Ballistic

THIRTY-ONE

At dusk the patrols became much less frequent; Gentry pictured a meeting back at the main gate, imagined the leader of the operation laying out his assault plan to a large group of men kneeling in the dirt with their weapons hanging from their necks.

Court knew he’d have to act fast. Part of any attack would surely include a blocking force outside of the walls on all points of the compass, ready to keep anyone from escaping.

At six p.m. he found the entire east side of the hacienda wall clear, so he slid out of the tree, hung by his arms, and dropped the rest of the way to the one-lane dirt road, rolling to the ground to absorb the jarring shock in his ankles and knees and spine. Quickly, he shot across the hard surface and buried himself into the tall grasses of the overgrown blue agave field. There he knelt for a moment, listened for shouts or gunshots or approaching vehicles. Hearing nothing that worried him, he stood, began moving north through the grass along the road, ready to tuck down into the foliage to duck the next patrol.

The valley had darkened to black by the time he turned at the northeast corner of the hacienda wall. While he made his way through the brush, a half dozen pickup trucks ambled by on the road to his right; they were driven by civilians, and more civilians sat in back with rifles. These were local farmhands, granjeros. Deeply tanned men with mustaches and cowboy hats, they were manual labor from the neighborhood, probably offered a week’s wages for a day’s work. These unskilled laborers would not take part in the attack. No, these men would just patrol the perimeter, perhaps set up a couple of roadblocks, just to make sure that if anyone in the hacienda managed to squirt out during the assault on the building, they would be mopped up before they made it out of the valley.

They weren’t evil killers, Court knew. They probably thought they were working for the federales and not the Black Suits, though there was no way to be sure. These were not beneficiaries of the drug profits of Mexico in any appreciable sense; they were just laborers who’d lucked into a little work. The Black Suits had access to all the labor they could ever want or need, and Court knew he needed to remember that if he ever got out of this damn valley.

Court knew these were not necessarily bad men. But they were in his way, and he would kill them just the same.

Ahead of him in the distance, at the hacienda’s front gate two hundred yards away, Court saw the headlights of several vehicles along the road. Big black SWAT-style armored cars, pickup trucks, a beat-up sedan, even a huge armored Policía Federal mobile command vehicle the size of a bus. He decided to get closer, maybe to grab a weapon or a hostage or a car that he could drive right up to the casa grande and rescue the Gamboas. He moved around an open pasture, dug into a low copse of pine trees, and neared his objective. There were dozens and dozens of men with guns here to prevent him from carrying out this plan, but still he moved towards them in the night. He heard barking dogs but knew the scent of all the other men, and all the other dogs for that matter, would render them worthless as early warning devices.

At fifty yards away he ducked lower. He was close enough to see the federales in their SWAT uniforms; they had already broken off into fire teams. Dozens of men rechecked weapons and strapped extra ammo magazines to their bodies. Court heard the fire teams run through their coms checks. Dozens of radios squawked and beeped and crackled through the cool evening.

Then the teams broke apart completely, ten or twelve men to a unit, some piled into two Policía Federal armored trucks that Gentry recognized as Ford BATTs, or Ballistic Armored Tactical Transporters, and the big black vehicles rumbled to life. Another dozen men boarded the beds of two pickup trucks. Even at this distance Gentry could tell the white trucks were pressed low on their chassis accommodating all the men and their gear.

The two pickups turned right at the road around the hacienda and disappeared into the distance. One of the big BATTs turned left and headed slowly in Court’s direction.

The remaining BATT remained at the front gate with its engine running. Court watched federales file into it, and the side door was closed and secured. Then another unit stacked up behind it in formation. The Policía Federal armored mobile command vehicle sat behind the rest of the vehicles; men came and left through a side door.

The truck moving to the east passed fifty yards off his left shoulder, everything outside of its bright headlights was black to the driver, and Court knew he could not be seen.

He understood the federales’ attack plan now, more or less. Three units, each with a dozen men, would assault the hacienda simultaneously from the south, east, and west. A larger force, twenty or twenty-five maybe, would be heading right up the driveway.

The farm hands with the cowboy hats and the scatterguns were outside the walls on the perimeter, ringing the action in clusters on all sides of the hacienda as a sloppy blocking force.

So there it was. Sixty heavily armed, highly trained Mexican Federal Police officers, plus another two-dozen armed locals hanging back in support.

Against a pregnant woman, an elderly woman, an injured old man, a sixteen-year-old boy, and a girl who cries the rosary over assholes who lost their shitty lives trying to earn a paycheck by killing her.

Goddammit, Court thought. Guess it’s time to go out in a blaze of glory.

