KILLER TAKEDOWN

The Executioner believes in final justice—so when rumors swirl that someone is trying to revive the empire of Pablo Escobar, the King of Cocaine, Mack Bolan makes it his mission to bring down Pablo’s ghost...for good. But to get to the phantom emperor, Bolan must first eradicate an army of skilled hit men, savage rival cartel bosses and a vicious torturer. The Executioner will need every weapon in his arsenal, but he vows to bring this deadly new drug reign to a fiery, explosive end!

#375 Salvador Strike

#376 Frontier Fury

#377 Desperate Cargo

#378 Death Run

#379 Deep Recon

#380 Silent Threat

#381 Killing Ground

#382 Threat Factor

#383 Raw Fury

#384 Cartel Clash

#385 Recovery Force

#386 Crucial Intercept

#387 Powder Burn

#388 Final Coup

#389 Deadly Command

#390 Toxic Terrain

#391 Enemy Agents

#392 Shadow Hunt

#393 Stand Down

#394 Trial by Fire

#395 Hazard Zone

#396 Fatal Combat

#397 Damage Radius

#398 Battle Cry

#399 Nuclear Storm

#400 Blind Justice

#401 Jungle Hunt

#402 Rebel Trade

#403 Line of Honor

#404 Final Judgment

#405 Lethal Diversion

#406 Survival Mission

#407 Throw Down

#408 Border Offensive

#409 Blood Vendetta

#410 Hostile Force

#411 Cold Fusion

#412 Night’s Reckoning

#413 Double Cross

#414 Prison Code

#415 Ivory Wave

#416 Extraction

#417 Rogue Assault

#418 Viral Siege

#419 Sleeping Dragons

#420 Rebel Blast

#421 Hard Targets

#422 Nigeria Meltdown

#423 Breakout

#424 Amazon Impunity

#425 Patriot Strike

#426 Pirate Offensive

#427 Pacific Creed

#428 Desert Impact

#429 Arctic Kill

#430 Deadly Salvage

#431 Maximum Chaos

#432 Slayground

#433 Point Blank

#434 Savage Deadlock

#435 Dragon Key

#436 Perilous Cargo

#437 Assassin’s Tripwire

#438 The Cartel Hit

#439 Blood Rites

#440 Killpath

#441 Murder Island

#442 Syrian Rescue

#443 Uncut Terror

#444 Dark Savior

#445 Final Assault

#446 Kill Squad

#447 Missile Intercept

#448 Terrorist Dispatch

#449 Combat Machines

#450 Omega Cult

#451 Fatal Prescription

#452 Death List

#453 Rogue Elements

#454 Enemies Within

#455 Chicago Vendetta

#456 Thunder Down Under

#457 Dying Art

#458 Killing Kings

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

Killing Kings

Don Pendleton

ISBN: 978-1-474-09653-9

Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Michael Newton for his contribution to this work.

KILLING KINGS

© 2019 Harlequin Enterprises Limited

Published in Great Britain 2019

by Worldwide Gold Eagle, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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Bolan’s grenade exploded with a smoky thunderclap.

The shrapnel sprayed the area with steel fragments designed to kill over a radius of sixteen feet. Grimaldi followed up with a second bomb.

The opposition appeared seconds later—two men armed with military rifles tumbled into the hallway just as Bolan and Grimaldi reached it. Neither of the two defenders had a chance to use their weapons. Bolan and Grimaldi cut them down in their tracks before they could react.

“That’s half of them,” the ace pilot said, and Bolan hoped it wasn’t simply wishful thinking.

“Careful with Cuéllar, if possible,” he said. “I need to pick his brain while it’s intact.”

Cuéllar knew the name of the person who headed up The Office, and the Executioner was counting on him to cooperate.

Whether the man wanted to or not.

For Special Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena,

Drug Enforcement Administration

(1947–1985)

The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.

—Albert Einstein

Someone said that Evil never dies. That’s true. But good and evil men are mortal. It’s the first group’s task to put the second in their place: the grave.

—Mack Bolan

Nothing less than a war could have fashioned the destiny of the man called Mack Bolan. Bolan earned the Executioner title in the jungle hell of Vietnam.

But this soldier also wore another name—Sergeant Mercy. He was so tagged because of the compassion he showed to wounded comrades-in-arms and Vietnamese civilians.

Mack Bolan’s second tour of duty ended prematurely when he was given emergency leave to return home and bury his family, victims of the Mob. Then he declared a one-man war against the Mafia.

He confronted the Families head-on from coast to coast, and soon a hope of victory began to appear. But Bolan had broken society’s every rule. That same society started gunning for this elusive warrior—to no avail.

So Bolan was offered amnesty to work within the system against terrorism. This time, as an employee of Uncle Sam, Bolan became Colonel John Phoenix. With a command center at Stony Man Farm in Virginia, he and his new allies—Able Team and Phoenix Force—waged relentless war on a new adversary: the KGB.

But when his one true love, April Rose, died at the hands of the Soviet terror machine, Bolan severed all ties with Establishment authority.

Now, after a lengthy lone-wolf struggle and much soul-searching, the Executioner has agreed to enter an “arm’s-length” alliance with his government once more, reserving the right to pursue personal missions in his Everlasting War.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Dedication

Quotes

The Mack Bolan Legend

Prologue

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

Epilogue

About the Publisher

Prologue

Medellín, Colombia

Jairo Dueñas had come far since he’d created Los Pepes at the tender age of nineteen years. At forty-seven years old, everything he’d ever dreamed of was either already his or was within his grasp.

