Damage Control

by John Gilstrap

  Boxers lifted his rifle from where he’d stashed it next to his right leg and handed it back to Jonathan. Slightly larger and heavier than Jonathan’s M27, Boxers’ Hechler and Koch Model 417 looked nearly identical, but fired a bigger 7.62-millimeter bullet that had way more penetrating power than the M27’s 5.56-millimeter round.

  “Here’s a couple of spare mags, too,” Big Guy said, handing back two thirty-round magazines.

  “What are you going to do?” Tristan asked from his perch on the floor. His eyes were huge.

  “I’m going to finish what they started,” Jonathan said.

  He squat-walked to the back bulkhead, to the door in the center. The gun port was tempting, but he dismissed it. Gun ports were for terrified armored car guards who cared less about hitting a target than about putting out a large volume of fire to put people’s heads down. That offended Jonathan’s sense of professionalism. Suppressing fire had its place, but this was not it. When he pulled the trigger, he wanted to hit what he was shooting at.

  As he reached for the handle of the personnel door in the center of the back panel, the technical released another burst of gunfire—a longer one this time—and four more bullets slammed through the bulkhead. The gunner was finding his aim.

  Nearly as tall as the crew cab was high, the door was designed for rapid deployment of troops, so when Jonathan pulled the latch and swung the door out, he opened up an enticing vertical trench for the technical’s gunner.

  The technical’s driver, however, read the lethality of the situation for what it was and backed off the accelerator. As the pickup truck fell away, Jonathan heard the gunner yelling for the driver not to be a coward.

  Jonathan dropped to his belly on the Sandcat’s floor and assumed a classic prone shooter’s position.

  “Slow down, Big Guy!” he commanded.

  Boxers hit the brakes harder than he’d expected, and while the distance between the vehicles closed, the technical hit its brakes hard, too. As the gunner opened up again, his rounds went wild.

  Jonathan’s didn’t. He centered the red dot of the 417’s gun sight on the technical’s grille, on the driver’s side and he unleashed a long burst that shredded the pickup’s engine, and then probably went on to shred the driver.

  The technical veered sharply to the right—its left—then hit a curb and flipped. While it was hard to see details this far away, there was no mistaking the silhouette of the gunner cartwheeling through the air and skidding into the street.

  “All right, Scorpion!” Boxers whooped. “Nice shooting!”

  Actually, it wasn’t. Anybody who couldn’t hit a target that big as it raced straight toward him deserved to be on the other end of the gun. The fact that it had happened at all spelled very bad news.

  It meant that the bad guys had connected the dots and knew exactly where they were.

  Armed with a compass point and the direction of travel, Hernandez would be able to figure out that that they were headed to the tunnel in the industrial park.

  “Maria,” Jonathan said, louder than he’d intended, and causing her to jump. “Where’s the next nearest tunnel to the U.S.?”

  “I already told you. The warehouse—”

  “No, you said that one’s the closest. Your boss has to know that’s where we’re going now. Where’s the next closest?”

  “Much farther,” she said. “Fifteen, maybe twenty kilometers east of the tunnel off Hermanos Escobar.”

  “Scorpion, we’re only about three klicks out now. With the world chasing us, I don’t want to do another twenty on the open road.”

  “They’ll have roadblocks,” Jonathan said.

  “And we’ve got a big-ass battering ram. Besides, they haven’t had time to set up a good ambush. By the time they do, we’ll have already blown past them.”

  Boxers was spinning himself up for some measure of unearned optimism. There’d been plenty of time. The question was whether or not the bad guys had utilized it efficiently.

  It didn’t matter. The one thing Boxers was right about was the fact that there was no turning back. With their cover blown, and wrapped in such an identifiable vehicle, a twenty-kilometer open-road sprint would be suicide.

  “Have you ever been to these tunnels, Maria?” Jonathan asked. “Any of them?”

  “I have been to one—the one we’re going to now—but I have not been inside.”

