STONY MAN

Operating under covert Presidential directives, the elite black ops group known as Stony Man is bound by honor to risk the ultimate price to uphold freedom.

MENTAL MELTDOWN

Following a series of suicide bombing attacks along the U.S.-Mexican border, the relatives of a dead female bomber attack Able Team, descending from social to homicidal in a matter of seconds. Clearly these bombings are far more than random killings. Searching for an answer to the seemingly psychotic episodes, the black ops group discovers someone is controlling these people’s minds with a new drug that leaves them catatonic or dead, after first giving them the extraordinary urge to kill. While Able Team follows leads in the U.S., Phoenix Force heads to investigate similar bombings in the Middle East. With numerous civilians already infected by the drug, they must eliminate the source before the body count of unwilling sacrifices mounts.

“ROCKET! ROCKET! ROCKET!”

Small arms began crackling and popping outside. Lyons heard the distinctive thud of an RPG launching off its tube and the hiss of the rocket motor igniting. He rolled behind the couch, covered his eyes and jammed his thumbs into his ears. By some miracle the rocket-propelled grenade hit the doorjamb rather than the door itself. The house shook and windows shattered.

“Enough of this less-than-lethal garbage…” The Ironman snapped in a drum loaded with lead.

James bounced up but immediately dropped back down. “Incoming!”

Pol dived to put the kitchen between him and the blast. Lyons and James leaped for the hall. The grenade hit the front door, which dissolved in an orange flash. Superheated gas and shrapnel expanded to fill the living room and the heat wash rolled through the house. Lyons sat up, yawning against the ringing in his ears. Gadgets spoke from his concealed position. He’d set up a small suite of minicameras to watch the house perimeter.

“You got twelve guys hitting the front. Five more are breaking off and flanking for the back.”

“Copy that, Gadgets. Hold position, wait for the shot. Pol…don’t let ’em in.”

Mind Bomb

Don Pendleton

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

EPILOGUE

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

Rosario Blancanales came out of the coroner’s office shaking his head. Carl Lyons sat behind the wheel of a bottle-green Renault 12 Estate and rolled his eyes behind his mirrored sunglasses. “Goddamn wild-goose chase.”

It was July. It was noon. And it was 110 degrees. The city was a blast furnace and felt ready to blow.

Carl “Ironman” Lyons, the leader of Able Team, had to give Juárez some credit. The city had managed to fall from being the number-one murder capital of the world to number two. Yet violent turf battles between the Juárez and Sinaloa cartels still rocked the barrios, and there was genuine war in the streets between the cartels and the army and state police.

Juárez had managed to drop to number two in murder overall, but the city still managed to be the number-one murder capital for women in all of the Americas. Juárez’s profoundly disturbing and mostly unsolved strings of kidnapping, torture, rape and murder of its young women continued unabated. Throw in total governmental corruption from top to bottom and the Paso Del Norte had just about seen it all.

But it had never before encountered suicide bombers, which was why Able Team was on the scene. The supersecret US covert operations team was dispatched only for the most urgent and dire situations. Only the President and a very select few of the Man’s advisers even knew of the existence of the highly trained, deadly team based out of Stony Man Farm, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of rural Virginia.

Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz, the third member of Able Team, sat quietly in the backseat watching their six, but Lyons could just about hear him thinking the same thing.

Blancanales put on his happy face as he climbed into the car. “How you boys doing?”

Lyons peered over his mirror sunglasses. “I’m in Mexico. In July. Driving a French station wagon without air conditioning.”

Blancanales grinned. “Well, at least it’s a dry heat!”

“Carl?” Schwarz rolled a sweating grape Fanta bottle across his brow. “Shoot him.”

Lyons considered it. “We got nothing?”

“It makes no sense.” Blancanales sighed. “None of the bombers has any connection that I can find. They come from all walks of life. Different ages and sexes, different parts of town. Go to different churches. The only thing they seem to have in common is that they’re all Mexican nationals. I swear it’s almost like they were picked at random.”

Lyons shook his head. “People don’t randomly strap on suicide vests.”

“No, they don’t,” Blancanales agreed. “And I hate to pull the barrio-boy race card, but homicide bombing isn’t a Latin MO. Something is wrong with this. All of it.”

Schwarz twisted open his bottle of pop. “Anyone?”

“Cherry,” Lyons declared.

“Tamarind.” Blancanales nodded. “Thank you.”

The three Able Team commandos sat in the vintage 1980s French station wagon and drank soda.

Schwarz had been turning his considerable intellect on the problem. “Blackmail is the only angle I can see. The cartels or someone had something on the bombers, or were threatening their families and coerced them.”

“To strap on a bomb and check out? In public?” Lyons snorted.

Blancanales shook his head. “It’s thin.”

“So thin I want to buy it a sandwich,” Lyons concluded. All three men were warriors, but Blancanales and Schwarz were soldiers. Lyons had been a homicide detective. He had kept his cop’s nose when he joined Able Team and often still approached situations like a detective.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Schwarz conceded. “You got anything better?”

Lyons turned to Blancanales. “We got anything better?”

Blancanales glanced up the street. “We got him.”

As a black Lincoln Navigator with tinted windows appeared at the intersection at the top of the street, Schwarz made a bemused noise. “And we got them.”

Lyons checked his rearview and saw a black Nissan Titan pickup that wore tinted windows, as well. “Looks like we got our first lead...”

Schwarz polished off his pop and reached into the duffel at his feet. “Sticking your head out to see who tries to blow it off is Phoenix MO. I thought us Able guys were supposed to be smart ’n’ stuff.”

“Not smart enough to get a decent car,” Lyons growled. Stony Man Farm had arranged for the CIA to position a clean, no-questions-asked vehicle at the safe house. When this was all over, Lyons was of a mind to track down the asshole spook in question to have a serious Q and A about what the hell species of farm animal manure they had between their ears. In the meantime, Lyons arranged a smile on his face that could have sold toothpaste. He held up his cherry Fanta and waggled it at the SUV watching them. “Hey, morons. Hi. Yeah. Yeah, you. I’m gonna kill every last one of you.” Lyons nodded and grinned like an idiot. “Except one and he’s gonna wish I had.”

Schwarz toasted a fresh purple bottle at the pickup behind them. “It’s true! He’s gonna! I’ve seen his work!”

Blancanales sighed and polished off his pop. “Can we go now?”

Lyons jerked the wheel and put the pedal to the floor. The R-12 Estate took its time, its 63 horsepower time, and lurched rather than lunged into traffic. Horns blared, tires screamed and traffic veered around the wallowing Renault. Lyons snarled in disgust. “Oh, for God’s sake!” He ignored the mayhem all around and took a straight line for the side street. The two black, V8-powered 4x4s lunged like hounds off the leash.

“There’s a third vehicle somewhere. They’re going to go for a pin,” Blancanales advised.

Lyons kept the pedal down, waiting for something in the car to respond. “You think?”

Schwarz hurled his empty pop bottle out the window and Blancanales and Lyons followed suit. There was almost no chance broken glass would do anything to the huge off-road tires of their adversaries, but it might cause some flats in the surrounding traffic to get in their way. “Shot” would have been charitable but the Renault finally managed to “scoot” up the alley and squirt into the next cross street.

A second Titan pickup came screaming up a few seconds short on timing to trap Able Team in the alley. Lyons turned straight into them. He played chicken for two seconds and then cranked the wheel and jumped up on the sidewalk. The only good news was that it was noon and hardly anyone was out walking on the heat-shimmering pavement. Lyons shot past his opponent. The pickup screamed in a beauty of a bootlegger’s turn.

The Able Team leader grimaced. “He’s good!”

Schwarz watched the Lincoln boil out of the alley behind them. “We’ll never make the safe house.”

Lyons agreed. “No shit.”

“Slow and steady wins the race,” Blancanales opined.

“Well, we’re already driving a French turtle, Pol! Any other suggestions?”

“Slow and steady. Drive slower and shoot steady.”

“Finally he talks my language.” Lyons limboed back over his seat and the passenger bench as Blancanales slid into the driver’s seat. He rolled into the wagon bed and unzipped his gear bag. The Able Team leader drew the massive Atchisson semiautomatic shotgun and removed the 24-round drum magazine. Velcro tore as he opened the bag’s side pockets of specialized ammo. He took out an 8-rounder.

The Navigator came roaring out of the alleyway behind them. The SUV’s starboard grille was crumpled, and smashed headlights hung by wires from the impacts but nothing seemed to be slowing the leviathan SUV down. Pinning prey in traffic with large SUVs and trucks and then filling the target car with lead was a favorite tactic of Mexican sicarios. This was a full-blown professional hit.

The Nissan Titan and the Navigator locked ranks and tore after them. The third pickup would be screaming through traffic trying to get ahead of the action.

Lyons tapped his magazine to make sure the rounds were still correctly seated. The face of the top three-inch Magnum shell was not crimped like buckshot nor did it present the sunken flat face of a slug. It gleamed like quicksilver and looked nothing so much as the nose cone of a missile. The tip was the point of a tungsten-steel long-rod penetrator. The gleaming, spiral-grooved metal around it was hard-cast lead. The rod was designed to tear through the engine block of a vehicle. The hard-cast lead would shatter like shrapnel and tear apart hoses, belts and small moving parts. John “Cowboy” Kissinger, the Stony Man armorer, had designed the round from the ground up to kill cars.

“Pop the back!”

Blancanales laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

Lyons put both his feet against the hatch frame and aimed between his boots. “Cover your ears!”

“Shit!”

“Madre de—”

The Atchisson detonated like doomsday in the confines of the Renault. The hatch glass literally atomized outward from the kinetic energy.

The armor-piercing round slammed into the gleaming grille of the Navigator. The Navigator’s hood flew. Bits of flame burst upward as gasoline and oil suddenly went places it wasn’t supposed to. The giant SUV swerved blindly and rammed a telephone pole.

Lyons yawned to clear his ears and took aim at the Titan. The 12 gauge kicked him like a mule as he put two quick shots through the pickup’s grille. The Titan fishtailed wildly and came on. Lyons raised an eyebrow. “Nissans, who knew?” He flipped his selector to full-auto and let her rip slightly left. Three rounds tore through the grille and hood, the last two walking up the driver’s-side windshield. The Titan went from fishtail into full spin and rolled.

Blancanales stood on the brakes. Gears ground as he rammed the car into Reverse and hit the gas. The Renault actually had a little torque in reverse and shot backward. “Carl, I want at least one in talking shape and we need to get out of here fast.”

Lyons snapped out his empty magazine and snapped in a 24-round drum. He leaped out and strode toward the crashed Lincoln, steam shooting out of its radiator.

Mexican cartel muscle often deactivated the air bags on their usually stolen vehicles so they could ram, crowd and pin their targets without pause. And since they might have to jump out, they never wore their seat belts. Mexican cartel muscle spilled out the doors of the SUV like broken drunks.

The Able Team leader tenderized them. He’d snapped in a drum Dutch-loaded with rubber slug baton rounds and rubber buckshot. Lyons proceeded to give each cartel man a 2-round burst—first a slug, followed by buck. The killers deflated beneath the brutal double blows and collapsed to the pavement.

An assassin popped up out of the sunroof screaming and trying to bring an Uzi in either hand to bear. Lyons squeezed off a round. The buckshot was rubber but the fist-size cloud pulverized an eye and smashed out teeth. The multiple blows to the skull probably hadn’t helped, either. The killer flopped back boneless over the luggage rack.

As sirens wailed in the distance, Lyons ran a practiced eye over his fallen opponents. He watched as one man emerged from the flipped Titan. His face was a bloody mess and he moved as though he was swimming in molasses. Nevertheless he was making a very determined effort to crawl away. “That one has spirit,” he grumbled.

Lyons walked up upon his man. The crawler screamed as the Able Team leader gave him a rubber round in each arm and leg. The killer twitched like a landed squid. Lyons scooped him up into a fireman’s carry and carried him to the Renault. “Fat moron...” He potato-sacked him through the blown-out back window and dived in. “Go!”

CHAPTER TWO

The Safe House

Carl Lyons lifted his head from cleaning his shotgun and sniffed the air. Schwarz’s hand went to his pistol. “What?”

