Читать книгу Devil's Playground - Don Pendleton - Страница 5

Even in the bright Acapulco sunlight, Rosa Asado felt invisible. Less than invisible, really. As part of Governor Brujillo’s executive protection team, she was supposed to keep to the background, ever vigilant.

While Asado was an attractive woman, she was just second-rate compared to this crowd. A slender blond American singer with a vacuous smile laughed at Anibella Brujillo’s latest witticism. The governor’s wife was a stunning woman in her late thirties, with long, black silky hair. Brujillo’s face was lean, with full lips that moved with facile ease as she spoke cultured English with a deep, husky breathlessness that sharply contrasted with the American songstress’s cackles and nasal-braying speech. It was no surprise, Asado thought. While the young blonde was popular in the United States, Anibella Brujillo had been a national heroine in her younger days, achieving international fame from Argentina to Ontario with fans of latin music. She had even achieved crossover success with several Top 10 hits in the U.S. between the time she was eighteen and twenty-nine, when Anibella finally officially retired from pop superstardom and married a young, up-and-coming politician in Guerrero’s state politics.

Brujillo’s voice could be described in one word—spellbinding.

Asado’s wide-brimmed hat, dark sunglasses and brunette curls were arranged to conceal the unobtrusive earpiece and throat microphone that kept her in touch with the rest of the executive protection team. If there was a battle, Asado wouldn’t be alone.

“We’ve got movement at the gates of the resort. Military vehicles,” a voice cut in on her concentration.

Asado’s hand rested on her thigh, not far from a pocket containing one of her twin Detonics .45 CombatMaster pistols. “I thought we had a report of a base arranging transport through the area.”

“They’re off the given path,” another one of the Mexican security team stated. “And I don’t know about you, but I’m not keen on having jeeps with machine guns passing too close to the command trailer.”

Asado’s brow furrowed and her fingertips played around the snap of her pocket. While the mobile command center was armor-plated, against a .50-caliber machine gun that protection might as well be tissue paper. “Ricky…”

She was about to give a quiet admonishment to be careful when distant thunder rumbled through the air, the earpiece shrieking through her skull as Ricardo Bonases howled in agony, shrieking something about his arm being severed.

Other members of the protection team closed in around Anibella Brujillo and Asado tore the pistol from her right pocket, thumbing down the safety lever. At the sight of armed men and women around her, the governor’s wife cut off her story in midword, green eyes scanning the area.

Asado caught Anibella’s glance toward two men at one far corner of the pool area, reinforcing her suspicions about the two men who seemed to be stalking the first lady. Veteran members of the detail had dismissed Asado’s warning about the pair, and others like them, pronounced as being harmless after background checks. Asado had been ordered to drop any inquiries about the mysterious shadows, and rumors among the rest of the security team had said those orders had come from Anibella Brujillo herself.

Right now, Asado didn’t know who exactly the pair were, but at least she felt secure that they wouldn’t make an effort to kill the governor’s wife.

An explosion rocked Asado as she closed with the first lady, the shock wave knocking her to the marble-tiled deck and pushing her into the water. Caught off guard, Asado sucked in a lungful of water. She lost the first pistol in her grasp from the concussion or from striking the marble pool deck. Either way, her reflexes took over, powerful legs kicking off the pool bottom and driving her head above the water. With a vomitous exhalation, she voided water through her mouth. Her slender but tightly muscled arms reached for the terra-cotta lip of the pool to brace herself as she took a ragged gasp of life-giving oxygen into her chest. As she surfaced, she spotted green-and brown-mottled shapes with assault rifles rushing through a cloud of smoke and debris from the explosion.

Asado tucked down, holding her breath this time as bullets pierced the pool’s surface, riding on spears of bubbles. She tore the other Detonics CombatMaster from her pocket, transferring it to her right hand and thumbing off the safety. With another kick, she broke the surface, spotting a Mexican soldier with a G3 assault rifle firing a short burst at the other end of the pool. Asado didn’t waste any time identifying the target. Instead she punched out two fat 230-grain hollow-point rounds into the camouflage-wearing gunman’s groin and lower belly. Wide-mouthed cavities scooped aside flesh and blood, hydrostatic pressure peeling back the bowl-like lips of the bullets and spreading them apart on impact, smashing out deep divots from the Mexican’s pelvic bone.

Robbed of the skeletal structure he needed to stand, the rifleman tumbled headfirst into the pool, his rifle clattering to the tile.

Asado surged for the deck, firing another shot at a second armed gunman who raked a burst of automatic fire across the governor’s wife and her party. Realizing that she heard nothing over her ear radio, Asado wondered if the water had shorted out the system when she was dunked. She would have to check on the radio, but not before she seized the enemy’s rifle. The Detonics .45 was powerful, but nothing beat a rifle when it came to killing people engaged in homicide. With a hard shove, she flopped onto the deck and grabbed the grip of the Heckler & Koch G3.

