by Scott McEwen
Diego watched him pick a man, and the two officers ran off toward the courthouse. “I wish my brother were here,” he said plaintively.
“You’re the jefe,” the gunner said. “We stayed to fight with you.”
Diego nodded and said a silent prayer, asking for help—not from the Virgin, as he normally might have done, but from his brother: Juan, if you are watching, and if there is any help to send these men, now would be very a good time.
Then he made a separate pact with God.
JOSÉ USED HIS key, and both officers slipped unseen into the courthouse, dashing to the back of the building and up the staircase. José noticed the officer wheezing during the climb.
“What’s wrong?”
“I was hit crossing the park.”
José saw him holding his side in the dim light. “Can you continue? You can wait for me here.”
“There are many men on the roof,” the officer said. “I’ve seen them taking shots at us. You’re going to need me, but we’d better hurry. I’m losing a lot of blood.”
Putting from his mind the fact that the officer would be dead soon whether or not they were successful, José continued the climb to the third floor. There he found the door to the roof locked, as it should have been. He grabbed his key ring. “They must be using ladders,” he observed.
“I’m sure they’re accessing the annex roof in back—climbing up from there.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.” José put the key into the lock. “Are you ready?”
“Yes, but what’s the plan?”
“Open the door and shoot everyone.”
The wounded officer couldn’t help laughing. José laughed with him. “Okay? Let’s go!”
He turned the key, pushing open the door, and they scrambled out onto the rooftop, where better than twenty narcotraficantes were crouched behind the parapet overlooking the park—four of them armed with RPGs for delivering a coup de grâce to the police forces below.
“Puta madre!” José hissed, having expected to find five or six men.
Both cops opened up on full automatic, moving low and fast, as the Americans had trained them. They mowed down six men apiece before the narcos even knew they were under attack, killing all four rocketeers, and ducking behind an air-conditioning unit to reload.
One of the narcos grabbed up an RPG and fired just as the wounded officer was raising up for another shot. The rocket hit him in the face and took off his head without detonating, exploding somewhere behind the courthouse as José raked his weapon along the parapet, knocking over a half dozen more narcos on the first pass. The remaining six men scattered, firing on José from all directions as he ejected the spent magazine and slapped in a new one.
He was hit multiple times as he rose up from behind the unit, determined to live long enough to clear the roof. Placing controlled bursts in what felt like slow motion, pivoting left to right in a tight corkscrew that carried him through an arc of better than 180 degrees, the sergeant killed or wounded the last of the narcos.
The carbine ran dry, and he landed on his tailbone with bone-jarring force, biting his tongue and falling over onto his back. In the moments before his death, José lay looking up at the stars and remembering—strangely he thought—that his worthless brother-in-law still owed him twenty-six hundred pesos.
83
TOLUCA, MEXICO
23:15 HOURS
An RPG tore through the steel security curtain of the shoe store display window, blasting fragments of molten steel and glass through the shop like a giant shotgun blast. One officer was killed outright, and Crosswhite was thrown across the floor. Shoes and wounded men caught fire, and Crosswhite jumped back up, running to the door and shooting at the shadows in the street.
The carbine shattered in his hands, followed by the instant boom! of Hancock’s .50 caliber.
He threw himself flat as the great rifle boomed again. The big bullet ricocheted off the concrete, sending hot pieces of spall into the wounded. The men screamed and tried to crawl deeper into the shop.
“We have to surrender!” one of the officers shouted.
Crosswhite grabbed his carbine away from him. “Surrender then, goddamnit. Let ’em cut your balls off! See to the wounded!” he ordered another, not knowing what else to say.
He could feel his lacerated hands bleeding as he mounted the staircase to the roof, finding it hard to keep a good grip on the weapon. “Motherfuckin’ sonofabitch!” he snarled. “Goddamn cocksucker, I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains out!”
He threw open the hatch and crawled out onto the roof, knowing exactly how naked he was but too pissed to care. Paolina and the baby were in the back of his mind, but he knew now that he would never see his young wife again—that some other man would raise his daughter.
“Fuckin’ Pope! Cocksucker!” he sneered, belly-crawling toward the parapet. “I’m gonna die on a goddamn shoe store, you motherfucker!” He glanced up at the sky on the off chance one of the CIA director’s stealth drones might be up there and gave it the finger.
Hancock’s rifle went off again, and he sprang into a crouch, firing at a pair of shadows on the far rooftop. Both shadows went down, and he dropped flat, rolling to the south side of the roof without taking any return fire.
The rocketeer beside Hancock was hit in the face and killed instantly. Hancock was hit in the shoulder. He swore a blue streak as he crawled closer to the parapet, pulling the Barrett after him by the strap, not knowing if the smartass on the far roof would have any grenades to pitch across.
“Shit just got real,” he told himself, knowing the bullet was still in him, possibly embedded in the bone, and feeling that the stitches in his leg were torn open.
“Hey!” he shouted, stuffing gauze into the shoulder wound. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Fuck you care?” Crosswhite called back.
“Got me pretty good, asshole!”
“Stand the fuck by! I’m about to do better!”
