by David Weber
“They’re good at their jobs?” President Howell asked.
“Yes, Sir,” Longbow said. “They worked together, before, and they’re very much a team, even if one of them needs watching…”
. XXII .
MANZANILLO, COLIMA,
MEXICO
Iván López Cervantes, head of the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, looked up from the movie playing on his computer as a voice began yelling loudly in the outer office. Happily, the video was between the interesting parts, and the dialogue wasn’t what he was watching it for, anyway. The yelling ceased suddenly, with the sound of an open-handed slap, and Cervantes went back to the movie, sure the matter had been handled appropriately.
The picture quality was getting to be quite good, Cervantes saw, since they had hired the new producer from Los Angeles. He didn’t know where his men had found the producer, nor how the sniveling bribón had survived the upheavals in California after the aliens’ arrival, but the man knew how to direct a film. Some of the camera angles he used were nothing short of stunning.
It didn’t hurt, of course, that the movie had some of the prettiest actresses Cervantes had ever seen, and this one was more flexible than he would have thought humanly possible. He shrugged; it never ceased to amaze him how far some people would go to get their next hit of crack. Regardless, he was sure the woman’s family would pay great sums of money to make sure the movie never surfaced, and that the movie would make even more once it was released anyway after the payment had been received. People like that idiot Ercilla could say what they wanted about how useless money was after what los Cachorros had done to the world, but there were certain immutable truths which had never failed Iván López Cervantes, and one was that there would always be something to be used for money. In fact, from all reports, the norteamericanos were putting their country back together again. That would be nice. They would certainly see to it that their money regained its value … and they had always been the cartels’ best customers.
On the other hand, Ercilla had a point about the way market conditions had changed. The pool of crackheads and junkies north of the border had been pruned back badly, and there was practically no demand for cocaine, heroin, or even meth these days. But that was all right, too. First, because norteamericanos were norteamericanos, which meant demand for the cartels’ traditional products would recover with time. And also because another of those immutable truths was that product of some sort would always flow north and money would always flow south, and that was the way it should be. One simply had to find the proper product at the proper time.
Diversification. It was the wave of the future and how he intended to not only grow the CJNG’s business in Mexico, but throughout the entire southwest of the North American continent. Los Cachorros had been stupid enough to actually take out the leadership of some of the other cartels to improve Cervantes’ “loyal ally” position here in Mexico. Now that they’d departed to the stars once more, though, leaving a total vacuum in their wake, the possibilities for a man who controlled his own well-trained army were limitless.
Before he could get back into the movie, a rap sounded on the door.
“Come in!” he called in English, recognizing the knock.
“Sorry to interrupt, Sir,” James Lohrman said, coming into the room, “but there’s been a sighting.” The former British SAS member stood an inch over six feet, with dark hair and a physique women loved and normal men didn’t have the time, energy, or discipline to acquire. Cervantes had always regarded his decision to hire the special forces operator away from the Sinaloas as one of his better decisions. And he’d been even more convinced of that since the other cartel leaders had begun to go missing. As someone who’d specialized in anti-hijacking and counter-terrorism operations as a member of the SAS’ special projects team, Lohrman knew how strike forces thought when trying to apprehend—or kill—their targets, which made him the perfect choice to figure out how to counter any such effort targeting Cervantes.
“A sighting?” Cervantes asked.
“Yes, Sir,” Lohrman replied, emphasizing the last word the way the British military did. “One of the Shongair shuttles just set down about a mile away.”
“A Shongair shuttle? I thought los Cachorros left?” Cervantes asked. “Have they returned?”
“No, Sir. We believe that someone—perhaps the United States, which seems to have acquired several of them—is using them to deploy their forces. We had word that one was sighted just prior to the takedown of the Tijuana Cartel. A Shongair shuttle was seen in the vicinity of their headquarters … and then nothing was heard from them again. A nearby farmer says he heard what sounded like a major battle, and when he finally went to check later, everyone in the compound had been slaughtered.”
