Mind Bomb

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 one with the Cadillac symbol on it. “We’re taking the Caddie.”

CHAPTER THREE

The Safe House

The Guillotine and “El Roble” sat bound to folding chairs. Enrico “the Oak” Olivar was a low-level thug in the scheme of things.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger had been the top bodybuilder in the world, his nickname was the “Austrian Oak.” Enrico had taken up the El Roble sobriquet in homage to his hero. He was small-time cartel-wise, and apparently not particularly bright. Everything the Farm could dig up on Olivar indicated he was kept around for intimidation purposes and low-level collection services. The charges against him, all of which had been dropped, were simple assault and battery.

Bowling Ball was still in his underwear and still handcuffed to the pipe. Guillotine glared bloody murder at him. Uribe stared at the floor between his feet unhappily and refused to make eye contact. All three criminals wore duct tape over their mouths. The Oak stared at Manzo, then at Lyons and then back again. He did this for long seconds as if he was doing Chinese algebra. The Oak flexed his mighty muscles against his shackles and started doing the math again. He’d been performing this cycle like a broken record since his blindfold had been removed. Lyons didn’t care for it all. Back at the Guillotine’s mansion Olivar had not displayed roid-rage aggression or pit-bull loyalty to his master. He’d kept going for his gun like an automaton.

Schwarz had been forced to light him up twice in the car and to put a replacement power module in his CEW. Lyons had even dug out his own TEK-12 flashlight/stun gun and armed it.

He strode over to Manzo and ripped off his gag. Lyons jerked his head at Olivar. “Is he always like this?”

“Bastard!” Manzo screamed. He was screaming at Uribe. “Dead! You are dead!”

Bowling Ball cringed.

Lyons shook his head. “I asked you a question.”

“Screw you!” Manzo spat. “I’ll kill you all! Your wives! Your whore mothers! I’ll kill your—”

Lyons snapped off a drill-sergeant-worthy hand-cut motion. “Gas them. Gas them all. Close the cellar door and I’ll ask again in half an hour. And shoot him in his other hand.” Lyons spun on his heel. Schwarz gave Manzo a shit-eating grin as he took out a grenade and pulled the pin. Blancanales racked the action on his modular shotgun.

Manzo shrieked. “No! No! No! No! No more gas!”

Lyons shot a glance at the Oak. Olivar’s muscles twisted and flexed like pythons in his restraints. Manzo’s speaking seemed to have put Olivar into an even more extreme state of agitation. “Is he always like this?” Lyons reiterated.

“No?” Manzo spoke nervously. “And it is kind of freaking me out.”

Lyons addressed the Oak. “Dude, what is your malfunction?”

Blancanales mirrored in Spanish. “¿Cuál es su fun-cionamiento defectuoso, hombre?”

El Roble began shaking as though someone had put a quarter in him again. Lyons glared at Schwarz, who threw up his spare hand. “It’s been half an hour since I juiced him!”

Manzo leaned away from Olivar in alarm. “What did you freaks do to him?”

Lyons read Manzo like a book. This was not Oaken normal and the Guillotine was genuinely freaked out by what he saw. The Able Team leader decided to work with Manzo’s shaken state. “So what’s with you and suicide bombing? Is Mr. Most Muscular here one of your strap-on psychos?”

Manzo gaped. Not like a man caught with his pants down, but like a man who was nonplussed. Lyons might as well have asked him the circumference of a moose. “What?”

Lyons pressed Guillotino anyway to gauge his reactions. “The bombs, asshole. The shit going on in this town, that has it on lockdown. Why are you pulling security detail for terrorists?”

Manzo’s jaw dropped. “Why would I do that? No one needs that shit!”

Lyons loomed. Manzo cringed. Lyons thundered. “Why are you batting cleanup for terrorists?”

“¡Madre de Dios! The terrorists are you! You CIA pricks! We were told to capture or kill any of you yanqui assholes who came trying to clean up your mess! Messing with La Raza? Starting your fake terrorist shit war on the border? Furthering your norteamericano conquistador agenda?” Manzo managed some spine. “Screw you and your black ops shit!”

