Don Pendleton - Mind Bomb

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.