Knockdown

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

Jake knew from experience that when men were under fire, they seldom shouted, “Incoming!” like in TV and the movies. They were more likely to let out some other startled exclamation—usually a curse or obscenity.

  He could tell from Barry’s voice that something bad was about to happen. When he jerked his eyes in that direction, he saw an object trailing smoke and fire sizzling through the air toward them. Jake’s reaction took only a shaved fraction of a second. By the time Barry added, “RPG!,” Jake had already wrenched the wheel to the left.

  Whoever had fired the rocket-propelled grenade from the convoy had good aim. If Jake had continued straight ahead, the grenade would have struck Barry’s door and blown them both into little pieces.

  Instead, by juking to the left, Jake caused the RPG to fall a few yards short. It hit the ground and exploded in a ball of fire.

  The blast was close enough that the force of it tipped the pickup onto its left wheels for a second, chunks of crystallized salt pelting the right-hand side of the vehicle. The pickup didn’t turn over. The right wheels slammed back down, spinning on the salt for a heartbeat and causing the pickup to slew a little before catching. The pickup leaped ahead again as it gained traction.

  “If they have one of those, they probably have another!” Jake called to his uncle as he pressed the accelerator to the floor again.

  “Or more!” Barry replied. “I’m keeping an eye on them. I’ll sing out if they—Here comes another one! Brake!”

  That was some quick reloading, Jake had time to think as he moved his foot from the gas to the brake and stomped hard. The back end fishtailed, drifting right. Jake let it go. The pickup spun crazily as the RPG sizzled through the air and detonated in front of them this time. The explosion blew a hole in the salt flat big enough to overturn the pickup if a wheel went into it. Jake hauled hard on the wheel, desperately trying to keep the pickup out of the hole.

  Still turning around and around, the pickup went over the hole, narrowly missing it with both front and back wheels. A few yards later, Jake regained control of the vehicle.

  “They slowed us down, blast it!” Jake said as he saw that the convoy had pulled slightly ahead again.

  “Give it the gas!” Barry told him. “I saw which SUV that last grenade came from. The one in the back. I don’t intend to let them draw a bead on us again!”

  As he said that, he thrust the barrel of his rifle out the window and opened fire. Whatever—or whoever—the package was, they wanted it safe and sound so they could figure out what was going on, but Barry was convinced the special shipment was in the middle vehicle. He raked the side of the third SUV with 5.62mm rounds. The range was a little too long for really accurate shooting, but he put as many bullets as he could in the vicinity of the rear window on the driver’s side, figuring that was where the man with the grenade launcher was.

  Muzzle flashes flickered from the windows of the other vehicles. A few bullets whammed against the side of Jake’s pickup but didn’t penetrate. Jake had regained the ground he had lost, and he was about to start pulling ahead again.

  Something hummed from right to left in front of him. That was a bullet, he realized with a somewhat detached air. It had come in through Barry’s open window, passed in front of both of them, and exited through the open driver’s window. Avoiding death by a matter of inches was kind of a big deal, but neither of them had time to think about that now.

  Barry had sat back to reload again. He shoved his rifle back out the window and resumed shooting. He targeted the first and third SUVs, avoided the one in the middle.

  “We’d better be right about where the package is,” Jake called.

  “I usually am,” Barry replied. That would have sounded arrogant coming from a lot of people. From Dog, it was just a statement of fact.

  The pickup was even with the lead vehicle in the convoy. Jake mentally asked the engine for all it had. As if that creation of metal and rubber had heard him, the pickup seemed to go a little faster. It edged ahead of the convoy, then slowly gained more and more ground.

  Barry leaned out the window to fire back at the lead vehicle. When the magazine ran dry, he dropped back into the seat.

  “I thought maybe I’d get lucky and blow a tire, maybe flip that SUV and stop the others,” he said. “Didn’t work, though. They’ve probably got solid tires on those things.”

