by Mark Greaney
Only the tips of the pine trees swayed. There was no more movement on this side of the house.
Damn, damn, damn. All his training told him to hold his ground, not to turn, to trust his plan and his fortifications and his fellow defenders to each stay responsible for his or her field of fire.
If Martin’s sector was attacked, Ramses and Laura would be on either side, they could see what was going on, and they could respond much better than he, here on the opposite end of the building.
Trust them. Don’t leave your post. Just trust your plan.
Another shot. And then a full automatic burst from a submachine gun.
Gentry focused his worry, turned it to a concentrated stare into the dark before him.
Nothing. No movement, no attack. Nothing at all.
Trust your plan, Court.
More gunfire, more shouting behind him.
Trust your plan, Court!
An explosion. A flash-bang grenade detonating inside the house on the second floor.
Shit! Trust your plan, Court!
Then Laura Gamboa’s voice. A shout.
A scream.
Fuck the plan.
Court Gentry rose to his knees, leapt to his feet, hefted the heavy shotgun in his right hand, and he turned and ran back into the house as fast as he could, leaving his post behind.
Only by pure dumb luck did he see the first assassin. Court ran into the dark living room along the western wall; the archway to the kitchen was just ahead and on his left, on his right the archway to the formal dining room. He’d planned on shooting past this room to hit the stairs to make his way to the landing and Laura’s position down the hall.
But there in the dark, not ten feet ahead in his path, the black tip of a weapon’s barrel appeared from the dining room. Gentry reacted in a single bound, let his feet fly out ahead of him, and he dropped to the cold stone tile like a ballplayer sliding into home plate. He slid on past the dining room’s archway on his right side, his long shotgun barrel up high towards the threat. As he slid into the archway, he saw the sicario in the dark; the man had obviously heard a noise, but he had not yet lowered his weapon towards its source.
Court pressed his shotgun’s muzzle into the marine’s belt buckle as Court stopped there on the ground, pulled one of the triggers, and pumped nine .33-caliber rounds into and through the man’s midsection, nearly ripping him in two and sending him flying backwards through the air behind the echoing boom and short, wide flame. His shredded body landed flat on the dining room table. There it bucked and spasmed as the electrical current from his central nervous system trickled out to his dying muscles.
Gentry rolled up to his knees before the man even came to rest on the table. He had not seen which way the sicario’s weapon had flown, and he did not want to waste time searching for it in the darkness, so he got back up and ran on, reloading the smoking barrel of his big gun as he reached the staircase.
He ascended three steps in a bound.
More firing, from two locations now. At the top of the stairs he turned right, heard an incredible blast ahead in a room off the hallway. Through smoke and dust and darkness, he saw Laura Gamboa backing up quickly from the master bedroom. Her pistol was out in front of her, but Court could plainly see it had locked open after firing its last round.
Court shouldered up to her, she stumbled backwards towards him in the hallway, and he caught her before she fell to the ground. At first he worried that she’d been shot, but then he recognized the telltale effects of a concussion grenade. Her pupils were dilated, and she wobbled wildly on her knees. “How many?” He asked. Her body was small but sinewy and muscular; he helped her regain a standing position.
She recovered a little and looked at him. “I don’t know. Marinos. They just appeared in the hallway!”
“They are in the house?”
“¡Sí! They are everywhere!”
Court grabbed Laura roughly by the arm, turned, and ran back up the hall, away from the mirador and towards the eastern part of the house, running past the landing overlooking the darkened living room.
Gunfire in the near distance did not stop Ignacio Gamboa from making one last adjustment to the carburetor. Neither did the tears fogging his vision and streaming down his face. By the light of a single red candle positioned on the engine, he finished his final turn of the screw. He shut the hood seconds later, staggered around towards the open passenger door, and pulled the half-empty bottle of clear anejo tequila off the rusted roof of the old Dodge truck.
He took a long, gulping swig.
