Lex Talionis

by Peter Nealen

  They must have trusted in their useful idiot mules’ discretion a bit more than they should have.

  The external security was apparently only watching a couple of narrow avenues of approach, which made our job easier. It made things more difficult in a couple of spots to get past them without being spotted, but by the time the sun peeked over the horizon, we were all in position, the SUC fighters on the canyon rim had been pinpointed, and every one of them was under the gun. Even better, it didn’t look like we’d been detected.

  We knew, thanks to Fernandez’ carelessness, that the meet was supposed to happen at 0700. More than likely, the SUC would have preferred earlier, just based on what we’d managed to find out about their professionalism from observing the aftermath of their operations, but I guessed that they couldn’t guarantee a bunch of college students would get there with the vans any earlier than that. I wondered why they wanted clueless kids, but figured that whatever the reasoning, it couldn’t be good. I suspected that even if we hadn’t been there to interdict whatever was going to happen, the coeds would have ended up regretting their involvement in the long run.

  The sun came up, and 0700 came and went. None of the SUC fighters moved, though a few started fidgeting a bit as time passed. The useful idiots were late.

  Finally, about half an hour later, movement drew my eye, and I saw a plume of dust coming down from the north. Moving very carefully and very slowly, I got the plume in my scope, and made out three fifteen-pack vans trundling along a dirt road coming over the hills. It looked like the activist brigade was finally showing up.

  Now timing became a little sensitive. I would have liked to have moved in on the external security, eliminated them, and been waiting in their place when the meet went down. But unfortunately, sneaking up on alert shooters and silently slaughtering them with suppressed weapons without anyone being the wiser only happens in movies. Suppressors only reduce the noise of gunshots; they don’t eliminate them. As soon as the first shot was fired, it was going to be go time.

  So, we watched and waited, knowing that we had no eyes on the canyon floor or the meeting site itself. We’d just have to hope we didn’t wait too long.

  The vans were not moving fast, and as they got closer, it looked more and more like the drivers were nervous as hell. They were driving tentatively, like little old women. They either had little or no experience driving on unimproved roads over rough terrain in the desert, or they were starting to realize just how stupid they were to go along with this little scheme. Maybe both.

  I turned my attention back to the overwatch position in front of me. The SUC fighters were watching the vans, and I saw one of them mutter something to his companion. The smaller man just shook his head as he answered. I couldn’t make out any words, but they looked annoyed.

  I could kind of see why. They’d been out here since before the sun had come up, and there were still some Border Patrol out there, along with a few of the more hard-core militias that came down by the border, and Presumidio Canyon looked like a prime spot for some of them to look for border crossers. The longer they stayed in place, the higher the chances that somebody would stumble across this little rendezvous.

  Of course, it was already too late for them to avoid it, but they were still unaware of our presence.

  After what felt like forever, as the sun rose higher in the sky and started to finally banish the night chill from the desert, the vans descended into the canyon and out of our sight.

  I started counting down as soon as the last one disappeared below the canyon rim. It was possible that they were waiting on whoever the students were supposed to transport, but given the mules’ lateness, I doubted it. My money was on the other players already being in position; there was no other reason for the SUC overwatch to be in place.

  I gave them two full minutes, plus a little change, after the last van had disappeared. The desert was quiet enough that we could hear the engines shut off and the slamming of doors, though voices were still muted by distance.

  A handful of seconds after the last door slammed, I centered my reticle on the bigger of the two guys on overwatch and squeezed the trigger.

  The 7.62 round caught him dead center between the shoulder blades and he fell on his face, as the supersonic crack of the round echoed across the canyon. I immediately shifted to his buddy, who was spinning around and bringing his AK up, and gave him a pair to the upper chest, even as the air was suddenly ripped apart by a ragged storm of suppressed gunfire. My first shot had been the signal that it was, indeed, go time.

  In seconds, the SUC’s exterior security died.

