Ballistic

THIRTY-TWO

Ernesto’s eyes blinked, and he drew a shallow breath. He looked up at the American standing over him on the dark veranda.

Gentry reached over the railing of the mirador and fired two HE rounds at movement in the moonlight by the corral in the distance. Wood and stone and fire blew twenty feet into the air.

Court knelt back to Ernesto. “Can you wa—”

He saw it now; the old man’s left leg was bloody, twisted to the side. Only held on by bits of meat and the denim in his jeans. Blood covered the tile of the mirador in the darkness.

Eddie’s father had been hit squarely in the femur with a round from a high-powered rifle.

Court looked back at the man’s face, and the eyes had rolled back. A last breath drained from his lungs.

Quickly, Gentry knelt over him, spoke into his ear. “I’ll take care of them. I’ll get them someplace safe. All of them.”

Then he stood and spun back into the house as the stucco walls turned to dust around him.

The family coughed and choked on the CS gas as Gentry shepherded them into the back of the truck. He’d retrieved the Hawk that held the tear gas grenades, and he fired the remaining rounds into the driveway and the trees beyond it, hoping like hell he was shooting in the general direction of the bad guys. When the weapon clicked on an empty cylinder, he let it fall to the tile of the entryway. He climbed into the back of the mobile command vehicle behind the family; Luz was right in front of him, and she looked past him, over his shoulder and back into the dark smoky house.

“Ernesto? Ernesto?”

There was no panic at all in her voice, even with everything happening around her. Court just pushed her deeper into the bus, dropped the high-explosive grenade launcher onto the padded bench next to Elena, and shut and locked the door behind him.

“I’m sorry, I have to—”

Court said the word drive as he was launched back against the door. Luz fell into his arms as he realized that the MCV was moving forward, its rear tires bouncing down the steps of the casa grande, and that whoever was driving was sure as hell stepping on the gas.

He crawled forward up the aisle, the bouncing and the buffeting of the truck’s chassis tossing him about; gunfire raked the walls of armor on both sides, a constant tinging sound like a downpour in hell.

In the front cab he found Laura behind the wheel; she knelt down low, desperately trying to get some sort of a view out of a windshield that was, while still intact, completely white from bullet strikes and cracked from one end to the other.

“I can’t see!” she yelled.

Court reached across her body and buckled her into her seat. He shouted into her ear as he did so. “Don’t worry! Just drive! Anywhere is better than here!”

They sideswiped one of the armored cars, ran completely off the driveway and into a pasture, and then Laura jacked the wheel so hard to correct for her mistake that the truck went up on two wheels for an instant before bottoming out and bouncing back onto the rocky drive.

Behind them in the long truck, police gear bounced and slammed around, knocking into Elena, Luz, and Diego.

Laura hit a small tree, knocking the MCV hard to the left and sending Gentry flinging into the dashboard.

“You suck worse than me!” Court screamed as he crawled across the front passenger seat, opened the heavy armored door, and leaned outside. They needed some sort of idea of their direction, even if it meant Gentry exposing himself to enemy fire.

“Right! To the right!” he shouted in English, and Laura turned the wheel to the left.

“¡Derecha! ¡A la derecha!” Court shouted.

She fixed her mistake, did not overcorrect this time. “Sorry! Sorry!”

Court spotted for her, though he heard bullets whizzing past him. They clanged off the rear door and the side panel; Gentry brought his body back inside the truck for an instant then darted his head out again quickly to help Laura find her way through the forest on the long, winding driveway.

They were in the woods twenty seconds later, safe from the sicarios at the casa grande, but Court knew good and well that they were not out of the woods, figuratively. The men up at the house had radios, which meant the trucks and the armored vehicle parked near the front gate would now be scrambling into position to block the exit.

Court bobbed his head back into the vehicle. Laura had found a small corner of the windshield that had not been turned smoke white with the impact of bullets. She leaned up and into it, straining against her seat belt, desperately trying to see out of the tiny viewing hole.

Court shouted to the back. “Diego, give me the grenade launcher!” He said the last part in English; he did not know the words in Spanish.

“The what?” shouted Diego from the dark rear of the vehicle.

