by Don Mann
A second later Akil’s voice came over the radio. “Alpha One. Alpha One, it’s Delta Four. The front gate is unmanned.”
“What happened to the guard we saw when we entered?”
“Gone, man. Vanished.”
Even more suspicious.
“Wait there, Delta Four. We’re pulling out.”
“Copy.”
He and Suárez quickly scanned the second floor for personal items but didn’t find much—some receipts in the desk drawer in one of the other bedrooms, a book in Spanish about Muhammad Ali, a closet full of men’s clothes. Even the phones were gone.
“Strange,” Suárez whispered.
“Very.”
Nothing much, either, on the ground floor. Suárez was standing on a stool looking in kitchen cabinets when Crocker said, “Let’s go.”
Out the side door, he saw Davis and Mancini waiting by the trucks. Without warning, shots came from the direction of the side wall and a burst of blood rose from Davis’s left collarbone. Crocker watched him spin, grab hold of the hood of the Ford pickup, and slide to the ground. Seconds later explosions rocked the front and back walls.
His ears filled with the high-pitched sounds of dogs wailing, Crocker backed inside the doorway and knelt into a crouch. Shielding his eyes from the smoke and flying debris with his left hand and turning left, he saw armed men dressed in dark camouflage with black armored vests and black masks stream through a smoking gap in the back wall. He figured they were probably charging through the front gate, too.
“Move to the main house!” he shouted into the radio. “Manny, you need help with Davis?”
“I’ve got him.”
Nieves: “We’re fucked!”
Akil: “Not happening.”
Crocker: “Keep quiet and grab as much ammo as you can from the trucks. Then rendezvous in the main house!”
Lisa Clark dreamt that she was sitting in front of a pasticceria on an old cobblestone Italian street, admiring the yellow tulips in the little park across the street. Her head was numb and soft like a pillow and her body filled with a cottony, fuzzy warmth.
Noticing that some of the tulips hadn’t been colored in yet, she filled them in with her mind, and as she did, a wave of euphoria passed through her body. The scene was perfect now. And she had created it herself according to the plan of the numbered schemata.
All the pain and anguish of the past had retreated far away.
She floated through the air like a feather. Then the air stopped moving and settled around her. Fingers touched her bare arm.
She heard someone say, “This way, Señora,” as though he was singing a song.
Her feet touched the ground. Gravel tickled her feet through the leather sandals. The air was fragrant with the smells of grass and flowers.
Although she couldn’t see, everything felt as though it fit together in a perfect God-like order.
She heard a voice whisper to her right, “Mom.”
She recognized the voice of her daughter, Olivia, which thrilled her. “Olivia.”
“Mom, I’m blindfolded. Are you there?”
“Yes, darling.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. Yes, absolutely.”
“Mom…Mom, I love you.”
“I love you, too,” Lisa responded. “Is something wrong?”
“Are you serious, Mom? Did they give you something?”
“Maybe…It’s not important.”
“Do you understand what’s going on? Do you know where they’re taking us?”
The urgency in her daughter’s voice was something that she didn’t understand and that almost offended her. She had opened her mouth to say something, when a man grunted “Quiet!” and squeezed her arm tightly until it hurt.
Crocker knelt over Davis on the tile kitchen floor and applied pressure to the wound with his left while reaching for a blowout patch in his emergency medical kit with his right. Rounds flew over his head and slammed into the wall and refrigerator behind him. There was glass strewn everywhere, spent shells and smoke. Suárez knelt behind a window to his right picking off the enemy, who had taken cover behind trees, chairs, bushes, and several modern sculptures in the yard.
“Who are they?” Suárez shouted as dogs continued to wail and yelp from somewhere in the backyard.
“Zetas, cops, fucking aliens. Just take ’em down!”
“With pleasure!”
Urgent voices screamed over the radio. “Boss, taking fire out front!”
“Two tangos down near the gate!”
“We need refo! The mofos keep coming!”