Los Pepes, properly, had called itself Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar, which in English translates to “Persecuted by Pablo Escobar”—an image the group had adopted, seeking public sympathy, although the message was not strictly true. Los Pepes was a group of vigilantes who waged war against the former Medellín Cartel, posing as warriors of the people while, in fact, they sought to claim Escobar’s wealth and drug trade with the US for themselves.

That hadn’t quite worked out as planned, of course. Escobar had died sixteen months after his escape from La Catedral Prison, trapped by agents of Colombia’s Bloque de Búsqueda—Search Bloc—and the ever-present DEA. Some said he’d been assassinated, but it hardly mattered. Only Escobar’s death had been important, followed by the swift unraveling of his cartel. Godfathers in the cruel Cali Cartel had dominated cocaine traffic for the next five years, and then they in turn had been killed or sent to prison for their crimes.

In recent years, however, Dueñas had recouped his losses from the earlier conflict, entered politics and now served with the Office of the Inspector General of Colombia, tasked with overseeing other arms of government, ensuring that they functioned properly and honestly.

Well...maybe not so much the latter part.

Dueñas’s office placed him in a prime position to collaborate with the most recent successors to the former Medellín Cartel, advising them on how to duck Colombia’s National Police and who to bribe at all levels of state, from the president’s office and Council of Ministers to the Senate and Chamber of Representatives, the Supreme Court and Council of State, to the civil and municipal courts of Colombia’s thirty-two departments, roughly analogous to US states.

And in the process, naturally, from each payoff he arranged, Dueñas skimmed a handsome profit for himself. He had “arrived,” as rich North Americans liked to say, and life was good. On top of his success in government and crime, Dueñas had a trophy wife, two perfect children, and a mistress on the side, stashed in a posh apartment in suburban Envigado, where Dueñas was headed now, in his chauffeured Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan.

His loyal wife, Adriana, thought he had a critical committee meeting to attend. In point of fact, he had a far more urgent, primal need to satisfy that only nineteen-year-old Isabella Döehring could. Just thinking of her now, Dueñas was totally and almost hopelessly aroused.

“Drive faster, will you, Julián?” he called from the back seat.

“Yes, sir. As you wish.”

And yet, a short block later, his chauffeur was slowing down again, now creeping almost to a halt.

“What’s going on?” Dueñas demanded. “What’s the holdup?”

“It appears there’s been an accident, sir.”

By scooting forward on his seat, Dueñas could see two other vehicles—real junkers, in his estimation—tangled in midblock ahead. Both drivers were afoot and arguing, with their arms flailing.

“Idiots,” Dueñas grated. “Back up and find a way around this mess.”

“Yes. I just need to—”

Before Julián even got the Mercedes into reverse, a sudden movement to the left made Dueñas turn in that direction, startled to see three young men carrying automatic weapons, rushing toward his car. He spun away from them, trying to reach the other door, but found another trio closing in from that direction, grim-faced, with weapons leveled at their hips.

“Jesucristo!” he blurted, as Julián—also his bodyguard—produced a pistol, cocking it. As he raised it, a blast of gunfire turned the driver’s window into a hailstorm of glass, the shards and bullets ripping off most of his head.

And as Dueñas huddled in the back seat, with his empty hands raised against the coming storm, he realized there wasn’t even time to pray.

Culiacán Rosales, Sinaloa, Mexico

Arturo Kahlo finished mopping up the remnants of his lunch with a tortilla, washed the whole thing down with the remainder of his third Tecate beer and dabbed his lips with a white linen napkin. When he belched, Kahlo made no attempt to mask the sound, and grinned back at the startled diners who were bold enough to glare at him, not knowing who he was.

If they had recognized him as a top sicario—a hit man for the Sinaloa Cartel, which was also called the Blood Alliance for its ruthless violence—they would have begged his pardon, rather than regarding him with thinly veiled disdain for his lack of table manners.

“Que te jodan,” he cursed at them, laughing at the stunned expressions on their faces, most especially the women, who had likely never been addressed that way before—except, perhaps, in bed.

Rising, he dropped a wad of pesos on the table, brushing back his jacket just enough to let them glimpse the Glock he wore in a hip holster. That drew gasps from a few of them. All eyes averted, suddenly preoccupied, as Kahlo left the restaurant, grinning.

The fear that he provoked in lesser humans was intoxicating, like strong liquor or a snort of pure cocaine. Kahlo loved that power more than anything on Earth.

Kahlo had killed so many men by now—and women, too, as he was an equal-opportunity assassin—that the faces ran together and were sometimes lost to him. The ones who mattered were rivals of his employers in the drug trade, as well as soldiers and police, their paid informers—some of whom died very slowly—minor politicians, and an Anglo judge in Dimmit County, Texas, whose murder had sent three “innocent” members of the Diablos Motorcycle Club to the Lone Star State’s death row.

Now Kahlo moved with long strides toward his car, a Cadillac CTS that had cost its owner $60,000 before it was stolen and smuggled south from Arizona, with all of the vital numbers changed. He loved the car, and the reactions it evoked from peasants on the streets of Culiacán Rosales.

They feared and envied him—a double boost to Kahlo’s ego.

As he neared the sleek black car, a voice called out from behind him. “¡Hola marica! ¿Adónde vas?”

It was nobody’s business where he went—no one but his employer, anyway—but the insult to Kahlo’s manhood set his blood aboil. Turning, he placed a hand over the butt of his Glock 21, the .45 ACP model, then froze as he found himself facing the muzzles of two shotguns that were held by young men who had to be hit men themselves.

“You’re making a mistake,” he cautioned them. “Do you know who I am?”

“Would we be here if we didn’t know you?” one of them replied.

Then both guns thundered, and Arturo Kahlo vaulted backward, into endless night.

