Suicide Mission

by William W. Johnstone

  But the leader of the group, Jorge, bellowed, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire! Drag her off of him!”

  Several guards leaped to follow the order. They grabbed hold of Catalina, and even though she was a capable fighter she was no match for those odds. They pulled her away from the guard who had kicked the girl, but not before she had hammered a couple more punches into his face. The crunch of cartilage and the way blood spurted from the man’s nose told Bill that Catalina had broken it.

  He felt a fierce surge of pride in her. Tackling that guard might not have been the smartest thing to do, but Catalina’s fighting heart wouldn’t allow her to stand by and watch such cruelty. She might have a checkered past, but her heart and her guts still represented much that was good about the human race.

  Unfortunately, much more that was evil was on display here in Barranca de la Serpiente. The guards closed ranks around Catalina and hustled her into the barracks. The rest of the female prisoners were prodded inside after her.

  “What do you think they’ll do to her?” Bailey asked under his breath, so low that only Bill could hear his words.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but I’m countin’ on her to survive until tonight.”

  He figured it would take at least that long for reinforcements to arrive and the battle to be joined.

  With the female prisoners unloaded, the truck moved on to another barracks building. This one was surrounded by a high fence topped with razor wire. There was only one gate in the fence, and it was heavily guarded. A man unlocked the gate and swung it open, and the truck drove through and came to a stop in front of the building.

  Bill studied the setup without being too obvious about it. When the time came, he and Bailey needed to be able to get out of here, free Catalina, arm themselves, and carry the fight to the enemy while the rest of their force attacked from the outside.

  One thing in their favor was that the guards didn’t seem to take their jobs too seriously. The fact that for the most part the prisoners were too scared to fight back had dulled their sense of alertness. While they were filing into the barracks, Bill noticed several moments when he could have jumped one of the guards and taken the man’s gun away.

  Of course, seizing such an opportunity right now wouldn’t really accomplish anything, so he continued being docile and cooperative. Bailey followed suit, although the big man cast dark, challenging glares toward their captors.

  The prisoners were taken at gunpoint to a long, low-ceilinged room. There were no bunks, just pallets on the raw wood floor. The only toilet facilities were buckets placed here and there, so the stench in the room was pretty bad. The smell of unwashed flesh didn’t help it. An air of gloom hung over the place, too, because the only windows were small, covered with thick layers of wire, and set high in the walls, meaning that it was dark and stuffy inside the building.

  When the door slammed closed behind the new prisoners, it was like they had been herded into a dungeon, even though the barracks was above ground.

  About two dozen men were already in the makeshift prison, men with ragged clothes and haunted eyes. They sat or stretched out on the pallets and looked up at the newcomers with dull and defeated eyes. None of them voiced a greeting.

  Bailey edged closer to Bill and said quietly in English, “I was hoping we could get these guys to fight on our side if we let them loose, but this bunch looks like they’ve given up.”

  “Yeah, but things might be different if something happened to give them some hope,” Bill replied. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  He thought Bailey was probably right, though. They couldn’t count on much, if any, help from the other prisoners.

  They sat down on one of the empty pallets next to another prisoner who glanced at them with a hangdog expression, then quickly glanced away. Bill said, “Hola, amigo,” then asked the man in Spanish, “How long have you been here?”

  At first he thought the man wasn’t going to answer him, but then with a sigh he said, “Three weeks. My time is almost up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All those who were brought here at the same time I was are . . . are gone already. My luck is bound to run out soon.”

  “What are they going to do to us?”

  The man looked at Bill again and asked, “You do not know?”

  “I know only that we were taken off the bus we rode to Dos Caballos. And my niece, she was taken as well, along with some of the other women.”

  The prisoner made the sign of the cross and said, “Then you should say a prayer for her, amigo, because she is as doomed as we are. The women who are brought here, they are used as . . . as . . .”

  “You don’t have to say it,” Bill told the man grimly.

  “They are subjected to terrible things,” the man went on, “and then when the devils incarnate who run this place grow tired of them, they are taken out and put to the same use as the rest of us.”

  “And what use is that?”

  “They practice killing. They slaughter us like animals. I have seen it with my own eyes. I was taken out once before and thought my time was up then, but they stopped for the day before they got around to my group. But I watched as they turned men loose and made them run so they could be shot down as moving targets. I saw other men have their throats cut or be chopped to pieces with knives. Some were turned loose and told to run across a field, not knowing that bombs were buried there, bombs that blew them into bloody pieces of meat. They call this place the Canyon of the Snake, but it is really hell on earth.”

  What Bill had just heard shook him to his core. He wasn’t really surprised, though. The Mexican cartels had long been known for their cruelty, and of course those Middle Eastern fanatics knew no limits on their evil.

  “What would you do if you had the chance to fight back, amigo?” Bill asked the man.

  “You mean in the Pit of Blood?”

  Bill frowned. This was the first time he had heard that phrase. He asked, “What’s the Pit of Blood?”

  The prisoner pointed at Bailey and said, “That one will soon know. They will take him there. They will make him fight . . . fight or die.”

