Читать книгу Mind Bomb - Don Pendleton - Страница 7
ОглавлениеThe Safe House
Carl Lyons lifted his head from cleaning his shotgun and sniffed the air. Schwarz’s hand went to his pistol. “What?”
“I smell coffee and doughnuts.”
Schwarz rolled his eyes at the former cop. “You smell them in your sleep.” Nonetheless, Schwarz rose and took up his pistol. Lyons clicked a fresh drum into his shotgun as Schwarz hit the buzzer and the door clicked.
Blancanales walked into the little patio and set a cardboard tray of café con leches and churros on the wrought-iron table between the guns. “You know? I’m a confirmed Starbucks man, but I am really liking the Cielito Querido coffee.”
Lyons inhaled several ounces of espresso and scalded milk without swallowing and grabbed a banana-size, sugar-rolled pastry. “Tell me you got us a new car.”
Blancanales gave Lyons a look of mock hurt. “Of course.”
“What kind?”
“Another thirty-five-year-old station wagon.”
“No damn—”
Blancanales gestured like a professional hand model at the door he’d left open. Lyons leaned out to stare at the big, boxy, ancient beast parked outside. The original ox-blood paint job had faded to a dull brown. The fake wood paneling on the doors now looked like very well-weathered bamboo where it wasn’t peeling.
Schwarz’s brows bunched. “Ford Granada?”
“Indeed, a GL, with a rebuilt 302 V8. She runs like a top. Someone had the good taste to remove the electric rev limiter—over 300 horsepower under the hood. She handles like a tank. But, should we step on the gas—” Blancanales tossed Lyons the keys “—the girl will go.”
Lyons caught the key ring. “I take back all those things I said about you.”
“I should hope so. What do we have on our prisoner?”
Schwarz had been chatting to the Farm on his laptop. “We have one Señor Oribe ‘BolaBolo’ Uribe.”
Blancanales shook his head at what was to come. “Bowling ball?”
“Yeah, it’s some kind of Mexican slang contraction of bola de bolos. You’d know better than me. Depending on whether you are a man or a woman, sometimes regardless, Uribe takes a bowling pin and inserts it into a body cavity. Which orifice? That depends on what you’ve done and how angry he is with you.”
Blancanales set down his coffee. “Is it too late to say too much information?”
“Then, while you contemplate this intrusion he takes a ten-pound ball and starts pulverizing fingers and toes with an overhand no release. He’s famous for going from frame to frame to get answers. We have a video of him playing a ‘ten frame’ game on an informer. It ain’t pretty.”
Blancanales made a determined effort to go back to enjoying his coffee. “Don’t need to see it.”
“Yeah, you don’t want to.” Lyons jerked his head toward the safe house basement stairs. “He’s wearing a luchador mask in the video, but the idiot took off his shirt during the proceedings. His physique and tattoos are a lock.”
“A wrestling mask?” Blancanales scoffed.
Schwarz handed Blancanales a tablet. Blancanales scanned Uribe’s jacket and mug shots. “That does appear to be our boy.”
Able Team was of a mind.
“They went for a pin,” Schwarz observed.
Lyons nodded. “Didn’t shoot at us much.”
“And they brought along a cartel torturer and interrogator,” Pol concluded.
“So why would the cartels be involved in seemingly random suicide bombings, much less any after-the-fact gringo investigations?” Schwarz asked.
“Dunno.” Lyons looked to Blancanales. “Let’s ask him.”
“Good idea.” Blancanales smiled. “Give me the keys. Finish your coffee. I’ll be back in about an hour.”
Lyons tossed him the keys. “Where you going?”
“Shopping.”
* * *
URIBE SAT IN the cellar in his underwear, handcuffed to a pipe. Despite the massive blunt trauma on his arms and legs, his wrists were bruised and abraded from trying to pull the pipe free of the wall. Neither the cast-iron drainpipe nor Uribe was going anywhere. Uribe was built like a middleweight who had given up boxing and taken up hot-dog eating competitions. His shoulders, chest and arms were still muscled but he had a gut that looked as though he’d swallowed one of his bowling balls, and he was bowlegged. Religious tattoos that the Catholic church would frown upon intertwined with Juárez cartel symbols that crawled down his arms, chest and stomach. He had a face like an Aztec statue with a crew cut.
Lyons sat in a chair opposite, giving him the hard stare over a folding card table. To Uribe’s credit he hadn’t started blubbering and spilling.
Blancanales came down the steep steps with a duffel bag over his shoulder, followed by Schwarz. Able Team was fairly sure Uribe had not gotten any kind of look at Blancanales. Uribe proved it by looking Blancanales up and down and spitting on him. “¡Raza traidor!”