El Centro District, Medellín

El Centro was a dicey part of town, one of the rougher neighborhoods in Medellín, but it drew many foreign tourists to attractions such as the Parque de Las Luces, Botero Plaza, the Museum of Antioquia, the Palace of Culture and the Museo Casa de la Memoria. The last one’s name translated to House of Memory, but as he stood scanning a busy street, Rafael Barón reflected that his memories of El Centro were mostly bad.

Still, gawkers came in droves—but if they’d done their homework, or their tour guides were true professionals, they would look elsewhere for hotels in Medellín.

Barón cared nothing for hotels unless the men he trailed were registered at one of them, and who would be so foolish as to book a room in El Centro if he had the cash and common sense to do better?

Tonight, Barón was staking out a dance club that was favored by some narcotraffickers and their women—seldom wives—for gathering to mix business with pleasure, as their voices were masked from any hidden microphones by the incessant hammering of of amplified pop music, sometimes interrupted by narcocorridos, songs that glamorized and celebrated the exploits of traffickers.

Barón’s mission tonight was scanning faces, photographing some of the more infamous with his cell phone, and afterward reporting what he’d seen in detail to his DEA controllers at the Justice Building. So far he had snapped pictures of seven local dealers and a visitor from Mexico who was believed to be associated with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, but he was waiting for a big fish who could boost his daily pittance covered by American taxpayers.

Now a jet-black Hummer limousine was pulling up outside the club. Well-dressed men and their women spilled from open doors like clowns emerging from a circus car, except in luxury, with more than ample room for anything they cared to do while rolling through the streets of Medellín. Barón lifted his cell phone, hanging back in the shadows as he snapped away, until he glimpsed a face he hadn’t seen in years and had to stop. He lowered his phone while he gaped, amazed.

It was impossible...and yet, how could he not believe the evidence of his own eyes?

He rushed another string of photos—click, click, click—then speed-dialed his contact and fidgeted through half a dozen distant rings before a sleepy voice answered.

“It’s me,” Barón began. “No, I don’t know what time it is, and you won’t care when you hear this. He’s back! There’s no mistaking it. Pablo! What do you mean, which Pablo? Was there ever more than one, gringo? I’m saying it is Pablo Escobar, El Rey de la Cocaína.”

The harsh voice scolded him, bringing a rush of heat to Barón’s cheeks. “Listen to me,” he answered back. “I haven’t snorted anything, okay? I’m not drunk, and I’m not crazy. It’s him! I don’t care if you say he’s dead. I’m telling you, he’s back!”

Chapter One

Val Verde County, Texas

“Man, I wish they’d show, already,” Jack Grimaldi said. “I’m sweating like a pig, here. Must’ve lost five pounds already.”

“I’ll bet it looks good on you,” Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, answered him.

They lay on sandy ground they’d scooped out with entrenching tools, before daybreak, under a staked-out tarp in desert camouflage, spruced up with dry mesquite pasted on top of it. The pattern of the loose fatigues they had been sweating through since dawn matched the tarpaulin, save for their tactical boots and web gear, both desert tan.

The warriors had come armed for bear—or, rather, armed for men who didn’t care who they gunned down or caught and tortured for whatever useful information they possessed. Each man lay stretched out beside a Steyr AUG bullpup assault rifle, selective fire, translucent magazines loaded with thirty rounds apiece of 5.56 mm NATO rounds. Each Steyer came equipped with a Swarovski 1.5x telescopic sight, integrated with the receiver casting. Its black ring reticle and basic range finder had been designed so that a person who was five feet eleven inches tall filled the scope at 300 meters downrange.

Aside from rifles, both watchers wore sidearms on their hips. Bolan’s semiauto Desert Eagle Mark VII pistol was chambered in .44 Magnum and fired nine rounds. Grimaldi had gone lighter, with a Glock 22 in .40-caliber Smith & Wesson, fifteen rounds in the magazine and one up the spout.

Their other armaments included extra magazines in Velcro pouches, M68 fragmentation grenades fitted with impact fuses, and their combat knives were Cols Steel GI Tantos with seven-inch fixed blades in a black, rust-resistant finish.

They were dressed to kill, and that was just precisely what they had in mind.

Now all they had to do was wait, and that was getting old.

* * *

The trail that had brought Bolan and Grimaldi to their present station in the desert had begun 1,750 miles away, to the northeast, at Arlington National Cemetery. One day earlier, amid the simple markers and some larger monuments to heroes, Bolan had been following procedure when he met with Hal Brognola, chief among his oldest living friends, once a street agent for the FBI, promoted through the ranks over time to a top-level but ill-defined post in the Justice Department that allowed him the freedom to take on various roles within the department.

The big Fed was a man known to have the President’s ear on matters of national security. Brognola, unknown to most government officials, was also the director of the Sensitive Operations Group, a clandestine organization whose covert headquarters was based at Stony Man Farm, semiconcealed within the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. From there, assignments were issued for its warriors—Mack Bolan, if the assignment aligned with his personal goals, plus the strike forces dubbed Able Team and Phoenix Force—who would take on terrorists and criminal cartels worldwide. Their missions were, in essence, to search and destroy. Targets assigned were generally not expected to stand trial.

When Brognola needed to speak with Bolan—long presumed dead by the public that had previously followed his extended one-man war against the Mafia, now with his records thoroughly expunged—Bolan sometimes dropped by the Farm, more often meeting casually in some venue such as Arlington, where getting lost among tourists came easily.

This time around, the big Fed had delivered some alarming news. That in itself was not unusual; he called on Bolan only when the stakes were high and time was short. The first part of Brognola’s message—that cocaine shipments to the United States from Mexico and South America had multiplied of late, the loads increased in volume—wasn’t any real surprise. Drug traffickers went through repeated boom-and-bust cycles, the same as any other multibillion-dollar industry, affected by such factors as the weather in their crop-producing regions, police activity at home or on transshipment routes and interference by competitors who hijacked shipments, slaughtering their crews.

