Run to Ground (2 page)

It took fifteen minutes for the Executioner to travel ninety yards and top a gentle rise of sandy ground. Below him, still a mile away and dusty-pale as no oasis ought to be, was Santa Rosa. Somewhere in the predawn darkness, he had crossed the border out of Mexico and into the United States. Without a map and compass to assist him, he had never known the difference.

Neither would Rivera, Bolan realized, with so damned much at stake. The niceties of jurisdiction would not faze his enemy this time. The hunters would be coming, could be there ahead of him and waiting at the tiny village, ready for the kill.

It made no difference either way.

The Executioner was walking into Santa Rosa with hell-fire lapping at his heels.

They found the car at 4:15 a.m. The driver's effort to conceal it had been hasty, ineffective, and Rivera's pointmen spotted it where he had coasted off the road, behind a stand of Joshua trees and sage. The convoy slowed, pulled over, six cars now, including the pale-green cruiser they had picked up at the borderline. Their altercation with the patrolmen had slowed them down, but not disastrously, since their quarry was on foot.

On foot and wounded.

Luis Rivera opened the driver's door and peered inside. He did not give a second thought to fingerprints. The car was his, and a "stolen" report would be filed with
the federales
in due time. For now, establishing the name and destination of his enemy was more important. If the gringo bastard managed to escape with what he obviously knew about Rivera's operation in Sonora, he could make sufficient noise to rouse the Mexican authorities, compel them to forget the years of rich
mordida
they had accepted from Rivera as compensation for selective blindness. If Rivera's enemy escaped, if he was free to talk, then it was finished. Loss of merchandise worth millions was enough to put the man on Rivera's hit list, but the drugs could always be replaced. Provided that he was free to make the deal. But he would not survive in prison, even with his wealth to shelter him from harm. His empire would be picked apart by jackals in his absence, and he would be left alone to face the years of isolation, fighting for his life against the animals inside.

It was too much. Rivera pushed the image out of mind and concentrated on the car. The body armor had deflected several dozen rounds, as it was meant to do. The windows had cracked into tiny cubes in back and on the driver's side, but they had held. Rivera smiled and made a mental note to have another set of wheels just like it readied for his use within the week. There might be something they could do about the undercarriage to prevent a ricochet from wreaking havoc underneath the hood as this one obviously had. In any case, the shield around the gas tank had prevented an explosion, stopping several rounds, and there were still a few miles left in the puncture-proof tires.

What interested Rivera most, however, was the blood. Great blotches of it soaked into the cushions of the driver's seat, eliminating any notion that his enemy had slipped away unscathed. Someone had tagged the bastard, and the gunner would receive a bonus if Rivera could identify him. If he was alive.

He had already lost nine men, and while their lives meant nothing to Rivera in the abstract, he considered it a loss of face, a personal affront that must be rectified with blood. A man in his position must not let himself be vulnerable. He must have the wherewithal to stand against an army of his enemies. Humiliation by a single man would be unthinkable, the end of everything that he had worked for all these years.

But now his enemy was wounded and on foot. He had already lost a lot of blood, and every step would cost him more. He might already be delirious from pain and shock, condemned to wander aimlessly until the deadly sun finished him. The desert would kill the gringo, given time... but Rivera knew that he could not afford to wait.

He straightened and scanned the dark sandy wastes on each side of the highway, hoping against hope that he might see the bastard, spot his lurching shadow or the huddled corpse he would eventually become. The empty landscape mocked him, its mute rejoinder spelling out what he already knew: that they were dealing with no ordinary man.

This one was special, certainly. No ordinary man had cracked Rivera's security, blown his merchandise sky-high and eliminated nine of his most trusted soldiers before escaping in his Mercedes. It required a special man to drive away — and then to
walk
away — despite his wounds, the shock and loss of blood. He might not last a mile on foot, but while he lived, he was a mortal threat to everything Rivera owned, the empire he had created. While the intruder survived, Rivera was a man on borrowed time.

