Global paralysis lasted an instant.
Gunmen unleashed sawing bursts of autofire as they sprinted for the nearest cover. As the bangers and cowboys scattered, Blancanales dropped to a knee beside the freshly made corpses and yanked the guthook sheath knife free of its scabbard.
The meth slaves scattered, too, but slowly because of their ankle restraints. Some headed for shelter under the trucks, while others set off across the fields. The three pregnant girls were moving the slowest of all, cradling their swollen bellies in both hands as they shuffled barefoot in the dust, their backs to the conflict.
The replacement workers huddled in a cowering knot beside the Lexus SUV.
A flurry of tightly spaced pistol shots rang out from the end of the line of trucks, then the Barrett boomed again. The second shot from the .50-caliber rifle sent half of the opposition diving for cover inside the meth lab. Xavier and his two bodyguards were the first through the crude doorway. The pair of single-wide trailers was 150 feet away, across a stretch of open ground. Because the bangers and rancheros had all seen how accurately Schwarz could shoot, none of them made a break in that direction.
For his part, Blancanales faced a difficult choice. There was a slim chance he could get some of the forced laborers to safety before the numbers ran down to zero. He couldn’t communicate with the burned-out zombies among them; and even if he could have, he didn’t have bolt cutters to sever the loops of braided-steel wire around their ankles. The newly arrived slaves’ wrists were secured behind their backs with nylon cable ties, but their ankles weren’t bound yet. They could run. Their brains weren’t fried by toxic chemicals, either, so at least there was a possibility they could understand and follow simple commands.
Saving some was better than saving none.
As always, living and dying was largely a matter of luck.
Blancanales ran for the Lexus and the newbies. In the chaos of heavy-caliber incoming and massed, full-auto outgoing, nobody was paying any attention to him or to them. When the kneeling prisoners saw a blood-spattered, masked man with a wickedly curved blade bearing down on them, their eyes widened in terror. Caught between gunbattle and guthook, they were too frightened to flee. They didn’t resist when he started grabbing their wrists and parting the nylon ties with deft snicks of the hook blade.
As one of the men rose warily to his feet, he jerked violently sideways and went down hard. The front of his stained T-shirt was spotted with dime-sized holes from a load of double-aught buck. The shooter, a cowboy who had been hiding behind truck 1, cycled the action of his 12-gauge pump as he advanced on the Lexus. Before the gunner could cut loose again, Blancanales raised the Beretta from behind his hip and ripped off four rapid-fire shots over the SUV’s hood. Two of the silenced rounds went wide of the target, but two hit the cowboy. One struck his left shoulder and the other bored straight through the middle of his crotch. Dropping his sawed-off shotgun on its sling, clutching his groin in both hands, the ranchero fell to the dirt, writhing like a worm on a fishhook.
There was no time to free the rest of the prisoners. Blancanales yelled at them in Spanish, “Get up! Help each other! Hurry!”
Tossing the sheath knife aside, he aimed the Beretta at the SUV’s driver’s side front tire and fired once, point-blank, through the sidewall, dropping it onto its rims. As he ran on, he did the same to the rear tire.
“¡Vámonos!” he shouted, waving for them to follow him.
In seconds the Able Team warrior caught up to the slowest of the three fleeing pregnant teenagers. He paused just long enough to scoop up the girl. As he did so, a .50-caliber report rolled over his back and an instant later a truck exploded with a dull whump! The girl was light in his arms, and she didn’t twist or struggle in his grasp. She had learned to be compliant when set upon by a male. Which probably explained why she had survived.
The other two girls were stumbling along fifteen feet ahead. “Carry them!” he yelled over his shoulder.
His tone of voice and the gun in his hand left no room for discussion.
Two of the freed men stopped and quickly gathered up the pregnant girls, carrying them as they ran.
Blancanales closed on the trailers with caustic smoke flowing from the burning trucks swirling around him, stinging his eyes. The Light Fifty boomed again, and a car horn started to blow. He didn’t look back.
On the far side of the single-wides, Blancanales put down the girl. Her baby face was contorted with fear, but she just stood there, a doe in the headlights. She didn’t move even when he turned away. As he roughly ushered the others forward, the car horn stopped and the gunfire dwindled, as well. Someone started yelling from the meth lab. He couldn’t make out the words.
“Get down! Quick!” Blancanales shouted in Spanish, shoving the prisoners from behind. “On the ground! Cover your heads!”
Then time ran out.
THE METH SLAVES HIDING under burning truck 2 didn’t budge at Lyons’s urging. They stared back at him as if he were the bogeyman. The unintelligible shouting of a huge guy in a ski mask with two autoweapons didn’t do much to instill confidence and trust.
Lyons slung one of the machine pistols, then lunged forward, grabbing the nearest laborer by the arm. “The rest of you, come on!” he yelled. “You can’t stay under there! You’re all gonna die if you do!”
The raggedy laborer went limp on him. Deadweight in the dirt. Lyons hauled him out from under the chassis anyway, but as soon as he let go, the man turned and crawled right back.
The heat from the engine fire was getting worse. So was the oily smoke. The situation was flat-out impossible. There was nothing Lyons could do. In the end, self-preservation had to take precedence over rescue.
“Shit!” he snarled in frustration as he bailed. High-kicking, he raced back the way he had come, around the last truck in line, past the end of the meth lab and the corner of the shotgun shack, heading for the irrigation canal. A single gunshot from the Barrett rang out, followed by a massive, billowing explosion. Behind him, at the edges of his peripheral vision, the world turned a brilliant orange. Holding the machine pistols overhead, he jumped for the irrigation ditch. In midair, icy cold slammed his back, penetrating right through his blacksuit. A fraction of a second later the overloaded nerves correctly registered the sensation as heat.
Skin-blistering heat.
As he plunged into the ditch water, the explosion’s concussive force pitched him forward, face first toward the far bank.
SCHWARZ NEEDED ONLY ONE API round to send the whole narco compound straight to hell.
He put the M-8 incendiary slug through the middle of one of the fifty-five-gallon chemical barrels lined up in front of the meth lab. On impact, there was an intense white flash. A fraction of a second later, with a resounding boom the targeted drum became a forty-foot-wide, forty-foot-high ball of flame. The initial explosion set off a chain reaction with the other drums and with the cargo container. In a stunning instant, the raw materials of meth mass production—acetone, toluene, ether—were transformed into nothing less than a napalm bomb.
At the center of the seething fireball, the cargo container flew apart; the detonation’s shock wave blew off the roof of the tumbledown shack and rocked the single-wide trailers off their cinder-block foundations. As a churning black mushroom cloud erupted from the center of the explosion, the heaviest debris began raining down, a torrent of unrecognizable metallic junk falling through the flaming mist.
Like a string of massive firecrackers, the gas tanks and cargo boxes of the rental trucks exploded one by one.
The initial blast sent the trailer nearest to the lab sliding off its foundation. With a sickening screech it dominoed into the second single-wide and knocked it loose, as well. For an instant the sky overhead was the color of flame.
“Stay