I’d only gone a few yards when the filament on the spotlights flared. I dropped to one knee and turned toward the building. Two men with AKs stood a few yards from the corner, looking up in my direction. They seemed to be looking right at me, but must have missed me in the shadows and the brush. As soon as they turned around to go, I rose and told them where I was with three bursts, back and forth across the head, neck, and shoulders. Both men crumpled to the ground.
“There’s another troop truck coming down the main entrance,” warned Junior.
I ran up the hill, intending to spray the back of the truck as it passed. But I was a little too late; the vehicle started past as I began trotting up the hill. It was a canvas-backed troop truck, a military-type vehicle though it had no markings.
I raised my submachine gun and began running toward the truck, intending to get as close as possible before firing. When I was less than ten yards away, I realized that the back of the vehicle was empty. Instead of firing, I kept running, catching up to it as it made the last turn toward the barn. Hopping up and over the rear tailgate, I slid on the metal floor, crashing into a pair of large metal ammo boxes at the side of the truck as the driver hit the brakes.
Nowadays, everything is plastic or some fancy high-tech alloy that will last for a billion years, weighs nothing, and in a pinch can make dinner for you. But for my money, there’s nothing like an old-fashioned painted steel ammo box, the thirty- or fifty-caliber variety that served our forebears from World War II forward. Basic, rugged, and dependable, it’s a design that can’t be improved upon.
Especially when it holds grenades.
The truck pulled in behind the other two. The driver and his companion got out, joining the men who were mustered in a semicircle around the front of the building.
“Shotgun, I’m in the truck that just pulled up,” I told him. “I’m coming for you.”
“Better not. All sorts of people over by the barn.”
“I’ll take care of them. Anybody between you and me?”
“Just one guy in the field that I can tell. I can take him if you get the people by the barn. I have to move to my right.”
“All right. That’s the plan. Stand by.”
The grenades were old, with a rounded belly and a lever at the side. They looked like Chinese Type 541s, an old but steady design.
I stuffed a couple in my pockets, then took a pair and ran to the back of the truck. Slinging my MP5 over my shoulder, I held both grenades firmly, one in each hand, then hooked out their respective pins with my forefingers.
It would have been cooler to use my teeth, I know.
“Fire in the hole!” I yelled to Shotgun, tossing a pair at the cluster of soldiers at the front of the truck. Then I turned and bounded across the field in two steps, diving headfirst to the ground to avoid the shock of the explosion.
The grenades exploded in a loud double bang. The pops were loud, but a little hollow, and I realized instantly they were practice grenades, “bangers” designed to scare people into paying attention, but without a fatal payload.
I gave myself another kick in the rump for not inspecting them more closely as the air filled with lead.
Shotgun, meanwhile, had risen a half second after the grenades went off and shot the man in front of him. He quickly ducked back down as the fusillade continued, the gunners happily aiming in his direction as well as mine.
“We got them right where we want them, Dick,” he said over the radio. “L-shaped assault.”
He was calling for a standard small unit maneuver, where an enemy is engaged on two fronts; looked at from above, it appears as if the attacking forces form an L, with the enemy locked in the middle between them.
I swung back around, moving parallel to the road. Trotting some twenty yards, I hunkered as low as possible, held my breath, and sprinted back across. Concentrating solely on Shotgun, the thugs didn’t see me as I crawled into position to ambush them. I waited until four or five of them paused to reload. Then I rose and got off a mag’s worth of bullets before dropping again to reload.
One of the lights above the barn in the front had been shot out, but there was more than enough light to see the bodies scattered on the ground. A few were moving around, but we’d clearly taken down between two-thirds and three-quarters of the group.
I don’t care who you are: seeing that many of your friends and comrades cut down puts a crimp in your confidence. The boys who were left alive were just looking for a way to get the hell out of there. The shots they’d been pouring into the field near Shotgun hadn’t been particularly accurate; they were aiming with their fear, not their eyes.
As a lull set in, Shotgun worked his way forward on his elbows, dragging his body forward in the field and waiting for a clear shot.
Looking for a target myself, I fantasized about grabbing one or two of these bozos and presenting them to the secretary of State. In fact, I might not even deliver him to her—better to deposit him in the middle of the Senate rotunda, just in time for a tasty committee hearing on border issues or terrorism.
There’s nothing like a little overconfidence to set you up for a good swift kick in the rear, which was promptly administered in the form of a large caliber machine gun. The gun began chewing up the ground behind me a second before I could yell at them to surrender.
The shots came from a Browning M2 fifty-caliber, an old but remarkably effective weapon that was being fired across the roof of a pickup truck that had come down the road behind me.
The pickup bounced up and down, making the machine gun particularly difficult to aim—a good thing as far as I was concerned. I scrambled back toward the truck, temporarily routed.
About five yards from the rear, I tripped and fell. My MP5 clattered away in the dirt. Some of the men by the barn, courage rallied by the arrival of reinforcements, rose and began firing in earnest. The pickup truck pulled sideways across the road. The man with the machine gun swung it around. The weapon made an awful sound as it fired, clunking and vibrating while its bullets sprayed in a wide and unfocused arc.
