The long row of connected adobe houses that make up the Los Diablos’ headquarters has fresh coats of paint on it. Chickens are clucking and roaming around, and there are more than a couple dozen Los Diablos MC bikes parked out front. All is well in their fucking neighborhood. Or, it is for now, until my boys and I step up to their front door, ready to start hurting people.

“Looks like the lazy asses are all still taking a fucking siesta.” Tate unsheathes two machetes and licks the back of one of the blades. “Time to put these new beauties to work.”

“You’re way too excited about those, man. Do you get off with them too?” Cole rumbles with laughter as he double-checks the safety on his Glock and hands me a sawed-off he’s had tucked under his cut at his lower back.

“Alright, enough fucking around. Everyone knows what to do? We need to stick to plan.”

“We’re square.” Axe pulls his rifle out of the custom holster he built onto his bike seat. “Time to find our marks. Then we raise hell, blow off some steam, and ask questions later.”

I wave Tate over. “Put one of those knives away and find your IR gear. This place could be rigged.”

Tate reaches into the satchel slung over his shoulder and pulls out a set of military-issue thermal imaging binoculars. “Got it.”

Buffered by the Satan's Saints inner circle with Tate in the lead, I get an overwhelming hit of adrenaline. I don’t want to give away the possible advantage, so we move in. Tate circles around the central adobe-style stucco house and comes back to the cluster of trees where we’re taking cover. He gestures with the thumbs down.

“What the fuck do you mean?” Axe questions him in a raspy whisper.

“There’s a small army inside that small side building over there,” Tate informs us. “Those guys are packing weapons and ammo to the hilt.”

“How the fuck did they not see you?”

“Stealth mode,” he grins.

“We need to draw them out, just as planned,” I tell them. “Once we have them outside, we can call in our men to back us up. Everyone knows what to do. Keep your radios on channel nineteen and listen out for changes in the plan, if any. Let’s go.”

I give the all clear and we split into two teams. Axe and I go straight ahead to the front of the building, while Tate and Cole head around back. That’s our way. Leaders out front. Plus, when shit goes down, the brazen motherfuckers inside will come in our direction and the cowards will head back to Tate and Cole. I don’t want stragglers. I want the big guns who are higher up the food chain. I didn’t just come here to launch a counterstrike, I’m here for answers. Taking a deep breath, I settle the trembling of anxious fingers, and the excitement tingling low in my gut.

Then my foot meets with the shitty wooden front door of the Los Diablos’ building in question. It cracks and splinters everywhere, making me smile.

“Rise and shine, fuckers!”

Moments later, I tuck myself to one side of the doorway to dodge the shower from a hail of Los Diablos members’ bullets. Axe and I duck and cover on the front porch. Just as Tate said, the men inside are ready and waiting. I smile. This will be easy. Right now, Los Diablos members probably think they have an advantage. They’ll soon find out that it’s not the case. Keeping up the act, I fire a few distracting shots into the open spaces and above the moving targets I see inside through one of the big picture windows. Satan’s Saints don’t make a habit of firing blind. We don’t kill innocents. Just the guilty. At the moment, these shots are mostly for show. Los Diablos may have a fuck ton of firepower inside, but every arsenal eventually runs out. Part of our plan is to give these bastards a false sense of security. Soon enough, they’ll nut up and bring the fight outside. When they do, I have my own shit ton of raging bulls hiding out less than half a mile away.

I catch a glimpse of Axe going wild west on their asses. Anyone who doesn’t know him will believe he’s careless and haphazard, seeming to shoot everything and anything he can aim at. But we know better. That’s his style. Chaos with precise purpose. He’s actually herding our exposed patch-wearing rivals one by one, directing them where we want them to go. These shots are missing on purpose because no one is more precise than Axe.

Los Diablos members are still taking their sweet time at the moment. They’re all hunkered down inside. Not one of them has come out of the house yet, but we have time. The fuckers will eventually get careless, and if they don’t, we have a fix for that possibility too.

