Killing Kings

by Don Pendleton

  “If she does,” Bolan replied, “I’m retiring.”

  “That’ll be the day.”

  The woman who opened the door a moment later couldn’t be mistaken for Eva Perón, or for Madonna. She was blonde, all right, but younger than the actress, much less the dictator’s wife, who’d died of cancer in Argentina more than sixty years ago, at age thirty-three. Bolan guessed she might be thirty, maybe thirty-one, unless she had a plastic surgeon of her own on speed dial.

  “Paula Juniot?” he asked her.

  “Yes. And who are you?” she asked in Spanish.

  They badged her, brandishing credentials that should pass inspection even at the door of Bureau headquarters in Washington. Juniot studied them briefly, then said in fluent English, “You’re very far from home.”

  “We have some questions that we’d like to ask you, if we may, about one of your late acquaintances.”

  “You have no jurisdiction here,” she said. “But since you ask politely, who might that acquaintance be?”

  “Diego Esguerra,” Grimaldi said.

  One of the lady’s eyebrows rose, the other staying flatlined. “Poor Diego. Have you finally discovered his remains?”

  “That’s part of what we hope to talk about,” Bolan told her.

  “I’ve done all my talking on that subject to the National Police, two years ago. Unless you have some further news of him...”

  “We might,” Grimaldi said.

  “Oh yes?” She frowned but didn’t budge from the doorway. “Enlighten me, by all means.”

  “Ma’am, we’d be better off discussing this inside,” Bolan said.

  “Do you have a warrant? No, of course you don’t. You’re not even Colombians.”

  “Ma’am—”

  “Just wait out here. I need to speak with my attorney.”

  She was turning back inside, then seemed to change her mind and swiveled back to face them, holding some small object in her hand. It was a small, stainless-steel pistol, something like an AMT Backup, maybe a Beretta 21A Bobcat. Grimaldi saw it the same time as Bolan did and knocked Janiot’s hand upward, causing the first shot to be wasted on the open sky.

  With that, they heard feet scrambling inside the house, and when a second shot rang out, it wasn’t a small caliber. The bullet punched through the woman’s back, and she was coughing blood as she pitched forward, falling into Bolan’s arms.

  * * *

  Diego Esguerra saw Paula drop and realized he didn’t give a damn. She should have used the front door’s fish-eye peephole and refused to speak with the North American agents, rather than engaging them in what she doubtless thought was witty repartee, attempting to impress him, possibly, while only placing him at further risk.

  The tall front door burst open, then rebounded from the nearest wall, but not before the two gringos pushed through, into the home he’d occupied with the late and unlamented Paula, since he had returned to Medellín from exile. They were inside now, with pistols drawn, and charging down the hall in search of whoever had fired the fatal shot.

  Esguerre triggered two more rounds from his FN FNP pistol, loaded with sixteen 9 mm Parabellum rounds before he’d fired the first one into Paula’s back. Now he reached out with his left hand and grabbed Luis Medina by his sleeve, shoving him out to face their enemies.

  “You hold them here!” he snapped, then turned and ran, not giving his lieutenant any time to argue.

  “Wait!” Medina shouted after him.

  “Do your job!” Esguerra snarled over his shoulder and kept running, from the parlor, through the dining room and kitchen, out the back door, where he half expected other gunmen to be waiting for him. Thankfully there were none, and he kept on past the swimming pool and toward the backyard gate.

  Before Esguerra reached it, he already had the heavy padlock’s key in hand. He sprang the lock, removed it, flinging it aside with no concern for where it landed. He had seen the last of this house and his lover, whom he had preferred over his stuffy, oh-so-proper wife before he’d faked his death and disappeared, one step ahead of DEA investigators and The Office’s killers.

  In the alleyway out back, Esguerra turned hard right and ran until he reached a small garage he rented on the side, just close enough to be of use to him in an emergency like this, with no one any wiser to its link with his abode on Calle 7. There was one more padlock to unfasten and discard, before he raised the metal garage door and stepped inside.

