Standoff

Twenty-six

Lina turned, a pistol now in her hand, aimed at my face. Odd thing to notice but her smile was gone. I snapped a hand out and deflected the barrel as she pulled the trigger. BANG! Powder burns stung the skin on my neck but the round missed. A sudden kick in the back of my leg sent me down on one knee. I looked over my shoulder and saw Daniela. “Morning,” she said all sing-song happy, moving a KA-BAR from one hand to the other.

“I warned you about her,” said Lina.

Apostles was holding back his men, apparently getting ready to enjoy the sight of his women kicking my ass.

“Cowboys Cheerleaders?” I asked, the sciatic nerve in the back of my leg sending shockwaves of hurt into my hip.

“Camouflage,” said Lina with a smirk. “That sent you off into a world of cliché schoolboy fantasies, right?”

I couldn’t argue with that.

“En efecto they were Special Operation Command,” said Apostles. “They taught self-defense to Ranger candidates. But then the US Army put the integration of women into special forces on hold so Lina and Daniela searched around for another challenge. And came to me.”

“And how do you know they’re not working undercover?” I asked.

Daniela feinted with a thigh kick and a strike to my windpipe, both of which I saw coming and blocked. But then I felt a slight pressure on the side of my waist. Daniela took a step back and pointed at my leg with the KA-BAR. I glanced down and saw a red stain spreading down the front of my pants. She’d cut me across the ribs and the slice had been deep, aggravating the wound Perez had put there at Juárez airport. I hadn’t seen that coming. A searing pain began to spread up and down my side.

The twins began to circle, looking for a way in. Eventually, they’d find one. This wasn’t a good situation. My back was always going to be exposed so I reached around for the Sig but before I could pull it out, Lina came at me capoeira-style, down low, twirling, changing direction, feinting. Daniela poised, waiting her turn, the knife held two-handed for a downward strike. I crouched and moved, keeping an eye on both of them, but I moved too slow and Lina’s ankle caught the side of my head. The strike left me dazed, poleaxed. Lina kept spinning, this time the opposite way. Another strike. Time — but only just — to protect my head with a raised arm and elbow but the bicep was corked and my left arm went dead. Daniela leaped at me for that two-handed knife strike. I shifted and rolled, and blood from her knife slash spattered across the concrete floor. Daniela had time to pull her strike, but when she came down, she slipped on the blood from the cut she’d put in my ribs and landed on her back, all balance gone. The knife clattered out of her hand toward me. I picked it up and swung at it at Lina as she made a move, a wild, range-finding air swing. But the follow-through took the blade through an arc that ended at Daniela’s neck and the knife stuck fast in her twin’s oesophagus.

“Danny!” Lina cried out, forgetting about me completely and running to her sister’s side.

And then the door behind Apostles burst open. It was Matheson. He stood there attracting a lot of attention, swaying with anger, his eyeballs red and protruding. He was looking right at me, a pistol by his side. “I’m going to fucking kill you, Cooper,” he rasped.

The Sig was suddenly in my hand. Pure reaction as he raised that pistol. Matheson’s dirty blond curls dancing behind the Sig’s front sight. The barrel leaped. An ear-slipping BLAM! as, in a burst of red, a hollow-point round sucked Matheson’s face clean through the back of his head. I got off a second shot in the noise and confusion and one of Apostles’ men, who was crouched in front of the boss, sprayed everyone with meat and cartilage as his chest exploded.

I didn’t stick around for the response, diving beneath the nearest truck. I crabbed my way back beneath the coupling and stopped beneath the trailer. Lying down, looking for targets, I shot out the knees of three guards as they ran back and forth, waiting for orders.

I could see Lina tending to Daniela’s injury, pulling her sister onto her side so that she didn’t choke in her own blood, the knife sticking up out of her throat.

I heard doors opening and plenty of shouting. Options were diminishing by the moment. I scuttled to the back of the hangar, beneath a succession of trucks. Two men came running down the narrow passage between the vehicles. I shot out their legs and both went down screaming. An FN clattered to the ground and lodged between a tire and the floor. I made a dash for it, but one of the wounded men with no knees had a pistol and began firing. I retreated all the way to the back of the hangar, putting a wall of truck rubber and metal between Apostles’ men and me. There were floor to ceiling doors here, but they were locked. A quick inspection revealed them to be thin aluminum panels hung on an aluminum frame.

