“Aquí está mi pistola,” I said all calm and ex-wifey. “So let me tell you again. Tell you. Not ask. Tell…you…I need roof access.”
He was already sweating. Poor kid. I bet he’s from a nicer part of town where guns and shit aren’t the local currency. He seemed gentle, like an avid computer user or someone who played piano in college. “Uh,” was his response.
“And make sure we aren’t stopped…because if we’re stopped…the first thing I’m gonna do is remove your pito.”
“Claro,” he said.
“Ninety seconds,” I informed him. “I want to be up there in ninety seconds.”
And he immediately led the three of us past his security group.
I had let him glance down and see my gun. That it was there. I let him see that it was pointing toward his pito. I did not let him see that it was out of bullets. That wasn’t important now. We were marched through the lobby into an elevator. The four of us. He wisely tried to shoo away a couple of security guys who wanted to sniff around our odd aura. The thing about nice hotels in financially challenged regions of the world is they have a ghastly armada of obsequious service staff, grinning and attentive, gawking at each step you take. Rita’s blood was everywhere. On her. On me. On Kyra. We looked like a car accident.
“Is there something wrong?” said one of the security guards.
Our clever concierge spoke without hesitation. “They’re doing a Shakespeare…uh…show…for the party upstairs. No hay problema.”
The elevator doors closed. We were alone. Thirty seconds.
We might have fooled the lobby staff with the Macbeth thing, but, walking through an elegant dining room on the twenty-sixth floor, with classical music piped in and a five-course meal clanking around while snooty tourists looked over at us was not going over well.
I didn’t care.
We crossed to a third set of stairs and started walking up to the roof.
“I want your landing pad lights on,” I said to our concierge.
“My what?” he replied.
“For the helicopter.”
“Ten seconds,” said Kyra.
“We don’t have a landing pad,” he said to me.
“What?”
The door opened. And, yup, there was the roof. The roof, with mostly gravel and some giant air-conditioner units and giant fans.
And that’s it.
No landing pad. No landing area.
“Rope,” said Kyra, announcing that this was gonna be one bitch of an extract.
Rita was passed out at this point. Were they going to lower a harness to us, whoever they were?
Right at the nineteen-minute mark, a Noticias 6 helicopter emerged from behind another skyscraper, growling with its noisy blades, pulling up to a hover above our roof, to present us with a glorious sight for sore eyes. Our escape vehicle.
The pilot probably had no idea who the hell we were but I’m guessing what he did know was that his boss owed some kind of mafia-type favor to my boss, whoever that might be at this point. Didn’t matter. Orders were orders. He looked at us, knowing he was obligated.
The rope ladder descended. Yes, a rope ladder, like, to climb a tree fort. And Rita roused from her drowsy delirium to gather her strength for one last surge of effort. She’s such a trooper. Kyra climbed alongside her, two rungs behind, cupping her upward with her body as they both ascended, grip by grip, the fifteen rungs to heaven.
I was about to go next but I stopped to shake my concierge’s hand: “I appreciate this more than you know…I uh…” Tired and worn out, I couldn’t think of jack shit to say to him so I stated the only sagacious thing I could think of. “Stay in school. And don’t do drugs.”
Once inside the ’copter, the pilot flew us directly east. I had been on the verge of unconsciousness for many hours now, barely having a sense that, yes, east was toward the main airport, that, yes, this was the extraction we were counting on, that, no, I would not get a chance to pass out because, no, things were not about to get any simpler for the world of Amanda.
Not at all.
Chapter 35
I woke up with a three-year-old girl staring at me. Rita’s daughter. In Rita’s living room. I was on Rita’s couch. Her little imp was pointing to my phone. “It keeps winging,” she said as she got my attention and walked off, her mission accomplished.
I squinted, looking for whatever she was talking about, thinking at least someone was accomplishing missions in my peer group. I saw my phone. Thirty-seven missed calls, thirty-three of which were from the same number. The Fat Man.
I dialed him right away. He answered right away. Uh oh.
