The Devil You Don't Know (American Praetorians Book 4)

by Peter Nealen

  The sudden silence when the gunfire ended was eerie. We stayed put for a minute, scanning for any new threats. None materialized. The policia didn't show themselves, either. Hell, there weren't even any sirens; they weren't even going to stick their necks out as far as the Arizona cops had.

  Leaving Little Bob to cover rear security, Jim and I moved forward to check the bodies. I was actually hoping for a live one; I wanted some information.

  But when we moved through, kicking weapons away from clutching fingers, it was obvious that we weren't going to be so lucky this time. We'd chopped them into hamburger. One had taken what looked like three rounds to the head, somehow. There were three nicely grouped, neat holes just beneath his left eye; there wasn't much left of the right side of his skull. The rest were just as dead. Old boy who'd tried crawling away had apparently died as soon as he'd stopped moving. He was staring at the brightening sky with a look of agonized surprise on his face. He looked about fifteen, in spite of the big “XIII” tattoo on his cheek.

  Jim and I quickly rifled through their pockets and found cash, cell phones, ammo, and not much else. No flash drives, no notes, nothing. We pocketed the phones and left the rest. Maybe the numbers and text messages would give up something.

  I left Little Bob and Ben up on the high ground to hold security while the rest of us headed back down to the road to assess the damage. I was pretty sure that at that range, some of those wild bursts had to have hit something.

  They had. Two tires were flat, and there was a bullet hole in the hood of my Expedition. Larry popped the hood to make sure the round hadn't hit anything vital. That was when Simon Canfield, the right-seater in the rear box truck, stumbled out of the cab, clutching his bloody leg. He'd been hit.

  I guided him down to sit against the front tire and carefully cut his pantleg away from the wound. It looked like a through-and-through to the calf, though it wasn't that clean; the bullet had deformed going through the door, and it looked like it had torn a pretty good chunk of meat out on its way through. He wasn't squirting blood, though, so it hadn't hit anything major.

  “Where's your first-aid kit?” I asked, with a sudden sinking suspicion.

  Canfield was looking pretty pale; he was slipping into shock. “There's one in the glove compartment.”

  That wasn't going to be any kind of useful trauma kit for a gunshot wound, but I clambered up and fished it out anyway. I'd been right. It wasn't much more than a space blanket, some antiseptic, some bandages, and a roll of gauze. The gauze would help, but there wasn't going to be enough. I looked around as I clambered down, but everybody was either changing a tire, checking engines, or holding security. I jogged over to the Expedition, dug in the back, and pulled out our vehicle's trauma kit. These fuckers were going to owe us some medical supplies when this was over.

  I wrapped Canfield in the space blanket from his inadequate first aid kit, then packed his wound with gauze and wrapped it tightly in an ace wrap. “You'll be fine,” I told him. I was a little worried about the shock. He hadn't lost much blood, but just getting shot is traumatizing enough to some people to put them in a downward spiral. And this was no place to leave him in a hospital; even with all the violence in Mexico, a gunshot wound showing up in the hospital would probably raise questions. “You're going to ride in my vehicle for a bit.” That way at least I could keep an eye on him, and intervene if he started circling the drain.

  I helped him to his feet and started toward the Expedition. Larry had just finished his examination, and gave me a thumbs-up. Nothing vital appeared to be damaged. He helped me get Canfield in the back seat, then I went forward to Harold's truck. Nick was finishing pulling aside the makeshift spike strip, made of what looked like nails and white engineer tape, that had provided the obstacle to block us into the ambush.

  Harold hadn't gotten out. That pissed me off. These were his people; we were responsible for protecting them, but he was supposed to be the manager. Sure, he was scared. But he still should have stirred off his ass to make sure everybody was all right once the shooting stopped.

  I jerked his door open. He looked down at me, a little startled. “Is it safe?” he asked. “Can we get out of here now?”

