Читать книгу Devil's Playground - Don Pendleton - Страница 6

Jon Dever was tempted to pull a cigarette from the glove compartment of the U.S. Border Patrol Ford Bronco, but he was trying to quit. His partner, Daniel Hogan, saw Dever’s gaze fall on the glove compartment door and smirked.

“Don’t start, Dan,” Dever muttered.

Hogan’s smirk continued to grow. “You should try some nicotine gum, Jon.”

“I did. Ate a whole pack at once and nearly puked my guts out,” Dever grumbled. “Besides, if I light up, they’ll smell the smoke a country mile away, even if they can’t make it out through the windshield.”

Hogan nodded sagely. That had been the younger man’s intent, to push his older partner into rationalizing against taking another cigarette. Dever was twelve years older than Hogan, who was in his early thirties, and had about seventy pounds on the younger man. Most of it was muscle, but enough was the result of the thickening of age.

Hogan put his night-vision glasses to his eyes again. “Got a visual.”

Dever picked up his glasses and looked. “Three trucks. They look military but—”

“Either the Mexican army’s making extra cash selling surplus to heroin smugglers, or they went in for steady employment by doing the transportation themselves,” Hogan surmised. “Either way, our orders are not to fire on anyone wearing a Mexican uniform.”

“This is bullshit,” Dever said. “My training officer would have had an aneurysm if he’d been told to let those bastards shoot at him without returning fire.”

“Hey. Washington doesn’t have a spine anymore. They’d rather beat their chests in a foreign country, but let the psychos next door do as they please,” Hogan snarled.

Dever took a long, deep breath, then got out a digital camcorder with a low-light optical filter on the lens. At least they could document any efforts by the neighboring nation’s military in breaking international law.

Dever’s brow furrowed.

“What’s wrong?” Hogan asked. He eyed the M-4 carbine locked in its clamp against the dashboard. It, and the Heckler & Koch .40-caliber pistol on his hip, would give any opponent a run for his money, if only his trigger finger hadn’t been restrained by insipid rules of engagement. The official attitude was to not spark a border war, but apparently the men wearing army uniforms and carrying Mexican-issue rifles were under no such restriction.

Several Border Patrol agents had been injured in increasingly tense encounters across the past few years. It was only a matter of time before the bastards had collected the final breath of an American law-enforcement agent. Some had called for the end of the Border Patrol due to its failure to control or act against foreign invaders. Others had wanted the National Guard to step in. Still more took their own weapons and camped out at major thoroughfares for migrating illegal aliens, seeking to take the law into their own hands. The fact that the American Minutemen were looking only to turn back illegal aliens, and not gun down unarmed intruders who were coming merely to seek jobs had kept the situation from surging to a flash-point of violence.

It had come close a couple of times. Military forces and federal agents had dealt with a crisis for the then-new Mexican president as powerful smuggling alliances actually engaged in brutal assault on American lawmen. Only the actions of people who existed in whispered rumor had prevented a second Mexican-American war from ripping the continent apart.

Hogan sighed. He hoped that the men who didn’t exist would make their presence felt again to push back the encroaching and increasingly bold and deadly smugglers.

Dever looked at the feed on the screen. “Something is moving out in the desert behind the trucks, but I can’t quite make it out. It might be a person. It’s about the right mass, but it doesn’t…No, it disappeared.”

Hogan chuckled nervously. “Maybe you saw a Chupacabra.”

“Not too many goats for a goat-sucker to feed on out there, Dan,” Dever returned. “Nothing. I just see bupkis.”

Hogan nodded. “We’ll review the DVR later. Maybe image enhancement will—”

“Down!” Dever shouted, and Hogan’s head slammed against the driver’s window. The windshield cracked violently as something crashed into it. Plings and plunks of rifle fire sounded on the Bronco’s metallic skin. Dever had his double-action-only USP .40 out, but instead of rising above the dashboard, he stayed hunched over the younger agent.

