feared and envied him—a double boost to Kahlo’s ego.
As he neared the sleek black car, a voice called out from behind him. “¡Hola marica! ¿Adónde vas?”
It was nobody’s business where he went—no one but his employer, anyway—but the insult to Kahlo’s manhood set his blood aboil. Turning, he placed a hand over the butt of his Glock 21, the .45 ACP model, then froze as he found himself facing the muzzles of two shotguns that were held by young men who had to be hit men themselves.
“You’re making a mistake,” he cautioned them. “Do you know who I am?”
“Would we be here if we didn’t know you?” one of them replied.
Then both guns thundered, and Arturo Kahlo vaulted backward, into endless night.
El Centro District, Medellín
El Centro was a dicey part of town, one of the rougher neighborhoods in Medellín, but it drew many foreign tourists to attractions such as the Parque de Las Luces, Botero Plaza, the Museum of Antioquia, the Palace of Culture and the Museo Casa de la Memoria. The last one’s name translated to House of Memory, but as he stood scanning a busy street, Rafael Barón reflected that his memories of El Centro were mostly bad.
Still, gawkers came in droves—but if they’d done their homework, or their tour guides were true professionals, they would look elsewhere for hotels in Medellín.
Barón cared nothing for hotels unless the men he trailed were registered at one of them, and who would be so foolish as to book a room in El Centro if he had the cash and common sense to do better?
Tonight, Barón was staking out a dance club that was favored by some narcotraffickers and their women—seldom wives—for gathering to mix business with pleasure, as their voices were masked from any hidden microphones by the incessant hammering of of amplified pop music, sometimes interrupted by narcocorridos, songs that glamorized and celebrated the exploits of traffickers.
Barón’s mission tonight was scanning faces, photographing some of the more infamous with his cell phone, and afterward reporting what he’d seen in detail to his DEA controllers at the Justice Building. So far he had snapped pictures of seven local dealers and a visitor from Mexico who was believed to be associated with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, but he was waiting for a big fish who could boost his daily pittance covered by American taxpayers.
Now a jet-black Hummer limousine was pulling up outside the club. Well-dressed men and their women spilled from open doors like clowns emerging from a circus car, except in luxury, with more than ample room for anything they cared to do while rolling through the streets of Medellín. Barón lifted his cell phone, hanging back in the shadows as he snapped away, until he glimpsed a face he hadn’t seen in years and had to stop. He lowered his phone while he gaped, amazed.
It was impossible...and yet, how could he not believe the evidence of his own eyes?
He rushed another string of photos—click, click, click—then speed-dialed his contact and fidgeted through half a dozen distant rings before a sleepy voice answered.
“It’s me,” Barón began. “No, I don’t know what time it is, and you won’t care when you hear this. He’s back! There’s no mistaking it. Pablo! What do you mean, which Pablo? Was there ever more than one, gringo? I’m saying it is Pablo Escobar, El Rey de la Cocaína.”
The harsh voice scolded him, bringing a rush of heat to Barón’s cheeks. “Listen to me,” he answered back. “I haven’t snorted anything, okay? I’m not drunk, and I’m not crazy. It’s him! I don’t care if you say he’s dead. I’m telling you, he’s back!”
Val Verde County, Texas
“Man, I wish they’d show, already,” Jack Grimaldi said. “I’m sweating like a pig, here. Must’ve lost five pounds already.”
“I’ll bet it looks good on you,” Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, answered him.
They lay on sandy ground they’d scooped out with entrenching tools, before daybreak, under a staked-out tarp in desert camouflage, spruced up with dry mesquite pasted on top of it. The pattern of the loose fatigues they had been sweating through since dawn matched the tarpaulin, save for their tactical boots and web gear, both desert tan.
The warriors had come armed for bear—or, rather, armed for men who didn’t care who they gunned down or caught and tortured for whatever useful information they possessed. Each man lay stretched out beside a Steyr AUG bullpup assault rifle, selective fire, translucent magazines loaded with thirty rounds apiece of 5.56 mm NATO rounds. Each Steyer came equipped with a Swarovski 1.5x telescopic sight, integrated with the receiver casting. Its black ring reticle and basic range finder had been designed so that a person who was five feet eleven inches tall filled the scope at 300 meters downrange.
Aside from rifles, both watchers wore sidearms on their hips. Bolan’s semiauto Desert Eagle Mark VII pistol was chambered in .44 Magnum and fired nine rounds. Grimaldi had gone lighter, with a Glock 22 in .40-caliber Smith & Wesson, fifteen rounds in the magazine and one up the spout.
Their other armaments included extra magazines in Velcro pouches, M68 fragmentation grenades fitted with impact fuses, and their combat knives were Cols Steel GI Tantos with seven-inch fixed blades in a black, rust-resistant finish.
They were dressed to kill, and that was just precisely what they had in mind.
Now all they had to do was wait, and that was getting old.
* * *
The trail that had brought Bolan and Grimaldi to their present station in the desert had begun 1,750 miles away, to the northeast, at Arlington National Cemetery. One day earlier, amid the simple markers and some larger monuments to heroes, Bolan had been following procedure when he met with Hal Brognola, chief among his oldest living friends, once a street agent for the FBI, promoted through the ranks over time to a top-level but ill-defined post in the Justice Department that allowed him the freedom to take on various roles within the department.
The big Fed was a man known to have the President’s ear on matters of national security. Brognola, unknown to most government officials, was also the director of the Sensitive Operations Group, a clandestine organization whose covert headquarters was based at Stony Man Farm, semiconcealed within the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. From there, assignments were issued for its warriors—Mack Bolan, if the assignment aligned with his personal goals, plus the strike forces dubbed Able Team and Phoenix Force—who would take on terrorists and criminal cartels worldwide. Their missions were, in essence, to search and destroy. Targets assigned were generally not expected to stand trial.
When Brognola needed to speak with Bolan—long presumed dead by the public that had previously followed his extended one-man war against the Mafia, now with his records thoroughly expunged—Bolan sometimes dropped by the Farm, more often meeting casually in some venue such as Arlington, where getting lost among tourists came easily.
This time around, the big Fed had delivered some alarming news. That in itself was not unusual; he called on Bolan only when the stakes were high and time was short. The first part of Brognola’s message—that cocaine shipments to the United States from Mexico and South America had multiplied