But then Brognola dropped the bomb.

A valued DEA informant working out of Medellín, Colombia, swore that he’d seen a ghost—and not just any ghost, at that. The specter he’d reported, having passed two polygraph exams that proved him truthful and sober, belonged to Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, a founder of the one-time Medellín Cartel, who’d introduced a new term to authorities around the planet: narcoterrorism, meaning the assassination of police, public officials, journalists—and once, twelve judges of Colombia’s Supreme Court, slain with eighty-six more persons during a guerrilla raid against Bogotá’s Palace of Justice.

The rub: by all accounts, Escobar was dead. And not just rumored to be dead, but shot to pieces by Colombian soldiers and DEA agents in December 1993, while fleeing from arrest in Los Olivos, one of Medellín’s middle-class barrios. According to the autopsy report, the drug lord had suffered wounds to his torso and legs, before a final gunshot drilled him through one ear.

There was no question of surviving what amounted to a point-blank execution. Photos of his corpse in situ, dripping blood and ringed by grinning slayers, had been broadcasted globally and still surfaced each year, around the anniversary of his passing. A painting by Colombian artist Fernando Botero showed Escobar writhing under a storm of bullets, gun in hand. At least eight books, which were penned by relatives, police and journalists, detailed the life and death of Colombia’s “King of Cocaine.” More recently there’d even been a TV series titled Narcos, running for three seasons that encompassed Escobar’s reign, his death and the succession of his Cali Cartel rivals to short-lived supremacy.

So he was dead, okay? And yet, if the DEA’s man on the street could be believed, together with his polygraph results, Escobar had not only returned, but also didn’t look as if he’d aged a day since drowning in his own blood on a Medellín rooftop.

Bolan and Brognola had talked about potential explanations. Escobar had two brothers but no twin, and if there had been a twin nobody noticed during eighteen years of international publicity, surveillance and even public interviews, said sibling would’ve aged since Escobar died, pushing age seventy by now.

Another thought: the lion’s share of Latin narcotrafficantes worshipped one or more orishas—deities of sects including Santeria, Palo Mayombe and plan, old-fashioned Voodoo, thought to safeguard criminals and bless their enterprises. Fine, but neither Bolan nor Brognola harbored a belief in zombies rising from their graves to walk abroad.

What then? Bolan had no idea as yet, but Brognola informed him that known enemies of the original, deceased Don Pablo had been dying off in waves of late, just when drug shipments from Latin America began to land on US streets. The latest were a top-ranked shooter for the Sinaloa Cartel and a former leader of the strongest group opposing Escobar during the early 1990s, Los Pepes, said to number officers of the Colombian National Police and Search Bloc among its members. The group allegedly dissolved when Escobar’s death made it superfluous, but Brognola had briefed him on a problem with that “common knowledge” spread by law enforcement and the media.

In fact, the Medellín Cartel was ravaged by arrests, convictions and assassinations in the months following Escobar’s death, and presumed extinct by spring of 1994. At the same time, however, the DEA had dropped the ball on tracking its successor, while they set their sights on Cali’s traffickers instead. Founded by Diego Murillo Bejarano, aka Don Berna, a one-time leader of the paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, the revived cartel was dubbed The Office of Envigado, a town six miles southwest of Medellín.

Don Berna had been extradited to the States eleven years ago, pled guilty to smuggling tons of cocaine and laundering money, and received a sentence of 376 months in prison and a $4 million fine. He’d been transported to a federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, a supermax lockup nicknamed the Alcatraz of the Rockies.

But apparently the men and women he had trained to carry on without him—before he sought “peace” by surrendering more than 20,000 weapons and 112 properties worth $20 million to Colombian authorities—were still around and thriving in his absence.

Having visited Colombia on more than one occasion, Bolan readily accepted that. In fact, he’d have expected nothing less.

But now Don Berna’s brainchild had come under fire, along with rival Mexican drug syndicates, including those based in Sinaloa, Tijuana, Matamoros and Juárez. The homicides had not been singled out for special interest at first, as they had been lost in the fog of Mexico’s drug wars, which had resulted in 200,000 deaths and 30,000 disappearances over the past twelve years, with 1.6 million survivors driven from their homes by violence. Unknown gunmen had also launched strikes against cartels without fixed roots: the Knights Templar, La Familia, Los Zetas and the Beltrán-Leyva Cartel.

But once you focused on those hits, assuming that the DEA’s informer was correct as to the “ghost” he’d seen in downtown Medellín, the “random” slaughter made a grisly kind of sense. Pablo Escobar reborn, if such a thing were possible, would absolutely try to purge his former enemies, rivals who had co-opted his old drug routes, and the upstarts who had nerve enough to plant their flag so close to Medellín.

It made sense, right—except that no such thing was possible in Bolan’s universe.

One solid bit of information Hal Brognola had provided to him, as they’s strolled through Arlington, was the reported date, time and location of the next big cocaine shipment due from Mexico.

Bolan and his brother in arms, Stony Man flying ace Jack Grimaldi, were watching for it now, ready to strike.

* * *

There had been countless speeches and endless arguments over the wall planned for construction back in 2016, closing off unauthorized traffic between the States and Mexico. At first the government of Mexico was falsely advertised as paying for that barrier, a fabrication that the Mexicans dismissed as baseless fantasy. Next up, American taxpayers were supposed to foot the bill, and Congress finally had allocated $1.6 billion for construction, buried in a larger spending bill, but there’d been no physical progress yet—at least not on the stretch of border Bolan and Grimaldi had staked out.

