But something about it felt so odd.
“Are you sure?” asked Rita.
“Based on your wedding dress alone, definitely!” said Kyra. “They so overcharged you.”
“It was French,” I chimed in.
“I love that dress,” said Rita. “I thought you did, too.”
“There’s no decent reason to charge a good Texas woman fifty-five hundred dollars for a dress!” said Kyra, hurling a brick as hard as she could, shattering the display window. Helluva shot from this far away. She was a pitcher in high school. Never lost the arm.
Within a split second the security alarm was ringing. A fancy-pants French boutique like this has pricey merchandise, so of course the only two patrol cars active this late in a town this small would soon be screeching to a halt right here. Which was our goal.
Because we were leaving.
Our first stop was the Shooter Rooter gun store located on the opposite side of town. We took side streets and drove there as fast as we could.
Skidding to a stop just at the curb, we jumped out and doused the exterior walls with gasoline with the intention to then pour as much as we could down the pipes on the roof. Inner and outer fuel.
This wasn’t a necessary part of the Diego equation, but it was important to all three of us. Automatic weapons were in the wrong hands. True, the rights to defend yourself and protect your home are a vital aspect of individual, self-preserving freedoms. But the stores here in Archer had become like video game centers. Kids were coming in, bypassing paperwork, and walking out with hollow points and Armalite assault rifles. Worse, there was a growing armada of teen delinquency in town. Being a known drug stop had proliferated the usage of weaponry to solve problems. We were infested.
“Flame set!” yelled Kyra.
She was on the roof and ready to drop her pilot lighter down the pipe shaft at the same time that Rita and I were going to ignite the outside fuel. This would give us a solid chance of burning the whole thing down at once rather than some sort of half-assed beginners-grade arson.
Flick.
We ran top speed back to the car. Within moments the flames were licking up the sides of the walls.
The bonus of blazing up a gun store is the aid of all the explosives inside that are destined to go off. Heat and pressure can do that.
When it finally exploded, it was like the Fourth of July. In December.
I hated that we were committing arson, but here’s what I hated more: junior high school kids getting shot by junior high school kids. So, yeah, when it comes to the lesser of two evils, I’ll take this, with a cinematic grin.
Chapter 17
The next morning I woke up at 6:05 when my phone began to ring. You’d think there might be a congratulatory message for a righteous deed or two, not that I was looking for one. I couldn’t really expect one without the obvious accompanying criminal charge. But the call was from a phone number I didn’t recognize, with an area code that seemed two digits short.
“—Grrehhhfffolllll,” I said.
When a call wakes me up in the morning, my top goal is to appear completely awake. However, my unstretched vocal cords could do nothing but roar a hello that, I swear, must’ve sounded like a motorcycle rev.
Didn’t matter, though. Within two syllables of my caller’s reply I already knew the beginning, middle, and end of what would be the ugliest conversation I’d had in quite some time.
“Amanda,” said the man.
It was the voice of disappointment. He wasn’t greeting me. He wasn’t commending me. He was shaking his head, slowly, side to side at the other end of the phone. I could hear the muscles in his neck.
I was waiting for the tongue click sound of disappointment my mother invented long ago but he plunged ahead.
“Arson? Really?” he said.
This was the Fat Man. The one and only.
“You! You got some nerve,” I replied. “I had my balls busted by the feds. Feds. Who ransacked my garage, stole my gear, and shat on my morality. And you…you didn’t do a single thing to help us out. Nope. Meanwhile, the only word I get on Diego Correra—remember him?—is when he gets a PR parade on the evening news!”
He didn’t respond. He sat on the silence for a moment.
“You’re wasting your time,” he finally said. “I need you ready for Diego.”