Hancock laughed, crawling south along the roof in the direction of the voice.
Crosswhite crawled quickly toward the north, keeping low behind the parapet. A few seconds later, Hancock’s rifle went off, and an armor-piercing round blasted a hole in the brick-and-mortar parapet, very close to where Crosswhite had been.
He sprang up and fired at Hancock’s silhouette just as the sniper was squeezing the trigger a second time, the carbine slippery in his bleeding hands.
Hancock fell over.
“How’d I do that time?” Crosswhite shouted across. When Hancock didn’t answer, he smiled. Crosswhite knew he hadn’t killed him—his aim had been off—but he’d hurt him.
“I’ll wait for him to come back up for air,” he said to himself, opening fire on the narcos below and shouting to his cops that the sniper was down.
The police downstairs began firing into the street, and Ruvalcaba’s men fell back.
Hancock’s shadow appeared once again over the parapet, but Crosswhite fired on him before he could raise the heavy rifle, driving the sniper back under cover.
“Come on, show me some more!” Crosswhite taunted. “Lemme air that shit out for ya!”
Hancock’s sluggish movement had told Crosswhite that the gringo sniper was badly hurt.
“Don’t you die on me over there! You suck that shit up and fight me!”
Hancock sprang up unexpectedly, firing a round through the parapet one foot from where Crosswhite was crouched.
“Fuck me!” Crosswhite murmured, displacing fast and firing at the sniper’s silhouette before he could track him.
84
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
00:30 HOURS
Pope sat staring with bloodshot eyes at a television monitor, watching an aerial view of the battle for Toluca in infrared. Midori stood behind him, her arms crossed in bitter disapproval. After Cross
white had thrust his finger toward the sky, there had been no doubt that it was him.
“I hope he kills that son of a bitch and comes for you,” she said, ashamed to have been even a small part of what was happening.
“Perhaps he will,” Pope said quietly. “The UAV’s at bingo fuel. I have to bring it back to American airspace.”
“Do something!” she implored. “Help them!”
He turned to look at her, a slightly incredulous look on his face. “What do you suggest I do?”
She pointed at the screen. “Call somebody down there!”
“There’s no one to call. It’s quite out of my hands.”
“Is the drone armed?”
“Of course not.”
She smirked, her emotions getting the better of her. “You say that like it’s an impossibility.”
He gave her a frown. “I don’t send armed UAVs over allied countries; you know that very well.” Returning his attention to the monitor, Pope gripped the joystick and banked the aircraft northward. “I shouldn’t have invited you to watch.”
“Why did you?”
“I don’t know. I thought . . . I thought we might reestablish a trust. I see now that all I’ve managed to do is make things worse between us.”
Midori had worked for Pope for over ten years, and she knew him well enough to understand how sincere a gesture this had been. Because of that, she was unable to help feeling compassion for him. “You really don’t understand what you’ve done, do you?” she said. “You’ve started a war down there. Those men are dying, Robert.”
He put the UAV on autopilot and turned in the chair, gently taking hold of her hands. “We’ve watched thousands of people die on these monitors. Tonight is nothing different. Don’t forget that two nuclear weapons came across that border—two. I cannot allow that to happen again. Not if it’s within my power to prevent it.”
She pulled her hands free. “Do you still think that’s what this is about? Tonight has nothing to do with the border—nothing.”
“I’ve already admitted to you this operation got out of hand. But it got out of hand only because Vaught exceeded his mission parameters—an accident of fate—an unknown variable that I could not have accounted for ahead of time. What’s happening down there now is fate playing itself out, nothing more.”
“And when the smoke clears?”
“I have no idea. We have to see who’s left standing.”
Midori stared at him, her slow eyes dark and sad—a sadness brought on by the irrevocable truth that the Pope she had respected and admired for so many years no longer existed. He had evolved into a man who could reduce a human life to nothing more than a blip on a screen. And he could do so with little more care than it took to brush his teeth.
“I’m going home now,” she said quietly.
“Good night,” he said in his gentle voice.
She put her hand on the doorknob. “By the way, it’s official: Lena Deiss and Sabastian Blickensderfer are getting married in eight days. Do you still want me to continue surveillance?”
“No,” Pope replied, turning back to the monitor and placing his hand on the stick. “Discontinue all surveillance. We’ve wasted enough time on Blickensderfer.”
85
TOLUCA, MEXICO
23:30 HOURS
Vaught waited for his moment and then fired a 40 mm high-explosive grenade into the doorway at the bottom of the stairs. He charged down and machine-gunned the survivors, stomping a crawling man’s neck on the way out the door.
“Jackasses,” he sneered contemptuously.
Stepping into the street, Vaught could hear the fighting on the east side of town reaching a gut-wrenching crescendo—sustained bursts of automatic fire and multiple explosions—and he was hit with the dreadful realization that Diego and his men were being slaughtered.
Down the block, he heard Crosswhite and Hancock harangue each other a last time. Vaught immediately zeroed the sniper’s position and dashed across. “Got you now, motherfucker!”
