by Scott McEwen
She edged closer to the fire, feeling the warmth on the backs of her legs. “I should be writing this down. I can’t believe you’re going to abandon me after tonight.”
That made him chuckle. “Well, you’ve got Crosswhite.”
She looked concerned suddenly. “What am I gonna do about him, Gil? He’s such a . . .”
“Such a what?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her cheeks reddening, “but Pope won’t want to let him go. He’s too goddamn good at what he does.”
“I just told you: you’re chief of station. Crosswhite’s workin’ for you. I’m workin’ for you. You’re cleaning up Pope’s mess in Mexico—covering up the Downly assassination; doin’ what Fields and that idiot Ortega couldn’t do—and that’s exactly what you remind Pope of when this is over. Can you do that?”
She crossed her arms, drawing a breath as she remembered the electrocution she’d received from Fields, being raped in Havana the year before, and witnessing more than a half dozen killings, all while working for Pope. She had more than earned the position of station chief.
“Yeah,” she said, feeling pissed. “I can do it. Fuckin’-A I can do it.”
He gave her a wink. “I gotta go.”
She offered her hand. “Thank you for saving my life. I owe you and Dan both now.”
He took her hand and gave her a peck on the cheek. “Don’t ever put your life on the line for Crosswhite again. Understand? He’s too goddamn reckless; he doesn’t consider the consequences.”
“But—” The look in her eyes was almost mournful.
“If he gets in a jam, I’ll be around, but for now, we gotta hope he and Vaught can take Hancock down on their own, because you’ll need a clean sweep to impress Pope.” He picked up the rucksack, zipped it closed, and dropped it back on the bed. “Keep the cash in a safe place. If Dan or I fail, Pope might send assassins from the ATRU to clean house. If he does, don’t worry about anyone but yourself. Get the hell out of Dodge—and remember the black book.”
80
TOLUCA, MEXICO
22:15 HOURS
Hancock had slithered into position behind a large tree, which had been growing out of the sidewalk for so many years that the concrete had been pushed up. He was a hundred yards from where the police had taken cover behind their protective barrier of armored trucks in front of the shoe store. Putting his eye to the scope, he placed the crosshairs on the face of the cop manning the machine gun beneath the truck.
Smiling, he squeezed the trigger. The shot echoed like thunder, and the machine gunner’s head evaporated.
Hancock didn’t roll behind the tree against the chance that someone had seen his muzzle flash. Instead, he kept his eye to the scope waiting to see if anyone would have the balls to return his fire. To his surprise, the police made no attempt to return fire; instead, they were rushing into the shop.
He shifted aim and fired into the clutch of men, hitting two cops with one shot and splattering their bodies. He squeezed the trigger again, and blew off another man’s shoulder. A fourth round took off an officer’s leg, and after that there were no more live targets within view—save for the now one-legged officer writhing on the sidewalk four feet from the doorway.
“That’s right,” Hancock whispered. “Call your buddies to come get you.”
Someone threw a length of rope out the door, and the wounded officer grabbed hold of it. Hancock blew off his arm at the elbow. A smoke grenade was tossed out onto the sidewalk, and he began to lose visual contact, so he squeezed the trigger again, hitting the wounded cop in the belly and blowing him apart.
As the gray smoke billowed up around the trucks, Hancock put an armor-piercing round through the engine block of each one. Then he put a round through the transformer up on the telephone pole. Sparks exploded from the old steel box, and the street fell into darkness. Satisfied that the police inside the shoe store weren’t going anywhere, he pulled back and trotted up to the corner, where his bodyguards stood waiting by the car. Twenty other men, some with RPGs, were fanning out to cover the street.
Fighting could now be heard on the east side of town: automatic weapons fire and the occasional boom of an explosion.
“How’s the attack going?” Hancock asked the man with the phone.
