by Dean Murray
Chapter 17
Alec Graves
Three miles south of Lochiel, Arizona
Northern Mexico
I could tell that Jasmin and Jessica were still in shock from the revelation James and I had shared, but I couldn't do anything at this point but hope that they'd be able to shake it off enough not to have it interfere with their ability to fight.
Juan seemed to be handling the news better, but I could tell that he was still a little off of his game. He'd finished briefing us on the latest version of the operation and then we'd made it back just in time to form up with the rest of the teams for transport down to the ambush location.
This was an operation that had been solely put together by the Brain Box rather than originating from Brandon's anonymous source and then being vetted by the Brain Box. I wasn't sure that it should make any kind of difference either way, but for whatever reason I was more nervous about this deployment than either of the last two.
The Brain Box had apparently identified a shipment of drugs that was being run up into the United States by one of the drug cartels that had especially heavy backing from a group of fifteen jaguars who'd spent the last decade or so kicking out all of the competition from their home city of Zacatecas. I was unclear on whether or not the authorities even realized that Zacatecas was where ten percent of the cocaine in the United States originated, but apparently the cartel had been having problems with a couple of the other regional drug gangs and as a result they were especially worried about making sure this particular shipment made it across the border.
The Brain Box had a long list of hacked email accounts that indicated that the Zacatecas crew had turned to their usual MO and escalated by including nearly a dozen jaguars to serve as guards for the shipment as it made its way north. If they continued with their normal procedure those guards would then pay a visit to the competing cartels and kill everyone they could find, but thanks to some more fancy hacking the Brain Box had a complete roster of who was going to be along for the ride as well as the route and schedule for the caravan.
Brandon had decided that we would intercept the convoy just short of the United States border, all of which explained why we'd spent the last hour in the darkness alongside the road setting up a series of tire shredders and vehicles such that we could block off the road in seconds.
The Brain Box apparently had aerial eyes on the convoy, and about the time that we all left Rio Rico they confirmed that the number of guards still matched up exactly with the count from the emails that had tipped us off about the operation in the first place.
A couple of minutes before three a.m. we got the signal that the convoy was only ten minutes out and that there were no other vehicles between us and them, so we sprang into action. The tire shredders were flipped to the 'shred' position and the SUV blockade was rolled into place.
Our team was on the north side of the road along with some other people from various teams while Vincent's team and Brandon were on the south side. The thinking was that the terrain to the south was less rugged and therefore we could reasonably expect that most of the bad guys would try to flee south once they realized how much trouble they were in.
Brandon had also positioned a few wolves around the ambush site in a rough circle a hundred yards or so from the road. Jaguars are usually faster than wolves, so the hope was that the wolves would be able to intercept and at least slow down any of the cats who broke free of the main fight and made a run for it. If everything went according to plan then we'd be facing an outnumbered group of cats with a few humans thrown in and we'd have the element of surprise on our side.
My shoulders tensed up as I saw the first SUV appear around a bend in the road. A second SUV followed less than twenty yards from the first, and then a large semi came into view next. Two more black SUVs rounded out the convoy and the next couple of minutes passed agonizingly slowly as we waited for the vehicles to enter our trap.
Brandon had positioned our team on the extreme western edge of the ambush site, so I was able to see our targets well before they had any possibility of seeing our roadblock. The rest of our teams were pretty well hidden, but still visible if you knew where to look. I watched as the same ripple of anxiety that I was feeling slowly swept down both sides of the road as each new wolf or hybrid was able to finally see the approaching group of cars.
The reaction by the lead car was almost perfect when they saw that the road was blocked ahead of them. They must have had radios, because all five vehicles started to accelerate at the same time. Trying to ram their way through our blockade was risky, but they couldn't reverse course quickly, not without losing the semi-truck and the tens of millions of dollars of drugs it was carrying.
They'd all slowed down to negotiate the final curve in the road, which meant that they were starting from a less than ideal velocity, but they still would have been able to break through if not for the tire shredders which they hit less than a second later. Within a few heartbeats the first two SUVs and the truck were all on bare metal rims and the last two SUVs' tires were smoking as they stopped just short of the shredders.
Four more of our SUVs rolled into place behind the convoy and then Brandon shot off a flare and all around me people were shifting forms in a multi-pointed roar of power. My hybrid legs tore into the hard ground underneath me as I joined everyone else in sprinting down towards the road.
At close range humans with guns simply aren't much of a threat because of how slow the operators are, but we were starting out far enough away that I'd been worried that five or six guards armed with fully automatic weapons might do some damage before we got close enough to neutralize them. Hybrids are generally big enough and our internal systems are redundant enough that we are hard to kill with anything less than large-caliber rifle fire, but a pistol shot to the head could still bring us down and the wolves are much less resilient.
My concerns meant that I was hyper-aware and looking for weapons, which explained how I ended up as the first person to realize it was a trap. People were piling out of the SUVs just as expected, but rather than splitting into two groups, one of which was armed and the other of which dropped down onto all fours as they transformed, every single one of the guards shifted with a lash of power and charged towards the hybrids and wolves attacking them.