  I heaved myself off the ground, finding that I’d stiffened up a bit after the movement, got my feet under me, and sprinted as best I could for the canyon rim. To my right and left, the rest of the team was similarly clambering to their feet and rushing forward. We had moments to take advantage of the element of surprise.

  I threw myself on my belly in the dirt and rocks beside the two corpses I’d just laid out, banging my elbow painfully on a particularly jagged rock. It took a second to get back on my sights, and I leveled my rifle at the small crowd on the canyon floor.

  The three vans were parked end-to-end in the dust, with three separate groups standing nearby. The kids driving the vans were immediately identifiable, as they were kind of huddled in a knot against the side of the middle van. Some of them were looking up toward the canyon rim, startled by the sudden noise of gunfire, though they looked like they were wondering what the noise was. Others were watching the group they’d met with, looking like they were starting to doubt the wisdom of some of their life choices.

  The other groups had already spun around and were searching the canyon rim above them, weapons up but not shooting yet. They probably didn’t quite realize yet just how fucked they were.

  The SUC fighters were all in various forms of desert camouflage, ranging from MARPAT desert digis to old Desert Storm-era chocolate chip, to some British desert tiger stripes. They were also ranged about the perimeter of the site.

  The guys in the middle also had their guns up, though they were dressed and equipped differently from the SUC. They were all dressed in civvies; jeans, t-shirts, and short-sleeved button-ups, with various ballcaps and even a couple of cowboy hats. But they all had skull-pattern masks over the lower halves of their faces, much like Los Lobos Rabiosos had worn, and they were all wearing the same low-profile chest rigs and carrying FX-05 rifles.

  They were also dividing their attention between the canyon rim and the SUC fighters. They were alert and wary, obviously suspecting their allies of double-crossing them.

  So, I picked the one in the white cowboy hat, and shot him through the dome. His hat went flying as his head jerked backward, and he dropped into the dust with a crash.

  Now, ordinarily, headshots were insurance shots. The head is a damned small target, even at that range, and we were close, barely fifty yards away. But I didn’t know if he had body armor on, and I like to exploit any rifts between my enemies whenever I can find them. If shooting Cowboy in the head started the newcomers shooting at the SUC, so much the better.

  Neither group opened fire immediately; apparently, they still weren’t sure where the shot had come from. But one of the newcomers leveled his rifle at one of the SUC types, whom I thought I recognized as Carlos Garcia, the SUC commander whose meeting with Fernandez had started this particular ball rolling. He barked something in Spanish. He sounded agitated and suspicious.

  All we needed was that momentary hesitation. Without any other signal, the entire team opened fire from the rim.

  I shot the guy covering down on Garcia. He crumpled, then struggled back up to one knee and shot Garcia, before I put two more in him and one in Garcia. Garcia was still protesting when he went down hard, my round blowing a sizeable exit hole out of his side, and sucking a good chunk of his lungs out with it.

  I shifted to one of the newcomers, who was now dumping rounds toward the canyon rim as he r
an toward the vans, looking for some kind of cover. He got close; I had to duck down for a second as a burst ripped through the air only about six inches from my head. When I got back up, he was changing mags on the move, trying to duck around the van. I squeezed off a snap shot at him, but it only hit him in the ass cheek. He went sprawling, but he was still kicking, and now mostly occluded by the van.

  The fire had slackened by then; the group had been like fish in a barrel. There was little to no cover down in that canyon, we had the high ground, and we were only around fifty yards away. The canyon floor was now littered with corpses, including a couple of the students. Who had shot them, I didn’t know. I’d deal with that later. There was at least one bad guy down there still kicking.

  Once the shooting stopped altogether, I cautiously rose to a knee. Nobody shot at me. “Geek!” I yelled.

  “Yeah!”

  “Hold your element up here and cover us!” I hollered. “I’m moving down to clear the kill zone!”

  “Roger,” Eddie yelled back. “We’ve got you!”

