by Peter Nealen
He moved up to the door and flowed out into the hall, heading for the next corner.
Chapter 23
Brannigan and Jenkins got to the double door at almost the same time. Brannigan paused just long enough to make sure that Jenkins was ready, then planted his size twelve boot just below the doorhandle.
There had been a time when he wouldn’t have been the man to do that. He’d been the commander—in a real way, he still was. The commander doesn’t breach the door. That’s for the team or platoon breachers. The commander is supposed to be either in the bird overhead or back in the COC, watching and listening.
But he wasn’t a Colonel anymore, and with a team of only ten men, there wasn’t room for dead weight. And Brannigan had never liked the “supervising manager back in the rear” aspect of modern command, anyway. To him, a leader had to lead. If that meant being the first one in the door, that was what it meant.
With the Blackhearts, he was back to doing what he’d signed up to do almost thirty years before.
The door splintered, cracked, and shuddered inward. Jenkins hit it with his shoulder, driving it open as he plunged inside. Brannigan hesitated just long enough to get his foot planted back on the ground and followed him in.
They were in a short hallway leading toward the main hall that ran through the center of the “walls” of the hacienda. It wasn’t as big as the main entryway, and he and Jenkins were practically brushing shoulders as they moved toward the T-shaped intersection ahead of them.
Jenkins hesitated a moment at the T, and Brannigan had to whisper, “Now,” before popping out into the main hallway. They didn’t have enough bodies to stack up the old way. They needed to keep moving.
He went right, feeling Jenkins go left behind him a moment later.
There were three young men ahead of him, about halfway down the hallway. One had already turned back at the sound of the crashing door, while the other two were mid-turn. All were armed, two with Vector submachineguns, the third with an MPX.
The older man with the MPX saw Brannigan and immediately snapped the submachinegun to his shoulder. Brannigan got a brief snapshot of the man; a lined, seamed face with a bald head and graying goatee. There was no widening of his eyes in fear; this guy was as hard as they came. He’d been around a while, and had probably killed quite a few people.
He was just a fraction of a second too slow.
Brannigan had already had his offset iron sights just below the line of his eye. It was a simple twitch of a couple of inches to bring the rifle to bear. The two suppressed shots blended together into a single, slightly stuttering bark in the narrow hallway.
At that range, he hadn’t bothered with a chest shot. Both rounds hit the older sicario in the bridge of the nose, snapping his head back with a spray of red that blasted into the face of the younger, long-haired man behind him.
That one got blood and brains in his eyes, and reached up to wipe the gore away, just in time for another 7.62 round to go through his hand and punch into his orbital bone, sucking a good bit of his brains out the exit hole behind his ear. He hit the floor just behind the older, bald shooter.
By then, the third man had completed his turn, his finger already mashing the trigger of his blocky, .45 caliber submachinegun, even though it wasn’t on-line yet. Bullets stitched into the plaster and wood above Brannigan’s head.
And stopped as another shot blew out the man’s brainstem. He dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.
The whole engagement had lasted less than three seconds.
He had been advancing on the three narco shooters as he’d fired, and was now almost on top of the bodies. That was when movement caught his eye at the end of the hall, and he flicked his eyes and his rifle toward it, his finger resting lightly on the trigger.
Fortunately, as keyed up as he was, having just shot three men in as many seconds, he was still mentally in the fight. He identified rifles, and then immediately identified the faces behind them.
Wade and Gomez.
“Friendly!” he rapped out as he twitched his muzzle up and off-line from the two men, his voice ringing with the old accustomed authority, but still sounding a little muted in his own ears after the gunfire.
“Friendlies!” Wade yelled in reply, and four rifle muzzles moved off line. Hancock was now beside Brannigan.
There were still four doors between the two teams. Wade moved directly to the closest one on the inside. Brannigan nodded fractionally. The hallway was no place to meet up and have a chat, no matter how much they needed to coordinate their movements.
