Killing Kings Read online

  Inside, he kept a private stash of weapons that did not comingle with the compound’s arsenal. Not trusting his ability to aim a rifle, he picked out the Armsel Striker that had ridden with him to the forest camp from Medellín. Esguerra unfolded the shotgun’s metal stock but didn’t check its cylinder, knowing the weapon had been loaded with a dozen 12-gauge buckshot rounds when he had arrived, and knowing no one would have tampered with it in the meantime.

  Before leaving his bungalow again, he double-checked to make sure that he hadn’t lost his holstered FN FNP pistol when he fell down outside. Returning to the din and firelight of his camp in chaos, he leaned close to the man who’d brought him this far, raised his voice to issue one more order.

  “Bring me Ilia Díaz. You know him?”

  “Yes, sir. Your pilot.”

  “Good. Tell him to meet me at the helipad as soon as he can get there. No excuses, no diversions. Understand?”

  “I understand, sir.” A quick bob of the head, and he was gone into the fog of war.

  Would he return? Would he or could he find Díaz? The pilot might be dead by now, or might have fled on foot—which meant the same as death, if Esguerra survived the night and later tracked him down. But if he was alive and could be found, the only place to wait for him was with the sleek Bell 407 crouching on its rectangle of soil.

  Esguerra huddled in the chopper’s shadow, staring off across the compound he had trusted as his sanctuary, now falling apart before his very eyes. Imagining he glimpsed one rifleman he didn’t recognize among the rest, and then another, he considered stepping out to fire at them, then reckoned that it would amount to suicide. If he could just escape, he could regroup and launch his master plan again from scratch. At the rate of destruction he was witnessing, no evidence of his identity would be left at the scene to put the DEA or police on his trail.

  And yet...someone, somehow, had traced him here. If they could do it once...

  Escaping was the first step. Nothing else mattered until Esguerra had accomplished that.

  But where in hell was his pilot for the getaway, as time was running out?

  * * *

  Carolina Carbera heard the first explosion, picking up her pace as she approached Esguerra’s camp. Another detonation swiftly followed, and she guessed without much doubt that Matt Cooper and Joe Gaynor had initiated the attack. And now she wondered whether they would die without her ever learning their real names, or who had sent them to Colombia.

  But then, if she were killed within the next few minutes, none of that would matter.

  From the darkness up ahead, she heard male voices arguing about their course of action. From the snatches she made out, they had been ordered to investigate a missing soldier, possibly the one she’d slain for weapons only moments earlier. One man insisted they should turn back to assist their comrades under fire at the compound; the other said their boss would be furious and punish them severely if they didn’t follow his command.

  So they were moving forward, running now, as Cabrera ducked into the trees beside the rural accress road. By feel, she checked her captured AK-103’s safety and verified that it was in the off position, its selector switch set for full-automatic fire. Now, at least in theory, all she had to do was aim and squeeze the trigger to eliminate the bickering gunmen.

  Unless they shot her first.

  The pair came into view, slowing their pace and calling out a name that, she assumed, had to have belonged to the smoking man she’d killed without firing a shot. The AK had a folding stock, but it had been extended when she got it and she’d seen no point in folding it along the left side of the weapon. With it at her shoulder now, Cabrera peered over the gun’s iron sights and waited, barely breathing, till her targets jogged into the frame.

  Her first burst, five or six rounds from the magazine’s thirty, struck both targets on the move. They dropped, one twitching, crying out, while his comrade in arms hit the dirt facedown and didn’t move again. Emerging from cover, she stepped up to the wounded man, took better aim and shot him through the head to still his cries. After she’d taken both their long guns, flinging them into the trees, Cabrera left them and moved on.

  In her years of service to the DEA, she’d never killed another person, never even wounded one beyond a punch that had rendered one resistant dealer semiconscious while he was being arrested. Now, within the span of roughly half a day, she’d slain four men—one with a homemade knife after he’d tortured her, one, a sentry, with well-placed kicks and the other two gunned down from ambush without giving them the option to surrender first.