Before he could answer, he had to stem the flow of blood so Davis didn’t bleed out.
He spoke to Davis in a low voice throughout the whole procedure. “Just a nick. Routine. I’ll have you patched up in a second, then we’ll get you out of here.”
The round had entered right below Davis’s left clavicle and exited his back near the spine. With the bleeding in the front staunched, Crocker lifted him enough to feel through the blood on his back.
There seemed to be no structural damage, which was a huge relief.
“Missed your spine,” Crocker said as he applied a second blowout patch to the gaping wound in back. “You’re a lucky man.”
“Thank God…” Davis’s eyes had rolled back in their sockets. His skin had turned pale and was covered with sweat.
It wasn’t a full kit, so Crocker used what he could find—combat gauze, QuikClot, tape. Holding Davis’s head up, he said, “Stay with me.”
Davis swallowed and managed a tight smile. “I’m trying, boss.”
Crocker stood by the side of the window, leveled his HK416, and squeezed off a three-round burst that hit some guy in a black helmet crouched behind one of the concrete planters. He heard Akil’s voice over the radio by his foot: “Nieves is down. Fuck. He needs help!”
Crocker picked it up and asked, “Where?”
“The throat!”
“Keep his airway clear and open as best you can. I’ll be there in a second. What’s your location?”
“Second-floor balcony.”
He ran in a crouch to the stairway and had dived behind the hallway wall when on his right periphery he saw a rocket rip through one of the tall windows. He covered his head as it crashed into the wall and exploded. Plaster fell; hot metal hissed through the air. But Crocker’s main concern was the cell phone in his front pocket, which was their connection to the FBI safe house.
He checked it. It seemed fine. With the HK416 clutched in his right and the med kit on his back, he scurried on his hands and knees through the swirling smoke until he found Mancini pressed near a front window, aiming a Vietnam-era M-79 grenade launcher that looked like an old-fashioned blunderbuss.
“Manny…”
Mancini was completely focused on the target through the leaf-type sight. He squeezed off a 40x46mm round at an M706 armored car parked in the driveway.
The round slammed into .25-inch metal armor and exploded. Seconds later, the twin .30 cals in the turret spun their way and opened fire, tearing into the concrete around the front window.
“Fuck!” Manny shouted, ducking. Pieces of plaster and dust flew everywhere.
Crocker fished a chunk of plaster out of his right eye. “You see what you started?”
“How’s Davis?”
“Not good.”
Manny broke the pirate gun open and slammed in another 40mm round as Crocker jumped to the other side of the window and took aim at a black Polícia Federal truck with six or seven men in back that sped into the yard.
“We got to get him to a hospital.”
Hot 5.56x45mm shells cascaded onto the floor around him. Sweat mixed with the grit on his bare chest. The armored car continued to fire, ripping away the wooden border around the window and sending pieces of glass cascading over Crocker’s head and shoulders.
“Do something, Manny. That 706 is pissing me off,” Crocker shouted.
“Why didn
’t you tell me that before?” Manny fired a beehive round that exploded near the back of the truck and released dozens of 24g metal petals that ripped into some of the men in black.
“That the best you can do?” Crocker asked.
“Kiss my ass!”
Mancini reloaded with an explosive round that hit the gas tank and caused the driver to lose control and crash into the armored car.
“Better!” Crocker shouted as he took aim at several armed men escaping in the pickup. Flames engulfed both vehicles.
“I love this fucking pirate gun,” Mancini shouted, setting down the M-79 and picking up an MP7. “Simple as shit but gets the job done.”
A secondary explosion caused the hood of the truck to flip in the air and land on top of an M706 turret. Two men ran from the side door, clutching AKs. Mancini calmly picked them off.
Crocker, meanwhile, had the cell phone in his blood-covered hand and was punching Lane’s number.
“Lane! Lane, you hear me? It’s Crocker.”
“Crocker, how’d it go?”
