Ballistic

by Mark Greaney

  Then he stood. Headed towards the armored command vehicle.

  Seconds later he was inside. He’d shut the door behind him, turned right, away from the front of the vehicle and towards the back cabin. A man called out from the cab, a question to his partner who was now dead in the brush. Court pulled out his knife, began to turn to deal with the other driver, but he stopped, noticing a metal rack that ran head high along the length of one side of the cab.

  All manner of weapons and ammunition rested in the rack or hung from hooks above it.

  Gentry’s eyes widened, and his face tightened into a cruel smile. “Oh, hell yes.”

  He turned away, headed to the front to kill the driver.

  The comandante led his men up the driveway towards the front of the house. They had been protected from any threat of fire from the windows or verandas of the hacienda’s casa grande by the armored vehicle ahead of them, but his men had widened out as they neared the building and now moved slowly, tentatively in the night. The truck slowed and stopped and shone its bright lights on the front door.

  Normally, the comandante would have nothing to do with a frontal assault, straight up the middle towards a defended stone building. But after sending in spotters that morning and seeing the property from the inside, he understood how concealed the driveway was from the hacienda itself. With the thick growth of bushes and trees on both sides, the archways at the front door, even the tall weeds between the cobblestones, twenty-five men heading in two columns straight up the driveway at noon would be more covert than if they jumped over the back wall in the middle of the night.

  Even so, he’d waited until nightfall and then one hour more because the defenders might have been expecting an attack as soon as darkness covered the property. Now, at nine in the evening, he could wait no longer. It was time to hit these worthless cabrones in the house, kill every last thing that moved—every man, woman, and child, and then the dogs and cats and the chickens and goats.

  He wanted to check with the other teams who should just now be approaching from other directions, but one of his damn officers had apparently depressed the transmit button on his radio, and it prevented the comandante from sending commands or hearing from any of his other men. He’d waited thirty seconds for el chingado cabrón to realize his error and fix his radio, but still he could not communicate.

  In another twenty seconds he would be ready to call for the attack, and if this hijo de puta didn’t fix his chingado radio, the comandante was going to string the pendejo up by his chingado—

  Behind him, lights through the forest. Moving up the driveway towards the house.

  He looked to the men around him as he quickly dove behind a low stone wall that rimmed the parking circle in front of the casa grande. He had to get out of the driveway before he was silhouetted by the approaching headlights.

  He turned back around, stared at the lights, and he could not believe what he saw.

  The mobile command vehicle bounced wildly up cobblestones towards his position.

  He’d left the two drivers in the MCV at the front gate, but they had no reason whatsoever to even run the engine much less take part in the attack.

  Even though his radio was not functioning, he pressed the button and screamed into it. “¡Cabrones! What the fuck are you doing?”

  Fifty yards away the vehicle’s red brake lights illuminated in the forest.

  The MCV stopped in the woods, began turning around in the tight confines of the narrow driveway.

  The comandante turned back towards the house. Whatever the hell his drivers were doing, they had eliminated any further surprise. He rose and opened fire on the front of the house with his M16 rifle; this was the only way he had to begin the attack without the use of his worthless radio.

  Men on either side of him followed suit; their rounds sparked against the stone facade and tore through the wooden door.

  The comandante heard a sound through the gunfire, and he turned back towards the noise. In his utter astonishment he stood up from behind the low wall and lowered his rifle to his waist.

  The massive armored MCV moved up the rocky driveway in reverse, its speed increasing by the second. The huge blue truck bounced and heaved, its chassis straining under the weight of tons of ballistic steel.

  The comandante had driven armored cars enough to know the view out of the rearview mirror was lousy; this pinche driver was blindly accelerating up towards the casa grande at a speed that he could not control.

  “¡Alto!” Stop! The comandante screamed into his radio; the problem with the mike seemed to have been rectified, although every other aspect of this attack was turning to mierda in front of his eyes. The MCV shot backwards towards the other armored truck, the BATT that was parked in the parking circle and shining its headlights on the big dark house.

  The armored vehicle doing what it was fucking supposed to be doing!

  The MCV looked like it would flip as it bottomed out at forty miles an hour; it missed sideswiping the other vehicle by no more than a foot, knocking off the driver’s side mirrors of both trucks.

  Suddenly, the comandante standing at the wall realized three things in rapid-fire succession: One, if his driver had had trouble seeing what was behind him before, now that his mirror was smashed and bouncing up the drive behind him he would not be able to see a thing. Two, that his driver was not his driver! And three—that the federale MCV moving at forty miles an hour was going to crash up the front steps of the house.

  Court let go of the transmit button and tossed the radio onto the floor of the truck and then stomped on the gas. The lumbering vehicle slowly accelerated up the driveway in reverse, bouncing and bumping up the hill. He buckled himself in, and only this allowed him to keep his foot planted firmly on the pedal. The buffeting inside the top-heavy vehicle made him feel like he was a rag doll being shaken by a giant. Still, he did not let up on the gas for an instant.

