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“¡Todos abajo!” Villaluz thundered.
Medical professionals hugged walls, hugged the floor or threw themselves over counters or through open doors. A few still ran willy-nilly in blind and deaf panic. Bolan brought his Beretta 93-R on line in both hands. “They’re wearing armor!”
“Sí!” Villaluz shouted. He held his .38 one-handed in front of himself like an old-style target shooter and shouldered a scurrying intern to the floor. Smiley dropped to a knee between Bolan and the inspector.
The killers shouted and swore in defiance. Everyone’s weapon ripped into life at once. There was nowhere to run and no cover to be had.
Observation, Records and Receiving turned into the OK Corral as Team Bolan went for the head shots.
Bolan’s first triburst collapsed a killer’s face. Another gunner screamed as Villaluz’s pistol erupted and shot his ear off. The screaming stopped as the inspector’s second shot slammed through the man’s septum and blasted apart his brainpan. Both dead men had the decency to collapse into their compatriots behind them and spoil their aim. Long bursts ripped into the ceiling lights, and half the corridor went dark. Smiley’s auto-pistol cut loose as fast as she could pull the trigger. She caught mostly shoulder, but it was enough for Bolan and Villaluz’s cross fire to crush the third killer’s skull beyond recognition. Bolan’s next triburst tore out a killer’s trachea, and two huddling nurses screamed as they were struck by the arterial spray. Villaluz clicked on empty and slapped leather for his second gun. Smiley’s Glock cracked on like clockwork and another gunner fell. The inspector raised iron, and the last hard-man staggered beneath a full broadside from Bolan and company.
The battle was over in a matter of heartbeats.
Smiley rose and ejected her spent mag. “Jesus, that was—Jesus!”
Fresh screams ripped through surgery as the double doors flew open beneath the boots of two more killers. Bolan’s burst scattered the skull of one, but then the Beretta slammed open on empty. Villaluz punched a shot into one armored shoulder and clicked on empty. Both men simultaneously shoved Smiley to the floor and dropped to a knee. The action made both men’s pant legs ride up and expose the ankle holsters they wore. Bolan’s snub-nosed Centennial revolver rose up in his hand. Villaluz leveled a tiny, antique Colt .32. Bolan felt the wind whip of bullets passing close to his head as he and the inspector’s revolvers spit fire.
The killer collapsed to the floor with his face cratered into a bloody moonscape.
Smiley pushed herself up snarling. “God…damn it!”
Bolan and Villaluz rose and swiftly reloaded. The Executioner eyed the inspector’s cocktail-sized hideaway weapon. “So how come they don’t call you Three Gun?”
“Before tonight—” Villaluz let out a long shaky breath as he reloaded his menagerie of metal “—I have never had to pull the third one.”
Bolan considered leaving. Sirens sounded in the distance. The Hospital Angeles fire suppression system finally made up its tiny silicon mind about the gun smoke in the air and recessed sprinkler heads deployed out of the ceiling and brought on the rain. The goat-screw trifecta was complete as a baker’s dozen of armed and soggy security guards roared through the surgery doors, guns drawn, telling everyone to get down a day late and a dollar short.
CHAPTER THREE
FIA Headquarters, Tijuana
The shit storm of recrimination was long, enduring and heartfelt. La Agencia Federal de Investigación wasn’t happy and its collective, bureaucratic brain blindly pinned the tail on Mack Bolan as the donkey of its discontent. They threatened him with incarceration, litigation and deportation. Bolan weathered the storm. He had operated in Mexico before, and he had a few friends who owed him. Bolan called in markers, and the Tijuana FIA chief’s jaw dropped as Bolan handed him the phone saying, “He wants to talk to you.” It ended with stern warnings to behave himself in future. Bolan walked out of FIA Tijuana station a free man but all chances of further cooperation with local law were shot.
Bolan was radioactive in Tijuana.
