by Bacon Thorn
Peñas smiled thinly, briefly, at Colorado. There was a shine of pride in his fierce black eyes. “Well done, redhead; I’m going to promote you to chief shit sniffer.”
Colorado accepted the mild insult as it was intended, a compliment with typical Peñas irony, and then the wrinkles around his chief’s eyes suddenly slipped back into their familiar grooves of concentration. “From the size of those trucks, those mothers can hold up to sixty dogs or more.”
“Easily, jefe . . .” Suddenly, Colorado’s expression changed. He looked astonished. “I’ll be Goddamned,” he said quietly. “I think somebody just shot me.”
There was a crimped whiteness around Colorado’s mouth. He tried to grin, and for a moment he stared incredulously at Navarre. “This is ludicrous, Thomas, so ludicrous,” he murmured, and then collapsed. As he fell, Navarre, shocked and speechless, caught him, and then saw the red stain spreading like a bright red flower on the back of the white blouse under the left shoulder.
The killing shot could have come from anywhere, and who would have heard it above the olés of the crowd roaring from the stadium in a deafening, cadenced booming of fifty thousand voices in the sounding basin of the plaza?
-
* * *
-
Pappe Nuños could not at first believe his eyes when he saw Thomas Navarre standing next to Lazlo Peñas unharmed and bewildered. In the same glance he took in the fallen red-haired Mexican who had taken the bullet meant for the American. The sight of Navarre dressed jauntily in the bolero jacket and flat, wide-brimmed hat was the shock that almost took his breath away. But here he was, the half Mexican with the charmed life who had disappeared in the Chihuahuan desert without a trace and survived to be present at the showdown after he should have died a dozen times. Nuños had learned several hours earlier of the failure of the abduction of the tangerine woman and he’d been jolted when he heard from a police contact how Flavio Ruiz had been killed. And Navarre had been part of the rescue party. How could anybody be that fortunate? That lucky? And hadn’t Navarre been favored by luck earlier when his two shots tore holes in the hard plastic door of the helicopter and wounded Nuños? And before then he had proved how charmed his life was by not only escaping the killers and their dogs, but ending their lives. As to the mysterious explosion that incinerated the van and its occupants, it defied explanation.
Crouching in the straw-strewn, packed earth behind a tall, thick timber upright in one of the empty bull-holding pens inside the corral, Nuños was hidden from view but had a wide sweep of vision. It included the hay trucks and a few other parked autos.
He wondered what enterprising soul had won the contract for delivering feed to the animals.
It was amusing, Nuños thought, that his mind should dwell momentarily on this insignificant detail in the scene before him. Of course, it was a delaying strategy to adjust himself to the cruel disappointment of Thomas Navarre being alive without a mark on him.
Nuños licked his lips, and then spat on the ground. Never mind, he told himself, with a renewed surge of confidence; there was still plenty of time for him to kill Thomas Navarre. It would be more satisfying, he decided, if he could strangle the man with his bare hands.
He wiped that thought from his mind and concentrated on the landing of the Black Hawk in the football stadium across the street, where it would drop off a pack of attack dogs. They were a reserve unit to place in action in case the main body was captured.
As if his anticipation had been a signal, Nuños heard excited voices. They came from the police cell phone he had taken from Leon Abruzza before pushing him over the balcony rail to his death. He looked up and saw the Black Hawk descending.
Both Navarre and Peñas were ducking behind one of the trucks when the radio voice of Emil Brazos shouted a loud warning that could be heard by anybody standing within five feet.
“Jefe,” he yelled, “the Black Hawk’s just offloaded a dozen or so dogs in the football field across the street. Gil’s a fucking traitor, and I’m coming down to take him out, with Max on my tail. Confirm! Please confirm!”
Navarre could not miss the cold fury in Peñas’s response to Brazos: “Kill the bastards! No holds barred. Stop them all, men and dogs!”
