by Matthew Funk
Banzai tore the Tiger to the side as the .50 opened up, noise shaking the windshield. Slugs designed to chew up aircraft metal like rice paper chunked the road.
Professor had no choice—he leaned out the window with the grenade launcher.
The gold-toothed Cartel gunman tracked them with the 600-slugs a minute coming from the red hot barrel of the .50.
Banzai nodded at the road ahead. "Looks like your calculations were a bit off this time, Professor. Tunnel's coming up in two miles."
Professor aimed the grenade launcher. Slugs bigger than his hand sang around, creased his beret with violated air.
"One minute to the tunnel." Banzai said.
Professor replied with the cough of the M79.
The grenade soared over the big rig's profile. It dipped. The shell slammed into the roof.
Smoke billowed rot-yellow from the big rig.
"It's all part of the plan." Professor ducked back into the Tiger. The sound of a descending plane rumbled through the window as he rolled it up.
Banzai glanced up as he braked the Tiger. Jasper was dive-bombing the Cesna out of the invisibility of the high, powder-blue sky toward the yellow smoke trail. Vaquero already clung to the landing gear, tassels snapping from his red-and-white calfskin jacket.
The Cesna's shriek grabbed the highway. The Cartel gunner tilted the .50 up to greet it. Tracers ribboned the air.
Tilting and swinging like a gut-shot crow, the Cesna wove between the blazing slugs. Jasper pressed his arsenal of crooked teeth toward the windshield, put the prop plane into a straight dive.
The Tiger followed to watch. It was Jasper's show now.
The Cartel truck shot into the tunnel. The Cesna shot after it.
Jasper tilted the wing of the plane and coasted into the opposing lane.
The tunnel was dark and tight as a snare around the plane. Nothing new to Jasper. The run through the tunnel would only take him a minute. Buzzing the triple-canopy tree lines ofIndochinahad lasted five years.
"Keep it steady, hombre," Vaquero yelled to the massive Cajun pilot.
"Steady as a coon hunter's rifle," Jasper hollered back. Spiced his words with a laugh. Saw the gold-teeth of the drop-jawed Cartel gunner as the plane pulled alongside the trailer and only grinned wider.
Jasper touched the Cesna's wing with a bit more tilt. Vaquero tensed on the landing gear, an arm's length away from the trailer's roof.
A Buick station wagon's headlights stabbed for the Cesna from the oncoming lane.
"Hold onto your linens, Vaquero!" Jasper yanked the stick. The Cesna soared over the Buick. Left wheel caught some camping gear and sent skis skittering on the tunnel floor.
Jasper dipped back.
"Intensity Level Bravo!" Jasper matched smirks with Vaquero.
"All the way!"
Vaquero jumped.
His fingertips met the edge of the trailer roof, clamped instantly, destroyed friction. Landing and hauling himself up was a single motion. Flung his spidery body onto the roof with hands still Mojave dry.
Jasper whirled a wave goodbye that went unseen. Vaquero dashed doubled-over for the trailer's rear. Tunnel ceiling scythed a foot above his head. It did not slow him. Such fear did not exist for this man who had spent half a decade charging Vietcong in lightless passages below the surface of the earth.
He reached the trailer doors as the gunman was pulling them closed. A twist of his body and Vaquero went through the closing gates like a lance. His two snakeskins cracked the gunman's jaw in four places.
The trailer's interior glowed blue phantasmal in fluorescents. Vaquero spared no moment to take in the shock of the four Cartel men and their jefe. He dove into them with fingers hooked and lips drawn as a garrote.
One drew his .44 Magnum fast. Vaquero splintered his wrist with a one-hand twist. Flung him into the next fastest. Wet snaps as his human missile landed.
A third cocked the action on an AK-47. Vaquero slid forward, took his legs out with a spin kick. The same kick widened, clutched the falling man's neck perfectly tooled to snap bone, broke him.
The fourth man spun his rifle on Vaquero. An instant of hesitation was all Vaquero needed. A wrist-throw tore the gun from his grip, an arm bar blasted his shoulder from its joint, a palm to the throat slammed it shut to any air.