  What troubled Cabrera at that moment was the way she felt—or rather, didn’t feel.

  In training she’d been cautioned to expect lethal mayhem, prepare for it and take for granted that a killing would upset her, maybe sicken her or cause her to seek counseling. Now, with her count at four, the only thing Cabrera felt was satisfaction at a task well done, plus the relief of being on her feet, still breathing, while her enemies were not.

  Maybe I’ll have a breakdown later, she considered, but the thought seemed so unlikely that she shrugged it off and started moving faster toward the battle under way, perhaps two hundred yards ahead of her.

  Whatever she might think of Gaynor and Cooper individually, leaving her behind and freezing her out of the action, they had saved her life when she was almost certain to have died. Now they were in the line of hostile fire—their choice, their doing, granted—but she couldn’t leave them to it on their own.

  Besides, the whole damned case was rightly hers.

  The closer Cabrera came to camp, the louder gunshots, screams and powerful explosions echoed in her ears. She wondered whether anyone in Anzá heard the sounds or understood their meaning. If so, would they summon the police, or simply take the route of countryfolk throughout Colombia and mind their own business until the killing reached their streets?

  “Not my problem,” Cabrera whispered to herself, and pushed on toward the battleground, trailing the scents of smoke and burnt cordite.

  The fight was going on without her, and she didn’t plan to miss another moment of it.

  * * *

  Riding with his windows down, the other cars in his convoy strung out behind him, Sarmiento heard the battle starting somewhere west of Highway 258 and drawing closer by the second. When his driver slowed their car, Sarmiento rounded on him, snapping, “What are you doing? Did I order you to stop?”

  “But boss,” the wheelman answered back. “The fight’s begun without us. It’s a trap for—”

  “Silence! If you can’t follow orders, get out of my car. But I warn you, do not go back to Medellín or Envigado.”

  Grimacing, his driver answered, “Yes, sir,” and floored the car’s accelerator. Seconds later, with a nod, he pointed out the narrow side road that had to serve the forest battleground. “Shall I pull in, sir?” he asked.

  “If you hope to survive the night,” Sarmiento answered, tending to his H&K UMP45 submachine gun. Manufactured as a lighter, cheaper version of the classic MP5, the UMP had been adopted by police and military forces of some thirty nations, notably including the US Border Patrol and the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, assigned to guard America’s largest office building and some of its off-site facilities.

  Sarmiento’s UMP fed .45 ACP cartridges from 30-round box magazines with a cyclic rate of 600 rounds per minute, with an effective range around seventy yards.

  In this night’s action, he expected to be much closer than that to his targets.

  He didn’t bother warning the men behind him in the convoy, trusting them to hear the sounds of battle as their vehicles turned off the highway, speeding down the narrow access road toward where the action was. Sarmiento wondered what had happened. If the gringos had set a trap meant for him and his soldiers, why had the shooting started before they’d arrived?

  And if it
wasn’t set for him...what did that mean?

  To hell with it, he thought, and put the problem out of mind. He didn’t care what was going on as long as Esguerra’s men were being killed off, making his own wet work that much easier.

  He hoped that Esguerra wasn’t killed, though. Craving that pleasure for himself, he would be gravely disappointed if he couldn’t watch the light of life pass from his rival’s eyes, before he hacked away his head, together with its altered face, and claimed it as a souvenir.

  “Faster!” he shouted at his driver. “Fail me now at your peril!”

  The wheelman didn’t answer, but he milked a few more kilometers per hour from their speeding vehicle, then shifted to the brake again as their headlights picked out two crumpled bodies lying in the middle of the road.

  “Faster, you idiot!” Sarmiento barked. “Run over them!”

  Their car lurched, thumping over the gunmen whom Sarmiento guessed had died while running from the fight. It was no less than the bastards deserved, shot down while fleeing, now being reduced to jelly by the convoy passing over their remains.

  And suddenly the compound lay in front of them. No gate prevented them from entering where bloody chaos reigned, with automatic weapons stuttering, men running all about, some of them falling. Buildings were aflame, tents flapping in the hot breeze as they burned.

