by Peter Nealen
He suddenly realized that, while he was still backed up to the greenery of the jungle behind him, he was in fact standing upright in the open, and he could see inside the shed in front of him, where a whole lot of motorbikes were lined up and waiting.
He could also see the man in blue-gray camouflage, his face still covered, turning his bullpup rifle toward him.
Tanaka snapped his rifle to his shoulder, his heart thumping, as he saw the muzzle stare at him like a bottomless black pit. It was a good fifty yards away, but somehow he could see the muzzle clearly, even as he searched for the red dot with his eye.
The dot tracked up over the man’s torso, and Tanaka spasmodically mashed the trigger, at the same instant that a flash and a faint puff of muzzle blast came from the other man’s rifle.
His M6 barked, the recoil pushing slightly back into his shoulder, even as the enemy’s bullet went past his ear with a harsh, painful snap.
He flinched away from the near miss, and then stared for a fraction of a second as he saw that the terrorist was still on his feet. He’d missed completely. In that instant, he knew he was dead.
Then Jenkins and Gomez opened fire on either side of him, smashing the terrorist off his feet with nearly a dozen rounds. The man jerked as bullets plucked at his chest and his assault vest, then toppled backward, knocking one of the bikes over as he hit it. The bike tipped, struck another one next to it, and then it was a domino cascade of falling motorcycles inside the shed.
“On me,” Gomez snapped, taking the lead. He put his head down and sprinted toward the shed. Tanaka followed, less than a pace behind him, just as determined as ever to keep up.
The Mexican Marines had picked up their fire, seeing the Blackhearts advancing out of the trees. They still didn’t have as many guns in the fight as they’d started with, but they managed to put enough lead on the big barn that the fire coming from there was starting to slacken.
In between gulped breaths as he pounded across the open ground toward the shed, Tanaka was briefly thankful that the Mexicans hadn’t simply opened fire on them, too.
Gomez slowed slightly as he neared the doorway leading into the shed, his rifle up and his black eyes scanning every shadow inside. He paused just long enough to drop his muzzle and put an insurance round through the dead terrorist’s skull, barely visible over the wreck of the motorcycle he’d knocked over when he’d fallen, then stepped across the threshold, pivoting to cover the corner he couldn’t see.
Tanaka was half a step behind him.
They rounded the corner together and came face-to-face with another terrorist. The man was in his camouflage trousers and a black t-shirt, having apparently stripped off his gear and his jacket before all hell had broken loose. His face was uncovered; he looked vaguely Hispanic.
Gomez charged into him before Tanaka could shoot, batting the muzzle of the terrorist’s bullpup rifle aside with his own weapon. The terrorist fired even as his weapon was knocked aside, the muzzle blast tearing a ragged, smoking hole in Gomez’ sleeve, the bullet hitting the doorframe with a bang.
In a second, Gomez and the terrorist were clenched together, fighting to keep each other’s weapon offline, even as they tried to shoot each other. For a moment, Tanaka just stared, unsure what to do. Gomez was too close; he didn’t want to risk shooting him.
Then he gritted his teeth, stepped in, punched the terrorist in the face with his own rifle muzzle, and pulled the trigger.
Gore splashed both him and Gomez with a fine, reddish mist. The muzzle blast blew a ragged, bloody crater in the terrorist’s cheek, and the overpressure actually popped the man’s eyeball halfway out with another surge of blood. Hair, blood, bits of skull, and pulverized brain matter splashed against the wall behind him.
But the man wasn’t dead. He collapsed with a strangled noise, clearly in shock, but he was blinking up at the two of them out of his surviving eye. Blood was pouring out of the wound, and he was starting to spasm. But he wasn’t dead yet.
Gomez extricated himself from the terrorist’s weakening grip, lifted his blood-misted rifle, and reached down to wrest the terrorist’s weapon away from him. He tossed the bullpup clear, as the dying man’s spasms got worse, then faded away.
He reached up, wiped some of the blood off his face, and turned toward the doorway without comment.
Tanaka kind of wished he’d said something.