“I believe you.” Lyons smiled a winning smile. “Now who gave you these reconquista bullshit manifesto talking points?”

Enrico “the Oak” Olivar snapped his handcuffs and shot to his feet. He immediately tripped over the leg irons fastening him to the chair. He fell on Manzo and toppled him over. His jaw distended like a snake trying to eat prey bigger than its head.

Lyons snarled. “Not today, Sparky!” Lyons lunged and vised Olivar’s ear between his thumb and forefinger and yanked back. Olivar reared and snapped his head to the side. Lyons stood by his nickname and neither moved nor let go. The Oak’s ear tore off in Lyons’s hand.

Olivar snapped his head down and sank his teeth into Manzo’s neck. Manzo keened like an animal. Uribe screamed in captive horror. Schwarz and Blancanales charged. Lyons took his TEK-12 in an ice-pick grip, jammed the electrodes between Olivar’s shoulder blades and hit the red button. Lyons felt the jitters from their body contact and smelled ozone as volts with six zeros behind them were delivered. Lyons’s eyes flared as Olivar rose up like a cobra and seized Lyons’s throat with spastic strength. The Oak’s lips skinned back from bloody teeth. On a good day Olivar could bench-press five hundred pounds. Now that steroid-built gym-strength was wedded to insanity. Lyons was borne over against his will.

The Able Team leader shot one hand into Olivar’s throat and squeezed off his trachea. The Oak didn’t seem to care. He grabbed Lyons’s hair and pulled himself down toward Lyons’s face, baring his teeth and drooling like a rabid dog. Lyons pulled a sacrifice and let Olivar pull him in with both hands.

He shoved his stun gun between Olivar’s teeth and hit the button.

Any electrician would tell you that electricity was a wily and uncertain thing. In Lyons’s own experience some people, dependent on drugs or willpower, could shrug off a stun gun’s effects. The TEK-12 didn’t have to meet the resistance of clothing or human skin. Olivar’s mouth was an optimal cavern of wet conductive-pathway mucous membranes. Tongue and gums burned. Mucous membranes led down his throat to his stomach and bowels, branched out into his lungs and spread up through the sinus cavities into the optic nerves and brain.

Enrico “the Oak” Olivar lit up internally like the Fourth of July.

Lyons shuddered as he took the secondary conduction but he held the button down. Olivar collapsed like 220 pounds of dressed beef, and Lyons let go of the shock switch. Olivar threw up all over Lyons’s chest. “Son of a bitch...”

Blancanales packed a field dressing against Manzo’s ripped right carotid. “He needs a hospital.”

Lyons shoved his CEW into Roble’s emasculated ear hole in case he turned froggy again. El Roble softly shuddered and drooled bile and blood on Lyons’s collarbone. Lyons kept his thumb on the red button and stared at the cellar ceiling. “I need a vacation...”

Safe House, El Paso, United States of America

LYONS GLARED INTO the middle distance. They had gotten out of Mexico but the whole situation was FUBAR. Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, the Stony Man computer genius, shook his head in the window on Lyons’s laptop. “Things go bad. We’ve been here before.”

Lyons wished he had a churro and a café con leche. Old Mexico always managed to convert him to her ways for a few days after he’d visited. He horked down a Krispy Kreme maple-iced glazed and Starbucks Americano. “We’re going back in. We start from scratch.”

Kurtzman didn’t like it. “Bowling Ball is useless. I say let him go and see where he runs.”

“I agree.”

“Guillotine had part of his voice box bitten out. It will be days before we can get him to tap out anything on a tablet. Assuming he doesn’t clam up and demand a lawyer.”

Lyons considered his muscle-bound opponent. “How’s the Oak?”

“The Oak is currently dying of internal electrical injuries, with his voice box burned out, by the way. We have no leads.”

Lyons went detective. “We go to back to square one. We do interviews.”

