by Brent Towns
Chapter 11
The Sanchez estate
Miguel Sanchez looked at his chirping cell phone on a nearby table with irritation. He viewed the phone as a necessary nuisance at the best of times, but right now it was about as welcome as a pit viper in your pantry. He had abducted a young girl from the nearby village and was forcing her to give him a private striptease. The girl’s back and thighs bore the bleeding welts from his riding crop, a crisscrossed patchwork of hurt and humiliation. She had been stubborn, this one, and required an extra dose of persuasion before starting her performance. Her dancing lacked sexiness but the tears streaming down her face more than compensated. Her pain turned him on even more than her firm breasts and gyrating hips.
But now the show had to be stalled because some fool had picked a most inopportune time to contact him. As he picked up the phone, he vowed that if the call was not important, he would have the caller’s manhood hacked off with a rusty butter knife.
He held the phone to his ear and growled, “Who is this and what do you want?”
The voice that replied was cold and flat. “Jacobs told me to contact you if things went sideways. Given all the dead bodies lying around, including Jacobs, I think it’s safe to say that sideways is exactly where things have gone.”
“Who are you?” Sanchez demanded.
“You can call me Omega. I’m the asset that Jacobs dispatched to handle Team Reaper.”
“Who’s Team Reaper?”
“I’ll skip the technical details and just call them a bunch of badasses.”
“Vigilantes or mercs?”
“Neither. Covert task force.”
“Then how do you know about them?”
“Let’s just say I have my ways,” Omega replied.
“Who put them on to us?”
“The name Reardon ring a bell?”
“Of course,” Sanchez replied. “We’re holding his hijo until he gives us a list of narcs.”
“Guess he went with option B.”
“Then his son is dead. Reardon was warned. Now he will see that I am a man of my word.”
“Hold off on that. We need the boy for bait.”
“For who?”
“For Reaper, Mr. Sanchez. Who else?” The sneer in Omega’s voice made it clear he thought Sanchez was a moron.
The drug baron did not suffer insolence well. “You watch your tone of voice with me, Omega.”
“Spare me your threats. You’ve got more important things to worry about than my tone of voice. We believe Reaper made it into Colombia. So don’t kill the kid. Let them come to you. Sucker them into a trap and then exterminate them. Or, if you find yourself backed into a corner, use the kid as a bargaining chip.”
“They’re here? In Colombia?”
“That’s what I just said.”
“Then I will kill them,” Sanchez said with all the savagery he could muster. “I will succeed where you failed, and then you will wipe that sneer from your voice, for I will have proven myself to be the better man. I have no fear of these Reapers.”
“Then you’re an idiot.”
“Hey, nobody talks to me that w—”
Omega hung up on him.
Sanchez stared at the phone in disbelief and silently vowed to make the man pay for his disrespect. First, he would take down these Reaper bastardos and then this Omega would join them in Hell. No one spoke to Miguel Sanchez with such insolence and lived to tell about it. He would make sure Omega choked to death on his own spleen.
But first, this Team Reaper needed to be put down like mad dogs.
Colombia
In that eerie hour between night and dawn, when dark still dominates but light has begun to bleed into the sky, four armed-to-the-teeth warriors moved in near silence along the edge of the clearing that contained Sanchez’s processing plant and warehouse. Kane, Cara, Ferrero, and Axe had beached the SOC-R five klicks downriver and hiked the rest of the way. They were soaked in sweat from their trek through the jungle—especially Axe, who had to lug the Hawk MM-1—but they shrugged off the discomfort.
It was time to hunt.
Kane knew, both from training and personal experience, that predawn was the perfect killing time. Night sentries were fatigued, which sapped their alertness. At shift’s end, they would be thinking about sleep, their attention subpar. Numbness crept over them, dulling that critical edge, leaving them ripe for the slaughter.
Kane crouched in the underbrush and waited, black-bladed Ka-Bar combat knife gripped firmly in his fist, ready to strike.
He didn’t have to wait long.