But he didn’t push toward them to meet up in that room. The fact that they were still clearing meant that they hadn’t found the hostages; they would have strongpointed to sort the matter out if they had. And since they were clearing this way…
“On you, George,” he said, just loudly enough so that Jenkins could hear him. Curtis was behind Jenkins, with Javakhishvili and Santelli turning to join them, and he gave Jenkins a hard tap of a fist on the back of his shoulder.
Jenkins might have occasionally been a little too full of himself because of his SEAL background, at the expense of actual field proficiency, but he didn’t miss a beat this time. Without turning to look back, keeping his eyes on his sector, he started to move forward, down the hall.
He paused at the first door, Curtis kicked it in, and then the two of them and Javakhishvili flowed inside. Javakhishvili was a little bit slow and awkward in CQB, Brannigan noticed; his movements weren’t as smooth and practiced as the other men’s.
Santelli was about to go in after them, but when there was no sound of gunfire from inside the room, Brannigan just said, “Right.”
Santelli wasn’t the greatest guy in the house, either, and he knew it, but he was quick on his feet. Instead of stutter-stepping, he just pushed past the open door the other three had entered and posted himself in the hallway, a few feet short of the stairway up ahead, and waited.
Hancock took the door, putting his back to the doorjamb and mule-kicking it just below the doorknob. It hadn’t even been latched; it swung open violently, hitting the wall with a bang before rebounding. Brannigan stormed into the room, which appeared to be some kind of rec room, with two TVs and a pool table, and Hancock shouldered the returning door out of his way as he went in behind him.
The quiet inside the hacienda had become almost deafening. Nobody was shooting. It was as if the bottom floor was suddenly deserted.
Without hostages or hostiles to deal with, there was no reason to stay in the room. Santelli took the lead, joining Javakhishvili in the hallway and pushing along. As soon as he came out behind Hancock, Brannigan could see Flanagan and Bianco making entry on yet another room.
With only ten men, it was going to take time to clear the whole hacienda. And in that time, the narcos could very well decide to kill their hostages, just to be on the safe side. He started wracking his brains for a way to find the hostages as quickly as possible.
Where would they put them? Do they even have them here in the hacienda? That was a troubling thought. If they’d been moved before the Blackhearts had even hit the place, it could end up being impossible to find them again.
Javakhishvili came to the stairs and turned his muzzle up toward the landing. As he did, something clunked on the stairway, and he suddenly turned back, shoving Santelli backward.
“Grenade!”
Fortunately, the frag didn’t get all the way down the stairs before detonating with a heavy, tooth-rattling thud. An ugly black cloud billowed out of the stairwell, and the overpressure washed over the Blackhearts brutally, amplified by the enclosed space. Brannigan’s head immediately started to hurt.
He pushed ahead through the smoke. They were vulnerable, stuck there in the hallway in the aftermath of the grenade explosion. Javakhishvili looked a little dazed from the shock, but Brannigan just hauled him upright and turned him toward the stairs. “On me!” he bellowed, before turning the corner and charging up to the
landing, his rifle in his shoulder and pointed up the steps.
He was already turning as he climbed, bringing his muzzle to bear on the top of the steps. There was a kid at the top, and for a second, they both froze.
The big, gray-haired man with the handlebar mustache, dressed in mottled desert camouflage and chest rig, stared over the sights of his tan 7.62 rifle at a black-haired, brown-eyed boy in a white t-shirt, who was holding an old “pineapple” grenade in one hand. The index finger of the other hand was through the ring on the pin.
The kid couldn’t have been much more than ten years old.
He pulled the pin, and Brannigan shot him.
The kid fell back as the bullet punched through his thin torso, the grenade rolling out of his hand, the spoon coming off with a faint ping. With a curse, as much at the necessity of killing a kid as at the close call, Brannigan ducked back down the stairs, almost colliding with Javakhishvili, and ducked away from the open stairwell.
He counted to three. No boom. Four. Five. Six. Still, the grenade didn’t detonate.
Maybe it was a dud. Maybe it was a “remanufactured” grenade, made from a surplus training grenade body, and the fuse was long.
