Exit Strategy

Amanda glanced back and the room where she’d left Joaquin was obscured by collapsed ceiling and walls. Her stomach twisted. Joaquin’s injuries already horrific, he was now either buried in rubble or chewed to ribbons by the torrent of fire and death hurled by their assailants.

If death hadn’t already claimed her husband from his gunshot wounds, it was closing its grasp on his life tighter and tighter.

Her eyes stung, throat constricted.

“Make sure that Perez got away with the kids,” Amanda shouted over the din.

“He had his orders,” Burnett growled. “He’ll get them as far away as possible. Or die trying.”

Amanda’s eyes widened with horror at that thought.

“They’re hammering this house from all sides. I doubt they brought enough aircraft to do that and chase down Perez in his truck,” Burnett emphasized. “But those kids need their mother. That means we keep on the move!”

Thunder and lightning seemed to blast Amanda’s world to splinters, her vision and hearing fading out. She could feel the dull thud of the floor against her cheek and shoulder, and even through the wail of ringing in her ears, Burnett’s big bad gun cracked through the mayhem of her sensory deprivation.

Rough hands suddenly yanked her to her feet, pushed her along. This time her feet snarled against each other, her knees cracking against clutter. These were the hands of a thug hauling her around like a piece of meat, not the hands of a protector.

Time had little meaning, but she felt her feet bash and stumble against each other what felt like a thousand times. Just when she was tired of tripping on her own feet, her vision cleared enough to see that she was outside in the Arizona sun.

She only caught a brief glimpse of the blue sky before she toppled face-first into the dry grass of the yard. Spitting and coughing blades from between her lips, she heard the grumbles of two men talking. Explosions and gunfire left her ears too muddled to make out their conversation, but when one bound her wrists behind her back, it didn’t leave much doubt.

From witness in federal protection to widow and prisoner.

With the aircraft and sheer firepower on hand, Amanda quickly put together that this was one of the many enemies she had made. Undoubtedly this was a cartel, since few others could afford helicopter gunships and trained troops, and only the most insane of Mexican government agencies would dream of murdering US Marshals on American soil.

Then again, Accion Obrar was a branch of the federales known for its gleeful willingness to break the rules. Harold Brognola of the US Justice Department had brought the Castillos to Arizona to protect them from AO, and if these men were cartel, they were only once removed from the paramilitary, unsanctioned vigilante force that she and Joaquin had gathered so much dirt on.

And now they owned her. The nylon cable ties bit her wrists cruelly, and her shoulders burned in protest as a captor hauled her to her feet.

“On the chopper, puta” came the order. Amanda struggled to stay upright despite the force of the thug’s shove, and she did enter the helicopter, but only after banging her knees and thighs against the bottom of the opened side door. The bare metal flooring chilled her cheek, and more hands snagged her ankles and lower legs, levering her up and into the cabin. She wanted to turn over, but a forest of combat boots surrounded her. They penned her in; she couldn’t move. She wanted to spit and curse them all, but more than one of them planted a sole on her back. The weight of their feet immobilized her, informed her that she was only meat for them; a trophy deer brought back from a successful hunt.

She only lived at their whim. One mistake and they crushed her underfoot, without qualm, without mercy.

Though, if their intent was to keep her, then she knew there was only one destination ahead for her.

El Calabozo sin Piedad.

These were Los Lictors, a group of merciless yet utterly precise commandos whose skills relegated the similar Los Zetas to second best. Assault rifles, special operations tactics, brutal accuracy and violence of action made them the elite champions of the cartel wars.

El Calabozo sin Piedad.

The Dungeon without Pity.

In her decades of covering corruption among Mexican law enforcement, no other prison in the world harbored such a grim, soul-chilling reputation. Not even the Black Dolphin prison in the former Soviet Union had such a reputation for violence and level of security.

People went in there, and the only reason they came out again was that they’d only been put there for “a vacation.” Accion Obrar used it to keep their favorite gun thugs and smugglers out of the view of the law. It was a place where demons were allowed to indulge their tastes for mayhem and abuse against rival cartels and political dissidents.

Amanda Moran Castillo was such a political dissident in the eyes of Accion Obrar.

And in the space of a day’s travel, she would be handed over to the worst inmates at the darkest, deadliest asylum on the planet.

No, Amanda didn’t live at the whim of these kidnappers. They wanted her to live.

For she was on the fast track to hell, and death was a mercy she’d soon beg for.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_458fbb5b-32a7-54f0-beb9-e587ff2c500a)

The assembly of all the members of the Stony Man Farm’s teams—Able Team, Phoenix Force, as well as the cybernetic squad—was not a good portent. With all hands on deck, this either had to be a national emergency or a direct threat to the Sensitive Operations Group itself. Without the presence of the founder of Stony Man—the Executioner, Mack Bolan—the covert agency still thrived, undimmed by the privation of the legendary soldier. The lone warrior had his own missions out in the world; things that fell through the cracks that even a top secret government-sanctioned antiterrorism agency could not attend to.

Carl Lyons, brawny, blond and grim-faced, and his colleague in arms, David McCarter, bracketed Harold Brognola at the head of the table. In contrast to the square-jawed, all-American football hero Lyons, McCarter was lean and fox-faced. His build was no less defined than Lyons’s, but he was more panther than king of the jungle. They were the respective leaders of their teams; Lyons commanding the urban warriors known as Able Team and McCarter being the leader of Stony Man’s foreign ops unit named Phoenix Force.