  I squinted up at him unhappily. The guy was obviously out of his element. Most logistics companies don't usually have to deal with being in the middle of firefights. “Simon got hit,” I said flatly. His eyes widened at that.

  “Is he...” He gulped.

  “He's all right,” I told him. “It was a through-and-through; didn't hit anything vital. He's riding with me so I can make sure he doesn't go into shock. But right now, you and I need to talk.”

  He looked around as if expecting every murderer and assassin in Mexico to jump out of the weeds on either side of the road. “Right now? Right here? Shouldn't we be moving?”

  “I have security set, and we'll get moving soon enough,” I said. “I've got some questions that are not going to wait. You answer them, and we can get on our way.”

  Harold looked at me for a second, searching my face like he was hoping to see a sign that I was fucking around. I wasn't. I didn't glare at him, but just watched him, carefully expressionless. Finally, he reluctantly climbed down out of the truck.

  With a jerk of my head, I indicated that we should walk. I didn't necessarily want any of the rest of the Harmon-Dominguez people to hear, though it was pretty certain that what was said was going to get repeated. I just didn't want to deal with any more argument and bullshit than I was already going to get from him.

  I stopped a few paces away from the truck, right on the side of the road. I kept looking at our back-trail; it was only a matter of time before another truck came along. We did need to be gone by then, but this had to be addressed.

  “This is the second ambush in the last twenty-four hours,” I said, my hands on my hips. “Now, what that tells me is that somebody has told these guys where we're going, and how we're going to get there. I know the leak's not from my company.” That went without saying, but it would reinforce the fact in his mind that the guys with guns didn't trust him. “So it's got to be coming from your side of the house.” I squinted at him. “Why would some of your people be talking MS-13 in on a regular shipment going into Mexico, Harold? And why would they be interested enough in it to make two tries, especially when the first one was so fucking disastrous for the ambush force?”

  The truth was, I was trying to rattle him. There was something fishy about this movement, and the fact that one of the major transnational criminal groups in the Western Hemisphere was after it, I was convinced, had nothing to do with our mission to go after El Duque. I was getting that “standing in a snake-pit” feeling again, and I didn't like it. If I could get Harold nervous enough to blurt something out, maybe I could learn enough to navigate this particular slippery slope.

  But he either wasn't talking, or he was so determined to “see no evil, hear no evil” that he honestly had no idea. “I don't know,” he protested, spreading his hands helplessly. “All I know is that we are supposed to take the shipment to a representative of SCC in Mazatlan. We were given the contact protocols and that was all.”

  “You didn't wonder a little bit about why you'd be trucking a few million dollars down into Mexico?” I asked, a little incredulously. I was spitballing the number; I had no idea what all was in those two trucks. “Wire transfers still work down to Mexico, you know. Why ship the cash?”

  He started to get defensive. “There are any number of reasons to move cash instead of making wire transfers,” he said. “Just because we didn't get briefed on it doesn't mean there's anything nefarious going on. I'm sure there isn't; Harmon-Dominguez is a reputable company, and if it wasn't for the present situation, I'd take your insinuations as a reason to terminate our business partnership.” His voice shook a little bit at that last; he was blustering, knew it, and knew that I knew it. We'd just saved their bacon; he wasn't about to try to do away with his security just because I didn't trust hi
s company. The same company that hadn't told him the whole story. He wouldn't meet my eyes during that little speech, either. He was on shaky ground, and he was starting to feel it wobble. It was beginning to dawn on him that maybe there really was something squirrelly going on.

  I stared at him for a moment, while he shifted and stared at the ground, the road, anywhere but at me. Finally, I just nodded curtly. “Fine,” I bit out. “Have it your way. We'll get moving. But you need to understand something.” I stepped in close and lowered my voice. He flinched back as I moved, but I'd been too quick for him to get much distance. “I am not a trusting man. Neither are my teammates. You might go so far as to call us downright suspicious motherfuckers. This has kept us, and our clients, alive in some very violent, unpleasant places.