And would a wall make any difference? Drugs had been flowing into the United States for decades now, by air, by water, stashed in vehicles that managed to evade dope-sniffing dogs at closely guarded border crossings. There had been narco submarines that Bolan knew of, and a whole maze of tunnels along the border, stretching west to east, from California to Texas. The Sinaloa Cartel had pioneered tunneling in 1989, between a private home in Agua Prieta, Sonora, and a warehouse located in Douglas, Arizona. Other syndicates had started burrowing since then, and for each tunnel located, the DEA presumed at least five more were moving dope around the clock.

“They’re here,” Grimaldi whispered, peering eastward across the sun-bleached open land through Steiner 210 MM1050 Military-Marine tactical binoculars.

Bolan shifted, following Grimaldi’s line of sight and saw two SUVs running tandem, raising plumes of dust behind them as they covered ground. He made them as a matched pair of Toyota RAV4s, either white or beige under their coats of desert grit, the better to pass unseen through the arid wilds of Southern Texas. Four men occupied each 4x4, and they were making for the point that Stony Man coordinates had marked as the drug tunnel’s adit in Val Verde County.

Bolan couldn’t see the tunnel’s southern terminus from where he lay, even with field glasses. The shaft might have been two or three miles long, for all he knew, bearing in mind that two things every drug cartel possessed were cheap labor and time. He didn’t know how long rotating crews might take to span that distance, digging night and day, nor did he care. The point was that transporters planned on moving through the tunnel here and now, clueless that they were being watched.

The pickup team wasn’t afraid of being seen by daylight—that much was apparent. Maybe they had worried more about missing their contacts in the dark, driving without headlights and only stars to guide them. On the other hand, perhaps they’d greased Border Patrol officers in advance to take a coffee break just now or simply look the other way. It had been true in Prohibition and throughout the modern War on Drugs.

Mexico particularly suffered from a scourge of bought-off law enforcement spanning decades, worsening as towns and villages descended into chaos. Its Federal Judicial Police force was dissolved in 2002, after one-fourth of its officers were linked to drug cartels, and its successor—the Federal Investigative Agency—likewise collapsed in 2005, with the arrests of its deputy director and 457 of its agents. After a four-year hiatus, the Federal Ministerial Police appeared, but nothing much had changed—at least if you believed the DEA and Texas Rangers.

The corruption wasn’t hard to understand: Mexican cops earned meager pay, and they were subject to the fear of having loved ones slaughtered by sicarios—hit men—the same as anybody else. Why swim upstream and be devoured by piranhas, when an officer could make a killing by just going with the flow?

The two RAV4s had stopped, disgorged their occupants—six of the eight packing assault weapons, and the drivers making do with pistols. Bolan heard them speaking rapid-fire Spanish, too fast and too far away to comprehend. Still, he had no trouble picking out the man who seemed to be in charge, the dark and bearded face filling his Steyr’s telescopic sight.

Waiting to see what happened next, he told Grimaldi, “On my call.”

“Call them,” Altair Infante ordered. “Now.”

His driver, Manuel Ortega, took a compact walkie-talkie from the cargo pocket of his khaki pants and pressed the talk button, saying, “Coyote calling Mole. Come in, Mole. Do you copy?”

Nothing right away, but then a voice came back at him through static. “Copy that, Coyote.”

“Where are you?”

“We’re at the hatch, just waiting for your signal.”

“This is it. Get out here, will you?”

“Yes, yes, give me a minute to lift this thing.”

“So, lift it!” Infante snapped, as if the team below ground could make out his words.

There was another brief delay, and then a hatch approximately ten feet square swung up and backward on hinges, with sand streaming from it as the adit of the tunnel was revealed. Blinking like real-life moles after their journey through the shaft, some of them coughing up stale air, four men emerged and stretched, feeling the sun before they turned around again and started dragging wooden pallets heaped with shrink-wrapped kilos of cocaine into daylight.

“Start counting them,” Infante ordered his soldiers. “And be quick about it. We need to get loaded up and gone before we have to deal with the Border Patrol, eh?”

“I thought you paid them off,” Ortega said, hoping it didn’t sound like he was whining.

“Who told you to think, idiot? Just do what you’re told and get a move on.” Turning toward the SUVs, Infante muttered, not quite underneath his breath, “Asshole.”

Ortega thought that he should say something, defend himself, but Infante was right: he wasn’t paid to think, only to follow orders without question, never mind what they might be or what he was required to do. Still, if only he had the nerve...

Half turning, driven by a wild impulse, Ortega had actually opened his mouth, could feel words forming in his mind and pressing on his vocal cords, ready to burst free from his tongue. It meant his death to speak, but how long could a man live once he was stripped of all his self-respect? That didn’t make him a man, someone to admire. It made him appear to be weak.

He was on the tipping point of suicidal madness when a bolt from heaven saved Ortega from himself, striking Infante’s head and blowing it apart, as if it were a mango with a firecracker inside.

Ortega had seen men killed before—had killed a few himself, in fact—but never had he seen a skull disintegrate, the brain within it taking flight and shredding while it tumbled through the air. One second he was staring at it, mouth agape, then suddenly a mist, red and gray and uncomfortably warm, spattered his face, smearing his Ray-Ban sunglasses. And—God Almighty—some of the muck was even in his mouth!

Ortega gagged and spat, while Infante’s gunmen and the hired transporters cried out in alarm. Then, a split second later, Ortega knew it couldn’t be a bolt from heaven that had slain Infante.

Would a bolt from heaven leave the flat crack of a military rifle floating on the desert breeze?

It was foolish even to suggest it.

But if they were under fire, that meant...

