Ballistic

TWENTY-SIX

The hacienda did not have electricity, but it did have a telephone, and it rang at two a.m., startling everyone in the home and waking those sleeping. Laura had just come up from the cellar, and she ran into the candlelit main sitting room to answer it. She grabbed it on the sixth ring, just as Court entered the same room through the door to the back patio. He’d spent the last two hours preparing for an attack that he prayed would never come.

“¿Bueno?”

“Good morning, sorry to disturb you so early. May I speak with Señora Elena Gamboa?”

Laura looked up to Court, her face white. She whispered, “De la Rocha.”

Without hesitation Court stormed through the dim, crossed the dusty tile flooring of the expansive room. Laura held the phone out for him and he pulled it to his mouth.

“Tell me you speak English, asshole!” His voice boomed against the stone walls, echoed down dark, lonely hallways, and rattled old panes of glass in the windows.

A long pause, then a low laugh. “Ah. The norteamericano. The one who swings like a monkey on television. How nice to finally talk to you, man to man.”

“I don’t know what you are, but marking an unborn child for death makes you no kind of man, you sick fuck.”

“You would not understand. There is a difference in our cultures that creates a wide chasm between our belief systems. Unfortunately for you, I expect you will be in the way of my objective, so you will die along with Señora Gamboa.”

Court laughed angrily, “You talk much better than your men fight. I’ve killed a half dozen of your guys already, remember?”

“Yes, I heard all about your actions. You are quite good at what you do. Do you have any idea how much money you could make working for me? Listen, obviously I have found out where you are hiding. I have men outside the hacienda walls even now. You and the family are completely surrounded.”

“And we are well armed. Tell your men to come in and get us.”

The rest of the Gamboa family had entered the room, even Ignacio stood on the stairwell, leaning against the wall, listening to one side of a conversation in a language that he did not speak.

De la Rocha laughed again. “Cálmate, amigo. Calm down. Just listen. We will allow you to surrender, to leave. If you want, you can take everyone except for Elena out with you. We only want her.”

“No deal.”

“Then this is the last time we will speak. You will be dead before dawn, but if this is your choice, it is okay with me.”

The line went dead. Court played with the phone for a moment to check it. Yes, the landline had been cut.

“Everyone check your cell phones,” he commanded, and for the next two minutes there was a shuffling of bodies around the living area of the hacienda as the family scrambled for their phones and tried to get a signal.

No… the mobile tower in the area had been disabled.

Shit. Gentry realized that disabling the cell phones took some manpower and some intelligence on the part of his adversary. Court recognized that they weren’t going to just get hit by a couple of fat Mexican ranch hands in straw hats. No… de la Rocha had managed to get together a decent enough crew, even out here in the wilderness.

Martin and Ramses had been on the landing; each had come in from his post on opposite sides of the casa grande. One had been covering the mirador to the north, the other to the south. Court stayed downstairs in the living room, looked slowly at each member of the Gamboa family. He did not sugarcoat their situation; he only said, “They are coming.”

No one moved.

“Where is Luis?”

“He’s in bed,” said Inez.

“Can you get him to go down in the cellar?”

She just shook her head. “No. He won’t understand. He won’t go.”

Court nodded. He didn’t have time to worry about Luis right now. Looking around the room at his pathetic force of nine, he just blew out a sigh. The Gray Man had always been labor, never management. He was no leader. He wished he had some profound way to rally his troops, but he didn’t really know what to say. It would come down to himself, Ramses, Martin, and Laura. These other poor people — well, he just hoped they didn’t accidentally shoot each other in the attack to come.

Court muttered to himself. “We’re in trouble.”

Elena stood; she’d been sitting on the sofa. “We can stop them.”

Gentry just stared back at her. He tried to say something helpful but could not think of a thing.

Inez announced she had bread in the oven that she needed to take out. Luz followed her into the kitchen, the old women disappearing before Gentry could point out to them that there were more important concerns at the moment.

He turned back to those remaining in the room and to the federales looking down from the landing. “There are four trained fighters here. Only two of us have real weapons. I just have a half-empty wheel gun and a fifty-year-old scattergun, like I’m in fucking Dodge City.” No one understood the reference. They all just looked at their American protector.

In the dim he looked at Elena and Laura, at Ernesto and Diego and Ignacio. He saw eyes of trust. Eyes of hope.

Eyes of fools.

His mind raced; he thought about the impending attack and what he could do about it.

Elena said, “Joe, don’t give up on us. We may not all be soldiers, but we can all help. Everyone can do something!”

The smell of fresh bread wafted from the kitchen.

Court sighed. “We can’t fucking bake our way out of this, Elena!” Elena Gamboa’s face reddened in anger and frustration.

Ramses chuckled on the landing above.

“Other than pelting our enemies with chimichangas, does anyone have any ideas?”

