The Apparatus (Jason Trapp Book 5)

by Jack Slater

  The movement of men was evident to the naked ear by now, which pulled Trapp back to the present. He heard boots thumping against stone and dirt, the heavy breath of bodies under strain, and the same tumbling of debris that had first alerted him to the enemy’s movement. He glanced at the boulder to his left, which he was leaning on for support, and cursed the way it blocked his view.

  “They’re coming into the open now,” Hector reported, his voice barely audible in Trapp’s ear. “I see them. At least five. More.”

  Trapp double-tapped the transmit button in acknowledgment.

  “Looks like they’re… running?” came an update only seconds afterward, then, “Gun, gun, gun!”

  The warning was appreciated, if not in the slightest surprising. For a second time, Trapp cursed the boulder that was curtailing his field of vision. He looked to his right and left, searching for a better spot, only to realize that he was stuck where he was, at least if he wanted to avoid signposting his presence.

  The first of Grover’s men crossed the approximately fifteen-yard section of the gully that he was able to view. He almost did a doubletake. They weren’t attacking – they were quite clearly retreating.

  From what?

  He looked again as another runner almost tripped, so careless was his flight. This one was dressed the same as the rest: black boots, dark navy fatigues, and the regulation black balaclava. As far as Trapp could tell, he wasn’t armed.

  That made the decision for him. Only an idiot ran into a fight without a weapon – an idiot or a fanatic. And Trapp suspected that Grover’s men were not the latter. They were mercenaries. Individuals who were capable of fighting hard when offered the right level of compensation – but equally liable to break and run. Which was exactly what they were doing.

  “We can take them,” Trapp said rapidly into his radio. “They have no idea we’re here.”

  “I concur,” Hector agreed. “Ten seconds. Warning shots.”

  The warning rattled over the radio net a second time in Spanish, for Hector’s men’s benefit, though Trapp suspected that most understood enough English that it wasn’t necessary. Not for the first time in the last few days, he felt a twinge of embarrassment that he’d come to this country and expected everyone else to adapt to his presence, not the other way around.

  Hell, ain’t that the American way.

  He grinned, pushing it from his mind, and turned to Ikeda. Her index finger was tapping against her rifle, but she was otherwise steady. “You ready?”

  “Like the day I was born,” she replied.

  “Not sure if that’s a good thing or not,” Trapp remarked as the last couple of seconds on his internal stopwatch burned away and the alarm rang out. “Let’s go.”

  Trapp leapt onto the boulder. He brought his rifle to his shoulder and fired three bursts of three rounds, allowing a couple of seconds in between each. A little further up the gorge on his side, four of Hector’s men did the same – though one blasted his weapon on full automatic.

  He said a prayer of thanks to whoever was watching over them from up above that this part of the country was almost uninhabited. That lead had to come down somewhere, and it was better that it was desert than someone’s home.

  On the other side of the gully, Hector and five of his men appeared from behind a thick section of foliage and copied the maneuver.

  All told, the gunfire lasted a full ten seconds, and even as they continued piling forward, some of Grover’s men were so stunned by the sudden appearance of men with guns that they tripped and bit the dirt. Trapp winced as one of them appeared to knock himself out.

  Still, it saves having to shoot the guy.

  “Down!” Trapp yelled as soon as the gunfire faded away, leaving only the muffled sound of battle on the other side of the ridge. Some of Grover’s men were still running down the mountain, though even those seemed to be moving through molasses.

  Hector’s men repeated the cry over and over in Spanish as Trapp fell silent. He pressed the stock of his rifle into his shoulder and trained it on the gaggle of retreating soldiers in the gully. They were both above and below the ambush point. At least fifteen of them were above him.

  The reality of their present position began to dawn on him. Grover’s men might be retreating, but they were still a formidable force – and they had the weight of numbers on their side. It would only take one misstep to turn this into a bloodbath.

