by Jack Slater
“Jefe – the gun. Aren’t you supposed to be unarmed? What if Reyes suspects –”
Carreon raised his arm to forestall the speech. He turned with a smile on his face, moving slowly. All of Grover’s men were still in their previous positions. They seemed unsuspecting.
“I guess I’m a little jumpy.” He grinned, forcing the expression on to his face and hoping that it wasn’t too obviously false. “I haven’t done this in a while.”
He took a step toward Jennifer Reyes and the gaggle of Grover’s men who surrounded her. As far as he could make out, their weapons were still safetied. They had no cover. They were arrogant, assuming they were the ones in control of their destiny.
Carreon unbuttoned his holster. He pulled the weapon free, surreptitiously sliding his thumb across the safety and disguising the click with a cough. He walked right up to Iker, raising his arm as if to hand the weapon over.
Then fired.
He squeezed the trigger three times, shifting the aim fractionally with each pull. Each shot hit its target, and three of Grover’s men dropped to the ground before the rest had a chance to even flinch.
“Follow me, Iker,” Carreon yelled, pivoting to get a clear shot at the fourth.
For the first time, his new right-hand man seemed actually shocked by the events occurring around them. He was frozen in place.
Carreon couldn’t wait. His heart was thundering now, halfway between exploding and seizing up. The adrenaline surging through him choked off his aim and made him snatch at the trigger. He squeezed it again but missed, and the same held true for his next few shots.
As if stumbling out of the paralysis of sleep, all of his sicarios were fumbling for their weapons, but slowly. He couldn’t blame them. “Hurry!”
A bullet zipped past his hair. It couldn’t have missed him by more than a couple of inches. The thought enraged him.
“You fucking donkey,” he yelled, squeezing the trigger over and over until the magazine ran dry, and one more of Grover’s men lay dead on the desert sand.
Finally, Iker reacted, understanding that either he did something now, or his new boss – and his ticket to the good life – would die before his eyes. He raised his rifle, an AK-47, to his shoulder, and pumped the entire magazine into a space around Jennifer Reyes.
The air was suddenly filled with hot lead and the deafening rattle of automatic gunfire, as from every angle the Federación’s sicarios rushed to protect their leader. Carreon ducked for cover, sheltering behind the bed of a pickup that was instantly turned into a pincushion – though whether from enemy fire or friendly was momentarily unclear.
One by one, caught between a vicious pincer of gunfire, Grover’s mercenaries succumbed to the inevitable. They crumpled onto the floor of the desert, their blood staining the precious white sand. And then there was a stunned, horrified silence. Everyone here had come expecting to do violence. But not like this.
“What the hell’s going on, boss?” Iker yelled out, his throat strangled from adrenaline or fear or just plain shock. “What did they do?”
Carreon was numbed by the realization that he was somehow, miraculously, still alive. He looked down, searching his body for any evidence that he might have been shot and somehow missed it.
But there was nothing.
He was intact.
He’d done it!
“Boss?” Iker said, his voice returning but uncertain. “Shit, boss, the Reyes girl. She’s been shot.”
Carreon swore and dived toward the body of Jennifer Reyes, who collapsed in slow motion to the desert floor, surrounded by a charnel house of blood and death and gore.
And as he did so, gunfire crackled from the ridge line above.
“Ramon – get down!”
Acting on instinct and buoyed by not just the rattle of gunfire, but also a lifetime’s worth of trust in his friend, Ramon Reyes fell to the deck. He hadn’t even made it a foot out of the ring of vehicles before the gunfire started within Fernando Carreon’s camp.
He scrambled desperately back, into safety, and sheltered half-crouched beneath the hood of his Range Rover. “What the fuck was that?”
Mendoza didn’t reply immediately. He was barking orders to the men around him, who were all training their weapons on the rival force, seventy yards distant. He watched as work parties of sicarios ran to the back of the 18-wheeler, right at the center of their encampment, and retrieved the heavy weaponry that they had brought as a last resort.
Reyes brought the binoculars back to his eyes. “Were they shooting at us?”
“I don’t think so,” Mendoza replied, dropping to the sand by his boss’ side. The butt of his rifle was pressed into the crook of his shoulder, and his eyes never stopped roving. “Maybe one of them went for him.”
“Let’s hope they did our dirty work for us,” Reyes said doubtfully.
He looked around, checking that none of his men were shooting. If this was just a mistake, someone with a twitchy finger on the trigger, then he didn’t want to blow the whole thing up while his wife was still in play. Luckily, they were not. As so often, he silently thanked the quick thinking of his oldest friend. While he had been cowering in the dirt, Mendoza had jumped into action.
“Hell,” Reyes yelped, concern spiking within him as his brain finally processed a new – and infinitely more troubling – source of information. He pointed upward, careful not to reveal himself. “Look, up in the hills.”
Mendoza looked up.
“What the fuck is going on?”
Reyes could only lie there and shrugged helplessly. The term fog of war had never seemed more appropriate. Gunfire was crackling all around them, like a sudden hailstorm impacting a tin roof, and yet somehow they were the only people not currently being shot.