  “Do you know how to get inside?” If ever he’d asked a question to which there was only one right answer, this was the one.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Relief.

  “The entrance is really just a hole in the floor with a ladder.”

  “Is that the only entrance to the tunnel? One way in and one way out?”

  “I don’t know. I never asked.”

  “There have to be vents,” Boxers said. “Tunnel that long would have to have some form of forced ventilation.”

  The complexity of the engineering challenge was stunning—made all the more so by the fact that it had presumably all been done by amateurs.

  “Why don’t we just charge the border crossing?” Tristan asked. “We’re close to that aren’t we?”

  “Can’t risk it,” Jonathan said. “We’ve got to get past the Mexican Border Patrol before we get to the American Border Patrol. Even if we made it to the U.S., they’d just hand us back to the Mexicans.”

  “If they all didn’t just shoot us first,” Boxers said. “Those guys get jumpy when they’re approached by speeding vehicles.”

  Jonathan’s earbud popped. “Scorpion, Mother Hen. SkysEye shows a barricade across the road not too far from you.”

  Jonathan saw it just as she said the words. It looked like six or seven emergency vehicles across the road, painting the night with red and blue flashing lights.

  “The turn into the park is just beyond them,” Maria said. “Half a kilometer.”

  Boxers slowed, but not much. “Tell me what you want to do, Boss.”

  “Ram ’em,” Jonathan said. He moved to the escape hatch in the roof—the spot where he so wished he had a gun turret—and threw it open. “I’ll keep their heads down. Tristan.”

  The kid’s head jerked up.

  “Climb on back here. Hurry.”

  The kid pulled himself off of the floor and back across the center console to squat next to Maria.

  “There’s gonna be a bump, and then there are going to be a lot of people behind us shooting at us.”

  “I know,” he said. “My safety is on.”

  “Well, take it off, then,” Boxers barked.

  “When they fire on us, put it on full-auto and open up through the back door,” Jonathan instructed. “Maria, grab a weapon and help.”

  Maria didn’t hesitate even a second. She snatched up one of the rifles they’d taken from the soldiers who’d tried to arrest her and moved to the back door, shoulder to shoulder with Tristan.

  “Slow down, Big Guy,” Jonathan said. “Get us as close as you can. Let them think we might be surrendering. When I start shooting, gun it and get us the hell out of here.”

  “Roger that,” Boxers said. “Just make sure to leave me enough space to get a good run at the fenders.”

  The Sandcat slowed to nearly a crawl as they got to within fifty meters of the checkpoint. Jonathan’s plan was simple: He was going to do exactly the opposite of what he’d done against the technical. When he started shooting, it wouldn’t be about acquiring a specific target and killing it. Instead, it would be about scaring the shit out of all the targets at once so that they’d dive for cover and still have their heads down when Boxers blasted through the barricade.

  As they approached, Jonathan kept his head inside the Sandcat, fearing that even the hint of a gun turret might spook the bad guys early and make them start shooting. Up ahead, the soldiers seemed confused. Jonathan guessed there were maybe fifteen of them in total. Some had taken shooting stances, and others were standing with their weapons at port arms.

  “I
want to do this soon,” Boxers said. “I’m running out of runway.”

  Jonathan steadied himself under the open escape hatch, steeled himself with a deep breath, and then stood to his full height. As soon as his shoulders were clear of the hatch, he brought the 417 to his shoulder and opened up on the roadblock. On full-auto, he raked their positions from left to right, and then back again. He emptied a mag in less than two seconds, and by then Boxers had found the gas, and they were moving fast. For such a heavy vehicle the Sandcat had a lot of acceleration.

  Jonathan fingered the release button to drop the spent mag, and then he slapped a fresh one in its place and resumed hosing bad guys.

  “Here we go!” Boxers yelled. “Hang on.”

