State Of War

“Should I even ask about the side effects?”

“The side effects are how krokodil gets its name.” Kurtzman hit a key. “Hold on to your breakfast.”

Bolan stared long and hard at the jpeg. He could tell it was a human ankle because two hands pulling down a sock framed it. Where the flesh wasn’t gray it was green. In between the blotches of necrotic color, the skin rose and cracked like a lizard’s scales. Bolan easily identified several suppurating injection sites. “This isn’t good.”

“It gets worse. A heroin high can last four to eight hours. Krokodil lasts for about ninety minutes, and by all accounts the withdrawal symptoms are obscene. Once you’re hooked on krokodil you need to hit three to four times per day. All you live for is to cook it or score it. According to the Russian medical service, once you start taking krokodil your life expectancy is a year or less. It’s the cell death and scaling that give the drug its name, and those scales eventually rot off. I’m reading accounts here of advanced users being found still alive but with their bones showing. In Russia they call it the drug that eats the junkie, literally and figuratively. It is the absolutely lowest form of addiction I have ever heard of.”

“And now it’s here in Miami-Dade.”

Kaino spoke quietly. “I’ve seen it. Smelled it, too. Any lab cooking the cocodrilo smells to the skies of iodine. So do the cooks. Most of the cooks are junkies themselves. Sometimes they pour the iodine into their wounds as remedial first aid. Sometimes they drink it. There’s some misguided mythology that drinking what they’re cooking with will make them stronger.”

Bolan had found himself drinking potassium iodide on several occasions; however, that had usually been after exposure to spent nuclear material. “So, the skin is rotting off their bones but they have very healthy thyroid glands.”

Kurtzman smiled bleakly. “That’s about it.”

“So now that El Hombre is here to save us, what are we going to do?” Kaino interjected.

“Russian chatter brought me, but it was tied up with the gang situation here in Miami-Dade. That’s why I asked for your help. Speaking of which, what are you willing to do, Master Sergeant?”

“After last night?” Kaino sighed, and not unhappily. “I’m looking forward to exploring the envelope of my first open-ended, paid, consulting leave of absence for the health and safety of the greater Miami-Dade metropolitan area.”

“Glad to hear that, Kaino.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“Well, I’ve got Russians chattering about gangs. You’ve got gangs spilling Russian filth on your streets. I think we should go talk to some Russians.”

* * *

“J UST SO YOU KNOW ,” Kaino warned, “the Russian mafia isn’t one of my areas of expertise.”

Bolan sat in Kaino’s unmarked car and watched the back door of Papi’s Tea Room through binoculars. “It’s one of mine.”

“You’ve been staring at that door for five minutes.” Kaino regarded Bolan dryly. “Has it done anything yet?”

“No, but it’s not happy.”

“The door isn’t happy?” Kaino queried.

“No.”

“It’s not a happy door.”

“No, someone violated it,” Bolan said.

“It’s a violated, unhappy door?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you know?”

“Look closer.”

Kaino squinted into his binoculars. “Well, it is a filthy door covered with graffiti.”

“Look at the hinges and the knob,” Bolan suggested.

Kaino looked, then slowly smiled. The steel security door was filthy, old, weathered and well covered with spray paint. The hinges were brand-new. So was the knob, and the metal around them was dented and blackened. Whoever had rehung the door had taken a pretty cavalier attitude toward his job. “Someone took a Masterkey to that door.”

Bolan nodded. A Masterkey was usually a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with sand or some kind of granulated composite designed to slam off door hinges and locks. The soldier shook his head at the door. “You know, if you’re not going to do a job right, you just shouldn’t do it at all.”

“My mother always said that.”

“My mother always said everyone deserves a second chance.”

“A second chance to do what?” Kaino asked.

From the bag between his knees Bolan removed a Remington 870MCS shotgun with a fourteen-inch barrel and a pistol grip. “To hang a door correctly.”

“Now, that’s not the kind of shotgun a good, God-fearing Justice Department Observation Liaison Officer should carry.”

Bolan slid two metal-cased shells into the shotgun and put three yellow plastics in behind them to bat cleanup.

Kaino slid from behind the wheel and pulled his revolvers.

The men walked nonchalantly down the alley. It was midday but Russian rap music made the poorly hung door vibrate. Bolan pointed the brutally shortened 870 at the top hinge and the laser sight in the grip put a red dot on it.

