Pablo's Ghost (Strike Force X Book 1) Read online

  Pablo’s Ghost

  Strike Force X: Book One

  Michael Newton

  Pablo’s Ghost

  Strike Force X: Book One

  Kindle Edition

  © Copyright 2020 Michael Newton

  Wolfpack Publishing

  6032 Wheat Penny Avenue

  Las Vegas, NV 89122

  wolfpackpublishing.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, other than brief quotes for reviews.

  Kindle ISBN 978-1-64734-894-6

  paperback ISBN 978-1-64734-895-3

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Outrage (Strike Force X Book 2)

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  About the Author

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  For E.T. and Mackenzie

  Pablo’s Ghost

  "I have always considered myself a happy man. I’ve always been happy, I’ve always been optimistic, I’ve always had faith in life because I think the most difficult times always bring something. It brings experience, and it’s the greatest thing to have in life."

  Pablo Escobar

  "All empires are created of blood and fire."

  Pablo Escobar

  1

  Antioquia Department, Colombia

  An unseen hand ripped the black linen hood from off Rogelio Vélez's bruised and bloodied head, causing his rodentlike eyes to squint against the sudden glare of ceiling-mounted floodlights. Pain, a constant since the moment he had been abducted, flared to agony inside his skull.

  Vélez tried to survey his prison, which by all apparent indicators—smell, sound, sight as he regained it—seemed to be an old, disused warehouse abandoned to the pigeons, rats and spiders that lay claim to such former abodes of men. A forklift layered with years of dust sat at the far end of the massive chamber. Small things scratched and scuttled in its dark corners.

  Beside Vélez, immediately to his left, was Andrés Araújo, blinking as if to mimic his employer, drying blood caked on lips and chin as if it were a rusty-colored Van Dyke beard. Both men were handcuffed, wrists secured behind their backs. Beyond that, both were bound with thin, tough nylon ropes to painfully uncomfortable metal folding chairs.

  It was outrageous for such men of prominence to be abused this way. If Vélez was not living it, he might have called the travesty unthinkable.

  He and Araújo had been leaving the Agujero de la Gloria nightclub in Parque Lleras, Medellín's center of action between dusk and dawn, accompanied by young cabaret dancers, when a black van screeched to a halt beside Vélez's silver limousine, disgorging six armed men dressed all in black from balaclavas down to combat boots, shouting commands for everyone to raise their hands.

  Vélez's driver earned his pay by reaching for the pistol in his shoulder holster. One of the attackers dropped him with a three-round burst of submachine-gun fire. Another set the women running for their lives—an awkward flight in tall stiletto heels—while the remaining four frisked Vélez and Araújo, handcuffed them, and dragged them both inside the van, where hoods were snugged over their heads. When each in turn asked what was happening, who the abductors thought they were, they had been gun-whipped into silence.

  Now here they were, wherever here might be, trussed up and staring at a forklift, half a dozen wooden pallets, and a rat creeping along the nearest wall.

  But they were not alone.

  Although the watchers made no sound, Vélez trusted his finely-honed survival sense to tell him that much.

  What a pity that it was unlikely to preserve his life much longer. There could be no coming back from this sort of intrusion, such a mortal insult. Logic and experience told him could only end up with a shallow grave—or worse.

  Behind him, a man's voice said, "So, we meet again, Rogelio."

  Footsteps on cracked concrete approached him from behind, then moved around Araújo's chair. The speaker stood before them, smiling almost wistfully. His face was instantly familiar, although changed somewhat by time and circumstance, but recognizable. Stunning.

  "You're dead," Vélez half-whispered. "Dead for what? How many years?"

  "Approaching twenty-eight," the man behind their kidnapping replied. "But who's counting?"

  "This is impossible," Vélez declared, trying for greater strength and emphasis.

  "And yet…"

  The dead man spread his hands, stepped closer, bending from the waist to let Vélez survey his face up close and personal. Same wavy hair, still black on top but with more gray around the temples. Same thick eyebrows. Same bushy mustache as in the early mugshots, later in the media. The smile beneath that mugshot still projected mockery.

  "Rogelio, do you not trust your own two eyes?"

  "I saw your body," said Vélez. "I was among the mourners at your funeral…"

  "You dare not speak my name?" the dead man challenged him.

  "It can't be you."

  "Perhaps this will convince you, then."

  The man who couldn't be stepped closer, bending from the waist, and raised a hand to brush the graying hair back from his right temple. Vélez beheld the dimpled scar there, felt the warehouse and his whole world tilting.

  "Pablo Emilio?"

  Having presented his stigmata for inspection, their kidnapper straightened and stepped back a pace. His smile beneath the famous mustache morphed into a frown.

  "At last," he said. "It grieves me to inform you of my disappointment."

  "What? I don't—"

  "La Oficina de Envigado, Rogelio."

  "Yes? And?"

