Killing Kings. Don Pendleton

       Chapter One

      Val Verde County, Texas

      “Man, I wish they’d show, already,” Jack Grimaldi said. “I’m sweating like a pig, here. Must’ve lost five pounds already.”

      “I’ll bet it looks good on you,” Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, answered him.

      They lay on sandy ground they’d scooped out with entrenching tools, before daybreak, under a staked-out tarp in desert camouflage, spruced up with dry mesquite pasted on top of it. The pattern of the loose fatigues they had been sweating through since dawn matched the tarpaulin, save for their tactical boots and web gear, both desert tan.

      The warriors had come armed for bear—or, rather, armed for men who didn’t care who they gunned down or caught and tortured for whatever useful information they possessed. Each man lay stretched out beside a Steyr AUG bullpup assault rifle, selective fire, translucent magazines loaded with thirty rounds apiece of 5.56 mm NATO rounds. Each Steyer came equipped with a Swarovski 1.5x telescopic sight, integrated with the receiver casting. Its black ring reticle and basic range finder had been designed so that a person who was five feet eleven inches tall filled the scope at 300 meters downrange.

      Aside from rifles, both watchers wore sidearms on their hips. Bolan’s semiauto Desert Eagle Mark VII pistol was chambered in .44 Magnum and fired nine rounds. Grimaldi had gone lighter, with a Glock 22 in .40-caliber Smith & Wesson, fifteen rounds in the magazine and one up the spout.

      Their other armaments included extra magazines in Velcro pouches, M68 fragmentation grenades fitted with impact fuses, and their combat knives were Cols Steel GI Tantos with seven-inch fixed blades in a black, rust-resistant finish.

      They were dressed to kill, and that was just precisely what they had in mind.

      Now all they had to do was wait, and that was getting old.

      * * *

      The trail that had brought Bolan and Grimaldi to their present station in the desert had begun 1,750 miles away, to the northeast, at Arlington National Cemetery. One day earlier, amid the simple markers and some larger monuments to heroes, Bolan had been following procedure when he met with Hal Brognola, chief among his oldest living friends, once a street agent for the FBI, promoted through the ranks over time to a top-level but ill-defined post in the Justice Department that allowed him the freedom to take on various roles within the department.

      The big Fed was a man known to have the President’s ear on matters of national security. Brognola, unknown to most government officials, was also the director of the Sensitive Operations Group, a clandestine organization whose covert headquarters was based at Stony Man Farm, semiconcealed within the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. From there, assignments were issued for its warriors—Mack Bolan, if the assignment aligned with his personal goals, plus the strike forces dubbed Able Team and Phoenix Force—who would take on terrorists and criminal cartels worldwide. Their missions were, in essence, to search and destroy. Targets assigned were generally not expected to stand trial.

      When Brognola needed to speak with Bolan—long presumed dead by the public that had previously followed his extended one-man war against the Mafia, now with his records thoroughly expunged—Bolan sometimes dropped by the Farm, more often meeting casually in some venue such as Arlington, where getting lost among tourists came easily.

      This time around, the big Fed had delivered some alarming news. That in itself was not unusual; he called on Bolan only when the stakes were high and time was short. The first part of Brognola’s message—that cocaine shipments to the United States from Mexico and South America had multiplied of late, the loads increased in volume—wasn’t any real surprise. Drug traffickers went through repeated boom-and-bust cycles, the same as any other multibillion-dollar industry, affected by such factors as the weather in their crop-producing regions, police activity at home or on transshipment routes and interference by competitors who hijacked shipments, slaughtering their crews.

      But then Brognola dropped the bomb.

      A valued DEA informant working out of Medellín, Colombia, swore that he’d seen a ghost—and not just any ghost, at that. The specter he’d reported, having passed two polygraph exams that proved him truthful and sober, belonged to Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, a founder of the one-time Medellín Cartel, who’d introduced a new term to authorities around the planet: narcoterrorism, meaning the assassination of police, public officials, journalists—and once, twelve judges of Colombia’s Supreme Court, slain with eighty-six more persons during a guerrilla raid against Bogotá’s Palace of Justice.

      The rub: by all accounts, Escobar was dead. And not just rumored to be dead, but shot to pieces by Colombian soldiers and DEA agents in December 1993, while fleeing from arrest in Los Olivos, one of Medellín’s middle-class barrios. According to the autopsy report, the drug lord had suffered wounds to his torso and legs, before a final gunshot drilled him through one ear.

      There was no question of surviving what amounted to a point-blank execution. Photos of his corpse in situ, dripping blood and ringed by grinning slayers, had been broadcasted globally and still surfaced each year, around the anniversary of his passing. A painting by Colombian artist Fernando Botero showed Escobar writhing under a storm of bullets, gun in hand. At least eight books, which were penned by relatives, police and journalists, detailed the life and death of Colombia’s “King of Cocaine.” More recently there’d even been a TV series titled Narcos, running for three seasons that encompassed Escobar’s reign, his death and the succession of his Cali Cartel rivals to short-lived supremacy.

      So he was dead, okay? And yet, if the DEA’s man on the street could be believed, together with his polygraph results, Escobar had not only returned, but also didn’t look as if he’d aged a day since drowning in his own blood on a Medellín rooftop.

      Bolan and Brognola had talked about potential explanations. Escobar had two brothers but no twin, and if there had been a twin nobody noticed during eighteen years of international publicity, surveillance and even public interviews, said sibling would’ve aged since Escobar died, pushing age seventy by now.

      Another thought: the lion’s share of Latin narcotrafficantes worshipped one or more orishas—deities of sects including Santeria, Palo Mayombe and plan, old-fashioned Voodoo, thought to safeguard criminals and bless their enterprises. Fine, but neither Bolan nor Brognola harbored a belief in zombies rising from their graves to walk abroad.

      What then? Bolan had no idea as yet, but Brognola informed him that known enemies of the original, deceased Don Pablo had been dying off in waves of late, just when drug shipments from Latin America began to land on US streets. The latest were a top-ranked shooter for the Sinaloa Cartel and a former leader of the strongest group opposing Escobar during the early 1990s, Los Pepes, said to number officers of the Colombian National Police and Search Bloc among its members. The group allegedly dissolved when Escobar’s death made it superfluous, but Brognola had briefed him on a problem with that “common knowledge” spread by law enforcement and the media.

      In fact, the Medellín Cartel was ravaged by arrests, convictions and assassinations in the months following Escobar’s death, and presumed extinct by spring of 1994. At the same time, however, the DEA had dropped the ball on tracking its successor, while they set their sights on Cali’s traffickers instead. Founded by Diego Murillo Bejarano, aka Don Berna, a one-time leader of the paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, the revived cartel was dubbed The Office of Envigado, a town six miles southwest of Medellín.

      Don Berna had been extradited to the States eleven years ago, pled guilty to smuggling tons of cocaine and laundering money, and received a sentence of 376 months in prison and a $4 million fine. He’d been transported to a federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, a supermax lockup