Poison Justice

by Don Pendleton

  The Executioner advanced on the Quintero stronghold, watching as the Hellfires began peppering the mansion, the Black Hawk door gunners mowing down any ground resistance.

  15

  “I blame you for this disaster!”

  “Me? How do you get that?”

  Cabriano was stunned by the accusation. Given the rage, though, that exploded at him from Quintero, he felt it wise to attempt to weather the drug lord’s storm.

  Quintero had led him back into the Show Room, where the rebels were loading duffel bags with cash, notebooks, ledgers.

  They were under siege. The entire house right then was shaking as the gunships that had razed what he figured was nearly a mile stretch of airfield and damn near a hundred men, pounded away from all directions. Quintero was pulling up stakes, that much was clear. Cabriano figured there had to be a tunnel out of the mansion. He hardly wanted to glue himself to the trafficker’s coattails under these conditions, but Quintero was his only hope.

  “Your trouble became my trouble! You could not take care of your own affairs, you brought agents, CIA, NSA, who knows into my life! I had a good life!” Quintero was screaming at him.

  Cabriano wished for two things as he counted up the number of FARC goons in the room, five in all. Realizing that Quintero was worked up into a murderous snit, he wanted an assault rifle.

  And he wanted a phone.

  Funny, he decided, what a man did, what he thought of when the end was near. Trouble was, he was torn between whether he’d make his last call on Earth to his wife or mistress.

  Maybe it didn’t matter.

  Cabriano listened to the endless chatter of autofire from some point beyond the open doors, men screaming out the ghost. Plaster rained in his face. The trophy animals were rocking with the pitch and yaw of a house about to come down on their heads.

  “My world goes up,” Quintero yelled. “You go down with me!”

  “What about your brother?”

  “What about him?”

  “We could use his help here!”

  “He is at the laboratory, working to prepare your next shipment.” Quintero laughed.

  “Get us out of Colombia,” Cabriano said, hating the note of pleading in his voice. “We wait this out, regroup. The black ops are all dead. The Saudis, too.”

  “Back to business as usual?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, you fool, my brother and I are finished in Colombia. This is a blatant show of force, something which we have paid everyone short of God to protect us from!”

  “Finished?”

  And then the end came.

  Quintero was pulling the huge hand cannon, Cabriano ready to dive for cover when the room blew up before his eyes.

  THE FRAG BLAST LED Bolan into the drug lord’s trophy room. Two full squads of DEA-Special Forces commandos had his back covered, the mansion ready to cave in any second. Bolan needed this wrapped, aware Fabio Quintero would be on high alert.

  The savages had been embroiled in a heated argument. Bolan found a few FARC-stragglers loading up whatever Quintero thought he needed to make a clean break. No point in prolonging their misery and fear, the Executioner rolled into the room, M-16 blazing. Three FARC thugs were hacking their way out of the smoke, assault rifles firing wild.

  Bolan diced them with a long raking, left to right, bodies slamming off the stuffed bull elephant.

  Quintero stepped up to the plate, roaring something in Spanish, the Desert Eagle thundering, drowning out his words.

  Marching on, Bolan hosed the drug lord with a burst to the chest. Quintero hammered his rhino trophy, bounced back, blood streaking his face, the handgun roaring. Then Bolan hit him with another burst to the chest and dropped him.

  All done here, with one more Quintero savage on the loose.

  Catching withering autofire from beyond the trophy room, Bolan moved toward the dead animals, stuffing and shredded cloth fluttering through the air. He took in the carnage, suddenly felt as if he’d aged ten years in two days. All the lives lost, including some good ones since the campaign began, and he briefly wondered how much of a difference had he made.

  Tomorrow, more like the Quinteros would rise up, he knew. But he would be there, doing what he could to see those who wished to live in peace—not rape, rob or murder or gain an empire through crime—made it through another day. Another Cabriano would claim the crown of crime…

  The groan snapped Bolan’s head to the side. The M-16 swung toward the human wreckage on the floor. Bolan saw a pair of legs eaten up by shrapnel. A few steps in that direction, and he found Cabriano still breathing and holding on to Quintero’s Desert Eagle.