“Damn bureaucrats are going to murder us,” Dever snarled.

“They will if we don’t shoot back,” Hogan said. He felt a knot rising on his battered skull, but he was in no more of a mood to rise and engage the enemy than Dever.

M-16s and the Heckler & Koch pistols were hot stuff against poorly trained “coyotes” armed with AK-47s. The human smugglers couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn at one hundred yards, while both the Border Patrol’s chosen pistol and rifle could score head shots at that same distance. Unfortunately, the enemy gunmen across the border were three hundred yards out. The short-barreled M-4s came up as inferior at that distance when compared to the older but vastly more powerful Heckler & Koch G3 battle rifles. The G3’s 7.62 mm NATO bullet could kill at over eight hundred yards. Only the armor plating and the heavy engine of the USBP Ford Bronco had managed to stop the high-powered slugs from drilling into the two agents.

The windshield finally gave up the ghost and disintegrated into diamondlike cubes of broken glass that rained down upon the pair.

“Damn!” Dever shouted.

Suddenly, from across the border, another weapon discharged. It was deep and powerful, thundering across the plains. The Mexican rifles stopped firing.

Dever poked the camera up over the dashboard, the LED screen rotated so that he could use it as an electronic periscope. G3 rifles crackled again from the trucks, but the tongues of muzzle-flashes licked out into the desert behind them.

Someone else had entered the fray.

MACK BOLAN HAD INTENDED to make his incursion against the alleged Mexican military forces covertly, but the lives of two American lawmen were on the line. The Executioner rapidly pulled the suppressor off his Barrett M-98 rifle and mounted the muzzle brake. He was going to need to make noise to redirect the murderous gunmen’s attention.

With his first pull of the trigger, the M-98 spit a .338 Lapua Magnum round into the head of one of the riflemen. The result was instant decapitation as the 300-grain slug detonated the Mexican’s skull with hydrostatic overpressure.

Sprayed with gore, stringy brain mass and bone fragments, the other gunmen in the truck were struck momentarily numb. Bolan’s first target slid over the rail of the truck, plopping to the desert sand below.

There was no doubt now that the enemy soldiers knew where the rifle shot came from. The Lapua Magnum round was designed to kill humans at over a mile and a half away, or punch through the engine of a lightly armored vehicle at closer range. That kind of power was accompanied by a throaty roar and a flash like lightning.

Just to make certain, the gunman right next to the first target caught a second Barrett round at the center of his clavicle. Windmilling backward as a fountain of blood vomited through the .338-inch hole in his upper chest, the Mexican was dumped next to the first target in the sand. G3s ripped to life, but the Executioner was in motion, leaving the area he’d fired from.

The semiautomatic Barrett punched out another slug as Bolan fired from the hip, catching a third smuggler through the center of his torso. The dying Mexican folded like a cheap shirt, collapsing as a grapefruit-size crater formed when the Magnum bullet excavated two vertibrae through the skin of his back.

Panic and screams had taken over the smuggling crew and one of the trucks fired up its engine. Bolan shouldered the Barrett and tapped off two .338 rounds which smashed through its grille. The engine seized up as the heavyweight slugs tore through gears and pistons. A commanding voice cut through the howls of fear.

“Track and fire! Split up! We’re too easy a target in the trucks!”

Bolan slung the mighty Barrett and drew his Beretta 93-R machine pistol from its spot under his left armpit. Suppressed, its muzzle-flash would disappear in the desert battleground. Now that he had their attention, he needed stealth and the protective curtain of nighttime shadows. The foregrip lever folded down, and he flipped the selector to 3-round burst. A snarl of silenced Parabellum rounds coughed from the end of the Beretta’s can, ripping into a man standing nearest to the leader shouting orders.

