Red Frost

The other workers kept their eyes on the ground, their expressions vacant, their faces rimed with dirt. Chemicals involuntarily absorbed through lungs and skin had cooked their nervous systems. The meth cowboys inched everyone forward, using their clubs now and then to speed up progress, or maybe just for the exercise.

There was no morning head count. The cowboys couldn’t do anything about overnight escapees, if there were any. And the possibility of an extra worker showing up had probably never even crossed their minds.

The little Mexican guy right in front of Blancanales was a herky-jerky skeleton; he could have been sixty years old or thirty. As the man staggered forward, he muttered to himself, repeating the same phrase over and over. “Lo siento mucho. Lo siento mucho. Lo siento mucho.”

Blancanales didn’t ask him what he was so sorry for.

The lights were on, but nobody was home.

Ahead of him, in the middle of the slave pack, were three very pregnant teenage girls. Their long black hair was matted to their skulls, their short dresses stained and so threadbare they were see-through. From the dossier that Blancanales had read back at the Farm, he figured the don had put them all in the family way. For Xavier, child molestation was one of the job perks.

When the big black Lexus rolled up, cowboys and slaves froze in their tracks. Xavier and his bodyguards exited the SUV and headed straight for the lead rental truck.

The mobster passed so close to Blancanales that under the aroma of cigar he could smell the man’s hair tonic. Fruity sweet. Mango-pineapple.

Beretta in hand, index finger resting on the wide combat trigger, Blancanales could have shot the under-boss in the back of the head as he walked by. That he held his fire was a matter of fair play, but it had nothing to do with the fact that the don was unarmed. Given the animal’s track record, Blancanales didn’t want death to come as a big, fat surprise.

Flanked by his bodyguards, Xavier stepped up to the driver of the lead truck. As the bald banger leaned forward to accept the don’s patronizing hug and backslap, his unbuttoned gray plaid shirt gaped wide. Against a crisp white T-shirt, Blancanales saw the polished walnut butt of a chrome Magnum revolver hooked over the front of his trouser waistband.

Embrace suffered, the driver handed the bulging gym bag to the don, who gingerly tested its weight on two fingers, then passed it over to one of his bodyguards without looking inside. Last stop for the money train. The driver turned and shouted at the other bangers, who immediately rolled up the trucks’ cargo doors and started pulling out the loading ramps.

A few seconds later, a dozen very frightened people stumbled down the first truck’s ramp, their mouths duct-taped shut, their wrists bound behind their backs with plastic cable ties.

Replacements for the dead and the dying.

A couple of cowboys used their clubs to drive the new workers over to the SUV, and then made them kneel on the ground beside it. The women wept into the poisoned dirt; the men blinked wide-eyed. One look around, one whiff of synthetic cat urine and they knew they had arrived smack-dab in hell.

The slaves at the front of the line shuffled by the newbies, up the ramps of the two nearest trucks. As Blancanales inched by those vehicles, the workers began to emerge. Using dollies, they off-loaded metal canisters of anhydrous ammonia and propane, and fifty-five-gallon drums of ether, toluene, acetone and isopropyl alcohol. They rolled the heavy drums across the hard-packed dirt and deposited them in front of the customized cargo container.

Blancanales showed a tad too much interest in the proceedings. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a blow coming from behind, but was too late to avoid it. The bamboo club whipcracked between his shoulder blades, making him stumble a half step forward. His flesh went numb. For a moment he couldn’t breathe; his chest was paralyzed from the shock. Then his back burned as if it had been blowtorched. He knew he had been cut. He could feel hot blood trickling down his spine.

“¡Rápido!” the man who’d struck him growled.

Blancanales glared over his shoulder at a potbellied thug in a tattered straw cowboy hat. The top three snaps of his faded denim Western shirt were undone, exposing a hairless brown chest. His round cheeks were cratered with pocks of assorted sizes, as if he’d taken a load of birdshot point-blank. His small black eyes were set close together under a single black eyebrow. A tooled leather scabbard riding high on his left hip held a stag-handled, gold-pommeled and cross-guarded guthook sheath knife.

The mafia enforcer took Blancanales’s stare as a direct challenge. He raised the bamboo club high overhead. His little eyes glittered with delight when his intended victim didn’t raise his hands to protect himself.

Hidden autopistol in hand, Blancanales stood his ground. He was already in position. Lyons and Schwarz both had line of sight on him.

