Don Pendleton - Powder Burn

“That’s why,” he said, and yanked the woman to her feet.

The ANFO blast shattered windows for a block in each direction, paving Carrera 11 with a crystal layer of glass. Smoke roiled along the street and sidewalks, human figures lurching in and out of it like the undead in a horror film. Most of them looked like zombies, too, with vacant eyes in bloody faces, caked with dust and grime as if they’d just climbed out of graves.

“Goddamn it!” Germán Mutis snarled. “I can’t see anything!”

“It’s finally clearing,” Jaime Fajardo said.

And he was right. After a lapse of seconds that seemed painfully protracted, Mutis saw the dust was settling, the smoke rising and drifting eastward on a breeze. He snatched the glasses back from Fajardo’s hand and trained them on the spot where he’d last seen his three intended targets.

The chic sidewalk café was definitely out of business. Shrapnel had flayed the bright facade, turned plate glass windows into a million shattered pieces, and a compact car had vaulted from the curb, propelled by the concussive blast, to land inverted on the café’s threshold. Bodies sprawled across the dining patio, twisted in boneless attitudes of death.

“No one could live through that,” Fajardo advised.

But some of them were living. Mutis saw them rising from the dust and rubble, teetering on legs that had forgotten how to hold them upright, gaping with their dusty scarecrow faces at the carnage all around them.

Never mind the drones. Where were the three he’d meant to kill?

If they were down, his mission was successful.

If they lived….

He focused on a body that had worn a charcoal business suit before the blast. What still remained of it may well have been the DEA man’s garb. One leg was bare now, flayed of cloth and quantities of flesh, but Mutis scanned along the torso, found the bloodied face with something odd protruding from the forehead.

So, the nails had worked.

One down. And if the gringo policeman had died at his table, the other two had to be nearby.

He sought the woman first. Her clothing, while conservative, had been more colorful than anything worn by her male companions. Was the color known as mauve? He wasn’t sure, but knew that he would recognize it when he saw it.

If it wasn’t blown completely off her body.

It pleased Mutis to think of her as both dead and embarrassed, though the concepts struck him as a contradiction. Rather, the CNP would be humiliated by the vision of its agent lying nude and bloody on the street.

“I want to see!” Fajardo said, almost whimpering.

“Shut up!” Mutis snapped. “Is that…? Mother Mary! She’s alive! The bitch is— And the other gringo!”

Mutis swiveled in his seat, barely aware when Fajardo snatched the glasses from his hand. In the backseat, Jorge Serna and Edgar Abello sat with automatic weapons in their laps, regarding him impassively.

“Get after them,” Mutis snapped. “They must not escape! Quickly!”

The shooters moved as if their lives depended on it, which was, in fact, the case. A simple, mundane order had been given—take three lives and snuff them out. So far, Mutis had accomplished only one-third of his mission.

El Padrino would not understand.

He would not be amused.

Within the cartel Mutis served, success was commonly rewarded and failure was invariably punished. He had witnessed El Padrino’s punishments on several occasions—had been drafted to participate in one of them, a grisly business—and did not intend to suffer such a fate.

Better to kill the bitch and gringo, or die in the attempt.

Mutis sat watching as his gunmen crossed Carrera 11, jogging in and out of bomb haze toward the epicenter of the blast. He took the glasses back from Fajardo, focused them again to suit his eyes and found the blasted killing ground of the café.

Both of his targets had regained their feet. They had been bloodied, seemed disoriented at the moment, but their wounds were superficial. Neither one of them was bleeding out, goddamn it.

Even though he was expecting it, Mutis still flinched when Serna opened fire, followed a heartbeat later by the sound of Abello’s weapon. Neither found their mark the first time, and their two targets started running.

“What are you waiting for?” he raged at Fajardo. “For the love of Christ, get after them!”

BOLAN HADN’T SEEN THE shooters yet and didn’t care to. If he could avoid them for the moment, reach his car and get the hell away from there before police arrived, he’d be satisfied.

Payback could wait.

And so he ran, pulling Arcelia Pureza behind him until she could run on her own and jerked free of his grip.

“Where’s Jack?” she asked him, as they reached an intersection, traffic stalled by the explosion, driver’s gaping.

“Dead,” Bolan replied. “Come on!”

She kept pace with him, had to have heard the automatic weapons fire behind them, but still asked, “Where are we going?”

“The garage up here,” he said. “I have a car. Save your breath!”

A bullet crackled past him, making Bolan duck and dodge. He couldn’t outrun bullets, but in the confusion of the aftershock, with all the dust and smoke, the shooters likely wouldn’t do their best.

Halfway across the street, a taxi driver took his best shot, swerved around the van in front of him and tried to jump the intersection, going nowhere fast. A stutter burst from Bolan’s rear stitched holes across the taxi’s windshield, nailed the driver to his seat and froze his dead foot on the cab’s accelerator. Bolan and Pureza cleared the lane before the taxi shot across and plowed into a storefront on the south side of the street.

“Ahead and on the left!” he told Pureza, in case she’d missed the thirty-foot bilingual sign that read Estacionamiento/Parking.

They reached the open doorway that served the garage’s stairwell, and Bolan steered Pureza inside. “Third level,” he told her. “Look for a gray Pontiac G6.”

“You’re not coming?” she asked him.

“I’ll be right behind you.”

As he spoke, Bolan drew his Glock and turned to face the intersection they’d just crossed. No other motorists had replicated the cabbie’s mistake. From where the soldier stood, the cars within his line of sight looked empty, their occupants either lying low or already out and running away from the gunfire.

Bolan caught his first glimpse of the shooters, a mismatched pair, the tall one with lanky hair down to his shoulders, the short one crew-cut to the point where he looked like a skinhead. Both carried weapons that resembled AKS-74U assault rifles. They could be knockoffs, but it wouldn’t matter if the men behind them found their mark.

Bolan squeezed off a shot at the tall guy, saw him jerk and stumble, then regain his balance for a loping run that took him out of sight behind a minivan. The short one, when he swung around that way, had already found cover of his own. Too bad.

Bolan had missed his chance to end it here, but he still hoped escape was possible. It would be inconvenient—not to mention costly—if he had to leave the rented car with all his hardware in the trunk and start again from scratch.

Still better than a bullet in the head, but damned annoying anyway.

He took the concrete stairs three at a time, sprinting to catch up with Pureza and make the most of their dwindling lead.

ARCELIA PUREZA WAS FRIGHTENED. No point in denying it, as she was running away from a slaughterhouse scene with gunmen behind her, trying to finish her off. Styles was dead, she was injured, though not very badly, and she was stuck with a stranger who might or might not have a clue as to how to keep them alive.