Even in the bright Acapulco sunlight, Rosa Asado felt invisible. Less than invisible, really. As part of Governor Brujillo’s executive protection team, she was supposed to keep to the background, ever vigilant.

While Asado was an attractive woman, she was just second-rate compared to this crowd. A slender blond American singer with a vacuous smile laughed at Anibella Brujillo’s latest witticism. The governor’s wife was a stunning woman in her late thirties, with long, black silky hair. Brujillo’s face was lean, with full lips that moved with facile ease as she spoke cultured English with a deep, husky breathlessness that sharply contrasted with the American songstress’s cackles and nasal-braying speech. It was no surprise, Asado thought. While the young blonde was popular in the United States, Anibella Brujillo had been a national heroine in her younger days, achieving international fame from Argentina to Ontario with fans of latin music. She had even achieved crossover success with several Top 10 hits in the U.S. between the time she was eighteen and twenty-nine, when Anibella finally officially retired from pop superstardom and married a young, up-and-coming politician in Guerrero’s state politics.

Brujillo’s voice could be described in one word—spellbinding.

Asado’s wide-brimmed hat, dark sunglasses and brunette curls were arranged to conceal the unobtrusive earpiece and throat microphone that kept her in touch with the rest of the executive protection team. If there was a battle, Asado wouldn’t be alone.

“We’ve got movement at the gates of the resort. Military vehicles,” a voice cut in on her concentration.

Asado’s hand rested on her thigh, not far from a pocket containing one of her twin Detonics .45 CombatMaster pistols. “I thought we had a report of a base arranging transport through the area.”

“They’re off the given path,” another one of the Mexican security team stated. “And I don’t know about you, but I’m not keen on having jeeps with machine guns passing too close to the command trailer.”

Asado’s brow furrowed and her fingertips played around the snap of her pocket. While the mobile command center was armor-plated, against a .50-caliber machine gun that protection might as well be tissue paper. “Ricky…”

She was about to give a quiet admonishment to be careful when distant thunder rumbled through the air, the earpiece shrieking through her skull as Ricardo Bonases howled in agony, shrieking something about his arm being severed.

Other members of the protection team closed in around Anibella Brujillo and Asado tore the pistol from her right pocket, thumbing down the safety lever. At the sight of armed men and women around her, the governor’s wife cut off her story in midword, green eyes scanning the area.

Asado caught Anibella’s glance toward two men at one far corner of the pool area, reinforcing her suspicions about the two men who seemed to be stalking the first lady. Veteran members of the detail had dismissed Asado’s warning about the pair, and others like them, pronounced as being harmless after background checks. Asado had been ordered to drop any inquiries about the mysterious shadows, and rumors among the rest of the security team had said those orders had come from Anibella Brujillo herself.

Right now, Asado didn’t know who exactly the pair were, but at least she felt secure that they wouldn’t make an effort to kill the governor’s wife.

An explosion rocked Asado as she closed with the first lady, the shock wave knocking her to the marble-tiled deck and pushing her into the water. Caught off guard, Asado sucked in a lungful of water. She lost the first pistol in her grasp from the concussion or from striking the marble pool deck. Either way, her reflexes took over, powerful legs kicking off the pool bottom and driving her head above the water. With a vomitous exhalation, she voided water through her mouth. Her slender but tightly muscled arms reached for the terra-cotta lip of the pool to brace herself as she took a ragged gasp of life-giving oxygen into her chest. As she surfaced, she spotted green-and brown-mottled shapes with assault rifles rushing through a cloud of smoke and debris from the explosion.

Asado tucked down, holding her breath this time as bullets pierced the pool’s surface, riding on spears of bubbles. She tore the other Detonics CombatMaster from her pocket, transferring it to her right hand and thumbing off the safety. With another kick, she broke the surface, spotting a Mexican soldier with a G3 assault rifle firing a short burst at the other end of the pool. Asado didn’t waste any time identifying the target. Instead she punched out two fat 230-grain hollow-point rounds into the camouflage-wearing gunman’s groin and lower belly. Wide-mouthed cavities scooped aside flesh and blood, hydrostatic pressure peeling back the bowl-like lips of the bullets and spreading them apart on impact, smashing out deep divots from the Mexican’s pelvic bone.