“Colonel Collins, welcome back.”
“Listen,” I said, groggy, but ready to verbally obliterate him.
“No, wait,” he interrupted. “Sorry, no, there’s no time. Diego is making moves. We have a known location on him. A banquet.”
Silence.
I sat there trying to figure out what to say. I’d been gone for, what, one single nap? This was after sprinting through the streets of the most violent city in North America, sprinting, not jogging, sprinting, after being borderline tortured by my former employer, after torching three drug crop fields, after the ransacking of my garage, and after the DEA threat to lock me up.
I barely had a sense of who was who anymore, as in who’s actually on my team.
“We wanna make a move,” said the Fat Man. “Now. This evening.”
I still didn’t say anything.
“I really shouldn’t get into it but…” He hesitated, then he mumbled to himself, “Fuck my fucked-up life.” He was already regretting what he was about to say next. “I’m sure you got random presumptions going through your head right now, wondering who the hell I am, whether my intel is legit, why the hell I haven’t pinpointed Diego before, why the hell I stay hidden while you’re out there in the field get—”
“I’m in.”
Silence.
“What?” he replied. He wasn’t ready for those two words.
“You had me at ‘fuck my fucked-up life,’ ” I told him. “I’m in.”
Minutes later I was standing across the kitchen counter from Kyra. It was a short phone call with the Fat Man so it only took me several seconds to tell her all I knew.
Her response wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic as mine. “Are you serious? Total no.”
“This could be our only chance,” I replied.
“The the Fat Man? Yeah. I ain’t buyin’ what he’s sellin’.”
“He said Diego is reactionary. You know what that means? You know what Diego’s being reactionary to? Us. Our little waltz through Iztapalapa. We rattled him. We did.”
“Is that what the Fat Man told you? The same Fat Man who probably sent us there in the first place? Almost got Rita’s arm blown off? She’s fine, by the way.”
I stood there, formulating in my mind the most reasonable explanation I could think of for what was a very unreasonable hunch about him.
But Kyra didn’t let me continue.
“Y’know what, it doesn’t matter,” she said, tone shifted. “If you trust him, I trust him.” She saw something in me. Or maybe she just saw me being me, standing there. “I don’t need to know what’s going on in there.” She pointed to my head. “Just tell me where to aim and feed me an MRE.”
She turned to head back to her bedroom. She needed what sleep she could get.
Chapter 36
Already late for the mission prep, I did something I never let myself do before a combat outing. I drove my truck out to Serenity Meadows. Yes, that’s a cemetery here in town. You can always tell when something’s the name of a cemetery. It sounds like someone tried to put a couple of nice words together in reference to the saddest place on earth.
I don’t usually do this before missions. Visit my family. I don’t usually kick my heart around like that. But I had something to say I hadn’t said before. A question, really.
Their gravesites were near a nice elm
tree at the far end of the knoll. I had a box of chocolates for my older daughter. A box of crayons for my younger. And a bottle of A.1. Original Sauce for my husband. Our running joke. Or my running joke. He loved the stuff. Practically drank it. Which repulsed me when he was alive. But now I miss it. I miss the label. I miss the smell. I miss him.
“I…uh…I didn’t come here for a good-bye,” I said, standing across from his headstone. “I…uh…I just want to just make sure nothing is left unsaid.”
I’m not much for communicating beyond the grave and so forth, but I tell ya, there’s something real about it. Whenever I need a response from him, I swear, the wind will rustle every tree on the hillside. He speaks to me through the country. That’s who he was. Is. A quiet, natural man. And I just needed to find out one last thing from him.
Did you know I was doing this for you?
“You were my favorite person of all time,” I said to him. “And…Sorry I brought this tornado upon our family. But I just need to know…if you know…that I did it because I wanted to be…to be the person you always admired.”
I wanted to be a good Amanda.
My husband’s wife.
