Conquistadors

by Jeff Kirkham

  Pablo Escobar had been cut down on the verge. He’d been laid low and revealed as another petty tyrant. He lacked the fortitude history demanded for a man to cross over to live forever in the memory of the human race.

  Did Escobar know it when he stood at that moment, overlooking the final battlefield that would select him as a man or as a god? Or did he console himself with tales of how other men had failed him or how the Fates had slighted him?

  Tavo would overcome whatever history put before him. He could feel it in his gut, and it rumbled and popped like tanks crushing mens’ skulls under their treads.

  Beto stood beside Tavo with a stupid, curious expression on his face.

  “Are you waiting for me to tell you what to do next?” Tavo finally asked.

  “No, Canoso. Is that all you wanted?”

  “Yes.”

  Beto shifted from one foot to another, waiting for more. It felt like watching a confused, adolescent dog, wandering around the edges of the pack. Tavo understood that he hadn’t provided the customary words or body language that would release the underling from this conversation. So, Beto hung on his next words, unsure.

  He didn’t care. He’d given all the orders necessary and he’d moved on to the next plane of thought. It was no longer his duty to massage the sensitivities of fools. He’d shrugged them off and moved on alone.

  When he finished his thought, Tavo returned to his Humvee.

  After midnight, the desert cooled slightly. Tavo listened to the mission brief, at the back of the group of commandos standing inside a circle of trucks. He paid close attention to the command frequencies and challenge codes. He would go in with the assault team and Beto wouldn’t know it until it was all said and done. Tavo would operate as just another squad member in the dark.

  He desperately needed the sleep, but he wouldn’t be able to sleep during the assault on the refinery anyway. His plan was to stick himself onto the back of one of the squads and to let them know his identity after they rolled out. He’d join the mission without Beto finding out until later.

  Truth was, he felt like getting his gun on. Even if there was no enemy contact, the professionalism and intensity of an assault would smooth his frayed ends. In a best case scenario, he’d get a chance to mix it up with some Americans—maybe deal a couple Jed Eckerts out of the deck. Lord knew, those assholes had taken their bites out of him over the last two weeks. He’d take pleasure in ending a few more lives.

  When the assault finally kicked off at three a.m., Tavo ghosted in behind a team. All his top-tier commandos carried AR-15s and they all had strict instructions to check their backstops, though Tavo couldn’t imagine a tiny 5.56 round penetrating the double skin of a fuel tank. The .308 rifles back in New Mexico had penetrated the tanks, but they were three times the bullet weight and twice the powder.

  Since they’d crossed the U.S. border six days ago, Tavo had kept his personal assault gear with him in his command Humvee. He pimped himself out with the highest-quality, most-expensive tactical gear money could buy—kit favored by American SOF shooting instructors. As a result, everything he carried was a notch above his commandos. They ran Gen 3 night vision; Tavo carried the newest white phosphor NVGs. They used regular laser pointers; Tavo ran a $3,000 ATPIAL infra-red laser. They wore no armor; Tavo ran with the lightest ceramic armor plates made. Tavo wore or carried $17,000 worth of tactical gear on his person and he would’ve spent ten times that much if it’d been possible.

  It didn’t take long for the squad leader to notice the extra guy at the back of his string, particularly an extra guy decked out like SEAL Team Six. When the squad leader looped back to find out what the hell was going on, Tavo stopped him with a hand to the chest and lifted his NVGs to show his face.

  “I’m Gustavo Castillo. My call sign’s Cascabel. Tell no one I’m here. Do you copy, soldier?”

  “Si, Jefe,” the team leader instantly pivoted and went back to work toward the front of his team.

  Professional and intense, Tavo exhaled his pleasure. Rolling into an assault, he let the freedom of training and instinct carry him.

  Gravel crunched under their feet as they passed through the entrance gate and the teams flowed toward their assigned sectors of the refinery. As Tavo’s squad turned north along the fence, working their search pattern, they came to a choke point and the squad leader motioned for the squad to stop.

