have much in the way of security, but most of the homes up in the hills were part of gated enclaves each with their own security station and armed guards. The raven-black 2008 Cadillac STS-V Bolan drove told most onlookers that Bolan belonged in these hills, and he wasn’t going to bother with trying to bluff his way past the gate. Bolan parked at a turnoff located about a hundred feet below the cliff that King Solomon’s house perched upon.

It wasn’t a particularly technical climb, but a hundred feet of rock was still a hundred feet of rock and Bolan was making his ascent at night. The soldier shrugged out of his sport jacket and took off his tie. He rolled up the sleeves of the black silk shirt he wore and strapped his silenced Beretta machine pistol to the thigh of his black climbing pants. Bolan put handcuffs and a few other odds and ends in a fanny pack and looped a coil of rope over his shoulder. He kicked out of his Italian loafers, laced into his rock shoes, powered up his night-vision goggles and started to climb.

Even at midnight the rock still radiated heat from the summer day, but a warm, dry rock face was the climber’s friend. He had scouted the cliff in the morning, and he climbed more by feel than what his goggles revealed. Only one overhang provided much of an obstacle, and for a few moments Bolan hung in space seventy-five feet above the road. However, he had photographed the ledge and committed its surface to memory, so the crevices and knobs were where he expected them to be.

Bolan was at the top a full five minutes under the time he had allotted himself.

He looped his rope around a tree trunk and cast the coil down the cliffside in case he needed to make a fast rope extraction. Satellite surveillance from the Farm had informed Bolan that Dominico’s girlfriend had left at noon and not returned. The gardener had gone home around 4:00 p.m. and the maid-cook had left at 10:00 p.m. It was now 12:15 a.m., and it appeared that Guillermo Dominico was alone. Bolan scouted the outside of the house. It was literally perched on a cliff and the glass walls had been designed to take full advantage of the view. Dominico had just enough of a back porch to include a long, narrow pool lined with black lava rock with an attached hot tub. There was a barbecue area off to one side, but no walls or fence to interfere with the vistas of the Anáhuac plateau below. Bolan spent long moments watching. Through his goggles he didn’t see the ghostly beams of any laser motion sensors. It appeared Dominico felt fairly secure in his aerie and the gates and guards on the periphery that kept out the riffraff and unwanted visitors from his past.

No one had planned on some American pulling a Spider-Man in the middle of the night.

Most of the rooms were dark. The master suite glowed blue from the light of a television. Bolan stepped into the shadows of the eaves and peered into the bedroom. One look told Bolan that Guillermo Dominico and the luchador Santo Solomon were the same man. King Solomon had been working out. He hadn’t quite reclaimed the fighting physique of his luchador days, but the barn-door shoulders were no longer sagging and the paunch and jowls from his DEA surveillance photos were gone. The coin-embossed, silver wrestling mask mounted behind glass on the wall surrounded by wrestling photos and newspaper clippings were something of a giveaway, as well. Dominico sat on a folded blue yoga mat wearing a pair of sausage-casing tight biking shorts; he was sheened with sweat and twitching and grimacing as he tried to hold a very forced and uncomfortable-looking half-lotus pose in front of his seventy-two-inch HDTV. Bolan paused a moment. It wasn’t something you saw drug kingpins do every day, even supposedly retired ones.

Up on the screen a man wearing nothing but a white loincloth sat in a full-lotus position and lectured in obviously dubbed Spanish. He looked like Yul Brynner, if the actor was a six-foot-six Special Forces operator moonlighting as a yoga instructor. Beneath his dais three beautiful blond women demonstrated poses at various levels of difficulty as he lectured. Bolan bided his time and silently picked the lock on the sliding-glass door.

