TAKE NO PRISONERS

Death floods the streets of Florida as rival gangs kill for blood rights to the distribution of a new synthetic drug, Crocodil. The Russian substitute for heroin, it’s the ultimate prize in the drug turf wars—a cheap high that brings even cheaper death. As rival Mexican and Salvadoran cartels shoot it out for kingpin status, Mack Bolan joins the war. Unleashing incendiary hell on gang territory in Miami, he blasts his way through a pipeline that leads south to Guatemala, where a corrupt Swiss pharmaceutical company has set up manufacturing. Allied with a couple of locals equally dedicated to stopping this lethal fix before it hits Main Street, U.S.A., Bolan faces an army of hard-core mercenaries and miles of cartel blood lust. Outgunned but never outmaneuvered, the Executioner doesn’t soft-sell his brand of payback to these merchants of human misery. Bolan goes in hard and without mercy.

Bang scythed the grenadier’s legs out from under him

Bolan rose to one knee, swung up both .45s and emptied them into the remaining enemy gunner. He dropped his left-hand gun and clawed for his last magazine. The two surviving bikers tore away.

The soldier got to his feet and lurched into the street. The biker he had shot was crawling away. Most people didn’t crawl away with three .45’s in their back. That told Bolan the guy was wearing body armor.

The Executioner searched for his team. Kaino was helping Svarzkova to her feet and weeping from the CS stench she gave off. Bang had reloaded and was covering Bolan, who could barely hear his own voice as he shouted, “Banger, we’re taking this guy with us! Get the car. We’re out of here!”

State of War

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Junk is the ideal product… The ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through sewer and beg to buy.

—William S. Burroughs

There’s a new drug on the scene, one that consumes the addict’s flesh from within. What kind of madness is this? We must drive the people who promote this horror back to the sewers they emerged from. Permanently.

—Mack Bolan

Special thanks and acknowledgment to

Chuck Rogers for his contribution to this work.

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

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER ONE

Miami Metropolitan Area, Florida

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, slid into the unmarked car and stuck out his hand. “Evening, Master Sergeant.” Miami-Dade Police Master Sergeant Gadiel Kaino could have been Bill Cosby’s younger, bigger, redheaded brother who had been a prizefighter but let himself go. The Puerto Rican cop shook Bolan’s hand. “Call me Kaino.”

“Call me Cooper.”

“You sure you want to do this? They eat white men alive where you want to go, and they’ll eat me for aiding and abetting.”

Bolan had done his research. Kaino had a large reputation in the Miami Metropolitan Area for breaking rules, stepping on toes and being one of the toughest cops in the county. Bolan noted the small tattoo of a heart with a scrolling N inside it on the flesh between his right thumb and forefinger. Kaino had been a member of the Puerto Rican Netas gang in his youth. “I’m down if you are.”

Kaino was down. He stepped on the gas and the eighties-vintage Crown Victoria rumbled forward. Bolan could feel the tightness of the suspension as Kaino took them into the bowels of the Metro. Kaino was clearly wary of Bolan. “Justice Department Observation Liaison Officer?”

Bolan grinned. “That would be me.”

“You aren’t Marshals Service.”

“No, but I know some good marshals.”

“Yeah, me, too.” Kaino’s eyes narrowed. “You sure as hell aren’t a lawyer.”

“No.”

“Homeland Security?”

“Nope.”

Master Sergeant Kaino had come up through Miami-Dade during the explosion of cocaine and the war on drugs of the 1980s. He gave Bolan a disparaging look. “Tell me you aren’t CIA.”

“I’m not CIA,” Bolan confirmed.

“Okay, so, not to be a dick or anything...”

“But...?”

“Who the fuck are you?”

Bolan looked at the ID badge hanging over his chest. “I’m a Justice Department Observation Liaison Officer.”

Kaino made a noise. “That’s messed up.”

“Yeah, they’re usually a little more creative.”

“I hope you brought some heavy iron, man. Where we’re going isn’t good.”

Bolan glanced at his bulging gear bag in the back. “The hugest.”

Miami-Dade sweltered in the summer heat, and they instantly lost the breeze off the ocean as Kaino took them inland. The neighborhoods went from bad to worse to urban war zone. Groups of people on porches and street corners gave the Crown Vic very hard looks. Bolan noted a number of the hard cases gave Kaino wary nods of recognition and respect. A small minority waved. On a corner a pair of prostitutes dressed like aerobics instructors shrieked happily as they rolled by. “Hola, Kaino!” “Looking good, Papi!”

“Hola, Allana!” Kaino called. “And not as good as you, Bebe!”

Allana and Bebe fired off a string of sexually challenging remarks in Puerto Rican Spanish that Bolan wasn’t quite sure he wanted to understand. “Kaino, those girls are dudes.”

Kaino regarded Bolan with great seriousness. “I have a broad spectrum of support in the Miami-Dade Latino community.”

“Broad-spectrum support is good,” Bolan acknowledged.

Kaino pulled into what could only be described as urban Armageddon. A lonely gas station sat in the island of glare from the lights over its pumps. Most of the streetlights on the block around it had been shot out. Nearly all the telephone lines had shoes tied together thrown across them. Gang graffiti was everywhere.

Bolan regarded the little old-fashioned filling station with interest. “Interesting.”

“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

The soldier grabbed his gear bag, and Kaino led him around back. There was little to see other than a weed-choked lot and some warped and ancient picnic benches. Someone had smashed off the doorknob to the men’s room. Someone else had painted an X-rated fever dream of an Aztec priestess on the door. Even Bolan had to admit it was a triumph. It was such a work of art that no one had tagged it. He noted the security camera over the door hung by wires like a half-decapitated chicken. Kaino drew a pair of four-inch Smith & Wesson revolvers. Bolan carried a .50-caliber Desert Eagle in one hand and a Beretta 93-R machine pistol in the other.

Kaino regarded Bolan’s steel. “Jesus! You weren’t kidding!”

Bolan shrugged.

Kaino kicked the door. “Miami-Dade!”

The men’s room was empty.

Bolan mentally cataloged the wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-ceiling gang graffiti covering the bathroom. It appeared that Los Zetas, the Gulf Cartel and Mara Salvatrucha-13 all claimed this men’s room. Given the acts of gastrointestinal Armageddon covering the floor and the facilities, it appeared that none of the gangs felt compelled to take responsibility for the state of hygiene and maintenance of their claimed territory. Bolan gave Kaino a wry look. “The Netas don’t seem very well represented in this establishment, Kaino.”

“La Asociación del Ñeta is a cultural organization, Cooper.” Kaino scowled. “And if we were in charge of this lavatory, people would be wiping their asses with toilet paper rather than the walls.”

“You know, I like the way you said that with a straight face. That was good.”

Kaino smiled despite himself. He looked around the lavatory measuringly. “But you’re right. The Netas aren’t well represented. Back in the day the Netas ran the prisons in Florida. Only the Aryans and the Latin Kings dared to give us any static on the inside. On the outside the Colombians ran the drugs and everyone fought for their business. Mexicans were mules for the Colombians. Mexico was just a transshipment point. And El Salvador?” Kaino scoffed. “A mud puddle where they ate guinea pigs. A Central American tragedy you heard about in the news. Now the Mexicans run everything. The Mexican cartels are the alpha predators now. They’re expanding south as well as north. And MS-13 is like a bunch of pit bulls roaming the streets, animals, biting everything that moves, and moving in on whatever they can move in on.”

Bolan was intimately aware of the ebb and flow of gang structure in the Americas. He had spilled blood fighting it. Kaino had obviously lived it, survived it, threaded the eye of the needle and come out a lawman. “Hard times for the old association these days?”

“We aren’t what we were. Netas are still strong on the inside, but out on the streets?” Kaino slowly shook his head. “MS-13 is pushing my people, and they push hard.”

“So why did you bring me to this shithole again?”

“Oh, this is a happening nightspot around here.”

“I can imagine.”

“No, it is. It’s the only gas station for blocks around. The rest all closed their doors. Every gangster’s whip needs gas, and no one wants to start a war over this station and see it close.”

Bolan ran his eyes over the mystery stains streaking the walls. “Like the Highlander, holy ground.”

“That was a good show.” Kaino pointed to the wall over the sinks. All the mirrors had been ripped out, and the wall there was an almost Jackson Pollockian fusion of gangland graffiti tags piled one over the other in such profusion that it was a startlingly profound work of art unto itself. “That’s the message board. That paint has to be at least an inch thick by now.”

“The gangs leave each other messages here.”

“Hey, man, during the cold war even Washington and Moscow had a red phone. Sometimes you have to talk.”

“People come here, check the latest messages and word spreads out,” Bolan concluded.

“That’s it exactly, you saw those benches outside? Sometimes the gangs come here when they need to have an actual parley.”

“So if this is holy ground, how come we have to walk heeled with big steel?”

“Because around here I’m considered dangerous big game,” Kaino told him. “And you? Well, let me tell you something Mr. Blue-Eyed Devil, you would be a genuine trophy. Get it?”

“More than you’ll ever know.”

“You’re scaring the shit out of me. I’m really wondering what I’m getting into.”

Bolan nodded. “I get that a lot.”

“I just bet you do.”

Bolan shrugged. “Want to see something cool?”

“Oh, I can’t wait.”

The soldier reached into his bag and took out a couple of cans of spray paint.

“No!” Kaino was appalled. “Oh, hell no!”

Bolan had run missions in Mexico and El Salvador. On several occasions he had run roughshod over the organized crime affiliates using the name El Hombre. He wondered if anyone in Florida would have heard of the moniker, and whether it would send any reverberations in the right directions. Bolan had practiced his painting skills before he had come to Florida. He did a credible job of painting El Hombre in bloated, amoebalike letters along with the date and the symbols that said El Hombre was now taking ownership of this men’s room. Bolan finished with a flourish of his own design.

Kaino’s jaw dropped. “Mother of God...”

“You like?”

“You just signed your death warrant,” Kaino stated.

“Fourth one I signed today.”

Kaino’s face went blank. “What?”

“Oh, I painted similar tags in Zeta, Gulf and MS-13 territory earlier.”

“Why...you...” A stream of Puerto Rican invectives poured forth from the master sergeant.

“I didn’t tag any Neta territory.”

“You fuckin better not have, ese, or I’ll kill you myself. Not that I need to, because you just killed us both.” Kaino eyed Bolan scathingly. “You already knew about this place, didn’t you?”

“Knew about it, but I appreciate the guided tour, and the sitrep from a veteran on the ground.” Bolan checked his watch. “They should be coming soon.”

“And that’s another thing. What do you think is going to happen when the Zetas, Gulf and MS-13 all roll up on this little slice of heaven at the same time?”

“Tension, apprehension and dissension?” Bolan suggested.

Kaino was so upset he forgot he was holding revolvers in both hands as he waved his arms up and down in outrage. “It’ll be fucking World War III! And you started it!”

“It’ll be Armageddon, but a focused Armageddon.”

“Oh, and how are you going to focus three rival gangs?”

“We’re going to make them focus on us.”

Kaino simply stared. Bolan’s phone rang. “Hold on, I need to take this.” He checked the caller icon and answered. “What’ve we got, Bear?”

Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman’s voice came across the line from the Computer Room at Stony Man Farm in Virginia. “We have multiple vehicles converging on the filling station from all directions.”

“Give me visual.”

A mile up in space a National Security Agency satellite peered down at Kaino’s corner of Florida and sent its feed to Bolan’s phone. The soldier saw the grid of streets that framed the neighborhood in greens and grays. Well over a dozen automobiles were converging on the station. He held out the phone so Kaino could see. “They’re coming.”

Kaino blinked. “You have a helicopter watching us?”

“Satellite.”

“You have a satellite.”

Bolan grinned. “Cool, isn’t it?”

* * *

T HE E XECUTIONER unzipped his bag and pulled out what appeared to be a pair of assault rifles on steroids.

“Jesus!”

“AA-12 semiautomatic shotgun.” Bolan slapped in a massive drum magazine and racked the action. “I know, you’ve never fired one before. So a buddy of mine installed a laser sight.” He squeezed the grip and a red dot appeared on the closest stall.

“So we’re just going to hose down Zetas, Gulfs and the MS-13 boys in a premeditated and, may I say, arranged act of mass murder?”

“Your weapon holds twenty-four rounds. That drum is loaded with tear gas.” Bolan pulled out a gas mask with night-vision goggles and an armored vest in the master sergeant’s size. He pulled out a second drum. “This one is loaded with rubber buckshot. Keep your shots low.”

Kaino stared at the weapon as if Bolan had handed him a two-headed baby.

“Come on,” Bolan cajoled. “You used to be Neta, tell me you’re not down with laying a little less-than-lethal hurt on these vato interlopers.”

A slow smile spread across Kaino’s face. “You know, this is almost like a wet dream, but I like my job. Plus, can I tell you something, just between you and me?”

“Shoot.”

“I don’t like lifting weights or having sex with men, and that’s all there is to do in prison.”

“Sorry, almost forgot,” Bolan pulled a business card from his shirt pocket. “Here.”

