A false book shelf was pushed aside on runners to reveal the vault door hidden there in the wall.

  "But is anyone in there?" Heath said as he stepped over a body. The carpet was littered with spent brass. The green print-patterned walls were punched through with holes all over.

  "I heard it closing as I approached," Pig said. "Someone was shouting orders in here."

  "Think it's our target?" Heath said.

  "Yeah," Manny said. "A quick census didn't turn him up. He's alive and he's in there with God alone knows how many amigos and how much firepower."

  "And commo," Pig added. "He could be putting out a calling-all-compadres right now. A shout out to cartel nine-one-one. They have access to choppers."

  "We could take someone else," Heath said and gazed about the room. "Some of these dudes chose the better part of valor. We could find them easy enough hiding out in the scrub."

  "I'd rather stay with Plan A," Manny shook his head. "You still have any Semtex?"

  "Not enough to blow that monster door," Heath said and touched the polished steel door. "That's a good six inches of pierced steel. No seams. And we didn't bring a drill."

  "We go in through the back," Pig said. "My dad's business was robbed when I was a kid and they went though the wall behind the safe. The strongest part of a room like this is the door."

  Heath and Pig entered a walk-in closet that shared a wall with the panic room. They pulled down shelves of clothing and racks lined with shoes to reveal a blank wall papered in the same densely patterned green paper of the rest of the master suite. Heath ran his hands over the wall.

  "This is money," Heath said.

  "What's money?" Pig said.

  "The walls. They're papered with bills. Ones and fives. Real ones."

  "It's like a million dollars pasted to the walls," Pig looked around with wide eyes at the rows of cash lacquered to the walls. "So that's what it looks like."

  Heath stuck his combat knife into the plaster and they quickly cut away a section of wall to reveal wooden stud framework built flush to a rough cast steel wall welded together in segments. Heath used the Rynex butt of his M4 to slam one of the studs free at the bottom and tore it loose of the top plate to leave a yard wide section of the fortified wall exposed.

  "Yeah, this is our way in," Heath said and crouched to pull a brick of Semtex from his pack. "Find me something heavy I can lean up here to direct the charge. Look around the kitchen. About yay big." He held his hands a foot apart.

  "On it," Pig said and departed.

  Heath shaped the greasy clay of the explosives into ropey loops just like a preschool kid making a snake out of modeling clay. He stuck it to the bare steel wall in the shape of a circle ten inches across. It would stay put so long as the outer surface was sticky.

  Pig returned as Heath was finishing with a heavy cast iron skillet in his hands.

  "This do?" Pig asked.

  "Like it was custom," Heath said.

  Heath slid a fuse into the soft plastic and played out a length of det cord. He then took the skillet and secured it, with Pig's help, over the ring of plastic explosives with duct tape. Then he leaned the two by four he'd removed from the wall and wedged it tight against the bottom of the skillet. Heath would have preferred bolting it but had neither the tools nor the time. Even loosely affixed, the skillet would direct more of the blast to the metal wall rather than have it expend itself into the closet.

  The two SEALs evacuated the closet with Heath letting out loops of det cord as he went. With Manny's help they flipped up the huge round mattress and all three crouched beneath it. Heath cut the cord, secured it to an electric hand detonator.

  "Fire in the hole!" he called followed by a tremendous roar. The room was misted with plaster dust. The mirror panels rained from the ceiling. A fog of chemical smoke billowed from the closet doorway. The lattice work doors were turned to kindling by the blast and Heath knocked them aside to enter the closet. Coughing, he peered through the smoke using his night vision lenses to see a roughly circular tear punched in the steel wall where the charge was set. The plates were buckled and the seams either side were ripped. The whole wall was scorched black. The heavy skillet drove a yard-wide hole in the opposite wall when the blast launched it away at mach two.

  Heath pulled the ring from a flash bang grenade and pushed it through the hole into the fortified room beyond. The interior of the panic room would be filled with an uncomfortable toxic haze already. The flash bang would fill the confined space further with dense smoke and bright light and make it intolerable. He moved to one side and trained his M4 on the hole. He could hear screams and spastic coughing from within.