Laura Gamboa held her pistol up. “Sí. I have an idea. How about we just shoot all the pendejos when they come?”

Court shrugged. “Well… yeah, that’s the plan, I guess.” He stiffened. “Everyone to your positions. You know what to do.”

Court stormed past the family towards the first set of sconces and blew out the candles there.

He passed the family again in the living room as he headed to the back door. “Buena suerte,” he mumbled. Good luck. With his hand on the latch he stopped, turned back, and looked at them one last time. They stood like stone statues there in the dark, staring back at him. Luz and Inez stepped out from the kitchen with a tray of rolls.

“Come on, goddammit!” he shouted, utter frustration at their predicament getting the best of him. “Elena, Luz, and Inez to the basement! Ernesto to the cellar hallway to guard the women; Diego and Ignacio to the kitchen to guard the basement access; Laura on the upstairs landing to overlook this room! Blow out all the candles on the way. Move! It’s not that fucking complicated! And stay away from the damn windows!”

Everyone moved off in different directions and, more or less, Court was somewhat relieved to see, in the directions of their duties.

“Fuck,” he said to himself.

He looked up at the landing; Martin had gone back to his post, but Ramses looked down at him. In the darkness the Mexican officer said, “Good luck, amigo.”

“We’re going to need it,” Court replied.

And then he stepped out the back door into darkness.

There were sixteen in the first wave. They were not elite sicarios, but they were nevertheless cold, ruthless men, trained in the use of their weapons and well “encouraged” by their leadership to fulfill the wishes of the head of their cartel.

In the nomenclature of the Mexican cartels, these men were referred to as soldados, “soldiers,” or more dismissively as estacas, in this sense meaning “fence posts.” They weren’t the top-of-the-line, but they could stand there with a gun in their hand and do their job.

Their ages ranged from seventeen to sixty-one; there were two sets of fathers and sons, and two more sets of brothers. All of them had served in the army, and one of them had been an officer, and that made him the leader of this ad hoc group of killers.

These men weren’t the best that the Black Suits had to call on, but they were the closest to the hacienda, and for that reason they would have to do. They all lived up here in the hills and mountains; most had worked together on other assignments at one time or another for Los Trajes Negros.

Three of them were judiciales, state police from Jalisco, and six more were municipales from nearby Tequila. State and local squad cars sat parked alongside the dirt track on the other side of the hacienda’s back wall, alongside two pickup trucks and three old sedans.

Spider had contacted the leader of his enforcers in this region just after eleven p.m., and it had taken all of three hours to get the muscle into the area. They’d pulled down two cell towers with a chain and a truck, and then waited for a radio call ordering them to cut the landline.

Most of them carried police issue shotguns or M1 carbines, a sixtyyear-old American rifle that is still seen all over Mexico, mostly in use by security guards at banks, department stores, and the like. Though venerable compared to any current frontline rifle, it fired a potent .30-caliber bullet from a fifteen-round magazine, and it got the job done.

Just as Gentry and the two GOPES had suspected from their inspection of the terrain, the attacking force came over the back wall, dropped down into the dark.

They moved through the overgrown grasses in pairs, kept their eyes on the dark building in the distance, still fifty yards beyond the patio and the pool. They ducked down behind the few lime and orange trees growing wild in the back, and then they ran in short, labored zigzags to the statues, and ducked down behind these as well.

They were close now; all sixteen had made it to the edge of the back patio. Seventy-five feet from the colonnade, where the rear doors to the main room sat invitingly. The teams of men began a disorganized leapfrog advancing maneuver, some nearly colliding with one another, others ducking down behind planters alongside the pool.

Fifty feet now, the former army officer, the man who was nominally in charge of this array of shooters, stood and waved all forces forward. He had not anticipated making it this far without resistance and had not planned for everyone to hit the same entry point, but the patio doors were closest, and once inside the house, his men could separate and begin the killing.

The man could already count the money that Spider would give him.

“¡Ataque!” he shouted.

Then, without warning, there was the rumble of a big engine to the right of his position on the patio, on the other side of the rectangular pool. A huge pickup truck had somehow been pulled up against the outer wall of the colonnade and covered with vines, far away from the front driveway and totally hidden from view. The sixteen men stood like the statues around them for stunned, precious seconds as the high-beam lamps and spotlight rack of the big F-350 flipped on and the entire rear patio flooded with blinding white light.

The leader spun towards the origin of the light, shielded his eyes from its glare, and raised his rifle one-handed to fire at its source.

But ten feet from the tips of his boots, in the filthy black pool, a noise and a movement caught his eye.

The Gray Man had spent nearly three minutes under the water, had spent the previous ten with only his head and shotgun above the thick, greasy surface of rotten leaves. When he heard the faint whistle from Martin that the attackers were coming, he submerged, breathing through a bamboo reed with his eyes shut tight, just waiting for the noise from the truck to tell him it was time to act. Ramses started the vehicle with the remote key fob when the sicarios were close enough to engage.

