9:00 PM. The outskirts of Los Angeles, California.
The night was as thick and suffocating as wet ink. Three heavily modified, unmarked transport trucks—their chassis explicitly treated with military-grade infrared-absorbing paint—rolled silently over a remote gravel access road. They rolled to a halt inside an abandoned, overgrown citrus orchard exactly three kilometers east of the Mendoza Cartel's central compound.
Inside the lead vehicle, Nick meticulously inspected the heavy steel baseplate of the final M252 81mm mortar system.
He keyed his throat mic. "Initiate."
The tactical element immediately split into two synchronized groups.
Several specialized spotters from the New York farm, carrying heavy laser designators and thermal rangefinders, slipped silently onto the elevated ridge directly overlooking the Cartel manor.
The primary fire-support element remained concealed in the orchard's natural defilade, rapidly calibrating their firing data.
Nick personally crawled to the highest vantage point on the ridge. Looking through his high-magnification thermal binoculars, the sprawling, heavily fortified outline of the Mendoza estate crystallized in glowing white and gray silhouettes.
Approximately fifty meters outside the manor's reinforced iron gates, twelve human corpses hung like dried meat from a massive, rusted steel gallows. Most of the victims possessed violently snapped necks; some had been hanging long enough to be stripped down to skeletal remains. Fat black crows hopped casually among the rotting flesh.
The dry desert wind whistled eerily through their hollow eye sockets.
Five heavily beaten, ragged prisoners were currently bound and forced to kneel directly in front of the main gate, aggressively guarded by two Sicarios wielding battered AK-47s.
The three-story main building was brightly illuminated. Nick counted four armed guards casually patrolling the inner courtyard. A localized watchtower in the southeast corner glowed with the faint, rhythmic orange cherry of a guard smoking a cigarette.
"Target confirmed. Coordinates locked," Nick whispered into his comms.
The lead scout immediately fed the data back to the gunline:
"GPS anchor point: 34°3'08"N, 118°15'43"W."
"Artillery defilade is positioned at a 285-degree azimuth to the primary target. Line-of-sight distance is exactly 3.2 kilometers."
"Elevation correction: Target zone is +12 meters. Ballistic trajectory adjusted."
Down in the depression of the orchard, the artillery array was fully deployed. Twelve M252 mortar tubes were arranged in a flawless, staggered fan formation.
An ammunition handler pulled a heavy M374A3 high-explosive shell from its insulated, shock-proof crate. He rapidly twisted the nose cone, setting the proximity fuze to "airburst mode"—a setting specifically designed to absolutely shred open-air infantry targets.
"Injecting atmospheric DOPE," the master gunner announced.
"Wind speed: Southwest, 2.4 meters per second. Ambient humidity: 67 percent."
"Firing solution locked. Azimuth 282 degrees, micro-adjusted for wind deflection. Charge 4. Impact dispersion pre-calibrated to saturate a forty-meter kill radius."
Nick crouched motionless at his observation post, his crosshairs resting directly on the center of the Cartel's roof.
"Battery. One volley. Twelve rounds. Two-second intervals. I want the watchtower and the main residence struck simultaneously. Fire."
At precisely 21:17:03, a sharp double-click echoed over the radio.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
Brilliant flashes of orange muzzle-flare violently tore through the darkness of the orchard. Twelve heavy mortar shells launched into the stratosphere with a terrifying, synchronized shriek, sounding exactly like a flock of demonic crows descending upon the manor.
Down in the courtyard, the Cartel guards looked up blankly, entirely failing to comprehend the meaning of the deafening, hissing sound tearing through the sky above them.
At 21:17:11, the first wave of airbursts detonated.
Six heavy shells exploded exactly two meters above the courtyard paving stones. A highly concentrated, umbrella-shaped dome of jagged, pre-formed tungsten shrapnel violently poured down upon the estate.
The guard in the watchtower was instantly vaporized along with his steel railings; the concrete base of the tower groaned and collapsed into a pile of rubble.
The two Sicarios guarding the kneeling prisoners were violently thrown backward by the massive overpressure shockwave. One of them was literally sheared in half mid-air, his internal organs painting the reinforced iron gates.