I ran forward and jumped onto the running board of a turbo-diesel-powered battering ram. The driver’s door was unlocked. I swung it open. The damn thing was heavy. I tapped the glass in the door — thick and bulletproof. Figured. These Macks were armored, built for battle. There was no key in the ignition so I ran to the truck beside it, a tanker. Same situation with the ignition key. Third truck along, I saw keys dangling from a sun visor.

I leaped down, crawled under the vehicle to the tanker and pulled one of the filler nozzles off the rack. There was no lock on the filler trigger to keep gasoline flowing. I looked around for something I could use. Paperclips! I dug into my pockets, pulled ’em out, straightened one and then wound it around the handle and trigger mechanism to keep it locked in the open position. More shouts. Jesus, the whole damn encampment was bearing down on me. I turned the master lever on the main fuel cock in the direction of the arrow and gasoline began to flow, gushing out of the nozzle under pressure, a miniature Niagara, splashing wheels, tires and trailers, and spreading across the floor.

I ran back to the Mack with the key in the ignition, gunshots ringing out in the confined space and rounds crackling past me, sparking and ricocheting off the metal trailers. One round tore through my jacket. I tried not to think about it, climbed into the rig and fired it up. The book of matches. I took them out of the pocket. In the door mirror I could see fuel spraying everywhere and the air was thick with choking gas fumes. Jumping across the wide seat and lowering the passenger window, I fired up the book and tossed it back toward the spreading pool of gas on the floor. I braced for the explosion, but nothing happened. A wave of gasoline had surged over the flames and extinguished them.

Fuck, fuck and triple fuck. Machine-gun fire had joined in with all the pistols and carbines. Time to motor. I jammed the rig into gear and booted the go pedal. In the mirrors I saw Apostles’ men sprinting down the aisles between the vehicles, holding their weapons above their heads, firing wildly. A round smashed one of the mirrors on my door. Slugs sparked off metal like crazed fireflies all around as a fusillade of lead was unleashed at the departing rig.

As I hit the wall at the back of hangar and smashed through it, those fireflies must have touched off the fuel. A pulse of air rushed into the hangar behind the trailer and a massive explosion erupted, the heat reflecting off the remaining door mirror searing my face. A mighty fireball blew the roof and one of the walls clean off the aluminum framework and they sailed high in the dawn sky.

One problem that took the edge off my pleasure at all this mayhem: the back end of the trailer attached to the prime mover I was escaping in was also on fire. Another problem — I was so busy gloating over the destruction raining down on Apostles and his people that I ran right into the main fuel dump positioned behind the now destroyed hangar. I pulled hard on the steering wheel to avoid crashing straight into a large storage tank raised off the ground, but desert sand doesn’t provide the best traction and the rig ploughed more or less straight on through regardless, taking out some pipework. The smashed and buckled plumbing sprayed diesel oil all over the back of the trailer as it barreled on by. I was now pulling a roaring gout of flame across the desert.

I scribed a lazy turn, keeping the rising sun on my right, set a northerly course and planted my foot. As far as I knew, there was nothing but thirty miles of sand and those rattlesnakes between the encampment and Texas.

Looking back, things had livened up considerably over in the encampment. Trucks and tankers were being driven out of the pool of flames and doused with foam. Men were running around everywhere. And then a stream of motorcycles surged out of one of the hangars, along with a couple of those pickups with mounted .50 caliber Brownings in the rear. Shit. I had a good head start and sixty mph showing on the speedometer, but the bikes could go faster. And meanwhile I was pulling what looked like a flaming comet and sooner or later those flames would reach my own fuel tanks.

A fire extinguisher was mounted on the side of the passenger’s floorboards. I let go of the steering wheel and reached across to grab it, but not at a great moment. The rig barreled into a shallow gulley, the prime mover grabbing some air and the towed fireball bucking and weaving dangerously. The truck crashed up the other side, booting a pool of dirt skyward before sliding sideways. My heart crowded into the back of my throat as I wrestled with the wheel. At the speed I was traveling, it wouldn’t take much to roll this rig on its side.

