Final Target

by John Gilstrap

  Tomás threw himself to the floor, grateful that he’d at least killed one of the bastards before they killed him.

  * * *

  “They found the Ma Deuce,” Boxers said in Jonathan’s ear as the M2 .50 caliber machine gun started to consume the house.

  “Give me a five count, and then blow the bus.”

  “Love to. Five, four . . .”

  “Everybody, down!” Jonathan called, and he threw his body over Angela and her patient. “Down! Down!”

  In his ear, he heard, “Two, one.” And then the world moved. The daisy-chained GPCs erupted, and within milliseconds, whatever fuel that remained in the gas tank of the bus joined the fireball. The stucco house hopped, and within Jonathan’s field of view, four or five sizable chunks of something pierced the front wall. The peak above the Palladian window—already weakened by gunfire—collapsed. Not all the way, but enough to reveal the sky where there had once been ceiling.

  Then the night was silent.

  * * *

  Alejandro watched his men as they flowed down the left side of the big house, ashamed of them for the fear they had demonstrated. He knew they were not cowards, because he had watched them inflict brutality on many, many people. Behind him, Orlando had placed a man on the big machine gun and was organizing a sweep around the side of the hacienda. The machine gun pounded the night, and its bullets tore big chunks out of the building. By the time this was over—

  The explosion registered as a flash in his peripheral vision and had exactly the same intensity and duration as a camera flash. It came with a pulse of hot air that obliterated sound and forced him backward.

  He didn’t remember hitting the ground, but that’s where he was, so he must have been thrown there. His sinuses hurt, and his eyes felt crusty. His ears felt as if they had been stuffed with wet cotton. He was aware of sensation and noise, but he couldn’t make any sense of them. He tasted blood. For a long few seconds, Alejandro wasn’t sure if he was on his stomach or on his back. He might have been floating.

  When awareness returned, it flooded back with startling speed. His vision cleared, and he saw carnage. The school bus that had brought the terrorists to this spot was now a twisted, erupted wreck. The truck with the machine gun simply wasn’t there anymore. Bits and pieces, maybe, but nothing that looked like it had been. And Orlando was gone.

  Perception of sound came last, and it came as a dull, garbled bit of gibberish. He heard people yelling, and he heard an odd sound coming from his own body. An odd gurgling sound that seemed to be associated with his breathing. And his breathing hurt. He coughed, and he was startled to see a mist erupt in front of his face. It tasted like blood.

  Oh, Christ, it was blood. He touched a spot on his chest that hadn’t hurt at all two seconds ago but now burned like fire, and it was slick with blood. Hot with it. He reached for his radio, but it slipped from his fingers into the sand. When he reached for it again to pick it up, he saw that his right hand was slick and shiny. In the glow of the moonlight, he knew it was blood.

  Good God, what had happened to him?

  It wasn’t until he tried to pick up the radio with both hands that he realized that his left hand wasn’t there at all. Nor his forearm. Shredded meat dangled like drapes surrounding the extension of long white bone. Two bones, actually, one longer than the other. A distant memory of a high school anatomy class reminded him that those were his radius and ulna, the two bones of his forearm.

  But they were supposed to be covered with muscle and skin, the very structures that were supposed to protect the prolific veins and arteries that were so close to the heart that they were among his favorite locations to employ his knife on the bodies of his enemies when trying to leave the impression that the murdered party had committed suicide. Not that anyone ever believed it.

  Here, the flow of blood was nothing like that. But the damage was ugly.

  So very, very ugly. Alejandro inhaled to scream, and, Jesus, it hurt. Somebody might have been running a sword through his ribs.

  And there was the gurgling sound. The sucking chest wound. There was a way to treat it, but he couldn’t remember what it was. But he did remember that it took two hands.

  This was not how he wanted to die. This was not how he deserved to die. He owned this part of Mexico. He’d earned it. It was his.

  He thought of the words from Ignacio Flores telling him that the military could not help—which meant that they would not help—and he could almost hear their gleeful cackles when they heard that Alejandro had been blown up by a school bus. A goddamned school bus. One that held children who’d dared to escape. This could not be. This could not happen.