“Race traitor?” Blancanales smiled without an ounce of warmth. He was the lord of role camouflage and he affected a perfect Mexico City accent with both his Spanish and his English as a second language. “I am venganza de la raza, Bowler. I am the vengeance of our race, and for what you have perpetrated against La Raza?” Blancanales reached into his bag and set a bowling pin on the table. “You attacked these gringos. They learned who you are, BolaBolo. They have delivered you unto me.”
Uribe blinked.
“You are going to pay.” Blancanales set a large tube of personal lubricant next to the bowling pin.
Uribe paled with shock. “No...”
Blancanales reached into his duffel and pulled out a vintage leather bowling bag. He unzipped it to reveal a scratched and ancient eleven-pound bowling ball. Blancanales nodded at Schwarz. “Set up the camera. This goes out live.”
Uribe went white.
Blancanales lifted his chin at Lyons. “Take off his chonies.”
Uribe threw up the churro and pineapple Fanta he had been given. He screamed and gagged at the same time. “No! No! No!”
Lyons ripped off Uribe’s tighty-whiteys with a yank. Schwarz set up a small video camera on a desktop tripod as Blancanales squeezed clear lubricant over the top of the bowling pin like he was topping an ice cream sundae. “Turn him over. Head down, ass up.”
Uribe screamed and kicked. Lyons effortlessly grabbed his ankles and brutally spun him facedown. The killer keened like a rabbit being killed as the Able Team leader kicked him into position. Schwarz scoffed as Uribe was kneeled up into a scary uncle. “Someone’s been in lock-up before.”
“No!” Uribe moaned. “Anything!”
“Any what?” Lyons snarled. “Name anything you can do for me except bleed out from internal injuries!”
“Anything!” Uribe shrieked. “I’ll tell you anything!”
Blancanales stared down at Uribe, as cold as a medieval executioner. “This man is mine.”
The Bowler threw up again. His voice cracked into a ragged soprano range as he shrieked at Lyons. “Anything!”
Lyons kept his face neutral. Playing the “good cop” was an extremely rare experience and he intended to enjoy it. “Why?”
Uribe shuddered. “Why what?”
“Why are you here?”
The whites of Uribe’s eyes were like a deer’s in the headlights. “You brought me!”
“Why did I bring you here! Why am I talking to you! Talk to me or Señor Venganza has his way!”
“I’m just a sicario!”
Sicario was the Latin-American term for cartel muscle and killer. The term was as ancient as the Bible. “You’re a torturer, a disappearer and a learner of secrets.”
“We were paid! Anyone who came asking! About the bombers! To take them! Find out who they were. Who they worked for. Then make them disappear!”
“Who paid you?” Lyons demanded.
“I don’t know. The orders came from the top.”
Lyons believed him. “New Juárez Cartel?”
“Yes!”
“Who gives you orders?”
Uribe shuddered in shame. “El Guillotino.”
“Bowling Ball and the Guillotine...” Schwarz muttered. “Love these Juárez guys.” He picked up the bowling ball. “Give him the ten pin, flip him, spread him and let’s see if I can pick up the split.”
“No!”
Lyons stared implacably at the cowering, naked killer. “What’s El Guillotino’s name?”
“Eladio Manzo!”
“Tell me about the bombers.”
“The bombers!” Uribe wept in fear and confusion. “Fanáticos! Psychos!” The torturer started to rise. “Who knows—”
Lyons drew his Colt Python and cocked it. “Head down, ass up!”
Uribe whimpered and resumed the position.
“You’re saying the bombers weren’t working for the cartels?”
Uribe actually looked shocked.
Lyons considered the quivering waste of skin in front of him. He tended to believe him. Lyons had been on both ends of some very rough interrogations, but he was not a torturer. He suddenly dropped to his heels beside Uribe. BolaBolo shrieked like he no longer had a pair. Lyons deemed his subject ready. “You wanna live?”
“¡Por favor!”
Lyons reholstered his six-gun. He dragged a folding chair over, took a seat and put his shoes up on Uribe’s ass as if it was a footstool. The Able Team leader drew the battered leather notebook from his days as an LAPD detective and clicked open an equally ancient Fisher Space Pen. “Tell me about Manzo...”
Dragonslayer
JACK GRIMALDI GRINNED from the pilot seat. “Guy’s really got his own working guillotine!” Stony Man Farm’s premier helicopter delivery system of man and ordnance was currently configured in civilian white flight camouflage. The ace pilot noted El Guillotino’s close-to-Kennedy-worthy compound.
“You want to do it right?” Blancanales lowered his binoculars. “Hire a Mexican.”
Lyons scowled beneath his optics. The head-chopping Manzo asshole had literally built a guillotine to the original French Revolution specifications. Even with a walled compound Lyons was pretty sure having a French Empire execution machine, gleaming in the sun, twelve feet tall, just off the tennis court, was illegal as hell in Mexico. Mexican bylaw enforcement seemed to be falling down on the job. They had probably fallen over piles of money. “Gadgets?”
