Don Pendleton - Red Frost

As Lyons ran from the front of the shack, sprinting across the strip of hardpan for the corner of the cargo container, Schwarz cut loose with the Barrett. Twenty yards to Lyons’s right a round whined past at chin height. Even though he knew it was coming, even though he had heard it many times before, the sound of that much lead flying by made the short hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

Five long strides brought him to the end of the meth lab and gave him a clear view of the last two trucks in line. On the sides of the cargo boxes above a screen painting of a joyous, all-American family in transit was the rental company’s ad slogan, Moving Your Way.

No one in Lyons’s sights was moving, though. The cannonlike bellow of the Light Fifty had frozen the slaves and their keepers in place.

Lyons broke from cover, rushing trucks 3 and 4. As the Barrett’s report echoed off in the distance, the legitimate targets and innocent bystanders started running in all directions. It was like one of those computer-simulated target-acquisition training systems, except instead of one shooter there were more than fifteen, and instead of one hostage there were at least twenty.

A torrent of gunfire roared to his right, out of sight, on the far side of the meth lab. It wasn’t directed at him. Somewhere in the back of his mind the weapons’ distinctive sound signatures registered: shotguns, pistols and sustained bursts from AK-47s, all of them presumably tracking Blancanales and pouring return fire on the combine.

The quartet of bangers at the last two trucks saw Lyons coming between the bodies of the slow-moving slaves. How could they miss him? Honking big dude, all in black, ski mask pulled down to his chin, silenced machine pistols raised in both fists. The bangers responded in a way Lyons couldn’t, not with a firing lane choked by noncombatants. As the cowboys back-stepped to cover between truck 4’s front bumper and Truck 3’s rear, they opened up with blue-steel 9 mm autopistols, shooting around, then through the panicked, hobbled workers.

Close-range body and head shots blew the stumbling, helpless obstacles off their bare feet.

Almost simultaneously the Barrett boomed again. Truck 4’s front end rocked hard as it absorbed a .50-caliber round. On impact, the hood delatched and popped partway up. A piercing metal-on-metal screech erupted from the bowels of the idling V-8 as the AP slug plowed through its block. A fraction of an instant later, the engine let out a final, grinding clank as tie rods and pistons broke loose. Smoke and steam boiled from the engine compartment. Hot oil and antifreeze sprayed over the crouched bangers.

Lyons took advantage of the cleared firing lane. As he charged, he cut loose with both MP-5 SD-3s, 3-round bursts to minimize muzzle climb. Staggering backward, half-blinded and panicked, the gangsters tried to return fire. The one in front, a baggy-pants wide boy with blue tats covering both arms from wrists to elbows took a point-blank round from one of his own homeys through the back of the head. The right side of his face just vanished, revealing a red crater from eyebrow to cheek. Gushing bright arterial blood, brain-dead on his feet, he toppled to the dirt.

The MP-5 SD-3s stuttered in Lyons’s big fists, saturating the killzone as he closed the ten yards of intervening ground. Twisting in agony under the hail of slugs, the three bangers went down hard.

And stayed down.

Lyons jumped over the jerking bodies, slipping between trucks 3 and 4. Slaves were bellycrawling under the chassis, taking cover behind the steel wheels. Through the greasy smoke billowing from the engine compartment, he could see others robot-walking across the fields, stray bullets whizzing around them, kicking up puffs of soil.

When he peeked around the cargo box, two of the remaining four bangers were in full retreat, joining up with the cowboys who had taken cover beside the first truck and the front of the cargo container meth lab.

A couple of the cowboys were facedown in the dirt.

Blancanales was nowhere in sight.

A ranchero jumped out of the meth-lab doorway, landed flat-footed and tried to drill him with a hip-leveled Kalashnikov. Lyons’s reaction time was faster. The Russian rounds went skyward as the shooter abruptly sat down, driven to his backside by a string of 9 mm rounds to the gut. Lyons ducked back as answering fire ripped along the line of trucks. In so doing, he nearly stepped on the face of one of the downed bangers. Brown eyes stared up at him, not angry, not surprised. Not anything, ever again.

With incoming fire hammering the right side of truck 3’s cargo box and ricocheting off the dirt, he dumped the spent mags and reloaded the machine pistols. It took him less than eight seconds to put live rounds under both firing pins. Turning left, away from the meth lab, he burst out from behind the rear bumper and took off along the outside of the line of vehicles to seal off any enemy foot retreat across the fields and allow Schwarz to mark his position.

Before he got halfway along truck 3 the Light Fifty roared again. Twenty feet ahead of him the cab shuddered as an M-2 round slammed its engine compartment, popping off a spawl of paint the size of a dinner plate. An instant later, the V-8 inside exploded with a muffled roar, freed pistons punching through cylinders and valve covers, windshield popping out of its frame, cab doors flying open, front wheel covers suddenly airborne.

Another killshot.

When he reached truck 3’s front bumper, a pair of bangers inside the cargo box of truck 2 popped up from behind tall canisters of anhydrous ammonia, autopistols blazing. Slaves lay on the floor of the cargo box all around them, hands protecting the backs of their heads, faces pressed into the deck.

Lyons sprayed one-handed, up-angled autofire across the bangers’ chests, whipsawing them off their feet. Their guns went flying and their bodies landed heavily on the backs of the prostrated slaves, who were too afraid to move.

As he ran on, the Barrett cut loose again. Truck 2 shuddered as its engine tore itself apart. Six-foot-high flames shot up around the buckled hood.

The volleys of gunfire from the meth lab suddenly trailed off. Over the scattered gunshots Lyons could hear shouting in Spanish. Trucks 4, 3 and 2 were burning, acrid gray smoke sweeping across the compound like ground fog.

Even drug dealers could read the handwriting on the wall. No transportation, no escape.

With a roar and spray of dirt, the black Lexus SUV sped around the front of the first truck, riding on two flat steel radials on the driver’s side. Lyons caught a glimpse of a candy-striped silk robe as the rear door swung shut.

SCHWARZ RODE the Barrett’s stunning recoil wave, simultaneously working the bolt to chamber a fresh round. Downrange, beneath a puff of glistening red mist, the headless corpse folded up like a lawnchair. The Able Team commando had a chance for another clear, quick shot at an enemy gunner, but he passed it up, instead swinging the crosshairs hard over to the right, to his assigned first target. Numbers had to fall in order for Lyons’s battle plan to work.

No deviations.

As the narco cowboys ran for cover they fired back wildly, spraying bullets his way. The location of his hide was pretty obvious: it was the only elevated position in miles of pancake-flat farmland. At a range of one hundred yards the pistol shots didn’t even land close, but the Russian autorifle rounds thunked and rattled the broad side of the combine. As he aimed at truck 4’s engine compartment and took up the trigger slack, a slug plowed through the rear of the cab two feet to his right, peppering that side of his face with hot metallic grit. He ignored it.

Schwarz knew Lyons was advancing inside the new firing lane, but he had the Able Team leader’s designated route to target down cold. The ex-L.A. cop was protected by two layers of cover—the engine block and the meth lab.