Pandora's Temple Read Online Free Page B

funny guy.” He stopped laughing and finally caught his breath. “After you’re dead, I think I’ll have you stuffed and mounted on the wall so I always have something to make me smile.”
    “You won’t be smiling in thirty seconds time, Morales, unless you agree to give me the Americans. Tick, tick, tick.”
    Morales reached down toward the briefcase and scooped up the two pistols. “Are these loaded?”
    “They are.”
    “So I could kill you with them now.”
    “You could.”
    “Let me see,” Morales said dramatically, looking from one pistol to the other, “which one should I use. . . .” A broad smile crossed his lips. “Eeney, meeney, miney . . .”
    And in that moment a portion of the compound’s façade around the gated entrance exploded in a fountain of rubble and dust. The remainder of the first wave of missiles that followed in the next instant obliterated the unmanned watchtowers and took out the compound’s armory in a sizzling display of light and ear-ringing blasts that grew like a fireworks display.
    “Mo,” said McCracken.

CHAPTER 4
Juárez, Mexico
    The missiles were Hellfires, fired from a pair of Hank Folsom’s drones that had been stationed over the compound. The countdown to fire had been triggered by Sal Belamo twisting the key into the handcuffs latching him to the briefcase, a signal sent to an operative at a base in Nevada whose hand was already poised on the button.
    For McCracken, the deafening blasts of the missile strikes slowed time to a crawl. He saw the series of blasts hurl any number of Morales’s men through the air to land in bloody clumps. He saw showers of vegetables, sliced meat, chicken, fish, and what looked like sangria kicked up from the luncheon tables behind the shock wave from a nearby strike. He saw the soldiers who’d been spared by the initial explosions springing desperately for their weapons, even as their eyes turned toward the sky in fear of falling to the next round of blasts. He saw the pistols Morales had been holding rattle to the veranda floor, and he ducked to retrieve the SIG Sauer in the same moment Sal Belamo grabbed hold of the .44 Magnum, the scorched air smelling like it was on fire now.
    In that moment the last two years vanished behind the haze of battle McCracken knew so well. Age lost all meaning, time measured in the breaths and moments between explosions, gunshots, and screams.
    Do I still have it?
    As if to answer that, McCracken and Belamo shot all six of Morales’s private guards, neither sure of whose bullets had felled which men. McCracken recorded the bodies tumbling in the same splotchy glimpses he caught of the barrel’s muzzle flash and smelled the smoke wafting upward before being swallowed by the air and breeze. The most powerful man in Mexico was left cowering on the floor using his wife with a now broken finger as a shield. By then, though, his soldiers who’d recovered their weapons in the courtyard just below also recovered enough of their senses to launch an all-out charge for the veranda.
    A few had actually opened fire wildly on McCracken and Belamo, when a huge figure burst up through the Mercedes SUV’s open sunroof. Johnny Wareagle, all seven feet of him, held M1A4 modified M-16s in either hand, clacking rounds off in two directions at once as if capable of focusing his eyes separately. Those eyes were deep-set and ice blue, his mostly jet-black ponytail whipping from side to side with each twist of his head.
    More missiles rained down, kicking up so much ground dirt and debris that Wareagle and the entire SUV vanished in the resulting cloud. The soldiers his bullets had spared opened up into that cloud with an unrelenting and deafening barrage. Spent shells clanged against each other on the ground in soft counterpoint to the shrill sound of the steel of the Mercedes being punctured, its windows shattered, and tires popped.
    Several of Morales’s soldiers were still firing when the dust cloud cleared enough to