  I led the way down, slipping and sliding down the steep wall of the canyon until I reached the bottom, my muzzle elevated to make sure I didn’t bury it accidentally in the sand. I picked up some more bruises from rocks and scratches from creosote bushes as I went.

  At the bottom, even as Nick and Larry came down next to me in showers of gravel and grit, I leveled my rifle at what little I could see of the one shooter I knew to still be alive, keeping an eye on the shell-shocked student activists who were staring wide-eyed at the carnage around them, frozen like bunny rabbits facing a rattlesnake, not even helping the couple of them who were bleeding and groaning on the ground.

  I circled around the back of the vans, never letting my muzzle stray too far from the students’ general vicinity. They might be shocked and traumatized into immobility at the moment, but there was no telling when one of them might do something stupid. That they were there at all did not speak highly of their common sense.

  My boots crunching on the sandy, gravelly ground, I eased around the back of the rear van, only to duck backward as three shots cracked past my face. Old boy was still back there and still had plenty of fight left in him. Another shot shattered the taillight as he tried to shoot me through the body of the van.

  So, I dropped to the ground, put my rifle and my cheek against the dirt, and shot him under the van.

  There wasn’t a lot of him visible, even down there; he’d huddled behind the tire. But there was enough, and I dumped three rounds into what I could see, the muzzle blast throwing dust and grit into my eyes, then put two more through the tire to be on the safe side.

  While I stayed in place, waiting for him to move, Larry had circled around to get a better shot at him. I kept my muzzle trained on the huddled form up until I saw Larry’s boot kick the FX-05 away. He was dead.

  It took only a matter of moments to check the rest of the bodies. None of us were the trusting type; we’d seen too many instances of “dead” bad guys playing possum so that they could shoot a soldier or contractor in the back, or set off a grenade. So, we started at one side and swept across, never turning our backs on an unknown corpse. Weapons were kicked away from clutching hands, eyeballs were muzzle-thumped, and corpses carefully rolled over to make sure they hadn’t wedged a last minute, explosive surprise under themselves while they were dying.

  Meanwhile, Bryan had broken off and herded the still-standing students around the back of the vans, while Eric checked the ones who had been shot.

  One was dead. The other would probably live; he’d taken a round to the side, but it had hit a rib and skittered around to exit next to his spine. It didn’t look like he’d taken any interior injuries, though he’d bled a good bit, and the rib was probably cracked, at best.

  None of the SUC fighters or the civilian-clad newcomers was still breathing. Once the last corpse had been checked, I yelled, “Clear!” toward the canyon rim. A few moments later, Eddie came skidding down the side of the canyon.

  “I left the rest up there on overwatch, just in case,” he said. I just nodded. It was smart, especially after the firefight. Who knew who else might be out in that desert?

  He looked around at the slaughter. “What have we got?” he asked. “SUC I can see. Who are these other assholes?”

  I reached down and pulled down one of the skull masks. The young man was obviously Hispanic, but had none of the neck or facial tattooing that could occasionally identify narcos. “Don’t know,” I replied. “No insignia, and we haven’t found any ID yet. They’re completely sterile, near as we can tell.”

  “Except for those rifles,” he mused. “Mexican special forces?”

  “Who knows?” I answered. “It’s possible; we’ve seen evidence of Mexican authorities and military forces working with cartels, and Mexico City can certainly act like an enemy a lot of the time. The rifles would certainly suggest Mexican Army or Marines, but then, you know as well as I do that somebody was funneling these damned things to the narcos even when we were down there.”

  He nodded, and smirked. “Well, whoever they were, and whatever they came across the border to do, they’re bug food now.” Eddie was not known for his reverence for the dead. “What do we do with the bodies?”

  “Leave ‘em,” I said. “Let the buzzards have ‘em.” A few were already circling overhead. I looked toward where Bryan was still covered down on the students. “That bunch is another matter.”

  “I’d smoke ‘em,” Eddie said coldly. “Aiding and abetting.”