  He’d been aiming, if you could call it that, more or less at the front door to the casa grande, but when he lost his mirror, he gave up on any pretense of precision in his targeting. Instead he just floored it, hung on to the steering wheel for dear life, and pushed his head back hard into the headrest, unsure when the impact would come or even if he would survive it.

  He felt a jolting crash that rocked him hard, slammed him tight into his seat, and caused his foot to slip from the gas pedal, but he knew he had not yet hit the house. As the bottom of the vehicle scrapped over stone, he determined it was the angel fountain in the center of the drive. This told him he was heading too far to the left to hit the front doors squarely.

  He turned the steering wheel slightly to the right, jammed his foot down on the pedal again as automatic-weapon fire raked across the thick glass plate of the windscreen. He streaked by the broken-down farm truck with Ignacio Gamboa’s body in the front seat.

  Court’s armored bus crashed straight up the steps of the casa grande; it smashed with brute violence into the western side of the archway and turned the two-hundred-year-old oak doors into logs and splinters.

  The MCV jolted to a stop. Court slammed the transmission into park, unbuckled himself, and spun into the back. Behind him the confused and tentative smattering of gunfire that had chased the truck up the drive now turned into a heavy fusillade as the Policía Federal quickly came to the realization that this was not a wayward vehicle of theirs but, instead, a breakout attempt by the family under siege.

  In the back Gentry fell down twice, stumbling from his dazed headache and lost a moment in the darkness, tripping over weapons that had fallen from their shelves. Seconds later he recovered, found the two items he’d been looking for, and opened the back doors.

  Diego knelt in the sitting room behind the couch and fired at movement on the back patio. His grandfather had gone upstairs to shoot from the mirador, but he had not heard his abuelo fire the M1 carbine in over a minute.

  An unreal amount of automatic fire shredded the front of the house. Diego knelt behin
d the couch as if it would give him some sort of cover; he only lifted his head when he heard an engine’s roar. The rear of a huge blue truck crashed into the entry way of the casa grande and continued several feet inside the building. In a panic Diego stood and fired with his pistol, the bullets just making sparks on the rear door. His weapon clicked open and empty.

  The sixteen-year-old boy fumbled his reload, dropped a magazine on the tile floor, and chased it to the edge of a wingback chair before retrieving it and seating it in the grip of his gun. Long before his weapon was back in the fight the black doors of the vehicle flew open, and Diego saw a man crouched there in the truck with two massive weapons in his hands.

  “Diego! It’s me! It’s . . .” In the excitement Court had forgotten his pseudonym. “It’s the gringo! Get everyone up here and in the van! Ándele!”

  It took the young boy five full seconds to comprehend, but when he did, he nodded, spun on his tennis shoes, and ran towards the kitchen. He shouted as he ran. “Mi abuelo is upstairs!”

  Courted nodded, but he did not go upstairs; instead he turned towards the shattered front doorway. There was little space between the hulking truck and the broken stone and stucco, but Gentry found a firing position, and he raised his right hand. In it he hefted a Hawk MM-1 handheld grenade launcher, loaded with a dozen high-explosive shells. The weapon was heavy and bulky and Court normally would have used both hands to fire it, but the weapon did not require both hands. He pulled the heavy trigger, and with a sound akin to a massive cork popping from an agitated champagne bottle, the first grenade left the barrel.

  Boom!

  Forty yards away an explosion of fire and smoke and broken earth and spinning federales. He fired three more times at the wall lined with attackers before lowering the weapon, lifting an identical device that he held in his left hand, and popping off three missiles loaded with CS agent, a powerful crowd-dispersing tear gas. With the last canister still in the air, he spun in the other direction, fired rounds from both weapons one at a time; they arced through the house, through the broken sliding glass doors to the patio, over the pool, and exploded in the garden behind the casa grande.

  Court had lived by luck, but he had no real expectation of hitting one single sicario attacking the rear of the house. No, he just wanted to show them the rules had changed; their cowardly attack on women, a kid, and an old man would now subject them to high-explosive rounds being shoved down their motherfucking throats.

  He fired one round of CS up the hallway that ran from the main room to the west, hoped like hell he’d have everyone out of here before the gas wafted back inside and made this living room unbearable.

  He dropped the CS grenade launcher as he ran up the stairs; it was too heavy to wield along with the high-explosive launcher. He turned to the right, shouted for Ernesto, wished like hell he’d grabbed a shotgun or a pistol or something other than a weapon that he could not use in the short range of a hallway.

  He turned towards the rear mirador, and he saw the old man there, lying on his back in a pool of blood.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Ernesto’s eyes blinked, and he drew a shallow breath. He looked up at the American standing over him on the dark veranda.

  Gentry reached over the railing of the mirador and fired two HE rounds at movement in the moonlight by the corral in the distance. Wood and stone and fire blew twenty feet into the air.

  Court knelt back to Ernesto. “Can you wa—”

  He saw it now; the old man’s left leg was bloody, twisted to the side. Only held on by bits of meat and the denim in his jeans. Blood covered the tile of the mirador in the darkness.