Kurtzman sighed. “I don’t see how that would help. The surviving bombing victims and witnesses have been interviewed by the Mexican authorities, the FBI and Interpol extensively.”

“No, I’m talking about the perpetrators’ families.”

The Stony Man cybernetics whiz tried to fathom where Lyons was going with this. “Carl, same deal. No one could find any terrorist ties in any of their backgrounds. The families and friends of the homicide bombers were horrified. They’re destroyed. No one doubts their stories.”

“I know. But Able showed up in Ciudad Juárez and suddenly everything went all Armageddon. I wonder if the same thing will happen if we go in again.”

Kurtzman hated every aspect of it. “You know you may be putting those families at risk.”

Lyons hated it as well, but he’d always been a let-the-truth-be-told-though-the-heavens-fall kind of guy. “At this point I can’t see them not being involved somehow, willingly or unwillingly,” Lyons kept his poker face as he threw out the bone and desperately hoped for a response. “You got anything better, Bear? I’ll go with it.”

“I got nothing more than you, and it sounds like you have more than me.”

Lyons resigned himself to his last, least-worst option. “Then I’m going with the Villa family.”

“Carl?” Kurtzman’s voice hardened. “They’ve suffered enough.”

“Which means they’re the most anomalous. You tell me what makes a nice Mexican girl go that way and I’ll believe you.”

Kurtzman looked away. “I got nothing.”

“Give me and Able a decent cover. Pol takes lead. I want Gadgets on our six in the background. Me and Pol? Our cover won’t have to last more than forty-eight hours but I want it pretty solid, enough to fool a grieving family and any local police.”

Kurtzman saw his solution within seconds. “I’ll have Barb work it up and get you documents, IDs and cover files via courier.”

Lyons nodded and rose. “I’m in a car.”

Ojinaga, Chihuahua

LYONS STOOD TO one side leaning against the family room wall and watched Blancanales work his magic. His partner wore his sixth-best tropical-weight suit and looked exactly like a senior insurance investigator. He exuded paternal concern for the distraught family as he interviewed them. Blancanales didn’t have to fake it. Neither did Lyons. In his own days as a police officer he’d been given the terrible task of informing families many times. Lyons grimaced internally. They meant business when they said there was nothing worse than seeing your children leave the world first.

The Villa family had been destroyed.

For a father of six, Rafa Villa had only just turned forty. His red-rimmed eyes looked a thousand years old. Señor Villa’s shoulders sagged as though they held the weight of the world. His wife, Juanita, cried so hard as her younger sister Sofi held her that her tears might make Jonah build a second ark.

Their daughter, Maribel, had just turned eighteen this month. She had graduated at the top of her class at the private Catholic school her parents had scrimped and saved to send her to. The pretty young girl with glasses and black hair that reached her waist had won a foreign student scholarship to the University of Northern Texas. Her declared major was Library and Information Sciences. Her dream was to be a head librarian somewhere in the United States. Two weeks ago she had gone to Texas for college orientation with her aunt Sofi as her chaperone. Maribel had come back with a somewhat geeky but very earnest blond boy and fellow freshman Todd Potter from Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, who’d texted her surprisingly not bad love poetry.

One week ago to the day Maribel had strapped on a suicide vest of TNT cylinders. The cylinders were wrapped with plastic sheeting containing nuts, bolts and ball bearings. The homemade shrapnel had been coated with rat poison to facilitate uncontrollable hemorrhaging in the victims. Security camera footage showed Maribel Villa stepping into a crowded cantina in Ciudad Juárez, during the lunch rush, yanking off her raincoat and pulling the rip cord fuse. Maribel had killed six people, seven including herself. Two of them had been children. She’d severely injured eighteen others.

It was utterly senseless. During her short life, Maribel had never left Ojinaga until her short trip for initial orientation and dorm assignment at UNT. There was no evidence of her having any political leanings whatsoever. Maribel’s three great passions in life appeared to be classical Spanish literature, the Ojinaga municipal library where she worked after school, and her dog, Kaliman.

