Exit Strategy
This was a plan burned into their brains in the past half hour, and all of that after an hour of study of the options, approaches and possibilities. The five men of Phoenix Force were trained professionals, and they were bringing with them the best technology ever assembled for combat and espionage. Their minds combined were the worth of any combat computer, let alone the paranoid security measures of the Caballeros Cartel.
Hawkins rapped on the door. “¡Abrir, esse!”
Encizo was impressed enough with Hawkins’s facility with the tone and dialect to think that they might have a chance at getting in the front door.
A panel opened up. “What makes you think we’re interested in what you’re selling?”
“We’re not selling anything,” Hawkins returned in rapid street Spanish. “Unless it’s your own asses.”
Wary, suspicious eyes burned through the door panel.
“It’s only the two of us. What are we going to do?” Encizo growled, every inch the veteran gang-banger. “What’s coming on our heels is much worse.”
Hawkins gave the door another thump, right under the aperture the guard glared through. “Come on. Tamale Boy knows there’s nothin’ coming with us. But we wait out here five more minutes, ICE is going to be rolling up with tanks!”
The reference to Immigration and Customs Enforcement widened the eyes of the doorman. “Rolling up in tanks?”
The door opened only slightly. A submachine gun muzzle poked through the crack. “Keep your hands where we can see them at all times.”
Hawkins rolled his eyes and interlaced his fingers at the back of his head. “This good, homie?”
Encizo did likewise. The door opened farther, hands snatching at their shirts and tugging them into the foyer. As soon as they were inside, Hawkins was able to count the welcoming committee: four men, including the guy standing at the door. He’d been standing there with an MP-7 leveled at Hawkins’s midsection and was continuing to follow him.
Encizo’s flannel shirt dropped open and the assembled Durango gun thugs recognized the hardware hanging in a shoulder harness.
There was a brief instant of confusion.
“Are you from—” one began to ask.
Unfortunately the moment the doorman started to close the door, Encizo’s interlaced fingers released the tension on the flash-bang grenade he was holding at the back of his neck. He’d thumbed out the pin when it looked as if he was surrendering, but the canister dropped to the floor, the safety spoon clanging away middrop.
The ensuing thunderbolt detonation at his feet was so hard that Encizo felt it like a punch to his chest. That was while wearing eye and ear protection. To the unprepared cartel guards, it was an assault on the senses.
In a flash of movement, Encizo drew his Cold Steel Tanto and drove it into the belly of the man holding an MP-7 at Hawkins’s navel. Six inches of chisel-tipped, razor-sharp steel plunged through muscle and viscera, severing the Caballero doorman’s aorta. Such a vicious arterial wound would kill in under a minute. Encizo sped up the process to prevent his suffering, driving the point upward and impaling the cartel guard’s heart.
Hawkins also opted for a non-gunshot first strike. He had out his punch dagger in the space of an instant and leaned into a hard jab to the neck of a second of the sentries. The wide arrowhead-shaped blade parted flesh and muscle, severing arteries and nerve clusters in its passage through the Mexican’s throat. With a twist, he presented the blunt back edge of the knife and pulled out with all of his strength. Any blood vessels or muscles not neatly slashed were now corkscrewed and bluntly ripped on the exit path. The sentry’s blinded eyes rolled up into his head as he toppled backward in a boneless mass.
Encizo gave a powerful kick to the third of their welcoming committee. The point of the Cuban’s boot was steel-tipped, and when he connected with the hip of that man, the force of the impact dislodged the femur from his pelvis. There was a numbed wail of horror, but it was cut off as Encizo clawed his free hand’s fingers into the Mexican’s face. The Tanto knife came up and punched through the relatively weak bone of the caballero’s temple. Bone splintered and large chunks of brain lacerated with brutal efficiency, Encizo ended this man much more swiftly than the other.
Hawkins snatched the submachine gun in the fist of the fourth and last of the group in the foyer. Blinded and deafened, the caballero barely had a grasp on the machine pistol before Hawkins spun it around. The Texan triggered a 3-round burst under his enemy’s chin, putting him out of commission in the blink of an eye.