Gentry was only twenty-five yards away from the rear of the BATT at the front gate when it drove forward, lumbered into the hacienda proper. The cops on foot jogged behind it in two columns. The driveway to the casa grande was a lumpy, bumpy, winding two hundred yards, and the big heavy armored truck moved slowly up the hill, disappeared into the forest; its headlights and taillights flickered through the trees and made a horror-show dance of ominous shadows all the way back to the gate.

The dogs disappeared up the drive with the foot patrol.

Court got down on his knees, crawled through the brush and grasses and around wild agave plants the size of kitchen tables. He moved slower and more quietly with every inch of progress; he expected there would be sentries back here around the command vehicle, and even though he could not see anyone yet, he knew any sound he made would travel through the night.

Soon he found himself at the road between two parked pickups. He was less than fifty feet from the gate; he could hear a group of men talking over the drone of the auxiliary power unit of the big armored command vehicle.

He looked ahead, across the road, and in a shallow run-off ditch on the other side, he saw a dead body, stripped to the waist. Even in the moonlight he could still see the big black bruise on the man’s jaw.

It was Sergeant Martin Orozco; a dozen bullet holes perforated his legs, arms, and chest. A final coup de grace wound was centered on his forehead.

“Sorry, amigo,” Court mumbled as he continued forward on his hands and knees.

Looking around the pickup on his left, towards the gate, past the command vehicle, he saw five or six Mexican farmer types with shotguns, their butt stocks resting on hips.

Most of the men stood right up by the gate, as if trying to catch a glimpse of the action two hundred yards away through the forest. Their body postures and tonal inflections showed their excitement. They were spectators; not one of them thought for a second any of them would be in danger or would even be called on to fire their old scatterguns.

Court knew he could hotwire one of these pickup trucks in under a minute. With it he could race up the driveway, get past the armored truck and the men, get the Gamboas in it and then drive through the hacienda, break out at one of the small gates on the west wall, making sure to avoid the sicarios who would be attacking from that side.

It would be easy.

Except for the one thousand or so copper-jacketed spikes of lead that would be flying at him and those he tried to protect at three thousand feet per second, each one with the potential to turn a human head into pink mist.

The pickup truck plan was a nonstarter.

If there was still an armored car here at the front gate, and if that armored car happened to be unlocked with the keys in the ignition, well then he’d be in business.

But the BATTs were gone, and with them any chance for—

A young PF officer stepped from the side door of the trailer-sized command vehicle, and the door locked back behind him. The officer turned away from the famers, walked across to the bushes along the far side of the road, and undid his belt. He shook as he tried to force himself to take a quick piss; he rolled his neck to scoot the shotgun that hung in front of him out of the way of the impending stream.

Gentry looked at the locked door of the command vehicle, wondered if the man taking a bathroom break had a set of keys on him. He wished the truck wasn’t so fucking big. Still, it was armored. It had the plating necessary to stop a rifle round cold; its thick front windshield would hold back dozens of direct hits before failing.

The vehicle would be nearly impossible for Court to drive, but he knew he did not have the luxury of being choosy at the moment.

Dammit.

Across the narrow road the officer pulled up his pants and zipped them, then reached into his pants pocket. Gentry recognized the glint of a key chain.

Court leapt to his feet, and he struck like a cobra.

He ran low and fast across the road as the policeman began to turn back towards the command vehicle. The gaggle of cowboys and farm hands was twenty-five feet off Gentry’s left shoulder and still looking up the drive towards the casa grande. Gentry moved like a shadow across the hard surface, drew his knife at the last second, simultaneously slipped it between the turning man’s floating ribs on the left side and covered the federale’s mouth with his right hand. He pushed the knife to the hilt and kept pushing the man forward into the bushes; Court turned the blade like a key as he followed the man into the thicket and fell with him, on him, onto the hard earth.

Court used his own dead weight on top of the man to stifle his kicks and thrashes. This hombre was probably a soccer player, Gentry thought; he was exceedingly fit, and his body did not play by the rules. Court expected the man to be limp in five seconds; it was nearly twenty before the life left his extremities. Court found himself exhausted, as if he’d been trying to stay atop a bucking bronco while preventing the bronco from making a sound for the entire ordeal. Court reached forward, pulled the keys out of the brush. He felt them for a moment, settled on two possible choices for the door of the vehicle. He held them in his fingers and retrieved the shotgun with his other hand.

Then he stood. Headed towards the armored command vehicle.