Emil and Max Garcia parted company a thousand feet up, both plunging down in their sleek, highly maneuverable MD 600Ns, but for a moment neither the ground observers nor Emil and Max could make out the Black Hawk clearly. It was gaining altitude quickly, its powerful blades whipping the hot air and churning dust, bits of dry grass, sand, and pebbles into spiraling clouds above the football field and obscuring the copter from view for a few seconds. Then Emil aimed his copter in a vertical dive that came to a halt about one hundred feet directly above the broad, flat top of the Black Hawk. Brazos was thoroughly familiar with the superior flight features of the small helicopter he commanded, which he knew had a reputation for extremely quiet performance from its rotors and the unusual capacity to hover suspended almost motionless over a suspect in near silence, never giving away its presence until it was safe.
Navarre and Peñas had fixed their binoculars on Emil’s earthward descent and watched breathlessly as he seemed to stop his machine in midair directly above the Black Hawk, as if he had slammed on the brakes.
Emil knew the Black Hawk’s crew expected attack from the smaller copters, and it was clawing to gain altitude and position to blast the MD 600Ns with its blazing .50s.
The success of his attack plan depended on his friend Max Garcia, who routinely performed suicidal maneuvers in the air and survived dangerous flying that daunted crack pilots who thought they were hot.
At the exact moment Brazos hovered in position, Max Garcia came zooming up from his strafing run over the field below, where he had fired at the scattered dogs heading for an exit. He thought he’d killed most of them, for he glimpsed still bodies in the grass. Quickly, he notified Peñas that a few of the dogs had escaped as he nosed his aircraft into the sky. There, in a wild, hair-raising maneuver, he flew by the windshield of the Black Hawk so close the pilots reared back in their seats, fearing a collision. After Max skimmed by them, his rotors buzzing no more than a whisper away from the curved glass, the stunned pilots recovered enough to scream at the men stationed at the gun ports to fire.
Brazos smiled at Max’s daring performance as he leaned heavily against the body straps that held him safely in place in the open door of his aircraft. He knew that his position above the Black Hawk was its most vulnerable. To escape destruction it must fly off at once or suffer the consequences. He was safe from the blazing .50s because he occupied the blind spot on the attack aircraft. Stationed in opposite portholes in the fuselage the guns could fire at almost any position, except the vertical—neither directly up nor down! This was Brazos’s advantage. He signaled his copilot to hold the copter steady as he aimed his .30-caliber machine gun. It was capable of firing shells that could pierce metal a quarter of an inch thick. And he was certain the whispering sounds of his own swishing blades above him were drowned in the clatter of the Black Hawk’s whirling rotors.
As Max swept by to the rear of Brazos’s position in another pass, drawing shuddering gunfire belatedly, Brazos leaned outward as far as he could stretch in his straps and fired point blank at the hub of the Black Hawk’s rotors.
As Navarre and Peñas watched in the distance, Brazos pumped round after round without letting up into the long, balanced blades of the Black Hawk. They saw through their binoculars dangerous slivers and chunks of the rotors tear free. If any jagged piece of metal struck Brazos, it could cut him in half.
Then the heavy body of the helicopter lurched and slipped.
Not to be left out of the final action, Max Garcia told his copilot to suspend their sleek MD 600N two hundred feet above the sinking hulk. From the open door he poured unrelenting fire into the Black Hawk’s front windshield, blowing the glass into the pilots’ faces. Like his copilot, Major Gil died instantly in his seat.
I
ncendiaries Max aimed at the wing tanks ignited the high-octane gas, and the explosion ripped through the fuselage of the Black Hawk like a high-temperature torch, melting, deforming, and reducing to ashes anything within its path. The flaming skeleton crashed to the ground in a great, expiring sigh, where it glowed and flickered fiercely.
Navarre could imagine the screams of men unable to escape the inferno and he didn’t doubt for a moment that Peñas would be touched by their terrible fate.
During the attack on the Black Hawk, twenty or so men had streamed from the bullring into the corral area with the grim intention of releasing the dogs in the hay trucks.
But Peñas had anticipated the move and called for reinforcements. The armed agents arrived about the same time as the conspirators and either wounded or shot them dead before they could mount a defense or free even one of the dogs.