  “But it has also made us very, very angry when the client fucks with the performance of our job by not telling us what we're dealing with.” I brushed past him, heading for my Expedition. “Let's go. There's going to be more traffic on this road any minute, and I don't want to be here when it shows up.” I could only assume that the gunfire had kept anyone away from this stretch of highway for a while.

  We mounted up and got moving. We were down two spare tires, but I mused that it could have been worse, especially given how close the bad guys had been while they hosed the kill zone down with bullets.

  Even as we pulled away from the failed ambush, leaving the corpses and their weapons lying in the dirt, the first cars started to appear around the bend. We were leaving none too soon.

  The next check didn't come from MS-13. It came from the Mexican police.

  It hadn't taken long to get from Magdalena to Santa Ana. It was a quick pass through increasingly level farmland, with hills covered in scrub forest rising to our left. In several places, dirt roads came up to join the highway, and I always got a little tense there, but the ground was open enough that I could see if the road was clear. No new ambushes materialized.

  As we came around the bend and through another cut on the way into Santa Ana, we came face-to-face with a roadblock. A serpentine of orange plastic jersey barriers had been set up across the road, with two blue-and-white Ford F-250s mounting blue-and-white light bars and with “Policia Federal” emblazoned on their cabs sitting behind it. There were almost a dozen men in black fatigues, fully kitted out in plate carriers, helmets, and balaclavas, with M-16s held ready, standing around the checkpoint, all watching the road coming from Magdalena. Another helmeted policeman was behind an M-240 set up on the roof of one of the pickups.

  “Nice and easy, gents,” I called over the radio. “I don't want to be trading bullets with the federales if we can avoid it.” In an ideal world, it shouldn't even have been an issue. By any account, for the most part, the Mexican Federal Police were supposed to be the good guys. But between our suspicions about the cargo we were escorting, the connection, albeit separated by several degrees, with El Duque, the firepower we were packing, and the bodies we'd left behind in Magdalena, getting stopped could turn out to be disastrous. We were in something of a gray area. We were finding ourselves in that gray area a lot lately.

  Two of the policia stepped forward as we slowed, hands held up to signal us to stop. I twisted around in my seat. “Canfield, if you don't want to wind up in a Mexican jail, I suggest you sit up and try to look not-shot.”

  He was leaning back in the seat, but hadn't laid down. He straightened when I said that, taking a deep breath. His color looked a little better; he was bouncing back a bit. “Do you think they'd arrest us? We weren't the ones who attacked anybody, and you said it was MS-13 who did the shooting...”

  “We've got weapons that it's illegal for Mexican citizens to carry, let alone gringos,” I explained. “They'd probably throw us in a hole just in case, so let's not give them a reason to take that precaution.”

  Canfield nodded, adjusting himself in his seat to try to look as normal as possible. I didn't know what he thought of the overall situation, but he definitely didn't want to go to a Mexican prison. At least he didn't decide to make an argument out of it just short of a police checkpoint.

  Nick let the Yukon roll to a stop just short of the first Jersey barrier. The two closest policemen walked up to the vehicle, one stopping just in front of it, but at such an angle that he could shoot through the windshield but not be in too much danger of being run over if Nick stomped on the gas, the other walking to the driver's side window. He tapped on the glass, one hand staying on the firing control of his rifle.

  Nick rolled down the window and handed him the same set of papers we had presented at the border in Nogales. The policeman, inscrutable behind his mask, took them, stepped back, and examined them, never taking his hand off his weapon. Then he spoke into his radio. He waited, and I held my breath. The whole damned thing could unravel right here, depending on how closely they decided to look at the trucks full of gringos. I found myself hoping that they'd rather take a bribe. Dirty cops can sometimes be dealt with.

  But after a few moments that seemed to stretch out into an hour, he stepped back to the window, handed the papers back, and waved the Yukon through. When the box truck moved forward, it got waved through without a second glance. The same thing happened with the rest of us.

