Target Engaged

Chapter 9-1

9

Kyle hung in the darkness above the General’s hacienda fifty meters of the way down on a black, nine-millimeter climbing line. His feet were braced against the cliff wall a meter above where the floodlights shone down into the compound. He would be invisible here to anyone looking up from below, or well to the side. The baddies should have had defensive lights that shone up the cliff, but they weren’t paranoid enough.

Should have been; Delta was coming.

He locked his descender to hold him in place and slid his MSG90 sniper rifle free. Through the scope, he could see that Carla hung in a position similar to his own on the far side of the curve, with Richie close by. Duane was midway between them and higher up the cliff. Chad was their high reserve, still at the cliff top eighty meters above.

Everyone except Carla had pulled up the black bandanna they wore about their necks. The bandannas had been in the kit provided by the CIA. On the front of them were printed the lower half of a white skull with fangs and a pair of spread-eagle wings down by the throat. It was the symbol of the lethal Los Antrax, the elite kill squad of the Sinaloa Mexican drug cartel reportedly run by Claudia Ochoa Felix, the Empress of Antrax.

Sinaloa hadn’t been in Venezuela as far as anyone knew, but the woman was hot in the news as the Kim Kardashian of the Mexican cartels. She had similar looks to her Hollywood counterpart and also boasted a massive social media presence. She kept a high lifestyle, a constant circle of armed guards, and a custom-made hot-pink AK-47 that she was reputedly exceptionally skilled with. Rumors alone, of her hitting a site deep in Venezuela would certainly stir things up.

The fact that intelligence pointed to the much quieter and less visible sisters Luisa Marie and Marisol Torres as being the actual Empresses of Sinaloa and Antrax didn’t matter for Delta’s purposes; the news and hype is what they were leveraging. And the Empress of Antrax was a lethal force, no matter which woman actually held the reins.

The CIA was leaving the three women alone because one of the greatest interruptions to the flow of drugs through Mexico had been the drug war between the Mexican cartels themselves. The Delta team was here to see if they could spread that type of confusion into Venezuela. If the cartels were busy killing each other, they’d be spending less time killing Americans with their drugs.

Kyle checked his watch and eyed the patrols. They still had five minutes before 0200. It was risky to hang here, but since General Vasquez was military, they were counting on a fairly standard changing of the guard at two.

As they’d anticipated, he ran a tight ship. Right at the hour, six armed soldiers came out of a room near the front gate. They were still yawning and scratching, which meant that was the barracks.

Carla slid to the ground, down into the darkest corner of the compound, and then came out moving fast. Her hair was tousled, which hadn’t been Kyle’s doing (or maybe it had—it was difficult to remember details like that when she was in his arms), and her shirt was still mostly undone, which he’d certainly enjoyed. Her black bandanna hung rumpled at her throat. She looked exactly as if she’d crawled out of someone’s bed.

She strode into the middle of the compound as if she belonged. A lot of the guards stopped to admire her passage across the flagstone courtyard but, as he’d guessed, not a single hand reached for a weapon. Her hips swayed and her hair masked her face, in effect forcing the men’s attention downward. That she wore all those weapons only added to the wet-dream fantasy she was drawing for them.

She was inside the walls, so she must belong. Right?

No way, guys.

Carla timed her walk exactly per his plan.

He watched her stride to the barracks entry at the point farthest from both the hacienda and the cliff wall. She arriaved at exactly the same moment that the six now-wide-awake soldiers reached the men they were replacing. Instead of six men manning the broad arc of the hacienda’s perimeter walls, there were now twelve.

And all twelve were eyeing the hot babe walking through the middle of their compound at two in the morning, not watching for an attack over the walls or checking on each other.

Like ducks perched in a neat row and facing away from the rest of the team.

Kyle and the other three Delta began dropping the teams from the rear as the guards gawked. Two shots to the head each. He took out the left side of the closest pair, while Duane took the right. Richie and Chad The Reaper began laying them down in a neat line from the other end of duck row. From the top of the cliff, these were still short-range shots for their sniper rifles. Since everyone was looking toward Carla’s approach to the front gate barracks, those still alive didn’t see that death was stalking behind them along the walls until it was too late.

The last pair of guards closest by the front gate had time to turn and startle at their dead companions before they too dropped to the ground with a pair of bullets where their brains used to be.

The quiet spit of Delta’s suppressed weapons hadn’t woken anyone. Everyone changed out magazines though they weren’t empty.

While they were shooting, Carla had entered the barracks. The next few seconds were going to affect their next steps.

There was a long silence, at least ten heartbeats. Had Carla faced overwhelming odds, she’d have solved it with a grenade. Instead, she stepped out of the barracks doorway, dropped a magazine out of both of her silenced Glock 17 handguns, and reloaded them with fresh magazines from her bandolier. She jammed the two magazines of foreign hardware into her back pocket.

