Blood Lies - 15

by Richard Marcinko

  “Couple of guards coming in the back way,” Junior warned.

  “Time to talk business then,” I told him. I pushed Melissa toward him. “Watch her.”

  “Why are you here?” Mongoose asked.

  “I wanted to see the great Rogue Warrior in action,” she said. “I can take care of myself. I got in without you. I can get out anytime I want.”

  “How’d you get in?” Mongoose asked.

  She rolled her eyes and leaned over just enough to make her tactics obvious.

  While that might work to get past a guard or two when things were running smoothly, with the mansion on lockdown mode it could no longer be counted on.

  “If it goes to shit, take her out with you,” I told Mongoose. “In one piece if you can. Bullet holes are optional.”

  “Dick, stop treating me like a child,” protested Melissa.

  “Stop acting like one.”

  “I can twist any of these men around my pinkie.”

  There was no sense debating the point; she was undoubtedly correct. I nodded at Mongoose, then turned and walked over to de Sarcena.

  The cartel boss had already spotted Melissa and was making a beeline toward her. He blinked when I stepped in front of him. Then he pointed at me.

  “Y-you—” he stuttered. “You.”

  I held out my hand. “I understand you’re a fan of my work,” I told him. “I came to sign some books.”

  The mobster regained his composure quickly and stroked his little goatee.

  “Well, this is an honor,” he said. He laughed a little. “The Rogue Warrior. A guest at my party! Ladies, do you know this man? He is a Yankee hero—the inventor of SEAL Team 6.”

  I bowed my head in modesty.

  Two security thugs had come through the panel and were heading toward us. Two more were making their way up the steps. Besides these four, there were four more scattered nearby, pretending to be discreet.

  “I have some business that may interest you,” I told de Sarcena. “So let’s sign some books.”

  “You must have a drink first,” said de Sarcena. “A gin—a Dr. Sapphire Bombay.”

  “Bombay Sapphire would be perfect,” I told him. I don’t like to correct my host, but it’s important to get the name of the drink right.

  “Yes, yes. You know, I read the books in English.” He switched from Spanish midsentence. Though heavily accented, his English was not bad. “I have read all your books, starting with the first. The first is my favorite. And which is yours?”

  “It’s hard to pick,” I told him. “They’re all my children.”

  “Ah yes, the diplomatic Rogue Warrior. People do not remember how diplomatic you can be. Yes, into my office down the hall. Please.”

  He took a step, then stopped, reaching for Ms. Reynolds’s hand.

  “And this lovely lady—she must be with you. Is this the famous Trace Dahlgren?”

  “No,” I said quickly. But before I could add anything else, Melissa interjected.

  “I’m Melissa Reynolds. You had me kidnapped.”

  “Oh no, no,” he chortled—it really was a chortle—“I am a businessman, not a kidnapper. And who would kidnap you? You are too beautiful. Too, too beautiful. A lovely creature.”

  One of the security people was making a high sign a few feet away. De Sarcena nodded, almost imperceptibly.

  Not good.

  “Let’s step into the other room,” I told him. “That way over there.”

  As I pointed, my coat came open, and my gun became visible. This may have been a bit theatrical, but I needed to move things along.

  “Yes, yes,” said de Sarcena. “Business before pleasure, eh, Rogue?”

  We started toward the Salon of War. Ms. Reynolds followed. Mongoose grabbed for her, but she was too quick, sliding between de Sarcena and myself.

  I gave her a dose of dagger eyes. Clearly, though, she had SEAL blood in her veins—she shot them right back.

  By now, de Sarcena’s security people had closed in and were only a few feet away.

  “We’re going into the room alone,” I told the mobster. “You won’t be harmed. But it’s better if we don’t have witnesses when we talk.”

  “This is always what I say,” he agreed. “Truly, you are a man after my own heart. I have learned much from your books.”