When Court surfaced, he was careful to do so facing away from the massive flood lamps. He immediately saw targets before him like fish in a barrel, and he showed no mercy. He rose from the water, spitting the hollow length of bamboo from his mouth as he did so, leveled the long side-by-side shotgun at the first man he saw, and he fired a barrel of birds hot into the man’s ample gut.

Boom!

Above him, to his right, he heard the short belching of a 9 mm submachine gun, Ramses firing from the mirador on the second floor. Another pistol cracked from ground level, coming from the patio door of the house. Court did not know who that was; he had assigned no one to that position.

Boom!

He fired his remaining chamber, sending over one hundred tiny beads of steel shot into the lower torso of a man in a green police uniform who spun away from him on the patio.

Splashes of water stitched close to him, and he ducked back under the lily pads to reload his shotgun while submerged. He kept the shells in his front pockets. He exchanged two fresh ones after dumping the two spent rounds, and he kicked himself into the shallower end of the pool as he did so, so he could come back out of the water at a place other than where he’d gone under.

He shot up again from the black water into the cool night air, found two targets who had just passed his location as they ran towards the casa grande, and he shot both men in their lower backs, sending them tumbling forward. Again he ducked below the surface to reload and swim to another part of the pool.

Six matones were down in under ten seconds; those to the rear of the attack had retreated out of the bright lights from the truck and dived back into the tall grass. But two men, both Jalisco state police, had been advancing up the right side of the pool, near to the truck, as it was turned on remotely. They fired on the vehicle with their M1s, blew out the headlamps but not the floodlights, and then ran past it as their own men began firing in their direction.

The two men made it under the colonnade that ran along the back of the house. It was pitch-black here and free of the wayward gunfire of their own forces. They ran away from the patio doors; after nearly a minute of keeping their right shoulder on the stucco wall, they found themselves turning the corner at the southwestern edge of the building. They continued in the deep dark along the stucco wall enmeshed by thick moneda vines. Far behind them the gunfire had dropped off now to an occasional crack and an answering boom.

They arrived at a window at floor level. It was locked, but one of the men used the butt of his carbine to smash the glass. He reached in and opened the latch, swiveled the window open, and stepped inside. His partner followed behind.

It was not honor or duty or glory that propelled them. It was money. It was the money they would get from this hit and the prestige they would get around their town from having their stock go up with Los Trajes Negros.

They found themselves in a darkened space, could barely make out the large oaken furniture of a master bedroom. On the other side of the window stood a large door, and it was shut. The two cops were both reasonably certain the shattering of the windowpane would have gone undetected by anyone on the other side, especially with sporadic gunfight still going on. The men stood and began crossing the tile floor to the door, were more than halfway there, when a sudden movement on their left caught their attention.

A voice in the dark. “Guillermo? My son? Is that—”

Both men fired their M1 carbines; in the light from their muzzle blasts they saw an old man, sitting up in his bed. His chest exploded, and he tumbled off the side, rolled head over heels, and settled hunched like a heap in the corner of the room.

Ramses and Martin met up in the sala, both responding to the sound of gunfire in the house. The men shouldered up, with Martin in front, and they moved in a well-practiced tactical maneuver that would allow them to attack enemies to the front of them while protecting each other. They arrived at a right angle in the hall, and then, just around the corner, they heard two pops from a pistol and a woman’s shout.

The two special operations group officers spun around the corner as if they were attached at the hip: Martin ahead and to the left, Ramses just behind and to the right. They trained their weapon lights on the hall and found Laura Gamboa Corrales on her knees in front of an open door, her back to them, and her pistol pointed into the darkness of the master bedroom.

Just then another loud crack and a flash of light from the bedroom. Ramses Cienfuegos flew back and down to the floor with a grunt as the air in his lungs fired from his mouth.

Martin Orozco opened fire into the bedroom, spraying the doorway just above Laura’s head with 9 mm rounds. As he fired, he stepped to the right to cover his fallen partner.

His weapon emptied in three seconds, and he knelt to reload it.

But there was no more shooting from the room ahead.

Martin sprinted past Laura now, and with the light attached to his rifle he saw two dead state policemen by the open window, a wall pocked and broken and chipped from all the gunfire, and then, on the floor on the other side of the bed, the slumped form of Luis Corrales.

Laura had stepped in behind him, and she cried out as she ran past and huddled over her father-in-law.

Martin left her, returned to his partner up the hallway. He was relieved to see Ramses up on his elbows; the gringo was there, too, kneeling over Ramses in the dark. The American was soaking wet. Ramses had taken a round directly into the ceramic ballistic plate on his chest. He’d had the wind knocked out of him, but he was uninjured. The three men looked at one another and breathed a sigh of relief.

The battle was over — for now.