Ballistic

by Mark Greaney

  The Mexicans were sprawled out on the floor in various unnaturally contorted positions. The Little Butcher’s apron had flipped up over his face. He was alive and bleeding heavily from the stomach.

  Matthew Hanley flipped off the overhead light, shrouding the room in near complete darkness. The only faint light now was a dim glow from the stairwell. He then pulled a submachine gun from the neck of one of the dead federales, kneeling on the floor below Gentry to do so. He turned low in a crouch, pulled the charging handle back on the weapon, and aimed it at the stairs.

  “How many?” he asked. He was all business, intense concentration preparing for the threat to come.

  Gentry was barely conscious. That last jolt of electricity, administered by Hanley himself, had almost killed him. Still, he muttered a guess. “Don’t know. A couple of federal cops, maybe more.”

  “Okay.”

  Several sets of footsteps on the stairs, running down.

  Hanley waited.

  Court hung from his bindings, a spectator; he felt completely exposed.

  Federal police in black appeared in the dim of the stairwell; Matt Hanley fired bursts into their legs to drop them, then more bursts into their faces and necks, hitting them above their body armor. Two men, three men down now. A fourth man took a round to the throat and stumbled on through the doorway before toppling in the middle of the room; his rifle flew from his hands and clanked across the concrete.

  It bounced into the lap of Jerry Pfleger. When the embassy clerk recognized what it was, his eyes opened even wider, and he pushed the weapon off of him like it was a live rattlesnake. It landed at his feet, and he kicked it away frantically, his arms raised high.

  He didn’t want anything to do with that rifle; he made it abundantly clear. He was not going to fight back. He did not want to give Hanley any reason to shoot him.

  Hanley grabbed the new weapon and stepped into the stairwell. He neither heard nor saw anyone else.

  As he returned to the torture chamber, he flicked the overhead light back on and the Little Butcher grunted. He held his bloody stomach with his fist, looked up at the armed American with eyes of fear and confusion.

  “You need him for anything?” Hanley asked Gentry, motioning to the fat torturer with the muzzle of the MP5.

  Gentry shook his head. “Nope.”

  Without hesitation Hanley shot the man three more times in the chest, and his groans stopped.

  After several seconds of quiet, Court said, “Thanks, Matt.”

  Hanley reloaded the weapon with a fresh magazine taken off the chest of one of the dead federales. As he manipulated the magazine release to recharge the weapon he said, “Fuck you, Violator. I don’t like you much more than these assholes.”

  “Okay.”

  Hanley then began unscrewing the restraints on Gentry’s wrists. “Glad to see you didn’t bite your tongue off. I was worried you’d forgotten your Russian.”

  “You told me to shut my mouth tight and to grab the men by the throat.”

  “Neck, actually, but close enough.”

  Hanley got both arm shackles removed then unfastened the ankle bindings. Court staggered forward, went down on one knee, and then sat on the cold concrete floor. His muscles hurt and spasmed uncontrollably. His right leg shook so badly he held it to the floor with his hands to quell the movement.

  Matt had already begun stripping the boots and pants off of one of the dead federal police. He stopped what he was doing to reach for the Bersa .380 he’d taken from the Little Butcher’s protégé, and he slid the weapon across the floor to Court.

  Hanley nodded towards Jerry Pfleger, still sitting in the corner, now shaking with fear.

  “I left that dumbass for you. You can kill him if you want. I really don’t care.”

  “No. I need him.”

  Pfleger nodded forcefully; his eyes wide with newfound hope. “That’s right! That’s right, buddy! You need me!”

  “I don’t need you to dance.”

  “To dance? What do you—”

  Court took the pistol proffered by his ex-boss, shot Jerry Pfleger in the top of his left foot, a round hole with a tattered edge of sock and leather appeared on his brown loafer.

  The young man stared at his bloody shoe for several seconds before screaming.

  Hanley winced with the shouting and screaming, and he tossed a pair of black tactical pants to Gentry.