  Jake turned his head. He had to look through the pickup’s back window to see the convoy now. He glanced into the pickup bed. Chet Taylor’s blanket-wrapped body was still there, despite all the explosions and bouncing and flying around. He was glad they had tied it down securely.

  “We’ll stop them in Hachita,” he said.

  CHAPTER 19

  In the middle SUV, Bandar al-Saddiq was livid.

  “Who are those . . . those . . .” He added every American obscenity he could think of, plus a few that probably didn’t exist but should.

  Then he stabbed a finger, shaking with anger, toward the pickup that was now well ahead of the convoy and angling back toward the highway.

  “Kill them!” he shouted at Enrique Galvez.

  The Mexican looked angry, too, as if he didn’t like being yelled at that way. Saddiq didn’t care. Clearly, those men in the pickup—whoever they were—meant to interfere with the mission that had brought him to the United States.

  That couldn’t be allowed to happen. The stakes were too high. Too many people had invested their wealth, their honor, their very lives in this plan to finally bring the Great Satan to its knees and teach the infidels their proper place in this world—under the boot of Islam.

  Lashkar-e-Islami would succeed where al-Qaeda, ISIS, and all the others had failed. They would strike where the Americans’ hearts were truly located.

  But only if Saddiq, who had contrived the scheme with the aid of a few others, was on hand to supervise the operation. He knew it was vainglorious, even sinful, to believe that he was so vital to its success, but when you came right down to the facts, it was true. This was, as the infidels would say, his baby.

  And he would not allow it to come to nothing now.

  “They are too far ahead of us now for the rocket grenades,” Galvez said gloomily. “They are out of effective range for our rifles, too.” He shook his head. “There is nothing more we can do, Señor al-Saddiq. But I give you my word . . . if they try to stop us, they will not succeed. There are only two men in the cab of that pickup. They cannot fight us and win.”

  “They seem to have done a good job of staying alive so far, against superior odds.”

  Galvez shrugged. “Clearly, the gringos are not ordinary hunters after bighorn sheep, as we thought they might be.”

  Saddiq sat back and blew out an exasperated breath. “I believe they are hunters,” he said. “But I am their prey.” He leaned sharply toward Galvez, and his lips drew back from his teeth. “They knew I was being brought across the border today, or else they would not be here. They knew!”

  “They could not have,” Galvez insisted. “No one would dare betray the Zaragosas. Anyone who did such a thing would die screaming, and his entire family with him.”

  “Someone dared. Those men”—Saddiq gestured toward the speeding pickup, which had pulled well ahead now—“are professionals. The way they drive, the way they shoot . . . Only men who fight for a living would be capable of doing what they have done. And there had to be a good reason they were here today, in this place.”

  Saddiq folded his arms over his chest and sat back again, indicating beyond any doubt that he believed himself to be that reason.

  Galvez’s expression told Saddiq that the man agreed with him, no matter how much Galvez didn’t want to. Which meant there had to be a traitor somewhere in the cartel.

  After a long moment, Galvez said, “Francisco will stop at nothing to find out who is responsible for this, señor. He will question everyone who can be questioned, he will turn over every rock—”

  “Until he finds the scorpion he has taken to his b
osom,” Saddiq finished. “That is all well and good, Galvez, but it means nothing if I fail to reach my destination safely and cannot put my plan into operation.”

  “We will not fail,” Galvez said again, but he sounded slightly less convinced now.

  Saddiq fumed a moment longer, then asked, “How soon will we reach this town you spoke of earlier?”

  “Hachita?” Galvez frowned. “Another two, three minutes. We are almost there.”

  “It seems logical that will be the next place the Americans attempt to stop us,” Saddiq said as he peered through the windshield with narrowed eyes. “So we will know one way or the other whether they will succeed very soon now, eh?”

  CHAPTER 20

  Jake kept one eye on the convoy in the rearview mirror, half a mile behind him, and the other on the gauges in the pickup’s dashboard.

