Salvador Strike

Over his bowl of sliced bananas on oatmeal topped with milk and honey, Marciano reread the bold, front page headline: National Gang Members Charged with RICO Violations. At last! Several key members of MS-13 were in custody and based on the pages of testimony by his key witness—testimony submitted and leading to indictments by a federal grand jury last week—these domestic terror mongers wouldn’t be spreading any more violence or bloodshed for a long time, if ever again. The suburban neighborhoods of Virginia, Florida and California would be safer with those bastards out of the picture.

Marciano thought of Ysidro Perez, the one brave soul who decided to get his life together and make a stand. With no thought for his own safety, Perez voluntarily stepped out on his homeboys in Virginia—a cell dubbed the Hillbangers by local law enforcement—to report on their activities and betray the sacred trust extended to him. Perez’s testimony had eventually led to not only the arrest of his leader, Mario Guerra, but six other high-ranking members from various cells throughout the United States.

And that’s only the beginning, Marciano thought.

The prosecutor dropped the paper on the table and turned to finishing his breakfast. The Bulova watch on his wrist, a Christmas present from his wife, told him he had only a few minutes before he had to leave for his office. Rush-hour traffic had grown worse over the past couple of years, as well as the construction of new homes in what had once been a quiet development, which ultimately tacked more than twenty minutes onto what had once been a ten-minute commute. It took him nearly a half hour to drive barely ten miles.

Sad, that’s what it was.

Marciano finished about half of his breakfast and then rose, scraped the remainder into the garbage can and rinsed out the bowl. He left it in the sink, confident Caroline would take care of it like she always did. Faithful and diligent, his adoring wife had stayed home with their three kids during their early years, but when the youngest finally reached seventh grade, she took a job selling real estate in a booming market. Marciano knew she was a shoo-in for such a position; it suited Caroline’s impeccable tastes and uncanny ability to match the right perspective buyer with the right place.

They didn’t really need the money. Investment proceeds from the sale and dissolution of his private practice with several equal partners in a Washington law firm had provided a more than adequate windfall. But Marciano couldn’t stop practicing law any more than a fish could stop swimming. So with a change in administration at the White House and the appointment of a close friend to Attorney General, Marciano transformed his practice from protecting major corporations from exploitation to going up against those who challenged the law of the land.

“So you view yourself as a crusader?” a member of the press had asked him right after the AG announced his appointment.

“Not at all,” he replied with a smile. “I’m simply a concerned citizen.”

That had brought a titter from the wall-to-wall bodies packing the press room at the Justice Department and a commendation from his boss on the way he’d handled the questioners in such a suave fashion.

Now entering his third year with the Attorney General, Marciano had made a number of influential friends, not least among them a man he’d truly come to admire and respect: Hal Brognola. Marciano had worked with plenty of federal agents in his time, but he’d never met anyone quite like that one. Brognola had an insight and knowledge into the workings of the criminal underworld like it was nobody’s business. Brognola was older—probably much older than he looked—and Marciano had always assumed he was semiretired, since he hardly ever saw the guy. Still, if he needed advice or wanted a fresh approach to a prosecutorial problem, Brognola was the first guy he would go to and that was saying a lot since, to his knowledge, the man had no law degree of any kind other than from the school of hard knocks. Yes, indeed, the guy had been around a very long time.

“Honey, I’m leaving!” Marciano called to his wife as he snatched his leather valise off the side table in the entryway of their two-story home.

Caroline had found the place when it got listed with her agency, and while taking a couple through it she fell in love. Marciano liked their private place by a lake in the foothills of the Shenandoah, but the trip had become impractical when his firm grew in size and clientele base, so Caroline convinced him to move to Herndon. He didn’t really like the additional upkeep required by the neighborhood association, and he wasn’t much for gardening or landscaping, but it did afford him an opportunity to spend quality time with Caroline so he didn’t really mind.