But as Apostles’ daughter Juliana had pointed out, it’s not always about me. In this instance, it was also about the men on those motorcycles who were gaining faster than I expected. I shouldn’t have been surprised. This was their turf and they trained on it. Also, the rig didn’t have the turn of speed I thought it might’ve had with an empty load.

There were at least a hundred dirt bikes cutting the corner, closing on the truck. And then I saw why. The sun was coming through the passenger window, which meant I’d drifted around to the east. Shit.

And just like that, the riders were on the left and right of the truck. Several of them pulled assault rifles from their scabbards and began shooting. The rounds pounded into the window and bodywork and made a lot of noise, but not much else. I thanked Apostles for the armor. When the riders saw what little effect their bullets had, they went for plan B and began shooting out the tires. I heard them blow and the rig’s speed dropped back around ten miles per hour and the control became mushy, but the tires were probably anti-terror units and filling them with holes didn’t have the usual effect.

The riders dropped back. I wondered why until .50 caliber rounds began pounding the cabin. The heavy slugs made a hell of a racket and cracked the armor in the door window, but it held. I swerved into the pickup, which pulled away, and the machine gunner in the back shifted his aim and had a crack at the tires. The truck sank on its axles a little more, but still the rig thundered on.

The machine-gun RV came in still closer, going for point-blank range. I swerved toward it and then pulled away. The RV likewise veered, but not until some burning fuel splashed off the back of the trailer and spattered the guy behind the gun. I watched him try to shake it off, but the stuff must have soaked through his clothes. He let go of the gun and frantically patted himself down as flames consumed his arms and torso. He jumped off the back of the vehicle, perhaps to roll in the dirt and put himself out. But as I watched, two guys on dirt bikes hit him. Their front wheels collapsed with the impact and the riders went over the bars into a puddle of burning fuel discharged by the trailer and the bikes caught fire and exploded.

Maybe hanging onto this trailer wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

The gun truck fell back as, in the passenger side door mirror, I saw one of those mobile ramps. And then two dirt bikes sailed off the end of the ramp and disappeared somewhere on top of the trailer close to the prime mover, out of the burning fuel. The slightest jarring through the steering wheel told me they’d impacted with the trailer roof. The ramp increased its speed and came closer as two more riders jumped. One of the bikes slammed into the rear of the cabin where the engine was housed, the resulting jar through the back of my seat feeling like a strike with a sledgehammer.

A boarding party? I swerved the truck left and right to dislodge the men, but nothing fell off. A noise on the roof above me. Holes suddenly appeared in the roof lining, daylight showing. Shit, no armor in the roof! I kept maneuvering the Mack from side to side, but too violently and it lost speed. More holes appeared. Rounds shattered the speedometer and fuel gauges, and shards of plastic, glass and metal filled the cabin, nicking my face and arms. I pulled the Sig, waited for a shadow to flit across those holes, fired upwards twice and heard a thump. An arm slumped in front of the windscreen, and then a smear of blood. I swerved and saw a body fall off the roof and get consumed by the sliding inferno behind me.

The passenger side door suddenly flew open and someone was suddenly in the cabin, covered in dust and black greasy soot, waving a pistol. I jerked the wheel to unbalance him as he fired. The round missed and buried itself in my door. I fired the Sig at him. The top of his helmet blew off and he seemed to go to sleep, slumping forward. The pistol in his gloved hand came to rest on the seat beside me.

And then I noticed something that had been trying to get my attention. It was a different engine sound. The truck was losing speed, the revs dropping. The turbo-diesel was running on fewer cylinders. Someone was back there fucking with the powerplant. I dragged the deceased guy beside me, fed his inert arms through the spokes in the steering wheel, and then pushed the rest of him into the floorboards. The steering now locked in the straight ahead, an improvised dead man’s switch provided by a dead man, I engaged the cruise control, grabbed my gun off the seat and kicked the door open.

No sooner was I outside when the truck rammed through a collection of cacti that tore my pants to shreds and lacerated a leg. The flora would’ve swept me off the running board had I not been holding onto a grab rail with white-knuckled fear. A fall at this speed would be fatal. I took a moment to catch my breath and observed that the same cacti had also forced the bike riders on a wide detour, so there were benefits. I edged down the running board, fingers hunting for another hand hold, stepped over the fuel tanks and came around the vertical exhaust stacks. A wrecked motorcycle was entangled in various hydraulic lines. One of Apostles’ soldiers was standing over the engine, trying to rip out any lead he could get his hands on.