The only people who would touch him would be the bad guys. Bolan walked out feeling a bit naked, as well. His Beretta 93-R machine pistol and his snub-nosed, 9 mm Smith had been confiscated. Both weapons were hard to come by, and both were probably about to become some cartel member’s prize possessions as soon as the FIA evidence people could process them, declare them destroyed, then sell them on the black market.
Something was going to have to be done about that.
Bolan had a full war load in the CIA safe house, but he didn’t want to go there until he was sure he didn’t have any tails, and he suspected he had a lot of them.
Bree Smiley walked beside him, livid beneath her bruises and stitches. “Sons of bitches. See if the Mexicans ever get reciprocity again on my—”
Bolan lifted his chin. “There’s our reciprocity right there.”
“¡Hola, amigo, muchacha!” Inspector Villaluz leaned against a gleaming black Toyota Tundra pickup and tipped his hat at them. “How was your visit?”
“We’re pretty much persona non grata,” Bolan said.
“Ah, yes.” The inspector held open the door for Smiley. She climbed in the back. Villaluz gave Bolan a solicitous grin. “So, they…ripped you a new rectum?” He savored the American colloquialism.
“They tried.”
“To be honest I was quite surprised to see you both walk out of the agency without shackles or escorts.”
“They forced me to make some phone calls,” Bolan admitted.
“I cannot imagine what that might mean.”
Bolan sized up Villaluz. Cop. Gunfighter. Corrupt, but brave, and honorable by his own lights. Bolan rolled the dice. “It means that card I gave you means something.”
Villaluz looked meditative as he pulled out into traffic. “So how do you feel? Are you hungry?”
Bolan patted the empty place where his Beretta should have been. “Actually, I’m feeling a little light.”
“Ah.” Villaluz nodded. “I think I can do something about that.”
“Lunch wouldn’t hurt either. Where do you recommend?”
“Mexicali,” Villaluz answered.
Bolan consulted his mental map. Mexicali was more than a hundred miles due east of Tijuana. “Why Mexicali?”
“Why?” Villaluz smiled happily. “They have the best Chinese food in all of Mexico!”
“And to see who follows us,” Bolan concluded.
“That, too.”
“And because I’m feeling light.”
Villaluz shrugged.
“You sure your superiors are going to approve?”
“I am getting you out of Tijuana, and I am keeping an eye on you,” the inspector replied.
“And reporting our every move?” Bolan surmised.
“Well…” Villaluz pursed his lips judiciously. “As I believe the situation requires.”
Bolan nodded. The inspector wanted the guys who had taken down Cuah Nigris, and he was willing to play both ends against the middle when it came to Bolan and his own superiors. They both knew Bolan and Smiley would be the fall guys if it went sour. It was a situation the soldier was willing to accept. “Fair enough.”
Villaluz pulled onto Highway D2 heading east. It was Sunday, and most people were heading the other way for home. The brown landscape was lined with shrines. They were constructed out of tombstones, piles of bricks or adobe, and covered with collages of curled photos, dried-up postcards of the Virgin Mary, desiccated garlands of flowers and spent votive candles. They were shrines to the dead. Most Mexican roadsides were dotted with them, but here along the border they were mostly shrines to the murdered. Along the D2 they marched like dominoes to the horizon and were a testament to the endemic violence that convulsed the country.
They made good time. Traffic wasn’t bad, and the inspector liked to drive fast. The only things that slowed them were the military and police checkpoints. Villaluz could have breezed through them on his FIA inspector’s badge but he stopped at each checkpoint and chatted up the men manning them. Bolan watched as the inspector pressed flesh and clapped shoulders. He seemed to know most of the uniforms by name, and all seemed eager to bask in the inspector’s reputation and machismo. Villaluz was dropping a net of lookouts and informants behind them on the road to Mexicali.
Bolan eased his seat back. “He’s good.”
