Devil's Playground. Don Pendleton

deck. She stayed prone, rolling onto her belly so that she could take aim with the G3 rifle at any newcomers.

      The two mystery men suddenly entered the fray, Uzi submachine guns blazing as they ambushed the marauding assassins. Raking fingers of 9 mm gunfire laced into the assassins with brutal efficiency as Asado discarded her empty G3 and reloaded her CombatMaster. Kneeling behind a stone planter, she fired three shots into a rifle-armed soldier, striking him in the upper chest and stopping him cold. Collarbone and ribs shattered by 230-grain bullets, his thoracic cavity was suddenly filled with rocketing shrapnel of deformed hollow-point rounds and bone splinters. Blood vomited from the dying man’s lips as he collapsed limply to the ground.

      Asado pivoted, looking for more targets when she saw Anibella Brujillo, armed with a gleaming, nickel-plated pistol, fire a shot into a dying assassin’s face as she stood over him. Asado recognized the pistol as belonging to Montero, one of the protection team. Montero was sprawled on the pool deck, most of his face missing and his brains forming a fan around the cavern that used to be his skull. Physical pain speared through Asado’s chest at the sight of her murdered comrade.

      Anibella fired two more shots, taking a fleeing rifleman between the shoulder blades, and she spit a curse. “Culo.”

      Rosa Asado stood, glaring at Anibella Brujillo.

      “You survived?” Brujillo asked.

      “No thanks to the gangsters on your payroll,” Asado answered, nodding toward the Uzi-armed gunmen who were escaping over the fence.

      “My dear, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Anibella stated. “All I see are two killers you allowed to escape.”

      Asado clamped her teeth in her lower lip to restrain the urge to throttle the woman. She thumbed the safety up on her CombatMaster. “I don’t know what this is all about, but I’m certain it has something to do with your links to those gangsters.”

      Anibella shook her head. “They were trying to murder me, because my husband is working hard to bring down the Juarez Cartel. This is proof that we are on the right track.”

      Asado took a deep breath and looked around. Except for Anibella, she was the only one standing. The blond American singer was facedown in a puddle of blood. However, looking at the wounds in the young woman’s back, she could tell that they were too neat to have been made by a G3’s rifle slug. They looked more like the bullets from a .38 Super, just like the one that Brujillo held.

      Asado looked up to see the silvery muzzle of Montero’s 1911 pistol leveled at her. A flower of fire appeared, and in that dying moment Rosa thought of her twin sister, Blanca, and how she’d never see her again.

      A 125-grain slug smashed into her forehead and puffed out the wet tresses at the back of her skull.

      The bodyguard collapsed in a jumble of limbs, eyes bulging in their sockets, staring vacantly at the clear skies of the Acapulco paradise.

      “OH, SAINT MARTHA,” Anibella Brujillo whispered, calling the goddess of death, Santa Muerte, by her nickname. “What a waste of a good scapegoat.”

      She flipped the nickel-plated 1911 back to Montero’s side.

      The two Uzi-packers were gangsters, but they were also Anibella’s devotees. As the high priestess of the Santa Muerte cult in the state, she was never far from the protection of her flock members. She was a shepherdess not of sheep, but of Mexican wolves, predators who infested the drug gangs and lorded over neighborhoods.

      It would take some time for the authorities to arrive, but she already had her followers acting on her plans to implicate Rosa Asado as the real perpetrator of this recent attack.

      The Juarez Cartel was stepping up its aggression, and Asado had been correct. The drug lords were seeking to eliminate her not because her husband was a crusading politician, but because she was the heart and soul of the Santa Muerte cult conquering the heroin trade in Acapulco.

      Anibella’s brow furrowed. She would deflect attention for now, but the Juarez Cartel was still not going to give up so easily. A full paramilitary assault was only one sign of the extremes that Juarez was willing to go to, to eliminate her and the cult.

      She needed an advantage over one of the most tenacious and lethal drug gangs in Mexico. The Mexican president had dropped a hint to her husband. A few years back, when the new president was under assault from multiple factions, an American operative had been assigned to assist him against drug gangs and military officers seeking to stage a coup.

      This lone man was like an army unto himself. Anibella had heard rumors of a more recent savage conflict between Colombian cartels and the Hong Kong triads on Mexican soil, involving a similar one-man battalion. The president gave governor Emilio Brujillo a contact number to bring in this solitary crusader.

      Anibella Brujillo knew that if anyone could level the playing field against the Juarez Cartel, even if they could arrange an army assault, it would be the mysterious lone warrior.

      CHAPTER ONE

      Jon Dever was tempted to pull a cigarette from the glove compartment of the U.S. Border Patrol Ford Bronco, but he was trying to quit. His partner, Daniel Hogan, saw Dever’s gaze fall on the glove compartment door and smirked.

      “Don’t start, Dan,” Dever muttered.

      Hogan’s smirk continued to grow. “You should try some nicotine gum, Jon.”

      “I did. Ate a whole pack at once and nearly puked my guts out,” Dever grumbled. “Besides, if I light up, they’ll smell the smoke a country mile away, even if they can’t make it out through the windshield.”

      Hogan nodded sagely. That had been the younger man’s intent, to push his older partner into rationalizing against taking another cigarette. Dever was twelve years older than Hogan, who was in his early thirties, and had about seventy pounds on the younger man. Most of it was muscle, but enough was the result of the thickening of age.

      Hogan put his night-vision glasses to his eyes again. “Got a visual.”

      Dever picked up his glasses and looked. “Three trucks. They look military but—”

      “Either the Mexican army’s making extra cash selling surplus to heroin smugglers, or they went in for steady employment by doing the transportation themselves,” Hogan surmised. “Either way, our orders are not to fire on anyone wearing a Mexican uniform.”

      “This is bullshit,” Dever said. “My training officer would have had an aneurysm if he’d been told to let those bastards shoot at him without returning fire.”

      “Hey. Washington doesn’t have a spine anymore. They’d rather beat their chests in a foreign country, but let the psychos next door do as they please,” Hogan snarled.

      Dever took a long, deep breath, then got out a digital camcorder with a low-light optical filter on the lens. At least they could document any efforts by the neighboring nation’s military in breaking international law.

      Dever’s brow furrowed.

      “What’s wrong?” Hogan asked. He eyed the M-4 carbine locked in its clamp against the dashboard. It, and the Heckler & Koch .40-caliber pistol on his hip, would give any opponent a run for his money, if only his trigger finger hadn’t been restrained by insipid rules of engagement. The official attitude was to not spark a border war, but apparently the men wearing army uniforms and carrying Mexican-issue rifles were under no such restriction.

      Several Border Patrol agents had been injured in increasingly tense encounters across the past few years. It was only a matter of time before the bastards had collected the final breath of an American law-enforcement agent. Some had called for the end of the Border Patrol due to its failure to control or act against foreign invaders. Others had wanted the National Guard to step in. Still more took their own weapons and camped out at major thoroughfares for migrating illegal aliens, seeking to take the law into their own hands. The fact that the American Minutemen were looking only to turn back illegal