Ghost Sniper

2

Vaught sped around the corner in the procured taxi, tires squealing, gunning the motor halfway down the block. Abruptly, he slammed on the brakes and bailed out of the taxi, shedding his jacket and making sure his DSS badge was still hanging around his neck. A half dozen curious bystanders stood huddled in a group at the end of the block. When he asked them in Spanish whether anyone had come out of the glass building, they backed away around the corner.

A bored-looking old man sitting on a stoop and smoking a cigarette pointed up and said, “Francotirador.” Sniper.

Vaught saw for the first time that the building was still under construction and that the lower floors were wrapped around with heavy plastic to discourage the general public from entering. He found a way inside and vaulted up a staircase, knowing he had twelve floors to climb. As he arrived at the tenth floor, a door clanged open up on the twelfth; he heard hurried voices descending, weapons clanking against the steel railing. He peered up between the stairs and saw four shadowy figures circling quickly downward.

Two masked men arrived on the landing directly in front of him, and he blasted them from ten feet, splattering the freshly painted white wall with bullets and dark crimson. Someone above fired down and missed, but he felt the spall from the ricochets cut into his shins and danced back out of sight, spraying a burst of fire upward. Sirens howled outside the building, and booted men were quickly mounting the stairs below. The men above retreated back toward the roof, and Vaught gave chase.

He kicked open the door to the roof and stood aside, waiting for a hail of bullets that did not come. Stealing a quick look around the jam, he saw two figures opening another door on the far side of the roof a hundred feet away. One of them disappeared behind it, toting a Barrett sniper rifle. Vaught shot down the second man before he could slip inside; then he ran across. But before he could make it all the way, the Federales came pouring onto the roof behind him, screaming, “Alto! Alto!” Halt!

Knowing they would not hesitate to shoot him, Vaught pulled up short, thrusting his hands into the air and turning around with his weapon dangling from the sling, his DSS badge glinting in the sun. “El francotirador se escapa!” he shouted. “Por ahí, amigos! Por las escaleras!” The sniper’s getting away! Over there! By the stairs!

Seven hard-eyed Federales surrounded him, covering him with M4 carbines and shouting for him to get down on his knees. They didn’t seem to hear what he’d said. Vaught repeated it, and someone kicked him behind his knee to drop him. They shoved him onto his face and shackled his hands behind his back.

“Are you deaf?” he shouted in Spanish. “The sniper’s getting away!”

One of the Federales pressed down on his neck with a lug-soled boot, saying in a sonorous voice, “Cállate.” Shut up.

Vaught was stripped of his weapons and radio, and then brought to his feet. He spit out what was left of the tobacco in his lip and looked at the captain who’d stood on his neck. The patch over the man’s breast pocket read “Espinosa.” He was tall and muscular, with a black mustache and heavy-lidded, obsidian eyes.

“Tell me you’ve got men covering the stairs, Captain. Tell me you’re not just letting that son of a bitch get away.”

The captain jerked his head toward the exit, ordering his men to take Vaught below.

“What the fuck is going on?” Vaught demanded. “Those are our people down there dead in the street! You’re letting the bastard escape!”

Below, Vaught was stuffed into the back of an unmarked car with black-tinted windows. He lowered his wrists and stepped through the cuffs to get his hands back in front of him, and sat watching as the captain spoke with two detectives in plain clothes. At length, they nodded and got into the car.

Vaught asked in Spanish if the sniper had been caught.

The man in the passenger seat said, “Everything is under control. Don’t worry.”

“I need to be debriefed by my people immediately.”

“First, you go to see our people.”

“No, that’s not how this works! I’ve got diplomatic immunity. You have to take me directly to my embassy. Are you federal cops or municipal?”

“La inmunidad diplomática,” the passenger echoed to the driver, and both men laughed.

Vaught sat back with a sigh, muttering in English, “Fuck you both.”

Within a few blocks, it was apparent they were not circling back toward the Federal District but were continuing on a course carrying them ever farther away from el Distrito Federal.

“Where are we going?”

When they ignored him, Vaught lunged over the seat for the steering wheel, hoping to wreck the car. The man in the passenger seat was ready, jamming a high-powered stun gun into Vaught’s neck, shocking him over and over until finally he lay crumpled on the floor behind the seat, virtually paralyzed.

“Cabrón!” the passenger cursed, throwing the stun gun onto the dash and straightening his tie. Asshole!

