Shadow War

“Copy,” McCarter answered from the vehicle.

“Copy,” Price echoed from Stony Man.

Phoenix Force moved down the hall toward the elevator.

CHAPTER THREE

Gonzales felt his heart sink. He watched Marta, Lagos’s woman, stroll into the warehouse through the door and walk into the light of the halogen lamps. At twenty, the former call girl and Mexico City porn star was a sight to behold. Her nails were painted in blood-red and her left hand held a lollipop she worked like a pro.

Her big, brown eyes widened in mock surprise as she regarded the hanging men. Her pink tongue lathed the head of the lollipop.

She giggled.

Lagos moved up behind her and whispered something into her ear. She reached up and traced her hand down the angular line of his face. If the violent drug kingpin had a weakness, it was this young female prostitute.

Despite himself, Gonzales’s eyes were drawn to the smooth line of her flat stomach where a tiny gold hoop had been inserted in her navel. She wore no bra, and her nipples poked hard against the sheer fabric of her blouse. The skin on her body was flawless.

Gonzales felt his stomach turn queasy.

Her perfume, something heavy and expensive, rolled into his nose, momentarily overpowering the stink of body fluids and terror that surrounded him. His mind recoiled from his terror, his thoughts rebounding like a rubber ball in an empty room. He thought about his little girl and his wife. He flashed on images of the bodies of people he’d seen who’d suffered at the hands of the Zetas.

He felt tears welling up in his eyes and he used the last vestiges of his pride to blink them back as Marta, at once sadistic and seductive, glided forward. She leaned in close, her beauty a blunt instrument, her breath hot and sweet against his neck, the crush of her heavy breast hard against his stomach. When she spoke, she purred, but her voice was the singsong soprano of a little girl.

“You were naughty,” she chided. “So naughty, and now you must be punished. I remember you from that restaurant in Cancún. Do you remember, Gabriel?”

Gonzales nodded. He’d worn a wire designed to passively boost the conversation for the CIA surveillance team’s parabolic boom mike. Lagos had met with a Venezuelan moneyman named Sincanaros and a representative of FARC, the Colombian Communist insurgent army and largest narco-military in the world. Marta had been there, dressed in a stunning little black dress that cost about as much as a U.S. union plumber made in a year. She’d cooed and rubbed her thighs together throughout the meeting, flustering even the experienced Colombian guerrilla commander.

“I remember,” Gonzales said, his voice hoarse.

“Lagos wanted me to act naughty that night,” she said. Her expression was coy, childlike. “Do you remember me being naughty? How I touched myself while everyone watched?”

Gonzales closed his eyes. He felt his gorge rising and from his churning, fear-cramped stomach, acid bubbled up and burned the lining of his esophagus. He winced in pain.

Marta’s tiny little hand found Gonzales’s crotch. He flinched. “I think you were excited that night,” she said. “I was so naughty.” She let go and stepped back. “Tonight is going to be a little different.”

From the small of her back the young woman produced a pearl-handled switchblade. She held it out and Gonzales closed his eyes again. He heard the greasy click as the tightly wound spring released the knife. He opened his eyes and saw the 5-inch blade wildly reflecting the light of the halogen lamps.

“Let’s see what’s going on with Gabriel.” Marta giggled.

She dug the point of her blade into the denim fabric of his jeans at his fly. He winced as she poked the soft skin of his inner thigh, and he felt blood trickle down his leg. Marta worked, grunting softly with the effort, to cut away the fabric around his crotch.

In seconds his penis hung exposed. The crushing weight of his helpless vulnerability slammed into him all over again. Only the thought of his wife and daughter kept his tongue still.

Marta stepped back and slid the still-open switchblade behind the buckle of her wide, black belt. The pearl handle rested against the smooth, brown stretch of her flat abdomen.

She turned her head and barked a command. A short, squat gunman stepped forward.

Gonzales’s eyes bulged from his head, and he moaned out loud despite his efforts to stifle the sound. Marta giggled again.

“No, don’t start it,” she snapped. “I want to start it.”

“Sí,” the man said. He stepped back, handing the orange-and-black power grass trimmer to the slight young woman. The muscles of her arms stood out in vivid relief as she mastered the weight. The long orange extension cord trailed out behind her, disappearing into the dark beyond the halogen lights.

The grass trimmer sprang to life in her hands, the 18-volt power tool screaming as the hard plastic cord spun at 7000 revolutions per minute. Gonzales realized the device would tear his clothes from his body, then flay his flesh open in a techno-modern version of the ancient Chinese “death of a thousand cuts.” His throat closed in his fear.

