Target America

3

Zakayev and the Castañedas hunkered near the walls on either side of the passageway, bracing for an attack.

Javier ordered his men onto their bellies and covered them with a tarp. “Let them come as close as possible before you fire.” He knew that because of the crazy Chechen with his finger on the bomb, they would have to kill every cop coming against them in order to escape with their lives.

Zakayev gripped the dead-man switch, keeping a wary eye on the Mexicans. He wasn’t worried about the RA-115 taking damage in a firefight. It was of Russian manufacture, awkward looking and ugly but built to take a genuine beating.

Flashlight beams came dancing down the walls from the north.

Agent hitch spotted what appeared to be a lump of cargo on the floor near the wall 150 feet down the tunnel. He held up a fist to halt the column.

“Looks like they took off and left their shit.” He moved out again, determined to catch the smugglers before they made it back to the other side. It didn’t matter to Hitch how far down the tunnel they caught them, just so they grabbed them before stepping out of the tunnel on the Mexican side. Let their lawyers try to prove they’d been bagged south of the border.

As they drew within fifty feet of the lump in the floor, Hitch made out the muzzles of the AK-47s sticking from beneath the edge of the tarp, stopping in his tracks.

Javier shouted, “Fuego!” and the AK-47s opened up with a deafening roar.

Hitch was struck in the face, arms, and torso, dead before he hit the concrete. Gutierrez and another agent went down at the same time, exposing three more agents to enemy fire. These three were also cut down before ever firing a shot. The seven remaining ICE men hit the deck and opened up with their MP5s.

The two groups blasted away at one another with automatic fire at 50 feet, nearly point-blank range for any automatic weapon.

The Castañedas’ ammo was old and corrosive, a mark manufactured in Korea during the midseventies, so the tunnel quickly filled with an acrid smoke, obscuring everyone’s vision. To make matters worse, a number of lightbulbs were shattered by ricocheting spall.

When the guns finally fell silent, there were only four men still left alive on each side.

Zakayev remained hunched behind the RA-115, with a death grip on the trigger mechanism.

“Deja de disparar!” Agent Gutierrez screamed. “Cease fire!”

“Regrésate!” Javier shouted from where he lay on his belly. “Go back!” He was amazed to still be alive and didn’t want to risk another hideous exchange of gunfire.

“We’re going back!” Gutierrez said. “Just give us a chance to pick up our wounded.”

“I give you one minute,” Javier shouted. “Then we fire again!”

“Cálmate,” Gutierrez said easily. “Cálmate, amigo.” Calm down. He couldn’t see much through the smoke but could hear the Castañedas switching out their magazines over the ringing in his ears. There was nothing to be served by continuing the battle. Besides, he was pretty sure he was bleeding to death, hit in the brachial artery of his right arm.

“We’re throwing away our weapons!” he called. “Just give us time to get the fuck out of here! De acuerdo?” Agreed?

“Okay. De acuerdo,” Javier replied, satisfied the fighting was over and the Americans were leaving.

Gutierrez told his men to throw away their weapons and struggled to his feet, bleeding profusely from the right arm. “I’m gonna need help,” he said to the others.

The ladder was more than twelve hundred feet back the way they’d come.

“Motha’fucker,” muttered the only unwounded ICE man, stepping over the bodies of their dead compatriots to slip Gutierrez’s good arm over his shoulders. “We just got our asses handed to us.”

“Hitch was an idiot,” Gutierrez grumbled, glancing back at the body.

“Goddamn glory hound,” added one of the others in disgust.

Gutierrez saw one of the agents still gripping a pistol. “Put that weapon down!” he ordered. “You trying to get us killed?”

The agent dropped the weapon as if it had suddenly burned his hand.

“This fight is over—we lost! Now let’s get outta here while we still can.”

Javier remained crouched near the wall, bleeding from a shoulder wound. All things considered, he didn’t feel too bad about the firefight. He had just led a battle against the supposedly unbeatable Americans, and he had driven them back with their tails tucked. Now all he had to do was get the crazy Chechen to put away the bomb’s detonator so he could shoot him in the head. He waited five minutes after the gringos were out of sight, and then ordered his men to their feet. He walked up to Zakayev and stood looking down at him, where he remained hunched behind the bomb.

“It’s safe now,” he said harshly. “You can put the detonator away.”

Zakayev didn’t reply — didn’t even move.

“Did you hear what I said?” Javier nudged him with the muzzle of the pistol. “It’s time to go. Put the detonator away!”

The Chechen keeled over on his side, a single bullet hole in the center of his forehead. The dead-man switch clattered against the concrete.

Before Javier could even blink, the RA-115 suitcase nuke detonated with a force of nearly two kilotons, vaporizing the Castañedas and the ICE agents — who were just arriving at the foot of the ladder — within a single microsecond. A microsecond later the surrounding rock was vaporized, the temperature at the center of the explosion reaching millions of degrees Fahrenheit. A few milliseconds after that, the earth and rock covering the explosion were heaving upward, compelled by a giant bubble of high-pressure gas and steam as the heat and expanding shock wave melted or vaporized still more rock, creating a molten cavity within the bubble. This expansion continued on for another few tenths of a second until the pressure within the bubble began to equalize with that of the outside atmosphere. Then, when it could no longer sustain the rate of the expansion, the bubble collapsed back in on itself, leaving a giant subsidence crater more three hundred feet wide and sixty feet deep.

The tiny Mexican border town of Puerto Palomas was devastated by the shock wave that traveled through the alluvial plain to knock out all power not only there but also to the city of Deming. Ground tremors were felt as far away as Roswell, New Mexico. And forty miles north of the blast, the US Geological Seismographic Station at Cookes Peak registered a seismic event of 5.1 on the Richter scale.

Though most of the blast’s radiation had been contained by the encapsulating earth and rock, the open shafts at both ends of the tunnel had allowed twin jets of fallout to blast ten thousand feet into the sky, resulting in a deadly cloud of radioactive dust and debris that was soon drifting eastward toward El Paso, Texas.