Mission: Apocalypse

“I had a good tailwind out of Baja, and if you’re going to fly an amphibian—” Jack Grimaldi, ace Stony Man pilot, grinned at his plane “—you can’t beat an Aztec Nomad.”

Busto perked at the name. “An Aztec Nomad?”

Bolan smiled and gave Busto’s shoulder a squeeze. “It’s what you are now.”

Busto giggled.

Grimaldi nodded. “It’s a plush ride.”

The sound of the plane had brought Dominico wandering down the beach. His arm was in the sling Busto had rigged for him. He staggered a little bit with blood loss and hangover. He clutched the tequila bottle and took some hair of the dog to brace himself. He looked Grimaldi up and down noncommittally. “Who’s this guy?”

“Fellow pilot,” Bolan said. “You’ll like him.”

Grimaldi shoved out his hand. “Jack.”

Dominico stuck out his hand and noticed there was a bottle of tequila in it. “Uhh…”

Grimaldi took the bottle and took a swig without batting an eye. “Top of the morning, Memo.” He handed the bottle to Bolan. “This would go better with coffee.”

Bolan agreed. They needed a strategy session and everyone needed food. Altata was a fishing pueblo, and the cantina was open late for the boats that had stayed out night-fishing for squid and stayed open to feed other fishermen who headed out before dawn. Mexican fishermen had long ago learned to reserve comment about strange boats and planes arriving or departing in the wee hours, but Bolan didn’t want Dominico, Grimaldi or his own descriptions floating around for anyone who came after them. “Najelli, do me a favor. Go to the cantina and get us some food. A lot of it.” He handed her a wad of pesos.

“You got it.” Busto took the money, dusted the sand from her clothes and trotted off.

Dominico gave Bolan a strange look. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure. Jack, I’ll be back in a second.” They walked down the beach a few yards. “What’s on your mind, Memo?”

“I’m thinking of asking Najelli to marry me when this is over.”

Bolan smiled. “Again?”

Dominico scowled. “Yeah, again. So tell me one thing, man to man.”

Bolan locked eyes with Dominico in deadly seriousness. “I didn’t sleep with her.”

“It sure looked like you slept with her.”

“I promised her I would set her and her family up in witness protection, then we had a beer, then we had a nap.”

“A nap?”

“Memo, I’m not going to lie to you. We held hands.”

“You held hands?”

“We held hands.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Well, okay.” Dominico let out a long breath. “Promise me you won’t do it again.”

“No.” Bolan shook his head.

“No?” Dominico spluttered in shock. “What the f—”

“At your wedding I’m going to lay a big old sloppy wet one on her.”

Dominico actually blushed. “Man…”

Busto came out of the cantina carrying a massive basket. They all returned to the cabin and she spread out paper plates and began heaping them with rice, yellow azufrado beans and fried sardines, and buried it all in the local salsa fresca. The two Thermoses of coffee were steaming hot and laced with cinnamon and nutmeg. The team spent long moments attacking the feast by the light of dawn through the window. Bolan waited for the first round to be finished and then spread out the police sketches as the team reloaded their plates.

“You recognize these guys, Memo? Pinto said they took the material off his hands.”

Dominico shook his head over the alleged Europeans. “Never seen baldy. Curly-top? Maybe, someplace, but I can’t place him.” He tapped the sketch of the bearded Hispanic man sporting the mullet. “But him? That’s Rubino Mankita.”

“What’s his story?”

Dominico shook his head. “Manny? He kills people.”

“For which cartel?” Bolan asked.

Dominico snorted. “The Libertad Onza cartel.”

Grimaldi shook his head. “Never heard of them.”

Bolan drank coffee and mulled that over. The Libertad Onza was the Mexican mint’s current one-ounce gold coin. “He’s freelance?”

“That’s what they say, and they say he takes payment in gold. He does his work bloody and he likes to do it in public.”

Busto rolled a sardine in a tortilla and bit it in two. “When I was doing security work in Mexico City? Mankita had a real bad reputation. They say when the assassination business was slow he had a sideline in kidnapping, only he wasn’t too good at it because half the time the kidnapping turned into a slaughter and even when he pulled it off the other half of the time he would kill the hostages when things didn’t go fast enough. Everyone was afraid of him.”

“Real bad hombre,” Dominico agreed.

“How come Pinto Salcido didn’t recognize him?”

“Pinto was always local West Coast. He never operated in Mexico City. He’d undoubtedly heard of Manny but wouldn’t know him by sight.”

That was probably the way the bad guys had wanted it, and it was a very interesting bit of intel. The Mexican cartels, the Russian Mafiya, the Chinese triads, all criminal organizations had their killers, but generally they were part of the extended family. Even if they were raping women and slaughtering children in their beds they were still considered soldiers rather than assassins. They did it for the profit or defense of their cartel, clan or syndicate. A man who killed for nothing more than money was a sociopath, and rightly feared and despised even by other criminals.

Whoever the bad guys were they were transporting nuclear material across Mexico. Bolan found it very intriguing that they would use a psychopath, much less put him in such a position of trust. More than intriguing, it made no sense, but too many things on this one made no sense. Bolan suspected there was madness involved, but a deadly serious machine was in motion, and he knew the pieces had no meaning because he didn’t have enough of the puzzle.

“Memo, best guess. Which way do you think they went?”

“Well, they aren’t transporting fifty kilos of cocaine or marijuana. If what you say is true they’re moving over a ton of metal and the goons guarding it. I’d go to Baja. Sparse population and you can buy an entire pueblo’s silence easy. By the same token, you got lots of airstrips, lots of ports, and Tijuana and Mexicali if you need a big-city connection. If things start to get too hot? Shit, man, you could just dump the stuff into the Sea of Cortez and come back for it later. I did that once. I’m sure salvaging uranium would be harder, but what the hell, man? These guys have money, and uranium doesn’t rust, does it?”

“It oxidizes, but that wouldn’t effect its radioactivity. It would just make it more dangerous to handle, and it would probably help spread the nuclear material out from the explosion.” Bolan frowned over a map of the Baja Peninsula. Dominico had called it the same way he would. “Still, over a ton of crated material plus the men guarding it. That pretty much precludes a light plane.”