Seconds later he was inside. He’d shut the door behind him, turned right, away from the front of the vehicle and towards the back cabin. A man called out from the cab, a question to his partner who was now dead in the brush. Court pulled out his knife, began to turn to deal with the other driver, but he stopped, noticing a metal rack that ran head high along the length of one side of the cab.

All manner of weapons and ammunition rested in the rack or hung from hooks above it.

Gentry’s eyes widened, and his face tightened into a cruel smile. “Oh, hell yes.”

He turned away, headed to the front to kill the driver.

The comandante led his men up the driveway towards the front of the house. They had been protected from any threat of fire from the windows or verandas of the hacienda’s casa grande by the armored vehicle ahead of them, but his men had widened out as they neared the building and now moved slowly, tentatively in the night. The truck slowed and stopped and shone its bright lights on the front door.

Normally, the comandante would have nothing to do with a frontal assault, straight up the middle towards a defended stone building. But after sending in spotters that morning and seeing the property from the inside, he understood how concealed the driveway was from the hacienda itself. With the thick growth of bushes and trees on both sides, the archways at the front door, even the tall weeds between the cobblestones, twenty-five men heading in two columns straight up the driveway at noon would be more covert than if they jumped over the back wall in the middle of the night.

Even so, he’d waited until nightfall and then one hour more because the defenders might have been expecting an attack as soon as darkness covered the property. Now, at nine in the evening, he could wait no longer. It was time to hit these worthless cabrones in the house, kill every last thing that moved — every man, woman, and child, and then the dogs and cats and the chickens and goats.

He wanted to check with the other teams who should just now be approaching from other directions, but one of his damn officers had apparently depressed the transmit button on his radio, and it prevented the comandante from sending commands or hearing from any of his other men. He’d waited thirty seconds for el chingado cabrón to realize his error and fix his radio, but still he could not communicate.

In another twenty seconds he would be ready to call for the attack, and if this hijo de puta didn’t fix his chingado radio, the comandante was going to string the pendejo up by his chingado—

Behind him, lights through the forest. Moving up the driveway towards the house.

He looked to the men around him as he quickly dove behind a low stone wall that rimmed the parking circle in front of the casa grande. He had to get out of the driveway before he was silhouetted by the approaching headlights.

He turned back around, stared at the lights, and he could not believe what he saw.

The mobile command vehicle bounced wildly up cobblestones towards his position.

He’d left the two drivers in the MCV at the front gate, but they had no reason whatsoever to even run the engine much less take part in the attack.

Even though his radio was not functioning, he pressed the button and screamed into it. “¡Cabrones! What the fuck are you doing?”

Fifty yards away the vehicle’s red brake lights illuminated in the forest.

The MCV stopped in the woods, began turning around in the tight confines of the narrow driveway.

The comandante turned back towards the house. Whatever the hell his drivers were doing, they had eliminated any further surprise. He rose and opened fire on the front of the house with his M16 rifle; this was the only way he had to begin the attack without the use of his worthless radio.

Men on either side of him followed suit; their rounds sparked against the stone facade and tore through the wooden door.

The comandante heard a sound through the gunfire, and he turned back towards the noise. In his utter astonishment he stood up from behind the low wall and lowered his rifle to his waist.

The massive armored MCV moved up the rocky driveway in reverse, its speed increasing by the second. The huge blue truck bounced and heaved, its chassis straining under the weight of tons of ballistic steel.

The comandante had driven armored cars enough to know the view out of the rearview mirror was lousy; this pinche driver was blindly accelerating up towards the casa grande at a speed that he could not control.

“¡Alto!” Stop! The comandante screamed into his radio; the problem with the mike seemed to have been rectified, although every other aspect of this attack was turning to mierda in front of his eyes. The MCV shot backwards towards the other armored truck, the BATT that was parked in the parking circle and shining its headlights on the big dark house.

The armored vehicle doing what it was fucking supposed to be doing!

The MCV looked like it would flip as it bottomed out at forty miles an hour; it missed sideswiping the other vehicle by no more than a foot, knocking off the driver’s side mirrors of both trucks.

Suddenly, the comandante standing at the wall realized three things in rapid-fire succession: One, if his driver had had trouble seeing what was behind him before, now that his mirror was smashed and bouncing up the drive behind him he would not be able to see a thing. Two, that his driver was not his driver! And three — that the federale MCV moving at forty miles an hour was going to crash up the front steps of the house.

Court let go of the transmit button and tossed the radio onto the floor of the truck and then stomped on the gas. The lumbering vehicle slowly accelerated up the driveway in reverse, bouncing and bumping up the hill. He buckled himself in, and only this allowed him to keep his foot planted firmly on the pedal. The buffeting inside the top-heavy vehicle made him feel like he was a rag doll being shaken by a giant. Still, he did not let up on the gas for an instant.

