Red Frost

“THIS MISSION ISN’T OVER, NOT BY A LONG SHOT.”

Hal Brognola turned away from the screen, a great, painful weight pressing down on his chest. He had to remind himself to breathe.

Rosario Blancanales’s death, if that is what had come to pass, was ultimately his responsibility. He was the man in charge. Circumstances beyond his control had forced him to make decisions based on fragmentary information, under incredible time constraints.

Under those conditions, unpleasant outcomes were to be expected. Friends, comrades lost in the bargain. But in the end, there was one simple, sustaining truth. Every member of Stony Man, Able Team and Phoenix Force was expendable if the fate of the nation hung in the balance. None of them had any reservations about dying for their country.

The grieving for the loss of their comrade in arms would have to wait. As the Bear had said, it wasn’t over.

Other titles in this series:

#24 BIRD OF PREY

#25 SKYLANCE

#26 FLASHBACK

#27 ASIAN STORM

#28 BLOOD STAR

#29 EYE OF THE RUBY

#30 VIRTUAL PERIL

#31 NIGHT OF THE JAGUAR

#32 LAW OF LAST RESORT

#33 PUNITIVE MEASURES

#34 REPRISAL

#35 MESSAGE TO AMERICA

#36 STRANGLEHOLD

#37 TRIPLE STRIKE

#38 ENEMY WITHIN

#39 BREACH OF TRUST

#40 BETRAYAL

#41 SILENT INVADER

#42 EDGE OF NIGHT

#43 ZERO HOUR

#44 THIRST FOR POWER

#45 STAR VENTURE

#46 HOSTILE INSTINCT

#47 COMMAND FORCE

#48 CONFLICT IMPERATIVE

#49 DRAGON FIRE

#50 JUDGMENT IN BLOOD

#51 DOOMSDAY DIRECTIVE

#52 TACTICAL RESPONSE

#53 COUNTDOWN TO TERROR

#54 VECTOR THREE

#55 EXTREME MEASURES

#56 STATE OF AGGRESSION

#57 SKY KILLERS

#58 CONDITION HOSTILE

#59 PRELUDE TO WAR

#60 DEFENSIVE ACTION

#61 ROGUE STATE

#62 DEEP RAMPAGE

#63 FREEDOM WATCH

#64 ROOTS OF TERROR

#65 THE THIRD PROTOCOL

#66 AXIS OF CONFLICT

#67 ECHOES OF WAR

#68 OUTBREAK

#69 DAY OF DECISION

#70 RAMROD INTERCEPT

#71 TERMS OF CONTROL

#72 ROLLING THUNDER

#73 COLD OBJECTIVE

#74 THE CHAMELEON FACTOR

#75 SILENT ARSENAL

#76 GATHERING STORM

#77 FULL BLAST

#78 MAELSTROM

#79 PROMISE TO DEFEND

#80 DOOMSDAY CONQUEST

#81 SKY HAMMER

#82 VANISHING POINT

#83 DOOM PROPHECY

#84 SENSOR SWEEP

#85 HELL DAWN

#86 OCEANS OF FIRE

#87 EXTREME ARSENAL

#88 STARFIRE

#89 NEUTRON FORCE

Red Frost

STONY MAN®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Don Pendleton

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

PROLOGUE

Port Angeles, Washington,

6:35 a.m. PDT

When day broke gray and chilly over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Chugash brothers were already fishing two miles off Ediz Hook, the long, narrow spit of land that guarded Port Angeles Bay. Their fifteen-foot open boat drifted with the current, rising and falling on the widely spaced swells. To the south, the mill town of Port Angeles was backdropped by the dark, heavily forested flanks of the Olympic Mountains. The snow-capped peaks were hidden in a ceiling of low clouds.

Stan Chugash sat on a seam-split life preserver cushion next to the forty-horsepower Evinrude’s tiller; brother Bob sat amidships, facing him. They were “mooching” for spring chinook salmon. As the dead boat rode the incoming floodtide, they carefully reeled up and then lowered spinning, plug-cut herring. A salmon’s take on the fall of the bait was often almost imperceptible and required concentration and practice to recognize. The Chugash brothers had been mooching these waters for more than fifty years.

