Dying Art

As the helicopter began to lift off, a few rounds skidded off the outer shell. Bolan fired a burst from the M60, and then heard Grimaldi’s voice come over his in-ear receiver.

“Those guys still want to dance? I got something for them.”

He used the mounted M240 machine guns to strafe the resort side of the beach again, and as they ascended Bolan could see the men below scattering like shell-shocked ants.

Bolan snapped the safety on the M60 and swung it back behind against the wall of the cabin. He pulled the door closed and turned to check on everyone. With the high-pitched roar from the rotors spinning at max speed, conversation was next to impossible. He flashed a thumbs-up to Martinez, who had rolled his mask up on his head. Sergio still lay on the floor, immobile, but quivering. Martinez gave a thumbs-up back. The Executioner went to the cockpit and sat in the copilot’s seat.

Grimaldi pointed to the headset, which Bolan then slipped on.

“We’ll be touching down on the Mexican side in fifteen,” Grimaldi said. “To make our deposit.”

Bolan acknowledged him.

Despite a few minor bumps, the op had gone pretty well. Still, they had to drop off Martinez, his marines and Diaz, before flying to US soil and delivering Sergio to the waiting DEA agents. Since this mission technically did not exist, Bolan assumed this second drop-off would be accomplished with minimal conversation and complications. Everything wrapped up nicely and tied off with a pretty bow.

Still, he worried about the young woman.

Should Sergio figure out that it was she who set him up, her life wouldn’t be worth a handful of pesos. There was no way to keep Sergio from his lawyers, and therefore the eventual communication with his father, Don Fernando, was inevitable. But Martinez had assured Bolan that the marines would protect her.

“That is all we have been doing lately,” Martinez told him. “Protecting reporters, informers and their families.”

This time they had their work cut out, Bolan thought.

La Fortaleza Diabla

Baja California, Mexico

Don Fernando de la Vega sat calmly behind his large teakwood desk smoking one of his Havanas and contemplating the recent turn of events. His rise to power as leader of Los Bajos Diablos had not happened overnight, and he prided himself on possessing an abundance of virtues, not the least of which was patience. He gazed about the empty room, plush in its opulence. Mayan statues decorated the walls, as well as paintings by some of Mexico’s greatest artists, alongside the works of Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Gauguin.

He drew on the cigar and savored the smoke in his mouth. It suddenly turned bitter tasting as he heard a knock on the door and his thoughts returned to Sergio.

“Enter,” he said.

The door opened and Gordo, his immense and extremely loyal bodyguard, entered along with Lupe Garcia, another of his lieutenants.

Don Fernando blew out a cloudy breath. Garcia stood at attention, Gordo looking down at him with the watchfulness that had endeared him to Don Fernando for many years. Nothing could get by the giant, no one could move to hurt his master... Gordo would give his life to assure that, and he had many scars of failed attempts.

“Has it been verified?” Don Fernando asked.

He could see beads of sweat beginning to run down Garcia’s cheeks. That told Don Fernando the answer even before the other man could speak. Prescience was another of Don Fernando’s virtues. He could read other men as clearly as a book.

“Yes, Don Fernando,” Garcia said. He swallowed hard, then continued, “He was taken from the resort in the dead of night.” He took a breath and seemed ready to say more, but stopped as Don Fernando held up his palm.

Sergio, his only son, taken... But by whom? The reports said that a military-style helicopter had been used in the abduction. Surely none of the other cartels had such equipment. So had it been the Mexican government? Doubtful, since he had heard nothing from his internal sources that they would be mounting such an audacious attack. There was only one certain answer.

“The Americans?” Don Fernando asked.

Garcia swallowed again, then gave a quick nod. “We believe so. He has vanished without a trace.”

Don Fernando took another draw on the cigar. If that were so, it meant both good and bad news. Good news meaning that Sergio was probably alive and unharmed, bad that he was most likely not in Mexico anymore. Looking up at Garcia, he frowned.

