State Of War

He shot a smug grin at the cop. “Hey, Kaino! How’s your chin?”

Kaino cocked his revolvers.

Salami howled in most likely meth-fueled glee. “Gonna do your little gringo friend like I did you, Kaino! Except worse!”

“Yo! Hombre!” Kaino leveled his weapons. “Let me grease this Falkland Island craving little prick once and for all!”

Salami shrieked in nationalistic outrage. “That’s the Islas Malvinas!”

Bolan watched Salami’s feet. “We came here to talk.”

Salami turned purple as he danced. “Talk? Fuck talk! Go ahead! Go for your second gun! You watch what happens! You want a talk with me, you gotta earn it! Show me something, puto!”

Bolan held up his hands in peace. “I told you I came to talk.”

“¡Maricón!” Salami spun into another blur and his heel scythed for Bolan’s temple. The soldier snatched off his cap by the bill and slapped it into the oncoming foot. Salami screamed as his talus bone cracked. His spinning kick turned into a spinout and he hit the floor in an ugly pinwheel of limbs. He screamed again as Bolan whipped his hat against his elbow.

Kaino stared in wonderment. “What the fuck?”

Bolan tossed Kaino his Pirates cap. Kaino caught it on the muzzle of his left-hand gun. He fondled the cap with his right trigger finger and stopped as he found the packet of impact material sewn high inside the brow. “What the hell?”

“Slap cap.”

Kaino grinned from ear to ear. “Oh, I gotta have one! Tell me they make these in Miami Heat!”

Bolan kept his eyes on the crying, cracked-ankle-hugging Salami on the floor and recovered his Beretta. “That can be arranged.”

Kaino sailed the cap back at Bolan. “Sweet!”

Bolan caught it and sat on his heels beside the gangbanger. “So, Baloney? Braunschweiger? Headcheese? What was your processed meat name again?”

“Fuck you!”

Bolan cocked back the cap in his hand.

“No more hat!”

“How much hat you receive is up to you, Summer Sausage.”

“I want my lawyer...” Salami mewled.

“No lawyers here. Just you, me, Kaino and God.”

“Oh, God...”

“And God’s busy. So he sent me,” Bolan said.

“Who are you!”

“You tell me.”

Salami gulped, shuddered and went from pale to green with the telltale nausea of broken bones.

“Don’t you puke on my shoes,” Bolan warned. “Now, who am I?”

“You’re El Hombre...” Salami whispered.

“That’s right. So I have one question for you. Who’s supplying you with codeine?”

Salami blinked. “What?”

“Cocodrilo’s main ingredient is codeine. Codeine is a controlled substance that requires a physician’s prescription to obtain and a pharmaceutical lab to manufacture. Cocodrilo needs codeine in bulk for production. Tell me who’s supplying it and I’ll leave you alone.”

“I don’t know!”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Bolan asked.

“I mean I don’t know!”

Bolan packed the brim of his cap into his palm several times for emphasis. “Last chance, Lunch Meat.”

“No one! I mean I don’t know!”

“You don’t cook it?” Bolan asked.

“No way, man!”

Bolan frowned.

“Man, only the junkies cook it! And they’re ripping off drugstores and burglarizing their grandma’s medicine cabinets and shit! We get it prepackaged!”

Bolan regarded the hobbled, panic-attacking drug dealer at his feet for long moments.

Kaino waved his revolvers. “You believe this shit?”

“Do you?”

“Well, that is the thing,” Kaino admitted. “The labs we’ve found aren’t set up for distribution. Just junkies cooking themselves to death and anyone who can pay. There’s too much product and not enough producers. Give him the hat again. Just to verify.”

Salami shrieked and clutched his ankle and elbow. “No more hat!”

“All right, then one last question.” Bolan leaned in close. “Who distributes to you?”

Salami shuddered. “Oh, God...”

CHAPTER FOUR

Safehouse

“So it’s a shell game.” Kaino bit off half a Cuban sandwich of his own making and chewed meditatively. “And the game is where’s the codeine at.”

Bolan also ate a sandwich, and cleaned his Beretta on the kitchen table. Rubber bullets made for interesting bore cleaning. “That seems to be the size of it. I just can’t see any underground local manufacturer.”

“What about a mainstream manufacturer?” Kaino suggested. “Keeping double books and diverting the goods to the streets.”

“I have people on that angle, but it’s not my first guess.”

“You think the Russians are smuggling it in?”

