Age of Blood

by Weston Ochse

  Peeking around the corner, Walker saw that there was less than a foot and a half between the sides of the van and the walls. If the police were going to come and get them, they’d have to either go over or under.

  He took off after Holmes. As he turned into the cross alley, he saw Laws using some of his own 550 cord to tie the hands of a man in a delivery uniform. He was pressed against the hood of a yellow van with a picture of an ecstatic chicken on the side below the words POLLO FELIZ. After Laws finished, he spun the driver around. The man’s eyes danced wildly above his gag. Laws pulled out a bag and placed it over the man’s head. Then he picked him up, carried him over to a dumpster, and tossed him in.

  Meanwhile, Yank started the vehicle and pulled forward. Holmes got in the back with Emily. Walker joined them, happy that the back of the truck was filled with cooked chicken instead of a decapitated body. Benches lined one wall and he sat by the rear door. His vantage was perfect. It wasn’t until after they pulled out that a rotund policeman ran around the corner. He glanced once at the truck, then dismissed it. Instead, he had his pistol trained on the back of the restaurant where the truck had just made a delivery.

  They turned the corner and pulled into traffic.

  “Shit, shit, shit.” Holmes tapped his ear. “I can’t get through to the others.”

  “Hey Yank, want some chicken?” Walker yelled, checking on the trays of cooked meat.

  “You asking me because I’m black?”

  “I’m asking you because I’m hungry and you stole a chicken truck.” Walker reached under a piece of tinfoil and pulled a leg free. It had been slow roasted. The smell was succulent. The meat begged to fall off the bone. He was bringing the leg to his mouth when he noticed Laws frowning. “What?”

  “You’re hungry?”

  Walker grinned and cleaned the chicken from the bone in three fast bites. “I’m always hungry during an op.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Emily said, her face turning the color of a turtle’s underbelly.

  “Walker, try and establish coms,” Holmes orderd.

  Walker dropped the bone onto the counter and wiped his hands on his pants. “Roger.”

  “So no news on the senator?” Laws asked.

  The girl perked up. “My father? Is he coming here?”

  Holmes nodded. “He was coming down to meet you.”

  She smiled. “So that’s what the man meant—the man who killed the driver. He said he was there to save me and that he had a meeting with my father.”

  “Who was the man who killed the driver?” Laws asked. “What did he look like?”

  “Tall. Light-skinned. He was Mexican but more Spanish. He was wearing a white suit.”

  “Know who that sounds like?” Laws said to Holmes, who nodded in return.

  She squeezed shut her eyes. “It was really strange. I don’t know how he cut off that man’s head. I never even saw a weapon.”

  “Didn’t you say that he had a meeting with your father?”

  She nodded.

  “How’d he even know the senator was coming? What sort of meeting is he going to have?”

  “The sort of meeting where the senator leaves in the custody of someone else.” Holmes punched his leg. “You think Ramon had this planned the entire time?”

  Walker suddenly got a weak signal. “—are in trouble … senator is gone.” He could barely understand Jen’s voice. There was a problem with the reception. “YaYa—oh my god, YaYa!” Then she began to sob, and the sound was so terrible and miserable that if he could’ve, Walker would have reached through the headset to make it stop.

  Yank banged on the steering wheel. “What the fuck is going on?”

  “Airport. Laws will give directions. Go now,” Holmes commanded.

  Yank’s face showed stone-cold rage. “What the hell is going on?”

  “Shut up and drive,” Laws barked.

  “This isn’t like any mission I’ve been on. We were always briefed. We always knew. We—”

  Laws cut him off. “This isn’t like any other mission because we aren’t like any other SEALs.” Then he added, “Take a left at the next light.”

  Yank complied, but couldn’t help but cry, “Bullshit.”

  “We’ve been over this. This is what being a member of Triple Six is about.” Laws shook his head and slapped Yank on the shoulder. “It’s not all crazy monsters and supernatural mumbo jumbo. It’s being able to make the best decision you possibly can without any thought whatsoever.”

