Exit Strategy

Though Able Team consisted of only three commandos, it was just as effective as the five-man army that was Phoenix Force. There was a spirited competition between the two groups, but each saw the other as an equal. The eight of them together were quite brilliant in a diversity of fields ranging from emergency medical treatment thanks to former SEAL and Navy corpsman Calvin James of the Force, to Able Team’s electronics genius Hermann Schwarz. When Brognola and Bolan had vetted the teams, they’d looked for smart, capable, quick-to-learn men who were straight shooters and athletic combatants.

The cyber team leader, Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, may not have been low in body fat, but with his thick shag of beard and furry, heavily muscled forearms, he was no weakling. Despite being confined to a wheelchair by a gunshot wound to the spine, Kurtzman’s upper body was slabbed over in thick muscle from exercise and the constant maneuvering of his manual chair. As strong as his arms and chest were, though, his mind was equally powerful as the creator and coordinator of the incredible computerized data collection and intelligence system that made the Farm’s missions possible.

“What’s the deal, Hal?” McCarter spoke up first. Though McCarter’s antic energy had been tamed greatly by the role of leadership of his team, the British SAS veteran still was not given to idling when there were things to do. “What’s the crisis du jour?”

“I just got news from Arizona,” Brognola answered. “We lost a lot of blacksuits serving as a security detail.”

An older bulldog of a man who had been with the Farm since the very beginning, Brognola had been an FBI agent assigned to capture or kill Mack Bolan a lifetime ago, back when the Executioner had waged his unsanctioned vigilante actions against organized crime on US soil. Rather than ultimately eliminate Bolan, Brognola had set up a situation where his lethal fighting skills could be more readily used to protect the United States. Since then, the big Fed had expanded the Sensitive Operations Group’s reach by creating the blacksuit program.

The blacksuits were cultivated from the best and brightest of the military and law enforcement, well-trained and honest men and women who didn’t quite have the clearance or lack of ties that would make them perfect for the covert agency. They came to the Farm in the shadow of the old Stony Man of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where they received continuing education and refresh training. They were also tapped for intel that didn’t make it into top secret databases immediately. Often, it was the men of Able or Phoenix who educated these warriors, so the loss of one was the loss of a friend as well as a student.

“How many?” Lyons asked, his voice a low rumble like thunder across the plains.

“Seven confirmed dead, five wounded. Don Burnett is missing, as well as one of the packages they were protecting,” Brognola advised regrettably. “Another principal was killed.”

“How many were they protecting?” McCarter quizzed.

Brognola took a deep breath. “Five. A man and his wife. Three children. The man, Joaquin Castillo, was killed. The children were out at a swimming hole. Their protection detail pulled them out when the attackers struck.”

Brognola handed out packets for the two action teams to read. The cybernetic crew had already gone over the information and grisly imagery in preparing the briefing packages.

“Son of a bitch,” Calvin James growled. James was the first American member of Phoenix Force. Despite the kind of discipline it took to be a medical corpsman and a SEAL, and later a member of San Francisco SWAT, James was still a little quick with a curse. Tall, black and lanky, he was passionate about his position. “You don’t need to ask me twice to put boot to ass against the bastards behind this.”

“I’ll have to,” Brognola returned. “That’s Mexican federale equipment at the scene of the crime. That means this is an international incident. One that the State Department wants to keep under wraps.”

“Excuse me?” Rosario Blancanales, the elder of Lyons’s two Able Team partners, asked. Five foot eleven, with silver hair and a face wizened beyond his years, his lithe, spry frame belied the appearance of his age. Where Lyons was a police officer and undercover FBI agent who had allied with Bolan often, Blancanales had served in Bolan’s unit during his military career and later assisted him in his private war against organized crime. Blancanales’s first team-up with Bolan post desertion had ended with him in jail, one of only two survivors of the Executioner’s death squad. His entry into Able Team had cleared those records. His elite Ranger training and natural diplomacy, which had earned him the nickname “the Politician,” made Blancanales an invaluable member of Stony Man. “The government is going to downplay the slaughter of US Marshals?”