“I smell coffee and doughnuts.”

Schwarz rolled his eyes at the former cop. “You smell them in your sleep.” Nonetheless, Schwarz rose and took up his pistol. Lyons clicked a fresh drum into his shotgun as Schwarz hit the buzzer and the door clicked.

Blancanales walked into the little patio and set a cardboard tray of café con leches and churros on the wrought-iron table between the guns. “You know? I’m a confirmed Starbucks man, but I am really liking the Cielito Querido coffee.”

Lyons inhaled several ounces of espresso and scalded milk without swallowing and grabbed a banana-size, sugar-rolled pastry. “Tell me you got us a new car.”

Blancanales gave Lyons a look of mock hurt. “Of course.”

“What kind?”

“Another thirty-five-year-old station wagon.”

“No damn—”

Blancanales gestured like a professional hand model at the door he’d left open. Lyons leaned out to stare at the big, boxy, ancient beast parked outside. The original ox-blood paint job had faded to a dull brown. The fake wood paneling on the doors now looked like very well-weathered bamboo where it wasn’t peeling.

Schwarz’s brows bunched. “Ford Granada?”

“Indeed, a GL, with a rebuilt 302 V8. She runs like a top. Someone had the good taste to remove the electric rev limiter—over 300 horsepower under the hood. She handles like a tank. But, should we step on the gas—” Blancanales tossed Lyons the keys “—the girl will go.”

Lyons caught the key ring. “I take back all those things I said about you.”

“I should hope so. What do we have on our prisoner?”

Schwarz had been chatting to the Farm on his laptop. “We have one Señor Oribe ‘BolaBolo’ Uribe.”

Blancanales shook his head at what was to come. “Bowling ball?”

“Yeah, it’s some kind of Mexican slang contraction of bola de bolos. You’d know better than me. Depending on whether you are a man or a woman, sometimes regardless, Uribe takes a bowling pin and inserts it into a body cavity. Which orifice? That depends on what you’ve done and how angry he is with you.”

Blancanales set down his coffee. “Is it too late to say too much information?”

“Then, while you contemplate this intrusion he takes a ten-pound ball and starts pulverizing fingers and toes with an overhand no release. He’s famous for going from frame to frame to get answers. We have a video of him playing a ‘ten frame’ game on an informer. It ain’t pretty.”

Blancanales made a determined effort to go back to enjoying his coffee. “Don’t need to see it.”

“Yeah, you don’t want to.” Lyons jerked his head toward the safe house basement stairs. “He’s wearing a luchador mask in the video, but the idiot took off his shirt during the proceedings. His physique and tattoos are a lock.”

“A wrestling mask?” Blancanales scoffed.

Schwarz handed Blancanales a tablet. Blancanales scanned Uribe’s jacket and mug shots. “That does appear to be our boy.”

Able Team was of a mind.

“They went for a pin,” Schwarz observed.

Lyons nodded. “Didn’t shoot at us much.”

“And they brought along a cartel torturer and interrogator,” Pol concluded.

“So why would the cartels be involved in seemingly random suicide bombings, much less any after-the-fact gringo investigations?” Schwarz asked.

“Dunno.” Lyons looked to Blancanales. “Let’s ask him.”

“Good idea.” Blancanales smiled. “Give me the keys. Finish your coffee. I’ll be back in about an hour.”

Lyons tossed him the keys. “Where you going?”

“Shopping.”

* * *

URIBE SAT IN the cellar in his underwear, handcuffed to a pipe. Despite the massive blunt trauma on his arms and legs, his wrists were bruised and abraded from trying to pull the pipe free of the wall. Neither the cast-iron drainpipe nor Uribe was going anywhere. Uribe was built like a middleweight who had given up boxing and taken up hot-dog eating competitions. His shoulders, chest and arms were still muscled but he had a gut that looked as though he’d swallowed one of his bowling balls, and he was bowlegged. Religious tattoos that the Catholic church would frown upon intertwined with Juárez cartel symbols that crawled down his arms, chest and stomach. He had a face like an Aztec statue with a crew cut.

Lyons sat in a chair opposite, giving him the hard stare over a folding card table. To Uribe’s credit he hadn’t started blubbering and spilling.

Blancanales came down the steep steps with a duffel bag over his shoulder, followed by Schwarz. Able Team was fairly sure Uribe had not gotten any kind of look at Blancanales. Uribe proved it by looking Blancanales up and down and spitting on him. “¡Raza traidor!”

“Race traitor?” Blancanales smiled without an ounce of warmth. He was the lord of role camouflage and he affected a perfect Mexico City accent with both his Spanish and his English as a second language. “I am venganza de la raza, Bowler. I am the vengeance of our race, and for what you have perpetrated against La Raza?” Blancanales reached into his bag and set a bowling pin on the table. “You attacked these gringos. They learned who you are, BolaBolo. They have delivered you unto me.”

Uribe blinked.

“You are going to pay.” Blancanales set a large tube of personal lubricant next to the bowling pin.

Uribe paled with shock. “No...”

Blancanales reached into his duffel and pulled out a vintage leather bowling bag. He unzipped it to reveal a scratched and ancient eleven-pound bowling ball. Blancanales nodded at Schwarz. “Set up the camera. This goes out live.”

Uribe went white.

Blancanales lifted his chin at Lyons. “Take off his chonies.”

Uribe threw up the churro and pineapple Fanta he had been given. He screamed and gagged at the same time. “No! No! No!”

Lyons ripped off Uribe’s tighty-whiteys with a yank. Schwarz set up a small video camera on a desktop tripod as Blancanales squeezed clear lubricant over the top of the bowling pin like he was topping an ice cream sundae. “Turn him over. Head down, ass up.”

Uribe screamed and kicked. Lyons effortlessly grabbed his ankles and brutally spun him facedown. The killer keened like a rabbit being killed as the Able Team leader kicked him into position. Schwarz scoffed as Uribe was kneeled up into a scary uncle. “Someone’s been in lock-up before.”

“No!” Uribe moaned. “Anything!”

“Any what?” Lyons snarled. “Name anything you can do for me except bleed out from internal injuries!”

“Anything!” Uribe shrieked. “I’ll tell you anything!”

Blancanales stared down at Uribe, as cold as a medieval executioner. “This man is mine.”

The Bowler threw up again. His voice cracked into a ragged soprano range as he shrieked at Lyons. “Anything!”

Lyons kept his face neutral. Playing the “good cop” was an extremely rare experience and he intended to enjoy it. “Why?”

Uribe shuddered. “Why what?”

“Why are you here?”

The whites of Uribe’s eyes were like a deer’s in the headlights. “You brought me!”

“Why did I bring you here! Why am I talking to you! Talk to me or Señor Venganza has his way!”

“I’m just a sicario!”

Sicario was the Latin-American term for cartel muscle and killer. The term was as ancient as the Bible. “You’re a torturer, a disappearer and a learner of secrets.”

“We were paid! Anyone who came asking! About the bombers! To take them! Find out who they were. Who they worked for. Then make them disappear!”

“Who paid you?” Lyons demanded.

“I don’t know. The orders came from the top.”

Lyons believed him. “New Juárez Cartel?”

“Yes!”

“Who gives you orders?”

Uribe shuddered in shame. “El Guillotino.”

“Bowling Ball and the Guillotine...” Schwarz muttered. “Love these Juárez guys.” He picked up the bowling ball. “Give him the ten pin, flip him, spread him and let’s see if I can pick up the split.”

“No!”

Lyons stared implacably at the cowering, naked killer. “What’s El Guillotino’s name?”

“Eladio Manzo!”

“Tell me about the bombers.”

“The bombers!” Uribe wept in fear and confusion. “Fanáticos! Psychos!” The torturer started to rise. “Who knows—”

Lyons drew his Colt Python and cocked it. “Head down, ass up!”

Uribe whimpered and resumed the position.

“You’re saying the bombers weren’t working for the cartels?”

Uribe actually looked shocked.

Lyons considered the quivering waste of skin in front of him. He tended to believe him. Lyons had been on both ends of some very rough interrogations, but he was not a torturer. He suddenly dropped to his heels beside Uribe. BolaBolo shrieked like he no longer had a pair. Lyons deemed his subject ready. “You wanna live?”

“¡Por favor!”

Lyons reholstered his six-gun. He dragged a folding chair over, took a seat and put his shoes up on Uribe’s ass as if it was a footstool. The Able Team leader drew the battered leather notebook from his days as an LAPD detective and clicked open an equally ancient Fisher Space Pen. “Tell me about Manzo...”

Dragonslayer

JACK GRIMALDI GRINNED from the pilot seat. “Guy’s really got his own working guillotine!” Stony Man Farm’s premier helicopter delivery system of man and ordnance was currently configured in civilian white flight camouflage. The ace pilot noted El Guillotino’s close-to-Kennedy-worthy compound.

“You want to do it right?” Blancanales lowered his binoculars. “Hire a Mexican.”

Lyons scowled beneath his optics. The head-chopping Manzo asshole had literally built a guillotine to the original French Revolution specifications. Even with a walled compound Lyons was pretty sure having a French Empire execution machine, gleaming in the sun, twelve feet tall, just off the tennis court, was illegal as hell in Mexico. Mexican bylaw enforcement seemed to be falling down on the job. They had probably fallen over piles of money. “Gadgets?”

Still wearing his telephone lineman’s rig, Schwarz stared at the dial and switch icons on his laptop. “His security is good.”

“Gadgets good?”

“No.” Schwarz snorted. “He’s got way too much stuff attached to his phone lines.” The Guillotine’s computers weren’t Farm good, either. Schwarz knew every nuance of El Guillotino’s defenses. “He’s got a safe room off his bedroom, and the asshole literally has a private elevator off that to his underground garage. Better figure on a private arsenal to go with it. He can hole up for a siege, or he can rabbit. I can disable his sensors and alarms, and we can figure on fifteen minutes max before the federales respond to gunfire this far out in the boondocks.”

Lyons took up the satchel charge at his feet. “Is he still home?”

Schwarz nodded. “He’s still home. He was looking at internet porn five minutes ago on his tablet and no vehicles have left the compound. The heat and the homicide bombings have everyone staying inside.”

Blancanales took out a P90 personal defensive weapon. It vaguely looked like Captain Nemo’s submarine Nautilus in matte black with black plastic furniture. He spun a suppressor onto the threaded barrel. “Want to just do it now?”

Schwarz absently drew a similar weapon and suppressed it while he kept his eyes on his tech. His hand moved to hover over the return key. “You want his shit turned off?”

“Is he in his bedroom?”

“Can’t tell. We’d have to look in the window, and—”

Grimaldi suddenly dropped Dragonslayer. “Let’s check!”

The helicopter pulled up a dozen meters from Manzo’s panoramic bedroom. The space consisted of a king-size bed and an IMAX-size entertainment center.

Grimaldi shrugged. “I don’t see anybody.”

Lyons eyed the garage-size closet doors. “Take me right over the closet.”

A handful of people stepped out and squinted up into Dragonslayer’s rotor wash. Several of them openly held handguns. Grimaldi nosed over the roof and the cabin door opened on hydraulics. Lyons pulled the rip cord on the satchel charge. The sound of the rotors drowned out the fuse but Lyons had his own internal clock. He heaved the canvas-packed charge.

Grimaldi dipped Dragonslayer’s nose and gave his girl the spurs. The chopper streaked away from the blast radius as the high-explosive charge dropped through the bedroom roof in a blast of smoke. Lyons checked the loads in his shotgun and checked his coil of fast rope. “Right back! Everyone! Mask up!”

Dragonslayer whined and thundered as Grimaldi banked around. Able Team pulled on their gas masks as Grimaldi pulled to another stomach-dropping halt that raised the chopper’s nose. They threw their fast ropes down into the smoking ceiling cave-in and Lyons shouted over the rotor sound. “Go! Go! Go!”

His teammates exited and Lyons followed. The friction of the fast rope heated up under his hands for a few heartbeats, then his boots hit rubble. The Able Team leader fired a 5-round burst of tear-gas rounds through the open bedroom door into the cavernous interior. Twelve-gauge CS shells didn’t pack much irritant per capita, but Lyons had a lot of them. Both Blancanales and Schwarz tossed flash-bangs.

