King of Swords

uninhabited mountains that bisected the peninsula. Part of him wondered what had gone wrong with the bull. Everything had been so perfectly planned, and then it didn’t explode. What the fuck. It was his first failure ever, which annoyed him more than being pursued by half the Mexican army.

Spotting the cactus with the streak of yellow paint on it, he made another right turn, and thirty yards farther, pulled to a stop. All the planning was worth it, he reasoned with satisfaction. They’d never catch him, and even though he hadn’t succeeded in his attempt to kill the two presidents, this escape would be spoken of in hushed awe by police for generations.

He killed the motorcycle engine, dropped his mount and walked into a small cave that had been eroded by centuries of flash floods from the mountains. He couldn’t help but grin at the thought of his pursuers’ plight.

Cruz saw the motorcycle tire tracks careen off to the left, and he spun the wheel, nearly flipping the burly vehicle. As they tore up the arroyo, they heard a sound from above. Cruz slowed, and the men searched the sky for the source of the clamor.

An ultra-light flew off into the distance, a single man at the controls. It was already five hundred yards away, so out of rifle range, leaving Cruz and the soldiers to gape at it in disbelief.

It banked over San Jose, and made for the coast and the sparsely inhabited East Cape area.

Cruz watched it disappearing from view as he radioed to the pursuing choppers. A few minutes later they chucked by overhead, a pair of gunships after little more than a kite with a lawnmower- sized engine propelling it.

A large part of him wanted to celebrate at the prospect of nailing the son of a bitch, but a tiny voice inside him countered that they wouldn’t. El Rey may be a homicidal psychopath, but stupid or careless he obviously wasn’t. Cruz watched the helicopters disappear in pursuit, and then, finding himself suddenly purposeless, turned the wheel and headed back to the convention center, his part in the chase over.

El Rey soared over the highway and then banked again, heading in the direction of the coast. He was looking for a very specific area and knew he was on borrowed time. The search team would now be looking for an ultra-light, so he’d need to ditch soon. Fortunately, everything was still going according to plan. He fished a cell phone from the knit bag suspended from the chassis and pushed redial even as he rapidly trimmed altitude.

“I’ll be arriving in two minutes. Have everyone suited up and ready to go,” he instructed into the phone, which he then dropped; watching as it fell two hundred feet to the ground. He was deliberately flying as low as possible, so as to avoid possible radar hits, but there was always a chance, so he’d taken an extra precaution.

He rolled onto a dirt road by a large cement factory and braked to a stop, shutting off the ultra-light motor before climbing to his feet. Three men, all dressed exactly like El Rey, stood by four All Terrain Vehicles, their engines putting in harmony. El Rey nodded to them, and slipped on a waiting helmet. Now all four were indistinguishable. He had paid each ten thousand dollars to participate in a race, over alternative trails, to a common destination ten miles beyond the airport, halfway between that landmark and the coast. Every contestant had a route charted for him, and all had gotten half their money in advance, the rest to be settled when they arrived.

“Good luck, gentlemen. On your mark, get set…go!” He gunned the throttle and took off, as did the rest, each in a slightly different direction.

As he rode towards the coast, he heard the choppers overhead. They’d managed to track the ultra-light, as he’d feared. Oh well. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that there were only two helicopters. One peeled off after the pair of racers who had gone via an inland dirt track, and the other stuck with El Rey and his partner, who were taking the shore route. They cut back and forth, and then his partner shot up another dirt path to his left, and now it was just El Rey moving along the dirt road that followed the coast.

He glanced down at his speedometer; he was doing fifty miles per hour — dangerously fast on that stretch of marginal track. The helicopter, uncertain which rider to go after, had gained altitude, the better to follow them both. He knew, and had anticipated that as he rounded the point and made it to the small beach outpost of Zacatitos. The other rider would branch even further inland, forcing his pursuer to make a decision. That would be in about three minutes at the rate he was traveling. He could see the other ATV’s dust cloud to his left as they diverged.

El Rey was fairly confident that the soldiers wouldn’t shoot at four ATV riders out for a good time. Even if they suspected one of being him, no officer would give the order to start shooting, especially absent any assassination. So far, the only crime had been shooting the cop, which while serious, wouldn’t justify gunning down a group of unarmed riders. He hoped he had called that one right, as otherwise at any moment he’d have fifty caliber slugs ripping through his back — assuming the Mexican soldiers could hit a fast moving small target from an airborne helicopter, which wasn’t a given.

He still liked his odds.

As he rounded the point, the helicopter faced the expected moment of truth. He’d know soon enough which rider the pilot had decided to follow, so he slowed a little as he passed the houses in Zacatitos. He pricked his muffled ears for the chopper and heard it heading north, after the other man. His luck had held.

He continued up the coast road for another few minutes — not so much a road as a single lane, badly-rutted dirt track. The ATV was the perfect vehicle for such terrain, and he wondered how the residents got their cars over the ruts, especially during the brief, intense rainy season.

A green beachfront house on his right sat atop a bluff, the ocean crashing below the gentle seaside slope. He turned down the drive and pulled into the courtyard, taking care to close the gate after him. The house was vacant, the owners having left it empty during the unbearable summer months, which he’d gleaned from talking to a real estate agent who’d shown him the property two weeks earlier. He’d broken in last week and made the meticulous preparations for his escape.

The serenity was broken by the shuddering whump of rotors, as the helicopter followed the road, three hundred feet above the ground. El Rey glanced at it and figured he had about twenty to thirty seconds. That would be more than enough time. He opened the garage, stepped inside and hefted his insurance policy to his shoulder. He was hoping they might miss the ATV out front, but wasn’t betting on it. Fifteen seconds later, the chopper was hovering fifty feet from the house, slowly dropping in altitude in preparation to land. When it was a hundred feet off the ground, the aircraft exploded in a molten orange fireball, dropping and crashing into the rocky soil beyond the road. A second explosion of the fuel tanks rattled the house windows, and then all that remained was an inky-black column of oily smoke rising from the wreckage.

El Rey set down the Iranian surface-to-air shoulder-fire missile and flipped the laser guide closed. It had performed as advertised. He was a satisfied customer. Maybe he should have taken the purveyor up on his double-discount offer.

Perhaps next time.

Knowing that the helicopter crash would draw more scrutiny within minutes, he pulled the ATV into the garage and shut the doors. Now it was just another multi-million dollar house on the beach.

And what a nice beach it was. White sand, medium drop off, some submerged rocks, little undertow.

El Rey quickly stripped and donned the waiting neoprene wetsuit. He retrieved his dual tank scuba harness and mask from the corner of the garage and after strapping it on, carefully walked down the beach, a pair of flippers in hand. Once in the mild surf, chest deep in the water, he donned the flippers and went under, checking the waterproof compass he’d strapped to his wrist. He swam out forty yards in search of a yellow nylon line with a float on it at the thirty-five foot depth. Submerging until he could grab it, he pulled himself down until he was on the bottom, next to the two Torpedo 3500 scuba propulsion units he’d anchored there the previous day. He unclipped them both from the chain and activated one, clipping the other onto the rear of the first. Each unit would run for roughly forty-five minutes, giving him an effective range underwater. And because he’d just be pulled along he wouldn’t use much air, so he’d make it to the waiting shrimp boat, out in the Sea of Cortez, no sweat. Two miles offshore, within an hour and a half, it would be stationed, waiting for his arrival.

Worst case, he could swim it. But the Torpedoes were worth their weight in gold.

He pointed the unit out into the open sea and got under way.

It was a good day for a boat ride.