  “Did you have to do that?”

  Court continued to gasp; he lay back flat on the cold floor for a moment to rest from his torture. Matter-of-factly, he said, “I don’t want him running away. I really don’t feel like chasing after him right now.”

  Jerry screamed, spit, and snot and vile curses ejected from him like water from a fire hose. “I’m gonna fucking kill you, you crazy sick mother—”

  Gentry crawled on his hands and knees over to the wounded man in the corner; the stainless automatic clicked on the concrete in the process. He sat back down, pressed the muzzle of the weapon onto the top of Pfleger’s right hand, pinning the hand to the concrete. “Don’t guess I need you to type, either.”

  “No!”

  Court hesitated. “Will you try to mind your manners?”

  “No! I mean, yes! Yes!”

  “Okay, stop the bleeding. You’ll be okay.” Gentry stood slowly on shaky legs, crossed the room to a shelf, and grabbed a towel and a roll of electrical tape, threw them both to the man who, in his writhing on the floor, missed it and had to scramble after it on his elbows, screaming and crying and cussing all along.

  Court slid the tactical pants onto his naked body slowly, still dazed and slowed by the electric shocks. Hanley pulled an undershirt off another guard and handed it over.

  In another minute they were heading up the stairs.

  They made it to the front of the warehouse; it was eight o’clock in the evening, and they encountered no one else on the property other than some dogs fenced in a long kennel. DLR was long gone by now, Court knew, and with him Laura Gamboa. Looking around briefly, he saw barrels of acid lined up against the wall. In the top of the liquid human hair floated. The only remnants of the former guests of this death house.

  He and Pfleger staggered out the door together while Hanley hotwired a car in the street. Within minutes they drove out of the neighborhood in a stolen Ford station wagon. Hanley was at the wheel; Court’s continued muscle spasms prevented him from driving. Pfleger was in the trunk; Court had used the rest of the electrical tape to bind Pfleger hands behind his back. As they approached a busy intersection, Matt scanned the street signs. He said, “Okay, I know where we are. Tepito. Bad part of town, but not too far from civilization.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’ll find a place to talk in a minute. Then you can take the car. I’ll catch a cab to the embassy. DLR’s men are going to learn about what happened if they don’t already know. You don’t want to stick around the capital for long.”

  They drove in silence for the most part; Jerry’s occasional groans and cusses in the trunk were audible but muffled. Gentry worked on getting control of his muscles; his arms and legs felt weak and rubbery, his abdominal muscles ached, and his back and neck throbbed in pain. There were electrical burns on his back, his butt, his wrists, and his ankles. He wore pants that were too short and a white T-shirt that was too small. There was just a trace of blood on the collar.

  Court’s feet were bare.

  He carried the Bersa Thunder .380 semiautomatic pistol with a fresh magazine he’d retrieved from the pants pocket of the dead apprentice torturer. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was small and concealable. As Court’s mind fought for control of his body, he reserved a portion of his thoughts to work on a plan, and that growing and evolving plan would necessitate a low profile. The MP5s and even the big Berettas the federales carried on their hips would just not do.

  The Bersa was wimpy, but it was very easy to conceal.

  Hanley had retrieved a Beretta for himself just
in case they ran into either narcos or street thugs while making their escape.

  Court was surprised when Hanley pulled up to a bodega on República de Ecuador and hopped out of the car without a word. He returned in less than a minute with a bottle of tequila in his hand. He pulled back into traffic and jabbed the bottle between his legs, unscrewed the cap, and took a long swig.

  He offered it to Gentry.

  “No, thanks.”

  “It will help your muscle cramps. Take it.”

  Court accepted the bottle, took a tentative swig, winced, and then took a longer gulp. He fought down the shot, then passed the bottle back to Hanley. “If you’d picked up a six-pack of Tecate, we could have had a party.”

  Matt swigged, laughed, and swigged again. “Nah, booze is efficient. No time for beer, Violator.”