Robbed of the skeletal structure he needed to stand, the rifleman tumbled headfirst into the pool, his rifle clattering to the tile.

Asado surged for the deck, firing another shot at a second armed gunman who raked a burst of automatic fire across the governor’s wife and her party. Realizing that she heard nothing over her ear radio, Asado wondered if the water had shorted out the system when she was dunked. She would have to check on the radio, but not before she seized the enemy’s rifle. The Detonics .45 was powerful, but nothing beat a rifle when it came to killing people engaged in homicide. With a hard shove, she flopped onto the deck and grabbed the grip of the Heckler & Koch G3.

Water suction and gravity dragged Asado back into the pool, just in time to avoid being cut in two by another assassin. As she sliced into the water, she kicked back from the edge, aimed the rifle and fired. Heavy recoil shook the weapon in her fist, but at a range of only ten feet, she was able to stitch the uniformed soldier from navel to throat with a 3-round burst of 7.62 mm bullets. The assassin jerked backward violently, as if propelled from a cannon, the rifle slugs coring through his torso as if it were made of soft cheese.

Asado spun and kicked for the far side of the pool. When she did, she saw that the table where Anibella Brujillo had been sitting was surrounded with corpses, other tables overturned in a scene of carnage. Spearing the rifle ahead of her, Asado knifed through the water like a torpedo. Muzzle-flashes blazed around the side of one table, showing that some of her comrades were still alive and fighting. Asado clamped her hand on the lip of the pool and yanked herself up on deck. She stayed prone, rolling onto her belly so that she could take aim with the G3 rifle at any newcomers.

The two mystery men suddenly entered the fray, Uzi submachine guns blazing as they ambushed the marauding assassins. Raking fingers of 9 mm gunfire laced into the assassins with brutal efficiency as Asado discarded her empty G3 and reloaded her CombatMaster. Kneeling behind a stone planter, she fired three shots into a rifle-armed soldier, striking him in the upper chest and stopping him cold. Collarbone and ribs shattered by 230-grain bullets, his thoracic cavity was suddenly filled with rocketing shrapnel of deformed hollow-point rounds and bone splinters. Blood vomited from the dying man’s lips as he collapsed limply to the ground.

Asado pivoted, looking for more targets when she saw Anibella Brujillo, armed with a gleaming, nickel-plated pistol, fire a shot into a dying assassin’s face as she stood over him. Asado recognized the pistol as belonging to Montero, one of the protection team. Montero was sprawled on the pool deck, most of his face missing and his brains forming a fan around the cavern that used to be his skull. Physical pain speared through Asado’s chest at the sight of her murdered comrade.

Anibella fired two more shots, taking a fleeing rifleman between the shoulder blades, and she spit a curse. “Culo.”

Rosa Asado stood, glaring at Anibella Brujillo.

“You survived?” Brujillo asked.

“No thanks to the gangsters on your payroll,” Asado answered, nodding toward the Uzi-armed gunmen who were escaping over the fence.

“My dear, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Anibella stated. “All I see are two killers you allowed to escape.”

Asado clamped her teeth in her lower lip to restrain the urge to throttle the woman. She thumbed the safety up on her CombatMaster. “I don’t know what this is all about, but I’m certain it has something to do with your links to those gangsters.”

Anibella shook her head. “They were trying to murder me, because my husband is working hard to bring down the Juarez Cartel. This is proof that we are on the right track.”

Asado took a deep breath and looked around. Except for Anibella, she was the only one standing. The blond American singer was facedown in a puddle of blood. However, looking at the wounds in the young woman’s back, she could tell that they were too neat to have been made by a G3’s rifle slug. They looked more like the bullets from a .38 Super, just like the one that Brujillo held.

Asado looked up to see the silvery muzzle of Montero’s 1911 pistol leveled at her. A flower of fire appeared, and in that dying moment Rosa thought of her twin sister, Blanca, and how she’d never see her again.

A 125-grain slug smashed into her forehead and puffed out the wet tresses at the back of her skull.

The bodyguard collapsed in a jumble of limbs, eyes bulging in their sockets, staring vacantly at the clear skies of the Acapulco paradise.

“OH, SAINT MARTHA,” Anibella Brujillo whispered, calling the goddess of death, Santa Muerte, by her nickname. “What a waste of a good scapegoat.”