No pause from me. “Listen, Fat Boy, my entire life is dedicated to ending his but I can’t do an-y-thing with the DEA parking a car in my ass. They came to my town. My town! And they pissed all over it with paperwork from some oily loser named Warren Wright. How am I supposed to take down Diego with all this shit? I need to hit him directly, not just his shipments!” I was yelling now. I wasn’t even mad. I was more jilted, jilted that the Fat Man hadn’t called me sooner. I felt like a high-school cheerleader nagging her ex.
“Colonel Collins, I’m gonna do you a massive favor and pretend you didn’t just cry about how hard the DEA is being on you. Are they firing bullets? No. Are they torturing villagers? No. Are they locking you up in a cellar? No. Stay focused.”
“Listen, the last time I—”
Click. He was gone.
I hated this guy.
He paid. That’s about it. That’s about the nicest thing I can say about a gopher hole like him. His checkbook didn’t suck.
The thing that scared me, though, all jokes aside, is the fact that my own contact didn’t know what the DEA was up to. How is that logistically possible? How could they come after me and my friends without scuffling up a dust storm in Washington? What were they doing in my town? Were they still here?
Were they being bribed by Diego?
Were they working for Diego?
Chapter 18
“We have no choice,” said Rita. “We have to check if the DEA is still in town.”
“That could be dangerous,” I replied, trying to sound profound. “You can’t simply spy on the DEA while it’s trying to spy on you.”
We all looked at each other. It was one of those late nights in the garage. Kyra was all greasy from arguing with an engine’s intake manifold and I was elbows-deep in a dead Buick. Rita had brought us clam chowder, which we drank from mugs. We three ladies do a terrible job of being dainty.
“We can’t launch a war if they’re sitting in the backseat waiting to yank the wheel,” I said, as I took my arms out of the engine.
“Why not?” said Kyra.
“Because the next time we raid a convoy, they could put us in jail.”
“No, why not as in why not spy on them?” clarified Kyra.
“What do you mean?” Rita set her mug down. It was one of those set your mug down types of proposals.
“We don’t know if they’re still here. I mean, if they’re gone, if they’re not even paying attention…then…then…”
“Then their entire visit was fake,” concluded Rita. Which silenced us for a little bit.
Fake?
Later that night, Kyra and I ventured out to a few sketchy motels around town. Let the games begin.
We found one clerk idling in his office, watching shark attack videos on his laptop. The trick was to pretend we were the type of ladies who wanted to meet “dudes in suits.” Which was doable because Kyra is blessed with the following problem: She looks like Audrey Hepburn. She looks so much like Audrey Hepburn, she spends most mornings dressing up to not look like her.
Except tonight.
Tonight she was doing recon. Civilian style. And she was wearing a cocktail dress and altitude shoes and talking like a bimbo. “Are there, are…y’know…eligible guys who might be…at the pool tomorrow…being eligible-y?” she said to the clerk.
This man was helpless before her. He said there was a ton of such guys. Smiled, pulled the toothpick from his mouth, and was delighted to try to pimp out his friends.
“No, no, no, more like, y’know…guys in suits…types,” said Kyra. “Are there…that?”
“You wanna wrangle a fella in a suit?” The t
oothpick went back in the mouth.
“Does that type come in here?” I asked.
“Naw. Last June, we had some gents from the fishing expo. But they was bearded ’n’ such. You like beards?” He stroked his beard.
“She doesn’t.” I pulled Kyra away.
Mission accomplished. No DEA there.
And the next two places would go exactly the same way. Some dude in flip-flops, feet up on the counter, telling us he hadn’t seen a “suit” since last March, or since Reaganomics, or whatever.
Three hours later, we moved up a notch on the social spectrum and canvassed the hotels, too.
Obviously, this took a bit more ingenuity. You can’t flirt with a desk manager who’s young and busy and female and straight, who stands as merely one of three possible managers rotating shifts during any given week.
Nevertheless, we had to try.
“By any chance, have you seen either of these two gentlemen in here lately?”
We showed her, the desk manager, a photo on Kyra’s phone of the billiard prince known as Warren Wright.