The rusted steel pillars of the gallows violently twisted and snapped. The concussive blast picked up one of the rotting corpses and hurled it directly through a third-story window, shattering the bulletproof glass into a massive spiderweb.
At 21:17:19, the second wave impacted.
The remaining six high-explosive shells successfully bypassed the roof of the main residence, punching deep into the architecture before detonating. The blasts instantly triggered a catastrophic secondary explosion in the manor's industrial gas pipeline.
Massive, roaring orange fireballs violently erupted from every single window simultaneously. Entire structural walls were blown completely outward, sending a lethal rain of burning brick and mortar crashing down into the luxury parking lot.
A surviving Cartel gunman who desperately sprinted out of the burning lobby was instantly impaled through the sternum by a massive, flying splinter of an oak doorframe, pinning him directly to the burning hood of a Mercedes.
Sparks rained down into the backyard, instantly igniting the exposed fuel tanks of three armed technical pickup trucks. The vehicles detonated in sequence, spraying burning gasoline and jagged metal shrapnel hundreds of meters into the air.
The Mendoza compound instantly descended into apocalyptic chaos.
The surviving guards fled in absolute, blind panic. Some were visibly vomiting from the sheer concussive trauma. One Sicario desperately began firing his AK-47 blindly into the pitch-black night sky, the tracer rounds tracing meaningless, pathetic arcs against the smoke.
On a surviving second-floor balcony, a Cartel lieutenant desperately attempted to shoulder an RPG to return fire at the ridge. Before his finger could even brush the trigger, a stray piece of burning shrapnel entirely decapitated him.
A burning chunk of debris struck the manor's luxurious stables. The highly prized, terrified Arabian horses began screaming, violently kicking down their stall doors and charging blindly into the raging inferno.
Through the thick, choking columns of black smoke, Nick's localized microphones picked up the desperate, agonizing screams.
"¡Nos están matando! ¡Nos están matando!" (They are slaughtering us!)
Interspersed with the screams was the panicked, crackling hiss of the Cartel's localized distress frequency: "Headquarters, this is Mendoza Actual, we require immediate air—"
The signal abruptly died in a burst of static. Either the radio relay had been obliterated, or the operator was dead.
Nick clinically observed the catastrophic battle damage through his thermals.
The entire top floor of the main residence had collapsed into the basement. The manicured courtyard was completely riddled with massive craters. He counted a minimum of fifteen fresh corpses scattered across the property, and the rapidly spreading fires had already consumed a third of the estate.
"Wrap it up," Nick ordered, packing his designator without a microscopic trace of regret.
The heavy artillery tubes were expertly disassembled and loaded into the trucks within thirty seconds. The heavy diesel engines roared to life, and the strike team vanished back into the vast, empty darkness of the desert.
Behind them, the raging inferno of the Mendoza compound illuminated the night sky for miles—a massive, scarlet rose blooming for the devil.
The debts incurred in New York had just been collected in fire and steel.
The Continental Hotel, Manhattan
That exact same night, Marquis de Gramont found himself entirely incapable of sleep.
His body throbbed with agony, and his mind boiled with humiliated rage. Seeking a distraction, he ordered Charon to arrange an exclusive, late-night dining service in his executive suite.
He had briefly considered inviting the Adjudicator to dine with him, but quickly remembered the woman was a bureaucratic monster who seemingly only consumed sterile, High Table-issued nutrient bars. He abandoned the idea.
A terrified Continental waiter had wheeled in a heavy silver service cart, offering the absolute pinnacle of the hotel's culinary repertoire. Gramont was mechanically chewing a piece of imported French foie gras, secretly fuming over his political impotence, when the encrypted satellite phone resting on the mahogany table vibrated violently.
Gramont glanced at the caller ID.
It wasn't a New York frequency. It was Los Angeles.
Gramont sneered and gestured lazily for Zero, who was standing perfectly still in the shadows behind him, to answer the device.
Zero picked up the phone, listened for exactly five seconds, and lowered the receiver.
"Marquis," Zero reported, his voice utterly devoid of inflection. "There has been a catastrophic incident in Los Angeles. Coordinated mortar strikes. A minimum of three rapid-fire volleys. The primary Cartel estate has been entirely razed to the ground."
