House of Acerbi

the ringing in her ears and the pain in her ankle, she appeared to be unharmed. As if in a dream, she stood and looked around. The hangar was gone, replaced instead by pieces of burning metal that littered the concrete for hundreds of yards in every direction.

Aimlessly seeking some kind of shelter away from all the fire and heat, she began hobbling across the tarmac toward the desert path that led to Acerbi’s hacienda. Squinting her eyes against the smoke, she stepped over things she didn’t recognize, winding her way past smoking pieces of jagged metal until she tripped over something soft.

In the flickering light from the flames, she looked down at her feet and saw the open, staring eyes of Alan Thorn. She screamed and began to back away, only to step on another mangled body just as a second explosion rocked the hilltop above her. Dana continued to scream, but her screams went unheard as she held her hands over her ears and closed her eyes just as a second fighter plane swooped by overhead. When she finally looked up, the hilltop where the hacienda had stood was enveloped in flames.

Now, entering the first stages of shock and overcome by pain and fear, Dana dropped to the ground and placed her head against the warm concrete. Peering out across a landscape of carnage, she felt herself drifting, as though she was floating just above her physical body. Slowly, she closed her eyes and waited-waited for the end.

CHAPTER 61

Immediately after the fighters had destroyed the hangar and the hacienda, six commandos from Israeli Team 5 rounded the hill below the smoldering remains of Acerbi’s house just as a black Humvee rolled to a stop a hundred yards in front of them. In one fluid motion, the commandos dropped to the ground and watched as two of Acerbi’s men jumped from the vehicle and headed toward a camouflaged bunker embedded in the base of the hill. After pulling the netting aside, the men lifted a steel door set at a forty-five-degree angle into the concrete, allowing the red lighting from inside to spill out across the warm desert sand in a diagonal line.

One of the men then returned to the vehicle and opened a door. To their amazement, the Israelis saw the unmistakable figure of Rene Acerbi step from the back of the Humvee. He paused and looked up at the sky for a moment before walking through the open doorway and disappearing downward, as if he had descended a stairway. The Team 5 soldiers exchanged excited glances. Had they just stumbled on Acerbi’s shelter? They called in their position and watched.

Without bothering to recover the bunker with the camouflage netting, Acerbi’s men closed the door and drove away. Instantly, the Israeli soldiers were on their feet. Special Forces teams are trained to work independently and take the initiative, and due to the importance of their quarry, they were not about to wait for orders to proceed.

After trying the door and finding that it was locked from the inside, a hefty sergeant attached two small explosive charges to the hinges and backed away. Seconds later, the smoking metal door lay twisted next to the concrete bunker as the men scrambled down the stairway inside. At the bottom of the stairs, the men found themselves standing at the end of a long corridor bathed in red light. It seemed to run on forever under the hill where Acerbi’s hacienda had once stood.

They made a quick check for laser trip beams and other traps before moving cautiously down the long corridor, passing several locked doors and an intersecting corridor that seemed to disappear into infinity in both directions. Acerbi could be anywhere!

Moving farther into the maze, they were surprised by two of Acerbi’s men who charged from behind one of the doors and began firing their weapons. Acerbi’s men were immediately dropped by the advancing Israelis, who were by now becoming spooked by the immense size of the vast underground labyrinth they had just entered.

Suddenly, the lead commando raised his hand and pointed down to the floor. Beneath a thick glass lid that was sealed shut, a large C4 explosive charge was wired to a timer with a red blinking light, and it was counting down.

“Run!”

The commandos turned and began running back the way they had come until they came to a doorway that had been locked but now stood open. Beyond the door was an empty room that contained another blinking red light on top of an explosive charge. The entire place was wired to blow! Time seemed to slow as the men began to run again. Up ahead, they could see the stairway they had descended, but it seemed like they would never reach it in their dream-like race. In their minds, they were already imagining the blast that would soon tear them apart. Run! The stairway was just up ahead, but their boots felt like they were made of lead. Safety was only a few hundred yards away!

The men practically flung themselves toward the stairs and willed themselves upward and out through the open doorway. They kept running. They were desperately trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Acerbi’s underground web when a huge explosion ripped the ground beneath their feet, hurling them forward through the air. The earth around them moved in a visual wave that carried a wall of sound and shock outward from the center of the explosion and littered the surrounding desert with falling dirt and burning debris.

The stunned soldiers lay on the ground, coughing in the thick dust before finally lifting themselves up, each man looking into the eyes of the others as they stood among the dwindling remnants of the swirling maelstrom. Listening to the staccato bursts of surprised shouts coming over their radios, it was obvious that the other teams in the area had been equally stunned by the huge explosion.

In the distance, sporadic gunfire continued to echo across the ranch until finally, an eerie silence began to settle over the desert. Looking back at the smoke coming from the gaping hole in the ground, the Israeli soldiers who had just narrowly escaped death were beginning to feel that something wasn’t quite right. The way in which events had unfolded seemed strange to them, but stranger still was a feeling that Acerbi’s actions had been planned. It was as though he had never intended to win-that he had staged the entire thing just to lure them in close so that they could witness an orgy of self-destruction-but for what possible reason? Shaking the dust from their clothes, they walked to the edge of the giant crater and peered down into what was left of an immense underground web of interconnecting tunnels. If Acerbi was still down there, he was no longer among the living.

By now, the rising sun cast a pale orange light over the desert. Sitting in the sand next to the crashed helicopter, Lev Wasserman watched the smoke of battle drift over the ranch, and as the sun crept higher, they could see hundreds of bodies littering the desert floor between the tall hill and the highway. It reminded him of a painting he had once seen in San Antonio, Texas, at the Alamo, where bodies from both sides lay frozen in death around the front door of the old mission church.

It appeared that Acerbi’s remaining forces were now fleeing across the desert behind the Mexican drug dealers, who had wisely jumped into their SUVs and sped away the moment they saw the first F-15 streak by overhead.

Standing next to Lev, Ben keyed his radio and called the teams in the field. “Any sign of Acerbi?”

“No one’s seen him since he disappeared underground in the area that exploded,” the Team 5 leader radioed back. “Unless he got out somehow, he’s finished.”

Leo and Lev exchanged glances. It couldn’t be that easy … could it? The worn phrase of having nine lives came to mind, but no one wanted to be the first to say it.

“Any prisoners?”

“Just one … a female. She was lying next to the hangar. It looks like she’s the only survivor. The others inside weren’t so lucky.”

A knot began to form in Lev’s stomach as he took the radio from Ben. “Did you say others?”

“Yes, sir … looks like civilians. As near as we can tell, there were about forty to fifty of them in there, but the condition of the bodies makes it kind of hard to tell.”

Lev looked at Ben with an expression of total disbelief. What the hell was Acerbi up to?

“Tell your men to bring the woman to us. We need to speak to her … now.”