by Peter Nealen
“Yes,” Harold said, “yes, of course.” He still sounded shaken.
Well, bud, that's what happens when your company gets in bed with bad people, I thought.
We moved back to the vehicles and got in. As I pulled my door closed, five more vehicles came out of a deeper parking lot and drove past, heading out of the port. I turned to watch as a Yukon, two box trucks with the Harmon-Dominguez logo on the side, and two Expeditions drove past and disappeared.
“Did you see that?” I asked Larry.
“I sure did,” he replied. “What does that shit tell you?”
I frowned after the retreating vehicles, even as Ernesto's PSD got back into their Suburbans. They didn't drive off, though, but just sat there, apparently waiting for something. “It tells me that they either knew about the ambush attempts, or expected them. And they knew enough about what we were driving, even after the Green Valley hit, to have a decoy set up.” The other convoy was out of sight, but I looked in the direction it had gone anyway. “Wherever we're going, they're going somewhere else, to draw off the wolves.”
“At least one pack of them,” Larry muttered. “That didn't look like a meeting with the representative of a multi-national trade firm.”
“It wasn't,” I said darkly. “It was a meeting with a hatchet-man. How well could you see his PSD?”
“Not very. They didn't look right, though.”
I shook my head. “No, they didn't. I couldn't see any giveaways besides the attitudes, but I'd lay good odds that they were all sicarios.”
“So, what do you figure?” he asked. The Suburbans were still sitting there. They had to be allowing the decoy time to draw off any surveillance before we moved. It could be a while. “Have the bad guys decided to drop any pretense of a cover now that we're in Mexico?”
“Maybe,” I answered. “We'll just have to see. And be ready to kill all of them if we have to.”
“That goes without saying.”
Chapter 6
“Well, this doesn't look good,” I muttered.
I was driving again; it had already been a long haul. We had turned off the highway a couple hours before, near El Salto. We were now weaving through the mountains on a gravel road that, so far, wasn't bad enough to bog down the box trucks, but one we still couldn't do more than about twenty-five to thirty miles an hour on. We'd already switched drivers twice since leaving Mazatlan, and we hadn't even covered a hundred miles yet.
We had just come around a long curve, with walls of pines and firs on either side of the road. As the route sloped down into the valley ahead, I saw a couple of beat-up looking pickups parked on the narrow shoulder, and a group of armed men standing in the road. The guy with the G36, wearing a white t-shirt and black jeans, held up his hand for us to stop. Looking around, I could see at least a dozen other men, all in civilian clothing, with their faces covered with bandannas or balaclavas. They were sporting a mix of AR-15s, AKs, a few G3s, and even one long-barreled Uzi carbine. I was pretty sure we were supposed to look at them, and not at the sandbagged position back in the trees that was covering the road with an HK21.
Ernesto's Suburbans were covered in dust, looking more gray than black by then. They braked to a stop, and then just sat there, without moving to get out, while the dust settled. Even then, they still sat there, waiting.
Finally, old boy with the G36 walked up to the lead Sub. The driver rolled down his window, and there was a brief exchange of words, followed by the window going back up and the rifleman walking up the line to the center Suburban. As he approached, the rear door's window slid down. At my angle, I couldn't see much more than the darkness inside the vehicle, but I was pretty sure that was where Ernesto was sitting. The man in the white t-shirt started talking through the window.
“Wish I could hear what they're saying,” I said.
“You're in a better position than I am,” Larry said, “I can't even see what's happening.” His angle wouldn't let him see more than the ass end of the box truck in front of us, and a couple of the gunmen hanging out on the side of the road. I filled him in briefly on what was happening.
After only a few moments, the man with the rifle gave Ernesto a sort of half-assed salute and waved the vehicles forward. The window slid back up, and the SUVs started moving. In a moment, we were rolling along, gravel crunching under the tires, as the militia stared at us.
