Red Frost

His head lowered like the others, Blancanales fell in at the rear of the line, moving in short, shuffling steps as if his ankles were bound, too. But they weren’t. The frayed cuffs of his jeans dragged on the ground, hiding that fact. He held his right hand tucked inside the bib. Out of sight against his chest, he held a suppressor-equipped Beretta 93-R, safety off, live round under the hammer.

As Blancanales stepped past the meth lab, he stole a peek inside. There was no proper door, just a single, man-size hole hacked through the rusting corrugated steel. A piece of discolored sheet plastic had been pulled aside to let the caustic fumes escape. Propane lamps hung from a cable stretched the length of the narrow enclosure, illuminating a long sawhorse table cluttered with funnels, rubber tubing, and plastic and glass jugs. Propane burners flickered blue under blackened pots. Bedsheets stretched over metal garbage cans were being used to filter the meth. Empty starter fluid, drain cleaner containers and torn plastic and cardboard from battery and pill bottle packaging littered the floor. Outside the doorway stood knee-high piles of the same. The lab’s hazardous refuse had created a dead zone around the camp, clearly visible in the Feds’ aerial photos.

The other workers kept their eyes on the ground, their expressions vacant, their faces rimed with dirt. Chemicals involuntarily absorbed through lungs and skin had cooked their nervous systems. The meth cowboys inched everyone forward, using their clubs now and then to speed up progress, or maybe just for the exercise.

There was no morning head count. The cowboys couldn’t do anything about overnight escapees, if there were any. And the possibility of an extra worker showing up had probably never even crossed their minds.

The little Mexican guy right in front of Blancanales was a herky-jerky skeleton; he could have been sixty years old or thirty. As the man staggered forward, he muttered to himself, repeating the same phrase over and over. “Lo siento mucho. Lo siento mucho. Lo siento mucho.”

Blancanales didn’t ask him what he was so sorry for.

The lights were on, but nobody was home.

Ahead of him, in the middle of the slave pack, were three very pregnant teenage girls. Their long black hair was matted to their skulls, their short dresses stained and so threadbare they were see-through. From the dossier that Blancanales had read back at the Farm, he figured the don had put them all in the family way. For Xavier, child molestation was one of the job perks.

When the big black Lexus rolled up, cowboys and slaves froze in their tracks. Xavier and his bodyguards exited the SUV and headed straight for the lead rental truck.

The mobster passed so close to Blancanales that under the aroma of cigar he could smell the man’s hair tonic. Fruity sweet. Mango-pineapple.

Beretta in hand, index finger resting on the wide combat trigger, Blancanales could have shot the under-boss in the back of the head as he walked by. That he held his fire was a matter of fair play, but it had nothing to do with the fact that the don was unarmed. Given the animal’s track record, Blancanales didn’t want death to come as a big, fat surprise.

Flanked by his bodyguards, Xavier stepped up to the driver of the lead truck. As the bald banger leaned forward to accept the don’s patronizing hug and backslap, his unbuttoned gray plaid shirt gaped wide. Against a crisp white T-shirt, Blancanales saw the polished walnut butt of a chrome Magnum revolver hooked over the front of his trouser waistband.

Embrace suffered, the driver handed the bulging gym bag to the don, who gingerly tested its weight on two fingers, then passed it over to one of his bodyguards without looking inside. Last stop for the money train. The driver turned and shouted at the other bangers, who immediately rolled up the trucks’ cargo doors and started pulling out the loading ramps.

A few seconds later, a dozen very frightened people stumbled down the first truck’s ramp, their mouths duct-taped shut, their wrists bound behind their backs with plastic cable ties.

Replacements for the dead and the dying.

A couple of cowboys used their clubs to drive the new workers over to the SUV, and then made them kneel on the ground beside it. The women wept into the poisoned dirt; the men blinked wide-eyed. One look around, one whiff of synthetic cat urine and they knew they had arrived smack-dab in hell.