  Eddie’s father had been hit squarely in the femur with a round from a high-powered rifle.

  Court looked back at the man’s face, and the eyes had rolled back. A last breath drained from his lungs.

  Quickly, Gentry knelt over him, spoke into his ear. “I’ll take care of them. I’ll get them someplace safe. All of them.”

  Then he stood and spun back into the house as the stucco walls turned to dust around him.

  The family coughed and choked on the CS gas as Gentry shepherded them into the back of the truck. He’d retrieved the Hawk that held the tear gas grenades, and he fired the remaining rounds into the driveway and the trees beyond it, hoping like hell he was shooting in the general direction of the bad guys. When the weapon clicked on an empty cylinder, he let it fall to the tile of the entryway. He climbed into the back of the mobile command vehicle behind the family; Luz was right in front of him, and she looked past him, over his shoulder and back into the dark smoky house.

  “Ernesto? Ernesto?”

  There was no panic at all in her voice, even with everything happening around her. Court just pushed her deeper into the bus, dropped the high-explosive grenade launcher onto the padded bench next to Elena, and shut and locked the door behind him.

  “I’m sorry, I have to—”

  Court said the word drive as he was launched back against the door. Luz fell into his arms as he realized that the MCV was moving forward, its rear tires bouncing down the steps of the casa grande, and that whoever was driving was sure as hell stepping on the gas.

  He crawled forward up the aisle, the bouncing and the buffeting of the truck’s chassis tossing him about; gunfire raked the walls of armor on both sides, a constant tinging sound like a downpour in hell.

  In the front cab he found Laura behind the wheel; she knelt down low, desperately trying to get some sort of a view out of a windshield that was, while still intact, completely white from bullet strikes and cracked from one end to the other.

  “I can’t see!” she yelled.

  Court reached across her body and buckled her into her seat. He shouted into her ear as he did so. “Don’t worry! Just drive! Anywhere is better than here!”

  They sideswiped one of the armored cars, ran completely off the driveway and into a pasture, and then Laura jacked the wheel so hard to correct for her mistake that the truck went up on two wheels for an instant before bottoming out and bouncing back onto the rocky drive.

  Behind them in the long truck, police gear bounced and slammed around, knocking into Elena, Luz, and Diego.

  Laura hit a small tree, knocking the MCV hard to the left and sending Gentry flinging into the dashboard.

  “You suck worse than me!” Court screamed as he crawled across the front passenger seat, opened the heavy armored door, and leaned outside. They needed some sort of idea of their direction, even if it meant Gentry exposing himself to enemy fire.

  “Right! To the right!” he shouted in English, and Laura turned the wheel to the left.

  “¡Derecha! ¡A la derecha!” Court shouted.

  She fixed her mistake, did not overcorrect this time. “Sorry! Sorry!”

  Court spotted for her, though he heard bullets whizzing past him. They clanged off the rear door and the side panel; Gentry brought his body back inside the truck for an instant then darted his head out again quickly to help Laura find her way through the forest on the long, winding driveway.

  They were in the woods twenty seconds later, safe from the sicarios at the casa grande, but Court knew good and well that they were not out of the woods, figuratively. The men up at the house had radios, which meant the trucks and the armored vehicle parked near the front gate would now be scrambling into position to block the exit.

  Court bobbed his head back into the vehicle. Laura had found a small corner of the windshield that had not been turned smoke white with the impact of bullets. She leaned up and into it, straining against her seat belt, desperately trying to see out of the tiny viewing hole.

  Court shouted to the back. “Diego, give me the grenade launcher!” He said the last part in English; he did not know the words in Spanish.

  “The what?” shouted Diego from the dark rear of the vehicle.

  Laura shouted back the translation, and within a few seconds young Diego appeared with the big gray cylindrical device. Court snatched it and p
ositioned his entire body outside the MCV now, his feet on a small running board below the passenger door, his right hand holding the open door, his left hand holding the Hawk MM-1 and balancing it on the front door. As the truck bounced and weaved on the bumpy driveway, Gentry found it next to impossible to aim.

  They approached the front gate now; Laura concentrated on it. But Court shouted to her from outside the passenger seat.

  “I’m going to make us another exit.”

  “What?”

  Court knew that blasting the cars with high-explosive grenade rounds would damage them, to be sure. But this wasn’t Hollywood; the vehicles would not blow sky high and then land conveniently out of his path.

  No, he would try to knock a hole in the old wall large enough for them to fit through. The MM-1 had an effective targeting range of one hundred and fifty meters in optimal conditions. The conditions in which Gentry found himself working were absolutely off the other end of the scale from optimum, but he had no choice but to give it a shot.

  As he expected, the federal police BATT pulled in front of the open gate, its headlights staring up the drive at him like taunting eyes. Daring him to keep coming.

  Gentry aimed his launcher ten yards to the east of the gate.

  Pop.

  Boom!

  Court’s first shot hit low, exploded a few yards short of the stucco wall.

  “You missed!” shouted Laura. Court wondered how she could suddenly see so much through the windscreen.