Don Pendleton - Mind Bomb

“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.”