by Jack Slater
He shook his head, still stunned by the abject devastation all around him. “It’s too late. We’re done…”
“We have to go. We’ve lost this fight. That doesn’t mean we’ve lost everything,” Iker said desperately, still tugging at his arm. “Let’s get the girl and get out of here. Maybe we have a chance.”
Jennifer.
Maybe there was a way out after all. Though in reality it must by now be hopeless, Carreon’s mind clutched on to this faint prospect of salvation. They still had the girl. Maybe she would at least buy them their freedom, if nothing else.
He spun, forced to shout over the sound of battle as a retreating sicario sprinted past him, dropping his pistol in his haste to escape. Carreon grimaced at the man’s cowardice, not recognizing he was doing exactly the same. “Where is she?”
They ran toward where they’d last seen her – surrounded by the bodies of Grover’s fallen prison guards. She was still there, abandoned by whoever was supposed to be caring for her. Iker covered his boss as Carreon dropped to the ground, bringing his rifle up and firing several bursts toward the column of enemy vehicles hurtling toward them.
“How is she?” he said roughly, the words punctuated by heavy breaths and gunfire.
Carreon’s fingers probed the wound. Her dark brown hair was splayed out across the light sand, her denim jeans now stained with blood, which was still trickling out from a wound around her groin. She was barely breathing.
He sank backward onto his haunches. Another blow. He wasn’t sure how many more he could take. He wasn’t sure if it was worth bothering. “She’s nearly dead.”
“Then she’s still alive,” Iker said, emptying his magazine and shouldering the rifle once more. “Come on, help me.”
His lieutenant grabbed Ramon Reyes’ wife by one shoulder and prompted him to do the same. They dragged her back over the soft sand, leaving a thin trail of blood as they went. By this point, Carreon was simply going through the motions, stumbling over the sand as they moved. Iker was driving this now, somehow still believing that they might survive when every omen told a different story.
Jennifer coughed, and her light top was suddenly sprinkled by a spray of red. Carreon’s foreboding only grew at the sight. It was internal bleeding. What hope was there for her now?
He dropped her.
For a moment, his lieutenant didn’t appear to notice, though he grunted a little heavier as he kept dragging. But after a few steps, he turned, noticing that Fernando was no longer by his side.
Carreon’s exhausted eyes met his searching gaze. “It’s too late,” he said softly, shaking his head. “We can’t get out. We may as well die like men.”
His attention was briefly stolen by another riot of noise in the distance as several of Reyes’ vehicles impacted the broken outer wall like a line of cavalry falling on a Napoleonic square. They drove ten, fifteen, twenty feet inside before eventually coming to a halt, all the while firing manically from inside. Most of the gunshots went wild, but enough found their targets to turn the tide of battle.
A few of his own men were still in the fight, but many more lay dead in the sand or were retreating in headlong panic. One sprinted right past where he and Iker had stopped, only for a stray round to take off the top-most part of his skull like a vengeful native. His torso kept moving forward longer than his legs did, but a second later the body lay still on the dirt.
Reyes’ men kept pouring through the gap created by the semi. One by one, the few remaining sicarios defending it fell, chewed up by a weight of incoming fire that was increasingly relentless. Carreon watched in stunned horror as several enemy shooters clambered up onto the toppled trailer, spewing covering fire in every direction as behind them a pair of fighters set up a heavy machine gun.
The chatter a moment later when that opened up like a demonic chainsaw was what broke the camel’s back.
The few of Carreon’s men who were left fighting abandoned their positions as one. It didn’t save them. The heavy gun bore down on them one after another, cutting two of them apart with impossible ease. One moment they were there, running, the next what was left of them was face down on the sand, in the center of a rapidly enlarging concentric circle of blood.
Almost numbed by the violence, Carreon looked down and was surprised to see that the rifle was still in his hands. He reached slowly for a fresh magazine and reloaded it.
Turning to his , he murmured, “It was good to meet you, my friend.”
Iker nodded. His voice was quiet against the din of battle, but Carreon had known him long enough to understand. “We go out fighting?”
Carreon shrugged. “Better than the alternative.”
Iker nodded. He shuffled forward so that he was by his boss’s side and raised the rifle to his shoulder. He nestled his chin against it and aimed but did not fire. There was no point – not yet. The battle was long over. Reyes’ Crusaders were now engaged in a mopping-up operation, even if they were somehow the last to realize it. They charged forward with blood-lust on their faces and met with no resistance.
The Federación gunmen had simply given up. And those few that were left died, one by one, occasionally lifting a pistol or rifle or carbine or knife in a last-ditch act of desperation.
Most often not.
Slowly, Carreon brought his own weapon up. His finger rested gently on the trigger.
“Cease fire,” a commanding voice called out. The gunfire didn’t immediately die away, but the call was picked up and echoed all over the now-bloody lakebed. “Cease fire!”
“Ramon,” Iker murmured.
Carreon nodded but said nothing.
“What does he want with us, I wonder?”
He glanced down at Jennifer Reyes’ broken body and saw that she was still. Too still for there to be any other explanation for her fate. He placed his left hand on her chest and felt for life.