It was Lyons’s favorite sort of home invasion. The Guillotine had rings of defenses around the perimeter, but Able Team had dropped in from the center. Manzo’s mansion was all open floor plans with glass walls. There was almost nowhere to hide. It was the perfect house to kick ass and take names.

Lyons marched forward, his teammates flanking him. Below people shouted, screamed, coughed and wept in Spanish. Lyons did a quick peek around the doorjamb and emptied nineteen more CS rounds into the IMAX-theater-like interior. Bullets ripped up in response but the enemy was firing blind and had no line of sight on the bedroom landing.

“Gadgets?” Lyons asked.

Schwarz dropped to the floor and reached into his bag of tricks. He pulled out a highly modified GoPro camera with a two-foot-long flexible fiber-optic lens extension. He worked the two tiny joysticks on the control plate of his own devising and the lens bobbed like a snake over the balcony to scan through the gas beneath. “Got hostiles behind the kitchen island.”

“Pol, stun and sting,” Lyons ordered.

Blancanales leaned out of the door frame and fired a stun grenade into the kitchen area. It was a 40 mm and the house thundered like an echo chamber. Blancanales followed it with a 40 mm sting ball grenade. The munition slammed into the oiled bronze of the restaurant-size refrigerator and 150 hard rubber spheres ricocheted off everything including screaming human flesh. “Get some, I’ll cover.”

Lyons and Schwarz rapidly moved down the stairs, tracking through the gas for targets. The former LAPD cop thumbed his throat mike and spoke into the PA system built into his custom-designed gas mask. The voice scrambler made him sound disturbingly like Darth Vader. “Paging Mr. Manzo. Paging Mr. Manzo...”

Lyons smiled beneath his mask as a ragged, choking voice screamed, “Screw you!” from behind the kitchen island

A Glock flopped over the cultured marble and popped off a couple rounds blindly and ten meters off target. Lyons snapped his shotgun up, took an extra second to aim and gently touched off a round. The CS gas projectile smashed into Guillotino’s gun hand and sent the Glock spinning away. Manzo screamed and flopped backward as the shell imbedded in his hand fountained gas between his fingers.

Lyons rounded on the kitchen aisle with Schwarz on his six. Team Guillotine was in a bad way. Sting-and-stun had beaten them down and the level of CS gas was going toxic. Lyons snapped in a 12-round magazine of buckshot and shot out the kitchen windows. He put two bursts into the two-story panoramic window looking down on the hillside and glass fell in giant, jagged sheets. Gas billowed out into the burning afternoon heat.

Manzo lay on the tile, gagging and mewling. Lyons’s round had literally punched through the back of his hand and oozed wisps of irritant from the front.

Schwarz photographed weeping and beaten men for the Farm’s database. He chuckled under his mask at the stigmata Manzo bore. “That’s a first even for you,” he said to his teammate.

Lyons shrugged beneath his mask and armor but he was secretly very pleased with himself. He took a knee, flipped and zip-tied Manzo. “Guillotine secure. We’re out of here, Pol.”

Blancanales swiftly descended the stairs. “On your nine, Ironman. We got a live one.”

Lyons turned. A man did a push-up and rose from the tiles. He was bloodied, beaten and choking. His hair was close cropped in a fade and beneath his pink tank top and Team Cruz Azul track pants he had a physique that could genuinely have taken him into the final round of a Mr. Mexico bodybuilding competition in the heavyweight division if it wasn’t for all his gang tattoos. He squinted through streaming eyes and took in Lyons kneeling over Manzo.

Lyons thumbed his PA. “Don’t do it.”

The muscleman walked toward the coffee table and the AK-47 lying on it.

“This one has spirit,” Lyons acknowledged. He put three tear-gas rounds into the muscleman’s bank-vault pecs. The cartel enforcer staggered backward with his Herculean chest a ruined mosaic of blunt trauma and impacted CS particles. He straightened and continued again for the rifle on the table.

Lyons frowned under his mask. “Gadgets?”

Schwarz raised his weapon and fired the M-26 modular accessory shotgun slaved beneath his submachine gun. His was loaded with a gas round rather than a gas projectile. CS gas erupted out of his shotgun like a high-velocity fire extinguisher and occluded the muscleman’s head. Musclehead staggered out of the cloud blindly, groping for the assault rifle.

“This one’s a freak!” Schwarz snarled.

Blancanales sighed across the com. “I hate the tweekers.”

“Genuine gift of emptiness.” Lyons kept a knee on Manzo’s chest but drew his Python. “Gadgets, light him up.”

Schwarz squeezed the trigger on his side-mounted CEW. The weapon chuffed and the twin probes sank into the smoldering hamburger meat Musclehead called a chest. Most conducted energy weapons hit and swiftly ebbed as their batteries drained. Schwarz’s weapon was a highly modified device of his own design. The lithium-ion batteries hit full charge and, rather than tapering, continued full charge until they suddenly cut. When Schwarz gave Mr. Most Muscular Mexico all twelve million volts, the cartel enforcer shuddered as if someone had put a quarter in him. He still took a step forward.

“Son of a bitch!”

Schwarz held the trigger down. The probes snapped, crackled and popped like God on High’s own million-volt Rice Krispies. The Latin Schwarzenegger finally fell twitching to the tiles. “Son of a bitch...”

“I like him,” Lyons decided. “Pack him up, but use the steel. Handcuffs and shackles.”

Jack Grimaldi’s voice came across the com. “I got chatter across the emergency channels. Smoke, explosions and the Old Faithful level of tear gas going into the sky has been noted. I’ve been hailed and asked who I am. Farm says federale helicopters are deploying. There is chatter from Santa Lucia Air Force Base. They are scrambling F-5 fighter jets.”

“Beat it, J.G.,” Lyons ordered.

“Gone!” The sound of Dragonslayer’s rotors faded into the distance.

Schwarz finished clapping Musclehead in irons. “And our extraction?”

Lyons went to a door off the kitchen and kicked it open. The garage door was opening and a man behind the wheel of a Jeep Cherokee screamed in terror. Lyons raised his weapon. The guy should have closed the driver’s-side window. The Able Team leader pumped five CS rounds through the open window into the Jeep’s interior, and the vehicle promptly swerved, ran over a dirt bike and crashed into the side of the garage.

Lyons gazed upon a gleaming black 2015 Cadillac Escalade. He grinned at the Peg-Board strung with keys beside the door. He snatched the one with the Cadillac symbol on it. “We’re taking the Caddie.”

CHAPTER THREE

The Safe House

The Guillotine and “El Roble” sat bound to folding chairs. Enrico “the Oak” Olivar was a low-level thug in the scheme of things.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger had been the top bodybuilder in the world, his nickname was the “Austrian Oak.” Enrico had taken up the El Roble sobriquet in homage to his hero. He was small-time cartel-wise, and apparently not particularly bright. Everything the Farm could dig up on Olivar indicated he was kept around for intimidation purposes and low-level collection services. The charges against him, all of which had been dropped, were simple assault and battery.

Bowling Ball was still in his underwear and still handcuffed to the pipe. Guillotine glared bloody murder at him. Uribe stared at the floor between his feet unhappily and refused to make eye contact. All three criminals wore duct tape over their mouths. The Oak stared at Manzo, then at Lyons and then back again. He did this for long seconds as if he was doing Chinese algebra. The Oak flexed his mighty muscles against his shackles and started doing the math again. He’d been performing this cycle like a broken record since his blindfold had been removed. Lyons didn’t care for it all. Back at the Guillotine’s mansion Olivar had not displayed roid-rage aggression or pit-bull loyalty to his master. He’d kept going for his gun like an automaton.

Schwarz had been forced to light him up twice in the car and to put a replacement power module in his CEW. Lyons had even dug out his own TEK-12 flashlight/stun gun and armed it.

He strode over to Manzo and ripped off his gag. Lyons jerked his head at Olivar. “Is he always like this?”

“Bastard!” Manzo screamed. He was screaming at Uribe. “Dead! You are dead!”

Bowling Ball cringed.

Lyons shook his head. “I asked you a question.”

“Screw you!” Manzo spat. “I’ll kill you all! Your wives! Your whore mothers! I’ll kill your—”

Lyons snapped off a drill-sergeant-worthy hand-cut motion. “Gas them. Gas them all. Close the cellar door and I’ll ask again in half an hour. And shoot him in his other hand.” Lyons spun on his heel. Schwarz gave Manzo a shit-eating grin as he took out a grenade and pulled the pin. Blancanales racked the action on his modular shotgun.

Manzo shrieked. “No! No! No! No! No more gas!”

Lyons shot a glance at the Oak. Olivar’s muscles twisted and flexed like pythons in his restraints. Manzo’s speaking seemed to have put Olivar into an even more extreme state of agitation. “Is he always like this?” Lyons reiterated.

“No?” Manzo spoke nervously. “And it is kind of freaking me out.”

Lyons addressed the Oak. “Dude, what is your malfunction?”

Blancanales mirrored in Spanish. “¿Cuál es su fun-cionamiento defectuoso, hombre?”

El Roble began shaking as though someone had put a quarter in him again. Lyons glared at Schwarz, who threw up his spare hand. “It’s been half an hour since I juiced him!”

Manzo leaned away from Olivar in alarm. “What did you freaks do to him?”

Lyons read Manzo like a book. This was not Oaken normal and the Guillotine was genuinely freaked out by what he saw. The Able Team leader decided to work with Manzo’s shaken state. “So what’s with you and suicide bombing? Is Mr. Most Muscular here one of your strap-on psychos?”

Manzo gaped. Not like a man caught with his pants down, but like a man who was nonplussed. Lyons might as well have asked him the circumference of a moose. “What?”

Lyons pressed Guillotino anyway to gauge his reactions. “The bombs, asshole. The shit going on in this town, that has it on lockdown. Why are you pulling security detail for terrorists?”

Manzo’s jaw dropped. “Why would I do that? No one needs that shit!”

Lyons loomed. Manzo cringed. Lyons thundered. “Why are you batting cleanup for terrorists?”

“¡Madre de Dios! The terrorists are you! You CIA pricks! We were told to capture or kill any of you yanqui assholes who came trying to clean up your mess! Messing with La Raza? Starting your fake terrorist shit war on the border? Furthering your norteamericano conquistador agenda?” Manzo managed some spine. “Screw you and your black ops shit!”

“I believe you.” Lyons smiled a winning smile. “Now who gave you these reconquista bullshit manifesto talking points?”

Enrico “the Oak” Olivar snapped his handcuffs and shot to his feet. He immediately tripped over the leg irons fastening him to the chair. He fell on Manzo and toppled him over. His jaw distended like a snake trying to eat prey bigger than its head.

Lyons snarled. “Not today, Sparky!” Lyons lunged and vised Olivar’s ear between his thumb and forefinger and yanked back. Olivar reared and snapped his head to the side. Lyons stood by his nickname and neither moved nor let go. The Oak’s ear tore off in Lyons’s hand.

Olivar snapped his head down and sank his teeth into Manzo’s neck. Manzo keened like an animal. Uribe screamed in captive horror. Schwarz and Blancanales charged. Lyons took his TEK-12 in an ice-pick grip, jammed the electrodes between Olivar’s shoulder blades and hit the red button. Lyons felt the jitters from their body contact and smelled ozone as volts with six zeros behind them were delivered. Lyons’s eyes flared as Olivar rose up like a cobra and seized Lyons’s throat with spastic strength. The Oak’s lips skinned back from bloody teeth. On a good day Olivar could bench-press five hundred pounds. Now that steroid-built gym-strength was wedded to insanity. Lyons was borne over against his will.

The Able Team leader shot one hand into Olivar’s throat and squeezed off his trachea. The Oak didn’t seem to care. He grabbed Lyons’s hair and pulled himself down toward Lyons’s face, baring his teeth and drooling like a rabid dog. Lyons pulled a sacrifice and let Olivar pull him in with both hands.

He shoved his stun gun between Olivar’s teeth and hit the button.

