Ghost Sniper

77

Night was falling as Hancock briefed his security team on the west side of town. His wounds from the night before were stitched and dressed, but the deep gash on his inner thigh was still suppurating, and the sutures threatened to tear if he lowered into a crouch.

“Remember,” he said, “we don’t have to kill them all. We just have to break their spirit. They’ll try to isolate me like they did last night, so it won’t be possible for me to take more than one shot from any position. Your job is to keep them off me long enough for me to displace. Once we’ve got them confused and disorganized, that’s when the rest of our people will attack from the east.”

“What do we do about Serrano being dead?” someone asked.

“Fuck Serrano!” Hancock stepped into the fellow’s face. “Ruvalcaba has plans to kill Castañeda and take over business in the whole damn country. That’s who we work for! Understood?”

The man nodded and took a step back, glancing at his compatriots, who looked at him askance.

For Hancock, the issue had become even more personal since the night before. Not only could Vaught still identify him, but in the process of almost killing him, he’d damn near forced the sniper to castrate himself on a broken beer bottle. That was too close for comfort, and Hancock planned to even the score.

There was no way to penetrate the center of town — yet. Police presence was too heavy, so he selected a pharmacy on a corner four blocks from el centro and set up on the roof. Putting his eye to the scope, he watched from three hundred yards as police trucks crisscrossed the intersection at irregular intervals.

“No one’s on foot,” he mumbled. The police were either hiding inside the buildings or maintaining a cruising speed high enough to make themselves hard to hit at a distance. With the city on lockdown, there was no civilian traffic, so it was safe for them to ignore the traffic lights.

The sound of a distant gun battle erupted to the south. The shots trailed off after a few seconds, and Hancock wondered dully who’d gotten the better part of the exchange.

Light from a streetlamp glinted off a glass door as a police officer stepped from a coffee shop. Hancock squeezed the trigger on instinct. The door shattered a third of a second later, and the officer was blown in half at the waist.

“Time to move!” he hissed to the two men lying prone just behind him, getting up as quickly as he could without tearing his stitches.

Sergeant Cuevas sprang from a table inside the coffee shop and ran to the door where the lieutenant lay blasted open on the sidewalk. The glass was blown toward the lieutenant, which meant the shot had come from the west.

Crosswhite and Vaught were already up and priming their weapons, moving past him out the door.

“He’s displacing!” Crosswhite shouted. “Let’s move!”

Vaught, Sergeant Cuevas, and two other officers loaded into an armored truck. Crosswhite took three more in another, and both trucks sped off down the street in the direction of the shot.

Chief Diego remained in the coffee shop, now their command post, alerting all patrol units by radio that the sniper’s attack had begun.

Sergeant Cuevas floored the accelerator. “He must have fired from the roof of the pharmacy.”

Vaught sat beside him on the passenger side, while the two officers in back aimed their rifles over the top of the cab.

Four narcos darted in front of the pharmacy, blazing away with AK-47s, but the bullets ricocheted harmlessly off the windshield. The men fumbled to reload, and the cops in the back opened up with their FX-05s, killing one narco and wounding another in the leg.

Cuevas braked hard and cut the wheel left, tromping the accelerator to pursue the fleeing men around the corner, running over the wounded narco and killing him.

Vaught let out with a guttural “Hooah!”

Crosswhite, in the truck right behind them, cut the wheel right to circle around the pharmacy in the opposite direction. A car sped out of the alley just in front of him, and he rammed it aside with the heavily armored truck. The officers in back fired directly down into the car, killing everyone inside. A second car sped out of the alley and slipped around behind them. Crosswhite caught a glimpse of the gringo sniper’s face in the backseat and shifted into reverse, jamming the pedal to the floor and throwing his arm over the back of the seat to see where he was going.

The car sped away around a corner, and he cut the wheel to spin the truck back around. He grabbed the radio and barked out a description of the car — a midnight-blue Dodge Charger — and that it was headed in Vaught’s direction.

Vaught answered that they’d already spotted the car and were in pursuit.

Crosswhite shifted into drive, and a flaming Molotov cocktail impacted the windshield, engulfing the front of the truck and obscuring his vision. He turned on the wipers and pressed the washer fluid button, but the reservoir was empty. The wiper blades quickly melted from the heat of the flaming gasoline and smeared the glass with melting rubber.

“Fuck!” He dismounted and grabbed a fire extinguisher from the behind the seat.

Before he had a chance to use it, they were engaged by automatic fire to the right. One of the officers in back was hit and dove out on Crosswhite’s side of the truck, holding his shattered forearm. The other two men returned fire and drove the gunners back around the corner, but yet another narco jumped out and fired an RPG.

Crosswhite and the wounded officer threw themselves flat as the rocket impacted the cab of the truck and exploded, killing both cops in back.

Crosswhite fired through the flames, knowing from experience that the enemy would use the fire as cover to press its attack. Three narcos went down, and he grabbed the wounded officer by the harness, helping him up. They fell back behind a line of three parked cars to fight a holding action.

“Drove right into an ambush!” he said, changing magazines.

The wounded officer fired his pistol over the hood of a car. “It’s a thing that happens.”

Sergeant Cuevas drove as fast as he could but couldn’t catch the gringo sniper’s car. More units were converging on the area, but the west side of town had been left out of the patrol box because there were too many crooked streets and tight turns.

“We should have anticipated.” Cuevas shook his head in aggravation. “He’s leading us into a trap!”

“I think you’re right,” Vaught said. “Break off! Let ’im go.”

“Chinga su madre!” Cuevas hit the brakes and watched the Charger disappear around a corner.

“It’s okay.” Vaught glanced up at the rooftops to check for enemy rocketeers. “He’s saying the same thing right now.”