Cracks and snaps and pops of weapons of differing calibers grew in frequency back behind him in the casa grande as the battle intensified.
Ignacio spun, threw the tequila bottle across the barn; it slammed against the stone wall and shattered into wet crystalline shards. He then climbed behind the wheel of the old Dodge and reached for the key. With a single turn the truck fired; the engine coughed and missed here and there, but the engine’s power was strong enough and constant enough to trust the vehicle.
Ignacio put his head in his hands and cried.
He had known for the last hour, all along while he worked, that he would get the truck started, he would get behind the wheel, he would put the transmission into drive, and he would drive the fuck out of here and leave everyone behind.
His parents, his sister, his nephew.
His brother’s unborn son.
Nothing he could do could possibly save them. And this was the only way to save himself.
He turned on the headlights.
No one survived a death warrant by the Black Suits. Staying with his family would be suicide, and suicide required a strength Ignacio Gamboa knew well he did not possess. He was not his little brother Eduardo, valiantly fighting his enemies and always providing for his family and friends.
And he was not his little sister, Lorita, giving of herself and relying on her faith.
No, Ignacio Gamboa had neither the gift of valor nor the gift of faith. He was just a man, just a weak man, and he was scared.
He was more like his brother Rodrigo. Weak, scared, looking out for himself and taking what others would give to him.
He’d seen Rodrigo shot through the forehead yesterday morning in the Parque Hidalgo, watched his brains blow apart. Ignacio was like his brother Rodrigo in many respects, but he did not want to be so much like his brother that he ended up dead.
No, Ignacio told himself. He would not die. He would run, and he would live!
Ignacio hadn’t mentioned it to the others, but he knew a place to go where Los Trajes Negros would not get them. He had friends who lived up in Durango, in Madrigal country. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of villages there where DLR and his Italian-suit-clad soldier boys would not dare go. Yes, if Ignacio made it up into the Sierra Madres of Durango, he’d have to work for los Vaqueros, he’d have to grow pot or coke or opium, or traffic pot or coke or heroin or meth, or kill others over pot or coke or heroin or meth, but what was the big deal? Better that than ending up like Rodrigo or Eduardo.
He did not tell his family before, because they would not go with him. And he did not tell them now, because they would not go with him.
He’d go alone.
He wiped tears from his eyes with his hairy, sweaty, meaty forearm, and he shoved the vehicle into gear.
He’d planned on just smashing through the closed double doors at the front of the barn, but they creaked open in front of him. Two men appeared in his headlights.
They raised weapons towards him.
“No!” Ignacio Gamboa stomped on the gas.
The two sicarios opened fire with MP5s, blasting the windshield and the hood and perforating the heavy man behind the wheel, riddling his spasming, convulsing body with brass-jacketed lead as the truck rolled forwards and past them, veered to the left as his face slammed down on the steering wheel, slowed as his dead foot slid off the gas pedal, and came to rest gently against the stone fountain in the cen
ter of the driveway’s roundabout.
The sicarios reloaded their rifles and fired again into the fat man’s twitching body.
Inez Corrales was not where she was supposed to be. Thirty minutes earlier she and Elena and Luz had been in the cellar, as directed by the gringo, lying on bedding, and by the light of a single veladora, they had prayed and talked of their lost loved ones. But after an hour there she told the other ladies that she needed to use the bathroom, so she walked down the hallway, past Ernesto Gamboa, who was dozing on the stone steps. At the top of the stairs she passed young Diego, lying on the kitchen floor but awake, and she told him she would be right back. But she entered the living room, crossed it to a long hallway that led to the western wing of the casa grande.
She passed through a small open-air courtyard, walked down a colonnade of cool stone walls, entered a dusty storeroom on the far side, and made her way in the dark towards a doorway leading to the outside.