It wasn’t worth taking chances. There was another stairway farther down the hall, across another T-intersection.
“Next stairway!” he barked. “Carlo, Herc, hold on this one so that we don’t get shot in the back!” Hardly waiting for an acknowledgement, he forged down the hallway toward the intersection and the stairs beyond.
He hadn’t mentioned the other part of his decision; he didn’t want Flanagan and the others going up those stairs and stumbling on an unexploded grenade.
The doors to the hallway that opened up on their right at the T-intersection were closed. He still tracked across it with his muzzle, just in case. So far, it looked like they’d eliminated most of the defenders on the ground floor, but he wasn’t going to take chances. Hancock and Curtis followed suit, with Jenkins bringing up the rear.
He didn’t pause at the base of the stairs, but immediately started up, swiveling as he went to cover the upper landing, praying under his breath. “Please, God, not another kid with a gun or a grenade.” He already dreaded the nightmares that were going to come after this op. The fact that the grenade hadn’t exploded was just going to make matters worse, once he had time to think.
The landing was clear, though. He surged up the stairs, keeping his rifle at the ready.
There was another scrawny young man waiting at the end of the short hallway at the top of the stairs, pointing a shotgun at the landing. He wasn’t ready for the apparition that loomed up from the stairs, though, and he panicked, triggering the shotgun blast into the ceiling over Brannigan’s head.
Brannigan dropped him with a pair of shots that blasted through his sternum and knocked him back against the double wooden doors behind him. He bounced off the doors, leaving a dark, wet stain on the wood, and fell on his face.
Brannigan moved up, Hancock beside him. Technically, they were the two senior leaders, but in the constantly shifting flow of close quarters battle, that didn’t matter a damn at the moment.
Together, with Curtis and Jenkins coming up behind them, they moved on the double door. There were two more doors, one on either side, but Brannigan had a hunch. And the voices he could hear on the other side of the door lent that hunch some distinct credence.
He and Hancock moved to either side of the doors. Curtis and Jenkins fanned out with them, weapons pointed at the join where the doors met.
Taking a deep breath, hoping that he wasn’t about to break his foot against a bar across the door, Brannigan lifted his boot and slammed it into the door, half a second ahead of Hancock.
The doors slammed open, and the four Blackhearts moved in fast, greeted by a chorus of screams.
There were a dozen girls inside, most of them in their underwear, none of them looking particularly healthy at the moment.
There were also three gunmen behind them. Two were pointing AKs in the general direction of the doors; the other had an MP5.
The screaming had started as soon as Brannigan’s boot had hit the door. And as he and Hancock stormed inside, time seemed to slow down as he registered the weapons pointed at him.
One of the girls, however, seemed to have retained some presence of mind. She screamed something in Spanish, even as she threw herself against two of the gunmen’s legs.
She provided the brief distraction that was all they needed. Hancock shot the one with the MP5, who had glanced down and tried to dance away from the girl, putting a tight, controlled pair high in his chest. He staggered backward, tripped, and fell flat, triggering a short burst of 9mm into the ceiling.
Brannigan had quickly sidestepped and blasted one of the AK gunners, who was trying to lower his rifle to shoot the girl on the ground. He walked three fast shots up the man’s torso and into his throat. Dying, the man collapsed on top of the girl, who had thrown his balance off.
Jenkins and Curtis each pumped two shots into the other man with the AK. He toppled backwards, crashed into a chest of drawers, and fell on his face on the woven rug underfoot.
Almost as one, the Blackhearts turned their muzzles toward the figures on the massive, four-poster bed.
None of them had seen pictures of Benito Espino-Gallo. Even so, there was no doubt in Brannigan’s mind that the pudgy man in black and white was the cartel patriarch himself. He was crouched on the bed behind a girl in white bra and panties, tears of terror streaming down her cheeks, a blocky, short-barreled weapon pressed between her shoulder blades. Next to him was a handsome woman, wearing a yellow dress, similarly shielded by a young woman, whom she was holding by the hair with one hand, a chromed Smith & Wesson 9mm held to the back of her skull.