  In the bedroom, Manny and Pig flanked the steel door and waited with rifles covering the opening. They heard a faint sound of a wheel being manually turned within. The door flew open in a rush and a fresh tide of yellow smoke spilled out followed by three forms. One of them rushed blindly at Manny. A muscular man in underwear was weeping as he swung a golf club. A driver. Manny brought him down with a double tap to the chest and a third to the head as he dropped. A Mozambique hit.

  Pig manhandled the remaining two to the floor where they sobbed and coughed. A heavyset man wearing a tank top and a bare ass. The Tuna. Had to be. The other was a woman. Petite with blonde streaked hair dressed only in red lace panties. Her store-bought tits heaved as she gasped in panicky breaths. Both of them were bathed in a lather of greasy sweat. It got hot in that box when the generator went.

  "We'll take them both," Manny said. "Get her something to cover up."

  Heath and Manny flex-cuffed the pair with wrists behind their backs and pulled them upright. They were both gasping between wracking coughs. The faux blonde, who was probably pretty under better circumstances, vomited violently and Manny wiped her mouth with a towel to keep her from choking to death. Pig found her a large man's t-shirt and they slid it over her head to cover her breasts and pinned-back arms. The shirt would further restrain her.

  "We're gone," Manny said over the PRC and they frogwalked their catches from the million dollar bedroom.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  TRANSIT HONDURAS

  A salt-blasted Beechcraft twin engine dropped out of the overcast and trundled over the strip of hard pan two hundred yards east of the rancho. The plane came in dark; no running lights. The markings on wings and fuselage had been whitewashed out. The wind from the prop stirred up the dust which rose in a cloud to turn to a bronze haze in the filtered dawn light coming over the mountains.

  The SEALs rose from the gloom of spiny plants along the makeshift runway that the Pecadores maintained for their own planes. They sprayed it with herbicides to keep the growth down along its four hundred meter length.

  Heath carried the woman over his shoulder and Flame and Pig half walked and half carried Oscar out onto the field. Both prisoners had black cloth bags tied loose over their heads. The bags expanded and contracted with each excited breath; the girl from fear and Oscar from the unaccustomed exertion of moving his fat ass.

  Chili walked drag, covering the ground between the team and the hacienda. He fired three round groups over their back trail every few seconds. There were lots of free range gangbangers around. Plenty of them had hauled ass when the garage went up. Chili fired suppression in case any of them found fresh courage and tried to rescue el jefe.

  A thick cloud of oily black smoke rose into the sky and sometimes bloomed above the collection of buildings as though they were boiling from within. The flames that spread from the burning vehicles were reaching stores of ammo or meth chemicals. There were frequent thuds and pops followed by a whoosh of flame. Sucks to be a Pecadore today. Supply gone. Rides gone. Half your friends capped.

  The plane revved and turned about to taxi closer over the rutted ground. It was an older model; seventies maybe. It had the pitting and scalding along the front of its wings that every smuggling craft bore from flying too low over sea water or sandy scrublands. The team piled into the Beechcraft making it sag on its landing gear under the extra weight of their gear and prisoners. Blair Freeman spoke from the pilot's seat in a shout and told them they were heavy.

  The SEALs tossed all they could from their packs starting with water jugs, dirty clothes and ammo. The guns they'd keep. What they left behind wouldn't conflict with their cover as local hired guns. The King Air's capacity was seven people and they were pushing it with eight. At over 10,000 pounds total weight the math was tight. And Oscar the Tuna was a big boy.

  "The chiquita!" Heath hollered over the roar of the engines. "Lose her!"

  Flame unbuckled the skinny chick and cut her flexicuffs with a flick of his combat knife. He handed her off stumbling to Chili who shoved her out the open hatch where she landed with a yelp on her skinny ass in the sandy soil. Chili barked a laugh as she rolled on the ground in the stiff gust from the props. She worked the t-shirt off over her head and ran blind away from the noise; topless and with the black sack still over her head.

  "That's it!" Manny called as he belted into the co-pilot's seat. "Wheels up before anyone new shows!"

  There was a radio set in the panic room and a pair of satellite phones. Pecadores reinforcements could be a day away or an hour. They needed to get airborne and over the horizon in a hurry.