The night was still save for a gentle cool breeze; she followed a stone footpath overgrown with weeds and moneda vines, took this disused trail to the old chapel. She opened the rotten wooden door slowly; she dared not make a sound that would alert the American or the policemen that she had left the casa, lest they come and take her back to the cellar. When she stepped inside, she closed the door tight so that it would block out any candlelight.
She’d brought a lighter, and she used it to light a veladora, which she took to the little altar there on the far wall, and she knelt, slowly so that the knee rest did not creak or even snap from her weight.
She lit a few more veladoras, just enough to illuminate the brass crucifix in front of her. Slowly the scent of candle wax and burning wick blended with the mold and dust in the air, and seventy-nine-year-old Inez Corrales Jimenez began to pray.
Gunfire erupted outside soon after. She turned back towards the door, eyes wide in the low light, but she calmed herself.
Turned back to her duty.
She had come alone to the chapel, to pray for her husband, dead now just three hours. She would pray for him here, in the chapel where he had been christened as a boy, where they had come to light candles right after their wedding in 1957, where their own boy, Guillermo, had learned to love Jesus.
The guns outside did not change the beauty and importance of this place in her life, to her family.
She turned back to the crucifix, began praying aloud, a tall glass veladora clutched in her hand.
The door flew open behind her; the draft of air whipped the candlelight in the small chapel, sending long shadows across the walls in a back-and-forth jolt.
She stiffened in surprise and fear, but she did not turn back to look. Only lowered her head and quickly made the sign of the cross over her body.
A marine sicario shot her once in the base of the skull with a Colt .45 pistol. Her tiny, aged, frail body lurched forward across the altar, came to rest at the foot of the crucifix, the candle in her hand spun through the air and extinguished with the movement.
Diego and his grandfather lay at the top of the staircase into the kitchen, and they fired their carbines at a figure in the living room. The man had shot at them first; Diego knew with certainty neither tía Laura, the bearded gringo, nor the two federales who’d worked for tío Eduardo would do that, so he determined this man in the dark behind the sporadic muzzle flashes to be their enemy.
The sixteen-year-old boy and the seventy-year-old man did not have any training in such things, so they did not space themselves apart properly. Their shoulders literally touched as they fought, affording their attacker the luxury of a single target at which to shoot. Also, they did not know to cover for each other as they reloaded; instead they just fired when they saw fit, stopped when they saw fit, and reloaded when they needed to do so. This created long, dangerous lulls in the fight, during which their enemy could creep closer to find a better angle of fire.
Ernesto rose to a knee to pull a third M1 carbine magazine out of his hip pocket, he leaned to shout something into Diego’s ear, and then he spun ninety degrees, dropped the rifle, and clutched high on his right shoulder. He slid halfway down the stairs on his old back, shouted from the shock of the impact, which felt as if he’d been kicked in the shoulder by a mule.
At the bottom of the stairs his wife appeared, a candle in her hand; she began climbing up to him, shrieking and crying; he yelled at her, ordered her back to the cellar, told her that he was fine.
Through the numbness in his arm and a fresh cold chill that now sloshed across his body like a high, cool wave over his little fishing boat, he began climbing the stairs again to fight alongside his grandson, reaching for the wooden rifle on his way.
Ramses Cienfuegos had fought off two men on the second-floor south mirador. At first he’d been alongside Colonel Gamboa’s sister, Laura, but a flash-bang grenade had been tossed into the upstairs parlor from the mirador itself and exploded between them. Laura had stumbled back into the hallway, out of sight, but Ramses had recovered quickly enough to charge forward instead of back. He saw two men on the mirador, they were preparing to attack, but Ramses surprised them with his aggressive tactics. The men escaped from him by leaping over the balcony towards the patio below, and when he arrived at the railing and looked down, he saw the marines disappear into the night around the west side of the casa grande. He was certain the assassins would regroup and try to breach from the ground floor, so he sprinted to the staircase, ran down it, and turned into the hallway towards the west wing.