Laura shouted back the translation, and within a few seconds young Diego appeared with the big gray cylindrical device. Court snatched it and positioned his entire body outside the MCV now, his feet on a small running board below the passenger door, his right hand holding the open door, his left hand holding the Hawk MM-1 and balancing it on the front door. As the truck bounced and weaved on the bumpy driveway, Gentry found it next to impossible to aim.

They approached the front gate now; Laura concentrated on it. But Court shouted to her from outside the passenger seat.

“I’m going to make us another exit.”

“What?”

Court knew that blasting the cars with high-explosive grenade rounds would damage them, to be sure. But this wasn’t Hollywood; the vehicles would not blow sky high and then land conveniently out of his path.

No, he would try to knock a hole in the old wall large enough for them to fit through. The MM-1 had an effective targeting range of one hundred and fifty meters in optimal conditions. The conditions in which Gentry found himself working were absolutely off the other end of the scale from optimum, but he had no choice but to give it a shot.

As he expected, the federal police BATT pulled in front of the open gate, its headlights staring up the drive at him like taunting eyes. Daring him to keep coming.

Gentry aimed his launcher ten yards to the east of the gate.

Pop.

Boom!

Court’s first shot hit low, exploded a few yards short of the stucco wall.

“You missed!” shouted Laura. Court wondered how she could suddenly see so much through the windscreen.

He fired again and nailed the hacienda’s wall perfectly. Fire, stone, and white dust exploded back and up in the dark. Gentry fired again, hit again, but wide of his last impact. He now saw black openings in the wall, with a five-foot wide “column” of stone between them. He aimed as carefully as he could at this remaining piece, and he pulled the trigger.

His weapon was empty.

Damn. Court climbed back inside, tossed the launcher on the floor in the back between the Gamboas, and quickly buckled up.

“Hit it!” he shouted.

“Hit it?” Laura screamed back her question, disbelief in her voice.

“Right in the middle! As hard as you can!” He then turned back into the back and screamed to the rest of the little clan. “Hold on to something!”

The gunfire came first. A couple of the campesinos at the front gate had gotten in front of the armored cars. Their shotgun pellets tickled the walls and windows of the huge truck looming closer.

Laura Maria Gamboa Corrales slammed the six-ton vehicle through the two-hundred-year-old wall, pulverizing it into stones and dust and whipping moneda vines. Inside the jolt was cataclysmic; the damaged windshield gave in completely, broke apart and away, and slid forward down the stubby hood. The occupants were stunned, but Laura’s new wide vision of the road in front of her greatly helped her driving; she pulled the wheel back to the left, crashed through a few low bushes, and nailed the left rear quarter panel on an ancient Datsun pickup. The impact spun the little truck across the road like a toy, forcing shotgunners to dive for cover, their straw hats flying into the air like leaves kicked up by a breeze.

Court Gentry unbuckled his seat belt, rolled onto his knees, and crawled into the back of the van. He grabbed the MM-1 launcher and scrambled to a case of grenades bolted against the wall by the back door. He worked there for a moment; Diego and Luz and Elena just watched him in the dim red light.

“Laura, stop the truck!” he shouted after another ten seconds.

“Are you crazy!”

“Do it!” She slowed the MCV, and Court opened the rear door. He almost fell out; his legs were weak after the concussion of the crash. Back in the dark, one hundred and thirty yards behind, the dozens of federales sicarios left behind at the casa grande were now making their way down the driveway towards all the cars positioned there. Gentry hefted the grenade launcher, sighted through its notch and post iron sights, and launched five tear gas grenades at the cars and trucks.

When he finished, even before the last canister impacted back at the gate, he dropped the MM-1 in the road and climbed back in the truck. “¡Vamanos!” he called forward to Laura, who put the big tank back into gear. It shuddered and scraped as it moved along now; they’d put the command vehicle through a hell of a lot more abuse than it could be reasonably expected to suffer, but it had kept them alive.

“Where are we going?” Laura asked when Gentry made it back up front.

He climbed into the passenger seat and snapped the seat belt tight around his waist. “Fuck if I know,” he admitted.