Within minutes, a sentry strolled by, fatigue visible on his drooping face. His shoulders slumped, an AK-47 dangling haphazardly from a leather sling. His feet dragged as he shuffled tiredly toward the front gate, no doubt ready for his tour of duty to end.
Kane intended to end more than that.
He let the sentry walk past before attacking. Then he powered to his feet, snaked an arm around the man’s neck, and crushed his throat to cut off any cry of alarm. The knife came up hard and fast. Using all his strength, Kane drove the sharp, heavy blade into the base of the man’s skull, punching deep. Then he dragged the body into the underbrush and wiped the knife clean on the dead man’s shirt.
One down, Kane thought. Who knows how many more to go.
Kill completed, the team crept toward the main gate, manned by two cartel soldiers with assault rifles. To the right of the gate loomed a twenty-five-foot guard tower with a .50 caliber machinegun mounted on top, manned by another sentry.
Kane motioned to Cara.
The former deputy from Retribution, Arizona nodded and double-checked the suppressor on the HK416. Not the most ideal sniping weapon but it would suffice. Her job was to take out the machine-gunner, which would be the signal for Axe and Ferrero to smoke the two sentries. The kills needed to be synchronized. The distance was approximately 60 meters, well within the rifle’s effective range and Cara’s shooting abilities.
Concealed by a patch of ferns, black-and-green fatigues blending into the shadows, Cara braced the HK across her left forearm. Through her NVGs, she saw the laser sight settle on her target. She smoothly stroked the trigger and sent a bullet sizzling up into the machinegun nest. The suppressor reduced the shot to little more than a phytt! sound.
Kane saw the machine-gunner’s head snap back as the 5.56 NATO round burrowed in under the man’s jaw and ripped up into his brain. He crumpled out of sight as red mist spritzed the air.
Less than two seconds later, Axe and Ferrero put down the pair of guards. The first one never knew what hit him as he caught a bullet in the face. Sucking oxygen one second, sucking sulfur the next.
His partner died a half-heartbeat later. A suppressed round split open the bridge of his nose and blasted through his sinus cavity before smashing out the back of his skull. Both sentries hit the ground, dead.
Kane scanned the area to confirm there were no more immediate threats, then motioned them forward.
The team rose in unison and moved stealthily toward the gate, weapons at the ready for any surprises. A burst of hushed bullets made short work of the lock and let them inside the kill-zone, death dealers on a mission of unfettered violence.
Axe swapped his HK416 for the Hawk MM-1, all twelve cylinders stuffed with grenades. No tear gas or flashbangs; they weren’t here to show mercy, so every chamber contained a high-explosive mini-bomb, ready to unleash hell at thirty rounds per minute.
Ready to give Sanchez’s goons a taste of the flames.
A luckless soldier chose that moment to emerge from an outhouse about fifty meters away, belt unbuckled, zipping up his fly. It would be the last dump the man would ever take. Kane’s 5.56mm salvo blew apart the soldier’s chest. The hammering impacts drove the victim back into the outhouse and dumped his dead body back onto the crapper.
The team moved across the compound like shadowed wraiths. The processing lab was on the far side, but first, they needed to take out the b
arracks, looming on their left. Better to kill the bad guys in their bunks than face them out in the open. Granted, there was no honor in that, but they didn’t care about honor, they cared about survival. Neutralize the threat as quickly as possible.
Axe fired on the run, putting three grenades through the windows. “Fire in the hole!” he growled. Moments later, glass shattered, and doomed men screamed. The three detonations thundered one right after the other, blowing out all the remaining windows. Splintered debris vomited from the openings along with blown-off limbs propelled on tongues of flame and smoke. Pieces of wet meat and charred bone rained down.
The barracks door flew open, and survivors began pouring out, some armed, some not. They stumbled about like dazed zombies, shocked and confused.
Axe lobbed two more grenades in their midst, and their disorientation turned to terror.