Deciding that he probably needed to do the same, even as he dragged a sleeve across his own face, feeling the salt stinging his skin and his eyes, Tanaka swept his eyes across the rest of the shed. It was crowded with motorcycles, and only he, Gomez, and Jenkins had made entry; the rest were nowhere to be seen.
***
Flint knew that things were going from bad to worse when the fire from the Mexican Marines out front intensified. He ducked down behind the trucks as more 5.7mm rounds smashed through the thin metal walls, and through the man called Gore, smashing him back into the tailgate of the nearest truck before dumping him on the grimy floor.
The only reason they could be hosing the barn down the way they were was if they were covering for a maneuver element. Which meant he and his crew were about to be flanked.
He wormed across the floor, grinding oily mud into his camouflage combat shirt, and peered out through a gap in the wall, toward the shed with the motorcycles. There didn’t seem to be any shooting coming from there anymore, and he swore under his breath. Those two clowns of Dingo’s…
But then he saw movement around the back. Too much movement to be the two who had gotten out of the barn just before the IED had gone off. Which meant only one thing.
Scuttling backward, he looked for the trap door in the floor. It had been carefully camouflaged when they’d first gotten this place from the Zetas, for a considerable sum of money, but he’d been smart enough to sniff it out. The Zetas should have known better.
Dragging the trap door open, he reached down and pulled out the MG21 machinegun nestled in the crate beneath. There was a lot more in the weapons cache, but the machinegun was what he needed right at the moment. Scooping up a can of linked 7.62x51mm ammunition, he scrambled back toward the gap.
It wasn’t a wide gap, but he didn’t need a big loophole. He didn’t even bother to deploy the MG21’s bipod, but rested the barrel on the edge of the foundation. Hastily loading the machinegun and getting as low behind it as he could, he put the sights on the shed and held down the trigger.
***
Tanaka never knew what hit him. He was moving past Jenkins to barricade on the door and see if he could get a shot at the barn, when a long, ravening burst of machinegun fire tore through the thin, sheet-metal wall of the shed, tracking across as Flint expertly traversed the MG21.
Jenkins was just barely low enough to avoid getting hit, crouching on a knee by the pile of motorcycles. Tanaka was standing, and took three rounds across the upper chest. One shattered ribs, driving fragments of bone into his lung. The next two obliterated his heart and half of his other lung.
He was dead by the time he hit the floor.
Chapter 23
Flanagan hadn’t seen Tanaka go down. It wouldn’t have changed anything if he had.
He did, however, see the muzzle blast and hear the report of what had to be a belt-fed machinegun firing from inside the metal-walled barn. Already on his belly in the weeds behind the shed, he simply reacted. Shifting his body to bring his rifle to bear, he put his red dot right on the muzzle blast and opened fire, dumping half a magazine at the machinegunner as fast as he could pull the trigger. In the prone, the recoil did little to move his muzzle away from his target.
***
Flint jerked back, letting his finger off the trigger, as he flinched away from the bullets punching through the sheet metal wall overhead. Somebody had him dialed in, a lot closer than he was comfortable with. As he flattened himself against the filthy floor, the volume of fire on his position only increased, bullets smacking small, bright holes through the metal with loud bang
s that reverberated through the entire barn. Several went past to punch into the side panels of the truck behind him. They weren’t going to do much more damage than the Mexicans were already doing, but then, Flint and his guys had no intention of using the trucks again, anyway.
He looked around at what was left of his team. Scrap, Funnyman, Lunatic, and Gibbet were about the only ones left. He could only see Funnyman and Lunatic from where he was lying, still trying to keep away from the gunfire that was turning the metal wall above him into a sieve. And they were all looking away, toward the Mexican Marines, trying to return the increasingly overwhelming fire coming at them.
A plan started to form in his mind.
***
With the machinegun silenced, and the fire coming from the barn slackening sharply, the Blackhearts had an opening.