When Nuños witnessed the destruction of the Black Hawk, he was swept with a wave of dismay that formed a knot in his throat. It engulfed him like a fever. He swallowed repeatedly, gulping his anger and disappointment and rage. He sighed then, a heavy, exhaling sound of air rushing from his lungs. Shit! It was over! Everything was gone! Finished! Bitterness flooded his mouth, and his saliva tasted sharp. He spat again and heard the sudden roar from the arena. For a moment, instead of standing in the manure-smelling deboxing area of the corrals at the Plaza de Toros, Nuños was the dark, angry thirteen-year-old who had stood ashamed beside his mother in a crowd waiting for scraps of the bull meat the carniceros gave to the poor. But even that simple charity was converted to profit, because the butchers slyly sold most of the public beef to a concessionaire who gouged the poor for the few pesos they could scrape together. Nuños’s mother seldom left the slaughterhouse with anything more substantial than a bone with a few shreds of meat clinging to it.
He was always hungry; his stomach was always empty and it hurt, and he vowed before he turned fourteen, on the day his mother died of malnourishment, fatigue, and hopelessness, that he would pay them all back for what they had done to her. An early widow, she had tried to support her son and two daughters by selling baskets. “Buy my baskets! I make them in my own manner with songs and fragments of my heart woven into them.”
Even today, thirty years later, the memory of his pale mother with her hands bleeding from basket weaving gave Nuños the black, angry, sinking feeling. The thought of her—only a moment of nostalgia—was like a whiplash raising hate again like a welt on his soul. He had never regretted, even now in his biggest moment of defeat, the path he had taken. He had learned not to trust anybody and to take advantage of every situation which could be manipulated for money.
Quickly, Nuños looked at his surroundings and almost immediately saw an unusual escape route. He was standing on a crate behind a wooden stanchion that rose vertically next to a sturdy, thick stone wall. The extra height he achieved by standing on the box allowed him to peer around the wooden stanchion and into the extended corral area. It was a half-acre network of sturdy wooden fences separating feedlots, box enclosures for the bulls, individual corrals for horses and mules. The bull pens opened into stalls, where the fighting bulls were lured before being turned loose through a gate and isolated in one of the small, dark, manure-caked chiqueros, where each bull spent his last hours before trotting into the main dark toril tunnel. Once a bull left his stall, he entered the tunnel. This passage was a straight corridor that ran under a section of the bleachers into the plaza arena through the red door, the gate of fright. Each bull remained a prisoner in the tunnel for a few minutes before the red door was yanked up, flooding a portion of the tunnel with light. There was another, parallel tunnel two hundred or so feet away that opened into the arena, and it was the passage for horses.
With the fifth bull in the arena playing out the sincere drama of death like the four before him, only one remained for the last faena. It would be easy for Nuños to make his way through the empty stalls after throwing his grenades over the wall to kill Navarre—and if he was lucky, Nuños thought, to kill Peñas as well—and then to step into the main toril tunnel. It would be safe for him to secrete himself in the tunnel because he was certain the last bull had already been released from his chiquero and was waiting in the dark for the red door to open. Nuños, creeping into the tunnel behind the bull, would prove how daring and bold he was. Nobody would ever think of looking for him in the tunnel. As for his own men, the captured and dead dog handlers in the corral area and the sniper assassins positioned among the spectators in the arena, well . . . they would have to manage for themselves.
It had been a good plan, and the bitter gall rose again in his throat, and he forced it down. To have come so close, then have it fall apart. After the last toro was released onto the sand, when the moment of the matador’s dance of death was to begin, with his step between the wicked horns, with his sword ready for the killing thrust, the dogs would have appeared. Who would pay attention to them? With their eyes riveted on the final, thrilling moments of the faena, the spectators would not be diverted by a few dogs disguised as K-9 police. Each one would slip out from under the stands and, by a different route, bound up through the seated crowds and converge on the president’s box, where Felipe Calderón and his body guards were located.