Stan flipped the dregs of cold, bitter black coffee from his insulated cup and transferred the sticky white crust of glazed doughnut from his fingertips to a knee of his green vinyl pants. Under the windproof rainsuit, he wore three layers of clothes. “Would you look at that yuppie asshole,” he remarked. “Miles of water to drive through, no other boats in sight, and he’s got to crowd us.”

The twenty-six-foot Alumaweld approached steadily from the west at four knots, dragging double downriggers behind. To Stan, it looked brand-new. A Furuno radar beacon swiveled endlessly on the enclosed cabin’s roof. In the hull’s forest-green side paint the name Fisher King was emblazoned in two-foot-high, silver-flecked, cursive letters. Mounted on the stern were twin, four-stroke Yamaha engines: more combined horsepower than Bob’s full-sized V-8 pickup truck. There was only one person in the boat.

“Think he’s drinking a gran-day lah-tay in there?” Bob asked as he glanced over his shoulder.

“Yeah, while he’s surfin’ the Web.”

Both in their late sixties, the Chugash brothers had retired from the Port Angeles paper mill. They had been salmon-fishing junkies since they were old enough to pull-start an outboard.

The bow of the Alumaweld turned slightly, aiming right for them. It wasn’t slowing down.

“You want to reel up and move, Stan? Fish the other end of the bank?”

“We got a dead boat. We got the right of way. Besides, if we move to another spot, that twerp will just follow us.”

The Alumaweld bore down on the Chugash brothers.

“Shit, we’re gonna have to pull up, Stan. He’s gonna snag our lines on a downrigger ball.”

“If he don’t ram us first.” With an effort, Stan stood up in the narrow boat. “Get out the way!” he hollered, waving an arm over his head.

The man piloting the Alumaweld cruiser stared at him through the tinted windshield and kept on coming, same course and speed.

“He can’t hear ya, Stan. Let’s just move.”

“He can see me, though, the son of a bitch,” Stan growled. He locked his rod in the gunwale holder and held out his hand. “Give me a goddamn sinker, Bob.”

Under the visor of his brother’s parka hood, Bob saw a puffy, weather-seamed face flushed with fury. “Stan, that’s not a good idea,” he said, then quickly added, “Remember your blood pressure….”

Stan reached down snatched an eight-ounce slip sinker from the thwart. The star varsity pitcher of the Port Angeles High School Rough Riders circa 1955 cocked back his arm and took aim at the approaching windshield. “I’m gonna knock out every one of those bleached fucking teeth.”

“Stan, for pete’s sake…”

Then both of the Alumaweld’s downrigger rods bucked hard in their holders. The reels screamed like banshees.

“Well, I’ll be gone to hell!” Stan snarled. “The bastard snagged a pair of fish right out from under us!”

As the man in the Alumaweld shifted his engines out of gear, Stan yanked the battered Evinrude to life. Gunning it, he circled wide, away from the certain collision, while Bob reeled in both of their lines.

The Alumaweld pilot, in a longbilled cap and hot-orange down vest, exited the cabin, beelining for the pair of bent rods as his boat coasted to a stop. Before he could reach the stern, the Alumaweld lurched violently backward, forcing him to grab for a handhold. In the same instant, a rip current appeared on the surface; the Alumaweld was caught in a swirling seam one hundred yards long. Guitar-string-taut downrigger cables sang and hissed as they sliced through the water.

As the Alumaweld rapidly reversed toward the Chugash brothers, waves of water cascaded over the boat’s splash well and onto the deck. The pilot dashed back to the cabin, dropped the engines in gear and pounded down the throttles. The twin Yamahas roared, their props sent up a plume of spray. The bow lifted, but the boat continued to move backward.

“That ain’t bottom he’s snagged on,” Bob said with delight. “Something’s dragging him. He hook himself a gray whale?”

The pilot stuck his head out the cabin window and yelled for help as he rushed past them. He sounded like a cat with its tail caught in a screen door.

“Hang on!” Stan shouted to his brother as he opened up the Evinrude’s throttle, trying to catch up and at the same time steer clear of whatever was going on.

Two hundred feet ahead of the Alumaweld, the rip current suddenly parted. Black columns thicker than a man’s body slid up through the surface, draped with the downrigger flashers, cables and cannonballs. The split in the rip current opened wider, and the huge black sail of a submarine emerged.

“Hoo-hah!” Stan hollered at his brother. “Yuppie snagged a Trident!”