  Cabriano had to have sensed his presence, since Bolan watched as the mobster aimed a look of pure anger and hate his way.

  “You? Who…are you?”

  Bolan answered the question with a burst to Cabriano’s chest, then raised Major Horn.

  “I’m on my way out, Major. Let’s saddle up before brother Fabio takes a long boat ride down the river.”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t do any good, Colonel, to scratch the hit on their jungle compound for now, seeing as there’s a fat whopping mess here to contend with?”

  “You can clean up later.”

  “Okay, Colonel. It’s your party, but it may be my funeral when you leave. I have the Colombian military to deal with when you walk off into the sunset.”

  “Where’s the Major Horn I heard when I landed? The man who wanted to take the gloves off and declare total war on the traffickers and FARC?”

  “Yeah, well, that was until I saw all these bodies that looked like they’d been dipped in acid.”

  “What you see spread around out there is the last of it.”

  “I hope to God you’re right.”

  So did Bolan, but he wasn’t about to raise phantom red flags.

  There was slaughter work still to be done.

  FABIO QUINTERO KNEW that nearly two decades on top of the cocaine heap was unheard-of. All traffickers, no matter how smart, how tough, how rich, had a life expectancy of ten, twelve years tops. That he—and brother Jorge—had survived and not been imprisoned, or worse, extradited to America, was a testament, he supposed, to the fact he believed in the hands-on approach to business.

  For once, he had broken that rule, and now he feared it would cost him his world.

  “Keep trying, dammit!”

  “Sir, there’s nothing but static on their—”

  He wheeled on his radioman, felt his grip tighten on the Galil assault rifle.

  “Understood.”

  He marched out of the command hut, silently urging his FARC work force to hurry up loading the fifty-kilo bales onto the transport trucks. They needed the shipment dumped on their gunboats, moved both up and down river and stashed in various safehouses in Cali and throughout the surrounding region before nightfall. Twenty distributors were demanding more product, and the Russians were due in Cali later that night.

  A hundred worries and self-doubt flooded his thoughts. Because of Jorge’s reluctance to carry out his wishes where their Mideast contact, the American mobster and the intelligence operators were concerned, pure stubbornness and pride had swayed him to leave his younger brother alone with the arriving parties. Mistake number one. He should have been there, since he had negotiated the deal with the mobster himself, though the intelligence operators had sought him out. And there the question of cutting American intelligence operators into the action lingered. Again, he figured pride got the better of him, thinking himself safe and secure in Colombia. Let them all come to him, he owned half the military and police, and those he couldn’t buy ended up dead, along with their entire families.

  Feeling the impatience and worry gnaw deeper, he began barking at his workers to load the trucks with greater speed. He scoured their sweaty scowls as they trudged bales from the lab.

  And yet perhaps another mistake, Quintero thought. The lab itself was shoved back into the forest. The jungl
e canopy was a thick spiderweb tangle, but only directly over the canvas roof. He had other facilities, underground, but the cost to maintain labyrinthine labs was astronomical. Besides, here they were close to the river, with easy and quick access to his brother’s airfield, then quick shipping routes north, through Panama. With all his informants in the military and police, many of whom worked with the Americans, he would be alerted well in advance, normally twenty-four hours before a raid was launched. In that event, product and precursor chemicals could be moved, the raiding party hitting a facility, stripped clean, the Americans left swatting at mosquitoes.

  It had never failed before, he thought, striding toward the lead transport, snarling at his people to board.

  He was grabbing the door handle when he heard a sound he feared as much as death. It descended from all points, the whapping squall of rotor blades appearing to blow the roof off the jungle canopy. He heard shouting in panic from the lab and turned that way as the first missile scored a direct hit in the heart of the facility.

  MAJOR HORN HAD NOT achieved stellar success against the Quintero Cartel. After going through the Farm’s intel, a few answers to the problem came to light. One word leaped to Bolan’s mind.

  Informants.

  Each raid on the Quinteros’ operations had been planned twenty-four hours before the event happened. That left an open window for the store to get hauled somewhere far away. Yes, there would be DEA, CIA down here, holding hands with the opposition, and whether or not Major Horn was planning his own future by lopping off a piece of the cocaine action was moot. If that was the case, he would be found out soon enough. Then there were the Colombian authorities, notorious for wearing the right public face, but in private unchaining the snakes.