Any electrician would tell you that electricity was a wily and uncertain thing. In Lyons’s own experience some people, dependent on drugs or willpower, could shrug off a stun gun’s effects. The TEK-12 didn’t have to meet the resistance of clothing or human skin. Olivar’s mouth was an optimal cavern of wet conductive-pathway mucous membranes. Tongue and gums burned. Mucous membranes led down his throat to his stomach and bowels, branched out into his lungs and spread up through the sinus cavities into the optic nerves and brain.

Enrico “the Oak” Olivar lit up internally like the Fourth of July.

Lyons shuddered as he took the secondary conduction but he held the button down. Olivar collapsed like 220 pounds of dressed beef, and Lyons let go of the shock switch. Olivar threw up all over Lyons’s chest. “Son of a bitch...”

Blancanales packed a field dressing against Manzo’s ripped right carotid. “He needs a hospital.”

Lyons shoved his CEW into Roble’s emasculated ear hole in case he turned froggy again. El Roble softly shuddered and drooled bile and blood on Lyons’s collarbone. Lyons kept his thumb on the red button and stared at the cellar ceiling. “I need a vacation...”

Safe House, El Paso, United States of America

LYONS GLARED INTO the middle distance. They had gotten out of Mexico but the whole situation was FUBAR. Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, the Stony Man computer genius, shook his head in the window on Lyons’s laptop. “Things go bad. We’ve been here before.”

Lyons wished he had a churro and a café con leche. Old Mexico always managed to convert him to her ways for a few days after he’d visited. He horked down a Krispy Kreme maple-iced glazed and Starbucks Americano. “We’re going back in. We start from scratch.”

Kurtzman didn’t like it. “Bowling Ball is useless. I say let him go and see where he runs.”

“I agree.”

“Guillotine had part of his voice box bitten out. It will be days before we can get him to tap out anything on a tablet. Assuming he doesn’t clam up and demand a lawyer.”

Lyons considered his muscle-bound opponent. “How’s the Oak?”

“The Oak is currently dying of internal electrical injuries, with his voice box burned out, by the way. We have no leads.”

Lyons went detective. “We go to back to square one. We do interviews.”

Kurtzman sighed. “I don’t see how that would help. The surviving bombing victims and witnesses have been interviewed by the Mexican authorities, the FBI and Interpol extensively.”

“No, I’m talking about the perpetrators’ families.”

The Stony Man cybernetics whiz tried to fathom where Lyons was going with this. “Carl, same deal. No one could find any terrorist ties in any of their backgrounds. The families and friends of the homicide bombers were horrified. They’re destroyed. No one doubts their stories.”

“I know. But Able showed up in Ciudad Juárez and suddenly everything went all Armageddon. I wonder if the same thing will happen if we go in again.”

Kurtzman hated every aspect of it. “You know you may be putting those families at risk.”

Lyons hated it as well, but he’d always been a let-the-truth-be-told-though-the-heavens-fall kind of guy. “At this point I can’t see them not being involved somehow, willingly or unwillingly,” Lyons kept his poker face as he threw out the bone and desperately hoped for a response. “You got anything better, Bear? I’ll go with it.”

“I got nothing more than you, and it sounds like you have more than me.”

Lyons resigned himself to his last, least-worst option. “Then I’m going with the Villa family.”

“Carl?” Kurtzman’s voice hardened. “They’ve suffered enough.”

“Which means they’re the most anomalous. You tell me what makes a nice Mexican girl go that way and I’ll believe you.”

Kurtzman looked away. “I got nothing.”

“Give me and Able a decent cover. Pol takes lead. I want Gadgets on our six in the background. Me and Pol? Our cover won’t have to last more than forty-eight hours but I want it pretty solid, enough to fool a grieving family and any local police.”

Kurtzman saw his solution within seconds. “I’ll have Barb work it up and get you documents, IDs and cover files via courier.”

Lyons nodded and rose. “I’m in a car.”

Ojinaga, Chihuahua

LYONS STOOD TO one side leaning against the family room wall and watched Blancanales work his magic. His partner wore his sixth-best tropical-weight suit and looked exactly like a senior insurance investigator. He exuded paternal concern for the distraught family as he interviewed them. Blancanales didn’t have to fake it. Neither did Lyons. In his own days as a police officer he’d been given the terrible task of informing families many times. Lyons grimaced internally. They meant business when they said there was nothing worse than seeing your children leave the world first.

The Villa family had been destroyed.

For a father of six, Rafa Villa had only just turned forty. His red-rimmed eyes looked a thousand years old. Señor Villa’s shoulders sagged as though they held the weight of the world. His wife, Juanita, cried so hard as her younger sister Sofi held her that her tears might make Jonah build a second ark.

Their daughter, Maribel, had just turned eighteen this month. She had graduated at the top of her class at the private Catholic school her parents had scrimped and saved to send her to. The pretty young girl with glasses and black hair that reached her waist had won a foreign student scholarship to the University of Northern Texas. Her declared major was Library and Information Sciences. Her dream was to be a head librarian somewhere in the United States. Two weeks ago she had gone to Texas for college orientation with her aunt Sofi as her chaperone. Maribel had come back with a somewhat geeky but very earnest blond boy and fellow freshman Todd Potter from Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, who’d texted her surprisingly not bad love poetry.

One week ago to the day Maribel had strapped on a suicide vest of TNT cylinders. The cylinders were wrapped with plastic sheeting containing nuts, bolts and ball bearings. The homemade shrapnel had been coated with rat poison to facilitate uncontrollable hemorrhaging in the victims. Security camera footage showed Maribel Villa stepping into a crowded cantina in Ciudad Juárez, during the lunch rush, yanking off her raincoat and pulling the rip cord fuse. Maribel had killed six people, seven including herself. Two of them had been children. She’d severely injured eighteen others.

It was utterly senseless. During her short life, Maribel had never left Ojinaga until her short trip for initial orientation and dorm assignment at UNT. There was no evidence of her having any political leanings whatsoever. Maribel’s three great passions in life appeared to be classical Spanish literature, the Ojinaga municipal library where she worked after school, and her dog, Kaliman.

The fawn-colored boxer lay forlornly, uncomprehending but inundated with his family’s sadness. Lyons dropped to his heels and scratched the boxer behind his ears. Lyons’s inner detective was not buying Maribel being radicalized over a single weekend while under the watchful eye of her aunt, much less at freshman orientation at the University of Northern Texas. The whole thing stank to high heaven. He sighed quietly at Kaliman. “Who’s a good boy?”

Kaliman’s docked tail twitched forlornly a few times as he licked Lyons’s wrist. Lyons nodded. “You and me both, brother.”

Blancanales looked over at Lyons. “Señor Irons, do you have any questions?”

Lyons and Blancanales had come to the Villas’ small farm posing as insurance investigators. One Latin and one Anglo fit the bill. A three-man team would have seemed too much. Schwarz was up in the hills with a rifle maintaining surveillance on the Villa farm and the two approaches to it.

An undertaker would have given his left testicle for the empathy and professionalism the Able Team leader exuded. “I know the state and local police have already done so, but with permission, I would like to see your daughter’s room. Of course you both are welcome to observe.”

Señor and Señora Villa looked at Lyons petting the family dog. Juanita Villa gave Lyons a tremulous smile. “Of course.”

Rafa Villa hung his head for a long moment. Lyons almost thought he had gone to sleep. Señor Villa raised his head and locked eyes with Lyons. “There is something I have not shown the federales.” Fresh tears spilled down the small farmer’s cheeks. “Something terrible.”

Juanita’s head snapped around. “¿Qué, mi amor, qué?”

Rafa Villa rose without a word and walked down the narrow adobe hall to his daughter’s room. Lyons and Blancanales shot each other a look and girded themselves for the worst.

Señor Villa reemerged with an assault rifle. Lyons wasn’t a gun-bunny but he recognized the weapon as one of the relatively new Mexican military FX-05 Xiuhchoatls or “Fire Snake” rifles. The weapon was black and stubby like most modern military weapons. It was Mexico’s first indigenous assault weapon, and only issued to certain units. If you were found with one and not active in the Mexican military it was pretty much a summary death sentence. It was a very strange thing for a teenage Mexican girl to have under her bed. This example was distinguished by a having a nonmilitary-issue, twin-drum, 100-round Beta C-Mag.

Alarm bells rang up and down the Lyons’s spine.

Señor Villa was not carrying the weapon like a holy relic, or like a dangerous serpent involved in his daughter’s death. He carried it crooked in his arm, as if he was going duck hunting. Lyons shot to his feet. In the same motion his Python appeared with slight-of-hand suddenness. “Freeze!”

Villa didn’t freeze. He raised the rifle to his shoulder.

Kaliman lunged and sank his teeth into Lyons’s wrist. Lyons’s shot went low and wide left, and the pistol fell from his hand as Kaliman’s canines found his ulnar nerve.

Blancanales tackled Aunt Sofi off the couch.

Rafa Villa shot his wife in the face.

Blancanales struggled to draw but he was entangled in screaming Sofi. Villa swung his rifle onto Blancanales’s puppy-pile and strode over. Lyons heaved seventy pounds of snarling lockjawed dog into his arms and vaulted the couch. Blancanales managed to lash out with one foot to slam a stacked leather heel into Villa’s shin.

The assault rifle ripped a 20-round burst into the adobe floor a foot from Blancanales’s head. Lyons’s shoulder block hit Villa with every pound of his body and his canine burden behind it. The Villa patriarch went flying with his rifle stitching holes in the roof as he fell backward. Lyons and Kaliman fell on top of him. The boxer gave a muffled yelp but maintained his death grip. Villa struggled beneath them both. Lyons rose up on his elbows and slammed his forehead directly between Villa’s eyes. The Able Team warrior saw purple pinpricks around the edge of darkened vision with the blow.

Rafa Villa went limp.

Kaliman rolled an eye up at Lyons accusingly. He wasn’t letting go. “Damn it...” He’d drained his stun gun into Roble and hadn’t packed a spare power module. Lyons dug his left hand around Kaliman’s trachea, found the dog’s thudding pulse and squeezed off the canine’s carotids. “Bad dog, no biscuit...”

Kaliman’s jaws slowly relaxed in the strangle.

Blancanales rose with his pistol in hand. His face was bleeding in several spots from fragments of flying floor chips. He helped Sofi up. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.” Sofi glanced dazedly at her sister. “Is she dead?”

Juanita Villa’s head was road kill. Blancanales nodded. “Yes.”

Sofi lifted her chin toward Rafa. “Is he dead?”

“No.” Blancanales shook his head. “He’s—”

Sofi Valenzuela drew a Walther PPK from under her blouse and shot Rafa Villa. She calmly spun and shot Blancanales repeatedly in the chest until he fell. As she calmly raised the smoking pistol for the head shot on Blancanales, Lyons rose and shot-putted Kaliman. Kaliman met Tia Sofi like an eighty-pound sack of comatose canine potatoes. Sofi Valenzuela toppled back, ass over teakettle, over the couch wearing Kaliman like a dog feather boa.

Lyons followed his mutt-missile’s trajectory and vaulted the couch. He leg-scissored Sofi’s gun arm and snaked his arms around her neck in a sleeper hold. Lyons cinched down and performed his second strangle of the day. Kaliman raised his head from the floor and managed a hoarse growl. “Pol!” Lyons urged. “Dog! Dog! Dog!”

Blancanales rose shakily. He had taken six rounds in the chest, but the PPK’s caliber was small and his concealed soft body armor had held. Kaliman began lurching to his feet. Blancanales seized the boxer by his collar and docked tail. The hallway had a hardwood floor and he bum-rushed Kaliman down it, sending him sliding like a curling stone. Blancanales slammed the hallway door shut. Sofi sagged unconscious in Lyons’s embrace.

The front door smashed off its hinges. Schwarz swept the scene with the double muzzles of his M4 carbine and the grenade launcher slaved to the forearm. He scanned the room and saw family interview turned into an abattoir. “Clear?”

The hall door rattled on its hinges as Kaliman hit it, scrabbling and snarling. Lyons laid Sofi’s unconscious form out on the floor. This just wasn’t Able Team’s finest hour. “Mostly.”

“What happened?”