  The car that he found waiting for him was a Mazda MX-5 Miata, sleek, jet-black, fourth-generation, with a power retractable hardtop. Its powerful 1.8-liter inline-four engine could generate enough power to accelerate from zero to sixty in under seven seconds, and its top speed could exceed 225 kilometers per hour.

  Packed in the Mazda’s trunk was Esguerra’s version of a “go-bag.” There were three go-bags, in fact. One held selected clothing and four passports in as many names, each from a different country: Canada, Colombia, Brazil and Switzerland.

  A second bag was filled with $2.5 million in cash, mostly large bills, including US dollars, euros and British pounds.

  The third contained a mobile armory. Among the weapons stashed inside the bag were an AR-57 submachine gun chambered for FN 5.7 mm cartridges loaded into 50-round P90 magazines, mounted horizontally atop the front handguard; a 12-gauge Armsel Striker combat shotgun with folding stock and a revolving cylinder, made in South Africa; and six M26 fragmentation grenades, fabricated in Bogotá for the Military Forces of Colombia. Ample ammunition for those weapons, and his FN FNP sidearm, was slotted into magazines, ready to load and fire.

  What Esguerra couldn’t purchase on the road, he could obtain by force and leave no breathing witnesses.

  As he pulled out of the garage—leaving it open to all comers, no trace of himself remaining anywhere inside—he thought his sacrifice of Paula and Luis had been worthwhile. Both might have served as witnesses against him in a court of law, but dead they posed no further danger to Esguerra. He had other soldiers waiting for him at his preselected hideout west of Medellín, near Anzá on the Río Porce.

  Powering through westbound traffic, careful at the same time not to draw attention from police patrols, Esguerra planned to leave the city for a short time only. It might take a few days to identify the gringos who had fouled his nest with Paula, trace them through whatever agency they served and punish them accordingly, but when he did, his hand would not be visible behind the scenes.

  If anything, their mourning colleagues and the media would spread more tales of Pablo Escobar’s return. And that, according to Esguerra’s plan, was what he’d wanted all along. While agents from the National Police, the DEA, FBI and even the CIA—why leave them out?—were searching for a ghost, he would be ripping their familiar world right out from under them and making it his own.

  * * *

  Luis Medina, stung by Diego killing Paula Janiot, leaving him to face their enemies alone, was still prepared to die for his boss. He did not expect consideration, but he felt the first pangs of uncertainty about Esguerra’s leadership. Of course a leader’s first and foremost duty was to keep a drug cartel intact and functioning, but still...

  Esguerra posed as Pablo Escobar these days, but hadn’t Escobar died fighting with his men, not long after Luis was born? More recently in Tamaulipas, Mexico, Julian Salinas of the Gulf Cartel and Pancho Carreon, the leader of Los Zetas, had laid down their lives battling police.

  “Put down your gun,” one of the gringos warned him, now that they had him cornered in Esguerra’s rec room. The eagle had escaped, leaving a pigeon in his wake. “We only want to talk.”

  “I have nothing to say to you, pricks!” Medina answered back. But he used the respite to reload his H&K Mark 23 with one of his spare 12-round magazines, leaving the empty where it fell onto the deep-pile carpeting.

  The carpet was snow-white, shampooed a
t two-week intervals by cleaners while Esguerra wasn’t home. Now cornered, Medina wondered what it would look like after his blood soaked into it.

  Well, there was only one way to find out.

  As a young man, he had served three years in Cali’s Villahermosa Prison, where 6,000 inmates were crammed into cellblocks built for 1,600, with one shower and one toilet for each 200 prisoners. Rape was endemic at Villahermosa, and its guards had ceded power, in effect, to brutal prison gangs. Medina had killed his first man there, and came out of it one small step short of being a psychopath.

  One thing he knew, beyond all doubt: he was not going back.

  And now his enemies were closing in to finish him. Medina heard them creeping closer, wondered how long it would be until one of the meddling neighbors called police. He was resolved, upon the first shrill sound of sirens in the distance, to insert the Mark 23’s muzzle in his mouth and kiss it all goodbye.

