Lethal Vengeance Read online

  Beyond those relics, the lair’s tenant had indulged himself with paint, two of the basement’s four walls showing a kind of mural that made Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” look like Sunday school art by comparison. Flames leaped against dark skies, demons cavorted, and the suffering of human females was portrayed with special care, displayed in painstaking detail.

  At center stage, two metal operating tables stood just far enough apart for someone to move back and forth between them, working on two subjects at the same time if the opportunity arose. One table’s straps hung limp and empty, its unoccupied surface covered with drying blood.

  Upon the other, Hal Brognola lay restrained, head raised to look around him in the midst of flashing lights and some alleged musician with a shrill voice howling lyrics Bolan couldn’t understand.

  Brognola wasn’t looking good, but he was still alive.

  Before advancing, Bolan scanned the basement, almost thinking El Psicópata had escaped, but then a man dressed all in black stepped from a corner the strobe lights mostly missed. His face was blood-smeared but that only made his smile more ghastly. In one hand he held a foot-long butcher’s cleaver. In the other, something Bolan couldn’t yet identify, about the size of a cell phone or a TV remote control device.

  “¡Hola!” he shouted without turning down the music. “You have come for this one, I suppose.”

  Bolan shouldered his Steyr AUG, was lining up its telescopic sight to drill Lalo Posada where he stood, when sounds of running men upstairs distracted him. Police? Somebody else? Before his finger curled around the rifle’s trigger, his intended target raised the hand that held the unidentified device, his thumb finding a button on its face.

  Around the basement, rapid-fire explosions overrode the raging music. They were loud, but nowhere close to the reports of high explosives, and they didn’t bring the house cascading down. Instead they filled the basement lair with clouds of swirling noxious fumes.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Rodolfo Garza hesitated on the threshold of the basement stairwell, straining to discern sounds of activity below over the racket hammering from cranked-up amplifiers. Finally, his soldiers clearly growing restive, he commanded them. “Go on! Get down there!”

  Although obviously nervous, hating it, they started down the steps in single file, the narrow stairs preventing a descent by two abreast. If anyone waited below, as seemed likely, the staircase made a perfect choke point for an ambush that would place Garza’s men at risk, so he hung back until roughly two-thirds of his soldiers had been swallowed up by chaos below.

  It seemed to Garza that the lights and music—with its lyrics now invoking a “great black goat of the woods,” whatever that meant—was not simply blaring out in celebration of El Psicópata’s evil, but intended to disorient intruders, which the storm of light and sound amply achieved.

  An unaccustomed pang of fear pierced Garza’s chest, a small internal voice ordering him, Don’t go down there! Still, he knew instinctively that quailing now would cost him the respect of his men, make him vulnerable to a lethal mutiny within the cartel’s ranks or mark him for elimination in the eyes of his godfather back in Culiacán Rosales.

  Angry at himself now, hating any hint of weakness, Garza pushed his way through the remaining soldiers to stand next in line above the basement staircase. “Let me pass!” he told them. And saw with satisfaction that the men he thrust aside were glad to have him go ahead of them.

  Garza had one foot on the top stair when sudden gunfire echoed from below, competing for attention with the raspy, heathen singing and its wild guitar strains, drums pounding a savage rhythm as if summoning a horde of savages from some benighted jungle village.

  He hesitated for an instant, hoping that his men would instantly annihilate whoever dared to challenge them, while leaving him to claim the victory. Forcing himself to move ahead, he started down the staircase but had only cleared two steps when more shooting erupted—this time on the ground floor of Lalo Posada’s house and starting in the parlor they’d already cleared.

  “What now, for God’s sake?” Garza muttered, instantly retreating, shoving his way back into the kitchen as his soldiers still above ground started firing automatic bursts into El Psicópata’s shabby living room.

  Pieces of furniture likely acquired from rummage sales were taking all the hits so far, the stuffing from a ventilated couch and wing chair drifting in the smoky air like snowflakes, but then Garza realized one of his men was laid out in the kitchen, face nearly obliterated by a shotgun blast. He’d barely grasped that loss when yet another shot boomed from the parlor and he saw another of his soldiers double over, dropping with his hands clasped against his bloody abdomen.

