Don Pendleton - Shadow War

“There they are,” Lyons said quietly. The six foot two, two-hundred-pound man turned his attention back to his target.

Clutching a Steyr AUG bullpup-designed assault rifle, Schwarz moved into position closer to team leader Carl Lyons. Behind them Blancanales leaned in to hear their conversation as he covered the periphery with his H&K MP-5 SD-3 submachine gun.

Blancanales put a finger to the communication piece in his ear. “We’re on-site and doing initial recon.”

“Copy,” Barbara Price answered. “Our coverage of local police channels put friendlies way outside your area of operation. Over.”

“Roger. Able out,” Blancanales murmured.

“Two vehicles,” Schwarz muttered, scanning the structure. “But big vehicles. Anywhere from five to ten guys. All former Zetas.”

“Sounds about right,” Lyons said, nodding.

Their briefing on the last-minute search-and-rescue operation had given them little to go on other than a target—Gabriel Gonzales, CIA confidential informant—and a location gathered by triangulating the man’s cell-phone signal. As part of his payment, the CIA had provided Gonzales, a former Mexican border patrol agent turned narcotic trafficker, with a state-of-the-art cell phone. The CIA had also added the location tracer buried in the body of the lightweight device.

As valuable as Gonzales might have been to drug-enforcement agencies, the CIA had turned a blind eye to his narcotics profiteering to concentrate on his anti-terrorism capabilities. It was a Faustian arrangement made common by the necessities of a post-9/11 world.

Gonzales granted the U.S. intelligence community a much-needed window into the realities of the growing, solidifying world of narco-terror. Organizations such as the former Mexican special-forces group turned drug runners, the Zetas and the violent international MS13 gang had begun to overlap with the intelligence agencies of Venezuela and the heroin syndicates of Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

Wherever there was illicit money to be made, there was an opportunity for black funds to flow into the operational coffers of terrorist organizations. It was a situation that Able Team had faced more than once.

“Let’s move in closer,” Lyons said. “But first scan with your optics. If there are sentries outside, they may well have night-vision gear. We’ll exploit the range of your sniper scope.”

“I see all,” Schwarz whispered as he shuffled forward.

Schwarz raised the Steyr AUG A3 to his shoulder. The A3 was the carbine configuration of the classic bullpup assault rifle with a shortened 16-inch barrel. The standard factory-mounted sighting optics had been replaced by Stony Man armorer John “Cowboy” Kissinger with a Picatinny mounting rail upon which he placed a 1.5X-telescope containing a circle aiming reticle.

A low, full moon hung over the scene, providing enough ambient light for the three-man special-operations team to operate without night-vision equipment.

Schwarz flinched once as the 1.5X magnification qualities of his sniper scope suddenly presented him with vision of a huge rat running lightly along an exposed section of plumbing until it disappeared into the open mouth of an overturned toilet.

He settled back, ignoring the pungent stench of the flood area. The humidity was stifling and the Able Team commando sweated freely under the black smears of his camouflage grease paint. He scanned the target building in vectors, his brain reducing the activity to simplified angles and precise geometric patterns.

“Nothing outside,” he said. “At least not from this angle…Wow, hold on.” A bright set of headlights suddenly appeared out of the ruins on the far side of the building.

Schwarz turned his weapon toward the new threat stimulus and dampened the passive feed on his scope even further.

“Holy crap,” he whispered. “It’s a McLaren F1!”

“I know I’m going to be sorry I asked, but what’s a McLaren F1?” Lyons asked.

Without preamble, and in the hushed tones of a small boy describing a cherished toy, Schwarz rattled off the car’s specks. “The F1 was the fastest production car ever made, and they only made one hundred of them. It’s got a 6.1-liter BMW S70 V12 engine, and it’ll go over 230 mph easy, without turbo or supercharges. Price tag? Well north of a cool million, my man.”

“Who the hell would drop that kind of money on such a classic supercar and then drive it into this mess?” Blancanales asked.

Schwarz shook his head as the metallic-silver supercar pulled in next to the SUVs and the bat-wing doors rose like something out of a science-fiction movie. “Anyone who’d do this is a bad, bad person. I think we’ll have to kill them all.”

“Suits me,” Lyons answered. “I freakin’ hate Zetas.”

Schwarz let out a low whistle. “Does she look like any Zetas you’ve ever seen?”

A tiny, delicate foot in a wraparound stiletto heel emerged from the darkness of the McLaren F1 and came to rest on the damp gravel. The leg attached to the thousand-dollar shoe seemed to go on for miles. Even in the poor light and across the distance, Able Team could see it was a million-dollar leg.

The young woman emerged from the McLaren F1. A sheer white blouse was knotted below her full breasts just above her red plaid miniskirt. Her hair was raven-wing black and hung in long, loose curls over a heart-shaped face.

“Oh. That’s very Britney Spears,” Schwarz breathed. “Very ‘I’m Not So Innocent.’”

“Please,” Lyons said. “It’s ‘Oops…I Did It Again’ and it’s so 2001 it makes me laugh.”

Blancanales’s head snapped around to stare at the Able Team leader. Schwarz removed his eye from the sniper scope, his mouth hanging open in shock.

“Um, you into pop princesses?” he asked.

“Shut up. She’s been all over the news, that’s all,” Lyons snapped.

Schwarz turned his head toward Blancanales. He could see the stocky Latino preparing a sarcastic riposte and felt his own laughter bubbling up in his throat.

Then the screaming began.

G ONZALES BEGAN to shiver in fear.

Lagos moved between the men hanging from the ceiling like slabs of meat at a slaughterhouse. He lit a cigarette. Beyond the lights the hulking figures of his men were reduced to nondescript shadows.

The man hanging on Gonzales’s left started to mumble a prayer to the Virgin Mary in rapid Spanish. There was the sudden sharp, acrid smell of urine as one of the men let his bladder go. Lagos chuckled and blew out a blue cloud of cigarette smoke.

“The people,” Lagos said, “they don’t understand that what we do is hard work. They think moving product is like being a rock star. You bang models and party all the time. Sometime you have to be like, uh, the Tony Soprano and use your gun. Right?”

Lagos moved around to stand in front of Gonzales. He regarded the hanging prisoner like some insect he’d found crushed on the sole of his shoe. He blew smoke into Gonzales’s face, then reached up with one hand and snatched the informant by the chin. Lagos locked eyes with his prey.

“But we know the truth, don’t we?” Lagos gritted. “We know it is hard goddamn work making our money. And the ladies aren’t the only things we bang, eh?”

From behind Lagos his men chuckled. To the terrified Gonzales it sounded like hyenas regarding a wounded gazelle. He was close enough to Lagos to see the black clogged pores of the man’s nose. There was a tiny residue of white powder around the edge of one of his cavernous nostrils. The man’s eyes blazed as bloodshot as a rabid dog’s. Gonzales squeezed his own eyes shut and tried to turn away. Lagos’s fingers were like steel bands on his face, and they burned his flesh with his intense body heat.