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.
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.
Under the present circumstances, no one seemed to find that humorous.
“Ready?” Bolan asked Grimaldi.
“And waiting.”
“Go!”
They rose as one and swept the camo tarp aside, leaving one end secured behind them with two tent stakes, so it couldn’t blow away. That was the least of Bolan’s problems at the moment, but he usually tried to take away whatever he’d discarded at a killing ground, except spent cartridges from the unregistered Steyrs, which wouldn’t ring a bell at any law-enforcement database.
Grimaldi kept pace with him as they ducked and weaved, charging the twin RAV4s and the gunmen around them. The morning had been nearly silent till the SUVs arrived, but now it echoed with gunfire and stank of burnt gunpowder.
To the Executioner, it smelled like coming home.
Home was where the Devil waited for him. Home was where he hunted evil men.
* * *
Manuel Ortega had his targets now, but whether he could bring them down was anybody’s guess. They weren’t running away, but rather rushing toward him, which he guessed should make the killing of them easier. But they were also firing on his crew as they advanced, showing no fear, and not letting rapid forward motion spoil their aim.
Ortega fired twice at the taller of the two men, knowing that he’d missed each time before his spent shell hit the dirt. He’d jerked the M9’s trigger both times, as he’d practiced not to do on firing ranges, but the training vanished from his mind like the previous night’s dream when he had live targets in front of him. Even defeated, kneeling in desert graves they’d dug themselves and weeping like pathetic children, they unnerved him.
That made him pathetic in his own eyes, and Ortega resolved that if this was to be his dying day, he would not take it lying down, groveling in the sand.
Get up, then! he told himself. Stand up and kill them.
Ortega clambered to his feet, squeezed off another shot and missed both of his enemies again. He then started toward the nearer SUV. Ignacio Azuela crouched beside its left-front fender, shielded from incoming bullets by the RAV4’s bodywork and engine block, while two of the gunmen Infante had commanded stood