  There’s an angle the marketing people haven’t thought of: Rogue Warrior, a favorite guide of Mexican cartels and scumbags world over.17

  De Sarcena gestured with his fingers and the guards backed off. I looked at Mongoose and glanced at Melissa, indicating that he should keep her out. But de Sarcena protested.

  “Please, bring your lovely assistant with you. Is she replacing Ms. Dahlgren?”

  “She’s more a party girl,” I told him. “Very undependable. She better stay outside.”

  Mongoose grabbed her around the waist, and despite her protests, held on tight enough to keep her out.

  “So, to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” asked the cartel leader when we were alone. The room was as ornate as the Hall itself, with marble walls and a large chandelier. A hammered metal table sat in the exact middle of the floor. Unlike the real thing, de Sarcena’s Salon of War had doors fitted into the marble walls. They were not quite twenty feet high, which left a good gap between them and the thirty-foot ceiling.

  “A pair of peasants owe you money,” I told him. “I’m here to pay their debt.”

  “Peasants? Hired you? I did not know you did this kind of work.”

  “Only as a favor.”

  “Hmmmph.” De Sarcena played with his peach-fuzz goatee again. “And how much do they owe me?”

  “Is that really important?”

  “Regrettably, no.”

  “It started as a few hundred,” I told him. “Now it is in the thousands.”

  I reached below my jacket, grabbed the envelope, and tossed it on the table.

  “That’s enough to cover their debt several times over,” I said.

  Now, you would think that someone who has a room stacked with bills just down the hall would not really care that much about money, even fifty thousand dollars of it. But de Sarcena did not become rich not caring about money. He grabbed the envelope greedily and tore open the top even though it wasn’t sealed. He dumped the packets of money onto the table, grabbed one and fanned it.

  “Fifty thousand,” he said.

  “More or less.”

  “And for this, I do what?”

  “You don’t bother the Garcias,” I told him.

  “Hmmmph.”

  There was something in the way he looked at the money that convinced me things weren’t going to go the way I had planned. I guess I’d realized that from the start; it was only now that I admitted it.

  I took a slight step backward, aligning myself toward the door.

  “You know, having read your books, I believe there may be more to this transaction than meets the eye,” said de Sarcena. “That is the expression, yes, more than meets the eye?”

  “I try not to use clichés,” I told him.

  He picked up one of the bundles of money. “You wouldn’t try to pay me with my own money.”

  “I might,” I admitted.

  “It would be a very Rogue thing to do. There was trouble in the yard this afternoon. A septic system. You don’t have any knowledge of this, do you?”

  “I try to keep my distance from sewage.”

  He reached into the right pocket of his sports coat and took out a piece of paper. When he unfolded it, I saw it was an image of yours truly taken from one of the security cameras in the hall when I’d come in. The print quality wasn’t all that good—the cyan had run into the magenta. And it wasn’t my good side.

  “Did you find the clog you looked for?” de Sarcena asked.

  “As a matter of fact, I did.”

  Clearly, it was time to take my leave. De Sarcena was no more than three feet from me; I took a half step and leaned toward him, my head ba
rely an inch from his.

  “If the Garcias are ever harmed, by anyone,” I said, emphasizing the last phrase, “I will come back and extract revenge. Remember today.”

  “Who says you’re leaving?” De Sarcena took a half step back. “We haven’t concluded our business.”

  There were any number of responses I might have made, but I never got to choose any of them, for at that moment the room exploded.

  * * *

  Exploded may be too strong a term. It seemed like it exploded, but to someone with experience in the black arts of special operations, hostage rescue, and general ass-kicking, what really happened was obvious: someone had tossed a flash-bang grenade into the room.

  Painfully obvious, because the explosion of the grenade was so loud that my ears popped and I could no longer hear.

  The flash blinded me as well, though given the fact that I spend half my life being blind to inconvenient facts that wasn’t much of a handicap.

  I relieved de Sarcena of his handgun—a Beretta 9mm—then hooked my arm around his neck. He started to resist, or at least that’s how I interpreted his kicking and elbowing, so I pushed my other arm up and choked him out.

