Killing Kings

by Don Pendleton

  “That’s sloppy parking,” Grimaldi observed. “Cops used to ticket drivers for it, back in my hometown.”

  “They’re in a hurry,” Bolan mused, as four doors opened on each car and lean men with a hungry look about them started piling out. Each one of them carried some kind of military rifle, SMG or shotgun held against their legs, for now, with muzzled pointed at the blacktop.

  “Reinforcements or a hunting party?” Grimaldi inquired.

  “The two rear windows I can see have rental stickers on them,” Bolan said. “The closest one—you see the frame around its license plate?”

  “Avis,” the pilot read aloud. “Do you think they still try harder?”

  “It makes me think of airports,” Bolan said.

  “And Sarmiento’s shooters should be local boys.”

  “We could sit this one out and let them dust him,” Grimaldi suggested.

  “It’s a plan,” Bolan agreed. “But if they take him, we can’t ask Rodrigo what he knows about his predecessor’s zombie strolling around Medellín.”

  “Good point. We’d better do something about it, then.”

  “What say we head around in back and try to find that alley first?”

  * * *

  Passersby would not suspect Rodrigo Sarmiento’s house was fortified, but he had taken various security precautions all the same. The walls were reinforced against invaders, while the doors and windows were resistant to incoming fire, if not perfectly bulletproof. His driveway gate, when shut, immediately activated a silent alarm inside the home, with flashing lights to warn him of intruders entering the property. Small CCTV cameras mounted beneath the eaves allowed him to examine every square foot of his land, within the wrought-iron fence, and never show his face outside.

  Beyond those passive measures, Sarmiento was well armed at home, with pistols placed in drawers throughout the living room, kitchen and dining room, the bedroom nightstands, and the bathroom cabinets. His bedroom gun rack also held two long guns: a Galil AR, Israel’s standard-issue assault rifle with a high-impact plastic handguard and pistol grip, plus a tubular metal skeleton stock that folded to the weapon’s right; and a Benelli M4 Super 90 semiautomatic shotgun with a collapsible stock that could shorten the piece by eight inches.

  The Galil was loaded with a 50-round box magazine containing 5.56 mm NATO rounds, able to spew them out at 700 rounds per minute. The Benelli was a military model, 12-gauge, holding seven rounds in its tubular mag and one in the chamber, ready to roar.

  In short, Sarmiento was prepared to stand off home invaders, first removing a Browning Hi-Power BDA pistol from his nightstand, in a clip-on holster that he fastened to his belt. The Browning, a 9 mm Parabellum work of art, packed fourteen rounds into its magazine—and a live on up the spout.

  Almost before Sarmiento finished taking stock, the lights began to flash inside his bedroom and throughout the house. He picked up a remote-control unit, turned on the fifty-inch Sony flat-screen TV directly opposite his bed, and switched it to the outdoor CCTV channel. There, he saw a group of strangers fiddling with his driveway gate, then giving up on that and nimbly clambering over the wrought-iron fence. All of them carried weapons and had given up on hiding them in broad daylight.

  “Son of a whore!” Sarmiento swore. One of the trespassers wasn’t a stranger to him, after all. He recognized Jerónimo Baillères from Sinaloa as the man issuing orders to the rest. His lips moved silently—the CCTV didn’t pick up sound—but Sarmiento didn’t need to be a lip-reader.

  Baillères and his flunkies had come all the way from Culiacán Rosales to eliminate him, and they weren’t waiting for night to fall on Palma de Mayorca. If the neighbors ventured from their homes, they’d likely die as well, along with any police answering an urgent emergency “123” call from the neighborhood.

  All right, then. If the eager Mexicans thought they had him cornered, they were foolish and mistaken. Turning to his gun rack, Sarmiento chose the lighter shotgun, draped its sling across his toso, with the weapon hanging muzzle down in back, then snatched a motorcycle helmet from the top shelf of his closet and proceeded to the kitchen.

  There, parked on its kickstand, facing toward the kitchen door and his backyard, stood Sarmiento’s ultimate escape plan: an AKT motorcycle, made in Envigado of all places. Sarmiento was an expert in its handling on streets and open country.