Carl Lyons took out a handkerchief and wrapped his bloody wrist. He was starting to develop a major headache from the head butt he had delivered. The only luck he’d seen today was that none of the major arteries were torn open. “Something messed up just happened.”

Schwarz looked at Blancanales, who mopped blood from his face and threw back his shoulders to stretch his aching chest. Lyons never showed it but from long experience Blancanales knew Lyons was as rattled as he was. “Carl isn’t kidding. This interview went from Twilight Zone to X-Files. Get the restraints and the heaviest sedatives we got for Señora Sofi. We need to get across the border with her ASAP.”

Lyons retrieved his fallen Python and began rapidly taking crime scene photos with his cell. The second piece of luck was that the Villa family farm was out in the boondocks. Third was that the rest of the family was out. A cold breeze blew through the Able Team leader. After what the Villa family had already suffered, coming home to this would be hell on earth. “I’m going to sweep the rest of the house for evidence. Get the señora in the car and concealed. I want to be out of here in ten and on US soil in thirty. Call Barb and tell her we have kidnapped a Mexican national and need our border crossing to be shit-through-a-goose smooth.”

Blancanales gazed down at the unconscious murderess and tried to fathom what had just happened. “And tell Barb we want Cal on this one. We need to interrogate this woman when she wakes up, but we’re going to need some subtlety.”

Lyons saw his role being reversed again. “You’re thinking I go hard, Cal goes soft?”

Blancanales nodded. “Yeah, and me observing, ideally unseen, if we can get a proper interview room.”

Schwarz pulled out his laptop. “On it.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Laredo, Texas

The FBI safe house was just about perfect. The Bureau kept it for running undercover stings. It was out in the sticks, and its main joy was that the little half bath off the living room had been faux walled off with a hidden door. It looked out on to the living room through what appeared to be an ornate two-way mirror. Lyons smiled. They had been serious about the war on drugs back in the eighties.

Schwarz sat ensconced in the hidden taping room with sound and video rolling. Blancanales stood beside him taking notes. Calvin James was the new factor in the equation. Blancanales was a psych-ops expert and Lyons an investigator, but James was the Farm’s number-one interrogator. He wore a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his tie loosened against the Texas heat. A pair of reading glasses he didn’t need perched on his nose. He wasn’t wearing a badge but even a cop would have taken him for a sympathetic law-enforcement officer trying to get to the bottom of a mystery. Lyons stood in the background like an angry stone Buddha.

Sofina Valenzuela looked at James in confusion and Lyons in naked fear. Able had kept her under heavy sedation until they’d reached the FBI sting house. Calvin James had flown in on a Farm-chartered private jet. While he had been in transit Able Team had left Señora Valenzuela alone and let her come out of the sedation naturally. For the past hour she had been in what Lyons could only describe as a fugue state. She looked like a woman who had slowly and painfully pulled herself up out of a deep, dark well and now found herself blinking into the noonday sun like a mole.

Lyons’s skin crawled. Everything about this op, since the first briefing at the Farm about the attacks along the border, had stunk; the problem was it was a smell he couldn’t put a name to, save one. Despite shooting her brother-in-law in the face and trying to kill Blancanales, Sofi Valenzuela smelled like a victim. As had her brother-in-law.

Lyons steeled himself to be the bad guy in a destroyed life.

“Where am I?” Valenzuela asked.

Calvin James opened a bottled water. “Are you thirsty?”

The woman focused on the water and spoke in a heartbreaking little-girl voice. “Please.”

Handcuffs at the wrists and ankles bound her to a heavy Edwardian chair. Lyons had a new stun gun in a small-of-the-back holster in case she pulled a Mexican Oak and snapped her restraints.

Calvin James cracked the cap on the water and held it to her mouth. She gulped half the bottle and leaned back gasping. “Why have you kidnapped me? We don’t have any money. It’s all in the land.” Lyons and Calvin shot each other a look. Valenzuela blinked again. “Where am I?”

“You’re in the United States.”

Lyons watched as she did the math, but it wasn’t the malfunction math of the Oak before he had gone all gift-of-emptiness. Valenzuela really just didn’t seem to get it. She flinched as the Ironman strode forward.

“Let me break it down for you.” Lyons held up a tablet and tapped the relevant photo file. It was the bloodbath at the Villa family farm. He brought up scenes of slaughter. “Your brother-in-law, Rafael, went to your niece Maribel’s room.” He rapidly swiped from crime scene pic to pic. “He came back with a loaded assault rifle, one with a 100-round drum. He shot your sister, the mother of his children, in the face five times.”

Valenzuela recoiled.

“Then he tried to shoot you and my friend. I managed to interrupt that. We thought it was over but then you drew a gun and shot your brother-in-law.”

Sofina Valenzuela’s face went slack. “I don’t own a gun...”

Lyons was relentless. “I could almost buy the heat-of-the-moment revenge angle, but then you turned and shot my friend four times in the chest. You were about to shoot him in the head, like you did Rafa. I had to beat you with Kaliman and choke you out. The story of the slaughter is all over Univisión. You are a missing person, considered kidnapped, which you are, and the federal police have an APB out for you.”

Valenzeula looked like she was about to throw up.

Lyons stared down at Sofi like an angry Old Testament God of the Desert with no sense of humor. “You’re telling me you don’t remember any of this?”

She shook like she might fly apart. “No...”

“Yes, you do.”

“I don’t know who you are!” The woman was close to losing it. “I don’t know what you are talking about!”

Lyons loomed in. “Yes, you do.”

Valenzeula squinted and cringed again as if she was staring into the sun. Her voice came out in a little-girl whimper. “My head hurts.”

People who had been choked out often had terrible headaches, but Lyons had put Valenzuela in a strangle. It was a relatively quiet go-to-sleep; some people actually found it refreshing.

Calvin James raised an eyebrow. He spoke sympathetically. “Señora Valenzuela? Do you suffer from migraines?”

“No.” The woman winced. “But my head, it hurts...”

“Do you tolerate aspirin?”

“I prefer ibuprofen...”

James reached into his medic bag and shook out a pair of pills. Lyons noted James’s sleight of hand and saw that one was a Valium. Calvin fed the woman the pills and helped her drink the rest of the water. “Rest for a few moments.”

James inclined his head for a private powwow and the two warriors stepped into the kitchen. “What do you think?” Lyons asked.

“If you hadn’t told me you were there? I’d believe her.”

“If I hadn’t been there? I’d believe her, too. Question is, Cal, do you believe the señora really doesn’t remember anything?”

James frowned and fished a water out of the fridge. “I don’t know her medical history, or if she or anyone in her family has any history of cognitive disorders. Of course, even if she did, she’s related to Rafa Villa by law rather than blood and it wouldn’t explain his behavior. She might have snapped from the trauma in the living room, gone berserk on everybody, and really doesn’t remember. Hysterical amnesia does exist, but it’s pretty goddamn rare, and none of that explains what she was doing with a concealed and unlicensed Walther PPK.”

“It’s louder than a rape whistle,” Lyons suggested. “And more effective.”

“I got a steak dinner that says when I ask her about the gun she says she’s never seen it before, and I’m betting she says she’s never fired a gun in her life.”

Lyons found himself agreeing. “So what do you think?”

“Positively anomalous. I want to give the Valium a few minutes to calm her down and start in again. Let me lead off, and don’t come in hard unless I give you the signal.”

“You got it.” Lyons reached into the fridge for a bottled water and vainly wished it was beer. His tablet beeped. Kurtzman appeared inset in the top right-hand corner of the screen.

Lyons tapped the screen. “What’s up, Bear?”

“Given all the weirdness I decided to keep an eye on you.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I couldn’t get an NSA satellite since you fellows hiding out in the Lone Star State under the aegis of the FBI was a low priority and not worth the hassle.”

Lyons was pretty sure he had a glimmer of what was coming. “But?”

“So, I’m spending a little observation time on a DigitalGlobe private satellite that’s supposed to be working on precision agriculture imaging in your neck of Texas. Akira hacked me in.”

“Nice, so what do you see?”

“You’re about to have company.”

“How much company?”

“Three vehicles. SUVs. They appear to have light bars on top.”

Lyons tapped his screen and spoke to Schwarz in the hidden bathroom. “You hear that?”

“Yup, any police chatter that could be relevant to us?”

“Not on our end. Bear?”

Kurtzman shook his head. “I suggest you assume they are hostile.”

“ETA?”

“Five minutes or less, and unless they’re on patrol or a picnic the only thing at the end of the road is you.”

“How’d they know we’re here?”

“No idea. Possible tracking device on Valenzuela?”

“Gadgets?” Lyons asked.

“I didn’t detect any on her when we took her. Nothing in the house has been or is giving off a radio signal.”

Lyons smiled ugly. “So someone tattled.”

James checked the loads in his HK .45. “And that someone could only be FBI.”

Blancanales spoke over the link. “If these guys are law enforcement, good or bad, there’s a million ways this goes wrong.”

Lyons made his battle plan. “Cal, get Valenzuela secured in the cellar, then come back, stay in the house and cover our six. Pol, you and I are going to meet and greet outside. Gadgets, stay concealed. You’re our ace in the hole if they assault the house.” Lyons went to his gear bag as his team moved. “Jack? We have a situation.”

“So I hear.”

“What’s your ETA?”

Grimaldi had Dragonslayer parked at the Rancho Blanco private airport, clear on the other side of the Laredo metropolitan area. “I can be there in ten flying low and skirting Laredo city airspace. Fifteen if you want me armed.”

“We got about five before they show. Arm up.”

“Inbound.”

Lyons clicked a drum magazine into his shotgun and set his gear bag out by the front door. The ranch house was adobe, which was good for stopping bullets. The front porch was about five feet above ground level and had a nice three-foot-solid running adobe rail save the opening for the stairs. The FBI house was a semidecent little fortress as things went.

Lyons set his shotgun against the porch rail and pulled up a rocker. He hooked his boot under the weapon so that he could flip it up into his hands. Pol came out to join him a moment later. He took a seat on the other side of the stairs to form a cross fire on the frontage and set his carbine out of sight. Calvin James spoke low through the open door. “Valenzuela is secure in the cellar. In position. I have eyes on the road.”

“Copy that.” Lyons saw dust rising in the distance. “Here they come.” A Chevy Suburban materialized out of the heat waves distorting the access road. It was followed by a second and a third vehicle. They weren’t shiny, armored cartel toys. To Lyons’s eyes they looked like well-used-and-abused unmarked law-enforcement vehicles. He and Blancanales watched as the lead vehicle pulled up within twenty meters. The second two broke out to either side and hung back about another ten meters. They’d formed a wedge. Men began spilling out. They wore khaki pants and blue windbreakers, and most sported cowboy hats. The majority appeared to be Latino. All of them had olive-green Glock pistols in duty rigs.

Lyons subvocalized into his mike. “Bear, I don’t suppose you have enough imaging to read what’s on the backs of their jackets?”

“I wish.”

A short man jumped out of the lead vehicle. He doffed his white hat and mopped his brow. The man had gray hair and a perfectly manicured cop mustache. He resettled his Stetson and smiled. “Howdy!”

Lyons waved. “Hey, fellas! What can I do you for?”

“Name’s Ibanez, and I need to ask you a favor. By the way, what’s your name?”

“Favor?” Lyons shrugged. “Shoot.”

“Well, I need to ask you one question.”

“Ask away!”

“And I am begging you.”

“What is it?”

“Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

The man shook his head as if embarrassed by the question. “Tell me you don’t have a Mexican citizen in there being held against her will.”

Lyons cocked his head and shook it sadly in return. “Where are you getting your information?”

“Would you mind if I ask exactly who you work for?” Ibanez countered.

“Not at all, but you go first.”

“Mind if I take a look around?”

“Not at all. Show me the warrant.”

Ibanez frowned but his demeanor remained business-like rather than hostile. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist.”

Calvin James came across the com link. “I’m looking through binoculars. You can’t see it from your angle, but two of the guys, right-hand car, standing behind the driver’s-side passenger door? They have tattoos. On their necks. One’s a spider. The other I can’t quite make out, but I don’t think its regulation, either.”

Grimaldi’s voice and vague rotor noise came across the link. “ETA five, Ironman.”