Kaino’s face went slack. Bolan geared up. The cop slowly shook his head. “That is the Seal of the President of the United States.”

Bolan slapped the Velcro tabs on his armor shut. “Yeah.”

“So you like, carry around presidential pardons in your pocket?”

“No, but I will take full responsibility for anything that happens here tonight, you were never here, and if for any reason someone disputes that, that is the phone number they can call and complain to.”

“Dude, who are you?”

“Gear up or scoot. Clock is ticking.”

Kaino geared up. “Well, seeing as how you are a guest of the Miami-Dade Police Department I would be derelict in my duty if I abandoned you to your folly.”

“I like your attitude, Kaino. You’ve used night vision before?”

“Nothing as cool as this, and never fitted to a gas mask.”

Bolan adjusted the mask to Kaino’s face and locked the night-vision in place. The soldier assembled his own unit. Kurtzman’s voice spoke on speaker. “Hostiles arriving on site.”

“Copy that, Bear.” Bolan pulled his mask down over his face. “On my mark.”

“Copy that, Striker. On your mark.”

Bolan heard vehicles screeching up to the gas station. Angry voices called back and forth in Spanish as more gangsters arrived by the second. Bolan walked out and strode around the station. Low-riders, SUVs, vans and pickups filled the parking lot. Gangsters shouted, swore and pointed angry fingers. The name El Hombre flew back and forth. Kaino was right, these weren’t upper echelon cartel men, they were gangbangers, and they were strangely reluctant to start shooting here at the one place they all respected.

“Kill the lights,” Bolan ordered.

“Denying your area power grid access...now.”

Gangsters of various stripes shouted in alarm as the street went dark. Bolan clapped the master sergeant on the shoulder. “Lay down the law, Kaino.”

The cop began to fire.

The gas rounds thudded from the barrel of the big 12-gauge in slow, methodical fire. They didn’t have a huge payload but Kaino had a lot of them. Bolan poured fire in on top of his partner’s, arcing high for a two-tiered barrage.

“Shoot and scoot, Kaino. They can’t see you but they can see your muzzle-blast.”

Pistols popped in answer from among the cars. Bolan and Kaino moved and dropped gas into the milling gangsters without mercy. The return fire came ever more sporadically. Bolan popped his drum, slipped in a specific 5-round clip and stalked toward the gas cloud.

“Cover me, Kaino.”

Kaino slapped in a fresh drum as Bolan strode up to an SUV and fired.

The Dragon’s Tongue ammo sent a one-hundred-foot jet of flame playing over the vehicle. The effect lasted less than a second. Any exposed person in the path of the flame would be badly burned. Gangsters choking on tear gas screamed at the effect. The driver slammed his vehicle into Reverse and rammed the vehicle behind him. Bolan hosed down two more vehicles and sent tongues of fire into the lanes between the clusters of gangs. Gangsters ran in all directions.

Kaino’s mask smothered the sound of his laughter to the general public, but Bolan heard it loud and clear as the master sergeant sent out clouds of rubber buckshot at calf level and swept his former opponents from back in the day off their feet. Bolan reloaded and flamed another five vehicles.

The rout was total.

Rubber screamed on asphalt as smoking rides peeled to get out of the gas and flamethrower effect. Bolan took the loudspeaker out of his bag and connected it to the mike in his mask.

Bolan’s voice boomed like God on High. “I am El Hombre! The gas station is mine! Miami-Dade is mine! I’m coming for all of you!”

He watched with mild satisfaction as the remaining gangsters ran, limped or crawled out of the war zone.

CHAPTER TWO

Miami-Dade Safehouse

“Did you have fun?” Aaron Kurtzman asked.

Bolan glanced at the Miami Herald. The morning headline read Gang War Erupts! In a smaller font the side story talked about a “Disturbing new twist in the ongoing turf battles. Police tactics purported used in battle.” Bolan turned to Kaino. “Did you have fun?”

“Oh, big fun.” Kaino held his hands three feet apart. “Huge.”

“Yeah, I guess we had fun, Bear.”

“Speaking of fun.” Kaino glanced at the laptop he’d been issued. He was speaking to someone named Bear, but his video window was blank. Kaino was a trained investigator, and he could tell by facial cuts that the man across the table from him was looking at a face. Kaino spoke to the Bear. “Your man here told me he would prefer it if I didn’t contact my department unless it was an emergency or to request resources.”

“That would be preferable,” Kurtzman agreed. “What’s on your mind?”

“Last night was fun, but what’s my status now?”

“As of now you are on an open-ended, paid, consulting leave of absence.”

“Never heard of such a thing.”

Bolan held up his Justice Department Observation Liaison Officer badge. “Want one?”

“Nah, open-ended paid consulting leave is good. So what’s next?”

“That depends on you.”

“Me?” Kaino threw back his head and laughed. “Dude! You just kicked the Zetas’, Gulf Coast’s and MS-13’s asses all at the same time. You’re El Hombre! King of the street, and may I add proud new absentee owner of a gas station! Dude, I just walk in your shadow and I’m thankful for the slot.”

“Didn’t know you were a poet, Kaino.”

“Puerto Ricans,” Kaino acknowledged. “We’re poetic people. So what can I do for you, El Hombre?”

“We’ve been picking up some real strange chatter. That led us to the Miami-Dade area.”

“Chatter?” Kaino queried.

“Yeah.”

“Like intelligence communications and satellites and shit like that?”

“And shit like that,” Bolan confirmed.

Kaino shrugged. “Oh.”

“Oh what?”

“I thought you were here about cocodrilo.”

“Crocodile?” Bolan queried.

“Well, yeah. Oh, and by the way, just so you know, Cocosino will be coming for both our asses after your little stunt last night.”

“Killer croc? Isn’t that a Batman villain?”

“Well, yes and no. I assure you Cocosino is real, and we have a trail of bodies to prove it.”

“You’re saying you have a supervillain straight out of a comic book in Miami-Dade?”

“We have a killer for hire straight out of your worst nightmare. A guy who doesn’t care. An enforcer. A guy who everyone’s afraid of. And you wrote your name on a wall. I really hope you understand the implications of that. Cocosino will be coming.” Kaino gave Bolan a very shrewd look. “But that’s not why you’re here, you’re here because...?”

“What’s cocodrilo?”

Kurtzman spoke triumphantly across the link. “Spanish from the Russian, krokodil, and that’s our link!”

“What does this crocodile stuff mean, Bear?”

“It’s bad.”

Kaino nodded. “Muy malo.”

“Krokodil is Russian for crocodile,” Kurtzman said.

“I picked up on that.”

“Krokodil is a new designer drug. It’s a desomorphine, or morphine derivative.”

“A heroin substitute,” Bolan stated.

“Right.” Kurtzman clicked a key and a window of text appeared on Bolan’s and Kaino’s laptops.

“The main ingredient is codeine,” Kurtzman informed them. “In the U.S. codeine is a controlled substance, but in Russia codeine is widely available as an over-the-counter drug.”

In Bolan’s experience what was readily available in Russia over the counter, much less under it, was appalling. A frown passed over the soldier’s face. “Most heroin addicts I’ve met would consider codeine a pretty piss-poor substitute for heroin.”

“It’s what they mix it with.”

“Like what?”

“Try gasoline, paint thinner, iodine, hydrochloric acid, even red phosphorus.”

“Bear, I’ve had Russians throw red phosphorus at me in anger. Now you’re saying they’re injecting it?”

“According to reports, the high is similar to heroin—a whole lot rougher, but if you’re a degenerate heroin addict, krokodil will get the job done, and it’s about ten times cheaper. The other benefit is, given the ingredients, you don’t need a friendly heroin dealer. You can get all the ingredients and cook it up on your own.”

“Should I even ask about the side effects?”

“The side effects are how krokodil gets its name.” Kurtzman hit a key. “Hold on to your breakfast.”

Bolan stared long and hard at the jpeg. He could tell it was a human ankle because two hands pulling down a sock framed it. Where the flesh wasn’t gray it was green. In between the blotches of necrotic color, the skin rose and cracked like a lizard’s scales. Bolan easily identified several suppurating injection sites. “This isn’t good.”

“It gets worse. A heroin high can last four to eight hours. Krokodil lasts for about ninety minutes, and by all accounts the withdrawal symptoms are obscene. Once you’re hooked on krokodil you need to hit three to four times per day. All you live for is to cook it or score it. According to the Russian medical service, once you start taking krokodil your life expectancy is a year or less. It’s the cell death and scaling that give the drug its name, and those scales eventually rot off. I’m reading accounts here of advanced users being found still alive but with their bones showing. In Russia they call it the drug that eats the junkie, literally and figuratively. It is the absolutely lowest form of addiction I have ever heard of.”

“And now it’s here in Miami-Dade.”

Kaino spoke quietly. “I’ve seen it. Smelled it, too. Any lab cooking the cocodrilo smells to the skies of iodine. So do the cooks. Most of the cooks are junkies themselves. Sometimes they pour the iodine into their wounds as remedial first aid. Sometimes they drink it. There’s some misguided mythology that drinking what they’re cooking with will make them stronger.”

Bolan had found himself drinking potassium iodide on several occasions; however, that had usually been after exposure to spent nuclear material. “So, the skin is rotting off their bones but they have very healthy thyroid glands.”

Kurtzman smiled bleakly. “That’s about it.”

“So now that El Hombre is here to save us, what are we going to do?” Kaino interjected.

“Russian chatter brought me, but it was tied up with the gang situation here in Miami-Dade. That’s why I asked for your help. Speaking of which, what are you willing to do, Master Sergeant?”

“After last night?” Kaino sighed, and not unhappily. “I’m looking forward to exploring the envelope of my first open-ended, paid, consulting leave of absence for the health and safety of the greater Miami-Dade metropolitan area.”

“Glad to hear that, Kaino.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“Well, I’ve got Russians chattering about gangs. You’ve got gangs spilling Russian filth on your streets. I think we should go talk to some Russians.”

* * *

“J UST SO YOU KNOW ,” Kaino warned, “the Russian mafia isn’t one of my areas of expertise.”

Bolan sat in Kaino’s unmarked car and watched the back door of Papi’s Tea Room through binoculars. “It’s one of mine.”

“You’ve been staring at that door for five minutes.” Kaino regarded Bolan dryly. “Has it done anything yet?”

“No, but it’s not happy.”

“The door isn’t happy?” Kaino queried.

“No.”

“It’s not a happy door.”

“No, someone violated it,” Bolan said.

“It’s a violated, unhappy door?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you know?”

“Look closer.”

Kaino squinted into his binoculars. “Well, it is a filthy door covered with graffiti.”

“Look at the hinges and the knob,” Bolan suggested.

Kaino looked, then slowly smiled. The steel security door was filthy, old, weathered and well covered with spray paint. The hinges were brand-new. So was the knob, and the metal around them was dented and blackened. Whoever had rehung the door had taken a pretty cavalier attitude toward his job. “Someone took a Masterkey to that door.”

Bolan nodded. A Masterkey was usually a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with sand or some kind of granulated composite designed to slam off door hinges and locks. The soldier shook his head at the door. “You know, if you’re not going to do a job right, you just shouldn’t do it at all.”

“My mother always said that.”

“My mother always said everyone deserves a second chance.”

“A second chance to do what?” Kaino asked.

From the bag between his knees Bolan removed a Remington 870MCS shotgun with a fourteen-inch barrel and a pistol grip. “To hang a door correctly.”

“Now, that’s not the kind of shotgun a good, God-fearing Justice Department Observation Liaison Officer should carry.”

Bolan slid two metal-cased shells into the shotgun and put three yellow plastics in behind them to bat cleanup.

Kaino slid from behind the wheel and pulled his revolvers.

The men walked nonchalantly down the alley. It was midday but Russian rap music made the poorly hung door vibrate. Bolan pointed the brutally shortened 870 at the top hinge and the laser sight in the grip put a red dot on it.

“So,” Kaino inquired, “you’re just going to light up that howitzer and announce—” The shotgun made a dull slap-click noise and the hinge twisted and broke as though hit by an iron fist. Kaino stood staring. “You have a silenced shotgun.”

“No, it’s the round that’s silent. The gunpowder hits a piston inside the shell and the piston rams the breaching load out of the shell down the barrel. The piston jams in the shell mouth so the entire detonation is contained inside the shell.”

“Very James Bond.”

Bolan’s weapon slap-clicked and the bottom hinge smeared away under the breaching round’s blow. He shucked in two more yellow rounds. “You want to go first?”

“Oh, no, you’re a guest.” Kaino generously waved his guns at the door for Bolan to take point. “By all means.”

Bolan kicked the door.

The music hit them like a wall. The bass thud-thud-thudded loud enough to rattle bones while someone snarled in Russian, undoubtedly about how bad he was and how many women he had. Bolan moved down the narrow hallway, passing a kitchen with notices that it had been closed by order of the health department. Bolan and Kaino peered through the windows in the double doors that led into the main tearoom.

The place looked like a cross between a shooting gallery and a strip joint. If any tea had ever been served here, the patrons had probably smoked it. Kaino made a disgusted noise. “Well now, that’s just sad.”

