Cartel: A Jason King Thriller (The Jason King Files Book 1)

by Matt Rogers

  He had no business there.

  They could spend as much time as they wanted looking for him.

  It would only leave Ramos unprotected for longer.

  The path ahead became clearer. Looking past the sheets of rainfall and the overbearing jungle canopy and the dense foliage covering every inch of available ground in sight, King could make out a man-made path that had been hacked into the perimeter of Piedras Negras, leading deep into the trees. The work had been done with machetes, creating enough space for vehicles to lumber through to an unknown destination.

  It could only mean one thing.

  The trail into Ramos’ facility.

  King hurried away from the ruins, staying low, shrinking into the foliage. It wasn’t hard to remain unseen. The tropical storm had unleashed madness upon the Mexico-Guatemala border, strictly limiting visibility to a few feet and masking all noise other than the loudest of artificial sounds. It was all-encompassing, all-consuming.

  King plunged back into the jungle.

  The setting he found himself in was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. It took him a moment to process, especially due to the state of his nose. Already, the cheek area on either side of his nose had started to swell, puffing his skin up underneath his eyelids. It made it hard to see. He heard the thumping of liquid against the rainforest floor and looked up to assess what the hell was happening.

  Big mistake.

  A torrent of falling water splattered across his face hard enough to flare up his broken nose again. He winced and ducked his head, realising all at once where the deafening sound came from.

  The jungle canopy had created an enormous makeshift canvas that collected rainwater across its broad fronds. The massive waterfalls came down sporadically as the fronds gave way under the weight of the liquid. King gazed out at the dark jungle before him, staring at the cascading streams of rainwater dotting the path ahead.

  He kept striding along the path, thoroughly drenched and painfully sore.

  Up ahead, he saw the facility.

  It was effectively an enormous camp site, composed of a main, two-level warehouse surrounded by living quarters and a collection of small huts. Giant floodlights atop the warehouse pierced through the rain, flooding the encampment with fluorescent light.

  Through the storm, it appeared as a blurry, heavenly glow.

  King knew it was nothing of the sort.

  He tightened his grip on the AK-47 and crossed the bare patch of land between the jungle and the facility’s edge.

  There appeared to be no-one home. They were all out in the ruins of Piedras Negras, searching for him. King wondered if Ramos was among them. If so, he would double back and mow through the enemy forces until he found his man.

  He hadn’t come this far for nothing.

  Ramos had to answer for what he had done.

  King burst into the warehouse with his adrenalin spiking through the roof. He experienced an overwhelming sense of deja vu — it was identical to the factory back in Tijuana, down to the finest details.

  The floor stretched out for what felt like a mile, running all the way to a point in the distance. The workstations were aligned into neat, orderly rows, just as they had been back in the maquiladora factory.

  The only difference between the factory in Tijuana and the one King had just stepped foot into was the complete lack of occupants.

  It was a ghost town.

  That was probably the way Ramos had intended it to be.

  He thought he was safe out here.

  He didn’t think King would make it through his forces.

  He was wrong.

  With the rain pounding against the other side of the corrugated iron roof hard enough to block out all other noise, King slunk through the rows of machinery, passing barrels of hydrochloric acid and gasoline and other mixers that were used to filter the coca leaves into pure cocaine. He checked every shadowy corner for signs of life — the halogen bulbs dangling far above didn’t provide much illumination.

  It created something out of a horror movie.

  The dim light cast long shadows over everything, exacerbating the tension and the uneasiness. King wrongly sensed movement in his peripheral vision every few seconds, twisting on the spot and aiming with the Kalashnikov to find nothing there.

  Where is everyone? he thought.

  They couldn’t all have been sent out to look for him in Piedras Negras.

  No-one would make such a foolish decision.

  There had to be more forces here.

  Somewhere…

  King began to sweat uncontrollably in the intense humidity of the warehouse. Condensation clung to everything in sight, forming and evaporating before his very eyes.

  He jolted on the spot, glimpsing movement in the distance. He narrowed his gaze and made out a similar row of elevated offices that he’d seen in the facility in Tijuana. They were slowly falling to pieces, rusting in the extreme conditions.

  King didn’t imagine the offices were used very often.

  A flight of old metal stairs led up to the rooms, which were arranged in a long row of cubes. The movement he’d seen had come from the window to the main office. A shadow had passed across the dirty glass, backlit by a soft light that came from within.

  King hurried across to the flight of stairs.

  Everything about it felt like a trap. From the emptiness of the warehouse to the strategically-timed figure passing across the window above — all signs pointed to someone goading him up to the office. He knew exactly what was happening, but that didn’t change a thing.

  Subconsciously, something told him it was Ramos.

  He was prepared to throw caution to the wind to capitalise on that hunch.

  Despite his best intentions, he made a racket climbing the flight of stairs. They cracked and creaked and wobbled underneath his combat boots, struggling to support his weight.

  He poked his head above the landing, staring up and down the shoddy stretch of flooring running along the front of the offices.

  The coast seemed clear.

  Gripping the Kalashnikov, unsure as to how many bullets he had left due to the adrenalin rush affecting his concentration, he stepped up onto the landing.

