They moved along the busy concourse toward a distant exit, Guzman asking questions. Bolan rejected offers of a meal, a drink, a currency exchange—the latter based upon his knowledge that one U.S. dollar equaled 2,172 Colombian pesos. He would’ve needed several steamer trunks to haul around the local equivalent of $250,000, and all for what?
The people he’d be meeting soon would either deal in dollars, or they wouldn’t deal at all.
Those who refused the bribe, received the bullet—or the bomb, the blade, the strangling garrote. Death came in many forms, but it was always ugly, violent and absolutely final.
“My car is in the visitors’ garage,” Guzman informed him. “This way, if you please.”
Bolan observed his usual precautions as they moved along the concourse, watching for anyone who stared too long or looked away too suddenly, avoiding eye contact. He caught no one observing their reflections in shop windows, kneeling suddenly to tie a loose shoestring or search through pockets for some nonexistent missing item as they passed.
Of course, he didn’t know the players here in Bogotá. Those who had tried to take him out the last time he was here were all long dead.
It would be easier when they got out of town, he thought. The open road made them more difficult to track, and once he reached the forest, started hiking toward his final target, it would be his game, played by his rules.
Or so he hoped, at least.
Each mission held surprises. Few, if any, ran exactly as the plans were drawn in quiet moments, prior to contact with the enemy. Whether you called it Chaos Theory or the human element, it all came down to the same thing: variables that could never be anticipated.
Even psychic powers wouldn’t help, if they existed, since most people in a crisis situation acted without thinking, running off on tangents, never stopping to consider what might happen if they turned left instead of right, sped up or slowed, cried out or bit their tongues.
Bolan had stayed alive this long because he planned ahead and still retained the flexibility required to change his plans, adapt to any given situation that arose. Someday, he knew, the switch would be too fast for him, his enemy too deadly accurate, and that would be the end.
But, hopefully, it wouldn’t be this night.
The sun was setting as they left the airport terminal, but most of the day’s humidity remained to slap him in the face like a wet towel. Bolan followed his contact from the blessed air-conditioning, across a sidewalk and eight lanes of traffic painted on asphalt, to reach the visitors’ garage. Inside, Guzman led him to an elevator, pushed the button, waited for the car and took them up to the fifth level.
“Over here, señor.”
Guzman led Bolan toward a Fiat compact, navy blue, which Bolan guessed was three or four years old. Inside it, Bolan pushed his seat back all the way, to make room for his legs.
“You need certain equipment, yes?” Guzman asked as he slid into the driver’s seat.
“That’s right.”
“Is all arranged,” Guzman replied, and put the car in gear.
“THEY’RE CLEARING THE GARAGE right now,” Horst Krieger said, speaking into his handheld two-way radio. “Be ready when they pass you.”
“Yes, sir!” came the response from Arne Rauschman in the second car. No further conversation was required.
“Get after them!” snapped Krieger to his driver, Juan Pacheco. “Not too close, but keep the car in sight.”
“Sí, señor,” the driver said as he put the Volkswagen sedan in gear and rolled out in pursuit of Krieger’s targets.
Krieger thought it was excessive, sending eight men to deal with the two strangers he had briefly glimpsed as they’d driven past, but he never contested orders from his commander. Such insubordination went against the grain for Krieger, and it was the quickest way that he could think of to get killed.
Besides, he thought as they pursued the Fiat compact, Rauschman’s six-year-old Mercedes falling in behind the Volkswagen, if they faced any opposition from the targets, he could use the native hired muscle as cannon fodder, let them take the brunt of it, while he and Rauschman finished off the enemy.
The Fiat quite predictably took Avenida El Dorado from the airport into Bogotá. It was the city’s broadest, fastest highway, crossing on an east-west axis through the heart of Colombia’s capital.
It was early evening, with traffic at its peak, and Krieger worried that his driver might lose the Fiat through excessive caution.
“Faster!” he demanded “Close that gap! We’re covered by the other traffic here. Stay after them!”
He waited for the standard “Sí, señor,” and frowned when it was not forthcoming. He would have to teach Pacheco some respect, but now was clearly not the time. The Volkswagen surged forward, gaining on the Fiat, while cars that held no interest for Krieger wove in and out of the lanes between them.
Krieger turned in his seat, feeling the bite of his shoulder harness, the gouge of his Walther P-88 digging into his side as he craned for a view of Rauschman’s Mercedes. There it was, three cars back, holding steady.
At least, with a real soldier in each vehicle, the peasants he was forced to use as personnel would not give up and wander off somewhere for a siesta in the middle of the job. Krieger would see to that, and Rauschman could be trusted to control his crew, regardless of their innate failings.
Krieger couldn’t really blame them, after all. The peasants had been born inferior, and there was nothing they could do to change that fact, no matter how hard they might try.
But they could follow orders, to a point. Drive cars. Point guns. Pull triggers. What else were they good for? Why else even let them live?
Horst Krieger would be pleased to kill the two men he was following, although he’d never met them in his life and knew nothing about them. One of them looked Aryan, or possibly Italian, but the race alone meant nothing. There was also attitude, philosophy and politics to be considered.
All those who opposed the sacred cause must die.
Some sooner, as it happened, than the rest.
Speaking across his shoulder, Krieger told the two Colombians seated behind him, “Be ready, on my command.”
He heard the harsh click-clack of automatic weapons being cocked, and felt compelled to add, “Don’t fire until I say, and then be certain of your target.”
“No civilians,” one of them responded. “Sí, señor.”
“I don’t care shit about civilians,” Krieger answered. “But if one of you shoots me, I swear, that I’ll strangle you with your own guts before I die.”
The backseat shooters took him seriously, as they should have. Krieger meant precisely what he said.
Rauschman’s two gunners in the second car would have their weapons primed by now, as well, although the order had to come from Krieger, and he hadn’t