“Oh, I would’ve definitely recognized him,” she said, ovaries on alert. “But, no, he wasn’t here, sadly.” She seemed to be telling the truth.
Five hotels and five conversations later, we were in the clear.
To go to war, of course.
Chapter 19
Imagine walking out to your backyard in your otherwise normal, Plain Jane neighborhood, stopping by a wall just beyond the garage, moving a bush to the side, exposing a hatch in the dirt, looking around to make sure no one is watching you from down the street, or across the street, or anywhere at all, and opening the hatch to expose a dark, underground cavern.
Took us three shovels and a mini dozer, but we dug a tunnel.
Two days earlier, Rita had the idea that we needed a subterranean passageway. We got the inspiration from a busted mission she had led years ago. We were in Barranquilla, Colombia, chasing several bandits into a dark hut when, mere seconds later, the bandits vanished. They fled down a tunnel that crisscrossed their main boulevard underground, so that our teammates on the perimeter at street level could be evaded. It was annoyingly brilliant. Those bastards dug the passage with enough twists and turns at just the perfect angles to thoroughly shield their entire escape. Their layout created a very rough journey for anyone unfamiliar with the serpentine darkness. Yet for them, the narcos, it was like a second home.
We hated it. And loved it.
The day the DEA raided our garage and stole our most difficult-to-obtain weaponry, we became desperate for a plan B.
So now, we kept our stash eleven feet underground, buried along subterranean walls.
“Did you know Paris has underground tunnels?” said Kyra. “Full of bones and shit? I dated a Parisian once. He hated that I didn’t smoke.”
“This top area needs a buttress,” said Rita. “This is where cars drive when our parking lot is full.”
Rita was pointing to an area just beyond our heads. We had buttressed the tunnel entrance and the exit but this middle section was quite a task—to brace loose dirt to withstand the weight of six thousand pounds or more. That takes real engineering.
Kyra’s brain could handle it. And did.
We even had a place to duck into in case both ends of the tunnel got breached. We built it at the vertex of the V-shape in the tunnel. This allowed us to fire on enemies from both directions, should we need to. This was worst-case scenario Armageddon-type thinking, but it’s worth being overprepared.
So then the obvious question was, What’s this tunnel really about?
This morning, we got the call we’d been waiting for. I was down the hole within minutes, heading for the far side. Rita and Kyra were both already there, gearing up. Strapping on Kevlar, lacing up boots. True, you need the very best gear when you’re a three-person army. But today we were more than three, and we were in full kit.
We emerged from the tunnel into a copse of pecan trees about a quarter mile away from the café and the garage. We walked out onto a clearing two miles beyond the back hills. A secluded area. This would be a tough place for anyone in the vicinity to hear our noise.
Helicopter noise.
Three Bell Huey 600s sat whirling on the deep grass, awaiting us.
The best part about shiny packages was what’s inside. Two of the pilots were from the Matamoros mission. Quiet and competent. They had a cargo of eighteen willing Marines. They’d heard of our exploits and wanted to help out. The Fat Man had arranged it, finally agreeing with my plea to really hit Diego where it hurt.
They saluted me. They saluted all three of us.
Kyra wiped tears from her eyes. She’s all heart. Rita hides her emotions well, yet this stuff got to her, too. Me? I was mushy as custard inside. But I was a colonel again. And these troops needed me to be razor sharp.
This was the night Diego would never forget.
“Platoon,” I shouted over the rotor noise, “let’s make some history.”
Oorah.
Chapter 20
At around 1:00 a.m. our choppers crossed into Mexico. The US border at certain points is fairly nondescript. You might not even realize that the two nations had swapped underneath you. But soon you start to see it. Even in the dark, you see it.
You ain’t home no more.
The street lights are different. They’re more randomly laid out. American towns tend to be a grid. Right angles and rows. Mexico is like a colony of lamps.