The leader of this group reacted not as a frightened smuggler but as a cold-blooded professional, pulling Bolan’s quiet kill in front of him as a human shield. Whether the Mexican had been dead or alive, his commander had deemed his own existence more important. Bolan popped off another triburst that forced the enemy headman behind the cover of his vehicle, 9 mm rounds eliciting jerks from his human shield.

A grenade sailed high and wide of the Executioner’s position, but he wasn’t going to stay upright. The minibomb detonated, shrapnel singing through the air in a sheet of razor wire over his fallen form. Bolan sighted on the legs of another rifleman and chewed his kneecaps off with another burst. The gunman howled in agony, collapsing facefirst in the sand. Strangled sobs of pain resounded from the fallen soldier.

“Aqui!” a Mexican rifleman shouted. Bolan rolled quickly out of the path of a salvo of bullets, triggering a trio of 9 mm slugs into the shooter’s chest.

Bolan took a momentary disadvantage and profited from it, grabbing the fallen rifleman’s G3 and a bandolier of ammunition off him. He dumped the magazine and slapped a 20-round box into the battle rifle. A Mexican rushed toward Bolan, too close and too fast for the Executioner to shoot, but the heavy wooden stock was as lethal as any bullet. With a sickening crunch, the heavy rifle butt caved in the gunner’s jaw on its way to splitting his palate and facial structure. Shards of jagged bone speared the unfortunate thug’s brain, dropping him instantly into a pile of dying human meat in the border sand.

A second man burst into view and Bolan brought the stock down hard into the side of the newcomer’s neck. The gunman’s neck released a wet, stomach-churning snap as it failed to absorb the lethal impact. Spine crushed, the Mexican collapsed at the Executioner’s feet.

Another truck engine turned over, and the Executioner whirled, burning off a half dozen slugs through the driver’s door. The wheelman jerked violently as bullets exploded through sheet metal and soft flesh. A river of blood poured from his lips as he slid out the door.

“Fall back! Fall back!” the enemy commander shouted. He jumped from the bed of the driverless vehicle toward the third truck. He laid down a sheet of covering fire to keep the Executioner at bay, but Bolan didn’t want to cut off the last vehicle.

Instead, he waited, letting the commander and the remnants of his group pack into the back of the remaining vehicle. A mad roostertail shot from under the wheels as the truck sought traction, driver in a panic and applying too much gas. Finally the treads bit into the sand and the vehicle lurched away from the death grounds.

Overloaded with men, it swayed as it made a wild turn back to its base, but the low center of gravity won out, keeping all the wheels on the ground. Bolan yanked the lifeless driver out of the cab. The Mexican riding shotgun with him was slumped, coughing up blood from lethal injuries. There was no way that Bolan could treat the horrific wounds inflicted by the powerful rifle. He unleathered the Desert Eagle and ended the gunman’s suffering with a 240-grain skull smasher. He pushed the corpse out of the cab and started the truck.

The Border Patrol agents, hundreds of yards away, had gotten out of their vehicle, watching in consternation. They’d just seen nearly a dozen men who’d tried to kill them left dead or wounded on the desert sand, their black-clad savior commandeering the Mexican truck to take up pursuit.

Bolan hated to leave the patrolmen in the lurch, their vehicle destroyed. He opened his satellite phone, linking up to Stony Man Farm.

“Bear, send a recovery team. We have two Border Patrol agents who’ll have a long walk unless they get a new ride,” the Executioner said. He slipped on a pair of night-vision goggles so that he could watch the road without resorting to headlights, which would betray to the escaping enemy that they were being hunted.

“We’re on it. Satellite imagery is following the remaining truck, if you should lose it,” Aaron Kurtzman responded.

“Not likely,” Bolan returned. “I put the fear of hell itself into them. The enemy driver is plowing up countryside as if there were no tomorrow.”

“ETA for the pickup on your agents is about five minutes. Satellite imagery shows that they’re unharmed. Both are moving around normally.”

“Great news,” Bolan said. “I hated to blow the element of surprise, but I couldn’t just stand by and let two lawmen be murdered.”