  Bailey understood enough Spanish to know what the man was saying. He took a deep breath, glared, and said, “Bring it on.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Dos Caballos

  Megan Sinclair pointed to the image on the laptop’s screen and said, “That’s it. They’ve stopped moving again.”

  Wade Stillman leaned forward to look over her shoulder.

  “Lay in the grid over it,” he told her.

  Megan tapped keys and did so, resulting in longitude and latitude lines appearing on the screen, overlaid on the satellite imagery it was already displaying. Three tiny red dots also were visible on the screen, so close together they looked almost like one. When Megan moved the cursor over those dots, a pop-up window appeared displaying their coordinates.

  “We know their location, almost right down to the foot,” she said. Her voice shook a little, betraying the depth of the emotion she felt. “Let’s go get them.”

  “We can’t yet,” Wade said, “and you know it. We have to figure out exactly what we’re doing.”

  From the chair where he sat on the other side of the hotel room, Braden Cole said, “That’s right. Planning is everything.”

  Megan took a deep breath. She didn’t like Cole. None of them did. He was about as cuddly as a copperhead. But she knew he was right. She had always planned out her jobs as thoroughly as she could.

  Of course, in the end, when she was caught, it hadn’t really helped . . .

  Nick Hatcher moved to Megan’s other side and looked at the screen.

  “What’s the best way in there?” he asked. As a getaway driver, he always studied all possible routes in and out of a place.

  The brightly painted nail on Megan’s slender index finger traced a path on the screen.

  “This is the canyon that leads into the valley where Bill, John, and
Catalina are right now,” she said. “Despite its name, the camp must actually be in the valley, not the canyon. But you can see how the name came about. Look at how the canyon writhes around.”

  “Like a snake,” Wade said.

  “Yes.”

  “This image isn’t real-time, is it?”

  “No, it’s archived and must be several months old, because you can see there are no buildings or any other visible signs of the camp. We know it must be there, though, otherwise Bill and the others wouldn’t be.”

  “Can we get a real-time satellite feed?” Wade asked.

  “Maybe off one of the DOD or NSA sats. Let me work at it for a few minutes.”

  She hunched over the laptop’s clicking keys while Wade and Nick stepped back. They joined Jackie Thornton, who stood at the window of the second-floor room, looking out at the town of Dos Caballos. The population was maybe two thousand people, and the town had a dusty, run-down look about it, as most places did in this rugged, mostly semiarid region of northern Mexico.

  “I don’t think you guys are gonna need me,” Jackie muttered. “I can fight a little, I guess, but Bill said he wanted me along in case he needed a spy. Not gonna be any spyin’ done on this mission, from the sound of it.”

  “We didn’t know that when we started,” Wade said. “Anyway, there’s no tellin’ what might come up before we’re finished.”

  “Maybe you should say ‘before we’re done’,” Nick suggested. “‘Before we’re finished’ sounds so . . . final.”

  Wade shrugged. They all knew there was a good chance none of them would be coming back. As long as they wiped out the men behind the camp, and as many of their followers as they could, that was all that mattered.

  “All right, take a look,” Megan said from the table where her computer was set up. All four men gathered around her, even Braden Cole.

  The image on the screen was different and didn’t have the GPS signal visible on it. Megan explained, “This is a real-time satellite feed, Wade, like you wanted, and I had to go through a different server for that so I can’t access the GPS feed at the same time. But it doesn’t really matter anymore since we know where they are.”

  She tapped the screen with her fingernail.

  Wade’s eyes narrowed as he studied the image. He said, “How come we never picked that up when we were looking for the camp earlier? I can see the buildings all right.”

  “That’s because you know they’re there, despite the camouflage on the roofs,” Megan said. “You’re looking for them. And I had to zoom in to a high degree of magnification to see as much as we’re seeing. Maybe we would have found the place eventually using just the satellite imagery, but it might have taken weeks or even longer. Bill was afraid we didn’t have that much time.”

  “Is there a road through the canyon?” Nick asked.

  “Yes. See that line? It doesn’t look like much of a road, though. More like just a dirt track.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I can drive it.”

  Megan smiled at the confidence in the man’s voice, then she said, “Now, here’s something interesting. There looks like another road here, in this basin west of the valley. See it? But where does it go? It appears to end at the mountains.”

  “Maybe it does,” Wade said. “There could be an old abandoned mine or something up there.”

  “There could be, but in that case the road would have deteriorated more than it has. It looks to me like it’s been used recently.”

  She knew that was a hunch, but she had learned over the years to trust her gut. Bill had mentioned to her that the CIA thought she would have made a good analyst. People like that had almost supernatural ability to take the tiniest indicators and put them together to make a meaningful picture. That was what she did now, as she continued, “The range of mountains that closes off the western end of the valley is about a mile wide, and there’s no pass where a road could go through it. But if there was a tunnel, this road over in the basin could lead to it.”

  Wade scratched his chin and frowned in thought.

  “They would have needed a way to bring in building materials and supplies,” he said. “That would be easier than trying to come up the canyon with them.”