  Blair nodded and threw the levers forward and the plane picked up speed as the rest of the team secured their remaining prisoner into a seat. They pulled off masks and body armor and belted themselves in. Pig was hauling the cabin door closed as the wheels left the ground. They held their breath as they skimmed over cacti and past some flowering segura towers level with the windows and close enough to reach out and touch. Blair gunned the engines hard and the propellers flared and the wind screamed over the wings and they climbed a sloping hill to the north. If he hadn't raised the gear when he did the wheels would have touched in a few places as they clawed through the air for the top of the rise.

  Then it was all blue sky and they made a gradual bank southward as Blair leveled the nose a bit but kept the Beechcraft in a steady climb for the next thirty minutes.

  They were in Honduras within four hours.

  They touched down at another hard pack dirt airstrip. This one was a trickier landing on a plateau atop a jungled ridgetop. Blair was a solid hand at the stick and brought them down without too many bruises. The SEALs immediately boarded a second plane, a commercial charter under contract to the agency through an oil exploration company friendly to American security interests in the region. The team was bound back for Mazatlan to await further developments.

  Blair was to follow once he'd briefed the interrogators on site but wound up staying two days because Oscar Benitez talked and talked and talked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A CELLAR IN HONDURAS

  The Tuna shared a cautionary tale that could serve as a warning to gangsters everywhere. To hear him tell it, Tony Montana could have lived to an old age if he'd only followed Oscar Benitez advice; something Oscar loudly offered to his eighty-inch Sony TV each time he watched Scarface on the Blu-ray.

  He was one of the Pecadores, it was true. But he was happy with his little corner of the plaza. He had no interest in being a godfather because godfathers got whacked. He used the word "whacked." Oscar's rural Mexican Spanish was sprinkled with all kinds of terms he learned watching the Godfather movies and The Sopranos. He even admitted to spending hours practicing the signature scowls of DeNiro and Pacino.

  The guy was a charmer for a murdering sociopath.

  Another of his hard and fast rules of survival was never using his own product. He drank his share of tequila and obviously wolfed frijoles by the plateful but never messed with the shit cooked up in the dozens of trailers and breeze block hovels hidden the shadows of canons for miles all around his stronghold at Plaza del Cool.

  Oscar had no idea who he was telling all of this to. It didn't matter in the end. His captors spoke good Spanish but moved like anglos. His interrogators in this small, cool cellar room spoke mannered Español as well but they weren't fooling him. He knew they weren't a rival cartel so survival was still an option for him. A deal could be made.

  But he'd have spilled his guts to rival gangbangers too. He was no hero. He'd talk in the end. Everyone talked in the end. Why go through a bunch of ugly shit just to wind up in the same place? He'd been on the other side of the table. And he was not so mannered and polite as these men who were sharing Cokes and cigarettes and laughing. When he asked the questions he made sure the people he was curious about were strapped down to the table, not seated at it. Others would hurt them while Oscar asked and asked and asked. "Where is my money?" "Where is my dope?" "Who did you betray me to?" These were usually young gunhands or smugglers or rivals. Sometimes cops. And, because they were young maybe, they all went out macho until just before the very end when they cried out for their mama or for Jesus and wept and pissed blood. No, that was not for the Tuna.

  It turned out the Pecadores Diez was a pretty loose outfit. They were cousins, second and even third cousins, and associated with one another out of convenience. If Oscar had business in Culiacan or Mazatlan, like a guy he was pissed at or who'd cheated him, he'd call his cousins there and they'd take care of the guy with guns, grenades or a machete. If he needed pseudo they'd find it at a good price and not screw him too much. If he needed goods run north then other cousins handled that. Even cousins took a pinch but kept it within reason. It was acceptable business practice and let him stay up in his hacienda with his TV and his women.

  One hand washes the other so Oscar made his hacienda available for unauthorized burials. There were hundreds of unmarked graves dotted over the hills and in the washes around his house. He could lead his questioners to some of them if they wanted.

  He kept a block-walled hut a discrete distance from his home. Inside was a butcher table, chain saws, bone saws, bolt cutters and barrels of acid; whatever a working disposal unit might need to make unwanted competitors, snooping journalists or greedy police vanish from the face of the planet. Some of his former girlfriends visited the hut when they got too bitchy.

