Conquistadors

by Jeff Kirkham

  Tavo was nothing if not smart, and he’d walked away from unnecessary risk scores of times. The words of his old instructor settled the debate. He would withdraw to his secret gun locker, hidden in the bowels of the Filly, quickly upgrade his weapons, and then exfil by the route he’d prepared when he first acquired the hotel.

  He caught a glint of burgundy, many rows back in the coffee, and recognized it as a beret. Kaibiles. Guatemalan special forces. They were approaching this like an urban mission, maybe even like a photo op. Otherwise, why would they wear the berets? His thoughts swirled and his ears rang from the massive hit of dopamine surging through his endocrine system. Seeing the flash of the burgundy beret launched his hunter’s impulse. Predatory chemicals pinged through his system like a trillion red hot ball bearings, heating up his reflexes, his muscles and his senses. His right hand shifted up the Glock and forward, sliding instinctively into his combat grip—high into the tang and his hand canting forward. From that grip, the shots would find their mark almost without aiming.

  The thundering of Sofía’s helo, rising into the air, released Tavo from any responsibility he had to restrain himself. He knew the Guatemalans had no air assets capable of downing her helicopter, other than a few World War Two P-51 Mustangs that the Americans had given them. If the Mustangs were in the air, lifting off from Guatemala City, half the country would’ve heard their massive engines by now.

  With his daughter aloft, he was free to do some killing, if killing needed doing.

  For now, he’d do the smart thing and withdraw. Later…perhaps.

  Tavo re-holstered his Glock, massaged the tension out of his gun hand, and walked through the halls of the Filly while he worked down the initial rush of adrenaline, consciously lowering his respiration and heart rate, even taking a second or two to give saludos to the housekeeping ladies in the open-air passageways. He had seen nothing to indicate an assault other than that flash of burgundy. That’s all he would ever see from professionals, and that had been a fortunate slip. Despite his calm, he tasted the storm that gathered.

  The housekeeping ladies blushed at his attention. Tavo stood six-foot-two, stock-straight and of noble bearing, even in his early fifties, when one could expect a man to begin to stoop. The ladies couldn’t resist him, but Tavo never took advantage of the attraction. It amused him. It made him smile. But he had little interest in sexual conquest.

  He channeled his mind toward musings about women. He forced himself to think about anything other than combat. It was a trick he’d been taught by another DARC instructor, Evan Hafer.

  “Focus on your latest fuck buddy. Focus on the book you’re reading. Focus on the running shoes you need to order from Amazon when you get back to base. Focus on anything other than the fight that’s coming, and get your mind back to smart-mode before it kicks off, if the Gods of War give you that option. Your brain doesn’t work for shit jumped up on adrenaline. Bring it down. Get back to stone-cold-killer mode. The guys who consistently win gunfights are the guys who don’t get too spun up about winning gunfights.”

  Tavo smiled. With his hazel-brown eyes and salt-and-pepper close-cropped beard, the women soften as he turned his money-makers on them. He enjoyed watching the cleaning ladies melt as he graced them with his approving gaze. Tavo had been ruthless about working out in the gym since his early forties. He alternated between sweat-drenched cardio and ass-busting weight-lifting. He was formidable, and even in his fifties, his virility would give a younger Sean Connery a run for his money.

  Of course, Tavo understood himself; he knew he was a sociopath. Unlike most people imagined, it didn’t mean he was without human emotions. He clearly enjoyed the pleasure of the cleaning ladies blushing and fidgeting under his attentions. He loved his daughter with all his soul. He enjoyed winning at the game of money. He wasn’t a machine. He was a more efficient model of human being.