  “Yes, but if it’s a back door in and out of the place, they must have it heavily secured. We probably don’t have the firepower to breach it. The canyon is still our best way in.”

  “Then that’s the way we’ll go,” Wade said. “Tonight?”

  Megan shook her head.

  “No. Tomorrow.”

  “That means leavin’ Bill, John, and Catalina in there overnight,” Wade said with a frown.

  “I know. But they’ll just have to hang on until then, because I have an idea.” Megan turned to look at Jackie and Cole. “And it all depends on the two of you.”

  Barranca de la Serpiente

  The afternoon was a long one in the hot, crowded, stuffy barracks. Bill had been in plenty of tight situations before and knew how to handle the strain, but even he felt his nerves growing taut. Sitting and waiting was one of the hardest parts of the job.

  Bill could tell that Bailey was struggling with it. The big man wanted to strike back at their enemies. He was worried about Catalina, too, as he mentioned in several muttered comments to Bill during the day.

  “That gal can take care of herself,” Bill said. “She’ll be all right.”

  He wanted to believe that, but given the odds against them, he had his doubts. All they could do for the moment was hope he was right.

  Finally, as the light of day began to dim, guards entered the barracks and forced the prisoners to crowd together on one side of the big room. More guards came in, these bringing loaves of bread, hunks of meat, and plastic bottles of water that they threw on the floor. When they all withdrew, the prisoners swarmed on the food and water, fighting with each other like animals to claim their fair share . . . or more.

  Bailey’s size and speed enabled him to grab a couple of bottles of water and enough food for both him and Bill, who stayed out of the melee. He came over to the spot they had claimed against the wall and shared the meal.

  “Pretty smart,” Bill commented. “They pit these fellas against each other so that it’s every man for himself. That way they’re used to fightin’ with each other.”

  “For when they get thrown into the Pit of Blood, you mean,” Bailey said.

  “Yeah. Men like the ones who work for the cartel, it’s got to be somethin’ pretty brutal to entertain ’em. So the prisoners who look like the best fighters, they turn ’em into gladiators.”

  “That’s why that guy said I’d wind up there.”

  “It won’t come to that,” Bill said. “We’ll be out of here before then.”

  “Or dead.”

  Bill didn’t argue with that statement.

  Darkness settled over the room after the crude supper, and soon most of the men were asleep. Bill tried not to doze off. He didn’t know exactly when the rest of his team would show up. It might be any time now.

  Exhaustion finally took its toll, though. Bill slept, and so did Bailey. When they woke, it was morning.

  “What the hell?” Bailey muttered as he sat up and knuckled his eyes. “I thought—”

  “I know what you thought,” Bill broke in. “So did I.”

  “You think something happened to them?”

  Bill had every confidence in the world in Wade Stillman and Megan Sinclair. But it was possible that one or all of the other three had double-crossed them. They were in a foreign country, after all, where enemies were a lot more common than allies.

  “Either they got delayed somehow,” he said, “or they’re takin’ their time because Megan’s got some plan in the works. She’s a tricky one, that gal. Smart as a whip.”

  “Yeah, and pretty, too. Too bad she’s such a cold fish.”

  “Maybe you just don’t know her well enough.”

  “And it’s starting to look like I won’t get the chance to.�
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  Bill couldn’t argue with that, either. All he could do was wonder where the others were and when they would get here.

  If they didn’t, the job would be up to him and Bailey and Catalina. What was the old saying? The difficult we do right away . . .

  The impossible takes a little longer.

  CHAPTER 38

  Catalina hadn’t spent a more nerve-wracking night since the time she had dodged the cartel killers back in Ciudad Acuña, after Marty was killed. Nothing happened, though. Some of the women were taken out of the barracks, then brought back later, and it wasn’t difficult to guess what had happened to them while they were gone, but Catalina wasn’t among those singled out.

  That wouldn’t last. As a newcomer, she knew her services would be in high demand.

  If that happened before the others showed up, she wouldn’t give in. In the past, she might have, figuring that with everything else she had done in her life, it didn’t really matter anymore. But the time she had spent with Bill, Bailey, Stillman, and the others had taught her that some things were worth fighting for. The past couldn’t be changed, but the way people lived their lives every day was still up to them. They didn’t have to allow their past mistakes to rule them. Human dignity meant something to her again, and she wouldn’t let anyone take it away from her.

  So she would fight. It wouldn’t be hard. None of the guards considered the female prisoners a threat. Catalina could tell that by looking at them, watching the careless way they acted around the women. They believed that all the women were too beaten down and terrified to ever fight back.

  When the time came, they would find out how wrong they were about her.

  In the canyon

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Jackie Thornton asked nervously as Cole steered the jeep along the rutted track that barely qualified as a road.

  “Of course it’s not a good idea,” Cole said. “We’re headed right toward a whole training camp full of cartel killers and bloodthirsty terrorists who want to murder as many Americans as they can. But you knew this job was going to be dangerous when you agreed to it, didn’t you?”