  Jonathan figured they had to be doing fifty when they made contact. The Mexicans had parked two environmentally friendly, fuel-efficient little toy cop cars nose-to-nose in the middle of the road, no doubt thinking that they’d created a roadblock. Boxers nailed them both simultaneously, just forward of their respective front wheels, and they spun out of the way as if they were made of balsa wood—or, more appropriately, as if pounds of metal had given way to tons of steel.

  This stuff was all about the proper application of mass and momentum, and nobody on the planet did it more expertly than Boxers.

  Tristan had been expecting something more dramatic than a thump. They’d just rammed two cars, for God’s sake, but it was less of an impact than the potholes. It knocked him on his ass, but that was about it.

  Now, the open back door framed the image of a world that was shooting back at them. As the line of soldiers and vehicles fell away, he watched some of them stand up and open fire. Above and behind, Scorpion’s gun continued to pound, and Tristan saw puffs of glass and flying metal as his bullets tore into the soldiers’ vehicles and equipment.

  A spray of blood announced the disintegration of a soldier’s head.

  To his left, Maria kneeled squarely in the center of the opening and opened up on the line of cars and people. She fired a long string of bullets, just holding the trigger down until the magazine was empty. As spent shell casings streamed from her ejection port, they showered over him. He didn’t know they’d be that hot.

  Tristan didn’t aim so much as he pointed and pulled the trigger. When his weapon went dry, he dropped out the magazine and reached for more on his vest, just like he’d done a thousand times when they were in hiding, but his hands hadn’t been trembling back then. And nobody was—

  Something hit him hard in the chest, driving the air from his lungs and causing him to sit down hard on his butt.

  “Tristan is shot!” Maria yelled.

  “Shoot back!” Boxers hollered.

  Holy shit, I’ve been shot!

  He fell backward, and there was Maria, looking down at him and saying something that he couldn’t hear. He was too busy trying to take a breath.

  Then Scorpion’s face arrived. He looked angry. “Where are you shot?” he yelled.

  Why is he mad at me?

  “I saw it hit his chest,” Maria said.

  The anger turned to relief. Maybe amusement.

  Scorpion lifted Tristan by the collar of his vest and stuffed his hand down the gap. A lightning bolt of pain launched through Tristan, from neck to groin. He yelled.

  “I thought your color looked too good,” Scorpion said. “That vest just paid for itself, young man.” He ruffled Tristan’s hair, just the way his dad used to.

  Keeping his grip on the collar of the vest, Scorpion pulled him up to a sitting position. “Cracked a rib in the worst case,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”

  Scorpion turned to Maria. “Come on up front. Help us navigate out of here.”

  Maria lingered for just a second or two. She touched his cheek and smiled. It was a look he didn’t know how to interpret. Surely, it didn’t mean what he wanted it to.

  “What?” Tristan asked.

  “You remind me of someone I once loved very much. I’m glad you are not hurt.” She turned and moved to the front with the others.

  What the hell had she been telling him? Could it really be that—

  The world erupted in blinding white light.

  Big Guy yelled, “Holy shit!” Their vehicle swerved violently and hit something hard. This time, whatever they’d hit won the battle.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  As soon as Palma told him the story of Maria’s rescue, and the bombings, Felix realized that they would attempt to use his tunnels as a means to get out of the country. The question was which one?

  He had a vast array of smuggling tunnels—at least eight of them currently in operation—that circulated literally tons of drugs into the United States every year. The Americans were such morons. While they distracted themselves with debates over whether or not to built a multibillion-dollar fence along the border, Felix and a few of his competitors owned the subterranean real estate—just as surely as they owned American Border Patrol agents and the owner of the properties on the other side where the tunnels rose back to the surface.

  Every now and then, Felix would tip off the El Paso police and the local news media so that they could discover one of his less productive tunnels and make a show for the American public about the hard work they were doing to stop the flow of drugs into their country. Each new discovery would boost a bureaucrat’s career. In their gratitude, they would only look but so hard for the next tunnel.

