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