  Peering through the curtained window of his kitchen door, he felt no great surprise on seeing two more gunmen entering his property through the back gate. They had removed its padlock somehow and were edging toward the house, but Anglos by the look of them, and armed with matching Steyr AUG rifles.

  Sarmiento cursed them as he climbed astride the AKT and kicked it into growling life on his first try. He rolled the cycle forward, then stretched one arm across its handlebars to unlatch the back door and fling it wide. No sooner had he done that than he revved the bike’s engine and shot across the rear veranda, steering to the left, away from the two riflemen.

  They likely could have shot him then and blown him from the saddle, but they hesitated for some reason. Pussies! Shooting past them, grinning fiercely at their startled faces, Sarmiento hit the ramp he had constructed up against the yard’s back fence, ascended it and sailed over that obstacle, the AKT’s exhaust sputtering in his enemies’ faces.

  Sarmiento hit the alley on the far side of his backyard fence and fishtailed dangerously as his rear tire nearly lost traction on the scattered gravel there. Then he was off and sailing toward the nearest cross street, laughing all the way.

  Chapter Eight

  Palma de Mayorca, Envigado

  “What the hell was that?” Grimaldi blurted out.

  “I’d say our pigeon’s flown the coop,” Bolan replied.

  “We should get after him,” Grimaldi said, then froze when he had half turned toward the open backyard gate.

  “About that...” Bolan said, watching as five or six gunmen burst from the house and onto its veranda. One of them yelled back into the split-level, “¡Gringos están aquí!”

  From inside there, a deeper voice commanded, “¡Mátalos!”

  Bolan heard the kill order, and he didn’t have to speak for Jack Grimaldi to react, both of them firing from the hip with their assault rifles. Their adversaries—five, he verified—were trying to do likewise, but confronting two Anglo strangers in the yard, while their intended target roared off on a motorbike, had slowed them down a deadly extra second. In the time it took for their unseen leader’s command to register, they were already going down, young soldiers dead or dying as they crumpled to the patio.

  More shooters in the house began unloading instantly. Grimaldi ducked behind a backyard barbecue that was built out of bricks to match the house, while Bolan palmed and armed a frag grenade and hurled it toward the home Rodrigo Sarmiento had abandoned in such haste. It sailed in through the open door leading to the kitchen—a modernistic kitchen, he saw now—and detonated when it struck the floor inside.

  The blast blew out two windows facing the patio and puffed smoke through the door. Bolan was prone when shards of razored steel that hadn’t penetrated men, walls or kitchen appliances flew hissing overhead and did a sloppy job of trimming Sarmiento’s backyard shrubbery.

  He didn’t wait for any dazed survivors on the far side of the open door to come out of their daze and open fire on him again. Instantly up and running, Bolan trusted his partner to follow him and fired an autoburst into the smoky doorway before entering.

  Three more gunners were down, in there. Half of one’s face was sheared away, blood pumping from the ruin that remained. Two others, stunned or wounded, were recovering and struggling to their feet, groping for weapons they had dropped while falling, but the Executioner didn’t let them get there. One head shot apiece put an end to them, and he crossed the blitzed-out kitchen toward another doorway, just as Grimaldi entered f
rom the yard.

  Mentally, Bolan was running numbers. He had counted nineteen men emerging from the Avis rental cars out front, and seven were accounted for, already dead or dying. That left—too damned many, right.

  Bolan now heard again the same voice that had ordered execution for Grimaldi and himself, just moments earlier, this time barking, “¡Ve tras ellos, coños!” He still had no view of the speaker, but from all the scuffling feet and angry muttering that followed, Bolan understood the boss was ordering his shooters to advance and tidy up.

  Which meant he had to rattle them again.

  The Executioner baseballed a second frag grenade through the open doorway in front of him, hurled at an angle, so that it would strike the wall beyond and either bounce off toward his enemies or blow on impact as designed. M68s were meant to blow on contact with a solid object, but that didn’t always work. Each had a backup pyrotechnic fuse on time delay, meant to ignite the lethal orb’s Composition B charge within three to seven seconds if the impact fuse turned out to be a dud.

