With the aircraft and sheer firepower on hand, Amanda quickly put together that this was one of the many enemies she had made. Undoubtedly this was a cartel, since few others could afford helicopter gunships and trained troops, and only the most insane of Mexican government agencies would dream of murdering US Marshals on American soil.
Then again, Accion Obrar was a branch of the federales known for its gleeful willingness to break the rules. Harold Brognola of the US Justice Department had brought the Castillos to Arizona to protect them from AO, and if these men were cartel, they were only once removed from the paramilitary, unsanctioned vigilante force that she and Joaquin had gathered so much dirt on.
And now they owned her. The nylon cable ties bit her wrists cruelly, and her shoulders burned in protest as a captor hauled her to her feet.
“On the chopper, puta” came the order. Amanda struggled to stay upright despite the force of the thug’s shove, and she did enter the helicopter, but only after banging her knees and thighs against the bottom of the opened side door. The bare metal flooring chilled her cheek, and more hands snagged her ankles and lower legs, levering her up and into the cabin. She wanted to turn over, but a forest of combat boots surrounded her. They penned her in; she couldn’t move. She wanted to spit and curse them all, but more than one of them planted a sole on her back. The weight of their feet immobilized her, informed her that she was only meat for them; a trophy deer brought back from a successful hunt.
She only lived at their whim. One mistake and they crushed her underfoot, without qualm, without mercy.
Though, if their intent was to keep her, then she knew there was only one destination ahead for her.
El Calabozo sin Piedad.
These were Los Lictors, a group of merciless yet utterly precise commandos whose skills relegated the similar Los Zetas to second best. Assault rifles, special operations tactics, brutal accuracy and violence of action made them the elite champions of the cartel wars.
El Calabozo sin Piedad.
The Dungeon without Pity.
In her decades of covering corruption among Mexican law enforcement, no other prison in the world harbored such a grim, soul-chilling reputation. Not even the Black Dolphin prison in the former Soviet Union had such a reputation for violence and level of security.
People went in there, and the only reason they came out again was that they’d only been put there for “a vacation.” Accion Obrar used it to keep their favorite gun thugs and smugglers out of the view of the law. It was a place where demons were allowed to indulge their tastes for mayhem and abuse against rival cartels and political dissidents.
Amanda Moran Castillo was such a political dissident in the eyes of Accion Obrar.
And in the space of a day’s travel, she would be handed over to the worst inmates at the darkest, deadliest asylum on the planet.
No, Amanda didn’t live at the whim of these kidnappers. They wanted her to live.
For she was on the fast track to hell, and death was a mercy she’d soon beg for.
The assembly of all the members of the Stony Man Farm’s teams—Able Team, Phoenix Force, as well as the cybernetic squad—was not a good portent. With all hands on deck, this either had to be a national emergency or a direct threat to the Sensitive Operations Group itself. Without the presence of the founder of Stony Man—the Executioner, Mack Bolan—the covert agency still thrived, undimmed by the privation of the legendary soldier. The lone warrior had his own missions out in the world; things that fell through the cracks that even a top secret government-sanctioned antiterrorism agency could not attend to.
Carl Lyons, brawny, blond and grim-faced, and his colleague in arms, David McCarter, bracketed Harold Brognola at the head of the table. In contrast to the square-jawed, all-American football hero Lyons, McCarter was lean and fox-faced. His build was no less defined than Lyons’s, but he was more panther than king of the jungle. They were the respective leaders of their teams; Lyons commanding the urban warriors known as Able Team and McCarter being the leader of Stony Man’s foreign ops unit named Phoenix Force.
Though Able Team consisted of only three commandos, it was just as effective as the five-man army that was Phoenix Force. There was a spirited competition between the two groups, but each saw the other as an equal. The eight of them together were quite brilliant in a diversity of fields ranging from emergency medical treatment thanks to former SEAL and Navy corpsman Calvin James of the Force, to Able Team’s electronics genius Hermann Schwarz. When Brognola and Bolan had vetted the teams, they’d looked for smart, capable, quick-to-learn men who were straight shooters and athletic combatants.
The cyber team leader, Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, may not have been low in body fat, but with his thick shag of beard and furry, heavily muscled forearms, he was no weakling. Despite being confined to a wheelchair by a gunshot wound to the spine, Kurtzman’s upper body was slabbed over in thick muscle from exercise and the constant maneuvering of his manual chair. As strong as his arms and chest were, though, his mind was equally powerful as the creator and coordinator of the incredible computerized data collection and intelligence system that made the Farm’s missions possible.
“What’s the deal, Hal?” McCarter spoke up first. Though McCarter’s antic energy had been tamed greatly by the role of leadership of his team, the British SAS veteran still was not given to idling when there were things to do. “What’s the crisis du jour?”
“I just got news from Arizona,” Brognola answered. “We lost a lot of blacksuits serving as a security detail.”
An older bulldog of a man who had been with the Farm since the very beginning, Brognola had been an FBI agent assigned to capture or kill Mack Bolan a lifetime ago, back when the Executioner had waged his unsanctioned vigilante actions against organized crime on US soil. Rather than ultimately eliminate Bolan, Brognola had set up a situation where his lethal fighting skills could be more readily used to protect the United States. Since then, the big Fed had expanded the Sensitive Operations Group’s reach by creating the blacksuit program.
The blacksuits were cultivated from the best and brightest of the military and law enforcement, well-trained and honest men and women who didn’t quite have the clearance or lack of ties that would make them perfect for the covert agency. They came to the Farm in the shadow of the old Stony Man of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where they received continuing education and refresh training. They were also tapped for intel that didn’t make it into top secret databases immediately. Often, it was the men of Able or Phoenix who educated these warriors, so the loss of one was the loss of a friend as well as a student.
“How many?” Lyons asked, his voice a low rumble like thunder across the plains.
“Seven confirmed dead, five wounded. Don Burnett is missing, as well as one of the packages they were protecting,” Brognola advised regrettably. “Another principal was killed.”
“How many were they protecting?” McCarter quizzed.
Brognola took a deep breath. “Five. A man and his wife. Three children. The man, Joaquin Castillo, was killed. The children were out at a swimming hole. Their protection detail pulled them out when the attackers struck.”
Brognola handed out packets for