“Now we get to see where the rabbits hole up,” Kurtzman told him. “You were right, though, Striker. They couldn’t be easier to track if they had a neon sign on them.”

The Mexicans’ truck bounced and charged across the terrain several hundred yards away from Bolan’s vehicle. Finally, the two-and-a-half-ton truck swerved. It almost tipped again, two wheels rising a couple of feet into the air, but the driver recovered the vehicle’s balance.

“They’re on a road now, Striker,” Kurtzman informed him.

Bolan eased his “borrowed” ride onto the road with far more grace than his quarry. Though the road was paved, there were no lights along it, or even rails on either side, just soft, gravel-filled shoulders. The fewer lights, the better. He didn’t need his terrorized prey to realize that he was still with them. As it was, he let off the gas enough to increase the gap.

Judging by the speed and distance traveled, they’d already gone twenty miles past the Arizona-Mexico border. The G3 and the powerful Barret M-98 rested on the bloody seat, in case he was being drawn into a trap. It was hours from dawn. Hopefully, he’d arrive at his intended destination before sunrise so that he could make a covert insertion.

If not, Bolan would do the best he could, even in broad daylight, though he doubted that his quarry had much farther to go. Already, they had dropped from nearly eighty miles an hour to half that. Bolan matched their speed, and saw them turn onto another road. There was a sign at the intersection. The Executioner paused long enough to read that the road led to an Army base.

“What’s the status on this base?” Bolan asked, reading off the name to Kurtzman.

“It’s fully active, Striker. It’s mostly a supply and transport depot, and according to reports, it’s been on the bubble as far as closing. There isn’t enough money to keep it going, with rising gasoline prices and the Mexican government just barely out of the red,” Kurtzman explained.

“So they’re taking odd jobs to keep the gates open?” Bolan asked.

Kurtzman sighed. “Sounds like it. A little dilemma.”

“No dilemma at all,” Bolan replied. “They tried to kill American lawmen. I’ve fought enough top-secret U.S. groups funded by drug money who murdered anyone in their way and shut them down. Slaughtering people and selling addictive poison isn’t a valid option for any group to fund itself.”

“Not everyone on the base is in on the cocaine cowboy rodeo,” Kurtzman stated.

“I’ve got a face and a voice,” Bolan returned. “When I cut off the head, the rest will die. I’m closing this connection now, Bear. Places to go. Things to break. Catch you later.”

He turned off the sat phone and pulled the truck off the road as he saw the supply depot’s lights in the distance.

The rest of this trip was going to be on foot.

BLANCA ASADO PUSHED HER auburn hair off of her forehead, kneading the skin below her hairline as she looked at the photograph of her twin sister lying on the morgue table. She squeezed her brow until it felt as if her skull was going to crack under the pressure, her eyes burning with tears. A swirl of sickness spun in her guts and air in the room felt unbreathable, despite the open window and the fact that Armando Diceverde wasn’t smoking.

“Blanca…” Diceverde began. “Blanca, are you okay?”

“I don’t know,” Asado replied. Rosa’s eyes had been closed, but she could tell by the way they had been shut that the force of a .38 Super slug to the brain had nearly disgorged the orbs from their sockets.

Diceverde wasn’t a tall man, and he only came up to Blanca Asado’s shoulder. The fact that Blanca was looking at the remains of her sister and best friend only made him feel spiritually smaller. A choked sob escaped Asado’s lips and she shook her head.

“Rosa wasn’t into making money with drugs. We’ve both seen what that shit does to good people,” Asado explained.

“You’re preaching to the choir, Blanca,” Diceverde replied. “She’d been flagging things for me to look at. We’ve both noticed something new burrowing into Acapulco’s drug scene. Someone has been giving the Juarez Cartel a real knocking.”

“And this is why Rosa was killed? Brujillo and his wife have been working hard together to end the hold that the cartels have over Acapulco. Rosa told me that she was investigating all forms of threats detected against Madame Brujillo.”

