Ballistic cg-3

by Mark Greaney

  All this took place in under one second. The disarmed men around him stepped back; Madrigal, Chingarito and Serna just stood and stared in confusion and shock.

  After five seconds of silence, Court let the revolver roll backwards on his finger; it hung upside down from the trigger guard.

  He stepped forward and held it out to Constantino Madrigal. “Here you go. Shoot me with it, or allow me to solve your problems with de la Rocha. If you don’t trust anyone here, shoot them, and then the threat of a leak will be gone. I’ll stay in here; you can tell everyone they were killed in a fight with me but you finished me off.”

  Madrigal’s mouth remained open in astonishment. He looked to his son to await the translation, but Chingarito’s own mouth hung agape. His father nudged him, and then the boy spoke. While his boy repeated Gentry’s words in Spanish, Madrigal looked around at the others in the mausoleum with him, as if to see if they had seen the same incredible act by the American.

  The Cowboy took the gun. Slowly, he motioned with it to his guards. “These two… I trust.”

  He looked back to Serna. “Hector, as well. And mi Chingarito. He is family. Plus he’s too smart to cheat me, aren’t you, mi hijo?”

  The Little Fucker confirmed with a nod that he was, in fact, too smart to double-cross his dad.

  One of Madrigal’s men picked his pistol up from the floor; the other took his weapon back from his boss. They both looked equal parts shocked and embarrassed.

  Soon the Cowboy recovered. “That was good, amigo. Very good. You could have killed me right then and you did not. I will give you your two days. Hector and I will tell no one else what our plan is. But I promise you, if I do not get Nestor Calvo delivered to me, alive, then I will send every one of my men after you.”

  Court nodded. “He will be yours, señor. I promise you.”

  For the second time in a week, Court Gentry swallowed all pretense of honor and shook the hand of Constantino Madrigal. It was even tougher this time than the last, chiefly because he knew that what he had just said was a blatant lie.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Forty-six hours later, three armored black Chevrolet Suburbans streaked west on a two-lane canyon road in southeastern Sinaloa. The lead vehicle flashed red lights on its dashboard, and the armed driver blew through tiny villas and the occasional intersection with no regard for any other traffic.

  The driver knew the convoy had to keep moving — fast.

  In the center seat row of Truck Two, braced on either side by two of the thirteen bodyguards brought along to protect him, Nestor Calvo Macias spoke on his mobile phone to his assistant. Calvo’s second-in-command had set up shop at the new property in Puerto Vallarta, and his job for the day was to keep DLR occupied and disinterested in Calvo’s whereabouts. Nestor was a professional, he did not like lying to his boss, but Nestor knew adult supervision was called for at the moment. He would not allow some gringo assassin, some ridiculous resin-skeleton bride in a dress, or some distracting quest for a fetus in hiding to ruin all he had built in the past years.

  By going against his leader’s orders right now and meeting with Hector Serna of los Vaqueros, Calvo would stop a costly gang war, he would present the corpse of his boss’s gringo nemesis to him, and he would limit the hemorrhaging of treasure and bodies that had been going on for the past week.

  The price would be somewhat heavy to end the Madrigal war, a methamphetamine laboratory in the northwestern tip of Jalisco state. But Calvo had chosen this barter item shrewdly. The lab had been costly and time-consuming to build, but it had underperformed since opening just thirteen months prior. Infrastructure in the area was poor, and access to skilled labor in the region problematic. Further, the army had concentrated on marijuana eradication efforts in the area, and the Black Suits worried constantly about the lab being discovered by some young college-grad army lieutenant who could not be bought off. So Calvo had offered to trade this potential debacle for the life of the man who was costing his organization millions of dollars a day and untold headaches.

  An easy enough decision.

  Meeting with Serna had been the most worrisome part of the deal for Calvo, but he now decided his concerns had been unfounded. Calvo’s security forces had sent an advance team to check out the location of the meeting, and they reported a safe house with only a few of Madrigal’s men, including Serna, and no other Vaquero forces in the area.