  It generally takes about three very long seconds to get someone to lose consciousness in that hold. Every so often you run into someone with a neck like a bull, and no matter how hard you press or how you maneuver your arms, they won’t go down.

  De Sarcena was just the opposite. His eyes rolled back so quickly I wasn’t sure I had him at first. But his limp arms and legs quickly convinced me. He was out.

  Which was slightly inconvenient, to be honest. He was heavy, well over two-fifty.

  I grabbed the money—no use leaving it behind—and pushed open the door, not quite sure what I would find. Mongoose was standing nearby, MP5 in hand, holding on to two of de Sarcena’s guards. Another two were on the floor nearby, ugly holes in their foreheads.

  And where was Ms. Reynolds?

  A few feet away, my MP5 in her hands.

  “Time to go!” I yelled to them. At least I think it was a yell—I was still unable to hear, even myself.

  I dragged de Sarcena to one of the windows at the back wall. Only a select few window panels would open, and I wasn’t in the mood to try each one. I decided to break them, and did so with the first thing that came to hand—de Sarcena’s head.

  He didn’t seem to mind. Maybe he groaned a little, but my ears were still out and I couldn’t hear it.

  The blood that trickled down his forehead was inconsequential.

  The guests had thrown themselves to the floor as soon as the grenade went off. They stayed there now; I’m sure they would have climbed under the tiles if they thought it possible.

  We ran out to the narrow balcony that ran across the back. It was only about three feet wide, a bit smaller than the original I believe, though I haven’t been back to measure. Mongoose took a rope from the rucksack and quickly tied it off on the railing.

  Under the best of circumstances, the next thing that would have happened would have been this: we would have rappelled from the Hall of Mirrors to the back of the mansion grounds. There an MH-60 would be waiting to pick us up. As we ran to the helicopter, a pair of Apache gunships would have swooped in and obliterated any of de Sarcena’s men foolish enough to follow us.

  I can dream, can’t I?

  “Go first!” I yelled at Mongoose. “Secure the rope.”

  He leapt to the window, grabbed hold of the line—he’d pulled on gloves—and began sliding downward, using his feet as a brake. I now had to make a decision: should I take de Sarcena, or should I leave him?

  Kidnapping the leader of the most dangerous cartel in this half of Mexico had not been in the original game plan. I hadn’t even considered it, frankly. But now that I had him, it seemed a shame to let him go. So I hauled him up onto my shoulder and got ready to go down.

  “Ladies first!” I yelled to Melissa.

  She yelled something back. My hearing was starting to return, but I couldn’t quite get it. I assumed that she was being her usual difficult self and refusing to take directions.

  “No, you go,” I insisted.

  She answered by spraying the MP5 a few inches from my head.

  I started to curse, then stopped as she pointed across the room. Two more guards were lying dead near the staircase. Apparently they had decided to rush in and save their boss; Ms. Reynolds’s work with the submachine gun had dissuaded them.

  SEAL genes at work once more.

  “Go!” I yelled at her. “Go, so we can get out of here.”

  This time she didn’t hesitate. She kicked off her heels, then climbed onto the ledge.

  “Use the gloves!”

  She reached into the backpack, then looked up, a worried look on her face. I turned and saw what she was worried about—two more thugs had appeared from the far side of the hall, both carrying automatic rifles. I dropped to my knees, then using de Sarcena as a shield began firing my pistol in their direction. I don’t think I hit either one, but I scared them enough that they hit the floor.

  When I turned back, Melissa was gone. I pulled de Sarcena a little tighter against my shoulder, hooked my arm around the rope, and started down.

  He was frigging heavy. I had trouble right away.

  The reason you wear gloves when you go down a rope is that the rope hurts like hell. That’s obvious when you’re rappelling, but even going down hand over hand you can do some serious damage to your palms and fingers.

  Of course, you could just suck it up and burn the crap out of your hands, which I’m sure you’re expecting me to do. But I’m not that masochistic. I hooked my left arm around the rope, put my feet on the line as a brake, and used my jacket as a glove as I went down to the ground.

