Ballistic

by Mark Greaney

  Someone in Calvo’s truck screamed, “Watch out!”

  The massive landslide missed Nestor’s vehicle. As the driver slammed on his breaks, the intelligence chief of the Black Suits crashed shoulder-first into his leather headrest, the man who had thrown himself over Calvo’s body collided into him. Calvo looked out the back window just in time to see the rear vehicle in the convoy catch the brunt of the mass of rock and dirt and dust and greenery; tons of falling rubble slammed into the Suburban, spun the massive armored vehicle 180 degrees on its axis before burying it along with the six men inside.

  Wet concrete continued pouring onto the first vehicle in the convoy. The driver recovered from the impact with the cement mixer, pushed the deflated airbag out of his way, and jacked the truck’s transmission into reverse. The truck’s wheels spun, but it found purchase and began backing up; men in the truck around the driver shouted and screamed, and the SUV backed hard into the grille of Truck Two. Seconds later the cement mixer itself reversed, backed through hundreds of pounds of gray sludge, and crashed into Truck One.

  Cement continued to flow from its chute, now directly onto the hood of the truck.

  The two bodyguards in the middle seat of Truck Two, one on either side of Nestor Calvo, pointed their weapons at the windows, awaited the order to exit the car. The leader of the detail, the man in the front passenger seat, hesitated. “Wait!” he shouted. “We don’t know how many there are. Calvo is safe in the truck.”

  The men sat silently for a few seconds, then the radio came alive with the voice of an injured man from the rear truck. “We have wounded. Some are dead, I think. Help us.”

  The lead bodyguard switched channels and put a call out for the local police.

  Behind him a shaken but highly focused Nestor Calvo had already found his mobile phone on the floor, ended the call he was on, and had begun dialing his own contacts in the area.

  The driver of Truck One saw him first. A man in dirty blue jeans, a black leather jacket, and a black motorcycle helmet with a smoked windscreen. Hanging low in his right hand was a black pistol, and in his left hand a black backpack swung at his side.

  “¡A la chingada!” Oh fuck! “El hombre de gris!” The Gray Man! he said, then he grabbed his walkie-talkie to report to the other trucks.

  But Truck Two had already seen him. “It’s the gringo!” shouted the guard on Calvo’s left, and he threw open his rear door, raised his short-barreled machine gun.

  And then flew back inside onto Nestor Calvo’s lap. On his forehead and left cheek he wore ragged holes that gushed rich red blood all over Calvo’s suit.

  The consigliere pushed the man out into the road and dove to pull the door closed, fumbling his phone into the air before his call could be connected.

  The leader of the detail attempted to open his door to get out on the far side of the armored truck and engage the Gray Man from over the hood. But yards of thick cement had already pushed back to his side of Truck Two, and he could not get it open.

  Instead he turned to the man behind him, on Calvo’s right. “See if you can get out!” He turned back to his own door and began rolling down the window.

  The driver of Truck One scrambled across the center console of the front seat, into the passenger side, and he struggled to roll up the heavy bulletproof window left open by the man who’d been ejected during the initial crash with the cement truck. The men in the backseats argued about what to do and screamed into their radios, trying to communicate with the detail commander behind them over the screams and pleas of the survivors of Truck Three.

  The man in the motorcycle helmet appeared at the driver-side window of Truck One, pulled a large rectangular object from his open backpack, and slammed it hard against the ballistic glass. When it hit it made a sound like a heavy, wet fish, and it adhered to the clear surface. The armed men inside the vehicle stopped screaming and stared at it for a moment, unsure what they were looking at. It was a black container made of metal, perhaps even iron, and covered in a thick black tarlike material. They saw the Gray Man pick his bag off the ground and move backwards, back up around the side of the huge cement mixer.

  “It’s a bomb!” shouted the driver.

  “Are we safe?” asked a bodyguard in the back.

  “Yes,” replied one, certain the bulletproof glass would protect them.