Bolan had been giving that a lot of thought. “Hard to imagine the Russian mafia smuggling codeine across the Atlantic just so local croc-heads can cook it at pocket change prices. Hard to see the profit margin being worth it, much less the logistics of the endeavor.”

“You think it’s someplace a lot closer to home.”

“Whoever is doing this is doing it through the Latino gangs in Florida. That’s our connection until something better pops up. We pound them until something breaks open.”

“Listen, man, I do admire your style.”

“Thanks. But?”

“I mean, I love hammering the bad guys with the semiauto Pez dispensers.”

“Who doesn’t?”

Kaino laughed. “Yeah, but all the pencil erasers at hostile velocity, flash-bangs and tear gas in the world aren’t going to break this organization. This can’t last. We’re about to take it up to distributor level. Man, I just don’t how much longer your less-than-lethal approach is going to work.”

“I agree. We keep playing it like this, the bad guys are going to start thinking we get squeamish at the sight of blood. Assuming his people haven’t already beheaded him, Salami is most likely going to snort himself a sinus load of chemical courage, lose his fear of the hat and want some payback.”

“And, so?”

“The fact is, Kaino, we’re going to be drenched in blood and bodies before this one is over. Like up to our eyeballs. What do you say?”

“Well, since you ask, I say let’s kick this pig and when it’s over the Pink Champale is on you.”

“Pink Champale?”

“What’s the matter, El Hombre, you afraid to see how the other half lives?”

Bolan had drunk everything from cobra venom sacs swimming in cognac in an opium den in Vietnam to fermented mare’s milk in a yurt in Mongolia. He was afraid that Pink Champale might just test him. “Done.”

“Well, now we’re cooking with gas!”

“Any other concerns?”

“Well, you’re El Hombre, international ass-kicker of mystery, and you might as well have dropped in from Mars. I suspect you’ll drop off the planet again with equal facility. But me? Everybody knows me, and everybody knows where I live. You know what I’m saying?”

Bolan nodded. “You’re worried about your family.”

“Yeah, I am.”

“Maybe you should call them.”

Kaino frowned. “Yeah, maybe I should.” He took out his cell and punched a preset number. A smile broke out across his face at the sound of his wife’s voice. “Che, mi amor. How are you and the kids?” The master sergeant’s face slowly went blank as his wife spoke to him. “You’re on a plane?” Kaino listened for long moments. He took a deep breath and let it out. “I love you, Marisol. Send me a postcard when you can.” Kaino cut the connection. “You son of a bitch.”

Bolan stared at Kaino speculatively. “You’re not going to start crying, are you?”

“My Marisol, she told me she couldn’t call me, and was told not to tell me where she and the kids are headed.”

“I don’t know where they’re headed, either, Kaino, and if this goes bad and we’re on the bad end of the blackjacks, then that’s for the best. Should the absolute worst happen on this one, your family will be taken care of regardless. I can tell you a gal I know picked out someplace very nice for them. In the Caribbean, all-inclusive and all expenses paid. I know your family is worried about you, but what I can tell you is this. In a few hours they’ll be worried about you in a tropical paradise.”

Bolan’s computer beeped. “What’s that?” Kaino asked.

The soldier frowned as his laptop’s screen flicked into the security suite screen. It was almost redundant in this modern age, but someone had cut the landline to the safehouse. “Kaino, try to call anybody on your phone.”

Kaino hit Redial to his wife and scowled. “I got nothing. I’m talking zero bars.”

“Jamming cell phones seems a little out of Salami’s pay grade.”

“Yeah, him and the next few Zetas up the food pyramid, as well. What do you think?”

“You’re about to get your bloodbath, Kaino. Gear up.”

Kaino checked the loads in both of his revolvers and picked up one of the semiauto shotguns. He clapped in a drum with a piece of red tape on it that meant it was loaded with lead. Bolan took up an MP-5/10 submachine gun. It looked like a Heckler & Koch that had been going to the gym. Bolan was operating on urban, U.S. soil. He wanted knockdown power without tearing up the neighborhood. The “10” stood for 10 mm and his weapon was loaded with subsonic, truncated cone, flathead bullets. Every light in the house went out as someone cut the power.

Window glass shattered as bullets tracked in a blind search-and-destroy swath through the room. “Shit!”

Bolan racked the bolt on his weapon. “Here they come.”