Marta grinned. “This is my favorite weapon. Its trademarked system uses centrifugal force to advance the line automatically as I need it.”

The twisted Lolita rattled off the grass trimmer’s specs in English with obvious enthusiasm, the way the proud owner of an American muscle car or an Italian Ferrari might talk about their automobile engine. Goddamn you, Yankees, he cursed his involvement with the CIA who had left him to die after his service.

Gunning the motor, Marta stepped forward. Her expression was twisted now, her grin so wide it threatened to split her face in two. Behind her, Lagos and his men had shuffled forward, their laughter almost muted by the high-pitched whine of the grass trimmer’s 7.1-liter engine.

Still Gonzales didn’t talk. He thought about it. If he did so, he might spare the other two men hours of torture. They were all dead, but maybe the other two men would be granted a quick coup de grâce if only Gonzales spoke up now.

Then he thought about his daughter and his wife. If he didn’t remain silent, they’d be raped, then they’d be tortured.

No.

Gonzales offered up silent apologies to the other men and then bit down so hard on his tongue to keep silent that it bled.

Marta stepped forward and the spinning plastic cord whipped into his leg just above the knee. The denim split like paper and his flesh was lacerated so deep into the flesh of the vastus medialis that blood splattered at 7000 revolutions per minute, spraying across the walls like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Gonzales screamed, then screamed again. White-hot lances of agony surged up through his body in bullet trains of anguish.

Engulfed in the shrieks and the screams produced by the little grass trimmer, only two of Lagos’s men, the ones nearest the door, heard the window breaking.

Marta stepped in again and thrust the grass trimmer forward. The spinning plastic cord bit Gonzales’s inner thigh. Blood splashed her face in streaks like tiger stripes, and unconsciously her slick pink tongue darted out to taste the hot fluid smearing her lips.

There was a scramble of bodies behind her shoulder as one Zetas gunman tried to shout a warning, then a flash like a sun going nova and a bang so loud it split eardrums. In the snap of a magician’s fingers Gonzales felt the concussion roll into him like the wind, punching him into motion on the end of his chains. He was blind. He was deaf. He was dizzy and bruised, confused and battered, as a second and then third flash-bang grenade went off.

The halogen light setup was knocked clear of its moorings and crashed to the floor, plunging the room into heavy shadow as a single brilliant lamp, now facedown, continued to burn. Men shouted in pain and confusion and anger as the front door of the building was smashed open.

Gadgets Schwarz thrust the barrel of his Steyr AUG through the smashed window glass and saw a dark shape pulling itself up off the floor, a long weapon in its hands. Schwarz squeezed the trigger and put a 5.56 mm round into the figure, then fired three more.

The figure went down and Schwarz pivoted smoothly, spotting a cluster of shapes directly behind the tangled mess of the halogen lights. He held back on his trigger and snapped the shortened barrel in a tight Z-pattern, burning a short burst into the crowd. Bodies hit the floor.

Carl Lyons entered through the warehouse door, his Atchisson autoshotgun testing the strength of his thick arms. The selective fire assault shotgun was fed with a 20-round drum magazine attachment and Lyons kept it tucked in close against his body, firing from the hip in such tight quarters.

He saw a balaclava hardman jump to his feet directly in front of the door, an old-fashioned Ingram MAC-10 in the grip of a fist covered by black, fingerless gloves. A sound suppressor as long as the weapon itself preceded the weapon like a black wand.

The Atchisson boomed in Lyons’s grip. The weapon recoiled smoothly into the ex-LAPD officer’s hip. The 12-gauge fléchette round discharged into the Zetas’s upturned face from a distance of less than three feet.

The tiny steel darts ripped through the flesh on the right side of the ex-commando’s face and drove mercilessly into the man’s skull. The back of the Mexican drug soldier’s head erupted, and the man’s body followed the momentum of his pulverized skull.

As blood spilled out of the ruined body, Lyons moved into the room. Behind him, Blancanales peeled off to the right, the H&K submachine gun up and ready in his hands.

Able Team moved in a tight configuration, a well-rehearsed ballet of trajectories and overlapping fields of fire. No motion was wasted as Schwarz anchored one section of the fire triangle and Blancanales another, letting Lyons and his autoshotgun move up the middle.

Blancanales tucked the folding stock of his submachine gun tight into his shoulder, the sound of Lyons’s booming shotgun ringing in his ears. He saw the silhouette of a man holding a Kalashnikov and cut loose, a burst of rounds striking the gunner high between the shoulder blades and punching through his neck.