Exit Strategy

Blancanales waited for his partners to set up on their targets.

“Ready.” Lyons’s voice crackled in his ear.

“In position,” Schwarz confirmed.

Blancanales set down his lunch and opened the big red toolbox. Inside, he had his stand-alone M203. He kept the grenade launcher hidden until he thumbed a buckshot round into the breech of the mighty weapon. The 40 mm barrel was twice the diameter of even the heaviest over-the-counter shotguns. That doubling of bore meant that the buckshot “grenade” held eight times the payload of a 12-gauge shell, turning the launcher into a brutal antipersonnel device. He closed the breech then swung it out of the toolbox, aiming at the driver’s-side door of the van and firing.

The range was fifty feet, which gave the swarm of projectiles Blancanales triggered the room to spread out to a four-foot-diameter circle. Each pellet, a third of an inch in span, perforated sheet metal and glass. The driver of the van and his steering column were ravaged brutally, bearings finding flesh, bone, plastic and wiring equally fragile. With a single blast, the Able Team warrior had eliminated the ambusher’s ability to escape the counterattack.

With smooth, practiced precision, Blancanales ejected the empty shell and pushed a second one home, aiming toward the rear of the van. Its back doors started to swing open, which confirmed that there were gunmen bunched up and ready to burst out onto the street.

The same sheet metal that provided so little protection for the driver buckled under the onslaught of another four-foot-wide swarm. The buckshot might not have had enough energy to punch through the skin of the van and an entire human body, but the second salvo of flying copper and lead meant that corpses tumbled out onto the street, not active, angry shooters.

The double burst of doom provided more than sufficient staggering horror to keep the gunners still inside the van stunned and indecisive as Blancanales put the grenade launcher back in its box and ripped his MP-9 from its harness. The shoulder stock clicked into place and Blancanales moved forward, selector on full-auto.

One of the enemy decided valor was the better part of discretion and leaped from the rear doors, weapon in hand. Before he could land, Blancanales tracked him and ripped off a burst of four 9 mm slugs. All four rounds were on target and instead of landing on his feet like a hero, the charging assassin toppled and crashed into a bloodied mess on the asphalt.

Cries in Spanish and English rattled from inside the van. Blancanales heard the jangle and roll of a side panel on the opposite side of the vehicle. Those unhurt, or at least able to beat a retreat, had decided to keep the bulk of the van between them and whatever avenging force was bearing down upon them.

However, sheet metal was as ineffective against a 9 mm submachine gun as it was to the 40 mm buckshot payload. Blancanales knew where the side door on the van would be; he aimed at the right spot and triggered two more short bursts. Slugs chopped into the thin skin of the van and a cry of agony split the air. To say that Blancanales felt bad about literally shooting fish in a barrel would be a lie.

These men were stationed, watching a federal building, and in wait to attack and either kidnap or kill a US deputy marshal and three terrified children.

No, mercy was not in the cards for these armed thugs, and as Blancanales swung around the rear of the van, keeping his eyes on the open doors, he was primed to continue blazing out 9 mm retribution as long as someone was there with a gun in his hand.

Cutting the pie to not expose himself to enemy fire, he spotted another cartel soldier standing in the rear doors. He was splattered in wet pink clothing, white shirt and linen jacket soaked through to the skin where his partners had bled all over him. He still had a rifle in both hands and the sight of Blancanales startled him.

Blancanales, on the other hand, had expected someone to be there and he stroked the trigger on the MP-9. At 900 rounds per minute, he emptied the last of the 15-round magazine into the blood-drenched ambusher. Blancanales destroyed his face and upper chest with that extended burst. In a heartbeat, he ejected the spent box and pushed home a fresh stack of thirty 9 mm slugs.

The last man in the van, the last living body at least, was huddled behind the driver’s seat, hands up and fingers splayed wide. “I’m not armed! Don’t shoot!”

Blancanales kept the muzzle of the machine pistol leveled at the man, but scanned the area. There could be one more gunman, possibly crouched around the front of the vehicle. This guy might be a legitimate surrender, or he could simply be a distraction. Either way, Blancanales refused to lock into tunnel vision on him.

In the distance the heavy booms of a shotgun and another machine pistol crackled in the midafternoon streets of Yuma.

“Step out of the van through the panel door,” Blancanales ordered. He listened for other signs of a possible hidden gunman. He had a prisoner, at least for the moment, but one mistake and his brains could be spilled on the street with the would-be killers he’d just dispatched.

The prisoner followed Blancanales’s instructions.

“Lay down on your stomach and lace your fingers behind your head,” Blancanales barked. He wanted this man as far out of position to start a fight as possible. The guy, obviously in a mood to survive this encounter, did as he was told. He intertwined his fingers and lay down, eyes shut. His breath came in rapid gulps, anxiety too real to be faked.

