All they had to ride on was the flashbang and sheer violence of action.
Marcetti, Schmidt, Rogers, and Teller rolled around the doorjamb and through the shattered door, moving left and right to gain separate angles on the target. Three bright dots of laser light danced across the gunman’s head inches to the left of Dominique’s face.
Then they had some unexpected help from Dominique herself. As he came through the door, Teller saw her bend far forward, then snap her head back, smashing the gunman’s nose with the back of her skull. His grip loosened, and she pitched herself forward, almost breaking free—
Her head was clear. Teller tapped the trigger of his H&K at the same moment as Marcetti and Rogers, and the cartel gunman spun to the side.
At the same instant, a fist-sized hole opened in the bedroom’s east wall between two others already there, emitting a spray of concrete and plaster dust. The gunman’s throat and upper chest simply came apart in a dark scarlet spray, his head literally torn from his body.
“Clear!” Marcetti called.
“Clear!” Teller, Rogers, and Schmidt echoed, pivoting with their weapons to check every corner of that blood-drenched room. The flashbang, Teller noted, had rolled under the bed and set fire to the sheets, and flames were beginning to lick against the wall.
No matter; they had plenty of time yet. Teller stepped forward, stooping to help Dominique.
But something was horribly wrong.
FOX TWO
LA CALLE SUR 145
DISTRICTO IZTACALCO
2320 HOURS, LOCAL TIME
Patterson saw the shadow with the pipe on its shoulder turning to face him, saw another shadow stoop and point. He began tapping off three-round bursts, trying to hit those shadows … but then there was a flash and a streak of motion, something hurtling straight toward him faster than the eye could really register.
The rocket-propelled grenade hissed a few feet above his head, then struck the brick wall of the ruined shell of a house behind him. The blast picked him up and smashed him sideways through the rotting fence.
He lost consciousness when he hit the street.
VICENTE HOUSE
LA CALLE SUR 145
DISTRICTO IZTACALCO
2320 HOURS, LOCAL TIME
An instant after dropping the hammer on the remaining Tango in the bedroom, Procario saw the flash from the RPG out of the corner of his eye, saw the streak and the detonation of the five-pound rocket across the street, saw Patterson hurled through the fence and sprawling onto the pavement.
“Man down!” he called. “Fox Two is down!”
Swinging the long, heavy barrel of his Barrett .50 to the right, Procario looked for a target. There … two men just emerging from behind the front wall of the Vicente house and entering the street. One carried the empty tube of an RPG-7 launcher; the second was pulling a fresh round from his backpack and helping the first man reload.
“No you don’t,” Procario said, and he squeezed the trigger.
The man carrying the grenade launcher came apart.
FOX ONE
MARIA PEREZ HOUSE
LA CALLE SUR 145
DISTRICTO IZTACALCO
2321 HOURS, LOCAL TIME
Teller heard Procario’s call of “man down” over the tactical channel, but his mind was grappling with another problem, even more immediate, if subtle. Three of the four bodies in the bedroom had been struck by BMG rounds, and the result was a charnel-house horror of blood and body parts, so much so that the west wall of the bedroom was almost completely covered by gory splashes of the stuff.
What was wrong?
He pulled his combat knife and cut through the ropes tying Dominique’s hands and legs. Her eyes opened, but she was having trouble focusing. He pulled off the gag. “Are you okay? Jackie! Are you okay?”
“What?” she said. “Chris? I can’t hear you.”
The assault team had been wearing earpieces that automatically blocked out gunshots and louder noises, but Dominique had caught the full force of the detonating stun grenade. She would be okay … she had to be okay …
As he turned to help her sit up, he glanced out through the smashed-in door at the two bodies laying outside in the hall.
Then it clicked, and he shouted the warning, “Threat to the rear!”