  But first, if he could kill these gringos, there was still a chance he might escape.

  And that meant he had to take the battle to his enemies.

  Medina wished in vain that he was wearing body armor, but the cabinet containing vests was in the study. Might as well be on the moon, he thought, and slowly rose behind the eight-foot billiards table, holding his pistol in a two-handed grip as he called out, “Okay. I’m coming out. You win.”

  “Throw out your weapon first,” one of the gringos shouted back at him.

  “I’m coming out now,” he repeated.

  Then he rushed them, firing randomly, imagining his own death in slow motion, a lá Hollywood. What he got instead was a slug through his left leg, shattering the femur, and the room tilted around him. He cried out in sudden agony as he fell, pistol tumbling from his hands and lost beyond recall.

  The gringos stood above him, staring down, weapons held casually at their sides.

  “That looks bad,” one of them stated.

  “It’s severed the femoral artery,” said his companion. “You could stop the bleeding.”

  “I’m not touching him down there.”

  The taller of them crouched beside Medina, lowering his voice a bit. “We haven’t got a lot of time,” he said. “Well, you don’t. With a wound like that, no ambulance, you might have two, three minutes tops.”

  Medina reached down towad his thigh, trousers already soaked with blood, but couldn’t find the wound at first. Then, when he did, the pain of stanching it was so extreme, he drew his red-stained hands away.

  “Mercy,” he rasped.

  “I’m not the one to ask for that,” the hard-eyed stranger said. “Maybe if you had something to exchange...”

  “Like what?” Medina asked.

  “Where’d your boss go? He took off and left you here. What do you owe him now?”

  “Nothing,” Medina replied. “Not one damned thing.”

  And in the seconds that remained, he told them all he knew.

  Chapter Thirteen

  South of Anzá, Antioquia

  Anzá was located thirty kilometers northwest of Medellín as the crow flew, but since Diego Esguerra wasn’t a crow, he had to reach his destination via Highway 62 northbound, then double back on Highway 258 above San Nicolás, a drive of eighty-two kilometers that consumed the best part of an hour and a half. He wanted to travel faster, when the urban traffic thinned, but he was forced to rein it in, watching for “speedbumps,” Colombia’s nickname for traffic officers.

  Anyone who tried to stop him now, before Esguerra reached his sanctuary, was as good as dead.

  His compound sprawled over two hundred acres, mostly forest, with a sort of village at its heart, connected to the highway by a narrow, unpaved access road. The property wasn’t surrounded by a fence per se, but Esguerra’s technicians had installed motion detectors and CCTV cameras in the woods, covering two beaten paths that wildlife used to reach the Río Porce, mostly after dark. More cameras and sensors had been randomly positioned where no trails existed, keeping watch for human trespassers.

  He had not mined the woods or littered them with any other kinds of traps, because repetitive explosions caused by deer, tapirs, jaguars or peccaries would ultimately draw attention to the property. On rare occasions when a stray peasant triggered silent alarms, gunmen were sent to intercept the uninvited visitor with weapons bearing sound suppressors. Should their deaths prove unavoidable, the forest was a perfect site for graves, or they could simply travel down the Río Porce to the larger Río Nechí and the Río Cauca, which the Nechí fed in turn.

  There, hungry caimans waited to accept all offerings with snorting gratitude.

  And nothing in the forest went to waste.

  Esguerra phoned ahead when he was fifty kilometers or so from the compound, described his car—which none of the gunmen on site had seen before—and gave his ETA. Upon arrival two men armed with automatic rifles greeted him, then stayed behind to watch the highway for any pursuers hanging back, unseen by Esguerra. He drove on down a winding track, past three ambush locations laid out in advance, and finally slowed into the approach toward his own private mountain hamlet.

  The compound included a command post with a cache of weapons and explosives, radio and satellite-phone gear, kept manned around the clock. A second building was the camp’s two-room infirmary, designed to cope with snakebites, illness and minor injuries. The mess hall was somewhat larger, with seating for two dozen gunmen at any given time, though half the men rotating in and out of camp at monthly intervals were constantly on duty and compelled to eat in shifts.