“Bad. The house was empty. We’ve been ambushed by two dozen Federales with armored cars and rockets.”
“No. How the hell did that happen?”
“Don’t know. We’re pinned down. We need relief, reinforcements, and medevac A.S.A.P.! Do you copy?”
“Medevac?”
“I’ve got two badly wounded men.”
“Message received. I got it. I’ll call the station, the governor. Hold on.”
“Medevac, Lane. I don’t want to lose these men!”
“No.”
“Hurry!”
“I will.”
Chapter Eleven
In a mad world only the mad are sane.
—Akira Kurosawa
Crocker slipped the phone into his pocket and turned to Mancini, who was reloading his MP7. The firing in front of them seemed to have let up. But the sounds from the backyard were still ferocious.
“I’m going upstairs to look after Nieves,” Crocker said. “Suárez’s in the back with Davis. Akil’s upstairs.”
Both men ducked simultaneously as an explosion sent the hood of the burning truck flying in the air.
“You want me to go back and relieve Suárez?” Mancini asked as it crashed to the pavement.
“Make sure the front is covered first.”
Mancini shouted at Crocker’s back, “Tell Akil to get his ass down here. I have an idea.”
“I’ll send him.”
Upstairs on the balcony he found Akil kneeling over a prone Nieves, holding both hands on his neck.
“It’s bad,” Akil whispered. “He’s lost a lot of blood.”
“Let me see.”
Akil removed his hands from the bloody mess. A round had taken a two-inch-long chunk out of the side of Nieves’s neck but had missed the carotid artery. Nieves had already gone into hypovolemic shock due to the loss of blood, but his body temperature was still relatively normal, which meant that the shock wasn’t severe yet.
“Hold this,” Crocker said, applying a blowout patch to the wound. Then he removed his black T-shirt and said, “Now move your hands away.”
He used the T-shirt to tie the bandage in place, then lifted Nieves’s legs and slid a deck chair under them so that they were about a foot off the balcony floor.
“We need to get some blood in him,” Crocker said.
“How?”
“Go see Manny downstairs in front. He needs you.”
Just then several large explosions rocked the back of the house. Crocker grabbed his radio and shouted, “Suárez, you okay? Suárez, report!”
No answer.
He tried Mancini. “Manny?”
“Yeah, boss.”
“I’m going to relieve Suárez. Any sign of medevac or reinforcements?”
“Not yet.”
He found Suárez crouched by one of the back windows, fighting like a manic kid.
“Suárez?”
No answer, so Crocker kicked his foot.
Suárez frowned and pointed to his eardrums, indicating that they weren’t working. Outside, past the patio and cement planters filled with geraniums, eight to ten men had taken up positions and were inching toward the house.
Crocker raked the middle of them with fire, then reloaded and continued left. He shouted, “You take the right, I’ll cover the left!” Then, remembering Suárez couldn’t hear, he slapped his shoulder and pointed. Suárez nodded, his face a mask of grim determination.
Crocker liked the guy more every second. Out of his right periphery he saw a flash and shouted, “Incoming!”
A second later, a shoulder-fired rocket passed through the destroyed window and exploded on impact with the cabinets on the wall behind them. Crocker felt hot shards of wood and metal burn into his back.
He heard Suárez coughing and spitting blood.
“You hit?”
Suárez shouldered his MP7 and continued firing. Crocker calculated that they would soon either run out of ammunition or be overrun.
Shouting into the radio, he said, “Manny, we need the forty mike-mike in back.”
“I got something even better. We’re coming.”
“Make it quick!”
When he raised his head above the sill to fire, he saw three men wearing black helmets circling to the right side of the house. Then a barrage of rounds came at him, causing him to hit the floor again and bruise his mouth.
“Fuck!”
As he readjusted the sight, he saw that he was down less than a magazine and a half. Suárez continued to cough and choke.
“What’s wrong?”