  “We’re not shooting a bunch of unarmed, dumb kids,” I snapped.

  “It’s a long hike back to our transpo,” he pointed out.

  “I’m not saying we’re bringing them with us, either,” I said. I squinted at the vans, as an evil idea started to form in my mind.

  I walked around the front and joined Bryan. He had the survivors on their knees, recently joined by the guy who’d been grazed in the side, their hands on their heads. He was watching them impassively, his eyes cold, his muzzle slightly elevated. All eyes were on his pitiless stare. They probably were waiting for him to go ahead and kill them all.

  Bryan wouldn’t. He liked to cultivate a certain image, not unlike Eddie’s actual cold-bloodedness, but he had his own moral code. I could trust him not to shoot unarmed morons, however tempted he might be.

  I let my rifle dangle on its sling, though my shooting hand was still on the pistol grip. I picked out Fernandez. “So, who are the newcomers?” I asked conversationally.

  She looked up at me. “I’ll never tell you shit, you pinche puto!”

  She’d barely gotten the last syllable of the insult out of her mouth when I lifted my rifle and put a round in the dirt about a foot in front of her. She flinched violently back from the report and the stinging shower of grit kicked up by the bullet. There was a risk that the round might ricochet, but it got the message across.

  “Answer the question,” I said, keeping my tone low and conversational. She just stared, shocked and scared.

  “We don’t know,” the younger man next to her said, his voice high-pitched and frightened. “Commandante Garcia didn’t tell us. He just said they were important, and that we needed to slip them in to Tucson, unnoticed.”

  “Well, looks like somebody noticed,” Bryan drawled.

  I just nodded thoughtfully, then rocked my magazine out and checked it. I’d reloaded after killing the last unknown, but I made a good show of judging the number of rounds and doing math in my head, before I rocked it back in. Then I went around the vans, putting a round in each tire and two in each radiator.

  “These aren’t going anywhere anytime soon,” I told the students as I strolled back, making an effort to appear nonchalant. Truth be told, I wanted to get the hell out of there with a quickness. We were way too close to Mexico for my comfort. “But I wouldn’t suggest sticking around.”

  “Wait, you’re just leaving us here?” the kid who’d answered me asked. “In
the middle of the desert?”

  I nodded. “Sasabe’s only six and a half miles from here, over those hills,” I said, jerking my thumb to the southeast. “You should be able to make that. Just try to keep an eye out for the rattlers and scorpions.” I lifted my muzzle slightly. “Start walking.”

  They weren’t sure we were serious, but they didn’t want to argue with the rifles, so they reluctantly complied, trying to help their wounded comrade. They didn’t really succeed in doing much of anything but making him wince in more pain.

  It took a while for them to get out of sight. They kept stopping and looking back as if expecting that we might relent and offer to take them with us. We didn’t.

  Finally, I raised a hand and circled it above my head. It was time to get moving.

  So it went, for weeks, into months. Alek came back from Kurdistan, bringing the bulk of the company with him. We were still too busy to manage much more than a cursory hand-wave as we came and went, and the other teams went to work. We moved from city to city, state to state, barely finishing up one target before we were studying the target package from Renton for the next one. We grabbed provocateurs, took out hit squads, and made certain cogs in the factions’ machines disappear.

  Meanwhile, the violence ebbed and flowed, never amounting to anything but a lot of people getting hurt or killed. Every time it seemed to die down, an incident would happen to make it flare up again. The social media campaigns keeping the riots going seemed to have lives of their own. Shut down one provocateur, and another one cropped up in its place.

  It was somewhat fortunate that we were so damned busy. It kept us focused on the mission at hand, and not the horror of the bigger picture. The United States wasn’t coming apart at the seams. It was unraveling.

  And it was becoming increasingly evident that there were players in the game, that weren’t necessarily part of either faction, that were actively pulling on the threads, trying to accelerate that unraveling.

  Chapter 28