  Huge pipes crisscrossed the refinery, connecting a mysterious sequence of storage tanks: long horizontal tanks, tall, narrow tanks and the occasional fat cylindrical tank. From the air, the refinery must’ve look like a collection of Tupperware, stacked and arranged in orderly rows.

  Clusters of pipes crossed the yard horizontally, one on top of the other. The set of pipes in front of the team of commandos ran parallel to the ground, turned down, dipped underground, then popped back up again, continuing toward some kind of junction building. The underground run allowed trucks to pass over to the other side of the refinery. The effect was to create a twelve foot-wide gap in the pipes—the perfect choke point for an ambush.

  Tavo moved up to the team leader and rested a hand on his shoulder. Tavo signaled with his hands that he and one other man would cut back, slip through the pipe and circle around the choke point, setting up an “L” counter-ambush against anyone who might be waiting to hit the squad in the gap.

  The squad leader nodded his understanding. Tavo motioned for a commando to come with him and Tavo led out, doubling back on their trail.

  The stack of pipes wasn’t an absolute barrier. A man could slip between the horizontal pipes. Tavo waved for his wingman to go through the pipes first. The man rolled through the gap and the magazines in his vest made the slightest clank as they tapped a pipe. He took up a defensive position behind a metal valve the size of a refrigerator while Tavo slid through the pipes himself.

  On the other side, he resumed the lead and wormed his way around a jungle of pipes and tanks. A series of sixty-foot long, horizontal storage tanks forced him to go farther into “Indian country” than he wanted, placing he and his wingman downrange of their own squad. Even though the deeper penetration would force him to shoot toward his own men, and them toward him, it had the benefit of placing them where no ambusher would ever think to look—deep behind them. Tavo considered radioing the squad leader, but even a whisper could blow his deep flank. Each minuscule crunch of gravel thundered in his ears.

  As he rounded the end of the last horizontal tank, he found himself so far downrange that the hair on the back of his neck stood straight up. He was far from certain that anyone had set an ambush. In all likelihood, the refinery was abandoned. But he knew for sure that the remaining five men in the team were pointing their rifles directly at him and his wingman. Tavo could see their lasers dancing in the space between him and the team. Santa Muerte had definitely joined the party.

  Tavo pointed his rifle in the air and drew infra-red circles in the sky, using his ATPIAL laser to mark his position for the team. He didn’t know if the men had been trained to know what the air-lasso meant. He’d seen it on American TV, and it seemed obvious, but he didn’t have a lot of confidence in the team’s level of intelligence. They were former drug dealers, after all.

  Tavo waved his wingman forward, grabbed his head and peeled the IR sticker off the back of his bump helmet. The wingman let him, like a toddler submitting to an angry parent.

  The IR sticker could only be seen through NVGs, and the sticker was meant to identify friend from foe. Tavo slapped the man’s IR sticker on his own chest.

  The squad’s laser beams danced around the yard, still hunting for targets despite Tavo’s efforts. Unlike his expensive ATPIAL, their lasers could be seen by the naked eye. Anyone laying in ambush knew the team was about to enter the yard.

  Still unsure whether he’d draw his own squad’s fire, Tavo sucked tight to the big storage tank and shimmied around the bulbous end, slowly opening up “pie wedges” of the yard. Another forest of pipes choked
the opposite side, traversing up, down and sideways.

  Almost immediately, he saw the shape of a man crouched in the clusters of tubing just opposite him. The man had no IR sticker and appeared completely unaware of Tavo and his wingman. The enemy stared intently at the green laser beams from the far side of the gap.

  Tavo keyed his radio three times—the pre-arranged signal for “enemy contact.” The squad leader keyed back once, meaning “acknowledged.”

  The ambusher faced directly away from him, so Tavo hazarded another slice of the pie, side-stepping around the tank and searching even deeper within the tangle of pipes. He picked out another form—a second ambusher.

  The blood pounded in his ears and the adrenaline washed over him like the instant after a snort of cocaine.

