Damage Control

CHAPTER THIRTY

Maria Elizondo couldn’t breathe. The stress of the darkness, the tightness of the space, and the sheer burden of the unknown had conspired to pull all the oxygen out of the air.

Intuitively, she knew that was impossible, but as she sat crouched in this tiniest of tiny spaces, reason and logic seemed far away. The tunnel smelled of dirt, smelled like a grave. And how appropriate. This would be the night when she lived or died. Either a future lay ahead for her, or it did not.

And it all depended on strangers. American strangers.

Maria prayed. She prayed for strength and courage and for God to forgive the unrelenting anger that had consumed her all these years. She prayed that He would understand not having heard from her in so long, and that He would see that in her heart she was a good person. If, in fact, this was to be the night when she and Saint Peter made personal acquaintance, she prayed that this would be the first day of a blissful eternity, not a tormented one.

According to Veronica, verified by the strange woman, Mother Hen, this tunnel would dump Maria in a storm sewer that ran under the alley behind her house. From there, she would need to find the ladder to a manhole, beyond which freedom lay. As a random thought, she offered up a separate prayer to thank God for not making it rain tonight. In this climate, the ground was so hard and impenetrable that even an inch of rain turned storm sewers into raging rivers.

As she inched down the incline on her rear end, Maria ran the instructions from Mother Hen through her mind. There would be three explosions, and she was not to emerge from the manhole until after the third. She was to stay close to the manhole and await the arrival of a military vehicle. It would flash its lights twice. She was then to approach the vehicle and get in. There would be three American men in the vehicle, one much younger than the others. The older two were soldiers of a sort, and they would protect her as she led them to the tunnels that terminated inside the United States.

“The FBI will be waiting for you on the other side,” Mother Hen explained. “They will take you into protective custody. They wanted me to stress to you that protective custody is not a form of arrest. It is for your own protection, to keep you from being harmed by Felix Hernandez’s friends. You’ll remain in custody for as long as it takes to convict Hernandez of his crimes.”

“Will I be in a jail cell?”

“You will be in a safe house,” Mother Hen said. “It’s a house like any other, but with guards and security systems.”

The news had distressed her. When she thought about her upcoming time in the United States-the nation she’d heard so much about since the day she was born-she’d never thought in terms of security teams and restricted movement. It made sense, she knew, but it was yet another reminder that none of the kindness or cooperation she would see in the future had anything to do with Maria the person. It would all be about Maria the witness.

The end would be the same, yes: a future as an American citizen. It shouldn’t matter how the dream was achieved, so why did it make her sad to be treated as the witness she’d volunteered to be?

Maria sensed in the darkness that the pitch of the incline was becoming more severe, and she found herself pressing hard with her hands and feet against the walls. She’d brought a tiny flashlight with her, one that she’d pulled from her keychain, but she dared not use it. She didn’t want to risk the possibility, however unlikely, of alerting a passing pedestrian or soldier to her presence by startling them with a flash of white light from beneath their feet.

As the dirt became damp, she realized that she must be getting closer to the sewer. Closer to danger.

Closer to freedom.

How in the world had Felix been able to dig this tunnel without her knowing it? His teams must have done it only during the day when she was at work. And what was the purpose? Was he merely preserving his option for a midnight liaison at a time of his choice?

Then she got it. It was the most obvious thing in the world when you thought about it. This was his planned escape route if his enemies arrived while he was visiting her, which he never did because when they were together, it was always at his hacienda. Such was not the case with his other mistresses, however. They were never trusted to be in the house, so he visited them in theirs, on occasion dismissing the mistresses’ husbands from their own beds.

Could it be that each of them have tunnels built beneath their houses?

Of course it could. For something to exist, Felix needed only wish that it be so, and it would appear.

The tunnel walls disappeared without notice. One instant her feet were pressed up against the earthen sides, and the next they were splayed wide, and she was falling. She didn’t even have time to dig her fingers deeper into the walls before she was airborne for just a millisecond, and then she landed hard and with a splash against the smooth concrete of the storm sewer.

She landed on her back and slid, her face slipping below the surface of the water before her hands and feet found a purchase and she was able to rise to her knees. Thoroughly drenched, she fought the urge to cough as her hand shot to the waistband of her pants, where she found the.44 Magnum still tucked where it was supposed to be.

She kept her right hand on the pistol grip as she extended her left hand over her head to see how close the ceiling was. When she felt nothing, she dared to stand, ever so slowly, and she was shocked to find that she could rise to her feet and stand to her full height.

That’s when she realized that she was casting a dim shadow, despite the pitch darkness. Only it wasn’t pitch dark right here. There was no detail to be seen, but when she waved her hand in front of her face, she could definitely see a silhouette.

To her right, she could see the silhouette of a ladder.

When she looked up, she saw two pinholes of gray light peering down at her like ghostly cat’s eyes through the manhole cover.