“Anyone else get away?” Blancanales asked.

“Yeah,” the man lying on the sidewalk answered. “He ran—”

Toward the front of the van, the veteran Able Team warrior concluded as a shadow flickered in the windshield of the vehicle, disappearing around the corner. There were no abandoned weapons on the sidewalk, so there was a good chance that the escaped ambusher was packing some serious firepower. Judging from what he’d seen in the hands of the dead sprawled in the back of the van, they had submachine guns, too.

Blancanales dropped to a kneeling position, making himself a smaller target as footsteps sounded on the asphalt on the other side of the van. The gunman intended to flank him, but the wily veteran was ready, front sight on the spot where a head would appear.

The cartel gunman burst into view, firing from the hip. That stream of bullets would have torn through Blancanales’s face had he remained standing, but instead, slugs merely sparked against a stone wall and lost their energy. Deformed bullets tinkled to the concrete like metallic turds.

In the meantime Blancanales fired from the shoulder, controlling his trigger pull and maintaining his front sight on his target.

The last violent ambusher died as Blancanales shredded him from crotch to throat with two tribursts of autofire in quick succession. Groin, spine and heart were all defiled by the brutal swathe of 9 mm rounds Blancanales threw at them, and with that, in the space of a few moments, the gunfight was over.

He looked to the man on the sidewalk.

“Stay right there. Make a move and you’ll be in hell before you untangle your fingers,” Blancanales warned him.

“Yes, sir.”

Blancanales wasted little time securing his wrists with a nylon cable tie.

“Carl, we’ve got our prisoner,” Blancanales said over the com.

“Good,” Lyons returned. “Because nothing’s left of my target.”

Blancanales could tell by the gruff tone of his partner’s voice that he’d found something particularly nasty in his attack.

Whatever it was, it was too important to broadcast even over the secure communication frequencies Able Team used in the field.

And if Lyons was worried, then Blancanales was in a hurry to know why.

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_6b872462-2039-555f-a7e4-aa8315c62026)

Carl Lyons heard the thunder of Rosario Blancanales’s grenade launcher and got to work. He ambled up to the rear of the van, the bill of his battered ball cap shading his features to make him look less intimidating. His loose hiking gear also kept his broad shoulders and biceps on full display. The shotgun between his shoulder blades and obscured by his hiking pack was ready to draw and blaze away. He got to the sidewalk-side panel door and turned, giving it a vigorous kick.

The man in the front passenger seat, ironically called the shotgun seat, threw open his door and stepped out, a pistol in hand.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the man shouted even as Lyons whipped out his brutal Mossberg semiauto. The shoulder stock extended and as soon as the gun was at eye level, the Able Team commander pulled the trigger. A fist-size knot of 00 Buck struck the gunman in the face, obliterating his features in an instant. The gunner’s corpse crashed against the passenger-side door, and it held him up for a few brief moments.

Lyons charged to get into the seat that his first target had vacated. He seized the door frame with his left hand and pushed the shotgun into the front seat ahead of him. As soon as the muzzle touched the chest of the ambushers’ driver, who was busy starting the vehicle, he pulled the trigger. At contact range, Lyons unleashed a firestorm inside the driver’s torso. Ribs disintegrated into splinters, and the burning jet of force that hurled projectiles faster than the speed of sound added to the unfettered devastation that nine copper-jacketed balls a third of an inch across could tear through flesh.

Rather than attempt to maneuver the barrel of the shotgun over the front seats, Lyons backed out immediately. With two strides, he was in the middle of the sidewalk and aiming at the area he’d just vacated. He saw an arm swing into view and blew it off with a well-aimed blast. He didn’t completely sever the limb, but the bones of the forearm were stripped of large chunks of muscle and artery. Blood squirted from the mangled limb.

With a slight pivot, Lyons hammered out three more shotgun blasts at close range. The van’s sheet metal proved little hindrance to the concentrated salvos of pellets, and the gunmen inside the vehicle released grunts of pain and dying breath as they caught the deformed slugs in vital areas. The panel door unlatched and swung open, but Lyons caught the first one there with a volcanic boom.

In the second time in seemingly as many seconds, the thug’s skull was excavated, face and brains stripped out of the crushed bowl that used to be his head. A figure was just over the nearly decapitated man’s shoulder and Lyons pivoted and pulled the trigger. The Able Team commander killed that gunman with a flourish of gore, the shotgun spraying the interior of the van with spongy clots of shredded human and splintered skeleton. This was full-on slaughter, the eye for an eye writ large, as Lyons considered a fellow lawman worth a dozen dead gun thugs.