Bolan nodded at the tableau in front of them. “Tragic.”

Nikita “Papi” Popov sat at a table flanked by two of his goons. In Russian parlance the goons were typical Russian “hammerheads,” big men, probably former military with mixed martial arts physiques filling out their designer tracksuits. The man on Popov’s left had the typical stubble hair cut. Popov’s right-hand goon bore a startling resemblance to a six-foot-six Jesus.

No one at the table was happy.

Indeed, all three mobsters appeared to have been beaten into pulps. They were well bandaged. Popov’s right-hand man had his right arm in a sling. The left-hand goon’s head was wrapped like a mummy. Popov appeared to have gotten the worst of it. He sat shirtless with his ribs taped and his left arm in a sling. Contusions grossly contorted the Russian prison gang tattoos covering Popov’s skin.

In typical Russian mobster fashion they sat grim-faced, drinking vodka and staring into the middle distance. The sea of bottles on the table indicated they had been at it for a while.

“Those sure are some sulky Russians,” Kaino observed.

“I’d go so far as to say morally devastated.”

“Morally devastated. I like that.”

“Let’s see if moral devastation has put them in the mood to talk,” Bolan said. “You take Bullethead and I’ll take J-man.”

Bolan and Kaino strode through the doors. Between the pounding music, the pounding of vodka and the Russians’ pounded state of being it took them far too many moments to notice.

The soldier shouted over what he could only loosely describe as music. “Mr. Popov! We need to talk!”

“Shit! Fuck!” Popov went apoplectic. “Kill them!”

The goons rose and kicked back their chairs. Bolan and Kaino closed the distance. The Jesus-looking hammerhead tried to go for the gun under his jacket. Bolan put the ruby dot of the Masterkey’s laser sight on J-man’s slung right arm and fired. The Russian screamed and dropped to his knees as his already injured wing took a 12-gauge rubber baton round.

Kaino snapped his revolvers forward with practiced ease. He rammed the muzzle of his left-hand gun into the Russian’s solar plexus like a fencer, then clouted the Russian behind the ear with the butt of his right. The Russian mobster went boneless across the table and slid to the floor in a cascade of vodka bottles. “There goes my pension...” Kaino muttered.

Bolan put a riot round into the stereo and the Russian rap ceased in a shower of sparks. He shook his head at Popov’s state of affairs. “So, besides me, who could have done this to you?”

“Fuck you!”

Bolan pumped his shotgun’s action and the laser designated Popov’s sling. Popov screamed. “No! For fuck’s sake! Please!”

“For the duration of this conversation I would advise you not to make me ask you anything twice.”

Popov stared sulkily at the tabletop.

“Tell your boys to resume their seats.”

Popov snarled. J-man sat back in his chair cradling his arm. Bullethead managed to scrape himself off the floor and did the same.

Kaino tsked as he confiscated their pistols. “Someone messed these boys up but good.”

Bolan nodded. The Russians had been systematically worked over, severely, and by pros. The soldier’s instincts told him that the beat down hadn’t been punishment or a warning. Popov and his men had been interrogated. “You seen the like around here?”

Kaino eyed the collection of contusions and broken bones with a professional eye. He lifted his chin at the bloody bandages. “Not in a long time. Let’s take a look at the wounds.”

Bolan ripped a dressing off the top of Popov’s shoulder, which elicited a shriek. Bolan’s eyes narrowed at a very nasty, ragged laceration across the Russian’s medial deltoid. The wound looked as though an animal might have made it. Kaino let out a long breath between his teeth and nodded. “Yeah.”

“Blackjack?” Bolan suggested.

“Close. I’d say a flat, beavertail slapjack sap with a coil spring in the handle, lead- and clay-loaded. A snap of the wrist will break bones. You swing side-on—” Kaino nodded at the Russian’s wound “—they’ll cut right through flesh. Jeez, there was an old-timer on the force when I first came out of the academy. He could put his halfway through the Miami phone book with a good windup.”

“Miami-Dade doesn’t use saps anymore, do they?”

“Nope.” The master sergeant sighed wistfully as he gazed backward into a bright, shining, never-to-return time in Florida law enforcement. “Banned them years ago.”

“Someone worked over our Russians.”

“Someone beat them like rugs.”

“Popov,” Bolan asked, “who did this to you?”

Popov clenched his teeth. Bolan calculated the look in the Russian gangster’s eyes. There seemed to be a genuine battle raging in Popov’s guts as to whom he was more afraid of, the warrior in front of him or the interrogators who had left him and his men in this sorry state. Popov was a genuine tough guy, but Bolan was beginning to think that whoever had interrogated Popov had gotten what they wanted out of him. Bolan smiled coldly. He wasn’t a torturer, but he had no qualms about letting his enemies think that he was.

“Popov, I’m going to start by dropping a hammer on every injury you already have, and then I’m going to start inflicting new ones. Who did this?”

Sweat broke out on Popov’s bruised brow. He hissed a single word through his teeth. “Zetas!”

“Well, just, shit,” Kaino opined.

Bolan weighed the Russian’s response. Zetas weren’t good. None of the Mexican cartels and their gangs were good news, but the Zetas had originally been Mexican Special Forces soldiers who had received special training by the U.S. Army Rangers at Fort Benning. Many of the Mexican soldiers had finally thrown up their hands and gone to work for the Gulf Coast Cartel as muscle. In the end the Zetas had gone independent and were now at war with their former Gulf Coast employers.

“We’re out of here.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it, unless you want to add something?”

“As a matter of fact I do.” Popov gasped as Kaino ground the barrel of one of his revolvers into the gangster’s injured arm and pressed the other between Popov’s eyes. “Stop calling yourself Papi. That’s Puerto Rican. We own that, and you don’t have privileges.”

Popov glowered.

Kaino ground the muzzles of his pistols in Popov like he was drilling for oil. “Say it!”

“I am no longer to be calling myself Papi! You own that! I do not have privileges!”

Kaino holstered his guns. “Smart boy.”

CHAPTER THREE

Safehouse

Bolan gazed long and hard at his files. Krokodil was just about the worst thing he had ever come across. He had seen the results of weaponized flesh-eating bacteria, but he had never seen that kind of damage self-inflicted. Bolan shook his head and clicked out of the horrific catalog of flesh eaten down to the dermis and bones showing through suppurating muscle tissue. Bolan had dedicated himself to a War Everlasting against organized human evil. He would be damned if he let this drug get a foothold in the United States. Bolan couldn’t bring himself to hate the junkies, the cooks or even the dealers. From all his research, when it came to krokodil they were all one and the same. They lived to fix until they died looking like extras in a zombie film, but some organization had introduced this filth into Florida.

Bolan intended to introduce himself to those individuals directly.

Kaino sat cleaning and oiling his twin .357s. Had the revolvers not been finished a lustrous gunmetal blue they would have sparkled. “You’re not buying the Zeta shit.”

“According to my source, they seem to have the most reliable supply of crocodile here in the metropolitan area.”

“That jibes with what I know, as well, but I stand by my statement. You’re not buying the Zetas roughing up Popov and his playmates.”

“No, if the Zetas had paid a visit to the Tea Room there would have been a bloodbath, and assuming they came out on top, their method of inquiry would have included lopping off limbs and heads. For that matter, most of the original Zetas who were Special Forces operators are dead. Those who are still around are the equivalent of generals in the cartel. They don’t do field ops anymore, and they sure as hell don’t leave Mexico. On top of that, I’m thinking Masterkeying a door is a little bit above the brains and pay grade of their local street gang affiliates here in Florida. Popov and his pals got worked by pros, like you and me, and they were deliberately left alive.”

“You think they’re under observation,” Kaino stated.

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“You think we got observed going in?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me at all,” Bolan said.

“Great, we’ve been made.”

“You worried about getting slap-jacked the same way?”

“Hell no.” Kaino grinned and reached into the bag he had taken from his apartment. He pulled out a twelve inch beavertail sap that was scuffed from long use, dry from long storage but shined with recent buffing. “I’m looking forward to meeting the competition.”

“I thought you said Miami-Dade banned those.”

“I’m on an open-ended, paid, consulting leave of absence. I’m interpreting that to mean I have a great deal of leeway in my operational and equipment requirement paradigms.

“So, you want to drop in on Los Zetas, anyway?”

“I think we’ll start with the local affiliates and work our way up the food chain. I’m looking at you for a place to start.”

“Oh, I got a place we can start.” Kaino slapped the sap into his palm.

* * *

B OLAN EYED THE DRUG fortress. It was an old, brick, two-story business building that had once housed an accounting firm. The windows were now barred and boarded. The front door was shiny stainless steel with a security camera above it, and a requisite oversize gangbanger stood in front mad-dogging anyone who walked by. The street was busy, but the locals made an extra effort to cross the street and not walk by. “Who lives here again?”

“A Zeta asshole named Salami.” Kaino handed Bolan a file.

Walter “Salami” Salemo had hair halfway down his back, wore a big white pirate shirt and stared into the mug shot camera with brown-eyed earnestness. The Salami looked like he should have been playing The Beatles’ “Rocky Raccoon” on a twelve-string guitar in a coffee bar someplace instead of being one of Miami-Dade’s most notorious meth distributors. According to the file, Salami had recently moved into moving crocodile.

Kaino waved his hand impatiently at the photo. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, but don’t let the noble-faired, long-haired, leaping-gnome look fool you. This guy Salami is a total dick.” Kaino poked a puckered scar on his chin Bolan had assumed was from his boxing career. “I got the scars to prove it. This guy will fool you. He nearly took my head off a few years back. Practices capoeira and shit.”

Bolan duly noted Salami’s martial arts background and raised an eyebrow at the man’s résumé. “Argentine?”

“The South Americans love coming to Florida.”

“Don’t I know it,” Bolan replied.

“So, you kicked the shit out of three gangs last night. You kicked the crap out of the Russians this morning. What’s on the agenda for the afternoon? You going to walk up to the door and start kicking the crap out of Salami and his people?”

“That was my first plan of attack. You got a better one?” the soldier asked.

“Listen, no one respects how you roll more than me.”

“Glad to hear that.”

“But sooner or later this ‘biggest dick on the block’ routine of yours is going to get us in some real trouble.”

“Well, all right, then. Wait until I’ve breached the door.”

“Your funeral.”

“Not if you can help it, Kaino.”

“Here we go again...”

Bolan took the baseball out of the box he had received by courier and slid out of the car. He set the modified Pittsburg Pirates cap on his head and walked across the street toward Salami’s fortress of narcatude. He wore earth sandals, cargo shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. By his own admission Bolan looked like a total rube. The gangbanger watching the door was built like a sumo wrestler. His tracksuit was blinding white and he had an Army Ranger high and tight haircut. Zeta tattoos covered his throat. Bolan walked up and gave the door guard a happy wave. “Howdy!”

“Basta, gringo.”

Bolan tilted his head like a dog hearing a sound it didn’t recognize. “What?”

The doorman gave Bolan a pitying look. “Fuck off.”

Bolan stared at the door guard like he might start crying. “But...I...”

“Madre de Dios...” The gangbanger rolled his eyes. “Fuck off.”

Bolan dropped to one knee and drove his fist three inches below the gangbanger’s belt line.

The fat man slowly sagged as his bladder hemorrhaged. “Oh, God...”

Bolan’s uppercut ripped the guard into unconsciousness. The soldier took out his Beretta 93-R. He gave the security camera the middle finger and then gave it a 3-round burst. The security camera burst apart. Bolan took a moment to take an indelible marker out of his pocket and wrote “El Hombre” on the fatman’s forehead.

Kaino shouted in Bolan’s earpiece. “You sick fuck!”

“Bank on it, Kaino.”

Dim sounds of consternation occurred behind the security door. Bolan pushed a thumbnail-size lozenge of plastic explosive into the lock and jammed a detonator pin into the mix. He took out his phone and hit an app.

“Fire in the hole!” Bolan pressed the icon and a fat chunk of fire left the doorknob in ruins. He pulled the pin on a grenade. “Any time, Kaino.”

Bolan kicked the door. Rage-faced gangbangers pulling guns confronted him. Rage turned to horror as the grenade clattered to the floor at their feet. The soldier waved and stepped back outside around the doorway. The sting-ball grenade detonated to the screams of the blunt-trauma beaten. He pulled the pin on a flash-bang and tossed it in. The foyer flashed with several thousand candlepowers of light and an Olympian thunder crack of sound.

Bolan stepped inside.

The sensory overloaded gangbangers were barely aware as Bolan put the mark of El Hombre on their foreheads. Kaino charged in with guns drawn and took in the scene. “You fascinate me.”

Bolan moved toward the stairs. The charging Zeta thugs had been stupid enough to leave the steel security gate to the stair open behind them. Bolan shouted up the stairs. “Yo! Ham-slice! Let’s talk!”

A torrent of Spanish insults echoed down the stairs. Bolan lobbed a sting-ball grenade up to the second-story landing. He stepped back as the cloud of rubber buckshot partially expanded back down the stairs. Bolan followed it with a flash-bang and the stairwell turned into the Norse god Thor’s personal thunder tunnel. “On my six, Kaino.”