  Another man tried once again to call out to the detail commander in the vehicle behind for instructions, and yet another voiced concern that the side window glass was not as strong as the side armor of the SUV.

  Finally, after looking at the sticky box on the glass for five seconds, the driver gave the order. “Bail out!”

  Three hands wrapped around three different door handles inside the big black Suburban.

  And then the bomb detonated, sent fire, iron shrapnel, and shards of ballistic glass into the SUV’s interior behind a shockwave that moved faster than the speed of sound. All the men inside were turned to pulp in eight-one-hundredths of a second, and the heavy vehicle rocked on its fortified steel chassis. The windshield blew out from the inside, shattered against the chute of the cement mixer, and flames engulfed the dead occupants.

  The four men still alive in Truck Two, Nestor Calvo included, just watched. When it was clear the armored vehicle in front of them, a truck virtually identical to their own, did not survive the blast, the detail commander gave the order for his men to bail out.

  The driver was the first through his door; he drew his .45 pistol as he stumbled out into the road.

  In the black smoke billowing from the windows of the Suburban in front of him, the man in the motorcycle helmet appeared, he still carried the pack low on his left, and now his pistol was aimed high on his right.

  The driver began to raise his weapon towards the threat, but three rounds to his chest spun him around, caused his .45 to sail from his hands. A fourth shot to the right side of his skull snapped his head to the side and killed him instantly. He fell dead on the blacktop as the two doors on the opposite side of the SUV opened and then closed again.

  Inside Truck Two Calvo screamed at the two surviving members of his detail. “Fight him! Get out and fight him!” The men moved from side to side in their seats, but they were otherwise frozen in terror. They just watched as the man in the motorcycle helmet stood alongside their truck and reached into his bag.

  “He has another bomb!” one shouted, but the man instead pulled out a piece of cardboard. He pushed it up to the windshield and the men inside the SUV read the single word written in black upon it.

  “Calvo.”

  All three men sat silently. The silence was broken by the slapping sound of an iron box covered in tar sticking to the driver-side window of the Suburban. The man in the black helmet stepped away from the vehicle, raised his pistol, and waited.

  Twelve seconds later the side door of the truck opened, and Calvo was ejected by the boot heel of one of the two members of his security detail. Immediately, he fell down in thick wet cement that had inched back on the road to his side of the truck. The door shut behind him. He cursed as he tried to stand back up. The man in the motorcycle helmet stepped forward, his pistol still trained on the Suburban, and he grabbed the fifty-seven-year-old by his necktie, pulled him out of the cement and to the side of the road. Court walked backwards up the road, pulling the man with the cement-spackled coal black suit, still covering the SUV with his gun, until he disappeared around the side of the dump truck.

  He let go of Calvo and reached into his backpack. He removed a black cell phone and handed it over to the Mexican.

  In Spanish the man said, “Press 4. Then Send.”

  Calvo did as he was told. Upon pressing the Send button an explosion rocked the canyon road fifty feet behind him. Shrapnel fired into the cement truck and pelted the hillside.

  Thirty seconds later the cement mixer moved forward towards the west, and the only men left alive at the scene were buried under tons of rock and dirt.

  A phone call wa
s intercepted by intelligence agents from the Black Suits at three p.m. The call was recorded and then played back for Daniel de la Rocha and Spider Cepeda just twenty minutes later. It was determined that the call was placed from a mobile phone, and the caller was the American known as the Gray Man. The call was received on a landline at a Vaqueros safe house in Mazatlan and then patched through to the mobile phone of Hector Serna, chief of intelligence for los Vaqueros.

  The entire conversation was in English.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Why did you call that number? Where did you get it?”

  “The number you gave me is compromised by the Black Suits. Calvo told me himself. I got this number from Jerry Pfleger the other day. I knew whoever answered could get in touch with you eventually.”

  “You have Calvo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Incredible. Still, this line cannot be trusted.”

  “It’s clean.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Calvo doesn’t know about it.”