She’d found her way out. Now all she had to do was wait.

It all took longer than Jonathan had anticipated. Planting of the second charge had been complicated by the presence of occupied buildings. The last thing he wanted was to blast some kid out of his crib. By the time he’d found a suitable vehicle to booby-trap, he’d already lost an extra ninety seconds off the timing of the first charge.

Thus, when he planted the third bomb, he could allow only forty-five seconds on the fuse.

He pressed the button to activate the countdown and then he ran like a bunny rabbit across the street and down one block to join the rest of his team. With his NVGs in place, there were no obstacles that he couldn’t see, and as he closed the distance, he saw Boxers with his rifle up and ready to shoot anyone who might threaten Jonathan’s retreat.

Jonathan slowed and backpedaled and dropped to his knees as he joined the others.

“Jesus, Boss, if I knew you were going to stroll, I’d’ve come along.”

“Stuff it and take cover,” Jonathan said, pressing the NVGs out of the way. “The first one’s going to be close and it’s going to be soon.” As he spoke, he cupped the nape of Tristan’s neck and pulled him forward and down to the grass. With the PC pressed into the dirt, Jonathan lay down on top of him.

“Oh, shit,” Tristan grunted. “What are you doing?”

“Sorry, kid, it’s just part of the job.”

“But you’re-”

The camera strobe of the detonation silenced him, and an instant later, the ground shook as if struck with a massive bass drum mallet.

Boxers laughed. “Well, shit, Scorpion. At least you gave us a show worth waiting for.”

They all held their positions on the ground for the better part of ten seconds to allow whatever debris was launched to land wherever it was going.

When there was no impact, he rose from on top of Tristan and helped the kid rise to his knees.

“Well, the overture’s over,” Jonathan said. “Time for the first act.” He stood, and pulled Tristan with him. “Ready to run again?”

Palma just happened to be looking right at the detonation when it happened. His first instinct on seeing the pulse of light was that it was a muzzle flash, but in the instant that it took him to flinch, he saw the eruption of debris, and he knew that it was a bomb. The chatter of automatic weapons fire followed almost immediately, followed by panicked reports from the guards at the Sandcats that they were under attack.

Within seconds, the police channels came alive with reports of the explosions and the gunfire.

To his left, Sergeant Nazario said, “Captain, sir, we have to go and help them.”

Did this make sense? Palma asked himself. Why would they choose to fight so far away when their true target was right here? Could this be a diversion?

“Help us!” cried a Sandcat crew member.

Palma pounded the hood of the car that shielded him. Somehow, they’d found out about the trap. Were they adapting, or were they merely being stupid?

“Sir, please,” Nazario said. “Let me go reinforce them.”

In his heart, Palma knew it was a mistake, just as splitting your forces is always a mistake. These terrorists had fooled him before, and he sensed that they were doing it again.

But men under his command needed help.

“Very well,” he said, finally. “Take second and third squads to reinforce the Sandcats. You are in charge. I want a full report. They’re panicking out there.”

Nazario threw off a quick salute and brought his portable radio to his lips.

The Sandcat crews started shooting even before Jonathan and his team were there to engage them. The first blast, triggered at the end of the block where they’d parked their vehicles, had incited blind panic, and they were firing randomly at the source of the explosion.

“I feel sorry for the poor schmucks who live on the other end of the block,” Boxers quipped over the radio. Bullets flew until they hit something. That meant hundreds of rounds were chewing up the properties downrange.

A minute thirty in, the plan was working perfectly.

Stealth no longer mattered. Jonathan and his team sprinted full out two blocks east, and then turned south for a block. When they turned west onto the street where the war was happening, the Mexicans were so outflanked that they actually had their backs turned to them.

It shouldn’t be this easy. There were six in total.

Jonathan and Boxers fired in unison, and two seconds later, the Sandcats were theirs.

Jonathan held his aim for a few seconds to verify that there was no movement, and then he turned to Tristan. “Almost home,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Something had changed behind the kid’s eyes. Jonathan didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t particularly care, but he got the distinct impression that he’d somehow crossed a line. For a second, he thought that maybe Tristan was going to pull back, but it only took a slight tug on his vest to bring him along.

Tristan’s mind screamed, They just murdered those men. Shot them in the back. They never had a chance.

“Fair fights are for dead fools, Tristan,” Scorpion said, somehow reading his thoughts. As he spoke, he hooked his foot under the belly of one of the dead men and rolled him to his back. The soldier’s cheek had erupted into a hideous blooming rose.

“Forget everything you’ve heard about honor in war,” Scorpion went on. “The winners are the guys who are still alive when the shooting stops.” As if by rote, he took the soldier’s rifle away and then moved on to the next corpse. “You’ve got to exploit every weakness.”

Scorpion made a point of establishing eye contact. “No matter how you cut it, it’s an ugly business.”