Lyons smelled a siege coming on. “All right, Ibanez, but you ain’t making any friends, and my people are gonna want to talk to you.”

“Well, I do feel bad about it, and I know my people will want to talk to you after this, as well.”

“And you and I are definitely going to have a little talk.”

“I owe it to you.”

“Fair enough.” Lyons set his water bottle on a little wrought-iron table. He snapped his knee up hard and flipped the AA-12 into his hands.

Ibanez froze for one heartbeat at the sight and slapped leather for his pistol. Lyons cut loose. He put a long burst of CS projectiles into each vehicle on full-auto. Midtraverse he put one round into Ibanez’s chest, then dived through the door.

Blancanales was already through and kicking the door shut. “I hope to God these guys aren’t for real!”

Lyons reached for a reload. “I hope you’re right.”

Kurtzman spoke urgently across the link. “They’re pulling stuff out of the vehicles. Looks like long arms! I—”

“Shit!” James fired a burst from his submachine gun out the window and dived for the floor. “Rocket!”

Small arms began crackling and popping outside. Lyons heard the distinctive thud of an RPG launching off its tube and the hiss of the rocket motor igniting. He rolled behind the couch and covered his eyes and jammed his thumbs in his ears. By some miracle the rocket-propelled grenade hit the adobe of the doorjamb rather than the door itself. The house shook and windows shattered.

“Enough of this less-than-lethal shit...” The Able Team leader snapped in a drum loaded with lead.

James bounced up and dropped back down. “Rocket!”

Blancanales dived to put the kitchen between him and the blast. Lyons and James dived for the hall. The grenade hit the front door and it dissolved in an orange flash. Superheated gas and shrapnel expanded to fill the living room as the heat wash rolled through the house. Lyons sat up and yawned against the ringing in his ears. Schwarz spoke from his concealed position. He’d set up a small suite of minicams to watch the house perimeter. “You got twelve guys hitting the front, five more are breaking off and flanking for the back.”

“Copy that, Gadgets. Hold position, wait for the shot. Pol, don’t let ’em in.”

Lyons fired a burst around the hall doorway. About a hundred bullets seemed to bee-swarm back in response. He could hear coughing and ragged shouts in Spanish. Lyons knew a few words and none of it sounded police procedural.

Schwarz spoke again. “Grenade!”

A green metal baseball looped through the blackened, smoking orifice of the front door and clattered to the floor. Lyons snapped back around the hall door as the grenade whip-cracked and lethal metal fragments buzz-sawed everywhere. Bullets began tearing through the front windows.

“They’re on the porch,” Schwarz reported.

“Wait for the shot.”

“They’re at the back door,” Blancanales reported from the kitchen.

Lyons heard the floor vibrate with boots. Schwarz told him what he already knew. “They’re entering the house, front door and front windows.”

“Take them.”

Schwarz cut loose. The two-way observation mirror shattered. Schwarz had a 60-round, quad-stack magazine loaded in his carbine and he held the trigger down. He took the attackers by surprise and from the flank. Schwarz reaped them like wheat.

Calvin James had flown out for an interrogation rather than a firefight, but the ex-SEAL had packed an MP5 submachine gun just in case. He put burst after burst into the men in the windows. Lyons stayed on one knee and leaned around the corner. He had a straight shot at the back door. Blancanales had an angle on it with his carbine-shotgun combo. The door hammered on its hinges, but the nice boys at the Federal Bureau of Investigations had installed decent doors, and anyone pounding on it had to be standing on the narrow stair.

Blancanales nodded at Lyons and burned an 8-round mag of his car-killing ammunition through the wooden portal.

Screaming out back joined the cacophony of screaming and gunfire at the front.

Grimaldi came across the link. “I have you in sight.”

“Copy, Jack,” Lyons responded. “Anything outside is hostile and legit.”

“Commencing gun run.”

“Copy. Everyone down!”

Dragonslayer was currently in civilian camouflage. Part of the facade was a rescue winch mounted over the starboard-side cabin door. The aerodynamic fairing did not house a motorized winch and three hundred feet of cable. It was a facade that contained a six-barrel “six-pack” micro-gun. The mini Gatling gun snarled into life and swept the porch and everyone still on it. Dragonslayer banked in a tight orbit and hosed down the surviving men at the back door.

“Ironman, I have drivers in the vehicles.”

“Disable the trucks.”

“Copy that.” Grimaldi continued his orbit and put a long burst through the hood of each vehicle.

“Gadgets, what do you have on the porch and the living room?”

“All targets are down.”

“Break position and cover the vehicles. Cal, go get Valenzuela. Pol, on me. Sweep and clear.”

Lyons and Blancanales checked the fallen. There wasn’t much to check. Schwarz had an assault rifle with a 60-round mag and the range had been fifteen feet or less. He’d fired high in case the men were wearing concealed armor. The fallen mostly had spaghetti for heads. Calvin James had been more surgical. His targets still averaged 75 percent of their facial features.

Dragonslayer’s PA system thundered like God on High. “You! In the vehicles! Throw out your weapons! Come out with your hands up and lay facedown on the road!”

Calvin came out of the cellar with an unconscious Sofina Valenzuela over his shoulder. Lyons suspected James had tranquilized her so she wouldn’t have to see the slaughterhouse upstairs. Lyons stepped out into the sunshine. The enemy outside had fared little better. Grimaldi’s six-pack fired 3,000 rounds a minute. The weapon was slaved to the pilot’s helmet-mounted sight. It didn’t fire unless he had a lock. Anyone the pilot gave even a one-second burst took fifty rounds.

The annihilation of the enemy was total.

Lyons nodded to himself. Not quite, he had three drivers currently going prone in the road and he was secretly relieved they appeared to be shit-scared as opposed to going into some brain-dead Kamikaze mode.

The Able Team warrior smiled as his boots crunched on the gravel road and he stood over his main quarry. The man lay sprawled on his back gasping. He had taken two CS rounds in the chest and was feebly swatting at the mass of smoldering CS particulate that had scorched the front of his uniform. Lyons made a mental note to buy stock in the company.

“Ibanez! About that little talk you owe me...”

CHAPTER FIVE

Ciudad

Carl Lyons showered off the stink of sweat, gunpowder and CS. All their suspects save Ibanez were in the hospital or in custody. Other than re-invading Mexico, there was very little to do but wait.

Able Team was ensconced in a brand-new, mildly palatial house in a new Laredo suburb. Theirs was the only finished house on the block. The rest of the subdivision had yet to recover from the housing crisis. The Farm had picked it out and it suited Lyons just fine. If the enemy found them here something genuinely spooky was going on. Able had run into spooky before, but in the Ironman’s experience 99 percent of spooky involved ignoring the scary trappings, figuring the angle and then attacking. Lyons followed his nose and took a seat at the kitchen bar. Blancanales handed him a plate of steak rancheros and eggs with enough hot sauce to scar the colon of a normal man.

Lyons took a bite and grunted his appreciation.

His mood took away some of his enjoyment of the food. Lyons had been fighting his war for some time, sometimes in some very strange places under even stranger circumstances. There was that one percentile of spooky that refused to be explained. The Ironman had seen things explainable and otherwise that would haunt him to his grave. He took a meditative sip of his coffee.

He didn’t care for what he’d seen in the past forty-eight hours.

The laptop on the counter chimed. Lyons tapped an icon and Kurtzman popped up. Lyons shoveled down steak. They’d been idle for eight hours. “That was fast.”

“We got a lot of data to crunch still, but we have plenty you want to hear now.”

“What do we have on the khaki lackeys from the ranch house?”

“They’re Zetas.”

Lyons was confronted with a “two plus two equals five” situation. “Zetas?”

“Confirmed. All of them have records in Mexico. Some have sheets here. We have fingerprints and matching tattoos.”

“The drivers?”

“They’ve clammed up, but veteran Zeta wheelmen, all three.”

Lyons confronted the five-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. “Guillotine, Bowling Ball and their guys who hit us in the streets are all New Laredo.”

“That is correct.”

“Last time I heard, Zetas and New Laredo don’t get along.”

“They don’t. As a matter of fact they’re at war at the moment. The Mexican state police and military have made some high-level busts against the cartels this past year in Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and Coahuila. The Zetas, New Laredos and the Gulf Coast boys are all fighting to fill the void.”

“Doesn’t it strike you a bit odd that New Laredo tries to hit us. We hit New Laredo back, but it’s the Zetas that cross the border to come looking for us?”

“Tad bit,” Kurtzman admitted.

“What’s the story on Ibanez?”

“That’s Captain Ibanez to you.”

“What?”

“Oh, you’re going to love this.”

Lyons hated it when the Stony Man cybernetics genius said that. “What?”

“Captain DeLoran Desus de Ibanez. Webb County Sheriff’s Office. ‘DiDi’ to his friends and ‘the Double D’ on the street. Decorated veteran of twenty years on the force. Some people think he’ll make sheriff some day.”

If Lyons got headaches he’d have one. “So what’s he doing leading an army of Zetas in cop clothing?”

“Good question.”

“We got any FBI connection with Ibanez?”

“Webb County Sheriff’s Department works with FBI, DEA and ATF and every other acronym on a daily basis. Ibanez has worked over a dozen multi-jurisdictional task forces. It’s a tangle of red tape but we’re taking it from the latest and working backward.”

Lyons went back to the beginning of spooky. “How’s Miss Valenzuela?”

“Well...” Kurtzman’s craggy brow furrowed. “Cal tranquilized her to get her out of the house and to the hospital.”

“Yeah, and Ibanez, too. So?”

“She never woke up. She seems to be in a coma.”

“Whatever Cal hit her with would have been mild. He knows what he’s doing.”

“Yeah, he used ketamine, just enough to make her comatose.”

“Could she have had a bad reaction to it? Or a mix? He’d given her Valium earlier. She’d been freaking out pretty hard. Could she have been on something else, as well?”

“Blood test showed no known narcotics in her bloodstream. Just the ketamine and Valium. Both low dose. She should be sleeping like a baby, not totally unresponsive to outside stimuli.”

Lyons jumped forward in the timeline. “How’s the Oak?”

“El Roble died about an hour ago.”

Lyons felt a little bad about that. He’d never fried someone from the inside out before. “I didn’t think he’d make it.”

“There were anomalies.”

Lyons quirked an eyebrow. “Drugs in his system?”

“He tested positive for steroids, as you might imagine. It appears he was an occasional user of marijuana.”

“So what was anomalous?”

“His pupils were blown.”

Lyons considered that. “Trauma will do that to you.”

“But from what I read in your preliminary after-action, neither you nor anyone else hit him in the head.”

The Ironman considered Olivar’s robot walk and the things Able had done to him. “No, you’re right. No one hit him in the head. I electrocuted him, though. That’ll cross a man’s eyes.”

Kurtzman made a face. “Read about that, but the doctor said his pupils were blown and at the same time he appeared to be in REM sleep.”

“Rapid eye movement? How could he tell his pupils were blown?”

“Because his eyes were open.”

Lyons paused. “He was dreaming with his eyes open and his pupils blown?”

“He was also trying to talk but you’d fried his mouth and throat.”

Lyons painted the picture in his head. “That’s not creepy.”

“Horror-movie creepy, apparently. Despite his condition he nearly broke his restraints. The nurses went into complete freak-out and refused to tend him. The doctor in charge was literally about to call the Nuevo Laredo diocese to see if they had an ordained exorcist available.”

Lyons shoveled down more steak. Spooky was at 2 percent and rising but he wasn’t about to have the Farm work him up any silver bullets just yet. “So he died.”

“Yes, but not from the fluids filling up his lungs or the internal electrical burns. He didn’t wheeze or gasp or fade. According to the doctor he suddenly shut off, like someone turning off a light. He said you’d have to shoot someone in the head for them to die any quicker. He said working the ER in Nuevo Laredo he’d seen just about everything. Said he’d never seen anything like Olivar, from the moment he rolled in to the moment he punched out. The doctor sounded like a good man and he sounded genuinely shaken up.”

Lyons ate steak. “All right, until you get more on your end I’m thinking we are headed back across the border again, maybe if we—”

“Bastard!” An enraged voice boomed from the other side of the house. “I will kill you!”