  Walker knew that there had always been speculation about selection to Triple Six. Every SEAL had three days of screening and selection consisting of interviews, role playing, and test taking. They compared their answers when they were drunk, but most of the questions had been individually purposed. No one could figure it out. If there were any common denominators, it was the ability of a Triple Six member to react on their feet and not be dedicated to the exact replication of a preplanned or prepracticed ideal.

  Holmes once again proved to the universe why he was the leader. “Everyone calm the fuck down and stop jumping to conclusions,” he said in an emotionless, even-keel voice. “We’ll find out what’s going on once we get there. If this is all a misunderstanding, we’ll all have a beer and laugh about it. If this really is what Ms. Costello says it is, then we’ll have to postpone the beer and laughter until after we rescue the senator and save the day. Understand?”

  Nicely done, thought Walker.

  Yank nodded, then said, “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. This is just fucking with my head.”

  Laws began to laugh. “This is nothing, SEAL. If you think this is fucking with your head, just wait. It gets better.” He laughed again. “It gets so much better!”

  44

  MEXICO CITY, MEXICO. AFTERNOON.

  Walker stood at the Hotel Majestic’s floor-to-ceiling window staring out at the Zócalo, or Plaza de la Constitución. The immense plaza had been a gathering place since Aztec times. Surrounding the Zócalo were government buildings and modern museums. Beneath the Zócalo were temples from the time of the Aztecs, most of them still unexcavated. The Zócalo was a place where kings and queens were received, where military parades celebrated Mexico’s liberation from Spain, where speeches by everyone of influence occurred. Even now there were a thousand people chatting, eating lunch, reading, playing chess, kicking soccer balls, and flying kites. If this was the population in microcosm, then it didn’t seem so bad, these thousand people standing in a historic concrete field, the Mexican flag rising from the center on a hundred-meter-high flagpole.

  But like anywhere, if you looked closer, you could see the stain of sin, like watching the universe through a flyspecked screen, and Walker was beginning to wonder if the stain in Mexico, like it was in so many other places, wasn’t something permanent. From the moment conquistador Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro rode into what was now modern-day Mexico, perhaps he’d brought with him the seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. The country’s entire bloody history was carved by these sins, as a conquering army came and took everything. The only problem was that they never really went home. The conquerors stayed and in the staying realized the only people they had now to conquer were themselves. YaYa had been right.

  The other SEAL had said something once, when they were talking about going on a weekend vacation to a Mexican resort. They hadn’t gone because cartel violence had put it off limits to the American military, but YaYa had been against it from the start.

  “Sounds like a bad idea to me. You’ve seen the way people are down there. Greed is in their blood. They’ll do anything to get more of everything. I bet if I took down a bucket of sand they’d steal that, too.”

  “Kind of harsh, don’t you think?” Walker had said. “People get like that when times are hard.”

  And YaYa had shaken his head viciously. “No. Not at all. Mexico is different. They’ve been living in an Age of Blood ever since the first Aztec rolled the h
ead of a farmer down a temple stairs. Never in the history of the world has there been one place with so much violence, so much self-hate, so much revulsion at the reality of how great they were and how far they’ve fallen. It’s like the conquerors came, never left, and became their own victims.”

  Walker thought that much the same could be said for America. Although there was no great Aztec nation present when the first Europeans began to plunder the bounty of the nation, the indigenous peoples had their own way of doing things. Early American Indians were called savages because of how they acted. But wouldn’t anyone act in the same manner if everything they knew was being taken from them? In the end, who were the savages? The conquerors or the conquered?

  And now SEAL Team 666 was living in their own personal Age of Blood. Walker turned from the window and sat on the edge of the bed. He reached down to pet Hoover. Yank was already snoozing in the bed next to his. He could hear Laws, Billings, Jen, and the two techs talking in the other room. Musso had been taken to the hospital. He’d been shot. Correct that. YaYa had shot him in the stomach.