The engine on the closest Sandcat turned and caught. Tristan jumped at the sound and whirled to see the Big Guy in the front seat, smiling broadly and giving a thumbs-up through the window. He said something, but the words were lost in the crisp thump of another explosion.

Scorpion checked his watch and gave a quick, satisfied nod. “Mount up,” he said.

With the second explosion, Palma knew that his worst fears had been realized. The timing had been brilliant. If his mental calculations were correct, Nazario and his men would have been very near the blast.

The debris had barely stopped falling when the screaming erupted on the radio. At first, all he heard was noise, irrational unintelligible yelling that overpowered the radio mike.

“Calm down, soldier,” Palma said, but he knew they’d stepped on his transmission.

He was about to try again when he heard the worst of the worst: “Sergeant Nazario is dead!”

Maria felt the first explosion more than she heard it. She assumed it was the first explosion. More a pulse than a boom, it launched waves through the knee-deep water that rolled to her waist and slapped against the concrete walls.

Stuff fell from the ceiling, too, though in the darkness she didn’t know what it was. It fell in chunks and it filled the air with dust that smelled like mold. Without light, and without knowledge of the truth, her mind screamed that the falling objects were spiders. And crickets. All the insects that most terrified her.

In that flash of fear, the possibility of capture or torture or death mattered less than battling the insects. Maria’s hands moved in spasms to brush whatever they were from her shoulders and hair.

Her hair! In her mind, her head was infested now, crawling with bugs. With pregnant bugs, determined to lay their eggs on her scalp.

It was all preposterous, of course-the ridiculous ramblings of a frightened little girl who’d never fully overcome her fear of the dark.

She told herself that none of it was true-insisted that none of it was true-but it did little to settle her racing heart and trembling hands.

This will be over soon, she told herself. What was it that Mother Hen had said? Three explosions in the space of five minutes, and she was to wait until-

There was nothing subtle about the next detonation.

It must have been much closer, because a pressure wave rolled like an earthquake through the storm sewer. She felt the walls move as the wave swept past her, and a tsunami of water smacked her like a liquid wall. It broke over her head and knocked her to the floor, where she tumbled under the assault of secondary and tertiary waves.

After a somersault, Maria came up sputtering and coughing, desperate to recover the air that had been pushed from her lungs. As she struggled to breathe, she also tried to find stability for her feet in the slippery muck that lined the concrete floor of the sewer.

By pressing her hands against the walls and digging in with her knees, she was finally able to stabilize herself. She tried to stand, but when she was barely above a squat, her head hit the top of the tunnel and a new wave of panic swept over her. She’d been washed to a new part of the sewer, but she’d been turned and jostled so much that she no longer could tell left from right, upstream from downstream.

She was stranded now on hands and knees, and the water was chin-high. If it started to rain, she would drown.

This new terror eclipsed any horrors of the past. She was blind and she was trapped and she was going to drown. If her remains were ever found at all, they would be tangled among weeds and bushes along the banks of the river, downstream from the outfall of this terrible place.

“Stop it!” she commanded herself aloud.

Nothing was done until it was done. She needed clear thought, not panicked ramblings. The cliché said that panic killed people, and now she knew what the cliché meant. If you’re panicking, you’re not thinking, and if you’re not thinking, you’re just giving yourself up to death.

She smelled smoke. The stench of burning rubber. It wasn’t very strong, but it was definitely there. How was it possible to set a sewer on fire?

She needed to find the dim light from the manhole cover. If she could-

Light! Of course! Her flashlight!

Holding herself out of the water by planting her left hand in the slimy muck, she explored her pants pocket with her right. Miraculously, the pistol was still there-as if she had any use for it right now. When her fingers found the outline of the three-inch tube that could only be the flashlight, she nearly cried.

“Please, please, please work,” she moaned.

The company that sold these things marketed them as waterproof, but how factual was their claim? She didn’t even know if the batteries worked anymore. More than that, she wasn’t sure she’d even turned it on before.

The fabric of her pants fought her efforts to remove the light, and once it was clear, she nearly dropped it. In the slipperiness of her grip, the light squirted out of her grasp, but somehow, through instinct and divine intervention, she didn’t lose it in the black water.

Somehow, Maria knew to twist it. She laughed aloud when the blinding white light appeared.

When she pointed the beam to her right, it revealed nothing but an endless tube of concrete that extended eight or ten meters before curving curved sharply to the right. Intuitively, she knew that that was the wrong way.

She pivoted the other way, where her beam revealed a wall of smoke rolling toward her. It was probably just an optical illusion, but the leading edge of the cloud appeared light in color, followed behind by a much darker, thicker cloud. It started to sting her eyes, but she wondered if that would be the case if she was still blind. Could it be that mere awareness brought discomfort?

But there was something else, something in the water, a ripple of movement that raced toward her, as if chased by the cloud.

Maria understood what it was when the first wave of rats swarmed around her.

She screamed.