  Housing consisted of Esguerra’s private quarters, untouched in his absence, plus a barracks housing fifteen bunks, plus tents scattered about with no apparent pattern to their placement. In a spacious prefab shed, Esguerra stored cocaine from time to time, in transit. Power for the camp—including the shed’s air conditioner—came from a generator fueled by gasoline.

  Esguerra parked his Mazda with the other vehicles of the camp’s motor pool: two open Jeeps, four ATVs, two mountain bikes and, for important guests requiring transportation to the site, a Chevrolet Equinox SUV. Downwind, a row of camo-painted portable toilets handled the camp’s inhabitants on a first come, first served basis.

  Set apart from all the tents and buildings, a Bell 407 helicopter squatted on its pad of cleared and beaten earth. The chopper seated seven, one of them its pilot, and cruised at 152 miles per hour over a 372-mile range. On prior occasions, it had flown Esguerra back and forth to Medellín, but his abrupt departure from the capital prevented him from using it today, so far.

  However, if the camp was breached...

  “Hey, boss!”

  Esguerra turned to find the site’s commander when he wasn’t there, Miguel Delgado, striding out to greet him at the motor pool. Concern was written on his face as he declared, “We weren’t expecting you.”

  “And I wasn’t expecting gringo agents on my doorstep,” Esguerra said. “They killed Paula and Luis before I managed to elude them.”

  “Jesus! Your woman, too?”

  “They don’t respect women or legal jurisdiction, my friend. We must be prepared in case, against all odds, they show up here.”

  “Of course. But if you think they’re coming here, perhaps...”

  “I may have to evacuate,” Esguerra admitted, “but I need to make some calls first. See if I can find out who’s behind this and how they discovered me.”

  “Do you suspect a traitor from within, sir?”

  “I rule out nothing at this point, Miguel.”

  “Shall I send out for reinforcements, then?”

  “By all means. Have them bring whatever armaments they have on hand. If we must face our persecutors here, let none of them emerge alive.”

  San Felix, Antioquia

  Tension was running high in room twelve of the Red Rooster motel. Agent Cabrera listened to the
recap of the recent action in San Antonio Prado, fuming at the news of Diego Esguerra’s escape.

  “If I had been there—” she began to say, but Bolan cut her off.

  “Then, what?” he asked. “Esguerra murdered his own mistress right in front of us, then put one of his flunkies on the spot to slow us down while he slipped out the back.”

  “Perhaps if there’d been three, instead of two...”

  “You would’ve gone around in back, alone, to stop him?” Grimaldi asked.

  “And why not?” she demanded angrily.

  “We’ve been over this,” Bolan stated. “With your injuries and state of mind, we couldn’t take the chance.”

  Frustrated, she said, “Then I could have called the DEA and had them send a team.”

  “And how would that have gone?” Bolan asked. “Would they just drop everything to look for Pablo’s ghost?”

  “They know me,” she insisted. “If I could have spoken to the task-force leader—”

  “Then he would’ve been obliged to call the National Police,” Bolan reminded her. Assuming that they didn’t laugh at him, they’d have to find a magistrate, swear out a warrant based on supposition and persuade the court that it was worth their time to search a woman’s home, looking for either one of two officially dead men. Based on what? The word of a cartel gunman?”

  “But—”

  “And while they waited for the warrant,” Bolan interrupted her again, “how many crooked cops would tip Esguerra off to the trouble headed his way?”

  Shoulders slumped, seeming defeated, Cabrera challenged Bolan, “Is there any good news, then, besides a murdered woman and another dead gunman?”

  “Diego’s girlfriend didn’t shoot us,” Grimaldi said, “but I’ll give her points for trying.”

  “And we caught a brief glimpse of Esguerra when he bailed,” Bolan told her. “Nothing I could swear to, but from what we saw, he might resemble Escobar.”