Killing Kings Read online

  “Hey, at least she’s civil,” Grimaldi stated. “This could be a little awkward, though.”

  It was, since both their shoulder rigs were meant for right-hand draws, but Bolan reached his Glock before Grimaldi reached his own. He handed back his .40 caliber, then passed her his partner’s in turn. “Names now?” he asked.

  “You first.”

  He used the one on his fraudulent passport. “Matt Cooper.”

  “You can call me Joe,” Grimaldi said. “Gaynor.”

  “And you are?”

  “Carolina,” she replied. “Cabrera.”

  “That’s a Stan Lee name,” the Stony Man pilot told her.

  “Excuse me?”

  “From the Marvel movies. What, you missed them? Peter Parker, Pepper Potts, Bruce Banner, Buckey Barnes? No? Nothing? You have seen movies, right.”

  “It is my birth name,” she replied stiffly.

  “Huh. Sorry.”

  “If we can bring this back to Earth,” Bolan said. “Why’d you pick on us, and why should we be talking to you now?”

  “I picked on you because you carry these,” she said, holding both Glocks up with her left hand, index finger through their trigger guards. “We talk because I wish to warn you of the danger you’ll be facing, if you follow your projected plan.”

  “What plan is that?” Bolan asked.

  “To confront Rodrigo Sarmiento,” she replied.

  “We’ve never met the man,” Grimaldi said.

  “And those may be the first true words you’ve spoken yet,” she said. “If you are wise, forget about your plan. Leave Envigado, Medellín—Colombia, in fact—on the next flight available to anyplace.”

  “Why would we do that?” Bolan challenged her.

  “Because to stay here means your death,” she answered. “Either immediately, or when Sarmiento finds you out. Between the two, I can assure you I will be more merciful.”

  Bolan decided it was time to call her bluff. “So, fire away,” he said.

  “That isn’t my intention,” she quickly replied. “But I must know who sent you here.”

  “No sale. If you work for Sarmiento and you think we’re after him—”

  “I know it,” Cabrera said.

  “Then you should want us dead right now, instead of wandering around at large.”

  “I am not one of his hit men,” she said.

  “I gather that,” Bolan agreed. “But what are you?”

  She hesitated, swallowed hard and said, “I’m with the DEA.”

  Chapter Five

  “The Drug Enforcement Agency?” Grimaldi asked.

  “Administration,” Cabrera instantly corrected him.

  “Oh, right. It must’ve slipped my mind.”

  “It slips many reporters’ minds, as well,” she said. “Or were you testing me?”

  “Would I do that?”

  “Quite possibly,” she said.

  “You wouldn’t have credentials in that handbag where you stash your pistol, would you?” Bolan queried.

  “If you’re asking whether I’m a total tonto, the answer would be ‘no.’”

  “Tonto,” Jack said. “Now, I recognize that name. The Lone Ranger’s faithful companion.”

  “It means ‘fool’ in Spanish, Mr. Gaynor.”

  “Ouch! You think that pissed Ed Ames?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Who that is. I get it, lady. No TV, no movies.”

  “I enjoyed Les Miserables,” she came back at him. “Hugh Jackman. There’s a man for you.”

  “Sorry. Homey don’t play that.” Grimaldi grinned at her via the rearview.

  “So, you’re shadowing Sarmiento and The Office?” Bolan asked her.

  “For the better part of two years now,” she said.

  “In what capacity, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “First you ask, then seek permission? So American.”

  “I think she just insulted you,” Grimaldi said.

  “Insulted both of us,” Bolan reminded him.

  “Hey, I’m a lost cause any way you look at it. Just ask the lady.”

  “I’m still waiting for an answer,” Bolan said to Cabrera—if that was, indeed, her name.

  “I am his personal assistant,” she replied. “And no, before you go too far, that doesn’t mean I’m his amante. What you’d call his ‘mistress on the side.’”

  “What kind of man is he?” Grimaldi asked.

  “Married to his work, I’d say.”

  “And his work is The Office,” Bolan said, not making it a question.

  “Sí. For years now, long before I was assigned to him.”