“And you’re not going to allow that to happen here.”
“No, Sir, I am not.” Cervantes appreciated the certainty in the British man’s voice, although with some skepticism—how do you know for sure, until you see the nature of the enemy?
“That’s what you hired me for,” Lohrman added. “If you’d like to bring up the closed circuit TV on your computer, we can follow along.” He crossed the room to look over Cervantes’ shoulder and caught a flash of the movie before Cervantes could switch the monitor to the security camera system. “Nubile little minx,” he added.
“Focus,” Cervantes growled.
“Yes, Sir,” Lohrman replied. He cleared his throat. “If you would bring up Camera One, Sir.”
Cervantes switched the monitor to the indicated camera and was given a view of the road leading to the hacienda. Since he’d hired Lohrman, the road had been bulldozed and repaved to make the last half kilometer of blacktop a straight line into the compound, with the foliage cleared off ten feet on either side. The sun had just set, but the monitoring system’s low-light capabilities were top of the line, and the sky wasn’t yet fully dark; he could easily see the military-style truck about a quarter of a kilometer from the hacienda’s gates.
“Are you expecting visitors?” Lohrman asked.
“No,” Cervantes replied, the first bits of doubt worming their way up his spine. “I don’t have anyone coming tonight.”
“Permission to engage?”
“Yes!” Cervantes exclaimed. “Do it!”
“Take it out,” Lohrman said into his microphone.
The men at the watchtowers had obviously been prepared for the order—less than two seconds later, two missiles blasted through the camera’s field of view, their rocket motors momentarily blinding the camera. Before the image could clear, the missiles hit the truck, detonating in a bloom that completely whited-out the screen.
“What was that?” Cervantes asked.
“LAHAT,” Lohrman said. “Israeli laser homing antitank missiles. My lads and I brought a few along when you engaged our services. One of the few tank rounds you don’t need a tank gun to operate. You can shoot them out of a 105-millimeter recoilless rifle, which is what my men just did. They’re supposed to have a ninety-five percent probability of kill.”
“Not a hundred percent?”
“That’s why we used two,” Lohrman said with a smile. “Just to be sure.”
After a few moments, the fire engulfing the truck began to die down, and the camera returned to semi-normalcy, although the center remained a solid mass of white.
Which made it easy to see the three figures walking towards the hacienda as they silhouetted themselves against the fire behind them.
“Your missiles killed the truck, but it doesn’t appear they were completely effective against its passengers,” Cervantes noted.
“They must have jumped out right before the missiles hit,” Lohrman said. “That’s the only way they could have survived that.” He shook his head. “Still, they don’t look injured…” He leaned over Cervantes’ shoulder to get a closer look at the monitor. “They almost look like women.”
“They must have been hiding in the bushes,” Cervantes scoffe
d. “There’s no way anyone survived that explosion.” He shrugged. “Still, we have enough junkies at the hacienda for tonight’s activities; we don’t need any more. Kill them, just in case.”
“You’re the boss,” Lohrman said, with zero remorse. Cervantes smiled at the reply; he didn’t like being second guessed. Lohrman muttered into his microphone, and Cervantes could hear the big .50 caliber machine guns in the watch towers firing, even through the main building’s thick walls.
The women kept walking—sauntering, really, Cervantes thought—despite the tracers zipping past them on the monitor.
“Who trained your men?” he demanded. “Darth Vader? Even Imperial storm troopers should be able to hit three women just walking towards them!”
“I trained them,” Lohrman said, his voice grim. “They’re better shots than that. Something’s fucked up.” He muttered into his com system, then asked, “Could you switch to Camera Two, please?”
The women reached the gate and three of his men stepped out of the guardhouse just inside it to meet them. The leader—Carlos Melzi, Lohrman’s second-in-command—held a pistol on the dark-haired woman in the middle, while the other two aimed Tavor assault rifles at the group. The women walked up to the gate, blurred for a moment, then continued strolling casually forward … but now they were inside the chain link fence!