  As a new generation of politicians and civil servants came to power in America—many of them current or reformed consumers of the products Felix created—it became progressively easier to smuggle drugs into the United States. As long as he handed the Americans enough victories in their drug war to allow the politicians to preen, and he cooperated with the Central Intelligence Agency to provide protection for their clandestine launch platforms and listening bases throughout Central America, they stayed out of his way, going so far as to falsify reports to their handlers back in Langley. For that last part—the falsified reports—Felix paid several chiefs of station up to twice their legitimate salaries in thank-you gifts.

  Of them all, Trevor Munro had been the most demanding—and, in the end, the most ungrateful.

  Until yesterday, Felix had never believed Munro’s claims that he’d had no knowledge of the Colombian incursion that had killed Mitchell Ponder and cost him so much. Who but the American military, after all, could have pulled off that kind of operation with such precision? Now that they’d lured the same operators into Mexico, their ingenuity and capacity for violence made Munro’s denials more credible.

  But the American commandoes were still but a few against many, and soon they would be dead. Palma’s guess that they would choose the nearest tunnel had turned out to be correct. And now, according to his last report, they were surrounded.

  Soon, they would be dead, and this long, annoying distraction would finally be over.

  Even better, if Felix’s intelligence gatherers were correct, Munro would soon be the associate deputy director of the CIA, with access to all of that agency’s assets. He’d be in a position where one word from Felix could bring him down, with a future measured in prison time.

  This blooming reality was far greater than any fantasy Hernandez had ever dared to dream.

  One million candlepower.

  For the last twenty years, that had been the standard wattage for helicopter searchlights. Jonathan figured that was the minimum wattage of the beam that lit them up, and he could tell from the way that Boxers ripped at his NVGs that the blast of light had damn near blinded him. When he swerved, he ran head-on into three steel-and-concrete bollards that stood sentry outside a warehouse building.

  “God damn it!” Boxers yelled. The plume of steam from under the hood told them that the Sandcat was dead.

  As the chopper continued to circle overhead, the floodlight remained fixed on the ruined vehicle, a beacon to the horde of pissed-off soldiers who would soon be racing after them.

  “Big Guy, y
ou all right?”

  “I so want to kill somebody right now!” Cursing, he undid his harness and shouldered his door open. He grabbed his ruck and shouted, “Where’s my weapon?”

  Jonathan handed it to him, and without pausing even a beat, Boxers rolled out of the Sandcat, pressed the weapon to his shoulder and fired two quick rounds into the artificial sun that had lit them up.

  The chin light flared and went black. You just don’t get to see marksmanship like that very often.

  Palma saw the shooter step out of the vehicle and drop to his knee, and as the enormous man took aim, he thought for sure that his bullet was somehow going to go straight between his eyes. In the wash of the light, the muzzle flash registered more as smoke than light. The world went dark, and Palma could not have been more impressed.

  “Set us down!” he commanded.

  Instead, the pilot pulled pitch and they rose higher.

  “Down there!” Palma yelled. “Our prey is down there!”

  The gunfire had frazzled the pilot. He was not trained in combat tactics. His job was to track traffic and deliver VIPs to their venues of choice. Getting shot at was not part of the deal.

  “Everybody out!” Jonathan commanded. “Everybody bring weapons.” God knew they had a big enough selection. Jonathan shrugged back into his ruck, and by the time he stood to his full height outside the vehicle, the others had gathered in a semicircle.

  “Where are we going, Maria?”

  She seemed startled by the realization that they were depending on her to be their guide. “I haven’t been paying attention,” she said. “I don’t know where we are, exactly.”

  In the distance, Jonathan heard the sound of approaching vehicles. If he used his imagination, he could see the distant phantoms of red and blue emergency lights. Staying put was out of play. He had to assume that the people in the chopper had weapons, and a stationary target would be their greatest gift.

  “Okay, this way,” he said. Relying on instinct and his memory of the map he’d studied on his GPS, he led them off in what had to be north. “Stay close to the buildings and move fast.”