I studied them as we went by. I couldn't tell who they were. As we finished rounding the bend, a rancho sprawled across the valley in front of us, so I assumed they were based there. But whether they were local militia, police trying not to look like police, bandits, or cartel-affiliated gangbangers, I couldn't tell.
“I wonder what that was all about,” Larry said, echoing my own thoughts.
“I'm sure if we knew more about the atmospherics down here, we might have been able to tell,” I said. “But we've got shit for that kind of intel. There were probably a dozen indicators that we completely missed. Colors, the way they wore their bandannas, something. We just don't have the context.”
Larry studied the topographic map in his lap. We'd ventured well past the imagery we had printed out, and so we were tracking our progress on the topo maps, which had most of the country covered. “We're in the middle of nowhere in the Sierra Madre,” he said, frowning. “All of our intel has to do with activity in cities.”
I snorted. “Hell, most of our intel's probably out of date, anyway. From what little I have been hearing, the splintering and infighting down here is getting worse every day. The Marines just rolled up another would-be capo in Durango last month.” Simon Jesus Rosales had risen almost overnight to attempt to seize control of the city. He'd managed to grab a good-sized chunk, too, though estimates seemed to range from thirty percent to seventy. There was some disagreement as to just how much of the city he had actually controlled. At any rate, two weeks later, the Mexican Marines had kicked in his door, flashbanged his ass on the shitter, and dragged him off to Penal del Altiplano. “The organizational map in Mexico is shifting faster than it does in Iraq.”
Larry shook his head. “Whoever they are, it looks like Reyes' people have some kind of arrangement with them.”
I had to agree. “I'd say they're either locals who were paid off, or Ernesto's cronies who were sent ahead to secure the route.” As we rolled through the rancho, which looked pretty abandoned, the latter explanation started to look quite a bit more likely to me. “Either way, this is one hell of a well-thought-out and prepared operation. Somebody had this all planned, every step of the way.”
He nodded. “And they kept it pretty compartmentalized, too. Mazatlan must have always been the link-up point, instead of the transfer point. Nobody on the actual convoy ever got told that, though.” He mused for a second, scratching his beard as he stared out the window at the trees going by. “Do you think the upper management knew that part?”
“No way of knowing,” I replied. None of this was really part of our mission. We just had to do our part of the contract and get eyes-on Reyes' people, after which we could break away and start working Reyes' organization until we found the link to El Duque. But wherever we were headed, it looked like we had a long way to get there, and discussing this shit helped pass the time. “Even if we broached the subject, they'd probably profess ignorance, or cite 'necessary security measures for a sensitive transaction' or some such horseshit.”
Larry laughed. “Yeah, 'sensitive transaction,'” he said. “That sounds about right.” He went quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, he sounded thoughtful, and a little concerned. “Jeff, I'm getting the distinct feeling that whatever we're headed for on this little trip isn't going to be remotely aboveboard. They wouldn't be taking these kind of security measures for something legal. For fuck's sake, Pemex doesn't have this kind of security; they get robbed all the damned time.”
“We figured that whatever was in the trucks was dirty from the beginning,” I pointed out. “What's your point?”
�
��My point is, if we witness cash, or weapons, or something like that getting passed to narcos, terrorists, or whoever the fuck, are they going to be able to afford to let us go back north?”
It was a question that had been kind of hovering in the back of my mind ever since we'd met with Ernesto in Mazatlan. We weren't exactly knights in shining armor, but we were still, to anyone's knowledge outside of certain circles, a standard security contracting company. Harmon-Dominguez sure as hell had no idea what we'd done in Somalia, Yemen, and Iraq. So there was no reason to believe that Reyes' people did, either. Would they want regular, run-of-the-mill rent-a-cops seeing whatever exchange went down, and then possibly talking about it? I began to doubt it.
“You think they're going to try to eliminate any witnesses?” I asked.
“I think we need to be prepared for the possibility,” he said.