“On a scale of one to ten, how well would you rate this raid?” Axe shouts the question over at me.

“It depends on how our brothers are doing out back.”

He laughs and rolls across the plank floor of the porch, then crouches behind a cedarwood open-back rocking chair. Worst fucking cover I’ve ever seen.

“The guys are fine. No one’s left the building yet. I’d give it a three outta ten, but should be able to bump that up to a seven when we start doing target practice on some Los Diablos MC kneecaps.” He bounces up on the balls of his feet and gets off three shots before he drops to the floor again. “They still think they outnumber us. I can’t wait until they realize we’ve got them trapped. We can’t fucking lose.”

I peek around the doorjamb and shoot a few inches from the exposed boot of a Los Diablos member in my line of sight. The guy yelps like a girl and falls to the floor as though I actually hit him. His return shot goes wide, missing me by several feet. I have to smile at the guy’s lack of aim.

“Which one of you pussies is gonna tell me where your boss is?” I shout. They won’t answer, but my question has intention. Talking is distraction, and distraction is good for business. “Do you even know English? Wait, are you guys all fucking idiots in there or what?” I taunt them. “Must be that, because if you had any sense, you’d know that planting those explosives at our clubhouse wouldn’t go unanswered. Is your president here, or is he cowering in a safe-house and shitting bricks somewhere? You’re all boring the fuck out of us out here.”

I don’t mean much of what I’m saying. Winning a war is a mental game as much as it’s physical. Distract, intimidate, and conquer.

Axe has that look now, and I’m sure my face looks the same way. We’re bored. The sorry excuses for rival MC members stay holed up inside, making this no fun at all. It’s time to up the ante. The gunfire coming from inside is more sparse too. Most of them have moved to an inner room away from the front door. Ready to head in, I give Axe, Cole and Tate the order over the radio to enter with caution wherever they see an opening, and I remind them to concentrate on taking out only patched members, one by one. I’m sure we’ll be close enough to disarm, disable, immobilize and incapacitate every single one of them. Tunnel vision becomes my world as a vivid memory of slamming Sabrina down into the floor right after the explosion takes over my instincts. They’ll get what’s was coming to them.

“Axe, how you doing over there, bro?” I shout the question, throwing myself to the left as a shell whizzes past my right ear.

Axe doesn’t answer right away, except with incoherent shouting. The next time I have a free moment to breathe, I take a quick peek over at the man. Axe is lying on the porch with his hand clasped to his shoulder, face screwed up in a grimace as he rolls around on the ground. “Jesus fuck, I forgot how painful it is to get shot.”

I bolt across the open doorway, staying as low as I can squat.

“You okay?” I swallow, clutching my gun until my knuckles ache.

“Nothing I can’t walk off,” he answers with a groan.

“You sure?”

“I’m peachy. They got the wrong arm. I think it’s a flesh wound.”

“No more fucking around,” I grumble, and give my reinforcements the all clear to enter the compound. To get in on the action, I drop my sawed-off and revolver, and crack my neck. “Time to level the playing field, you twisted sons of bitches!”

I have four stun grenades in my pocket. One by one, I pull the pins, throw them various distances from the doorway where they disappeared somewhere inside the house, and give it a minute for the devices to do their jobs. Soon, the confusion and panic start inside. I take out the sawed off again and run inside kamikaze style. I make it blindly past a couple of hallways and grab hold of one of the cocksuckers. He tries to tackle me. Big fucking mistake. I’m so revved up it’s like he’s fighting me in slow motion. His punch is forced, causing him to stumble forward. Twisting to the side and using his own sloppy forward-motion, I avoid his punch, push his arm away and elbow the fool in the back of his head. That’s pretty much it for him. I instinctively grab him in a headlock, dragging him outside to a safer spot behind a metal water storage tank beside the building.

Tightening my hold on him, I get to the point.

“Where the fuck is Vasquez?”