The slaves at the front of the line shuffled by the newbies, up the ramps of the two nearest trucks. As Blancanales inched by those vehicles, the workers began to emerge. Using dollies, they off-loaded metal canisters of anhydrous ammonia and propane, and fifty-five-gallon drums of ether, toluene, acetone and isopropyl alcohol. They rolled the heavy drums across the hard-packed dirt and deposited them in front of the customized cargo container.

Blancanales showed a tad too much interest in the proceedings. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a blow coming from behind, but was too late to avoid it. The bamboo club whipcracked between his shoulder blades, making him stumble a half step forward. His flesh went numb. For a moment he couldn’t breathe; his chest was paralyzed from the shock. Then his back burned as if it had been blowtorched. He knew he had been cut. He could feel hot blood trickling down his spine.

“¡Rápido!” the man who’d struck him growled.

Blancanales glared over his shoulder at a potbellied thug in a tattered straw cowboy hat. The top three snaps of his faded denim Western shirt were undone, exposing a hairless brown chest. His round cheeks were cratered with pocks of assorted sizes, as if he’d taken a load of birdshot point-blank. His small black eyes were set close together under a single black eyebrow. A tooled leather scabbard riding high on his left hip held a stag-handled, gold-pommeled and cross-guarded guthook sheath knife.

The mafia enforcer took Blancanales’s stare as a direct challenge. He raised the bamboo club high overhead. His little eyes glittered with delight when his intended victim didn’t raise his hands to protect himself.

Hidden autopistol in hand, Blancanales stood his ground. He was already in position. Lyons and Schwarz both had line of sight on him.

It was as good a time as any to start the party.

Blancanales pivoted his hips, turning sideways to his attacker, poking the sound suppressor’s muzzle from behind the bibfront. The Beretta chugged once in his fist. The muffled gunshot was lost in the clatter of heavily loaded dollies rolling down steel ramps.

The 9 mm round caught the cowboy dead center in his torso, just below the tip of his sternum. Grimacing, he clutched at his chest with his free hand. His mouth opened wide, but no sound came out, just a puff of bright blood mist, propelled by an explosive final breath. His right knee buckled and he crumpled, dropping onto his face, loose and boneless like a bag of beans. There was no exit wound out the middle of his back—the subsonic Parabellum round lacked the power to through and through.

One of the other cowboys saw him drop and rushed over to render aid. The ranchero knelt beside the fallen man. When the cowboy grabbed his friend’s shoulder and turned him over, the weeping red hole was there for all to see. Putting two and two together, proximity and conflict, the cowboy jumped to his feet, swinging his sawed-off 12-gauge around on its shoulder sling. “¡Asesino!” he howled at Blancanales.

This time Blancanales shielded his eyes with a forearm, but not to defend himself from a load of double-aught buck.

A 709-grains boattail slug transformed the cowboy’s skull, crown to chin, into pink vapor and hot, wet shrapnel an instant before the hollow boom of the Barrett fifty rolled over the camp.

WHEN THE COWBOY RAISED the club to strike Blancanales in the face, Lyons had the green light. He yanked the MP-5 SD-3s from their scabbards and scrambled out of the ditch. As he straightened his legs, both of his buttocks cramped up. When he broke into a run anyway, it felt as if they’d been speared crossways with a barbecue skewer.

The pain didn’t slow him down; it made him a whole lot madder.

Lyons had trained in Shotokan karate, but his natural fighting style was pure berserker. He relied on split-second reactions and survival instinct. Wildman rage and the accompanying adrenaline rush helped to ramp up both.

In squishy wet boots, the big man charged across open ground for the rear of the shotgun shack, forcing his legs to move under him, stomping the feeling back into his feet. He angled hard to the left, out of Schwarz’s lane of fire. The tumbledown shack and the meth lab just beyond it momentarily concealed his advance. On the far side of those structures, slaves and slavemasters were preoccupied with the unloading of the still idling rental trucks.

Lyons had assigned himself the task of reaching last truck in line, thereby outflanking the enemy, dividing their fire and compressing the battle in time and space.

It was the only way a handful of attackers could annihilate an opposition six times their number.