Ortega hit the dirt, shouting to his companions, “Incoming gunfire! Hit the ground!”

Instead of dropping to save themselves, the gunmen who’d accompanied Infante and Ortega in the SUVs were firing back at someone, something—maybe nothing, if the truth be told—with submachine guns and assault rifles. Ortega guessed they had to feel better, making so much noise, even if they couldn’t pick out a living target in the sandscape that surrounded them.

Thinking he ought to do something, Ortega reached for his own weapon, a Beretta M9 chambered in 9 mm Parabellum, with an ambitxterous safety and decocking mechanism making, it convenient for both right-and left-handed shooters. As a left-hander himself, Ortega babied the Beretta, cleaning it religiously and treating it as what he sometimes thought it was: his only true-blue friend on Earth.

But he still needed a target before he could use the weapon to good advantage.

So far he couldn’t tell if someone was still shooting at the pickup crew. Five other gunners, together with Ignacio Azuela, the driver of the second RAV4, were unloading into the desert to Ortega’s left, northwest of where he lay, the discharge of their weapons drowning out whatever hostile fire might be incoming now. Streams of bright cartridge casings glittered in the air and bounced across the desert floor as they landed.

Ortega squeezed off two shots in the general direction his companions were unloading, virtually blind until he realized that Infante’s blood and brains still smeared his Ray-Bans. He ripped them off, and had to squint against the glare of morning sun.

One target—that was all he needed to acquit himself with courage, but he still couldn’t find one.

Behind him, frightened cries and scuffling feet told him the underground transporters were retreating to their tunnel and, no doubt, would soon be fleeing back across the border to Mexico. Ortega wished that he could follow them, get lost somewhere in Coahuila and forget about the life he’d chosen, and never return.

But then he thought about his boss, who would never stop looking for a deserter from his family, and Ortega knew that sudden death, right here and now, was better than the screaming, inescapable alternative.

Chapter Two

After the first man had dropped, nearly headless, Bolan swiveled slightly to his right. It was enough for him to bring the tunnel’s entrance under fire from where he lay in the camo tarpaulin’s shade.

The men who’d begun to drag the pallets of packaged cocaine from darkness into daylight were unarmed, but they had been escorted from the other side by three cartel gunmen, no doubt assigned to keep the worker ants from snorting up along the way, and to avert hijacking on the Texas side, at least until the coke was packed into the white RAV4s and headed north.

That raised the number of gunmen to eleven, counting the two drivers with their sidearms, and now minus one: the seeming leader of the pickup crew Bolan had dropped with his first shot.

There’d been two reasons for his choice. First, the man giving the orders would be difficult to take alive, for questioning. Second, Bolan was satisfied that any member of the mobile team would know where they were meant to take the load. At that location he would certainly find more men, probably someone from the cartel’s midlevel management, who would impart more information, whether he liked it or not.

But Bolan was taking care of first things first.

He didn’t mean to let the workers, with their escorts, duck back into hiding and escape to Mexico unscathed, and absolutely not with the cocaine they’d brought across. From what he’d glimpsed of shrink-wrapped kilos, he projected that three standard wooden pallets should be heaped with fifty parcels each, or close to that. The standard pallet measured nine square feet and weighed approximately thirty pounds. Two men apiece could drag a pallet bearing fifty keys, the total weight around 140 pounds, maybe allowing stops for rest along the way.

The grunts wouldn’t have counted on a full load going home, and at the moment, under fire, delivering the cargo seemed to be the last thing on their minds. The six Bolan could see from where he lay were trying to escape, but one of the cartel gunmen had blocked the tunnel’s entrance with his body, shouting threats at them and leveling an MP5K submachine gun at his cringing, pleading team.

Enough of that, Bolan thought, as he zeroed his telescopic sight and stroked the Steyr’s trigger lightly to dispatch another single shot. Downrange, he saw the guard vault over backward, crimson spouting from a chest wound, dropping half inside the tunnel’s mouth.

That left the dead man’s workers in a quandary. Should they run past his corpse, desert the unexpected battleground and risk reprisal later, or pick up his gun and join the fight? If certain death waited on both sides of the bleak equation...

Bolan made the choice for them, spotting the worker closest to the fallen thug and drilling him between his shoulder blades. The dead or dying man dropped to his knees, then toppled forward, face dropping into the lifeless soldier’s crotch and lodging there.

Under the present circumstances, no one seemed to find that humorous.

“Ready?” Bolan asked Grimaldi.

“And waiting.”

“Go!”

They rose as one and swept the camo tarp aside, leaving one end secured behind them with two tent stakes, so it couldn’t blow away. That was the least of Bolan’s problems at the moment, but he usually tried to take away whatever he’d discarded at a killing ground, except spent cartridges from the unregistered Steyrs, which wouldn’t ring a bell at any law-enforcement database.

Grimaldi kept pace with him as they ducked and weaved, charging the twin RAV4s and the gunmen around them. The morning had been nearly silent till the SUVs arrived, but now it echoed with gunfire and stank of burnt gunpowder.

To the Executioner, it smelled like coming home.

Home was where the Devil waited for him. Home was where he hunted evil men.

* * *

Manuel Ortega had his targets now, but whether he could bring them down was anybody’s guess. They weren’t running away, but rather rushing toward him, which he guessed should make the killing of them easier. But they were also firing on his crew as they advanced, showing no fear, and not letting rapid forward motion spoil their aim.

Ortega fired twice at the taller of the two men, knowing that he’d missed each time before his spent shell hit the dirt. He’d jerked the M9’s trigger both times, as he’d practiced not to do on firing ranges, but the training vanished from his mind like the previous night’s dream when he had live targets in front of him. Even defeated, kneeling in desert graves they’d dug themselves and weeping like pathetic children, they unnerved him.