“So,” Kaino inquired, “you’re just going to light up that howitzer and announce—” The shotgun made a dull slap-click noise and the hinge twisted and broke as though hit by an iron fist. Kaino stood staring. “You have a silenced shotgun.”

“No, it’s the round that’s silent. The gunpowder hits a piston inside the shell and the piston rams the breaching load out of the shell down the barrel. The piston jams in the shell mouth so the entire detonation is contained inside the shell.”

“Very James Bond.”

Bolan’s weapon slap-clicked and the bottom hinge smeared away under the breaching round’s blow. He shucked in two more yellow rounds. “You want to go first?”

“Oh, no, you’re a guest.” Kaino generously waved his guns at the door for Bolan to take point. “By all means.”

Bolan kicked the door.

The music hit them like a wall. The bass thud-thud-thudded loud enough to rattle bones while someone snarled in Russian, undoubtedly about how bad he was and how many women he had. Bolan moved down the narrow hallway, passing a kitchen with notices that it had been closed by order of the health department. Bolan and Kaino peered through the windows in the double doors that led into the main tearoom.

The place looked like a cross between a shooting gallery and a strip joint. If any tea had ever been served here, the patrons had probably smoked it. Kaino made a disgusted noise. “Well now, that’s just sad.”

Bolan nodded at the tableau in front of them. “Tragic.”

Nikita “Papi” Popov sat at a table flanked by two of his goons. In Russian parlance the goons were typical Russian “hammerheads,” big men, probably former military with mixed martial arts physiques filling out their designer tracksuits. The man on Popov’s left had the typical stubble hair cut. Popov’s right-hand goon bore a startling resemblance to a six-foot-six Jesus.

No one at the table was happy.

Indeed, all three mobsters appeared to have been beaten into pulps. They were well bandaged. Popov’s right-hand man had his right arm in a sling. The left-hand goon’s head was wrapped like a mummy. Popov appeared to have gotten the worst of it. He sat shirtless with his ribs taped and his left arm in a sling. Contusions grossly contorted the Russian prison gang tattoos covering Popov’s skin.

In typical Russian mobster fashion they sat grim-faced, drinking vodka and staring into the middle distance. The sea of bottles on the table indicated they had been at it for a while.

“Those sure are some sulky Russians,” Kaino observed.

“I’d go so far as to say morally devastated.”

“Morally devastated. I like that.”

“Let’s see if moral devastation has put them in the mood to talk,” Bolan said. “You take Bullethead and I’ll take J-man.”

Bolan and Kaino strode through the doors. Between the pounding music, the pounding of vodka and the Russians’ pounded state of being it took them far too many moments to notice.

The soldier shouted over what he could only loosely describe as music. “Mr. Popov! We need to talk!”

“Shit! Fuck!” Popov went apoplectic. “Kill them!”

The goons rose and kicked back their chairs. Bolan and Kaino closed the distance. The Jesus-looking hammerhead tried to go for the gun under his jacket. Bolan put the ruby dot of the Masterkey’s laser sight on J-man’s slung right arm and fired. The Russian screamed and dropped to his knees as his already injured wing took a 12-gauge rubber baton round.

Kaino snapped his revolvers forward with practiced ease. He rammed the muzzle of his left-hand gun into the Russian’s solar plexus like a fencer, then clouted the Russian behind the ear with the butt of his right. The Russian mobster went boneless across the table and slid to the floor in a cascade of vodka bottles. “There goes my pension...” Kaino muttered.

Bolan put a riot round into the stereo and the Russian rap ceased in a shower of sparks. He shook his head at Popov’s state of affairs. “So, besides me, who could have done this to you?”

“Fuck you!”

Bolan pumped his shotgun’s action and the laser designated Popov’s sling. Popov screamed. “No! For fuck’s sake! Please!”

“For the duration of this conversation I would advise you not to make me ask you anything twice.”

Popov stared sulkily at the tabletop.

“Tell your boys to resume their seats.”

Popov snarled. J-man sat back in his chair cradling his arm. Bullethead managed to scrape himself off the floor and did the same.

Kaino tsked as he confiscated their pistols. “Someone messed these boys up but good.”

Bolan nodded. The Russians had been systematically worked over, severely, and by pros. The soldier’s instincts told him that the beat down hadn’t been punishment or a warning. Popov and his men had been interrogated. “You seen the like around here?”

