by Mark Greaney
She passed through a small open-air courtyard, walked down a colonnade of cool stone walls, entered a dusty storeroom on the far side, and made her way in the dark towards a doorway leading to the outside.
The night was still save for a gentle cool breeze; she followed a stone footpath overgrown with weeds and moneda vines, took this disused trail to the old chapel. She opened the rotten wooden door slowly; she dared not make a sound that would alert the American or the policemen that she had left the casa, lest they come and take her back to the cellar. When she stepped inside, she closed the door tight so that it would block out any candlelight.
She’d brought a lighter, and she used it to light a veladora, which she took to the little altar there on the far wall, and she knelt, slowly so that the knee rest did not creak or even snap from her weight.
She lit a few more veladoras, just enough to illuminate the brass crucifix in front of her. Slowly the scent of candle wax and burning wick blended with the mold and dust in the air, and seventy-nine-year-old Inez Corrales Jimenez began to pray.
Gunfire erupted outside soon after. She turned back towards the door, eyes wide in the low light, but she calmed herself.
Turned back to her duty.
She had come alone to the chapel, to pray for her husband, dead now just three hours. She would pray for him here, in the chapel where he had been christened as a boy, where they had come to light candles right after their wedding in 1957, where their own boy, Guillermo, had learned to love Jesus.
The guns outside did not change the beauty and importance of this place in her life, to her family.
She turned back to the crucifix, began praying aloud, a tall glass veladora clutched in her hand.
The door flew open behind her; the draft of air whipped the candlelight in the small chapel, sending long shadows across the walls in a back-and-forth jolt.
She stiffened in surprise and fear, but she did not turn back to look. Only lowered her head and quickly made the sign of the cross over her body.
A marine sicario shot her once in the base of the skull with a Colt .45 pistol. Her tiny, aged, frail body lurched forward across the altar, came to rest at the foot of the crucifix, the candle in her hand spun through the air and extinguished with the movement.
* * *
Diego and his grandfather lay at the top of the staircase into the kitchen, and they fired their carbines at a figure in the living room. The man had shot at them first; Diego knew with certainty neither tía Laura, the bearded gringo, nor the two federales who’d worked for tío Eduardo would do that, so he determined this man in the dark behind the sporadic muzzle flashes to be their enemy.
The sixteen-year-old boy and the seventy-year-old man did not have any training in such things, so they did not space themselves apart properly. Their shoulders literally touched as they fought, affording their attacker the luxury of a single target at which to shoot. Also, they did not know to cover for each other as they reloaded; instead they just fired when they saw fit, stopped when they saw fit, and reloaded when they needed to do so. This created long, dangerous lulls in the fight, during which their enemy could creep closer to find a better angle of fire.
Ernesto rose to a knee to pull a third M1 carbine magazine out of his hip pocket, he leaned to shout something into Diego’s ear, and then he spun ninety degrees, dropped the rifle, and clutched high on his right shoulder. He slid halfway down the stairs on his old back, shouted from the shock of the impact, which felt as if he’d been kicked in the shoulder by a mule.
At the bottom of the stairs his wife appeared, a candle in her hand; she began climbing up to him, shrieking and crying; he yelled at her, ordered her back to the cellar, told her that he was fine.
Through the numbness in his arm and a fresh cold chill that now sloshed across his body like a high, cool wave over his little fishing boat, he began climbing the stairs again to fight alongside his grandson, reaching for the wooden rifle on his way.
* * *
Ramses Cienfuegos had fought off two men on the second-floor south mirador. At first he’d been alongside Colonel Gamboa’s sister, Laura, but a flash-bang grenade had been tossed into the upstairs parlor from the mirador itself and exploded between them. Laura had stumbled back into the hallway, out of sight, but Ramses had recovered quickly enough to charge forward instead of back. He saw two men on the mirador, they were preparing to attack, but Ramses surprised them with his aggressive tactics. The men escaped from him by leaping over the balcony towards the patio below, and when he arrived at the railing and looked down, he saw the marines disappear into the night around the west side of the casa grande. He was certain the assassins would regroup and try to breach from the ground floor, so he sprinted to the staircase, ran down it, and turned into the hallway towards the west wing.