He ran down the hallway, passed several rooms, and then turned sharply and entered a courtyard, made of long open colonnades that formed a box around a garden of weeds with a huge garbage-strewn fountain in the middle. The open sky shone into the space and illuminated it just enough for him to see his way forward down the stone tiles. He ran towards a doorway on the far side.
He cleared the room beyond with his submachine gun, found it to be an old storeroom, and also discovered a wide open door to the outside.
He knew in an instant that the men were already in the house.
Somewhere behind him.
Ramses Cienfuegos retraced his steps. He still heard gunfire on the far end of the house, but he also knew that the men he’d seen earlier could not have made it that far in such a short time. He reentered the courtyard, followed the east-west colonnade back to the east, and then turned to the north to go back into the hallway that led to the main portion of the casa grande.
As he jogged, he looked away for an instant, out into the garden, wondering if someone was hiding in the tall grasses and weeds.
When he looked back up, a man was there, thirty feet away and running up the tiled colonnade towards him.
A marino in full battle dress, carrying an MP5.
Both Mexicans saw each other at the same time. Both raised their weapons as their eyes widened in surprise and fear.
The marino fired his MP5 up the hall, spraying bullets towards the federale. Ramses fired his Colt 635 down the hall, spraying bullets back at the sicario.
Ramses Cienfuegos went down first, a hot snap into his right biceps, another to his right shoulder, and then his helmet shattered and smashed and leapt straight off his head into the air. He spun away while firing his weapon, supersonic lead arced from the muzzle and nailed the sicario in his right arm, then across his chest plate, tipping him backwards and knocking him down.
Both fell flat on their backs on the cold tile, only twenty-five feet apart and bleeding in the dark colonnade hallway. Both men’s primary weapons were empty, and both men sat up and struggled to reload, encumbered as they were by their wounds and the slick blood coating their weapons and their spare magazines.
“¡Cabrón!” Ramses shouted as he rolled onto his right hip, ejected the spent magazine from the well of the rifle, used the same arm to retrieve a loaded spare from his assault vest, and struggled to reload.
“¡Chingado federale!” The marine shouted as a reply; his voice echoed in the hallway and acros
s the courtyard. He’d given up on reloading his rifle; instead he pushed the weapon away, reached across his body with his left hand, and with a shout of pain drew his pistol from the drop-leg holster on his right hip. He fought his inertia to roll back to his left to line up a shot.
Ramses gritted his teeth against the searing burn of the bullet wounds, screamed another obscenity at the assassin, and realized he was beaten. He struggled to pull back the charging handle on the rifle with his one good hand; he looked up to see the black pistol emerge at the end of the sicario’s arm, saw the assassin scoot on the tile in his expanding blood pool to get his weapon around for the killing shot.
Ramses knew he could not ready his weapon before his enemy could raise his. He could not pull back the charging handle one-handed without propping the butt of the gun on the tile, and he had no time to do this. He wore no handgun, he’d given it to Major Gamboa’s sister, and without a loaded rifle he had no way to engage his foe. So he let the rifle fall to the floor, sat there on the cold tile. His legs splayed out in front of him, and he relaxed, thought of his family, and waited to die.
The marine leaning on his side ahead of him grimaced in pain as his weapon rose. He clearly saw he would get the drop on the federale, and his face, contorted in pain, morphed into a smile.
Ramses Cienfuegos drew a long breath and sighed. Watched his killer enjoy the moment.
“¡Come mierda!” Eat shit! Ramses shouted.
And then, as silent and as fast as the predawn breeze that drifted through the hacienda, the American sprinted from around the corner and into the tile colonnade behind the marine. He carried the long, old, side-by-side double-barrel shotgun, and his eyes were down at the open breach of the weapon. He was trying to reload it as he ran, but when he recognized the scene in front of him, the gringo’s eyes widened. Ramses watched the gringo discard the two fresh shotgun shells back over his shoulder, and then the wounded Mexican federale watched the American toss the big shotgun into the air in front of him while he ran forward as fast as he could.