“It’s being kept under a tight lid,” Carmen Delahunt interjected. Delahunt, one of the members of Kurtzman’s cybernetics team, had investigative and tech skills that easily translated into search algorithms that helped keep the Stony Man teams up-to-date on enemy action. “State Department and the White House don’t want the public to get a word of this,” she added.

“Federales involved? No doubt,” Gary Manning added. Manning, a Canadian, was a barrel-chested polymath, tall and strong, and he was also a genius with explosives. His restless intellect, however, had kept him moving from field to field. He had proved to be an expert woodsman and hunter, served with the military in Southeast Asian operations, owned his own import-export firm and was an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, where he’d cross-trained with German antiterrorism agencies.

This depth and breadth of experience had made him a steady hand and wise counsel to Phoenix Force leader McCarter, while his hunting talents had translated into his being a lethal sniper and his engineering had made him a master of demolitions. He, like McCarter, was an original Phoenix Force operator and was not surprised by an act of cross-border violence being held in secret to avert the possibility of war between two nations. Too often, Phoenix’s five had been sent in to defang and defuse conflicts instigated by outside parties looking to profit from war and chaos. “Given that Joaquin and Amanda Castillo are considered enemies of the state in Mexico, the legitimacy of this strike force could be fairly solid.”

“You know about these two?” Hawkins asked. The youngest and newest member of Phoenix, T. J. Hawkins, was the other American who’d diluted the original mission description of Mack Bolan’s foreign legion.

Hawkins, who had grown up on the South Side of Chicago, was a veteran of the US Army Rangers and Delta Force. He had a history of going outside the rules to protect innocent lives to do what was right, politics be damned. He was a prime candidate to fill in the ranks after McCarter replaced their retired original commander.

“The last time we were in Mexico, I managed to catch a newscast about Accion Obrar. The similarities to Stony Man made me curious enough to delve further,” Manning noted.

Hawkins frowned. “Being a Texas boy, I looked into Accion Obrar because they were allegedly behind unseating paramilitary gangs operating on both sides of the border. Just in case we had to deal with Los Sigmas or Los Omegas or some group like that.”

“The new hotness is Los Lictors.” Hermann Schwarz spoke up. Schwarz was Blancanales’s longtime friend and a fellow survivor of Bolan’s death squad. Balancing electrical engineering and Ranger training made Schwarz, nicknamed “Gadgets,” one of the top ten fighting elite in the country alongside his fellow Able Team warriors. “For those of us on Able Team who aren’t fluent in Spanish, that’s ‘the officers’ or ‘the magistrates.’”

Lyons met Schwarz’s gaze at his friend’s usual razzing. “How illuminating.”

“He’s up to five-syllable words, Gadgets! Cheese it!” Blancanales stage-whispered across the table. The humor, so close in the wake of the loss of several blacksuits, was meant to distract from the pain. These men were law enforcement professionals and gallows humor was a means to keep laughing instead of crying. For that, Lyons was glad for his friends’ antics, though it didn’t ameliorate the anger he felt for the murderers of the blacksuit marshals.

“This is particularly disturbing in that we have little idea who could have betrayed the location of the Castillos,” Huntington Wethers, the third member of the Farm’s cyber crew, noted. A tall African American who looked born to be a college professor, complete with corduroy jacket and pipe, Wethers was a mathematical genius and a man who was meticulous in seeking out information on the web. This didn’t mean that he was slow; indeed, he was able to process raw data in bulk, but he was thorough. “The setup arranged by Hal, utilizing ‘in-house’ resources, was kept away from agency heads specifically.”

“The potential for a mole to intercept was minimized, but there’s never a sure thing where more than one person is involved,” Brognola grumbled. “So, we have a list of who could have let slip about their security.”

“A list we’re going through with a fine-tooth comb,” Akira Tokaido said. No irony was lost that the young Japanese American’s spiky punk hairstyle only saw a comb to further splay and launch it toward the ceiling. Where Wethers was meticulous, Tokaido was punk rock and thrash metal, making wild leaps of deductive logic, though his mathematical and coding capabilities were not haphazard.

Where speed and intuition were required, Tokaido was an F-22 Raptor pulling 9 Gs to outmaneuver his opponents. Wethers was more the aircraft carrier sailing along at 35 knots but with eyes and ears everywhere. Delahunt was the bridge between the two, using her own investigative instincts to seek handholds of information to scale impregnable fortresses of mystery.

