Mission: Apocalypse. Don Pendleton

Bolan nodded. “The bad guys didn’t expect to get discovered, but they got sloppy with their packaging and we caught a break. But if they did get discovered, King Solomon would take the rap. No one believes in drug dealers who retire. Think about it, he drops a profitable business in drugs, leaves for the capital and goes dark for two years. On paper it sounds shady as hell. He’d be the perfect fall guy. Memo would be shipped off to a secret prison someplace, someplace dark and deep, and by the time the Ukrainian interrogators got done with him and figured out he really didn’t know anything, whatever ugliness the bad guys are planning would have already happened.”

      “So who are the bad guys?” Busto asked.

      Bolan shook his head. “I don’t know.”

      “What are they planning?”

      “I don’t know, but something involving a flatbed-load of radioactive material.”

      “Jesus…”

      “Najelli,” Dominico said very quietly, “some campesinos in Mexico City are already dying from just moving this stuff. I’ve seen what it’s going to do to people. I signed up with the hombre here. We’re gonna stop it. We got to.”

      Busto looked back and forth between the two men. “Jesus, Memo, you know I heard you joined some cult and gotten religion or something.”

      Dominico rolled his eyes. “It’s not a cult, it’s—”

      Bolan cut him off. “We’re going to go pay a visit to Varjo Amilcar. You in or not?”

      “Oh, I’m in.” Busto dropped her cigarette butt to the ground and crushed it beneath her heel. “But how are you going to play it?”

      Bolan had been considering his approach. “The element of surprise is always good.”

      “Surprise is good,” Dominico agreed. “And I think Varjo will be very surprised to hear from me, but I don’t think it will be a good kind of surprise. I’m thinking we don’t even make it through the gate.”

      Bolan smiled slyly at Busto. “How surprised would Varjo be if you called him and said you wanted to see him?”

      Busto snorted. “He’d be surprised. He’s always wanted a piece of me.” She chewed her lip and shook her head. “But I don’t know if he’d buy it. He knows I hate him. He’d suspect something.”

      Bolan weighed what he knew about the Hammer. “You said people have disappeared. People in Culiacán are scared. Everything is messed up and now he’s the top dog. What if you called Varjo and told him you’re lonely, scared and out of money? That you’re scared for your mother and daughter.”

      Busto smiled bitterly. “Well, that would all be true, wouldn’t it?” Her smile grew predatory as she thought about it. “But he’d like that. He’d like that a lot. Varjo has a real sick cruel streak. He’d love me to come to him begging. He’d love to break me.”

      Dominico looked at Bolan with renewed respect. “Jesus, you’re all Machiavellian and shit.”

      “It’s what I do,” Bolan agreed. He looked to Busto. “How soon can you be ready for your big date?”

      

      VARJO AMILCAR was ready for his big date.

      He was ready for it tonight. Bolan had smelled the sadism behind his reassurances when Busto had started crying and saying she didn’t know what to do anymore. Busto could have had a job in Mexican soap operas. She was that good. They sat in her parents’ old farmhouse. The walls were made out of adobe bricks, and Busto said the place was at least a hundred years old. They’d put her mother and her daughter in the Bronco and sent them on to the next town where her mother had friends. Bolan and Dominico drank coffee and ate red beans while they watched Busto doll herself up for her date. She’d looked cute in her knock-around clothes in the glare of the headlights.

      Now she was a knockout.

      Skintight jeans sheathed her lower body. Bolan suspected she’d had some surgical enhancements, and her upper half was doing its utmost to explode out of the camisole she wore. She’d brushed out her braids and her brown hair fells in waves around her shoulders. She draped a man’s sport coat that had been cut to fit her frame over it and began judiciously applying makeup to emphasize her features.

      Now she really looked like she belonged in Mexican soap operas.

      Bolan watched as she checked the loads in her 9 mm Ruger and stuffed spare magazines into her pockets. “You any good with that?”

      Dominico stabbed a proud thumb into his chest. “I taught her everything she knows!”

      “You any good with that?” Bolan repeated.

      Dominico rolled his eyes. “Man…”

      Busto checked the loads in a snub-nosed .38 and tucked the little revolver into the top of her boot. “When I went to Mexico City the security service that hired me put me through a course to teach me right.”

      Dominico deflated. “Man…”

      Bolan turned on Dominico. “You said you always had an Uzi, ever since you started flying?”

      “Yeah.” Dominico thrust out his jaw defiantly. “That’s right.”

      “You ever fire it?”

      “Of course I fired it!”

      “In anger?” Bolan prodded.

      “Yeah! Yeah, I did as a matter of fact! I was in a firefight! With Colombians in Baja!”

      Bolan probed further. “Did you hit anything?”

      “I…” Dominico’s shoulders sagged. “I don’t know, man. It was dark, and across an airstrip.”

      “I see.”

      A city map and satellite photos were spread out across the table. Bolan tapped the spot where Amilcar had a house on the Culiacán River. “Najelli, you’re going to drive right up. Memo and I will be in the trunk. All eyes will be on you and I doubt they’ll search the car. They will probably search you for a wire. They’ll find your gun, but Varjo probably expects you to have one. Expect to have it taken from you. Ask for a drink, start crying again and then tell him you want to be alone with him. I want Varjo separated from the rest of the household, so try to get him into the bedroom as soon as possible.”

      Busto grinned. “That shouldn’t be hard.”

      “No.” Bolan gave her an appreciative glance. “No, it shouldn’t. Once you’re inside Memo and I will extract ourselves from the car and make our way to you. With luck we’ll achieve total surprise.”

      “And then?”

      “Then we have a quiet talk with the man.”

      

      DOMINICO LAUGHED in the darkness. The trunk of Busto’s Grand Marquis was pitch-black, but it was cavernous. Both Bolan and Dominico were able to recline on their sides on piles of blankets in relative claustrophobic comfort as the sedan bounced over the potholed streets of Culiacán.

      “What?” Bolan inquired.

      “The song.”

      Bolan perked an ear. Busto had her stereo cranked up playing cassettes of old school narcocorrido music. The corrido was a form of Mexican norteño folk music. The narcocorridos were folk songs about various drug smugglers and their exploits. They had become popular in the sixties when the American drug culture had exploded and enterprising Mexican criminals had exploited it. Today it was a music industry unto itself in Mexico. The music was fast and the Mexican slang so thick Bolan couldn’t make much of it. “What about it?”

      Dominico laughed again. “It’s about me. That song is ten years old. It never made it to CD, not that I know of. It’s called ‘De Las Alas Hasta el Rey.’”

      Bolan flexed his