HANCOCK HAD BEEN hit straight across the back by one of Vaught’s NATO rounds. Both shoulder blades were grazed, and his infraspinatus muscles spasmed painfully every time he attempted to lift and aim the rifle. His fingers were tingling, and he was going into shock.
“Time to go,” he groaned, dragging himself and the Barrett into the stairwell. Hancock trotted down to the ground floor, ducking into the street, where the narcos were gunning it out at almost point-blank range with the policemen in the shoe store.
He knew from the ferocity of fighting on the east side that the city was about to fall. “My work here is done!” He ran off up the sidewalk through the dark until he made it to the corner where his bodyguards stood waiting impatiently beside the midnight-blue Dodge Charger.
“Let’s get the hell out of here. I need a medic.”
The other two men gladly loaded up, and the car sped off.
CROSSWHITE VERY NEARLY shot Vaught when he appeared on the rooftop across the street. But Vaught gave him a wave and fired an HE grenade into the narcos below, killing four men and opening up and full automatic.
With apparently no sniper to worry about, Crosswhite stood up and opened fire as well.
The narcos were now caught in a murderous cross fire with nowhere to run. Within ten seconds, fifteen men lay dead in the street.
“Is the son of a bitch dead?” Crosswhite shouted over.
Vaught took a small flashlight from his harness, flashing it around. “I don’t see him!”
“He’s gotta be there! Look for a blood trail—he’s hit!”
Vaught found the trail of blood and followed it down to ground level, where Crosswhite and five other police officers met him in the middle of the street, all of them looking at one another in dismay.
“He can’t have disappeared!” Crosswhite said. “He’s hit—I hit him!” He turned toward the bodies. “Check these assholes!”
Everyone took out a flashlight and checked the corpses for the face of a gringo, but Hancock was not among the dead.
“Goddamnit!” Vaught shouted. “How did you lose him?”
“What the fuck are you talkin’ about?” Crosswhite retorted. “He was on your side of the fucking street!”
“Fuck!” Vaught kicked a body. “We had him, Dan! We fucking had him!”
The fighting on the east side suddenly fell off to nothing, and everyone knew the city had fallen.
“Well, shit!” Crosswhite said in disgust. “There’s no time to worry about it now. We gotta get the wounded outta here. We’ll escape across the west side.”
A pair of trucks came roaring around the corner, and everyone brought their weapons to bear.
“Hold fire!” Vaught shouted, seeing that the trucks were loaded with federal troops.
Chief Diego jumped down from the running board of the lead truck, his left arm in a sling and blood dripping from his fingers. “Thank God some of you are still alive!”
Lieutenant R. Felix got out on the driver’s side, his troops already dismounting to form a defensive perimeter around the shoe store, spreading out up the street. The officers led the medics inside, shining their lights on the wounded men who were covered with the dust and debris of battle.
Vaught recognized Lieutenant Felix from the morning after the quake. “We didn’t lose the city?”
Felix shook his head. “Toluca still belongs to the people. Where is Sergeant Cuevas?”
“He’s over there.” Vaught gestured at the body. “The sniper got him. I’m sorry. He was a damn good man.”
“Yes, he was,” Felix said, going to the body and making the sign of the cross upon seeing the face of his dead friend.
Crosswhite led Diego into the shoe store so that he could see his wounded men. “How many did we lose?”
“Half, I think,” Diego said
, kneeling down to take the hand of a young officer who was obviously dying. “Yes, I think half.”
“Who sent the army?”
Diego had already begun to say the last rights over the young officer. When he finished, he kissed the man’s forehead and rose to his feet, thumbing the tears from his eyes. “I’m sorry. What did you ask me?”
Confused, Crosswhite looked down at the dead young man and then back at Diego. “You’re a priest?”
“No. I am not ordained, but I hope that God will accept this man into his Holy Kingdom long enough for me to become so.”
“I don’t understand. We just won! You’re going back to the seminary?”
“I promised God that if he saved the city, I would return to the priesthood. He sent the soldiers, and the city was saved. I will keep my promise.”
Crosswhite opened his mouth, but seeing the look in Diego’s eyes, he knew there would be no point in trying to dissuade him. “Well . . . well, good job, then!” He bumped Diego briskly on the shoulder with a bloody hand. “You’re a brave man, Diego. You kept your men together, and you saved the city. Juan would be proud of you.”
“The Holy Father saved the city, and my brother sits at his right hand. Thank you for shedding your blood with us. I am forever in your debt.” Diego shook Crosswhite’s hand, turning for the door and stepping out just as Vaught was striding in.
“Who sent the army?” Crosswhite asked him quietly.
Vaught glanced outside. “That lieutenant out there, Felix, he was good friends with Cuevas. Cuevas got through to him just before the attack, and Felix talked a battalion of men into acting without orders. The federal government doesn’t even know they’re here yet.”
“Well, you can bet your ass they’ll be taking credit for the victory by sunrise. Come on, let’s get these men loaded up. I wanna get home to my wife.”
“Hey, ya know,” Vaught said, following his lead, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”
“What?” Crosswhite positioned himself to lift one of the wounded men by the shoulders.