The guards weren’t the only ones having wet-dream fantasies about this warrior woman. She was like a sucker punch to Kyle’s hormones every time he saw her. And when she did something like that… Hollywood never had it so good, because Sergeant Carla Anderson was the real deal.

Kyle and Richie slid to the ground, heading toward the main building that intel had identified as the General’s most likely personal residence. It was a grand, two-story affair at the deepest curve of the cliff at the center of the compound. Duane kicked off the cliff face to swing out from the rock. He timed it perfectly to land on a second-story balcony.

At that moment, the compound’s lights went out. Carla must have stumbled on the generator that they’d been unable to locate from above. Darkness only improved their advantage.

Kyle pulled down his NVGs and studied the one side of the building they hadn’t been able to observe from above. Heavy front door, enough so that it might be fortified and guarded. But there were low windows to the sides.

There was a shout from the far side of the compound, but it didn’t last long. Chad took care of it from on high.

It was a warm night and Kyle had observed during their high reconnaissance that one of the windows was open. He dove through it and rolled to his feet in a living room with a layout so similar to the shoot room they’d cleared twenty-four hours earlier that it was actually disorienting.

The man sleeping beside the door and cradling an Uzi never woke as Kyle ended his dreams. Richie came in from clearing the other side of the first floor.

Even in the green tones of the night vision, the opulence of the room was still fantastic. Marble floors covered with thick rugs now padded their footsteps. Large comfortable chairs, a dining table fit for feeding twenty. A huge marble fireplace that had to be strictly for show in this tropical country. Chandeliers of gold and crystal.

Art on the walls that his night gear couldn’t resolve, but he’d wager was equally astonishing.

An old lady came out of a back doorway, wrapping a scarf over her head as she did so. She gasped but didn’t scream, so he whispered to her softly, “Silencio, señora.”

Showing she was a smart woman, she nodded several times and then moved backward through the door she’d entered from.

He followed.

It was a long and narrow kitchen. Whatever money the General had invested elsewhere, he hadn’t bothered here. It was a rough and rude space with only the soft hum of a modern refrigerator breaking a scene that could have easily served during the time of the conquistadors.

The woman returned to a mattress in the kitchen corner and sat on it, doing her best to mask three sleeping children, the oldest a girl in her early teens. No man, no weapons. The cook and her family. Kyle held his finger to his lips, which she’d see by the light of the green spill-over from his night vision. Her nod confirmed her lack of desire to have any part in what was about to happen.

She would also give a useful report about the man with the white skull mask, so it was advantageous to let her go.

Returning to the living room, Kyle followed close behind Richie, who was already well up the stairs—paused and waiting for his partner. They moved ahead in a one-and-one cover formation.

Six doors, six bedrooms.

The first two were empty.

The next had a rifle propped inside the door and an older man in the bed with a young girl—younger than the teen sleeping behind the cautious cook. From the briefing materials they’d studied during the flight from Miami to the drop zone, he recognized the man as Major Gonzales, the General’s chief assistant. He was a vicious assassin who had helped the General control whole sectors of the military through intimidation and hostage-taking among officials’ families. The man woke to a gag entering his mouth and zip ties snapping around his wrists.

The girl whimpered but didn’t cry out.

Richie jerked the man from the bed to the floor and then bound his ankles.

Kyle scanned the room for other weapons and caught the girl sliding her hand under the pillow. The move was too surreptitious.

Kyle didn’t think…didn’t have time to…didn’t need to.

His training kicked in and he shot her twice between her small breasts and once between the eyes. Her body’s final flinch pulled a long-barreled, stainless-steel Smith & Wesson 686 revolver into plain view. The major’s damn gun was bigger than she was.

Shit!

He knocked the weapon clear of her dead hand, then kicked Major Gonzales in the kidneys on his way back to the hall, receiving a satisfying grunt despite the gag.

Duane entered through the balcony door and held up two fingers. A pair of hidden guards outside, no longer a problem.

As the three of them were moving back into the hall, Kyle heard the first whine of the helicopter starting up and then the climbing cry of the engines.

Carla was still on the move, and that would draw all attention her way.

Two more empty rooms and then the door at the end of the hall. Locked, of course. And probably not in a way that could be simply kicked in. He flagged Duane forward.

When Kyle saw the size of the breaching charge Duane was setting up, he knew the door was worse than he’d thought. General Carlos Vasquez was a man who didn’t sleep comfortably at night.

Kyle tapped Duane’s shoulder and signaled that he and Richie were going in from the outside. They went back down the hall and entered rooms to either side. In moments, he was out on the balcony that encircled the upper story. He’d chosen the side closer to the helo.

He couldn’t see Carla, but he could hear her exhorting the pilots to action.

“El Jefe!” she kept screaming at them. The Chief! She would look as if she’d come from his bedroom with urgent orders for the General’s men to get the helicopter.

As he arrived to one side of the long line of French doors and windows that lined the balcony for the whole length of the master suite, a spate of loud gunfire sounded from inside, shattering the glass. With his panicked shots, the General had given them his exact location.