Ghost Sniper

82

Chief Diego Guerrero had the makings of a disaster on his hands, and he didn’t need Special Forces training to see it. His force was outgunned and outnumbered at least two to one. He’d tried calling again for federal assistance, but the phone lines were down, and the enemy had managed to knock out cellular service as well. He supposed they had destroyed the cell towers, a common tactic.

Wounded men were being brought into the coffee shop by twos and threes now, leaving blood all over the place. One machine gun emplacement had already been hit by an RPG from the roof of the bank, and the enemy was moving in and out of their perimeter almost at will. There were no more motorized patrols. The trucks that weren’t burning were being used to move or provide cover for the wounded.

“There’s no more word from Sergeant Cuevas,” said another sergeant, tossing aside the radio. “They must be dead.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Diego said. “We’re going to lose the city. There are too many of them. And with the rockets …” He shook his head. “I’ve failed. It’s time to consider surrender.”

“Surrender?” the sergeant blurted. “Are you crazy? They’ll line us up and shoot us!”

Diego shook his head. “No. Only me. I will offer my life in exchange for yours. Ruvalcaba is smart enough to see the sense in sparing the men. A slaughter will only make it more difficult for him to buy friends in the government.”

The sergeant, a man named José, pointed out the window. “Ruvalcaba’s not out there! He’s probably hundreds of miles from here! Do you think you can negotiate with wild animals?”

Diego was calm. “What choice do I have but to try, José? The men will certainly be killed otherwise — all of them.”

“Then let them die fighting,” José insisted. “Not stood up against a wall!”

Diego looked around at the almost twenty bleeding men crowding the coffee shop, many of them barely conscious. “What do you men think?”

“We fight on,” one of them said. He gestured with a pistol. “Or we kill ourselves.”

“No surrender,” said another.

“Never surrender!”

“Never!”

The others nodded in stubborn agreement.

“Very well,” Diego said. “Then we will fight.” He accepted a carbine from an officer too badly wounded to walk and collected his spare magazines. “Let’s go, Sergeant. Our Calvary awaits.”

They ducked outside and darted across the square to the nearest machine gun emplacement.

Diego took a knee beside the gunner as bullets flew through the trees over their heads. “How much ammunition do you have?”

“After this belt, one box,” the officer said. “We’re going to lose the square, Jefe. You should take a truck and try to get through to the capital. Someone has to tell what happened here.”

Diego patted him on the back. “That will be a story for someone else to tell. I will never abandon you men.”

The officer squeezed the trigger, putting a burst into a parked car where a couple of narcos had just taken cover. One of the narcos sprawled out dead, and the other scurried back around the corner of the bank.

“There!” José exclaimed, pointing above the courthouse. “I saw a man with an RPG.”

Diego looked around. His men were pulled into a protective perimeter in the town square, using their trucks, as well as park benches, statues, and trees, for cover. He estimated that half his force was dead or wounded. “Let’s go,” he said to José. “We have to kill the man with the rocket.”

“Jefe, no!” the gunner said. “It’s too dangerous. We you need you here.”

“He’s right,” José said, grabbing Diego’s arm. “I’ll take someone else. You stay and lead the men.”

Diego watched him pick a man, and the two officers ran off toward the courthouse. “I wish my brother were here,” he said plaintively.

“You’re the jefe,” the gunner said. “We stayed to fight with you.”

Diego nodded and said a silent prayer, asking for help — not from the Virgin, as he normally might have done, but from his brother: Juan, if you are watching, and if there is any help to send these men, now would be very a good time.

Then he made a separate pact with God.

José used his key, and both officers slipped unseen into the courthouse, dashing to the back of the building and up the staircase. José noticed the officer wheezing during the climb.

“What’s wrong?”

“I was hit crossing the park.”

José saw him holding his side in the dim light. “Can you continue? You can wait for me here.”

“There are many men on the roof,” the officer said. “I’ve seen them taking shots at us. You’re going to need me, but we’d better hurry. I’m losing a lot of blood.”

Putting from his mind the fact that the officer would be dead soon whether or not they were successful, José continued the climb to the third floor. There he found the door to the roof locked, as it should have been. He grabbed his key ring. “They must be using ladders,” he observed.

“I’m sure they’re accessing the annex roof in back — climbing up from there.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.” José put the key into the lock. “Are you ready?”

“Yes, but what’s the plan?”

“Open the door and shoot everyone.”

The wounded officer couldn’t help laughing. José laughed with him. “Okay? Let’s go!”

He turned the key, pushing open the door, and they scrambled out onto the rooftop, where better than twenty narcotraficantes were crouched behind the parapet overlooking the park — four of them armed with RPGs for delivering a coup de grâce to the police forces below.

“Puta madre!” José hissed, having expected to find five or six men.

Both cops opened up on full automatic, moving low and fast, as the Americans had trained them. They mowed down six men apiece before the narcos even knew they were under attack, killing all four rocketeers, and ducking behind an air-conditioning unit to reload.

One of the narcos grabbed up an RPG and fired just as the wounded officer was raising up for another shot. The rocket hit him in the face and took off his head without detonating, exploding somewhere behind the courthouse as José raked his weapon along the parapet, knocking over a half dozen more narcos on the first pass. The remaining six men scattered, firing on José from all directions as he ejected the spent magazine and slapped in a new one.

He was hit multiple times as he rose up from behind the unit, determined to live long enough to clear the roof. Placing controlled bursts in what felt like slow motion, pivoting left to right in a tight corkscrew that carried him through an arc of better than 180 degrees, the sergeant killed or wounded the last of the narcos.

The carbine ran dry, and he landed on his tailbone with bone-jarring force, biting his tongue and falling over onto his back. In the moments before his death, José lay looking up at the stars and remembering — strangely he thought — that his worthless brother-in-law still owed him twenty-six hundred pesos.