Stealth Attack

by John Gilstrap

  The Mini Cooper appeared to veer toward a close-in parking spot, but then the driver changed her mind at the last second and turned away. Now she was headed toward Patrick’s car.

  “Oh, shit,” he said aloud. He was counting on a long shot—the longer the better, as far as he was concerned. Scanning the lot himself, the only slots he saw for her were along the back row. His back row. That would put his prey only twenty or thirty feet away from him.

  He needed to move quickly. Keeping the rifle out of view, below window level, he wrapped his left thumb and forefinger around the charging handle and cycled it. He jumped when a bullet leapt from the breach and twirled into the passenger side window.

  The gun had been chambered the whole time.

  He reseated the charging handle and pressed the bolt release. At first, he was concerned that the bolt didn’t snap closed, but then he realized that it already was. He needed to settle himself down. Needed to breathe.

  Patrick could see Angelina’s face now. She looked just like the pictures from the research packet Monroe had emailed him.

  Only now she was three-dimensional. Now she was real flesh, and her hair showed movement. Her eyes blinked.

  She had two little boys to raise, and her husband was dead. Killed by an IED in some town in Afghanistan that Patrick couldn’t pronounce when he read it.

  Patrick took comfort in the fact that the boys would have each other after their mother was gone. And they’d have their grandmother. He knew they all lived together. He knew the neighborhood where they lived, and they clearly had money. The boys would be fine.

  Ciara, on the other hand, would be ravaged and beaten if he did not go through with this. God only knew the tortures she would endure.

  “Stop thinking about it,” he told himself. “Stopthink-ingstopthinkingstopthinking. . .”

  Angelina swung her tiny car wider than she needed to get it lined up with the parking spot she’d chosen. As she eased in, her head turned, and she looked right at him.

  It was as if she knew. Perhaps the intensity of his glare had drawn her attention. He’d heard of things like that happening. That supernatural stuff. That supernatural bullshit.

  Timing would be everything. She had to be standing, and she had to be looking elsewhere when he slid out of his seat, shouldered his rifle and pumped rounds into her until she fell.

  He wished now that he’d had the presence of mind to back into his parking space to make his getaway easier, but it was to late to worry about that now.

  Why was she taking so long?

  * * *

  Angelina didn’t like the way that guy in the Ford was looking at her. It wasn’t an ogle or anything remotely flirty. Not really predatory, either. Frightened, maybe?

  She’d picked up his gaze right after she’d abandoned the parking space by the Dumpster. First, she noticed that he was sitting in the car in the first place. Why would someone be sitting alone in a car in a restaurant parking lot? She supposed he could be waiting for someone, but how would that someone even be able to find him way back here?

  At first, she decided that it was none of her business, but then she saw the cast of his eyes. They really were following her.

  As she got closer, she noted how he was listing in his seat to his right. He appeared to be trying to hide something.

  It was damned suspicious behavior, for sure. When she got inside, maybe she’d place a call to the Prince William cops to have them cruise through the lot and check him out. From what Angelina could tell, there was no reason to suspect a federal crime in progress, so she had no jurisdiction to investigate.

  And if he was hanging out to mess with her, well, it hadn’t yet been forty-eight hours since she’d kicked the ass of her regular sparring partner. One of the conditions she’d set for herself for her return to real fieldwork was to sharpen her ground fighting skills. Most agents never dealt with any of that stuff after the academy—and certainly not after their thirtieth birthday, give or take—but she wanted to be the agent she’d always dreamed of being.

  As she shoved the gearshift into PARK, she paused for a moment and peered through the windows of the adjacent car to see if the guy in the Ford was posing any kind of threat.

  He was looking straight out through his windshield. Listening to the radio, maybe? Talking on the phone? His lips weren’t moving, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t listening to the other end of a conversation.

  To hell with it. Fat Freddie’s barbecue was only fifty yards away, and her clock was ticking.

  * * *

  The rifle lay across Patrick’s lap. He held it by the barrel shroud, the grip hovering on the far side of the center console. With the Mini Cooper so near and with its driver looking at him as she was, there was no way for him to position the weapon properly without it being seen.

  That was okay, though. He had a plan. As he slid out to his left, he would drag the rifle across and get a proper grip. By the time he positioned himself for the shot, everything would be fine.

  What was happening? The Mini Cooper had been stopped for probably thirty seconds now. Why wasn’t she getting out? He knew better than to look because his gut told him that she was watching him.

  Was it getting hard to breathe, or was that his imagination?

  Movement.

  She was out of the car. This was it. This was his moment. He waited until she was clear of her vehicle.

  She closed her door. She stretched her back. She turned away from him.

  He pulled the latch on his.

  In a few seconds, this would be over.

  * * *

  Angelina glanced at the Ford as she climbed out of her car, disguising the glance as an extended stretch of her back. The guy hadn’t moved. He just continued to stare.

  She followed his eyeline. There wasn’t anything out there. Certainly, nothing that would rate such intense examination. Could it be that he was avoiding her gaze? Could it be that she’d embarrassed him when she looked at him, and now, he just wanted her to go away?

  Surely, that was it.