  Bolan was down and rolling when no blast occurred immediately, ticking off the seconds in his mind. Alarmed shouts from gunmen he couldn’t see yet were eclipsed about four seconds later by the frag grenade’s delayed explosion, warnings transformed into cries of pain from those who still had the ability to speak at all.

  The corridor was smoky under tract lighting when Bolan cleared his second doorway, with Grimaldi close behind him. He turned left, his partner to the right, both finding more men down, some lying deathly still, others writhing in pain. Between them, he and Grimaldi spared single shots for the survivors and moved on.

  Twelve dead now, and that left seven who were possibly regrouping for a last assault, or maybe trying to escape the way they’d entered, from the street.

  Seconds later Bolan had his answer: they were running for it, toward their waiting rental cars. With all the gunfire and explosions, he assumed at least one neighbor had to have telephoned for the police by now. How long until the first squad car arrived? He reckoned ten to fifteen minutes was the minimum, even with wailing sirens, unless some unlucky cop just happened to be cruising through Palma de Mayorca when headquarters received the call.

  No time to waste.

  The last gunmen were bunched up at the split-level’s front door, trying to get through it simultaneously, turning their flight into a sort of slapstick comedy routine. Off slightly to one side, one guy was shouting at them. His angry, commanding voice immediately struck a chord of memory with Bolan.

  “We need that guy, if it’s possible,” he cautioned Grimaldi, and then started pumping 5.56 mm rounds into the others, piling dead men in the doorway as a limp and leaking barricade.

  The crew chief turned to face them, leveling a Uzi submachine gun, and shouting, “Fucking gringos!” in Spanish. Bolan tagged him with an FMJ slug through one shoulder, leaving him with a useless arm and likely shattering his collarbone at the same time. The bigmouth lost his weapon and collapsed in front of them, snarling like a trapped animal.

  “Let’s get him out of here,” Bolan said.

  “Gonna bleed all over the Mustang,” Grimaldi cautioned.

  “So, I’m glad we bought insurance on it.”

  Bolan found a pistol holstered undeneath the gunman’s ruined arm and tossed it toward the corpses in the front doorway. Between them, he and Grimaldi picked up their prisoner—the team’s leader still cursing them in Spanish all the way—and hustled him back through the slaughterhouse, across the backyard, to their waiting car.

  It couldn’t have been comfortable, but he fit just fine inside the Mustang’s trunk.

  Horizon Enterprises LLC, Envigado

  Agent Cabrera knew that she might never have this chance again. She was the only person presently in the Horizon offices, and while she knew it would be risky, snooping through Sarmiento’s private files, she found the prospect irresistible. She had a duplicate key to his office door, copied weeks earlier at a hardware store in Medellín, and this was her first opportunity to use it during business hours. It suited her much better than running the gauntlet of security at night.

  For all that, Cabrera’s hand still trembled slightly as she fit the key into the first of two locks on Sarmiento’s door. He should have had two keys, but that was where his arrogance kicked in—or maybe it was caution of a sort, with Sarmiento thinking he’d be less likely to lose a vital key if there were only one to be kept track of.

  Either way, it worked to her advantage now, as she unlocked the doorknob first, and then the door’s dead bolt. She slipped inside, leaving the door slightly ajar—why not, when she was totally alone?—and then switched on the ceiling lights.

  Again, why not? A prowler after hours might betray himself with a penlight, but turning on fluorescents when Horizon’s headquarters were theoretically open for business was no threat at all.

  She’d pinned her hopes on that word: theoretically. With the receptionist gone off for the long lunch Sarmiento granted her, and none of Horizon’s “sales reps” on the premises just now, she felt increasingly secure.

  Still, it was good to have the pistol inside her handbag, where she also kept a can of pepper spray for less extreme encounters. If surprised without those weapons readily at hand, Agent Cabrera was a scrapper in her own right, as she held a black belt in Krav Maga, the “real-world” martial art that originated in Israel, combining elements of aikido, boxing, wrestling, judo and karate, plus the “dirty tricks” expected in barroom brawls.

