Hell Dawn

Mendoza stood and two men helped him shrug into his jacket. He stared down at Cortez who waited for him to speak his piece.

“I want you to stay here,” he said.

“What?”

“You don’t trust this guy? Fine. But I don’t want you out there asking questions and pissing him off. You stay here.”

“Damn it—”

“Stay!”

Cortez threw up his hands and looked away from Mendoza. The drug lord smiled and, flanked by his security entourage, left the room.

Reaching into his pocket, Cortez touched a business-card-size CD that lay inside and smiled. The CD contained a copy of the Cold Earth worm that he had found hidden within the seams of the American’s coat. Cortez had known for months that his partnership with Mendoza was fragile, primarily because of the fragility of Mendoza’s mind. When he’d found the small CD during the return trip to Mexico, Cortez had known instantly that he had found a way to profitably end the partnership.

CHAPTER SIX

Denver, Colorado

The wait seemed to last forever.

Lyons and Blancanales sat in the hospital waiting room. Lyons, his face scarlet with anger, tapped his foot to some unheard manic beat and stared at the double doors leading into the critical care unit. Blancanales drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair as both men waited for information regarding their wounded comrade.

“That black-coated son of a bitch is mine,” Lyons said.

“Stand in line,” Blancanales replied. Lyons gave him a look that told him he was willing to do anything but that.

“Did the Farm get anything on him yet?”

“Negative,” Blancanales said. “They’re running all the usual traps. They found the abandoned car, or what was left of it, anyway, on the outskirts of town. Got a forensics team checking it out. And we do have some satellite photos that the cyberteam is running through its databases. Aaron said they look to have some positive ID within the hour.”

“Good. He doing okay? About Gabe, I mean?”

Blancanales shrugged. “As well as can be expected. He’s kicking the shit out of himself because he couldn’t do anything to help.”

“That isn’t right. I ought to kick his ass for even thinking that way. No one expected him to do any ground fighting. He was just there to make the contact.”

“Sure, but that isn’t how he sees it. He feels responsible for this kid and seems to think he should’ve done more. And I guess if I was in his situation, I’d feel the same damn way.”

Lyons grunted. “Maybe. But that doesn’t make it right.”

Blancanales smiled at his friend, who continued staring at the doors. “Anyway, maybe Jack can give Aaron a pep talk. You know, snap him out of it,” Blancanales said.

Lyons grunted once more and the two men fell silent.

Blancanales had just downed a Coke and some peanuts when a doctor stepped through the doors. She was petite, with blond hair and the golden tan of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. A white lab coat covered her surgical scrubs and she clutched a clipboard to her chest. Letting the door swing shut behind her, she swept her eyes over the room and searched for the Stony Man commandos.

Blancanales uncoiled from his chair and met her halfway across the room, Lyons right behind him. The three exchanged brief introductions and handshakes. Using a right forefinger, the woman pushed her wire-rimmed glasses off the bridge of her nose and studied the chart in her left hand.

“Your friend’s been through a lot,” she said. “One slug penetrated his abdomen, but fortunately missed his vital organs. Another bullet cracked two ribs. One of the ribs struck a lung and bruised it. If you hadn’t gotten him in here when you did, he could have died within hours.”

Blancanales’s hands bunched into fists. He squeezed them tight as rage coursed through his body, a malignant force that seemed to overtake him. He hoped that Kurtzman and the cyberteam had been able to track down information on the shooter. He’d known Schwarz nearly his entire adult life. The two guys, along with Lyons, were fellow warriors, brothers in blood. And Blancanales vowed at that moment to extract some payback from the guy responsible for nearly killing his oldest friend. A glance at the man standing next to him told Blancanales that his friend was likewise ready to unleash a torrent of hell on the man responsible for this.

“Can we see him?” Blancanales asked.

“I can take you back there for a couple of minutes. But no longer. Like I said, he’s been through a lot, and he needs his rest.”

“Understood,” Lyons said. Blancanales nodded in agreement.

When they reached the unit, Lyons bulled his way through a pair of curtains that led into Schwarz’s room. Blancanales saw his friend stiffen, his jaw clench. An instant later he saw why. Schwarz lay on the bed, pale, unconscious. A ventilator tube wound from his mouth, held in place by medical tape. IV tubes snaked down from liquid-filled plastic bags before biting into the flesh of his arms. A heart monitor was clamped over his index finger and an occasional beep sounded as the monitor did its work. Blancanales swallowed hard.

“He unconscious?” the warrior asked.

The doctor nodded. “We had to sedate him heavily to keep him from rejecting the ventilator tube.”

“He looks like hell,” Lyons said.

“He’ll be okay,” the doctor replied. “Now that we’ve found the problem, he just needs time to recuperate.”

The doctor excused herself. Lyons and Blancanales stood at their friend’s bedside. Both men remained quiet, their eyes focused on Schwarz, for a full two minutes.

Lyons, his face a mask of rage, turned to Blancanales. “The guy who did this.” A cold rage, barely restrained, was audible in his voice. He paused as he searched for the right words. “When we find him, it isn’t going to be pretty.”

Blancanales nodded. “No, it won’t.”

“This is going to cost the bastard. We’re talking serious payback.”

“In spades, amigo.”

“We watch out for each other, right?”

“Damn straight.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Just think. Within days, we could have it. And it would give us the power necessary to get revenge on the United States for daring to desecrate our lands with its troops. It’s a like a gift from almighty God Himself.”

“Perhaps,” Ahmed Quissad said, unimpressed.

The former Iraqi soldier stood and crossed the room with long strides until he reached a pane of one-way glass. Stretching the length of one wall, the glass looked down upon a crowded nightclub located in one of Prague’s busier tourist districts. Quissad watched as men and women danced, drank and caroused. He found himself alternately fascinated and disgusted by their behavior, grinding against one another, sweating like animals, succumbing to decadent abandon. Though muffled by layers of soundproofing, Quissad still heard the thumping of industrial dance music as it reverberated through the nightclub below.

Animals and nothing more, he thought. Reflected in the glass, he saw his lieutenant—Tariq Khan—standing behind him, staring at his back. Apparently the little man wanted a reply. Quissad waited, knowing that the heavy silence, and the man’s sickening need for praise, would cause him to become restless.

“It is good news, yes?”

Quissad took a drag from his cigarette, shrugged. “Perhaps. What does our friend want for this piece of technology?”

“It’s a disk, one containing a virulent program—”