Desert Impact

“Seems to me the best place to start would be with an inventory,” Bolan said. “If nothing is missing, then that will answer at least one question.”

Kingston nodded. “All right. Let me get through this inspection tomorrow morning, then in the afternoon I’ll go over our warehouses and inventory logs with a fine-toothed comb. If something has gone missing, we’ll find it.”

“Sounds good,” Bolan said. “In the meantime, I’ll be out with the Border Patrol. We’re going to take another look at the site where the weapons were found and see if we can start piecing together the movements. I’ll get in touch with you by tomorrow night or early the next morning to see what you’ve discovered.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Kingston said. “If these weapons are coming out of here, I want to know it. Then the bastards behind it can pay the tab.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Bolan said. “Thanks for your cooperation.”

“Anytime, Colonel,” he said, getting to his feet. He stuck out a hand. “I know I was a bit of ass when you came in, but I’d like to offer you my hand and my help.”

The two men shook and Bolan thanked him once more before leaving the building—through the office doors this time—and headed back to his car. Rivers was waiting for him back in Douglas, and they had a long day ahead of them.

* * *

RENE SURENO WATCHED from the balcony as his second, Jesus Salazar, drilled the small group of men in hand-to-hand combat. Rene allowed himself a grim chuckle. For a man named after the son of God, Jesus was anything but a pacifist. He was an icy killing machine who’d served in the Mexican army for several years before traveling to Africa and working for a private military company as a mercenary.

Rene had hired him after Jesus had returned to Mexico and run afoul of one of his distributors. The distributor and several of Rene’s men showed up for months in little pieces all over Mexico City. Rene was no fool and knew that any man capable of that would be a powerful ally, and he’d been right. For the right amount of money, Jesus would do almost anything, but for the past several months, he’d been focused on moving drugs and weapons while training Rene’s soldiers to kill and fight better than any other cartel in the country.

He watched as Jesus quickly defeated a man by dropping him to the hard stones of the courtyard in one swift move and sweeping his legs out from beneath him. As the man lay there, he simulated the finishing move that in real combat would have killed him—dropping an elbow into his throat, then following with a reverse move with his knife that would have opened his neck from one side to the other. Getting to his feet, Jesus turned his attention to the others, explaining why the man had lost.

As Jesus spoke, the man got slowly to his feet and Rene saw the hate in his eyes—and realized his intentions—before Jesus would have had a chance to notice. Drawing his combat knife, the man lunged forward, then stopped cold as the bullet from Rene’s gun took him in the abdomen. The echo from the shot startled everyone, and they looked up at the balcony to see him staring down into the courtyard.

Jesus turned and saw the would-be killer falling to the ground, then moved closer, kicking the knife out of his hands. “Gracias,” he called up to Rene. “Podría haber sido doloroso.”

“Painful?” Rene laughed. “He might have killed you.” He preferred to speak in English, knowing that disappearing inside the U.S. required the ability to speak without an accent.

“Maybe,” Jesus admitted. “But I knew you were there.” He looked down at the man groaning and bleeding on the stones. “It’s never personal,” he said, loud enough for the others to hear. “You cannot let it be personal. This man allowed his anger to get the better of his judgment. See what it cost him?”

The other soldiers agreed quite loudly that the man had made a mistake. “You two,” Jesus said, gesturing at two men nearby. “Get him out of here. Put him in the hot box.” Eyes wide at this cruelty, the men did as they were told, and Jesus turned his attention back to the fighters he’d been training.

Rene contemplated having the man killed outright, but Jesus’s choice would send a clear message—those foolish enough to bite the hand that fed them would not just be killed, but would die horribly. Behind him, the phone on his desk rang, and he turned his attention back inside, shutting the balcony doors behind him.

“Hello?” he said, picking up the handset.

“Rene, this is Kingston. We have a problem.”

“What problem?” Rene asked, annoyed. Kingston had proven useful to his weapon smuggling plans and was even more helpful with information. Still, he could be overly jumpy, and he was only one cog in the chain. Paranoia had its place, but a man should still be able to sleep at night.

“There’s a guy sniffing around where he doesn’t belong. He’ll be with that Border Patrol agent who interrupted our last shipment.”

“They’re going back?” Rene asked.

“Yes, so I’ve heard.”

“I’ll take care of it. You keep working on the next shipment.”

