by Jeff Kirkham
A man emerged from the deep shadows, dragging the shrieking woman by her hair. She screamed and whimpered. She shuffled and stumbled, her pants dangling by one leg, tangling her up. The woman was naked from the belly button down. The gangbanger dragging her toward the building paused to punch her in the mouth and to stomp on the pants, freeing the writhing woman from her entanglement. Maybe the man meant to hand her off to his compatriots inside. After the punch in the mouth, her shrieking gave way to mewling. The man dragged her through the glass doors at the front of the building and the woman’s cries ceased as the door swished closed.
“Why didn’t you…” Sofía began to speak and Tavo jammed his finger to his lips. His daughter stilled, the question still swirling in her eyes. She reached for his binoculars sitting on the low wall beside the rifle and looked from window to window. Tavo thought he heard the slightest whimper from his daughter.
“We’re at the state building,” Tavo’s radioed blared. He turned it down and replied, “Overwatch confirms. Roadrunner at Overwatch. Situation nominal. You’ve got one sentry on each corner facing the plaza. Several tangos are passed out on the sidewalk. Unknown combatants inside.” The reminder that they didn’t know what was inside was probably unnecessary. Beto had done more door kicking than Tavo by a wide margin.
Fifteen years ago, Beto deployed four times as a SEAL right in the middle of the “get some” years of the Global War on Terror. He had assaulted buildings like this probably dozens, if not hundreds of times.
Now she understands, Tavo thought to himself, switching his thoughts to his daughter. The scene in the plaza with the raped woman slammed home the brutal truth— the world had always been a more monstrous place than they taught in business school.
Tavo suddenly regretted his decision to let his daughter come with him on the op. He never would’ve permitted her to see this side of the world if not for his suspicions that she betrayed him. It’d been an error of judgment caused by his cynicism.
He had been wrong. She almost certainly had nothing to do with the assault on the hotel in Antigua. He flicked a look in her direction. His daughter covered her mouth with one hand and searched with the other, scanning the building across the plaza for any sign of the woman.
Sofía was an innocent…
Tavo settled his riflescope on the first sentry, keeping his finger away from the hungry trigger. He’d humped the thirty pound Barrett 82A1 to the top of the OXXO building, thinking he might need to send rounds through concrete. But hanging over the little Plaza Zaragoza, he realized that the Barrett was way too much gun for this op. More importantly: it was way too much gun to kill men with his daughter present. Tavo felt a shock of foreboding—the cocktail of emotion that marked a rare mistake.
Foolishness. Regret. Consternation.
The Barrett would be like shooting gangbangers with a deck cannon on a warship. If he pulled the trigger, he’d unleash a six-foot tongue of flame that’d paint them as the most inviting target in the entire area of operation. And it would obliterate anything on the other side of the battle space. His daughter might see the carnage the Barrett and its master intended.
He reached out his hand, as though he needed the binos. Sofía passed them and Tavo pretended to examine a target. Then he slipped them into the big pocket on his plate carrier vest. At least she wouldn’t see the carnage up close.
Tavo had come on the assault to command and to provide overwatch. With his daughter present, he had no intention of joining the fight. Even so, his trigger finger stroked the side of the Barrett’s lower receiver.
This was war, and anything could happen.
He didn’t hear the whip-snap of Beto’s suppressed round as it passed through the gangbanger sentry’s head. The man slumped deeply, not even falling out of his chair. Tavo strained to hear the rifle shot. His men materialized from the shadows, passing the dead sentry.
Watching his trained assaulters work was like watching a TV show. They flowed through the sentry positions, eliminating threats and drunken men alike with their M4s. Tavo felt pleased with the money he’d invested in training. He wanted to be on the ground with them, skirting death and dealing oblivion.
Beto’s second element must’ve closed on the state building from the west side. The guard suddenly stood, then folded to the ground like a puppet with severed strings. Again, Tavo heard nothing.
He knew from the evening news that many of the big cities in America burned at this moment in the darkest part of night. Hermosillo probably wouldn’t be far behind, but the street lamps still glowed in Plaza Zaragoza just like any other night.