The front door flew off its hinges beneath a hostile boot. Bolan and Kaino both closed their eyes and stuck their fingers in their ears as the flash-bang wired to the door went off. Bolan moved at a crouch to the hallway with Kaino on his six. The lead invader had stepped directly into the flash-bang’s audio-visual assault. The attacker didn’t fall, but he shook his head to clear it. That bespoke some training. Bolan aimed down the hall and put three rounds into the man’s chest. The fact that he didn’t fall signaled body armor. Bolan raised his aim and put a bullet through the shadowy figure’s head.

The soldier hit the tactical light attached to his weapon and let the next man in have 7,000 candela on strobe function. In the pulsing light show Bolan saw a man in a coverall, armor and night-vision gear. As the gunner shot high and wide, the Executioner put a bullet between the lenses of the man’s solarized NVGs.

Suddenly everything was silent.

Dogs began barking and the distant sounds of an alarm began to manifest themselves on the street outside. Thunder clapped as the flash-bang wired to the kitchen door went off. The enemy played it smart and didn’t immediately rush in. Bolan took the opportunity to dive through the bedroom door and roll up with his weapon leveled. Outside a man shouted, “Go! Go! Go!”

The interior walls of the old bungalow were 1970s construction and might as well have been paper-thin. Bolan had taken note of where the kitchen door would be in relation to the bedroom wall. He deliberately burned the remaining twenty-five rounds in his magazine on full-auto through the bedroom wall and into the kitchen behind. Men screamed as Bolan vectored his bullets in below the waist.

The soldier slapped in a fresh magazine and slammed the bolt home. “Kaino!”

The master sergeant didn’t have to be told twice. Kaino entered the kitchen with his semiautomatic shotgun booming on rapid fire. Bolan took Kaino’s six and knocked down the next two men who came through the front door with head shots.

Everything went quiet again.

Bolan spoke softly. “Kaino?”

“I have four men down in the kitchen.”

“I have four down in the hall.”

“You figure a pair of two-man teams, front and back?”

“Plus the sniper, and command and control should be very nearby if not on the scene.”

“I want that sniper’s ass.”

Bolan eyed the master sergeant’s crouching bulk in the gloom. “You hit?”

“No, but my sandwich press is.” Kaino growled.

The soldier moved silently to the kitchen entry. He stared at Kaino’s perforated kitchen appliance lying among the broken glass and shattered crockery. Kaino wasn’t exaggerating. His sandwich press would never panini again. “Bastards,” Bolan agreed. “Let’s take them.”

“I’m figuring it has to be the roof catty-corner across the street. It’s the only two-story on the block and it has a For Sale sign.”

Bolan’s sniper instincts told him Kaino was most likely right.

“So do we play it?” Kaino asked.

“You could stick your head out.”

“And you’ll pop whoever blows my head off?” Kaino said.

“Yeah.”

Kaino shook his head and racked his bolt on a fresh drum. “Cover me.”

“Go.”

Kaino burst through the kitchen door and out into the street. His shotgun roared as he put blasts of buckshot through the facing windows. Bolan followed, scanning with his optic. He caught no movement on the roof or in any of the windows. Lights suddenly blazed on the side driveway, and a van barreled onto the street. Kaino put three rounds into the grille but round-lead buck wasn’t stopping the oncoming vehicle.

“Kaino!” Bolan shouted.

The cop’s shotgun racked open on empty. The van plowed straight for Kaino. The master sergeant dropped his shotgun on its sling and slapped leather for his six-guns. The twin, four-inch Smiths rolled in his hands in rapid double-action fire. Glass geysered from the windshield as round after round of .357 Magnum hollowpoints punched through. Bolan had no kill shot with Kaino standing in the headlights. He flicked his weapon to full-auto and put a burst into the rear driver’s-side tire. The tire exploded and the van fishtailed wildly past Kaino and stopped hard against a telephone pole.

“You all right?” Bolan called.

Kaino’s hands shook slightly as he fished a pair of speedloaders out of his pockets. “Reloading!”

“Covering!” Bolan scanned the street as Kaino approached the van. He peered in the driver’s window and went around to the passenger’s side. He opened the door and a body slid out. “Clear!”