I needed him to know that. Because there was a strong chance I would never have this conversation again. I could get killed on this one. Not just based on the high danger level, but because I was starting to get careless during battle. I was starting to be less self-preserving. I glimpsed it in Mexico City: a willingness to die. Which is fine, I guess, but the deeper issue was starting to loom on my peripherals: I don’t know if they send souls of people like me upward or downward. What’s in the cards for a former mother who runs around the Western Hemisphere killing people? Shooting enough people to elicit retaliation against her own family? I don’t think my soul goes to heaven for that.
So I seriously doubt I’ll get reunited with my family up there. But that’s fine. I just need my husband to know that when I don’t show up, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Which sounds like a pity party, table for one, but it’s not. I just need them never to wonder how much I loved them.
I put the steak sauce on the base of the stone. I looked up toward the clouds in the distance, felt the breeze rise across one of those spectacular cloud-filled sunsets that looks like the portal to divinity.
“Dear Lord,” I said out loud in prayer, “I don’t have the proper words to say all this but I pray that you forgive me what I’m about to do.” And then I added, “I’m about to finish my life story.” And then, “One way or another.”
I leaned down and placed a kiss on top of each gravestone. The wind did come up. But it didn’t drown out my final whisper.
“Good-bye, my darlings.”
Chapter 37
Back in the supply tunnel behind our garage, I was prepping my new HK416. Rendezvous was at 6:45 p.m. And the birds were on time. Whatever dread I had that Fat Man might screw me over was entirely dispelled when I emerged onto the field. Two Bell Huey helicopters were there. That was expected. But what was truly a shock, what brought tears to my eyes, and I’m not a crier, is what was in those helicopters. My crew.
My crew.
Nearly half my original platoon was suited up. Locked and loaded.
“What Diego did to you is beyond criminal,” said the radio operator. Marcus. My first friend from basic training. “We can’t let it go unchecked.”
The others nodded in agreement.
I had a lump in my throat. I was already beyond emotional. Then, when I got in, I saw Rita there, shoulder bandaged, hobbling, barely able to get her fatigues to fit. She looked like a medical training video. I couldn’t hide the disapproval on my face.
But she wasn’t interested in my face. “Can’t keep me out of this fight, Colonel.”
“No, no, no,” I said, ready to begin orating my commonsense dissertation on the importance of health and safety. “You need to stay here so that—”
She cut me off, “You can’t keep me out.” And with that, she yanked the door hatch shut, closing us all in the cabin to make her point. And then stared at me with enough impenetrable stubbornness to change my mind on the spot.
“No, ma’am,” I agreed. “I can’t.”
Chapter 38
We were roaring along at 110 miles per hour back into Mexico. I might as well buy a condo there. Feels like my second home. No, wait, first home. I spent more time there than I did in Texas. In my head, anyway.
After an hour of chitchat among the crew, we began to quiet down. Mission protocol was to start focusing mentally on what was ahead for each of us. Focusing on the execution of the basics.
“All right, platoon, listen up,” I said over the radio. “The intel on the compound is that it’s occupied by both hostile and neutral persons. But I’m not interested in being morally correct on this one. I’m not interested in you fine folks losing life or limb. The ROE on this op is fire away.”
“Drop zone in sight,” said the pilot. “Range to target six clicks.”
My crew started murmuring to each other in reaction but I kept talking. “Expect every single thing in that place to want you dead on arrival. Even the chef’ll throw his fork at you if he can. Shoot to kill.”
And that’s exactly what we did. Ten minutes later, we hadn’t even commenced our fast-rope insertion, and we were already embroiled in an air-to-ground gunfight. We were firing on their watchtower. They were firing on our broadside.
We were at war with Diego.
Fast roping works best when you can destroy whatever is shooting at you before you drop down next to it and cuddle. In our case it was a genuine watchtower. Two enemies with M24 rifles. Mid-conversation, mid-smoke, they looked up, saw us on the horizon, and shot us up. We saw them and returned service.
The ROE, the rules of engagement, were wide open for us. My teams had been so battered by Diego over the years, they were now playing the feud game. Scars were deep. Memories were long.