Tavo didn’t need night vision to see his teams make entry into the building. The pools of light from the street lamps poured almost all the way around the building, painting the scene in grayscale. His men disappeared through the doorway and the night hushed. A peal of drunken laughter echoed about the plaza from the state building. A silent twinkle flashed in a first story window, then another.
Suddenly, the windows of the first floor lit up like a lightning storm. The thunder of unsuppressed gunfire boomed across the plaza, startling the drowsy town. Tavo pictured the gangbangers inside the building groping through their drunken fugue in a vain attempt to defend themselves.
He monitored the front door, the side entrances and the roof, peering over the top of his giant rifle. His unaided eyes would pick out movement a lot better than through the big Leupold scope.
The access door on the state building roof slammed open and four Los Negros gunmen spilled out, driven like rats before the flood tide. Tavo rested his weight on the stone wall of the OXXO building, two floors higher, and steadied himself. He held the pistol grip with one hand and cupped the other hand beneath it, flexing his fist to make adjustments to his point of aim. Two hundred meters across the plaza might as well have been point-blank for the Barrett.
WHOOMP! WHOOMP! WHOOMP! WHOOMP!
The Barrett barked like a bull mastodon, unleashing one-tenth of a pound slugs that shredded the men across the plaza like piñatas. As he resettled his optic on the rooftop, the first thing he noticed, as his eyes recovered from the flash, was a blue-sleeved, severed arm, draped over the roof wall. Tavo could hear his daughter whimpering. She’d been wearing ear protection, but the violence of the fifty cal was enough to unsettle anyone.
“Overwatch to Roadrunner.”
“Go for Roadrunner.”
“I just wasted some local PD on top of the building.”
“Yeah,” Beto responded. “There are police partying with the gangbangers.”
Tavo snorted. His recon guys hadn’t said anything about cops. They probably hadn’t thought it worth mentioning. Local police in Hermosillo ran with gangs as often as not.
His command radio crackled to life. “Overwatch, North security. Six army Jeeps entering town from the north. Requesting permission to engage.”
Tavo rubbed his face with his rough shooting gloves.
The dogs of war had bolted off their leash.
Enter the Mexican Army, too soon for his liking. Tavo closed his eyes and pictured the threat. He mulled over ramifications. The battle space and his long-term game plan commingled in his mind. He sorted through the big chess pieces, the players of influence, his pile of toy soldiers. He considered the malleable people of Sonora. The Catholic Church. The local army commander. He thought about his daughter. He weighed his doubts. He measured his power in drams of lethal force.
“Engage the Jeeps hard, then withdraw,” Tavo ordered his men at the north end of town. “Stop them on the road.”
He needed a half-hour. He wasn’t ready to get into a fight with the army. His soldiers were still filtering into Sonora from the roiling stew of America. At the present moment, he could only field two hundred men. He needed just a couple more days to consolidate.
As Tavo watched the state building flicker with rifle fire, he wondered what had awoken the army. They didn’t usually get off their bureaucratic asses for anything short
of the promise of a cash bribe. Had they come to rescue the archbishop? Maybe the base commander was waxing brave tonight. Maybe a junior officer hadn’t gotten laid in a while and he was feeling his oats. Sometimes weird shit happened. The world wasn’t a chess game, Tavo reminded himself. It was more like a fishing derby with currents and tides, spawning seasons and moon phases. He couldn’t hope to capture all the myriad elements in his calculations. Some fish would escape his genius, no matter how meticulous.
“They broke through, sir,” the radio blared. “The Jeeps pushed past our ambush.”
Another fish through the net.
He should’ve set up a roadblock between the army base and town. The last thing he wanted was a shooting fight with the army this morning. Not yet. This little assault was supposed to position his cartel as the peacekeeper, not the invader.
“North Security. Withdraw to the plaza,” Tavo ordered and switched radios.
“Overwatch to Roadrunner.”
“Go for Roadrunner,” Beto answered.