  “What if he’s lying?”

  “He is too scared to lie.”

  A pause. “Very well. When will you deliver him to us?”

  “Calvo says the Black Suits know about the safe house in Tepic. We need to change the location.”

  A long pause. “All right.”

  “I can take him to the safe house where he was going today.”

  “No. They obviously know the location of—”

  “It’s the only other place I know of. They won’t be expecting us to hand him over. There is no reason to suspect they will be there.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Do you want him back or not?”

  “Of course we want him back.” A short delay. “What time?”

  “Midnight.”

  “Why not earlier?”

  “I think there are others looking for me. CIA. Russians. It will take some time to cover my tracks and get there.”

  “We will come to you. Tell me where you—”

  “Midnight. The ranch in Concordia. I’ll be there. Bring a lot of men and a lot of guns.” The call ended.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  At five p.m. the leadership of the Black Suits met in the huge main sala of the Casa de las Olas, an eleven-thousand-square-foot modernistic mansion overlooking the beach fifteen minutes south of downtown Puerto Vallarta on Federal Highway 200.

  The men present in the meeting were protected by two dozen more sicarios patrolling the lush ten-acre estate, and they, in turn, were surrounded by Puerto Vallarta municipal police on the payroll of DLR. The cops patrolled the neighborhood in squad cars and sat in a pair of small, armed speedboats out on the water, just past the breakers.

  Spider ran the main portion of the meeting while DLR stood next to him.

  “Four teams will hit the Concordia ranch at 12:05 a.m., four separate vans will attack from each point on the compass. A fifth team will come in behind the main attack with the objective of receiving Nestor and then taking him out of the area. We will all meet back here by dawn.”

  De la Rocha sipped bottled water and looked through the fifteenfoot-high windows off his left towards Bandaras Bay. He was distracted for many reasons, not the least of which was that he would not be going on the rescue mission to recover his consigliere. It was determined to be too dangerous for the organization itself to expose DLR to what was certain to be one hell of a firefight.

  Spider, the leader of the armed wing, would also be staying behind. Daniel had ordered this, and Spider was not happy about it, but since the execution of Emilio Lopez Lopez, Spider had been in charge of DLR’s safety, so it only made since he would stay at the house by DLR’s side.

  Both men had led forces into battle, and neither man wanted to stay behind at this palace on the beach while their soldiers fought and bled and died and killed one hundred miles north of here. But logic prevailed.

  And DLR had a feeling that staying here tonight, with a relatively small contingent of twenty armed men or so, would not be without action of its own.

  As the discussions of the coming operation petered out and the men who would soon head off to battle began strapping weapons and gear to their bodies, DLR stepped out of the sala and onto a raised dining room open to the great room. As soon as they’d arrived at the rented villa, he’d ordered the long table removed and his largest Santa Muerte idol erected in its place. The skeleton sat on its throne in the center of the room, behind it white curtains hung from the high ceiling down to the wood floor of the dining room, candle sconces ringed the throne and the room itself. Daniel knelt down in front of his patron saint, said a prayer for his family, and said a prayer for the death of the Gray Man.

  At the end of his last prayer he looked up slowly into the face of la Santa Muerte, then called out to Spider. Cepeda shot out of the scrum of his men down in the sala and up the three steps to the raised dining hall.

  “Sí, Don Daniel?”

  “Do you think the gringo really got the phone number he called today from Jerry Pfleger?”

  “No. Calvo gave him that number because he knew his agents were monitoring it. The old bastard is as cunning as they come.”

  DLR nodded. “Yes. He is very cunning.”

  Spider stood dutifully over his master.

  DLR turned and looked up to him. “I want everyone staying behind ready for action tonight.”

  Spider nodded. Confused. “Of course.”

  Daniel stood and left the dining room through the curtains, heading for his master suite in the back of the mansion.

