Flame and Chili worked their way forward to a spot within a hundred yards of the most remote building, a cinder block stable. The horses were housed for the night. A steel structure garage building was beyond it. The two SEALs lay down in a hide where some cholla cacti were clumped. It was elevated enough to give them a clear view and a field of fire over the open ground between the loose "U" shape described by the buildings.

  Manny, Heath and Pig were positioned closer to what they pegged as the guest houses and the likely home of any gunmen under the employ of thePecadores. The cousins were probably bunked in the big house. The three SEALs were downwind from the main compound and awaiting an all clear from Flame and Chili.

  The two SEALs in the cactus clump mounted night scopes to their M4s after securing suppression tubes to the ends of the barrels. They sat with knees up and elbows resting on their kneecaps to steady their aim. Through the scopes they could clearly see the ghostly shapes of the dogs dozing and trotting between the buildings unaware of the strangers watching them.

  The snipers worked the pack from outer left and right toward the center in a pattern of fire they agreed on while setting up.

  Both Flame and Chili were country boys and loved dogs. But these mutts were killers and had nothing in common with the beloved hounds they were raised with like brothers. Dogs were family where they came from. These animals in their sights, with spooky eyes glowing in the starlight, were bred for short tempers and were loved by no one. They were man-killers trained through cruelty and deprivation to kill what they did not know. Any living being, a man, a deer, a burro or child, was only meat to them. Worse than that, the noise they raised upon the first scent of strange, armed men near the big house would wake the whole place all at once.

  The first dog, a Staffordshire/Alsatian mix went down with a center shot. Two curious mastiffs trotted to it and sniffed the unmoving form. They were dropped with a head shot to one and a center mass blow to the other. The shots were less than a second apart. Kill shots. The dogs dropped onto their own shadows to lie motionless.

  The scent of fresh blood roused the rest to action but no canine voices were raised yet. More dogs fell as they were drawn toward the first three victims. The animals were confused now. There was the stench of their own blood and exposed entrails but no visible cause for it. Some dogs raised noses in the air and others turned on one another in confusion. There were loud growls and yelps of pain as the dogs fought with one another. But these sounds were to be expected in the night and no lights went on in the buildings.

  The loose congregation of tussling mutts brought the whole pack into clear view and Flame and Chili took the opportunity to switch to rapid fire and opened up on the packed mass of leaping fur until most were still and only a few were left to skitter back from the sudden carnage. The dogs were confused and began to leap, front paws in the air, and bark at whatever invisible force was stalking them.

  Lights could be seen in one of the windows of a guest house and a powerful exterior light went on revealing still dark shapes dotting the ground between the guest houses and the big hacienda. Some of the dogs ran for Guest House One, around a corner and out of Flame and Chili's sight.

  "Shit," Flame said under his breath and both men were up and moving down from their hide toward the acre-sized lake of silvery light around the building. Chili keyed his PRC three times fast.

  A rail-thin young man in loose boxers and Los Tigres Del Norte concert t-shirt stepped from the guest house as two of the dogs ran panting and yelping to him. He held an Uzi easily in one fist and knelt to pat the head of the dogs crowded around his legs. He cooed to them and called them by name. His hand came back covered in a greasy mess of blood and flesh.

  He raised his head to squint into the dark and saw two masked men in dark outfits suddenly emerge from the gloom and into the pool of light. The dogs turned with deep growls growing from their chests as the strangers walked without hesitation toward them, their rifles spitting fire with a low staccato huffing sound rushing from the long black barrels. The dogs dropped to the ground by the young man who knew their names. The teenager was stone dead, dropped by three shots to the chest within a half second of spotting the strangers.

  Flame and Chili stepped over the last of the dogs and the corpse of the young man in the Los Tigres shirt. As he moved past, Flame put a round through the teen's head to make certain.

  The plan was for Manny and Pig to take Guest House Two first while Heath located and disabled the generator supplying electric to the remote compound. But that changed when the lights in Guest House Two came on. Flame and Chili moved up on Guest House Two first while the other three moved to Guest House One and the generator.

  Flame came through the front door first with Chili close behind. They swept the living room scanning through their scopes. No movement. No recumbent bodies. A big screen TV, couches grouped in a pit and lots of PlayStation and Xbox equipment along with a litter of bongs and sand-filled ashtrays loaded with butts. Someone painted a huge mural that covered one block wall from floor to ceiling. It was a cloaked female figure with a skull face and big tits. She was smoking a blunt the size of a Subway hoagie and gripping an AK 47 under the logo "Nina Blanca" in stylized 3D lettering. Chili found the switches for the outdoor lights and flipped them off.

  They moved deeper into the house where they found three adult men asleep on cots in a front bedroom. There were hand guns and a machete lying on a table by a blown-glass bong in the shape of a human skull. An AK-47 and a shotgun leaned in one corner. The SEALs slung their rifles and finished each sleeper with deep cuts across the throat that opened up windpipe, main vein and artery in one expert slash. They moved behind the men and yanked their heads off the pillow by the hair so the spray of blood showered away from them. No sound but the wet hiss of their victims' final exhalation and the brush of bare feet on the sheets as they kicked their last. The rank scent of fresh blood and expelled urine filled the room.