“Where were his bodyguards when this occurred?”

Garcia compressed his lips briefly. “Four of them were killed. The others, I am having brought here as we speak.”

“How many of them?”

“Six.”

Don Fernando raised an eyebrow. “So you are telling me that ten men, whose loyalty is supposed to be beyond question, could not protect my son from an abduction?”

“They were taken by surprise, sir,” Garcia said. “They fought back. Four of them died.”

“Silence!” Don Fernando slammed his hand on the desktop with such force that it snapped his cigar in two. He tossed the pieces away and opened his humidor to retrieve another.

Garcia said nothing. The sweat continued to cascade down his face.

Don Fernando snorted in disgust as he rotated the tip of the new cigar in the flame of his lighter.

“When you have them all here,” he said, “assemble them in the courtyard.”

Don Fernando felt a growing agony over this situation, but he immediately suppressed it. He placed his cigar into the antique, mother-of-pearl ashtray, pulled open his desk drawer and removed a stainless steel 9 mm Taurus semiautomatic pistol. Pulling back the slide slightly, he verified that a round was in the chamber, then set the weapon on the desk in front of him. “I shall attend to this personally. Show everyone the price of failure.”

“Yes, Don Fernando,” Garcia said.

The cartel leader waved his hand dismissively, and the other man scurried out the door. When Garcia had left, he picked up his cigar and spoke to the giant.

“Gordo, after I have dealt with the traitors in the courtyard, kill him. Slowly.”

The giant’s face showed no expression. He simply nodded and left.

Patience... Prescience...

Don Fernando drew on his cigar as he contemplated one of his other virtues: cunning. He thought about the plan that he already had in place, and how he could modify it to ensure that whoever had taken his son would pay a terrible price.

Yes, he thought as he exhaled a cloud of smoke. There will be a reckoning... There will be vengeance...

Two months later

Istanbul, Turkey

Clayton Tragg watched as the miserable little man used a jeweler’s loupe to inspect the two halves of the hand-carved ivory spheres. This professor, Higgins, the handpicked expert his employer had selected to accompany them, was almost as pathetic as Lucien Bruns himself had been when he was originally contacted about the artifact. How two grown men could get so excited about a pair of old hand-carved pieces of ivory, much less be willing to pay a fortune for them, was almost beyond Tragg’s comprehension. Still, it was what he was getting paid for, on two fronts if the truth be known, so who was he to complain? With things drying up in Iraq and Afghanistan, lucrative new work for the dark ops section of what remained of Granite Security, Inc., was getting more and more scarce. Plus, it beat the hell out of escorting some US-backed mullah and aspiring politician around a perpetual war zone worrying about snipers and IEDs.

He watched the Turkish art dealer, Hakeem Karga, who had “acquired” the artifact known as The Lion and the Lioness Attacking the Nubian, purported to be from the Islamic Period, and made even more valuable because it dared to show human figures when such depictions were considered idolatry by Sharia Law. Two corresponding circular spheres of hand-carved ivory and mother-of-pearl over twelve hundred years old...

Tragg reflected on that. The piece had been around for over a thousand years, the last several decades of which it had spent in the National Museum of Iraq, only to have been “removed” when American tanks rolled into Baghdad. From there it passed through various hands before ending up here, in the possession of one of the biggest crooks in Istanbul, who’d most likely bought it from ISIS or al Qaeda, or one of the other regional bands. Once the militants finally realized they could make themselves some money selling stolen stuff from the museums instead of getting their religious rocks off by destroying it, they quietly set aside their strict ideology of demagogy and covertly entered into the more profitable black market business. Maybe they were smarter than they looked. And then again, maybe not. Tragg was sure that Karga had paid them a fraction of what he figured he could get selling it on the black market to some rich American or European collector.

Or maybe even a Mexican one. Tragg silently chuckled at the thought.