LITMIR.BIZ

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whizzing around them, kicking up puffs of soil.

      When he peeked around the cargo box, two of the remaining four bangers were in full retreat, joining up with the cowboys who had taken cover beside the first truck and the front of the cargo container meth lab.

      A couple of the cowboys were facedown in the dirt.

      Blancanales was nowhere in sight.

      A ranchero jumped out of the meth-lab doorway, landed flat-footed and tried to drill him with a hip-leveled Kalashnikov. Lyons’s reaction time was faster. The Russian rounds went skyward as the shooter abruptly sat down, driven to his backside by a string of 9 mm rounds to the gut. Lyons ducked back as answering fire ripped along the line of trucks. In so doing, he nearly stepped on the face of one of the downed bangers. Brown eyes stared up at him, not angry, not surprised. Not anything, ever again.

      With incoming fire hammering the right side of truck 3’s cargo box and ricocheting off the dirt, he dumped the spent mags and reloaded the machine pistols. It took him less than eight seconds to put live rounds under both firing pins. Turning left, away from the meth lab, he burst out from behind the rear bumper and took off along the outside of the line of vehicles to seal off any enemy foot retreat across the fields and allow Schwarz to mark his position.

      Before he got halfway along truck 3 the Light Fifty roared again. Twenty feet ahead of him the cab shuddered as an M-2 round slammed its engine compartment, popping off a spawl of paint the size of a dinner plate. An instant later, the V-8 inside exploded with a muffled roar, freed pistons punching through cylinders and valve covers, windshield popping out of its frame, cab doors flying open, front wheel covers suddenly airborne.

      Another killshot.

      When he reached truck 3’s front bumper, a pair of bangers inside the cargo box of truck 2 popped up from behind tall canisters of anhydrous ammonia, autopistols blazing. Slaves lay on the floor of the cargo box all around them, hands protecting the backs of their heads, faces pressed into the deck.

      Lyons sprayed one-handed, up-angled autofire across the bangers’ chests, whipsawing them off their feet. Their guns went flying and their bodies landed heavily on the backs of the prostrated slaves, who were too afraid to move.

      As he ran on, the Barrett cut loose again. Truck 2 shuddered as its engine tore itself apart. Six-foot-high flames shot up around the buckled hood.

      The volleys of gunfire from the meth lab suddenly trailed off. Over the scattered gunshots Lyons could hear shouting in Spanish. Trucks 4, 3 and 2 were burning, acrid gray smoke sweeping across the compound like ground fog.

      Even drug dealers could read the handwriting on the wall. No transportation, no escape.

      With a roar and spray of dirt, the black Lexus SUV sped around the front of the first truck, riding on two flat steel radials on the driver’s side. Lyons caught a glimpse of a candy-striped silk robe as the rear door swung shut.

      SCHWARZ RODE the Barrett’s stunning recoil wave, simultaneously working the bolt to chamber a fresh round. Downrange, beneath a 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

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