That made him pathetic in his own eyes, and Ortega resolved that if this was to be his dying day, he would not take it lying down, groveling in the sand.

Get up, then! he told himself. Stand up and kill them.

Ortega clambered to his feet, squeezed off another shot and missed both of his enemies again. He then started toward the nearer SUV. Ignacio Azuela crouched beside its left-front fender, shielded from incoming bullets by the RAV4’s bodywork and engine block, while two of the gunmen Infante had commanded stood beside him, firing Russian AK-102 assault rifles across the car’s roof, toward their adversaries.

From the sound of them, Ortega knew their would-be slayers’ weapons fired the same 5.56 mm rounds. A single shot could turn him into a leaking monstrosity like Altair, bleeding out into the desert soil.

“How many shooters?” Azuela asked, as Ortega dropped beside him, bruising both knees on impact.

“I’ve seen two,” Ortega replied. “Who knows if there are more?”

“This was supposed to be an easy job,” Azuela said.

Standing above them, now reloading, one of Infante’s gunners snarled, “Shut up! Stand and fight, before I drill your ass myself.”

Ortega knew he was addressing both of them, muttered, “Shit!” underneath his breath, then shrugged at Azuela and struggled to his feet again, using his free hand to support himself on the RAV4’s fender. It was hot from baking in the Texas sun, but that brief pain was nothing, next to the anticipation of his gruesome death.

This was the price Ortega knew he’d someday pay for choosing the life he had: smuggling drugs, beating and killing men he’d sometimes never met before, though others had been his friends before orders turned them into targets.

Hearing a sound rise from his throat that soon became a battle cry, Ortega lunged around the RAV4’s grille and rapid-fired the M9 toward his enemies until its slide locked open on an empty, smoking chamber.

He was fumbling with a second magazine, inside one of his cargo pockets, when they cut him down.

* * *

Jack Grimaldi watched the pistolero fall, his breastbone drilled and shattered by a tumbling 5.56 mm slug, and felt no triumph from the kill he’d made. In fact, the only thing he usually felt after slaying an enemy—whether on foot and face-to-face or in an airborne duel—was sweet relief.

A stranger had meant to kill him, but had died himself, instead.

Grimaldi knew that any fight you walked away from was a win.

The man he’d shot had died circling around the nose of one RAV4, but the gunners standing behind it plainly didn’t feel like making targets of themselves, when they could snipe at their attackers from behind their SUV.

No problem, he decided. Not unless the windows of their vehicle were bulletproof, that was.

From jogging forward, slightly off to Bolan’s left, Grimaldi stopped and took a knee, then leaned into the Steyr AUG’s stock, cushioned by a synthetic rubber shoulder plate. The rifle was selective fire, but had no switch to make the change; instead the weapon came equipped with a selective trigger—pulling it halfway meant semiautomatic fire, while squeezing it back all the way loosed a full-auto spray.

For this job, he bore down on the trigger and gave up counting rounds expended, sweeping back and forth across two dusty windows on the RAV4’s right-hand side. The safety glass—not bulletproof—shattered on impact, as did the glass in the windows along the driver’s side. Grimaldi’s 55-grain full-metal-jacket projectiles cleared both sets of panes, flying at some 3,200 feet per second, possibly diverted from their course a bit, but still finding the gunmen who had threatened him, piercing their centers of mass.

They fell together, dropping out of sight behind the SUV. One of them strafed the sky with a short burst as he was going down, and then Grimaldi dismissed them from his mind, knowing both men were dead or getting there.

Off to his right, Bolan was firing, dropping bodies. The Stony Man pilot glanced at his Steyr’s see-through magazine and counted roughly fifteen rounds remaining before he had to reload. A blur of movement from the second SUV in line drew him in that direction, while Bolan was taking down a couple of gunmen who’d kept their workers pinned at gunpoint, near the secret tunnel’s exit hatch.

As Grimaldi approached the second vehicle, a short gunman broke from cover, carrying what looked to be a Mini Uzi, trying to reload it on the run. The ace pilot didn’t know why he’d exposed himself before he primed his weapon, but it wasn’t his place to reject the shooter’s suicidal urge. Stroking the Steyr’s trigger twice, he punched holes, around lung-level, into the runner’s torso, and the fight went out of the guy for good.

How many active shooters left?

A hasty look around the battlefield showed him more hostiles down than up and moving. Two of those still on their feet were tunnel laborers, with their hands raised as high as they could reach, unless a sci-fi tractor beam hoisted them into the air. Their effort to surrender was in vain, though, as the last gunman who’d brought them through the tunnel stitched them both with automatic fire and laid them facedown in the sand.

Dumb move, Grimaldi thought, as Bolan shot their killer in the face. Of course, the odds of that one living through the firefight had been minimal, at best.

They still needed someone to question, though, and Grimaldi hoped that they hadn’t overplayed their hand. Bolan seemed to have no concern on that score, as he palmed a fragmentation grenade, released its safety pin and pitched the bomb down the tunnel’s gaping throat. Somewhere below ground, the explosion thumped and rumbled, bringing down a portion of the tunnel’s roof.

“Is anybody left?” Grimaldi called to Bolan.

The big guy turned back to answer him, but didn’t have a chance to speak before a high-pitched voice cried out, somewhere behind the forward SUV.

“¡No me mates, por favor! Lo dejo!”

The best translation of those words, for Grimaldi, came when a pistol sailed over the vehicle’s hood and landed in the dirt, followed a moment later by its magazine.

* * *

Ignacio Azuela didn’t want to die. While death was inevitable for everyone, he preferred that event to occur at some distant time, rather than today.

