Don Pendleton - Killing Kings

“This is it. Get out here, will you?”

“Yes, yes, give me a minute to lift this thing.”

“So, lift it!” Infante snapped, as if the team below ground could make out his words.

There was another brief delay, and then a hatch approximately ten feet square swung up and backward on hinges, with sand streaming from it as the adit of the tunnel was revealed. Blinking like real-life moles after their journey through the shaft, some of them coughing up stale air, four men emerged and stretched, feeling the sun before they turned around again and started dragging wooden pallets heaped with shrink-wrapped kilos of cocaine into daylight.

“Start counting them,” Infante ordered his soldiers. “And be quick about it. We need to get loaded up and gone before we have to deal with the Border Patrol, eh?”

“I thought you paid them off,” Ortega said, hoping it didn’t sound like he was whining.

“Who told you to think, idiot? Just do what you’re told and get a move on.” Turning toward the SUVs, Infante muttered, not quite underneath his breath, “Asshole.”

Ortega thought that he should say something, defend himself, but Infante was right: he wasn’t paid to think, only to follow orders without question, never mind what they might be or what he was required to do. Still, if only he had the nerve...

Half turning, driven by a wild impulse, Ortega had actually opened his mouth, could feel words forming in his mind and pressing on his vocal cords, ready to burst free from his tongue. It meant his death to speak, but how long could a man live once he was stripped of all his self-respect? That didn’t make him a man, someone to admire. It made him appear to be weak.

He was on the tipping point of suicidal madness when a bolt from heaven saved Ortega from himself, striking Infante’s head and blowing it apart, as if it were a mango with a firecracker inside.

Ortega had seen men killed before—had killed a few himself, in fact—but never had he seen a skull disintegrate, the brain within it taking flight and shredding while it tumbled through the air. One second he was staring at it, mouth agape, then suddenly a mist, red and gray and uncomfortably warm, spattered his face, smearing his Ray-Ban sunglasses. And—God Almighty—some of the muck was even in his mouth!

Ortega gagged and spat, while Infante’s gunmen and the hired transporters cried out in alarm. Then, a split second later, Ortega knew it couldn’t be a bolt from heaven that had slain Infante.

Would a bolt from heaven leave the flat crack of a military rifle floating on the desert breeze?

It was foolish even to suggest it.

But if they were under fire, that meant...

Ortega hit the dirt, shouting to his companions, “Incoming gunfire! Hit the ground!”

Instead of dropping to save themselves, the gunmen who’d accompanied Infante and Ortega in the SUVs were firing back at someone, something—maybe nothing, if the truth be told—with submachine guns and assault rifles. Ortega guessed they had to feel better, making so much noise, even if they couldn’t pick out a living target in the sandscape that surrounded them.

Thinking he ought to do something, Ortega reached for his own weapon, a Beretta M9 chambered in 9 mm Parabellum, with an ambitxterous safety and decocking mechanism making, it convenient for both right-and left-handed shooters. As a left-hander himself, Ortega babied the Beretta, cleaning it religiously and treating it as what he sometimes thought it was: his only true-blue friend on Earth.

But he still needed a target before he could use the weapon to good advantage.

So far he couldn’t tell if someone was still shooting at the pickup crew. Five other gunners, together with Ignacio Azuela, the driver of the second RAV4, were unloading into the desert to Ortega’s left, northwest of where he lay, the discharge of their weapons drowning out whatever hostile fire might be incoming now. Streams of bright cartridge casings glittered in the air and bounced across the desert floor as they landed.

Ortega squeezed off two shots in the general direction his companions were unloading, virtually blind until he realized that Infante’s blood and brains still smeared his Ray-Bans. He ripped them off, and had to squint against the glare of morning sun.

One target—that was all he needed to acquit himself with courage, but he still couldn’t find one.

Behind him, frightened cries and scuffling feet told him the underground transporters were retreating to their tunnel and, no doubt, would soon be fleeing back across the border to Mexico. Ortega wished that he could follow them, get lost somewhere in Coahuila and forget about the life he’d chosen, and never return.

But then he thought about his boss, who would never stop looking for a deserter from his family, and Ortega knew that sudden death, right here and now, was better than the screaming, inescapable alternative.

Chapter Two

After the first man had dropped, nearly headless, Bolan swiveled slightly to his right. It was enough for him to bring the tunnel’s entrance under fire from where he lay in the camo tarpaulin’s shade.

The men who’d begun to drag the pallets of packaged cocaine from darkness into daylight were unarmed, but they had been escorted from the other side by three cartel gunmen, no doubt assigned to keep the worker ants from snorting up along the way, and to avert hijacking on the Texas side, at least until the coke was packed into the white RAV4s and headed north.

That raised the number of gunmen to eleven, counting the two drivers with their sidearms, and now minus one: the seeming leader of the pickup crew Bolan had dropped with his first shot.

There’d been two reasons for his choice. First, the man giving the orders would be difficult to take alive, for questioning. Second, Bolan was satisfied that any member of the mobile team would know where they were meant to take the load. At that location he would certainly find more men, probably someone from the cartel’s midlevel management, who would impart more information, whether he liked it or not.

But Bolan was taking care of first things first.

He didn’t mean to let the workers, with their escorts, duck back into hiding and escape to Mexico unscathed, and absolutely not with the cocaine they’d brought across. From what he’d glimpsed of shrink-wrapped kilos, he projected that three standard wooden pallets should be heaped with fifty parcels each, or close to that. The standard pallet measured nine square feet and weighed approximately thirty pounds. Two men apiece could drag a pallet bearing fifty keys, the total weight around 140 pounds, maybe allowing stops for rest along the way.

The grunts wouldn’t have counted on a full load going home, and at the moment, under fire, delivering the cargo seemed to be the last thing on their minds. The six Bolan could see from where he lay were trying to escape, but one of the cartel gunmen had blocked the tunnel’s entrance with his body, shouting threats at them and leveling an MP5K submachine gun at his cringing, pleading team.

Enough of that, Bolan thought, as he zeroed his telescopic sight and stroked the Steyr’s trigger lightly to dispatch another single shot. Downrange, he saw the guard vault over backward, crimson spouting from a chest wound, dropping half inside the tunnel’s mouth.

That left the dead man’s workers in a quandary. Should they run past his corpse, desert the unexpected battleground and risk reprisal later, or pick up his gun and join the fight? If certain death waited on both sides of the bleak equation...

Bolan made the choice for them, spotting the worker closest to the fallen thug and drilling him between his shoulder blades. The dead or dying man dropped to his knees, then toppled forward, face dropping into the lifeless soldier’s crotch and lodging there.