  In short, she was no pushover.

  Now, if Cabrera only knew what she was searching for...

  Was Sarmiento, her employer and surveillance target, somehow Pablo’s “ghost”? She’d seen nothing to make her credit the idea, and countering suspicion was the fact that some rival, still unidentified, lately had been wreaking havoc on The Office’s cocaine shipments to the States. It made no sense at all for Sarmiento to subvert his own cartel, since he had reached its pinnacle, with no one else above him, thwarting his ambition.

  Right, then. So he wasn’t playing Pablo Escobar resuscitated, but she knew he had been looking into the reports, deploying men to question witnesses who claimed encounters with the ghost, zombie, or whatever he or it was meant to represent. What had they learned so far?

  Perhaps there would be information on that subject in Sarmiento’s files.

  He had three filing cabinets in his office, plus a wall safe hidden by a portrait of José de San Martín, who’d driven Spanish overlords from much of South America during the early nineteenth century. Cabrera didn’t know the combination to that safe, but she was conscious of another odd lapse in Sarmiento’s personal security: he trusted the push-button locks on his three filing cabinets, apparently refusing to believe that any thief might simply tilt the cabinets backward and trip the locks from underneath.

  Which was exactly what Cabrera did.

  When all three were unlocked, she examined the contents of their four drawers in turn, letting her fingers do the walking through file folders, which were sorted alphabetically. She tried “Pablo” and “Escobar” first thing, then “Fantasmas” for ghosts, but struck out all around.

  She was considering more options, when a voice behind her asked, “What have we here?”

  Cabrera knew that voice, and as she turned, her eyes confirmed that it was Omar Roldán who was standing in the office doorway, leveling a blue steel pistol at her face. He caught the flicker of her gaze toward Sarmiento’s desk and her handbag, smiling as he said, “Forget about it, Carolina. Our boss likes this carpet as it is, without bloodstains.”

  * * *

  “I never trusted you,” Roldán confided as they drove, the traitor lying on the back seat of his silver Audi A8, wrists and ankles tightly zip-tied and immobilized. “I like to watch you slink around the office, true enough—those skirts, that ass of yours—but something always seem
ed a little off about you. Like fish that’s just gone over, eh?”

  He knew he’d been fortunate enough to catch her in the act of spying, just returning to Horizon Enterprises, hoping that he’d find the boss still there, missing him but capturing a traitor. Always stealthy in his movements, even when it wasn’t necessary, he had seen the open door to Sarmiento’s office before calling out to him, and thus surprised the scheming bitch as she rifled through Sarmiento’s files.

  In search of what? He didn’t know and hadn’t asked her, satisfied that he had nabbed her red-handed.

  She’d tried to fight him when he closed the distance between them, but she hadn’t seen his backup weapon, a compact Mega Stun SA-150 hidden in his left hand, while she focused on the Smith & Wesson pistol in his right. She’d thrown a punch at him, hammering his cheek, but then he’d jammed the shocker underneath her right breast, paralyzing her on contact with 150,000 volts. Before she came around, he had retrieved zip ties, making damned sure that she couldn’t gouge his eyes or kick him in the balls.

  Luck had blessed him twice, when he was dragging the woman to the ninth-floor’s special elevator, no other Horizon employees to spot him at it. Once inside the elevator, he had pressed the button labeled “G” for the building’s underground garage. The nearest parking spaces to the elevator were reserved for Mr. Sarmiento and Horizon’s other workers, and a quick look revealed no one around to see him hauling Cabrera to his Audi and lifting her into the car’s back seat.

  Even trussed up, still groggy as she was, she’d tried to kick him then, but Roldán dodged it, leaning in to hurt her with one clutching, twisting hand. Now, even as his cheek continued to swell from the punch she’d landed, he was smiling at his own reflection in the Audi’s rearview mirror, talking to his prostrate passenger although he couldn’t see her.