It was as good a time as any to start the party.

Blancanales pivoted his hips, turning sideways to his attacker, poking the sound suppressor’s muzzle from behind the bibfront. The Beretta chugged once in his fist. The muffled gunshot was lost in the clatter of heavily loaded dollies rolling down steel ramps.

The 9 mm round caught the cowboy dead center in his torso, just below the tip of his sternum. Grimacing, he clutched at his chest with his free hand. His mouth opened wide, but no sound came out, just a puff of bright blood mist, propelled by an explosive final breath. His right knee buckled and he crumpled, dropping onto his face, loose and boneless like a bag of beans. There was no exit wound out the middle of his back—the subsonic Parabellum round lacked the power to through and through.

One of the other cowboys saw him drop and rushed over to render aid. The ranchero knelt beside the fallen man. When the cowboy grabbed his friend’s shoulder and turned him over, the weeping red hole was there for all to see. Putting two and two together, proximity and conflict, the cowboy jumped to his feet, swinging his sawed-off 12-gauge around on its shoulder sling. “¡Asesino!” he howled at Blancanales.

This time Blancanales shielded his eyes with a forearm, but not to defend himself from a load of double-aught buck.

A 709-grains boattail slug transformed the cowboy’s skull, crown to chin, into pink vapor and hot, wet shrapnel an instant before the hollow boom of the Barrett fifty rolled over the camp.

WHEN THE COWBOY RAISED the club to strike Blancanales in the face, Lyons had the green light. He yanked the MP-5 SD-3s from their scabbards and scrambled out of the ditch. As he straightened his legs, both of his buttocks cramped up. When he broke into a run anyway, it felt as if they’d been speared crossways with a barbecue skewer.

The pain didn’t slow him down; it made him a whole lot madder.

Lyons had trained in Shotokan karate, but his natural fighting style was pure berserker. He relied on split-second reactions and survival instinct. Wildman rage and the accompanying adrenaline rush helped to ramp up both.

In squishy wet boots, the big man charged across open ground for the rear of the shotgun shack, forcing his legs to move under him, stomping the feeling back into his feet. He angled hard to the left, out of Schwarz’s lane of fire. The tumbledown shack and the meth lab just beyond it momentarily concealed his advance. On the far side of those structures, slaves and slavemasters were preoccupied with the unloading of the still idling rental trucks.

Lyons had assigned himself the task of reaching last truck in line, thereby outflanking the enemy, dividing their fire and compressing the battle in time and space.

It was the only way a handful of attackers could annihilate an opposition six times their number.

As Lyons ran from the front of the shack, sprinting across the strip of hardpan for the corner of the cargo container, Schwarz cut loose with the Barrett. Twenty yards to Lyons’s right a round whined past at chin height. Even though he knew it was coming, even though he had heard it many times before, the sound of that much lead flying by made the short hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

Five long strides brought him to the end of the meth lab and gave him a clear view of the last two trucks in line. On the sides of the cargo boxes above a screen painting of a joyous, all-American family in transit was the rental company’s ad slogan, Moving Your Way.

No one in Lyons’s sights was moving, though. The cannonlike bellow of the Light Fifty had frozen the slaves and their keepers in place.

Lyons broke from cover, rushing trucks 3 and 4. As the Barrett’s report echoed off in the distance, the legitimate targets and innocent bystanders started running in all directions. It was like one of those computer-simulated target-acquisition training systems, except instead of one shooter there were more than fifteen, and instead of one hostage there were at least twenty.

A torrent of gunfire roared to his right, out of sight, on the far side of the meth lab. It wasn’t directed at him. Somewhere in the back of his mind the weapons’ distinctive sound signatures registered: shotguns, pistols and sustained bursts from AK-47s, all of them presumably tracking Blancanales and pouring return fire on the combine.

The quartet of bangers at the last two trucks saw Lyons coming between the bodies of the slow-moving slaves. How could they miss him? Honking big dude, all in black, ski mask pulled down to his chin, silenced machine pistols raised in both fists. The bangers responded in a way Lyons couldn’t, not with a firing lane choked by noncombatants. As the cowboys back-stepped to cover between truck 4’s front bumper and Truck 3’s rear, they opened up with blue-steel 9 mm autopistols, shooting around, then through the panicked, hobbled workers.