She flipped the nickel-plated 1911 back to Montero’s side.

The two Uzi-packers were gangsters, but they were also Anibella’s devotees. As the high priestess of the Santa Muerte cult in the state, she was never far from the protection of her flock members. She was a shepherdess not of sheep, but of Mexican wolves, predators who infested the drug gangs and lorded over neighborhoods.

It would take some time for the authorities to arrive, but she already had her followers acting on her plans to implicate Rosa Asado as the real perpetrator of this recent attack.

The Juarez Cartel was stepping up its aggression, and Asado had been correct. The drug lords were seeking to eliminate her not because her husband was a crusading politician, but because she was the heart and soul of the Santa Muerte cult conquering the heroin trade in Acapulco.

Anibella’s brow furrowed. She would deflect attention for now, but the Juarez Cartel was still not going to give up so easily. A full paramilitary assault was only one sign of the extremes that Juarez was willing to go to, to eliminate her and the cult.

She needed an advantage over one of the most tenacious and lethal drug gangs in Mexico. The Mexican president had dropped a hint to her husband. A few years back, when the new president was under assault from multiple factions, an American operative had been assigned to assist him against drug gangs and military officers seeking to stage a coup.

This lone man was like an army unto himself. Anibella had heard rumors of a more recent savage conflict between Colombian cartels and the Hong Kong triads on Mexican soil, involving a similar one-man battalion. The president gave governor Emilio Brujillo a contact number to bring in this solitary crusader.

Anibella Brujillo knew that if anyone could level the playing field against the Juarez Cartel, even if they could arrange an army assault, it would be the mysterious lone warrior.

CHAPTER ONE

Jon Dever was tempted to pull a cigarette from the glove compartment of the U.S. Border Patrol Ford Bronco, but he was trying to quit. His partner, Daniel Hogan, saw Dever’s gaze fall on the glove compartment door and smirked.

“Don’t start, Dan,” Dever muttered.

Hogan’s smirk continued to grow. “You should try some nicotine gum, Jon.”

“I did. Ate a whole pack at once and nearly puked my guts out,” Dever grumbled. “Besides, if I light up, they’ll smell the smoke a country mile away, even if they can’t make it out through the windshield.”

Hogan nodded sagely. That had been the younger man’s intent, to push his older partner into rationalizing against taking another cigarette. Dever was twelve years older than Hogan, who was in his early thirties, and had about seventy pounds on the younger man. Most of it was muscle, but enough was the result of the thickening of age.

Hogan put his night-vision glasses to his eyes again. “Got a visual.”

Dever picked up his glasses and looked. “Three trucks. They look military but—”

“Either the Mexican army’s making extra cash selling surplus to heroin smugglers, or they went in for steady employment by doing the transportation themselves,” Hogan surmised. “Either way, our orders are not to fire on anyone wearing a Mexican uniform.”

“This is bullshit,” Dever said. “My training officer would have had an aneurysm if he’d been told to let those bastards shoot at him without returning fire.”

“Hey. Washington doesn’t have a spine anymore. They’d rather beat their chests in a foreign country, but let the psychos next door do as they please,” Hogan snarled.

Dever took a long, deep breath, then got out a digital camcorder with a low-light optical filter on the lens. At least they could document any efforts by the neighboring nation’s military in breaking international law.

Dever’s brow furrowed.

“What’s wrong?” Hogan asked. He eyed the M-4 carbine locked in its clamp against the dashboard. It, and the Heckler & Koch .40-caliber pistol on his hip, would give any opponent a run for his money, if only his trigger finger hadn’t been restrained by insipid rules of engagement. The official attitude was to not spark a border war, but apparently the men wearing army uniforms and carrying Mexican-issue rifles were under no such restriction.

Several Border Patrol agents had been injured in increasingly tense encounters across the past few years. It was only a matter of time before the bastards had collected the final breath of an American law-enforcement agent. Some had called for the end of the Border Patrol due to its failure to control or act against foreign invaders. Others had wanted the National Guard to step in. Still more took their own weapons and camped out at major thoroughfares for migrating illegal aliens, seeking to take the law into their own hands. The fact that the American Minutemen were looking only to turn back illegal aliens, and not gun down unarmed intruders who were coming merely to seek jobs had kept the situation from surging to a flash-point of violence.