As the submarine surfaced, the angle of the trapped downrigger cables grew steeper and steeper, lifting the Alumaweld’s stern from the water and driving down the bow. The Yamahas’ propellers bit into air, their three-hundred-horsepower roar became a shrill, frantic whine. The motors’ water intakes sucked air, too. Red-lined, overheating, the four-strokes belched white smoke.

From the way they were losing ground on the flat-black painted ship, Bob guessed its speed at close to forty knots, this while dragging the Alumaweld behind. He had seen The Hunt For Red October seven times. And Tridents from the Bangor sub base were always passing through the strait on their way in or out of the Pacific. This sail was low in profile and sloped in the rear.

“Stan, that ain’t a Trident!” he shouted through a cupped hand.

Stan couldn’t hear him over the sustained shriek of the wide-open Evinrude.

“That’s a goddamn Russian sub!” Bob screamed at his brother. “And it’s headed for the Hook!” Then their boat bottomed out, full length, in a wave trough. The sickening impact slammed Bob’s jaws shut, and he nearly bit off the tip of his tongue.

Ahead, the Yamaha four-strokes sounded like lawn-mowers hitting rocks.

Big rocks.

Abruptly, they went silent.

Bob held on to both gunwales as the sub’s foaming wake hit them. When Stan swung wide to avoid being swamped, he stole a look over his shoulder. The sub was already a quarter mile away. It was about the same distance from the Coast Guard air station on the end of the spit.

Stan slowed the motor to idle. He and Bob carefully stood up to get a better look. The low, long ship barreled toward land. It showed no sign of turning or stopping.

“Oh, my God…” Bob muttered.

The impact boomed across the water like a thousand-pound bomb, followed by the shriek of an impossible weight of metal grinding over the Hook’s jagged riprap. As the vessel grounded itself, its bow angled upward. Dark, oily smoke poured from amidships, enveloping the sail and masts, a slender, greasy pillar coiling into the overcast sky.

From a half mile out, the Chugash brothers could see the beached sub’s engines were still running full speed, the screw throwing a towering roostertail. The Alumaweld lay bottom up on the edge of the riprap. It looked like a Cracker Jack toy beside the massive black hull.

The yuppie was nowhere in sight.

CHAPTER ONE

Moses Lake, Washington,

6:48 a.m. PDT

Carl “Ironman” Lyons crouched in a water-filled irrigation ditch, soaked to the waist. A black ski mask covered his face, hiding his short-cropped blond hair, any reflection off his skin and, of course, his identity.

The shallow canal was the only cover on the south side of the target. After three hours in the ditch it was finally getting light enough for Lyons to see the killzone without the aid of night-vision goggles. The ramshackle narco compound was surrounded by flat, tilled farm fields. Whatever was planted in them had barely sprouted.

No perimeter fence or gunposts protected the pair of hammered, single-wide trailers on cinder blocks, the converted SeaLand cargo-container-cum-laboratory, the sagging, unpainted shotgun shack, the collection of junked and rusting cars and the jumble of fifty-five-gallon chemical drums and empty ammonia tanks.

No fence was required.

The site was eight miles from the nearest public road, in the middle of seventy thousand acres of private land.

Lyons’s .357 Magnum Colt Python hung in a black ballistic nylon shoulder holster, a foot above the water-line. A pair of suppressor-equipped, 9 mm MP-5 SD-3s sat in quilted Gore-Tex scabbards on the mud bank in front of him. The scabbards’ flaps hung open, exposing the machine pistols’ black plastic grips and retracted folding stocks.

Lyons methodically clenched and unclenched his big fists to keep the blood flowing to his fingertips. Below the water, his legs were numb, hips to toes, and it felt as if his testicles had retracted up into his body cavity. The former L.A. cop didn’t try to block out his discomfort. Just the opposite. In the back of his mind he inventoried it over and over, item by item.

Being royally pissed off was a good thing.

It helped him maintain focus.

Then he caught movement on the horizon to the north. Four sets of headlights cut through the purple gloom. The lights bounced up and down, up and down as the vehicles bounded over the crop rows. Lyons flipped open the cover on his wristwatch and checked the time. The convoy was a little ahead of schedule.

As the vehicles drew nearer, he heard the rumble of the engines and the squeak and rattle of cargo. The minifleet of rental trucks was delivering raw materials and would take away finished product for distribution in Idaho, Washington and Oregon.