He ran down the hallway, passed several rooms, and then turned sharply and entered a courtyard, made of long open colonnades that formed a box around a garden of weeds with a huge garbage-strewn fountain in the middle. The open sky shone into the space and illuminated it just enough for him to see his way forward down the stone tiles. He ran towards a doorway on the far side.
He cleared the room beyond with his submachine gun, found it to be an old storeroom, and also discovered a wide open door to the outside.
He knew in an instant that the men were already in the house.
Somewhere behind him.
Ramses Cienfuegos retraced his steps. He still heard gunfire on the far end of the house, but he also knew that the men he’d seen earlier could not have made it that far in such a short time. He reentered the courtyard, followed the east-west colonnade back to the east, and then turned to the north to go back into the hallway that led to the main portion of the casa grande.
As he jogged, he looked away for an instant, out into the garden, wondering if someone was hiding in the tall grasses and weeds.
When he looked back up, a man was there, thirty feet away and running up the tiled colonnade towards him.
A marino in full battle dress, carrying an MP5.
Both Mexicans saw each other at the same time. Both raised their weapons as their eyes widened in surprise and fear.
The marino fired his MP5 up the hall, spraying bullets towards the federale. Ramses fired his Colt 635 down the hall, spraying bullets back at the sicario.
Ramses Cienfuegos went down first, a hot snap into his right biceps, another to his right shoulder, and then his helmet shattered and smashed and leapt straight off his head into the air. He spun away while firing his weapon, supersonic lead arced from the muzzle and nailed the sicario in his right arm, then across his chest plate, tipping him backwards and knocking him down.
Both fell flat on their backs on the cold tile, only twenty-five feet apart and bleeding in the dark colonnade hallway. Both men’s primary weapons were empty, and both men sat up and struggled to reload, encumbered as they were by their wounds and the slick blood coating their weapons and their spare magazines.
“¡Cabrón!” Ramses shouted as he rolled onto his right hip, ejected the spent magazine from the well of the rifle, used the same arm to retrieve a loaded spare from his assault vest, and struggled to reload.
“¡Chingado federale!” The marine shouted as a reply; his voice echoed in the hallway and across the courtyard. He’d given up on reloading his rifle; instead he pushed the weapon away, reached across his body with his left hand, and with a shout of pain drew his pistol from the drop-leg holster on his right hip. He fought his inertia to roll back to his left to line up a shot.
Ramses gritted his teeth against the searing burn of the bullet wounds, screamed another obscenity at the assassin, and realized he was beaten. He struggled to pull back the charging handle on the rifle with his one good hand; he looked up to see the black pistol emerge at the end of the sicario’s arm, saw the assassin scoot on the tile in his expanding blood pool to get his weapon around for the killing shot.
Ramses knew he could not ready his weapon b
efore his enemy could raise his. He could not pull back the charging handle one-handed without propping the butt of the gun on the tile, and he had no time to do this. He wore no handgun, he’d given it to Major Gamboa’s sister, and without a loaded rifle he had no way to engage his foe. So he let the rifle fall to the floor, sat there on the cold tile. His legs splayed out in front of him, and he relaxed, thought of his family, and waited to die.
The marine leaning on his side ahead of him grimaced in pain as his weapon rose. He clearly saw he would get the drop on the federale, and his face, contorted in pain, morphed into a smile.
Ramses Cienfuegos drew a long breath and sighed. Watched his killer enjoy the moment.
“¡Come mierda!” Eat shit! Ramses shouted.