“Moving!” Hancock bellowed. He got to his feet, keeping his rifle pointed at the barn. It was a lot more of a laborious movement than he’d anticipated; the last forty-eight hours were taking their toll. Getting old, Rog. With his feet under him, he dashed forward, his lungs burning, managing only a few yards in about three seconds, before throwing himself prone again, immediately opening fire on the barn. He didn’t want that machinegunner to get enough breathing room to open up on them again, especially not as they were crossing the open ground.
He hadn’t seen Tanaka get dumped, either. He’d been on the other side of Flanagan, around the back of the shed. But like Flanagan, it wouldn’t have changed anything if he had. Both of them had developed the ability to compartmentalize their emotions in combat. It was a survival skill for any soldier.
Flanagan and Wade pounded past him, both men circling around behind him, in order to avoid crossing into his line of fire. They both hit the ground with heavy grunts, then started shooting.
***
Flint stayed on his belly, worming his way under the truck and toward the back of the barn. It was a tight fit; the truck wasn’t really lifted, and Flint wasn’t a small man. But it gave him a little bit of cover, and he hoped that it would keep him low enough to avoid getting shot.
A sudden fiery impact in his right leg put the lie to that hope. “Fuck!” He couldn’t look down to see how bad he’d been hit; his cheek was pressed into the thin layer of greasy mud on the concrete floor of the barn. But it felt like his calf. Hopefully it hadn’t taken too much meat with it. He didn’t go into shock. It just made him mad.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been shot.
He kept going, scraping his back on the truck’s undercarriage, and came out under the headlights, to see Scrap doing the same thing, only a few feet away.
For a second, the two men just stared at each other.
Flint didn’t know Scrap any better than he knew any of the rest. He didn’t even know his real name. They’d never met before the team had been set up and started training. It was the way the employer liked to operate. He knew that it had its cons; he’d spent enough time on small teams over the last couple of decades to know that a group of brothers performed better than a pack of complete strangers. But since it was the way this gig went, he hadn’t questioned it. He’d just altered his mindset accordingly. There was only one non-expendable member of Flint’s team: Flint.
He’d gotten to know Scrap enough over the last couple of months to know that they were kindred spirits, of a sort. Which mean that Scrap was thinking the exact same thing.
“What the hell are you doing?” Scrap asked.
Flint didn’t answer. There was no need. He wasn’t in a good position, halfway out from under a truck, still flat on the ground, but Scrap was still on his belly, while Flint had managed to turn halfway over onto his side. And his holster was on his high side.
He drew the Field Pistol as quickly as he could under the circumstances, knowing that Scrap wasn’t going to be able to roll to one side and draw on him before it was all over. Even so, he didn’t want Scrap to yell. Better to do him and get out.
The FK BRNO pistol barked as Scrap tried to shove himself back under the other truck. He was simply too slow; even a man as fast as Flint would be hard pressed to crawl backward that quickly. The first 7.5mm bullet punched through his mouth, blowing a bloody hole through his lower jaw and leaving it hanging.
The second round went through his right eye and blasted half his brain out the exit hole. The remains of his head slumped over his shoulder to rest on the floor.
Then Flint was scrambling out from under the truck and scuttling over to the rolling toolbox that covered the escape tunnel. Staying as low as he could—the gunfire from outside was only intensifying, with bullets crisscrossing through the barn, shattering already broken windows and riddling trucks and walls alike—he heaved the toolbox to one side, then dove headfirst into the narrow, muddy hole. He paused just long enough to pull the igniters on the failsafe, and then he was doing his best impression of a gopher, wriggling down the tunnel, away from his team’s last stand.
***
Hancock had barely gotten up to a knee when the barn exploded.
The blast blew the roof off and sent twisted pieces of corrugated sheet metal flying. Hancock threw himself flat, dropping backward and rolling over to shield his face, even as a metal fragment that sounded like it was the size of a lawnmower blade ripped past overhead, whickering through the air with an ugly sound to hit the dirt behind him with a savage impact before tumbling another ten yards.
He looked up. The barn was engulfed in flame and ugly black smoke. All that was visible outside the fire was a few twisted remains of sheet-metal walls and bent, twisted, and blackened structural beams. What might have been a burning truck could be dimly seen through the wall of flame and blackened framework. The weeds outside were starting to catch, too; if it hadn’t been so damp, he would have worried that they were about to get caught in a wildfire.