Though Able Team consisted of only three commandos, it was just as effective as the five-man army that was Phoenix Force. There was a spirited competition between the two groups, but each saw the other as an equal. The eight of them together were quite brilliant in a diversity of fields ranging from emergency medical treatment thanks to former SEAL and Navy corpsman Calvin James of the Force, to Able Team’s electronics genius Hermann Schwarz. When Brognola and Bolan had vetted the teams, they’d looked for smart, capable, quick-to-learn men who were straight shooters and athletic combatants.

The cyber team leader, Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, may not have been low in body fat, but with his thick shag of beard and furry, heavily muscled forearms, he was no weakling. Despite being confined to a wheelchair by a gunshot wound to the spine, Kurtzman’s upper body was slabbed over in thick muscle from exercise and the constant maneuvering of his manual chair. As strong as his arms and chest were, though, his mind was equally powerful as the creator and coordinator of the incredible computerized data collection and intelligence system that made the Farm’s missions possible.

“What’s the deal, Hal?” McCarter spoke up first. Though McCarter’s antic energy had been tamed greatly by the role of leadership of his team, the British SAS veteran still was not given to idling when there were things to do. “What’s the crisis du jour?”

“I just got news from Arizona,” Brognola answered. “We lost a lot of blacksuits serving as a security detail.”

An older bulldog of a man who had been with the Farm since the very beginning, Brognola had been an FBI agent assigned to capture or kill Mack Bolan a lifetime ago, back when the Executioner had waged his unsanctioned vigilante actions against organized crime on US soil. Rather than ultimately eliminate Bolan, Brognola had set up a situation where his lethal fighting skills could be more readily used to protect the United States. Since then, the big Fed had expanded the Sensitive Operations Group’s reach by creating the blacksuit program.

The blacksuits were cultivated from the best and brightest of the military and law enforcement, well-trained and honest men and women who didn’t quite have the clearance or lack of ties that would make them perfect for the covert agency. They came to the Farm in the shadow of the old Stony Man of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where they received continuing education and refresh training. They were also tapped for intel that didn’t make it into top secret databases immediately. Often, it was the men of Able or Phoenix who educated these warriors, so the loss of one was the loss of a friend as well as a student.

“How many?” Lyons asked, his voice a low rumble like thunder across the plains.

“Seven confirmed dead, five wounded. Don Burnett is missing, as well as one of the packages they were protecting,” Brognola advised regrettably. “Another principal was killed.”

“How many were they protecting?” McCarter quizzed.

Brognola took a deep breath. “Five. A man and his wife. Three children. The man, Joaquin Castillo, was killed. The children were out at a swimming hole. Their protection detail pulled them out when the attackers struck.”

Brognola handed out packets for the two action teams to read. The cybernetic crew had already gone over the information and grisly imagery in preparing the briefing packages.

“Son of a bitch,” Calvin James growled. James was the first American member of Phoenix Force. Despite the kind of discipline it took to be a medical corpsman and a SEAL, and later a member of San Francisco SWAT, James was still a little quick with a curse. Tall, black and lanky, he was passionate about his position. “You don’t need to ask me twice to put boot to ass against the bastards behind this.”

“I’ll have to,” Brognola returned. “That’s Mexican federale equipment at the scene of the crime. That means this is an international incident. One that the State Department wants to keep under wraps.”

“Excuse me?” Rosario Blancanales, the elder of Lyons’s two Able Team partners, asked. Five foot eleven, with silver hair and a face wizened beyond his years, his lithe, spry frame belied the appearance of his age. Where Lyons was a police officer and undercover FBI agent who had allied with Bolan often, Blancanales had served in Bolan’s unit during his military career and later assisted him in his private war against organized crime. Blancanales’s first team-up with Bolan post desertion had ended with him in jail, one of only two survivors of the Executioner’s death squad. His entry into Able Team had cleared those records. His elite Ranger training and natural diplomacy, which had earned him the nickname “the Politician,” made Blancanales an invaluable member of Stony Man. “The government is going to downplay the slaughter of US Marshals?”

“It’s being kept under a tight lid,” Carmen Delahunt interjected. Delahunt, one of the members of Kurtzman’s cybernetics team, had investigative and tech skills that easily translated into search algorithms that helped keep the Stony Man teams up-to-date on enemy action. “State Department and the White House don’t want the public to get a word of this,” she added.

“Federales involved? No doubt,” Gary Manning added. Manning, a Canadian, was a barrel-chested polymath, tall and strong, and he was also a genius with explosives. His restless intellect, however, had kept him moving from field to field. He had proved to be an expert woodsman and hunter, served with the military in Southeast Asian operations, owned his own import-export firm and was an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, where he’d cross-trained with German antiterrorism agencies.

This depth and breadth of experience had made him a steady hand and wise counsel to Phoenix Force leader McCarter, while his hunting talents had translated into his being a lethal sniper and his engineering had made him a master of demolitions. He, like McCarter, was an original Phoenix Force operator and was not surprised by an act of cross-border violence being held in secret to avert the possibility of war between two nations. Too often, Phoenix’s five had been sent in to defang and defuse conflicts instigated by outside parties looking to profit from war and chaos. “Given that Joaquin and Amanda Castillo are considered enemies of the state in Mexico, the legitimacy of this strike force could be fairly solid.”

“You know about these two?” Hawkins asked. The youngest and newest member of Phoenix, T. J. Hawkins, was the other American who’d diluted the original mission description of Mack Bolan’s foreign legion.

Hawkins, who had grown up on the South Side of Chicago, was a veteran of the US Army Rangers and Delta Force. He had a history of going outside the rules to protect innocent lives to do what was right, politics be damned. He was a prime candidate to fill in the ranks after McCarter replaced their retired original commander.