by Mark Greaney
“I’m not running out on you; we just can’t—”
“It’s okay.” She did not believe him; this much was clear.
He turned to Laura. “If I can make it into town, I can get some sort of truck or something. I’ll be back here before you know it.”
“How are you going to get past the sicarios?”
Gentry was not ready to be challenged on his plan. He had no real plan for what he would do once over the wall. But he trusted, more or less, in his ability to figure something out if he could get out of here and see the lay of the land from another perspective.
“Ramses did it. I’ll head over to that side of the property.”
Elena was becoming combative. Court knew she was only thinking of her unborn child. “Ramses had Martin to sacrifice his life to create a diversion. Would you like one of us—”
“Of course not. I can slip away on my own.” He hesitated, looked into the tired, scared, and shell-shocked eyes. “I’ve been doing this for a long time.”
“Slipping away?” Elena asked, angry.
“Yes.” Court admitted. “But I will be back.”
Elena and Diego clearly did not believe him. He looked into Laura’s big brown eyes, saw kindness and understanding and compassion, but he had no idea what she was thinking.
Court ripped a camouflaged T-shirt off of one of the dead marines at the back door. The man had been shot in the head, so dried blood had crusted around the crewneck, but Gentry ignored it, took off the denim jacket he’d been wearing, and replaced it with the dead man’s shirt.
It was just past two in the afternoon when Court began heading through the house to the west wing. The sun was high over the mountains; the afternoon light was broken by scattered clouds. Elena had returned to the cellar without saying good-bye, but Laura and Diego started to follow him into the hallway.
“You guys stay here. Keep the guard up, but if the sicarios hit, don’t even try to defend the home. Go into the cellar, and fight them from there. You can do a lot of damage to an attacking force coming up that little hallway.”
Court did not mention the flip side of this truth: an attacking force could do a hell of a lot of damage to a defending force pinned into a little hole with no escape.
“You aren’t taking a gun?” asked Diego. He’d noticed Joe was unarmed.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You need every gun and every bullet. And it won’t do me any good. If I start shooting out there on the other side of the wall, there will be fifty guys on top of me in no time.”
Diego shook his head in frustration, “No. That is not why. I think it is because you feel bad. You are running away, and you feel better by telling yourself: well, I gave them all the guns, what more could I do?”
Court wanted to tell the boy that he needed to learn how to trust people, but he stopped himself. No, actually, Diego did not need to learn to trust. Here, he didn’t need that kind of advice. Court did not trust, for reasons that were no better than Diego’s.
Both of the Mexicans in front of him had been fucked over before, lied to and double-crossed. How could he tell them he was any different?
He couldn’t tell them. He’d have to show them he was different.
He turned and left them there in the hallway.
Court’s low crawl took most of the afternoon. As he pulled his body through the grass, he listened to the cracks of gunfire that emanated from the casa grande every ten minutes or so.
He expected DLR’s men to wait until nightfall before attacking, but he knew he could not discount the possibility they would send in individual spotters or sappers during the day to get a better idea of what they were up against. The only way he could think to prevent this, or at least slow down the deployment of these daylight teams, was to instruct Laura and Diego to fire their guns every few minutes throughout the day in different directions. If they did this sporadically and in random patterns, any federale infiltrators might think that they had been detected and stay hunkered down, or even retreat back over the hacienda wall.
Court wished that he could move faster, he knew he did not have time to waste, but with the undulating hills and mountains in the distance, he could not just break out into a run across the property. There would be snipers, he would be spotted, and the snipers would shoot him dead.
His low crawl was a worthwhile tradeoff to avoid this eventuality.
