Killing Kings Read online

  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 se
e-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?”

  Chapter Three

  Ozona, Texas

  Mack Bolan and Jack Grimaldi sped away from the rural airstrip where the Stony Man pilot had landed his Bell 206 helicopter. Their nondescript ride, a Chevy Impala, had been dropped off by the DEA. As the two warriors headed toward the next stop in their mission, a highway sign loomed large, announcing The Biggest Little Town in the World.

  “Texas,” Grimaldi said. “They’ll never take any awards for modesty.”

  The sign did make a certain kind of sense, Bolan supposed. Ozona was the seat of Crockett County—named for Davy, martyr of the Alamo—and was the county’s home for 3,225 of Crockett’s 3,719 full-time residents. That left the other 494 citizens spread over 2,807 square miles, mostly sagebrush and desert; call it 5.6 souls per square mile.

  A person never had to see a neighbor if he or she played their cards right, and the isolation made it perfect for what Bolan had in mind. The county sheriff’s website listed thirteen staff members in all: four sergeants, one dog handler, one detective, one investigator—if that differed from “detective”—and six deputies. Their jobs included drug investigations, serving state and civil warrants, managing the county jail, and going on routine patrol. Divide that by the hours in a given day, and even if they worked twelve-hour shifts—unlikely, Bolan thought—that meant a maximum of six or seven officers on duty at a time.