LITMIR.BIZ

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the table.

      DEA knew about the eastern Washington meth lab, but it was holding back its strike teams while it bargained for the Mexican government’s assistance in scooping up the cartel kingpins in Baja. The agency was looking for a really big score, and headlines to match. As usual, negotiations between international bureaucrats were going nowhere. While the desk jockeys made faces at one another over six-course lunches, the criminals continued to rake in drug-trade profits, and their spent, poisoned slaves ended up in the fields surrounding the Moses Lake site, in shallow, unmarked graves.

      Stony Man, and specifically its three-man subset, Able Team, had been ordered by the President to land a blow the dirtballs would understand. The kind of blow that conventional law enforcement wasn’t prepared to deliver.

      AFTER THE CONVOY of rental trucks rattled past, Herman “Gadgets” Schwarz rose from the floorboards in front of the Deere combine’s bench seat. He rolled up his ski mask, exposing his face, then decocked and reholstered his silenced Beretta 93-R.

      Schwarz shoved open the grimy slider window on the passenger side of the cab, which faced the meth factory compound. The early-morning air that rushed in felt heavy and damp; the sun was just peeking out, a seam of neon orange on the horizon.

      He shared the combine’s wide bench seat with a .50-caliber Barrett Model 90 rifle. The bolt-action, bullpup-style weapon weighed twenty-five pounds; it was the little brother of the thirty-two-pound semiauto Barrett Model 82 A-1. Its forty-five-inch barrel was sixteen inches shorter than the 82 A-1, making it more portable. Unlike the semiauto Light Fifty, there was no backward barrel movement when it fired, which made for better accuracy. To compensate for the additional recoil, it was fitted with a dual-chamber muzzle brake that dampened the kick to 12-gauge levels. The gun’s telescope was from Geodesic Sights; in addition to standard optics, it was factory equipped with a laser range finder to verify target distance.

      There was already plenty of light to shoot by.

      From his knapsack on the floor, Schwarz took out a pair of Lightning 31 ear muffs and two extra 10-round magazines. He pulled on the ear protectors and set the mags close to hand on the seat. Like the clip already in the Barrett, one was loaded with black-tipped, armor-piercing M-2 boattails. The Model 90 was zeroed at 100 yards. At that range, a 709-grain M-2 slug would penetrate almost two inches of nonarmored steel. The other mag contained blue-tipped M-8s, armor-piercing incendiaries.

      Schwarz draped the metal sill with a folded bath towel, then pushed the Barrett’s muzzle, barrel and retracted bipod legs through the window, resting the short, ventilated forestock on the pad. He snugged the rifle butt into his shoulder and scanned downrange through the scope. From his elevated position in the cab, he controlled the entire killzone.

      His assignment was simple: close the barn door.

      NOBODY NOTICED when a gray-haired man in overalls suddenly popped up at the edge of the field. The guards were occupied with the slaves, and the slaves with the guards.

      The third member of Able Team wore a stained, holed-out T-shirt under his denim bibfronts, exposing the lean, corded muscle in his arms and shoulders. Rosario “the Politician” Blancanales didn’t bother to brush the wet soil from the front of his jeans, dirt he’d picked up crawling along the furrows and over the fresh graves. Only his intense black eyes were visible above a cheap polyester dust mask.

      Most of the slaves had the masks on, too, either over their faces or hanging down around their chins on the elastic straps. The masks were a psych job by the mafia slavemasters. They did nothing to protect the workers from toxic chemicals. Only biohazard suits with self-contained air supplies could do that.

      His head lowered like the others, Blancanales fell in at the rear of the line, moving in short, shuffling steps as if his ankles were bound, too. But they weren’t. The frayed cuffs of his jeans dragged on the ground, hiding that fact. He held his right hand tucked inside the bib. Out of sight against his chest, he held a suppressor-equipped Beretta 93-R, safety off, live round under the hammer.

      As Blancanales stepped past the meth lab, he stole a peek inside. There was no proper door, just a single, man-size hole hacked through the rusting corrugated steel. A piece of discolored sheet plastic had been pulled aside to let the caustic fumes escape. Propane lamps hung from a cable stretched the length of the narrow enclosure, illuminating a long sawhorse table cluttered with funnels, rubber tubing, and plastic and glass jugs. Propane burners flickered blue under blackened pots. Bedsheets stretched over metal garbage cans were being used to filter the meth. Empty starter fluid, drain cleaner containers and torn plastic and cardboard from battery and pill bottle packaging littered the floor. Outside the doorway stood knee-high piles of the same. The lab’s hazardous refuse had created a dead zone around the camp, clearly visible in the Feds’ aerial photos.

      The other workers kept their eyes on the ground, their expressions vacant, their faces rimed with dirt. Chemicals involuntarily absorbed through lungs and skin had cooked their nervous systems. The meth cowboys inched everyone forward, using their clubs now and then to speed up progress, or maybe just for the exercise.

      There was no morning head count. The cowboys couldn’t do anything about overnight escapees, if there were any. And the possibility of an extra worker showing up had probably never even crossed their minds.

      The little Mexican guy right in front of Blancanales was a herky-jerky skeleton; he could have been sixty years old or thirty. As the man staggered forward, he muttered to himself, repeating the same phrase over and over. “Lo siento mucho. Lo siento mucho. Lo siento mucho.”

      Blancanales didn’t ask him what he was so sorry for.

      The lights were on, but nobody was home.

      Ahead of him, in the middle of the slave pack, were three very pregnant teenage girls. Their long black hair was matted to their skulls, their short dresses stained and so threadbare they were see-through. From the dossier that Blancanales had read back at the Farm, he figured the don had put them all in the family way. For Xavier, child molestation was one of the job perks.

      When the big black Lexus rolled up, cowboys and slaves froze in their tracks. Xavier and his bodyguards exited the SUV and headed straight for the lead rental truck.

      The mobster passed so close to Blancanales that under the aroma of cigar he could smell the man’s hair tonic. Fruity sweet. Mango-pineapple.

      Beretta in hand, index finger resting on the wide combat trigger, Blancanales could have shot the under-boss in the back of the head as he walked by. That he held his fire was a matter of fair play, but it had nothing to do with the fact that the don was unarmed. Given the animal’s track record, Blancanales didn’t want death to come as a big, fat surprise.

      Flanked by his bodyguards, Xavier stepped up to the driver of the lead truck. As the bald banger leaned forward to accept the don’s patronizing hug and backslap, his unbuttoned gray plaid shirt gaped wide. Against a crisp white T-shirt, Blancanales saw the polished walnut butt of a chrome Magnum revolver hooked over the front of his trouser waistband.

      Embrace suffered, the driver handed the bulging gym bag to the don, who gingerly tested its weight on two fingers, then passed it over to one of his bodyguards without looking inside. Last stop for the money train. The driver turned and shouted at the other bangers, who immediately rolled up the trucks’ cargo doors and started pulling out the loading ramps.

      A few seconds later, a dozen very frightened people stumbled down the first truck’s ramp, their mouths duct-taped shut, their wrists bound behind their backs with plastic cable ties.

      Replacements for the dead and the dying.

      A couple of cowboys used their clubs to drive the new workers over to the SUV, and then made them kneel on the ground beside it. The women wept into the poisoned dirt; the men blinked wide-eyed. One look around, one whiff of synthetic cat urine and they knew they had arrived smack-dab in hell.

      The slaves at the front of the line shuffled by the newbies, up the ramps of the two nearest trucks. As Blancanales inched by those vehicles, the workers began to emerge. Using dollies, they off-loaded metal canisters of anhydrous

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