Now Vaquero looked around. The jefe was a man with a trimmed beard and a false beauty mark on one fat cheek. He was diving for cover under a bank of computers.
Vaquero dove on top of him. He snatched the drive of the computer and tucked its suitcase-sized bulk under one arm. A last glance around confirmed there were no other records—only cheap furniture and a fortune in cocaine.
Vaquero spun and ran for the trailer doors.
The jefe lifted a Colt .45 in a trembling, four-ringed hand.
Vaquero leapt from the trailer without stopping.
He landed on the hood of the Tiger, dead-center on its tiger paw logo of red-and-black stripes.
The sound of the Cesna dropping a barrel of napalm at the head of the tunnel sent the jefe to his knees in the trailer.
The Tiger sped to keep Vaquero balanced. He seized the curve of its hood. He held tight as Banzai slowed to avoid the inferno opening ahead.
The truck could not slow in time. Hydraulic scream muffled by the explosion of napalm. The trailer jack-knifed into the cab.
The cab sheared into the flames that choked the tunnel.
The Tiger spun. The glow of the exploding big rig cloaked it. Banzai gunned it.
Jasper cackled on the Tiger's radio. "Feeling that Bravo mojo?"
It was time to head home.
Home was many different things for these men.
The war had bound their fates.
First in the silent pines and starvation of Green Beret survival training atFortBenning.
Then the five years "in country," suffering and dealing suffering in a jade-and-clay land, so vastly strange and horrible it often seemed only the stitching of the red-black Tiger stripe patch of the 5th Special Forces Group they shared held them together.
Then the message, received inCambodiaover their stained and fading radio fromDa Nang, disavowing them and condemning them to fight their way back to a civilization they no longer understood.
Tiger Team Bravo was bound together as orphans of war.
They belonged somewhere, though. They had families.
Vaquero's home was a duplex inScottsdale. He pulled up outside in his Ford Bronco, bought with cash and rebuilt with his wife's help.
He took notice that the building's paint was already fading under the stiffArizonasun. Another chore to see to. He liked that.
He grabbed his duffel from the truck bed. A new tool set clicked inside—a Christmas present for Alexandra, his wife. It held other things he carried at all times:
The yin-yang symbol from his sensei that Alexandra had made into a keychain. The survival knife from Benning. The pair of taxidermy rattlesnake heads, dried into a fanged snarl, for luck.
Vaquero smiled at that luck as he took the stairs to his apartment two at a time. He was fortunate enough to have a simple life. Work and love were easy when unquestioned.
He never questioned, never suspected, what he found when he opened the door.
Jasper's home was not a building, but a land. He knew every copse of pine and ball cypress he drove by on that last stretch into Bayou Lafitte.
He thought of all the places that this one place contained: The flatboat docks with their twelve-foot poles where he could wile away a pair of days just drinking and trawling. The floating bars strung with Christmas lights and the hoot of zydecko music.
Today it would be a visit to his old man, though—to the stilt house cradled in the roots of the banyans he'd climbed as a kid. It was a special occasion.
That it was the holidays was incidental. Today was special because the Cartel job had won him enough money to buy his Pa his own shrimping boat. No more seasons having to put up with Buford Clem
ens as a sloppy, stuck-up skipper.
Jasper left the Cartel cash out in the Dodge. He took into the stilt house what he always had on him: Pair of dice. Deck of Tarot cards fromNew Orleans. Black Leatherman tool.
He had a six-pack of Abita in hand, too. He damn near dropped it at what he found inside the stilt house.
Banzai felt as at home atLong Beach,Californiaas he did anywhere else. He stepped off the bus and walked to where he could see the waves. The waves understood him and he, them.
Life and home to Banzai was like a tide: Surface and motion ever-changing, substance always the same.
Childhood had been one place after another—Sacramento, where his mother's grave was while his father was busy dying in the 442nd during World War II. ThenOmaha,Kansas City,Pittsburgh, as his grandparents fled the memories of internment inCalifornia. Then back toCalifornia, to here inLong Beach, as they returned to make peace with those memories.
