Killing Kings

KILLER TAKEDOWN

The Executioner believes in final justice—so when rumors swirl that someone is trying to revive the empire of Pablo Escobar, the King of Cocaine, Mack Bolan makes it his mission to bring down Pablo’s ghost...for good. But to get to the phantom emperor, Bolan must first eradicate an army of skilled hit men, savage rival cartel bosses and a vicious torturer. The Executioner will need every weapon in his arsenal, but he vows to bring this deadly new drug reign to a fiery, explosive end!

#375 Salvador Strike

#376 Frontier Fury

#377 Desperate Cargo

#378 Death Run

#379 Deep Recon

#380 Silent Threat

#381 Killing Ground

#382 Threat Factor

#383 Raw Fury

#384 Cartel Clash

#385 Recovery Force

#386 Crucial Intercept

#387 Powder Burn

#388 Final Coup

#389 Deadly Command

#390 Toxic Terrain

#391 Enemy Agents

#392 Shadow Hunt

#393 Stand Down

#394 Trial by Fire

#395 Hazard Zone

#396 Fatal Combat

#397 Damage Radius

#398 Battle Cry

#399 Nuclear Storm

#400 Blind Justice

#401 Jungle Hunt

#402 Rebel Trade

#403 Line of Honor

#404 Final Judgment

#405 Lethal Diversion

#406 Survival Mission

#407 Throw Down

#408 Border Offensive

#409 Blood Vendetta

#410 Hostile Force

#411 Cold Fusion

#412 Night’s Reckoning

#413 Double Cross

#414 Prison Code

#415 Ivory Wave

#416 Extraction

#417 Rogue Assault

#418 Viral Siege

#419 Sleeping Dragons

#420 Rebel Blast

#421 Hard Targets

#422 Nigeria Meltdown

#423 Breakout

#424 Amazon Impunity

#425 Patriot Strike

#426 Pirate Offensive

#427 Pacific Creed

#428 Desert Impact

#429 Arctic Kill

#430 Deadly Salvage

#431 Maximum Chaos

#432 Slayground

#433 Point Blank

#434 Savage Deadlock

#435 Dragon Key

#436 Perilous Cargo

#437 Assassin’s Tripwire

#438 The Cartel Hit

#439 Blood Rites

#440 Killpath

#441 Murder Island

#442 Syrian Rescue

#443 Uncut Terror

#444 Dark Savior

#445 Final Assault

#446 Kill Squad

#447 Missile Intercept

#448 Terrorist Dispatch

#449 Combat Machines

#450 Omega Cult

#451 Fatal Prescription

#452 Death List

#453 Rogue Elements

#454 Enemies Within

#455 Chicago Vendetta

#456 Thunder Down Under

#457 Dying Art

#458 Killing Kings

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

Killing Kings

Don Pendleton

ISBN: 978-1-474-09653-9

Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Michael Newton for his contribution to this work.

KILLING KINGS

© 2019 Harlequin Enterprises Limited

Published in Great Britain 2019

by Worldwide Gold Eagle, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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Bolan’s grenade exploded with a smoky thunderclap.

The shrapnel sprayed the area with steel fragments designed to kill over a radius of sixteen feet. Grimaldi followed up with a second bomb.

The opposition appeared seconds later—two men armed with military rifles tumbled into the hallway just as Bolan and Grimaldi reached it. Neither of the two defenders had a chance to use their weapons. Bolan and Grimaldi cut them down in their tracks before they could react.

“That’s half of them,” the ace pilot said, and Bolan hoped it wasn’t simply wishful thinking.

“Careful with Cuéllar, if possible,” he said. “I need to pick his brain while it’s intact.”

Cuéllar knew the name of the person who headed up The Office, and the Executioner was counting on him to cooperate.

Whether the man wanted to or not.

For Special Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena,

Drug Enforcement Administration

(1947–1985)

The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.

—Albert Einstein

Someone said that Evil never dies. That’s true. But good and evil men are mortal. It’s the first group’s task to put the second in their place: the grave.

—Mack Bolan

Nothing less than a war could have fashioned the destiny of the man called Mack Bolan. Bolan earned the Executioner title in the jungle hell of Vietnam.

But this soldier also wore another name—Sergeant Mercy. He was so tagged because of the compassion he showed to wounded comrades-in-arms and Vietnamese civilians.

Mack Bolan’s second tour of duty ended prematurely when he was given emergency leave to return home and bury his family, victims of the Mob. Then he declared a one-man war against the Mafia.

He confronted the Families head-on from coast to coast, and soon a hope of victory began to appear. But Bolan had broken society’s every rule. That same society started gunning for this elusive warrior—to no avail.

So Bolan was offered amnesty to work within the system against terrorism. This time, as an employee of Uncle Sam, Bolan became Colonel John Phoenix. With a command center at Stony Man Farm in Virginia, he and his new allies—Able Team and Phoenix Force—waged relentless war on a new adversary: the KGB.

But when his one true love, April Rose, died at the hands of the Soviet terror machine, Bolan severed all ties with Establishment authority.

Now, after a lengthy lone-wolf struggle and much soul-searching, the Executioner has agreed to enter an “arm’s-length” alliance with his government once more, reserving the right to pursue personal missions in his Everlasting War.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Dedication

Quotes

The Mack Bolan Legend

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Epilogue

About the Publisher

Prologue

Medellín, Colombia

Jairo Dueñas had come far since he’d created Los Pepes at the tender age of nineteen years. At forty-seven years old, everything he’d ever dreamed of was either already his or was within his grasp.

Los Pepes, properly, had called itself Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar, which in English translates to “Persecuted by Pablo Escobar”—an image the group had adopted, seeking public sympathy, although the message was not strictly true. Los Pepes was a group of vigilantes who waged war against the former Medellín Cartel, posing as warriors of the people while, in fact, they sought to claim Escobar’s wealth and drug trade with the US for themselves.