MARIA PEREZ HOUSE
LA CALLE SUR 145
DISTRICTO IZTACALCO
2321 HOURS, LOCAL TIME
Enrico Barrón had been playing dead for almost three minutes now, lying on the floor, his legs beneath Jose Flores’s dead body. Through slitted eyes, he’d seen the assault team—Americans, with those black utilities, vests, and NVDs they had to be Americans—move down the hall in single file, blast open the door, and storm through into the bedroom. His pistol lay on the floor next to his hip; his hand was inching toward the weapon. His hand closed on the grip as he heard the Americans shouting, “Clear!”
With both Carlos and Juan dead, they would be checking the bodies, and they would find that he was unhurt. Clearly, they were wearing some sort of ballistic armor under those tactical vests, or the vests themselves were armored, because Jose had pumped three rounds into one of them without visible effect.
He would have to shoot at their heads, which were protected only by wool balaclavas and the plastic and metal complexities of those night-vision goggles they wore.
“Threat to the rear!”
Damn! What had given him away? He lunged to his left, jerking his legs out from under Juan’s body, raising his weapon as he did so, squeezing the trigger again and again and again. Gunshots banged loud in the narrow hallway; one of the American commandos staggered, hit …
Barrón was on his feet and running down the hall toward the stairs.
VICENTE HOUSE
LA CALLE SUR 145
DISTRICTO IZTACALCO
2321 HOURS, LOCAL TIME
The RPG gunner was dead, torn in half by Procario’s shot, but other cartel gunmen were racing across the street now, headed toward the front of the Perez house. One of them ran toward Patterson’s still form, motionless on the pavement.
Procario swung the muzzle back to the left, tracking just ahead of the running man, his finger tightening on the weapon’s trigger.
Nothing happened.
Damn it to hell! A rookie’s stunt; the Barrett .50 fired from a five-round magazine, and in the past four minutes or so he’d engaged five targets. His chamber was locked open, the magazine empty.
Swearing viciously, Procario thumbed the mag release, then groped for a fresh load sitting on the table beside him. He snapped it home and chambered the first round just as the running cartel gunman reached Patterson, standing directly over him, and began firing his M-16, emptying a twenty-round magazine into the motionless body.
A terrible, icy calm descended over Procario as he watched the gunman reload, then turn and begin jogging toward the front of Hotel One. Other men were crossing the street from Hotel Two, all of them heavily armed. The temptation to shoot the man who’d just killed Patterson was almost overwhelming, but Procario suppressed the impulse. The cartel force was storming into Hotel One now, cutting off Fox One’s route of retreat. This wasn’t about simple-minded revenge.
It was about which tactics would best help the team inside that house.
FOX ONE
MARIA PEREZ HOUSE
LA CALLE SUR 145
DISTRICTO IZTACALCO
2321 HOURS, LOCAL TIME
Teller scooped up his H&K as the gunman in the hallway fired wildly into the room. Marcetti was hit, a round striking him in the right shoulder and spinning him around. Schmidt triggered his shotgun; the frangible round splintered a section of wall as the cartel gunman got to his feet and started running. Teller and Rogers both fired three-round bursts, tracking the man as he vanished behind the bedroom wall … and then the target was gone.
Lunging forward, he brought the weapon up to his shoulder as he rolled around the doorjamb and into the hall
.
A few feet ahead, Cameche stepped into the hall just ahead of the running gunman, between the fugitive and the stairs, his own H&K raised. “¡Alto! Drop it!”
The gunman dropped his pistol—its slide was locked open over an empty chamber—and raised his hands. “¡No fuego! Don’t shoot!”
Teller came up behind him, spun him around to face the wall, kicked his feet apart, and roughly searched him for weapons. He had none. As Cameche grabbed the man’s collar and rammed his face against the plaster, Teller used a plastic zip-strip to bind his wrists behind his back.
“Patterson is dead,” Procario’s voice said over the tactical channel. “You have five … no, six, repeat six Tangos, M-16s and one AK, all coming in through the front door.”
