In the canyons created by the low-rise warehouse buildings, the chopper overhead appeared to be everywhere. The grinding hum of the rotor blades pounded the night from all directions.
The fact that the aircraft had had a chin light in the first place gave Jonathan hope that the flight crew didn’t have night vision, but hope was a lot like prayer—always welcome, but rarely dependable for results. The chopper would find a place to set down soon, and in the meantime, the crew was no doubt working the radio to coordinate ground forces.
They needed to keep moving.
“Maria, is any of this looking familiar?”
“It all looks familiar,” she said. “The buildings all look the same. It’s been a long time since I’ve been here.”
“What’s the unit number again?”
“Twelve-seventy, I think.”
“You think?”
“That’s what I remember.”
“Is that the number you gave to the FBI?”
“I think so, yes.”
Jonathan felt a swell of anger, but he swallowed it down. What was it about civilians that once the tension ratcheted up, made everything become a question? No one was sure of anything anymore. Well, there was a solution for that.
Jonathan tapped the transmit button on his chest. “Mother Hen, Scorpion.”
In Fisherman’s Cove, Venice jumped when the SkysEye image refreshed and she saw the wrecked vehicle, the horror of the image made even worse by the fact that Jonathan hadn’t checked in afterward.
She was just reaching for the transmit switch when her speakers popped. “Mother Hen, Scorpion.”
Relief. She fought hard to keep the emotion out of her voice as she replied, “Is everybody all right? Looks like a bad wreck.”
“We’re fine, but we’re in trouble. A little lost in the forest. Can you talk us in?”
Venice spun her chair a little to view a different screen. “Where are you exactly? I won’t get another satellite image for two, almost three minutes.”
A pause. “We’re in front of unit seven-thirteen.”
“Stand by one,” she said.
“We don’t have much more than one,” Jonathan quipped. “The quicker the better.”
Anticipating a challenge like this, Venice had called up a schematic for the storage facility over an hour ago. It appeared on her screen as checkerboard of north–south streets intersecting with east–west streets. Depending on size, some blocks had more units than others.
She keyed her mike. “From seven-thirteen, you need to go five blocks north and three blocks east.”
“Roger,” Scorpion said. “Keep an eye on the SkysEye feed. I know the bad guys are close, but I don’t have a visual. We need to know where they are.”
“Will do,” she said.
Venice hated this part of her job—the passive watching and waiting while people she cared about fought for their lives. She knew they needed her—that the technology she tamed and interpreted was as critical to every mission as the weaponry wielded by the guys, but from this far away, the team felt very small and terribly isolated.
When her image finally refreshed, she used thermal imagery to find Jonathan and the team, and was pleased to see that they were making progress toward the target building. When she saw that the pursuing troops were taking the wrong path, she smiled.
The happiness evaporated in an instant when she realized what she was really seeing.
Jonathan’s earbud popped. “Scorpion, they’re trying to flank you on your right. It looks like they’ve figured out where you’re going.”
He and Boxers said it together: “Shit.”
“What?” Tristan asked.
Jonathan keyed his mike. “Any chance we’ll get there first?”
“They’ve got vehicles.”
Not the question he’d asked, but it was an answer nonetheless.
Jonathan played the next few minutes out in his mind, and it all came down to a firefight that they couldn’t possibly win. Surrender was not an option, so that left only a third alternative. If only he knew what it was.
“I’m open to suggestions, Big Guy,” he said.
“I’m sure you’ll come up with something, Boss. Meanwhile, is it your plan to keep jogging toward the ambush?”
Stopping made no sense. They had no defensive positions and they were outgunned. They’d lost the elements of surprise. So, what did that leave? If only storage units had secondary entrances.
Wait. That was it. “We’ll go in through the back door,” he announced.
Boxer gave him The Look. “What back door?”
“How much det cord do you have?”
The Big Guy beamed. “Enough to make a lot of back doors,” he said.
Jonathan keyed his mike. “Mother Hen, I need the name of the street that runs parallel to the one with our target building.”
Tristan was growing tired of the mysterious communications between Scorpion and the Big Guy. He got that they had somebody talking in their ear, but Tristan had a stake in this thing, too, you know? The least they could do was speak in complete sentences, or maybe even relay what it was they were talking about.
He was also tired of being the only one who seemed to struggle with the running. His lungs had burned before, but now with this huge bruise on his chest, the pain was even worse. The vest swung a little on his body with every step, and with each swing, it felt as if someone were poking a finger into the center of the sore spot.
And where were all the police and soldiers? Not to jinx anything, but after all that shooting, he’d have thought there’d be a little more hubbub.
Without warning, Scorpion and the Big Guy slid to a stop in the middle of the road.
“Okay, Tristan and Maria, there’s been a change in plans.”
Tristan felt something dissolve inside him. Every time Scorpion said something like that, life got a lot shittier.
As if to prove the point, the night became day as floodlights jumped to life from high atop God only knew how many poles.
The invaders’ night vision was no longer an advantage. Palma felt proud that he’d thought of finding and throwing the main power switch that he knew had to be here somewhere.