  He descended the stairs into the old basement of the hotel. The detour in his focus had done its job and he found himself exhaling away the jitters. He sucked through his teeth and forced himself to smile as he stared into the retina lock on the gun locker. The lock responded by quietly clicking, and Tavo opened the thick, teak door and stepped into the closet. The LED lights flickered to life and revealed the load-out Tavo kept oiled and ready, everywhere he spent more than a couple days: two Heckler and Koch 416 AR15 rifles, a Crye AVS plate carrier with detachable chest rig, six loaded mags, a full-sized Glock 17 on a battle belt with extra mags and a white phosphor PVS-14 night vision monocular on an OpsCore bump helmet. He left the night vision and bump helmet on their hooks, but strapped on the rest with practiced efficiency. Within thirty seconds, he was set to go to war.

  Before leaving the gun locker, Tavo turned back inside and hunted around in a drawer for a final piece—a suppressor for the AR15.

  The smart play would be to drop into the huge storm drain that ran under the plantation and pass right beneath the Special Forces team. He could abandon his combat kit in the tunnel and emerge on the edge of town without a shot being fired, free as a quetzal bird.

  Tavo lifted the steel grate set in the patio tile and lowered himself into a six-foot clay tunnel. Antigua was like this everywhere—threaded throughout with artifacts from the earliest Spanish settlers. Only God knew why the Spanish had built such a huge storm drain in the middle of a hacienda. When they built it, the native Kakchikel Mayans frequently attacked and slaughtered the Spanish invaders. They made excellent slaves, right up until the moment they went berserk and murdered their overlords. Maybe the oversized storm drain had been built for escape even then.

  Tavo trotted down the huge drain counting his paces, his feet pattering through the sheen of water trickling along the bottom of the old tunnel. He’d marked a feature in the escape tunnel at two hundred and seventy-five paces—an access grate at the back of the plantation. He found himself counting down.

  Two-nineteen, two-eighteen, two-seventeen…

  He knew he should keep going. The professional gunman in him insisted that the pro move would be to keep walking, right out into the sunshine of town. He should drop his $10,000 worth of combat gear in the mud at the bottom of the storm drain and drift away into another perfect, emerald morning. The green-shrouded volcanos towering over Antigua would welcome him with open arms, sociopathic heart notwithstanding.

  Nothing good could come from stopping at that access grate.

  One eighty-six, one eighty-five, one eighty-four…

  He regretted not grabbing the bump helmet. He hadn’t thought about how dark the tunnel would be even in the light of morning and the helmet had an LED flashlight clipped over the left ear. He was more afraid of tripping over a dead rat than anything. If he fell face-first into the muck, a low-profile escape into town would be harder. People would stare.

  Again, the professional in him shook its head, preaching that the smart play was to walk away. Tavo always took the smart play. Yet, still he counted down his steps to the access grate.

  Ninety-six, ninety-five, ninety-four…

  The glint of light ahead, coming from the access grate, drove his primal urges forward, like reluctant lambs, and forced them to become thoughts.

  He wanted to fight.

  Such a stupid thing, but primal urges could not be ignored. Again, he was no machine. His bits of humanity demanded their due.

  Ever the smart sociopath, Tavo had a system for this. He pictured his emotions coming from his gut: as though his bowels were the bottom of a well and the emotions burbled up from below. By catching his emotions down low, Tavo found that he could identify them and deal with them. There would be no stopping his emotions—they would bubble up to his conscious mind regardless. But once identified, he could wrangle the feelings with a modicum of control. The trick would be to not let the feelings become thoughts. Thoughts—and decisions—generated by un-inventoried emotion were the Achilles Heel of human beings.

  Tavo told himself no lies, and therefore, he lived as a lord among men
; a god in man’s clothing.

  He reached deeper than his desire to fight and found…nothing. So, that was it. The originating emotion. He supposed the lust for combat was nothing new to mankind and that a faceless urge to kill had been making decisions for men for tens of thousands of years.

  Now standing beneath the big iron grate, with green-tinted light of the plantation dripping down from above, he shrugged, conceding to a part of his brain that operated on chemicals rather than electrical impulses. Without really thinking about it, Tavo reached around to the pouch at the back of his battle belt and withdrew the little bottle of gun oil. He reached up and squirted oil on top of each hinge and let it sink into the crevices while he weighed his options.