  Nestor had ordered his bodyguards to travel light and undermanned today to decrease the chances of DLR finding out about the meeting. Calvo knew he could never tell de la Rocha about this bit of intrigue. Logic and reason would play no part into his patrón’s thinking; he would not agree to a deal with Madrigal in any form or fashion.

  As the three-vehicle convoy raced through the narrow canyon on its way to the safe house in the mountains, Calvo continued speaking on his mobile phone to his second-in-command.

  “DLR insists la CIA is working with Madrigal. He wants us to send sicarios after CIA men in the D.F. He is even talking with Spider about a direct attack on the American embassy. This is absolute madness!”

  Two hundred yards ahead of the three Suburbans a large cement truck pulled onto the road from a commercial gravel pit on the left. The big black trucks closed on it quickly as the huge lumbering mixer struggled to gain speed. Its red and white rotating drum revolved as it lumbered up the road.

  The driver of Calvo’s lead vehicle honked and blinked his lights rapidly as he rushed up from behind.

  Calvo was unaware of this, and he continued his conversation. “The girl was never worth the trouble; the Gamboa family was never worth the trouble.”

  The lead vehicle arrived directly behind the cement truck as the canyon narrowed in a turn. There were just a few feet on either side of the narrow blacktop road, which was surrounded by steep, rocky inclines that made passing impossible. The lead driver flashed his lights continuously and honked his horn. The cement mixer was increasing its speed but not fast enough to satisfy Calvo’s three expert security drivers. Words were exchanged over the radio between the Suburbans about the slowdown.

  Calvo remained unaware.

  “I need you to let me know if Daniel comes to you and begins asking too many questions about where I am. I can call him at any time and give him some story. Don’t try and fool him yourself. He can smell a lie just like his father could.”

  The canyon narrowed further, and the cement truck accelerated to barely forty miles an hour. The lead motorcade driver leaned on his horn now, swerved his truck from left to right behind the mixer, and the front passenger rolled down his window, hefted his M4 rifle, and waved it outside so that it could be seen by the cement truck’s driver in his passenger-side rearview.

  Calvo glanced up at the persistent honking as he spoke.

  “Nothing, just traffic.” He looked down at a notepad on his lap. “Yes, I will give them the coordinates of the super lab. As soon as we see the norteamericano’s body I will contact—”

  In the lead vehicle the front passenger had removed his seat belt and positioned half of his body out the window now, angrily waving the rifle in the air. The driver flashed his lights and began cursing loudly as they arrived at the most narrow portion of the mountain canyon. He reached for his radio to warn the other vehicles to be ready for—

  Right in front of him, the big cement mixer slammed on its breaks, skidded to a stop. A two-foot-wide high-pressure stream of wet concrete shot from its five-foot-long chute, and the lead Suburban drove right into the gravelly mixture before braking. It slid hard into the rear of the mixer, airbags deployed, and concrete covered the hood and windscreen. Hundreds of gallons of the gray sludge sprayed the vehicle and splashed onto the narrow road around it.

  The bodyguard who had been hanging out the window flew completely from the Suburban; his back snapped, and his weapon slid forward, all the way past the front wheels of the cement mixer.

  Just behind this the driver of Calvo’s SUV screamed “Hold on!”
Nestor looked up from his phone, out the windshield, and into the morning glare ahead, just as his truck’s brakes locked and the SUV slid into Truck One.

  Calvo’s phone flew out of his hand, and he slammed into the seat back in front of him. The bodyguards on either side of him did the same.

  The leader of Calvo’s detail sat in the front passenger seat of Truck Two. As he recovered from the impact, his M4 rose from between his knees, and he grabbed his walkie-talkie and shouted to the rear vehicle. “Truck Three! Back! Back! Back!”

  The rear driver jammed his Suburban in reverse, and Calvo’s driver did the same.