And then, as silent and as fast as the predawn breeze that drifted through the hacienda, the American sprinted from around the corner and into the tile colonnade behind the marine. He carried the long, old, side-by-side double-barrel shotgun, and his eyes were down at the open breach of the weapon. He was trying to reload it as he ran, but when he recognized the scene in front of him, the gringo’s eyes widened. Ramses watched the gringo discard the two fresh shotgun shells back over his shoulder, and then the wounded Mexican federale watched the American toss the big shotgun into the air in front of him while he ran forward as fast as he could.
The marine assassin knew nothing of the danger behind him. He took his time to level his Sig Sauer pistol at the injured man sitting ahead of him on the tile.
The wooden-stocked scattergun spun through the air backwards, the gringo caught it with both hands around the barrel near the muzzle as he neared the unsuspecting marine on the floor in front of him. The American took hold of the weapon by the barrel, reared back as he ran, and swung the shotgun with all his might — like a baseball batter swinging for the fences, like a golfer forcing every ounce of energy behind the head of his driver — and the hickory butt stock of the shotgun connected with the back of the sicario’s head, just as the Mexican began to pull the trigger on his pistol.
The impact of hard wood on flesh and bone was sickening, the smack of a melon impacting the street after falling from a truck at speed. It echoed across the courtyard and blood splatter showered the tile and stucco column just ahead of where the assassin sat.
The sicario would have died no faster had he been decapitated. He tumbled forward behind a spray that shone in the moonlight, and he fell on his face. His pistol disappeared under his body.
Ramses blew a long sigh of euphoric relief as the American dropped his shotgun and ran up the hall to check on him.
Just then two more marinos appeared behind the gringo; they made the mistake of first looking right instead of left, and Ramses saw the men before they saw their two targets. They recovered in a second though and began turning towards the left, began raising their rifles.
“¡Atrás!” Behind! Ramses screamed at the American while sliding his stubby rifle hard down the tiled hallway towards him. “¡Cárgalo!” Charge it! he screamed, and the bearded gringo understood immediately, dove headfirst with his arms out, slid forward on his chest to reach the weapon.
The cracks of rounds and the concussion of the withering gunfire of two weapons rocked the narrow hall. Stucco and stone ripped from the walls just above both men, sending sharp shards of two-hundred-year-old building materials through the air like jet-powered hornets. Gentry grabbed the blood-smeared sub gun not ten feet in front of Ramses, he rolled onto his back while racking the bolt back on the little rifle, and began firing before he’d even found his targets.
As the two sicarios’ bullets stitched lower along the walls on either side of Court and Ramses, Gentry’s return fire advanced on the tile floor, creating a fault line — like fissure that chased towards the two men forty feet on. Terra-cotta exploded in sparks and smoke closer and closer to the men, until both marine assassins reeled backwards, spinning and jolting from multiple gunshot wounds as they stumbled and died.
“Fuck!” shouted Court, but he could not hear himself. His ears rang. He kept his eyes and the sights of the nearly empty Colt trained on the two forms slumped in the smoky moonlight ahead. Behind him he heard Ramses crawling forward.
“You okay, amigo?” asked Court without taking his eyes from the gun sites.
Ramses crawled up next to Court, lay on the tile on the American’s left side. Ramses spit out a mouthful of stucco and terra-cotta and sweat. He answered back in English that was delivered in some sort of poor impersonation. “Yeah, dude. That was awesome.”
Court just laughed. He knew the adrenaline running through him would make him edgy for about as long as his ears rang. And after that he would crash hard.
TWENTY-NINE
Most of the surviving defenders gathered back in the living room fifteen minutes later. A crowing rooster told them the dawn was near, but the sky outside remained coal black.
Gentry stood, his hands on his hips, bloodstains drying on his denim jacket from his chest to the top of his pants. His beard sparkled with perspiration. He’d just returned from the driveway outside, where he’d found Eddie’s brother’s body lying across the front seats of the old farm truck. Wearily, he announced to the room, “Ignacio is dead.”
“He died trying to rescue us,” said Luz.