Close-range body and head shots blew the stumbling, helpless obstacles off their bare feet.

Almost simultaneously the Barrett boomed again. Truck 4’s front end rocked hard as it absorbed a .50-caliber round. On impact, the hood delatched and popped partway up. A piercing metal-on-metal screech erupted from the bowels of the idling V-8 as the AP slug plowed through its block. A fraction of an instant later, the engine let out a final, grinding clank as tie rods and pistons broke loose. Smoke and steam boiled from the engine compartment. Hot oil and antifreeze sprayed over the crouched bangers.

Lyons took advantage of the cleared firing lane. As he charged, he cut loose with both MP-5 SD-3s, 3-round bursts to minimize muzzle climb. Staggering backward, half-blinded and panicked, the gangsters tried to return fire. The one in front, a baggy-pants wide boy with blue tats covering both arms from wrists to elbows took a point-blank round from one of his own homeys through the back of the head. The right side of his face just vanished, revealing a red crater from eyebrow to cheek. Gushing bright arterial blood, brain-dead on his feet, he toppled to the dirt.

The MP-5 SD-3s stuttered in Lyons’s big fists, saturating the killzone as he closed the ten yards of intervening ground. Twisting in agony under the hail of slugs, the three bangers went down hard.

And stayed down.

Lyons jumped over the jerking bodies, slipping between trucks 3 and 4. Slaves were bellycrawling under the chassis, taking cover behind the steel wheels. Through the greasy smoke billowing from the engine compartment, he could see others robot-walking across the fields, stray bullets whizzing around them, kicking up puffs of soil.

When he peeked around the cargo box, two of the remaining four bangers were in full retreat, joining up with the cowboys who had taken cover beside the first truck and the front of the cargo container meth lab.

A couple of the cowboys were facedown in the dirt.

Blancanales was nowhere in sight.

A ranchero jumped out of the meth-lab doorway, landed flat-footed and tried to drill him with a hip-leveled Kalashnikov. Lyons’s reaction time was faster. The Russian rounds went skyward as the shooter abruptly sat down, driven to his backside by a string of 9 mm rounds to the gut. Lyons ducked back as answering fire ripped along the line of trucks. In so doing, he nearly stepped on the face of one of the downed bangers. Brown eyes stared up at him, not angry, not surprised. Not anything, ever again.

With incoming fire hammering the right side of truck 3’s cargo box and ricocheting off the dirt, he dumped the spent mags and reloaded the machine pistols. It took him less than eight seconds to put live rounds under both firing pins. Turning left, away from the meth lab, he burst out from behind the rear bumper and took off along the outside of the line of vehicles to seal off any enemy foot retreat across the fields and allow Schwarz to mark his position.

Before he got halfway along truck 3 the Light Fifty roared again. Twenty feet ahead of him the cab shuddered as an M-2 round slammed its engine compartment, popping off a spawl of paint the size of a dinner plate. An instant later, the V-8 inside exploded with a muffled roar, freed pistons punching through cylinders and valve covers, windshield popping out of its frame, cab doors flying open, front wheel covers suddenly airborne.

Another killshot.

When he reached truck 3’s front bumper, a pair of bangers inside the cargo box of truck 2 popped up from behind tall canisters of anhydrous ammonia, autopistols blazing. Slaves lay on the floor of the cargo box all around them, hands protecting the backs of their heads, faces pressed into the deck.

Lyons sprayed one-handed, up-angled autofire across the bangers’ chests, whipsawing them off their feet. Their guns went flying and their bodies landed heavily on the backs of the prostrated slaves, who were too afraid to move.

As he ran on, the Barrett cut loose again. Truck 2 shuddered as its engine tore itself apart. Six-foot-high flames shot up around the buckled hood.

The volleys of gunfire from the meth lab suddenly trailed off. Over the scattered gunshots Lyons could hear shouting in Spanish. Trucks 4, 3 and 2 were burning, acrid gray smoke sweeping across the compound like ground fog.

Even drug dealers could read the handwriting on the wall. No transportation, no escape.

With a roar and spray of dirt, the black Lexus SUV sped around the front of the first truck, riding on two flat steel radials on the driver’s side. Lyons caught a glimpse of a candy-striped silk robe as the rear door swung shut.