Marciano opened the heavy front door of his house and a loud thumping sound greeted him. The steady beat came from some kind of sound system inside the late-model Lincoln SUV with heavy window tinting parked at the curb. Marciano took a couple of hesitant steps through the doorway and closed it securely behind him. As he proceeded down the flagstone pathway that curved toward the driveway where his BMW sat idling, he noticed the rear-seat window of the SUV roll down.

He instantly recognized the object that protruded from the interior, but just a moment too late to really do anything about it.

Gunfire resounded through the chill morning air as a torrent of hot lead spit from the muzzle of the submachine gun. Slugs ripped through Marciano’s double-breasted pinstripe suit and lodged deep in his flesh, his body dancing under the impact of each round. Some of the bullets hit center mass while others grazed him deeply and in enough volume to actually tear chunks of flesh from the bones of his arms and legs. Marciano never saw his shooter; he also never saw the trio of young Hispanic males in gray hooded sweatshirts marked with the symbol of MS-13 as they emerged from the backseat of the SUV.

The young men made their way up the flagstone path, kicked in the front door and fanned out to scour the house. They would complete their work in short order, gunning down Caroline Marciano with the same butchery as her husband and then set fire to the home. These events would signal the fate of the U.S. Attorney General’s case, as about the same time police units responded to reports of gunfire coming from the area of the Marciano residence, a federal game warden would discover the butchered remains of a headless and handless victim in a wildlife marshland at the edge of Riverbend Regional Park—remains the coroner took several days to identify as those of Ysidro Perez.

1

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

“Without a case, the AG was forced to release the gang leaders they had in custody,” Hal Brognola said. “MS-13 had tried to hide the identity of the body, but fortunately we had DNA and blood samples that had been taken when Perez required medical treatment for his diabetes while in federal custody.”

A brooding silence fell on the War Room as the others considered Brognola’s grim announcement. Among that group sat a figure more powerful and imposing than all the rest. Arms folded, Mack Bolan leaned back in his chair and stared at the documents of a file folder arrayed before him. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a new tune but no question remained in his mind that this particular case required his kind of intervention. No matter the enemy, Bolan’s battle plan was always the same—strike terror into the heart of an organization to the point where he destroyed it from the inside out. The time had come to execute that plan against MS-13.

“Tell me more about Marciano,” he told Brognola.

The head Fed’s eyebrows rose. “You mean beside the fact that he was a top-notch prosecutor and good friend?”

Bolan nodded.

Brognola sighed. “I first met him a few years ago when the AG brought him on board. I haven’t known too many like him, Striker. Gary was relentless. He had come from a background in corporate law, but he took to federal prosecution like a duck to water. There are some men who are born for this kind of thing. Just like you were born to do what you do, Gary was the exact same way.”

“He never gave you a reason to think he might have been playing for the other team?”

“Absolutely not.”

Bolan furrowed his brow. “Then we have to assume these gang members had someone inside the Justice Department feeding them intelligence. They knew where and how to hit Marciano’s family, and they knew where this Ysidro Perez had been holed up while he was waiting to testify.”

“That was our initial conclusion, as well,” Barbara Price interjected.

Stony Man’s beautiful mission controller flipped a lock of honey-blond hair behind her ear. Bolan caught the movement and his eyes locked on hers. Through the years, Price had been a steady aid and object of physical comfort to Bolan. They saw each other rarely, but on such occasions they shared a deep connection and intimacy. Price’s background in the NSA qualified her better than anyone else to oversee the daily operations of the Stony Man teams, and they appreciated her. But, she had chosen to reserve her deepest and most personal passions for the Executioner.

Brognola continued. “The thing everyone forgets is that I knew Gary Marciano. I acted mostly as a sounding board and confidant for him, and one thing I know about him for sure is that he tended to play his cards very close to the vest. In the case of MS-13, there were only two other people who knew those kinds of details—me and the Attorney General. And since my personal questioning of the AG in front of the President leads me to conclude he didn’t say anything, the theory that an insider passed sensitive materials to any shot-callers inside MS-13 is damned unlikely.”