Bolan took the steps three at a time.

A gunman crawled across the floor, blind and stunned, with his AK abandoned. Bolan gave him a lash across the left kidney with the slide of his Beretta to keep him honest and moved toward Salami’s inner sanctum. Kaino reached the second floor and kept his weapons trained behind them.

“Kaino,” Bolan called. “Give me a quick sweep.”

Kaino swept the stripped offices. “Empty!” He gave the steel door at the end of the hall a significant look. “They’ve gone all safety room on us. Probably calling in reinforcements.”

Bolan concurred and walked up to the steel door.

“What are you going to do?”

Bolan dramatically pulled out a short cylinder of flexible charge and made a fist. He put the cylinder between his middle and ring fingers and held it up to the security camera like a high explosive middle finger.

“Here we go...” Kaino muttered.

Bolan gave the hapless video device a 3-round burst from the Beretta, pressed the adhesive side of the explosive against the door lock and stuck in the detonator pin. “Fire in the hole.”

Bolan pressed the app on his phone and flexible charge cut a blackened crescent around the lock. The crack of the HE died as the soldier came to a decision. “Kaino, I need Salami alive. I’m going to try to take him. If it all goes to shit, you do what you have to do.”

Kaino gave Bolan a hard look. “All right.”

The soldier ejected his magazine of hollowpoint bullets and slapped in twenty-one rounds of less lethal ammo. In Bolan’s experience rubber bullets had a pretty dismal track record unless they came in shotgun slug sizes or buckshot-size swarms. At 21 grains, the 9 mms Bolan was loading were basically like hitting someone with a Gummi bear that had been on the shelf a few months too long. Of course they were coming in at 800 feet per second and the Beretta 93-R did have the advantage of pumping them out in 3-round bursts.

Bolan kicked the door and stepped aside.

A double-barrel went off like dynamite and two ARs burned their magazines in seconds and pinged open on empty.

The soldier stepped in.

A Zeta gangbanger screamed and charged, wielding his spent rifle by the barrel like a club. Bolan gave him three bursts from the Beretta and dropped him clutching his ribs. Another gangbanger stared stupidly with his sawed-off shotgun broken open, trying to pluck out the smoking shells. Two bursts or rubber bullets below the belt buckle left the gangster sagging and wetting himself.

Kaino came through the door.

Salami literally cartwheeled at Bolan, who put a burst into his ribs. Salami’s foot scythed the Beretta out of Bolan’s hands. The soldier ducked the ensuing heel kick by a hair and backpedaled.

It had been a long time since someone had tried to kick a gun out of Bolan’s hand, and the last would-be Bruce Lee who had tried it had received lead for his trouble. Salami grinned and slowly began to dance from side to side to Brazilian rhythms only he could hear. By the size of the man’s pupils Bolan suspected Salami was drugged up and feeling no pain. “How do you like that, ese?”

He shot a smug grin at the cop. “Hey, Kaino! How’s your chin?”

Kaino cocked his revolvers.

Salami howled in most likely meth-fueled glee. “Gonna do your little gringo friend like I did you, Kaino! Except worse!”

“Yo! Hombre!” Kaino leveled his weapons. “Let me grease this Falkland Island craving little prick once and for all!”

Salami shrieked in nationalistic outrage. “That’s the Islas Malvinas!”

Bolan watched Salami’s feet. “We came here to talk.”

Salami turned purple as he danced. “Talk? Fuck talk! Go ahead! Go for your second gun! You watch what happens! You want a talk with me, you gotta earn it! Show me something, puto!”

Bolan held up his hands in peace. “I told you I came to talk.”

“¡Maricón!” Salami spun into another blur and his heel scythed for Bolan’s temple. The soldier snatched off his cap by the bill and slapped it into the oncoming foot. Salami screamed as his talus bone cracked. His spinning kick turned into a spinout and he hit the floor in an ugly pinwheel of limbs. He screamed again as Bolan whipped his hat against his elbow.

Kaino stared in wonderment. “What the fuck?”

Bolan tossed Kaino his Pirates cap. Kaino caught it on the muzzle of his left-hand gun. He fondled the cap with his right trigger finger and stopped as he found the packet of impact material sewn high inside the brow. “What the hell?”

“Slap cap.”

Kaino grinned from ear to ear. “Oh, I gotta have one! Tell me they make these in Miami Heat!”

Bolan kept his eyes on the crying, cracked-ankle-hugging Salami on the floor and recovered his Beretta. “That can be arranged.”

Kaino sailed the cap back at Bolan. “Sweet!”

Bolan caught it and sat on his heels beside the gangbanger. “So, Baloney? Braunschweiger? Headcheese? What was your processed meat name again?”

“Fuck you!”

Bolan cocked back the cap in his hand.

“No more hat!”

“How much hat you receive is up to you, Summer Sausage.”

“I want my lawyer...” Salami mewled.

“No lawyers here. Just you, me, Kaino and God.”

“Oh, God...”

“And God’s busy. So he sent me,” Bolan said.

“Who are you!”

“You tell me.”

Salami gulped, shuddered and went from pale to green with the telltale nausea of broken bones.

“Don’t you puke on my shoes,” Bolan warned. “Now, who am I?”

“You’re El Hombre...” Salami whispered.

“That’s right. So I have one question for you. Who’s supplying you with codeine?”

Salami blinked. “What?”

“Cocodrilo’s main ingredient is codeine. Codeine is a controlled substance that requires a physician’s prescription to obtain and a pharmaceutical lab to manufacture. Cocodrilo needs codeine in bulk for production. Tell me who’s supplying it and I’ll leave you alone.”

“I don’t know!”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Bolan asked.

“I mean I don’t know!”

Bolan packed the brim of his cap into his palm several times for emphasis. “Last chance, Lunch Meat.”

“No one! I mean I don’t know!”

“You don’t cook it?” Bolan asked.

“No way, man!”

Bolan frowned.

“Man, only the junkies cook it! And they’re ripping off drugstores and burglarizing their grandma’s medicine cabinets and shit! We get it prepackaged!”

Bolan regarded the hobbled, panic-attacking drug dealer at his feet for long moments.

Kaino waved his revolvers. “You believe this shit?”

“Do you?”

“Well, that is the thing,” Kaino admitted. “The labs we’ve found aren’t set up for distribution. Just junkies cooking themselves to death and anyone who can pay. There’s too much product and not enough producers. Give him the hat again. Just to verify.”

Salami shrieked and clutched his ankle and elbow. “No more hat!”

“All right, then one last question.” Bolan leaned in close. “Who distributes to you?”

Salami shuddered. “Oh, God...”

CHAPTER FOUR

Safehouse

“So it’s a shell game.” Kaino bit off half a Cuban sandwich of his own making and chewed meditatively. “And the game is where’s the codeine at.”

Bolan also ate a sandwich, and cleaned his Beretta on the kitchen table. Rubber bullets made for interesting bore cleaning. “That seems to be the size of it. I just can’t see any underground local manufacturer.”

“What about a mainstream manufacturer?” Kaino suggested. “Keeping double books and diverting the goods to the streets.”

“I have people on that angle, but it’s not my first guess.”

“You think the Russians are smuggling it in?”

Bolan had been giving that a lot of thought. “Hard to imagine the Russian mafia smuggling codeine across the Atlantic just so local croc-heads can cook it at pocket change prices. Hard to see the profit margin being worth it, much less the logistics of the endeavor.”

“You think it’s someplace a lot closer to home.”

“Whoever is doing this is doing it through the Latino gangs in Florida. That’s our connection until something better pops up. We pound them until something breaks open.”

“Listen, man, I do admire your style.”

“Thanks. But?”

“I mean, I love hammering the bad guys with the semiauto Pez dispensers.”

“Who doesn’t?”

Kaino laughed. “Yeah, but all the pencil erasers at hostile velocity, flash-bangs and tear gas in the world aren’t going to break this organization. This can’t last. We’re about to take it up to distributor level. Man, I just don’t how much longer your less-than-lethal approach is going to work.”

“I agree. We keep playing it like this, the bad guys are going to start thinking we get squeamish at the sight of blood. Assuming his people haven’t already beheaded him, Salami is most likely going to snort himself a sinus load of chemical courage, lose his fear of the hat and want some payback.”

“And, so?”

“The fact is, Kaino, we’re going to be drenched in blood and bodies before this one is over. Like up to our eyeballs. What do you say?”

“Well, since you ask, I say let’s kick this pig and when it’s over the Pink Champale is on you.”

“Pink Champale?”

“What’s the matter, El Hombre, you afraid to see how the other half lives?”

Bolan had drunk everything from cobra venom sacs swimming in cognac in an opium den in Vietnam to fermented mare’s milk in a yurt in Mongolia. He was afraid that Pink Champale might just test him. “Done.”

“Well, now we’re cooking with gas!”

“Any other concerns?”

“Well, you’re El Hombre, international ass-kicker of mystery, and you might as well have dropped in from Mars. I suspect you’ll drop off the planet again with equal facility. But me? Everybody knows me, and everybody knows where I live. You know what I’m saying?”

Bolan nodded. “You’re worried about your family.”

“Yeah, I am.”

“Maybe you should call them.”

Kaino frowned. “Yeah, maybe I should.” He took out his cell and punched a preset number. A smile broke out across his face at the sound of his wife’s voice. “Che, mi amor. How are you and the kids?” The master sergeant’s face slowly went blank as his wife spoke to him. “You’re on a plane?” Kaino listened for long moments. He took a deep breath and let it out. “I love you, Marisol. Send me a postcard when you can.” Kaino cut the connection. “You son of a bitch.”

Bolan stared at Kaino speculatively. “You’re not going to start crying, are you?”

“My Marisol, she told me she couldn’t call me, and was told not to tell me where she and the kids are headed.”

“I don’t know where they’re headed, either, Kaino, and if this goes bad and we’re on the bad end of the blackjacks, then that’s for the best. Should the absolute worst happen on this one, your family will be taken care of regardless. I can tell you a gal I know picked out someplace very nice for them. In the Caribbean, all-inclusive and all expenses paid. I know your family is worried about you, but what I can tell you is this. In a few hours they’ll be worried about you in a tropical paradise.”

Bolan’s computer beeped. “What’s that?” Kaino asked.

The soldier frowned as his laptop’s screen flicked into the security suite screen. It was almost redundant in this modern age, but someone had cut the landline to the safehouse. “Kaino, try to call anybody on your phone.”

Kaino hit Redial to his wife and scowled. “I got nothing. I’m talking zero bars.”

“Jamming cell phones seems a little out of Salami’s pay grade.”

“Yeah, him and the next few Zetas up the food pyramid, as well. What do you think?”

“You’re about to get your bloodbath, Kaino. Gear up.”

Kaino checked the loads in both of his revolvers and picked up one of the semiauto shotguns. He clapped in a drum with a piece of red tape on it that meant it was loaded with lead. Bolan took up an MP-5/10 submachine gun. It looked like a Heckler & Koch that had been going to the gym. Bolan was operating on urban, U.S. soil. He wanted knockdown power without tearing up the neighborhood. The “10” stood for 10 mm and his weapon was loaded with subsonic, truncated cone, flathead bullets. Every light in the house went out as someone cut the power.

Window glass shattered as bullets tracked in a blind search-and-destroy swath through the room. “Shit!”

Bolan racked the bolt on his weapon. “Here they come.”

The front door flew off its hinges beneath a hostile boot. Bolan and Kaino both closed their eyes and stuck their fingers in their ears as the flash-bang wired to the door went off. Bolan moved at a crouch to the hallway with Kaino on his six. The lead invader had stepped directly into the flash-bang’s audio-visual assault. The attacker didn’t fall, but he shook his head to clear it. That bespoke some training. Bolan aimed down the hall and put three rounds into the man’s chest. The fact that he didn’t fall signaled body armor. Bolan raised his aim and put a bullet through the shadowy figure’s head.

The soldier hit the tactical light attached to his weapon and let the next man in have 7,000 candela on strobe function. In the pulsing light show Bolan saw a man in a coverall, armor and night-vision gear. As the gunner shot high and wide, the Executioner put a bullet between the lenses of the man’s solarized NVGs.

Suddenly everything was silent.

Dogs began barking and the distant sounds of an alarm began to manifest themselves on the street outside. Thunder clapped as the flash-bang wired to the kitchen door went off. The enemy played it smart and didn’t immediately rush in. Bolan took the opportunity to dive through the bedroom door and roll up with his weapon leveled. Outside a man shouted, “Go! Go! Go!”

The interior walls of the old bungalow were 1970s construction and might as well have been paper-thin. Bolan had taken note of where the kitchen door would be in relation to the bedroom wall. He deliberately burned the remaining twenty-five rounds in his magazine on full-auto through the bedroom wall and into the kitchen behind. Men screamed as Bolan vectored his bullets in below the waist.

The soldier slapped in a fresh magazine and slammed the bolt home. “Kaino!”