Ten minutes later, Vaught was dragged from the back of the car by two different men and taken into a building at the end of an alley. There was no doubt that he was now in the hands of the cartels and that he likely didn’t have long to live. He made up his mind to take out one of the bastards the very first chance he got, but with his hands cuffed together, that wasn’t going to be the easiest stunt to pull.

He was thrown onto a musty couch that smelled of cat piss. A different guy with the same stun gun appeared and jammed the weapon into Vaught’s gut, giving him another five jolts. Vaught screamed involuntarily, his muscles contracting uncontrollably until his bladder let loose.

A number of men stood laughing.

“Knock it the fuck off!” someone ordered in English, and the room fell into an abrupt silence.

Vaught opened his eyes to slits, catching a glimpse of a white male dressed in jeans and an olive drab T-shirt. He stood in the doorway holding a Barrett sniper rifle by the carrying handle. His sandy blond hair was cut high and tight above a pair of merciless blue eyes, and there was an Airborne Rangers tattoo on his bulging left bicep. He grunted out orders in heavily accented Spanish and then disappeared down a hall, carrying the weapon that had blown Alice Downly in half.

Someone took away Vaught’s badge, body armor, and boots, leaving him in his stocking feet. He felt like an idiot for having let them take him alive, but what was he supposed to have done? Gun down a bunch of cops on a rooftop in Mexico City? The sad reality was that he’d put himself in this rat-fucked situation by going off the reservation, so he wasn’t about to blame anyone else. He’d just have to get himself out of it — or take the damn bullet without complaint.

Out of nowhere, he was given another jolt from the stun gun and shoved off the couch, onto the floor. One of the handcuffs was released long enough to roll him onto his belly and recuff his hands behind him. This gang wasn’t taking any chances, and Vaught saw his hopes of going down fighting quickly slip away.

A stun gun took a lot out of a man, the electricity forcing the muscles to do a tremendous amount of work in an extremely short period of time, converting the blood sugar into lactic acid and leaving the victim completely exhausted in a matter of seconds. Vaught already felt as though he’d gone ten rounds with a heavyweight fighter, and he was pretty damn sure he hadn’t experienced the last of that fucking stun gun.

There weren’t all that many people to say good-bye to, really. He’d grown up in a Marine Corps family, raised in numerous locations around the world, so he didn’t have what most people would call regular friends. He was the youngest of three brothers (the two eldest both being marines), and his father, a gunnery sergeant, had named him for the Chance Vought F4-U Corsair flown by his paternal grandfather — yet another marine — in the Korean War.

Determined to escape the shadows of his older siblings, Vaught had decided to break with the family’s USMC tradition and enlist in the US Army — one month after the Bin Laden attacks — boldly stating his intention to become a Green Beret.

He’d discovered early that he was a natural leader. Within a month of his first hour in combat, he was promoted to a Special Forces weapons sergeant with the Fifth Special Forces Group out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Vaught then went on to serve multiple tours over the next eight years with an ODA (Operational Detachment — A, or A-Team) in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now as he lay drooling on the floor with his face pressed against the filthy concrete, a commotion flared up down the hall, and there was a heated discussion over the unbelievable stupidity of bringing an American DSS agent to that location.

“Hey, I’m happy to leave,” he mumbled in English, and couldn’t help a sardonic chuckle.

One of the men standing over him kicked him in the ass. “Cállate, cabrón.”

Vaught didn’t say anything more, fearing that another electrical jolt might sap the last of whatever strength he had left. As it was, he wasn’t sure if he could even get to his feet without help, much less put up a fight.

Then a glowering Senator Lazaro Serrano — the head of the Mexican delegation to fight drug trafficking — stepped into the room, and that was the icing on the cake of Vaught’s day. He was hard pressed to stifle an ironic laugh.

“Buenos días, Señor Serrano. Gusto en verle.” Good morning, Mr. Serrano. It’s good to see you.

Serrano didn’t reply. He turned and began haranguing the apparent leader of the crew, a skinny fellow with an AK-47 over his shoulder. “You didn’t even put a fucking bag over his head, cabrón? Now he’s seen my fucking face, and we have to kill him! You stupid fucking cabrónes — all of you!” He slapped the man upside the head and stormed out of the room, hissing angrily over his shoulder, “Get rid of him!”

He shouted for someone to follow him on his way out of the building, and a heavy door slammed shut.