It was after five thirty when he arrived at the wall. He scooted under the weeping willows, pulled out a small bottle of water, and drank it down. He was exhausted and sunbaked; his knees and forearms and hands were scratched and bloody, his shoulders and lower back exhausted. The scar tissue in his left scapula, where an arrow had entered seven months earlier, felt knotted and tight; he reached back and rubbed the area while he sat and rested. After just a couple of minutes in the shade he stood and walked along the narrow bank, stepped into mud once or twice as he moved deeper under the foliage of the trees. He saw a water snake floating towards him in the murky pond; he ignored it, moved on a bit further, and then climbed up into a tree whose limbs reached above and over the wall.
Up high enough to look out into the rest of the valley now, he saw the dirt road that ran just on the other side of the hacienda wall. From where he sat he could swing out and drop down onto it, then run to the other side, move low, and dive into the tall, spindly blue agave plants that grew there amidst the high weeds.
He was just about to do that when a red pickup truck drove past from his right. It was loaded full with men with rifles, eight in all, and they passed by just under his position, rumbled and bounced along the track, and disappeared around the wall to his left a hundred yards on.
The men were local campesinos, farmworkers in blue jeans and straw cowboy hats, but they weren’t tending to their fields. They’d been hired by someone to patrol the perimeter.
Seconds later a federale on a motorcycle came up the road from the other direction.
By the time the biker disappeared around the southern edge of the outer wall, Court could already hear the rumbling of a pickup. It appeared; it was black and bore PF markings. A pair of officers stood in the bed and held on to the roll bar with one hand while propping their M4 rifles on the roof of the pickup with the other.
This old dirt farm road surely hadn’t seen so much traffic since the hacienda had been a working agave farm and tequila distillery.
Court tucked himself deep into the tree, found a semi-comfortable position, and prepared to wait there until dusk. He hoped there would be some sort of break in the action while the attackers prepped to hit the casa grande, and he hoped to take advantage of that lull.
But waiting till nearly the time of the attack meant that he would have no chance to make it back out onto the main road to commandeer a vehicle or create any other way to help those in the casa grande before the assassins attacked in force. No, waiting until the last moment to escape would force him to rush to save them.
He could still, with little doubt, save himself. He could wait for the raid on the house behind him, and then he could drop down off the wall into the darkness on the outside of the hacienda, and he could walk off into the agave fields and the forests, and he would survive. He could shit-can this lost cause; he could live to fight another day; he could return to Europe and target Gregor Sidorenko, the Russian mobster who had pursued him all the way into the Amazon jungle. He could kill Sid and then get a small measure of his life back. He could find work, and he could forget about Daniel de la Rocha and this horrific civil war here in Mexico, and he could never look back.
All this he would love to do.
But he could not run out on the five people behind him.
They were counting on him. Only because there was no one else, but that did not matter. He would help if he could, and if he could not, then he would die trying.
He would not, could not, leave them behind.
THIRTY-ONE
At dusk the patrols beca
me much less frequent; Gentry pictured a meeting back at the main gate, imagined the leader of the operation laying out his assault plan to a large group of men kneeling in the dirt with their weapons hanging from their necks.
Court knew he’d have to act fast. Part of any attack would surely include a blocking force outside of the walls on all points of the compass, ready to keep anyone from escaping.
At six p.m. he found the entire east side of the hacienda wall clear, so he slid out of the tree, hung by his arms, and dropped the rest of the way to the one-lane dirt road, rolling to the ground to absorb the jarring shock in his ankles and knees and spine. Quickly, he shot across the hard surface and buried himself into the tall grasses of the overgrown blue agave field. There he knelt for a moment, listened for shouts or gunshots or approaching vehicles. Hearing nothing that worried him, he stood, began moving north through the grass along the road, ready to tuck down into the foliage to duck the next patrol.
The valley had darkened to black by the time he turned at the northeast corner of the hacienda wall. While he made his way through the brush, a half dozen pickup trucks ambled by on the road to his right; they were driven by civilians, and more civilians sat in back with rifles. These were local farmhands, granjeros. Deeply tanned men with mustaches and cowboy hats, they were manual labor from the neighborhood, probably offered a week’s wages for a day’s work. These unskilled laborers would not take part in the attack. No, these men would just patrol the perimeter, perhaps set up a couple of roadblocks, just to make sure that if anyone in the hacienda managed to squirt out during the assault on the building, they would be mopped up before they made it out of the valley.