  Or, was she being surveilled?

  She settled herself. One of the complications of being in her line of work was a strong streak of paranoia. With the various shake-ups the Bureau had seen in the past few years, it was hard not to feel jumpy. The director’s own bodyguard had betrayed her, for God’s sake. At least, that was the rumor that no one spoke of aloud.

  This was stupid.

  She started for the restaurant, even though her appetite had dimmed.

  Behind her, her left channel picked up the click of a door opening.

  It had to be her guy because there wasn’t anyone else out there.

  Just ignore it, she told herself. The guy was probably harmless.

  But her Spidey-sense wouldn’t let her. She pivoted her head for a nonthreatening peripheral view, and right away, she knew something was wrong.

  It was the way he moved. It was too fast. Too . . . sideways.

  Holy shit, did he have a rifle?

  * * *

  Patrick knew he’d been made as soon as she started walking. Her stride wasn’t right. She was watching him without wanting him to know.

  He had to move now. If he didn’t move right now, he’d lose his nerve entirely. Besides, she knew. Made no sense to go back now.

  He opened his door and slid out of his seat, pulling the rifle with him, but the sling caught on the shift lever.

  “Goddammit,” he muttered. He leaned back in and freed it. Only cost him a couple of seconds. He moved his hand to the AR-15’s pistol grip and stepped clear of the door.

  Just like being at the range, he swung the stock up to his shoulder, settled the reticle of this scope on his target.

  But the target was ducking for cover.

  * * *

  “Shit! Oh, goddamn!” Angelina heard the words out of her mouth before she knew she’d said them.

  It was a rifle! What the hell?

  She squatted low and went for cov
er.

  Amazing what you can notice in the time of a shutter flash. Black rifle. AR15 of some sort. Glass scope.

  Angelina knew from a dozen different training classes that cars made miserable sources of cover under any circumstances, but they were particularly useless against any kind of rifle. Especially when the rifle was only twenty feet away.

  Her only chance was to put an engine block between her and the shooter. She squatted in front of a high-end Mercedes, vaguely aware of how much the emblem on the hood resembled a target.

  When the shooter opened up, it was perhaps the loudest noise she’d ever heard. He fired over and over again, and with each report, she felt the impact reverberate through the frame of the vehicle and into the Mercedes’s engine.

  Somehow, her SIG-Sauer nine-millimeter had materialized in her hand. Honest to God, she didn’t remember drawing it.

  She needed to shoot back. He’d be advancing on her, and if she wasn’t prepared, she’d die cowering in the parking lot of a place named Fat Freddie’s. That was not the obituary she’d dreamed of.

  The shooting went on seemingly without end.

  Angelina belly-crawled back toward her own vehicle—the direction she figured the shooter would not anticipate.

  She popped up for her shot probably before she should have, before she’d re-established effective cover, and there he was, pounding away at the spot where she no longer was.

  She brought her SIG up to a shooting position just as he saw her. He pivoted his rifle to shoot.

  Angelina did a mag dump on the guy. Her pistol bucked over and over in her hand, and she could see her rounds tear into her assailant. The first two tore into his hands. Such a cliché. They say that in a gunfight, people always shoot the thing that scares them, and the gun is always in the hands. As the shooter dropped the rifle, she saw his shirt and suit coat dimple with impacts, and then he was gone from sight.

  Never breaking her aim, Angelina dropped her spent magazine onto the asphalt parking lot and replaced it with one from her belt.

  Her hearing was gone. Her vision was blurred, and she didn’t think it was possible for her heart to hammer any harder. Her eyes never left the front sight of her pistol. If this guy had somehow survived and he stood up, she was going to cut him in half.

  With the pistol at high-ready and her elbows locked, Angelina sidestepped back in front of the Mercedes with its shredded hood, and when she cleared its side, she got her first good look at her shooter. He lay on his back, wedged between his opened door and a blue Chevy parked next to him. His head was propped up by the Chevy’s tire, his chin resting on his chest as blood pooled around him.

  Angelina still approached carefully. Call it horror movie syndrome, but if he sat up now, she knew that she would shit herself on the spot.

  But he didn’t move.

  His eyes were open, pupils fixed.

  Angelina kicked his rifle away with her right foot and holstered her pistol. Protocol called for cuffing the body, just in case, but she didn’t have any cuffs on her.

  As the sound of sirens crescendoed around her, she double-checked to make sure her badge was visible. The local cops were going to be spun up pretty tight.

  As she pulled out her phone to call her boss, she sent up a prayer of thanks that voice dial was a thing. No way would she be able to dial with her hands shaking like this.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jonathan and Boxers had spent the bulk of their Army careers as operators for the First Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, or the Unit, engaged in missions that never officially happened. Before the 9/11 attacks changed everything, many of those missions took them to Mexico and Central America to harass drug lords and bring justice for people who so rarely saw it from their own leaders.

  For decades, the state of Sinaloa had been the epicenter of drug smuggling, providing much of the infrastructure necessary to transport raw product produced in Central America up to the southern border of the United States, and from there to be distributed across the Fruited Plain.