He had been thinking of the man as a gringo, but Rivera wondered now. The hit man was tall and he was dressed in black, his face obscured by cosmetics. For all Rivera knew, he might have been a black or a tall Chicano. Doubly thankful that the man had taken a bullet, he knew that it would make their manhunt that much easier. Whoever or whatever he might be, the enemy was badly wounded, perhaps mortally, and he would wear that wound as a distinctive badge of his identity. They could not miss him.

Unless the desert swallowed him alive.

If his enemy was rational and strong enough, he would be making for a settlement, a doctor, anyone who might possess the necessary skills to save his life. But if he was delirious he might walk around in circles till he dropped, covering miles with lifeless, zombie strides until his blood and strength gave out. If he had wandered off without a destination in mind, Rivera knew that they might never find him.

Even searches from the air might fail to spot the obvious, and he was on the wrong side of the border for any sort of massive sweep. He must be circumspect, discreet, but thorough.

Above all else, he must be thorough.

Killing those patrolmen at the border had been risky, but Rivera had no choice. Their cruiser might be useful, especially if his enemy should reach the sanctuary of a town. Official trappings could not hurt, and while the uniforms had been a bloody write-off, he still had the car, their weapons, badges. These objects might provide Rivera with an edge, if he was forced to deal with any other Americans in his search. They would not fool a lawman, but with civilians they might be enough to buy some time.

His men were rummaging inside the car, retrieving a submachine gun — empty — from the floorboards on the passenger's side, stripping the glove compartment of registration papers and any other documents. Beneath the dash they found Rivera's nickel-plated automatic pistol still in place in its special holster, undiscovered by the enemy, and one of them handed it to Rivera with a deferential, almost reverent, gesture.

He weighed the weapon in his hand, removed the magazine to verify that it was still loaded and tucked it inside the waistband of his slacks. His enemy had left one weapon empty, missed another, but they could not leap to the conclusion that he was unarmed. He had been carrying explosives at the rancho and he might have other lethal tricks in store for anyone who got too close. Despite his wounds and loss of blood, despite the distance he would have to travel and his loss of the machine gun, he was dangerous. This one would be dangerous until he died.

They were no more than sixty miles from home and yet Rivera felt the chasm widening, experienced the sense of distance that he always felt on entering the States. He was light-years removed from childhood in Nogales, running with the other homeless gutter rats who joined together for survival on the streets. As best Rivera knew, his mother was a prostitute who had been murdered by a gringo when her only son was eight years old. His father was a faceless shadow, never seen and seldom thought of. Rivera had survived without maternal or paternal care, and he had grown up hard, accustomed to the violence of the slums, where life was cheap and love was a commodity on sale.

At nine he had been picking pockets in Nogales, trusting in his size and speed until he grew proficient at the art, acquiring skill enough to dip the fattest wallet without ruffling its owner. Street gangs fought for territory, coveting the districts where the gringos came to spend their dollars, and before he was eleven, Rivera was a grizzled veteran of those wars. At twelve he killed a man — a boy, really, three years his senior — and ascended on the basis of his growing reputation to a leadership position in the gang he ran with. No longer forced to work the streets himself, he had instructed others in the art of picking pockets and began to cultivate a taste for certain minor luxuries.

The members of his gang had always handled pills and marijuana on a small scale — for the tourist trade — but in the early sixties, with the rise of "flower children" in America, Luis had recognized the drug trade's great potential. He had put his troops to work for men who farmed cannabis, had studied them and learned the ropes, until he was prepared to take over the business for himself. It had not been an easy move. There had been bloody work involved, but by the time a certain Dr. Leary had begun to preach the doctrine of "Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out," Rivera had been ready to provide the children of Aquarius with all the marijuana they could handle. In the circles where he traveled, he had been respected and admired for his achievements. He was seventeen years old.

The marijuana trade was still important to Rivera, but his fortune had been tripled by the traffic in cocaine and heroin. The latter poison he refined himself, from poppy fields in the Sierra Madre, but the coke required a loose alliance with suppliers in Bogota. It was a risky enterprise with Colombians involved — people who were quick to launch a shooting war for no apparent reason — but again Rivera had survived. He was a multimillionaire who purchased politicians and policemen as another man might purchase cigarettes, and now it galled him that he had to do this butcher job himself. If it had not been so important...