The fawn-colored boxer lay forlornly, uncomprehending but inundated with his family’s sadness. Lyons dropped to his heels and scratched the boxer behind his ears. Lyons’s inner detective was not buying Maribel being radicalized over a single weekend while under the watchful eye of her aunt, much less at freshman orientation at the University of Northern Texas. The whole thing stank to high heaven. He sighed quietly at Kaliman. “Who’s a good boy?”

Kaliman’s docked tail twitched forlornly a few times as he licked Lyons’s wrist. Lyons nodded. “You and me both, brother.”

Blancanales looked over at Lyons. “Señor Irons, do you have any questions?”

Lyons and Blancanales had come to the Villas’ small farm posing as insurance investigators. One Latin and one Anglo fit the bill. A three-man team would have seemed too much. Schwarz was up in the hills with a rifle maintaining surveillance on the Villa farm and the two approaches to it.

An undertaker would have given his left testicle for the empathy and professionalism the Able Team leader exuded. “I know the state and local police have already done so, but with permission, I would like to see your daughter’s room. Of course you both are welcome to observe.”

Señor and Señora Villa looked at Lyons petting the family dog. Juanita Villa gave Lyons a tremulous smile. “Of course.”

Rafa Villa hung his head for a long moment. Lyons almost thought he had gone to sleep. Señor Villa raised his head and locked eyes with Lyons. “There is something I have not shown the federales.” Fresh tears spilled down the small farmer’s cheeks. “Something terrible.”

Juanita’s head snapped around. “¿Qué, mi amor, qué?”

Rafa Villa rose without a word and walked down the narrow adobe hall to his daughter’s room. Lyons and Blancanales shot each other a look and girded themselves for the worst.

Señor Villa reemerged with an assault rifle. Lyons wasn’t a gun-bunny but he recognized the weapon as one of the relatively new Mexican military FX-05 Xiuhchoatls or “Fire Snake” rifles. The weapon was black and stubby like most modern military weapons. It was Mexico’s first indigenous assault weapon, and only issued to certain units. If you were found with one and not active in the Mexican military it was pretty much a summary death sentence. It was a very strange thing for a teenage Mexican girl to have under her bed. This example was distinguished by a having a nonmilitary-issue, twin-drum, 100-round Beta C-Mag.

Alarm bells rang up and down the Lyons’s spine.

Señor Villa was not carrying the weapon like a holy relic, or like a dangerous serpent involved in his daughter’s death. He carried it crooked in his arm, as if he was going duck hunting. Lyons shot to his feet. In the same motion his Python appeared with slight-of-hand suddenness. “Freeze!”

Villa didn’t freeze. He raised the rifle to his shoulder.

Kaliman lunged and sank his teeth into Lyons’s wrist. Lyons’s shot went low and wide left, and the pistol fell from his hand as Kaliman’s canines found his ulnar nerve.

Blancanales tackled Aunt Sofi off the couch.

Rafa Villa shot his wife in the face.

Blancanales struggled to draw but he was entangled in screaming Sofi. Villa swung his rifle onto Blancanales’s puppy-pile and strode over. Lyons heaved seventy pounds of snarling lockjawed dog into his arms and vaulted the couch. Blancanales managed to lash out with one foot to slam a stacked leather heel into Villa’s shin.

The assault rifle ripped a 20-round burst into the adobe floor a foot from Blancanales’s head. Lyons’s shoulder block hit Villa with every pound of his body and his canine burden behind it. The Villa patriarch went flying with his rifle stitching holes in the roof as he fell backward. Lyons and Kaliman fell on top of him. The boxer gave a muffled yelp but maintained his death grip. Villa struggled beneath them both. Lyons rose up on his elbows and slammed his forehead directly between Villa’s eyes. The Able Team warrior saw purple pinpricks around the edge of darkened vision with the blow.

Rafa Villa went limp.