The Moses Lake operation produced and transported a couple million dollars’ worth of methamphetamine a week, a joint venture of the Mexican mafia and an enterprising southern-California-based barrio gang.

Lyons knew all about bangers from his days with the LAPD. They were the Cub Scouts of organized crime, earning their merit badges fighting other gangs, staking out turf for drug sales, supplying security for shipments and collections. The Mexican mafia, on the other hand, was into some elaborately bad, big-boy shit. Kidnappings. Political payoffs and assassinations. Torture.

One by one, the four trucks’ headlights swept over an enormous John Deere combine abandoned in the middle of a cultivated field one hundred yards away. As the lead vehicle rapidly closed on the narco compound, the driver started honking his horn. The other drivers followed suit.

Almost at once, weak yellow propane lanterns came on in the trailers; there was no electricity at the site. Lyons saw shadowy movement behind the newspapers taped up for window shades. Then people started spilling out the trailer doors. Some had guns. Most didn’t.

That was the sticky part.

The twenty without guns were barefoot, dressed in rags and not there by choice.

The seven with guns wore ranchero jeans and shirts and low-heeled cowboy boots. They carried AK-47s and sawed-off pump shotguns on shoulder slings, and two-and-a-half-foot-long clubs on wrist thongs.

Given the small size of the killzone and the number of structures, isolating the camp’s forced laborers from the armed enforcers was going to be flat-out impossible once the attack began.

The rental trucks parked in a daisy chain in front of the SeaLand container. The four drivers and four passengers got out, leaving the headlights on and engines running. The lead driver carried an overstuffed, black nylon gym bag. From the tats crawling up their necks and their superbaggy shirts and pants, Lyons immediately made them as bangers.

The rancheros started herding the rag people toward the trucks. It was slow going. The unfortunates had to take short, shuffling steps because their ankles were tethered with loops of plastic-covered cable.

In the headlights’ glare Lyons got a good look at the meth zombies. Forced to work in the cargo container lab without respirators or skin protection, they were perpetually stoned from the toxic fumes and the drug powder in the air. They had legions of sores on their faces and arms, and bald patches on their heads. Lyons figured most of that damage was self-inflicted. Unless otherwise occupied, hard-core tweakers picked themselves raw looking for “meth mites.”

He also got a close look at the clubs the rancheros carried. They were made from a single shaft of bamboo. The business ends were split into dozens of narrow strips, right down to handles heavily wrapped with layers of electrician’s tape. Like cat-o’-nine-tails, they could shred skin down to the bone. They were relatively sophisticated enforcement tools, which confirmed his guess that the rancheros were all mafia crew. If bangers had been in charge of the narco slaves, they would have relied solely on fists and boots.

The Able Team leader caught a strong whiff of beans cooking inside the trailers. The familiar sweet aroma mixed with the cat urine stink of the meth lab. The effect was like a snap kick to Lyons’s solar plexus.

Then another set of headlights appeared on the horizon. These were blue-white halogens, coming from the east, the direction of the farm’s main house. Lyons had seen the Feds’ aerial-surveillance photos of the building, which looked like an upscale Vegas whorehouse. A sprawling, fieldstone-faced split level with a two-story, five-car garage, a swimming pool, tennis courts and gardens.

The workers, rancheros and bangers all stopped and stared as a midnight-black Lexus LX740 pulled up and parked. A pair of tall, fit-looking Mexicans got out of the front of the big V-8 SUV, both in short leather jackets, slacks and shiny, pointy-toed dress shoes. The third man, who exited the left rear door, looked as if he’d just rolled out of bed. He wore a gaudy, striped silk bathrobe that fell to his knees and gray snakeskin, silver-toe-capped cowboy boots. His body was round through the middle, like a spider, his cheeks pendulous with flab. His slicked-back black hair hung down in long coils around his narrow, sloping shoulders. Lyons immediately recognized the mafia underboss from the Feds’ mugshot gallery. Don Xavier was greedily smoking his breakfast, a fat, juicy, ten-inch-long Cuban cigar.

All the cards were on the table.

DEA knew about the eastern Washington meth lab, but it was holding back its strike teams while it bargained for the Mexican government’s assistance in scooping up the cartel kingpins in Baja. The agency was looking for a really big score, and headlines to match. As usual, negotiations between international bureaucrats were going nowhere. While the desk jockeys made faces at one another over six-course lunches, the criminals continued to rake in drug-trade profits, and their spent, poisoned slaves ended up in the fields surrounding the Moses Lake site, in shallow, unmarked graves.