“Mex military approaching from the north. We need to exfil. They might be spinning up birds.”
Helicopters would throw the battle space into an entirely new level of chaos. Tavo felt the presence of his daughter, exposed with him on the roof of the OXXO building.
“We’re jackpot here,” Beto called over the radio. “Archbishop and the priests are free and we’re escorting them outside. Forty dead Los Negros inside. We have two down. The vicar got killed in the crossfire. Coming out the east door. Acknowledge.”
“Acknowledged,” Tavo spoke into the radio. The priests and several assaulters poured out of the side door of the state office building, making their way west down the sidewalk.
“Exfil, NOW, Roadrunner.” Tavo coaxed into the radio as the angry whine of the speeding Jeeps filled the plaza. “Let those priests go on their own. I don’t want the army guys to see our assaulters. Everyone needs to vanish.”
As he said it, he already knew it was wishful thinking. Nothing in battle ever conformed to wishful thinking.
The knobby tires of the Jeeps howled as they flew into the Plaza Zaragoza. Tavo swiveled the Barrett and thunder-clapped a .50 caliber round through the front grill of the first Jeep. The passenger compartment exploded with dark liquid—engine oil, blood or both. The Jeep careened over the curb, across the plaza grass and smashed, full speed, into a tree. The impact knocked the tree askew and launched a body through the window.
BRRRRRRRRR!
The second Jeep was still rolling when the Rheinmetall MG3 opened up on Tavo’s position. Tavo dropped behind the concrete wall, leaving his Barrett on top. Sofía had already curled into a ball against one of the air exchangers. She and Tavo stared at one another as she prayed with her rosary beads, muted by the roar of the belt-fed machine gun tearing up their rooftop.
Was she praying for their lives? Was she praying for the woman being raped?
None of the machine gun fire was particularly effective—the machine gunner had sighted in on the vanished burst of flame from the Barrett. The night brimmed over with whizzing chips of concrete and buzzing chunks of lead, enough to humble any hard-bitten warrior. In his daughter’s eyes, even in the milky dark, Tavo beheld her amazement and fear.
Her wide eyes and open mouth gaped at him—surely bewildered at how her father could live in two worlds: the fairytale citadels of wealth and the gristmill of combat. It was not the face of a sociopath. This girl, praying the rosary under the scythe of a machine gun, could not plot the destruction of her father. A person could pretend to be someone they weren’t in the light of day, wrapped in human drama, but nobody could playact under a barrage of suppressing fire. Nothing revealed a person like combat.
BRRRRRR…
The machine-gun fire shifted away and Tavo lifted himself slowly up to the Barrett and searched for threats. He spotted the machine-gunner, now crumpled in the back of the second Jeep, probably killed by one of Beto’s men. Movement at the edge of the reticle caught his eye and he swiveled to a new threat, a soldier preparing to fire another MG3 from a third Jeep, probably at Beto’s squad. Tavo fired another round from the Barrett.
WHOMP!
The scope jumped with recoil and Tavo tracked back, searching for the target. He found the man dangling over the side, cut nearly in half below his breastbone. Intestines and offal hung over the side wall and glopped onto the grass.
He glanced back at his daughter, still balled up beneath the air exchanger.
She’s not a killer…
Tavo panned across the Jeeps through the scope. He could see five of the six vehicles, one dead against the tilting tree. Another held the eviscerated gunman hanging over the side. The remaining three Jeeps parked nose-to-nose in a hasty stockade. Two of those had MG3s in the back dangling from pintle mounts, but no one had stepped up to man them. Tavo could see legs and helmets sticking out from around corners and edges of the vehicles—all men he could kill through the light metal skin. Almost nothing in the Jeeps would stop his .50 caliber round.
He spotted a soldier peeking around the corner of a building, probably from a Jeep he hadn’t located. The man dropped back and disappeared.
Tavo preferred to let his men on the ground work the problem of the soldiers. He’d done his part to stop the vehicles, and he was in no hurry to draw rounds by sending another cone of flame from the Barrett. Beto could handle the grunts on the ground.
