The earth trembled underneath him and the brightness of the flame was such that he saw it even through his closed eyelids. Nat blew out the breath and stood, moving quickly but not hurrying, and within him his heart was still at ease as he cut through the wire and moved into the compound. He was still smiling peacefully as a shadow lunged at him, cursing in Spanish, and Nat used the assault rifle in his hands to blow the son of a bitch in half.
Where was he? Oh yeah, Mexico. Gonna bust into this place and get the guy who killed John Howard’s wife. That was it. Hold on to that moment of clarity. Remember why he was here.
But it was hard, so fuckin’ hard. Was he back in ’Nam? No, this was Mexico. Were we at war with Mexico now? Must be, or else why would the marines be here? He’d have to ask John Howard about that. John Howard had never lied to him, never let him down.
Something was gonna blow up real good. Rich knew that much. And when it did, he was gonna cut through that fence and run toward that big house, and if anybody tried to stop him he was supposed to shoot them. Was Charlie in there? Must be, yeah, the VC must’ve taken over the place, that was it. Little bastards in their black pajamas. Who would’ve ever dreamed that they could fight so good?
What was he waiting on? The explosion. Don’t move until then. Big explosion. He couldn’t miss it. Ka-blooie! Yeah, man, he’d know it when it happened. But he almost missed it anyway, and it was a couple of seconds after the big blast before he remembered what he was supposed to do next. He shook his head, cut the wire, and stepped through the gap.
“Rock ’n’ roll, man,” he said aloud. “Rock and fuckin’ roll!”
Macon checked the wire first. Electrified, of course. But the gloves he wore and the heavy insulation on the handles of the wire cutters would protect him from that. The night was quiet, but it soon wouldn’t be. He put pressure on the handles. The first strand of wire parted.
Somewhere in the compound, an alarm went off.
There were eight strands of wire. Macon cut them in less than fifteen seconds. Then he was through, running toward the generator building. Enough light came from the house so that when he reached the door, he saw that it was locked. But the door wasn’t meant to keep out a man who was six five and weighed two hundred and forty pounds. Barely slowing down, he lifted his booted right foot and crashed it against the door, close to the jamb. Wood splintered and cracked, and the door flew open.
He lunged inside, feeling for a light switch. Something brushed his face. He reached up and felt a pull chain. When he jerked on it, light from a bare bulb flooded the room. Squinting against the sudden glare, he saw the heavy generator, bulking on the concrete floor like some sort of misshapen metal toad. Beside it were at least a dozen fifty-gallon drums. Macon grinned as he shrugged off his backpack. The seconds ticked off in his brain. A little more than half a minute had passed since he’d cut the first wire.
He pulled out the roll of wire and dropped the backpack next to the drums of gasoline. He turned and started toward the door, and suddenly the guard was there, lunging at him and driving the blade of a long, heavy knife into Macon’s body. Macon cried out in pain and dropped the wire and his rifle. The guard, a thick-bodied Mexican a foot shorter than him, tackled him and knocked him to the floor.
They rolled over, and that made the knife twist and tear inside him. Flailing, Macon got his right hand around the guard’s neck. He squeezed hard, until it looked like the man’s eyeballs were going to pop out. The guard slammed punches into Macon’s face, but Macon ignored them. He held on for dear life. His superior strength forced the guard back, but Macon could feel himself weakening. Now or never, he thought.
He drove the guard’s head against the concrete floor as hard as he could. The man’s skull made a sound a little like a watermelon bursting open. He went limp as blood and gray matter began to pool under his head.
Macon pushed himself up onto hands and knees. He knew he was hurt bad. His insides were cut to pieces. And in the back of his head the countdown was still going on. Now it had been almost a minute. Too long, too long. The others were waiting on him, and they had to get inside quickly before the guards knew what was going on. They needed that distraction he was supposed to provide.
Blood dripped in a steady stream from the huge wound in his belly as he crawled across the floor toward the backpack. When he reached it, he picked it up and collapsed with his back propped against one of the drums of gasoline. He could smell the gas, but even stronger was the sheared copper smell of freshly spilled blood, a lot of it. He ignored that as he pawed inside the backpack.