  Ignoring the pain, he rose to his knees and steadied himself. He straightened his back. Bracing his hand against his thigh, he raised his face to the sky and howled. He didn’t know what it sounded like, and he didn’t care. It was his call to the world that he mattered, that he could not be defeated.

  Even through his deafness, he knew that his howl was loud, that it cut through the ongoing sounds of violence.

  * * *

  The violence of the explosion rattled Tomás. It seemed literally to suck the air away, replacing it with pressure and noise. And then silence. He knew from the feeling of pressure inside his head that he’d been deafened, and he hoped in that moment that it was only a temporary thing. But if it was permanent, and the Jungle Tigers had been killed, then he could accept permanent deafness. It wasn’t half the price he would be willing to pay if he could rid the world of those assholes.

  It wasn’t a quarter of the price he was willing to pay if he could avenge his family.

  He felt no pain, so he knew he was all right. And he knew that his ears were recovering, because he could hear cries and moans from the wounded people outside. The glass in the front of the building was all gone now, and bits of high-velocity bus parts had carved holes through the stucco walls that allowed light to shine through. He didn’t care about the people who owned this castle of a house—anyone that rich didn’t need his sympathy—but he couldn’t help but wonder how shocked they were going to be when they came back from wherever they spent the rest of their year and found this scorched and pockmarked version of what their home used to be.

  He rose to the window and pulled away a chest of drawers so he could get a better view. Outside, he saw devastation. The bus they’d arrived in was now a twisted inferno. The technical was gone, and the ground around the spots they’d occupied was littered with shattered junk. He was confident that shredded human remains were among the strewn garbage, but he didn’t care.

  Amid the wailing and the moaning out there, one voice rose louder than the others. A thin man with a precious beard kneeled just outside the perimeter of the devastation. He howled like a wounded animal, and even from this distance, in the moonlight, Tomás could make out the form of Alejandro Azul. He was probably fifty meters away, but from here, he seemed to be missing an arm. And he was covered with blood.

  Tomás brought his rifle to his shoulder and settled the iron sights on the pitiful creature. “Alejandro Azul!” he yelled.

  * * *

  “Alejandro Azul!”

  Alejandro heard his name. Was that possible? And then he heard it again. He looked up to see a figure in a second-floor window, waving a hand. It was a friendly gesture, but he knew that it was malevolent in intent. “Alejandro Azul!”

  The figure in the window said, “This is Tomás Rabara. You’re going to die, you son of a whore!”

  This couldn’t be happening. Alejandro opened his mouth to reply, but before he could form a word, he saw the muzzle flash.

  * * *

  Alejandro’s brains left his skull in a fan of gore that sprayed in a pattern that looked just like a scallop shell. He just folded in on himself and didn’t move.

  Tomás shot him four more times. Once each for his brother, his sister, his mother, and his father. He didn’t know if those shots hit their mark, but it didn’t matter. He switch
ed his fire selector to AUTO and held the trigger until the bolt locked.

  “Tomás!” He felt a hand on his shoulder, and when he whirled, he led with his rifle. He hadn’t made it halfway before Scorpion twisted the carbine from his hand and tangled him up in his sling. “Are you crazy? Jesus! I’ve been shouting for you.”

  “I got him!” Tomás said. He didn’t realize he’d been crying until he heard his own voice break. The emotion welled up from someplace deep inside. He found himself sobbing. He wiped away the tears and snot and said, “I got Alejandro Azul!”

  “Good for you,” Scorpion said. “Now, pull yourself together.” He raised his voice so he could be heard throughout the house. “You all know what you need to do. Show no mercy to these people who would be happy to torture you if they got their hands on you.”

  He started to walk away, then turned back to Tomás. “Good job, kid. You okay?”

  He didn’t trust his voice to speak yet, so he nodded.

  “Okay, make sure every compass point is covered.” Then to everyone: “You have all the ammunition there is. Keep that in mind. Running out of ammo is one of those feelings you’ll wish you never had again.” To Tomás: “Once they’re dead, it’s okay to stop shooting.”