Squirming over on his belly, he grabbed Suárez under the ribs from behind and pushed up and squeezed at the same time. A piece of plaster the size of a Ping-Pong ball flew out of Suárez’s mouth.
“Disgusting,” Suárez said.
“Drink some water.”
The shooting from the yard had intensified to the point that it was difficult to raise a weapon above the sill to return fire. But he did anyway, and as he fired heard a tremendous crash from the right side of the house.
He thought for a second that the Federales had broken through the barricaded side door, and that maybe he and his men would be joining Ritchie soon. But then a loud, incessant firing deafened him, and he saw that it was directed at the men behind the planters. He watched as they retreated and the big guns from the right mowed them down one by one. Then the guns tore into the Federales on the left side of the yard.
Suárez looked at Crocker, and Crocker looked at him, both men’s expressions asking, What the fuck is going on? Seconds later, a black M706 armored car swung into view.
“Who’s that?” Suárez asked.
It looked like the one Crocker had seen on the front drive with twin .30 cal machine guns and five-foot run-flat tires. Now it was firing at the Mexicans.
“They’re on our side!” Suárez shouted with a rapturous smile on his face.
“Seems like.”
Before Crocker had a chance to say anything about Mancini, Suárez stepped through the broken window with his MP7 and ran to join the mop-up activity in the yard. Crocker followed.
Five minutes later, all the Mexicans had either fled or were dead, or bleeding out. One soldier with a black mask over his face lay in a pool of blood behind one of the concrete planters. Crocker was bending down to grab the RPG-2 that lay next to him when he heard Akil’s voice.
“You gonna fucking thank us, or what?”
He looked up into the slanting sunlight and saw Akil’s dirt-smudged face sticking out of the side door of the M706. Without missing a beat, Crocker said, “Get your lazy ass out here and help me load Davis and Nieves inside.”
“Ungrateful fuck,” Akil groaned as he jumped and hit the grass.
“Nice work,” Crocker said, slapping a hand to his chest.
“By the way, your back’s a bloody mess.”
Crocker reached around and felt sticky blood mixed with g
rime. It didn’t seem serious, so he said, “Not a problem.”
“What the fuck just happened?” Akil asked as he and Crocker climbed the steps to the balcony.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, who were they and what they fuck was that all about?”
“That was the Mexican police,” Crocker answered.
“You’re kidding.”
“I saw ‘Federales’ painted on one of the trucks.”
When they reached the balcony, out of breath, Akil wiped dirt and sweat off his forehead and said, “And I thought Iraq and Afghanistan were messed up.”
“Welcome to Mexico.”
The bleeding from Nieves’s neck seemed to have stopped, but he was still in shock, and his pulse was weak and thready. As they carefully carried him downstairs and toward the armored car, a black helicopter banked overhead.
“Medevac?” Akil asked.
Crocker squinted into the morning haze. It was a Black Hawk with POLíCIA FEDERAL painted along the back of the fuselage. “Apparently not,” he answered. “Load him inside.”
The interior of the M706 was extremely hot and had room for a driver, a gunner, and eight other occupants on benches along the sides. Mancini drove while Akil manned the machine gun. Nieves lay on one bench and Davis on the other. Crocker crawled on his knees from one side to the other, monitoring each man.
“How about getting some air in this crate?” Crocker asked.
Mancini shouted, “The air conditioning doesn’t seem to be working.”
“Try the fan.” Crocker tossed his cell phone to Suárez, seated crossed-legged on the floor. “Call Lane. Tell him where we are.”
The M706 growled and lurched toward the front gate.
“No answer,” Suárez shouted over the growl of the engine. “I left a message.”
“Try again!”
Once they reached the street, Mancini cranked the Chrysler 361 cubic V-8 engine as fast as it would go and tried to trace his way back to the FBI safe house. The Polícia Federal Black Hawk followed about sixty feet overhead.
“What should we do about the helo?” Akil asked from the turret.
“Ignore it.”
“What if it fires at us?”