  The questioners in the cellar really didn't need to ask a lot of questions. Oscar would launch into detailed anecdotes with just a prod. Names, places and even dates (if he could remember them) would spill from him as they shared ice cold bottles of Mexican Coca-Cola from a tub under the table where they had Oscar chained to a bolt ring. He'd even describe what everyone was wearing.

  While all of his stories and confessions and bragging were of possible interest to other law enforcement agencies, the questioners had a very specific area of curiosity.

  "What about the pseudo?" one of the questioners asked. "Do you get it bulk in canisters or other means?"

  "Sometimes in drums," Oscar said. "Someone will know someone up in Texas and a drum will go missing. That is when it is easy and we can cook crystal by the kilo."

  "And when you can't?"

  "We get it in pills. You know, cold medicine. Allergy pills. Gabachos have all these allergies you know. It is because they don't eat right."

  "The pills come from Texas?" the questioner interrupted gently before the Tuna went off on another tangent.

  "All over," Oscar said. "Sometimes from jobbers. They rob drug stores up north and bring it down. Not so reliable. Then sometime we can get it from importers in case lots."

  "Imported from where?"

  "China sometimes. Or the Dutch. It comes up from Caracas. Cheap stuff. But a pain in the ass to unpack. We have gummers to crush the pills to dust."

  "Anywhere else?"

  "Yes. My cousin Esteban has a contact who brings us Egyptian pills. I only know because I asked him when a barrel of pills came through El Valle with scribble writing on them."

  "And who did Esteban buy the pills from?" the questioner kept his voice flat with disinterest.

  "I don't know the guy's name," Oscar said after a pull on a Coke. "He called him 'the Arab.'"

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A RIDE IN THE SUN

  Plaza del Cool was cool no more.

  The sun rose on a smoldering graveyard. It was warming up and already the flies swarmed over every once-living surface.

  There were twenty-one dead Pecadores. All stone cold dead. Not one wounded. Like death stalked the rancho taking souls and leaving the living with hardly a scratch.

  The handful of dazed survivors were all low level gun hands and gofers. The jefe was gone, taken away by the masked men in the night. His bonita told them of the plane and how they threw her off just before take-off.

  The men, boys really, just stood looking at her breasts as she screamed at them to do something. Those men could come back and kill the rest of them. The jefe had been unable to reach anyone on the radio from the panic room. The masked men shot the hell out of the radio and the satellite phones before leaving. There was no help coming for them.

  They all had cell phones but were far from a cell tower. After a hurried council over beers in the bullet-riddled kitchen of the hacienda they picked the two youngest among them to take horses and ride to where there were enough bars on their cells to call one of the older cousins.

  This decision only came after shrill nagging from the jefe's whore. The men sucked on beers and eyed her hungrily and remembered those glorious Hollywood boobs now hidden under the loose-fitting man's shirt she now hugged close in the morning chill. Her nipples stood up under the linen and only when her shouting became louder did they awaken as one from a trance. They all shared a silent, urgent desire to bend her over the kitchen table and give her reason for the all the noise she was making. But fear of the Tuna, even though his absence was most probably permanent, tamped down their desire. If he did manage to come back their lives would not be worth living if they touched his streaked blonde puta without his permission.

  The days of the vaquero were long gone. The purebred Paso Finos in the stables were here for the amusement of the Tuna's visiting lady friends. Two reluctant candidates managed, with some difficulty, to get two terrified animals saddled and rode them away from the rancho. Their cousins found much humor at this half-assed rodeo. The smoke in the air and the heavy stench of blood from dogs and men made the ponies crazy with fear; the whites of their eyes showing all around. One nino was thrown against the wall of the stall while securing the cinch. The other received a wicked bite on the forearm as he bridled his mount. Once in the saddle they leaned down close and gripped the pommel as the ponies bolted away at a full gallop in their eagerness to escape the charnel house behind them. Their cousins hooted and shouted encouragement and rude insults as the two young men painfully bounced in the saddle and disappeared across the rough ground to the west.