  “Who’s that?” another of his men called out to no one in particular.

  “Never mind who!” Garza barked at all of them as one. “Just kill the bastard, will you?”

  Leading by example, he shouldered his SIG SG 553, aimed in the direction that his men were firing and squeezed off a burst of 5.56 mm NATO rounds that felt like roughly one-third of the rifle’s 30-round box magazine. His brass was still cascading to the floor when Garza saw a gringo he recognized lean out around the doorjamb, triggering another shotgun blast that cut the legs from under one Garza’s men.

  Dean Jeffers of the DEA, who’d clipped him for five thousand US dollars—as he now saw, to arrange this death trap on the sly.

  Rage flared in Garza’s chest at that betrayal and he vented it by firing off another automatic burst that punched holes through the lath and plaster wall but missed his enemy by inches.

  “You son of a whore!” he shouted at the American agent who had double-crossed him.

  And from hiding, Jeffers called back to him in Spanish, “Ven a buscarme, maricón!”

  Come and get him? Tossed off as a dare, it was in fact precisely what Garza planned to do. He could not bear the insult and the murder of his men on top of being taken for five grand.

  “You heard him,” the narco boss told his soldiers. “Kill the son of a whore and bring me back his head! Go on! Get after him!”

  Cringing, but more afraid of Garza than the DEA man—as they should be—his men started to advance behind a steady blaze of gunfire.

  * * *

  Bolan took down the first descending gunmen with a rising burst from his Steyr AUG, three of them tumbling down the stairs with arms and legs tangled together, two dropping their weapons, while one sprayed a wasted stream of slugs into the basement ceiling. Two gunmen cried out, their voices overlapping, then Miguel Vergara silenced them with close-range submachine-gun fire before he turned his Spectre M-4 on the shooters frozen midway down the staircase.

  Bolan left the sergeant to it, ducking through the pall of smoke to reach Brognola on the butcher’s operating table. He’d determined that it was smoke, not some lethal or disabling kind of gas, after two hacking breaths that burned his throat and sinuses but caused no further damage. Still, the smoke was bad enough, half blinding him, obscuring his enemy wherever psychopath Lalo Posada had ducked off to hide.

  Bolan dismissed him for the moment, while remaining on alert as he reached Brognola. A hurtling cleaver or some other weapon could prevent him liberating his old friend and bring their rescue mission to a screeching halt. They were already cut off from the world above by gunmen—none of them displaying badges that would have prevented him from shooting them. And, to the best of Bolan’s knowledge, they were still pinned downstairs with the sadist who’d claimed an untold number of victims around Juárez.

  Instead of laying down his AUG and grappling with the buckled straps that held Brognola supine on El Psicópata’s metal slab, Bolan unsheathed his Cold Steel knife. He sliced through the big Fed’s bonds, beginning with the straps that held his wrists, next sawing through the one across his chest and finally severing the rest across his hips and ankles.
r />   Gasping at the smoky air, Brognola grabbed for Bolan’s free hand once the knife was tucked away and hauled himself into an upright seated posture. Tears were streaming down his cheeks, whether from the pervasive smoke, relief, or both. His voice croaked as he said, “It took you long enough.”

  “You’re welcome,” Bolan said, drawing the Glock out of his shoulder holster. “Can you use this?”

  “Try me!” Brognola answered as he brought the pistol up close to his face and peered at the weapon’s trigger, whose forward position told him the Glock 22 was locked and loaded.

  “Feels good,” he observed, taking the spare mag Bolan offered to him and stuffing it into the trouser pocket on his left.

  The Executioner stood by, covering all directions in the smoky chamber while Brognola swung his legs over the operating table’s edge and tried to stand. He wobbled for a moment, Bolan lending him support until his muscles, barred from any exercise since his abduction, started prickling as circulation was restored.