It had come close a couple of times. Military forces and federal agents had dealt with a crisis for the then-new Mexican president as powerful smuggling alliances actually engaged in brutal assault on American lawmen. Only the actions of people who existed in whispered rumor had prevented a second Mexican-American war from ripping the continent apart.

Hogan sighed. He hoped that the men who didn’t exist would make their presence felt again to push back the encroaching and increasingly bold and deadly smugglers.

Dever looked at the feed on the screen. “Something is moving out in the desert behind the trucks, but I can’t quite make it out. It might be a person. It’s about the right mass, but it doesn’t…No, it disappeared.”

Hogan chuckled nervously. “Maybe you saw a Chupacabra.”

“Not too many goats for a goat-sucker to feed on out there, Dan,” Dever returned. “Nothing. I just see bupkis.”

Hogan nodded. “We’ll review the DVR later. Maybe image enhancement will—”

“Down!” Dever shouted, and Hogan’s head slammed against the driver’s window. The windshield cracked violently as something crashed into it. Plings and plunks of rifle fire sounded on the Bronco’s metallic skin. Dever had his double-action-only USP .40 out, but instead of rising above the dashboard, he stayed hunched over the younger agent.

“Damn bureaucrats are going to murder us,” Dever snarled.

“They will if we don’t shoot back,” Hogan said. He felt a knot rising on his battered skull, but he was in no more of a mood to rise and engage the enemy than Dever.

M-16s and the Heckler & Koch pistols were hot stuff against poorly trained “coyotes” armed with AK-47s. The human smugglers couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn at one hundred yards, while both the Border Patrol’s chosen pistol and rifle could score head shots at that same distance. Unfortunately, the enemy gunmen across the border were three hundred yards out. The short-barreled M-4s came up as inferior at that distance when compared to the older but vastly more powerful Heckler & Koch G3 battle rifles. The G3’s 7.62 mm NATO bullet could kill at over eight hundred yards. Only the armor plating and the heavy engine of the USBP Ford Bronco had managed to stop the high-powered slugs from drilling into the two agents.

The windshield finally gave up the ghost and disintegrated into diamondlike cubes of broken glass that rained down upon the pair.

“Damn!” Dever shouted.

Suddenly, from across the border, another weapon discharged. It was deep and powerful, thundering across the plains. The Mexican rifles stopped firing.

Dever poked the camera up over the dashboard, the LED screen rotated so that he could use it as an electronic periscope. G3 rifles crackled again from the trucks, but the tongues of muzzle-flashes licked out into the desert behind them.

Someone else had entered the fray.

MACK BOLAN HAD INTENDED to make his incursion against the alleged Mexican military forces covertly, but the lives of two American lawmen were on the line. The Executioner rapidly pulled the suppressor off his Barrett M-98 rifle and mounted the muzzle brake. He was going to need to make noise to redirect the murderous gunmen’s attention.

With his first pull of the trigger, the M-98 spit a .338 Lapua Magnum round into the head of one of the riflemen. The result was instant decapitation as the 300-grain slug detonated the Mexican’s skull with hydrostatic overpressure.

Sprayed with gore, stringy brain mass and bone fragments, the other gunmen in the truck were struck momentarily numb. Bolan’s first target slid over the rail of the truck, plopping to the desert sand below.

There was no doubt now that the enemy soldiers knew where the rifle shot came from. The Lapua Magnum round was designed to kill humans at over a mile and a half away, or punch through the engine of a lightly armored vehicle at closer range. That kind of power was accompanied by a throaty roar and a flash like lightning.

Just to make certain, the gunman right next to the first target caught a second Barrett round at the center of his clavicle. Windmilling backward as a fountain of blood vomited through the .338-inch hole in his upper chest, the Mexican was dumped next to the first target in the sand. G3s ripped to life, but the Executioner was in motion, leaving the area he’d fired from.

The semiautomatic Barrett punched out another slug as Bolan fired from the hip, catching a third smuggler through the center of his torso. The dying Mexican folded like a cheap shirt, collapsing as a grapefruit-size crater formed when the Magnum bullet excavated two vertibrae through the skin of his back.