Six seconds later, three guards carrying machine guns burst into the generator room and saw Macon sitting there, a backpack in his lap, the bottom half of his body awash in crimson. He was smiling, though, as he held up something and showed it to them.
In the two seconds that remained, they didn’t have time to recognize it as the pin from a grenade. Then the flames of hell reached out and claimed them.
Henry Macon died thinking of his wife.
Thirty-seven
Ramirez leaped to his feet as the explosion rocked the compound. Even the normally impassive Ryan looked startled. But Hammond was more than startled. Panic bloomed inside him. He turned to run. He didn’t know where he was fleeing, but he didn’t care. He just had to get away.
“Silencio!” Ramirez cried. “Stop him!”
A shot cracked behind Hammond and something sliced across his upper right thigh, leaving behind a line of fiery agony. That leg folded up beneath him, dumping him heavily on the tile floor.
“I didn’t say to shoot him!” Ramirez yelped.
“You said stop him,” Ryan responded. “He’s stopped.”
Hammond rolled and writhed on the floor, clutching his wounded leg. Ryan came over to him. Somewhere outside the main house, gunfire chattered. Ryan brought his foot down on Hammond’s bullet-torn leg, making the sheriff scream. Pointing the pistol in his hand at Hammond’s face, Ryan asked, “Do you know anything about this?”
“Stark!” Hammond shouted, fighting through the pain in his leg. “It’s got to be Stark!”
“That’s what I figure, too.” Ryan’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t double-cross us, did you, Hammond? Maybe let Stark escape so he could come down here and get us off your back for you?”
Hammond jerked his head from side to side. “God no! I . . . I’d never do that!” He looked over at Ramirez, who stood there with his face carefully controlled but his eyes leaping around in fear and confusion. “I swear it! I would never betray you!”
“He is telling the truth,” Ramirez said. “He is too cowardly a dog to try such a thing.” The drug lord nervously wiped the back of a hand across his mouth. “Silencio, what are we going to do? It sounds like Stark has an army out there!”
“He couldn’t come up with an army,” Ryan said scornfully. “All hands were against him. A few friends, maybe. They’ll never get in here, Don Ernesto.”
“You’re sure?”
Ryan nodded. “And if by some chance they do, I’ll deal with them.” He paused, then added, “But maybe you’d better get to the chopper, just in case.”
Ramirez’s head bobbed up and down in a spastic nod. “Sí. The chopper. And you come, too. We will leave Stark to my men.”
Ryan was wrong, Hammond thought, although his mind was blurry with pain. Hammond had dealt with Stark enough lately to know that once the man made up his mind to do something, he wouldn’t let anything stop him, not even death. If it took his last breath, Stark would make it in here.
Ryan left Hammond’s side and moved toward Ramirez. Hammond rolled over and groaned.
“What about the sheriff?” Ryan asked.
“Leave him,” Ramirez answered without hesitation. “Let Stark have him.”
And Stark would kill him, no doubt about it, Hammond thought. But maybe not, if, when he burst in here, he found Hammond standing over the bodies of Ramirez and Ryan. Maybe Stark would be grateful enough to let h
im go.
Reaching up to grasp the edge of a table, Hammond hauled himself up and stumbled to his feet. All he had to do was jump Ryan and get his hands on the man’s gun. He could do that. Hell, he’d been all-state, hadn’t he?
With an incoherent yell, Hammond lunged after them. Ryan turned smoothly, not hurrying, brought up the pistol in his hand, and fired twice. Twin black holes appeared an inch apart in Hammond’s forehead. The sheriff’s momentum carried him forward another step before his nerves and muscles realized that he was dead and dumped him facedown on the floor. Ramirez glanced at the body, shrugged, and said, “He was of no more use to us anyway. Let’s get out of here, Silencio.”
Several men ran out of the gunners’ quarters and headed for the blazing generator building before Stark could stop them. If they ran into Macon over there, he would have to deal with them. But there were probably still quite a few inside the long, low, red-roofed building. Stark pulled a flash-bang grenade off his web belt and heaved it through the open door. He turned his head, closed his eyes, and covered his ears.