He had run up against some wrestlers gone bad before, and anyone who had the capacity to fake that kind of physical carnage day in and day out without using wires or computer-generated special effects could also inflict it for real outside the ring. Bolan grimaced at the tiny click the latch made as he lifted it with his pick. Dominico was oblivious. His attention was equally divided between his DVD guru and his own straining knee joints. Bolan watched as the women on the giant TV unfolded themselves effortlessly from their sitting positions and flicked out their legs into full-forward splits. Dominico’s groan was audible through the sliding glass as he made a very impressive attempt at following suit.

Bolan slid back the door and it closed behind him as he strode into the room.

Dominico’s head snapped around and he rose an inch out of his splits. “Hey!”

Bolan slammed his hands down on Dominico’s shoulders. The former crime lord groaned as the soldier leaned his two hundred plus pounds into his attack and pushed Dominico a little deeper into the splits than he’d ever gone before. He could almost hear the groin muscles and tendons pulling like piano strings being tuned to the breaking point. Dominico’s shoulders suddenly heaved as he tried to push himself up. He was a powerful man, and it was a mighty attempt but Bolan had all the leverage. Dominico was pinned in place like a bug. The only direction for him to go was down. Bolan spoke quietly from his position of moral advantage. “Try that again and you’re going to sing soprano, Santo.”

Dominico couldn’t rise and he sure as hell didn’t want to go any lower. He snarled, suspended in yogic purgatory. “Don’t call me Santo!”

Bolan raised an intrigued eyebrow. For a man about to be snapped like a wishbone Dominico was remarkably defiant. Bolan leaned a little harder. “You’d prefer King Solomon?”

“No!” Dominico’s triceps stood out like horseshoes as he bore the weight of both of them. “It’s just Memo now!” he gritted.

“Memo” was the diminutive of Guillermo, like Billy for William. Bolan decided to give it to him. He didn’t have a partner to play good cop-bad cop with so he was going to have to play both roles; that and Guillermo Dominico was giving off just about the weirdest vibe of any crime lord Bolan had ever encountered. It was going to require more study than just a quick beat down for intel. “Okay, Memo, let’s talk.”

“Hey, man…” Dominico groaned in counterpoint. “Do I know you?”

“I want to know about the operation in Culiacán.”

“What are you? FBI? DEA?”

Bolan shoved down a little harder. “Talk to me or make a wish.”

Every muscle in Dominico’s body tensed with strain. “I haven’t been to Culiacán in years!”

“There’s a farm up in the hills. Near the Tamazula River. It has a hacienda and a warehouse and an airstrip. There was a time when you flew out of it. From what I know you used to own it.”

“I got nothing going on in Sinaloa! I’m retired!”

“Drug dealers don’t retire, Memo.” Bolan leaned hard. “They just change their M.O.”

“Jesus!” Dominico shuddered with effort. “I’m retired! Ask anybody!”

“That’s not what I hear, Memo.”

“Heard from who!” Dominico probed.

“Your old buddy, Oswaldo Salcido, for one,” Bolan replied.

“Pinto!” A geyser of Spanish profanities erupted from Dominico’s mouth. “That prick? You took his word? I set him up in business! I gave him a piece of my territory when I retired as a gift! Now he fingers me? Pinche chingaso mother…” Dominico dropped back into profanity.

Bolan shut it off by giving the crime lord an extra millimeter of unwanted flexibility. “You are going to talk to me.”

“Listen…” Dominico’s elbows bent as his muscles began to give out and his crotch moved inexorably toward the floor. He hissed through clenched teeth. “You gotta let me up, man…before I never have children!”

Bolan relented a couple of inches. “Come up slow.”

Dominico didn’t rise. He suddenly dropped beneath Bolan’s grip and spun on his back like a break-dancer. His legs scythed upward and his ankles locked behind Bolan’s head. The soldier’s feet left the ground as he found himself in a scissors hold. The glass walls shook as Bolan hit the floor flat on his back and the air blasted out of his lungs. He clawed for the Beretta 93R strapped to his thigh, but Dominico grabbed his wrist in both hands. “Gonna snap you like a toothpick, motherfucker!” Dominico began pulling back to straighten Bolan’s arm and break his elbow.