  “Don’t do that, asshole,” he grunted, watching as a tall mercenary, his rifle still shouldered, unlike many of the rest, started tugging on its strap. He aimed carefully at a spot just a few inches from the man’s boots and fired a single round.

  The slug sparked off a stone and ricocheted in the opposite direction, landing somewhere up the hillside with a dull thud. The target of his gentle ministrations reacted in slow motion – jumping in almost comical fashion and falling backward. Trapp kept his rifle trained on the man, who divested himself of his own weapon with startling alacrity, throwing it down the hillside and scrambling back.

  “Good move.”

  Trapp glanced over his right shoulder, down the hillside, where almost a dozen of the retreating mercenaries were still picking their way out of the gully. They had a head start of at least eighty yards already, which he suspected was insurmountable. They had to deal with the ones they had in front of them first. He just had to hope that Grover wasn’t with the first group.

  “Tell them to put their guns down,” Trapp called out. “One by one. No one wants to be a hero today, all right?”

  As Hector translated the message, Trapp jumped down from the boulder. His partner landed by his side with leonine grace. “Not my first rodeo.”

  “Never said it was.”

  They worked as a pair, Ikeda stepping back and providing cover as Trapp encountered the mercenaries directly, taking weapons from them and patting them down before roughly manhandling them onto the dirt.

  He turned to Ikeda and said, “You got any flex cuffs?”

  She grimaced. “Nope.”

  “Okay. Be careful.”

  The guy on the ground in front of him was only armed with a pistol, holstered at his hip. Trapp reached down, removed the weapon, and ejected the round from the chamber before tossing it in one direction, the magazine in another, and the weapon itself in a third entirely.

  He repeated the same with the next, and the next. All over the hillside, Hector’s men were copying the maneuver. At least some of them had cuffs with them, and they were none too gentle when affixing them.

  Trapp made his way up the hill, leading with his rifle. Half a dozen of the masked fighters were still yet to be apprehended. Two of them, at the front, already had their fingers interlaced behind their heads. He indicated to them to get down, and they did without protest.

  He almost missed the movement. Almost.

  “Don’t do it, jackass!”

  Trapp snapped the barrel of his rifle up, aiming it directly at the offending fighter’s chest. His finger was already grazing the trigger, applying a couple pounds of pressure. Not enough to fire a round, but sufficient to speed the process in the event he needed to.

  Now was one of those times. The shooter at the back had his fingers on his pistol’s grip and looked like he planned to draw it at any moment.

  “I’m warning you,” Trapp growled. “Do not touch that weapon. Drop it, now!”

  The man made his decision. His hand clutched the weapon, elbow already drawing back as he attempted to withdraw it from its holster.

  Trapp squeezed the trigger. Three rounds exploded from the barrel and hurtled up the hillside, landing directly in the center of the shooter’s chest. He quickly readjusted his aim and fired three more at something more solid, aware that the mercenaries were all wearing armor plates.

  He felt no remorse. At least not in that moment. The man had made his decision, and he had to live with the consequences.

  Or in this case, not.

  “Cover me,” he muttered, mov
ing up the hill with his rifle packed to his shoulder.

  “You got it,” Ikeda replied, her voice level. She barely sounded ruffled by the sudden burst of gunfire.

  His own heart was thundering in his chest, and he dropped his trigger hand to his pants to wipe off the sweat as he climbed. As he reached the fallen body of the man he’d just shot, he kicked the pistol from a set of splayed, unmoving fingers.

  There was no need.

  Now why did you have to go and do that, asshole?

  Trapp stood over him for a few seconds, coming to terms with the suddenness of what had just happened. He breathed out, blinking hard, and then got back to work.

  Around him, the three other mercenaries were frozen in place, as shocked by the sudden outbreak of violence as he was. As Ikeda held her weapon over them, Hector’s men moved up the hillside with professional ease, frisking and securing them.

  Only when Trapp was absolutely certain that the scene was secure did he drop his weapon. And even then, he brought his eye to the scope first and scanned every inch of hillside within sight, just in case.