“It goes well,” the man said. “The police have fallen back to the center of town. They have prepared positions . . . sandbags . . . machine gun emplacements. It will be hard to dig them out, but you can pick them off easily. We should go.”
“My work is here.” Hancock was loading rounds into the Barrett’s magazine. “At least one of the gringos who can identify me is in that building down there—probably both. Tell our people in the east to take their RPGs to roof level and fire down into the machine gun nests. The police don’t have the men or equipment to hold the center of town against rockets. If our people move aggressively, we’ll own the city by midnight. Once we’ve proven ourselves, Serrano’s friends will support Ruvalcaba, but we have to demonstrate our strength right here, right now, so tell them to get on it!”
The man got back on the phone, and the driver stood looking at Hancock. “I’ve heard that Ruvalcaba is on the run,” he remarked.
“Sure he is,” Hancock said, smacking the magazine back into the rifle. “Wouldn’t you be? With Serrano dead, Mexico City’s not safe for him. He’ll stay in Chiapas until he can negotiate with the government for a safe return. Look, it all hinges on what we do here tonight. By morning, there will be a new chief of police, half of your people will be cops, and it’ll be like this never happened. That will give Ruvalcaba a lot of breathing room.”
The driver nodded. “Okay,” he said, “but it’s good the rest of the men don’t know he’s running away.”
“The rest of the men are idiots.” Hancock slung the great weapon. “Shit, half of them can’t even fucking read.”
The driver took offense. “My mother can’t read. Is she an idiot?”
Hancock grinned. “Not unless she’s lugging an AK-47 for Ruvalcaba.”
The driver was hard pressed to hide his irritation. “How much time are we going to waste here? Those cops down there aren’t a threat.”
“Yes, they are,” Hancock insisted. “They’ve got two Green Berets with them, and Green Berets are too dangerous to let live in a battle like this—and they’re dangerous to me personally. So we stay and kill them.”
SERGEANT CUEVAS’S BODY lay on the sidewalk just outside the door to the shoe store, his left shoulder having been blown off and part of his lung hanging out the top of his exploded rib cage.
Much of the smoke from the grenade had blown back into the building, making it even tougher to see in the dark, and no one dared use a flashlight for fear of the sniper.
Purely on impulse, Vaught dashed out the door, grabbed Cuevas’s FX-05 with the 40 mm grenade launcher, and leapt back inside without drawing any fire.
Crosswhite jumped to his feet. “That was a goddamn stupid thing to do!”
“Tell me about it.” Vaught slung the weapon. “I’m going after him.”
“The fuck are you talkin’ about?”
Vaught pointed up. “Along the rooftops. He shot out the lights, and now it’s dark as shit out there. He won’t expect me to come after him—not any more than he did the first time.”
Crosswhite drew from a cigarette, the cherry glowing bright red. “And the first time worked out so well for ya.”
“If it hadn’t been for crooked cops, I’d have bagged his fuckin’ ass.”
Crosswhite wanted to go with Vaught, to carry the fight to the enemy, as had always been his nature. But tonight he had to admit the truth: he wanted to see Paolina again, he wanted to see his baby girl born, and his best chance of that was staying inside the shoe store and waiting for the fight to come to him. “Fuck you,” he muttered, flicking away the cigarette with
a shower of tiny sparks.
“For what?” Vaught asked indignantly.
“For being like I used to be.”
Vaught put a hand on his shoulder. “You’re just old and scared, dude. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Crosswhite smirked and knocked the arm away. “Kiss my ass.”
The conversation had been in English, so the other five combat-effective officers hadn’t understood what was being said. When Vaught went to the back of the shop, mounting the stairs to the roof, they asked Crosswhite where he was going.
Crosswhite answered, “Él va a cazar al francotirador gringo.” He goes to hunt the gringo sniper.