  Before the Medellín Cartel's collapse in 1993, Vélez had organized the so-called "Office of Envigado"—a town located seven miles southwest of Antioquia Department's capital in the Aburrá Valley. Formed as a defense against the cartel's enemies in Cali and the wild men of Los Pepes—short for "persecuted by Pablo Escobar"—it had fought on to the bitter end, then managed to survives as a successor syndicate of sorts, maintaining ties to both the government in Bogotá and to guerillas lurking in the hinterlands.

  "You organized us, Pablo," said Vélez, still nearly choking on the name. "We followed your instructions to the letter, did whatever you commanded."

  "Until you believed that I was gone," their host responded in a scolding tone. "Since then you've made yourself a multi-millionaire and man of influence. Is that not so, Rogelio?"

  "I carried on," Vélez protested, "and survived. I never slighted you—your memory—by any word or deed."

  "Unless we count attempting to control my former territory, eh?" The not-so-dead man shrugged and spread his hands. "But what of that? Time passes. Life moves on."

  For some, Vélez thought, but he kept it to himself.

  "The good news, now, is that I'm back!" his captor said, smiling again. "I am reclaiming all that's mine and all that would have been, if traitors had not stabbed me in the back."

  "You can't mean—"

  "What else could I mean?" the image of a man long dead replied. "Do you expect
me to believe the Search Bloc and Los Pepes actually traced my phone to Los Olivos and surprised me there, among my own people who loved me, owed me everything they had, from homes and hospital to schools and churches, plus their daily bread? Do you accept the lie that I grew frightened near the end and shot myself to keep from going back to prison? Eh?"

  "But—"

  "No!" The voice rose to a shout. "We both know who bears the responsibility. Is that now true, Rogelio?"

  "You think that I betrayed you?" Vélez could no longer feign a pose of disbelief. His mind could not conceive how such a thing was possible, and yet…

  "I think nothing," the man who had returned to life answered. "I know it for a fact. A certainty."

  "You are mistaken, jefe."

  "Don't debase yourself with any further lies. You have been tried, convicted, and your sentence passed. You know what must be done to halt contagion's spread."

  Vélez could think of no response, sat blinking at his former lord and master, now become his mortal enemy.

  The ghost made flesh pressed on. "It must be purged by fire."

  Rogelio Vélez stared blankly at the man standing before him. He could feel Andrés Araújo staring at him, but kept his eyes fixed directly on the man in charge.

  "What does that mean, Pablo?"

  Forcing the name between his bloodied lips left Vélez with a foul taste in his mouth.

  Instead of answering, his captor looked beyond his prisoners and raised his right hand, snapped his fingers some other watchers who had been observing the proceedings from behind Vélez and his lieutenant, staying silent, out of sight.

  On cue, two men Vélez had never seen before stepped into sight, one to his right, the other passing by Araújo on the left. Although the men were strangers, Vélez recognized the type. They were sicarios—hired killers—both in their mid-twenties, dressed in track suits and expensive running shoes. Each carried a red plastic gasoline container in one hand, the usual five-gallon size.

  "Treason shall be expunged," their leader said. "Eradicated. Only ashes of betrayal will remain."

  He nodded, and the silent hitmen both removed the twist caps from their fuel containers, tossing them aside. As one, they stepped forward, raising the plastic jerrycans, prepared to dump their contents on the seated prisoners.

  "Wait!" Vélez cried, hating the tremor in his voice. "Don't do this, Pablo!"

  "You pretend I have a choice, Rogelio," his judge and would-be executioner replied. "How often have you done this very thing, or worse, while you pretended to safeguard my interests?"

  "I swear to Jesus Christ above that I have not betrayed you, jefe!"

  "Save your breath for Him," the man in charge replied. "Assuming He will deign to speak with you." Then, speaking to his men, "Proceed!"

  Vélez was gagging on the fumes of high-test gasoline before the man assigned to him began pouring the fuel over his head. Eyes shut against the reeking deluge, Vélez gasped as it awakened fresh pain from his facial gashes—nothing, he knew all too well, compared with what would follow soon.

  Beside him, Vélez heard Araújo vomiting, spewing some of the alcohol he had consumed within the hour, give or take, at the Agujero de la Gloria, when he believed this night would end with sweaty sex on satin sheets. Fighting an urge to follow suit, Vélez cried out instead.

  "Please reconsider, Pablo! It is not too late!"

  "For you, it is. The choice was yours." Then, to his men, "¡Encederlos!"

  Vélez could only close his eyes and lips against the coming holocaust. He heard cheap lighters thumbed to life before one clattered at his feet, the other near Araújo's. Still, there was no blocking out the flames, their searing heat, as flames erupted from his hair, his flesh and clothing.

  For a split-second, Vélez recalled advice he had received from some old cartel warrior years before. "If you are ever trapped by fire and can't escape," his mentor in those bygone days cautioned, "face toward the flames and breathe as deeply as you can, to sear your lungs and hasten death."