"Carlos Mendoza and Emilio Vargas are confirmed to be buried beneath the rubble. Localized search and rescue operations are currently underway."
Gramont froze, his silver fork hovering inches from his mouth.
Even from his chair, Gramont could hear the frantic, terrified voice bleeding through the phone's speaker, layered over the muffled, chaotic sounds of blaring sirens and roaring fires.
"The attackers utilized military-grade indirect fire from well beyond our visual perimeter!" the Cartel liaison screamed over the line. "They dropped their payload and immediately vanished! When our surviving elements reached the firing position, they found nothing but localized blast-caps and baseplate impressions in the dirt! The forensic execution was tier-one! Preliminary ballistic assessment confirms they utilized M252 mortars..."
Gramont's breathing completely stopped. His knuckles turned white as he gripped his silver steak knife.
The muscles in his jaw twitched so violently that the damaged blood vessels beneath his swollen, purple skin throbbed menacingly.
In the span of a single, twenty-four-hour window, on both the East Coast and the West Coast, two of the High Table's most heavily relied-upon proxy syndicates had been systematically, flawlessly eradicated with military-grade precision.
"M252?" Gramont's voice sounded like a broken, rusted bellows, every single syllable dripping with venom. "Eighty-one millimeters... they utilized fucking mechanized military artillery against a civilian compound!"
Gramont slammed his knife into the table. "The Mexican Cartel's primary stronghold was deleted overnight. This is the explicit handiwork of that Russian butcher, Anthony Tarasov."
"Marquis. The logistical mathematics do not support your conclusion," Zero analyzed coldly, entirely unbothered by Gramont's rage.
"The driving distance between New York and Los Angeles is roughly 2,800 miles. Even assuming extreme highway speeds and absolutely zero rest stops, the transit requires a minimum of forty hours."
Zero tilted his head slightly. "If Anthony's Vanguard was the element that annihilated the Camorra at the Brooklyn docks yesterday, they fundamentally lacked the physical time required to reach Los Angeles and execute this artillery strike tonight."
"Are you suggesting he deployed two entirely separate strike teams?" Gramont turned his chair, glaring violently at the assassin.
"I am suggesting Anthony either commands an invisible, heavily armed faction stationed permanently on the West Coast, or his localized military infrastructure is vastly larger than we comprehended," Zero paused.
"However, according to the Continental's deepest intelligence archives, the Tarasov syndicate possesses absolutely zero logistical footprint in California. Their entire criminal empire is exclusively anchored to the Eastern Seaboard."
Gramont stared blankly at the wall.
Three catastrophic events.
Three entirely different geographical locations.
Almost the exact same operational time window.
"He is actively provoking me," Gramont hissed, his voice vibrating with barely contained, atomic rage.
"No." Gramont stood up slowly. "He is actively mocking me. He is demonstrating through sheer, overwhelming kinetic force that if I genuinely wish to play proxy-wars, he will comfortably match my bets until I am bled entirely dry."
Zero remained perfectly silent.
The Shinobi master knew the Marquis was absolutely correct.
If these three highly complex tactical operations were indeed orchestrated by the exact same mastermind, it demonstrated vastly more than simply possessing a well-armed militia. It demonstrated a terrifying, god-like capacity for operational planning, logistical synchronization, and execution.
To successfully launch simultaneous, flawless precision strikes on opposite sides of the continent required more than just hired guns. It required a highly robust, deeply entrenched intelligence network and a military-grade command-and-control infrastructure.
The Tarasov family—a localized, regional mafia—should fundamentally not possess that tier of capability.
"We have entirely underestimated his operational scope," Gramont whispered, slowly sinking back into his chair. His manicured fingers tapped an erratic, anxious rhythm against the mahogany table. "Or... perhaps... there is a much larger sovereign power actively operating behind him."
Suddenly, the sheer, crushing weight of his humiliation boiled over.
With a feral, guttural scream, Gramont violently kicked the heavy silver dining cart.
The cart flipped completely over, violently spilling priceless, vintage wine, shattered crystal, and ruined delicacies across the expensive Persian rug.
Breathing heavily, his bruised face contorted in absolute fury, Gramont ripped the door open and stormed out of the executive suite.
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