The grenade went off with its blinding flash and high-pitched burst of sound that was more like a giant scream than a bang. The glare lasted only a second. Stark wheeled into the doorway and saw men scrambling around, most of them obviously disoriented. A few of them had managed to avoid the effects of the flash-bang enough so that they could see what they were doing as they tried to reach the door. One of those men spotted Stark and yelled a curse as he swung up a pistol.
Stark opened fire with the assault rifle.
The L85 bucked and roared in his grip as he sprayed the room with short, lethal bursts. The bullets flung men around like rag dolls. They danced and jittered as blood spurted from dozens of holes in their bodies. One by one they fell to the floor, which was awash with blood in a matter of seconds.
Stark threw an incendiary grenade into the pile of corpses and moved on. With a thump, the grenade burst behind him and spread an all-consuming fire from one side of the room to the other.
Gun flame bloomed in the darkness as Stark ran toward the main house. He heard the wind-rip of a pistol round passing close beside his head. Without breaking stride, he pulled a 9mm pistol from its holster with his left hand and triggered it twice, bracketing the place where he’d seen the muzzle flash. The second bullet found its target. A man screamed and the gun cracked again as he involuntarily jerked the trigger, but the bullet went harmlessly into the night sky.
A shadow moved behind the wrought-iron gate as Stark approached it. He dived forward as an automatic weapon opened up. A slug hit the top of his left shoulder but glanced off the Kevlar. Still, the impact was enough to numb that arm for a second. He gritted his teeth and fired the assault rifle one-handed. Sparks flew as lead spanged off the gate. But enough of them got through to stitch a line across the chest of the machine gunner. With a groan, he collapsed and died.
Stark scrambled up, shaking his left arm to try to get some feeling back into it. The gate was locked, but several rounds from the L85 blasted it open.
With the squeal of hinges, Stark kicked the door open and ran into a tunnel-like path that led to the courtyard in the center of the hacienda. Somewhere, in one of the rooms off that courtyard, he would likely find Ramirez, cowering like the rat that he was. The Vulture was ill-named; even a carrion bird could soar high in the sky, but Ramirez was a small, verminlike creature, more suited to a dark hole than the open heavens.
Stark advanced slowly toward the courtyard, ready for anything.
Will Sheffield, Nat Van Linh, and Rich Threadgill stalked toward the main house from different angles. Sheffield and Nat had noted that the barrackslike building where the gunners were housed was already on fire. John Howard’s work, more than likely. But there were still plenty of guards spread out around the estate who hadn’t been mown down and then trapped in that inferno. Some of them took potshots at the former marines as they moved through the darkness. More than once, they found themselves in fierce firefights as they closed in on the house. Nat took cover in some trees as bullets searched through the darkness for him and whistled close by his head.
Breathing hard, he crouched there. He had thought that he was in very good shape for his age, but now he knew he was wrong about that. He owned a restaurant and some fishing boats, for God’s sake! He wasn’t a warrior anymore. He wasn’t even close to the fierce young man he had been thirty years earlier.
But he could still see pretty well in the darkness, he discovered. He spotted the guard moving through the trees toward him, searching for him, and all at once it was as if he were back in the jungle, waiting patiently for his enemy to come to him. Silently, Nat laid his rifle aside and slipped his combat knife from its sheath. Like an animal with its prey finally in reach, he came up from the ground, grabbed the man’s hair with his left hand and jerked his head back, then used his right to slide the keen edge of the blade across the man’s taut throat. Blood gushed hotly as the guard twitched and died. Nat let him go and stepped back . . .
Right into a bullet that plowed into his upper right arm through a gap in the body armor, breaking the bone and sending him spinning off his feet.