“And on the surface, they seemed to be antigovernment attacks, but Rosa was curious about the sheer ferocity levied against the first lady,” Diceverde replied. “She sent me copies of her research into a new player on the drug scene, organized around a Santa Muerte cult.”

Blanca wrinkled her nose at the mention of the death cult, a popular subreligion that had sprung up in the underworld. Loosely based on Santería, Santa Muerte was a more ethically flexible religion, its morality open enough to allow drug dealers and murderers with faith issues to make amends for their wrongdoing with prayer and sacrifice, without hindering their more bloodthirsty and highly profitable activities. Suddenly the sins of dealing poison or mowing down another human being could be washed away with a moment’s contrition without renunciation of their previous crimes. Congregations sprung up in destitute slums and prison blocks across Mexico, and followers came from every walk of life, from the lowest gutter urchin to the most powerful drug baron.

“So if Rosa was picking up leads about Santa Muerte cultists taking over the state’s drug scene and trying to kill the governor and his wife…” Blanca began.

“The cultists have never made an attempt against Señora Brujillo,” Diceverde countered. “They have been hitting the Juarez Cartel and the smaller organizations hard, so much so that the Juarez group has been importing help from overseas.”

“So why would they accuse my sister of being part of this Santa Muerte cult and its takeover bid?” Asado asked. “Or of trying to murder the first lady?”

“We might never know,” Diceverde answered. “Maybe she saw something during the hit. There was a sighting of two men escaping the resort after the gunfight. An evidence technician I know also told me, off the record, that he was ordered to eliminate evidence of two 9 mm submachine guns from the battle scene.”

“Two 9 mm SMGs?” Asado asked. She did some mental arithmetic, looking at the reports of the fight. “The assassins were using Mexican-issue G3 rifles. The bodyguards had .45 and .38-caliber handguns and submachine guns. The first lady shot several assassins using a .38 owned by one of the protection detail…”

“And she shot your sister in the head,” Diceverde punctuated.

Asado took a deep breath. “After my sister might have been responsible for at least four dead assassins.”

“Too many shell casings to match with slugs,” Diceverde countered. “But you know Rosa and her baby Detonics .45s.”

“She was deadly with them,” Blanca replied. Her brow furrowed and her eyes began to sting. “Rosa wouldn’t have tried to shoot the first lady, even if she was responsible for a fake assassination attempt on herself. She wouldn’t have pulled a gun on her!”

“Everything that First Lady Brujillo is saying contradicts the hints that Rosa and I had been gathering,” Diceverde replied. His lips pulled into a tight line across his mouth. “Unfortunately, someone got to Rosa’s copies of the records when she died.”

“Someone on her protection detail who hadn’t been killed at the resort, most likely,” Asado said, her mind focusing on the problem.

“Not likely. The first lady liked to keep her personal staff close by. Anyone severed from her service usually ended up going somewhere far away,” Diceverde explained.

Asado frowned. “So that’s why the Feds want to talk to me.”

“If they’ve been fooled into thinking that Rosa was dirty, they might want to know how much she told you,” Diceverde added.

Asado took a deep breath. “I need to talk to someone about this. I know some people who know some people.”

“How many trust you enough to give you that kind of wiggle room?” Diceverde asked.

Asado’s shoulders fell.

The room was hot and cramped, bugs rattling against the rapidly disintegrating screen on the window. A small, naked bulb in a desk lamp glowed, throwing light on the reporter’s copies of Rosa Asado’s notes.

“The dent in the Juarez Cartel’s activity came when Governor Brujillo was elected,” Asado noted. “And it’s only become larger the more the governor cracked down on the cartel.”

“Circumstantial evidence. Nothing that would stand up in a court of law,” Diceverde admitted, regret weighing his words.