"It's a trap!"
My words hadn't even had a chance to begin fading away before Brandon started yelling for everyone to push on and attack.
I'd slowed down slightly when I realized that the cats were prepared for us, but I heeded Brandon's orders and crashed into a large male jaguar a second later. There was nothing of finesse in the exchange of blows. He jumped at me with quickness that I wouldn't have thought I'd be able to match, but I somehow managed to get an arm up between the two of us and I picked him out of the air and plunged my claws into his side.
I'd been lucky and I knew it, but as I dropped his lifeless corpse to the ground the back of the semi-truck opened up and three more men jumped out and suddenly the odds had tilted against us.
With one squad detached to Naco, the security team that had stayed back at the hotel, and a few people like Alison still on light duty, we were down to twenty-three effectives onsite at the ambush. We'd been expecting twelve cats and half a dozen humans, which would have meant that we'd essentially have them outnumbered by about fifty percent, once you factor in the fact that we had some wolves out to catch leakers rather than stationed where they could get right into the fight.
Instead, we were up against twenty-one cats, counting the three that had been hidden inside of the trailer with the drugs. Suddenly we were outnumbered and fighting a holding action until the wolves out on the perimeter could arrive and help tilt things back in our direction.
I ducked another cat and then ripped a smaller female off of James' back, but she writhed out of my grasp before I could kill her. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jess and Jasmin double-team the jaguar that I'd just dodged, but there was still something
tickling the back of my mind. In order to have planned this ambush the cats must have had a pretty good idea of how many people we could field. I didn't see any way they could have known that we'd be down a team, so counter-ambushing us with such a small number of shape shifters didn't make any sense.
Another cat tried to attack Jess and drive her off so that she couldn't assist Jasmin, but Juan got ahold of the cat's ribs and slammed it into the ground hard enough that I heard bones break. Before Juan could follow up and finish off his injured opponent, two more cats threw themselves at him. One cat latched onto his leg and the other hit him higher up, gaining a purchase on his chest as its back legs tore into his stomach. He needed help, but another cat was circling me and I knew if I turned my back on it that I'd be dead within seconds.
Down on the south side of the road our forces were even worse off than we were. Whether by accident or design, the cats had sent most of their numbers down there and I could see that they were being pressed badly by the sheer weight of numbers arrayed against them. Vincent and his guys were almost all fighting more than one opponent and bleeding in several places, but the real show was being put on by Brandon.
I'd never seen Brandon go all-out before, which meant that I'd never realized just how much he'd been holding back in all of the fights I'd seen him in before. He wasn't just fast, he seemed to flicker from one place to the next without actually crossing the intervening distance. Brandon killed two cats in three seconds while I was watching out of the corner of my eye and I suddenly realized he was right. He just needed the rest of us to hold on for another minute or so and he'd swing the odds back in our favor all by himself.
My opponent suddenly switched directions and threw himself at James, but I managed to move with him and I got a couple of claws into his feline body. It wasn't much more than a flesh wound, but it threw off his timing and trajectory enough that James was able to spin around and land a couple of blows of his own.
We were in the middle of a total free-for-all. I jumped in and tried to keep the cat James had been fighting up until that point occupied, which positioned me perfectly to see Brandon's plan finally finish unraveling.
The three shape shifters who'd been in the back of the semi with the drugs had been slow to engage, but as I got a decent look at them for the first time I realized that all three were nearly half again as big as any of the other jaguars we were fighting. As Brandon started in on his third kill the three big cats split up with one heading towards us and the other two heading to the south side of the road.
James had somehow left my new opponent with a limp, which was going a long way to counteract the fact that he was obviously older than any of the cats I'd fought so far. The difference in speed and strength was noticeable, but I juked one direction and then waited until he was committed and threw myself forward with enough force that I managed to get both sets of claws on my cat before he could land and change directions.
We went rolling across the ground from the force of my spring, but I managed to keep superior positioning and as I dropped another lifeless body to the ground I looked up to see a trail of bodies between where the three bigger cats had been a few seconds before and where they were now.
Ancients. It finally made sense. They'd sprung the trap with a smaller number of cats because they'd figured that the sheer deadliness of their three most powerful cats would be more than enough to offset both Brandon's considerable gifts and any quantitative disadvantage they would be suffering under.
It was obvious that the two Ancients on the south side of the road had planned on engaging Brandon simultaneously, but they'd taken too long to identify him. Those precious few seconds had allowed Brandon to cut down the bulk of the cats that had been trying to swarm Vincent's team under and now Vincent and his guys had thrown themselves at one of the Ancients in the hope that they could keep it distracted long enough for Brandon to kill the one he was fighting and then turn around and save them.
There was no question in my mind but that Vincent's guys would need rescuing. They were keeping their opponent on the defensive by sheer weight of numbers, but even while on the defensive he was landing respectable blows that were taking a toll on the hybrids facing him.
The fight between Brandon and the other Ancient was nothing but a blur. I couldn't tell who was winning because I couldn't even follow what was happening in the fight. I had a second to hope that Brandon's supercharged strength and speed was enough to carry the day and then a hammer blow of force hit me between the shoulders.