The master sergeant didn’t have to be told twice. Kaino entered the kitchen with his semiautomatic shotgun booming on rapid fire. Bolan took Kaino’s six and knocked down the next two men who came through the front door with head shots.

Everything went quiet again.

Bolan spoke softly. “Kaino?”

“I have four men down in the kitchen.”

“I have four down in the hall.”

“You figure a pair of two-man teams, front and back?”

“Plus the sniper, and command and control should be very nearby if not on the scene.”

“I want that sniper’s ass.”

Bolan eyed the master sergeant’s crouching bulk in the gloom. “You hit?”

“No, but my sandwich press is.” Kaino growled.

The soldier moved silently to the kitchen entry. He stared at Kaino’s perforated kitchen appliance lying among the broken glass and shattered crockery. Kaino wasn’t exaggerating. His sandwich press would never panini again. “Bastards,” Bolan agreed. “Let’s take them.”

“I’m figuring it has to be the roof catty-corner across the street. It’s the only two-story on the block and it has a For Sale sign.”

Bolan’s sniper instincts told him Kaino was most likely right.

“So do we play it?” Kaino asked.

“You could stick your head out.”

“And you’ll pop whoever blows my head off?” Kaino said.

“Yeah.”

Kaino shook his head and racked his bolt on a fresh drum. “Cover me.”

“Go.”

Kaino burst through the kitchen door and out into the street. His shotgun roared as he put blasts of buckshot through the facing windows. Bolan followed, scanning with his optic. He caught no movement on the roof or in any of the windows. Lights suddenly blazed on the side driveway, and a van barreled onto the street. Kaino put three rounds into the grille but round-lead buck wasn’t stopping the oncoming vehicle.

“Kaino!” Bolan shouted.

The cop’s shotgun racked open on empty. The van plowed straight for Kaino. The master sergeant dropped his shotgun on its sling and slapped leather for his six-guns. The twin, four-inch Smiths rolled in his hands in rapid double-action fire. Glass geysered from the windshield as round after round of .357 Magnum hollowpoints punched through. Bolan had no kill shot with Kaino standing in the headlights. He flicked his weapon to full-auto and put a burst into the rear driver’s-side tire. The tire exploded and the van fishtailed wildly past Kaino and stopped hard against a telephone pole.

“You all right?” Bolan called.

Kaino’s hands shook slightly as he fished a pair of speedloaders out of his pockets. “Reloading!”

“Covering!” Bolan scanned the street as Kaino approached the van. He peered in the driver’s window and went around to the passenger’s side. He opened the door and a body slid out. “Clear!”

Bolan kept his eyes peeled as he trotted over. Kaino had laid down some serious carnage. The driver looked as only a human could who had taken several .357 rounds to the face. Only his seat belt kept the dead assassin upright. There was no one else inside the vehicle. In the back of the van were a pair of chairs and surveillance equipment. Bolan walked around the steaming grille and joined Kaino, who stood over the expired sniper. A great deal of the assassin’s blood was coagulating all over an FN P90 personal defensive weapon. The sixteen-inch long civilian barrel, the sound suppressor mounted on the muzzle and the electro-optical sight gave the personal defensive weapon a distinctly offensive weapon aura.

“Did he say anything?”

“Yeah, he mumbled some kind of Euro-trash nonsense, but then he had the bad taste to go all ambient temperature on me.” Kaino shook his head disgustedly as the bloody froth bubbles from his victim’s chest wounds and mouth slowly subsided. “You want to try CPR? You go right ahead.”

“What kind of Euro-trash babble?”

“I don’t know!” Nearly being van-rammed seemed to have rattled the master sergeant. “I can tell you it sure as hell wasn’t Spanish!”

“Did it sound Russian?”

“Well, what does Russian sound like?”

Bolan slowly enunciated a choice phrase he had learned in Moscow that would have raised Kaino’s eyebrow. “Did it sound anything like that?”

“No, and don’t think I don’t know you said something totally suck-ass, either!”

“Italian? French?” Bolan tried. “Scandinavian?”

“Oh, and like I know how to pick those out of a dying hit man Euro-trash crowd!” Kaino frowned mightily. “And I know you can, but I’m just Miami-Dade master sergeant who works for a living. I’m not an international man of mystery.”

“You notice anything interesting, Kaino?”

“Yeah, these guys aren’t local.” Kaino spit off to one side. “They aren’t even Latino. They’re pros, and I’m definitely thinking we got made coming out of Papi’s Tea Room.”

CHAPTER FIVE

FBI Miami Office

Kaino took in the gleaming, efficient and tasteful Federal Bureau of Investigation surroundings. “Swanky.”

“Heads up,” Bolan advised. The FBI special agent striding down the hallway toward them wore a very purposeful expression her face. It was a pleasing face to look upon. She was African American, but her face bespoke far more of Africa than America and her skin was very dark. She managed to be petite and leggy at the same time, and the cut of her relaxed hair and her navy pantsuit and the true gray of her blouse and shoes showed her off to maximum effect.

“Nice,” Kaino opined.

Bolan agreed wholeheartedly. He put on his most amiable game face and held out his hand. “Special Agent.”

Despite the special agent’s diminutive stature, she had a grip like a clam. “Sophina Savacool.”

“Cooper,” Bolan said. “And this is—”

Special Agent Savacool had a smile that could light up an FBI foyer and did. Though at the moment it was tinged with a little bit of bemusement. “Oh, I assure you, Mr. Cooper, Master Sergeant Gadiel Kaino’s reputation precedes him.”

Kaino’s massive mitt engulfed the special agent’s. “My pleasure, Agent Savacool. In all my years in law enforcement this is my first visit to the FBI Miami office. Thank you for seeing us.”

Agent Savacool’s bemusement turned up a charming notch. “Oh, I was the one told to see you, but then again, when legends of Miami law enforcement, and—” Savacool ran her eye up and down Bolan “—a mystery man go on a midnight rampage in the city streets, it’s funny how I end up being the one sent to the meet and greet. At least the call said it was you. Is there a reason I shouldn’t run you both in by the way?”

Bolan put on his most winning smile. “I mean absolutely no disrespect, Special Agent, but running me in would be...how can I put it? Problematic for you. And Kaino’s with me.”

“Oh, I got the memo.” Savacool’s bemused smile turned into a genuine smirk. “And I have never seen a government memo shorter, more distinct, much less more anomalous.”

“Savacool?” Kaino frowned. “Is that like Mandinka or something?”

“German Dutch,” the agent replied.

Kaino scowled. “What’s a soul sister like you doing with a name like that?”

Savacool frowned at Kaino and jerked her head at Bolan. “What’s a pulsating piece of Puerto Rican pulchritude like you doing working for the man?”

“Well...because...” Kaino grinned. “He’s the man!”

Savacool stared up at Bolan and her eyes went predatory as she did some math. “Well, bless my soul! El Hombre, in the flesh, and in my foyer. You know, there is a fascinating file I read about a guy with that handle. Seems he’s torn up the streets of our southern neighbor and ripped the cartels a new rectum on more than one occasion.”

Bolan had dealt with more federal agents than he’d had hot dinners. Far too many when they were exposed to him went straight into bureaucratic bluster mode. Bolan gave Savacool full marks. She was absolutely charming while she was trying to figure him out, and was waiting to have all the facts before she ripped his throat out. “Special Agent Savacool, I—”

“Call me Sophie—my friends do.” The special agent handed Bolan her business card.

Bolan grinned. “Sophie? I had to pull a lot of strings to make sure that FBI forensics got the bodies from the shootout last night, and Master Sergeant Kaino lost some genuine cred with his own people for going along with it.”

Savacool nodded without an ounce of commitment. “I feel you.”

“I know the circumstances are highly unusual, but I need a complete rundown on the suspects.”

“They’re like you, mysterious. But follow me.”

Savacool led them down a series of hallways. Kaino whispered low at Bolan’s side. “What’s pulchritude?”

“It means the she thinks you’re a fine figure of man, Kaino.”

Kaino puffed up with pride. “I am that.”

FBI personnel congregating in the hallways regarded Bolan and Kaino with grave suspicion and barely constrained disapproval. A few shot Savacool sympathetic looks. Word had spread. The woman led Bolan and Kaino into an empty conference room. The soldier and the cop took seats at a long table while Savacool cued up the flat screen on the wall and a laptop. “These are your playmates.” Autopsy photos of ten men in various states of ventilation appeared on the screen. “Your assailants’ fingerprints appear in none of our available databases. All of them were armed with sound-suppressed FN P90 Personal Defensive weapons. One of the weapons had been modified for sharpshooting. Their clothing, NVG and body armor were off the rack and second- or thirdhand. We’re working on it, but the equipment has a very sophisticated level of sterility. I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”

Savacool gave Bolan and Kaino a look. “I don’t suppose either of you have anything that might shed a light on things?”

“Kaino got a few words out of the sharpshooter just before he expired. He thought he said something in a European language. We’ve ruled out Spanish, and he didn’t think it was Russian, which leads me to exclude any of the Slavic language groups.”

Kaino nodded. “Yeah, what Cooper said.”

“That is of interest. We’re checking dental records, but none of them match anything in our databases, either. However the driver of the van was a light-skinned black, and he had two fillings, both resin composites.”

Kaino gave Bolan a searching look.

“A lot of the European countries have banned silver amalgam fillings,” Bolan explained. “The United States and Russia haven’t. Silver amalgam is one of the cheapest routes to go with dental fillings, and soldiers don’t usually spend a lot of money on cosmetic surgery or trying to go green. It goes a long way toward your Euro-trash merc theory, which by the way I agree with.”

Kaino just stared. “Man, who the hell are you?”

Savacool pointed her finger at Kaino. “I’m glad you asked that question first.”

“Oh, it isn’t the first time I’ve asked, and I don’t think it’s going to be the last.”

Bolan stayed on subject. “I gather we have nothing on the van?”

“Reported stolen two days ago, and the surveillance gear and electronics inside had the model numbers and identifiers scrubbed. The mounting screws and the holes for the equipment are shiny-new. I suspect this entire operation against you was mounted within the last forty-eight hours and was pro all the way. And now that we have established that you’re El Hombre—” Savacool rolled her eyes “—it starts to make one hell of whole lot more sense.”

“Can you give me anything?”

“Well, you two seem to have a habit of shooting people in the face, but we ran your sharpshooter through the facial recognition software and looked for a match in the database. Interpol gave us this image—it’s a 75 percent likelihood of a match.”

A grainy security camera picture dated over a year ago showed a blurred image of what might have been the sharpshooter. He was snarling and had to have whipped his head. Bolan stared long and hard at the crystal-clear picture of the weapon in his hand and spitting brass in what looked to be a very posh living room. “SIG SG 551 short assault rifle. Swiss.”

Savacool glanced at her file on the desk. “Wow...you are good.”

“It’s an awfully swanky piece,” Bolan admitted. “Where was the picture taken?”

“In Mexico, during the assassination of Christo Bruno.”

Bolan searched his mental files. “He was Gulf Coast, wasn’t he?”

“Bruno was actually the head of the Gulf Coast’s armed, or La Resistencia wing. The attack on his hacienda in Matamoros last year was positively surgical. He had a heavy security presence on the premises and they along with Bruno and every other person present, including women and children and the hired help were gunned down. The forensic evidence the federales shared with us imply that the attackers took no losses. In fact the Mexican State police in Tamaulipas did a lot of angry muttering about suspecting it was Navy SEALs or Delta Force.”

Kaino leaned back in his chair. “If Bruno had his place wired, how come only one pic?”

Bolan eyed the shooter up on the screen. “The attackers knew where the security cameras were. The shooter must have been forced past that camera during the firefight, or he hadn’t knocked it out yet.” Bolan turned to Savacool. “I gather the house was stripped of security?”

“All the security systems were destroyed. Bruno reached his safe room, but they breached it with explosives and gutted its security suite. We have this pic because Bruno’s security system had a wireless backup and transmitted to an outside data storage facility.”

“There was nothing from any of the other cameras?”

“Oh, there was plenty. Pictures of the grounds and perimeter. All show everything right as rain until they suddenly start going dead. The outside cameras were taken out with precision rifle fire.”

“The attackers didn’t leave anything behind at all?” Kaino asked.

“The only things they left behind were bullets and bodies. They even took the time to clean up their spent brass.”

“I’m going to need everything you have on this Bruno character and what he was up to for the year before his killing.”

Savacool held out a blue flash drive with the FBI logo on it. “I figured you might say that. It also has contact information for Mexican officials pertinent to the investigation. The drive also contains everything Forensics has so far on your boys down in the morgue.”

“Thanks, I appreciate that.”

“So what are you going to do now, Mr. Cooper?”

“Oh, I don’t know, just be myself.”

Kaino snorted in amusement.

Savacool was not amused. “You know you can’t just run around pulling a Terminator in the streets of Miami.”

Bolan shrugged. “I needed a few ass-kickings to start busting things open.”

“You do realize, Mr. Cooper, that the FBI doesn’t usually think in terms of ass-kickings to bust things open?”

“Yeah, but admit it, you wish they did.”