  Scorpion rumpled his hair as he walked out. Ordinarily, it was a gesture that would have pissed him off, but coming from Scorpion, it felt like high praise.

  He wiped his face again and straightened his gear. There still was a lot of fighting to do.

  * * *

  Jonathan went on to the next step. The kids would cover their sectors, or they would not. He really had no control over that.

  He pressed the TRANSMIT button on his radio. “Mother Hen, Scorpion.”

  “It’s about time you checked in.”

  “I don’t need your shit right now. Things are getting hot as hell. Where is our chariot?”

  “They’re en route.”

  “I want to talk to them directly.”

  “They don’t have a radio,” Venice said. “They only have a phone.”

  “I pay you to be a genius with electrons,” he said, knowing full well that the reference to pay would piss her off. “Make your electrons place a phone call.”

  A beat. “Stand by,” she said.

  “Big Guy, how does it look out there?”

  “Some are dead. A lot are alive. It’d be nice to have a ride home.”

  “Working on it.”

  * * *

  Jesse saw a flash on the horizon. “Did you see that?” he shouted.

  “That’s the right coordinates,” Davey said. Then, maybe five, seven seconds later, a faint boom registered above the noise of the engines. “Oh, yeah, this is going to be interesting.”

  “What do you think that was?”

  “A harbinger of bad times ahead,” Davey said. “Told you it was going to be a hot extraction.”

  “What exploded?”

  “I have no idea. But it takes some of the guesswork out of where we’re going, doesn’t it?”

  Jesse’s stomach started to hurt. It was one thing to think in the abstract about a hot extraction, but it was something entirely different to witness the violence from closer in. “How far out are we, Davey?”

  “I put it at four miles and change. Call it six, seven minutes.” As Davey spoke, he pushed the throttles forward. “Now we just have to hope the good guys are still alive to be collected.” A beat. “If they’re not, then we’re going to wish we had more guns. Next time you agree to something like this, son, press for a bigger paycheck.” He laughed.

  How could he do that? How could he laugh? Jesus, they were headed into God only knew what, and—

  The special phone buzzed in his pocket. Jesse pulled it out and, bracing himself against the bulkhead of the cockpit, used his chin to fold out the antenna, and his free thumb to press the CONNECT button. In the distance, he thought he could make out the sound of gunfire. “Yeah!” he shouted. “This is Jesse.”

  “No names,” the now familiar voice reminded him.

  “Screw you. The whole world is coming apart over there.”

  “Stand by for Scorpion. He’s the man you’re there to pick up.”

  “Whoa. What?”

  The line clicked, there was a moment of silence, and then she was back. “Scorpion, you have Torpedo.”

  “Good morning, Torpedo,” said a remarkably cheerful voice. “We sure will be happy to see you.” In the background, the phone brought sounds of gunfire. “How far out are you?”

  “About seven minutes. What just blew up?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Scorpion said. “You’re likely to see more explosions. Are you driving the boat?”

  “No.”

  “Then let me talk to the driver.”

  Jesse poked his father in the shoulder and extended the phone. “Scorpion wants to talk to you.”

  Davey brought the phone to his ear. “Hello, Scorpion. I think my code name is Bomber. I’m not sure, but I’m carrying a Torpedo that’s looking pretty peaked.” He listened. “I think you need to know that we have no trauma kits on board. Not even sure we have a first-aid kit.” Pause. “Got it. Hey, I’m curious. Does Operation Angry Hornet mean anything to you? Yeah, I thought so. I was the squid with the extra ammo.” He laughed. “Yeah, well, you can make it up to me in six minutes. Bomber, or whoever the hell I am, out.”

  Davey handed the phone back to Jesse, who looked at it, then looked at his father. “You know this guy?”

  “Our paths crossed in a sandy place a few years ago,” Davey said. “He was caught in a crack and growing tired of his rifle saying click-click. I gave him some extra, even though he was an Army puke.”

  Ahead, the sounds of battle grew louder.