  Nestor climbed back into his seat just as his truck went into reverse, throwing him forward again. The bodyguard on Calvo’s right grabbed him and covered him with his body. While doing so, both he and Calvo saw a flash of light on the rocky cliff above and just slightly behind them. The boom of an explosion came a fraction of a second later, and an instant after that, Calvo and his protector watched helplessly as the explosion blasted stone and dirt away from the brown scrub on the cliff. Boulders the size of easy chairs broke from the cliffside and tumbled down towards the convoy, knocking flat shale shingle and trees and dirt free on their way down.

  Someone in Calvo’s truck screamed, “Watch out!”

  The massive landslide missed Nestor’s vehicle. As the driver slammed on his breaks, the intelligence chief of the Black Suits crashed shoulder-first into his leather headrest, the man who had thrown himself over Calvo’s body collided into him. Calvo looked out the back window just in time to see the rear vehicle in the convoy catch the brunt of the mass of rock and dirt and dust and greenery; tons of falling rubble slammed into the Suburban, spun the massive armored vehicle 180 degrees on its axis before burying it along with the six men inside.

  Wet concrete continued pouring onto the first vehicle in the convoy. The driver recovered from the impact with the cement mixer, pushed the deflated airbag out of his way, and jacked the truck’s transmission into reverse. The truck’s wheels spun, but it found purchase and began backing up; men in the truck around the driver shouted and screamed, and the SUV backed hard into the grille of Truck Two. Seconds later the cement mixer itself reversed, backed through hundreds of pounds of gray sludge, and crashed into Truck One.

  Cement continued to flow from its chute, now directly onto the hood of the truck.

  The two bodyguards in the middle seat of Truck Two, one on either side of Nestor Calvo, pointed their weapons at the windows, awaited the order to exit the car. The leader of the detail, the man in the front passenger seat, hesitated. “Wait!” he shouted. “We don’t know how many there are. Calvo is safe in the truck.”

  The men sat silently for a few seconds, then the radio came alive with the voice of an injured man from the rear truck. “We have wounded. Some are dead, I think. Help us.”

  The lead bodyguard switched channels and put a call out for the local police.

  Behind him a shaken but highly focused Nestor Calvo had already found his mobile phone on the floor, ended the call he was on, and had begun dialing his own contacts in the area.

  The driver of Truck One saw him first. A man in dirty blue jeans, a black leather jacket, and a black motorcycle helmet with a smoked windscreen. Hanging low in his right hand was a black pistol, and in his left hand a black backpack swung at his side.

  “¡A la chingada!” Oh fuck! “El hombre de gris!” The Gray Man! he said, then he grabbed his walkie-talkie to report to the other trucks.

  But Truck Two had already seen him. “It’s the gringo!” shouted the guard on Calvo’s left, and he threw open his rear door, raised his short-barreled machine gun.

  And then flew back inside onto Nestor Calvo’s lap. On his forehead and left cheek he wore ragged holes that gushed rich red blood all over Calvo’s suit.

  The consigliere pushed the man out into the road and dove to pull the door closed, fumbling his phone into the air before his call could be connected.

  The leader of the detail attempted to open his door to get out on the far side of the armored truck and engage the Gray Man from over the hood. But yards of thick cement had already pushed back to his side of Truck Two, and he could not get it open.

  Instead he turned to the man behind him, on Calvo’s right. “See if you can get out!” He turned back to his own door and began rolling down the window.

  The driver of Truck One scrambled across the center console of the front seat, into the passenger side, and he struggled to roll up the heavy bulletproof window left open by the man who’d been ejected during the initial crash with the cement truck. The men in the backseats argued about what to do and screamed into their radios, trying to communicate with the detail commander behind them over the screams and pleas of the survivors of Truck Three.

  The man in the motorcycle helmet appeared at the driver-side window of Truck One, pulled a large rectangular object from his open backpack, and slammed it hard against the ballistic glass. When it hit it made a sound like a heavy, wet fish, and it adhered to the clear surface. The armed men inside the vehicle stopped screaming and stared at it for a moment, unsure what they were looking at. It was a black container made of metal, perhaps even iron, and covered in a thick black tarlike material. They saw the Gray Man pick his bag off the ground and move backwards, back up around the side of the huge cement mixer.

