Killing Kings Read online

  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 shi
pment 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.