  “There must be something pretty impressive in those papers,” Larry commented, as we left the checkpoint behind and entered the town of Santa Ana. “Nobody wants to stop us except for the gangbangers.”

  “Either there's some high-level cover worded into them,” I mused, “or whoever has an interest in this shipment's already gone ahead and paid off all the cops on this route.” I wasn't sure which possibility was more disturbing.

  Chapter 4

  “Think we can go around?”

  We were parked on a dusty turnout. An abandoned red and white hacienda-style house sat tangled in weeds next to a pair of large, graffiti-scrawled, corrugated metal warehouses. Piled tires lined the sagging barbed wire fence, and a white semi-trailer, also overgrown with weeds, sat between us and the highway. Hermosillo was just over the ridge.

  Jim and I were leaning over the hood of my Expedition, with a photomap of the area laid out on the hot metal. I shook my head. “It looks like we can skirt around the edges a little, but we won't be able to avoid it entirely.”

  Jim ran a hand over his beard. “Fuck. I don't want to get in a street fight in fucking Hermosillo.”

  “Getting out of Basra was probably worse,” I pointed out.

  “That's your benchmark?” He snorted. “That's like saying a tire iron to the nuts is worse than a baseball bat to the head. I seem to remember that just about every one of us got shot, fragged, or both on that run, and we lost a couple of Team Hussein in the process.” He grimaced. “Two years ago, I wouldn't have worried so much. But Hermosillo's really gone to shit in the last couple of months.”

  He wasn't wrong. We'd both done our research leading into this job. Hermosillo had been solidly a part of the Sinaloa empire for years, with tons upon tons of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and meth moving north without much trouble. Sure, there had been squabbles, with plenty of dead cops, dead narcos, and a couple of dead reporters. The cartels had never been so monolithic that there wasn't going to be violence even in the heart of their territory.

  But ever since the Mexican Marines had captured Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman in 2014, the Sinaloa Cartel had started to fragment. Little, regional capos had started to try to grab their piece of “El Chapo's” pie. Hermosillo had become a prize in the struggle for territory. It was a choke point on that particular drug route, or “plaza.” It was strategically important. About three hundred people had been killed in street fighting in the last two months alone.

  The risk in venturing in there wasn't just the Mara Salvatrucha thugs who wanted the cargo. It was the Sinaloa factions who would likely dog-pile onto any fight that started.

  “This ain't the best quality overhead,” I said, squinting at it. It really wasn't. I could barely make out city blocks.
“But it looks like if we take this way”--I traced the route along the eastern edge of the city-- “we can avoid most of the built-up areas.” I paused, studying it, then straightened up. “Fuck. I can't pick out ambush sites on this piece of shit. But there it is. We can't avoid the city entirely.” Well, we might, if we didn't have box trucks to escort. I didn't trust those fucking things on the dirt roads out in the desert; they weren't all terrain vehicles by a long shot.

  We stared out at the desert and the highway for a moment. “Well, there's no point in wasting time procrastinating,” Jim finally said. “We can't put this off until nighttime, and the sicarios are probably out in greater force when it's dark, anyway.” That was a change from our time in the Middle East, and one we'd have to get used to. Darkness would still provide an advantage, particularly with the NVGs in our kitbags, but Arabs don't like to be out after dark. Mexicans don't give a shit. It's easier to kill people and get away in the dark when the Mexican Marines are after your ass, anyway.

  I agreed with a monosyllable, as I swept the imagery off the hood of the truck. Larry was still sitting at the wheel, watching us from behind his sunglasses. When I got in and slammed the door, he didn't turn, but just said, “Well, that didn't look too promising.”

  “We were hoping we could find an alternate route around Hermosillo,” I said. “No such luck.”

  Larry flashed his headlights at Nick's Yukon, which was already poised to get back on the highway. Nick waved from the window and started rolling.