The rest of Phoenix Force was at work now, as they heard the toppling form of one man hit a pallet from the catwalk by the icehouse’s windows. Gary Manning’s work with the G-3 was dead-on, taking out at least one of the gunmen in the windows. In the same instant, dock doors around the back exploded off of their hinges with the aid of a Manning-designed breaching charge.
Hawkins and Encizo tossed another flash-bang. On the detonation, they exited the foyer, machine pistols tracking.
There’d been another pair of men poised to act in case something happened, but the sudden crash of one of their partners from the catwalk caught their attention. A moment later they were the recipients of a flash-bang detonation and, in that next instant, streams of 4.6 mm autofire that slashed through their internal organs.
From the back, McCarter and James were blazing away with their own weapons. The Briton with his MP-7, James with his Kitty carbine that, despite a suppressor, still produced a vigorous clatter as high-velocity 5.56 mm tore through the air at nearly 2,500 feet per second. Cartel gunmen twisted and writhed as swift bursts chopped through their flesh.
Another body toppled over a railing above. His arrival on the warehouse floor was punctuated with the thunder of splintering wood and a mist of spraying blood as bones on the way to the concrete split flesh between like ersatz scissors. Hawkins paused long enough to see who else Manning had engaged from a distance. He saw another three bodies sprawled on the wire mesh flooring of the catwalks, each lying with limbs twisted to impossible angles. He saw that there were another two gunmen up there and was about to aim at one, but Manning’s marksmanship was demonstrated again. The man’s face burst into a cloud of dark gore, skull cored by 7.62 mm NATO jacketed lead.
The last of the gunmen threw his weapon away, holding his hands up in an effort to keep the invisible god of death from taking his life.
The others on the icehouse floor were still in the mood to fight, no sudden thunderbolts of doom whispering out of nowhere to execute them. Hawkins hurled a flash-bang at a clot of Mexican cartel gunners, letting his empty MP-7 crash to the floor. The distraction device struck one of the caballeros and bounced skyward before it detonated, raining earsplitting thunder and eye-burning light.
With the crash of the grenade, Hawkins transitioned to the light-equipped Beretta, drawing it up and firing. As in practice with the barrel given extra weight from the mounted torch, recoil was nonexistent. A stream of 9 mm bullets barked out of the five-inch barrel of the M9, connecting with Durango soldiers and punching through upper chests and heads with laser precision. For ten shots, four men were down and dead, Hawkins so fast on the trigger that he punched them twice or three times before gravity caught up with the suddenness of their demise.
Encizo had the stock extended on the MP-7, braced against his shoulder. From this position he was able to move and pivot with speed and grace, and yet, every time he had a clear view of an enemy, he also had the machine pistol on target. High-velocity projectiles exited the barrel so swiftly, their mass so minor, that recoil wasn’t a factor in putting rounds on target, either. A flurry of 4.6 mm hornets zipped through skin and cartwheeled through muscle, lodging in bone once they struck fluid mass.
Though adrenaline and the fog of combat made the fight seem to stretch out longer, in truth, it was barely closing in on a minute since Encizo had dropped the first flash-bang to start the battle. Moving with trained precision, and making certain they were in cover, the four men of Phoenix Force inside the icehouse exercised brutal efficiency at crushing any opposition.
A minute and five seconds after the flash-bang started festivities, an eerie silence enveloped the icehouse
“Gary, how loud was it out there?” McCarter’s voice rang over their hands-free communicators.
“Except for the tamale cart, nobody even noticed it. He crashed just inside the foyer when I took him,” Manning returned.
“Right. Get down here,” McCarter ordered. “Good breach, T.J., Rafe.”
“Thanks,” Hawkins answered. Even though they were engaged in radio chatter, none of the five commandos were letting their attention wander from the tasks at hand. For the four inside, it was making certain no one was up and fighting. For Manning, it was removing himself from his hide and joining the others.
So far, they’d only secured one end of the Nogales icehouse smuggling tunnel.
There was still three hundred feet to trek underground and security at the other end to deal with.
CHAPTER FIVE
Perez took another sip of his energy drink, his eyes feeling full of sand and grit. He wasn’t sure when the last time was that he’d blinked. Nerves buzzed throughout his body, but all that really mattered was the Castillo children. The two girls slept. Pequita with her arms around the younger, shorter Annette, protecting her. The two kids drew strength from their contact and he hadn’t allowed their minds to wander to the fates of their parents.