  “What took so long?”

  “When Pablo Escobar was killed, the DEA soon rounded up the other leaders of the Medellín Cartel. They told the world, from Washington on down, that Medellín was finished as a center of the drug trade. It had moved to Cali, they insisted, and with more agents, more funds, they could defeat that syndicate, as well. Of course, they did, after a fashion. It is ‘common knowledge’ now, from headquarters pronouncement, down to Netflix.”

  “There you go,” Grimaldi said. “The power of the tube.”

  She nodded, looking grim. “Admitting that The Office had arisen to replace the Escobar cartel might have produced too many questions from the White House, Congress and the media; therefore, Cali was targeted, and then the drug wars started setting fire to Mexico, dwarfing the narcoterrorism spawned by Medellín. When that proved uncontrollable...well, suddenly The Office was ‘discovered,’ and a new campaign began.”

  “And how did you get stuck into the middle of it?” Bolan asked. “You are Colombian by birth, correct?”

  “From Bogotá. Some years ago—the reasons aren’t important—I went north, enrolled at Stanford University and then I was recruited by the DEA before commencement. I am multilingual, like most educated people here, and I had seen what the cartels were doing to my homeland, to its people. How could I refuse that opportunity to put things right.”

  “You think that’s possible?” Bolan asked.

  “I know that people of the Andes have been chewing coca leaves before the first Spaniards and Portuguese ‘discovered’ the so-called New World. The leaves have been unearthed with mummies in Peru. In time, science and greed caught up with history, and recognized the world’s insatiable appetite. If laws banning the powder were repealed, would it destroy the great cartels?” She shrugged. “I don’t know, and I don’t care. I have work to do, right here and now. As for your own task...”

  “Right now, we’re ghost hunters,” Grimaldi said.

  She frowned. “Explain, please.”

  “Pablo Escobar,” Bolan said. “I assume you’ve heard the stories that he’s back, alive and doing fine? Some say he looks as young as on the day he took his dirt nap.”

  “Ah. And you believe those fairy tales?”

  “I know somebody has been hitting Pablo’s enemies from when he was alive, and taking shots at the cartels that have tried to fill his shoes. I don’t believe in ghosts, but people are dying. We’re here to find out why, and who’s responsible.”

  “I admit Rodrigo is aware of these fables. He puts no stock in them, of course, and yet... He has lost men, had property destroyed, shipments of product intercepted, stolen—or the last one, up in Texas, burned with no attempt to profit from it.”

  “Who does he blame?” Grimaldi asked.

  “Many rivals would be pleased to crush The Office and preempt it. All the Mexican cartels, of course, or in Colombia, Los Rastrojos Comandos Urbanos, based in Cali. Cubans or Guatemalans, Panamanians, even a few Brazilians. In Peru, there are at least one hundred thousand citizens of Japanese descent, together with at least four thousand new arrivals. There’s no doubt that some of them ha
ve Yakuza connections.”

  “So, it could be anyone except Don Pablo,” Grimaldi stated.

  “Or,” Cabrera said, “there’s a possibility that someone is impersonating him, playing upon his memory, indelibly impressed upon Colombia. His former home, at Hacienda Nápoles, is now a theme park with four luxury hotels surrounding Pablo’s zoo, which includes bison, zebras, rare goats and at least one ostrich. Naturally, to please the moralists, an anti-crime museum and simulated prison also occupy the grounds.”

  “Like Narco Disney World,” Grimaldi said.

  “Many in Antioquia still revere him as a Robin Hood of sorts, remembering the football fields he built for children, and the homes constructed for the poor in barrios.”

  “Like how Al Capone tipped newsboys twenty bucks apiece and built soup kitchens in Chicago during the Depression,” Grimaldi said.

  “While he robbed their parents blind,” Cabrera stated. “Yes, it’s much the same. When Pablo died, twenty-five thousand mourners thronged his funeral. Today some pray to him for help as if he were a consecrated saint.”

  “I guess you can fool some folks all the time,” Grimaldi said.

