Don Pendleton: Killing Kings

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 nicknamed the Alcatraz of the Rockies.

But apparently the men and women he had trained to carry on without him—before he sought “peace” by surrendering more than 20,000 weapons and 112 properties worth $20 million to Colombian authorities—were still around and thriving in his absence.

Having visited Colombia on more than one occasion, Bolan readily accepted that. In fact, he’d have expected nothing less.

But now Don Berna’s brainchild had come under fire, along with rival Mexican drug syndicates, including those based in Sinaloa, Tijuana, Matamoros and Juárez. The homicides had not been singled out for special interest at first, as they had been lost in the fog of Mexico’s drug wars, which had resulted in 200,000 deaths and 30,000 disappearances over the past twelve years, with 1.6 million survivors driven from their homes by violence. Unknown gunmen had also launched strikes against cartels without fixed roots: the Knights Templar, La Familia, Los Zetas and the Beltrán-Leyva Cartel.

But once you focused on those hits, assuming that the DEA’s informer was correct as to the “ghost” he’d seen in downtown Medellín, the “random” slaughter made a grisly kind of sense. Pablo Escobar reborn, if such a thing were possible, would absolutely try to purge his former enemies, rivals who had co-opted his old drug routes, and the upstarts who had nerve enough to plant their flag so close to Medellín.

It made sense, right—except that no such thing was possible in Bolan’s universe.

One solid bit of information Hal Brognola had provided to him, as they’s strolled through Arlington, was the reported date, time and location of the next big cocaine shipment due from Mexico.

Bolan and his brother in arms, Stony Man flying ace Jack Grimaldi, were watching for it now, ready to strike.

* * *

There had been countless speeches and endless arguments over the wall planned for construction back in 2016, closing off unauthorized traffic between the States and Mexico. At first the government of Mexico was falsely advertised as paying for that barrier, a fabrication that the Mexicans dismissed as baseless fantasy. Next up, American taxpayers were supposed to foot the bill, and Congress finally had allocated $1.6 billion for construction, buried in a larger spending bill, but there’d been no physical progress yet—at least not on the stretch of border Bolan and Grimaldi had staked out.

And would a wall make any difference? Drugs had been flowing into the United States for decades now, by air, by water, stashed in vehicles that managed to evade dope-sniffing dogs at closely guarded border crossings. There had been narco submarines that Bolan knew of, and a whole maze of tunnels along the border, stretching west to east, from California to Texas. The Sinaloa Cartel had pioneered tunneling in 1989, between a private home in Agua Prieta, Sonora, and a warehouse located in Douglas, Arizona. Other syndicates had started burrowing since then, and for each tunnel located, the DEA presumed at least five more were moving dope around the clock.

“They’re here,” Grimaldi whispered, peering eastward across the sun-bleached open land through Steiner 210 MM1050 Military-Marine tactical binoculars.

Bolan shifted, following Grimaldi’s line of sight and saw two SUVs running tandem, raising plumes of dust behind them as they covered ground. He made them as a matched pair of Toyota RAV4s, either white or beige under their coats of desert grit, the better to pass unseen through the arid wilds of Southern Texas. Four men occupied each 4x4, and they were making for the point that Stony Man coordinates had marked as the drug tunnel’s adit in Val Verde County.

Bolan couldn’t see the tunnel’s southern terminus from where he lay, even with field glasses. The shaft might have been two or three miles long, for all he knew, bearing in mind that two things every drug cartel possessed were cheap labor and time. He didn’t know how long rotating crews might take to span that distance, digging night and day, nor did he care. The point was that transporters planned on moving through the tunnel here and now, clueless that they were being watched.

The pickup team wasn’t afraid of being seen by daylight—that much was apparent. Maybe they had worried more about missing their contacts in the dark, driving without headlights and only stars to guide them. On the other hand, perhaps they’d greased Border Patrol officers in advance to take a coffee break just now or simply look the other way. It had been true in Prohibition and throughout the modern War on Drugs.

Mexico particularly suffered from a scourge of bought-off law enforcement spanning decades, worsening as towns and villages descended into chaos. Its Federal Judicial Police force was dissolved in 2002, after one-fourth of its officers were linked to drug cartels, and its successor—the Federal Investigative Agency—likewise collapsed in 2005, with the arrests of its deputy director and 457 of its agents. After a four-year hiatus, the Federal Ministerial Police appeared, but nothing much had changed—at least if you believed the DEA and Texas Rangers.

The corruption wasn’t hard to understand: Mexican cops earned meager pay, and they were subject to the fear of having loved ones slaughtered by sicarios —hit men—the same as anybody else. Why swim upstream and be devoured by piranhas, when an officer could make a killing by just going with the flow?

The two RAV4s had stopped, disgorged their occupants—six of the eight packing assault weapons, and the drivers making do with pistols. Bolan heard them speaking rapid-fire Spanish, too fast and too far away to comprehend. Still, he had no trouble picking out the man who seemed to be in charge, the dark and bearded face filling his Steyr’s telescopic sight.

Waiting to see what happened next, he told Grimaldi, “On my call.”

“Call them,” Altair Infante ordered. “Now.”

His driver, Manuel Ortega, took a compact walkie-talkie from the cargo pocket of his khaki pants and pressed the talk button, saying, “Coyote calling Mole. Come in, Mole. Do you copy?”

Nothing right away, but then a voice came back at him through static. “Copy that, Coyote.”

“Where are you?”

“We’re at the hatch, just waiting for your signal.”