The flanking maneuver was really just an extension of the strategy that Palma had put together to catch Harris and his team at Maria’s house. Surround the one place they had to go, and wait for the prey to arrive. It was the most logical play, and therefore one that he had no choice but to deploy.
Because it was logical, and therefore obvious, he worried that his enemy would once again get a step ahead.
This time, he held back a reserve of eight men, two each to cover the likely escape routes if the criminals tried to get away.
Meanwhile, Palma himself took Sergeant Sanchez and three of the surviving members of his original team and pursued his prey on foot.
Harris and company would have to be near panic now as they realized that they were being driven to a killing zone. Palma would enjoy watching them die.
He and his tiny squad moved carefully yet quickly as they pursued their targets north and east inside the storage compound. Hernandez had been very specific about the location of his smuggling tunnel. It was the single destination for Harris to target, so therefore it made no sense for them to lie in hiding along the way. As they got closer, he’d slow down.
On the other hand, if he heard shooting, he’d know that it was time to run in earnest.
Stealth no longer mattered. Bathed in light, their final advantage had been stripped away. From this point forward, survival was all about speed.
All they had to do was outrun a shitload of people who were all bent on killing them. Jonathan grabbed Tristan by the vest and pulled him close. “Listen to me,” he said. “Do exactly as I say. Are you good with that?”
Tristan’s eyes were twice their normal size and they showed terror.
“You can’t panic on me, son. Do you understand that?”
“Yes. Yes, I u
nderstand.”
“Okay.” Jonathan spun him ninety degrees so that he was facing west. “You keep an eye on the end of the block. If you see a person—I mean, if you see anyone, shoot them. Set your selector on full-auto, and try to keep it to three-round bursts. A lot of them. Remember what we talked about. Keep the butt tightly in your shoulder, and get a lot of bullets downrange. Even if you don’t hit anything, you’ll keep their heads down. Can you do that?”
The kid nodded, and Jonathan needed to believe him. He turned to Maria, who’d overheard. “I’ll watch the other end,” she said.
Jonathan smiled. “Thank you.”
While they spoke, Boxers took a pry bar to the hasp and lock of unit eleven-seventy, the storage unit that shared a back wall with their target building. Big Guy won the battle easily, stripping the entire assembly out of the corrugated metal door.
Jonathan wished he could let Boxers set the charges himself, and stay out here with the kids keeping cover, but setting the charges was a two-person job.
The interior of eleven-seventy might have been somebody’s attic, stacked with furniture and toys, or, given that it was in Ciudad Juarez, a disguised meth lab and a few bodies.
Boxers tossed his ruck onto an old sofa, pulled open the top flap, and lifted a customized wooden spool wrapped with ten feet of plastic tubing stuffed with PETN—detonating cord. Also known as Primacord, it had been a staple in Boxers’ rucksack for as long as Jonathan had known him. For all he knew, the Big Guy had taken a roll of the stuff with him as a Boy Scout when he went camping.
Boxers pulled the tactical light off the muzzle of his rifle and shined it on the back wall. Good news there: a concrete block wall, one of the most frangible building materials on the planet. “Cool,” he said.
Boxers started to measure out a length of cord, and then stopped himself. “Screw it,” he said. “We want a hole, so let’s by-God make a hole.”
“You’re using the whole spool?” Jonathan’s jaw dropped. Ten feet of det cord was, in technical parlance, a shitload of explosive. “You’ll collapse the roof.”
“But I can’t mount it,” Boxers countered. “I don’t have epoxy, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have time—” He stopped himself. “When did I start explaining explosive shit to you?”
Point taken. Boxers broke stuff, Jonathan negotiated stuff. That was the division of labor.
The Big Guy reached back into his ruck and pulled out yet another spool. “Cut me off fifteen seconds of OFF and connect it to a detonator.”
Otherwise known as old-fashioned fuse, OFF was at once the most dependable yet imprecise way to set off explosives. Dependable because when the flame got to the ASA compound—a nasty mixture of lead styphnate, lead azide, and aluminum along with a tetryl kicker—it always went bang. Imprecise because a fifteen-second length of fuse might burn for ten or twelve seconds, or it might burn for twenty.
Jonathan eyeballed the length of fuse, cut it with his KA-BAR and pulled a detonator from his own ruck and married the two.
As he handed it to Boxers, the world outside the storage room erupted in gunfire.
Tristan was living the nightmare, the one where you spend the entire dream dreading that a thing will happen, and then, in the last instant before you jerk awake, there it is.
He’d been staring into the artificially lit night down the barrel of his rifle, waiting for and dreading the appearance of the people who’d been trying to kill them, and then there they were—a group of four of them. For a couple of seconds, he strained his eyes to see if they really were the people he feared. The one of them brought a rifle to his shoulder, and Tristan’s finger took over for his brain.
He was pretty sure that he saw flashes from some gun barrels down there, but then the flashes from his own muzzle wiped all of those out. The noise, too. The gunfire in the canyon created by the buildings was deafening. The hammering bang of his rifle made his head feel like it had been stuffed with cotton.