As Lyons ran from the front of the shack, sprinting across the strip of hardpan for the corner of the cargo container, Schwarz cut loose with the Barrett. Twenty yards to Lyons’s right a round whined past at chin height. Even though he knew it was coming, even though he had heard it many times before, the sound of that much lead flying by made the short hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

Five long strides brought him to the end of the meth lab and gave him a clear view of the last two trucks in line. On the sides of the cargo boxes above a screen painting of a joyous, all-American family in transit was the rental company’s ad slogan, Moving Your Way.

No one in Lyons’s sights was moving, though. The cannonlike bellow of the Light Fifty had frozen the slaves and their keepers in place.

Lyons broke from cover, rushing trucks 3 and 4. As the Barrett’s report echoed off in the distance, the legitimate targets and innocent bystanders started running in all directions. It was like one of those computer-simulated target-acquisition training systems, except instead of one shooter there were more than fifteen, and instead of one hostage there were at least twenty.

A torrent of gunfire roared to his right, out of sight, on the far side of the meth lab. It wasn’t directed at him. Somewhere in the back of his mind the weapons’ distinctive sound signatures registered: shotguns, pistols and sustained bursts from AK-47s, all of them presumably tracking Blancanales and pouring return fire on the combine.

The quartet of bangers at the last two trucks saw Lyons coming between the bodies of the slow-moving slaves. How could they miss him? Honking big dude, all in black, ski mask pulled down to his chin, silenced machine pistols raised in both fists. The bangers responded in a way Lyons couldn’t, not with a firing lane choked by noncombatants. As the cowboys back-stepped to cover between truck 4’s front bumper and Truck 3’s rear, they opened up with blue-steel 9 mm autopistols, shooting around, then through the panicked, hobbled workers.

Close-range body and head shots blew the stumbling, helpless obstacles off their bare feet.

Almost simultaneously the Barrett boomed again. Truck 4’s front end rocked hard as it absorbed a .50-caliber round. On impact, the hood delatched and popped partway up. A piercing metal-on-metal screech erupted from the bowels of the idling V-8 as the AP slug plowed through its block. A fraction of an instant later, the engine let out a final, grinding clank as tie rods and pistons broke loose. Smoke and steam boiled from the engine compartment. Hot oil and antifreeze sprayed over the crouched bangers.

Lyons took advantage of the cleared firing lane. As he charged, he cut loose with both MP-5 SD-3s, 3-round bursts to minimize muzzle climb. Staggering backward, half-blinded and panicked, the gangsters tried to return fire. The one in front, a baggy-pants wide boy with blue tats covering both arms from wrists to elbows took a point-blank round from one of his own homeys through the back of the head. The right side of his face just vanished, revealing a red crater from eyebrow to cheek. Gushing bright arterial blood, brain-dead on his feet, he toppled to the dirt.

The MP-5 SD-3s stuttered in Lyons’s big fists, saturating the killzone as he closed the ten yards of intervening ground. Twisting in agony under the hail of slugs, the three bangers went down hard.

And stayed down.

Lyons jumped over the jerking bodies, slipping between trucks 3 and 4. Slaves were bellycrawling under the chassis, taking cover behind the steel wheels. Through the greasy smoke billowing from the engine compartment, he could see others robot-walking across the fields, stray bullets whizzing around them, kicking up puffs of soil.

When he peeked around the cargo box, two of the remaining four bangers were in full retreat, joining up with the cowboys who had taken cover beside the first truck and the front of the cargo container meth lab.

A couple of the cowboys were facedown in the dirt.

Blancanales was nowhere in sight.

A ranchero jumped out of the meth-lab doorway, landed flat-footed and tried to drill him with a hip-leveled Kalashnikov. Lyons’s reaction time was faster. The Russian rounds went skyward as the shooter abruptly sat down, driven to his backside by a string of 9 mm rounds to the gut. Lyons ducked back as answering fire ripped along the line of trucks. In so doing, he nearly stepped on the face of one of the downed bangers. Brown eyes stared up at him, not angry, not surprised. Not anything, ever again.