The gunner paused, undoubtedly to rearrange his gun. I scrambled forward, grabbed the MP5, and fired in his direction.
Actually, that’s what I wanted to do. I definitely pressed the trigger, but nothing came out. I’d apparently shot myself empty and not realized it in the heat of the battle.
Now it was a race—which one of us would get his gun loaded and set first?
As I fumbled for a fresh magazine, a black shadow appeared behind the truck. It was a car, but it looked like a dive bomber come to earth, cruising toward its target. A second later it hit the truck broadside, tossing the machine gunner and his assistant out as the vehicle spun wildly to the side.
I pushed the magazine home. Pumping bullets into the two men who’d been tossed from the back of the pickup, I started running toward the car. The door to the pickup opened; I put a couple of bursts into it, and the man behind it slumped down to the ground.
The driver already lay lifeless against the steering wheel.
A few yards away, Veronica stumbled out of the rental, which she had just used to upend the machine gunner by crashing into the pickup. The air bags had deployed; her face had been burned from the bag as it went off, and her right knee was bruised, but otherwise she seemed intact.
Dazed, but intact.
“Dick?” she said. “Dick?”
“It’s all right. I’m right here,” I told her.
“Did I get them?”
“You got them. Good work,” I said. I grabbed hold of her and pulled her to the ground behind the car.
“Dick?”
“How many fingers?” I asked, holding up my hand.
“Two?”
“Close enough. Stay here until I come back for you. It won’t be long.”
By the time I got back to the big two-and-a-half-ton trucks, Shotgun had come up through the field and taken out the rest of the tangos. He stood in front of the barn, gun dangling at
his side, surveying his handiwork.
He looked a little sad. Depressed even.
“I think we got them all,” he muttered. “But my bag of potato chips got crushed.”
“I’ll buy you a case as soon as we reach the States,” I told him.
VIII
We had killed a lot of people—twenty-six to be exact. But two men had apparently managed to escape over the hills in the direction of the condo development; Junior could see them clearly on the Bird’s feed. A third figure was on the road heading away from the house. He too had probably been with the tangos, maybe in the house, and was now making a getaway.
There wasn’t a lot to be done about any of them. Calling the Mexicans would have been a waste of time. And while we were close to the border, no U.S. agency was going to cross it on my say-so.
The two men heading toward the development were my main concern. I estimated it would take the two men a good half hour to reach the development; at that point we might have another ten minutes to get the hell out of there before cartel members or whoever was helping these bastards sent someone to find out what had happened.
“Twenty minutes,” I told Shotgun. “We have twenty minutes to look for anything useful. Don’t waste your time figuring out what it is—just pile it in the back of the truck.”
“Anything?”
“Anything nonedible.”
“Man, you are in a bad mood.”
Veronica was still a little woozy from the crash. I helped her into the cab of the third truck, the one I had found the grenades in.
“You’re a gentleman,” she said. “You know you’re a lot nicer than you let on at first.”
“Don’t let it get around,” I told her, going over to check on Shotgun.
All of our guys take a special lock-picking course taught by a former Christian In Action agent in New Orleans. Generally, the first or second lock they learn to pick is a Yale lock similar to the ones that were securing the building—not because they’re particularly easy to pick (they’re not hard), but because they’re ubiquitous. I would say that a good three-quarters of the padlocks I’ve encountered in my travels have been made by Yale.
Nice lock. But when you get so much practice picking it …
Shotgun has been through the course three times—they serve a wicked po’boy in the bar next to the building where class is held. I would venture to say he could have picked it in five seconds flat if he wanted.
Instead, he got it open in about two, counting the time it took him to retrieve his gun from his holster.
Blammm. Blammm.
“They’re making these better and better,” he said, pulling the broken lock away. “Took me two shots.”
“It helps if you hit the metal.”
We rolled the door to the side and found the light switch on the wall to the left.
The interior of the building was set up like a cheap movie studio or soundstage, with canvas and sheetrock walls mounted on two-by-four frames and arranged to form the outlines of a building.
“Practicing a D.A.,” said Shotgun. “What were they going for?”
(A D.A. is a “direct action,” a term used for a strike against a house or some other small target. It’s slightly more generic than, say, “snatch and grab,” which would be an operation to, duh, retrieve a particular individual. A snatch is a D.A.; a D.A. is not necessarily a snatch. And then you have operations like the bin Laden raid, which are BFWs for the good guys—big fucking wins!—and damn good work too, I might add.)
I looked at the layout. It was pretty generic—it could have been a large house, it could have been a small office building. It could have been an office suite. Whatever the target, they had been quite serious about what they were doing—there were bullet holes and scorch marks on the walls.
There were some weapons and uniforms hanging on a rack at the back. Besides a range of Mexican army trousers and shirts, there were several uniforms of Arizona and New Mexico state troopers. There were even Smokey the Bear-style trooper hats on a rack next to them.
“Hey, who wears a blue uniform?” asked Shotgun, pulling out a jacket from a nearby box.