Still wearing his telephone lineman’s rig, Schwarz stared at the dial and switch icons on his laptop. “His security is good.”
“Gadgets good?”
“No.” Schwarz snorted. “He’s got way too much stuff attached to his phone lines.” The Guillotine’s computers weren’t Farm good, either. Schwarz knew every nuance of El Guillotino’s defenses. “He’s got a safe room off his bedroom, and the asshole literally has a private elevator off that to his underground garage. Better figure on a private arsenal to go with it. He can hole up for a siege, or he can rabbit. I can disable his sensors and alarms, and we can figure on fifteen minutes max before the federales respond to gunfire this far out in the boondocks.”
Lyons took up the satchel charge at his feet. “Is he still home?”
Schwarz nodded. “He’s still home. He was looking at internet porn five minutes ago on his tablet and no vehicles have left the compound. The heat and the homicide bombings have everyone staying inside.”
Blancanales took out a P90 personal defensive weapon. It vaguely looked like Captain Nemo’s submarine Nautilus in matte black with black plastic furniture. He spun a suppressor onto the threaded barrel. “Want to just do it now?”
Schwarz absently drew a similar weapon and suppressed it while he kept his eyes on his tech. His hand moved to hover over the return key. “You want his shit turned off?”
“Is he in his bedroom?”
“Can’t tell. We’d have to look in the window, and—”
Grimaldi suddenly dropped Dragonslayer. “Let’s check!”
The helicopter pulled up a dozen meters from Manzo’s panoramic bedroom. The space consisted of a king-size bed and an IMAX-size entertainment center.
Grimaldi shrugged. “I don’t see anybody.”
Lyons eyed the garage-size closet doors. “Take me right over the closet.”
A handful of people stepped out and squinted up into Dragonslayer’s rotor wash. Several of them openly held handguns. Grimaldi nosed over the roof and the cabin door opened on hydraulics. Lyons pulled the rip cord on the satchel charge. The sound of the rotors drowned out the fuse but Lyons had his own internal clock. He heaved the canvas-packed charge.
Grimaldi dipped Dragonslayer’s nose and gave his girl the spurs. The chopper streaked away from the blast radius as the high-explosive charge dropped through the bedroom roof in a blast of smoke. Lyons checked the loads in his shotgun and checked his coil of fast rope. “Right back! Everyone! Mask up!”
Dragonslayer whined and thundered as Grimaldi banked around. Able Team pulled on their gas masks as Grimaldi pulled to another stomach-dropping halt that raised the chopper’s nose. They threw their fast ropes down into the smoking ceiling cave-in and Lyons shouted over the rotor sound. “Go! Go! Go!”
His teammates exited and Lyons followed. The friction of the fast rope heated up under his hands for a few heartbeats, then his boots hit rubble. The Able Team leader fired a 5-round burst of tear-gas rounds through the open bedroom door into the cavernous interior. Twelve-gauge CS shells didn’t pack much irritant per capita, but Lyons had a lot of them. Both Blancanales and Schwarz tossed flash-bangs.
It was Lyons’s favorite sort of home invasion. The Guillotine had rings of defenses around the perimeter, but Able Team had dropped in from the center. Manzo’s mansion was all open floor plans with glass walls. There was almost nowhere to hide. It was the perfect house to kick ass and take names.
Lyons marched forward, his teammates flanking him. Below people shouted, screamed, coughed and wept in Spanish. Lyons did a quick peek around the doorjamb and emptied nineteen more CS rounds into the IMAX-theater-like interior. Bullets ripped up in response but the enemy was firing blind and had no line of sight on the bedroom landing.
“Gadgets?” Lyons asked.
Schwarz dropped to the floor and reached into his bag of tricks. He pulled out a highly modified GoPro camera with a two-foot-long flexible fiber-optic lens extension. He worked the two tiny joysticks on the control plate of his own devising and the lens bobbed like a snake over the balcony to scan through the gas beneath. “Got hostiles behind the kitchen island.”
“Pol, stun and sting,” Lyons ordered.
Blancanales leaned out of the door frame and fired a stun grenade into the kitchen area. It was a 40 mm and the house thundered like an echo chamber. Blancanales followed it with a 40 mm sting ball grenade. The munition slammed into the oiled bronze of the restaurant-size refrigerator and 150 hard rubber spheres ricocheted off everything including screaming human flesh. “Get some, I’ll cover.”
Lyons and Schwarz rapidly moved down the stairs, tracking through the gas for targets. The former LAPD cop thumbed his throat mike and spoke into the PA system built into his custom-designed gas mask. The voice scrambler made him sound disturbingly like Darth Vader. “Paging Mr. Manzo. Paging Mr. Manzo...”