  The pickup had labored valiantly, but the temperature gauge’s needle had finally started to creep over toward the red. He knew he risked damaging the engine if he kept up this pace much longer. If the pickup ground to a halt, he and Barry would be sitting ducks for their enemies.

  Luckily, he wouldn’t have to keep going this fast for much longer. He could see the scattered, run-down buildings of Hachita up ahead. As they came closer, he was able to pick out the red sheen of Barry’s truck parked next to Chet Taylor’s mobile home a couple hundred yards off the highway.

  At the last second, he braked as he reached the dirt road leading to Taylor’s place. The tires left deep skid marks as they swerved to a stop.

  Jake wrestled the vehicle back into line and raced down the narrow dirt road with clouds of dust boiling into the air behind the pickup.

  Barry was out the door before Jake brought the pickup to a complete stop.

  “Come on!” he called over his shoulder. “And bring that Tommy gun!”

  The Thompson was lying in the floorboard on the passenger side, where Barry had put it earlier. Jake grabbed the machine gun and the semi-auto rifles and bailed out the other side, running to the passenger door on the big Kenworth.

  Barry had unlocked it with his remote as soon as they were in range of the signal, so Jake was able to haul himself up, yank the door open, and dive in as the big truck’s engine rumbled to life.

  Barry threw the Kenworth into gear. The passenger door was still open, but the sudden start slammed it. Jake hit the button to roll down the window.

  “That’s bulletproof glass, you know,” Barry reminded him.

  “Yeah, I know. Which means we won’t be able to shoot through it, either.”

  Barry grinned. “Yeah, there’s that to consider.”

  He hauled the wheel around as he backed up the truck. Neither of them had really considered the possibility that they might need to pull out of there in a hurry.

  That was an unacceptable lack of foresight for a pair of professionals, Jake told himself—but nobody could think of everything all the time.

  That was why nobody lived forever in this game. Statistically, Barry had been living on borrowed time for a couple of decades now. The odds should have caught up to him a long time ago. The fact that they hadn’t spoke volumes about his skills.

  The truck powered away from the mobile home with a throaty roar from its massive engine. Jake looked past Barry and saw the three SUVs rocketing along the highway toward Hachita. It was going to be close . . .

  The convoy was still a hundred yards away when Barry pulled smoothly onto the asphalt. The truck stretched nearly from one side of the highway to the other.

  Barry had rolled his window down, too. “Hand me that Tommy gun!” he called.

  Jake had watched plenty of World War II movies when he was growing up. He had been hoping he’d get to shoot the Thompson, like the GIs he’d seen in those movies, but he was on the wrong side of the cab.

  Without hesitation, he thrust the machine gun into his uncle’s hands. As the driver of the lead SUV stood on his brakes to avoid T-boning the truck, Barry racked the Thompson’s slide back and opened fire.

  The sustained belch of automatic fire chewed into the front of the SUV and sprayed glass everywhere as the windshield shattered into a million pieces. A red mist seemed to fill the inside of the vehicle as the slugs shredded the driver and the man beside him on the front seat.

  The SUV slewed sideways, completely out of control. Tires gave, axles snapped, and the vehicle rolled over and flew into the air—heading straight for the truck parked across the road.

  CHAPTER 21

  Jake ducked instinctively and lifted an arm in front of his face even though he knew that wasn’t going to do any good. It was just a human reaction.

  He expected the SUV to smash into the side of the truck. At the speed it was going, the impact might be enough to knock the massive Kenworth over on its side.

  Nothing happened in the next couple of heartbeats, though. The seconds seemed to stretch out much longer than they really were. Jake couldn’t see the SUV anymore.

  Then a huge crash from his side of the truck made him jerk his head in that direction.

  To his amazement, he saw that the SUV had narrowly missed the truck and flown completely over it to land on the pavement beyond and explode into a ball of flame. The heat from the blast beat against Jake’s face.

  The Thompson in Barry’s hands started its crazed chattering again. Over the racket, he called, “They weaved around and switched places again! The vehicle with the package is in the back now!”