I chuckled, without humor. “I guess if that happens, our reputation is going to spread a little bit further, isn't it?” There was no way we were going down without a fight, and if we did go down, we were going to take one hell of an honor guard with us.
Still, I found myself hoping it didn't come to that. It was a complication that we didn't need. I recalled Jim's oft-repeated dictum. “The more points of failure that are possible, the more likely the whole op's going to go in the shitter.”
As it turned out, we got a chance to increase our reputation earlier than we'd expected.
The sun had gone down over the Sierra Madre behind us barely an hour before. We were almost out of the mountains; the pine and fir forests were gone, most of the oaks were behind us, and we were threading our way through hills covered in more widely-scattered scrub and cactus. All the vehicles were running with their headlights on; though ours didn't seem to be doing much more than glaring off the clouds of dust kicked up by the rest of the convoy in front of us. Jim had to be miserable trying to see in the rear. The dust had settled on every surface inside the vehicle by then; the air conditioner's filter seemed to have given up. My throat felt dry and scratchy from all of it, and I occasionally had to suppress a cough.
It might have been helpful to go blacked out and drive on NVGs, but obviously the Harmon-Dominguez people couldn't do that, and I didn't want Ernesto or his goons knowing we had the capability. So we plowed through the desert night all lit up like we didn't give a fuck who saw us coming.
We got down to the valley floor, where the road ran alongside a river. The riverbed was just a dark line of vegetation in the moonlight to the right, barely visible through the dust. Ahead of us, I could see a few lights, gleaming orange in the evening dark. It looked like a farm or ranch up ahead; there weren't enough lights for a town.
But as we got closer, white headlights blazed out suddenly, and then a handful of trucks were surging up onto the road to block the way.
The way Ernesto's security types reacted was telling. They stopped suddenly, spreading out to the sides of the road in a textbook herringbone formation. Doors opened on the opposite sides of the Suburbans from the trucks on the road, and the goons piled out. Larry had killed our headlights as soon as the blocking force appeared, but Harold hadn't. In the white circle of the box truck's headlights, I could clearly see one of the dark-suited PSD take a knee behind the Suburban, aiming a Kriss Vector toward the pickups on the road.
I took this in even as I was already halfway out of my own seat, rifle in hand. At that point, it didn't matter what I thought of our clients or Ernesto and his squad of dressed-up sicarios, or if the locals in the trucks were actually good guys who were trying to do their part to stop the cartels from ranging over their territory; incoming bullets weren't going to give a shit.
I'd heard of places in the country in Mexico where there were groups who wandered the night, ready to kill for kicks. I had no idea if these were the same people, or if the story was just an urban legend. There were plenty of similar myths floating around places in Iraq, and hell, there were even stories like that in the States. When I was a kid, I remembered hearing urban legends about cult groups up in northern Idaho who were like that.
There was yelling in Spanish coming from the direction of the pickups. They'd left their headlights on, which had the combined effect of illuminating their targets and blinding us. I darted down off the side of the road, staying low; none of the lights were pointed that way. I was in the shadows in a heartbeat, and started working my way around to the flank. In short order, Jack, Eric, and Ben were with me. I couldn't see them that well, but we'd done so much training together over the months before heading south that I could pick them out just by the way they moved.
My Spanish was still horrible. I couldn't tell what was being shouted between the pickups and Ernesto's people. But as we circled out into the desert, I could see enough to see that the guys on the pickups had their faces covered, just like the gunmen back at the rancho in the mountains, and that they weren't watching their flanks or their six.
I suppressed a wolfish grin. Time to teach them the error of their ways.
Ordinarily, I'd never use a warning shot. We never trained to fire warning shots; the only warning you'd get, if staring at a gun muzzle wasn't enough, was going to be either your head getting split or your buddy falling on his face with a bloody hole in him. But under the circumstances, I decided that defusing the situation might be preferable to just mowing them down. Again, I didn't know if these were narcos, gangbangers, or what. If they were just local autodefensas, I really didn't want to kill them if I could help it. We'd gotten into a couple of fights with neighborhood watch militias in Basra that I would rather have avoided.