His goggles were up on his helmet but I still needed a second look to make sure.

“Hey, Whelt!” I yelled at him. He turned around. “Been looking for you.”

“What?”

“You’re AWOL. Special Agent Cooper, OSI. I’ve been looking for you.”

“Are you fucking kidding?”

About what?

Whelt went for the pistol on his thigh, but I didn’t have to reach for anything, the Sig already in my hand. I shot from the hip, the round hitting above the knee and dropping him onto the space beside the engine. He wouldn’t be going anywhere in a hurry. Loose leads whipped around over the engine, one of them sparking. Diesels have no spark plugs. From the way the cylinders were firing, my guess was that the power leads were for the fuel injection system. A quick inspection confirmed it. I got them back into their sockets, my hand jumping around with all the vibrations, and the motor instantly leaped back into life.

Looking back at the trailer, I could see that cover over the framework was largely burned away, the wood decking on the tray well alight with several wrecked motorcycles smoking and smoldering on it. Down the back was where the real action was happening. The rear tires and wheels were flaming Catherine wheels spitting molten rubber in a wide spray that made the riders keep their distance. One of the tires exploded. Once they’d all blown and the back end was running on rims, the trailer would become a massive dragging weight. Movement was keeping me alive. If the rig was made to stop, I’d be surrounded and shortly thereafter I’d be in the hereafter, no doubt checking into a nice suite in hell.

I had to lose the trailer. How did that work? It rattled, clanked and bucked on top of what looked like a turntable. A heavy locating pin was locked behind steel jaws. Maybe that’s what had to be released. But how? I figured it couldn’t be done while bashing across the desert at sixty mph, give or take. Checking beneath the turntable, I saw a handle. Maybe that was how to do it. I got my hands on it and tried to shift it. Nope, too much pressure. I scanned around, looking for what I wasn’t sure. But then I saw it — a hammer. It was clipped against the back of the cabin. I leaped over Whelt and reached for it. But then something made me look down, a movement. It was Whelt at my feet, grinning against the pain, a pistol in his hand aimed upwards into my groin. This guy had real bad timing. I swung down and felt his collarbone collapse under the hammer as the weapon clattered out of his hand.

I stepped back to the turntable and struck the handle with the hammer. It budged, but only a few degrees. I hit it again — nothing. It only released when the trailer’s weight wasn’t resting on the turntable. I just had to get lucky and hit it at the right moment as the rig bucked. I struck it again and moved the handle half a turn. The jaws had opened, but not all the way. I swung the hammer again, harder this time. Maybe a little too hard. The handle snapped off, fell through the metalwork and dropped onto the ground racing away beneath the truck. Shit.

Another tire exploded.

I retraced my steps back to the cabin, the truck’s bodywork puckering around me a couple of times when random percentage shots fired by riders out wide almost got lucky. The opposition seemed to have lost heart. I opened the driver’s door and kept it open while I disengaged the dead man’s switch and threw him out. Just maybe I’d make it over the line after all.

The engine was running smoothly, all gauges that weren’t smashed either in the green or yellow. The barrier fence was only thirty miles north of Apostles’ encampment and I’d been motoring now for over thirty minutes at sixty mph. I had to be close. I peered forward. Something was out there … Whatever it was, it didn’t feel right. Mexican desert slid into Texan desert without so much as a bump or ripple on the other side of the narrow dry ditch that was the Rio Grande. And yet, there did appear to be something on the horizon. I leaned forward and squinted. Maybe it was the fence itself.

The Mack ate up the desert toward it and the line soon came into focus … Right. It wasn’t a bump or a ripple or a fence at all but at least five hundred motorcycle riders, shoulder to shoulder, stretched out in a line with support from those RVs with 50. caliber Brownings. Shit. Perhaps this was the end of the line. A rocket-propelled grenade arced out from the line, but there was time at this distance to turn the steering wheel a few degrees and avoid the ground burst. So now Apostles and Perez were getting serious. They didn’t want me escaping to pass along whatever they thought I might know, that a modernized Pancho Villa — style raid on Columbus was on the way. Dropping Matheson at their feet would’ve confirmed their suspicions about any holes in my story. According to Chalmers I wasn’t supposed to be the judge, jury and executioner, let alone feel good about it. But maybe Chalmers was just laying the groundwork to protect his own skin, because it was going to take plenty to stop me busting a cap in the jerk’s ass when I saw him next.

