Don Pendleton - Devil's Mark

“Well, speaking of silencio,” Wang stated, “I expect it might sound like something of a contradiction, but it’s gotten a tad more violent and more silent here in ol’ Mexicali.”

The inspector speared himself another steak from the pile. “It is the same in Tijuana.”

“It’s my experience,” Bolan said, “that Mexico isn’t a very quiet place, and when it does get quiet it means something very bad is about to happen.”

“That’s pretty astute there, Coop.”

Villaluz polished off his beer. “My friend is feeling somewhat light.”

“Well, I reckon if I were him I’d want to go heeled.” Wang pushed away from the table. “Follow me.”

Bolan, Smiley and Villaluz followed Wang back into the kitchen and down the stairs into the cellar. Sacks of beans, rice and flour formed pyramids that nearly brushed the ceiling. Wang went to a steel security door and punched in a code.

Bolan stepped into the candy store.

Small arms of all descriptions were racked on the walls and covered tables. Wooden crates of weapons were palleted in piles like the beans and rice next door. “So what can I do you for?” Wang asked proudly.

“Tell me a story,” Bolan said.

Wang chewed his lip for a moment in thought. “I’ll tell you a story about the old days. Most yanquis don’t know it, but the Chinese tongs used to run a lot of the crime on the border. When the U.S. had their anti-Chinese movements in the 1800s, many Chinese moved south across the border. In the end the Mexicans had their own night of the long-knives, but we still stayed. People still wanted opium and a place to do it. Men wanted Chinese prostitutes and places to do them. Mexico until recently was never the land of gunfighters the U.S. was, so if you wanted someone dead and didn’t have men of your own? A tong hatchet man was a good bet.”

“And then you got pushed out.”

“Yep, in the 1980s Mexican brown heroin became cheap, plentiful and of higher quality than ever before. Our China white couldn’t compete. Cocaine was the other drug of choice, and we were not a natural conduit for it. The Chinese criminal web in Mexico contracted. But if there is one thing we Chinese have it’s worldwide connections. Mexican criminals have always gotten most of their weapons by stealing them or buying them black market from the Mexican military or smuggling them in from the United States. However, we Chinese have always been a secondary, shadow-conduit. AK-47s and light support weapons to revolutionaries in the south. PRC, Taiwanese and Philippine knockoffs of MAC-10s, Uzis and M-16s to the drug cartels. We Chinese never cared, business was business.”

“And what’s your relationship with the cartels?” Bolan probed.

“For the most part we have always had a wary truce with the cartels. We are a source of guns, and the Chinese laundries these days launder money into Asian offshore banks in the Pacific.”

“And now?” Bolan asked.

“Now?” J.W. frowned. “Now, things are…”

“Beginning to take an alarming turn?” Bolan suggested.

Wang walked over to a crate and opened it with a small crowbar. “You know what those are.”

Bolan looked at a dozen AK-47s packed in straw. “Kalashnikovs.”

“You betcha. Weapon of the people. Used to be every cartel asshole wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt had to have one. I couldn’t keep them in stock. Now? Now I can hardly give them away. The cartels took the high hat and consider them peasant weapons, used by barefoot illiterate assholes. Now they want M-4 carbines like your boys use. The weapons of the world conquerors.”

Bolan was aware of this. “And?”

Wang pulled a pistol out from under his jacket. “You know what this is?”

Bolan eyed the large, uniformly gray, space-gun-looking Belgian weapon. “FN Five-seveN.”

“No, it’s a mata policias.”

“Cop killer.”

Wang nodded. “Every Mexican criminal wants one of these. Now me? I’m a .45-caliber man, give me that 12.5 mm slug any day. But the little 5.7 mm rounds this baby squirts out? Rumor is they slide right through bulletproof vests. The U.S. war on drugs? Well, in Mexico it’s starting to look like a civil war. The cops are arming up, the government is sending in the army, and the bad guys want a solution to all these assholes in body armor. They love the mata policia, and they all want that Belgian carbine that fires the same cartridge. But you know what the problem is?”

“Supply and demand,” Bolan stated.

“That’s right. Belgian guns have always been expensive, and trying to smuggle Belgian guns into Mexico, well, that’s a very interesting proposition. It takes a U.S. buyer. Five-seveNs are legal up north, but it throws in another middleman. If a U.S. citizen buys five or ten or fifty of them, he risks attracting a lot of unwanted attention, so the price goes way up. So they only come in at a very slow drip. They’re also status symbols. I heard of them going for 10k a pop down here on the border and the supply just cannot meet the demand.”

“So what’s the solution?”

“From an economic standpoint?” Wang reached into an already opened crate and pulled out another pistol. “The solution is this.”

The weapon looked like any one of a dozen 9 mm service pistols from around the world made of black metal and wearing black plastic grips. It was the Chinese QSZ-92 service pistol, and the only thing unique about it was the proprietary cartridge if fired.

Wang regarded the pistol. “Oh, I’ll admit it’s not as sexy as the Five-seveN. It’s no race gun, but the 5.8 mm cartridge it fires has the pedigree. Needle-pointed steel-core bullet? Check. Magnum velocity? Check. And—”

Smiley stared at the pistol as if it were a snake. “And half the price of a Five-seveN.”

“Try less than a tenth,” Bolan said. “And you don’t have to smuggle it across the U.S. border. You just pay off any customs official from Ensenada to Acapulco and he can bring them in by the container vessel.” Bolan smiled at Wang without an ounce of warmth. “How many are you bringing in this year, Wang? Hundreds? Thousands? You going to bring in Chinese Type 05 submachine guns in the same caliber, as well?”

Wang frowned. “Therein lies the problem.”

“What would that be?”

“I don’t want to.”

Bolan was mildly surprised. “Oh?”

“Oh, I’m telling you, my cousin in Hong Kong has them ready to go. He thinks we should market them locally as asesinos chinos.”

“Chinese assassins?”

“Yeah, my cousin earned his degree in marketing. He’s good. He wants to sell them from Tijuana to Matamoros, one end of the border to the other, from sea to shining sea.” Wang laid the weapon back in the crate. “Every punk on the street will want one.”

“And be able to afford one,” Smiley added bitterly. “You’ll make a killing.”

“You bet we would, but kill who?”

Wang turned to the inspector. “Forgive me, my friend, but the Chinese philosophy has always been to pay off the police and then get out of the way and let the Mexican criminals kill each other.”

Villaluz’s eyes narrowed but he reserved comment.

“Now it’s different. Now it’s war. The cartels aren’t just killing one another. They are killing policemen, soldiers, mayors, judges and journalists. They are taking over whole towns. Parts of whole states. The days of paying off police and politicians in Mexico is almost over. Now it’s simpler, and cheaper, to kill them. I was born in Mexico. I’m a Mexican citizen. My family is here. My business is here, and I reckon I just don’t want to live in a narco-state.”

Bolan had to admit that for a tong gunrunner who pit-fought animals and ate them J. W. Wang was a somewhat surprising man of conscience. He still kept his voice hard. “So what are you going to do about it?”