LITMIR.BIZ

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you think that?”

      “Because you’re trying to impress me, inflating the haggling price so that when you finish in a third of the time, I’m surprised,” Lyons answered, giving Schwarz a gentle pop on the shoulder.

      “Curses...foiled!” Schwarz answered. “We’re leaving Perez to snooze?”

      Lyons nodded. “Saddle up, Pol. We got people to do and things to see.”

      Blancanales held his tongue for the sake of the kids, at least until he bid them so long. Outside the safe room, the eldest member of Able Team was brought up to speed on the situation and layout of the ambushers.

      “One per van?” Blancanales asked. “We hit them simultaneously. Are we looking for prisoners?”

      “That would be a bonus, but considering that these creeps are looking to kidnap kids and murder more federal agents and local cops, I don’t see a lot of need to be gentle. Just leave enough for dental or fingerprint identification,” Lyons explained.

      The three men went to a locker room that had been set aside for them. They’d left their gear bags within and now quickly went to work changing.

      “What’s the plan, Ironman?” Schwarz asked. “I mean, beyond kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out?”

      “We don’t want them to see us coming until it’s too late,” Lyons returned. “I’ll be a hiker.”

      Lyons stripped out of his suit and pulled on a pair of cargo shorts. He laid and tucked his body armor, complete with trauma plates, over his bare, muscular torso, which he covered with a loose-fitting T-shirt. The cargo shorts were held up with a full two-inch belt. He clipped an inside-the-waistband holster and an outside pancake holster, for the snub-nosed and full-size Python Plus respectively, to that belt. The oversize T-shirt fell over the two weapons, disguising them against his waist.

      He reconfigured his war bag into a hiking pack, throwing the carry loops over his shoulders. There was a sheath into which he could reach, drawing a compact, folding-stock version of the Mossberg 930 SPX. Compact wasn’t really a true term for it. The scattergun still had a full 24-inch barrel and an under-barrel tube magazine that held eight 3-inch Magnum shells or nine standard 12-gauge rounds. With the folded stock, however, it disappeared inside the backpack. Pulled out, the stock would snap instantly into place, braced against Lyons’s shoulder to control recoil and direct the fistfuls of pellets with deadly precision.

      With an extra in the chamber, Lyons was happy with having ten hefty blasts of 00 Buck from regular 12-gauge shells. He also had sixteen rounds of .357 Magnum ready to go with just a quick draw. The semiautomatic Mossberg didn’t need to be pumped to lay out its payload of rage against a group of targets.

      Schwarz shrugged into a windbreaker and sunglasses, but only after he put on a shoulder harness for a Brügger & Thomet MP-9 submachine gun. This, too, had a folding stock and condensed itself to the length of a standard handgun, yet had a shoulder stock and a vertical handgrip for the same kind of precision Lyons got out of his shotgun. With a 15-round flush-fitting magazine to start off the festivities and spare 30-round sticks, Schwarz wasn’t undergunned, either. Especially when it spat out 9 mm rounds at 900 in a minute.

      “I’ll just be another Fed going out in an unmarked car,” Schwarz announced. “What about you, Pol?”

      “Hate to say it, but I don’t think these guys are going to pay much attention to a Hispanic in coveralls with a tool chest,” Blancanales responded as he changed into his gear. “The toolbox is going to be a nice little knock-knock joke.”

      With that, the Politician set a stand-alone M203 grenade launcher in the toolbox. He also had an MP-9 subgun, which tucked under his loose coveralls nicely. A name tag and a battered old ball cap rounded out to make him look like a maintenance man coming off duty or going to some other appointment.

      “How do I look?” Blancanales asked.

      “Like I should give you a tip so you can get your cousin to clean my pool,” Lyons grunted.

      “Be careful, man. Someone might think you’re trying to be ironic and politically correct,” Schwarz chided.

      “Perish the thought,” Lyons returned.

      “He’ll get a little more than an hour of nap if we don’t wake him.” Blancanales motioned toward the safe room where the deputy marshal and the children were being kept under guard.

      “Just as well. You saw how exhausted he was,” Lyons said. “We’re fresh, and we’re ready to give some payback.”

      With that the Able Team trio split up to take their separate exits.

      Phoenix Force had their opening shots in this war, but it was time for the Able Team warriors to make their entrance.

       CHAPTER SIX

      Under Nogales, Arizona, specifically under the icehouse utilized by the Caballeros de Durango Cartel, the five members of Phoenix Force were busy at various tasks.

      Gary Manning checked out the systems of the smuggling tunnel, impressed with both the tunnel’s professional construction and with the powered cart-and-track combination that ferried goods across in bulk. Each cart could convey up to 250 kilograms on a pallet, and there were two sets of tracks, each with trains composed of four such cars. Both were on the Arizona side, docked in, as the train meant to travel down to Mexican Nogales was partially loaded. There were crates for rifles and other weaponry, as well as stacks of ammunition for those weapons in the process of being loaded. The attack by Phoenix Force had interrupted the shipment.

      The crates were being examined by McCarter and Encizo, each assessing the types of armaments destined for warfare to the south of the border. Judging by the small arms and ammunition amounts involved, some form of security force was being reequipped. Lack of rocket launchers or other antiarmor weaponry indicated this shipment wasn’t going to a guerrilla force somewhere in the vicinity of Central America or the northern part of South America, where FARC and similar antigovernment troops needed that kind of firepower to take on military forces. This gear looked like the stuff necessary to give a small paramilitary force the edge it needed to overwhelm and slaughter police officers in the streets of a major Mexican metropolis or to even the odds against a rival cartel.

      Encizo confirmed it with a shipment of knockoffs of their MP-7 submachine guns. A close examination and he could tell that these weapons were built in the People’s Republic of China, which also produced an unauthorized copy of the SIG Sauer P228. That knockoff ended up as the sidearm of many a clandestine operation for both sides of the Bamboo Curtain. Encizo looked carefully at the ammunition.

      “These look like just the right kind of hardware for an executive protection team,” the Cuban said.

      McCarter nodded. “Or some blokes who might want to go through a temporarily powered-down metal detector.”

      Encizo frowned. He’d heard plenty of stories of the audacity of Mexican cartels, but the Durango faction and their caballeros had earned their notoriety from walking through seemingly airtight security to make their kills. “Well, it’d be a shame to let them fall into the wrong hands.”

      “Don’t worry, we’ll keep a nice stash of spares handy,” McCarter said. “Gary can booby-trap the rest.”

      “No traps,” Manning countered. “Just need to make certain they’re unusable. Remember, the police are going to be here.”

      “Right, I forgot,” McCarter said. “The last thing we need to do is hurt the blokes who are on our side.”

      Calvin James and T. J. Hawkins returned from their reconnaissance sortie down the tunnel, both men moving swiftly.

      “We got within a hundred feet of the other end and heard activity ramp up,” James reported. “No cameras sighted us, but T.J. was watching a scanner and the airwaves

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