Don Pendleton: Run to Ground

His men were rummaging inside the car, retrieving a submachine gun — empty — from the floorboards on the passenger's side, stripping the glove compartment of registration papers and any other documents. Beneath the dash they found Rivera's nickel-plated automatic pistol still in place in its special holster, undiscovered by the enemy, and one of them handed it to Rivera with a deferential, almost reverent, gesture.

He weighed the weapon in his hand, removed the magazine to verify that it was still loaded and tucked it inside the waistband of his slacks. His enemy had left one weapon empty, missed another, but they could not leap to the conclusion that he was unarmed. He had been carrying explosives at the rancho and he might have other lethal tricks in store for anyone who got too close. Despite his wounds and loss of blood, despite the distance he would have to travel and his loss of the machine gun, he was dangerous. This one would be dangerous until he died.

They were no more than sixty miles from home and yet Rivera felt the chasm widening, experienced the sense of distance that he always felt on entering the States. He was light-years removed from childhood in Nogales, running with the other homeless gutter rats who joined together for survival on the streets. As best Rivera knew, his mother was a prostitute who had been murdered by a gringo when her only son was eight years old. His father was a faceless shadow, never seen and seldom thought of. Rivera had survived without maternal or paternal care, and he had grown up hard, accustomed to the violence of the slums, where life was cheap and love was a commodity on sale.

At nine he had been picking pockets in Nogales, trusting in his size and speed until he grew proficient at the art, acquiring skill enough to dip the fattest wallet without ruffling its owner. Street gangs fought for territory, coveting the districts where the gringos came to spend their dollars, and before he was eleven, Rivera was a grizzled veteran of those wars. At twelve he killed a man — a boy, really, three years his senior — and ascended on the basis of his growing reputation to a leadership position in the gang he ran with. No longer forced to work the streets himself, he had instructed others in the art of picking pockets and began to cultivate a taste for certain minor luxuries.

The members of his gang had always handled pills and marijuana on a small scale — for the tourist trade — but in the early sixties, with the rise of "flower children" in America, Luis had recognized the drug trade's great potential. He had put his troops to work for men who farmed cannabis, had studied them and learned the ropes, until he was prepared to take over the business for himself. It had not been an easy move. There had been bloody work involved, but by the time a certain Dr. Leary had begun to preach the doctrine of "Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out," Rivera had been ready to provide the children of Aquarius with all the marijuana they could handle. In the circles where he traveled, he had been respected and admired for his achievements. He was seventeen years old.

The marijuana trade was still important to Rivera, but his fortune had been tripled by the traffic in cocaine and heroin. The latter poison he refined himself, from poppy fields in the Sierra Madre, but the coke required a loose alliance with suppliers in Bogota. It was a risky enterprise with Colombians involved — people who were quick to launch a shooting war for no apparent reason — but again Rivera had survived. He was a multimillionaire who purchased politicians and policemen as another man might purchase cigarettes, and now it galled him that he had to do this butcher job himself. If it had not been so important...

But it was. The economic loss that he had suffered was sufficient to demand revenge against his enemy, but it was not his prime consideration. He had suffered a loss of face, and while the Oriental concept was an unfamiliar one, no Hispanic male grew up without a sense of pride, machismo, which demanded retribution for an insult. If Rivera let his enemy escape, competitors would think that he was vulnerable, weak. In time they would begin to test him, ripping off consignments, threatening his trade and territory, making inroads with his customers. The fire last night had cost him several million dollars, but it would be nothing in comparison to losses he would suffer if he had to start from scratch, establishing his territories through protracted warfare with the competition. Esquilante in Chihuaha, Lopez in Coahuila, Quintana in Durango: any one of them, or all of them together, would be glad to see him fall. Without Rivera in the picture, there would be more money for the smaller fish, more trade to go around.

Rivera smiled. He was not going anywhere just yet. The jackals might be hungry, snapping at his heels, but he had always managed to outsmart the competition, and he was not finished yet. One man could not defeat him, not when he had dared so much and come so far alone. It was unthinkable.

Possibly the gringo bastard was dead already. If he was, and if Rivera could not find his body in the desert, then the problem would remain unsolved. He might be forced to fabricate an enemy, provide a straw man for display to his competitors, to show results. If worse came to worst, he would not mind the lie. Not if it helped to save his empire, everything he had built and everything he had become.

But, then, the worst of it would be not knowing. If he did not see the body for himself, if he could not reach out and touch the lifeless flesh, how could he ever rest in peace? How could he be certain that the warrior wouldn't come back, this time to kill Rivera in the very heart of his estancia, his castle?

Scowling, he admitted to himself that there could be no substitute for certainty. Whatever he might tell his competition, and whoever's corpse he might display for their inspection, he would have to know and be convinced that it was settled with this stranger who appeared from nowhere, striking like the wrath of God. Luis Rivera had no faith in anyone or anything outside himself; he was not part of an organized religion, viewing it as a placebo for the peasant class. No Marxist, he was still convinced that fat cats and politicos supported different churches as a method of controlling superstitious millions, falling back upon the name of God whenever man proved frail and fallible. It was a crutch he had never leaned upon.

There were several drug traffickers active along the Mexican-U.S. border and he wondered why the solitary warrior had selected him. He wondered how the man had scouted his defenses, how he knew precisely when the merchandise would be available and where it would be stored. Sufficient mysteries to baffle any man, and Rivera would never know the answers if he didn't find his enemy.

It would be best, of course, if he could take the man alive. Interrogation might be fruitful, and it certainly would entertain the troops. However, the odds were long against securing a prisoner, and if he had to settle for a corpse, he would be satisfied. As long as he found something, anything, to prove his enemy was dead beyond a shadow of a doubt.

The gringo's death was not sufficient in itself, however. If he spilled his guts to the authorities before he died, Rivera might have to cope with bad publicity and pressure from the States, outraged denials of complicity from Mexican officials on the pad. It would not matter, in the long run, if the federales raided him or not. Publicity itself was fatal, in sufficient quantities, and while the spotlight focused on Rivera, his competitors were free to move against him from the shadows, gobbling up his customers, his territories.

There were precautions to be taken. At home, the cleanup crew would have removed all traces of narcotics from the ranch by now. The bodies of his soldiers would be tucked away for later burial, well hidden in the event of a police search. The damage to his property could be described as accidental, even written off against his fire insurance with a little sleight of hand, but none of that concerned Rivera now.