That hadn’t quite worked out as planned, of course. Escobar had died sixteen months after his escape from La Catedral Prison, trapped by agents of Colombia’s Bloque de Búsqueda—Search Bloc—and the ever-present DEA. Some said he’d been assassinated, but it hardly mattered. Only Escobar’s death had been important, followed by the swift unraveling of his cartel. Godfathers in the cruel Cali Cartel had dominated cocaine traffic for the next five years, and then they in turn had been killed or sent to prison for their crimes.

In recent years, however, Dueñas had recouped his losses from the earlier conflict, entered politics and now served with the Office of the Inspector General of Colombia, tasked with overseeing other arms of government, ensuring that they functioned properly and honestly.

Well...maybe not so much the latter part.

Dueñas’s office placed him in a prime position to collaborate with the most recent successors to the former Medellín Cartel, advising them on how to duck Colombia’s National Police and who to bribe at all levels of state, from the president’s office and Council of Ministers to the Senate and Chamber of Representatives, the Supreme Court and Council of State, to the civil and municipal courts of Colombia’s thirty-two departments, roughly analogous to US states.

And in the process, naturally, from each payoff he arranged, Dueñas skimmed a handsome profit for himself. He had “arrived,” as rich North Americans liked to say, and life was good. On top of his success in government and crime, Dueñas had a trophy wife, two perfect children, and a mistress on the side, stashed in a posh apartment in suburban Envigado, where Dueñas was headed now, in his chauffeured Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan.

His loyal wife, Adriana, thought he had a critical committee meeting to attend. In point of fact, he had a far more urgent, primal need to satisfy that only nineteen-year-old Isabella Döehring could. Just thinking of her now, Dueñas was totally and almost hopelessly aroused.

“Drive faster, will you, Julián?” he called from the back seat.

“Yes, sir. As you wish.”

And yet, a short block later, his chauffeur was slowing down again, now creeping almost to a halt.

“What’s going on?” Dueñas demanded. “What’s the holdup?”

“It appears there’s been an accident, sir.”

By scooting forward on his seat, Dueñas could see two other vehicles—real junkers, in his estimation—tangled in midblock ahead. Both drivers were afoot and arguing, with their arms flailing.

“Idiots,” Dueñas grated. “Back up and find a way around this mess.”

“Yes. I just need to—”

Before Julián even got the Mercedes into reverse, a sudden movement to the left made Dueñas turn in that direction, startled to see three young men carrying automatic weapons, rushing toward his car. He spun away from them, trying to reach the other door, but found another trio closing in from that direction, grim-faced, with weapons leveled at their hips.

“Jesucristo!” he blurted, as Julián—also his bodyguard—produced a pistol, cocking it. As he raised it, a blast of gunfire turned the driver’s window into a hailstorm of glass, the shards and bullets ripping off most of his head.

And as Dueñas huddled in the back seat, with his empty hands raised against the coming storm, he realized there wasn’t even time to pray.

Culiacán Rosales, Sinaloa, Mexico

Arturo Kahlo finished mopping up the remnants of his lunch with a tortilla, washed the whole thing down with the remainder of his third Tecate beer and dabbed his lips with a white linen napkin. When he belched, Kahlo made no attempt to mask the sound, and grinned back at the startled diners who were bold enough to glare at him, not knowing who he was.

If they had recognized him as a top sicario—a hit man for the Sinaloa Cartel, which was also called the Blood Alliance for its ruthless violence—they would have begged his pardon, rather than regarding him with thinly veiled disdain for his lack of table manners.

“Que te jodan,” he cursed at them, laughing at the stunned expressions on their faces, most especially the women, who had likely never been addressed that way before—except, perhaps, in bed.

Rising, he dropped a wad of pesos on the table, brushing back his jacket just enough to let them glimpse the Glock he wore in a hip holster. That drew gasps from a few of them. All eyes averted, suddenly preoccupied, as Kahlo left the restaurant, grinning.

The fear that he provoked in lesser humans was intoxicating, like strong liquor or a snort of pure cocaine. Kahlo loved that power more than anything on Earth.

Kahlo had killed so many men by now—and women, too, as he was an equal-opportunity assassin—that the faces ran together and were sometimes lost to him. The ones who mattered were rivals of his employers in the drug trade, as well as soldiers and police, their paid informers—some of whom died very slowly—minor politicians, and an Anglo judge in Dimmit County, Texas, whose murder had sent three “innocent” members of the Diablos Motorcycle Club to the Lone Star State’s death row.

Now Kahlo moved with long strides toward his car, a Cadillac CTS that had cost its owner $60,000 before it was stolen and smuggled south from Arizona, with all of the vital numbers changed. He loved the car, and the reactions it evoked from peasants on the streets of Culiacán Rosales.

They 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!”

Chapter One

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 of late, the loads increased in volume—wasn’t any real surprise. Drug traffickers went through repeated boom-and-bust cycles, the same as any other multibillion-dollar industry, affected by such factors as the weather in their crop-producing regions, police activity at home or on transshipment routes and interference by competitors who hijacked shipments, slaughtering their crews.

But then Brognola dropped the bomb.

A valued DEA informant working out of Medellín, Colombia, swore that he’d seen a ghost—and not just any ghost, at that. The specter he’d reported, having passed two polygraph exams that proved him truthful and sober, belonged to Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, a founder of the one-time Medellín Cartel, who’d introduced a new term to authorities around the planet: narcoterrorism, meaning the assassination of police, public officials, journalists—and once, twelve judges of Colombia’s Supreme Court, slain with eighty-six more persons during a guerrilla raid against Bogotá’s Palace of Justice.