It wasn’t till the incoming bullets tore up the wall next to him that the true seriousness of his situation sank in. Christ, they were shooting back!
“Get down!” he yelled to Maria, but she was already ahead of him, having dropped to her stomach.
Tristan didn’t pay a lot of attention to her. He had heads to keep down.
The soldiers at the end of the road had likewise dropped to the ground to shoot back.
He picked one of the four muzzle flashes, aimed at it, and took a deep breath, just as the Big Guy had instructed him to do. He let half of the breath out, and tightened his finger on the trigger. The rifle bucked against his shoulder. He counted three or four rounds— it was actually hard to tell how many bullets were fired with each burst—and let up. Then he did it again. And again and again, until the bolt locked open, and it was time to fish another full magazine out of his vest.
He dropped out the old, slapped in the new, reset the bolt, and started shooting again.
Somewhere in the middle of the second magazine, he heard another long burst of rifle fire coming from above and behind. He assumed it was from Maria, but before he could turn to check, the Big Guy grabbed him by the back of his vest and lifted him as if he weighed nothing. The man moved with remarkable speed, carrying Tristan one unit closer to the soldiers he’d been shooting at, and dropping him onto the asphalt. As the Big Guy lay on top of him, he said, “Get down.” As if there was a choice.
Three seconds later, the explosion was the loudest noise Tristan had ever heard.
If Tristan Wagner had been a better marksman, more people would be dead now.
As Palma crossed into the open from behind one row of buildings on his way to the row where he’d expected to engage the enemy, he saw the kid and Maria Elizondo by themselves in the alleyway. By the time he could react, the kid opened up on them.
Palma and his men dropped to the ground and returned fire, but it was all wild and unaimed, just as the incoming fire was.
The lull in the shooting told him that the kid was reloading, and that would be the best time—
Another long burst erupted from the shooter’s location, and this one was both purposeful and effective, hitting Sergeant Sanchez in the head and killing him instantly.
Palma dared a peek and saw the enormous man—Lerner—dragging the boy forward to cover while Harris dragged the girl in the opposite direction, and both covered their protectees with their bodies.
That could only mean one thing.
“Cover up!” Palma yelled.
An enormous explosion destroyed the storage unit where the shooting had come from. The blast wave threw concrete and metal roofing up and out in every direction, and caved in the doors directly opposite the one they blew.
Even as the debris was still falling, Palma realized their plan. By blasting through the shared wall of the storage units, the Americans would have access to the tunnel entrance without exposing themselves to the troops that Palma had stationed on the front side.
Once inside the tunnel, Palma’s tactical advantage would evaporate. Men in a single file, or even two abreast, can bring only one or two weapons to bear at a time—the same number as their opponents, who, in this case, had proven themselves to be outstanding marksmen. As the lead elements of a larger force are shot down in a tunnel, their bodies then serve as obstacles for the passage of others.
If Palma was going to win this battle, he was going to have to win it out in the open in the next few seconds.
Ignoring the concrete and dust and metal that continued to pepper the area, Palma rose to a prone shooting position and brought his rifle to his shoulder. With his elbows pressed against the littered asphalt, he sighted through the haze and saw all four of his targets arising from the ground.
The closest two—the big man and the boy—disappeared into the rubble before he could take a shot. Of the remaining two, one was wearing a ballistic vest, and the other was not.
Palma settled his sights on Maria Elizondo and squeezed the trigger.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Jonathan felt the bullet reverberate through Maria’s body, and just from the way she dropped, he knew that the bullet had clipped her spinal cord. He dropped with her, whipping his M27 to his shoulder and unleashing an entire magazine load down the street in the direction the shot had come from.
The sound of Jonathan’s gunfire brought Boxers back around the edge of the shattered wall, and he added thirty rounds from his 417 to the fusillade.
Using Boxers’ shooting as cover fire, Jonathan rose enough to heave Maria onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and from there, he ducked into the ruined storage unit. As he’d hoped, the back wall had been reduced to rubble, and the roof was gone, but the blast wave had not communicated to the front wall of twelve-seventy.
“What happened to Maria?” Tristan asked when he saw Jonathan with the girl draped over his shoulder. Outside, Boxers continued to keep people’s heads down
“Shot,” Jonathan said. “Bad, I think.”
As he stepped across the new threshold Boxers had just created, he thumbed his tactical muzzle light to life and scanned the floor. He smiled when he saw the raw hole that had been cut into the concrete. He shined his light down the opening and was even more pleased to see the stout ladder that had been mounted on the vertical face. He had no idea how deep it went, but the bottom was beyond the beam of his light.
“Big Guy!” he yelled. “We’re in business! Let’s go!” To his PC: “You first, Tristan. I’ll be right behind you.” Under different circumstances, he might have gone first to clear the way, but he wanted to get the kid below grade and under cover as soon as possible. “Use the light I gave you.”
A shadow fell over Jonathan, and there was Boxers, towering over him. “Give the girl to me,” he said. “You’ll get a hernia.” He was already lifting Maria from Jonathan’s shoulder to his own.
Damage Control Page 33