Tavo checked on his daughter and switched from the riflescope to his binoculars. With the binos, he could take in the whole battlefield in a single scan.
He didn’t like what he saw.
Both Beto’s team and Bravo Team had ducked inside a parking garage next door to the state office building. The soldiers pinned under and around the Jeeps were trading rounds with Beto’s crew. As Tavo had seen before, men tended to settle into these fifty-fifty gunfights, which made no sense at all in the calculus of battle, but to them seemed the right thing to do at the time. Once a man got behind something thick and hard, he would be slow to leave it.
“Actual, Roadrunner.” Tavo keyed his radio.
“Go for Roadrunner.”
“Keep moving west. Exfil that parking garage. A squad of Mex Army is moving around the backside of your position.”
“Roadrunner Two took a round to the throat. We’re leaving him. On the move. Roadrunner out.”
BRRRRRRR!
Tavo ducked below the wall, but the string of 5.56 went somewhere other than his perch atop the OXXO. Sofía crept up beside him at the wall, probably feeling safer next to another human being.
Tavo left her and jumped up behind the Barrett and quickly located the dart of flame that marked the MG3.
KA-WHOOMP!
The round fired before Tavo meant to send it, but it silenced the MG. Sometimes, when he accidentally fired, things worked out—surprise trigger break and all. He re-centered the scope on the belt-fed and found the soldier falling slowly backwards, gripping a severed hand. Tavo had impacted the machine gun body itself, and the twisted metal and red-hot frag had done its deadly work.
Fire from the soldiers beneath the Jeeps peppered the rooftop. Tavo crouched down and turned his head to avoid taking frag in the face. He came eyeball-to-eyeball with Sofía. Her panic seemed to have subsided.
“This is war, mi amor. This is what it takes to keep people safe,” Tavo shouted over the pop-pop-pop of rifle fire down in the plaza. Killing a bunch of Mexican Army in order to kill gangsters in order to free priests? He couldn’t tell if he’d convinced her of anything or not. Even to him it wasn’t particularly clear. In combat, it rarely was. He’d shot and killed the guys trying to shoot and kill him. End of story.
“Roadrunner to Actual.”
Tavo looked down at his radio. “Go for Actual.”
“We’re clear of the AO. Minus one VIP. Minus four blue team. Five mikes out from the ORP.”
“We’ll see you there in ten.” Tavo reached up with one hand and slid the Barrett off
the wall and into his arms. He faced Sofía.
“We saved the archbishop and all but one of his priests. Los Negros won’t be a problem anymore. We’ve done what we came here to do. Let’s go home.”
She looked at him with wide, wet eyes and nodded.
Chapter 11
Tavo Castillo
Rancho Santiaguito, 65 Miles outside of Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico
The ironwood mountainside chewed the sun as it sank toward the horizon, ending another day in the northern desert of Mexico.
Tavo sensed the opportunity escaping him, and he resented the daylight hours he’d spent sleeping.
America floundered in its death throes, the weakened shadow of a once dazzling empire. While the greatest opportunity he’d ever seen lay vulnerable, Tavo had been forced to catch up on the sleep he’d missed the night before. Given the opportunities, and the stakes if he failed, he couldn’t afford to make decisions with a woolly mind. So, he’d slept eight hours after the night raid. He’d also run a 5k in the late afternoon cool-down, a highland desert circuit on the dirt roads that cut through the chaparral. He wanted to ensure that his physical and mental machine were in peak, working order. Over the next three days, he would lock in his destiny, either as a little-known criminal genius or as an emperor the likes of which hadn’t been seen in a thousand years.
As he let his hot sweat cool in the setting sun, Tavo noticed a dead woodpecker chick curled on the desert floor. He sat on a chunk of crumbling granite and let his mind wander.
The baby woodpecker must’ve died leaving the nest, its plumage nearly, but not quite, full. A big ironwood and a mesquite tree overhung the rock pile, and Tavo felt certain he’d find a nest if he searched one branch at a time.
