Mind Bomb

Rosario Blancanales came out of the coroner’s office shaking his head. Carl Lyons sat behind the wheel of a bottle-green Renault 12 Estate and rolled his eyes behind his mirrored sunglasses. “Goddamn wild-goose chase.”

It was July. It was noon. And it was 110 degrees. The city was a blast furnace and felt ready to blow.

Carl “Ironman” Lyons, the leader of Able Team, had to give Juárez some credit. The city had managed to fall from being the number-one murder capital of the world to number two. Yet violent turf battles between the Juárez and Sinaloa cartels still rocked the barrios, and there was genuine war in the streets between the cartels and the army and state police.

Juárez had managed to drop to number two in murder overall, but the city still managed to be the number-one murder capital for women in all of the Americas. Juárez’s profoundly disturbing and mostly unsolved strings of kidnapping, torture, rape and murder of its young women continued unabated. Throw in total governmental corruption from top to bottom and the Paso Del Norte had just about seen it all.

But it had never before encountered suicide bombers, which was why Able Team was on the scene. The supersecret US covert operations team was dispatched only for the most urgent and dire situations. Only the President and a very select few of the Man’s advisers even knew of the existence of the highly trained, deadly team based out of Stony Man Farm, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of rural Virginia.

Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz, the third member of Able Team, sat quietly in the backseat watching their six, but Lyons could just about hear him thinking the same thing.

Blancanales put on his happy face as he climbed into the car. “How you boys doing?”

Lyons peered over his mirror sunglasses. “I’m in Mexico. In July. Driving a French station wagon without air conditioning.”

Blancanales grinned. “Well, at least it’s a dry heat!”

“Carl?” Schwarz rolled a sweating grape Fanta bottle across his brow. “Shoot him.”

Lyons considered it. “We got nothing?”

“It makes no sense.” Blancanales sighed. “None of the bombers has any connection that I can find. They come from all walks of life. Different ages and sexes, different parts of town. Go to different churches. The only thing they seem to have in common is that they’re all Mexican nationals. I swear it’s almost like they were picked at random.”

Lyons shook his head. “People don’t randomly strap on suicide vests.”

“No, they don’t,” Blancanales agreed. “And I hate to pull the barrio-boy race card, but homicide bombing isn’t a Latin MO. Something is wrong with this. All of it.”

Schwarz twisted open his bottle of pop. “Anyone?”

“Cherry,” Lyons declared.

“Tamarind.” Blancanales nodded. “Thank you.”

The three Able Team commandos sat in the vintage 1980s French station wagon and drank soda.

Schwarz had been turning his considerable intellect on the problem. “Blackmail is the only angle I can see. The cartels or someone had something on the bombers, or were threatening their families and coerced them.”

“To strap on a bomb and check out? In public?” Lyons snorted.

Blancanales shook his head. “It’s thin.”

“So thin I want to buy it a sandwich,” Lyons concluded. All three men were warriors, but Blancanales and Schwarz were soldiers. Lyons had been a homicide detective. He had kept his cop’s nose when he joined Able Team and often still approached situations like a detective.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Schwarz conceded. “You got anything better?”

Lyons turned to Blancanales. “We got anything better?”

Blancanales glanced up the street. “We got him.”

As a black Lincoln Navigator with tinted windows appeared at the intersection at the top of the street, Schwarz made a bemused noise. “And we got them.”

Lyons checked his rearview and saw a black Nissan Titan pickup that wore tinted windows, as well. “Looks like we got our first lead...”

Schwarz polished off his pop and reached into the duffel at his feet. “Sticking your head out to see who tries to blow it off is Phoenix MO. I thought us Able guys were supposed to be smart ’n’ stuff.”

