Exit Strategy

“We can work with overconfidence, esse,” Hawkins returned, settling verbally into his role and flow. His walk already was smoother, rolling, his head bobbing to an internal beat. It could have been seen as a stereotype, but the truth was that he’d seen far too many boys from the barrio who affected the gait and rhythm he copied. Just because it was a cultural cliché did not mean that it wasn’t real.

Encizo, on the other hand, stomped along, shoulders swiveling, fists rocking back and forth. Not tall, his strut would take up an entire sidewalk, if only by force of his demeanor, not counting his wide shoulders and brawny arms. This was the confidence and weight of a veteran of the streets. No gang member or cartel representative could look at him and not think that he’d been representing la raza out on the front lines. Even without seeing the scar tissue he’d incurred over the years on Phoenix Force, observers would see a longtime warrior. That, plus his mode of dress and his demeanor, made him not merely an enforcer, but the enforcer.

The two of them were indeed strapped to the teeth. Encizo had his two HK pistols, plus his favorite Walther PPK in its ankle holster, and a pair of Tanto-styled fighting knives, one in a sheath hidden on the calf opposite his Walther, the other hanging from a leather thong around his neck. Hawkins had additional weaponry, too, including a push knife inside his gaudy-looking belt buckle, and a snub-nosed .357 Magnum—a tiny five-shot in comparison to Manning’s and Lyons’s handguns. The trouble for the cartel’s watchman and the other observers was that they had no idea that these two were ready for all-out war, or that the other three members of Phoenix Force were poised and ready to give them a hail of blazing cover fire on a moment’s notice.

The two of them also had extra surprises to grant them an advantage. Their electronic ear buds, low-profile and hard to notice without a high-powered telescopic lens, provided not only communications with their allies, but also hearing protection, electronically filtering out ear-damaging booms the likes of indoor handgun fire, or even better, flash-bang grens, which the two of them were also equipped with.

Curiosity would be the bait for the cartel gun thugs to allow them into the icehouse. Security and thorough procedure would make them shut the sound-proofed doors before they even considered firing the first shot to eliminate the two intruders. And in the moments between, Encizo’s plan was to buy them precious extra minutes and the element of surprise by popping off a distraction device at 140 decibels and blazing bright. That was what the sunglasses were for, given the flash-bangs went off at an intensity of 600 thousand lumens, more than enough to leave an opponent seeing stars and blotches of afterglow for a long time.

It wasn’t a sure thing; nothing ever was. But anything that gave them at least one second’s worth of surprise was worth another second of life in the middle of a firefight. Each extra second alive was one where they could find another opportunity, another means of cheating death. Those instances were supported by Encizo and Hawkins wearing undershirt body armor, advance intel based on ground-facing satellite radar and infrared, and Gary Manning’s sniper-rifle-mounted thermal vision, which could peer though even the tinted windows of the icehouse to see gunmen looking down upon them.

This was a plan burned into their brains in the past half hour, and all of that after an hour of study of the options, approaches and possibilities. The five men of Phoenix Force were trained professionals, and they were bringing with them the best technology ever assembled for combat and espionage. Their minds combined were the worth of any combat computer, let alone the paranoid security measures of the Caballeros Cartel.

Hawkins rapped on the door. “¡Abrir, esse!”

Encizo was impressed enough with Hawkins’s facility with the tone and dialect to think that they might have a chance at getting in the front door.

A panel opened up. “What makes you think we’re interested in what you’re selling?”

“We’re not selling anything,” Hawkins returned in rapid street Spanish. “Unless it’s your own asses.”

Wary, suspicious eyes burned through the door panel.

“It’s only the two of us. What are we going to do?” Encizo growled, every inch the veteran gang-banger. “What’s coming on our heels is much worse.”

Hawkins gave the door another thump, right under the aperture the guard glared through. “Come on. Tamale Boy knows there’s nothin’ coming with us. But we wait out here five more minutes, ICE is going to be rolling up with tanks!”