“Mr. Cooper, from what I’ve read, I will freely admit that it would be more fun than a barrel of monkeys to roll with you, throwing local, state and federal law out the window and laying down the hurt on the bad guys.” She shot Kaino a look. “And apparently armed with a ‘get out of jail free’ card issued from God on High to boot. But you have to understand, you—”

Bolan made his decision. “You want to?”

Savacool’s face went uncharacteristically blank. “Do I want to what?”

“Would you like to roll with me, Special Agent Savacool?”

“You have got to be kidding.”

“I can arrange it—” Bolan snapped his fingers “—like that.”

“I’m on an open-ended, paid, consulting leave of absence,” Kaino confirmed. “It’s been pretty educational.”

Savacool just stared.

“Sophie,” Bolan asked, “do you speak Spanish?”

“Spanish, French, Russian and I’m currently taking courses in Arabic at the Miami University Middletown campus.”

“Oh, she’s good.” Kaino nodded happily. “Dude, we totally want her on the team. Sophie, you want to join the home team?”

“The winning team?” Bolan added.

“I...” Savacool was literally at a loss for words. “I’d have to take that up with my superiors.”

Bolan took out a blank business card and wrote two phone numbers on it. “You can direct any questions you may have to the top number.”

Savacool took the card. She was FBI and she knew the Washington, D.C., 202 area code on the first one like an old friend. “And the bottom one?”

“You can call me anytime.”

Savacool nodded, then she stood and left the conference room.

Kaino nodded judiciously. “She likes you.”

Bolan took the flash drive and plugged it into his phone. “Who doesn’t?”

“Salami?” Kaino suggested.

“He just doesn’t know me well enough yet.” Bolan’s phone peeped at him. The Farm’s own cybernetic wunderkind, Akira Tokaido, had developed the phone’s security suite personally, and Tokaido’s security applications examined the flash drive for bugs, malware or any kind of FBI shenanigans and proclaimed the files were clean. Bolan hit Send and the info went straight to Kurtzman back in the Computer Room in Virginia. “Let’s go.”

Kaino fell into formation with Bolan. They were a pair of large and dangerous-looking men, and FBI personnel unconsciously moved to get out of their way.

Kaino sighed as they reached the foyer and his FBI adventure came to a close. “You think Savacool will join the winning team?”

“Definitely.”

The Miami afternoon heat hit them like a wall as they stepped out of the FBI office and crossed the parking lot. “What now?” Kaino asked.

“I have people processing the information Agent Savacool gave us. They’ll contact me when they have anything useful.” Bolan glanced up at the sun and knew it was about noon. “You know a good place to eat?”

“I know a place in Little San Juan that makes goat stew like murder, man.”

“On me.”

“Cool.”

They stopped in front of Bolan’s ride. The shiny black Signature L Lincoln Town Car had been violated. Bolan took in the almost childlike graffito of a crocodile painted in electric-pink spray paint across his hood. Kaino spit in disgust. Some genuine dread crept into his voice. “I told you he’d be coming for you.”

The noontime, midsummer Miami air was brutally hot, heavy and still. Bolan sniffed it. “You smell that?”

Kaino’s nose wrinkled and his face made a fist of disgust. “Yeah, I smell it, and I told you! Didn’t I?”

Bolan slowly nodded. “You did.” Bolan tasted the turgid, humid air again—the two entwined scents were unmistakable. One was the acrid, burned metal by way of nail-polish remover smell of iodine.

The other was the stench of rotting flesh.

Bolan punched in Savacool’s business card number from memory. She answered on the first ring, and had apparently memorized Bolan’s number, as well. “What’s happening, Cooper?”

“I’m going to need your parking-lot surveillance video, specifically the south side, from within the last forty-five minutes.”

“I have been told to give you my full cooperation. However my superiors have been adamant that I report all contacts with you.”

“I feel you,” Bolan replied.

Savacool snorted. “Please state the nature of your emergency, Mr. Cooper.”

“Cocosino just tagged my ride.”

Every ounce of fun dropped from Savacool’s voice. “Oh my God...”

CHAPTER SIX

Little San Juan, Miami

The goat stew was excellent, and the restaurant’s little patio was shady and cool, but only Bolan seemed to be truly enjoying it. Kaino and Savacool regarded Bolan gravely over their plates. The agent shook her head. “I’ll give you credit, Cooper. You know how to pick your friends, but you sure know how to make some serious enemies.”

Bolan sopped up goat gravy with an immense chunk of Puerto Rican water bread. “They’re complementary talents.”

“Well, I have to give you this, too. You gave Miami law enforcement our first picture of Cocosino.”

Bolan watched the FBI security camera footage again on his phone. The video clip wasn’t much to go on. A man in filthy black jeans, filthy black combat boots and a filthy black hoodie with a baseball cap underneath that hid his face had walked up, tagged Bolan’s Town Car and walked away. Gloves and a black bandanna and dark glasses completed his camouflage. It was of interest that Cocosino had violated Bolan’s car in broad daylight in an FBI parking lot. “You don’t mess with a man’s ride.”

“That’s just wrong,” Kaino agreed.

Bolan watched the video again. The FBI had a swell suite of cameras covering all the angles. “I’m figuring five-seven? He couldn’t be more than 150 pounds dripping wet.”

“We ran identification software on the tape. The computer puts him at about those measurements.”

Kaino sipped his coffee with little pleasure. “Don’t be fooled by his size. That junkie piece of shit has left a trail of bodies across Miami.”

Bolan wasn’t selling the killer short. He had found out long ago that it wasn’t the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog. Worst of all was one with the gift of emptiness. A killer who didn’t care was as dangerous as they came.

“Sophie, you say he does most of his damage with a machete?”

“That’s his preferred MO,” Savacool confirmed. “But he’s also made some serious mayhem with a .44 Magnum when he’s had multiple targets.”

“Does he take heads?”

“You’d think he would,” Kaino muttered. “That’s real popular with the Mexican cartels these days, but no, our boy prefers to chop his victims beyond recognition. Even without the stench, everyone recognizes a Cocosino crime scene. What I want to know is, how does he pull his vanishing act looking and smelling like that?”

“Probably goes back and lies in his grave until the next job comes along,” Savacool said. “Man’s a goddamn ghoul if you ask me.”

“You’re not far off the mark,” Bolan said. “This guy doesn’t go out. He doesn’t have friends. Wherever he’s holed up is most likely not much more than a hole. Cocosino only lives for three things—to kill, get paid for it and fix. He most likely has a handler who transports him and brings him food, drugs and jobs.”

“And who the hell would handle a zombie like him?” Kaino asked.

“Someone just like him, but can still pass for human at first glance.”

“Jesus,” Savacool said. “That’s the most horrible life I can imagine.”

Bolan nodded. He and Kaino had smelled Cocosino, and if the assassin was really was addicted to krokodil, then some part of him probably relished the idea of being killed and ending his suffering. Savacool was also right about another thing. After a year of krokodil addiction and paying for it with murder, Cocosino was now more ghoul than man in more ways than one.

Now Bolan and Kaino were his prime targets.

“What now?” Kaino inquired. “The safehouse is trashed and definitely not safe. Unless you want to go back and let them take another swing at us.”

“I doubt they’d try it again, particularly since they saw us visit the FBI office. Then again, our enemies don’t know where we are at the moment, and I want to keep it that way. I have my people working up the info Sophie was kind enough to give us. I want to take the files on the Zetas you have and the info we got out of Salami and work up our next plan of attack. Like you said last night, we’re taking this up to the distributor level.”

“Ass-kickings to bust things loose?” Savacool mused.

“I offered you a spot on the team. First string.”

“We’ll get to that in a minute. The good news is I think I may be in a position to help you on the safehouse front. You have Cocosino after you, and he is as gutter level as it gets. On top of that you were attacked by some kind of very professional international hit squad. Whoever is pulling all this together has a pretty extensive reach.” Savacool grinned. “But I doubt they know about my great-aunt’s place in the suburbs.”

Kaino smiled happily. “She’s on the team!”

“Actually, after the tagging in the parking lot my superiors have ordered me to, and I quote, ‘wear you two like underwear.’ I’m your babysitter in Miami as of now and for the duration.” Savacool gave Bolan a very frank look. “Mr. Cooper, that was one fascinating phone number you gave us, I must admit. The Miami office’s cooperation with you has been given a very high sense of urgency. But I expect you to be honest with me at all times. You don’t pull any more James Bond shit without telling me first. We may have to cooperate with you, but that cooperation could quickly become...how shall I put it? Less than enthusiastic?”

“Agent Savacool, I understand the position of you and your office completely. I can’t tell you who I am or reveal most of my sources. But I can tell you this. We’re on the same team. You’re at every meeting. Your input on investigation and strategy is not only welcomed but encouraged. I have no authority over you. My only requirement is that in a combat situation you let me lead, and I say that simply because I have the most experience at it. The second you can’t hang with me or my methods, you can walk and report me to your superiors, no hard feelings.”

“He gave me the same deal,” Kaino affirmed.

“You know, I thought for sure you were going to get mad.”

“He doesn’t get mad.” Kaino resumed attacking his goat stew with gusto. “He gets all spooky and shit, and then he goes all Action Jackson.”

Bolan smiled. That was one way of putting it.

Savacool wrote an address on a napkin. “It’s on the edge of the Everglades. The roads get a little twisty and dark, but most map apps can find it.”

Kaino looked up from his plate. “You’re not coming with us?”

“I need to report in, and pick up a few things. I’ll meet up with you tonight.” Savacool turned to leave. “The key is under the gnome.”

Bolan and Kaino watched Savacool walk to her car. Kaino frowned. Bolan frowned in return. “I thought you liked her.”

“I do.”

“Then what up?”

Kaino was doing some kind of Puerto Rican mathematics as he watched Savacool’s chiseled calves. “She’s awfully damn skinny.”

“So?”

“So we’re spending the night.”

“And?”

Despite having mostly demolished a heaping plate of goat stew, the master sergeant’s right hand reflexively went to his belly. “You think she can cook?”

Miami Beach

S ALAMI POPPED MORE painkillers, washed them down with half a glass of wine and tried not to vomit at the stench pervading his beach house retreat. It radiated off the visitors sitting on his couch. Through his haze of pain, he was thinking he would have to have the sofa disinfected. He might just have to have the whole house fumigated. He might just have to move.

Salami’s guest of honor hid his features under a hoodie, hat, sunglasses and a bandanna. A woman who looked like a Latina vampire-stripper who had been buried alive for a hundred years sat beside him. From what little Salami had gleaned, she was Cocosino’s “handler,” and few steps farther from the grave than he was. She wore a black turtleneck sweater despite the heat.

Salami tossed back the rest of his glass and poured himself another. “So, you saw him? You saw El Hombre?”

The wraparound dark glasses focused on the amber prescription bottle on the coffee table. Cocosino’s voice was a tuberculotic rasp. “What’s that? Percocet?”

“Yeah, doctor’s orders.”

A horrible sound came out from under the bandanna that Salami realized was laughter. “I got something that will make you feel a lot better.”

Salami cringed in horror. “No, man, I’m good. El Hombre? You saw him?”

“Saw him. Tagged him. I like him.”

“You like him?”

“You know, people think I’m just a degenerate junkie.”

Salami withheld comment.

“And I am a degenerate junkie, but I am not just a degenerate junkie.”

The gangbanger wanted more wine and drugs, but he didn’t want to appear weak. “Oh?”

“I think about things. I have lots of time to think. I’ve read the newspapers. I watch TV and heard what they’re saying on the street. I’ve listened to what you and others have told me.”

“Yeah?”

“There’s an El Hombre who’s rampaged through Mexico on several occasions.”

“I’ve heard that.”

Cocosino cocked his masked, rotting head in question. “Did you know the first time I fixed on krokodil, I bought it from you?”

Salami flinched so hard it hurt his cracked joints.

“Anyway, this El Hombre, I think he has a real problem with shedding innocent blood. He’s got a code. I watched him and Master Sergeant Kaino. It’s like some bad buddy movie. They have a code.”

“So what are you saying?”

“So I want to give them a surprise. Something they’re not going to like. Something they have no answer for.”

“Yeah?”

Cocosino turned his mummy-wrapped head. “Delilah.”

Delilah leaned forward, and the stench coming off her was unbearable. She slid a piece of paper across the coffee table. Salami stared at the laundry list. “¡Madre de Dios!”

“It’s not too much to ask,” Cocosino rasped. “Considering.”

“Okay, give me a day or two and—”

“I need it by tonight.”

Salami nearly strangled on his wine. “And what are you going to do with all this shit?”

“I’m going to give El Hombre something that will haunt his dreams, even if he survives it.”

“And how are you going to find him again?”

“There’s something in the paint I tagged his car with. Something that satellites can see and people can’t.”

Salami stared at the rotting killer on his couch. “You have a satellite watching El Hombre?”

Delilah smiled and spoke for the first time.

“No, but someone else who wants him dead does.”

West Miami

T HE KEY WAS UNDER the gnome.

Special Agent Savacool could cook. Kaino happily held out his plate for a second chicken-fried steak. “You know, I really like breakfast for dinner.”

