The Kings Of Cool

290

Highly trained Baja state policemen who know their work, Lado’s men blow the generator, plunging the compound into darkness, the only light now coming from the lamps on their helmets and the night-vision scopes on their rifles as their teammates blast a hole in the compound wall.

Then they make small, tight, leapfrogging rushes toward the house, one team covering the other as they move.

This is not a war in which prisoners are taken, this is a war in which prisoners’ entrails are used as message boards, so while the Berrajano men defending the compound couldn’t give a shit about Doc, they do give a shit about their own lives and so they fight like hell.

And they’re good.

All are veterans of Mexico’s long drug wars, and some fought in Bosnia, Congo, Chechnya. They are, in short, survivors, and now they fight to survive, to get through another night to eat another breakfast, smoke another cigarette, fuck another woman, hug their children, drink a beer, watch a futbol match, feel the sun on their faces, just get out of this dark cold night.

Lado has other ideas.

Other orders.

Kill the man called Doc who approved the assassination of Filipo.

Slaughter the Berrajanos who guard him.

Leave a message.

He gives terse commands but knows they are superfluous-his men know their job, they have performed dozens of these missions, they move forward in small knots, firing short, efficient bursts, and the trained ear can distinguish the two sides by the firing patterns as some of the Berrajanos fire from the wall and slip over to the outside to try to make their way through the chaparral to safety, while others retreat into the house and fire from the windows, hoping to make the house a fort where they can make a stand.

Lado has no intention of allowing that. He’ll take no unnecessary casualties but he will take necessary ones, and now he sends men rushing to the main door with a satchel charge. Two fall in the exposed space in front of the door but one makes it, leaves the satchel, and crab-scuffles away, flattening himself to the ground as the charge goes off and shatters the heavy wooden door.

It hangs on its hinges like a drunk man leaning in the doorway as Lado’s next team surges forward into the house.

Don Winslow

The Kings Of Cool