“Don’t you want to let things cool off a bit?” Kingston asked. “We can’t afford to get caught.”

“Shut up,” Rene snarled. “I said I will take care of this man. You just do your job. Everything stays on schedule. Understood?”

The silence stretched for several seconds. “Understood,” he replied.

“Good,” Rene said, then hung up the phone. He returned to the balcony and called Jesus inside. They had some planning to do.

Chapter 5

Dinner the night before with Rivers and his young family had reinforced Bolan’s opinion of the man—he was one of the good guys. His wife, Olivia, was a down-to-earth, dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty from a wealthy Greek family. They had a wonderful eight-year-old daughter, Katrina, who was the spitting image of her mother and had the laugh of an angel. Bolan was charmed by the little girl. Her dark eyes stared directly into his as she asked very adult questions about everything from where he was born to why he carried such a big gun. The evening had been a pleasure, with good food and laughter and the sharing of peaceful company—a situation Bolan valued more with each passing day of his life. Colton Rivers was obviously a family man of the first order.

Early the next morning, Bolan found himself some black coffee and a woman selling warm tortillas and eggs from a hot cart near his hotel. He drank the coffee and ate his breakfast while he waited for Rivers to arrive. Once he did, they headed out of town, following Highway 80 West, then cutting north toward Tombstone. Rivers explained that there was a lot of big empty nothing out there—mountains, desert, cacti and the occasional cougar hunting free-range cattle when the opportunity arose. “And in between Bisbee, Tombstone and Sierra Vista, there’s an area of about a hundred square miles where we’ve seen a lot of illegal traffic in the past year or so.”

“You do flyovers, right?” Bolan asked.

Rivers nodded. “Sure, but it’s a big desert and we’ve got limited resources. The only reason we were out that night is because one of the unmanned drones picked up some unidentified movement during the day that was too big to be humans. We figured maybe a couple of mules—the guys who run illegals up into Tucson or Phoenix—had some trucks out there.”

Ten miles or so outside of Tombstone, Rivers cut back west, using a dirt track that made the one Tony lived on look like a well-maintained, big-city street.

“The San Pedro Conservation area is about ten miles west of here, but it gets a lot of tourist traffic—bird watchers, mostly—so the illegals tend to avoid it.” Rivers pointed to a series of large, rocky hills in the distance. “That’s where we were when they hit us.”

Bolan nodded, glad he’d brought his sunglasses along. The desert sun was reflecting off every light-colored surface and would have been blinding without them. “Let’s start there, then,” he said. “I want to see where you were positioned.”

Rivers guided the SUV around rocks, saguaro cacti, a few stunted mesquite trees and plenty of low, pointy scrub brush. The wandering route made Rivers chuckle. “Tony says that everything out here will stick you, prick you or kill you. Some of those damn Mesquite needles will puncture a tire.”

They were within a couple hundred yards of the rocky terrain. “This is close enough,” Bolan said. “You came in this way with your men, right?”

“More or less,” Rivers replied. “There’s hardly a path.”

“Let’s walk from here,” Bolan suggested.

The agent shrugged and pulled the SUV to a stop, cutting off the engine. Both men climbed out and into the staggering heat. Rivers unpacked a shotgun from the back and offered it to him, but he shook his head. It wouldn’t make sense for any of the illegals to still be in the area after the recent firefight. Their operations depended on not getting caught in the open.

They moved across the intervening terrain, and Bolan noted that there were plenty of tire tracks and crushed plants to show how much vehicle movement had occurred in the area. “Are all of these from your guys?” he asked, gesturing at the imprints in the sand.

Rivers nodded. “We had to bring in a flatbed to pull our vehicles, plus the ambulance and field people. It was a goddamn mess.”

“I bet,” Bolan said, scanning the horizon. They were in a lousy position, and although he didn’t expect trouble, it never paid to be stupid about such things. They climbed up the rocky hillside and surveyed the lee where the ambush had happened. There was still plenty of evidence that a little gate into hell had opened down there.

“They were moving over there when we spotted them,” Rivers said, pointing to the valley floor and another, still larger set of rocks and hills, perhaps three-quarters of a mile or a little farther away. “We checked it out the next day. They left some tracks, but we still haven’t figured out how they got there.”

