He used the tangle of pipes as cover and crossed closer to the door. The two guards were on the constant lookout, their eyes never at rest, but the massive hangar-sized space was poorly lit, and Juan had more than ample cover. He kept looking back to make sure the others hadn’t inadvertently flanked him. He was lining up to take his shot when a pressure-release valve directly behind him hissed out a jet of steam into the air. The guards both looked in his direction, and one of them must have spotted him because his gun came up and he loosed a three-round burst.
How the spray of rounds didn’t puncture a critical valve and immolate them all was a miracle.
Juan ducked but came up almost instantly and dropped one of them with a double tap to the chest. The sentry who had let Cabrillo into the building burst through the door, his weapon held high and tight against his shoulder. The second guard had dived flat behind a clutch of fifty-five-gallon drums.
Cabrillo fired twice more, and the sentry collapsed. The doors closed behind him.
In the distance, he could hear Espinoza barking orders.
The guard peered out from around the barrels. Juan put a round two inches from his eye to keep him pinned in place and then charged with everything he had. The distance was less than twenty feet. He reached the barrels and pumped up in one easy bound. The guard was still flat on his stomach, never hearing the assault or expecting it.
Juan’s mistake was assuming that because liquid poured from the side of the barrel where the high-velocity round had punctured it, all the kegs would be full. They weren’t.
His foot touched down on the lid of one of the barrels, and his momentum toppled it and the three right next to it. He fell in the middle of the clanging mess and for a second had no idea what happened. The guard came to his wits an instant quicker. He got to his knees and swung his machine pistol toward Cabrillo. Like a greenhorn, Juan had dropped his pistol when he landed, so he kicked out with one foot and pushed one of the barrels into the guard, fouling his aim. His three-round burst pinged off the I-beam rafters.
Cabrillo grabbed the empty barrel in a bear hug and threw himself at the guard. When they collided, the soldier went down, and Juan used his impetus to drive his full weight, plus the barrel, into the man’s chest. Ribs snapped like twigs. The man was down but not out. Juan frantically searched for his automatic, and was bending to retrieve it from between two more barrels when the wall behind him was stitched with a string of 9mm holes.
Espinoza recognized him immediately. His eyes went wide and then narrowed with satisfaction when he realized that the man who had caused him so much difficulty and shame was twenty feet from him and unarmed.
“I know you are alone,” he said. Sergeant Lugones appeared at his side. “Sergeant, if he moves a muscle, shoot him dead.”
Espinoza set his machine pistol onto an electrical-transformer housing and pulled his sidearm from its holster and placed it beside it. He came up to Juan with a smug look, the look of a bully who had cornered the weakest neighborhood kid. He didn’t stop even when a nautical horn sounded an alarm outside.
“I don’t know who you are or where you came from, but I assure you that your death is going to be especially enjoyable.”
Juan fired off a lightning right jab that caught Espinoza square in the nose and rocked him back a pace. “You talk too much.”
The Argentine charged in a blind range. Cabrillo let him come, and as they were about to collide chest to chest he turned to the side and shoved Espinoza in the back as he went past. He crashed into the wall hard enough to make the metal ring.
“And you fight like a girl,” Juan taunted.
“Lugones, shoot him in the foot.”
The Sergeant didn’t hesitate. The single shot was especially loud, and Juan went down hard, clutching at the ruined member and screaming in agony.
“Okay, now let’s see how you fight,” Espinoza sneered. “On your feet, or the next shot takes out a knee.”
Juan tried twice to stand on his own and both times he collapsed back onto the cement floor.
“Not so tough now, is he, Sergeant?”
“No, sir.”
Espinoza moved to Juan’s side and yanked him to his feet in a savage thrust. Cabrillo swayed drunkenly and fought to keep from crying out. Espinoza kept one hand on Juan’s arm and fired two powerful punches into his gut. Juan sagged, and nearly dragged the Argentine down to the floor with him.
“Pathetic,” Espinoza said.
He reached down again for a repeat performance. Juan sat meekly until Espinoza’s head was a foot away. Then he reached out with both hands, one on the man’s chin, the other on the occipital bulge at the back of his skull. From a disadvantaged position on the ground, he still managed to generate enough torque that when he twisted Espinoza’s head, the spinal column snapped cleanly.
The corpse went rubbery as it fell, and nearly blocked him from picking up the Five-SeveN. He raised it and fired before Sergeant Lugones’s brain had processed what had just happened. The first round blew through his stomach and emerged on the other side, the second caught him in the forehead.
The horn sounded again, one long, continuous blast of sound that originated not fifty feet from where Juan sat. He managed to get to his feet, his prosthetic leg undamaged by the bullet, and he’d started for the door when a titanic crash seemed to rock the building’s foundation and the knife-edged prow of the battle cruiser Guillermo Brown exploded through the wall of the processing plant.
Six seconds later, the shock waves generated by collapsing steel and crushed concrete was enough to detonate the bomb.
The building started to go up like the Hindenburg over Lakehurst.
TWENTY-EIGHT