  He let the gun fall into its strap and dropped heavily onto his haunches, boots scraping on the rocky soil below. A wave of exhaustion overcame him, to the point that he didn’t even look up when someone joined him.

  “Suicide by cop,” Ikeda murmured. “You okay?”

  “It was a stupid thing to do,” he grunted, voice flat. “So what was the point?”

  She shrugged. “Only he knows. Maybe he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life behind bars. Or maybe he just panicked. Thought he might be able to run.”

  “Then he was an idiot.”

  “No one’s disputing that,” Ikeda replied as lightly as the situation allowed.

  “What the hell are we doing here?” Trapp asked at last, watching through clouded eyes as Hector’s men started frog marching the bound mercenaries into one central location before frisking them more thoroughly for cell phones, communications devices, anything they could strip for intelligence.

  “Our jobs.”

  “I guess,” he said humorlessly. “Sometimes it seems like all we do is clear up messes that people just like us started in the first place.”

  “Sure.” Ikeda shrugged. “But someone’s got to do it, right?”

  He sighed, climbing to his feet and offering her his hand. She accepted it, and he hauled her upright after him. “You’re probably right. It’s just – this one seems so…”

  “Sordid?” she offered. “I don’t think anyone’s denying that. This is a messy, horrible freaking situation. It’s a war, I guess, but not an honorable one. How many poor bastards have to die just so that kids back home can snort white powder up their noses?”

  “You think we caught him? Grover, I mean.”

  She tapped him gently on the hand. “Let’s go find out.”

  They walked down the hillside in silence, toward where Hector’s men had a little over a dozen prisoners lying flat on the ground, hands tied behind their backs and under constant armed guard. Trapp thought over what Ikeda had just said.

  Maybe it wasn’t an honorable war. But did such a thing truly exist? At the end of the day it was still shooting and killing and dying – and did it really matter whether it was a soldier or a criminal on the other end of a bullet?

  Sometimes it really didn’t feel that way. But as he looked out at the professionalism – and more importantly, determination – of Hector’s men, he realized that he had it all wrong. Maybe they were fighting criminals. But that didn’t make the battle any less just. It didn’t make his presence here any less valuable.

  If anything, it was the exact opposite. Ikeda was right that the problem started back home when rich kids paid forty bucks for a baggie of coke, and their broke neighbors paid half that for hits of twice-cut meth. That was a chronic disease that was bigger than him, bigger than her, bigger than anything they could do.

  But what Warren Grover had started here was worse still. He’d ignited a battle because of some toxic combination of misplaced vanity and unbridled greed. He’d started something he couldn’t finish, but someone had to. Maybe that someone was Hector León.

  But it was just as likely that it was him.

  “He’s not here,” Hector reported the moment they arrived. “The man you are looking for.”

  “Okay,” Trapp said, ejecting the half-spent magazine from his rifle and replacing it with a fresh one. “Then let’s go find him.”

  47

  Fernando Carreon watched in horror as the semitruck began building up steam. In the soft sand of the long-dried lakebed, it took longer than it might have on tarmac.

  But not much.

  And as he watched, he saw all of his hopes slipping away. There was no way of stopping what was about to happen. That much was painfully clear. And after his men and Reyes’ fought hand to hand and slaughtered one another at close range, there would be no stepping back from the abyss.

  Perhaps that had always been an impossible dream. It was about to become a hard, unyielding reality.

  “You!” he yelled at a nearby sicario who was reaching into a cigarette pack instead of doing something useful. “We need to tighten up this wall. Now!”

  Carreon pointed at the makeshift fortification of parked trucks that formed a circle around his temporary encampment. They’d been arranged like that to provide cover from small-arms fire, not withstand the impact of an eighteen-wheeler barreling toward them. But it was all there was.

  Iker instantly picked up on the same thread as his master. He directed several men to start moving trucks to reinforce the boundary and climbed into one himself as Carreon stripped a rifle from the body of one of Grover’s men. The weapon was still slick with blood, which he wiped on the corpse’s pants leg before he hoisted it.