The reference to Immigration and Customs Enforcement widened the eyes of the doorman. “Rolling up in tanks?”

The door opened only slightly. A submachine gun muzzle poked through the crack. “Keep your hands where we can see them at all times.”

Hawkins rolled his eyes and interlaced his fingers at the back of his head. “This good, homie?”

Encizo did likewise. The door opened farther, hands snatching at their shirts and tugging them into the foyer. As soon as they were inside, Hawkins was able to count the welcoming committee: four men, including the guy standing at the door. He’d been standing there with an MP-7 leveled at Hawkins’s midsection and was continuing to follow him.

Encizo’s flannel shirt dropped open and the assembled Durango gun thugs recognized the hardware hanging in a shoulder harness.

There was a brief instant of confusion.

“Are you from—” one began to ask.

Unfortunately the moment the doorman started to close the door, Encizo’s interlaced fingers released the tension on the flash-bang grenade he was holding at the back of his neck. He’d thumbed out the pin when it looked as if he was surrendering, but the canister dropped to the floor, the safety spoon clanging away middrop.

The ensuing thunderbolt detonation at his feet was so hard that Encizo felt it like a punch to his chest. That was while wearing eye and ear protection. To the unprepared cartel guards, it was an assault on the senses.

In a flash of movement, Encizo drew his Cold Steel Tanto and drove it into the belly of the man holding an MP-7 at Hawkins’s navel. Six inches of chisel-tipped, razor-sharp steel plunged through muscle and viscera, severing the Caballero doorman’s aorta. Such a vicious arterial wound would kill in under a minute. Encizo sped up the process to prevent his suffering, driving the point upward and impaling the cartel guard’s heart.

Hawkins also opted for a non-gunshot first strike. He had out his punch dagger in the space of an instant and leaned into a hard jab to the neck of a second of the sentries. The wide arrowhead-shaped blade parted flesh and muscle, severing arteries and nerve clusters in its passage through the Mexican’s throat. With a twist, he presented the blunt back edge of the knife and pulled out with all of his strength. Any blood vessels or muscles not neatly slashed were now corkscrewed and bluntly ripped on the exit path. The sentry’s blinded eyes rolled up into his head as he toppled backward in a boneless mass.

Encizo gave a powerful kick to the third of their welcoming committee. The point of the Cuban’s boot was steel-tipped, and when he connected with the hip of that man, the force of the impact dislodged the femur from his pelvis. There was a numbed wail of horror, but it was cut off as Encizo clawed his free hand’s fingers into the Mexican’s face. The Tanto knife came up and punched through the relatively weak bone of the caballero’stemple. Bone splintered and large chunks of brain lacerated with brutal efficiency, Encizo ended this man much more swiftly than the other.

Hawkins snatched the submachine gun in the fist of the fourth and last of the group in the foyer. Blinded and deafened, the caballero barely had a grasp on the machine pistol before Hawkins spun it around. The Texan triggered a 3-round burst under his enemy’s chin, putting him out of commission in the blink of an eye.

The rest of Phoenix Force was at work now, as they heard the toppling form of one man hit a pallet from the catwalk by the icehouse’s windows. Gary Manning’s work with the G-3 was dead-on, taking out at least one of the gunmen in the windows. In the same instant, dock doors around the back exploded off of their hinges with the aid of a Manning-designed breaching charge.

Hawkins and Encizo tossed another flash-bang. On the detonation, they exited the foyer, machine pistols tracking.

There’d been another pair of men poised to act in case something happened, but the sudden crash of one of their partners from the catwalk caught their attention. A moment later they were the recipients of a flash-bang detonation and, in that next instant, streams of 4.6 mm autofire that slashed through their internal organs.

From the back, McCarter and James were blazing away with their own weapons. The Briton with his MP-7, James with his Kitty carbine that, despite a suppressor, still produced a vigorous clatter as high-velocity 5.56 mm tore through the air at nearly 2,500 feet per second. Cartel gunmen twisted and writhed as swift bursts chopped through their flesh.