He glanced around the edge of his mirror shades at the dormered houses packed close alongOcean Boulevard. His grandparents were in one—they were his constant.
Banzai carried little up the flagstone path, flanked by Zen rock gardens, to their house. No identification. No cash. Only his shades and a set of needlenose pliers, useful for hot-wiring, lockpicking, stabbing.
This, he thought, was a useful life: Constantly ready for motion, with love of family as core.
After seeing what their house held, Banzai wasted no time rushing to a payphone to call Colonel Professor.
Colonel Professor had madeComptoninto his home. It had taken work.
He piloted the Tiger down Imperial, one eye on green lights popping on and off along the dashboard. Each green light meant the security measures he'd installed every one-hundred yards around his house were still alive and unviolated.
It gave him calm. Knowing his girls were safe meant the world to him.
When he had returned fromVietnam, they had become his world. Their mother had abandoned them to him. She claimed it was out of disgust over what he had done overseas. He doubted that. Why abandon the girls if that was the case?
But things were what they were. Life went according to plan.
Colonel Professor did the best he could to make it go according to his plan.
He had to. Above all, for the sake of his girls—Marsha was on her way to nursing school. Angelica hated a lot about 9th grade, but gymnastics and flute were passions that saw her through the lack.
There was too much lack, too much loss in this life, for him to fail them.
He clicked a button on the Tiger's ceiling to open the iron gate of his driveway. Another button on the dash disabled the traps in the yard. A final button opened his garage.
Motion sensors along the rose-circled house's perimeter sent data by radio to the Tiger's homemade screen.
The pale-green read-out told him what he would find inside.
Colonel Professor gave himself fifteen seconds to hunch over the wheel, face split in grief, sobbing.
Then he cut himself off. He checked inside to confirm what his machines had told him. After he had seen, he picked up his phone and dialed to send out a code to his team: Threat Level Bravo.
Colonel Professor knew, even before they called back to confirm the meeting site, that his team had something else in common now.
All their families were gone.
Tiger Team Bravo assembled in the parking lot of Johnie's Coffee Shop. Even Jasper looked as grim as Colonel Professor always did.
"So cough it up, egghead." Jasper spat a brown string of dip. "Who stole our people?"
"I have some leads."
"Thought we were dead on paper, hombre," Vaquero said, shaking his head, boneless with sorrow. "Who would know enough about us to come after our families?"
"Our list of enemies is long," Professor said. "Private mercenaries operating on US soil tends to draw attention. In the two years since we escaped the war zone together, we've brought down crooked cops, Mexican gangs, industrial tycoons."
"Baretta knew," Banzai said. "He's about the only one who does. Maybe Cartel surveillance could pick up Vaquero's wife…"
"Her name's Alexandra, hombre. Use it."
"But my grandparents?" Banzai went on. "I've only visited them twice since we got back."
"Same with my pa," Jasper said. "He don't even have a phone or power."
"Like you say, Billy," Professor said, "Only Baretta knew enough about our families to put an enemy on them. Especially so quickly after the big rig went down. It makes sense that kidnapping our loved ones is retaliation for stealing the Cartel records."
"Well, there you go," Jasper said, nodding eagerly. "Plain as the Ace of Spades. Baretta."
Professor scowled up at the coffee shop's sign, its curving letters blinking against the brown-and-orange blaze of theLos Angelessky.
"It's when things make sense that you've got to worry," Professor said.
They found Baretta in his French Quarter loft, his high-tech ransacked into a glittering mess around him, holes through his head. The bullet had punched from one temple through the other. They left his eyes intact to bulge like the note stuffed in his mouth.
Jasper pulled it out, spread the wadded paper. He read it as Professor examined the bullet holes.
"It's in Mexican," Jasper said. He handed it to Vaquero. "You read it."
"I'm Brazilian." Vaquero frowned. "We speak Portuguese."
"Well pardonez-moi. Do you read Mexican or not, cowboy?"
Vaquero shrugged as he scanned the note. Banzai paid no heed, lost in the sepia of a photograph—one taken of his grandparents when they were in the Internment Camp inCalifornia.