“About half the police agencies in the hemisphere,” I told him.
There were a dozen jackets, and a similar number of shirts and pants in the boxes next to it. Another box held an assortment of hats and caps. The guys who were working here had the raw material to disguise themselves as just about any police agency they wanted.
They had a decent amount of arms, too, stacked in a row of lockers against the wall behind the area that was used for mock attacks. The men who’d been in the trucks outside had all had AK47s. There were a few more inside, but they were in the minority. There were a handful of FX-05 Xiuhcoatls recently introduced to the Mexican army. There were M16s similar to those we’d encountered earlier. More plentiful than either were AR15s—updated civilian versions of the M16 often used by police departments—and a surprisingly large stock of what were either Strum Ruger MP9 submachine guns or very good knockoffs.
Very compact, the MP9 can be thought of as an improved Uzi. With a thirty-two-bullet magazine, it fires 9mm bullets from a closed bolt. It has a telescoping, paratrooper-type stock and is very small, adding to its utility.
There were other weapons as well, a veritable smorgasbord that included shotguns and grenade launchers.
So were these guys Hezbollah?
They were definitely Arab, but there was no way to know their actual affiliation. They hadn’t posted any large flags or pictures of their leaders on the wall—how very inconsiderate of them.
We ran upstairs but the loft was empty.23
“Put one more load of guns in the truck, then grab some pictures on your cell phone,” I told Shotgun. “Get pictures of all the people outside. I’m going up to the house.”
“All of them?”
“As many as you can. Get moving. We have maybe ten minutes to finish up.”
* * *
The main house was set up as a dormitory, with a great room and a large, country-style kitchen downstairs, then a number of bedrooms behind them and upstairs. Bunks were stacked tightly in the rooms, four units high; you had to squeeze in to fit, and God help you if you sneezed in the middle of the night.
Or I should say, Allah help you.
There were plenty of signs that the majority if not all of the men who’d been staying here were Muslim, starting with the Korans that we found in nearly every bunk.
Most of the Korans were stamped on the inside cover with an insignia showing where they had come from. The marks had a green gun raised by a fist—Hezbollah’s flag.
Pay dirt.
There were videotapes as well. I grabbed a pillowcase and threw in a bunch, then continued searching through the house. The front room upstairs had been set up as an office; there were two computers and a bunch of CDs. I threw the CDs into my makeshift bag and started ransacking the drawers. I found stacks of forms—driver license applications, various substitute IDs. There was a folder with Social Security numbers and related information. There were also credit cards.
When the bag was stuffed, I ran downstairs. Shotgun had just pulled up with the truck.
“I got some grenade launchers,” he said, hopping out. “Couldn’t resist the heavy artillery.”
“Two computers upstairs,” I told him. “Grab the CPUs.”
I glanced at my watch. Twenty minutes had passed since we’d begun searching the building.
Veronica was sitting in the cab, still a little winded. She nodded when I asked if she was OK, but her eyes were unfocused.
A shot of Dr. Bombay would have straightened her right out, but there was none nearby.
“Junior, what’s going on?” I asked over the radio.
“The two guys are just about at the condo development.”
“What about the other guy?”
“Lost him. I couldn’t cover both.”
“All right. Follow the other two and see where th
ey go. We’ll hit that tomorrow. I want to get some of this stuff back. Yell at me if they rally their troops.”
“You got it.”
I met Shotgun in the front room. He had both computers in his arms—and a twelve-pack of Coors on top of them.
“Found these in the fridge,” he said cheerfully. “I thought Muslims weren’t supposed to drink.”
“They’re not supposed to blow people up either. Doesn’t seem to stop them.”
Upstairs, I pulled open a file cabinet and saw a bunch of papers. The writing was all in Arabic. I piled them on the desk.
“How we doing on time?” called Shotgun, trotting up the stairs.
“We’re leaving. I need something to put all these papers in. Look around for a box or something.”
“Will a briefcase do?” he yelled.
“Great.”
“Whole bunch of them in this closet,” he said from the other room. He came in with two. When he opened it, we saw there was a laptop inside.
“Bonus!” said Shotgun. He reached for it. “Hey, you think we can get the Internet?”
“There’s no time to screw around. Grab whatever you can and let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Roger that. Man, I’m hungry.”
I stuffed the papers in the cases, piled more on top, then ran down the stairs. Shotgun followed, four more briefcases in his arms.
We threw everything in the back, then ran up to the cab.
“Anybody coming for us?” I asked Junior over the radio.
“Not that I see.”
“Good. Where are they?”
“They ran into the development. But they didn’t go into any of the units, or the community center. They went into the sewer.”
“The sewer?”
“Yeah. Down a manhole.”
“Can you download the image to my sat phone?”
“Uh, stand by.”
I fiddled with the phone. Unlike in the cellular world, there are no cool Apple iSatPhones—yet. The interface on my phone was clunky, and the screen was fairly small. The keyboard on the front—the phone looks a bit like a RIM BlackBerry on steroids—was convenient, but not particularly accommodating for thick fingers like mine.
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