  “Be thankful for the smoke,” Brognola said, pulling a rueful face. “I smell like a latrine at summer camp.”

  “I’d recommend a bubble bath or two when we get out of here,” Bolan replied, half smiling.

  “You mean if.”

  “No quitting when we’ve still got targets on the hoof, guy.”

  “Quitting, hell,” Brognola said in what passed for a growl. “Just let me at ’em.”

  “That’s more like it. Keep an eye out for Posada, too.”

  “Is that the bastard’s name?”

  “I’ll tell you all about him when we have a minute,” Bolan answered.

  “Looking forward to it. And before it slips my mind, thanks for the drop-in, either way it goes.”

  “It’s going hot,” Bolan said. “We’ve got one way out of here, and that’s upstairs, through plenty of hardmen gunning for our scalps.”

  “Better than waiting on a slab to take it lying down,” the big Fed said. “Come on. Let’s kick some ass.”

  They were halfway from the operating table to the basement stairs, eyeing the smoke around them as they went and expecting to be ambushed by El Psicópata any second, when Miguel Vergara cried out from the bottom of the staircase. “Granada!” Bolting backward, he repeated it in English. “Grenade!”

  Bolan had time to see the little antipersonnel device, resembling the Mk 2 “pineapple” first used in World War II, before it detonated with a thunderclap that added more smoke to the basement’s reeking atmosphere, square pieces of its grooved cast-iron exterior punching holes through the murk as shrapnel on the fly. Bolan and Brognola ducked low, but the man from Justice was slower, his leg muscles still resisting mental orders, and he yelped before clapping his left hand to his scalp.

  “Goddamn it!”

  “How bad are you hit?” Bolan asked.

  “Just a graze, I think,” Brognola said, showing a bloody palm while a red streamer trickled from his hairline toward his jaw. “Just what I need right now, a damned hole in the head.”

  “Looks like you’ll live,” Bolan told him.

  “When did you start telling fortunes, pal?”

  “Just call it wishful thinking.”

  “I’ll take what I can get,” the big Fed said and raised his borrowed Glock. “Let’s get this done.”

  * * *

  Feeding replacement rounds into his Remington 870, Dean Jeffers cursed himself for getting into this. He should have let Rodolfo Garza have El Psicópata and the kidnapped man from Justice, then sort out the mess himself while Jeffers checked his growing bank account online.

  The more who died inside Lalo Posada’s house, the safer he’d have been. But no. He’d felt compelled to try his luck on shit creek, even knowing he’d be outnumbered something like twenty to one by well-armed shooters that had gone into the house ahead of him.

  Dumb move, he thought. And possibly his last one.

  Jeffers knew he’d killed or badly wounded three of Garza’s men so far, whittling the odds by some 16 percent, but that didn’t console him. It would only take one lucky shot to put him down and out, with thirteen shooters ranged against him that he knew about.

  The hopeful news: from all the firing that he’d heard downstairs, there was a good chance Rodolfo’s men would kill the first two trespassers he’d seen outside, maybe losing a few more of their number in the process. Now that someone on Rodolfo’s team had started lobbing hand grenades, the battle’s volume and lethality had been cranked up another octave, leaving Dean Jeffers the odd man out.

  He could try running for it, out the broken front door to the street and off from there to reach his waiting car, but Jeffers didn’t like his odds of outrunning full-auto fire across some sixty yards of open ground.

  His other options: stand and fight or phone the consulate for help, but neither one appealed to him. Both left his life at risk. One, fighting on his own. The other meaning he’d have to mark time while awaiting reinforcements, then—if he survived the firefight—trying to explain to his boss and to the DEA’s Office of Professional Responsibility exactly what in hell he had been up to in Chihuahua and in other duty postings prior to this one.

  Accepting bribes rated a two-year sentence for each separate offense, and Jeffers would have trouble counting all the times some narcotrafficker had greased his palm over the years, while fines could be imposed at triple the amount received. Apply the sentences consecutively—

  Even with time off for good behavior in the joint—assuming that someone he’d put away didn’t arrange to have him shanked while he was inside—Jeffers would be lucky if he didn’t come out in a wheelchair, headed straight for an assisted-living home that smelled like purgatory on the road to Hell.