  Jake wasn’t sure how his uncle knew that; the black SUVs all looked identical to him. He wasn’t surprised that Barry had noted some minor difference between the vehicles, though. Barry was that observant.

  Jake peered past Barry and saw the lead SUV skidding and swinging around sideways as the driver braked, skillfully bringing it parallel to the truck parked across the road. Movement at the rear passenger window caught Jake’s eye, a familiar shape protruding from it.

  “Barry, down!” Jake yelled. Barry trusted his nephew enough that he reacted instantly and bent forward so that Jake had a clear line of fire through the window on his side.

  Jake had seen the grenade launcher with an RPG loaded in it sticking out the window and knew one of the cartel soldiers was trying to draw a bead on them with it. Using both hands on the 9mm, he took swift but careful aim and squeezed off three rounds.

  At least one of the bullets hit the pressure trigger on the grenade. It exploded before the man in the SUV could fire it. Flames engulfed the vehicle, roasting anyone left inside it and turning it into a shattered hulk that continued skidding along the pavement toward the truck.

  There was no way to avoid this collision. Barry didn’t have time to pull forward or back up. But he was able to get the window beside him part of the way up and duck down behind it before the blazing wreck slammed into them. The bulletproof glass would stop burning chunks of debris, too.

  The crash rocked the Kenworth but didn’t tip it over. The SUV’s gas tank hadn’t gone up yet, but it was bound to in a matter of moments.

  Barry dropped the Thompson, threw the truck in gear, and slammed his foot down on the gas. The powerful, finely tuned engine responded immediately as he hauled the wheel to the right, grunting with the effort.

  The truck leaped ahead as Barry turned, the cab going across the shoulder and onto the softer ground to the left of the highway. The eighteen huge wheels dug big ruts in the dirt but continued turning.

  Barry circled the still-burning SUV that had flown over them before crashing. The truck’s front end lurched back onto the pavement and lunged northward just as the second SUV’s gas tank ignited and an even larger ball of hellish flame swallowed up the vehicle.

  The third SUV darted around the explosion and whipped past on the right-hand shoulder. Jake pounded a hand on the dashboard in frustration.

  “They’re ahead of us!”

  “For now,” Barry said as he straightened the truck and increased its speed.

  “Can they outrun us?”

/>   “We’re gonna find out.”

  By now, the SUV and the pursuing truck were barreling through what amounted to “downtown” Hachita, past convenience stores, gas stations, a couple of cafés, and a bar. The explosions just south of town had drawn people out of the buildings. They stood, using their hands to shade their eyes from the noonday sun as they indulged their curiosity and tried to see what was going on.

  Then, as the remaining SUV raced past, some of the citizens began stumbling backward and clapping their hands to their chests. As Jake saw them collapse, he shouted in fury, “They’re shooting those people!”

  Flame flickered from the barrels of weapons protruding from the SUV’s windows. As the citizens of Hachita became aware of the slaughter being carried out on them, they tried to scramble back to safety inside the buildings. Some of them made it, but others went down with crimson flowers blooming on their backs.

  Grimacing, Jake leaned out the window with his pistol, intending to take a few shots at their quarry, even though he knew that if the “package” was a person, they needed to take him or her alive.

  Before he could do that, however, the SUV reached the northern end of the little town and the shooting from it stopped. The vehicle continued heading in that direction at high speed.

  The Kenworth roared after it.

  “Should we go back there and try to help those people?” Jake asked.

  “Don’t think it didn’t occur to me,” Barry answered tightly, “but our job is to find out what’s going on here. It has to be something pretty important for the Zaragosa cartel to go to this much trouble.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Jake muttered a couple of curses under his breath, then said, “I can’t believe they just mowed people down like that!”

  “You’ve been in this business long enough to know that animals like the Zaragosas don’t worry about hurting people. Anybody who gets in their way isn’t even human . . . just something to be brushed aside or stepped on, like a bug.”

  “I know,” Jake agreed, “but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”