A secondary explosion from inside the fire shook the ground with a heavy whump. Loud pops could only be ammunition cooking off. But there were no more gunshots coming from the barn.
“Well, fuck,” Wade said, as he pried himself off the ground. “I didn’t think they were going to go all hard-core, Scarface on us.”
“Means we still don’t know who the hell they were,” Childress said from behind Hancock.
“We’ve got bigger problems for now,” Hancock said grimly. He turned his eye toward the line of Mexican Marines that was spreading out across the clearing from the gate, their P90s at the ready. “Let’s get back to the shed.” It wasn’t a lot of cover, but it was better than nothing.
Hancock still didn’t entirely trust Huerta, and he didn’t want to imagine Brannigan’s disappointment if he got the team killed or stuck in a Mexican jail for life times two. Even if he died in the process, he still didn’t want to imagine it.
It was a little strange, he reflected, as they moved quickly but carefully back toward the shed. He’d never met an officer who inspired that kind of loyalty before Brannigan. Most of them had been ladder-climbers who could be trusted only to do and say what would look good for their careers. Some had been arrogant bastards who treated their men like dirt. The really good ones had had a tendency to act not unlike his best Sergeants, and, in similar manner, gotten out after five to ten years, usually as Captains. A man making it to full bird Colonel and still being the kind of leader that Brannigan was, was vanishingly rare.
He briefly wondered if he wasn’t putting his loyalty to Brannigan over his responsibilities to Tammy and the kids. If he was dead, who was going to take care of them?
Kinda too late for that, ain’t it? This is the third time you’ve stuck your neck out for Brannigan, knowing you might not make it back.
Inside the shed, he found Gomez on a knee, his rifle at the ready, facing out the entrance. Tanaka’s body was lying behind him; it looked like Gomez was guarding their fallen comrade.
“Oh, hell,” Hancock said. “What happened?”
“That first burst took him out,” Jenkins said matter-of-factly. �
��He stuck his head up and got schwacked.”
“He was moving up and got shot through the wall,” Gomez said, without turning around. “Wasn’t anything he could have done; wasn’t anything he did wrong. It was just his time.” It was probably the longest speech any of them had heard from Gomez yet, and the tone of rebuke aimed at Jenkins was unmistakable.
“What’s the plan now, Boss?” Curtis asked. Like Gomez, he was facing the door and the advancing Mexican Marines. “We gonna get to go home?”
“That depends on Huerta,” Hancock said, as he stepped up to stand next to Gomez, letting his rifle hang. “Keep your eyes open.”
Is there really anything you’re going to be able to do, if he decides to bury us? We’re outnumbered ten to one.
He doubted it. But he wasn’t going to disappear into a Mexican prison without a fight, either. Especially not when it had been Huerta who had hired them in the first place.
He could see the Admiral, most easily distinguishable by the fact that he wasn’t carrying a submachine gun or rifle. But the man wasn’t approaching them; he wasn’t even looking in their direction. He was walking toward the burning barn, flanked by four Marines on his Personal Security Detachment, and accompanied by two of his lieutenants.
There was a group of five Mexican Marines approaching the shed, however. They held their P90s at the low ready, but they weren’t pointing them at the Blackhearts. They still had their balaclavas up; that seemed to be standard procedure for the Marines. Hancock supposed that it was only common sense in a country where the enemy had a well-deserved reputation for going after the families of people who stood up to them.
There was something familiar about the guy in the middle. After a moment, he thought he recognized him as that lieutenant, Medina. As much as he could recognize him by height and demeanor, anyway.
“You are Hancock?” the man asked. His English was heavily accented but intelligible. Hancock just nodded.
“This is the best time,” the man continued. “If you go back the way you came, and wait near the road, there will be two vans coming for you. They will have Ciela International stickers on the sides. Get in them. They will take you to Cancùn, and then you can get transportation back to Los Estados Unidos from there.”