But it was. The economic loss that he had suffered was sufficient to demand revenge against his enemy, but it was not his prime consideration. He had suffered a loss of face, and while the Oriental concept was an unfamiliar one, no Hispanic male grew up without a sense of pride, machismo, which demanded retribution for an insult. If Rivera let his enemy escape, competitors would think that he was vulnerable, weak. In time they would begin to test him, ripping off consignments, threatening his trade and territory, making inroads with his customers. The fire last night had cost him several million dollars, but it would be nothing in comparison to losses he would suffer if he had to start from scratch, establishing his territories through protracted warfare with the competition. Esquilante in Chihuaha, Lopez in Coahuila, Quintana in Durango: any one of them, or all of them together, would be glad to see him fall. Without Rivera in the picture, there would be more money for the smaller fish, more trade to go around.

Rivera smiled. He was not going anywhere just yet. The jackals might be hungry, snapping at his heels, but he had always managed to outsmart the competition, and he was not finished yet. One man could not defeat him, not when he had dared so much and come so far alone. It was unthinkable.

Possibly the gringo bastard was dead already. If he was, and if Rivera could not find his body in the desert, then the problem would remain unsolved. He might be forced to fabricate an enemy, provide a straw man for display to his competitors, to show results. If worse came to worst, he would not mind the lie. Not if it helped to save his empire, everything he had built and everything he had become.

But, then, the worst of it would be not knowing. If he did not see the body for himself, if he could not reach out and touch the lifeless flesh, how could he ever rest in peace? How could he be certain that the warrior wouldn't come back, this time to kill Rivera in the very heart of his
estancia,
his castle?

Scowling, he admitted to himself that there could be no substitute for certainty. Whatever he might tell his competition, and whoever's corpse he might display for their inspection,
he
would have to know and be convinced that it was settled with this stranger who appeared from nowhere, striking like the wrath of God. Luis Rivera had no faith in anyone or anything outside himself; he was not part of an organized religion, viewing it as a placebo for the peasant class. No Marxist, he was still convinced that fat cats and politicos supported different churches as a method of controlling superstitious millions, falling back upon the name of God whenever man proved frail and fallible. It was a crutch he had never leaned upon.

There were several drug traffickers active along the Mexican-U.S. border and he wondered why the solitary warrior had selected him. He wondered how the man had scouted his defenses, how he knew precisely when the merchandise would be available and where it would be stored. Sufficient mysteries to baffle any man, and Rivera would never know the answers if he didn't find his enemy.

It would be best, of course, if he could take the man alive. Interrogation might be fruitful, and it certainly would entertain the troops. However, the odds were long against securing a prisoner, and if he had to settle for a corpse, he would be satisfied. As long as he found something,
anything,
to prove his enemy was dead beyond a shadow of a doubt.

The gringo's death was not sufficient in itself, however. If he spilled his guts to the authorities before he died, Rivera might have to cope with bad publicity and pressure from the States, outraged denials of complicity from Mexican officials on the pad. It would not matter, in the long run, if
the federales
raided him or not. Publicity itself was fatal, in sufficient quantities, and while the spotlight focused on Rivera, his competitors were free to move against him from the shadows, gobbling up his customers, his territories.

There were precautions to be taken. At home, the cleanup crew would have removed all traces of narcotics from the ranch by now. The bodies of his soldiers would be tucked away for later burial, well hidden in the event of a police search. The damage to his property could be described as accidental, even written off against his fire insurance with a little sleight of hand, but none of that concerned Rivera now.

His enemy was still at large, most likely still alive, and he remained a liability until his head was safely in the bag. As for that head, Luis Rivera would be happy to assist in its removal.

"What is the nearest town?" he asked Camacho, certain that he knew the answer even as he spoke.

"It will be Santa Rosa,
jefe."

"Take one car north to watch the road beyond, and leave another in the town itself. But be discreet. I want no contact with the enemy until we are prepared."

"It will be done."