  He held these two mens’ lives in his hands, like paper-mâché dolls ripe for crushing. Getting the drop on another man dripped with sweet ecstasy. The gods of Olympus, alone, had enjoyed this dominion over man. Tavo lingered, allowing his adrenaline to ebb, toying with the men’s lives. He could either continue “slicing the pie” and come out from behind the storage tank, giving himself a full view of the yard. Or he could start the death-dealing. Once Tavo pulled the trigger, his squad would open fire and the exquisiteness would end.

  Should he take the two upon his plate, or search for more?

  There hadn’t been any shooting yet in the refinery. Nothing disturbed the pregnant pulsing of the moment. Tavo drew it out, like an orgasm held in abeyance, building but never peaking. He shuffled another half-step around the storage tank. He took in the whole of the yard.

  Behind a giant wedge of concrete, he found another enemy, also fixated on the squad of assaulters still outside the kill zone. Tavo slipped back to cover and took several deep breaths. Each breath released a scrim of adrenaline. His hands shook and his face tingled, but he knew neither would interfere with the skill he’d honed over the last five years. He’d visited Mount Olympus many times before, and he knew his flesh would ultimately surrender to training.

  Despite their professionalism, his squad would shoot at any muzzle flash, friend or foe. Some instincts training could not defeat. The adrenaline wasn’t enough to make Tavo forget the truth about combat: men wouldn’t concern themselves with downrange friendlies once the shooting started. They’d shoot at anything that moved.

  Even inside his Helix suppressor, Tavo’s muzzle flash would attract bullets like a corpse draws flies. He needed to hide his muzzle from the squad. Then he could release the hounds.

  He slithered back away from the storage tank. He gave up the cover of the heavy metal, but moved deeper so the tank would block his squad’s angle of view. He crabbed sideways and laid face-down in the gravel. The two enemies across the courtyard came into view again, and they remained oblivious to his executioner’s axe.

  It was the best he could do, given the battlefield geometry. His squad would have to fight the third man on their own. Tavo certainly wasn’t going to step out into the yard and get his ass shot off for his trouble.

  With his blood finally cooling, he eased his safety off. He steadied his IR laser, ignoring the electronic rifle sights. The IR laser would be his Destroying Angel, killing whomever it touched. In Tavo’s NVGs, the laser sluiced across the dust of the courtyard, invisibly stroking the doomed men.

  Chest, head, groin, head, the invisible laser teased.

  Enough stroking…Time to feed.

  Tavo exhaled and rocked the trigger.

  PFFT. PFFT. PFFT, whip-SNAP, SNAP, SNAP!

  Tavo didn’t confirm the first three hits. He slid his laser over to the second man, who pivoted around in surprise at the strange snapping behind him.

  PFFT. PFFT. PFFT. PFFT, whip-SNAP, SNAP, SNAP, SNAP!

  Tavo dumped four rounds into the second man, he flipped backwards over a horizontal pipe and disappeared and shuffled sideways, still laying in the gravel, and hungry to gain a shot on the third man tucked up against the concrete pillar. But his world erupted in chaos before he could get a shot.

  BOOM, BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM…

  Gravel leapt off the ground and hammered at his face. A vicious sting sprang up in his right ear. He scrambled for the cover of the storage tank. He felt something slap at his foot and then howling pain shot up from where his middle toe should’ve been. After an eternity of scrambling in the gravel, he reached the cover of the storage tank, jammed himself behind a concrete support, and peered back around, searching for new targets.

  He found the problem. The first man he’d shot was still in the fight, maneuvering deeper into the pipe jungle, trying to make a killing shot on Tavo.

  whip-SNAP, SNAP!

  Tavo’s wingman opened up and dropped the ambusher a second time.

  Chastened, Tavo leaned out, looking for the second man he’d shot, but still not seeing him. He’d pitched out of view.

  SNAP, SNAP, SNAP, BOOM-BOOM-BOOM, SNAP-SNAP-SNAP-SNAP-SNAP…

  Tavo’s squad must have pushed through the gap and engaged the third man. The pain in his foot had grown into a rip-roaring throb he could no longer ignore. He disconnected the pain from his conscious mind, stood and leaned around the tank into the courtyard, ducking back when a bullet pinged off the storage tank, his own men shooting at him.