SCHWARZ RODE the Barrett’s stunning recoil wave, simultaneously working the bolt to chamber a fresh round. Downrange, beneath a puff of glistening red mist, the headless corpse folded up like a lawnchair. The Able Team commando had a chance for another clear, quick shot at an enemy gunner, but he passed it up, instead swinging the crosshairs hard over to the right, to his assigned first target. Numbers had to fall in order for Lyons’s battle plan to work.

No deviations.

As the narco cowboys ran for cover they fired back wildly, spraying bullets his way. The location of his hide was pretty obvious: it was the only elevated position in miles of pancake-flat farmland. At a range of one hundred yards the pistol shots didn’t even land close, but the Russian autorifle rounds thunked and rattled the broad side of the combine. As he aimed at truck 4’s engine compartment and took up the trigger slack, a slug plowed through the rear of the cab two feet to his right, peppering that side of his face with hot metallic grit. He ignored it.

Schwarz knew Lyons was advancing inside the new firing lane, but he had the Able Team leader’s designated route to target down cold. The ex-L.A. cop was protected by two layers of cover—the engine block and the meth lab.

The Barrett thundered, battering Schwarz’s shoulder as he touched off the round. His arm was still tender from the forty practice rounds he had fired two days before in Virginia.

“Twelve-gauge recoil levels, my ass,” he muttered as he ejected the spent round and reacquired the sight picture. Smoke and steam poured out from under the truck’s half-open hood.

Not at all surprising.

The cyberteam at Stony Man Farm never left anything to chance. They had blueprinted engine design and placement, drawing virtual bull’s-eyes for him on the sides of the vehicles.

Right on schedule, Lyons darted out from between the last two trucks. As he did so, Schwarz fired another M-2 round. Truck 3’s front end shuddered, then rocked when the engine blew apart. The Barrett’s bolt snicked back, butter smooth, and a huge smoking brass hull flipped up and out of the action.

Locking down the bolt on the third cartridge, he put the sight post on truck 2’s ten-ring and let it rip. Though he thought he was snugged up nice and tight, the Light Fifty’s buttstock slammed into him. The stunning impact sent daggers of pain up the side of his neck and down his shoulder.

It did much worse to the rental truck.

When the engine deconstructed, flying shrapnel blew out both front tires. As the axle dropped onto its rims, the hood lurched up and the engine compartment belched flame and smoke.

Before he could snap the cap on truck 1, the drug lord’s black Lexus burst into view from behind it, bouncing over the furrows at high speed, making a bee-line for the farmhouse. Schwarz took a swinging lead on the target and broke trigger. The Barrett bellowed, its minimal forestock jumping high off the bath-towel cushion.

No way could the Lexus’s bulletproof glass deflect a .50-caliber AP slug.

Downrange, the SUV’s driver’s window vanished from the frame as it imploded. A nanosecond later, the passenger’s window exploded. As the passenger’s window disintegrated, two sets of brains and skull bones mixed with a glittering shower of shattered, gray-tinted glass.

The Lightning 31 earmuffs didn’t completely muffle the sustained bleating of the SUV’s horn as the vehicle rolled onward, driverless. To hear better, Schwarz edged the sonic protector off his right ear.

The Lexus rolled slower and slower as it bumped over the furrows. The horn suddenly stopped blowing. On the far side of the vehicle, the rear door opened and Xavier bailed with the black gym bag. Stumbling on his skinny bare legs in his thousand-dollar cowboy boots, he waved for his troops to regroup around him. Four cowboys did so, partially blocking the don from view.

Schwarz could have taken him out by shooting through the others, but he held his fire. Kneading out the .50-caliber whiplash in his neck and shoulder, he kept one eye pinned to the scope. He watched as Xavier and his human shields sprinted for the meth lab where the rest of the crew had holed up. After they had scurried between the barrels of offloaded chemicals and slipped inside the crude doorway, Schwarz replaced the earmuff and resumed work, methodically punching a few big-bore rounds through the corrugated walls. He shot high on purpose, to keep the opposition pinned and unable to return aimed fire. The .50-caliber impacts raised clouds of dust from the metal roof. He could imagine what it was like for the dirtbags inside. Like being sealed in a fifty-five-gallon steel drum while someone beat on it with a sledgehammer.

When the tenth spent cartridge flipped out of the action, clinking on the others lying beside him on the bench seat, Schwarz left the bolt open and stripped out the empty clip. He reached for the mag loaded with M-8s and slapped it home.