  Knife work is nasty but quiet if done right. The suppressed M4s would have made the job easier but after putting twenty or more rounds through each rifle the silencer tubes would be fouled and not as quiet as they were when the SEALs started. The basso cough of the rifles in the confined echo chamber of a room might be enough to awaken a house full of sleepers no matter how stoned they were.

  Flame gave a silent prayer that these gangbangers were into the grass rather than the meth tonight. All they needed was to show up on a night when the Pecadores decided to party on their own crystal product. The SEALs could have walked into a non-stop three day binge of tweaker hell. Not good. Crank made people unpredictable and hard to put down.

  The SEALs found two more rooms with sleeping gunmen and finished them before sweeping an empty bathroom and a kind of den with a pool table at its center.

  At the rear of the home they found a master bedroom and Flame killed the occupant while Chili watched the door. The heavyset man lay in a pond of his own blood to one side of the king sized bed and Flame leaned over him and touched the far side of the bed. The sheet was cool with a slick of sweat. Flame sniffed the air. A hint of flowers.

  He motioned for Chili to hold and crept across the room to flip open a closet. Only a few clothes on racks and boxes of cowboy boots. Some women's clothes and shoes. Folded jeans on shelves. Flame turned back to Chili and held up a single finger then made a circling motion with it.

  The pair exited the master bedroom and separated to make a circuit of the house.

  Chili was the first into the dark kitchen and scanning through his scope to see a sink full of dishes and a landscape of gleaming tequila and malt empties. From the corner of his eyes a dark shape brushed across the indicator lights on the front of a microwave. He turned as the room lit up flame colored from the bloom of a shotgun. The whole house filled with the roar of it and Chili fired a long sweeping burst back toward the source of light and noise. A second discharge from the shotgun and Chili felt plaster rain down on him from above. The flower-scented shooter firing high.

  He was effectively blinded, all night vision gone in the sudden nova of light from the muzzle blast. Chili aimed by memory of where the shotgun discharged and sent a three round burst across the room followed by another. A crash of glass and a shrill yip and a body hit the floor.

  "Here," was all Flame said as he entered the kitchen behind Chili stepping across the ruins of the kitchen with the M4 trained low.

  A young girl. Pretty. Couldn't be more than nineteen. She lay on the tiles in nothing but a black slip. Her head was attached to her body by only a few strands of flesh where two rounds from the M4 took her high in the chest. She stared at Chili from an unnatural angle with her one remaining eye. The other was nothing more than a black hole drilled in her face. By her manicured hand lay a Mossberg pump, smoke still rising from the barrel and open action. She had tiny roses carefully painted on each nail. That's what Chili would remember.

  Time for sorrow another day. If they lived. Guest House Two was cleared and they moved outside to cover the other three SEALs taking Guest House One.

  Shouts and replies from everywhere. The lights were coming on all over the hacienda including big groups of spotlights mounted on the roof of the big house and the garage. The kitchen lights were on and the SEALs were the cockroaches caught heading for the goodies. The shotgun blasts got everybody out of bed.

  Flame and Chili moved for the shadows between the guest houses and fired bursts blind toward the windows of the hacienda. It would buy them a few seconds.

  "Heath, where the fuck are you, bro?" Chili said as he reloaded the M4 with a fresh magazine and Flame watched the illuminated ground beyond them over open sights.

  As if in answer, there was a deep crump from somewhere behind the big steel garage building and a gush of burning fuel rose up into the night sky. With that, the compound went dark once again. The generator was out. The night belonged to the SEALs once more.

  Some tattooed men stood in a group in the entry yard before the hacienda building. They were in patterned sleep pants and shirtless. They were scanning about nervous and sightless with AKs in their fists. They would each fire a shot into the dark every few seconds which only served to maintain their night blindness. Chili was amused to see one of them was buck naked.

  Sighting through the scopes, Flame and Chili walked toward the group and gunned them down. The bangers never saw them coming. Chili heard a triple click on his PRC and turned his head to see two dark shapes, Manny and Pig, hustling toward the hacienda; the main house. That meant Guest House One was clear. Time for the main assault.

  There was the sound and flash of gunfire everywhere. The dark house was shimmering with the luminescence of gunfire from within. Firing blind. Probably firing at each other. The whole compound echoed with the signature freight train chug of AKs and the boom of shotguns. These assholes had no idea what was going on and weren't stopping to analyze the situation. Somebody was disturbing their sleep time and killing their buzz and they'd pump lead into the night to stop the strangers or chase them off.

  But SEALs don't stop. And they sure as shit don't run. The random fire from the gangbangers only served to give away their positions.

  Flame gave the open double doors of the big house a long burst, sweeping horizontal as he trotted over a broad veranda. Stained decorative glass panels blew inward. Chili walked behind and to one side of Flame to cover the windows across the front of the house. A flash and a shadow there and Chili fed rounds through windows covered with a lattice of wrought iron bars. Sparks flew from the bars. The sound of bursting glass panes followed.

