LITMIR.BIZ

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Man crew kept the blacked-out windows on their SUV buttoned up tight against the smell.

      The road they rolled along was made of dirt and heavily rutted, dotted with puddles of dubious origins. Bored, apathetic faces stared out at the expensive vehicle from the safety of clapboard and aluminum-siding shacks.

      The poverty was appalling and left Carl Lyons uneasy. He was no stranger to Central and South American conditions. Able Team had made the lower half the Western Hemisphere a primary area of operations since the unit’s inception.

      Blancanales, already recovering, guided the big vehicle through narrow alleys while hungry dogs barked and chased them. Up ahead a line of railroad tracks divided the sprawling shantytown and massive warehouses began to line its length. Beyond these the silent mausoleum of factories built by American companies that had exported jobs to exploit cheap labor reared up like austere, prefabricated mountains.

      Blancanales cut the SUV onto a single-lane dirt road that paralleled the train track. The Dodge’s suspension rattled and hummed but inside the climate-controlled cab the ride was smooth and virtually silent. Up ahead a chipped and cracked asphalt lot opened up just past a broken gate in a dilapidated chain-link fence. A battered and rusted sign warning away trespassers in Spanish hung off to one side like a forgotten letter.

      The building across the old parking lot was abandoned, dotted with broken windows and gaping emptiness where doors had stood. A line of crows had taken roost across the top, and Blancanales slowed the vehicle as he pulled into the old parking lot.

      “How are we sitting for time?” he asked.

      Lyons looked at his watch. “We’re a good hour before the meet, according to the CIA stringer,” he said. “We couldn’t have got here any sooner with flight time anyway.”

      Blancanales guided the SUV around the side of the building. A pair of filthy alley cats hissed in surprise at the sudden appearance of the monstrous vehicle and scrambled for the safety of some overflowing garbage bins. Lyons eyed the building with a wary gaze as Blancanales drove around it. He reached under the seat and pulled an M-4 clear.

      “Politics give me a rash,” Lyons muttered. He snapped the bolt back on the compact carbine and seated a 5.56 mm round.

      “I just wish we had more time to check out this set up,” Schwarz said from the backseat. He pulled an identical M-4 from a briefcase on the seat next to him and chambered a round. “We don’t know this guy from Adam.”

      Blancanales reached over and pulled his own prepped and ready M-4 from the inside compartment of his door. Each man on the team wore a windbreaker over a backup shoulder holster. They had no intention of hiding their firepower when they went into the meet.

      As the team stepped out of the vehicle there was a thunderous roaring as a freight train began its approach of the rail yard off to the side of the building. Lyons looked around. This was the location of the meet with the man who was supposed to take them to where their target was hiding.

      “This strike you as overly isolated for a simple meet-and-greet?” Schwarz asked.

      “Why, whatever do you mean, Grandma?” Lyons asked.

      The freight train began to slow even further. The engineer popped its brakes with a deafening hissing noise accompanied by the screaming of steel on steel as wheels locked up on rails. Blancanales eyeballed the upper reaches of the building as they approached. The windows looked back at him, silent and dark.

      Closer to the ground the building was taken up by a concrete loading dock and roll-up bay doors for almost two-thirds of its length. The other section was broken by a single metal door set at the top of a short flight of concrete steps. Spiky lines of graffiti covered the wall and doors. Displaced air from the sliding train pushed scraps of paper across the broken asphalt like stringless kites.

      Juárez was one of the most polluted cities on the face of the earth and here, in its underbelly, the stench was sharp and chemical, coating the tongues of the three men as they approached the building.

      The train pulled up next to the yard, arriving in a deafening din as boxcar after boxcar slowly rumbled by. Though they stood right next to each other the men couldn’t have heard one another speak. Lyons frowned and made a gesture with his hand.

      The other two immediately spread out, forming into a loose triangle as they finished their approach to the front of the building. Schwarz looked to one side and saw a line of gouts suddenly erupt in the earth. He reached over and shoved Lyons to one side, then flung himself in the other direction. The line of bullets stitched its way up the middle of them while off to the side Blancanales had lifted his carbine and began spraying it at the top line of windows on the building.

      The compact M-4 carbine was designed for close-in range and ease of concealment, but the 5.56 mm rounds were more than powerful enough to cross the space between the ambush sniper and the men caught in the path of his murderous fire.

      Blancanales’s burst peppered the building.

      Lyons rolled with the hard shove his teammate had given him and somersaulted over one shoulder. He came up and quickly scanned the building for the attackers. He saw nothing other than the single sniper trading shots with Blancanales and quickly crossed his stream of 5.56 mm rounds with those of the ex-Green Beret.

      Bullets rebounded off the wall and shattered what slivers of glass still remained in their frames. He saw brilliant bursts of muzzle-flash and tried to bring his own fire to bear accurately as he continued racing toward the building. The freight train had formed a blanket of painful white nose on the entire area, and Lyons felt acutely strange, able to register the feel of his recoil and the heat of escaping gases but still almost entirely unable to hear the report of his own weapon in his hands.

      Off to one side Schwarz bounced up off the parking lot and raced for the single pedestrian door set to one side of the building. Behind him Blancanales continued spraying successive bursts into the area of the sniper in an attempt to suppress his gunfire. The freight train continued to roll on past their position in an endless line of flatbed trailers and boxcars.

      Snarling with the effort, Schwarz raced toward the building, his M-4 carbine up and at the ready. Closing with the short staircase, he let go of the carbine with his left hand and leaped up like a sprinter running hurdles. He caught hold of a metal safety rail running the length of the stair and vaulted over to the top of the steps.

      He tucked his elbow in tight against his ribs and drew the M-4 in close to his body. With his free hand he grabbed the doorknob and twisted, jerking the heavy door open on protesting hinges. The sound of the train rolled into the building and echoed off it so that the racket was actually worse the closer the Stony Man crew got to the massive warehouse structure.

      As the door swung open in his hands, he darted inside. Immediately, Schwarz found himself in a cavernous space some three stories high. He scanned the gloomy interior and let the door swing closed behind him. He had expected the structure to contain floors but he quickly shifted his tactics to compensate for the open space.

      He pivoted and dropped into a crouch facing an erector-set formation of ladders and scaffolding set against one wall. Through a forest of metal bars and steel mesh he caught an impression of movement. He triggered a burst and heard the sniper do the same. Lead slugs ricocheted wildly inside the building and muzzles-blasts flared, casting crazy shadows.

      Realizing he had to cut an angle on the sniper, Schwarz dived forward across oil-stained concrete and came up before triggering a second burst with his M-4. He saw a black-clad figure lean over a railing with a scope-mounted M-16, its black buttstock jammed tight into his shoulder.

      The man fired down at Schwarz, and the Able Team electronics whiz threw himself toward the uncertain cover of a line of fifty-five-gallon barrels. One of the rolling bay doors directly beneath the sniper suddenly slid open to a height of about three feet and Schwarz had a brief glimpse of Rosario Blancanales lying flat on his stomach, M-4 held out in front of him.

      Realizing Lyons was about to enter the abandoned factory, Schwarz raked the scaffolding with automatic fire, still desperately

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