  The room that contained the source of the movement lay dormant. There was no sign of life in the two windows, both fingerprint-stained and cloudy, making it hard to see what was going on inside. The door had been left ajar, with a single crack of light filtering through the gap.

  King scurried over to the office’s front wall and pressed his back against the warm steel, directly beside the doorway. He could see through the gap in the doorway through to the opposite wall.

  It gave no answers.

  ‘You don’t quit.’

  A voice resonated through the doorway, spilling out from the office. King recognised it immediately. It carried a flabbergasted tone, but it was still laced with icy determination.

  Joaquín Ramos would not be going down without a fight.

  47

  ‘How did you know it was me?’ King said, his mind racing as he weighed up the possibilities of what might happen next.

  Ramos could bullrush him. There could be seven men crammed into the tiny office, all heavily armed, just waiting for him to make a move. The second he stepped into sight he would be met with a storm of gunfire, and that would be it for the short-lived career of solo operative Jason King.

  ‘Who else would it be?’ Ramos said. ‘No-one has balls like that around here. No-one strolls into a tiny apartment pretending to be someone else when he’s outnumbered three-to-one by me and my men.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Somehow, it seems to have worked out for you.’

  ‘I have a question,’ King said.

  ‘I guess now’s a better time than ever.’

  ‘Did you retreat back to this facility because of the Draco cartel, or because of me?’

  ‘Fuck Draco,’ Ramos hissed. ‘I wouldn’t change my schedule for them if m
y life depended on it. Or almost anyone, for that matter. Don’t think I was scared, either. I don’t fear a soul on earth. But when someone as unpredictable as you shows up, I need to spend time assessing what the next move needs to be.’

  ‘Now I’m here,’ King said. ‘You don’t need to think any longer.’

  ‘You step through this door and I’ll put a bullet in your head.’

  ‘You sure about that?’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘I’m awfully accurate.’

  ‘So am I.’

  King listened to the way Ramos’ voice carried itself across the room. From his rudimentary assessment, the tone seemed to fill the space rather easily. King guessed that other than perhaps a desk and a few chairs, the office was empty.

  It didn’t sound like there was a small force waiting for him.

  But he couldn’t be sure.

  One on one, he liked his chances. It would come down to a matter of reflexes, a typical gunfight straight out of a Western. It would rely on who had the nerve and the calm focus in the heat of the moment to aim and fire accurately.

  King liked his chances in that scenario.

  But it wouldn’t be as straightforward as that. He was sure of it.

  ‘You’re United States military?’ Ramos said, his voice emanating from the same place. He hadn’t moved from the same position. King pictured him with a barrel trained at the doorway, possibly crouching behind a desk. ‘Special Forces?’

  ‘Not really your concern right now,’ King said.

  ‘Of course you are. Only way you could have got to Bennett. He was intercepted at the border, right?’

  King said nothing. He squatted down and pinched two fingers around a jagged piece of rust that had peeled away from the metal walkway. With a heave of exertion, he tore the palm-sized chunk free, cutting both his fingers in the process. Warm blood gushed out of the cuts, covering the piece of rust, but it didn’t faze him in the slightest.

  He hurled the thick sliver of rust and metal through the gap in the doorway like a fastball, turning his body as he did so. He put his entire bodyweight into the motion. It hit the opposite wall hard enough to sink into the plaster.

  At the same time, King swung his boot around and kicked open the door with enough force to send it flying off its hinges. The rust embedding itself into the wall accompanied by the booming crash of the door landing on the office floor created a cacophony of noise.

  Anyone inside couldn’t help but react to it.

  As soon as his boot met the door, King darted back out of sight and pressed himself against the wall. He hadn’t caught a glimpse of the interior of the office, but he was certain of what was to come.

  Sure enough, an automatic weapon roared and bullets shot past him out the doorway, carrying through to the main floor of the factory itself. Just as the gunfire started, it ceased a moment later. Ramos realised that the move had been a ploy to scare him into action.

  Silence settled over the factory once again.

  With his ears ringing, King couldn’t be certain of what he’d heard, but he didn’t think his mind was playing tricks on him.

  It had almost definitely been a single stream of gunfire.

  One man.

  Ramos.

  ‘Where’s the rest of your men?’ King said, still taking cover beside the doorway.

  ‘Out looking for you.’

  ‘Bullshit. You have more than that. I know it.’

  ‘You think I’m going to tell you what I’m doing here just because you kicked a door open?’

  ‘I thought you might be willing to help me out. If you’re so certain that you’ll make it out of here alive, then what’s the harm?’

  ‘I might not make it out of here alive,’ Ramos said. ‘But in the end, you—’

  At that moment — just as Ramos had entered the middle portion of his speech — King rounded the corner and stepped into the open doorway.

  He took in everything that lay in front of him in less than a heartbeat.

  The room’s sole purpose was to store unused furniture, judging by the straw-made wicker chairs piled high across the room. Stacks of flimsy furniture had been arranged in a rudimentary barricade, behind which Ramos stood cowering.