  Not all emotions were unproductive, he reasoned. This would be far from his first gunfight. He generally avoided killing since it drew so much attention. But in his line of work, killing was always on the table, and his competitors routinely overused the tool. Tavo had never gone to war against government troops, and if he was right about the burgundy beret, these were American-trained Guatemalan Special Forces. Rather than give him pause, the thought struck him as a rare opportunity.

  He reminded himself that the originating emotion—his lust for combat—colored his judgment. With that realization in hand, he weighed the benefits.

  For one thing, he was ready. Over the past three years, he’d slipped into dozens of classes at the best combat shooting schools offered by American Special Operations Forces veterans: DARC, Blackwater, Gunsite, Lamb, Haley, Costa, Yeager. He had been just another handsome Latin American man, welcome and befriended in the highest circles of American gun culture. Nobody had any inkling he stood at the head of the largest drug cartel north of Panama. His desire to fight wasn’t just a primitive impulse; he had made ready for fifteen years, and fighting against American-trained adversaries would be his final validation.

  Guatemala and the Filadelfia were lost to him. He already knew that. He wouldn’t be fighting to regain his property. The Guatemalans probably didn’t even know his real name or his face, but they had somehow connected the Filly to drug trafficking. Somewhere in his organically-designed organization, security had slipped and the Guatemalan Ministry of Defense—ever eager to appease the Americans with drug seizures—had sent a professional team to root him out. His security breach would be a puzzle for another day, and he would most certainly get to the bottom of it, no matter how deep he had to go.

  No, the Guatemalans were making an exploratory incursion based on a speculative notion that the Filly, and its VIP guest, were connected to the Mexican cartels.

  If Tavo ambushed their finest soldiers from behind, it would send a shockwave through the Latin American Special Forces community. The Kaibiles were considered some of the best, and they frequently trained other troops in the region. Killing even one of the Kaibiles would have a chilling effect on Special Forces, even in Mexico.

  Somewhere between his bowels and his mind, the decision was made, and Tavo silently lifted the grate and peered out. He emerged against the stone wall deep inside the plantation. With only a hundred and eighty degree threat angle, it would be a good place to insert.

  He enjoyed the sensation of lifting his body weight up and out of the storm drain. Five thousand hours of upper body work in the gym was a small price to pay for the gratification of using his body as a weapon in combat.

  He crouched low and scanned the columns and rows of coffee, seeking any shape that did not belong. Fifty yards down a row, he found a Special Forces soldier, facing toward the west boundary, apparently on security. Tavo lowered himself to the ground and took his time setting up the prone shot. From his position, the coffee blocked his shot. He knelt and shifted back and forth until a window opened.

  Zzzz-snap!

  The 5.56 round passed through the neck of the Kaibil and dropped him to the ground.

  With that single shot, Tavo had racked up ninety percent of the advantage of conducting this assault. He could lower himself back down the storm drain and call it a win. The rational justification for engaging the Kaibiles disappeared like the mist over the coffee.

  Ambushing a Special Forces unit with a single man wasn’t combat training. It was stupid.

  Tavo popped off the ground into a crouch and Indian-stepped over to the dead man, scooping up his beret while scanning for threats. He jammed the too-small beret on his head and went hunting for the remainder of the team’s rear security.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid—the mantra rang in his head. Still he hunted.

  He made his way toward the west wall, his ultra-expensive, German AR15 at the ready, scanning down each row of coffee as it arched into the distance.

  A man, a fine killing machine and death; the trifecta of a human predator’s trade. Tavo smiled despite the objections clanging in his mind.

  He almost passed the row, but something snagged at his consciousness. He stepped back and picked out the shape-that-didn’t-belong and recognized it as the front three inches of a Tavor rifle. He could’ve tracked the shape back into the leafy, green coffee and sent a barrage of 5.56 into the man. Instead, Tavo waited, occasionally checking his back for threats.