So I put a bullet through the window of the closest pickup truck.
Now, a 7.62 NATO round fired through a sixteen inch barrel doesn't quite burn up all the powder in the case. That means that in the dark, the muzzle blast is a very impressive blossom of flame. That, along with the earsplitting roar of the shot's report and the window shattering, was sure to get their attention.
It did. I don't think they knew what to do. There was more yelling in Spanish, and a lot of bodies hit the dirt all at once. Fortunately, nobody shot back. I had moved about six feet to my right as soon as I'd fired, though, just in case.
They couldn't see shit. Harold's headlights were in their eyes, and we weren't showing any light aside from the muzzle flash of that initial shot. “Ernesto!” I yelled.
“What?” He didn't sound happy.
“Tell 'em that we can see them all, even the ones lying in the dirt, and if we want to, we can kill every last one of them,” I said. “If they don't want to die, they should get in their trucks, go back where they came from, and forget they saw anything on the road tonight.”
There was a long silence. I could picture the arrogant prick, his mouth working like he'd bitten into something sour. The tone of his voice when he answered solidified it for me; he didn't like the rent-a-cop security types calling the shots. “Just kill them anyway,” he demanded. “It will serve these palurdos right.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I told him. “I'm not killing anybody who's not shooting at me. Tell 'em to get lost, or we're going to have a long night out here.”
There was a long silence. Then I heard Derek, slightly muffled but still clear enough, yell, “I know what you're thinking, Ernesto! Unless you really want to get buttfucked with a bullet, I'd suggest you don't try to force the issue!” Derek usually had an interesting way of putting things.
Ernesto didn't say anything for long moment. I could almost hear the gears turning from where I was. Then, with a snarl that sounded a lot like, “Pinche culero!” he started yelling at the men lying prone out in the road in Spanish. Again, I couldn't pick out more than a handful of words, but after a moment and some muttered conversation, they carefully got up, keeping their hands away from the firing controls of their rifles and shotguns, and got back into their trucks. They backed up, turned around, and drove back the way they'd come, back toward the lights of the ranch house.
We stayed in place, low down amid the brush and the cactus, until they were gone. I'd closed my dominant eye as the headlights had swept over our position, so I could see the road and the ground beyond it clearly enough to make sure they hadn't left anyone or any surprises behind. Only then did I get to my feet and move back to the road.
Ernesto was standing by his Suburban, staring in our direction as we walked in out of the dark, weapons still held ready and scanning the surroundings. His eyes narrowed as he watched us; he was reassessing who we were. So he had that much in the way of brains, at least.
He apparently hadn't reassessed quite enough, though. He walked up to me and got close enough that I could have kneed him in the nuts. “Listen, pendejo,” he snarled, “when I tell you to do something, you do it, do you understand me? As far as you are concerned, I am El Jefe, comprende?”
I just stared back at him, my face blank and my eyes hooded, while simultaneously suppressing the urge to rip out his windpipe. I don't like arrogant cocksuckers at the best of times; when said arrogant cocksucker is most likely a narco fuck on top of it, I really, really want to get violent.
But I controlled myself and just stood there and stared him down. I could see the wheels turning behind his eyes; he was wondering just who the fuck we were. Finally, he grimaced, spat at my feet, and muttered, “Maricón,” before stalking away to his vehicle.
Only once he was looking away did I let my lip curl contemptuously. His spit hadn't hit my boot; it had gone onto the ground nearby. He was rethinking things, all right. He had realized that the escort wasn't just a bunch of rent-a-cops.
Unfortunately, that wasn't necessarily a good thing. While we'd avoided unnecessary bloodshed, we may have tipped our hand a little in the process. Ernesto was going to be asking questions now, wondering just why a bunch of paramilitary pipe-hitters were escorting this shipment instead of the disposable mall cops he'd been expecting.