  King had the Kalashnikov trained on the man’s temple in the blink of an eye.

  He felt the bullet slice through the skin on his shoulder as the muzzle flare registered before his eyes. Nerve endings screamed for relief, blood spurted from the thin line drawn across his sweaty, mud-coated skin, and he felt the fingers of his right hand against the AK-47’s grip falter slightly.

  He’d been hit — but beyond recognising that a bullet had struck him, he tuned everything else out. Adrenalin masked the pain.

  Cortisol pumped through his veins, concentrating every fibre of his being on the target directly in front of him. Most of Ramos’ body was covered by the stacks of chairs, protecting his vital organs from a direct gunshot.

  But not the top of his head.

  King fired, rolling with the motion as the Kalashnikov kicked back against his shoulder, the barrel recoiling as it fired. He glimpsed a puff of fine red mist and Ramos went down behind the rudimentary barricade, collapsing unceremoniously to the floor.

  The situation was still incredibly volatile.

  King sprinted across the short stretch of space between them and leapt over the chairs with everything he had left in his body. He landed directly on top of Ramos, preventing the man from swinging his weapon around to fire off a last-ditch retaliation shot.

  He crunched into the man’s stomach, winding him. He heard the breath burst from Ramos’ lungs, and felt his limbs squirming underneath his form.

  He was still alive.

  The headshot — miraculously — hadn’t killed him.

  King bared his teeth and spun on the spot, adopting the jiu-jitsu position known as “side-control”. He lay on his stomach sideways across Ramos’ chest, pinning the man helplessly to the ground underneath his own bodyweight.

  He used the position to assess which hand Ramos was holding the gun in. When he located it, he snatched at the weapon and tore it free from the guy’s grasp with animalistic determination. He hurled the gun away — where it bounced off the far wall and came to a standstill well out of reach — and seized Ramos by the throat, slamming him back down onto the wood-panelled floor when he tried to rise.

  King breathed a sigh of relief.

  Victory.

  48

  It was undeniable that Ramos was in horrendous shape.

  The Kalashnikov bullet had sliced across the very top of his skull, carving a bloody path through his scalp. It had shot past him after that, embedding in the plaster wall instead of lodging in his brain and killing him. The hair in the centre of his head was gone, torn away by the Parabellum round.

  Already, the wound had started to bleed profusely.

  The blood drained from Ramos’ cheeks, his eyes darting left and right with all the panicked intensity of a man who knew he was mortally wounded.

  But he also knew that he had some time left.

  ‘I can survive this if I get to a hospital, yes?’ he said through a sweaty mask of terror.

  King kept his hand pinned firmly across the guy’s throat. In this position, he didn’t look so intimidating. King thought of all the hundreds — if not thousands — of men and women that Ramos had slaughtered mercilessly in his quest for a dollar. He would never understand the psyche of men like the one underneath him.

  He would kill them all the same, though.

  ‘Probably,’ King said. ‘You’d better get there quick if you want to stop the bleeding.’

  ‘You’re going to take me there.’

  ‘Somehow I doubt that.’

  Ramos coughed pathetically, regurgitating a vile concoction of blood and vomit. ‘You don’t ever back a desperate man into a corner. You don’t think I would have prepared for this after what you did to my men back in Tijuana?’

  ‘Pr
epared for what?’

  ‘You are a noble man, yes?’

  King said nothing.

  ‘You serve your country?’ Ramos said.

  Silence.

  ‘You try to do good?’ Ramos said.

  King tightened his grip on the man’s throat.

  Ramos smirked through bloody teeth. ‘That’s what I thought. You can’t let any of your precious innocents get killed. That won’t do you any good in this world.’

  ‘The fuck are you talking about?’ King snarled.

  ‘You will take me to a hospital, and then you will do exactly what I say from that point onward. Because I have the manpower and the contacts to cause massacres across Mexico. One phone call and I can gun down a hundred innocents. You want that blood on your hands, American?’

  ‘You’re not exactly in the position to be able to do that, Ramos.’

  ‘Prepare for the worst,’ the man wheezed, winking. ‘That’s how I got all this. That’s how I built this fucking empire with my own two hands. Because I don’t underestimate people like you.’

  King stayed quiet, but he couldn’t hide a slight tremor that ran its way down his arm, ending in his fingertips that were curled around Ramos’ throat. The man sensed it, and sneered.

  King shifted uncomfortably. He didn’t know what to think. Nothing felt right about the deserted warehouse, and the mood exacerbated his uneasiness. From the rain slamming against the roof above his head to the unbearable humidity leeching sweat from his pores to the foul stench of the warehouse floor, jam-packed with vile and rancid processing ingredients.

  Everything about it set him on edge.

  ‘Spit it out,’ he snarled, putting enough pressure on Ramos’ larynx to cut off the man’s airflow.

  Blood rushed to Ramos’ cheeks as he went red in an attempt to breathe. The crimson stuff continued to pour out of the top of his head, an event that would prove fatal unless the wound was tended to soon.

  ‘There’s a small village,’ Ramos gasped as King released the pressure. ‘Couple of miles from here. I sent my men there.’