“I pity your quarry, mates,” McCarter quipped.

“Eventually they become yours,” Delahunt said. “And when they do, that’s when things get...satisfying.”

Gary Manning raised an eyebrow at Delahunt’s breathless final word. The red-haired ex-cop was a beautiful woman, regardless of age, and even her toughness never marginalized her feminine allure.

Manning turned toward the big Fed, hoping to keep his mind clear. “You don’t think that it’s a direct link to the government, do you, Hal?”

“No,” Brognola returned. “The crew has been digging deep and hard, looking for threads that might have exposed the blacksuit witness security detail, and those assignments are showing up in the system. It’s not an actual mole inside WITSEC, either.”

“More like a worm in the computer systems,” Tokaido acknowledged. “I’m picking up the damage left behind and Hunt and I are trying to locate and end it.”

“As well as to perform some forensic work on the worm so we can learn where it came from,” Wethers added. “Its elusive nature confirms that a genius put it together, or even a team of geniuses.”

“Say, the best hackers a Mexican covert agency could put together?” Lyons asked.

Wethers nodded in affirmation.

“Accion Obrar is a fairly blunt name for a so-called top secret government op,” McCarter said.

Lyons tilted his head. “It seems more like a terrorist group. In fact, I think some French commies could sue for stealing the title ‘Action Directe.’”

“It’d make targeting them easier,” McCarter mused.

Lyons smirked. He turned back to Brognola. “We’ll be babysitting the kids? Because you know that they’ll still be a target.”

“That, and I know you want a crack at the thugs who killed so many of our blacksuits,” Brognola confirmed. “Weapons free. No rules. No referee.”

“Using the kids as bait is going to be tough.” Blancanales spoke up. “But, sadly, this wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had to do it.”

“And we haven’t lost one of our protectees yet,” Schwarz interjected. “We won’t let them down.”

“You said the father was killed and the mother is missing,” McCarter said. “She might be on her way back to Mexico?”

Brognola indicated the Briton was right with a nod. “The most likely place they’ll put her is El Calabozo sin Piedad. So, right now, our priority is for Phoenix to head to Mexico to get her out of there.”

Rafael Encizo grumbled, drawing McCarter’s attention. “I’ve heard rumors about that place. It’s on a scale of the Cuban prison I was kept in as a teenager.”

In his youth, Encizo, the last of the original founders of Phoenix Force, had fought against the Communist dictatorship in his native Cuba. Only by breaking his jailer’s neck and stealing a boat did he escape to the United States. One of the few members of Stony Man’s action teams not a military veteran, Encizo’s lifetime of work as a salvage diver and as a special consultant for the US Drug Enforcement Administration in Florida had forged him into a highly capable combatant. Officially the oldest of Phoenix Force, he was a swarthy and incredibly strong man for his diminutive height of five-eight. Not the most muscular member of Phoenix—that was Manning—his strength was still considerable, as were his skills with knives. “The worst part is that this is a prison in a friendly nation to ours.”

“Cuba’s on the friendly list now, after all this time,” James offered. He was Encizo’s closest friend on the team, the two spending long stretches of off time scuba diving as well as practicing sparring with their chosen knives. “But, yeah, Mexico is supposed to be a democracy.”

“If Mexico were working so well as a democracy,” Hawkins interrupted, “people wouldn’t be flooding across the border illegally to escape poverty, corrupt governments and the cartel wars.”

The Texan didn’t often offer his opinion on a crisis unless he felt strongly about it. Raised in a border state, Hawkins had a lifetime’s worth of perspective on illegal immigration, and could tell the difference between the criminals who exploited desperation and those seeking escape from turmoil in Mexico or other Central American nations. He caught a knowing nod from the three members of Able Team who had engaged in their own operations against corruption in El Salvador, Guatemala and some of the harsher Mexican states.

Then again, the people of Stony Man were in a position of experience and education, having intimate familiarity with the forces of corruption that trampled humans with their clumsy steps.