  Everything was so fucked up.

  Holmes had decided to put them in a hotel because there were issues. He didn’t want to return to the embassy or else he knew he’d lose command and control. As it was, he’d gone radio-silent from all support so he wouldn’t have to answer the messages from NSW Command that unequivocally stated the FBI had current jurisdiction on the missing senator and his aide, and that Triple Six was to stand down, despite having successfully saved the senator’s daughter.

  They’d tried to drop her off, but she refused to leave. She’d said she was tired of being part of the problem and wanted to be part of the solution. Holmes had decided to keep her, just in case she could shed some light on her captors.

  Because Holmes was furious.

  SEAL Team 666 would get the senator back.

  Period.

  But Walker realized how hard it would be. They were off the grid, which meant no help from anyone back in the States and no help from anyone connected to the embassy. They were all alone, except for Holmes’s and Laws’s contacts inside the Mexican military.

  They had none of their equipment, except that which had been on their persons. Everything on their plane had been confiscated because the FBI considered it a crime scene. The FBI had also confiscated the plane the senator came down in, which held much of their additional ammo and equipment requests. Gone were their other weapons, ammo, computers, and surveillance devices. Unless there was a local Spy-Mart or SEAL-Mart, they’d be hard-pressed to figure out how to MacGyver their way to figure out where the senator was and save him.

  According to the official statement, immediately after Senator Withers’s plane had set down, YaYa had received a phone call. He then began acting strangely, barking and laughing much like he had prior to his exorcism. Then when the senator’s plane had pulled next to the open ramp of the C-130 Hercules, and right after he got out to meet the fine young Americans aboard the plane, YaYa had opened fire. He shot the commo box in the rear of the C-130, then leaped atop two Secret Service agents, knocking them both unconscious. Musso had tried to be a hero and was gut-shot for his daring. Everyone had screamed for YaYa to stop, but as Jen had described him, he was less a man and more animal. After coldcocking the Mexican crew chief who tried sneaking up behind him, YaYa had dragged the senator away.

  No one followed. Instead Billings, who’d stayed in the jet and had seen it all, radioed their emergency. They managed to shut down the airport, but not soon enough. YaYa and the senator were gone. They had no leads. They had no evidence. All they had was a member of SEAL Team 666 who’d gone batshit crazy and taken the senior serving senator on the Sissy.

  The door opened and Holmes came in, his face a cartographic merging of worry lines. He went straight into the other room. Walker woke Yank, and they joined him.

  Jen, Billings, and Laws sat on one of the beds, while the other two techs, whose names turned out to be Goran and Patrick, fussed with two tablets, trying to maneuver through the local wireless using their own shadow IPs. Holmes sat heavily on the other bed. Out of habit, Yank went to the window to check outside. Walker remained where he was in the doorway, hoping their commander had a plan.

  “So here’s the deal,” Holmes said. “I had some friends in Dam Neck contact USSOCOM to check our status and it’s not good. We’ve been put on the blacklist, which means any contact has to be reported and they’re not going to stop until they find us.”

  “They don’t think we did anything, do they?” Yank looked from one SEAL to the other.

  Holmes shook his head. “They don’t know. The operators have probably figured it out, but the bureaucrats learned all their strategy from Hollywood, therefore we have to be involved somehow.” He laughed hollowly. “So we’re not going to be getting help from our own anytime soon.”

  “But we knew that already,” Laws pointed out.

  “We did,” Holmes said, nodding, “but I wanted to check out how far they went with it.”

  “All the way to blacklist, looks like.” Laws put his head in his hands.

  “So what now?” Walker asked. He hated being cooped up in the hotel room. There had to be something they could do.