He’d been aiming, if you could call it that, more or less at the front door to the casa grande, but when he lost his mirror, he gave up on any pretense of precision in his targeting. Instead he just floored it, hung on to the steering wheel for dear life, and pushed his head back hard into the headrest, unsure when the impact would come or even if he would survive it.

He felt a jolting crash that rocked him hard, slammed him tight into his seat, and caused his foot to slip from the gas pedal, but he knew he had not yet hit the house. As the bottom of the vehicle scrapped over stone, he determined it was the angel fountain in the center of the drive. This told him he was heading too far to the left to hit the front doors squarely.

He turned the steering wheel slightly to the right, jammed his foot down on the pedal again as automatic-weapon fire raked across the thick glass plate of the windscreen. He streaked by the broken-down farm truck with Ignacio Gamboa’s body in the front seat.

Court’s armored bus crashed straight up the steps of the casa grande; it smashed with brute violence into the western side of the archway and turned the two-hundred-year-old oak doors into logs and splinters.

The MCV jolted to a stop. Court slammed the transmission into park, unbuckled himself, and spun into the back. Behind him the confused and tentative smattering of gunfire that had chased the truck up the drive now turned into a heavy fusillade as the Policía Federal quickly came to the realization that this was not a wayward vehicle of theirs but, instead, a breakout attempt by the family under siege.

In the back Gentry fell down twice, stumbling from his dazed headache and lost a moment in the darkness, tripping over weapons that had fallen from their shelves. Seconds later he recovered, found the two items he’d been looking for, and opened the back doors.

Diego knelt in the sitting room behind the couch and fired at movement on the back patio. His grandfather had gone upstairs to shoot from the mirador, but he had not heard his abuelo fire the M1 carbine in over a minute.

An unreal amount of automatic fire shredded the front of the house. Diego knelt behind the couch as if it would give him some sort of cover; he only lifted his head when he heard an engine’s roar. The rear of a huge blue truck crashed into the entry way of the casa grande and continued several feet inside the building. In a panic Diego stood and fired with his pistol, the bullets just making sparks on the rear door. His weapon clicked open and empty.

The sixteen-year-old boy fumbled his reload, dropped a magazine on the tile floor, and chased it to the edge of a wingback chair before retrieving it and seating it in the grip of his gun. Long before his weapon was back in the fight the black doors of the vehicle flew open, and Diego saw a man crouched there in the truck with two massive weapons in his hands.

“Diego! It’s me! It’s…” In the excitement Court had forgotten his pseudonym. “It’s the gringo! Get everyone up here and in the van! Ándele!”

It took the young boy five full seconds to comprehend, but when he did, he nodded, spun on his tennis shoes, and ran towards the kitchen. He shouted as he ran. “Mi abuelo is upstairs!”

Courted nodded, but he did not go upstairs; instead he turned towards the shattered front doorway. There was little space between the hulking truck and the broken stone and stucco, but Gentry found a firing position, and he raised his right hand. In it he hefted a Hawk MM-1 handheld grenade launcher, loaded with a dozen high-explosive shells. The weapon was heavy and bulky and Court normally would have used both hands to fire it, but the weapon did not require both hands. He pulled the heavy trigger, and with a sound akin to a massive cork popping from an agitated champagne bottle, the first grenade left the barrel.

Boom!

Forty yards away an explosion of fire and smoke and broken earth and spinning federales. He fired three more times at the wall lined with attackers before lowering the weapon, lifting an identical device that he held in his left hand, and popping off three missiles loaded with CS agent, a powerful crowd-dispersing tear gas. With the last canister still in the air, he spun in the other direction, fired rounds from both weapons one at a time; they arced through the house, through the broken sliding glass doors to the patio, over the pool, and exploded in the garden behind the casa grande.

Court had lived by luck, but he had no real expectation of hitting one single sicario attacking the rear of the house. No, he just wanted to show them the rules had changed; their cowardly attack on women, a kid, and an old man would now subject them to high-explosive rounds being shoved down their motherfucking throats.

He fired one round of CS up the hallway that ran from the main room to the west, hoped like hell he’d have everyone out of here before the gas wafted back inside and made this living room unbearable.

He dropped the CS grenade launcher as he ran up the stairs; it was too heavy to wield along with the high-explosive launcher. He turned to the right, shouted for Ernesto, wished like hell he’d grabbed a shotgun or a pistol or something other than a weapon that he could not use in the short range of a hallway.

He turned towards the rear mirador, and he saw the old man there, lying on his back in a pool of blood.