“Shoot them!” Lohrman yelled at the screen. He pushed his microphone button and yelled it again.
The three women reached Melzi before the man could fire, and the middle one reached out, grabbed him by the throat with one hand, and lifted him from his feet.
That broke him out of whatever fog had possessed him, and he shoved his pistol against the side of her head and began squeezing the trigger frantically.
Just like the men with the machine guns, though, he seemed to miss her with every shot. Then her hand twitched, Melzi’s neck snapped to the side at an unnatural angle, and she opened her hand. He hit the pavement like so much dead meat.
That seemed to free the other two men, who blazed away with their assault rifles. The leader frowned at them a second, then the other two women blurred and materialized abruptly next to the sicarios. They grabbed the rifles, reversed them, and shot their previous owners. Lohrman had never seen anyone move that quickly. They didn’t seem to move so much as disappear from one place and appear at the other.
He shook his head, disbelieving, as the .50s started up again. The woman in command flicked a hand at her fellows, then at the machine guns, and both her companions disappeared from the camera’s field of view.
After a second or two, the machine guns fell abruptly silent.
The woman looked up at the camera and blew it a kiss, then pulled out a pistol of her own. She aimed it at the camera and smiled, and the picture dissolved into static.
“Camera Four, please,” Lohrman said.
He didn’t seem quite so confident anymore, Cervantes noted, which was totally understandable, since Cervantes was shaking and about to piss his pants. Scared didn’t do his feelings justice; he could barely get his shaking finger to toggle the system to the correct camera. He flipped Five on first—there was nothing going on in the game room—then managed to get Four as the brunette woman walked towards the porch of the main building.
A ball-shaped object flew into the picture to land next to her, then she disappeared in a fiery ball of smoke and dirt as the grenade exploded. She walked straight through it, unfazed, then frowned again as the men on the rooftop opened up with automatic weapons. She waved to someone outside the camera’s field of view and first one weapon, then the other, went silent. She shook her head and walked up the stairs to the main entrance.
“Where … where are the rest of your men?” Cervantes asked. “Sh—shouldn’t we be leaving or … or something?”
“It’s too late,” Lohrman muttered, almost to himself. He shook his head as if to clear it, then added, “I have a squad outside the door. I don’t know how the others didn’t do it, but these are my best men. They’ll stop her.”
The woman on the monitor opened the mansion’s front door and was met with a torrent of bullets as the two men stationed in the foyer emptied their magazines on full automatic. She blurred and vanished. The rifle fire stopped.
“Who else is between us and … her?” Cervantes was afraid he knew the answer, but found he had to ask anyway.
“No one,” Lohrman said grimly as ten rifles fired. They were in the outer office, just beyond the closed door, and the slab of wood did nothing at all to soften the weapons’ staccato thunder.
Cervantes clapped his hands over his ears to block out the cacophony … then pressed even harder to block out the screams. Cervantes had heard plenty of men—and women, too—scream in fear, but these were different. These wrapped every ounce of terror and horror in the screamer’s soul—and then some—into one final breath. One by one, they were snuffed out. Something hit the door, and a narrow stream of red oozed under it to puddle on the brilliantly burnished hardwood floor.
The sudden, total silence was even more terrifying than the screams had been.
Cervantes lost control of his bladder and felt the warm fluid running down his leg. He would have run if he’d had control of any of his muscles.
“What … what…” he mumbled. He wanted to know what the outcome had been, but he was physically unable to form words.
“I don’t know,” Lohrman said, somehow understanding. He squared his shoulders and exhaled explosively. “But it’s time for me to go find out.”
