LITMIR.BIZ

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and immediately three men armed with Type 64 Chinese submachine guns emerged from shadows. The street soldiers were flat-faced with black eyes that glittered with sinister light.

      He countered their advance with a few simple words of identification and was allowed to pass unmolested into the inner sanctum of the triad gangster known only as Illustrious.

      Bao stepped across the threshold and the door to the room was slammed shut behind him. The room was ornately furnished and uncomfortably warm, darkened to the point of gloominess.

      Three brass braziers smoldered, providing a red-tinged light that served more to throw shadows than to illuminate. On a couch of red silk cushions, his face obscured by a demonic mask of black plaster, reclined Illustrious.

      To his left, immobile as a statue, stood a massive bodyguard. Bao had once witnessed the giant execute a disobedient underling with a single well-placed punch to the back of the neck.

      Bao stopped, brought his feet together and gave a respectful bow.

      “Thank you for granting me an audience,” the intelligence officer said.

      “How may Illustrious be of service?” the masked figure replied.

      The mask was more than a petty affect designed to create an aura of mystery. The Communist Party ran the People’s Republic as a totalitarian police state and did not suffer organized crime lightly. There were many in Chao Bao’s own agency who would gladly see such a powerful underworld figure dead.

      “It seems we have a situation,” Bao explained, “in Africa.”

      “Yes?”

      “I’m going to require the use of your Armenian connection.”

      Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

      THE JUÁREZ CARTEL had turned the city into a free fire war zone.

      In the year leading up to August of 2009 the border city had the highest murder rate in the world. Chaos was rampant in the streets, and the police department was utterly ineffective, or completely corrupted, in the face of drug money and paramilitary criminal violence.

      Bodies littered the streets. People were executed, abducted and assaulted on an hourly basis. Sexual predators and serial killers so afflicted the city’s female population that Amnesty International had become involved with international relief efforts to save the women.

      Federal police and Mexican army troops deployed in huge numbers to the area in an attempt to restore order. The drug cartels responded by fighting an insurgency campaign with weapons every bit as powerful as those wielded by the military.

      The U.S. sent money and resources to help combat the problem, but the warfare spilled across the border, causing a dramatic increase in kidnappings and gang violence in El Paso and as far west as Arizona.

      The drugs still flowed north. In return, money flowed south. Many analysts claimed American firearms flowed south, as well. While this might have been true to a degree, the cartels combated each other, as well as the police and Mexican army, with military-grade hardware unobtainable by the citizens of the United States.

      The wealth to be accrued was so great that corruption was systemic. It filtered its way up from street cops to judges to army generals and national politicians.

      Like a disease passing so quickly it was pandemic, the stain of drug money spread into the heart of the Mexican government’s establishment.

      This included the officers and agents of the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional, or National Security and Investigation Center, CISEN.

      Forty-eight hours earlier a high-placed official in CISEN sold out the location of an undercover team of agents from the American Drug Enforcement Administration to members of the hyperviolent and brutally sadistic Juárez Cartel.

      The bodies of the American law-enforcement officers turned up in a ditch near the border.

      Their heads turned up hanging from light poles throughout the city.

      Now the CISEN agent responsible for the betrayal was meeting with his cartel contacts to receive his payment.

      Thanks to the digital intercept capabilities of the National Security Agency, Stony Man’s Able Team would also be attending the meet. Except the elite counterterrorist team would be gate-crashing.

      THE ABANDONED FACTORY of the now defunct company Servicious Plasticos Ensambles stood alone in a massive dirt lot cluttered with garbage and rubble. Once the factory sweatshop had closed down, the city cut the power to that section of the grid.

      Now the structural skeleton of the factory, along with the shantytown neighborhood surrounding it, lay covered in an utter darkness broken only by the occasional lantern in some black eye of a window. The lights of the better sections of Juárez glittered in the background.

      Somewhere several blocks over, a woman began screaming in long, looping shrieks. A man’s voice broke in, shouting angrily.

      Seconds later a staccato burst of automatic weapons fire broke out.

      Then there was an abrupt silence broken a heartbeat later by the screech of tires.

      Able Team emerged out of the darkness.

      They moved fast, with a purpose and a lethal confidence hard earned. Like one of the U.S. Army’s small kill teams hunting the lonely stretches of highway outside of Baghdad, they emerged from the desert and disappeared again into shadow.

      Night-vision goggles, DARPA-supplied next-generation AN/PVS-9 models, turned them into cyclopean silhouettes. Sound-suppressed M-4 carbines hung under jackets, silencer-equipped barrels pointed downward. Muscular torsos were sheathed in Kevlar-weave protective vests boasting ceramic inserts.

      They wore backup silenced 9 mm pistols in shoulder rigs, and unmuffled .45-caliber Detonic Combat Master handguns were nestled in holdout holsters at the small of their backs. Fighting knives of surgical-grade steel were clipped to calves or forearms as weapons of last resort.

      The stench of industrial pollution was a constant background miasma. Halfway across the dirt lot the smell was cut suddenly by the sharp putridness of rotting meat.

      Alarmed, Carl Lyons, ex-LAPD homicide detective and Able Team leader, turned his head in the direction of the stink and saw a dead dog lying in a shallow depression. The NVG’s amplification of ambient light was so good he could see the squirming white mass of maggots covering the corpse.

      Hermann Schwarz, former Army reconnaissance specialist and electronics genius, turned his head and spit the taste out of his mouth.

      “This place has really gone to the dogs,” he muttered in a low voice.

      Rosario Blancanales, former Special Forces soldier, opened his mouth to reply and suddenly froze. The unmistakable sound of a rattlesnake buzzed out of the bushes near his foot.

      Lyons spun instantly, cursing softly. His head swiveled as he scanned with the NVGs, looking for the snake. Both he and Schwarz drew their Beretta 92-F pistols with 4-inch silencers screwed into the specially threaded barrels.

      “Where is it?” Schwarz snapped.

      “There.” Blancanales pointed to the ground at his feet.

      Both of his teammates lifted their pistols but were too slow.

      The Western Diamondback rattlesnake uncoiled like a trap going off, striking even as Blancanales tried dancing backward. It stretched out four feet and its blunt head rammed into the Puerto Rican’s leg with the force of a baseball bat.

      “Jesus!” Blancanales grunted and staggered.

      He felt the hot needle of a fang slide into his calf, and instantly agonized jolts of pain raced up and cut his breath off.

      Schwarz and Lyons, using their NVGs, fired.

      The snake blew into three separate chunks like a severed noodle. The squat, ugly head of the Diamondback hung for a moment from the top of Blancanales’s

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