  But now, blazing from scalp down to his seven hundred-dollar handmade shoes, all that Rogelio Velez could do was scream.

  2

  Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve, Central African Republic

  Reg Hardy scanned the tree line thought his Steyer AUG's Swarovski 1.5× telescopic sight, watching for movement in the shadows there.

  The Austrian assault rifle ranked high on Hardy's list of favorites. A bullpup design with its magazine slotted behind the pistol grip and trigger, it chambered 5.56×45mm NATO rounds and fed them with selective-fire capability ranging from single shots to three-round bursts or fully automatic fire. Translucent magazines allowed a shooter to determine his remaining ammo with a glance. The weapon weighed a trifle under eight pounds, measured 31.1 inches from its muzzles flash suppressor to the butt plate of its shoulder stock, and qualified for service with thirty-five armies and seventeen major law enforcement agencies worldwide.

  Today, accompanied by four veterans of FACA—the Central African Armed Forces—Hardy was prepared to intercept a group of poachers who had plagued the government and its endangered wildlife far too long.

  The unit did not plan on taking any prisoners. The Dzanga-Sangha Reserve, established in 1990, sprawls over 1,544 square miles of rainforest in the southwestern CAR. Ecologically rich, it harbors more than fifty species of mammals, many under threat of imminent extinction, plus an estimated 2,500 Baka natives dwelling as their forebears had during the Stone Age. Wildlife tourism at the reserve boosts the CAR's weak economy, but it still ranks among the world's poorest nations, where employed citizens earn an average $400 per year.

  The reserve also supports a thriving black market for poachers, particularly stalking western lowland gorillas, shot and dismembered for ghoulish "souvenirs," and forest elephants slaughtered for ivory.

  Today, Reg Hardy had the pachyderms in mind.

  Forest elephants are the smallest of Earth's three surviving species, noted for oval-shaped ears and straighter, downward-pointing tusks than those of their larger relatives in Africa and Asia. Living in family groups of twenty-odd individuals, they contribute greatly to the Dark Continent's rain forests, foraging on leaves, fruit, and tree bark, nicknamed "mega-gardeners of the forest," replenishing natural flora with seeds and pits passed through the elephants' digestive tracts.

  That is, if they survived.

  Poachers cared about nothing but money. International bans on ivory sales had the same effect as Prohibition had on alcohol, or global drug laws on trafficking in controlled chemicals. On one recent occasion, poachers had massacred an entire herd of twenty-six forest elephants, carting off the tusks, leaving their carcasses to rot.

  Reg Hardy's hand-picked team sought to accord those butchers the precise respect which they accorded to their prey.

  Forget about negotiation and "tough love." Across the so-called "Third World" justice was a stone-cold bitch.

  Hardy focused and froze. Softly advised his men, "Movement at ten o'clock."

  Emerging from the shadows, half a dozen men in camouflaged fatigues, all armed with rifles, edged into the open. Ranged around Hardy, his men sighted along the barrels of their Russian AKM assault weapons.

  "Ready," he said, then squeezed the Steyr's trigger, reaching out across one hundred yards to drop the central figure in the poachers' skirmish line.

  Short bursts of auto fire from his companions did the rest. Surprised, a couple of the poachers got off random shots but did no damage to the ambush team. Within a span of ninety seconds all of them were down and out for good. Hardy felt nothing in the aftermath of sudden mayhem other than the satisfaction of a job well done.

  No questions would be asked in Bangui, the CAR's capital city. No one among the thirty-one appointees to the CAR's Council of Ministers cared what went on in the hinterlands, as long as they could plausibly preserve deniability. Hardy's contract was strictly off the books, permitting any ministers who'd taken payoffs from a poa
ching network or illicit buyers to retain the cash with no fear of demands for a refund. This time next week, they'd likely have another source of bribes lined up and Hardy adjust his sights for those offenders.

  Hardy led his companions over open ground to form a ring around their fallen enemies. One of the poachers was still moaning, moving fitfully. An AKM round ended that.

  "So, shall we bury them?" one of his young companions asked.

  "Negative," Hardy said. "We'll take their weapons with us. Otherwise, leopards and vultures need to eat, the same as worms."

  The roam phone in his pocket shivered silently. Hardy removed it, saw the number on its LED screen, keyed "ACCEPT" to take the call. Said, "What?"

  "We have a job, if you're available," the caller answered back.

  "Same place?"

  "The usual."

  "I should be there sometime tomorrow."

  "See you then."

  Bucharest, Romania

  The Paradise Hotel had never lived up to its name.

  For starters, it was situated in the Ferentari district, ranked on most lists as the capital's worst neighborhood for crime and drugs, though it was located a mere three miles southwest of bustling, thriving downtown Bucharest. In Ferentari, alleyways and vacant lots were heaped with garbage that no city agency bothered to haul away. Armed gangs patrolled the narrow, littered streets, fighting sporadically for turf, most selling cocaine, heroin, or any other outlawed drug they did not privately consume.