The shock of having lost a team member was like a heavy slam to the gut. The op had gone seriously sour. Jackie was okay—he prayed she was okay—but one of their team members was dead, and the rest of them, minus Procario, were trapped on the upper floor of Hotel One. Not good …
Teller grabbed the prisoner’s collar and shoved him into the second bedroom, tripped him, forced him down onto the floor. The woman, Maria Perez, lay on the bed, her wrists zip-stripped behind her, her eyes very wide. Standard operating procedure for a hostage rescue: Anyone you didn’t know, even an unarmed civilian, was handcuffed or zip-stripped, both to keep them from wandering around in a firefight and to keep them from grabbing a weapon and becoming combatants.
“X-ray, Fox One,” Marcetti said. His voice sounded taut with pain. “See what you can do about our friends on the stairs.”
“Copy. Target acquired.”
MARIA PEREZ HOUSE
LA CALLE SUR 145
DISTRICTO IZTACALCO
2322 HOURS, LOCAL TIME
Carlos Mora Barquin reached the first-floor stairs at the back of the house and looked up. He couldn’t see anyone up there, but he heard the thud of booted feet, heard someone speaking in English. He slapped Julio Mazariegos on the shoulder and pointed. Go!
The yanqui commando outside had been a nasty surprise, as had the claymore outside of the safehouse. That mine had shredded three of his boys before they’d made it out the door, and the commando had killed two more. Jorge had been killed by a sniper after firing his RPG.
Mora’s training with the Guatemalan Kaibiles had given him a keen understanding of close-quarters tactics, of fire and movement. He’d been to this house several times, learning the location of each room, wall, and corridor. It was a small house, with the upstairs smaller than the first floor—just two bedrooms on the second floor plus several closets and a bathroom at the front of the house, and with a ladder going up to the roof. The attackers would be toward the front of the house, in the first bedroom … about there …
Circling his arm rapidly, he sent the rest of his men up toward the second floor.
VICENTE HOUSE
LA CALLE SUR 145
DISTRICTO IZTACALCO
2322 HOURS, LOCAL TIME
The stairway leading from the first floor to the second was toward the back of the house, and that presented Procario with a nasty problem. The angle, shooting down from the third floor of the Vicente house, was such that his shots had to pierce Hotel One’s front wall, at least one interior wall, and the floor in order to reach the line of men now ascending the stairs. The BMG round had tremendous penetrating power, but he wasn’t sure that after going through the concrete at the front, it would have the power to punch through the floor as well, especially since there were twelve-inch vertical joists supporting the floorboards at two-foot intervals.
He picked the first man in line, now halfway up the steps, tracked him … drew breath … held … squeezed …
MARIA PEREZ HOUSE
LA CALLE SUR 145
DISTRICTO IZTACALCO
2322 HOURS, LOCAL TIME
A loud crack snapped through the house, splinters flew from the banister beside the steps, and Julio yelped. “I’m hit!”
“Keep moving, ’mano!” Mora yelled. “You move, they can’t hit you!”
That wasn’t entirely true, but he needed to keep his people from breaking. Even the ex-soldiers among them didn’t have that much training, and charging up the stairs inside a darkened house was a tough thing to ask even of elite Fuerzos Especiales. That last round had punched down through the floor, and that made the rush even more unnerving.
If they could just reach the landing at the top of the steps …
FOX ONE
MARIA PEREZ HOUSE
LA CALLE SUR 145
DISTRICTO IZTACALCO
2322 HOURS, LOCAL TIME
Teller was waiting as the head of the first Tango in line appeared above the steps. The hallway was dark, but through his NVDs the man was brightly lit. The red aim-dot from Teller’s laser sights rippled across the man’s upper chest, and then Teller tapped a three-round burst into the target, knocking him backward.
Schmidt and Cameche each tossed grenades at the same moment—one M-67 and one M-84. The flashbang went off first, filling the stairway with a sun-bright flare of raw light, the fragmentation grenade detonating an instant later with a shrill bang.
Screams sounded from the darkness downstairs. Marcetti yelled, “Go! Go!” and Teller advanced to the top of the stairs, H&K at the ready.