“Mole worships the ground he walks on. Even the dirtiest cops do. The cartel street thugs respect him, and the cartel jefes in Tijuana have a hands-off policy. He doesn’t mess with them and they don’t mess with him.”
“He’s messing with them now.”
“He’s sticking his neck way out on this one, and that is uncharacteristic.” Smiley shook her head. “Cuah and the Barbacoa Four all going down while in custody has him riled up. As far as he’s concerned, someone has crossed the line, and now he’s going to cross it, as well.”
“There’s going to be a war soon.”
“Soon? Buddy, last night was World War III. I can’t wait to see what you consider a real war.”
“Stick around.”
Villaluz hopped back into his truck and peeled out with screaming tires to the cheers of the khaki-clad federales. Bolan brought up the million-dollar question. “You ever seen the cartels attack like that?”
“I have seen them brazen, bold and reckless,” the inspector said.
“You ever seen them suicidal? You ever seen them go kamikaze?”
The inspector pushed in the cigarette lighter in the dash and took his time lighting a Montana cigarette.
“You’ve seen this before tonight, haven’t you,” Bolan stated.
The usually loquacious Villaluz examined the glowing end of his cigarette. “Yes.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“The taking of heads as a terror tactic is not new among the Mexican crime syndicates. I have seen them behave—what is the English idiom—crazy-brave to prove themselves. But ruthlessly willing to die, to sacrifice themselves to kill their target, that was, as you said, kamikaze. That is new.”
Bolan shot the inspector a shrewd look. “That’s not what bothers you the most.”
“No, it is not. What bothers me most,” the inspector continued, “is the code of silence.”
“All criminal gangs have it,” Bolan said.
“That is correct,” the inspector agreed. “The Italian mafia calls it omertà, in Mexico it is simply called silencio, but as you say, in all cultures, it is basically the same. If you are a member, you do not talk.”
“And?”
“I have never seen such a silencio as I have seen now. Cartel men talk about a code of honor, but in the end? They do not have one. That much money, that much drugs? They betray one another all the time. Now I fear there is some new player in the game, and his silencio is absolute. All of the Barbacoa Four died in custody, three in ours, and finally Cuah in yours. That is just the tip of the iceberg. Many have died in federal custody and witness protection, and whoever is doing this? He takes the heads of his enemies, and he takes the heads of his own fallen. No one is talking. You saw Cuah Nigris. He was wetting himself in fear, like a dog. What does it take to inspire such fear in a known sociopath?”
It was an ugly question and Bolan didn’t have an immediate answer.
Smiley spoke from the backseat. “The DEA fears that al Qaeda has somehow infiltrated one or more of the border cartels.”
Villaluz snorted. “I wish that was the case.”
Bolan raised an eyebrow but waited for Villaluz to elaborate.
Smiley was less circumspect. “That’s a hell of a thing to say.”
“It is the truth, Agent Smiley. I am sure terrorists from the Middle East with money could pay the cartels to smuggle men and materials across the border. But a bunch of foreigners taking over the streets of Tijuana? With an iron silencio? Forgive me, señorita, but I was born here. I have been a policeman all my adult life. I promise you, getting Mexican gangsters to get behind Muslim sharia law and sacrificing their lives unflinchingly in the name of the Holy Koran? I do not find it credible. Something else is going on.”
Bolan found himself on the same page as the inspector. “What do you think?”
“I do not know.” Villaluz stared into the smog clouding Mexicali city in the distance. He suddenly perked up as they hit the city limits. “Let us get onto business.”
“The Barbacoa Four?” Smiley asked.
“No, the best Mongolian Barbecue in Mexico.” Villaluz roared into town as if he owned it, and now he whipped through the checkpoints with a flash of his badge. He drove to the famous intersection of Avenida Madero and Calle Megar and took a turn into La Chinesca, Mexicali’s famous Chinatown. The buildings were a mix of old and new, but most had Chinese flourishes like pagoda accents and painted doors. What La Chinesca had more than anything was restaurants. They crowded every street, each one declaring in Spanish, Cantonese and English that they served the auténtico Chinese-Mexican cuisine.