Kaino eyed the collection of contusions and broken bones with a professional eye. He lifted his chin at the bloody bandages. “Not in a long time. Let’s take a look at the wounds.”

Bolan ripped a dressing off the top of Popov’s shoulder, which elicited a shriek. Bolan’s eyes narrowed at a very nasty, ragged laceration across the Russian’s medial deltoid. The wound looked as though an animal might have made it. Kaino let out a long breath between his teeth and nodded. “Yeah.”

“Blackjack?” Bolan suggested.

“Close. I’d say a flat, beavertail slapjack sap with a coil spring in the handle, lead- and clay-loaded. A snap of the wrist will break bones. You swing side-on—” Kaino nodded at the Russian’s wound “—they’ll cut right through flesh. Jeez, there was an old-timer on the force when I first came out of the academy. He could put his halfway through the Miami phone book with a good windup.”

“Miami-Dade doesn’t use saps anymore, do they?”

“Nope.” The master sergeant sighed wistfully as he gazed backward into a bright, shining, never-to-return time in Florida law enforcement. “Banned them years ago.”

“Someone worked over our Russians.”

“Someone beat them like rugs.”

“Popov,” Bolan asked, “who did this to you?”

Popov clenched his teeth. Bolan calculated the look in the Russian gangster’s eyes. There seemed to be a genuine battle raging in Popov’s guts as to whom he was more afraid of, the warrior in front of him or the interrogators who had left him and his men in this sorry state. Popov was a genuine tough guy, but Bolan was beginning to think that whoever had interrogated Popov had gotten what they wanted out of him. Bolan smiled coldly. He wasn’t a torturer, but he had no qualms about letting his enemies think that he was.

“Popov, I’m going to start by dropping a hammer on every injury you already have, and then I’m going to start inflicting new ones. Who did this?”

Sweat broke out on Popov’s bruised brow. He hissed a single word through his teeth. “Zetas!”

“Well, just, shit,” Kaino opined.

Bolan weighed the Russian’s response. Zetas weren’t good. None of the Mexican cartels and their gangs were good news, but the Zetas had originally been Mexican Special Forces soldiers who had received special training by the U.S. Army Rangers at Fort Benning. Many of the Mexican soldiers had finally thrown up their hands and gone to work for the Gulf Coast Cartel as muscle. In the end the Zetas had gone independent and were now at war with their former Gulf Coast employers.

“We’re out of here.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it, unless you want to add something?”

“As a matter of fact I do.” Popov gasped as Kaino ground the barrel of one of his revolvers into the gangster’s injured arm and pressed the other between Popov’s eyes. “Stop calling yourself Papi. That’s Puerto Rican. We own that, and you don’t have privileges.”

Popov glowered.

Kaino ground the muzzles of his pistols in Popov like he was drilling for oil. “Say it!”

“I am no longer to be calling myself Papi! You own that! I do not have privileges!”

Kaino holstered his guns. “Smart boy.”

CHAPTER THREE

Safehouse

Bolan gazed long and hard at his files. Krokodil was just about the worst thing he had ever come across. He had seen the results of weaponized flesh-eating bacteria, but he had never seen that kind of damage self-inflicted. Bolan shook his head and clicked out of the horrific catalog of flesh eaten down to the dermis and bones showing through suppurating muscle tissue. Bolan had dedicated himself to a War Everlasting against organized human evil. He would be damned if he let this drug get a foothold in the United States. Bolan couldn’t bring himself to hate the junkies, the cooks or even the dealers. From all his research, when it came to krokodil they were all one and the same. They lived to fix until they died looking like extras in a zombie film, but some organization had introduced this filth into Florida.

Bolan intended to introduce himself to those individuals directly.

Kaino sat cleaning and oiling his twin .357s. Had the revolvers not been finished a lustrous gunmetal blue they would have sparkled. “You’re not buying the Zeta shit.”

“According to my source, they seem to have the most reliable supply of crocodile here in the metropolitan area.”

“That jibes with what I know, as well, but I stand by my statement. You’re not buying the Zetas roughing up Popov and his playmates.”

“No, if the Zetas had paid a visit to the Tea Room there would have been a bloodbath, and assuming they came out on top, their method of inquiry would have included lopping off limbs and heads. For that matter, most of the original Zetas who were Special Forces operators are dead. Those who are still around are the equivalent of generals in the cartel. They don’t do field ops anymore, and they sure as hell don’t leave Mexico. On top of that, I’m thinking Masterkeying a door is a little bit above the brains and pay grade of their local street gang affiliates here in Florida. Popov and his pals got worked by pros, like you and me, and they were deliberately left alive.”