Domingo Castillo, however, stayed mostly awake, or only partially asleep. Young Dom was classically nodding off, pulling himself awake only as he dipped into slumber.
Perez sucked back another sip. A knock at the door startled him and he nearly choked on his drink.
His hand fell to the big .45 on his hip.
“Friends coming in,” growled a voice from the other side.
Dom jerked fully awake but his sisters remained wound together in sleep.
In walked three men, newcomers Perez hadn’t seen around the offices before. He’d been told to expect them. While he recognized them, he didn’t know any names. He knew the trio was usually referred to by code names. He also knew these guys weren’t supposed to exist, and the things they did when not teaching cops and soldiers were to stay secret until the end of time, according to the nondisclosure agreement Perez had been made to sign during training ops.
“I don’t know if you’re a sight for sore eyes or if I’m gonna regret dragging you guys into this mess,” Perez said.
Carl Lyons strode forward, holding out his hand to the deputy marshal.
Though Perez initially worried that these three men might be hurt, the handshake waylaid any fears that the man introduced as Ironman was fragile.
The man Perez knew as Politician seemed only two-thirds the size of Ironman by muscle mass, and yet the gray-haired warrior’s grip and arm were no less tightly muscled and firm. There was a wary alertness in his eyes, and though his hair had gone prematurely light, he still possessed a limber ease of movement that accompanied that strength.
The last was called Gadgets, and though he didn’t have the same muscle tone and cut of build as the other two men, he didn’t lack for a good grip in his handshake. It just seemed as if everything the genius did required very little physical or mental effort; that he glided with the flow rather than struggle unnecessarily. That Zen mentality had showed its true nature when he’d watched the man win a bench-press competition among the blacksuits without a grunt of exertion.
“We’re not going to talk about too many details in front of the kids,” Lyons warned. “By the way, I’m Karl Stone, he’s Pol Rosa, and Gadgets is Hermann Black.”
“Nice to meet you again,” Perez replied.
Schwarz walked over to Domingo Castillo carrying a small pack. He unzipped it and pulled out a small bottle of orange soda, handing it to him. “You doing okay?”
The boy nodded. He glanced over at Perez, as if to ask if it were okay to drink this. Perez gave a nod of assent, and Dom pulled off the top and took a thirsty sip. He approached his sisters and whispered to them, “Pequita, Annette!”
The girls’ eyes opened. Schwarz watched them, reminding Perez of a loyal family dog, one that would die for them before allowing harm to strike.
Sadly, tragedy had already struck.
“Orange soda and candy bars. Dentists might hate him, but he knows how to raise a kid’s spirits,” Blancanales said to Perez. “How about you?”
“I’m pretty certain my urine will be glow-in-the-dark neon green next time I piss,” Perez said, tapping the side of his can. “But the jokes aren’t true. I can’t smell colors yet.”
Lyons plucked the can from the blacksuit marshal. “You’ll get some sleep before we go anywhere. I need you in good operational condition.”
“You think I want to sleep?” Perez asked.
Lyons sat him down. “We’ll give you an hour. Don’t worry. We’ve got your back.”
“I don’t...” Perez began. His eyes grew heavier.
He realized that Pol was tapping rhythmically on his shoulder. The steady, soothing beat hypnotized him. Slumber came quickly.
“Nice trick,” Lyons said.
“Learned it from an old guy when I was stationed in Korea,” Blancanales replied.
Lyons smirked. “Think he’d teach it to me?”
Blancanales shook his head. “Nah. You’re too much of a pale sow’s ear.”
Lyons rolled his eyes. “Take a look at the kids while Gadgets has them filling up on sugar.”
Blancanales did so. In the meantime, the Able Team leader took Perez’s cell phone and checked it. He didn’t expect there to be anything on it, but maybe someone had sent messages to Perez. Lyons found some alerts on his phone, but they were simple emails and social media garbage. That didn’t mean there weren’t clues inside the phone that someone else would find useful.
“Done looking at the magic picture box?” Schwarz asked.
“All yours, wizard,” Lyons returned. “Grog not understand intricacies of electronic communications within it.”