Panic and screams had taken over the smuggling crew and one of the trucks fired up its engine. Bolan shouldered the Barrett and tapped off two .338 rounds which smashed through its grille. The engine seized up as the heavyweight slugs tore through gears and pistons. A commanding voice cut through the howls of fear.

“Track and fire! Split up! We’re too easy a target in the trucks!”

Bolan slung the mighty Barrett and drew his Beretta 93-R machine pistol from its spot under his left armpit. Suppressed, its muzzle-flash would disappear in the desert battleground. Now that he had their attention, he needed stealth and the protective curtain of nighttime shadows. The foregrip lever folded down, and he flipped the selector to 3-round burst. A snarl of silenced Parabellum rounds coughed from the end of the Beretta’s can, ripping into a man standing nearest to the leader shouting orders.

The leader of this group reacted not as a frightened smuggler but as a cold-blooded professional, pulling Bolan’s quiet kill in front of him as a human shield. Whether the Mexican had been dead or alive, his commander had deemed his own existence more important. Bolan popped off another triburst that forced the enemy headman behind the cover of his vehicle, 9 mm rounds eliciting jerks from his human shield.

A grenade sailed high and wide of the Executioner’s position, but he wasn’t going to stay upright. The minibomb detonated, shrapnel singing through the air in a sheet of razor wire over his fallen form. Bolan sighted on the legs of another rifleman and chewed his kneecaps off with another burst. The gunman howled in agony, collapsing facefirst in the sand. Strangled sobs of pain resounded from the fallen soldier.

“Aqui!” a Mexican rifleman shouted. Bolan rolled quickly out of the path of a salvo of bullets, triggering a trio of 9 mm slugs into the shooter’s chest.

Bolan took a momentary disadvantage and profited from it, grabbing the fallen rifleman’s G3 and a bandolier of ammunition off him. He dumped the magazine and slapped a 20-round box into the battle rifle. A Mexican rushed toward Bolan, too close and too fast for the Executioner to shoot, but the heavy wooden stock was as lethal as any bullet. With a sickening crunch, the heavy rifle butt caved in the gunner’s jaw on its way to splitting his palate and facial structure. Shards of jagged bone speared the unfortunate thug’s brain, dropping him instantly into a pile of dying human meat in the border sand.

A second man burst into view and Bolan brought the stock down hard into the side of the newcomer’s neck. The gunman’s neck released a wet, stomach-churning snap as it failed to absorb the lethal impact. Spine crushed, the Mexican collapsed at the Executioner’s feet.

Another truck engine turned over, and the Executioner whirled, burning off a half dozen slugs through the driver’s door. The wheelman jerked violently as bullets exploded through sheet metal and soft flesh. A river of blood poured from his lips as he slid out the door.

“Fall back! Fall back!” the enemy commander shouted. He jumped from the bed of the driverless vehicle toward the third truck. He laid down a sheet of covering fire to keep the Executioner at bay, but Bolan didn’t want to cut off the last vehicle.

Instead, he waited, letting the commander and the remnants of his group pack into the back of the remaining vehicle. A mad roostertail shot from under the wheels as the truck sought traction, driver in a panic and applying too much gas. Finally the treads bit into the sand and the vehicle lurched away from the death grounds.

Overloaded with men, it swayed as it made a wild turn back to its base, but the low center of gravity won out, keeping all the wheels on the ground. Bolan yanked the lifeless driver out of the cab. The Mexican riding shotgun with him was slumped, coughing up blood from lethal injuries. There was no way that Bolan could treat the horrific wounds inflicted by the powerful rifle. He unleathered the Desert Eagle and ended the gunman’s suffering with a 240-grain skull smasher. He pushed the corpse out of the cab and started the truck.

The Border Patrol agents, hundreds of yards away, had gotten out of their vehicle, watching in consternation. They’d just seen nearly a dozen men who’d tried to kill them left dead or wounded on the desert sand, their black-clad savior commandeering the Mexican truck to take up pursuit.

Bolan hated to leave the patrolmen in the lurch, their vehicle destroyed. He opened his satellite phone, linking up to Stony Man Farm.

“Bear, send a recovery team. We have two Border Patrol agents who’ll have a long walk unless they get a new ride,” the Executioner said. He slipped on a pair of night-vision goggles so that he could watch the road without resorting to headlights, which would betray to the escaping enemy that they were being hunted.