“You think they’re under observation,” Kaino stated.

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“You think we got observed going in?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me at all,” Bolan said.

“Great, we’ve been made.”

“You worried about getting slap-jacked the same way?”

“Hell no.” Kaino grinned and reached into the bag he had taken from his apartment. He pulled out a twelve inch beavertail sap that was scuffed from long use, dry from long storage but shined with recent buffing. “I’m looking forward to meeting the competition.”

“I thought you said Miami-Dade banned those.”

“I’m on an open-ended, paid, consulting leave of absence. I’m interpreting that to mean I have a great deal of leeway in my operational and equipment requirement paradigms.

“So, you want to drop in on Los Zetas, anyway?”

“I think we’ll start with the local affiliates and work our way up the food chain. I’m looking at you for a place to start.”

“Oh, I got a place we can start.” Kaino slapped the sap into his palm.

* * *

B OLAN EYED THE DRUG fortress. It was an old, brick, two-story business building that had once housed an accounting firm. The windows were now barred and boarded. The front door was shiny stainless steel with a security camera above it, and a requisite oversize gangbanger stood in front mad-dogging anyone who walked by. The street was busy, but the locals made an extra effort to cross the street and not walk by. “Who lives here again?”

“A Zeta asshole named Salami.” Kaino handed Bolan a file.

Walter “Salami” Salemo had hair halfway down his back, wore a big white pirate shirt and stared into the mug shot camera with brown-eyed earnestness. The Salami looked like he should have been playing The Beatles’ “Rocky Raccoon” on a twelve-string guitar in a coffee bar someplace instead of being one of Miami-Dade’s most notorious meth distributors. According to the file, Salami had recently moved into moving crocodile.

Kaino waved his hand impatiently at the photo. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, but don’t let the noble-faired, long-haired, leaping-gnome look fool you. This guy Salami is a total dick.” Kaino poked a puckered scar on his chin Bolan had assumed was from his boxing career. “I got the scars to prove it. This guy will fool you. He nearly took my head off a few years back. Practices capoeira and shit.”

Bolan duly noted Salami’s martial arts background and raised an eyebrow at the man’s résumé. “Argentine?”

“The South Americans love coming to Florida.”

“Don’t I know it,” Bolan replied.

“So, you kicked the shit out of three gangs last night. You kicked the crap out of the Russians this morning. What’s on the agenda for the afternoon? You going to walk up to the door and start kicking the crap out of Salami and his people?”

“That was my first plan of attack. You got a better one?” the soldier asked.

“Listen, no one respects how you roll more than me.”

“Glad to hear that.”

“But sooner or later this ‘biggest dick on the block’ routine of yours is going to get us in some real trouble.”

“Well, all right, then. Wait until I’ve breached the door.”

“Your funeral.”

“Not if you can help it, Kaino.”

“Here we go again...”

Bolan took the baseball out of the box he had received by courier and slid out of the car. He set the modified Pittsburg Pirates cap on his head and walked across the street toward Salami’s fortress of narcatude. He wore earth sandals, cargo shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. By his own admission Bolan looked like a total rube. The gangbanger watching the door was built like a sumo wrestler. His tracksuit was blinding white and he had an Army Ranger high and tight haircut. Zeta tattoos covered his throat. Bolan walked up and gave the door guard a happy wave. “Howdy!”

“Basta, gringo.”

Bolan tilted his head like a dog hearing a sound it didn’t recognize. “What?”

The doorman gave Bolan a pitying look. “Fuck off.”

Bolan stared at the door guard like he might start crying. “But...I...”

“Madre de Dios...” The gangbanger rolled his eyes. “Fuck off.”

Bolan dropped to one knee and drove his fist three inches below the gangbanger’s belt line.

The fat man slowly sagged as his bladder hemorrhaged. “Oh, God...”

Bolan’s uppercut ripped the guard into unconsciousness. The soldier took out his Beretta 93-R. He gave the security camera the middle finger and then gave it a 3-round burst. The security camera burst apart. Bolan took a moment to take an indelible marker out of his pocket and wrote “El Hombre” on the fatman’s forehead.

Kaino shouted in Bolan’s earpiece. “You sick fuck!”