Vaught lay waiting for the sniper to reappear, but he did not. The men milled around the room for a minute or two, talking among themselves as they discussed who would kill the American. Suddenly there was a horrendous burst of automatic fire. As the bodies dropped around him, Vaught closed his eyes, waiting for the lights to go out.

An empty magazine clattered against the concrete, and he looked up to see one of the cartel members smiling crookedly down at him as he slipped another thirty-round banana clip into the AK-47 and pulled back the charging lever.

“Can you sit up?” the fellow asked in Spanish.

“I can try.” Vaught rolled to his back, and with some effort did manage to sit up on his own.

The skinny gang leader, now sprawled out on the far side of the room, riddled with bullets, began to choke on his own blood, and the gunner put a single round into him, silencing him for good.

The gunner then crouched behind Vaught and slipped a key into the handcuffs.

“I’m Mendoza,” he said. “An undercover agent with the PFM.” This was the Policía Federal Ministerial, or Federal Ministerial Police, an agency formed in 2009 to fight corruption and organized crime throughout Mexico, modeled loosely after the FBI.

Vaught sat rubbing his wrists where the steel had bruised him. “Where were you earlier, when my people were getting slaughtered in the street?”

Mendoza shrugged. “I learned of the planned attack only a few minutes before it happened. By then, there was no way for me to send warning without getting myself killed. I’m afraid my saving your life is going to cause the PFM a lot of trouble. I’ll probably get reprimanded for not letting these people kill you. It’s taken eighteen months to work my way this deep into the cartels. Now all that time is entirely wasted. After what I’ve done here, I can’t risk going back to them as the lone survivor. They’d kill me whether they believed me or not — just to be absolutely sure.”

“Well, I’m really sorry about that,” Vaught said.

“You should be, cabrón.” Mendoza helped him to his feet. “What you did was stupid. You don’t have the authority to pursue criminals in Mexico. Your job was to protect your people, nothing more.”

Vaught swayed slightly, and Mendoza guided him to a chair, taking a phone from his pocket. “I have to call my superiors now to find out what to do with you.”

“I need to get back to my embassy. You can help me do that.”

Mendoza waved a finger. “Your embassy is already surrounded by Mexican security. Right now Lazaro Serrano thinks you are dead. It might be best to keep it that way.”

“Hey, look,” Vaught said. “My people need to know about that sniper as soon as possible. He’s an American, trained by our special forces. What do you know about him?”

“Almost nothing. He’s someone the cartels brought in special for this assassination. We didn’t know anything about him before today, but I did hear someone say he’s been contracting for the cartels for some time.”

“Who said that?”

Mendoza gestured at the dead man he’d just shot. “He said it.”

After a tense telephone conversation with his commander, Mendoza slipped the phone back in his pocket. “As I expected, my superiors are angry I didn’t let these people kill you. They say you asked for it. Now, because of you, my deep-cover operation is blown, and other agents might be at risk. My commander made it clear that under no circumstances are you to go back to your embassy. The PFM will now use you to build a case against Serrano. That will keep me out of the picture and protect my identity — which will also help to protect our other deep-cover agents within the cartels.”

“I’m sorry,” Vaught said, leveling his gaze, “but I don’t work for the PFM. I work for the DSS. I have diplomatic immunity, and I’m getting back to my fucking embassy.”

Mendoza took the stun gun from inside his jacket and set it on the table. “I don’t want to use this again, but I will.”

“Again?”

Mendoza smiled his crooked smile once more.

“You made me piss myself!”

“I had to make sure you didn’t do anything else stupid before I could figure out how to save your worthless life.”

“So what the fuck do we do now? I’ve got a bullet in my arm, and it’s going to need attention soon.”

“Right now the PFM is asking the CIA for permission to use you.”

“I don’t work for the C–I-fucking-A either!” Vaught flared in English.

Mendoza had a hatchet face, bushy eyebrows, and a protruding Adam’s apple. “We’ll soon see who you work for, my friend.”

“Fuck this!” Vaught said, again in English, getting up weakly from the table. Mendoza took up the stun gun and zapped him in the thigh to send him toppling to the floor.

Vaught grabbed his leg. “Oh, you fuckin’ cocksucker!”

Mendoza sat laughing in the chair. “You owe me a life, my friend. So now we’re going to wait until my superiors talk to the CIA.”

“You motherfuckin’ cocksucker,” Vaught muttered, digging the can of Copenhagen from his pocket and putting a dip into his lip. “You just wait!”