  Unfortunately, this made for a pretty awkward arrangement with de Sarcena on my back. I got maybe fifteen or twenty feet before my fingers started to slip. I tried scrunching my shoulder up to shift his weight but it was too late—he fell off to the ground.

  Fortunately for him, he landed on his feet rather than his head. Unfortunately for him, the ground was cement rather than dirt, and he ended up breaking one of his ankles.

  I was appropriately sympathetic when I reached the ground a few seconds later.

  “On your feet, asshole,” I barked, pulling him up.

  He whined something, adding a few choice words about my parentage, all in English. I corrected his pronunciation with a quick chop to the nose.

  I’ll say this for him—he bled easily. He now had blood on every piece of clothing as well as his face and hands.

  And mine. I made a mental note to send him a laundry bill.

  I hoisted him over my shoulder and began running along the pool toward the back of the property. Floodlights lit the way, making it easy to see. But this was bad—the lights also made it easy for de Sarcena’s thugs to see us, and a few began taking potshots as we ran. Apparently the possibility that they might hit their boss was not enough of a deterrent to keep them from shooting. For all I know, it may have been an added incentive.

  The outer perimeter of the estate was oriented to prevent an attack from the outside. In theory, this should have made it easier for us to escape; we didn’t have guns pointing in our face. But the reality was more complicated. The high walls and fences were formidable barriers no matter which side you climbed them from, and once we were out of the building, de Sarcena’s minions began coming at us from every direction.

  Doc, watching along with Junior, anticipated this and put our emergency extraction plan into operation. A series of rockets began landing on the northern end of the property. These were actually little more than bottle rockets, slightly modified so that their show arrived on their downward trajectory. This had the effect of confusing the response by the security forces. Their confusion was increased by a timely power failure, initiated by a remote-controlled explosion that took out two of the main transformers feeding the mansion property.

&nb
sp; Shotgun had placed the charges earlier. He had then moved into position to cover our retreat in the case of an emergency—which clearly we were in now. As we ran toward the back of the estate, there was a massive explosion in front of us: Shotgun had fired a Carl Gustav into the wall.

  I’m sure you’re all interested in the weapon—your basic 84mm recoilless rifle. Unfortunately, we’re all a little pressed for time at this point in the narrative, so I’ll give you the abbreviated version: the Carl Gustav is made by a division of Bofors. The name comes from an alternative name for the town where the state armament factory was once located. (The factory, or more correctly its descendants, are now part of the Swedish gun company.) You can think of the weapon as a rifled bazooka—a very large shell spins down the barrel like a bullet would, then emerges and flies toward its target. While intended as an antitank gun—and a damn good one at that—the Gustav or “Goose” is nondiscriminatory; it will pulverize concrete and stone just as readily as metal.

  And so it did here, blowing a four-foot-wide hole in the wall at the back of the property.

  Naturally, de Sarcena’s goons reacted with outrage at this, and immediately rushed to plug the gap. Which was why instead of going through the hole, we headed to the western side of the property, where Shotgun had carefully placed a chain metal ladder over the top of the wall.

  There was one remaining complication—the video surveillance system had a camera covering the area we wanted to escape through. The camera was located so close to the house that it didn’t make sense to detour around it, and killing the video there would be as good as drawing a big arrow and saying Here we are! Shunt’s looping trick wouldn’t last enough for us all to get across and over the wall, and rather than risk someone noticing that the feed was acting funny, I told Junior to kill the entire system.

  “Got it,” he said. “Cameras are off.”

  My butt was dragging badly by now, and so was de Sarcena, who was pushing me so low his legs made skid marks in the ground. Mongoose came over and grabbed him, hoisting him onto his shoulder like a light ragdoll. He climbed the metal ladder quickly, and when he got to the top he heaved the Mexican over, sending him to the other side in a tumble.

  “Ooops,” he said, climbing over. “How clumsy.”