The outriders departed the area as more RPGs arced from the line, fingers of supposedly smokeless propellant leaving smoke trails in the morning sky as they blasted toward the truck. I kept coming, but made things difficult, putting in turns, some of them more aggressive as the distance closed. Small arms and .50 caliber rounds joined the crescendo of metal hurled at the Mack. Lead peppered the bodywork, grille and windshield — a thousand high-velocity steel fists. The Mack just shrugged it off. Damn, you gotta love American built. It just works, right? I turned the wheel and the truck skidded sideways. I put in another turn, evasive action required to avoid a couple of RPGs with flat trajectories fired from dead in front, and things suddenly got interesting. The truck veered to the left. I corrected. It skidded violently to the right, the amplitude of each skid more extreme with each correction. Oh shiiiit … Losing control here. More lead slammed into the truck, smashing lights and mirrors, Apostles’ men realizing that the end was near. In the last vestige of the passenger side door mirror remaining, I saw the problem: the trailer. It had almost unhitched itself and was swinging around off the back of the prime mover like a giant counterweight. So I spun the steering wheel to the opposite stop, massively over-correcting. The forces suddenly unleashed flicked the trailer around like a giant, multi-ton pendulum. The center pin must have ripped clean out of the base plate jaws because suddenly the trailer was on its own, free to tumble, rolling and burning across the sand, smash into the line of motorcycles and support vehicles. The launch of RPGs suddenly dried up in the panic as riders rode over each other to get the hell out of the way of the flaming steel juggernaut tumbling toward them.

The trailer flattened two of those .50 caliber RVs and at least twenty riders were swamped by it. Other riders, their clothes on fire, careened into others who caught fire, just like a bad smash at the Indy 500.

The Mack, now freed from the weight of its load, leaped forward with a burst of acceleration and punched through the pall of black smoke marking where the line had been, and shunted a burning vehicle out of the way.

With no mirrors, I had no way of knowing what was going on in my wake, but up ahead, maybe half a mile away, I could see the barrier fence. This was going to present its own problems. Like how the hell was I going to punch through it, a wall of reinforced steel eighteen feet high? The Mack was heavy and it was also powerful. Hell, just maybe I could batter my way through. I pulled the seat belt over my shoulder, buckled in and pushed the accelerator pedal to the boards. But at the last moment, I thought better of it. The damn fence was constructed to prevent exactly what I was about to attempt, fool, I reminded myself. I stood on the brakes and grabbed a handful of steering wheel. The Mack responded better without the trailer, but not good enough. The wheels all locked up, it skidded sideways and collided with the fence, throwing me savagely against the belt.

I sat there for several seconds, doing nothing except maybe groaning a little. Steam poured from the Mack’s radiator and the air reeked of hot water, scorched rubber and diesel fumes. I unclipped the belt and pushed open the door. The Mack was tall. Perhaps if I could make it up onto the roof, I could vault the fence.

My body wasn’t working so well as I climbed out onto the running board, stepped up onto the cheese grater that the mud guard over the front wheel had become, and stood on the Mack’s hood. From there it was a running jump up onto the windscreen and then onto the roof but the fence was still too high and too far away. I took a deep breath, pulled the Sig and checked the magazine. One round plus one in the chamber and two full mags in my pocket. Time to change mags. No way was I going to let Perez practice his hobby on me.

I turned to look back at Apostles’ front line, expecting the worst. The trailer had done a good job, but there were still a lot of tangos out there. No doubt they’d be regrouping and heading my way. But in fact the opposite was the case. They were retreating, heading south, kicking up those familiar rooster tails of dirt. Something had spooked them, and then I saw what it was. In fact it was two of them — a couple of Predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles flying figure eights overhead, slow and menacing.

“Hey Cooper,” a familiar voice called out behind me, on the other side of the fence. It was Ranger Gomez, a Border Patrol SUV parked behind him. “So lemme guess … the truck’s a rental, right?”