He drew his pistol as he walked to the door and threw it open. The arm that had been propped against it—no longer attached to its original owner—fell into the room to splash in the puddle. A woman—a rather attractive woman, actually, with dark hair—stood in the middle of a slaughterhouse. She was untouched, although the walls behind her were shredded with bullet holes, and huge patches of plaster had been blasted away, and the floor—what was visible of it, anyway—was littered with spent cartridge cases. Bodies and pieces of bodies filled the room, and the walls were coated in splashes of scarlet. In fact, the only thing not painted in crimson was the woman, who didn’t have a drop on her. The stench of rent bowels wafted into the room, and Cervantes’ stomach voided itself, too.
“Oops,” the woman said. “I seem to have gotten something on my pants.”
“Don’t. Fucking. Move.”
Despite what he had to be feeling, Lohrman managed to put some steel into his voice as he stepped forward into the outer office. Cervantes looked up to see the Brit still pointing the pistol at the woman, although it was anyone’s guess where the bullet would go, as badly as he was shaking.
“Me? Move?” the woman asked. “I really don’t think I want to, dahling.” She looked around her feet, and her upper lip curled back. She pointed to the floor. “I might slip on some of his guts and ruin this new top.”
“How?” Lohrman asked.
“Could you be a little more forthcoming?” The woman licked her lips. “There are many things I am, but a mind reader isn’t one of them.” She cocked her head. “Not yet, anyway.”
“How … how—?” Lohrman waved his free hand at the gore, although he was obviously trying very hard not to look down at the dismembered parts of his squad.
“It’s simple, dahling,” the woman said. “I’m a vampire.”
“Vampires don’t exist.”
“Why do they always have to say that?” a new voice asked. Cervantes’ head twitched, and then he swallowed as one of the other women—the blonde—stepped out of the hallway to join the brunette. “Can’t we just skip through this part and kill them? It’s so boring, and I need to get back for a nail appointment. I seem to have broken one somewhere along the way.” She shrugged. “Or, maybe I didn’t break a nail, and I’m just bored and ready to be done here.”
A redhead walked in to stand by the blonde, but she didn’t say anything. Her silence was even creepier than the blonde’s nonchalance.
&n
bsp; “Vampire’s don’t exist,” Lohrman repeated, like a man willing it to be true.
“Boring,” the blonde noted.
“Cecilia,” the first woman said, “could I trouble you for your pistol?”
The blonde pulled a pistol from a small-of-the-back holster and lobbed it to brunette, who put it to her temple and fired. It sounded like a cannon going off, and the bullet slammed into the wall on the other side of her. Another piece of plaster fell.
Lohrman looked back at the woman; there was no visible mark on her. His jaw fell open, but he wasn’t quite done yet. As she turned to lob the pistol back to the redhead, he dropped his own weapon, grabbed the broken chair next to him, tore off one of its wooden legs, and dove forward to stab her with it. He slipped in some of the gore, though, and only succeeded in driving it through her stomach.
He jumped back up, covered in blood, and retreated, holding up his fists defensively.
The woman looked down at the chair leg in her stomach and sighed. “Seriously? Bullets didn’t work, so now you’re going to kill me with a chair leg?”
“I thought driving a stake through a vampire killed it,” Lohrman said. “Killed you, I mean.”
“It’s supposed to be through my heart,” the woman replied with a sigh, pulling the chair leg from her stomach. There wasn’t a trace of blood on it, a corner of Cervantes’ brain noticed. “It’s supposed to go here,” she added, pressing against her chest. “Like this!”
She drove the chair leg through her chest, and all three women gasped as she fell to her knees.
Then all three started laughing as she stood again, pulled out the wooden piece, and cast it aside.
“Sorry,” she said, “but that’s just too cliché. And, as you can see, it doesn’t work, either.” She shrugged. “As it turns out, neither do crosses, garlic, or anything else along those lines.” She smiled. “I know, because people have tried all of them on me, and I’m still here.”
Lohrman’s mouth moved several times before he could get his voice to work.