  Over the years, that mission had transitioned from the military to the Drug Enforcement Administration, where enforcement and interdiction was uneven at best and entirely dependent upon whose butt sat in the big chair in the Oval Office. Under the Darmond administration, no one seemed to care all that much about porous borders and the streams of poison and damaged children that flowed into American commerce.

  Still, the infrastructure that supported the days of strong enforcement survived, ready for the inevitable return to sanity.

  Boxers had a good memory for individual elements of that infrastructure, and a phone call to Papa Smurf, an old friend who still toiled in the shadows, confirmed that a runway cut into the forest a long time ago was still functional and was capable—though barely—of handling the needs of their Hawker 500.

  They approached in the dark, flying as low and as slow as possible to mimic the flight characteristics of the much smaller airplane that approach radars had been fooled into believing they were. Papa Smurf had marked the runway for them with infrared strobes, allowing them to land without lights, using night vision instead.

  The old barracks building was still there, though it provided shelter for every species of animal other than human. Jonathan was not interested in exploring that.

  Papa Smurf had even delivered on his promise to have a locally registered Dodge Durango waiting for them.

  Favors in this part of the world always came with a hefty price tag—made even heftier by the shortened time frame—but with cash came reliable results.

  On Jonathan’s order, they stayed in the aircraft until after sunrise so that they could all get some sleep. Besides, transporting all the gear from the Hawker to the Durango in the middle of the night, using only night vision, was an invitation for trouble.

  “How often do you DEA boys come this far south to play?” Jonathan asked as they were loading toys into the Durango.

  “Not as often as we should,” Dawkins said. “Not as often as we’re going to, once the big boss is voted out of the Oval. Maybe even sooner, if word of the tourist abductions leaks out.”

  In recent months, even the high-dollar tourist attractions had become hotbeds for criminal activity. For Americans in particular, kidnapping was the most significant risk, but those abductions were often accompanied by other violence. When victims resisted, they died at an alarming rate. The U.S. State Department had had a travel advisory in place against most of the northern half of Mexico for the better part of a year now.

  Local gun laws were so draconian that possession of even a single bullet could get you put away for most of a lifetime, so no one was able to defend themselves against the gangsters who terrorized the country. The cartels owned the cops and the politicians, who cooperated by making sure that the populace was unable to resist or defend themselves.

  “I thought drug raids were picking up,” Boxers said. “I read that somewhere.”

  “Staged for the cameras,” Dawkins said. “Every now and then, President Darmond makes noises about Mexican corruption, and the politicos down here do their little dance. The press takes pictures and then loses interest.”

  Jonathan hated all of it. “When I’m elected king, I’m going to make hypocrisy a capital crime,” he said. “I don’t care if some asshat politician swings for the fences and whiffs the shot, so long as it was an honest swing.”

  “I’ve got my money on pigs flying before politicians stop lying,” Dawkins said.

  Boxers laughed. “Mine’s on pigs flying before Digger is elected anything.”

  Once they were loaded up and ready to go, Jonathan turned to Dawkins. “Tell me more about this contact of yours.”

  “Not much to tell, really. She’s talented at working all sides against each other and always coming out on top in the end. You’ll get it when you meet her.”

  “Has she got a name?” Boxers asked.

  “Sofia Reyes. And before you ask, I have no idea if that’
s real or a pseudonym.”

  Dawkins directed them to a place called La Lagartija. Calling it a dive bar would be generous. Barely one story tall, the place appeared to be constructed of recycled siding, with random splashes of pastel blues, greens, and oranges. A covered porch wrapped around the entire exterior, furnished with an eclectic collection of once-abandoned furniture. Everything from overstuffed loungers to folding card table chairs. About half the chairs were occupied, and of those, about half of the occupants were passed out.

  “La Lagartija,” Jonathan said. “The lizard?”

  “The little lizard,” Dawkins corrected.

  Jonathan pointed through the windshield as they cruised the parking lot. “Is that a cop car?”

  “Of course,” Dawkins said. “It’s a cop bar. But it’s also a bad guy bar. Fees have to be negotiated somewhere, and with listening technology improving the way it is, the old-fashioned text messages and phone calls are too risky anymore.”

  “So, the cartel guys are brazen enough just to do business face-to-face?” Boxers asked.

  “We can’t even call it an open secret anymore,” Dawkins said. “The secret part doesn’t even exist. But if anyone can point us in the direction of Silva and Guzman, Sofia’s the one.”

  “Isn’t it going to be a bit awkward for her to give us information in front of her customer base?” Jonathan asked.

  “Oh, they won’t stick around when we enter,” Dawkins said. “Believe it or not, the cartels are still a little bit afraid of us. The DEA and FBI still make them nervous. I always thought it was my good looks, but I think the badge has something to do with it.”

  “Why be afraid of Americans?” Boxers asked. “We don’t have jurisdiction down here.”

  “No, but we can make their lives uncomfortable. Nobody likes to look up and see a drone watching them.”

  “Do you actually do anything with the drone footage?” Jonathan asked.

  “I don’t know. Whether headquarters does or not is above my pay grade. All I know is nothing changes. The bad guys get richer and more people keep dying. Good times.”