81
TOLUCA, MEXICO
22:45 HOURS
Vaught closed the hatch, moving across the roof in a combat crouch, relieved to be free of the death trap below. Was he abandoning the others? Possibly, but not out of cowardice. He had a score to settle with Rhett Hancock, and if he made a mistake, the sniper would make him pay with 42 grams of lead moving at 3,000 feet per second. The FX-05 was fixed with a red dot scope, giving him a small measure of “night vision” when it came to aiming, but until he could close the distance, Hancock would hold every advantage—not the least of which being that Vaught had no idea where the hell he was.
He crossed to the next rooftop and went to the edge, stealing a glance at the street below and pulling quickly back. Men were converging on the shoe store with rifles and RPGs. He could shoot some of them and buy Crosswhite some time, but if Hancock was watching, they’d be his last shots. Still, his instincts were telling him the sniper was not set yet, so he swung the rifle over the parapet and fired a grenade at the lead RPG man.
The grenade hit the wall next to the rocketeer, blowing a hole in the brick wall and killing the man instantly.
Vaught immediately opened up with the FX-05, cutting down six more men as they scrambled to find cover where there was none. The weapon ran through ammo a little faster than he was accustomed to, but he hit everyone he meant to before pulling back to reload. He would not go back to the well a second time, no matter how tempting.
Hancock, meanwhile, had been moving along a rooftop on the opposite side of the street when Vaught opened up. He heard the grenade explode and saw the flashes of Vaught firing on full automatic. But by the time he got the Barrett unslung, Vaught had disappeared behind a large plastic water tank called a tinaco. So he set the bipod of the giant rifle on a ventilation duct and waited for Vaught to reemerge on the opposite side. When he didn’t reappear, he began to suspect he’d been spotted.
VAUGHT STOOD WITH his back against the tinaco, indeed having spotted a shadowy figure on the far roof. Confident he’d come within a breath of having his guts blown out, he tapped on the tinaco with his knuckle to make sure it was full of water, which would stop even an armor piercing round from coming all the way through.
The cannon across the street went off a few seconds later, and he felt the impact of the round reverberate through the tank. Water began leaking out onto the roof—and not from one hole but two. Hancock had shot the side of the tinaco near the bottom, leaving entrance and exit holes no more than six inches apart.
A second shot boomed out, and water began running out from two more holes.
“How much water you got over there?” the sniper shouted.
Vaught wasn’t sure, but he doubted the tank held more than three hundred gallons. The great gun went off again, and two more holes appeared on the opposite side.
After a fourth shot, water was literally gushing from the tank.
“Goddamn, that’s gotta be scary!” Hancock taunted, his laughter carrying over the distant echo of the battle being fought on the east side of town. “Two minutes from now, you’ll be dead!”
Vaught sank into a deep crouch against the side of the tinaco, measuring the distance to the next rooftop, where a three-foot-high parapet encircled the edge. But the truth was that even if he made it to the next roof, Hancock’s armor piercing rounds would easily defeat the simple clay-brick and mortar parapet, which had not been built with the intention of stopping antiaircraft bullets.
“The bastard’s right,” he muttered, thumping the muzzle of the rifle against his forehead in frustration. He double-checked the distance to the south, back the way he’d come, where the parapet was thicker, but the distance was twice as far.
Then he remembered the smoke grenade in his trouser pocket. “Dumb-ass!” he hissed at himself, pulling the grenade and popping smoke on the north side of the tinaco.
“You’ll still never make it!” Hancock shouted. “Too far!”
Vaught jumped out on the south side of the tank where there was no smoke, firing the grenade launcher and pulling back.
The grenade detonated, and he took off north through the smoke, sprinting across the roof and vaulting the thin parapet to run clean across to the next building and into a concrete cupola encasing a stairwell.
Hancock, covered in mortar dust, sat up behind the air duct and rested back on his hands, a loud ringing in is ears.
“Clever prick,” he muttered, spitting out bits of grit.
He got back behind the Barrett and saw the smoke dissipating over the far rooftop. His prey had escaped—but only for the moment. He used his phone to call the men below, ordering them to hunt Vaught at street level.