As he peered back through the scope’s eyepiece, something dark flew out of the lab entrance and landed in the dirt about fifteen feet away. It was the overstuffed gym bag. Schwarz again slipped off the Lightning 31’s cup. He could hear someone yelling from the doorway. He couldn’t make out whether it was in Spanish or English, but the idea was pretty obvious.

Take the bag of cash and leave me the fuck alone.

Schwarz covered his ear, then slid the Light Fifty’s bolt forward, chambering a blue-tipped incendiary round.

Some things money just couldn’t buy.

BLANCANALES LOWERED his bloody forearm and pulled the silenced Beretta 93-R from underneath the denim bibfront. He concealed the pistol along the outside of his right thigh. Nobody was looking directly at him. Slaves and slavemasters were either staring at the practically headless guy on the ground or gawking uprange for the source of the stunning killshot.

Global paralysis lasted an instant.

Gunmen unleashed sawing bursts of autofire as they sprinted for the nearest cover. As the bangers and cowboys scattered, Blancanales dropped to a knee beside the freshly made corpses and yanked the guthook sheath knife free of its scabbard.

The meth slaves scattered, too, but slowly because of their ankle restraints. Some headed for shelter under the trucks, while others set off across the fields. The three pregnant girls were moving the slowest of all, cradling their swollen bellies in both hands as they shuffled barefoot in the dust, their backs to the conflict.

The replacement workers huddled in a cowering knot beside the Lexus SUV.

A flurry of tightly spaced pistol shots rang out from the end of the line of trucks, then the Barrett boomed again. The second shot from the .50-caliber rifle sent half of the opposition diving for cover inside the meth lab. Xavier and his two bodyguards were the first through the crude doorway. The pair of single-wide trailers was 150 feet away, across a stretch of open ground. Because the bangers and rancheros had all seen how accurately Schwarz could shoot, none of them made a break in that direction.

For his part, Blancanales faced a difficult choice. There was a slim chance he could get some of the forced laborers to safety before the numbers ran down to zero. He couldn’t communicate with the burned-out zombies among them; and even if he could have, he didn’t have bolt cutters to sever the loops of braided-steel wire around their ankles. The newly arrived slaves’ wrists were secured behind their backs with nylon cable ties, but their ankles weren’t bound yet. They could run. Their brains weren’t fried by toxic chemicals, either, so at least there was a possibility they could understand and follow simple commands.

Saving some was better than saving none.

As always, living and dying was largely a matter of luck.

Blancanales ran for the Lexus and the newbies. In the chaos of heavy-caliber incoming and massed, full-auto outgoing, nobody was paying any attention to him or to them. When the kneeling prisoners saw a blood-spattered, masked man with a wickedly curved blade bearing down on them, their eyes widened in terror. Caught between gunbattle and guthook, they were too frightened to flee. They didn’t resist when he started grabbing their wrists and parting the nylon ties with deft snicks of the hook blade.

As one of the men rose warily to his feet, he jerked violently sideways and went down hard. The front of his stained T-shirt was spotted with dime-sized holes from a load of double-aught buck. The shooter, a cowboy who had been hiding behind truck 1, cycled the action of his 12-gauge pump as he advanced on the Lexus. Before the gunner could cut loose again, Blancanales raised the Beretta from behind his hip and ripped off four rapid-fire shots over the SUV’s hood. Two of the silenced rounds went wide of the target, but two hit the cowboy. One struck his left shoulder and the other bored straight through the middle of his crotch. Dropping his sawed-off shotgun on its sling, clutching his groin in both hands, the ranchero fell to the dirt, writhing like a worm on a fishhook.

There was no time to free the rest of the prisoners. Blancanales yelled at them in Spanish, “Get up! Help each other! Hurry!”

Tossing the sheath knife aside, he aimed the Beretta at the SUV’s driver’s side front tire and fired once, point-blank, through the sidewall, dropping it onto its rims. As he ran on, he did the same to the rear tire.

“¡Vámonos!” he shouted, waving for them to follow him.

In seconds the Able Team warrior caught up to the slowest of the three fleeing pregnant teenagers. He paused just long enough to scoop up the girl. As he did so, a .50-caliber report rolled over his back and an instant later a truck exploded with a dull whump! The girl was light in his arms, and she didn’t twist or struggle in his grasp. She had learned to be compliant when set upon by a male. Which probably explained why she had survived.