Three bodies lay at the bottom of the steps, entangled in splatters of blood, two of them still moving. Teller loosed two more bursts into the tangle, silencing the screams; a fourth body lay motionless halfway down the steps.
“You have two Tangos downstairs,” Procario’s voice said over the tactical channel. “They’re moving back down the main hall … they’re moving into the living room, the big room at the front of the house.”
Confident that no one was waiting down there in the darkness to pop them as they came down the stairs, Teller led the way down the blast-broken steps, picking his way over the first body, and across a gap where two steps had been partially torn away by the frag grenade.
“Tangos are preparing to engage,” Procario said. “Hold your position.”
As he came off the stairs, Teller could see the entrance to the living room twenty feet ahead. He dropped into a crouch, weapon aimed at the opening.
A loud crack sounded from the living room, and someone screamed. “One Tango down,” Procario reported, and then a second BMG shot rattled windows. “Two Tangos down,” and then an explosion hurled bits of furniture into the hallway. “Second one had a grenade,” Procario added. “Tangos neutralized.”
“Let’s go,” Marcetti asked. “Watch out for snipers. Their snipers.”
“According to Cellmap, Hotel Two is empty,” Procario said. “You’re good to egress.”
That was comforting, but the team didn’t relax. There was always the chance that someone without a cell phone had remained behind with a rifle.
Holding the prisoner’s bound arms, Cameche steered their captive out the front door, with Teller and Dominique close behind. No shots were fired, but sirens shrilled and growled in the distance, coming closer. As Teller stepped out onto the street, he glanced up and saw a yellow glow flickering inside the upstairs front bedroom—the fire started by the flashbang. In this neighborhood, a house fire could be a serious danger to the entire block.
Teller didn’t know if those were fire sirens approaching or police, called in by reports of a running gun battle on Calle Sur 145, but either way the assault team needed to get clear, and quickly. The local authorities would not take kindly to Americans shooting Mexican citizens, no matter what the provocation.
Schmidt and Rogers found Patterson’s body sprawled in the street and picked it up between them.
No man left behind.
“The Perez woman,” Dominique told Teller. “She … she tried to help me.”
“Hey, March?” Teller said. “I think we can let the woman go.”
Marcetti nodded. “Do it.”
Cameche cut the zip-strip binding Perez’s wrists.
“Sorry about your house, Miss Perez,” Teller said. “But you’re free to go.”
“¡Por favor, no!” she cried. Tears were streaming down her cheeks as the words tumbled out. She shifted to English. “Please, please, let me come with you! If … if they know that I survived, they will think I helped you! You … have no idea what these people can do, what they will do!”
“We have a pretty good idea, Señorita Perez,” Marcetti said. “We do know that you’re the niece of Jaime Perez, and the girlfriend of Juan Escalante, however. We’re going to want you to answer some questions for us.”
“Anything!” she replied. “Absolutely anything! I … I am sick of this life.”
Together, they hurried down the street to the Vicente house.
Fifteen minutes later, they were crowded into the upstairs bedroom. The street outside was crowded with fire trucks and emergency vehicles; rotating light bars sent waves of red and blue and white light across the faces of the nearby buildings. Police were cordoning off the bodies in the street as firefighters played streams of water into the bedroom of the Perez house.
Antonio Vicente stood in the hallway, hands on hips, managing to look furious and terrified at the same time. “You no should do this!” he cried in broken English. “If the drug lords, they suspect you have been here, in my house, my life is not worth a single peso!”
“We got them all, Señor Vicente,” Marcetti said. He was sitting on the bed with his shirt off, allowing Rogers to apply gauze pads and medical tape to his bloody shoulder. The bullet had gone clean through, breaking his clavicle, scapula, and one rib, but first aid measures had stopped the bleeding, and the wound was not otherwise serious. “No one knows you helped us.”
“The police outside, they are talking to my neighbors. If they come here and search—”
“They will need a federal search warrant,” Procario said, interrupting. As in the United States, the police needed a warrant to enter a citizen’s home. “By the time they obtain one, we will be long gone.”
The Last Line Page 24