Pain blotted out everything else, filling his senses for a second. Awareness came back to him just in time for him to see the man charging at him, eager to finish him off. Nat’s right arm was useless, but he felt around on the ground with his left hand, found the knife he had dropped, and lunged up with it, taking the guard by surprise. The blade sank into the man’s groin. He screamed as Nat ripped the knife through his guts, but he managed to squeeze the trigger of the machine pistol in his hand as he fell forward, dying. At this range the bullets penetrated the armor and chewed into Nat’s leg. He cried out as the guard fell on him, pinning him to the ground. Feeling himself weakening from shock and loss of blood, Nat tried to roll the dead weight off him. He couldn’t do it.
He passed out while he was still struggling to free himself.
A hundred yards away, Sheffield had his own hands full. He was pinned down behind a small shed of the sort that was used to store lawn equipment. He hunkered low to the ground as automatic weapons fire tore into the shed from two directions at once. Unlike the main house and most of the other buildings in the compound with their thick adobe walls, the shed was a frame structure, and the wooden walls didn’t do much to slow down the high-powered rounds. Another few minutes, in fact, and the gunners would have shot the thing to pieces, and then Sheffield wouldn’t be able to hide behind it anymore. Knowing he couldn’t stay where he was, he threw a flash-bang around one corner of the shed and then followed it, firing bursts from the assault rifle as he ran. A shot came from his left. He went down, rolled, and fired in that direction, then swept the L85 back to the right.
When he surged up onto his feet, nobody fired at him. Knowing that he’d been lucky, he put that behind him and moved on toward the house. He thought he caught a glimpse of someone—Rich Threadgill, maybe—ducking through an open door.
Threadgill had reached the house, all right. He had shot some guys along the way. He didn’t know who they were, but they had been trying to shoot him, so that was all he needed to know. Except for John Howard and the other four, everybody in here was an enemy, and it was okay to shoot them. John Howard had made that perfectly clear. So Threadgill was confident that he wasn’t going to get in trouble.
He ran down a hallway with a tile floor. A couple of big Mexican guys in flowery shirts jumped out through an arched doorway and blasted away at him with pistols. Threadgill pulled his old long-barreled Colt. It boomed loudly in the narrow hall as he emptied it into the two Mexicans. The heavy-caliber bullets punched right through their torsos, knocking them back against the wall. Bloodstains bloomed on their shirts, but Threadgill couldn’t see them very well against the background of colorful flowers. The men slid down the wall, leaving crimson smears on the adobe behind them. Threadgill moved past them into the arched doorway, holstering the Colt and lifting his ass
ault rifle as he did so. There might be more enemies inside.
Instead there were a lot of women, a dozen or so, girls, really, except for one fat mamacita who spread her arms and tried to get between Threadgill and the young women who had been brought here for the Vulture’s perverted pleasures.
The scene flickered and shifted in front of Threadgill’s eyes. Instead of young, pretty Mexican girls, he saw young, pretty Vietnamese girls. He remembered you couldn’t trust them no matter how pretty they were because sometimes they worked with the VC and more than one poor GI had wound up dead just ’cause he wanted some o’ that poontang and got his throat cut instead. Sometimes they planted bombs, too, and blew soldiers to bloody little bits, and you just couldn’t trust ’em because they were the enemy, Goddamn it, and John Howard had said it was okay to shoot the enemy. So Threadgill didn’t pay any attention to the screaming that filled the room as he lifted the assault rifle and tightened his finger on the trigger.
Sheffield got to him just in time to knock the barrel of the rifle up so that the bullets tore into the ceiling instead. “No, Rich!” he shouted. “No!” He shouldered Threadgill aside.
That put him in just the right position to take the bullet that the fat mamacita fired from the pistol she had dug out of a pocket in her voluminous skirt. The slug hit Sheffield in the chest. It didn’t penetrate the Kevlar, but it still felt like a punch from a giant fist that knocked him backward.
Threadgill caught his balance and brought the rifle to his shoulder. He fired one shot, blowing half the woman’s head off. His mind had snapped back to normal, and as the woman collapsed, he looked past her body at the shrieking, terrified Mexican girls. He spoke enough Spanish to tell them to get the hell out of there, to run away home and never come back to this place of evil. There would be no place to come back to, anyway. By morning it would all be gone.
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