  Finally, Hanley pulled the sedan off the road, down a callejón towards the back of a construction site. He found a ramp that led down to a covered parking lot below a hotel that was only half completed. He jumped out to move a pair of orange barrels out of the way, and then he proceeded into the dark lot.

  They parked the car, and Gentry popped the trunk so Jerry could get some air. They left a car door open for light and walked around to the back. Pfleger was on his back with his foot propped up. He looked up, terrified, at the two American spies staring down at him in the low light.

  “Please don’t kill me. I swear I will do whatever you—”

  Hanley took another long pull on the tequila bottle. “Shut up or I’ll shut the trunk.”

  Jerry stopped talking.

  Hanley took Court by the shoulder, walked him over to the corner of the garage, still within the low glow of the Ford’s interior lights. Together they stood; Court took the bottle and drank some more tequila, hoping like hell it would mute the shakes in his muscles.

  He handed it back to Matt, and the big blond American took a long pull before asking, “So what the hell are you doing here in Mexico, duking it out with the narcos?”

  “I just stumbled into this.”

  “That wasn’t too bright. This drug war is crazy. Worse than Colombia. You ever seen anything as fucked up as this?”

  “Yeah . . . I have.”

  Hanley regarded Gentry then nodded slowly. “You must have done some work in Bosnia.”

  “I must have,” replied Court, in semi-agreement. Hanley let it go. He did not know much about Gentry’s pre–Goon Squad work for the CIA, and he did not need to.

  “Langley said you knew the GOPES commander, this Major Gamboa.”

  “Yeah, long time ago.”

  “And now DLR is going after his family.”

  Court nodded. “That’s what I’ve been dealing with.”

  “Wish I could give you some support, but officially speaking, my employer doesn’t care about Gamboa, and while they do care about you, they only care about making you dead.”

  “Why did you help me?”

  Matt shrugged. “You did fuck up my life, but now that it is fucked-up, there’s not much more they can do to me.”

  Court didn’t understand. Hanley saw this and continued. “Look, you’d have done it for me. In the Goon Squad, you did your job and you did it well. Of course you fought back when we turned on you. I can’t begrudge you that. I’m not going to just sit and watch the fucking Daniel de la Rocha Cartel torture you to death. You may be persona non grata amongst the top brass at Langley, but I didn’t get into this line of work to watch Mexican drug lords murder American patriots.”

  Gentry nodded. Leaned back against the cold concrete.

  Matt said, “This isn’t the first time I’ve been sent by Denny to ID you.”

  “No?”

  “Couple of years ago. I was in Paraguay at the time.” He chuckled. “I didn’t know how good I had it in Paraguay. Fucking Haiti, kid. You have no idea.”

  “We don’t have much time.”

  “Anyway, that thing goes down in Kiev. Carmichael has my ass on a company jet from Asunción to Kiev so fast my head’s spinning. They were trying to ID you as the operator there, as if one man could have pulled that off, but we both know it wasn’t you.”

  Gentry nodded. Hanley stared him down, and Court knew the other man was doing his best to read Court’s face for any reaction to his statement. Court’s face still twitched from the current that had been ripping through his central nervous system; no lie detector–type clues from his limbic system would be reliable in his current state.

  Hanley gave up. “Anyway, got a free trip to Europe out of it, at least.”

  Still no response from Gentry.

  Matt smiled again, “You were always the quiet one. The one who did most of the work but never bitched. Hightower was the loudmouth of the group.”

  “How is Zack?”

  “How is he? Is that a serious question? He’s dead. They’re all dead.”

  “All who?”

  “All the Goon Squad guys. You killed them all, buddy. You put both barrels of a .44 Derringer into Zack Hightower’s chest, sent him cartwheeling out a window. He died at the scene.”

  Jesus, thought Court. Matt Hanley really was out of the loop. Zack had survived the shoot-out, and Court had run an op seven months earlier in North Africa with him. Zack had been wounded badly in the Sudan, and Court did not know for sure whether or not he’d survived, but clearly, he knew a hell of a lot more than Matt Hanley did about what had been going on at the upper echelons of the Special Activities Division.