Water suction and gravity dragged Asado back into the pool, just in time to avoid being cut in two by another assassin. As she sliced into the water, she kicked back from the edge, aimed the rifle and fired. Heavy recoil shook the weapon in her fist, but at a range of only ten feet, she was able to stitch the uniformed soldier from navel to throat with a 3-round burst of 7.62 mm bullets. The assassin jerked backward violently, as if propelled from a cannon, the rifle slugs coring through his torso as if it were made of soft cheese.

Asado spun and kicked for the far side of the pool. When she did, she saw that the table where Anibella Brujillo had been sitting was surrounded with corpses, other tables overturned in a scene of carnage. Spearing the rifle ahead of her, Asado knifed through the water like a torpedo. Muzzle-flashes blazed around the side of one table, showing that some of her comrades were still alive and fighting. Asado clamped her hand on the lip of the pool and yanked herself up on deck. She stayed prone, rolling onto her belly so that she could take aim with the G3 rifle at any newcomers.

The two mystery men suddenly entered the fray, Uzi submachine guns blazing as they ambushed the marauding assassins. Raking fingers of 9 mm gunfire laced into the assassins with brutal efficiency as Asado discarded her empty G3 and reloaded her CombatMaster. Kneeling behind a stone planter, she fired three shots into a rifle-armed soldier, striking him in the upper chest and stopping him cold. Collarbone and ribs shattered by 230-grain bullets, his thoracic cavity was suddenly filled with rocketing shrapnel of deformed hollow-point rounds and bone splinters. Blood vomited from the dying man’s lips as he collapsed limply to the ground.

Asado pivoted, looking for more targets when she saw Anibella Brujillo, armed with a gleaming, nickel-plated pistol, fire a shot into a dying assassin’s face as she stood over him. Asado recognized the pistol as belonging to Montero, one of the protection team. Montero was sprawled on the pool deck, most of his face missing and his brains forming a fan around the cavern that used to be his skull. Physical pain speared through Asado’s chest at the sight of her murdered comrade.

Anibella fired two more shots, taking a fleeing rifleman between the shoulder blades, and she spit a curse. “Culo.”

Rosa Asado stood, glaring at Anibella Brujillo.

“You survived?” Brujillo asked.

“No thanks to the gangsters on your payroll,” Asado answered, nodding toward the Uzi-armed gunmen who were escaping over the fence.

“My dear, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Anibella stated. “All I see are two killers you allowed to escape.”

Asado clamped her teeth in her lower lip to restrain the urge to throttle the woman. She thumbed the safety up on her CombatMaster. “I don’t know what this is all about, but I’m certain it has something to do with your links to those gangsters.”

Anibella shook her head. “They were trying to murder me, because my husband is working hard to bring down the Juarez Cartel. This is proof that we are on the right track.”

Asado took a deep breath and looked around. Except for Anibella, she was the only one standing. The blond American singer was facedown in a puddle of blood. However, looking at the wounds in the young woman’s back, she could tell that they were too neat to have been made by a G3’s rifle slug. They looked more like the bullets from a .38 Super, just like the one that Brujillo held.

Asado looked up to see the silvery muzzle of Montero’s 1911 pistol leveled at her. A flower of fire appeared, and in that dying moment Rosa thought of her twin sister, Blanca, and how she’d never see her again.

A 125-grain slug smashed into her forehead and puffed out the wet tresses at the back of her skull.

The bodyguard collapsed in a jumble of limbs, eyes bulging in their sockets, staring vacantly at the clear skies of the Acapulco paradise.

“OH, SAINT MARTHA,” Anibella Brujillo whispered, calling the goddess of death, Santa Muerte, by her nickname. “What a waste of a good scapegoat.”

She flipped the nickel-plated 1911 back to Montero’s side.

The two Uzi-packers were gangsters, but they were also Anibella’s devotees. As the high priestess of the Santa Muerte cult in the state, she was never far from the protection of her flock members. She was a shepherdess not of sheep, but of Mexican wolves, predators who infested the drug gangs and lorded over neighborhoods.

It would take some time for the authorities to arrive, but she already had her followers acting on her plans to implicate Rosa Asado as the real perpetrator of this recent attack.

The Juarez Cartel was stepping up its aggression, and Asado had been correct. The drug lords were seeking to eliminate her not because her husband was a crusading politician, but because she was the heart and soul of the Santa Muerte cult conquering the heroin trade in Acapulco.

Anibella’s brow furrowed. She would deflect attention for now, but the Juarez Cartel was still not going to give up so easily. A full paramilitary assault was only one sign of the extremes that Juarez was willing to go to, to eliminate her and the cult.

She needed an advantage over one of the most tenacious and lethal drug gangs in Mexico. The Mexican president had dropped a hint to her husband. A few years back, when the new president was under assault from multiple factions, an American operative had been assigned to assist him against drug gangs and military officers seeking to stage a coup.

This lone man was like an army unto himself. Anibella had heard rumors of a more recent savage conflict between Colombian cartels and the Hong Kong triads on Mexican soil, involving a similar one-man battalion. The president gave governor Emilio Brujillo a contact number to bring in this solitary crusader.

Anibella Brujillo knew that if anyone could level the playing field against the Juarez Cartel, even if they could arrange an army assault, it would be the mysterious lone warrior.