  “Not that it matters,” Jesse said, changing the subject. “How far out can bullets kill?”

  Davey looked at his GPS. “We’ll be at that spot in about two minutes. Having fun yet?”

  * * *

  To Tomás, the Jungle Tigers looked like ants poring over discarded food. They were everywhere. They ran more than they shot, but they weren’t running away. Rather, they were running for advantage, trying to find spots where they could get an angle on them to shoot. Tomás knew that he had hit two of them, but he didn’t know if he had killed them. Once they fell out of sight, he moved on to another target.

  Mr. Dawkins seemed calmer than Tomás expected in the middle of all the shooting. He didn’t do much shooting himself but rather directed the fire of others.

  Tomás had relocated to a spot on what Scorpion called the green side of the building. He’d pushed a chest of drawers up against the window and shot his rifle through the space between the side of the chest and the left edge of the window. Most of his targets were only shadows, and while they fired back, he didn’t think they knew exactly where he was. They just shot back randomly as they ran.

  He’d lost track of the others—all except for Angela, who was still tending to Leo in the hallway, just outside. He thought he heard her say something about getting cut by falling glass, but he wasn’t sure. What he was sure of was that she was having a hard time controlling the bleeding.

  Santiago was blasting away from the room behind his—one room closer to the front—and others were shooting from somewhere, but he knew for a fact that Diego and Renata were just hiding, trying to make themselves as small as possible while crying and pleading for it to stop. Tomás was disappointed that Mr. Dawkins didn’t do something about that, but what were his options? Instead, he took their spare ammunition away from them and distributed it among the kids who were still in the fight.

  Scorpion and Big Guy were in the other part of the house, the part with too much glass, but Tomás didn’t know why or what they were doing.

  Somebody cried out, and then someone yelled, “Renata! Oh, no, Renata!”

  Angela spun away from Leo and hurried past Tomás’s door. “My God!” she yelled. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

  Tomás ha
d to know. He backed away from his window and stepped into the hall and then into the bedroom adjacent to his. There wasn’t enough light to see detail, but there was enough to see the panic as the others stared at the little girl on the floor. Her face appeared to be missing, and blood flowed freely over the floor.

  “She’s dead,” Mr. Dawkins said. “That’s terrible. I’m so sorry for the loss. Now, everybody, back in the fight.”

  “We have to help her!” Angela said, moving forward.

  Mr. Dawkins looked like he might intervene, but then he stepped out of her way. “Just stay low.” Then he turned to the hallway. “Scorpion! One of the students is dead!”

  No one seemed to know what to do. They all stood there, staring. When Angela kneeled at Renata’s side, she pulled the girl from her side onto her back, then yelped and jumped back as the structure of Renata’s ruined head shifted. The other students yelled, too. But no one moved.

  Tomás shouldered past the others and pulled a blanket off the nearest of the two beds in the room. “This will be all of us if we don’t fight back,” he said. He shook the blanket open and let it drift down over the little girl’s body. “Rest with God,” he said.

  When he looked up, the others were still staring.

  “Shoot!” he said.

  * * *

  Jonathan covered for Big Guy while Boxers set up a Claymore mine in the big family room on the first floor. Designed to be a nasty bit of business, with a 100 percent lethal range of fifty meters and a moderately effective range out to a hundred meters, a Claymore used a pound and a half of Composition C4 to propel seven hundred ball bearings into an enemy’s face. In this case, it was pointed toward the front doors and would obliterate everything downrange. It was Boxers’ very inelegant version of the Alamo, a convincing way to slow down those who might follow them as they exfilled.

  Dawkins shouted again, “Scorpion!”

  “I heard you the first time!” Jonathan shouted. “Get everyone else downstairs. Now!”

  As he spoke, Jonathan saw a cluster of five bad guys climbing over the wall on the ocean side of the house, beyond the swimming pool. Jonathan heard a ripple of gunfire from upstairs, and one of the fence climbers collapsed onto the sand. Jonathan fired full auto through the glass and stitched up two more. The other two ran for cover.