Another body toppled over a railing above. His arrival on the warehouse floor was punctuated with the thunder of splintering wood and a mist of spraying blood as bones on the way to the concrete split flesh between like ersatz scissors. Hawkins paused long enough to see who else Manning had engaged from a distance. He saw another three bodies sprawled on the wire mesh flooring of the catwalks, each lying with limbs twisted to impossible angles. He saw that there were another two gunmen up there and was about to aim at one, but Manning’s marksmanship was demonstrated again. The man’s face burst into a cloud of dark gore, skull cored by 7.62 mm NATO jacketed lead.

The last of the gunmen threw his weapon away, holding his hands up in an effort to keep the invisible god of death from taking his life.

The others on the icehouse floor were still in the mood to fight, no sudden thunderbolts of doom whispering out of nowhere to execute them. Hawkins hurled a flash-bang at a clot of Mexican cartel gunners, letting his empty MP-7 crash to the floor. The distraction device struck one of the caballerosand bounced skyward before it detonated, raining earsplitting thunder and eye-burning light.

With the crash of the grenade, Hawkins transitioned to the light-equipped Beretta, drawing it up and firing. As in practice with the barrel given extra weight from the mounted torch, recoil was nonexistent. A stream of 9 mm bullets barked out of the five-inch barrel of the M9, connecting with Durango soldiers and punching through upper chests and heads with laser precision. For ten shots, four men were down and dead, Hawkins so fast on the trigger that he punched them twice or three times before gravity caught up with the suddenness of their demise.

Encizo had the stock extended on the MP-7, braced against his shoulder. From this position he was able to move and pivot with speed and grace, and yet, every time he had a clear view of an enemy, he also had the machine pistol on target. High-velocity projectiles exited the barrel so swiftly, their mass so minor, that recoil wasn’t a factor in putting rounds on target, either. A flurry of 4.6 mm hornets zipped through skin and cartwheeled through muscle, lodging in bone once they struck fluid mass.

Though adrenaline and the fog of combat made the fight seem to stretch out longer, in truth, it was barely closing in on a minute since Encizo had dropped the first flash-bang to start the battle. Moving with trained precision, and making certain they were in cover, the four men of Phoenix Force inside the icehouse exercised brutal efficiency at crushing any opposition.

A minute and five seconds after the flash-bang started festivities, an eerie silence enveloped the icehouse

“Gary, how loud was it out there?” McCarter’s voice rang over their hands-free communicators.

“Except for the tamale cart, nobody even noticed it. He crashed just inside the foyer when I took him,” Manning returned.

“Right. Get down here,” McCarter ordered. “Good breach, T.J., Rafe.”

“Thanks,” Hawkins answered. Even though they were engaged in radio chatter, none of the five commandos were letting their attention wander from the tasks at hand. For the four inside, it was making certain no one was up and fighting. For Manning, it was removing himself from his hide and joining the others.

So far, they’d only secured one end of the Nogales icehouse smuggling tunnel.

There was still three hundred feet to trek underground and security at the other end to deal with.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_95f97567-fc8a-5a2f-a503-4b98df167c6a)

Perez took another sip of his energy drink, his eyes feeling full of sand and grit. He wasn’t sure when the last time was that he’d blinked. Nerves buzzed throughout his body, but all that really mattered was the Castillo children. The two girls slept. Pequita with her arms around the younger, shorter Annette, protecting her. The two kids drew strength from their contact and he hadn’t allowed their minds to wander to the fates of their parents.

Domingo Castillo, however, stayed mostly awake, or only partially asleep. Young Dom was classically nodding off, pulling himself awake only as he dipped into slumber.

Perez sucked back another sip. A knock at the door startled him and he nearly choked on his drink.

His hand fell to the big .45 on his hip.

“Friends coming in,” growled a voice from the other side.