  With round one behind them, Bolan hit the jungle lab with the only real solution to the problem.

  Another lightning tempest of Hellfires, bullets and commandos got the avalanche rolling.

  Bolan bounded off the Black Hawk, the M-60 door gunner yammering out the heavy metal thunder. Dragon Company had the skies swarmed with gunships on all points, two more Hellfires pretty much vaporizing the lab. A firestorm gushed out, as ether and acetone ignited. Flaming human comets came wailing from the inferno.

  Bolan turned his sights on the trio of transport trucks lurching off down the trail.

  That would be Quintero.

  The elder Quintero had a nasty surprise waiting when he hit the river.

  Bolan fired his M-16 at armed FARC thugs, shooting from the hip, dusting four on the fly before he hit the trail. An explosion rocked the jungle behind Bolan. Turning he found commandos leaping from the flaming hull of a Black Hawk going down, crashing its fiery descent through the jungle canopy.

  The Executioner left Horn and commandos to nail it down, and gave chase to the last savage.

  “HURRY! HURRY!”

  Fabio Quintero cursed his mules, spewing all the fear and hatred he felt about the destruction of his lab from a force that shouldn’t exist. He charged up and down the wooden wharf, torn between watching the sky over the river and railing for the workers to just hurl the bales into the gunboats.

  He heard engines sputtering to life and caught the raging storm of death and destruction beyond the line of dense jungle vegetation.

  He froze suddenly, warning bells gonging in his head. Why were there no helicopters over the river? Where were all the enemy commandos? Why was he standing there, alone, with his boat and two tons of product?

  The two Apaches sailed out of nowhere. They looked like giant prehistoric birds to Quintero as it hit him what was happening.

  He raged at the injustice of it all, knew the kingdom was about to go up in flames.

  It did, as he hit the deck and the first missile blew a gunboat out of the water.

  BOLAN STEPPED OFF the trail, M-16 chattering at armed figures scraping themselves off the matchstick ruins of the wharf. The Apaches soaring on down the river, the Executioner blew doomed opposition back into flaming trash pelting the water. From the raining debris of gunboats, a white mist floated behind the wreckage.

  Bolan navigated a march, hugging the edge of the jungle tree line. One man was left, crabbing, Galil in hand, at the far edge of the wharf. As he closed in, he recognized the elder Quintero. The drug lord grunted, hauled himself to his feet. All these years the trafficker had reigned, escaping justice, either rough or at the hands of the law. Bribes, murders, or fleeing the country until the heat cooled, Bolan figured Quintero had worn a tainted crown long enough.

  The drug lord snarled an oath, wheeled toward Bolan. Beyond the feral look in the eyes, the soldier read an unquenchable anger and hate, the man not wanting to give up the ghost. If Bolan let him walk, he would buy his way out, and back into the game of dispensing death and misery. But Quintero made his move, aiming his Galil with shaking hands.

  The Executioner hit the M-16’s trigger and blew Quintero into a watery grave.

  Epilogue

  “What? No bouquet of roses?”

  Bolan found Brognola sitting halfway up in bed. The big Fed looked understandably gaunt and tired, but there was a shine to his eyes that told Bolan the man was grateful he—both of them—was still alive.

  Bolan took a chair beside the man’s bed. Brognola had a room to himself, the Justice Department even hooking up cable to his television. The big Fed was watching a news channel.

  The doctor told Bolan it was a miracle how quickly Brognola was on the mend, the bullet having missed both heart and spine by less than an inch. Stranger things, Bolan knew, had happened.

  For a few moments they sat in the kind of peaceful silence that only longtime friends could share.

  “It’s good to see you,” Brognola said quietly.

  “It’s good to be here. By the way, the roses are Barb’s department,” Bolan told Brognola, and reached into his coat pocket. “She’s on the way,” he added, and held out three Havanas for Brognola’s viewing pleasure.

  ISBN: 978-1-4603-7424-5

  Special thanks and acknowledgment to Dan Schmidt for his contribution to this work.

  POISON JUSTICE

  Copyright © 2005 by Worldwide Library.

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