The element of surprise was the most ingenious part of the idea. Attack dogs wearing K-9 vests would not seem suspicious to the fans. They were on hand to protect the president. No alarm would be spread until it was too late. The killing would begin when agents surrounding the president were surprised by the dogs that had pierced their defenses. Then panic in the crowd would precipitate a rush for the exits. In the hysteria and confusion, snipers would shoot at the president and at least one or two would hit their mark.
But that advantage was gone! Navarre was responsible for that. Against all odds, he had reached Peñas, and the assassination had been aborted. The killing of Calderón in a spectacular and bloody demonstration of the power of the Ring of Gold had been prevented.
It was all over. Just as Major Gil was all over—the man who miserably failed the most important mission in his life. Nuños swore he would still kill Navarre and go on to other things. Then he realized with a sudden flash of inspiration that everything was not lost. In his moment of self-pity he had blanked out his power of control over the dogs who had escaped from the football fields. There was a second chance. Success could rise out of defeat. The odds had shifted. They favored him now that the federal police must be convinced they had prevented the assassination. Everything pointed to that conclusion. The Black Hawk had been destroyed; all of the dogs in the trucks had been immobilized or killed. The ground force, the dog handlers, and the gunmen had been killed or were in custody. Only he, Nuños, remained. He was certain that neither Peñas nor Navarre had the faintest suspicion that the author of the assassination plan was no more than three hundred feet away from them. That would not enter their minds. A ruling member of the Ring of Gold was too lofty and clever to actually participate in a murder that might bring him down.
Of the four or five escaped dogs, he was certain the black hound was one of them. It was the killer he had personally named Satan. He was the most dangerous. His brother, fearsome but not as bright, had disappeared in the desert. Yes, Satan was a huge, swift, savage, voiceless animal who had tracked and killed a dozen wily canines especially trained to evade pursuit and choose pathways that registered almost no footprints. They’d been chosen for their ability to think and reason cleverly. Yet each one had become a victim of Satan, whose superb nose always let him to his quarry. Satan had to be alive. In his brain, as in the others, was stored the body odor of Felipe Calderón. Nuños had only to blow two sharp notes on the small silver dog whistle hanging from a chain around his neck, and the killers who had run from the football field would come. He was certain they were hidden in the corrals, waiting tensely in anticipation of his signal.
Nuños blew his whistle, soundless to human ears, but clear as a bell to canines. He heard t
hem coming, their feet padding swiftly on the littered ground. They stopped and stood like soldiers in front of him, waiting for orders. Brusquely, he sent them on their fatal errands, and then took a hasty inventory of his costume and confirmed in his mind that with the gray wig and re-formed mustache he was unrecognizable except on close inspection. He decided quickly he would profit by the added confusion of hurling the two hand grenades pinned to his belt beneath the faded rebozo he wore. Landing among the agents and their prisoners, the explosives would wipe out Navarre and anybody within a range of twenty feet from him.
The diversion would give him the time to move into a better position, where he could make his escape.
Dismounting hastily from his wooden box, Nuños fumbled with the safety pins that connected the grenades to his belt.
Shit! They were stuck. With a vicious yank, he pulled them free, hearing the safety pins pop. He was already into a full stride, heading toward the gate in the empty bull pen, where he lobbed the grenades with his left hand. They flew over his right shoulder in a high arc above the stone wall.
-
Chapter XXI
-
The agents Peñas had called into the corrals to supplement the men already in place were feeling good about themselves. All but a few of the dogs had been stopped. Missing were the half dozen who had outrun the guns of Max Garcia in the field.
Yes, the president was safe. Peñas’s men could allow themselves some relief from the high tension that had kept them on edge for two days. To Navarre the men in custody were certainly not fanatic killers. They were drab, doleful, Chaplinesque figures filmed with hay dust, bleeding from splinters, scratches, and wounds. They seemed unworthy of the brief fight they had mounted to take the trucks. At least ten others were lying in the dust where they had fallen with fatal wounds. Soon they would be carted away in ambulances.