Lyons checked the loads in his Python and scooped up his stun-light. He tapped Kurtzman’s window blank but left his own camera and audio rolling.

“Follow me.” Lyons followed the sound of thumps, bumps and profanity.

James stood in the hall by one of the spare bedrooms. “We got a live one.”

“What happened?”

“He came up from the transportation tranquilizer I gave him about an hour ago.”

“Blinking, mumbling and confused as I recall.”

“Right, but not like Valenzuela. More like he’s in some waking dream or coming off a bender. Then about a minute ago he woke up. And I mean snapped into awareness, found himself handcuffed to a bed and he is pissed.”

Lyons opened a chat window and texted Blancanales and Schwarz.

Prisoner awake. He’s seen me ’n Cal. Stay back unless called. Let’s see what Webb County Sheriff’s Department has to say.

Lyons and James strode into the room. Carl set the open laptop on a dresser to give the camera a good view of the prisoner. Ibanez lay spread-eagle on the bed. James had removed his scorched jacket and uniform shirt and dressed his burns. The captain had some pretty exciting blunt-trauma bruising and his eyes were still red and his voice hoarse from the gas. Despite middle age he was built like a boxer in training. Captain Ibanez was full-on Latino but he had a good-ol’-Texas-boy accent thick enough to cut a knife with. “And just who the hell are you?”

Lyons put a great big check by that and smiled. He took out his ancient detective pad and made a vaguely questioning circular motion with his pencil. “What? You don’t remember me?”

“Oh, I am gonna remember you, asshole!” Ibanez snarled. “You have any idea who you’re screwing with?”

Lyons spent a long infuriating moment searching his eyebrows for the answer. “Webb County Sheriff’s Department?”

Ibanez smiled pure hatred. “That’s right, smart guy, and you are so dead.”

Lyons lifted his chin and turned his head to the right and then the left. “You sure you don’t remember me?”

“I’ve put away more scumbags than I can count, but I’d remember you from a lineup.” Ibanez glared bloody murder at James. “And Super Fly over there.”

James grinned at Lyons. “Called me Super Fly!”

“Up yours.”

The Phoenix Force pro was smiling but he and Lyons exchanged a look of agreement. Spooky was at 3 percent and rising. Lyons spread his hands and kept his tone mocking. “This morning? Half a platoon of Zetas? RPGs? Grenades? Kidnapped Mexican nationals? Me shooting you in the chest twice? None of this ringing a bell?”

The captain’s eyes flickered down to his scorched and bruised chest. For a heartbeat Lyons saw pure confusion before Ibanez snapped back to rage. “I don’t know what’s going on here or what your beef is...” Ibanez’s voice dropped low. “But best you kill me, Sunshine.”

Lyons waved his pad. “Nah, think I’ll burn you a steak instead. You like hot sauce, Captain?”

“Screw you! Webb County always pays its debts!”

Lyons picked up his laptop and followed James out. Ibanez shouted after them. “Dead! You’re dead! That goes for you, too, Shaft!”

James grinned happily. “Called me Shaft.”

Lyons wasn’t in a laughing mood. “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.”

James’s amusement faded. “This is messed up.”

They went back to the kitchen and Lyons tapped the video feed back to two-way. “What’d you make of that?”

“Well, if I didn’t know you’d been there personally, I’d—”

“You’d believe him. I know. What do you make of it?”

“Positively anomalous.”

“I keep hearing that word. I don’t like it.”

“You seem to keep running into this behavior on this one, Carl. What do you make of it?”

Lyons looked at James, who shrugged. “I’m going to give him a few minutes to calm down. Then I’m going to want to get a blood sample to run a full toxicological on him, then make an attempt at a real interview.”

“All right.” Lyons let his mind go detective again. He considered the known facts, and all he had was that almost nothing was known. He could work with that. “Bear?”

“Yes?”

“For the moment I am going to back-burner demonic possession.”

“Okay...”

“I need you to search databases, start with Homeland Security and the FBI. I need any suspected act of terrorism or a violent crime where the suspect was caught and denied all knowledge. I would be tempted to start internationally.”

“You know just about everyone says they didn’t do it, in every language.”

“Look for more than that, not just denial but denial of any knowledge, particularly if they got caught red-handed. I don’t care if it’s going to be a long night.”

Kurtzman rubbed his head at the enormity of the task ahead of him and his team. “You’re talking a long week, possibly a month.”

“I’ll give you a hint to narrow down your search. Look for anomalies and look for suspects who later went into comas, went crazy or died.”

The Repair Shop, Zurich, Switzerland

PIRMIN “THE WOLF” WOLFLI worked late into the night. There was nothing wolflike about him. He was short and pudgy. His bulging dome of a forehead, drooping jowls, pendulous ears and heavily bagged, sad-canted eyes made him more like a human caricature of an aged basset hound. Around the office people affectionately called him “Wolfie.” Behind his back less affectionate people called him “the Gnome.”

“The Wolf” was a sobriquet he had first earned long ago in what he warmly remembered as “The Swinging Seventies.” The nickname had been earned by his ruthlessness in hunting down his fellow man. He was in his seventies himself now and by his own admission not much was swinging these days. Wolfli was still a very dangerous hunter of humans; but rather than loping through the shadowy corners of Europe like a wolf as he had in his youth, he now plodded along like the hound he resembled, and used his very well-trained nose to ferret out his prey.

Wolfli let his juniors do the running.

His back office looked like a tiny eighteenth-century European salon. He hunched over his desk, peering through a flex-necked jeweler’s magnifying glass as he performed delicate surgery upon the innards of a 1978 vintage Rolex Sea Dweller diving watch.

Watch repair was a front, but Pirmin Wolfli was a genuine artist. He considered it occupational therapy. The craftsmanship, precision and rightness of a Swiss instrument gave him some hope that the human race was capable of doing at least one thing correctly. It relaxed him, and he was currently under incredible levels of stress. The little bell above his door rang and a tall, beautiful, blonde, buxom woman walked in.

Daniela Winter was his personal assistant both in the shop and in the Wolf’s other line of business. The Wolf took in her perfect carriage and her perfectly tailored charcoal pantsuit. Ninety minutes of a very strenuous style of yoga before dawn every morning and very subtle cosmetic surgeries over the past decade had left Winter at some un-guessable age ranging somewhere from a possible late thirties to an unthinkable fifty. She had once been runner-up in the Miss Switzerland pageant. Winter never mentioned it because it might give a clue as to her real age. The Wolf smiled. He was one of the few people who knew it.

“Pirmin.” Winter was one of the few people on Earth who addressed the Wolf by his first name, and only in private. She spoke in High German. “We have a problem.”

The Wolf gently lifted out a tiny brass flywheel and frowned at the corrosion. The old diving watch had salt-water damage. “I am beset by them.”

“I fear the Americans may have become involved.”

Wolfli set the tiny wheel on the felt in front of him. The operation he was currently running was the most delicate, dangerous and had the highest stakes of his career, and quite possibly anyone else’s on Earth. “Are you sure?”

“It seems very likely.” Winter made a face. “Ferraris thinks it is the FBI. Circumstantial evidence supports his idea.”

It was very likely that one day soon either Winter or Ferraris would inherit the Wolf’s position. Ferraris had the bad taste to be openly in competition for it and to make misogynistic innuendo behind Winter’s back. “Well.” The Wolf peered over his glasses. “Ferraris does bench-press more than you.”

Winter smirked.

“What do you think?” the Wolf inquired.

“It does not smell like the FBI.” Winter waved a casual hand. “To me anyway.”

The Wolf smiled again. Winter was from the central canton of Fribourg. High German was her first language but any Swiss who met her would laugh and say, “That one is Italian!” by temperament. Wolfli himself was from the southernmost canton of Ticino and he had grown up speaking Italian. Winter was the first woman the Wolf had ever recruited and trained. “And what is it that you smell, Dani?”

Winter’s nose wrinkled. “Cowboys.”

The Wolf nodded. The United States was an amazing place, and the FBI and CIA were marvelous organizations. The best of their kind in the world. However, during the seventies and the Vietnam conflict, and the eighties when their President Reagan had decided to win the Cold War, the prime of the Wolf’s fieldwork, the CIA had cemented its cowboy reputation among its fellow nations. It remained a nickname for them to this day in some circles.

The few occasions when the Wolf had been forced to take action against agents of the United States, either personally or by proxy, he had outmaneuvered and eliminated them with ease. They had never suspected him or even known of his organization, and he had left their superiors blaming the Soviets or other hostile players. The Americans were good, but in the Wolf’s experience few of them were chess players, and none were watchmakers. Of course, it was a relatively new century now and everything got better with practice. “CIA?”

“I don’t know. Ferraris described it as ‘renegade, but with extreme precision.’”

The Wolf snorted. Ferraris was a Geneva man and, as Swiss went, very French in style. “Surely you do not suspect private contractors?”

“I do not know. I cannot put my finger on it, but I do not like anything about what I am hearing.”

The Wolf sighed wearily. If the Americans knew what was really going on, all hell would be breaking loose. However, Hell’s fire and chaos appeared to remain confined in Gehenna, for the moment. This led him to believe that the Americans had stumbled upon the side effects. Nevertheless, he could not afford to have them bumbling around. A United States intervention could be catastrophic. The question was, like the watch in front of him, was it repairable?

“Where are these cowboys now?”

“Ferraris reports they have gone dark.”

“We know their line of inquiry?”

“Yes, in fact they were very useful in that regard.”

“They will reemerge. Pick your team. Have them standing by.”

“At once, I will—”

“Have Ferraris lead it.”

Winter controlled her facial expression but the room went as cold as her name.

“You will act as controller, in the field,” the Wolf concluded.

The room warmed a degree or two. Winter loved fieldwork, and field commander on an assignment of this magnitude was huge. However, putting Winter in charge of Ferraris hinted at a possible hierarchy to come. “As you say.” Winter lingered a moment by the door. “Pirmin?”

“Yes, my dear?”

“Do I have permission to exercise the fight-fire-with-fire protocol?”

The Wolf bent over his work. The die was cast. “Yes.”

CHAPTER SIX

The War Room, Stony Man Farm

Kurtzman and Huntington Wethers pored over databases based on Lyons’s search criteria. The initial search had brought up thousands of files. The obvious conclusion was that the world was a violent place. Kurtzman trawled North, Central and South America while Wethers worked North Africa and the Middle East. They’d been at it through the night. Akira Tokaido looked up from his workstation and laughed. “Data dump from Japan! Godzilla size! Who wants it?”

Wethers let out a long breath. “Sometimes, I hate him.”

Kurtzman stared at his vast folder of not much. Besides the recent attacks in Mexico, the Americas were yielding nothing save cartel killings and the usual South American sicko horror. The United States was loaded with anomalous killings, crimes and misbehaviors, but nothing quite rang true to Lyons’s criteria. Kurtzman smiled at his map. “I’ll take it.”

“Transferring now!”

Kurtzman watched file upon file descend upon him courtesy of the Farm’s resident young hacker. In Kurtzman’s experience a great deal of Japanese crime could be considered anomalous. They had a very different culture. Part of that culture was a code of silence when it came to violent crime. It was also an open secret that Japanese authorities cooked their books to make their nation appear to be a nonviolent industrious island paradise. Kurtzman sent the files to his main west screen of the drive-in-size monitor and hit his translation software.

Hunt Wethers tapped his display. “Here.”

“Where?”

“Israel. Haifa to be exact.”

A map of Israel popped up on one of Kurtzman’s auxiliary screens. He tapped a key and data scrolled wearing a frown. “The string of suicide bombings last week? Hezbollah claimed full credit. The Israelis are launching retaliatory air strikes as we speak.”

“Yes, but one of the attackers survived. The suicide vest failed.” Wethers looked over from his screen pointedly. “A teenage girl, off everyone’s radar until last week.”

“She claims she didn’t do it?”

“Full signed confession, save that the Haifa police had a file going and everything prior to her confession has been completely redacted.”

Kurtzman knew where this was going. “The Mossad took over the case.”

“Military intelligence took over the case,” Wethers confirmed. “And while it doesn’t say it in so many words, it sure smells like Mossad yanked the case from them.”