  “The only difference between Pablo and Sarmiento,” Cabrera said, “is that Rodrigo loathes publicity. His second greatest worry at the moment, after loss of revenue and men, is that the new war will expose him and The Office to official inquiry.”

  “But now the DEA’s on top of him,” Bolan stated.

  “Unless we’re already too late.”

  He turned in his seat to face her. “We may be able to help out with that.”

  Cordillera Central, Antioquia Department

  “I understand... Yes... No, there’s been no trace of interference with us... If you think it’s necessary, certainly... As you wish, sir... Of course, I’ll call immediately if required... Goodbye, sir.”

  Ciro Uribe switched off his satellite phone, folded its antenna and glared at the thing in his hand as if wishing to fling it away. Behind him, Victor Shuk discreetly cleared his throat before asking, “More grief from Envigado?”

  “And from Texas now, they say. Some kind of daylight massacre and a whole shipment lost—not stolen, this time—burned, as a gesture of disrespect.”

  “Crazy,” Shuk said.

  “Yes, it is. Who slaughters a dozen men or more to seize the cocaine, then destroys it, when they could make millions selling it across North America?”

  One thing Ciro Uribe knew was cocaine, its production and refinement, and the economics that made it one of the planet’s top commodities. His adult life had been devoted to that cause, and the facility he operated now concerned itself with nothing else.

  To start, making a single kilogram requied roughly a ton of coca leaves, for which a peasant farmer could expect to make $400 to $500. If a farmer chose to process leaves himself, a ton reduced to crude paste might earn him $900 per kilo. A covert lab such as Uribe’s refined the paste, producing pure white powder that, depending on its port of entry into North America, might fetch $10,000 to $20,000. Sent to Western Europe, at this morning’s currency exchange rate, that meant €8,750 to €17,400. Lower-level dealers paid some $70,000 to $80,000 per kilo, then cut the pure drug with whatever diluents were handy—baking soda, baby laxative, sugar, rat poison—and sold it off piecemeal in grams, reaping a minimum of $150,000 from their customers.

  And that was how cartels banked billions every year, despite speeches in Congress or in Parliament by prohibitionists who always sent a proper bagman to collect their monthly bribes. The same was true, at varied levels, in every significant police department down the line, from US states, to counties and to towns of any size.

  Lost in his private reverie, Uribe missed the next thing Shuk had said. “Sorry,” he apologized distractedly. “What did you say?”

  “I asked how many men he’s sending,” Shuk replied.

  “Ten or fifteen. He isn’t sure yet. Either way, they’ll helicopter in before nightfall.”

  Uribe’s forest lab was situated in the Central Andes, bounded by the Magdalena River’s valley on the west, and by the Cauca River’s valley to the east. It was rough country, relatively easy to secure and difficult to reach without alerting guards, since trespassers either arrived by air or slogged on foot.

  “It couldn hurt,” Shuk said.

  “What couldn’t?” Uribe asked.

  “Having more men and guns on hand.”

  “More mouths to feed, you mean,” Uribe replied. “There was no mention of them bringing in supplies, and we’re already running short for this month. The workers eat like pigs.”

  “So, ration them. If they protest, shoot one of them and hire a cheap replacement—or just share his work among the rest.”

  “We’ll lose deserters, Victor.”

  “Even with the new guards from Envigado standing watch all night?”

  Shuk had a point.

  “Okay,” he said. “You tell them, eh? Before they’re fed tonight.”

  Central Andes

  Bolan checked his compass, verifying that he was within two miles of his selected target. Most of it would be uphill from where he stood, and that was fine. He planned to be on station before night descended.

  Grimaldi had brought him this far in a Cessna 182 Skylane, rental permitted once the owner had confirmed the Stony Man ace’s pilot’s license as a valid document and dinged “Matt Cooper’s” Amex Platinum Card for the aircraft’s full replacement price, just in case the two Americans didn’t manage to return. If they made it back—or Grimaldi did, flying the return trip solo—they would owe a mere $500 per hour.

  As for the HALO jumping gear, they’d purchased that outright in Medellín, with no intent of it surviving through the drop.