Kaliman rolled an eye up at Lyons accusingly. He wasn’t letting go. “Damn it...” He’d drained his stun gun into Roble and hadn’t packed a spare power module. Lyons dug his left hand around Kaliman’s trachea, found the dog’s thudding pulse and squeezed off the canine’s carotids. “Bad dog, no biscuit...”

Kaliman’s jaws slowly relaxed in the strangle.

Blancanales rose with his pistol in hand. His face was bleeding in several spots from fragments of flying floor chips. He helped Sofi up. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.” Sofi glanced dazedly at her sister. “Is she dead?”

Juanita Villa’s head was road kill. Blancanales nodded. “Yes.”

Sofi lifted her chin toward Rafa. “Is he dead?”

“No.” Blancanales shook his head. “He’s—”

Sofi Valenzuela drew a Walther PPK from under her blouse and shot Rafa Villa. She calmly spun and shot Blancanales repeatedly in the chest until he fell. As she calmly raised the smoking pistol for the head shot on Blancanales, Lyons rose and shot-putted Kaliman. Kaliman met Tia Sofi like an eighty-pound sack of comatose canine potatoes. Sofi Valenzuela toppled back, ass over teakettle, over the couch wearing Kaliman like a dog feather boa.

Lyons followed his mutt-missile’s trajectory and vaulted the couch. He leg-scissored Sofi’s gun arm and snaked his arms around her neck in a sleeper hold. Lyons cinched down and performed his second strangle of the day. Kaliman raised his head from the floor and managed a hoarse growl. “Pol!” Lyons urged. “Dog! Dog! Dog!”

Blancanales rose shakily. He had taken six rounds in the chest, but the PPK’s caliber was small and his concealed soft body armor had held. Kaliman began lurching to his feet. Blancanales seized the boxer by his collar and docked tail. The hallway had a hardwood floor and he bum-rushed Kaliman down it, sending him sliding like a curling stone. Blancanales slammed the hallway door shut. Sofi sagged unconscious in Lyons’s embrace.

The front door smashed off its hinges. Schwarz swept the scene with the double muzzles of his M4 carbine and the grenade launcher slaved to the forearm. He scanned the room and saw family interview turned into an abattoir. “Clear?”

The hall door rattled on its hinges as Kaliman hit it, scrabbling and snarling. Lyons laid Sofi’s unconscious form out on the floor. This just wasn’t Able Team’s finest hour. “Mostly.”

“What happened?”

Carl Lyons took out a handkerchief and wrapped his bloody wrist. He was starting to develop a major headache from the head butt he had delivered. The only luck he’d seen today was that none of the major arteries were torn open. “Something messed up just happened.”

Schwarz looked at Blancanales, who mopped blood from his face and threw back his shoulders to stretch his aching chest. Lyons never showed it but from long experience Blancanales knew Lyons was as rattled as he was. “Carl isn’t kidding. This interview went from Twilight Zone to X-Files. Get the restraints and the heaviest sedatives we got for Señora Sofi. We need to get across the border with her ASAP.”

Lyons retrieved his fallen Python and began rapidly taking crime scene photos with his cell. The second piece of luck was that the Villa family farm was out in the boondocks. Third was that the rest of the family was out. A cold breeze blew through the Able Team leader. After what the Villa family had already suffered, coming home to this would be hell on earth. “I’m going to sweep the rest of the house for evidence. Get the señora in the car and concealed. I want to be out of here in ten and on US soil in thirty. Call Barb and tell her we have kidnapped a Mexican national and need our border crossing to be shit-through-a-goose smooth.”

Blancanales gazed down at the unconscious murderess and tried to fathom what had just happened. “And tell Barb we want Cal on this one. We need to interrogate this woman when she wakes up, but we’re going to need some subtlety.”

Lyons saw his role being reversed again. “You’re thinking I go hard, Cal goes soft?”

Blancanales nodded. “Yeah, and me observing, ideally unseen, if we can get a proper interview room.”

Schwarz pulled out his laptop. “On it.”