  “We can do two things. Waiting for someone to contact us is a possibility. The problem with that is they have no way to do that. Cell phones are dumped so we can’t be tracked. If YaYa wanted to reach out and contact us, say in the event he came to his senses, he couldn’t even do that.”

  “I’m hoping it wasn’t something he planned,” Walker said, encouraging the others to come to his friend’s rescue. “I mean, we all know it wasn’t YaYa who did this, right?”

  Yank looked at Walker and shook his head. “Sure looked like the same crazy motherfucker.”

  “But that must mean that thing must still be inside him.”

  “Then why didn’t you feel it, Mr. Radar?” Laws asked, his voice angry.

  “It must have hid from me. It must have—”

  “Stow it.” Holmes stood and went to the window. “We’ll worry about guilt or innocence when we have the senator back safe and sound. Until then, let God sort it out.” He turned back to the men and women in the room and folded his hands behind his back. He stared at them for a long moment.

  It was Laws who spoke first. “You have a plan.”

  Holmes nodded and allowed himself a small smile.

  “And you have an ace in the hole,” Laws added.

  Holmes nodded again, ever so slightly. His smile remained in place.

  Laws high-fived Walker, who wasn’t sure what he was high-fiving. Then he turned back. “So give. What’s the plan?”

  Holmes checked his watch; then he raised his chin. “Hey, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, you able to hack into the police database?”

  Goran and Patrick both grinned. “If it’s a Linux system it’ll be easy enough.”

  “Wait, do you speak Spanish?” Jen looked from one to the other. “I didn’t know you spoke Spanish.”

  Goran explained, “We don’t have to know Spanish. Linux is written in English for all intents and purposes. If we can get in, then we vector the information through Google Translate or another third-party program.”

  Jen wasn’t convinced. “I still think we should have someone who speaks Spanish. Do we have anyone?”

  Laws raised his hand.

  “What don’t you speak?” she asked.

  “Swahili. It’s all those pops and clicks that confuse me,” he said.

  Jen addressed Holmes. “So if they get inside, what do you want them to find?”

  “Any reports of vehicles stolen from the airport during a two-hour period starting an hour before the senator’s plane landed and ending an hour after he was taken. I need to know if he was working alone or with help. If he had help, then we’re probably lost because whoever met him brought the vehicle with them.”

  “They could have stolen it from the airport,” Walker offered.<
br />
  Holmes shook his head. “We’re not going to be that lucky, but we’ll check. Of course, if YaYa was working alone or if he had to obtain his own transportation, then there should be a record of the missing vehicle.”

  “What if it was taken from the long-term lot?” Guildenstern asked. “You might never find it then.”

  “I doubt YaYa would be able to get that far carrying the senator. My guess is that he found the nearest vehicle he could get his hands on. Based on the layout of the airport, something nearer the private terminal.”

  “And once we find the vehicle, we can insert an all-points bulletin for the car into the system,” Jen said. Her eyes were wide as she stood and began consulting with her two techs.

  “What about us?” Yank asked. “What if we find him? All we have are P229s. As much as I like them, I think we need bigger guns.”

  As if on cue, someone knocked on the door.

  Yank and Walker pulled their weapons free and aimed at the door while Holmes moved to check it. Seeing what he wanted to see through the peephole, he waved for the two SEALs to put down their weapons and he opened the door.

  Navarre walked inside. When the door was closed, he and Holmes embraced.

  “Tough day, amigo,” Navarre said. “This is not a good situation.”

  “An understatement,” Holmes said flatly.

  “I’ve been told to report to headquarters. They want a full account of my assistance to you and your team about … how do you say it, boon dangle?”

  “Boondoggle, sure. Our government wants plausible deniability.” Holmes punched his left palm with his right fist. “But I understand. You need to take care of you and your own.”

  “I’ve taken care of you first, old friend. That shit on the border with the ’cabras has been bothering me. I want to make it up.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a keycard from the same hotel. “Room 333. It’s a suite. Your gear is in there.”