It didn’t make a lick of sense. What the hell kind of plan was to coax someone into an ambush, and then not even bother taking your shot?
No, it was apparent that there was something here that he was missing.
“What do you want us to do?” Mendoza said, his voice strangely distant as he looked up at the ridge line. Reyes’ gaze was drawn to the same spot. The gunfire was coming from a section a few hundred feet above and peppering Carreon’s position mercilessly.
“Shit,” Reyes swore. “What if he thinks it’s us?”
He suddenly felt fear for his wife’s life as he never had before. Perhaps it wasn’t even fear, just the jealousy of a man not used to losing control. But whatever the course, he knew he couldn’t let her die.
“We need to make a move while he’s distracted,” he decided. “We’ll use the truck as cover. If it makes it that far, use it to force a gap in his lines. We’ll go through that.”
“You sure about this, boss? We’ll take a hell of a beating. Especially if those guys in the hills decide to make us a target. They can pick us off from up there and we won’t be able to do a damn thing about it.”
Reyes grimaced, knowing that it was true. And yet what else could he do? To lose his wife once was careless. To allow it to happen twice would be a disaster. One that his enemies wouldn’t soon allow him to forget.
“Let’s get moving.”
45
“Get them on the radio, now!” Grover screamed at the nearest of his men. “What the hell is going on? I want him dead. I don’t care what it costs.”
“It’s no good, sir,” the nearest radio operator reported. “I can’t raise them. Any of them.”
Grover pushed the hapless man aside and grabbed a tan-colored scope that was lying just inside the lip of the ridge. He pushed it to his eye and trained the viewfinder on the unruly gaggle of vehicles that that fool Carreon had brought with him.
He should never have allowed this. Carreon had turned on him. That much was clear. He swore again, sensing that events were slipping from his grasp.
“What should we do?”
The question hung in the air without answer as he lay against the dirt, fruitlessly searching the scene below him for
any hint of meaning. Carreon’s men were sheltering from the gunfire behind their vehicles. In the center of the circle, half a dozen or more bodies lay still, blood watering the sand around them.
His men, Grover knew. The ones he’d sent to watch Carreon and the Reyes girl. They were irreplaceable. All he had left were the twenty-nine with him now, all mercenaries. They would not linger long once they understood that all hope of victory was gone. And that could surely not remain lost on them for very much longer.
“Did I tell you to stop shooting?” Grover said, both to fill the silence and to push back on his rising anxiety. “I want every last one of them dead.”
“What about Reyes?” the team leader questioned.
Grover jerked the scope toward the other assortment of vehicles. “Do you see him?”
“No…”
He tore his eye away from the viewfinder and tossed the scope back at the speaker, who plucked it from the air a second before the two-thousand-dollar unit smashed against the ground. “Find him!”
He received no reply, though around him men jumped into action. The machine gun nests still concentrated their fire on Carreon’s men, sweeping from vehicle to vehicle and leaving them smoldering wrecks. But the snipers, working in tandem with the spotters beside them, shifted their focus to Reyes’ small force. Steady voices called out elevation and windage, confirmed among each other that they were focusing on unique targets, and then fired.
“They’re moving,” one of them reported calmly. “Three, now four of the trucks. No – all of them.”
“Retreating?” Grover asked.
There was a short pause before the reply. “The opposite.”
Grover closed his eyes. It was apparent now that he’d lost control, if he’d ever had it at all. The men around him must have reached the same conclusion. What were his options? It was evident that he needed to be quick. If he was trying to figure that out, those around him would be doing the same, trying to decide whether their futures would be better served by acting with him – or against.
He could run now, while the two combatants were beating seven shades out of each other on the lakebed below. There was money secreted away in Cayman Islands accounts and Dominican Republic vaults. He had passports, bolt holes prepared ahead of time for just this eventuality.
It was still possible for him to escape this mess and live free the rest of his life as an extremely wealthy man. Not a billionaire—too much money had been expended on this operation, and he’d only had full command of El Federación for a couple of weeks. Not long enough to prepare a real retirement, but enough to be extremely comfortable.
But perhaps there was still a chance to salvage this. Reyes needed to die. Or Carreon. Ideally both. Either death would bring chaos, and chaos carried with it opportunity. He still had Abalos on his side. And Salazar. There was still a path.
Whether the glimmer of light he saw was real or not, Grover didn’t know. And in reality, his subconscious mind was unlikely to surface a reality that injured his sense of self. But now he saw a way out, a way to not just escape this calamity with his dignity intact, but a path to the goal he had sought all along. And like a drowning man clutches a rope, he reached for it with single-minded focus.
“Sir –?”
“What?” he snapped, pushing himself back as though dodging a splash of hot oil as a volley of bullets impacted the ridgeline, sparking off boulders just a few feet away.
His interlocutor was now looking down at him from above, and Grover sensed the man’s scorn, even if he maintained a studiously polite tone of voice. “I asked if you wanted us to pull back. It looks like they’re ranging us now. One of my men spotted a heavy machine gun.”
“We have the high ground, do we not?” Grover said, his mind now closing with rage at what he perceived as the man’s fear – not recognizing that it was in truth a lack of faith.