Show up and shoot.
I slid down the rope and greeted the ground along with a flood of bullets from the patio. Some douche decided to buy himself a Gatling gun and mount it by his pool. That’s what was now besieging me and Marcus as we were the first on the ground.
However, with two quick shots from her rifle, Kyra had pierced the guy’s skull open from high up in the doorway of our helicopter. That’s my girl. Allowing me to crouch down, take point, and fire as many rounds into the gazebo as possible.
They weren’t precise shots. I was aiming for where I expected soldiers to be. The entire picnic crowd was scrambling. We definitely had caught them with their pants down. There wasn’t one single guard who looked ready for a fight. Their own intel, if they even had any, was that skies were clear, weather was balmy, and the roasted pork was lightly salted.
The bad news for us, though, was that the whole place was crawling with families.
Kids.
Ugh. My team was cleared to shoot at will but none of us was willing to blast at a crowd of kids. Even with all the enemy guards ducking down and running back into the shadows among the scattering families, we still didn’t have the stomach to shoot into a civilian throng. Which, ahem, was a recipe for a difficult afternoon.
“Pressing forward,” I yelled. “Condor Five, gimme cover on the patio.”
The gunner in the Huey fired his Vulcan 20mm, which is a big weapon that makes a big noise and desecrates everything it sees, spitting out the kind of big bullet hailstorm that devours concrete. He lit up the pool deck as a show of force, as a poker move, to intimidate enemy shooters who were hiding in the family crowd and motivate them to take deeper cover rather than hold a line. Those enemies weren’t, after all, 100 percent sure we wouldn’t fire into them. (We wouldn’t, but they didn’t know that.) Which meant we now had about ten solid seconds of hesitation on their part when we could rush inside the hacienda.
“PRESS!” I yelled.
And I darted along a pinball path of whatever items of cover I could find. A lawn chair, a lawn table, the
buffet itself, a cart, some garbage cans, a moped. Aiming my gun to take any precise shot possible toward the cluster of enemies, but not finding a single clean target, given that each thug was eclipsed by a screaming nine-year-old or a terrified nanny.
Where the hell is Diego?
As my platoon scurried into better positions, covering one another, taking out stray guards who couldn’t retreat fast enough, I began to scan the area for the Holy Grail himself. Our radio code name for him was quite fitting, by the way.
“I have no visual on Dickbag,” I said into my radio. “Condor Two, make sure he doesn’t have wheels.”
“Copy that,” replied the pilot.
My primary Huey ascended up out of its hover and flew about a hundred yards down the hill toward the mansion’s parking lot, where a bunch of Escalades and Mercedes were parked.
Wham! Not anymore!
One by one, each vehicle was blown to Neptune by our guy in the sky. Hellfire missiles will do that to your morning commute. Which, however, still didn’t bring me my Dickbag.
Where was he?
I now stood in the hacienda’s living room, searching among the cowering faces for any sign of my nemesis. Please God, tell me this S.O.B. is actually here. I kept thinking to myself I can’t do this again. I can’t drag my comrades into hell, burn them in combat, drench them in foreign and domestic blood, then send them back home, baked and bruised, only to sit by a fireplace years from now and say wistfully, Yeah, whelp, we did our best, tough racket.
Erase that thought, Amanda.
A cartel bandito in a cowboy hat spun from behind a wall with a 12-gauge aimed right for my chest, just as I squeezed the trigger on my HK first, downing him.
Close call.
I pressed forward even more, entering the middle rooms of the massive ranch. I think this place was actually one of Diego’s seven mansions. Seven.
More bullets flew past my head, screaming their airy little trajectories, as I barely ducked in time. I couldn’t believe how distracted I was getting. This particular shooter was on the far side of the room—a dude with a superb nickel-plated .45. Must be nice to be rich. I spun up and hammered three quick shots at him, catching his face all three times. Which scared his buddy, who was already having second thoughts about loitering in public during a Marine invasion.
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