Schwarz smiled and pulled out his Combat PDA. He connected a wire between the two devices then let the microcomputer dive into the phone, checking for the sort of trace programs and outré technology that would turn a cell phone into a weapon. “Bang.”
“Find something?” Lyons asked.
“This phone’s riddled with worms,” Schwarz explained. “I’m running through the diagnostics and there’s little wonder how the safe house was found. And it’s still transmitting.”
Lyons nodded. “That means we can expect shadows.”
Schwarz locked eyes with his friend and partner. “Expect them? I never figured you for a passive host waiting for guests.”
Lyons looked over at Blancanales, who had finished his initial evaluation of the kids. Though they hadn’t come to physical harm in the escape to Yuma, they were frightened, and very likely had a feeling that their parents were either dead or in fatal danger. Blancanales’s expression evidenced that those worries dogged the children, though they each managed to maintain a brave face.
“I’ll only be in passive mode until you give me something to shoot at, Gadgets,” Lyons announced. “So how fast can you give that to me?”
“That’s the Ironman I remember,” Schwarz returned. “Call it fifteen minutes?”
Lyons narrowed his eyes. “Make it ten.”
Blancanales gave his report on the mood and emotional status of the Castillo youngsters quickly and succinctly.
“I hate dragging them around as bait,” Lyons grumbled. “But I also don’t want to abandon them. If this thing is an attempt to ramp up tensions between the US and Mexico, leaving them here makes the federal building a target.”
Blancanales rested his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “We’ve handled babysitting-style assignments before. If anything, with us, they not only have a group of the best defenders in the world, but also folks who can handle the trauma the kids have experienced.”
Lyons nodded. “We already went over this at the Farm and on the plane. It’s the least of all possible evils, and it’s something I can live with.”
Blancanales returned to Dom and his sisters while Lyons took a mental inventory. Utilizing the resources of the Farm, as well as the skills and strengths of his partners, there was little doubt that Able Team could bring the hammer down on Los Lictors or whomever the Durango Caballeros were using as their enforcers on this side of the border.
Their plan to have Deputy Marshal Perez on their side, continuing his role as caretaker for the kids and as a fourth gunner, allowed them some wriggle room, but he was glad for Schwarz’s additional suggestion. Out in Los Angeles, where Able Team had a lot of friends and contacts, they had a woman who could also supply her own brain and firepower to the mix.
Lao Ti and her business partner, May Ling Fu, had aided the Stony Man trio on previous occasions and were now on their way to assist once again. As they were not a federal law enforcement agency, although Dr. Lao Ti’s electronics and computer firm was a government contractor, there was a better possibility that holes in Brognola’s agency security would be averted. If not, then there was another angle with which to see how the Mexican agency and their pet cartel were penetrating US government security.
He got on his assigned phone. “Barb, it looks like someone loaded some tracking software into the phones of the blacksuits. Gadgets says he’s going to see if any trackers are in the area.”
Price sounded skeptical. “We’re skating on the edge here. Maybe this was just the thing necessary to draw all of you out into the open.”
“A trap. Something from the legacy of Crowmass and the Arrangement,” Lyons mused aloud, giving in to grudging agreement.
“They’ve resurrected the Aryan Right Coalition enough times to figure out who you are and why you’re their number-one target,” the mission controller added. “You as in Able and Phoenix.”
“And we’re going in expecting them to want to trap us,” Lyons answered. “Just look back on all of those ambushes we’ve been through. We fight our way out. It’s what we do.”
“But sooner or later that string of luck is going to fail,” Price countered. She sounded worried, and Lyons knew that his bluster and bravado wouldn’t do anything to soothe her nerves. There were facts and knowledge, prior example, but there was also the knowledge that for all their talent and strength, the warriors of Stony Man Farm were still human, still fallible. Mistakes and a run of bad luck could be the end of any or all of the Stony Man warriors. Lyons had watched too many comrades fall, too many lovers in his life cut down by vengeful thugs.
“Luck isn’t a string. It’s a wave you ride. And in between the waves, a good surfer knows how to stay afloat and position himself for another swell,” Lyons added. “There’s so much more than just chance working for us.”
“Gadgets should be getting the telemetry necessary to home in on your shadows,” Price said. “And he and you were right. They’re waiting to ambush...at least ambush Perez and the kids if they leave.”