“No doubt,” Court replied, though he had every doubt in the world. A quick glance to Ernesto confirmed Gentry’s suspicion that Ignacio’s own father didn’t believe his son had gone out like a hero, either.
But neither man spoke up.
The five remaining members of the Gamboa family were huddled together on the sofa, sobbing and crying now. Ernesto seemed lost in space at this point; there were tears in his eyes, but he was not as energetic in his misery as were the rest. His wife diligently bandaged her husband’s shoulder. Ernesto just kept his chin high and ignored the pain as he gazed off into the darkened corners of the room.
Court continued with the bad news, and Elena translated for those who did not understand. “Ramses is wounded, shot twice, but he’s a tough little bastard. He’ll fight if we get hit again.” Ramses was in the kitchen just now, pouring clear tequila from a bottle all over his arm and shoulder. It hurt like a bitch, but it served as a decent anesthetic. The bandages that Elena had created by tearing bedsheets would help stanch the blood flow.
Court next looked at Laura. “Inez is dead, too. We found her in the chapel.” He paused. Tried to think of something “right” to say. “She went quick. No pain.”
Laura nodded distantly. Fatigue and shock had blunted the blow. Court noticed she did not even cry.
Court continued. “There’s more, I’m afraid. The truck is not going anywhere. It’s riddled with bullets and smashed. And… ”
“And?” asked Diego. He held the M1 carbine in his hand like a security blanket. He’d fired it twenty times at the man who’d been here in this room twenty minutes prior, and although there was neither a body nor a blood trail leading away from the room, Diego felt like he’d protected his family by holding off the attacker.
“And when I was outside, I heard trucks out in the distance, out past the walls of the hacienda.”
“Trucks?”
“Yes. They sounded like big armor-plated trucks.”
Laura stared through her bloodshot eyes. She understood. Nodded . “Federales.”
Court nodded. “I’m going to assume they are not friendlies. A half dozen trucks, maybe. I’m guessing there could be fifty men out there past the wall.”
Court was as shell-shocked as the rest of them. The room just seemed sucked dry of all life. As if even though de la Rocha’s people had not yet accomplished their mission, they had already killed much of the defenders’ will to survive.
Court searched his brain for a silver lining, no matter how narrow the strand. Damn, he wished he was a leader, an officer, a motivator. Fuck, just like he’d been told many times before, at this moment he felt like he was just a “door kicker.” A “breach bitch.” A
“gun monkey.”
Finally, he lightened a bit. “As for good news… there is a little. It’s almost dawn, and I do not think they will hit us during the day. They know we have a bunch of new weapons at our disposal, and they can’t fight us from inside their armored trucks, so we have until nightfall to find a way out of this mess. We’ll come up with something.”
Not exactly the speech Patton would have made at a time like this, Court realized.
Laura shook her head. “Joe, you have not slept… you cannot function like—”
“I’ll be okay.” He dismissed her with a wave of his hand. He didn’t have time to talk about how he needed a nap. “I’ve picked over the dead marines, and in addition to the sub guns, I found radios, a set of binoculars, and a mobile phone. They’ve apparently already changed their radio codes. I’ve got to figure the mobile will be tapped or traced, and the tower around here is down, but we can hang on to it. It may come in handy at some point.
They all discussed going to the U.S. for a few minutes, and then it was everyone back to their defensive positions. Court took guard duty on the back mirador, still the most likely avenue of any attack. He told Martin and Diego and Ramses and Laura to wander the house, keep an eye out all the windows as best they could, and the wounded and elderly Ernesto was ordered to lie down with Luz and Elena in the cellar. Laura gave her father a pistol to hold, to give him the honor of still taking a nominal role in the protection of his family.
* * *
Twenty minutes later Court lay on the second-floor balcony, facing east, and he watched the soft light of a clear dawn roll slowly over the forest. The white of the back wall of the property appeared slowly, as if it were being painted before his eyes on a black canvas.