  “It’s a bomb!” shouted the driver.

  “Are we safe?” asked a bodyguard in the back.

  “Yes,” replied one, certain the bulletproof glass would protect them.

  Another man tried once again to call out to the detail commander in the vehicle behind for instructions, and yet another voiced concern that the side window glass was not as strong as the side armor of the SUV.

  Finally, after looking at the sticky box on the glass for five seconds, the driver gave the order. “Bail out!”

  Three hands wrapped around three different door handles inside the big black Suburban.

  And then the bomb detonated, sent fire, iron shrapnel, and shards of ballistic glass into the SUV’s interior behind a shockwave that moved faster than the speed of sound. All the men inside were turned to pulp in eight-one-hundredths of a second, and the heavy vehicle rocked on its fortified steel chassis. The windshield blew out from the inside, shattered against the chute of the cement mixer, and flames engulfed the dead occupants.

  The four men still alive in Truck Two, Nestor Calvo included, just watched. When it was clear the armored vehicle in front of them, a truck virtually identical to their own, did not survive the blast, the detail commander gave the order for his men to bail out.

  The driver was the first through his door; he drew his .45 pistol as he stumbled out into the road.

  In the black smoke billowing from the windows of the Suburban in front of him, the man in the motorcycle helmet appeared, he still carried the pack low on his left, and now his pistol was aimed high on his right.

  The driver began to raise his weapon towards the threat, but three rounds to his chest spun him around, caused his .45 to sail from his hands. A fourth shot to the right side of his skull snapped his head to the side and killed him instantly. He fell dead on the blacktop as the two doors on the opposite side of the SUV opened and then closed again.

  Inside Truck Two Calvo screamed at the two surviving members of his detail. “Fight him! Get out and fight him!” The men moved from side to side in their seats, but they were otherwise frozen in terror. They just watched as the man in the motorcycle helmet stood alongside their truck and reached into his bag.

  “He has another bomb!” one shouted, but the man instead pulled out a piece of cardboard. He pushed it up to the windshield and the men inside the SUV read the single word written in black upon it.

  “Calvo.”

  All three men sat silently. The silence was broken by the slapping sound of an iron box covered in tar sticking to the driver-side window of the Suburban. The man in the black helmet stepped away from the vehicle,
raised his pistol, and waited.

  Twelve seconds later the side door of the truck opened, and Calvo was ejected by the boot heel of one of the two members of his security detail. Immediately, he fell down in thick wet cement that had inched back on the road to his side of the truck. The door shut behind him. He cursed as he tried to stand back up. The man in the motorcycle helmet stepped forward, his pistol still trained on the Suburban, and he grabbed the fifty-seven-year-old by his necktie, pulled him out of the cement and to the side of the road. Court walked backwards up the road, pulling the man with the cement-spackled coal black suit, still covering the SUV with his gun, until he disappeared around the side of the dump truck.

  He let go of Calvo and reached into his backpack. He removed a black cell phone and handed it over to the Mexican.

  In Spanish the man said, “Press 4. Then Send.”

  Calvo did as he was told. Upon pressing the Send button an explosion rocked the canyon road fifty feet behind him. Shrapnel fired into the cement truck and pelted the hillside.

  Thirty seconds later the cement mixer moved forward towards the west, and the only men left alive at the scene were buried under tons of rock and dirt.

  * * *

  A phone call was intercepted by intelligence agents from the Black Suits at three p.m. The call was recorded and then played back for Daniel de la Rocha and Spider Cepeda just twenty minutes later. It was determined that the call was placed from a mobile phone, and the caller was the American known as the Gray Man. The call was received on a landline at a Vaqueros safe house in Mazatlan and then patched through to the mobile phone of Hector Serna, chief of intelligence for los Vaqueros.