  There were no landing strips within ten miles of Bolan’s target—which, itself, lay fifteen miles northwest of Medellín. For the extraction, if Bolan survived that long, Grimaldi had a Schweizer 300 light utility chopper on standby, equipped with a winch that could hoist Bolan into the sky, once he’d radioed in his coordinates, standing ready with a flare.

  The hard part, leading up to this moment, had been persuading Carolina Cabrera to play along. Bolan had double-checked her DEA ID through Stony Man, and while that alone would never guarantee reliability, Bolan had stayed alive over the years as much by reading people as by knowing military hardware. He believed that the woman could be trusted—to a point, at least, when she might feel oblighed to rat him out, not to The Office, but to headquarters in Bogotá.

  So far she was reluctantly on board, and had provided the location of the coke lab Bolan was approaching now, on foot. Meanwhile she planned to stay in place as Sarmiento’s personal assistant, working from within The Office and collecting evidence that would support indictments, extradition to the States, convictions and imprisonment.

  That was, if there was anybody left to prosecute if Bolan and Grimaldi held up their end of the deal.

  Grudgingly, Cabrera had supplied the GPS coordinates for Bolan’s present target, and identified its manager in residence as Ciro Uribe, a Medellín Cartel alumnus who had eased into the drug trade as a member of M-19, the paramilitary group that Pablo Escobar employed to raid the Bogotá Palace of Justice, slaughtering judges and—not incidentally—torching the files of cartel leaders who’d been dubbed “The Extraditables.” Uribe hadn’t gone along on that raid, as he was deemed too young, and so he had survived to fight another day, next as a Medellín Cartel hit man, later moving into The Office’s upper-level management.

  Now he was in the Executioner’s crosshairs, but not until he’d been given a chance to spill his guts, tell all he knew and maybe—just maybe—buy back his life.

  As for his soldiers at the drug lab, and whichever workers loved their boss enough to fight for him, they all were going down.

  Bolan was dressed much as he had been f
or the Texas strikes, his desert camouflage swapped for a forest pattern. His armaments were also basically unchanged: the Steyr AUG, the .44 Desert Eagle, M68 grenades, the GI Tanto fighting knife. One change was the addition of a dozen NATO STANAG type 22 mm rifle grenades, capable of launching from the AUG’s integral flash hider without the use of an adapter. The rifle used a three-position gas valve: a small dot was used for normal operation; a large dot indicated fouled conditions; while a “GR” closed position launched grenades without need of a bullet trap.

  As Bolan closed to smelling distance from his destination, stinking coca fumes and wood smoke from a cooking fire borne on the mountain breeze, he fitted a grenade onto the Steyr’s muzzle. Creeping now, he moved in close enough to count the tents and buildings, picking out the one most likely to be Uribe’s command post.

  Sighting through his rifle’s telescope, he launched the first grenade.

  * * *

  Ciro Uribe was inside one of the camp’s chemical toilets, seated, with his trousers down around his ankles, when the first explosion rocked his fiberglass closet and nearly tipped it over to one side. Bracing his arms against its confining blue walls, Uribe tried to guess whether the blast resulted from some idiot mishandling gasoline or ether, or if it had been deliberate.

  The second detonation, coming less than half a minute later, settled it.

  The camp was under fire, with Sarmiento’s reinforcements nowhere to be seen.

  Uribe stuggled to his feet, hauling his pants up, fastening his belt. He wore a pistol in a shoulder holster every waking hour of his life at the compound—a SIG Sauer P226 in rust-retardant stainless steel, chambered for .357 SIG rounds, just in case a jaguar came along—and now he drew the shiny weapon, ready to defend himself as best he could.

  The moment he set foot outside the toilet, yet another blast ripped through the compound, bringing down a large camouflage tent where coca leaves were heaped into a pit, first covered with cement, a binding agent spread in dry layers, and later processed, using ether, gasoline, and other chemicals to bleach and purify the coca paste. The latest blast set off combustible materials that enveloped the camo tent in a fireball even as it was collapsing on itself.