Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
PICASSO
The command tent buzzed with a tense, unfocused energy, more pressure cooker than organized chaos. Maps spooled across folding tables, held down by radios, ammo magazines, and half-empty mugs of burnt coffee. The air was thick with sweat, diesel, and fear no one wanted to name.
Picasso stood at the head of the central table, shoulders rigid, jaw tight enough to crack a tooth. His fingers tapped a relentless rhythm against the scarred plywood, right over the border between two sectors on the map.
“Put Tex on,” he said.
Wolf was already there, tablet in one hand, sat phone on speaker in the center of the table. “You’re live, brother. We’ve got a white van and multiple kids missing. What do you see?”
Tex’s voice crackled through the speaker, rough and steady. “Got your coordinates, Wolf. Pulled recent sat passes and I’m runnin’ thermal sweeps now. Problem is, that city’s a kicked anthill. Mudslides, rubble, half the roads gone. Lotta places to tuck a van outta sight.”
Grainy images appeared on Wolf’s tablet: blocks of collapsed buildings, streets swallowed by debris, and blacked-out industrial zones.
Picasso leaned in, scanning. “Too much dead space,” he muttered. “If they pulled into a buried alley or under a half-collapsed overpass, they’re ghosts.”
Behind him, voices cut through the static.
“Chief,” Reef called from the tent entrance, breathing hard. “Headcount’s in from family sectors. We’ve got four kids confirmed missing from East Four.”
Cookie stepped in after him, face grim. “Matches what I’m hearing from the interpreters. Parents say they saw men around the latrines earlier. White van, no markings.”
Picasso’s fists clenched, then loosened by force. Four kids. And Gabriella.
He forced his voice to stay even. “Any adults unaccounted for?”
A beat. Then Dude’s gravelly tone came over the net. “Gabriella O’Reilly—no one’s seen her since 0300. Her radio was found smashed near the latrines. It’s now confirmed she’s missing.”
The floor seemed to tilt under Picasso’s boots.
He’d told her to get some rest. Ordered her back to her tent like it was a safe zone instead of just another soft target inside a barely-held perimeter.
He swallowed hard, shoving the guilt down deep, locking it with everything else. There wasn’t time.
Wolf’s voice cut through, anchoring him. “Industrial district’s a mess,” he said, zooming in on a cluster of dark warehouses. “Roads washed out, power dead. Minimal traffic. If I wanted to disappear people and vehicles, I’d use this grid.”
Picasso straightened, dragging his focus back to the map. “Tex, intel puts Sinaloa pushing into the tunnels near La Paz and the old freight yards. You seeing any heat clusters that fit a parked van plus multiple bodies?”
“Working it,” Tex drawled, fingers clicking faintly in the background.
“Got three possibles so far. One’s just a busted bus depot—they’re cookin’ scrap metal in there.
Second’s a church basement crowdin’ refugees.
Third…” He paused. “Third’s interestin’.
Old concrete plant near La Paz. No power, but I’m seein’ a van-sized heat signature and about half a dozen smaller ones clusterin’ near it.
Could be nothin’. Could be your devils.”
Picasso’s pulse kicked.
“Send the coordinates,” Wolf said. “We’ll hit that one first.”
“Already in your inbox, brother. And Picasso?” Tex’s voice sharpened. “Clock’s runnin’. Traffickers don’t sit on assets. They move ’em.”
“I know,” Picasso said quietly.
He looked up, meeting the eyes of every man in the tent—Atlantic and Pacific both. Grizzly, Falcon, Reef, Hurricane, Abe, Cookie, Dude, Benny, Mozart. Every expression was the same: anger, barely leashed.
“This just became a snatch-and-rescue,” Picasso said, voice cutting clean through the hum.
“Primary objective: recover the kids and O’Reilly alive.
Secondary: gather intel on the trafficking route.
We are not turning this into a full assault on cartel infrastructure tonight. We go in fast and surgical.”
Grizzly’s hands flexed around the edge of the table. “And if we run into more of them than we can handle?”
“Then we adapt,” Picasso said. “But we don’t blow this into a firefight that gets the hostages killed.”
He jabbed a finger at the map where Wolf had marked the old concrete plant. “Atlantic team is the entry element. We hit the plant, clear, and extract the hostages.”
He shifted his attention to Wolf. “How do you want the split?”
Wolf hesitated for a heartbeat, then nodded. “I’ll take Abe, Cookie, and Benny for outer cordon and extraction route. Two Humvees. We set blocking positions here and here,” he said, tapping two choke points on the approach roads, “and we own your way in and out.”
Turning to Picasso, Wolf continued, “Take Dude with you. He is our demolitions expert, the best we have. You’ll probably need to blast through rubble at several points along the way.”
Wolf looked at Mozart. “You stay on camp security with me. You are our quick-reaction force if anything hits us here. You also run comms with Tex and the Mexican liaison. Nothing and no one gets through this perimeter without being eyeballed.”
Dude gave a single, hard nod as Picasso acknowledged the order. Mozart was already reaching for the nearest radio handset.
“Local support?” Wolf asked.
Picasso exhaled through his nose. “We loop in Mexican police and army, but outside our box. They set up additional roadblocks on these outbound routes.” He circled three highways and a secondary road with his finger.
“They stop and search vans matching our description, but they do not roll into our objective while we’re inside.
Last thing we need is an uncoordinated militia stomping through a hostage site. ”
Wolf keyed his radio. “You heard him. Liaison team gets the word out—roadblocks, checkpoints, but they stay outside this grid until we’re clear.”
A crackle answered from the liaison corner of the tent. “Si. I make them move,” said the Mexican army captain with a strong accent. “They hold cordon.”
Picasso nodded once in his direction, then looked back to his men.
“Atlantic moves as primary assault,” he repeated. “Pacific’s split between our outer ring and keeping this camp locked down. We are not leaving these people undefended.”
Falcon’s eyes were hard. “Rules of engagement?”
“Quiet as possible,” Picasso replied. “Suppressors where you can run them, controlled shots only. No wild fire near the kids. If we lose surprise, we fight our way out, not through.”
Reef shifted his weight, jaw working. “Chief… if they split the hostages? Move them to different sites?”
Picasso held his gaze. “Then we get who we can and take every scrap of intel back to base and regroup. But we start here.”
He didn’t add what was pounding in his chest: And we get her.
Wolf closed the sat case with a decisive snap. “You heard him,” he said to both teams. “Gear up. Five minutes to roll.”
Chairs scraped, boots pounded out of the tent, the low murmur exploding into focused motion. Weapons checks, mag slaps, radios crackling to life. In the corner, Mozart and Dude were already pulling up camp schematics and comms nets, slotting themselves into the role of shield and relay.
Picasso lingered over the map for half a heartbeat longer, eyes fixed on the tiny red dot marking their first target and the ring of routes tightening around it.
Hold on, Firecracker.
Then he turned and strode after his men into the dark.