“Most men do,” Savacool agreed. She seemed to appreciate men with hearty appetites. Her great-aunt’s abode was a solid, brick house of Shaker-style built in the housing boom after World War II. Savacool had kept with the clean simple lines of the builder but added all modern appurtenances. The river was close by. A pleasing breeze blew off it and Savacool had opened up the house to receive it. The houses on the winding lane were few and far apart, and none had fences. The streetlights were few, ancient and dim. Spanish moss hung from the huge live oaks in swaths of Southern Gothic glory.

Savacool smiled as Bolan finished his meal. “You like fried steak?”

“Haven’t had one since the last time I was in Argentina.”

Savacool cocked her head. “How do they do it?”

“Well, there’s no gravy or biscuits. They fry it in oil and squeeze lemons on it. Usually have French fries on the side.”

Savacool made a noise. “Savages.”

“They’ll put fried eggs on top if you ask.”

“Well, at least that’s progress.”

Kaino suddenly snapped his head up. “You smell that?”

Bolan snuffed the air. “What?”

Savacool’s face contracted in disgust. “Oh, yeah, I was in New York in 2010 for the blooming of the corpse flower. It just about knocked me off my feet. Nice nose, Kaino.”

“I’m a gourmet and a gourmand, man. My nose takes me where I need to go.” Kaino pulled one of his .357s.

Bolan caught the sent of rotting mammal on the breeze and what lay beneath it. He rose and pulled his Beretta. “Iodine. Cocosino is here.”

Kaino took out his second .357. “Go for the head. Nothing else will stop him.”

“No.” It sickened Bolan to say it, but Cocosino was one of their few active leads. “Take his legs off if you can. I want him alive, and if he really is a krokodil addict, twenty-four hours without a fix will leave him willing to tell us anything we want to know.”

Savacool pulled her .40-caliber FBI-issue Glock and checked the load by reflex. “Hardcore, Cooper.”

Bolan took in the architecture. “Fuse box in the basement?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s kill the lights before he does and call 9-1-1.” Bolan sniffed the air again. The stench was becoming more powerful. It was unfortunate that all the windows and doors were open. “Be careful coming back up. If he’s close enough to smell, he’ll be in the house in moments.”

Savacool ran at a crouch to kill the lights. Bolan and Kaino stayed low and reached into their gear bags.

Kaino sniffed the air and nearly gagged. “Jesus, it smells like a dead wildebeest rotting on the savannah!”

“Didn’t know you were a poet, Kaino.”

“Yeah, well, you know.” Kaino pulled his NVG on top of his head and nearly gagged again.

Bolan had been exposed to dead bodies that ranged from fresh to mummified and every shade in between. It had long ago lost any power over his nose or his stomach. But Kaino was right. The stench was so strong it was almost anomalous.

The lights cut out. Bolan and Kaino pulled down their NVGs. A second later the agent’s voice spoke softly at the top of the stairs. “Savacool.”

“Clear.”

Savacool crouched beside the kitchen island cradling an M-4 carbine.

Bolan tapped an icon on his phone. “Bear, I need satellite on my position, stat.”

“I thought you’d gone dark on the Savacool family estate?”

“Stat, Bear.”

“One second. Checking available satellites. Have one with window. Nonessential shore surveillance. Assuming priority...now.” Kurtzman’s voice rose in instant alarm. “Striker! Be advised! You are surrounded!”

“Show me.” Bolan’s screen filled with an overhead thermal image of Great-Aunt Savacool’s manse. It was surrounded by what looked like between thirty and forty individuals. They formed an arc, cutting off the house from the road. The river behind blocked any escape out the back.

Bolan’s eyes narrowed. “Show me my car.”

The satellite zoomed on the hood of the Town Car. Cocosino’s crocodile graffito glowed like a neon sign. Kaino glowered beneath his goggles. “Jesus, when Cocosino tagged your car, Coop, he really tagged your car.”

Savacool risked a peek over the kitchen island and out the window. She didn’t have any NVGs, but it was a clear night. The ancient and poorly dispersed streetlights threw small islands of yellow light. The huge, spreading live oaks threw pools of blackness. She popped down grimacing in the dark of the kitchen. “It’s like Night of the Living Dead out there.”

Bolan rose and took a quick look. In his NVGs the world was lit in green and gray. Savacool wasn’t far off the mark. Dozens of figures were literally shambling toward the house. However, the walking dead didn’t usually carry bats, knives and other improvised hand weapons. They also didn’t usually have a universal uniform of a black hoodie.

Even for Bolan the smell was starting to become overpowering.

Savacool clicked off the safety on her carbine.

Bolan shook his head. “No.”

Savacool was appalled. “No? What do you mean, no?”

“They’re junkies.”

Kaino quietly exploded. “So fucking what? I’m with Cool! We cut our way to the car and—”

Glass shattered outside and fire spread across the hood of Bolan’s ride.

“Oh, that’s just grand!” Kaino snarled.

Bolan read his opponent’s mind. “He wants us to start shooting.”

“I want to start shooting!”

“These people are krokodil junkies. I suspect he gave them all a nice fat fix hours ago and bused them in while they were flying high. Now they’re coming down and they’re hurting for it, and the price of free fixes for life is our heads.”

Savacool’s voice was quiet but firm. “Cooper, that is the sickest thing I have ever heard, and I feel for those poor souls outside, but I am not going to be dragged down and torn apart by rotting junkies.”

Another Molotov looped through the air. It fell just short of the porch and broke on the flagstones.

Kaino spoke through clenched teeth. “Coop, they’re going to burn us out!”

“Cocosino wants a massacre, and while it’s going on he’s waiting to take his shot.”

Savacool gave Bolan a desperate plan. “Tell me you have a plan.”

“I do.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m going out there.”

The FBI agent and the Miami-Dade master sergeant spoke in unison. “What the fuck!”

“Cool, you’re going onto the porch with your rifle. Cocosino is camouflaged, just another skell in an army of them. When he takes his shot at me, you take him down. Kaino, you’re going to defend the porch. I suspect some of these guys are going to get past me.”

“And if I’m not allowed to shoot, how am I supposed to do that?”

“Unless someone shoots at you, you’re doing it with your fists.”

“Jesus!”

“We’re out of time.” Bolan shrugged into his vest. He wished he had a full raid suit of rip stop material gloves and a helmet. He belted his Beretta to his thigh and cinched the retaining strap so it couldn’t be taken from him in a clinch. “Let’s go.”

Bolan strode out the front door and marched down the steps.

One of the junkies in the oncoming crowd screamed. “Get him!” He let loose with a tee-ball. The hate stick revolved through the air. Bolan turned his body slightly to avoid it and marched straight up to the hater. Up close the soldier saw sunken eyes and cheeks. He sent his fist crashing into the emaciated face. The junkie flew back five feet and fell like a broken scarecrow. Several junkies moaned. Others clutched themselves more tightly than their weapons. Many were already shivering from withdrawal. Bolan cracked his knuckles and regarded the crowd by the light of his burning Lincoln. “Who’s next?”

Fear rippled through the swaying crowd and fought addiction on nearly equal terms.

“Kill him!” a woman in the crowd shrieked like a harpy. “Kill him and we get all we want!”

The cry was like the crack of a whip. Addiction won the battle. The junkies released their individual fears and gave themselves over to their need. “Kill him!”

The crowd surged.

“Get out of there!” Kaino roared.

Bolan waded in. His fists became battering rams, his fingertips spears and the edges of his hands blunt axes. The soldier went for disabling strikes. He kept his kicks low so he couldn’t be taken off his feet, breaking clavicles and jaws. When he threw a kick, a junkie lost a knee or an ankle. Bolan didn’t whirl like a dervish. He moved through the crowd like a juggernaut. The attackers were weak, malnourished and, by the smell, carrying soon-to-be lethally infected wounds. They had two advantages, and those were numbers and abject desperation that had turned into bloodlust.

A rock thudded into Bolan’s left shoulder. A bandaged hand missing a finger clawed across the lenses of Bolan’s NVGs and left a swathe of rotting infection across them. Bolan grabbed the stick-thin wrist and shattered the elbow behind it. He ripped the half pound of contaminated gear from his head and threw it into a screaming face.

“Kill him! Kill him!”

Bolan felt his gorge rise, and not just from the stench of rotting flesh. This might well have been the worst attack anyone ever had ever perpetrated on him. Cocosino had recruited an army of rotting junkies willing to kill and burn for one more fix and bused them into West Miami. Given what Bolan knew about krokodil addiction, killing them might have been a kindness.

A .44 Magnum gun went off like a bomb in the crowd, and Bolan staggered as he took a sledgehammer blow low in his left floating ribs.

“Kill him!”

“Cooper!”

An emaciated arm wrapped around Bolan’s throat and squeezed with chemically fueled strength. The krokodil zombies were only a few steps away from the living dead. They could hardly feel pain beyond the agony of their addiction, but they still had to breathe. Bolan rammed his elbow into his assailant’s guts. Fetid breath blasted out of degraded lungs. The grip around Bolan’s neck loosened and he took a step forward to give himself room. He swung again backward, and this time snapped his arm straight. The Executioner’s fist slammed up into his assailant’s groin. It was the one place where no drug could make a man invulnerable. The croc-zombie slimed off Bolan’s back vomiting. The soldier suddenly had a few feet of breathing room.

A figure indistinguishable from the other ghouls raised a gleaming stainless-steel revolver. The .44 Magnum gun went off like a cannon and hit Bolan in the chest like a thunderbolt. A junkie ghoul-girl stepped in the way, and Cocosino’s second shot blew through her body and hit Bolan a second time right over the solar plexus.

Savacool’s rifle fired three times rapidly in return and tore dirt where Cocosino had been standing. She screamed over the sound. “Cooper! Cooper!” The creatures of the chemical apocalypse responded with everything from shrieks to moans, but all said the same thing.

“Kill him! Kill him!”

Bolan staggered. He couldn’t tell if his armor had held and couldn’t get any air into his lungs. Three junkies converged on him, and Bolan’s limbs responded too slowly to stop them. The iodine and death stench was overpowering as they swarmed him. Another arm snaked around Bolan’s neck. A ten-inch boning knife chopped into the degraded armor covering Bolan’s chest. A fist crashed into his jaw. Bolan shot out his hand and seized the throat of the knife-wielder. With her hood fallen back, she was little more than a halo of wild hair and stark bones. The soldier’s fingers sank into the suppurating wounds where she had been injecting into her neck. Two more croc-zombies hit the pile of horror, and Bolan found himself in a rugby scrum of the living waiting to be dead.

A girl grabbed his arm in spindly hands. A palpable cloud of corruption exhaled out of the dying junkie’s mouth and broken and rotting teeth sank into Bolan’s biceps. Another set of teeth sank into his thigh. The knife chopped into the soldier’s chest again, and this time he felt the cold burn as it slid home and the hideous grating on bone as it jammed between his ribs. Another fist hit him in the face and more hands grabbed at his legs.

The paean of dead junkies walking was almost a moan of benediction.

“Kill him! Kill him!”

The knife ripped free from Bolan’s ribs and the skeletal, witch-thing wielding it pulled back for another stab. A small revolver popped from one side, and Bolan took three more in the chest. He dropped to one knee as a starving, rotting junkie chop-blocked him in the back of his legs. Bolan felt tooth stumps scrape against the back of his neck as suppurating limbs smothered him.

The ghouls were dragging him down.

Bolan roared like the apex predator he was and erupted upward.

The knife-wielder shrieked and took her blade overhead in both hands for the kill shot. Bolan snapped his head forward in a butt. The junkie would most likely not even register a smashed septum or cracked cheekbone. Bolan went skull to skull. Purple pinpricks danced around his vision, but his would-be butcher dropped like a bullock in the slaughter shoot.

The Executioner risked multiple concussions and snapped his head backward into the face of a junkie biting at his nape. He felt a jaw break and that gave him just enough room to rip his arm free from the ghoul eating his biceps. He gave the withered, rotting girl an elbow that sent teeth flying and eyes rolling. The addict chewing on his leg took a knife hand to the temple and went boneless. The chop-blocker was still on hands and knees, and Bolan drove his heel into the top of the addict’s right hand and shattered it.

A Goth-looking junkie screamed and shoved his revolver forward. “Die! Why don’t you die?”

Bolan jerked his head aside as the revolver snapped and spit fire. The hair ripper behind him howled as he took a bullet in the shoulder. The soldier chopped his left hand into the shooter’s needle-tracked wrist and the revolver went flying. He took his bit of room and spun, his back fist unhinging the addict’s jaw. The drug-addled assassin dropped to his knees. Bolan slammed a knee up into his jaw and sent him into a temporarily blissful sleep.

Savacool’s rifle broke into rapid semiauto fire. Bolan heard tires squeal out on the street, but he had no time for it.

Kaino was suddenly beside him and he dropped junkies with Ali-worthy left jabs and Foreman-worthy rights.

The crowd fell back.