The HE rounds exploded, and body parts flew everywhere. Blood sprayed and spurted from savaged flesh. Two soldiers not killed outright in the blast writhed in agony on the ground until Kane and Cara snapped bullets into their heads to put them out of their misery.
Almost immediately another group of soldiers staggered out of the barracks. The lead man emerged just in time to catch a 40mm projectile square in the chest. The grenade punched through his sternum and detonated inside his chest cavity. The man evaporated in a chunky crimson mess, blown apart from the inside out.
Kane, Cara, and Ferrero poured on withering streams of auto-fire to keep the soldiers pinned inside as Axe dumped his last five rounds through the doorway. The grenades wreaked high-explosive havoc inside the barracks that caused the walls to visibly buckle. Flames lapped hungrily at the dry wood, and the conflagration spread rapidly. Anyone who tried to come out the door got cut down, and within moments, the stacked bodies blocked egress. The troops trapped inside screamed in agony as they burned alive.
“Let’s move,” Kane said. With the bulk of the enemy troops decimated, they needed to take down the cocaine cookhouse and find Jeremy Reardon.
Axe tossed the empty Hawk MM-1 and switched back to his HK416.
They skirted the burning barracks and approached the lab at a fast trot. Kane opted for a full-frontal assault, kicking open the door and charging in low with his assault rifle blazing. Axe, Cara, and Ferrero followed hot on his heels.
Only one guard defended the four white-clad chemists. The guy managed to squeeze off a hasty burst with his sub-gun, but it missed by a good margin, ripping into the wall to Kane’s right.
Kane’s aim proved much more accurate and far more lethal. He tracked a line of auto-fire across the soldier’s torso. The sizzling salvo slammed the target across a workbench. His crashing corpse knocked over several containers of chemicals which mingled with his fresh-spilled blood.
All four chemists raised their hands to show they were unarmed, but Reaper was taking no prisoners. The hell with these coke cookers. They dealt in white poison, their work bringing misery and death to thousands of people. They profited from those deaths, and now it was time for them to reap the consequences.
“Light ’em up,” he rasped.
The Reaper warriors chopped them down with their HKs.
As the bodies hit the floor, Team Reaper ejected their spent magazines and slapped in fresh ones. Kane plucked a couple of incendiary grenades from his combat webbing and tossed them onto a workbench. As the team headed for the door, the grenades went off behind them and sent thermite in all directions. The burn-baby-burn conflagration would leave nothing but charred wreckage and hot ashes in its wake.
As they started to exit, gunfire greeted them, and bullets chewed the air, courtesy of a trio of soldiers who had popped up from out of nowhere. Kane retreated inside the cookhouse, pushing the others back with him. “Three tangos outside,” he informed them.
Chemical-laced smoke was quickly filling the cocaine lab. Coughing as the fumes burned her throat, Cara said, “We can’t hole up here, Reaper.”
“I know.” Kane could feel the rapidly-spreading flames at their backs. They couldn’t stay in here much longer unless they liked their ribs barbecued.
He spun back into the doorway, catching the soldiers off guard, and terminated the nearest target with a precision burst from his HK that tore off the top of the guy’s head.
The other two soldiers directed twin streams of lead toward Kane’s position. He ducked back inside for cover as slugs drilled into the doorway, gouged splinters from the jamb, and pocked the wall around it. The flames were uncomfortably close as he waited out the thunder of guns.
And then the gunfire stopped, followed by the distinct sound of magazines being ejected. Kane’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a cold, knowing grin. The two fools should have alternated firing. Instead, fueled by fear, they had emptied their clips at the same time. Now they were both frantically trying to reload.
Reaper seized the moment and made them pay for their tactical error.
Kane charged out the door and hammered a sustained burst of 5.56mm heart-stoppers into the torso of the man on the left. Close on his heels, Cara took out the guy on the right with a short, chopping burst to the chest. Both soldiers toppled backwards into the dirt, blood clouding the air above their twitching corpses.
“Well, that sucks,” Axe said, nudging Ferrero. “We didn’t even get to play.”