They weren’t evil killers, Court knew. They probably thought they were working for the federales and not the Black Suits, though there was no way to be sure. These were not beneficiaries of the drug profits of Mexico in any appreciable sense; they were just laborers who’d lucked into a little work. The Black Suits had access to all the labor they could ever want or need, and Court knew he needed to remember that if he ever got out of this damn valley.
Court knew these were not necessarily bad men. But they were in his way, and he would kill them just the same.
Ahead of him in the distance, at the hacienda’s front gate two hundred yards away, Court saw the headlights of several vehicles along the road. Big black SWAT-style armored cars, pickup trucks, a beat-up sedan, even a huge armored Policía Federal mobile command vehicle the size of a bus. He decided to get closer, maybe to grab a weapon or a hostage or a car that he could drive right up to the casa grande and rescue the Gamboas. He moved around an open pasture, dug into a low copse of pine trees, and neared his objective. There were dozens and dozens of men with guns here to prevent him from carrying out this plan, but still he moved towards them in the night. He heard barking dogs but knew the scent of all the other men, and all the other dogs for that matter, would render them worthless as early warning devices.
At fifty yards away he ducked lower. He was close enough to see the federales in their SWAT uniforms; they had already broken off into fire teams. Dozens of men rechecked weapons and strapped extra ammo magazines to their bodies. Court heard the fire teams run through their coms checks. Dozens of radios squawked and beeped and crackled through the cool evening.
Then the teams broke apart completely, ten or twelve men to a unit, some piled into two Policía Federal armored trucks that Gentry recognized as Ford BATTs, or Ballistic Armored Tactical Transporters, and the big black vehicles rumbled to life. Another dozen men boarded the beds of two pickup trucks. Even at this distance Gentry could tell the white trucks were pressed low on their chassis accommodating all the men and their gear.
The two pickups turned right at the road around the hacienda and disappeared into the distance. One of the big BATTs turned left and headed slowly in Court’s direction.
The remaining BATT remained at the front gate with its engine running. Court watched federales file into it, and the side door was closed and secured. Then another unit stacked up behind it in formation. The Policía Federal armored mobile command vehicle sat behind the rest of the vehicles; men came and left through a side door.
The truck moving to the east passed fifty yards off his left shoulder, everything outside of its bright headlights was black to the driver, and Court knew he could not be seen.
He understood the federales’ attack plan now, more or less. Three units, each with a dozen men, would assault the hacienda simultaneously from the south, east, and west. A larger force, twenty or twenty-five maybe, would be heading right up the driveway.
The farm hands with the cowboy hats and the scatterguns were outside the walls on the perimeter, ringing the action in clusters on all sides of the hacienda as a sloppy blocking force.
So there it was. Sixty heavily armed, highly trained Mexican Federal Police officers, plus another two-dozen armed locals hanging back in support.
Against a pregnant woman, an elderly woman, an injured old man, a sixteen-year-old boy, and a girl who cries the rosary over assholes who lost their shitty lives trying to earn a paycheck by killing her.
Goddammit, Court thought. Guess it’s time to go out in a blaze of glory.
Gentry was only twenty-five yards away from the rear of the BATT at the front gate when it drove forward, lumbered into the hacienda proper. The cops on foot jogged behind it in two columns. The driveway to the casa grande was a lumpy, bumpy, winding two hundred yards, and the big heavy armored truck moved slowly up the hill, disappeared into the forest; its headlights and taillights flickered through the trees and made a horror-show dance of ominous shadows all the way back to the gate.
The dogs disappeared up the drive with the foot patrol.