“Since we’ll be breaking into an official Mexican prison, I don’t think we’ll be able to head across the border with our arsenal in diplomatic luggage,” McCarter said to Brognola.

“Sadly, no. You’ll be working without a net,” the big Fed agreed. “Unless you happen to have some contacts down there. We’ll arrange a HALO jump for you, if necessary.”

“The day the five of us can’t skirt border security without a parachute insertion is the day we’re retiring as a team,” McCarter countered. “Sorry, T.J.”

Hawkins shrugged. As the team’s jump master, he was usually the one who prepped them for such intrusions, the same as James and Encizo took the bulk of the preparation work for underwater operations. “No skin off my nose on how we get there, boss. We just need to get there before Amanda Castillo is irreparably damaged.”

“We are on the clock,” Brognola said.

“Is that why Barb’s not here?” McCarter asked. “Burning up the phone lines looking for alternate approaches?”

“Making use of every asset we can.” Brognola affirmed the mission controller’s absence. “I don’t have to tell you that this is going to be one of the stickiest things we’ve had to deal with in a while. One wrong move and we could have a war flare-up on our border.”

“We’re never called in when the options are clear and easy,” Schwarz said. “That’s why they call it the Sensitive Operations Group.”

Brognola’s scowl didn’t bode well for the continuing discussion.

“Something else amiss?” Manning asked.

Brognola nodded. “Somewhere in the mix, the attackers on the Arizona safe house left a trail of breadcrumbs that ties the blacksuits to the Farm and this operation. So far, we’re still an unsubstantiated rumor, but a Congressional Oversight Committee is being assembled for the express purpose of finding out who created this enormous screwup.”

“The blacksuit training program and you are out in the open and vulnerable on this,” Lyons said. “And considering the kind of political infighting that’s been wrecking Congress over the past five or so years, if they learn that you have the ear of the President...”

“They will come down on us. They’ll use it to crush him and weaken the nation even further in international eyes,” Brognola confirmed. “It’s not me that I’m worried about, but our sudden vulnerability is too coincidental with the Castillo situation for it not to be a direct attack.”

“People have come at the Farm with armed force before,” McCarter observed. He glanced over to Lyons, remembering one instance where virtual reality hypnosis had turned Able Team into one such assault force. “But this time they’re going after our underbelly.”

Lyons narrowed his eyes. “We’ve been making more than enough enemies and ruining more conspiracies. And the one that has the deepest-digging fingers is the Arrangement.”

“White supremacists and Mexican drug gangs?” Tokaido asked.

“You remember the Fascist International in our files,” Lyons offered. “There are plenty of pure-blooded Mexican and other Central American ‘whites.’ More than enough to keep us steadily busy all this time. Our last outing with them was more than enough to cause them a lot of pain and discomfort in the media.”

“The loss of Stewart Crowmass,” Blancanales added.

“Well, apparently he’d lost enough iterations of the Aryan Right Coalition to have an idea who or what we are,” Brognola said. “That’s another thing that Carmen and Aaron are working on. We’re trying to erase the trails and the crumbs that would expose the President and the Justice Department.”

“So even if we bring down Accion Obrar, there’s still a chance that you’ll be made to fall on your sword? After all we’ve done for the country?” McCarter asked.

“Face it. We’ve done a lot more than just water-boarding and drone strikes,” Lyons said. “The Democrats will go nuts over civil rights violations of our targets, especially someone not proven guilty like Crowmass. The Republicans will just stamp us as another out-of-control government program and a symbol of big government picking on the innocent.”

“Crowmass was good at whipping up each party, hitting their particular hot buttons,” Schwarz added. “Even dead, he’s giving us shit.”

“Not just Stony Man,” Encizo added. “The whole country. Because if things degrade to the point where we might go to war with Mexico, the groundwork he laid might just spark a civil war.”

The Stony Man operatives got up from the meeting table. As of now, they were on the clock and more than just one life was at stake. Just as it always was. They wouldn’t have it any other way.