  No calls, then, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t try to blast his way out of the battle zone and make a getaway. The way things had been going lately, Jeffers thought he might be overdue for just a small dose of good luck.

  Or maybe not.

  The first step toward escaping was getting out of Lalo Posada’s creepy house alive. If he could lay down ample fire with his shotgun, take out a couple more of Garza’s men or simply keep their heads down long enough for him to reach the exit, he could duck and dodge until he reached his car, the way he’d once done while playing tailback for the Yale Bulldogs a lifetime earlier.

  If he could do it then for points and some applause, why not tonight, when life itself was riding on the line?

  And there was no time like the present, heading out before some smartass lobbed a grenade his way.

  Backing away from the kitchen’s doorway, Jeffers kept the wall between him and Garza’s men until he was prepared to make his dash. Stepping a little to his right, he pumped out three buckshot charges in rapid fire then turned and sprinted for the door.

  Jeffers was halfway to the porch before a line of submachine-gun bullets stitched across his back and pitched him forward on his face. Behind him, one of Garza’s gunners called out in Spanish, mocking him, “Hey, man, how do you like that shit?”

  As the light began to fade around him, Jeffers found he didn’t like that shit at all.

  * * *

  Vergara fired the last volley of bullets from his M-4 up toward the kitchen then drew his Beretta 82 and loosed three more rounds before trying to reload his SMG. For that, he had to press a magazine release button above the Spectre’s trigger housing on the left, letting the empty mag drop at his feet. He wasted precious seconds as the backup magazine snagged on his trouser pocket long enough to slow him down.

  He heard footsteps easing along the stairs to reach him, muffled whispers adding background noise, so he fired two more pistol shots up that way, smiling as some guy he couldn’t see cried out in sudden pain.

  So far, so good. But then another frag grenade came arcing down the stairwell, bouncing once on the concrete as he shouted out ano
ther warning to Joshua Brinkman and the man they’d come to save. Vergara then dropped to a crouch and pressed his face into a corner of the basement wall.

  The blast was stunning, deafening. It bounced the sergeant off the cinder blocks in front of him, skinning his forehead and causing him to drop both guns as he fell onto his side. He felt rather than heard feet hammering downstairs and then one of the cartel’s gunners stood over him, rolling Vergara to expose his face and torso for a kill shot.

  It seemed to shock the would-be killer when Vergara’s Mark 1 trench knife ripped into his stomach, slicing upward, opening a floodgate that released a crimson tide across the sergeant’s shirt and slacks. He twisted the knife then ripped it free and smashed its knuckleduster into the blank face with light already fading from his adversary’s eyes. Before he dropped, Vergara plucked a Mini Uzi from his grasp and turned it on the staircase, holding down the trigger till its magazine ran dry.

  That storm of FMJ slugs brought down two more soldiers who’d been following the cartel grenadier. Before the rest could gather nerve enough to follow through, Vergara pushed the gutted corpse away from him and felt another frag grenade weighting his jacket pocket on the right. He removed it, pulled the pin and made a sidearm pitch that sent the deadly orb hurtling upstairs and through the open door.

  Wild shouts and scrambling feet announced its landing on the kitchen floor. A cool, quick soldier might have kicked or tossed it back, but none of those collected on El Psicópata’s ground floor had the nerve or speed to manage that. When the grenade went off, it felt like cupped hands hammering Vergara’s ears again while dust rained down upon him from the floor above.

  He struggled to rise, his shoe soles slipping on bloody concrete, but managed to stand upright and return his trench knife to its sheath. He plucked his submachine gun from the floor, heedless of blood spattered along its six-inch barrel and around the cocking lever on the left-hand side of its receiver. He replaced the weapon’s empty magazine and jacked a round into the chamber. Beyond that, the SMG was double-action, just a trigger squeeze to let it rip.