Stony Man, and specifically its three-man subset, Able Team, had been ordered by the President to land a blow the dirtballs would understand. The kind of blow that conventional law enforcement wasn’t prepared to deliver.

AFTER THE CONVOY of rental trucks rattled past, Herman “Gadgets” Schwarz rose from the floorboards in front of the Deere combine’s bench seat. He rolled up his ski mask, exposing his face, then decocked and reholstered his silenced Beretta 93-R.

Schwarz shoved open the grimy slider window on the passenger side of the cab, which faced the meth factory compound. The early-morning air that rushed in felt heavy and damp; the sun was just peeking out, a seam of neon orange on the horizon.

He shared the combine’s wide bench seat with a .50-caliber Barrett Model 90 rifle. The bolt-action, bullpup-style weapon weighed twenty-five pounds; it was the little brother of the thirty-two-pound semiauto Barrett Model 82 A-1. Its forty-five-inch barrel was sixteen inches shorter than the 82 A-1, making it more portable. Unlike the semiauto Light Fifty, there was no backward barrel movement when it fired, which made for better accuracy. To compensate for the additional recoil, it was fitted with a dual-chamber muzzle brake that dampened the kick to 12-gauge levels. The gun’s telescope was from Geodesic Sights; in addition to standard optics, it was factory equipped with a laser range finder to verify target distance.

There was already plenty of light to shoot by.

From his knapsack on the floor, Schwarz took out a pair of Lightning 31 ear muffs and two extra 10-round magazines. He pulled on the ear protectors and set the mags close to hand on the seat. Like the clip already in the Barrett, one was loaded with black-tipped, armor-piercing M-2 boattails. The Model 90 was zeroed at 100 yards. At that range, a 709-grain M-2 slug would penetrate almost two inches of nonarmored steel. The other mag contained blue-tipped M-8s, armor-piercing incendiaries.

Schwarz draped the metal sill with a folded bath towel, then pushed the Barrett’s muzzle, barrel and retracted bipod legs through the window, resting the short, ventilated forestock on the pad. He snugged the rifle butt into his shoulder and scanned downrange through the scope. From his elevated position in the cab, he controlled the entire killzone.

His assignment was simple: close the barn door.

NOBODY NOTICED when a gray-haired man in overalls suddenly popped up at the edge of the field. The guards were occupied with the slaves, and the slaves with the guards.

The third member of Able Team wore a stained, holed-out T-shirt under his denim bibfronts, exposing the lean, corded muscle in his arms and shoulders. Rosario “the Politician” Blancanales didn’t bother to brush the wet soil from the front of his jeans, dirt he’d picked up crawling along the furrows and over the fresh graves. Only his intense black eyes were visible above a cheap polyester dust mask.

Most of the slaves had the masks on, too, either over their faces or hanging down around their chins on the elastic straps. The masks were a psych job by the mafia slavemasters. They did nothing to protect the workers from toxic chemicals. Only biohazard suits with self-contained air supplies could do that.

His head lowered like the others, Blancanales fell in at the rear of the line, moving in short, shuffling steps as if his ankles were bound, too. But they weren’t. The frayed cuffs of his jeans dragged on the ground, hiding that fact. He held his right hand tucked inside the bib. Out of sight against his chest, he held a suppressor-equipped Beretta 93-R, safety off, live round under the hammer.

As Blancanales stepped past the meth lab, he stole a peek inside. There was no proper door, just a single, man-size hole hacked through the rusting corrugated steel. A piece of discolored sheet plastic had been pulled aside to let the caustic fumes escape. Propane lamps hung from a cable stretched the length of the narrow enclosure, illuminating a long sawhorse table cluttered with funnels, rubber tubing, and plastic and glass jugs. Propane burners flickered blue under blackened pots. Bedsheets stretched over metal garbage cans were being used to filter the meth. Empty starter fluid, drain cleaner containers and torn plastic and cardboard from battery and pill bottle packaging littered the floor. Outside the doorway stood knee-high piles of the same. The lab’s hazardous refuse had created a dead zone around the camp, clearly visible in the Feds’ aerial photos.

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.