  A pair of frag grenades through the empty window panels of the double doors. They clattered to a resting place inside and went off with a thunderous roar that shredded a room full of cheap whorehouse furniture and the gunmen unwisely using the sofas and settees for shelter. Flame and Chili shouldered through the riddled doors and into the smoke and chemical stink of the front room. They finished off the writhing bodies with double and triple taps.

  Over their PRCs, set for speaker mode, they heard Manny telling them to move back toward the kitchen area at the rear of the house and cover them while they swept the master suite. Heath said over the PRC that he'd fixed the garage and was moving on the house from the north.

  A muffled sound like a distant storm came from the garage building and a glow grew visible through the windows atop each garage door followed by a thunderous crack and two of the doors blew outward on a rolling wave of flame. The steel building was engulfed from within by an inferno growing from six vehicles parked inside. A reserve gasoline tank went up and large sections of the roof flew into the dark sky in a rapidly expanding nimbus of burning fuel. The burning fuel touched vehicles parked nearby and each sank to its rims as tires melted.

  Chili and Flame dove for the richly carpeted floor as the concussive blast from two hundred gallons of gasoline igniting struck the hacienda and blew in the windows facing the garage in a hurricane of flying glass and wood splinters.

  "Jesus, Heath," Flame said.

  "Went up like a motherfucker!" Heath crowed over the open line from their PRCs. The house and its surroundings were awash in the flickering bonfire where the garage once stood.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE KEEP

  They owned Oscar Benitez' casa.

  The team took the main house, moving room by room bringing down armed men. The initial attack was all of twenty seconds before the surviving gunmen within began withdrawing deeper into the big rambling house.

  It was a one-sided fight with the SEALs more awake, more sober and equipped with night vision gear along with the best combat training in the world. They could see their targets. The cartel gunmen were firing blind.

  But the SEALs weren't invincible and with all the lead flying the law of averages said that one of the gangbangers could get lucky. Still, the team moved toward the source of the gunfire rather than taking cover or retreating. They knew from hard won experience that the faster they got this over with the better for their own survival rate. Grab the advantage and press the advantage. Own the night.

  In a fleeting moment of quiet, Heath joined Flame and Chili as they crossed a great room toward a half wall separating an expansive home theater from a commercial kitchen. They kept up suppression fire to cover one another as they moved forward in a leapfrog pattern. They had to watch their footing as the floor was already littered with bodies, bottles, spent brass, DVD cases and drug gear. They marched over what had to be the biggest private collection of porno and action movies south of San Diego.

  Flame fell over a dog that charged in front of him and he hit the tiled floor hard. The dog was a burly mastiff but was only interested in getting as far from the flashing lights and noise as its paws would carry it. The dog skittered over blood-slick tiles to vanish into the kitchen area.

  Fire erupted from the dark in the kitchen. A three-foot spear of flame leapt toward the team and swept the home theater in a five-second volley. The basso hammering of the weapon was from a light machine gun. An M-60 or a Chinese made tripod weapon. The chemical composition of the air changed as it fired. Hell, the barometric pressure rose in the enclosed space as the big weapon exploded the night.

  Flame rolled to the cover of a leather sofa set. The wild fire coming from the dark crossed the floor turning the glass top of a coffee table into a burst of flying shards. He found himself in a puddle of something wet and rose to his knees to pour half a magazine of ammo through the plaster of the half wall.

  As a bunker, built of decorative tile, wall board and two by fours, the half wall sucked. A deep grunt and a heavy metallic thud answered the fusillade of shots. The team rushed the kitchen and Chili finished off a bearded man lying by a belt-fed Negev machine gun. He pumped five rounds into the man from point blank range. An Israeli-made Negev. An ugly gun only Pig could love.

  More noise toward the back wall of the kitchen. Heath fired high to suppress return fire as Flame and Chili charged forward with guns up. They reached a bank of refrigerated cabinets. Each put a three-round burst through a pair of swing doors and followed the rounds through to a mud room equipped with a washer, dryer and stall shower. A rear door lay open and they flanked it to look through at an angle. The door opened onto the pool veranda and they could see figures climbing over the curtain wall around the pool to get away. In the surreal light of their night vision lenses they could see the broad black smear of a blood trail on the wall.

  It was a rout. Who they didn't kill they ran off. Let them run. There was nowhere to go in the desert. They were out of any kind of cell range to whistle up reinforcements. And Heath had fixed their vehicles so they weren't riding out of here any time soon. And none of the runners saw or heard anything that wouldn't make them think they saw a hit by a rival outfit.

  "We're in the master suite," Manny said over the PRCs. "Secure the perimeter. Heath, I need you back here."

  Heath left the kitchen, changing magazines as he went.

  Chili sniffed at Flame.

  "Where the hell you been swimming, boy?"

  Flame sniffed at his sleeve.

  "Tequila," Flame said his nose wrinkled under the mask.

  "It's a panic room," Manny said.

  He stood with Pig before a heavy steel door set in a wall of a sprawling master bedroom complete with a puffy circular bed, mirror ceiling and wet bar. It looked like some retro Playboy fantasy except for the two dead men lying in sticky puddles in the thick ply carpet. One of them had lost control of his bowels when he died and the air in the room swam with the stink of it.