There was none.
“Gone,” he whispered.
Reyes approached at the head of a phalanx of his men.
El Toro, Carreon remembered.
That was what they called him. He looked like a bull, too. Squat and muscular, with stocky legs and an animal rage in his eyes. Or perhaps not even true rage, but just the madness of battle. Carreon had felt the same at the start of the fight. The capacity for such delusion was present in every man. It was, perhaps, what made mankind such a warlike species. As danger approached, you could convince yourself of anything. That you were ten feet tall. The death would not come for you.
How petty such delusions were in the cold light of defeat.
They circled him and Iker. Two dozen men, and those were just in the first ring. All were armed. All wore vicious snarls on their faces, still hopped up on the most potent narcotic known to man.
They would rip him apart, Fernando knew. Give them only an instant, and they would rip him apart.
“Ramon,” he murmured, his throat now desperately dry. He cleared it and tried again, but only to elicit the same result. “You came.”
Ramon Reyes grinned wide as he saw who was before him. “Fernando – I”
His eyes dropped to the sorry sight at his enemy’s feet. Carreon followed the man’s gaze down.
She was beautiful even in death, he thought. So young. She looked too innocent to have been caught up in a world like this. She could have been anything. A singer, a dancer, a teacher, but just like him, she had chosen this life. A different path, perhaps, but one that led to the same destination.
And just like him, it would prove the cause of her demise.
“I’m sorry.” Carreon shrugged. And he truly was. He had, after all, not started this fight. He had hoped to end it on his own terms, of course. But that was a very different thing.
“You bastard,” Reyes spat, lunging forward, only to be stopped by a grunt of warning from Iker, who brandished his rifle without flinching.
“It wasn’t me,” Carreon said, offering up only the truth and nothing more. There was no bargaining his
way out of the fate that lay in store for him. It was better to take it like a man.
“You caused it,” Reyes stated, anger swirling in his eyes, though he had begun to reassert control over his emotions.
“Someone else did.”
“Liar!”
“What have I got to lose?” he asked, reasonably enough. “I never wanted this fight, Ramon. Believe me when I tell you that. We both got played.”
Reyes looked at him disbelievingly. “By who?”
“An American. His name was –”
But Reyes was already turning away. He waited until he was screened by the bodies of several of his men before he gave the command. “Kill them both.”
Iker, his finger on a hair trigger, opened fire before anyone else. His rifle was on full automatic, and he chewed through the entire magazine in a matter of a couple of seconds.
There was a stunned silence, punctuated only by the scream of a mortally wounded man.
And then all of Reyes’ sicarios opened fire as one.
48
“Hell, you don’t see that every day,” Trapp muttered, genuinely stunned by what he was watching through a spotter’s scope that had been abandoned on the ridgeline. Half a dozen men, maybe more, had just died in the last act of a brutal baffle.
“That one was Fernando Carreon,” Hector said from beside him. “And one of his capos.”
“Then the man he was talking to was Reyes?” Trapp asked.
He pulled himself away from the scope. He didn’t need to see what was happening down there. It was an orgy of bloodlust. A gunshot echoed up the hillside every few seconds as the remaining gangsters executed wounded men and even pumped rounds into bodies that seemed most assuredly dead.
“That’s right,” Hector murmured, his eyes still pressed to the optical sight of one of the discarded sniper rifles. “I don’t see him anymore. Damn. We should have taken the shot.”
Already, some of Reyes’ men were climbing into their vehicles. With their brutal work done, it seemed as though they had little desire to savor the consequences. Trapp wondered what would happen to the bodies. Would they just be left here until someone found them a day, a week, even a month from now?
“You sure that’s a good idea anyway?” Trapp asked.
Hector pulled himself away from the gunsight, handing the weapon to another of his men and issuing a sharp command before he returned his attention to his American colleague. “Why would it not be?”
Trapp grimaced. “Look, this is your country – and you know it better than me. But it seems to me that this place is already a tinderbox. And now Carreon’s dead, his cartel’s as like as not to fall apart. You better believe there will be a dozen other jumped-up pricks falling over themselves to take his place.”
“What’s your point?”
“You sure it’s a good idea to knock Reyes off, too? It’ll feel good in the moment, you better believe I know it, but it’ll cause a wave of violence in your country like you haven’t seen yet.”
Hector glanced down into the valley, his fingers drumming unconsciously on the pistol at his hip. His lips were tight, nostrils slightly flared, a hungry expression on his face that Trapp knew well.
“I don’t see how it could get any worse,” he stated, not unreasonably.
“You kill Reyes right now, you’ll be throwing gasoline on the fire. Every thug in the country will look to make himself king. Anyone who can pull a couple of guys together will call themselves jefe, and you’ll spend the next decade mopping them up.”
“That’ll happen anyway. And what am I supposed to do, just let Reyes walk after everything he’s done?”
“For now… Yes.” Trapp punctuated the comment by slapping the ground. “It’ll feel like shit, I know that. But if you pull the trigger on this guy right now, thousands more innocent people will die. Every town will turn into a battleground for the next few months as a dozen different factions scrap for control. And look, I don’t really care if these psychopaths kill each other. But it’s not just them who die.”