Lyons smiled beneath his mask as a ragged, choking voice screamed, “Screw you!” from behind the kitchen island
A Glock flopped over the cultured marble and popped off a couple rounds blindly and ten meters off target. Lyons snapped his shotgun up, took an extra second to aim and gently touched off a round. The CS gas projectile smashed into Guillotino’s gun hand and sent the Glock spinning away. Manzo screamed and flopped backward as the shell imbedded in his hand fountained gas between his fingers.
Lyons rounded on the kitchen aisle with Schwarz on his six. Team Guillotine was in a bad way. Sting-and-stun had beaten them down and the level of CS gas was going toxic. Lyons snapped in a 12-round magazine of buckshot and shot out the kitchen windows. He put two bursts into the two-story panoramic window looking down on the hillside and glass fell in giant, jagged sheets. Gas billowed out into the burning afternoon heat.
Manzo lay on the tile, gagging and mewling. Lyons’s round had literally punched through the back of his hand and oozed wisps of irritant from the front.
Schwarz photographed weeping and beaten men for the Farm’s database. He chuckled under his mask at the stigmata Manzo bore. “That’s a first even for you,” he said to his teammate.
Lyons shrugged beneath his mask and armor but he was secretly very pleased with himself. He took a knee, flipped and zip-tied Manzo. “Guillotine secure. We’re out of here, Pol.”
Blancanales swiftly descended the stairs. “On your nine, Ironman. We got a live one.”
Lyons turned. A man did a push-up and rose from the tiles. He was bloodied, beaten and choking. His hair was close cropped in a fade and beneath his pink tank top and Team Cruz Azul track pants he had a physique that could genuinely have taken him into the final round of a Mr. Mexico bodybuilding competition in the heavyweight division if it wasn’t for all his gang tattoos. He squinted through streaming eyes and took in Lyons kneeling over Manzo.
Lyons thumbed his PA. “Don’t do it.”
The muscleman walked toward the coffee table and the AK-47 lying on it.
“This one has spirit,” Lyons acknowledged. He put three tear-gas rounds into the muscleman’s bank-vault pecs. The cartel enforcer staggered backward with his Herculean chest a ruined mosaic of blunt trauma and impacted CS particles. He straightened and continued again for the rifle on the table.
Lyons frowned under his mask. “Gadgets?”
Schwarz raised his weapon and fired the M-26 modular accessory shotgun slaved beneath his submachine gun. His was loaded with a gas round rather than a gas projectile. CS gas erupted out of his shotgun like a high-velocity fire extinguisher and occluded the muscleman’s head. Musclehead staggered out of the cloud blindly, groping for the assault rifle.
“This one’s a freak!” Schwarz snarled.
Blancanales sighed across the com. “I hate the tweekers.”
“Genuine gift of emptiness.” Lyons kept a knee on Manzo’s chest but drew his Python. “Gadgets, light him up.”
Schwarz squeezed the trigger on his side-mounted CEW. The weapon chuffed and the twin probes sank into the smoldering hamburger meat Musclehead called a chest. Most conducted energy weapons hit and swiftly ebbed as their batteries drained. Schwarz’s weapon was a highly modified device of his own design. The lithium-ion batteries hit full charge and, rather than tapering, continued full charge until they suddenly cut. When Schwarz gave Mr. Most Muscular Mexico all twelve million volts, the cartel enforcer shuddered as if someone had put a quarter in him. He still took a step forward.
“Son of a bitch!”
Schwarz held the trigger down. The probes snapped, crackled and popped like God on High’s own million-volt Rice Krispies. The Latin Schwarzenegger finally fell twitching to the tiles. “Son of a bitch...”
“I like him,” Lyons decided. “Pack him up, but use the steel. Handcuffs and shackles.”
Jack Grimaldi’s voice came across the com. “I got chatter across the emergency channels. Smoke, explosions and the Old Faithful level of tear gas going into the sky has been noted. I’ve been hailed and asked who I am. Farm says federale helicopters are deploying. There is chatter from Santa Lucia Air Force Base. They are scrambling F-5 fighter jets.”
“Beat it, J.G.,” Lyons ordered.
“Gone!” The sound of Dragonslayer’s rotors faded into the distance.
Schwarz finished clapping Musclehead in irons. “And our extraction?”
Lyons went to a door off the kitchen and kicked it open. The garage door was opening and a man behind the wheel of a Jeep Cherokee screamed in terror. Lyons raised his weapon. The guy should have closed the driver’s-side window. The Able Team leader pumped five CS rounds through the open window into the Jeep’s interior, and the vehicle promptly swerved, ran over a dirt bike and crashed into the side of the garage.
Lyons gazed upon a gleaming black 2015 Cadillac Escalade. He grinned at the Peg-Board strung with keys beside the door. He snatched the one with the Cadillac symbol on it. “We’re taking the Caddie.”
