Bio-Strike

countless overlapping footprints in the earthen floor, some of them fresh, others little more than faded scuffings that were probably generations older than he was.

Then the conical beam glanced off a heap of scattered rubble that Guillermo recognized as a trail marker of sorts. He was nearing the last portion of the underground march. In another fifty, sixty yards, the tunnel would ascend to its exit on the western side of the arroyo, where Lucio’s men would await him with their transport vehicles. Guillermo would have a short rest as they loaded up, and then it would be back into the hole for the return trip with the villagers and forzadores, tiring work for the fittest of men — and the growing paunch above his belt was conspicuous evidence he had never been especially good at self-maintenance.

Guillermo continued on for another fifteen minutes or so before the ground began to rise, and the tunnel’s stagnant atmosphere was relieved by a stream of fresh air from outside. Soon afterward, he noticed a wash of spectral moonlight through the break in the rock face that opened into the gully.

He increased his pace despite his weariness, impatient to reach it.

* * *

Felix Quiros had been patient. Resisting any impulse to act prematurely, he had waited for several breathless moments after Guillermo appeared from the tunnel’s entrance, waited until the long line of mules had filed into the arroyo behind the stupid fucking cabron, even waited until all but a few of the Salazar forzadores had emerged — which was to say, until he was positive that the entire shipment of heroin had been carried out — before he reached a hand down to the radio detonator’s transmitter unit on the ledge beside him.

Then, with a quick tug on its antenna to be certain it was fully extended, he flipped the device’s firing switch.

Inside the tunnel, its receiver sent a jolt of current through the wires leading to the multiple TNT satchel charges that Quiros and his men had planted along the final yards of the passage, covering them from sight with stones and loose earth.

The explosion was virtually instantaneous. It clapped and rolled through the arroyo, shaking its very walls, a fantastic claw of flame and smoke lashing from the tunnel’s entrance. Debris pelted from the spiky edges of the fireball like meteors, buffeting the forzadores who had been last to exit the tunnel as its sides came tumbling down in a cascade of blasted rubble, slamming some to the ground.

Felix aimed his bullpup at Guillermo and opened up on him, taking him out with a rapid volley that knocked him onto his back, his legs jerking and kicking, his hands on his spurting chest. Felix poured several more rounds into him and, when he finally stopped moving, began to rake the bottom of the gully with fire, raising little geysers of sand and pebbles into the air, fanning his weapon from side to side even as his men did the same from their own perches. Screaming in pain and terror, the helpless young mules were cut down where they stood, some crawling on the ground under their bulky loads in futile attempts to reach cover.

Meanwhile, the handful of stunned forzadores who remained on their feet had begun blindly triggering their own weapons at the outcrops, but they were easy, exposed targets for the scissoring barrage from the ambush positions.

The men on the slopes continued to lay down fire until all movement in the gully had ceased. Paused in the echoing, smoking stillness. Reloaded. And on Felix’s signal chopped out another sustained hail of bullets, emptying their magazines into the sprawled bodies below, making sure every one of them had been left a corpse.

The slaughter had taken less then ten minutes from beginning to end.

Lathrop kept recording for a while longer, wanting to catch a scene of Felix and his men as they descended into the arroyo for the scag. They worked fast, cutting the straps of the dead couriers’ bundles with folding knives, then tearing them from their backs and gathering them into a single huge mound. While this was going on, a few of Felix’s hombres split off from the rest and went scrambling toward the north end of the gulch, presumably to bring the vehicles they’d use to haul away their score.

Lathrop considered waiting for them to return, maybe taking a shot of them in the process of loading up, but rejected the idea almost immediately. He’d got Felix hands down for the killings and the snatch, got what he needed from A to Z. Why push the envelope? Sometimes there was a temptation to make too much of a game out of things. He knew his weaknesses and had to be careful about giving in to them. No way a guy in his position could afford that.

Not unless he wanted to join Guillermo and those other victims who’d come out of the tunnel with him in the great hereafter.

Carefully detaching the night scope from his camcorder, Lathrop put both back into their cases, shouldered his weapons, and silently retreated into the darkness.

FIVE

VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 2, 2001

“Any success convincing lang to pay for his chits?” Nimec asked, and held up his punch mitt.

“You’re starting to sound like Roger.” Megan threw an off-balance left jab that barely nicked the padded leather.

“Shit,” she muttered, winded. Her face was glistening with perspiration.

“Let’s go, keep your rhythm.”

“We’ve been at this for almost an hour, might be a good time to call it quits—”

“Uh-uh.”

“Pete, I’m bushed. It isn’t coming together for me this morning, and I still have to get showered for work —”

“What I hear, you were tired in Kaliningrad when you took down an armed assailant. Way before you started these lessons.”

“I had no choice then.”

“You don’t now, either,” he said, sidestepping to the right. “Breathe deep. And stay on me!”

Megan opened her mouth and swooped in some air. Keeping her left foot in front of her right, she pivoted toward him and took another shot. It landed more solidly, closer to the white target dot in the center of the mitt.

“Better,” he said. “Again.”

Her fist snapped out, caught the edge of the dot.

“Again! Keep that arm in line with your lead foot!”

Her next punch was precisely on the spot.

“Good,” Nimec said. He stepped in closer, pressing her, flicking the mitt past the side of her cheek. “Cover up, I could’ve nailed you right there. And what do you mean ‘like Roger’?”

Megan raised her arms, tucked her chin low to her collarbone. Her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, she was wearing a white sweatband around her head, a white tank top with an Everlast logo in front, black bike shorts, and Adidas sneakers.

“I mean that you’re both assuming Bob feels he owes us,” she said.

Bob, Nimec thought.

“Doesn’t he?”

“I think he thinks we’re even.”

“With regard to what? The time we saved a nuclear sub from being hijacked with the President aboard? Or found out who did the Times Square bombing after his people got steered down the garden path?”

Megan let his question ride, bouncing on her knees to stoke her energy. They were in a regulation fight ring on the top level of his San Jose triplex condominium, the entire floor a sprawling rec/training facility that included, in addition to the professionally equipped boxing gym, a martial arts dojo, a soundproofed firing range, and an accurate-down-to-the-reek-of-cigarette-butts-awash-in-beer reproduction of the South Philadelphia pool hall where the blush of youthful innocence was slapped off Nimec’s cheeks by the harsh red glare of neons when he was fourteen or so. Megan had never spoken to him about that period of his life at any length, never gotten the gist of