"Outlaw thugs, it says," Vaquero read, "I guess that means us. Return what you have stolen and we will return your families."
Professor traced the angle of the bullet hole to the wall: A nest of splinters held a gold wad. He plucked it free, weighed it in his palm.
"Then it gives a time and place for the drop." Vaquero finished. They all looked to Professor. He displayed the slug on his hand.
"A solid gold bullet."
"Manuel Segura," Vaquero said.
"The one that got away, huh?" Jasper said, swatting Banzai on the shoulder. Banzai kept his mirrors fixed on the photo. Jasper turned from being ignored, spat on the floor. "Knew we should have smoked that greaser when we had the chance, ‘stead of just freeing all them chicas he had locked up in his plantation."
"At least we know where to find him," Vaquero said.
"That's what bothers me," Professor said.
All of them watched him. He led them out the rainbow screen of beads curtaining the loft's exit.
"How you figure?" Confusion crushed Jasper's expression. "Who else uses gold bullets for his executions? Got to beSegura."
"Think about the angle of the bullet," Professor said, voice a rasp below the hollers of the French Quarter crowd as he led Tiger Team Bravo into the swelter ofNew Orleans' streets. "Where have we seen that before?"
"Only in ‘Nam." Vaquero was quick to answer. "In one temple, out the other. That's how the ARVN used to do in the captured Cong."
"Well, other than that little hitch in our giddy-up," Jasper said, "Makes sense that it'd beSegura. He deals with the Cartel and has a grudge."
Professor answered only with the deepening of the worry lines in his dusky face.
Manuel Segura's antebellum mansion sat on a sprawl ofLouisianaland abandoned by the census to the teeming of the bayou. But even before its moss-draped ivory columns were raised, pirate maps had been drafted in Indian ink by smugglers shuttling slaves and tobacco into the Colonial territories.
Those maps were ash now. Their embers still glowed only on the tongues of the Cajuns, passed down through generations.
Government forgot those weedy canals, but to Jasper Babineaux they were vivid as the lines in his palm.
Tiger Team Bravo glided up their mystery in a flatboat, skin shadow-torn with black camo, night vision crisp as
jungle cats.
The channel ended in the green gum of undergrowth, fifty yards from a grove of spruce by theSeguraplantation's slave quarters. Vaquero took point, slipping them through roots gemmed with blue lichen, past wire snares laid bySegura's hired trappers, into the heart of the plantation.
They clipped through the chain link gate bordering the mown lawn.
They fanned out around the house, adrenaline prickling at the absence of guards.
They encircled the manor, its wedding-cake height lit sparingly on all floors, a ghostly orange watched by Banzai as he waited at the tree line to deliver covering fire at an instant's demand.
Doors were forced at the same moment. Vaquero led Professor up the back porch. Jasper stormed the kitchen's side door with sawn-off shotgun goring ahead.
No gunshots came to Banzai's pitch-perfect hearing. Only the grumble of bull frogs and the rippling of gar in the bayou. He dashed to join the others.
Their room-to-room took five minutes. Colonel Professor spent half of that watching out the windows. He didn't need to say what was written in his scowl:
This was a trap.
When the shapes of men with rifles drifted like smudges of cinders from the plantation's borders, Professor keyed his radio.
Jasper was already on it, calling in from the third-floor bedroom.
"FoundSegura. He's got and in-and-out hole through his head."
"Incoming Tangos," Professor whispered back. "Move to the upper floors to lay down fire."
"Eighty-six that idea, chief," Jasper answered. His boots thumping down the stairs were the only sound. "Head to the basement."
"We'll be blockaded in there," Professor answered.
Jasper bounced down the last step, slapped his commander on the shoulder, and flashed a crooked grin. "Just trust me."
They dashed for the cellar as machinegun fire shredded the silence. Glass popped. Wood clattered with a hundred dashes of lead.
Tiger Team Bravo fled into the cellar door with puffs of butchered furniture behind them.
Banzai slammed the cellar door. He shot the iron bolt home. A leap brought him onto the soil of the basement floor with his comrades.