LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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