Bugs fluttered en masse from the screen, buzzing away into the night, drawing Asado’s attention. Something had frightened the tiny, sensitive creatures. Her hand slid under the loose tail of her blouse and she pulled out a hammerless .357 Magnum snub-nosed Ruger.

Diceverde’s eyes widened at the sight of the revolver. “What—”

Asado put a finger to her lips and shook her head. The journalist fell silent, hazel eyes going to the window. She pushed him to the wall and guided him to sit, protected by brick and masonry.

“I didn’t even see that,” Diceverde whispered.

“Well, if you had, then it wouldn’t be doing the job I wanted it to,” Asado replied. “Shush.”

A fist punched through the tattered windowscreen, an ugly, lime-shaped object locked in it. Asado clamped her hand over it, clenching it tight, and jammed the muzzle of the Ruger up into the wrist attached to it. Two thunderbolt blasts ripped through the confined room, the sheer power of the Magnum pistol enough to sever the appendage.

A howl of pain cut through the night and she hurled the disembodied hand back through the screen. A heartbeat later the brutal little round object exploded, rocking the walls and ceiling hard enough to rain dust in the room. Diceverde winced from the grenade blast, but realized that if the mysterious hand had let go of the bomb, the two of them would undoubtedly have been killed instantly.

Curses sounded outside and Asado swept the files off the table, stuffing them into Diceverde’s briefcase. “Come on, Armi.”

The journalist wasn’t waiting for a second invitation. He was up and on the woman’s heels in a flash. He paused long enough to retrieve a nickel-plated Colt 1911 from a drawer and thumbed the hammer back, short fingers wrapping easily around the slender autoloader’s grip. He jammed two spare magazines loaded with .38 Super rounds into his offside pocket.

Though it was against the law for civilians to own guns in Mexico, that didn’t stop people from breaking the law. As well, Diceverde had made enough enemies across his career as a reporter to know he needed a powerful and reliable handgun. They didn’t get much more powerful and reliable than the Colt in .38 Super.

Asado grabbed a handful of Diceverde’s shirt and shoved him through the door as an assault rifle poked through the window frame. She opened fire on the weapon in the portal, her pistol blazing like the sun. Bullets chopped just an inch over Diceverde’s head, letting him know just how close he had come to dying. His stocky legs propelled him through the doorway and the front door to the building opened, a black shadow appearing in front of him.

The journalist saw the unmistakable profile of an AK-47 in the man’s hands, and Diceverde triggered the Colt twice. The .38 Super roared in the darkness, creating bright strobes of light. The rifleman jerked, and Diceverde wasn’t sure if he had scored hits or not.

A muzzle-flash flared from the mouth of the AK, but it was stretched and elongated. Having been present for enough gunfights, the little reporter knew that the shots had been discharged into the ceiling. Diceverde triggered the Colt twice more, cracking out 125-grain hollow-point rounds at well over 1300 feet per second, aiming just behind the origin of the muzzle-flash. He was glad he’d spent the money on having night-sights installed on the shiny pistol. By following the vibrant neon-green dot hovering in the distance between the more indistinct yellow rear dots, he knew exactly where he was aiming.

A strangled cry filled the air and the rifle clattered to the floor.

Thunderbolts launched from behind Diceverde and he jerked his attention to another figure in the door, which was writhing as Magnum projectiles speared through his body, soft, exposed lead peeling apart on contact with fluid biomass and tunnelling horrendous cavities through the chest of another gunman.

Diceverde ran to the door and pressed his broad back to the wall to the side. He took the momentary break to drop his half-empty magazine and pocket it, feeding a new stick of nine shots into the Colt.

He heard the clicking of metal as somewhere in the shadows, Blanca Asado reloaded the partially spent AK-47.

“We’ll need the firepower,” Asado stated.

“Blanca…” Diceverde began.

The words he intended to say were ripped from his memory as the wall suddenly exploded behind him, concussive forces hurling him to the floor, his vision blurring.