I was situated as a gunner. Seated at the handles of the .50 cal. For those who don’t know, these bullets are massive, like mini-torpedoes that can rip through concrete at a rate of six hundred rounds per minute.
Normally the sniper takes the point, but I know this terrain better than anyone. And seeing as how this was an ill-advised, ill-conceived, illegal mission, it was crucial we didn’t falter on any detail. Not one.
Tonight we were hunting something new.
Crops.
And I just spotted the first landmark on the way. Pitch black up ahead. “NV on,” I called out to my gang via the radio headset. We flipped our night vision goggles on. Everything then became monochrome and anonymous. You have a range finder in the bottom of your view, telling you that that tree up ahead is seventy-nine meters away, telling you that the dope field on the right is seven hundred meters.
They’re hard to spot from a distance, these crops, because the trees shield them from sight. But once your visual angle is correct, you can tell that up there on yonder hill lies a three-million-dollar crop of Diego Correra’s finest herb.
And it would be a shame to just leave it by its lonesome.
Chapter 21
We let loose on six AGM Hellfire missiles. The dope field had no chance. The power of a Hellfire is unreal. Think of the impact of a monster truck barreling through a pillow fort in the middle of a freeway.
Overkill.
My favorite type of kill.
In the time it takes to spell the words absolutely wrecked, we absolutely wrecked about 150 acres of Diego’s lifeblood. Lit it up like a backyard barbecue. Hillside gouged. Foliage fried.
“Platoon,” I said into the radio. “Breakfast is cooked. Let’s move on to lunch.”
We coded our targets as follows:
“Breakfast” was the cluster of dope fields located thirty-five miles west of the Sierra Madre Occidental line, tucked just inside the Mexican border. Those fields were, ahem, gone now.
“Lunch” was a row of meth labs on the edge of a small town called La Resaca. This place was located twenty miles beyond the first fields. The trick was that it was nestled in between an elementary school and a pediatrics hospital. Not kidding. A school and a hospital. Thank you, Diego, for being the predictable douche we needed you to be.
“Dinner” was pure coca leaves. An entire crop of Colombian-grade cocaine located near the Gulf Coast. Diego’s pride and joy. No other cartel on the continent had the technology to grow good coke this far north
. Diego spent four million bucks to create the crops. His opus. And it would be last on our evening’s raid menu.
But, en route to lunch, we encountered something we didn’t think we’d face. “Contact left!” screamed Rita.
“Tangos on ridge, seven o’clock!” shouted the pilot.
A hailstorm of bullets whizzed past us. Lance Corporal Kagawa, a nice kid from Delaware, great sense of direction, terrible at karaoke, got his upper thigh ripped open by one of the random shots. “Ggggnnnnphhhhhh.” He cringed.
I quickly slid over to his side of the helicopter. He was strapped in, there was no way he could fall out the open door, but a bullet hole is a bullet hole and I needed to stanch his bleeding ASAP.
“Man down,” I called out into the radio.
We had a medic on our team, but the medic was in one of the other birds.
Yet that was about to be a very secondary concern. “RPG INCOMING!” my pilot yelled at the top of his lungs. You could hear what sounded like a jet engine whining in the distance, climbing the notes of a Doppler effect as it approached us at the terrifying pace of 650 miles per hour. An RPG hitting us would ignite our entire world in a huge midair explosion. Blades flying. Body parts soaring through the air. Flames singeing us at five thousand degrees. No thanks.
The first chopper dove left and downward. Smart pilot, Heather. She knew to fly into and askew from the oncoming RPG trajectory: A textbook move, but it’s not easy to actually defy every survival instinct you have and turn toward an oncoming death projectile. The second chopper, my chopper, had to split in the other direction, which was obviously undesirable—the maneuver meant exposing ourselves to a wider arc of vulnerability.
Luckily, or fatefully, the bandito who shot the first rocket at us severely underestimated that thing called gravity. Everyone does.
So he missed.
Kill or Be Killed Page 19