“We’re on it. Satellite imagery is following the remaining truck, if you should lose it,” Aaron Kurtzman responded.

“Not likely,” Bolan returned. “I put the fear of hell itself into them. The enemy driver is plowing up countryside as if there were no tomorrow.”

“ETA for the pickup on your agents is about five minutes. Satellite imagery shows that they’re unharmed. Both are moving around normally.”

“Great news,” Bolan said. “I hated to blow the element of surprise, but I couldn’t just stand by and let two lawmen be murdered.”

“Now we get to see where the rabbits hole up,” Kurtzman told him. “You were right, though, Striker. They couldn’t be easier to track if they had a neon sign on them.”

The Mexicans’ truck bounced and charged across the terrain several hundred yards away from Bolan’s vehicle. Finally, the two-and-a-half-ton truck swerved. It almost tipped again, two wheels rising a couple of feet into the air, but the driver recovered the vehicle’s balance.

“They’re on a road now, Striker,” Kurtzman informed him.

Bolan eased his “borrowed” ride onto the road with far more grace than his quarry. Though the road was paved, there were no lights along it, or even rails on either side, just soft, gravel-filled shoulders. The fewer lights, the better. He didn’t need his terrorized prey to realize that he was still with them. As it was, he let off the gas enough to increase the gap.

Judging by the speed and distance traveled, they’d already gone twenty miles past the Arizona-Mexico border. The G3 and the powerful Barret M-98 rested on the bloody seat, in case he was being drawn into a trap. It was hours from dawn. Hopefully, he’d arrive at his intended destination before sunrise so that he could make a covert insertion.

If not, Bolan would do the best he could, even in broad daylight, though he doubted that his quarry had much farther to go. Already, they had dropped from nearly eighty miles an hour to half that. Bolan matched their speed, and saw them turn onto another road. There was a sign at the intersection. The Executioner paused long enough to read that the road led to an Army base.

“What’s the status on this base?” Bolan asked, reading off the name to Kurtzman.

“It’s fully active, Striker. It’s mostly a supply and transport depot, and according to reports, it’s been on the bubble as far as closing. There isn’t enough money to keep it going, with rising gasoline prices and the Mexican government just barely out of the red,” Kurtzman explained.

“So they’re taking odd jobs to keep the gates open?” Bolan asked.

Kurtzman sighed. “Sounds like it. A little dilemma.”

“No dilemma at all,” Bolan replied. “They tried to kill American lawmen. I’ve fought enough top-secret U.S. groups funded by drug money who murdered anyone in their way and shut them down. Slaughtering people and selling addictive poison isn’t a valid option for any group to fund itself.”

“Not everyone on the base is in on the cocaine cowboy rodeo,” Kurtzman stated.

“I’ve got a face and a voice,” Bolan returned. “When I cut off the head, the rest will die. I’m closing this connection now, Bear. Places to go. Things to break. Catch you later.”

He turned off the sat phone and pulled the truck off the road as he saw the supply depot’s lights in the distance.

The rest of this trip was going to be on foot.

BLANCA ASADO PUSHED HER auburn hair off of her forehead, kneading the skin below her hairline as she looked at the photograph of her twin sister lying on the morgue table. She squeezed her brow until it felt as if her skull was going to crack under the pressure, her eyes burning with tears. A swirl of sickness spun in her guts and air in the room felt unbreathable, despite the open window and the fact that Armando Diceverde wasn’t smoking.

“Blanca…” Diceverde began. “Blanca, are you okay?”

“I don’t know,” Asado replied. Rosa’s eyes had been closed, but she could tell by the way they had been shut that the force of a .38 Super slug to the brain had nearly disgorged the orbs from their sockets.

Diceverde wasn’t a tall man, and he only came up to Blanca Asado’s shoulder. The fact that Blanca was looking at the remains of her sister and best friend only made him feel spiritually smaller. A choked sob escaped Asado’s lips and she shook her head.

“Rosa wasn’t into making money with drugs. We’ve both seen what that shit does to good people,” Asado explained.

“You’re preaching to the choir, Blanca,” Diceverde replied. “She’d been flagging things for me to look at. We’ve both noticed something new burrowing into Acapulco’s drug scene. Someone has been giving the Juarez Cartel a real knocking.”

12 Növ.

Devil's Playground

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