“Bank on it, Kaino.”

Dim sounds of consternation occurred behind the security door. Bolan pushed a thumbnail-size lozenge of plastic explosive into the lock and jammed a detonator pin into the mix. He took out his phone and hit an app.

“Fire in the hole!” Bolan pressed the icon and a fat chunk of fire left the doorknob in ruins. He pulled the pin on a grenade. “Any time, Kaino.”

Bolan kicked the door. Rage-faced gangbangers pulling guns confronted him. Rage turned to horror as the grenade clattered to the floor at their feet. The soldier waved and stepped back outside around the doorway. The sting-ball grenade detonated to the screams of the blunt-trauma beaten. He pulled the pin on a flash-bang and tossed it in. The foyer flashed with several thousand candlepowers of light and an Olympian thunder crack of sound.

Bolan stepped inside.

The sensory overloaded gangbangers were barely aware as Bolan put the mark of El Hombre on their foreheads. Kaino charged in with guns drawn and took in the scene. “You fascinate me.”

Bolan moved toward the stairs. The charging Zeta thugs had been stupid enough to leave the steel security gate to the stair open behind them. Bolan shouted up the stairs. “Yo! Ham-slice! Let’s talk!”

A torrent of Spanish insults echoed down the stairs. Bolan lobbed a sting-ball grenade up to the second-story landing. He stepped back as the cloud of rubber buckshot partially expanded back down the stairs. Bolan followed it with a flash-bang and the stairwell turned into the Norse god Thor’s personal thunder tunnel. “On my six, Kaino.”

Bolan took the steps three at a time.

A gunman crawled across the floor, blind and stunned, with his AK abandoned. Bolan gave him a lash across the left kidney with the slide of his Beretta to keep him honest and moved toward Salami’s inner sanctum. Kaino reached the second floor and kept his weapons trained behind them.

“Kaino,” Bolan called. “Give me a quick sweep.”

Kaino swept the stripped offices. “Empty!” He gave the steel door at the end of the hall a significant look. “They’ve gone all safety room on us. Probably calling in reinforcements.”

Bolan concurred and walked up to the steel door.

“What are you going to do?”

Bolan dramatically pulled out a short cylinder of flexible charge and made a fist. He put the cylinder between his middle and ring fingers and held it up to the security camera like a high explosive middle finger.

“Here we go...” Kaino muttered.

Bolan gave the hapless video device a 3-round burst from the Beretta, pressed the adhesive side of the explosive against the door lock and stuck in the detonator pin. “Fire in the hole.”

Bolan pressed the app on his phone and flexible charge cut a blackened crescent around the lock. The crack of the HE died as the soldier came to a decision. “Kaino, I need Salami alive. I’m going to try to take him. If it all goes to shit, you do what you have to do.”

Kaino gave Bolan a hard look. “All right.”

The soldier ejected his magazine of hollowpoint bullets and slapped in twenty-one rounds of less lethal ammo. In Bolan’s experience rubber bullets had a pretty dismal track record unless they came in shotgun slug sizes or buckshot-size swarms. At 21 grains, the 9 mms Bolan was loading were basically like hitting someone with a Gummi bear that had been on the shelf a few months too long. Of course they were coming in at 800 feet per second and the Beretta 93-R did have the advantage of pumping them out in 3-round bursts.

Bolan kicked the door and stepped aside.

A double-barrel went off like dynamite and two ARs burned their magazines in seconds and pinged open on empty.

The soldier stepped in.

A Zeta gangbanger screamed and charged, wielding his spent rifle by the barrel like a club. Bolan gave him three bursts from the Beretta and dropped him clutching his ribs. Another gangbanger stared stupidly with his sawed-off shotgun broken open, trying to pluck out the smoking shells. Two bursts or rubber bullets below the belt buckle left the gangster sagging and wetting himself.

Kaino came through the door.

Salami literally cartwheeled at Bolan, who put a burst into his ribs. Salami’s foot scythed the Beretta out of Bolan’s hands. The soldier ducked the ensuing heel kick by a hair and backpedaled.

It had been a long time since someone had tried to kick a gun out of Bolan’s hand, and the last would-be Bruce Lee who had tried it had received lead for his trouble. Salami grinned and slowly began to dance from side to side to Brazilian rhythms only he could hear. By the size of the man’s pupils Bolan suspected Salami was drugged up and feeling no pain. “How do you like that, ese?”