Ghost Sniper

19

By seven o’clock that afternoon, Crosswhite was back on the ground in Mexico City. During the flight, he’d received a coded text message from Paolina letting him know that she was leaving for Toluca, but his phone had been turned off, so the message was already an hour old by the time he landed. He was able to exchange another coded message with her before leaving the airport, verifying that she was okay and that they would meet in Toluca.

He was sitting in his Jeep at a stoplight on the outskirts of Mexico City when the vehicle began to vibrate as though it had broken a motor mount. “What the hell is this now?” he wondered aloud.

A few seconds later, chunks of concrete began falling off the aging office building across the street, and the traffic light started bobbing up and down on its metal arm.

A man hawking bottled water in the street stood outside Crosswhite’s open window.

“Terremoto!” he said. Earthquake!

Crosswhite got out of the Jeep to feel the earth trembling underfoot. He’d been in Los Angeles during the quake of ’94, and he could already tell this one was shaping up to be somewhere along those lines. He had to get on his knees, as there was no way to keep standing with the vibrations. He knew that Mexico City was built on an ancient lake bed of mostly sand, and that soil liquefaction would exacerbate the quake’s effects to the extreme. The shaking became more intense, and all at once, the ten-story office building collapsed as if in a controlled demolition.

Cracks appeared in the asphalt, and the power to the streetlights failed. Crosswhite’s first reaction was wanting to hide under the Jeep until the shocks passed, but he forced himself to get back in the vehicle and got the windows up just as a billowing gray cloud of dust engulfed everything.

Within two minutes, the earth grew still, but Crosswhite knew there would be aftershocks, believing the quake to have easily been a 6 or 7 magnitude. The city’s last major quake, in 1985, had registered 8.1 on the Richter scale. That one had killed at least twenty thousand people. This one wasn’t as strong, but Crosswhite knew that it had been plenty powerful enough to bring the city to a halt. It would be months before everything would be back to normal.

He took out his phone to call Paolina, but there was no signal. “Shit!” He threw the phone down on the seat beside him.

By the time the dust began to clear enough for him to see, sirens were wailing. A fire engine roared past with klaxons honking as the emergency services machine came to life.

Getting to Toluca in a hurry would now be easier said than done, but he had a four-wheel drive and a full tank of gas. Crosswhite shifted into drive and sped off down the road, knowing the police would be too busy to worry about enforcing traffic laws.