Bolan kept his eyes peeled as he trotted over. Kaino had laid down some serious carnage. The driver looked as only a human could who had taken several .357 rounds to the face. Only his seat belt kept the dead assassin upright. There was no one else inside the vehicle. In the back of the van were a pair of chairs and surveillance equipment. Bolan walked around the steaming grille and joined Kaino, who stood over the expired sniper. A great deal of the assassin’s blood was coagulating all over an FN P90 personal defensive weapon. The sixteen-inch long civilian barrel, the sound suppressor mounted on the muzzle and the electro-optical sight gave the personal defensive weapon a distinctly offensive weapon aura.

“Did he say anything?”

“Yeah, he mumbled some kind of Euro-trash nonsense, but then he had the bad taste to go all ambient temperature on me.” Kaino shook his head disgustedly as the bloody froth bubbles from his victim’s chest wounds and mouth slowly subsided. “You want to try CPR? You go right ahead.”

“What kind of Euro-trash babble?”

“I don’t know!” Nearly being van-rammed seemed to have rattled the master sergeant. “I can tell you it sure as hell wasn’t Spanish!”

“Did it sound Russian?”

“Well, what does Russian sound like?”

Bolan slowly enunciated a choice phrase he had learned in Moscow that would have raised Kaino’s eyebrow. “Did it sound anything like that?”

“No, and don’t think I don’t know you said something totally suck-ass, either!”

“Italian? French?” Bolan tried. “Scandinavian?”

“Oh, and like I know how to pick those out of a dying hit man Euro-trash crowd!” Kaino frowned mightily. “And I know you can, but I’m just Miami-Dade master sergeant who works for a living. I’m not an international man of mystery.”

“You notice anything interesting, Kaino?”

“Yeah, these guys aren’t local.” Kaino spit off to one side. “They aren’t even Latino. They’re pros, and I’m definitely thinking we got made coming out of Papi’s Tea Room.”

CHAPTER FIVE

FBI Miami Office

Kaino took in the gleaming, efficient and tasteful Federal Bureau of Investigation surroundings. “Swanky.”

“Heads up,” Bolan advised. The FBI special agent striding down the hallway toward them wore a very purposeful expression her face. It was a pleasing face to look upon. She was African American, but her face bespoke far more of Africa than America and her skin was very dark. She managed to be petite and leggy at the same time, and the cut of her relaxed hair and her navy pantsuit and the true gray of her blouse and shoes showed her off to maximum effect.

“Nice,” Kaino opined.

Bolan agreed wholeheartedly. He put on his most amiable game face and held out his hand. “Special Agent.”

Despite the special agent’s diminutive stature, she had a grip like a clam. “Sophina Savacool.”

“Cooper,” Bolan said. “And this is—”

Special Agent Savacool had a smile that could light up an FBI foyer and did. Though at the moment it was tinged with a little bit of bemusement. “Oh, I assure you, Mr. Cooper, Master Sergeant Gadiel Kaino’s reputation precedes him.”

Kaino’s massive mitt engulfed the special agent’s. “My pleasure, Agent Savacool. In all my years in law enforcement this is my first visit to the FBI Miami office. Thank you for seeing us.”

Agent Savacool’s bemusement turned up a charming notch. “Oh, I was the one told to see you, but then again, when legends of Miami law enforcement, and—” Savacool ran her eye up and down Bolan “—a mystery man go on a midnight rampage in the city streets, it’s funny how I end up being the one sent to the meet and greet. At least the call said it was you. Is there a reason I shouldn’t run you both in by the way?”

Bolan put on his most winning smile. “I mean absolutely no disrespect, Special Agent, but running me in would be...how can I put it? Problematic for you. And Kaino’s with me.”

“Oh, I got the memo.” Savacool’s bemused smile turned into a genuine smirk. “And I have never seen a government memo shorter, more distinct, much less more anomalous.”

“Savacool?” Kaino frowned. “Is that like Mandinka or something?”

“German Dutch,” the agent replied.

Kaino scowled. “What’s a soul sister like you doing with a name like that?”

Savacool frowned at Kaino and jerked her head at Bolan. “What’s a pulsating piece of Puerto Rican pulchritude like you doing working for the man?”

“Well...because...” Kaino grinned. “He’s the man!”

Savacool stared up at Bolan and her eyes went predatory as she did some math. “Well, bless my soul! El Hombre, in the flesh, and in my foyer. You know, there is a fascinating file I read about a guy with that handle. Seems he’s torn up the streets of our southern neighbor and ripped the cartels a new rectum on more than one occasion.”