CHAPTER THREE

When David McCarter mentioned being able to circumvent the law in getting them into Mexico without outside assistance, he’d exaggerated some. During the flight to Yuma, Arizona, where the surviving blacksuit had retreated with the Castillo children, McCarter had Rafael Encizo and Calvin James calling in favors with their friends. In addition to the blacksuits trained by Phoenix Force, James had friends in both California and Nevada police agencies from his time as a member of San Francisco SWAT, and Encizo had similar brothers in arms in the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Deputy Marshal Domingo Perez had driven south from the safe house, moving closer to the Mexican border instead of farther away. But that was a good thing; it provided a major city and airport hub. The Yuma PD, the county sheriff’s office and local FBI and USMS were present and on alert, keeping watch over the still-free family. Yuma sat only fourteen miles and change from the Mexican border, and with the Gila River and all manner of county roads webbed across the countryside, there was plenty of above-ground activity to keep an eye on.

What McCarter sought was the underground smugglers’ routes, all the way from Andrade, California, on Interstate 8 to Douglas, Arizona, on 191. Over the years, nearly one hundred covertly built tunnels had been discovered; routes by which the cartels could get between the Sonora State in Mexico to Arizona. Heroin, cocaine, guns and money flowed freely through those tunnels, and there were likely many more that hadn’t been unearthed by American and Mexican law enforcement. Both Phoenix Force and Able Team had experience with the subterranean trespasses over several missions, and McCarter was certain of one thing: if they found one end of such a tunnel, they’d be set for supplies.

Considering the state of tunnel politics, they would be going full clandestine. Sure, each member of the Force was equipped with sanitized versions of their preferred sidearms, but having access to cartel weaponry and money would be a boost of support that McCarter could truly appreciate. After all, one way that Stony Man was able to keep its chunk of the US government’s black budget so small was thanks to rules of engagement that stated the blood money assembled by drug dealers and terrorists would be well spent turned back against them. Over the years Stony Man kept a minimal footprint despite its government sanctions, having adopted Mack Bolan’s rule of robbing the robbers.

Hitting the end of a smuggler pipeline would not be anything new for the team.

Encizo’s nodding increased in frequency, his expressions growing more excited as he spoke in rapid Spanish to the person on the other end of his call. McCarter smiled, snapping his fingers to get the attention of the others, none of which showing signs of a solid lead.

While Encizo had his cell phone to his left ear, his right hand was busy scribbling down notes. He was on to a very hot lead, which was exactly what McCarter wanted. Everything was written down in pencil, because McCarter watched the eraser bob and wag with each new bit of info.

After a seeming eternity, Encizo was finally off the phone.

“Whatcha got?”

Encizo grinned at McCarter. “Nogales, Arizona. Here’re the notes.”

McCarter took the pad, reading up and down.

In essence, the Nogales site was one that was heavily suspected, thanks to weeks of surveillance, but both Mexican and American judges were dragging their feet. It was, little doubt, due to pressure from one of many cartels. In years past, the cartels had carried out assassinations and other attempted murders on both sides of the line, irrespective of the tourist draw of the small cities and, according to the local DEA, Los Lictors had picked up the slack.

That the enforcer gang seemed to be doing a lot of cleanup of rival cartels, while drugs still flowed across the border, was a sign that Mexican federales and military were working in collusion with “the Magistrates.” In particular, the report claimed the government was helping the Caballeros de Durango Cartel to take control of the Juarez Valley area and destroy other cartels.

Joaquin and Amanda Castillo had personally interviewed dozens of officials and ordinary people for their investigation. One report quoted a former Juarez police commander who claimed the entire department was working for the Knights of Durango Cartel and helping it to fight other groups. He’d also asserted that the cartel had bribed the military. Also quoted was a Mexican reporter who’d stated hearing numerous times from the public that the military had been involved in murders.

Further evidence appeared in the US trial of an ex-Juarez police captain who admitted to working for the cartel. He asserted that the Durango Cartel influenced the Mexican government and military in order to gain control of the region. A US DEA agent in the same trial alleged that the bent cop had contacts with a Mexican military officer. The report also stated, with support from an anthropologist who studied drug trafficking, that data on the low arrest rate of Durango Cartel members was evidence of favoritism on the part of the authorities. A Mexican official denied the allegation of favoritism, and a DEA agent and a political scientist also had alternate explanations for the arrest data. Another report detailed numerous indications of cartel corruption and influence within the Mexican government.