“There were two other agents with the BATF who questioned Perez,” Price said. “I had Bear look deeply into both of these guys, and neither of their activities of recent give us any suspicion they leaked intelligence of their dealings to any outside parties.”

“That’s right,” Aaron “the Bear” added. “I dug into their phone records and e-mails. I even scanned their personal financials for large purchases or cash transactions of any kind. They both came back as clean as a whistle.”

That note satisfied Bolan. Kurtzman had repeatedly demonstrated his wizardry in the wide arena of technology. The computer servers installed in the Annex at Stony Man Farm processed and stored massive amounts of information. Kurtzman could hack into just about any secured system in the world. If either of the BATF agents had left a trail of any kind, Kurtzman was the man to find it. If he said they were above reproach, then that was good enough for Bolan.

Price looked toward Brognola, who tendered a curt nod. “Given what we know to this point,” she said, “there’s only one other possibility. One other person did know about Ysidro Perez and Marciano’s case. But nobody outside Marciano or Hal knew that. Not even the Attorney General.”

“I’m listening,” Bolan replied.

“You’re familiar with the history of MS-13?” Brognola asked.

Bolan nodded. Mara Salvatrucha Trece’s could trace its roots back to the early 1980s and the peasant guerrillas that immigrated into the United States, victims of the bloody civil war in El Salvador. While their origins came about in Los Angeles, they had risen in status and numbers exceeding one hundred thousand members. Their operational territory numbered in excess of thirty states. Their platform: become the largest and most powerful gang in the country; their methods: robbery, gunrunning, drug trafficking and murder-for-hire. They had become nothing less than a domestic terrorist group, one that was organized and well equipped, and Bolan knew it was time for him to act in a way law enforcement could not.

“Back in 2001,” Price said, “when the FBI first got involved in this with another witness, this one a pregnant girl who was also killed by members of the gang, they organized themselves and conducted major raids in multiple jurisdictions, including areas in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Because of how much leadership they took down, the Justice Department thought they had effectively crippled the organization and its influence. Unfortunately, they were wrong.”

“You see, one of the things Gary realized after he was first assigned Perez’s case was that while each cell had its own shot-callers,” Brognola said, “the source of the strings being pulled was in El Salvador.”

“Where the gang originated,” Bolan said. “It makes sense. There’s always a bigger fish out there.”

“Well, Gary decided the only way they could bring MS-13 down for certain this time was to send an agent to penetrate the hierarchy. He came to me with his idea, and we agreed for a time to keep it between just ourselves.”

“Why didn’t he want to let the AG in on it?” Bolan asked.

Brognola chuckled. “I know why you ask, and I can assure you now that he didn’t suspect his boss of any wrongdoing. He knew it would be difficult to get the additional funding for such an operation without any hard proof, so he brought the guy in from the outside on temporary duty, a BATF agent named Ignacio Paz. He padded the expense line items and nobody looked too closely, including the AG, since they knew he was building a major case against MS-13 with Perez.”

“So Paz goes undercover in El Salvador to locate the top dog in the organization,” Bolan concluded.

“Right,” Price replied. “And nobody’s heard from him in weeks. We have found information on Marciano’s computer under some secretly encoded files.”

“I’ve ordered Bear to extract and decrypt the files from the computer so nobody at the AG’s office or FBI forensics would find them,” Brognola said. “I didn’t want to risk exposing Paz. Striker, MS-13 has its own intelligence service. They’re in the courts, the police departments, even the jails and prisons. They report on their own members and have even been known to send men out to commit crimes for the sole purpose of circulating them through the prison systems and assassinating deal makers.”

“I’m familiar with these kinds of tactics, Hal,” Bolan said. “From what you’ve told me, I think Marciano was on the right track. The only way to put down a group as organized as this is to chop off the head.”

“That was our feeling exactly,” Brognola replied.

“Okay, I’m in. Where do you want me to begin?”