“Don’t worry,” Kane said grimly. “You’ll get your chance.”
Flames totally engulfed the barracks, thick black smoke rolling across the compound, and the lab was quickly becoming an inferno. The team moved toward the warehouse, cold-eyed warriors wreathed in smoke like death-demons strolling through the scorched landscape of Hell.
Jacobs had told Kane that Jeremy Reardon was being held in a storage shed. Various small buildings—storage units, basically—littered the compound. The team searched each one as they circled toward the warehouse in the northwest corner. The search confirmed what Kane’s gut already knew—Jeremy wasn’t here. Inside one of the sheds, they found a grimy mattress and some food remnants, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out that at one point this had been the kid’s cage. But since he wasn’t there, he had either been moved elsewhere or killed, and as soon as they finished burning this place to the ground, Kane intended to find out which.
There were four sentries guarding the warehouse, but Reaper’s team cut them down with ruthless efficiency before Axe prepped the cocaine-filled building for destruction. The C-4 charges would be more than enough to level the warehouse and leave nothing but a burning hell-zone behind. Axe set the timers for two minutes, and the team exfiltrated the smashed compound.
They were well into the jungle when the C-4 detonated. They couldn’t see the actual explosion, but a concussive wave of heat rippled the underbrush all around them. Kane glanced back and glimpsed fiery debris tumbling from the sky in a flaming rain of destruction.
They had invaded hostile territory and whipped up a recipe for total annihilation with bullets, balls, and blood as the main ingredients. Then they had rammed it down the enemy’s throat with a cold steel fist.
But the mission didn’t end there. All the death and destruction didn’t matter if they failed to bring Jeremy Reardon home. Ripping the guts out of Sanchez’s drug empire was a nice bonus, but it was not the catalyst for this assignment.
Get Jeremy back. That was their objective.
Time to move to target number two—Sanchez’s estate.
Time to bring the thunder right to the bastard’s door.
Chapter 12
Team Reaper Headquarters
Swift drained his fifth cup of coffee, chugging caffeine to stay alert. A direct IV might have been preferable, but with Brick tied up in New York to debrief with the SEALs, there was no medic to hook him up with a needle and a bag of stay-awake juice. So java—lots of java—would have to suffice.
Reynolds was racked out in one of the bunks. No point in both of them staying up. He would roust her if Reaper One called for a drone, but that se
emed highly unlikely at this point, given how long it would take to get the Predator UAV over the Colombian jungle. He’d told her to get some shuteye, and she hadn’t argued.
So he was all alone when his deep-dive analysis program alerted him that it had dug up a commonality within the data feeds from the terrorist attacks.
He quickly scanned the information, did some double-checking, and confirmed it was legit. He let out a low whistle. “Well, ain’t that something,” he muttered. The information needed to get to the proper authorities immediately; problem was, Reaper had told him to keep his analyzation of the terrorist attacks on the down-low.
Decisions, decisions.
He dripped Visine into his eyes to moisten away the scratchiness, and by the time the redness started to fade, he knew what he needed to do. Kane was 2,500 kilometers away, quite possibly engaged in a firefight right at this very moment. There was nothing he could do with the information and Swift couldn’t afford to sit on it until he got back.
He fired off a silent apology to Reaper and prepared himself for a royal butt-chewing when Thurston found out about his side project. And he would own it, all the way. Getting chewed out never killed anyone. Not a chance in hell would he let her know that Reaper had asked him to look into the terrorist attacks.
Thurston was somewhere on the premises. He normally would have just yelled for her, but he didn’t want to wake up Reynolds. So he called her cell phone instead. She answered on the second ring.
“What is it, Slick?” Thurston liked to get straight to the point.
“Got something I need you to see. Something critical.”
“From Reaper?”
“It’s not about Reaper,” Swift replied.
“Then what’s it about?”
He hesitated, then sighed and said, “It’s about the terrorist attacks.”
“That’s not…” Her voice trailed off, and Swift heard her match his sigh with one of her own. “I’ll be right there.”