Bolan suddenly had space. He stood with his bloodied fists clenched. The mob’s moral check returned. The degenerate drug addicts reverberated between the two opposing poles of need and fear, but the battle dynamic in West Miami had changed. The dozen junkie croc-zombies still standing visibly deflated like balloons. Bolan’s voice was ice-cold. “Now, which one of you primate, screw heads lit up my ride?”

A frizzy-haired young man with a claw hammer in his hand dropped his weapon on Savacool’s lawn and fell to his knees in supplication. “Please...”

“All of you!” Bolan bellowed. “On your knees! Now!”

The standing junkies knelt. Some moved to hands and knees and others assumed the prone position with obvious practice. Savacool came down the steps with her weapon shouldered.

Bolan looked out onto the road. “He got away?”

“I didn’t want to risk firing into the crowd when he fired into you. I got a shot at him when the van screamed up, but I don’t know if I hit him. I gave the van the rest of my magazine.” Savacool shook her head unhappily. “He got away.”

Kaino stared at Bolan in awe. “I have never seen anything like it.”

Bolan took in the army of broken, moaning, drug-addicted and rotting humanity littering the field of battle by firelight. “Neither have I.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mercy Hospital, Miami

The doctor was appalled, both by Bolan’s smell and by his condition. She shook her head at the massive, blackening contusions where Bolan’s armor had taken .44 Magnum hits and held. “These are firearm-related blunt trauma contusions, Mr. Cooper?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Bolan replied.

“That one’s a knife?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Dr. Gubatan had already known the answers. She sucked in her breath as she looked at his neck, biceps and thigh. “These are human bite wounds?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m required to inform you that I must report this to the police.”

Agent Savacool held up her badge. “It’s already been reported to the FBI.”

Dr. Gubatan sniffed Bolan again. It was pretty clear it was a smell she had encountered before. “This wouldn’t happen to be related to an incident in the West Miami area that is blowing up across all channels?”

“Doctor, I’m afraid I can neither confirm nor deny that.”

There were few things E.R. doctors in Miami hadn’t seen. Dr. Gubatan was even shorter than Savacool but about five times as wide. She scowled at the FBI ID like it was a personal affront, but her features set into a grimace of concern as she prodded Bolan’s blackening biceps. “The bite wounds are already going septic.”

Bolan wasn’t surprised, but he just didn’t have time for hepatitis. Anything even more chilling that a krokodil addict’s bite might be carrying would just have to be dealt with later. “I’ll need a round of full spectrum antibiotics.”

“You’re telling me.” Dr. Gubatan left the room nearly at a sprint while rapidly typing into her tablet. A nurse came in and began cleaning the bites.

“You all right?” Savacool asked.

“I feel like a zombie crawl just stomped a mud hole in me and tried to chew it dry. With a few shootings and stabbings in the mix.”

“No, Cooper. You went down in that rotting crowd, and I was too scared to shoot into it. Are you okay?”

“That was bad,” Bolan admitted.

Savacool was about an inch from collapsing in tears. “I’m still shaking.”

Bolan nodded. “Me, too.”

Savacool laughed, but it was laced with tension. “Not you! You’re stone cold.”

“I shake on the inside. I don’t shake on the outside until the job is done.” Bolan winked. “And I’m someplace safe with someone I like.”

“You know? Speaking as a black female Southern FBI agent—you’re the first man of any color or description who ever made sensitive sound cool.”

“That’s how I roll.”

“So how are you?”

“Hungry. Where’s Kaino?”

“Well, he went all Muhammad Ali on anything that even came close to the porch. You should have seen it.”

“I caught a bit of it. He had my six when it was getting really bad. He was something to see.”

“I relieved him of porch patrol and he went to back your play on the run. I pulled a sweep around the mob and tried to stop the van. Anyway, he busted some knuckles. He’s getting his hands taken care of and Miami-Dade pooh-bahs are debriefing him hard.”

“How about you?”

“I have been sternly informed to report in first thing in the morning.”

Bolan looked at his swollen hands and was reminded of the damage he had wreaked. “How about Cocosino’s army?”

Savacool’s shoulders twitched in revulsion. “They’ve been isolated for obvious reasons, but I visited their ward.”

Bolan nodded. “Bad?”

“Cooper, you don’t want to see these people under bright lights, and I’m not even adding in what you did to them. I still see them when I close my eyes.” Tears spilled down Savacool’s cheeks. “I know why you did it the way you did, and I respect it. I just don’t know if you did them any favors.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Well, I already threw up,” Savacool said.

“Me, too.”

“What I want to do is to go to church. I want to pray for those people, and I shit you not, I wouldn’t mind hearing some words of comfort. But I just don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon.”

“You got a big heart, Cool. But I mean they know about your great-aunt’s place, and that means they know about you. You’re on the list. I wouldn’t go home if I were you, or to any friends or relatives.”

“Well, hell, Cooper. Chances are they know we’re here. I don’t know if any place in Miami is safe, so unless you can requisition a helicopter, get clearance to land on the roof and...” Savacool’s voice trailed off. Her bemused disgust look returned. “You’re smiling.”

Bolan nodded at himself. “Some of this is going to require stitches. Gather up Kaino and meet me on the roof in an hour.”

Overtown, Miami

D ELILAH TEASED THE BULLET out of Cocosino’s back. He never flinched. “You got it out?”

“Yes.”

“Rifle or pistol?”

Delilah held up the conical .22-caliber bullet to the single bulb in the room. “Rifle.”

“The FBI bitch...”

Delilah tossed the bullet to the filthy basement floor and the surgical tweezers after it. “You want me to sew you up?”

“Hit me.”

Delilah took a cooked syringe of krokodil and injected it straight into Cocosino’s bullet wound. He visibly relaxed as the cocktail of codeine and solvents flooded his veins. Delilah looked at the rotting yet still strangely vital man beneath her and saw her future. There had been a time when he was one of the up-and-coming hot things in South Beach. Model, gigolo, getting acting jobs and working the club circuit. Then addiction had taken him down to the lowest, most execrable possible path a junkie could go. She had followed him down that spiral path. Then krokodil had arrived on Miami’s shores and taken him from the gutter to hell itself. He had become Cocosino, had become a killer to ensure an endless series of fixes until he could no longer function. Delilah didn’t want to think about what was happening to her own body, but she couldn’t help smelling it. Cocosino would need a new assistant soon. She pushed the image aside with drug-addled insanity and took a sniff of meth before sewing the bullet wound. “I like this El Hombre.”

“I love him. I love everything about him.” Cocosino lay motionless as the surgical needle moved through noninfected flesh. “I want him.”

“They called.”

“What did they say?”

“El Hombre, Agent Savacool and Kaino left the hospital by helicopter. Their whereabouts are currently unknown.”

“That’s not a problem,” Cocosino said.

“We’re out of a job.”

“Lots of people in Miami-Dade need killing. There are plenty of jobs.” Cocosino turned what was left of his face toward Delilah. “And we’ll see El Hombre again.”

Trump International Beach Resort

“W OW .” A GENT S AVACOOL stared out at the Intracoastal Waterway from the twenty-seventh-story balcony.

Kaino looked almost uncomfortable among such luxury. “Jeez, this hotel room is bigger than my house,” he said.

Bolan pulled his hand out of the ice bucket and flexed his fingers. “I was told 1,174 square feet.”

Kaino’s face went flat.

“It is a double suite,” Bolan admitted, and it was pretty damn swanky. “I’ve operated in Florida before. I know a few people who owe me a few favors.”

Savacool gave Bolan a stare equal to Kaino’s. “Donald Trump owes you favors?”

“No, and keep that in mind when you order from room service.”

Kaino waved his taped-up hands as he picked up a menu. “Don’t worry about that, man. A burger and a beer, and I’ll be—” Kaino sat upright in outrage. “A burger costs what! Madre de dios!” Kaino lost his English in shock and reverted to the Spanish of his youth.

Bolan turned to Jack Grimaldi. “Thanks for coming on short notice, Jack.”

The Stony Man pilot grinned. “When have you ever given me notice, Sarge?”

No one raised an eyebrow at the usage of the word Sarge.

“On average?” Bolan conceded. “Never.”

“And now he finally starts talking sense.”

“I got no notice, either,” Kaino concurred.

“Mine was short,” Savacool agreed.

Bolan sighed. “Any of you want out?”

“Oh, hell no!” Kaino laughed. “I’m seeing this one through.”

“To the end,” Savacool agreed.

Grimaldi gave Bolan a droll look. “I gather I’m here for the duration?”

“I’m thinking at least to Mexico. What have you got for me?”

The pilot put a laptop and several files on the dinner table. Bolan’s team gathered around. Kurtzman’s face appeared in fuzzed-out mode on the screen. “There have been a slew of killings in coastal Tamaulipas that are awfully damn similar to Savacool’s boy Christo Bruno’s. It looks as if there is a real fight shaping up for Tamaulipas. Someone is pushing hard to move the Gulf Coast off the Gulf Coast or force them to play ball. Of course they’re not having it, and the bodies are piling up.”

Bolan nodded. “Do we have anything on Salami?”

“An informant told us he’s holed up in a bungalow on Miami Beach. We have it under surveillance. You’ll also be happy to know that the krokodil supply has been seriously disrupted. Word on the street is you just can’t get it. Junkies are picked up left and right committing burglaries to try to steal prescription meds to cook with. But that was always your plan, to make a mess and see who comes to clean it up.”

“It’s one way to get the ball rolling, and we have Cocosino and foreign mystery assassins.”

Savacool gave Kaino a glance. “You sure the sniper was speaking Russian?”

“Man, I couldn’t swear to it.”

Savacool gave Bolan a searching look. “Krokodil is a Russian drug. It would make more sense.”

“In some ways, but like Kaino and I discussed, it’s an awfully long hop from Moscow to Miami to pedal stuff junkies buy with pocket change, and speaking of Russians, when we found Popov he had already had his ass handed to him.”

“So you don’t think the Russians are involved?”

“I think they’re somehow part of the mix and, more important, I think there are players in this game that have yet to reveal themselves.”

“So how do you want to play it?”

“I think I want to have another conversation with Salami.”

Kaino smiled happily. “Wear a hat!”

“Definitely.”

“Oh.” Grimaldi reached into his gear bag. “Almost forgot. A friend worked this up for you.” He tossed Kaino a Miami Heat cap. It made a strangely meaty thud in the big master sergeant’s palm as he caught it. Kaino massaged the impact material in the brim almost erotically and began adjusting the tab in the back for his head. “Sweet!” Kaino settled his cap on his head with a happy sigh. “So why do you want to talk to Salami? He’s an asshole. You think he lied to us?”

“No, I think he believed everything he told us when he told it, but I think he may have had some very interesting conversations with some very interesting people since you and I had our powwow with him. Plus, I’m thinking if Savacool can get a line on where he’s hiding out, so can the people we’re working against.”

Grimaldi had seen this more times than he had fingers and toes. “You think he’s being watched?”

“I’m counting on it.”

“So we’re going to pile into a car, drive up to Salami’s beach blanket Babylon and see who shoots at us? Again?” Kaino asked.

Bolan shook his head. “Not exactly.”

Savacool leaned her elbows on the table, perched her chin in her hands and gave Bolan the big brown eyes. “Do tell.”

“You and Kaino are going to pile into a car, loaded for bear, and be ready to hit Salami’s place on my signal.”

Savacool regarded Bolan with grave suspicion. “And you?”

Bolan looked at Grimaldo. “Did you bring me a jump rig?”

“Did I bring him a jump rig...” the pilot scoffed.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Miami Beach, 10,000 feet

Grimaldi shouted from the cockpit into the helmet com link in Bolan’s ear. “Go! Go! Go!”

The soldier stepped out of Dragonslayer’s cabin and arched hard as he gave himself to gravity. Miami was a spectacular pool of light below, cut by the dark lines of waterways and counterpointed by the vast darkness of the ocean to the east and the Everglades to the west. The Stony Man pilot spoke in Bolan’s earpiece.

“Triangulating target.” The helicopter’s navigational computer synced with the grid of light below. “Target acquired, illuminating.”

The gimbaled infrared laser mounted on the helicopter fired a beam invisible to the human eye. In Bolan’s NVGs a bright pulsating spot appeared near the ocean’s edge. The spot pulsed on the roof of Salami’s beach bungalow.

“Copy that, Dragonslayer,” Bolan replied. “I have visual.” He stretched his arms behind him, turning his body into a streamlined dart aimed for the ocean’s edge. He enjoyed several more seconds of free fall and hit his chute as he crossed over the target. The canopy deployed, and Bolan began a tight spiral over Salami’s domicile. Out front Bolan could see a pair of men with slung rifles. They were smoking cigarettes, obviously in a low state of alert. Most of the lights in the house were off. The back patio and the beach beyond were dark and appeared empty. Bolan vectored in. The wind off the water was mild and the sand was soft. The soldier flared his chute as the beach rushed up at him and made a textbook landing. “On the ground. Going in.”

“Copy that, Sarge. Orbiting your position.”

Bolan clicked out of his harness and pulled his stun gun. He silently walked around the house and right up to the thugs lounging against Salami’s yellow Corvette. A black SUV sat parked to one side.

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