The narcos in the street fired an RPG through the door of the building into which Vaught had escaped and stormed inside.
Vaught heard the explosion and started back up the stairs. Hiding inside the cupola, he waited and fired on the first shadows to appear below, killing three men and forcing back the rest.
Vicious threats were called up to him, but he ignored them. He did not step out onto the roof, believing that Hancock would burn him down the second he showed himself.
Knowing he had the angle on the men below and plenty of ammo to keep them at bay for the time being, he was content with a standoff.
“We’ll let the situation develop,” he said quietly, crouching down and tucking a pinch of tobacco into his lip. “Good shape here . . . good shape.”
82
TOLUCA, MEXICO
23:00 HOURS
Chief Diego Guerrero had the makings of a disaster on his hands, and he didn’t need Special Forces training to see it. His force was outgunned and outnumbered at least two to one. He’d tried calling again for federal assistance, but the phone lines were down, and the enemy had managed to knock out cellular service as well. He supposed they had destroyed the cell towers, a common tactic.
Wounded men were being brought into the coffee shop by twos and threes now, leaving blood all over the place. One machine gun emplacement had already been hit by an RPG from the roof of the bank, and the enemy was moving in and out of their perimeter almost at will. There were no more motorized patrols. The trucks that weren’t burning were being used to move or provide cover for the wounded.
“There’s no more word from Sergeant Cuevas,” said another sergeant, tossing aside the radio. “They must be dead.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Diego said. “We’re going to lose the city. There are too many of them. And with the rockets . . .” He shook his head. “I’ve failed. It’s time to consider surrender.”
“Surrender?” the sergeant blurted. “Are you crazy? They’ll line us up and shoot us!”
Diego shook his head. “No. Only me. I will offer my life in exchange for yours. Ruvalcaba is smart enough to see the sense in sparing the men. A slaughter will only make it more difficult for him to buy friends in the government.”
The sergeant, a man named José, pointed out the window. “Ruvalcaba’s not out there! He’s probably hundreds of miles from here! Do you think you can negotiate with wild animals?”
Diego was calm. “What choice do I have but to try, José? The men will certainly be killed otherwise—all of them.”<
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“Then let them die fighting,” José insisted. “Not stood up against a wall!”
Diego looked around at the almost twenty bleeding men crowding the coffee shop, many of them barely conscious. “What do you men think?”
“We fight on,” one of them said. He gestured with a pistol. “Or we kill ourselves.”
“No surrender,” said another.
“Never surrender!”
“Never!”
The others nodded in stubborn agreement.
“Very well,” Diego said. “Then we will fight.” He accepted a carbine from an officer too badly wounded to walk and collected his spare magazines. “Let’s go, Sergeant. Our Calvary awaits.”
They ducked outside and darted across the square to the nearest machine gun emplacement.
Diego took a knee beside the gunner as bullets flew through the trees over their heads. “How much ammunition do you have?”
“After this belt, one box,” the officer said. “We’re going to lose the square, Jefe. You should take a truck and try to get through to the capital. Someone has to tell what happened here.”
Diego patted him on the back. “That will be a story for someone else to tell. I will never abandon you men.”
The officer squeezed the trigger, putting a burst into a parked car where a couple of narcos had just taken cover. One of the narcos sprawled out dead, and the other scurried back around the corner of the bank.
“There!” José exclaimed, pointing above the courthouse. “I saw a man with an RPG.”
Diego looked around. His men were pulled into a protective perimeter in the town square, using their trucks, as well as park benches, statues, and trees, for cover. He estimated that half his force was dead or wounded. “Let’s go,” he said to José. “We have to kill the man with the rocket.”
“Jefe, no!” the gunner said. “It’s too dangerous. We you need you here.”
“He’s right,” José said, grabbing Diego’s arm. “I’ll take someone else. You stay and lead the men.”