  “Stop here!” Sarmiento shouted, heedless of the other vehicles now piling up behind them. He was first out of the car, spotted a gunman coming toward him and ripped off a burst that put his adversary down.

  First blood, he thought, at least for him, this night. Without turning, he shouted to his soldiers, entering the camp on foot now that he’d blocked their cars: “Rally to me! Exterminate the sons of bitches!”

  Laughing like a madman, Sarmiento charged into the fray, trusting his loyal troops to follow him. If any failed him now, they could burn in Hell, and if he met them there before the night was out, he’d gladly watch them burn.

  * * *

  Diego Esguerra was running out of time and patience, crouched beside his helicopter, waiting for Ilia Díaz. He wondered if his pilot had been killed before Esguerra’s runner found him, or if the runner himself were lying dead somewhere in the smoky confusion of his forest camp.

  In either case, if Díaz didn’t show up soon, Esguerra had resolved to flee on foot and take his chances in the woods, away from the pandemonium surrounding him, the faceless men who sought to end him there. He couldn’t pilot the Bell 407 on his own, much less land it without killing himself, nor could he drive out of the camp. The first explosion had disabled his Mazda Miata and damaged the compound’s ATVs. As for the mountain bikes, he’d never learned to drive one of them, either—painful irony, after the films and photographs he’d seen of Pablo Escobar driving a motorcycle with his aides around him, seeming to enjoy themselves immensely.

  So his hope for an escape relied on Ilia Díaz. Without the pilot, he might well get lost roaming the woods at night—that was, if he wasn’t arrested first, or shot by someone stalking him.

  Esguerra still had no idea who’d sent the gringos to harass him, but he recognized the bastard who had just arrived, leading a caravan of cars now blocking the only road that served Esguerra’s compound. Even by firelight, through drifting smoke, he knew Rodrigo Sarmiento at first sight, the enemy he hated most of all for taking over from Don Pablo at his death, rejuvenating Escobar’s supposedly defunct cartel, building The Office into Colombia’s preeminent cocaine distributor of late.

  He felt an urge to track his nemesis, go after him and blast him with the Armsel Striker, but he knew that was a suicidal plan—no plan at all, in fact, beyond self-sacrifice. And whatever Esguerra represented to the world at large—a target for police and rival narcotraffickers—one role he couldn’t play convincingly was that of sacrificial lamb.

  “Boss!” The call alerted him, Esguerra raising his shotgun until he recognized Ilia Díaz approaching at a jog that seemed to cause him pain. A closer look revealed his pilot to be injured, bleeding from a wound above his beltline, where he’d clamped one hand to slow the loss of blood.

  “Now what?” Esguerra muttered to hiself.

  As Díaz closed the gap between them, slowing down, Esguerra asked, “What happened to you? Don’t tell me you’re wounded!”

  “Don’t worry, boss,” Díaz answered. “I can fly.” But even speaking made him wince from pain.

  “You must fly,” Esguerra demanded. “Get me out of here before they kill us both.”

  The pilot glanced to his left and then to his right, as if trying to work out who “they” were. He then shook his head as if to clear it, reaching up to the Bell’s right-hand door, straining to open it and gasping from the pain of that effort. He got it open nonetheless, and gestured for his boss to climb in ahead of him. Esguerra hauled himself into the chopper’s cockpit, turning back to ask, “Which seat?”

  “It makes no difference,” Díaz replied through gritted teeth, then found he couldn’t climb into the helicopter without help and said, “Can you please give me a hand?”

  Cursing under his breath, Esguerra leaned across to drag the pilot up beside him, grunting at the strain from his deadweight.

  “Strap in, boss,” Díaz instructed, while he buckled his own safety harness, grappling with a crash helmet that dangled by its chin strap from a hook before him.

  “Hurry up, will you?” Esguerra snapped.