Kurtzman mulled that over. “Haifa and military intelligence.”

“You know something?”

“I might know somebody, and they might still owe me a favor.”

“You calling this actionable?”

“Best lead we have. I need every scrap of information on the bombing in Haifa, news feeds, internet rumors and anything else we can cajole out of the Israelis through normal channels. Contact Jack, tell him to pull Cal out of Texas, and tell Able to sit tight.”

Tokaido nodded. “I’ll do it! Anything else?”

“Tell Barb I want Phoenix Force assembled in the next six hours, and I want them in Israel in twelve.”

Jerusalem, Israel

“IT WAS VERY STRANGE.”

Dr. Galina Rabovskya looked every inch the Jewish grandmother she was. She had been a military doctor with medical degrees in both neurology and psychology. The doctor maintained a small private practice and on the side was an Israeli military intelligence medical “asset.”

She poured coffee from an ancient copper ibrik for David McCarter and Calvin James. “Extremely jet-lagged” barely described the two Phoenix Force men.

“You would think there would be a matrix for predicting terrorist inclinations,” McCarter, the leader of Phoenix Force, noted.

She arched a thick eyebrow. “I assure you it takes all kinds.”

McCarter sipped his Turkish coffee and his eyes nearly rolled back in his head. James matched the doctor and perked her eyebrow for eyebrow. “But?”

“But this was very strange. Oh, on the surface it made perfect sense. A pair of young Palestinian lovers decide to cement their love into eternity with a suicide pact against their hated Jewish oppressors. All very romantic. They strap on explosive vests they made together, go to a nightclub full of innocent people, and...”

“But?” James repeated.

“But the girl’s vest malfunctioned. The boy, Hamdi, rode the elevator to martyrdom and took ten club patrons with him. The girl? Lena? She managed to launch most of her right arm into the VIP room. The emergency medics stabilized her and she was turned over to military intelligence.”

James conjured up Lyons’s new favorite-hated word. “And things started getting anomalous?”

“That is a good word,” the doctor admitted. “And highly accurate.”

“She denied all knowledge of the attack?”

“Not at first. After being captured, she was completely unresponsive. This was naturally attributed to the trauma of her boyfriend’s death and her own survival and self-mutilation. Despite her injuries, some of the Mossad boys got rough with her. They got nothing. Then she went into what I would describe as a fugue state, which lasted for approximately an hour. When she came out of that she was responsive.”

“How did she respond?”

“Miss Labaki responded exactly like a seventeen-year-old girl who woke up in terrible pain to learn her boyfriend is dead, she is missing an arm and accused of capital crimes.”

“She denied being involved in the crime?”

“She denied all knowledge of the crime. She begged us to tell her who we were, what was going on and where Hamdi was.”

Cal saw where this was going. “And the men from Mossad were not amused.”

“They got rough with her again.”

“How did she react?”

“React? She was like a hothouse flower suddenly thrown into the desert. They could have broken her just by yelling at her. They overrode my objections and turned off her morphine. She confessed. She confessed to everything.”

James mimicked Lyons. “But if you hadn’t seen the security camera footage from the nightclub?”

“I would have believed her story before her confession.”

“You don’t believe her confession?”

“I believe she would have confessed to anything, including the Kennedy assassination, to stop the pain. But they got their confession and their case tied up neatly in ribbons and bows. They were satisfied.”

“And Miss Labaki went into a coma and died,” James concluded.

“Miss Labaki is currently in a persistent vegetative state.”

McCarter sat straighter. “She’s alive?”

“She’s alive,” Rabovskya confirmed. “But I would not call it living. I use the term vegetative state loosely. I was so alarmed by what I saw that before my medical team was taken off the case I ordered both functional magnetic resonance imaging and arterial spin labeling scans.”

McCarter blinked.

The doctor smiled sympathetically. “These scans rely on the paramagnetic properties of oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin.”

McCarter looked to James for a lifeline.

The Phoenix Force medic smiled smugly. “It means you can see images of changing blood flow in the brain associated with neural activity.”

Rabovskya nodded. “I see you have had some training. I also ordered a magnetoencephalogram.”

“How many letters are in that word?” McCarter asked.

“Twenty. In layman’s terms it is an imaging technique used to measure the magnetic fields produced by the electrical activity in the brain.”

James leaned forward. “What were the results?”

“Before Miss Labaki went brain-dead? Her brain was like Fallujah on a Friday night. Or in American terms—the Fourth of July. I was ordering a positron emission tomography when I was suddenly thanked for my work and informed my services were no longer required.

“I do not know what the interrogators did to her after that, but I can tell you I do not believe it could have made any difference. I can only describe it as a cascading series of brain malfunctions. Machines currently breathe for her, keep her heart beating, clean her blood and feed and hydrate her. The only reason she is being kept alive is that she is such a medical anomaly.”

McCarter shook his head. “Hate that word.”

The kitchen went silent as they all brooded.

The landline phone on the wall rang and the doctor rose. “Excuse me.”

James considered what he had heard. “I am definitely putting it in the wheelhouse.”

“Definitely,” McCarter agreed.

Dr. Rabovskya answered the phone and her face went blank. Her expression grim, she covered the receiver with her hand. “It is for you.”

The two soldiers looked at each other. “Who is it?” McCarter asked.

“A woman, asking for the American in charge. She has a European accent.”

McCarter looked at his partner. The spook factor was at 4 percent and rising. James smiled and shrugged. “Doesn’t know you’re English.”

McCarter stood and took the phone. He had long ago learned to mask his accent when needed. “Hello?”

A woman spoke. McCarter tried to place her accent and couldn’t. “You are inquiring after the Labaki woman?”

“I am.”

“Give me your cell. I will contact you. You will need to come to Beirut.”

McCarter gave her his cell number. The phone went dead in his hand.

“And?” James asked.

“We’re going to Lebanon,” McCarter announced. “And we’re going to need guns. But I don’t want to raid the US Embassy armory here or across the border. Someone knows we’re here and they’ll be watching.”

Rabovskya smirked over her coffee cup. “I might be able to help you with that.”

Nahariya, Israel

AS PHOENIX FORCE drove along the coast, McCarter looked left from the driver’s seat out into the Mediterranean.

An Israeli Navy Sa’ar 5-Class warship patrolled close to shore. Tensions were high. Hezbollah rocket attacks out of Lebanon had hit Israel just seventy-two hours ago and the idyllic Mediterranean beach community of Nahariya was only six miles from the border. Tanks, APCs and military vehicles were everywhere. Armed IDF soldiers loitered on every street corner. Israeli F-16 fighter jets in ground-attack configuration screamed low overhead with monotonous regularity. Smoke from their guided bomb and missile strikes rose into the sky over the border like the output of Industrial Age smokestacks.

McCarter left the strip and headed inland. He happily worked the gears. The Škoda Yeti was a VW-owned, Czech-manufactured SUV and technically a five-seater. However, none of the five members of Phoenix Force could be described as lithe or dainty. It was a little crowded for Manning, Encizo and Hawkins in the back.

The Yeti was a four-cylinder but it came loaded with a variable geometry turbocharger, a direct-shift, seven-speed gearbox and had torque on loan from God. It had a sunroof and decent windows to shoot from. That was if they could get guns. Trying to smuggle guns into Israel was mildly suicidal.

Buying them on the thriving internal Israeli black market was a more viable option but only slightly less dangerous.

McCarter pulled up to what could only be described as an automotive stalag camp. Three Quonset huts squatted behind a twelve-foot-high, chain-link fence topped with razor wire. A fourth hut, looking like a twisted and blackened beer can, appeared to have been hit by a rocket.

A sixteen-foot scaffold stood behind the pair of connected trailers that formed the office. The scaffold had a satellite dish and a ham radio antenna on top, but it sure smelled to McCarter like a currently unoccupied machine gun tower. McCarter drove beneath a weathered sign covered with strings of Christmas lights that read Corkie’s Autohaus in Hebrew, Arabic and English.

Maan Korkaz stepped out of a trailer.

McCarter and James shot each other a look. The Druze auto mechanic and reputed arms dealer bore an extremely disturbing resemblance to the bearded, evil, mirror-universe Spock from the original Star Trek series, save that he didn’t have pointed ears and he wore a blue mechanic’s boiler suit. Unlike Spock, he also smoked unfiltered Turkish cigarettes. McCarter and James climbed out of their SUV.

McCarter tipped his cap. “Morning, guv.”

Korkaz snorted. He spoke with a British accent. “I know someone who has spoken for you.”

“Then sell me some guns, mate.”

Korkaz eyed McCarter astutely. “Brighton Beach lad?”

“You are a gentleman of discernment. This is my friend Cal.”

“Pleased to meet you. Your friends can stay in the car. Follow me.” McCarter and James shot each other another look. The Middle East was a barter culture. Usually tea and hospitality and a feeling-out process preceded deals. Manning, Encizo and Hawkins gave WTF looks from the backseat. McCarter and James rolled the dice and followed as Korkaz led them behind the covered car bays to a small, weed-choked automotive graveyard of rusting hulks. “I don’t know what you have heard, Mer—?”

“David.”

“Call me Corkie. But things are a bit crazy around here of late.”

“Aren’t they always?”

“More than usual.”

“Even for around here?”

“Even for around here.”

Korkaz led them to a rusting yellow school bus. He clambered inside and yanked up a hatch in the floor. A short flight of wooden steps led down into darkness. The Druze hit a switch and cheerfully bright track lighting illuminated a low but spacious bunker full of crates.

“So you want to go into Lebanon?” Korkaz asked.

“No, I don’t.” Phoenix Force had operated in Lebanon on a number of occasions. They had found answers there. Usually at terrible cost, and they were answers that nobody wanted to hear. “But I have to. What’ve you heard?”

“Nothing good. Killings. Inexplicable ones. Bad ones, even for this—how do you say?—neck of the woods.” The Druze suddenly grinned disarmingly. “I would not go there unarmed were I you.”

“So what have you got?”

“I have something for you. I am not sure if it fits the bill, but you may recognize it from your salad days of youth.” Korkaz opened a crate and McCarter felt a twinge of nostalgia as he gazed upon the contents. Korkaz nodded. “No one wants submachine guns anymore. Everybody wants PDWs and ARs.” Korkaz sighed at the dully gleaming cast-steel weapons. “Dying breed.”

McCarter took up one of the submachine guns. The Sterling was a weapon he was well familiar with. Unlike most automatic weapons the magazine curved out from the left-hand side rather than down from the bottom, which made it look vaguely like one half of a backward crossbow. The beer-can-thick, fattened, black metal tube of a built-in sound suppressor modified the barrel of this example. The weapon was a Sterling Mk-5. McCarter had carried just such a weapon during his stint in the British SAS. “Brilliant. Where’s it from, then? India?”

Korkaz blew out a long, thin stream of smoke. “Iraq. Republican Guard security detail.” The Druze nodded at James. “Got them from some Yanks a while back.”

McCarter pulled out a massive wad of Euros. “I’ll take them, and every spare magazine you have. Pistols?”

“Browning Hi-Powers, manufacture.”

It was all old-school British gear and what McCarter had been weaned on. “I have a lad who is something of a sharpshooter. You have anything with a scope sight? Preferably sighted in?”

“I might have something, but most likely old.”

“That’ll do.” McCarter sighed hopefully. “Got any grenade launchers?”

“I wish.”

McCarter’s cell rang. He didn’t recognize the number. He answered in a neutral English language accent. “Hello?”

“The Minerva Hotel. You have ninety minutes. If you are not there, there will be no further communication.” It was the same woman’s voice with the same accent he couldn’t identify.

The line went dead. Korkaz and James looked at McCarter expectantly. McCarter shrugged at Korkaz. “You know the Minerva Hotel?”

The Druze nodded. “I do, Hezbollah took unofficial ownership a decade ago. The IDF has bombed it dozens of times. It is mostly a pile of rubble with a rats’ nest of tunnels beneath that put my poor cellar to shame.”

McCarter just didn’t see his job getting any easier. “You wouldn’t have any hand grenades?”

Korkaz stroked his beard. “There might be a few Indian manufacture Mills bombs lying about.”

“I’ll take all you have.”

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