  The CIA had a shoot-on-sight directive out against the Gray Man, yet the Gray Man was not as much of an outsider as Matthew Hanley.

  “Who put the shoot on sight out on me?”

  Hanley looked at the tequila bottle, like he was measuring his consumption. “Denny Carmichael was the one who contacted me. Told me you had to go.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Carmichael knows. Others at the top. I was told you were the enemy, to execute the shoot on sight. I was shown a presidential finding to that effect; it mentioned something about a foreign nation’s involvement, and I asked Denny what that was all about. He told me a deal had been worked out between folks way above my pay grade, and I needed to shut the hell up and execute the finding. I told Denny the only way to be sure to wax you was to drop a JDAM on your head, but he ordered me to use the team to liquidate you. I told Zack, he told the others, and now they are all dead.” Hanley took an exceptionally long pull of the clear liquid. Court saw him wobble a bit from its effects.

  He laughed a moment. “You didn’t hear any of that from me.” He laughed some more. “I am so fired.”

  Court looked at his former boss incredulously. “Matt . . . for what you did back there in the basement, you aren’t just going to get fired.”

  “Federal prison? A wet squad at my door? Nah, I’ll convince them you got away somehow. I’ve made a decent living bullshitting my friends and coworkers.” He smiled, but Gentry saw that he was nervous. “It was worth it to waste those carteleros.”

  “Matt . . . Langley will kill you for saving me.”

  Hanley shrugged. “I’ll have to sell it. You shot your way out of the basement, took me as a hostage, beat me up, and dumped me by the side of the road as you made your escape with that embassy douche.” He paused. “We’re going to have to make it look good. I’m thinking a pair of black eyes, maybe a cracked rib.”

  Court just shook his head slowly.

  “You have something else in mind?”

  “You said it. We’re going to have to make it look good.”

  Hanley blew out a long sigh, nodded as if he expected this. He drank another three swigs of tequila in rapid-fire succession, then backed up to the wall of the parking garage. He tossed the bottle underhanded, away into the dark. It shattered. Then he pointed to a place high on his shoulder. “Right there. Do it, Violator!”

  Court pulled the Bersa Thunder .380 from his pants pocket.
Took a few steps back and raised the weapon. Hanley watched him through eyes squinted in anticipation of the pain and agony that would come. “Please don’t miss, kid.”

  Then Court looked away from his weapon’s sights and into the man’s tight eyes.

  “Sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  The pistol lowered.

  “No!”

  Court shot Matthew Hanley in the stomach. Hanley brought his hands to the searing pain in his right side. Warm blood oozed through his thick fingers. Softly, he gasped, “For the love of God, Court.” The heavyset case officer lowered to his knees, fell to the cold cement, rolled onto his stomach writhing in pain.

  Court fired again, shot Hanley in the back of the right shoulder.

  “Jesus!” screamed Jerry Pfleger. He’d sat up in the trunk and could see the action against the wall. Court turned to him, stormed over to the car with his pistol up, and Jerry ducked back into the trunk. Gentry slammed the trunk lid, then returned to the man rolling around on the bare concrete. Hanley was on his back now; he tried to scoot away from the Gray Man but could not.

  As he stood over the big man, Court said, “Nobody was going to buy a textbook bullet hole in your shoulder. Not from a guy like me.”

  “I could have sold it, you fuck! I could have made them believe!”

  “C’mon, stop crying. The shoulder is through and through, and the gut shot is lodged in a shitload of fat. Are you the only guy in Haiti putting on weight these days?”

  “I’m going to bleed to death!”

  “No, you’re not. Listen, nobody at Langley is going to question whether or not you were helping me when they find out I shot you three times.”

  Hanley was fighting shock. Still his eyes widened.

  “Three times?”

  Court stood, quickly pointed the pistol again, and shot his former boss in his left thigh.