puff of glistening red mist, the headless corpse folded up like a lawnchair. The Able Team commando had a chance for another clear, quick shot at an enemy gunner, but he passed it up, instead swinging the crosshairs hard over to the right, to his assigned first target. Numbers had to fall in order for Lyons’s battle plan to work.
No deviations.
As the narco cowboys ran for cover they fired back wildly, spraying bullets his way. The location of his hide was pretty obvious: it was the only elevated position in miles of pancake-flat farmland. At a range of one hundred yards the pistol shots didn’t even land close, but the Russian autorifle rounds thunked and rattled the broad side of the combine. As he aimed at truck 4’s engine compartment and took up the trigger slack, a slug plowed through the rear of the cab two feet to his right, peppering that side of his face with hot metallic grit. He ignored it.
Schwarz knew Lyons was advancing inside the new firing lane, but he had the Able Team leader’s designated route to target down cold. The ex-L.A. cop was protected by two layers of cover—the engine block and the meth lab.
The Barrett thundered, battering Schwarz’s shoulder as he touched off the round. His arm was still tender from the forty practice rounds he had fired two days before in Virginia.
“Twelve-gauge recoil levels, my ass,” he muttered as he ejected the spent round and reacquired the sight picture. Smoke and steam poured out from under the truck’s half-open hood.
Not at all surprising.
The cyberteam at Stony Man Farm never left anything to chance. They had blueprinted engine design and placement, drawing virtual bull’s-eyes for him on the sides of the vehicles.
Right on schedule, Lyons darted out from between the last two trucks. As he did so, Schwarz fired another M-2 round. Truck 3’s front end shuddered, then rocked when the engine blew apart. The Barrett’s bolt snicked back, butter smooth, and a huge smoking brass hull flipped up and out of the action.
Locking down the bolt on the third cartridge, he put the sight post on truck 2’s ten-ring and let it rip. Though he thought he was snugged up nice and tight, the Light Fifty’s buttstock slammed into him. The stunning impact sent daggers of pain up the side of his neck and down his shoulder.
It did much worse to the rental truck.
When the engine deconstructed, flying shrapnel blew out both front tires. As the axle dropped onto its rims, the hood lurched up and the engine compartment belched flame and smoke.
Before he could snap the cap on truck 1, the drug lord’s black Lexus burst into view from behind it, bouncing over the furrows at high speed, making a bee-line for the farmhouse. Schwarz took a swinging lead on the target and broke trigger. The Barrett bellowed, its minimal forestock jumping high off the bath-towel cushion.
No way could the Lexus’s bulletproof glass deflect a .50-caliber AP slug.
Downrange, the SUV’s driver’s window vanished from the frame as it imploded. A nanosecond later, the passenger’s window exploded. As the passenger’s window disintegrated, two sets of brains and skull bones mixed with a glittering shower of shattered, gray-tinted glass.
The Lightning 31 earmuffs didn’t completely muffle the sustained bleating of the SUV’s horn as the vehicle rolled onward, driverless. To hear better, Schwarz edged the sonic protector off his right ear.
The Lexus rolled slower and slower as it bumped over the furrows. The horn suddenly stopped blowing. On the far side of the vehicle, the rear door opened and Xavier bailed with the black gym bag. Stumbling on his skinny bare legs in his thousand-dollar cowboy boots, he waved for his troops to regroup around him. Four cowboys did so, partially blocking the don from view.
Schwarz could have taken him out by shooting through the others, but he held his fire. Kneading out the .50-caliber whiplash in his neck and shoulder, he kept one eye pinned to the scope. He watched as Xavier and his human shields sprinted for the meth lab where the rest of the crew had holed up. After they had scurried between the barrels of offloaded chemicals and slipped inside the crude doorway, Schwarz replaced the earmuff and resumed work, methodically punching a few big-bore rounds through the corrugated walls. He shot high on purpose, to keep the opposition pinned and unable to return aimed fire. The .50-caliber impacts raised clouds of dust from the metal roof. He could imagine what it was like for the dirtbags inside. Like being sealed in a fifty-five-gallon steel drum while someone beat on it with a sledgehammer.
When the tenth spent cartridge flipped out of the action, clinking on the others lying beside him on the bench seat, Schwarz left the bolt open and stripped out the empty clip. He reached for the mag loaded with M-8s and slapped it home.
As he peered back through the scope’s eyepiece, something dark flew out of the lab entrance and landed in the dirt about fifteen feet away. It was the overstuffed gym bag. Schwarz again slipped off the Lightning 31’s cup. He could hear someone yelling from the doorway. He couldn’t make out whether it was in Spanish or English, but the idea was pretty obvious.
Take the bag of cash and leave me the fuck alone.
Schwarz covered his ear, then slid the Light Fifty’s bolt forward, chambering a blue-tipped incendiary round.
Some things money just couldn’t buy.
BLANCANALES LOWERED his bloody forearm and pulled the silenced Beretta 93-R from underneath the denim bibfront. He concealed the pistol along the outside of his right thigh. Nobody was looking directly at him. Slaves and slavemasters were either staring at the practically headless guy on the ground or gawking uprange for the source of the stunning killshot.
Global paralysis lasted an instant.
Gunmen unleashed sawing bursts of autofire as they sprinted for the nearest cover. As the bangers and cowboys scattered, Blancanales dropped to a knee beside the freshly made corpses and yanked the guthook sheath knife free of its scabbard.
The meth slaves scattered, too, but slowly because of their ankle restraints. Some headed for shelter under the trucks, while others set off across the fields. The three pregnant girls were moving the slowest of all, cradling their swollen bellies in both hands as they shuffled barefoot in the dust, their backs to the conflict.
The replacement workers huddled in a cowering knot beside the Lexus SUV.
A flurry of tightly spaced pistol shots rang out from the end of the line of trucks, then the Barrett boomed again. The second shot from the .50-caliber rifle sent half of the opposition diving for cover inside the meth lab. Xavier and his two bodyguards were the first through the crude doorway. The pair of single-wide trailers was 150 feet away, across a stretch of open ground. Because the bangers and rancheros had all seen how accurately Schwarz could shoot, none of them made a break in that direction.
For his part, Blancanales faced a difficult choice. There was a slim chance he could get some of the forced laborers to safety before the numbers ran down to zero. He couldn’t communicate with the burned-out zombies among them; and even if he could have, he didn’t have bolt cutters to sever the loops of braided-steel wire around their ankles. The newly arrived slaves’ wrists were secured behind their backs with nylon cable ties, but their ankles weren’t bound yet. They could run. Their brains weren’t fried by toxic chemicals, either, so at least there was a possibility they could understand and follow simple commands.
Saving some was better than saving none.
As always, living and dying was largely a matter of luck.