Court got down on his knees, crawled through the brush and grasses and around wild agave plants the size of kitchen tables. He moved slower and more quietly with every inch of progress; he expected there would be sentries back here around the command vehicle, and even though he could not see anyone yet, he knew any sound he made would travel through the night.
Soon he found himself at the road between two parked pickups. He was less than fifty feet from the gate; he could hear a group of men talking over the drone of the auxiliary power unit of the big armored command vehicle.
He looked ahead, across the road, and in a shallow run-off ditch on the other side, he saw a dead body, stripped to the waist. Even in the moonlight he could still see the big black bruise on the man’s jaw.
It was Sergeant Martin Orozco; a dozen bullet holes perforated his legs, arms, and chest. A final coup de grace wound was centered on his forehead.
“Sorry, amigo,” Court mumbled as he continued forward on his hands and knees.
Looking around the pickup on his left, towards the gate, past the command vehicle, he saw five or six Mexican farmer types with shotguns, their butt stocks resting on hips.
Most of the men stood right up by the gate, as if trying to catch a glimpse of the action two hundred yards away through the forest. Their body postures and tonal inflections showed their excitement. They were spectators; not one of them thought for a second any of them would be in danger or would even be called on to fire their old scatterguns.
Court knew he could hotwire one of these pickup trucks in under a minute. With it he could race up the driveway, get past the armored truck and the men, get the Gamboas in it and then drive through the hacienda, break out at one of the small gates on the west wall, making sure to avoid the sicarios who would be attacking from that side.
It would be easy.
Except for the one thousand or so copper-jacketed spikes of lead that would be flying at him and those he tried to protect at three thousand feet per second, each one with the potential to turn a human head into pink mist.
The pickup truck plan was a nonstarter.
If there was still an armored car here at the front gate, and if that armored car happened to be unlocked with the keys in the ignition, well then he’d be
in business.
But the BATTs were gone, and with them any chance for—
A young PF officer stepped from the side door of the trailer-sized command vehicle, and the door locked back behind him. The officer turned away from the famers, walked across to the bushes along the far side of the road, and undid his belt. He shook as he tried to force himself to take a quick piss; he rolled his neck to scoot the shotgun that hung in front of him out of the way of the impending stream.
Gentry looked at the locked door of the command vehicle, wondered if the man taking a bathroom break had a set of keys on him. He wished the truck wasn’t so fucking big. Still, it was armored. It had the plating necessary to stop a rifle round cold; its thick front windshield would hold back dozens of direct hits before failing.
The vehicle would be nearly impossible for Court to drive, but he knew he did not have the luxury of being choosy at the moment.
Dammit.
Across the narrow road the officer pulled up his pants and zipped them, then reached into his pants pocket. Gentry recognized the glint of a key chain.
Court leapt to his feet, and he struck like a cobra.
He ran low and fast across the road as the policeman began to turn back towards the command vehicle. The gaggle of cowboys and farm hands was twenty-five feet off Gentry’s left shoulder and still looking up the drive towards the casa grande. Gentry moved like a shadow across the hard surface, drew his knife at the last second, simultaneously slipped it between the turning man’s floating ribs on the left side and covered the federale’s mouth with his right hand. He pushed the knife to the hilt and kept pushing the man forward into the bushes; Court turned the blade like a key as he followed the man into the thicket and fell with him, on him, onto the hard earth.
Court used his own dead weight on top of the man to stifle his kicks and thrashes. This hombre was probably a soccer player, Gentry thought; he was exceedingly fit, and his body did not play by the rules. Court expected the man to be limp in five seconds; it was nearly twenty before the life left his extremities. Court found himself exhausted, as if he’d been trying to stay atop a bucking bronco while preventing the bronco from making a sound for the entire ordeal. Court reached forward, pulled the keys out of the brush. He felt them for a moment, settled on two possible choices for the door of the vehicle. He held them in his fingers and retrieved the shotgun with his other hand.