“Odd,” Bolan said, thinking. The agents’ post was a good place to watch the area, with plenty of cover. “I’m trying to figure out how they got so close to your position.”

“It happened damn fast, Matt,” Rivers said. “I saw them moving around and they disappeared. We were getting ready to pull out, and I saw them again, and then bam, they were on us.”

“Maybe—” Bolan started to say when a shot rang out, and the back of Rivers’s head exploded in a gruesome shower of blood, bone and brain.

Diving for cover, the Executioner cursed to himself. The Border Patrol agent was dead before his body hit the ground, and now Bolan was out here without any backup and no idea where the shot had come from. He rolled to a well-protected spot behind a cluster of rocks and drew the Desert Eagle from his shoulder rig. Unfortunately, the round that had killed Rivers was from a rifle, and a handgun was not a long-distance weapon.

He heard scuffling feet and rolling rocks and turned, scanning in every direction. From the far side of another collection of boulders, a voice called, “Do you want to die, too, gringo?”

The sounds of movement were now surrounding him from all sides, and Bolan knew he was in real trouble. “Not really,” he called. His assailants had him cornered. All they were trying to do now was avoid casualties on their end. “On the other hand, I’m happy to take some of you with me if this gets out of hand.”

The man Bolan presumed was the speaker stepped out from his cover. He had a Heckler & Koch sniper rifle over his shoulder and was now pointing a simple, tactical shotgun on Bolan. He wasn’t a big man, but he was compactly built, with the lean muscle and steady gaze that said he was not a man to screw with.

“You don’t have to die today,” the man said. “But if you don’t throw down your weapon, you will.”

Bolan nodded and got slowly to his feet. He had considered fighting back, but the moment Rivers hit the ground, he’d decided that would be counterproductive. He was alone and outnumbered, and allowing himself to be captured would give him access to the people behind all of this.

“Easy,” Bolan said. He dropped the magazine out of the Desert Eagle, then worked the slide, emptying the chamber. He reversed the gun and held it out butt-first to the man. “It’s my favorite, so I’d just as soon not throw it on the ground.”

The man nodded and whistled softly. Six more men appeared from hiding, their weapons trained on Bolan, who kept his hands up. “I understand,” the man said, moving in and taking the weapon from him. “I’ll see that it’s well taken care of.”

“I’d appreciate it,” Bolan said. “What now?”

“Now?” the man said. “We drive.”

* * *

BOLAN WAS IN the back of a truck that was rattling along on either a rutted dirt road or barely a road at all. He was blindfolded, and his hands were tied together with plastic zip ties, as were his ankles. The men had searched him, confiscating his wallet, keys and the other documents he had on him.

Gritting his teeth at a massive bump, Bolan tried to hold himself as still as possible and replay the day’s events in his mind. He’d been too casual, thinking the ambush Rivers had called him about was most likely someone—maybe a single individual—selling weapons to a small cartel, who had panicked when confronted by the Border Patrol. Maybe both sides had panicked—it had been dark and confusing. Bolan had underestimated the situation and those involved, and it had cost someone, a good man, his life.

Rivers was dead, and Bolan had to accept some of the responsibility for that. Owning your mistakes, he knew, was at least as important as owning your successes, maybe even more so. He intended to do everything he could not only to put an end to whatever was really going on, but also to ensure that Rivers hadn’t died in vain. Someone had a bill to pay, and the Executioner intended to collect in full.

It seemed like a smart bet that he’d been taken into Mexico, though he couldn’t know for sure how far they’d come. He estimated they’d been driving for at least two hours when the truck slowed, turned and then rolled to a stop.

Bolan heard the tarp covering the back end of the truck get shoved aside, and then his blindfold was ripped off. Several faces peered in at him—every look one of contempt and anticipated violence. Two large men reached in, grabbed him by the ankles and dragged him out into the midday sun. Once he was clear of the tailgate, they hoisted him into the air like a trussed-up turkey and pulled him forward. The toes of his boots trailed dust in his wake.

Bolan did his best to stay upright and scan his surroundings. They’d obviously brought him into the courtyard of an old hacienda. Many of the buildings were little more than basic adobe structures, with no windows and blankets for doors. He saw the main house at the far end of the courtyard, and it was either much newer than the adobe huts or had been massively renovated. Second-floor balconies overlooked the compound below, and on the roof he spotted heavy air-conditioning units and several satellite dishes.

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