a bitch,” Calvin James growled. James was the first American member of Phoenix Force. Despite the kind of discipline it took to be a medical corpsman and a SEAL, and later a member of San Francisco SWAT, James was still a little quick with a curse. Tall, black and lanky, he was passionate about his position. “You don’t need to ask me twice to put boot to ass against the bastards behind this.”
“I’ll have to,” Brognola returned. “That’s Mexican federale equipment at the scene of the crime. That means this is an international incident. One that the State Department wants to keep under wraps.”
“Excuse me?” Rosario Blancanales, the elder of Lyons’s two Able Team partners, asked. Five foot eleven, with silver hair and a face wizened beyond his years, his lithe, spry frame belied the appearance of his age. Where Lyons was a police officer and undercover FBI agent who had allied with Bolan often, Blancanales had served in Bolan’s unit during his military career and later assisted him in his private war against organized crime. Blancanales’s first team-up with Bolan post desertion had ended with him in jail, one of only two survivors of the Executioner’s death squad. His entry into Able Team had cleared those records. His elite Ranger training and natural diplomacy, which had earned him the nickname “the Politician,” made Blancanales an invaluable member of Stony Man. “The government is going to downplay the slaughter of US Marshals?”
“It’s being kept under a tight lid,” Carmen Delahunt interjected. Delahunt, one of the members of Kurtzman’s cybernetics team, had investigative and tech skills that easily translated into search algorithms that helped keep the Stony Man teams up-to-date on enemy action. “State Department and the White House don’t want the public to get a word of this,” she added.
“Federales involved? No doubt,” Gary Manning added. Manning, a Canadian, was a barrel-chested polymath, tall and strong, and he was also a genius with explosives. His restless intellect, however, had kept him moving from field to field. He had proved to be an expert woodsman and hunter, served with the military in Southeast Asian operations, owned his own import-export firm and was an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, where he’d cross-trained with German antiterrorism agencies.
This depth and breadth of experience had made him a steady hand and wise counsel to Phoenix Force leader McCarter, while his hunting talents had translated into his being a lethal sniper and his engineering had made him a master of demolitions. He, like McCarter, was an original Phoenix Force operator and was not surprised by an act of cross-border violence being held in secret to avert the possibility of war between two nations. Too often, Phoenix’s five had been sent in to defang and defuse conflicts instigated by outside parties looking to profit from war and chaos. “Given that Joaquin and Amanda Castillo are considered enemies of the state in Mexico, the legitimacy of this strike force could be fairly solid.”
“You know about these two?” Hawkins asked. The youngest and newest member of Phoenix, T. J. Hawkins, was the other American who’d diluted the original mission description of Mack Bolan’s foreign legion.
Hawkins, who had grown up on the South Side of Chicago, was a veteran of the US Army Rangers and Delta Force. He had a history of going outside the rules to protect innocent lives to do what was right, politics be damned. He was a prime candidate to fill in the ranks after McCarter replaced their retired original commander.
“The last time we were in Mexico, I managed to catch a newscast about Accion Obrar. The similarities to Stony Man made me curious enough to delve further,” Manning noted.
Hawkins frowned. “Being a Texas boy, I looked into Accion Obrar because they were allegedly behind unseating paramilitary gangs operating on both sides of the border. Just in case we had to deal with Los Sigmas or Los Omegas or some group like that.”
“The new hotness is Los Lictors.” Hermann Schwarz spoke up. Schwarz was Blancanales’s longtime friend and a fellow survivor of Bolan’s death squad. Balancing electrical engineering and Ranger training made Schwarz, nicknamed “Gadgets,” one of the top ten fighting elite in the country alongside his fellow Able Team warriors. “For those of us on Able Team who aren’t fluent in Spanish, that’s ‘the officers’ or ‘the magistrates.’”
Lyons met Schwarz’s gaze at his friend’s usual razzing. “How illuminating.”
“He’s up to five-syllable words, Gadgets! Cheese it!” Blancanales stage-whispered across the table. The humor, so close in the wake of the loss of several blacksuits, was meant to distract from the pain. These men were law enforcement professionals and gallows humor was a means to keep laughing instead of crying. For that, Lyons was glad for his friends’ antics, though it didn’t ameliorate the anger he felt for the murderers of the blacksuit marshals.
“This is particularly disturbing in that we have little idea who could have betrayed the location of the Castillos,” Huntington Wethers, the third member of the Farm’s cyber crew, noted. A tall African American who looked born to be a college professor, complete with corduroy jacket and pipe, Wethers was a mathematical genius and a man who was meticulous in seeking out information on the web. This didn’t mean that he was slow; indeed, he was able to process raw data in bulk, but he was thorough. “The setup arranged by Hal, utilizing ‘in-house’ resources, was kept away from agency heads specifically.”
“The potential for a mole to intercept was minimized, but there’s never a sure thing where more than one person is involved,” Brognola grumbled. “So, we have a list of who could have let slip about their security.”
“A list we’re going through with a fine-tooth comb,” Akira Tokaido said. No irony was lost that the young Japanese American’s spiky punk hairstyle only saw a comb to further splay and launch it toward the ceiling. Where Wethers was meticulous, Tokaido was punk rock and thrash metal, making wild leaps of deductive logic, though his mathematical and coding capabilities were not haphazard.
Where speed and intuition were required, Tokaido was an F-22 Raptor pulling 9 Gs to outmaneuver his opponents. Wethers was more the aircraft carrier sailing along at 35 knots but with eyes and ears everywhere. Delahunt was the bridge between the two, using her own investigative instincts to seek handholds of information to scale impregnable fortresses of mystery.
“I pity your quarry, mates,” McCarter quipped.
“Eventually they become yours,” Delahunt said. “And when they do, that’s when things get...satisfying.”
Gary Manning raised an eyebrow at Delahunt’s breathless final word. The red-haired ex-cop was a beautiful woman, regardless of age, and even her toughness never marginalized her feminine allure.
Manning turned toward the big Fed, hoping to keep his mind clear. “You don’t think that it’s a direct link to the government, do you, Hal?”
“No,” Brognola returned. “The crew has been digging deep and hard, looking for threads that might have exposed the blacksuit witness security detail, and those assignments are showing up in the system. It’s not an actual mole inside WITSEC, either.”
“More like a worm in the computer systems,” Tokaido acknowledged. “I’m picking up the damage left behind and Hunt and I are trying to locate and end it.”
“As well as to perform some forensic work on the worm so we can learn where it came from,” Wethers added. “Its elusive nature confirms that a genius put it together, or even a team of geniuses.”
“Say, the best hackers a Mexican covert agency could put together?” Lyons asked.
Wethers nodded in affirmation.
“Accion