I'd committed the cardinal sin and allowed myself to become so distracted that I lost track of what was going on in my immediate area. The mere fact that I wasn't dead by the time that I hit the ground told me that I hadn't been knocked over by one of the cats, and I rolled to my feet to see that Jasmin had thrown herself at me to keep the third Ancient from executing me on his way towards Juan.
I thought Juan was a dead man, but he flung himself to the side with speed I hadn't known he possessed, and his evasion was just enough that the Ancient couldn't fully compensate. Instead of a killing slash to the neck Juan took a set of claws to his shoulder, but the massive jaguar probably would have killed him a second later if not for the arrival of two of the wolves who had been out on the perimeter. Both wolves jumped the Ancient at the same time that James finished off his latest opponent and moved in to help them.
Jess and Jasmin were only a leap away and I was only a couple of seconds behind them, but the Ancient killed one of the wolves and savaged another before any of us could arrive to assist. It looked like James got a claw or two into the jaguar as it jumped back out of range of the gang converging on it, but it was hard to tell for sure and if he had, then he'd paid for the blow with a set of deep slashes to his chest.
Somehow we'd finished off all of the other cats who had made it over to engage us, and it looked as though the other team on the south side of the road finally had the upper hand in their fight. A couple of their people were already headed this way to help deal with the Ancient, but it was going to be too little too late.
The second wolf, the one who had been hurt so badly a few seconds ago, was back on her feet, but she was so punch-drunk that she staggered away from the rest of us before anyone could stop her. The Ancient only needed a few feet of separation to make his play to finish her off.
A black-furred glowing streak of light pounced on the injured wolf and the rest of us threw ourselves at the Ancient in an attempt to save her. It was like fighting a wraith. I slashed at the cat, but my claws found nothing but empty air and a second later lines of fire tore their way across my chest.
My ribs held and protected my heart from the vicious attack, but the force of the blow knocked me backwards. I saw Jasmin flung away with blood dripping down her side and Jess knocked into James so that he couldn't interfere with what came next.
There was a frozen heartbeat where I could see the Ancient as it gathered itself and sprang at me. I didn't have to be able to see the arc of its trajectory. I was stumbling and off balance, there was no way that something as deadly as this jaguar had already proved itself to be was going to miss such an easy kill. I got my claws up roughly where I thought it would hit me only it didn't hit me because a massive form had been interposed between the two of us.
The Ancient hit with enough force that it actually managed to knock Juan over. I experienced another of those odd instances when I could see exactly what was happening despite the jaguar's unnatural speed. Blood fountained away as the Ancient opened up multiple arteries all up and down the inside of Juan's arms and then I sank my claws into black fur and made a fist around a set of feline ribs.
After hundreds of years of life, after decades of being all but invincible on the battlefield, having someone bury their claws inside of their flesh like that must have been so inconceivable that the Ancient panicked. Instead of doing the right thing and attacking me, the Ancient jumped away in an effort to break my hold.
The effort was nea
rly successful. I was pulled off of my feet and it felt like my arm had nearly been dislocated, but I managed to keep ahold of the cat and dragging me like that meant that James was able to time the landing and rake long furrows down the jaguar's other side.
Jess was only a fraction of a second behind him and she managed to lock her jaws around a back leg high enough up that she was mostly safe from the raking attack of the other back leg.
The Ancient tried to make up for the lapse earlier and attacked me with a level of brutality that exceeded anything I'd ever experienced before. I tried to use my grip on its ribs to keep it away from me, but I simply wasn't strong enough. Despite my best efforts, incredibly powerful jaws closed on my upper arm and I felt the huge bone that was the next best thing to indestructible shatter from the pressure even as my inner arm was shredded by two sets of deadly claws.
I willed my fist not to relax, but it seemed somehow disconnected from my will and a fraction of a second later the Ancient was free and turning on Jess. The blood loss had created a sense of exhaustion inside of me and I wanted so badly to just close my eyes and go to sleep, but I forced them open long enough to see that the Ancient got only a single slash to the side of Jessica's face, thankfully missing her eye, before the two wolves from the other team arrived and helped James pin the jaguar down just in time for Brandon to show up and kill it with a single blow.
I looked down and realized that I'd transformed back to human form without intending to. It was a bad sign, but it was hard to be too worried considering that I should have been dead several minutes ago, that I would have certainly been dead if Juan hadn't thrown himself in front of me. I rolled over and found Juan. When the Ancient had leaped at me there at the end so that it could break my arm it must have pushed me back toward him because we were surprisingly close.
"Did we get it, Alec?"
"Yeah, it's dead. All three of them are."
Juan smiled. I'd never seen anyone look as pale as he did at that moment. It was obvious that his shift back to human form hadn't slowed the bleeding enough. I was probably going to die and I was only losing blood from one arm not two like he was.
"Why, Juan? You should have let him have me. I'm dead anyways."
"No, Alec. You're important. We aren't going to get very many more chances to save our people before the storm breaks over us."
I wanted to ask him what he'd meant, but it was no use. Juan was dead and I would be joining him in the next few seconds.