Lyons looked at his Combat PDA, which displayed the presence of three vans on a satellite view of the federal building. He tapped one of the van blips and could see heat sources from downward-looking infrared.
“They’re on the same channels...I think,” Price said. “Bear and Gadgets have the proper terminology of how these traces go. And those vans don’t look like they’re sitting waiting for rush hour to take advantage of the carpool lane.”
Lyons, phone tucked between his ear and shoulder, scanned the vans that had been marked as targets. Every one of them was loaded with men and all were huddling, ready to explode into action. Lyons had seen that kind of ready-to-roll-out tension before, back when he was on the LAPD and the FBI. He’d been on enough SWAT raids to understand that preparedness, to know the coiled energy waiting for an opportunity to burst. He’d felt that tension in his own bones, so he knew what he was looking at, even through a thermal camera in low orbit over Yuma, Arizona.
He put the PDA away. “We’ll take care of the vans. After all, there’s only one vanload for each of us. We’ve practically got them outnumbered.”
“Pride goes before the fall,” Price noted.
Lyons snorted. “But to really bowl ’em over, you need 12-gauge.”
Price managed a laugh and disconnected.
“You got it all in five minutes,” Lyons said to Schwarz. “You were yanking me on needing fifteen to do the job.”
Schwarz grinned. “What makes you think that?”
“Because you’re trying to impress me, inflating the haggling price so that when you finish in a third of the time, I’m surprised,” Lyons answered, giving Schwarz a gentle pop on the shoulder.
“Curses...foiled!” Schwarz answered. “We’re leaving Perez to snooze?”
Lyons nodded. “Saddle up, Pol. We got people to do and things to see.”
Blancanales held his tongue for the sake of the kids, at least until he bid them so long. Outside the safe room, the eldest member of Able Team was brought up to speed on the situation and layout of the ambushers.
“One per van?” Blancanales asked. “We hit them simultaneously. Are we looking for prisoners?”
“That would be a bonus, but considering that these creeps are looking to kidnap kids and murder more federal agents and local cops, I don’t see a lot of need to be gentle. Just leave enough for dental or fingerprint identification,” Lyons explained.
The three men went to a locker room that had been set aside for them. They’d left their gear bags within and now quickly went to work changing.
“What’s the plan, Ironman?” Schwarz asked. “I mean, beyond kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out?”
“We don’t want them to see us coming until it’s too late,” Lyons returned. “I’ll be a hiker.”
Lyons stripped out of his suit and pulled on a pair of cargo shorts. He laid and tucked his body armor, complete with trauma plates, over his bare, muscular torso, which he covered with a loose-fitting T-shirt. The cargo shorts were held up with a full two-inch belt. He clipped an inside-the-waistband holster and an outside pancake holster, for the snub-nosed and full-size Python Plus respectively, to that belt. The oversize T-shirt fell over the two weapons, disguising them against his waist.
He reconfigured his war bag into a hiking pack, throwing the carry loops over his shoulders. There was a sheath into which he could reach, drawing a compact, folding-stock version of the Mossberg 930 SPX. Compact wasn’t really a true term for it. The scattergun still had a full 24-inch barrel and an under-barrel tube magazine that held eight 3-inch Magnum shells or nine standard 12-gauge rounds. With the folded stock, however, it disappeared inside the backpack. Pulled out, the stock would snap instantly into place, braced against Lyons’s shoulder to control recoil and direct the fistfuls of pellets with deadly precision.
With an extra in the chamber, Lyons was happy with having ten hefty blasts of 00 Buck from regular 12-gauge shells. He also had sixteen rounds of .357 Magnum ready to go with just a quick draw. The semiautomatic Mossberg didn’t need to be pumped to lay out its payload of rage against a group of targets.
Schwarz shrugged into a windbreaker and sunglasses, but only after he put on a shoulder harness for a Brügger & Thomet MP-9 submachine gun. This, too, had a folding stock and condensed itself to the length of a standard handgun, yet had a shoulder stock and a vertical handgrip for the same kind of precision Lyons got out of his shotgun. With a 15-round flush-fitting magazine to start off the festivities and spare 30-round sticks, Schwarz wasn’t undergunned, either. Especially when it spat out 9 mm rounds at 900 in a minute.