The Blackhearts were now in a line across the room, except for Curtis, who was covering the door. Suppressed rifle muzzles moved to cover Benito and his wife.
“End of the line, bud,” Brannigan said grimly, his front sight post trained on Benito Espino-Gallo’s forehead. “Killing the girl ain’t gonna save you. Just gonna make your stay in hell that much worse.” He didn’t quite have a clean enough shot for his tastes.
“If you don’t get out of here, we’ll kill them all!” the woman screamed, grinding the barrel into the back of the captive girl’s head. The girl cried out, but the woman yanked on her hair, swearing at her in Spanish.
“Not going to happen,” Hancock replied.
There were footsteps on the steps behind them. Brannigan heard a growled, “Friendly,” but he didn’t dare take his eyes off Benito. The patriarch of the Espino-Gallo gang was glaring at him with a mixture of hatred and stark terror, all but his forehead and one eye behind the girl. Brannigan suddenly imagined that the shotgun in the man’s hand would have been shaking if he hadn’t had it pressed to the girl’s back.
“We’ll let the girls go if you let us go!” Benito suddenly said, his voice surprisingly shrill. “Safe passage. You fall back for an hour and you don’t follow us when we leave! Those are the terms!”
Brannigan felt, more than saw, Hancock turn to glance at him. He knew what was going on in Roger’s head, too. They weren’t any kind of authorities. They couldn’t turn Espino-Gallo over to the Federales without going into a Mexican jail with him. He’d probably get out before they did.
Nor could they drag him across the border to face justice on the US side of the line. Again, everything they had done since the first shot had been fired was technically illegal.
It hadn’t stopped them before, not from the Persian Gulf to Southeast Asia, but it limited their options. They were there to kill Espino-Gallo and rescue the girls. There wasn’t anything else they could do.
And, somewhere deep behind his terror, Espino-Gallo had to know that. And he was banking on it.
“You want the girls alive?” he demanded, getting a bit of bravado back in his voice. “Then you let us go. There’s no other option, gringo. It’s one or the o
ther. You can’t take us to jail. You get us dead, or you get the girls alive. Pick one.”
“Fuck you,” Gomez said, suddenly appearing at Brannigan’s elbow.
With preternatural speed, the dark-eyed man snapped his rifle to his shoulder and blew Espino-Gallo’s brains across the headboard of the bed, the bullet passing so close to the girl’s head that she flinched away, clapping her hand to her suddenly-ringing ear with a cry. She probably thought she’d been shot.
With a surge of near-panic, Brannigan shifted his aim to the woman in the yellow dress. He was a fraction of a second faster than Gomez. Their rounds had to have crossed somewhere behind her eye. Her head snapped back, spraying blood, hair, and brains across the headboard to intermingle with her husband’s, and she fell back to land on the bed with a faint bounce.
Chapter 24
The screaming had started again, most of the girls gripped by sheer animal terror at the shooting. The two hostages on the bed must have thought they were dead.
“It’s all right,” Brannigan said loudly. “We’re here to rescue you; you’re safe now.” They didn’t seem to hear him.
Gomez had let his weapon hang, and was looking closely at each of the huddled, half-naked, tear-stained girls. Brannigan saw that some of them looked terribly young.
But what else did you expect from these savages? The same ones who sent a kid out to drop grenades down a staircase?
“Sonya!” Gomez barked, raising his voice to be heard over the crying and sobbing.
A hand lifted. The girl who had thrown herself against the shooters’ legs was crawling out from under the corpse that had fallen on top of her. Gomez waded through the others and grabbed her arms, pulling her to her feet.
The girl, brown-skinned and black-haired, collapsed against him, sobbing. Gomez held her tightly for a moment, before letting go with one arm and pulling back a little.
Brannigan was already thinking. The others had set up on the windows and the doors, while Hancock was tearing into the chest of drawers, pulling out clothes and tossing them on the floor.