  He could feel the distance between himself and the metal storm grate, like a cave diver with a safety line, stretched to its limit, scratching across dozens of sharp rocks. Tavo would either need to withdraw back to safety or decide on a new path of egress. He concluded that the Kaibiles had inserted over the south wall. If he exfilled in that direction, he would risk coming face-to-face with their command element. He’d either need to fight through to the north or withdraw to the storm drain.

  The Kaibil stepped into the open. Tavo’s rifle rose of its own accord. The young man’s death had already been written on the wind, and a series of automatic actions took over. Tavo sent a round, quickly followed by two more. The soldier hadn’t even turned in the direction of the gunfire before crumpling to the ground. The rows of coffee echoed with a sound like three, quick snaps of a bullwhip.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid…

  Finally, Tavo’s intellect regained full control and he retraced his steps back to the storm drain, his eyes hunting for another adversary.

  There was no reaction to his suppressed rifle fire. The mist and the coffee plants must have absorbed the sound of his bullets, or more likely, had deprived the assaulters of a sense of where the shots had originated.

  The Kaibiles would return to find their security element dead; probably the youngest members of their team. Psychologically, nothing would scare the forces of law and order more than this. Some part of every fighting man longed for a head-on fight. But the kind of opponent who murdered your security element would seem supernatural, as though the bullets had come from the clear, blue sky.

  Fighting men could kill what they could see and understand. What really terrified them was dying without ever knowing the threat.

  Maybe not such a stupid play after all.

  Tavo dropped down the storm drain and quietly pulled the cover closed over him. The round grate settled into its steel collar with the crunch of rust-on-rust.

  He pattered through the thin mud at the bottom of the tunnel toward the circle of light at the end. Now, with the animal carnality of combat behind him, questions flooded his mind.

  Who had set him up?

  Only one person had known he would be at the Filidelfia Hotel that morning, and she had just taken to the skies in a helicopter.

  Chapter 3

  Noah Miller

  Miller Cattle Ranch, Rio Rico County, Arizona

  Noah Miller counted thirteen trees on his property, and they were all cottonwoods. His daughter’s tire swing had nearly rotted off the nylon rope on the big cottonwood by his stock watering pond.

  Used to have, he reminded himself.

  Used to have a pond.

  Used to have a daughter.

  The pond had been dry since July and the daughter had been gone for two years, three months and thirteen da
ys.

  Noah took another long pull of his Dos Equis, but it’d take a lot more than beer to put down the gnawing in the back of his throat. Noah knew this from ample experience; beer was good for ending the day, not putting down heartache.

  He’d seen enough John Wayne and Liam Neeson to know that he was supposed to be going balls-out on a revenge plot. He knew it the same way he knew he was supposed to vote in the primaries and buy life insurance. It wasn’t like he didn’t know who had killed his family. It’d been one of the cartels. Zetas maybe. Quite possibly one of the smaller bands of smuggler-thugs. He would’ve recognized the head man, but probably not the others. He was too busy that afternoon trying to think of a way to keep them from murdering his wife and daughter.

  But Liam Neeson would’ve tracked that shit down and sorted it out by now.

  Two years, three months and thirteen days. Plenty of time to find five Mexican cartel soldiers among the thousands in Northern Sonora. Noah hadn’t even tried. In the movies, the bereaved father came away from the funeral on fire to murder some sonofabitches. Noah came away from the funeral feeling like his flame had been snuffed out under a flood of remorse.

  “Enough,” Noah said aloud to the dirt lawn and the rotting tire swing. He took another pull of beer, happy to get a head start on the bottle of whiskey that would undoubtedly round out his evening.

  His porch faced east, so he couldn’t watch the sunset from there. But the sunset painted Miller Peak gold like an Aztec pyramid which was almost better. Leah had insisted he build the homestead facing east. She’d been a woman who always looked to what was coming and never what had passed. She preferred the sunrise to the sunset.