if, somewhere in its family tree, an ancestor’d had relations with a Desert Eagle, with flat, high-tech angles and facets along the barrel’s length.
“Nice coloring on yours,” Lyons said, admiring the big gun. Naturally, the Canadian woodsman would have preferred a hunting-size revolver. All the horsepower of a Magnum bullet meant nothing if you couldn’t hit with it. “I usually don’t have problem with my four-inch revolvers, but, man, the only sucker who could miss with this puppy is the one with the bread to afford it.”
Manning chuckled. “I also like a little bit of reach with my weapons. You’re good out to a hundred, a hundred and fifty yards with yours. This, I’ve hit steel ram targets at three hundred yards.”
“Okay...that’s impressive,” Lyons admitted. He didn’t have to try out the trigger pull on the big .357. It was hand built by John “Cowboy” Kissinger, Stony Man’s armorer, an artist of steel and springs. His personal revolvers were slick and smooth, parts gliding across each other as if ice skating. They were also coated and treated against even the harshest of elements, further protecting their inner workings from hitches and imperfections that would ruin accuracy or speed of shooting.
“Just be careful out there,” Lyons said, trading Manning’s hog leg back for his pair.
The brawny Canadian nodded in return. “Careful? Or just do it as we’ve always done it? Because, pardon my linguistic torture, careful don’t do the job.”
“Yeah,” Schwarz admitted, interjecting. “We tend to err on the side of wild-ass hijinks. But this time, we’ve got the Farm under attack from an outside source. One we just can’t shoot up.”
“Well, we could, but then we’d be on the run for blowing a renegade congressman in two,” Hawkins added.
“It worked for Mack,” James offered. “On the run...convicted of a crime—they pretty much pulled—they operate in the Los Angeles underworld. If you have a prob—”
“Please. We got enough of that when the movie remake came out,” Blancanales groaned. Even so, he got a smile out of James.
“I’m not going to lie and say we don’t each have our own exit strategies.” McCarter spoke somberly. “But right now the only way out we need to concentrate on is getting Amanda Castillo back together with her children.”
“Don’t worry. We’ve never let a kid down,” Schwarz said. “And you five are pretty damn good yourselves. You’ll free her.”
“First things first,” Encizo added. “We bust down the doors of a Caballeros Cartel smuggling tunnel and get into Mexico the hard way.”
“Always with the negative vibes, Rafe,” Blancanales quipped. “To us, it’d be the fun way.”
“We’d also like to not level half of Nogales, Arizona, though,” Encizo countered.
“Don’t worry about that,” McCarter calmly assured. “We’ve got Gary. Even if we go with a nuclear option, he’ll make sure no bystanders are hurt.”
“Just Los Lictors and the Caballeros de Durango,” Manning added with emphasis.
“And in this case, since I’m better with Mexican-dialect Spanish, I’ll take the lead,” Hawkins, the Texan, said. He continued in the language he indicated, “Or don’t you think I’ll be convincing?”
“You know, Gadgets, I think we’ve been coveting the wrong member of Phoenix for Carl’s replacement on Able,” Blancanales joked.
Schwarz grinned. “We’d be golden even with a member of the Lollipop Guild if we wanted.”
Lyons scratched his head with his middle finger, extended as a beacon to his two wisecracking buddies.
“If any cartel is going to have a light, Caucasian-looking gent, no matter how well tanned, it’ll be the Durango mob,” Encizo admitted. “Especially with their ties to Accion Obrar.”
“Those bastards smell awful familiar,” Lyons said. “Like our old sparring partners. Remember Miguel Unomundo?”
“The Fascist International had a minor resurgence a while back. Remember the Ankylosaur robots?” Hawkins asked.
“Ankylosaur combat drones,” Manning corrected.
“Something tells me that with the involvement with Stewart Crowmass, the Fascist International has a brand-new title.”
“The Arrangement,” McCarter concluded.
Lyons nodded. “We thought that taking him down during the Japanese whaling crisis would have ended all of his problems, but that shrewd bastard already had a set of fail-safes in place. It’s why Hal’s got his neck on the line back in Wonderland and we’re busy pretending to be target practice for paramilitary cartel enforcers.”
“Are you certain it was merely Crowmass?” Manning inquired. “He was not alone in all of this. According to Carmen, he had allies in Central and South America and the Middle East.”
“Do you have any specific names?” Blancanales asked.
Manning quickly wrote down several notes on a page, tore it out and handed it over. “If, while you’re playing the Judas Goat, you happen to run across someone in Texas or California, you might want to bring the trouble to their very own front door.”
Blancanales looked over the sheet, face torn between a frown of concern and a mirthless grin of malice. “Him? You sure?”
“It’s only rumors at this point,” Manning stated.
Lyons took a peek at Manning’s notes and sighed. “Even when he shot a lawyer in the face, he was still a goddamn hero. No wonder this wasn’t a part of the official briefing.”
“Hal and the Sensitive Operations Group are on thin ice as it is. Going after this guy, with his hooks in the US government and overseas, it’d take a hell of a lot of brass,” Manning stated.
Lyons ejected a shell from his rifle’s under-barrel shotgun. It gleamed from base of round to the tip. “Brass? I’ve never been accused of being short of that.”
Grim silence enveloped the cabin as the two teams returned their gear to their cases.
Nothing less than full-on warfare was going to occupy their thoughts for the next several days.
From his position operating a small tamale cart near the refrigerated warehouse run by the Caballeros de Durango Cartel, Pedro Guzman was easily able to keep an eye on the US side of the smuggling tunnel and any who’d dare approach it. If something strange showed up on his personal radar, he was in direct walkie-talkie contact with his brethren. So far, his tour of duty as security for the tunnel had been uneventful.
Few lawmen would ever want to take on Los Lictors, and he and his brothers in arms had dealt with Los Sigmas, the last group of hard-core paramilitary cartel muscle that had obtained control of Nogales and the border crossings into and out of Arizona. Competition and the