Bolan had never seen so many Chinese people dressed like cowboys in his life.
Villaluz pulled down an alley and rolled up the windows against the flies and the rotting stench of the offal littering the ground from all the butchering going on to fuel over a hundred restaurants in less than four city blocks. The feral cats and dogs were some of the fattest Bolan had ever seen. He smiled at the inspector. “You were born here.”
The inspector grinned back. “You are a very astute man. I was born in Mexicali, but as you may suspect, particularly for a man of my age, when I was coming up through the ranks, if you had ambition, Tijuana was the only place to be. But this is where I grew up. Right across the street. When I was a boy, you could cut the line between La Chinesca and the rest of Mexicali with a knife, and we were always fighting the Chinese gangs.”
“What’s the tong situation like here?” Bolan asked.
“A very good question. Up until the 1950s Chinese actually outnumbered Mexicans in this city. The tongs controlled the opium trade, prostitution and gambling. Now they are a small minority, and, as you might imagine, Mexican brown heroin pushed out China white in the 1980s and the tong control with it. The cartels have pushed the Chinese out of almost all organized crime except that which the Chinese commit against one another. Though they do a brisk business in specialty Chinese brothels, gun-running and gambling.”
“What kind of gambling?”
“Mostly dog and cock fighting.” Villaluz shook his head ruefully. “The Chinese have a ferocious reputation.”
“Oh?”
“Oh, sí, if you challenge them? They have a special stipulation.”
Smiley gave Villaluz a leery look. “What’s that?”
“That if their animal wins? They get to cook and eat yours.”
“That’s sick,” Smiley stated.
“Oh, some of the restaurants in La Chinesca specialize in fighting-dog meat. Many people, both Mexican and Chinese, believe if you eat moo shu pit bull it increases your virility, and machismo.”
Smiley stared at a badly drawn graffito of a dog on the back door of the building. “No. Oh, hell no. Tell me we’re not.”
“We are. There is someone I think we should talk to.” Villaluz gave Smiley a serious look. “Señorita, I strongly recommend you order the shark fin tacos with hoisin sauce.”
Bolan opened his door and the side-street abattoir stench was almost overpowering. He gave Smiley a hand over an expansive puddle while Villaluz banged on the door. A pudgy little Chinese man in an apron and a paper hat opened the door with a cleaver in his hand. He and Villaluz exchanged a few words, and suddenly the man was all smiles and ushered them in. Smiley closed her eyes as they walked through the kitchen past meat hanging on hooks that clearly wasn’t beef, pork or chicken. Both Chinese and Mexicans labored over prepping ingredients for the Sunday dinner crowd and takeout rush. They pushed through the kitchen door out into the restaurant. The decor was half Mexican rancho and half Mandarin splendor. It was just about noon on Sunday, and the place wasn’t open for business yet. The chef led them to a booth in the back where a man sat with a bottle sipping Patrón Silver tequila.
Bolan was pretty sure he had never seen a Chinese man dressed for a square dance before. The man wore a taupe-colored Stetson hat and a pink, yoked cowboy shirt. His attempt at a beard and mustache was worse than Villaluz’s. Most of the Chinese people Bolan knew avoided the sun, but this man was deeply tanned and had crow’s feet around his eyes. The man’s sleeves were rolled up, and the calluses covering his knuckles bespoke long and intensive martial arts practice. He paused for the barest of moments as he took in the state of Agent Smiley’s face and then nodded at the inspector.
Villaluz made a graceful gesture with his hand. “Señor Cooper, Señorita Smiley, allow me to introduce Señor Juan-Waldemar Wang.”
Bolan shook his head. “That’s a mouthful.”
Wang threw back his head and laughed. “You have no idea, GI.” Wang spoke his English with a southwestern twang. “So you can just call me J.W.”