Bolan found himself wrestling with a professional luchador, and he had no illusions about who was going to win a match between them. Dominico’s legs felt like two pieces of oak as they vised down on Bolan’s carotids for the strangle.

The soldier’s temples pounded as he felt the blood shut off to his brain. His only advantage was that wrestling, whether real or fake, was played by rules and most people in an emergency did what they had practiced, and a lot of wrestling holds had weaknesses for those willing to cheat. Bolan managed to turn his head two inches. Dominico howled and released the scissors hold and Bolan’s arm as the big American sank his teeth into his calf. Bolan shook his head against the head rush as he lurched to his feet. Dominico popped up and came in snarling and limping. “You dirty son of a bitch! I’m gonna—”

Bolan faked a right-hand lead but Dominico lowered his head and came in, willing to take a punch so he could get his hands on Bolan again and resume trying to snap him like kindling. Bolan fired his right hand for real—except that rather than going for a fist to the jaw he corkscrewed his thumb into the hollow of Dominico’s throat. His adversary’s eyes flew wide, and his tongue popped out as his trachea compressed. Bolan slammed his fist into the ex-drug dealer’s solar plexus, and the guy’s diaphragm spasmed against his already deflated lungs. Dominico’s face drained of blood, and he sat down on his yoga mat gasping like a landed fish. Bolan stepped in and threw an uppercut as if he were bowling to pick up a spare. His knuckles looped into the point of Dominico’s chin like a wrecking ball and ironed him out flat on the floor.

Bolan drew his Beretta 93-R machine pistol. The laser sight blazed into life as he squeezed, and it painted a ruby red dot between Dominico’s eyebrows. Dominico gazed up into the muzzle of the machine pistol dazedly and sucked for air. Bolan took a couple of long breaths himself and shook his head to clear it. “Memo? I’m done playing with you.”

“You aren’t DEA,” Dominico gasped. “And FBI doesn’t work like this. You aren’t cartel, either. Who the fuck are you?”

Bolan gazed down on Dominico. He had taken down more bad guys than most people had eaten hot meals. A lot of those bad guys had been drug traffickers. At this point most drug dealers would be screaming for mercy or screaming for their lawyer. For a former professional wrestler who’d just gotten his ass kicked and a drug dealer staring down the muzzle of a machine pistol, Dominico was remarkably calm and collected.

Bolan raised an eyebrow at the Yul Brynner look-alike lecturing in dubbed Spanish on the screen. “Memo, what is that stuff?”

“You gotta be kidding me, man.” Dominico genuinely looked shocked that Bolan didn’t know. “That’s Cielo Ahora.”

Bolan watched the bald man gesture gracefully with hands the size of catcher’s mitts while his nubile assistants twisted like dreamy-eyed circus contortionists. “Heaven Now?”

“Change your life, man,” Dominico confirmed. “Changed mine.”

Bolan peered down at Dominico with sudden intuition. “This is why you retired from the life?”

“Hey, man, everybody’s got to grow up sometime. I been a legend twice. But Santo Solomon had two cracked vertebrae in his neck, and the doctors told him if he wrestled again he’d end up in a wheelchair. No one needed to tell King Solomon that he was going to wind up dead or in prison. Not that I cared, until a couple of years ago. Gavi helped me get my head right.”

“Gavi?”

Dominico grunted up at the screen and the bald man with the piercing eyes. “Gavi.”

“So you quit the life because you found God?”

“Found Gavi.” Dominico grinned. “The rest I’m working on.”

Bolan gave Dominico a long, calculating look. “Memo, you want to go for a ride?”

Dominico’s face went flat. “I’ve seen that movie, man.”

Bolan shrugged. The ruby dot of the laser never wavered from Dominico’s forehead. “I can kill you now.”

Dominico weighed the steel in Bolan’s blue eyes. “A ride is good.”

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