“Not smart enough to get a decent car,” Lyons growled. Stony Man Farm had arranged for the CIA to position a clean, no-questions-asked vehicle at the safe house. When this was all over, Lyons was of a mind to track down the asshole spook in question to have a serious Q and A about what the hell species of farm animal manure they had between their ears. In the meantime, Lyons arranged a smile on his face that could have sold toothpaste. He held up his cherry Fanta and waggled it at the SUV watching them. “Hey, morons. Hi. Yeah. Yeah, you. I’m gonna kill every last one of you.” Lyons nodded and grinned like an idiot. “Except one and he’s gonna wish I had.”

Schwarz toasted a fresh purple bottle at the pickup behind them. “It’s true! He’s gonna! I’ve seen his work!”

Blancanales sighed and polished off his pop. “Can we go now?”

Lyons jerked the wheel and put the pedal to the floor. The R-12 Estate took its time, its 63 horsepower time, and lurched rather than lunged into traffic. Horns blared, tires screamed and traffic veered around the wallowing Renault. Lyons snarled in disgust. “Oh, for God’s sake!” He ignored the mayhem all around and took a straight line for the side street. The two black, V8-powered 4x4s lunged like hounds off the leash.

“There’s a third vehicle somewhere. They’re going to go for a pin,” Blancanales advised.

Lyons kept the pedal down, waiting for something in the car to respond. “You think?”

Schwarz hurled his empty pop bottle out the window and Blancanales and Lyons followed suit. There was almost no chance broken glass would do anything to the huge off-road tires of their adversaries, but it might cause some flats in the surrounding traffic to get in their way. “Shot” would have been charitable but the Renault finally managed to “scoot” up the alley and squirt into the next cross street.

A second Titan pickup came screaming up a few seconds short on timing to trap Able Team in the alley. Lyons turned straight into them. He played chicken for two seconds and then cranked the wheel and jumped up on the sidewalk. The only good news was that it was noon and hardly anyone was out walking on the heat-shimmering pavement. Lyons shot past his opponent. The pickup screamed in a beauty of a bootlegger’s turn.

The Able Team leader grimaced. “He’s good!”

Schwarz watched the Lincoln boil out of the alley behind them. “We’ll never make the safe house.”

Lyons agreed. “No shit.”

“Slow and steady wins the race,” Blancanales opined.

“Well, we’re already driving a French turtle, Pol! Any other suggestions?”

“Slow and steady. Drive slower and shoot steady.”

“Finally he talks my language.” Lyons limboed back over his seat and the passenger bench as Blancanales slid into the driver’s seat. He rolled into the wagon bed and unzipped his gear bag. The Able Team leader drew the massive Atchisson semiautomatic shotgun and removed the 24-round drum magazine. Velcro tore as he opened the bag’s side pockets of specialized ammo. He took out an 8-rounder.

The Navigator came roaring out of the alleyway behind them. The SUV’s starboard grille was crumpled, and smashed headlights hung by wires from the impacts but nothing seemed to be slowing the leviathan SUV down. Pinning prey in traffic with large SUVs and trucks and then filling the target car with lead was a favorite tactic of Mexican sicarios. This was a full-blown professional hit.

The Nissan Titan and the Navigator locked ranks and tore after them. The third pickup would be screaming through traffic trying to get ahead of the action.

Lyons tapped his magazine to make sure the rounds were still correctly seated. The face of the top three-inch Magnum shell was not crimped like buckshot nor did it present the sunken flat face of a slug. It gleamed like quicksilver and looked nothing so much as the nose cone of a missile. The tip was the point of a tungsten-steel long-rod penetrator. The gleaming, spiral-grooved metal around it was hard-cast lead. The rod was designed to tear through the engine block of a vehicle. The hard-cast lead would shatter like shrapnel and tear apart hoses, belts and small moving parts. John “Cowboy” Kissinger, the Stony Man armorer, had designed the round from the ground up to kill cars.

“Pop the back!”

Blancanales laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

Lyons put both his feet against the hatch frame and aimed between his boots. “Cover your ears!”

“Shit!”