  “Everyone,” Carreon called out frantically. “Shoot the semi. We need to stop it or we’re fucked.”

  He ran to the wall of trucks, grabbing his men by their shoulders and arms and torsos and pushing them toward the fight. He rested the rifle barrel on the bed of a dented red Silverado and found his aim.

  The speeding semi was a hard target to miss, but when he squeezed the trigger he did just that. The stock bucked powerfully against his shoulder, and the first three rounds went wide. As if the sound of gunfire broke a spell, all around him his men got the message and started firing.

  The remainder of Reyes’ men were climbing into their trucks and charging toward his already beleaguered circle of men, mostly taking advantage of the cover offered by the much larger semi. The plan was evident – if simple. They intended to use the larger truck as a battering ram to breach the encampment’s walls, allowing the smaller SUVs and pickups to break his lines.

  “Come on,” Carreon muttered, studying his aim as the profile of the oncoming semi grew and grew in size. The clattering of gunfire from all around him was incessant now, and the big truck’s windshield a patchwork of bullet holes, and yet still it kept coming.

  He squeezed the trigger, aiming for the engine block. Three round bursts with a tiny gap between each round to allow him to wrestle the gun back under control. He thought he hit with the last burst, but it was impossible to say. He fired again. Again. The weapon clicked dry.

  With numb fingers, he ejected the spent magazine and jacked a new one in. He brought the rifle back to his shoulder and trained it once more on the semi. He fired.

  But it was only thirty yards away and closing fast.

  It was truly impossible to miss now, and the combined impacts of dozens of men firing at a single target began to show. The windshield, now almost opaque from the combined effect of hundreds of impacts, cracked out of its frame. Half fell inside the cabin, and half came loose and shattered against the ground.

  And still it kept closing.

  “Keep shooting!” he yelled, an evident note of panic in his voice now. Only a fool would not feel that way, and yet that didn’t make it any less shameful. But no one around was liste
ning. The scene was an ecstasy of gunfire and violence. Contorted, rictus faces screaming into the abyss. Brass casings flying everywhere, painting the desert floor gold. Men starting to look over their shoulders. Taking a hesitant half-step back.

  Dropping their guns.

  The semi’s engine buckled under the weight of perhaps a thousand individual bullet impacts. By now it had to be half a ton heavier. A giant geyser of steam erupted out of one side, bursting out in a single giant gush. The beleaguered, broken vehicle resembled a cavalry horse charging into battle, mortally wounded, smoke erupting like frantic exhalations into cold air.

  A horrible, mechanical grinding filled the air, drowning out even the loudest of the gunfire, and the semi started listing to its left, threatening to topple over at any moment.

  But now it was only a few feet away. A zombie. Dead, but still propelled by its own momentum.

  “Jefe,” Iker hissed, his lips a few inches away from Carreon’s ear and squeezing his shoulder hard. “We have to move. Now!”

  Carreon tried to resist, but not particularly hard. He knew that this fight was futile. Probably had known it right from the start. And yet what other choice had he had? He allowed himself to be pulled backward by the right shoulder, the rifle dropping to his side.

  Iker yanked him hard, and as he did, the semi impacted the outer boundary of parked trucks. They posed no more resistance as it careered through them than skin does to a bullet. The cabin rocked from left to right, and the trailer skidded out to one side, but still it came forward, still-spinning wheels kicking up great gusts of sand as it pushed seemingly weightless trucks out in front.

  “Boss, come on,” Iker yelled, having by now abandoned any pretense of decorum. “We have to get the hell out of here.”

  Carreon shook his head as he surveyed the damage. He watched as the semi finally came to a stop, accompanied by the scream of metal scraping against metal. He watched as one of his men, entirely overtaken by battle lust, clambered onto the hood of the tractor, submachine gun in hand, and wildly sprayed rounds into the cabin.