He’d watched the other members of his team get cut down around him—some of them killed outright, while others were left twitching and gurgling through their death throes while the Texas sun beat down upon them mercilessly. Even the workers who had hauled the pallets of cocaine from Mexico, below ground, were now dead, some shot by Infante’s gunmen, who wouldn’t let them run away, others by the two Anglo riflemen who had ambushed their party.

Dead was dead, no matter who had pulled the trigger. Azuela had no idea whether the strike was some kind of hijacking by a rival drug cartel—perhaps reprisal by survivors of the raids his own cartel had staged in recent months—or if the killers were a pair of gringo vigilantes. Such things happened on the border, he’d been told, by private groups such as the Texas Minutemen and California Desert Hawks. According to reports, they shot first, rarely asking questions afterward, and might be prone to seizing drugs for later resale on their own—all in the name of Free America.

Azuela calculated that his life was definitely forfeit if he fought whoever had wiped out his comrades today. But if he surrendered, offered to tell everything he knew, then perhaps...

“Come out of there and show your hands,” one of the gringos ordered, trusting that Azuela understood enough English to do as he was told.

“¡Ya voy!” he answered, then added, “I’m coming now. Don’t shoot!”

Azuela’s legs were trembling as he rose and walked atound the RAV4, empty hands held high. Surrender might be shameful, but at least he hadn’t wet himself so far, in the process of self-abasement. He would willingly obey, and tell them all he knew, unless he saw an opportunity to shade the truth a bit and thereby gain some extra time.

What did they call it in the north? Fudging.

Both men covered him with matching rifles, while the shorter of the pair came forward, frisked him thoroughly and then told the man who seemed to be in charge, “He’s clean.”

“Okay,” the other Anglo said. “We’ve still got a few minutes. I just want to send a smoke signal.”

That said, the taller gunman took a can of what Azuela thought was lighter fluid from a pocket of his baggy desert camo pants and walked back to the pallets laden with kilos of cocaine wrapped in plastic. First he fired a short burst from his weapon into each pallet’s white cargo, spraying powder as the shrink wrap burst asunder. Then he doused each in turn with fluid till the can was empty. Then he tossed it underhand away from him.

Yes, it’s definitely lighter fluid, Azuela thought, as the sickly sweet aroma of it reached his nostrils.

Finally the taller man moved along the line of dripping pallets, striking matches, dropping one on each of them in turn and then stepping back as pale flames shimmered skyward, the late-morning heat immediately amplified.

So, not a hijacking—at least not as Azuela understood the term. Hijackers stole drugs, or whatever else a target shipment might consist of, and then sold it off themselves, or offered it for ransom to the owners they had robbed. Depending on the ever-fluctuating street price of cocaine in the United States, Azuela knew he must be watching $10 million to $12 million going up in smoke.

If the wind shifted, how high could he become, just breathing in those fumes? Would they kill him? And if so, would he even care?

“There goes your jefe’s product and his profit,” said the man who’d set it all ablaze. “Now, do you want to help us, or be added to the pyre?”

* * *

“Just ask me what you want to know,” their prisoner replied. He didn’t hang his head or snivel, didn’t try avoiding Bolan’s gaze, but seemed prepared to stand his ground and do what must be done to stay alive.

Assuming anything could save him at this point.

“First let me tell you what we know,” Bolan said. “You work for The Office, based in Envigado, but we may as well just call it Medellín. The founder, Don Berna, is rotting in a solitary cell at ADX Florence, where furnishings include a bed, a desk and a chair, all made from poured concrete. The sink has no tap, and the water in his toilet cuts off if he tries to jam it. There’s a timer on his shower to prevent flooding, and he has one light bulb the guards control remotely. If he’s lucky and he’s caused no trouble, he can leave his cage for one hour per day, five times a week, with three guards watching him. That’s where he’ll stay until he dies, unless he lives past eighty-one without losing his mind.”

“I never worked for Don Berna,” their captive said. He didn’t sound defiant; he was simply doling out a fact of life.

“Which brings me to my first question,” Bolan replied. “Who runs The Office now that he’s away forever?”

“You must understand—”

“He’s stalling,” Grimaldi said, playing bad cop for the moment. “Hell, I’d say he’s useless. Can I pop him now?”

“No, wait! I’ve never met him, you must understand. Some people talk. Of course, they claim to know things, but is any of it true? I don’t know.”

“All right. Let’s start with something that you do know,” Bolan answered. “What’s your name?”

“Ignacio Azuela,” the reply came back without a trace of hesitation.

“You’re Colombian?”

“Sí.”

“And the others here?” Bolan gestured across the body-littered field with his left hand.

“The men who came with me,” Azuela said. “And also the gunmen who traveled through the tunnel, I suppose. The workers who came with them would be mexicanos.”

“Working for The Office?”

“For anyone who pays them, I imagine, doing anything.”

“It looks like none of them are going home,” Grimaldi said, faking a hungry smile.

“But you still might,” Bolan chimed in. “Although I’d recommend a change of scene from the Antioquia Department, if you make it.”

“How can I go back now?” Azuela asked. “I’ve said too much already to survive inside Colombia.”

“That leaves a big world to get lost in,” Bolan said. “But first we need a name.”

“I’ve told you, I don’t know the boss of La Oficina.”

“But I’ll bet your life,” Bolan replied, “you know where this shipment was meant to go upon arrival, and the man who’d be receiving it.”

“Sí. This I know. But in return...”

“You take one of the SUVs, whatever cash your friends have in their pockets and get lost. Try double-crossing us, or if we ever see your face again—even by accident, across a busy street—and you’ll be history.”

“I understand,” their prisoner said. “Now, do you wish to write this down?”

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