“We do. But they have the numbers. This wasn’t supposed to turn into a pitched battle.”
“Well, now it is. So do your damn job. You think you’ll find another gig that pays you as much is this one?”
He received a silent shake of the head in return.
“Then we have an understanding. Do you have eyes on Ramon Reyes?”
Grover watched as the mercenary relayed the question to his men and waited for the response. He was careful to position himself a few feet back from the lip of the ridge, conscious that gunfire and shrapnel was now zipping over his head with increasing regularity.
It wouldn’t do to die, not now that he’d come so far.
As he waited, he surveyed his men who were scattered in line across a section of the hillside about ninety feet across. There were fourteen two-man teams in total, a few feet separated from each other, and each dug in behind a small structure built from sandbags. They were flimsy defenses, really. They’d argued for more, but he hadn’t seen the point.
He ground his teeth, frustrated at how long it was taking to get an answer. It was a simple enough question, wasn’t it? Either they saw him or they didn’t. “Well –?”
Reyes flinched as a whip cracked nearby, again and again, beating down from above with furious intensity. Something scored his face, leaving it stinging with heat and pain. It took him a couple of seconds to realize that it was incoming fire, mostly passing just overhead, and he sighed with relief.
But his mercenaries didn’t all get so lucky. Grover watched as one of the sniper teams was eviscerated by incoming machine gun fire. One moment they were there, the next both their heads seemed simply to disappear in a spray of red.
There was a moment of stunned silence as all around on the ridge, Grover’s men ceased firing and turned to gaze at the bodies of their fallen comrades. The clamor of the violence in the valley below was still clearly audible, if anything growing in intensity as Reyes’ men joined the fight.
The tenor of it had changed, and the tempo, and almost instantly the volume of gunfire concentrated on their position on the ridgeline faded as Carreon’s men were forced to confront the more immediate threat that was headed right for them.
But up on the hillside, Grover’s men were no longer joined in battle. He saw one of the machine gun teams scramble backward a few feet, ducking into cover and leaving their weapons where they were.
He watched, open-mouthed, as both to their right and left others did the same. The trickle became a flow, and before long almost every post was unmanned and men were streaming down the hill on either side of them.
“What the hell are you doing, you idiots?” he screamed. “Keep shooting. You think I’m paying you to fucking run?”
There was no reply other than the clatter of a rifle being tossed onto the stones at his feet as one of the mercenaries ran past. Grover thought about picking it up and firing at the deserters, but as another passed by, he froze.
All that Grover could see of this man was his lips, which were white with fury. Not just fury – rage. And so he froze, correctly suspecting that the anger was directed not at the man who had just killed his friend, but him.
It was over.
Rounds were still chewing into the ridgeline up above, but only because the men pulling the triggers didn’t know they were shooting at ghosts.
Grover stared at the man dumbly, communicating an unrequited message with his eyes. It’s done.
And even if his mind had not yet fully come to terms with this new reality, his body did. His foot moved, then his knee, and then he broke into a run, thoughtless, heedless as fear and panic overtook him. He hared after his men, then jinked slightly to the left, so that he was heading for a different gully than most as his brain started whirring once again.
His men – the deserters – would soon realize that he had value. They would come after him, and by then he had to be long gone. If Fernando Carreon was still alive, he would pay anything for one Warren Grover. And that prospect was too horrifying to even imagine.
And so he too ran.
46
“W
hat the hell –?” Trapp muttered.
A thin rock fall from the slope above first caught his attention. His fist flashed upward, and the men – and one woman – surrounding him instantly dropped to their knees, each with a weapon at the ready. His eyes darted left and right, every sense on edge as he tried to work out what had triggered the sensation of danger in his mind.
They were in a gully on the backside of the hill that led up to the ridge. It was about forty feet wide and a little more forested than the rest of the area, though the foliage competed with large boulders the size of men. Most of the bushes and trees were dried-out husks, but their branches were sturdy and tangled and provided excellent cover. It was now late in the afternoon, and the sun had dropped out of sight. The terrain reminded him of the mountains of Afghanistan – only a lot warmer.
The official warning came a couple seconds later.
“Looks like the bad guys are coming your way,” Burke reported over the radio network from his makeshift command post back in the truck. He repeated the warning in Spanish.
“How many?” Trapp murmured as quietly as he could manage.
“Just about all of them. Moving fast. I’d say maybe thirty? Hard to be sure.”
“Okay. Get yourself somewhere safe. We’ll handle it from here.”
Burke replied tersely, a rattle over Trapp’s radio headset indicating that he was already on the move. “Copy.”
They split into two teams of about six and scrambled behind cover on opposite sides of the narrow valley. Trapp scrambled over a large boulder, pausing on the top to give Ikeda a hoist up after him. She patted him on the back in thanks and rolled silently down onto the other side. Both took up firing positions that afforded them a view of the gully.
What now? Trapp wondered.
The prime question was whether they had been spotted. If so, then their small force of a dozen was about to be pitted against one almost three times its size. Hector’s men were excellent fighters – but from everything they knew, so was the enemy.