  “Shift fire, assholes. Cascabel is downrange. Acknowledge right now!” Tavo panted into the radio, his pain probably not as “disconnected from his consciousness” as he would’ve liked to believe.

  “Bravo One, acknowledged. Shifting fire.”

  The shooting died off suddenly and Tavo inched out from behind the cover of the storage tank, dragging his maimed foot. His squad of commandos moved up the yard, several rifles swinging his way. He jerked his IR laser in the air, making desperate circles.

  After a few moments of quiet, he felt relatively confident his own men wouldn’t shoot him. He stepped into the yard and crossed in front of his advancing squad, casting a wary eye in their direction. Nobody fired. He stalked toward the man he’d killed, and his wingman went to secure the man who’d survived Tavo’s first volley.

  Tavo found the man sprawled across a pipe, his throat blown open. He wore standard multi-cam fatigues. The pant legs were tucked into his boots, which probably pegged him as a surviving airman from Nellis Air Force Base.

  “Bravo Cinco for Cascabel,” someone said in a thick Spanish accent over the radio. Tavo assumed it was his wingman. “Come to me, please, Jefe. This one is still alive.”

  Tavo hobbled toward where he’d seen the first man fall and found his wingman standing over a wheezing American draped against some white pipes, staining them with his blood.

  Tavo flipped up his NVGs and switched on the red light attached to the rail on his AirFrame helmet. He wanted to see the man who had cost him a toe with his own eyes.

  The red flashlight turned the man’s blood black. The American bled from at least five places, any one of which would probably kill him eventually. Tavo’s wingman had kicked the man’s rifle to the side: a scoped, lever-action 30-30. The ambusher wore a blood-stained plaid shirt and denim pants. His cowboy hat had fallen to the side and the rim was splattered in blood. The American had come to war in leather-tooled cowboy boots.

  “Howdy, partner,” Tavo leered at the dying man.

  “Yipee ki yay, drug-dealer,” the American shot back. Apparently, not all of the fight had drained out of him yet.

  “You know me?” Tavo raised an eyebrow.

  “I know you well enough.”

  “How do you know I’m cartel?” The fact that he knew they were cartel raised interesting questions.

  The man just harrumphed. “Heh, heh, heh,” he ignored Tavo’s question. “How’s that ear and that foot feeling?” He nodded at Tavo’s own wounds.

  Tavo reached up and felt the side of his face. His hair, cheek and neck were covered in sticky blood. A chunk of his ear was missing. The thought of his appearance being altered by this piece-of-shit infuriated him.

&
nbsp; “How’s it feel to have your guts on the outside?” Tavo gloated. Even in the red light, the mass of shining offal hanging over the man’s belt could only be one thing. “I think we’ll take a few minutes to work you over a bit before you die. Maybe we can make your last shitty moments in this world even shittier.”

  “Do your worst, Mexicano.” The man chuckled, then fell into a wet coughing fit. Tavo stabbed at the man’s exposed guts with his suppressor, pushing the coughing fit into a deep moan.

  When he caught his breath, the American spoke. “Hey. Narco Man. When I see you in hell, let’s go another couple rounds.”

  “It’s a date,” Tavo said as he breach-checked his H&K 416 and clicked off the red light on his helmet. He pulled down his NVGs in order to see the infrared laser sight.

  “Until then, suck a bag of dicks,” the American spoke into the darkness.

  Tavo shot him in the head twice, the spat of the suppressor the last sound the cowboy would ever hear.

  Chapter 37

  Tavo Castillo

  Dry Lake Refinery, Interstate 15 and Highway 93, Fifteen miles north of Las Vegas, Nevada

  Beto didn’t ask why Tavo had joined the assault teams without telling him. In the flat light of late morning, the refinery seemed far less ominous than it had the night before. They’d killed eight insurgent fighters hidden within the refinery and they’d learned precious little for their effort.

  Tavo, Beto and the squad leaders circled up in the middle of the refinery to conduct an after-action review.

  “So, these dipshits were a mixed bag of airmen from the base and few locals?” Beto ran his fingers through his hair, drying it after wearing a bump helmet all night. “How’d they get organized so fast?”