  Bobbing his head, whether to nod agreement or because staying alert proved difficult, Díaz began the task of flipping switches, scanning displays on the instrument panel, working pedals with his sluggish feet. Above them, Esguerra could see and hear the Bell’s main rotors, thirty-five feet in diameter, begin to move. Slowly at first, the four blades gathered speed until their sound was almost deafening inside the cockpit, nothing but a blur of motion overhead. The tail rotor—much smaller by comparison, with only two blades—had begun to spin as well, its sound inside the Bell a whine beside the larger rotor’s growl.

  Liftoff was tentative at first—more of a rocking from side to side—but then Esguerra knew they had begun to hover, no longer a stationary target on the ground. No sooner had the thought arrived than he recoiled, surprised and frightened by a bullet’s impact on the Perspex windowpane immediately to his right.

  “What the hell!” he blurted, turning to see a woman running toward the helicopter with some kind of military rifle in her hands, lifting her weapon for another shot.

  Esguerra didn’t think his window could be opened, so he grabbed the door handle, wrenched it upward and then shoved it open while he swiveled in his seat. He thrust the Armsel Striker toward the redhaired apparition bent on killing him and fired a 12-gauge blast in her direction. Hit, she crumpled to the ground, Esguerra whooping in delight.

  “Got her!” he shouted to Díaz, vaguely conscious that the pilot couldn’t hear him, or perhaps just didn’t care. “I don’t know who she was, but she missed her chance. Now get me out of here!”

  Only another moment more, and he’d be safe—at least for now. Rebuilding might take time, certainly money, but so what? Esguerra had already faked one death and then returned, wearing a famous corpse’s face. What challenge could defeat him after that?

  Mack Bolan was already moving toward the chopper, bent on stopping it before it got away, when he saw Carolina Cabrera rushing forward, firing toward the Bell. Inside the cockpit, someone—almost certainly Esguerra—sprang the door open and fired a shotgun at her, dropping her before she could squeeze off a second shot.

  What was she doing here? Joining the battle, naturally. Doing just what Bolan had been trying to avoid when he left her behind at the motel. How she’d followed him and come to be there in the midst of what had turned into a massacre, he didn’t care. The details would be obvious once he’d had time to sort them out.

  But there was no time for distractio
ns now.

  His steady hand affixed a 22 mm grenade to the AUG’s flashhider, snapping into place. Raising the Steyr to his shoulder, Bolan made his mind a blank beyond its focus on the rifle’s telescopic image of the helicopter rising, its Rolls-Royce M250 turboshaft overwhelming gunfire from the compound with its roar.

  If Bolan didn’t stop the chopper now, his target would be out of range in nothing flat, moving three miles per minute at top speed. If he tried for the whirlybird and missed, it meant starting the hunt for Esguerra from scratch, the man vanishing into the night and likely only surfacing again months later, with a new face and a new identity.

  He wouldn’t reappear as Pablo’s ghost, of course. Maybe he’d mimic some other notorious felon who’d died or gone to prison in the States. Maybe he’d simply vanish, living off the fortune that he’d stashed away, until old age caught up with him at last.

  “Not this time,” Bolan told himself, holding the rifle steady as he squeezed its trigger and the sleek grenade took flight.

  There was no fiery trail to track it through the darkness, but the night sky came alight as Bolan’s HE round impacted on its target, shearing through the helicopter’s fuselage and purging its interior with fire. Roughly a hundred feet above ground level, it disintegrated, flaming streamers arcing downward as its dual fuel tanks ruptured, their explosion coming close behind the first, ensuring that the aircraft’s passengers would be unreognizable before they even hit the ground.

  Tearing his eyes away from that fireball, Bolan ran toward the spot where Cabrera had collapsed, kneeling beside her. Someone else came up beside him, and he nearly fired the AUG again before he recognized Grimaldi, hastening to aid him.

  “How bad is it?” he asked.

  “Hard to tell,” the Executioner replied. “Buckshot, but I can’t tell how many pellets hit her, or exactly where.”

  Cabrera’s blouse and slacks were stained with blood, and more of it was leaking through, but Bolan couldn’t wait on open ground, dressing her wounds from the first-aid kit on his belt, while two groups of gunmen were still fighting it out for mastery of the compound.