Bolan had dealt with more federal agents than he’d had hot dinners. Far too many when they were exposed to him went straight into bureaucratic bluster mode. Bolan gave Savacool full marks. She was absolutely charming while she was trying to figure him out, and was waiting to have all the facts before she ripped his throat out. “Special Agent Savacool, I—”

“Call me Sophie—my friends do.” The special agent handed Bolan her business card.

Bolan grinned. “Sophie? I had to pull a lot of strings to make sure that FBI forensics got the bodies from the shootout last night, and Master Sergeant Kaino lost some genuine cred with his own people for going along with it.”

Savacool nodded without an ounce of commitment. “I feel you.”

“I know the circumstances are highly unusual, but I need a complete rundown on the suspects.”

“They’re like you, mysterious. But follow me.”

Savacool led them down a series of hallways. Kaino whispered low at Bolan’s side. “What’s pulchritude?”

“It means the she thinks you’re a fine figure of man, Kaino.”

Kaino puffed up with pride. “I am that.”

FBI personnel congregating in the hallways regarded Bolan and Kaino with grave suspicion and barely constrained disapproval. A few shot Savacool sympathetic looks. Word had spread. The woman led Bolan and Kaino into an empty conference room. The soldier and the cop took seats at a long table while Savacool cued up the flat screen on the wall and a laptop. “These are your playmates.” Autopsy photos of ten men in various states of ventilation appeared on the screen. “Your assailants’ fingerprints appear in none of our available databases. All of them were armed with sound-suppressed FN P90 Personal Defensive weapons. One of the weapons had been modified for sharpshooting. Their clothing, NVG and body armor were off the rack and second- or thirdhand. We’re working on it, but the equipment has a very sophisticated level of sterility. I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”

Savacool gave Bolan and Kaino a look. “I don’t suppose either of you have anything that might shed a light on things?”

“Kaino got a few words out of the sharpshooter just before he expired. He thought he said something in a European language. We’ve ruled out Spanish, and he didn’t think it was Russian, which leads me to exclude any of the Slavic language groups.”

Kaino nodded. “Yeah, what Cooper said.”

“That is of interest. We’re checking dental records, but none of them match anything in our databases, either. However the driver of the van was a light-skinned black, and he had two fillings, both resin composites.”

Kaino gave Bolan a searching look.

“A lot of the European countries have banned silver amalgam fillings,” Bolan explained. “The United States and Russia haven’t. Silver amalgam is one of the cheapest routes to go with dental fillings, and soldiers don’t usually spend a lot of money on cosmetic surgery or trying to go green. It goes a long way toward your Euro-trash merc theory, which by the way I agree with.”

Kaino just stared. “Man, who the hell are you?”

Savacool pointed her finger at Kaino. “I’m glad you asked that question first.”

“Oh, it isn’t the first time I’ve asked, and I don’t think it’s going to be the last.”

Bolan stayed on subject. “I gather we have nothing on the van?”

“Reported stolen two days ago, and the surveillance gear and electronics inside had the model numbers and identifiers scrubbed. The mounting screws and the holes for the equipment are shiny-new. I suspect this entire operation against you was mounted within the last forty-eight hours and was pro all the way. And now that we have established that you’re El Hombre—” Savacool rolled her eyes “—it starts to make one hell of whole lot more sense.”

“Can you give me anything?”

“Well, you two seem to have a habit of shooting people in the face, but we ran your sharpshooter through the facial recognition software and looked for a match in the database. Interpol gave us this image—it’s a 75 percent likelihood of a match.”

A grainy security camera picture dated over a year ago showed a blurred image of what might have been the sharpshooter. He was snarling and had to have whipped his head. Bolan stared long and hard at the crystal-clear picture of the weapon in his hand and spitting brass in what looked to be a very posh living room. “SIG SG 551 short assault rifle. Swiss.”

Savacool glanced at her file on the desk. “Wow...you are good.”

“It’s an awfully swanky piece,” Bolan admitted. “Where was the picture taken?”

“In Mexico, during the assassination of Christo Bruno.”

Bolan searched his mental files. “He was Gulf Coast, wasn’t he?”

“Bruno was actually the head of the Gulf Coast’s armed, or La Resistencia wing. The attack on his hacienda in Matamoros last year was positively surgical. He had a heavy security presence on the premises and they along with Bruno and every other person present, including women and children and the hired help were gunned down. The forensic evidence the federales shared with us imply that the attackers took no losses. In fact the Mexican State police in Tamaulipas did a lot of angry muttering about suspecting it was Navy SEALs or Delta Force.”