Hector roughly grabbed the sniper rifle off his man, lay on his belly, and pressed his eye to the sight. In Spanish, he muttered, “Do you see him?”
“Maybe, sir,” the Marine replied, sounding uncertain. Trapp strained to translate the words, but kept his mouth shut. This was Hector’s country, Hector’s command, and Hector’s fight. He was only here to help.
“Where?”
“By the red Silverado. I think. Just up from the semi.”
“I see it,” Hector said softly, slowing his breathing and visibly acquiring his target. He reached up and adjusted something on the gunsight. “It’s him.”
Trapp thought about doing something to stop him but decided against it.
Maybe he was wrong, and Hector was right. It was entirely possible that getting rid of Ramon Reyes was a net good, even if his death unleashed a wave of violence. It was weighing these countervailing demands that made a soldier’s job such a difficult one. The soul they watched through the gunsight was never just a single life.
He knew the pressure well.
Hector cursed and set the rifle down on its side. “A lot of people are going to die anyway,” he growled.
Nodding with genuine sorrow, Trapp said, “I’m sure they are. But some won’t. And you’ll be the one who saved them.”
“That’s not why,” Hector said, gritting his teeth with frustration.
“I know,” Trapp murmured, understanding what the Mexican officer meant. He was a rare breed. Not out for himself, or plaudits or medals or acclaim. Just looking to do the best by his countrymen. For his family. For his men.
“This isn’t over,” Hector replied, crawling backward until enough of the ridgeline blocked him so that he could stand without attracting attention from the lakebed below.
“No,” Trapp agreed. “But it’s a start.”
Warren Grover pulled up at a gas station outside a town called Fresnillo, about a four-hour drive away from the lakebed in which his dreams had turned to dust. It was the first moment he’d taken his foot off the gas that whole way. When he pulled his fingers off the steering wheel, his knuckles ached.
He sat by the gas pump for a couple of minutes without moving as the reality of what had happened to him that day washed over him. All his hopes, all his ambitions, they were gone. That was the reality. No denying it, no changing it.
The town was a small one, a couple of thousand souls in the middle of the desert. He didn’t know what the people who lived here grew or built or otherwise did for a living. But it was quiet, and the only other car at the gas station was pulled up in front. Maybe the owner’s. The lights of the convenience store attached glowed brightly against the darkness.
Grover beat his open palm against the dash. “Fuck!”
The curse echoed in the cramped confines of the truck’s cabin. He repeated the gesture once more, hitting the dashboard so hard his palms stung, but this time he did it in silence. It seemed even more childish that way, though he couldn’t help himself.
What rankled more was that that idiot Carreon would probably survive this test and come out on the other side even stronger. He had valued his position so little at the start that Grover was able to wrest it from his fingers. Was that really the mark of a man who deserved to have such power in the first place?
Grover knew that he had to stop thinking this way, but he was stuck in a loop and couldn’t help himself. Still, he had to try. He was deep in unfriendly territory, and if he wanted to survive, then he needed to get the basics right.
He settled back into his seat and played his eyes around the station, checking to see if anyone was watching. They were not, mostly because there was no they to watch him. The cashier had his back to the store glass and seemed to be playing on his phone. There was no one else in sight. His was the only car that had passed by in the last two minutes. He kept looking.
At the front of the gas station store was a selection of clear-fronted newspaper b
oxes and a rack stacked with the kind of items you find in a place like that. Firewood, engine oil, and a messy selection of gas cans.
He climbed out of the car and retrieved one of the cans from the front of the store. He walked back to the car, wrapped his fingers around the pump handle, and filled first the truck’s gas tank, then the can, though he intended only to make use of one.
Grover spilled a little gasoline onto his hands as he filled up the can and wiped it against his pants, savoring the way the chemical burned his nostrils before it finally evaporated away into nothingness. He wondered whether it was an accurate metaphor for what was to happen to him.
With the task done, he returned the pump and walked inside to pay.
“Una lata de gas, por favor,” he said, brandishing the newly heavy can. “And pump two.”
If the cashier was surprised to see an American out here in the middle of nowhere, he didn’t show it. In fact, his face displayed no emotion whatsoever. It was probably easier that way, Grover thought, shivering at the prospect of wasting a life in this way. Had this boy ever even left his hometown?
Did he have dreams – or was he satisfied to live out his life in a place like this?
Grover wasn’t sure which answer he would find more troubling. Better not to know.
The cashier rang up the purchase and said blankly, “Todo?”
“Yes. No – wait.”
The kid frowned. Finally, some emotion. Grover pointed at a cell phone box stacked on a rack behind him, then told him to add a Sim card and some credit to the total on the register. Again, he displayed no evident interest as to why a stranger would need such an item.
“Thanks, kid,” Grover muttered as he paid and left. He received no response.
He climbed back into the truck and drove to a spot in the desert about a mile from Fresnillo, shielded from the lights of the town by a small hill. It was a moonless night, and hazy enough that what meager glow that shone down from the stars did little to light the earth. As far as he could tell, though, there were no man-made structures in sight. Certainly no lights.