  A cluster of small, uninhabited islands sit in Bandaras Bay, just a few hundred yards off of Mismaloya. Collectively called Los Arcos, they are named for the archlike formations carved out of the rock by centuries of pounding surf. During the day the protected marine reserve around Los Arcos was full of scuba divers, snorkelers, and pleasure boats, but one hour before midnight the only creatures in the waters around the tiny islands were fish, lobster, sleeping blue-footed boobies and other sea birds.

  Fifty yards closer to shore a pair of private boats bobbed in the water. In each boat four men sat with M16 rifles in their laps. Two men in each boat had an M203 grenade launcher mounted on their M16s.

  Each boat also had a radio and a two-million-candlepower flashlight to scan the calm water in all directions.

  They were hardly battleships, but the two converted gunboats would certainly present an obstacle for anyone trying to make it to the back of Casa de las Olas from the water.

  Court Gentry knelt waist-deep in water that was surging back and forth in the black recesses of a small grotto in one of the rocks of Los Arcos. His eyes looked past the two small boats and towards the white sand beach beyond them. A pair of men with flashlights strolled back and forth on the sand, rifles hanging on their backs. A wall of white boulders and brown shale ran up to the right of the small beach.

  Past the men, past the beach, up the hill, he scanned the palatial estate. It looked a bit like a space station. It was a modern glass-andsteel structure, all hard metal edges and glass walls. The focal point of the back of the house was a balcony than ran along a gargantuan window. On the other side of the glass Court could just make out dim lighting, perhaps from candles. Much of the grounds of the property were well lit and, Court assumed, well protected. But from here the building itself seemed buttoned up and quiet.

  On the highest point of the southern wing of the huge mansion, a black Eurocopter EC135 sat in complete darkness. Only the few streetlights and glowing buildings higher on distant hills framed its silhouette.

  Court took a few minutes to deflate his small rubber boat and to tuck it into a dry nook in the grotto out of sight of the coast. Then he turned to his equipment arrayed on a rocky shelf just above the water line. He donned his scuba gear and his fins, slung a long coiled rope to his tank, connected his Glock to his Buoyancy Control Device, and attached his bag of clothing, extra magazines, and o
ther items to his utility belt.

  He pulled a mobile phone out of a protected case, powered it up, and made a phone call. Court said what he had to say and then hung up as the man on the other end screamed and cussed.

  The phone went back in the case; the case went back in the bag.

  At twenty minutes past eleven p.m. Court sank slowly below the water in the grotto, pushed off with his gloved hands, kicked his legs, and began swimming away from Los Arcos and towards the shore.

  He passed the two boats twenty minutes later, traveling sixty feet below them and breathing as slowly and as shallowly as he could to minimize bubbles above. Twenty minutes after that he was below the surf, the ocean floor crept up towards the beach, each wave that surged him forward was followed by an undertow that pulled him back, but he kicked to maximize his progress and, after ten minutes of heavy exercise, he worked his way ashore. He’d let the current push him south of the lights of the building, south of the beach and into the rocks.

  He took off his scuba gear, turned off his tank, and stowed it between boulders at the water’s edge. He pulled off his fins and his clammy wetsuit. Underneath his neoprene he was dressed head-totoe in black cotton. He slipped into soft-soled shoes, pulled a black ski mask over his face, put his extra magazines in the cargo pockets of his pants and a black Glock into the holster on his belt.

  At midnight he began climbing up the rock, careful to stay out of view of the sentries on the beach, the spotlights from the boats, or any guards in the windows of the house.

  His progress was slow and arduous, but he made it to the south side of the villa and then proceeded silently to the front, careful to move in shadow and concealment.

  Daniel de la Rocha knelt before his throned idol in the candlelit dining room, the huge high-ceilinged main sala of the villa was open and empty behind him; both rooms were illuminated by the light of over one hundred white candles as well as a little ambient light that filtered through the sala’s window overlooking the bay. On the floor, on tables, on wall sconces, and on tall narrow stands, the burning candles emanated not just light but pungent aromatic wax as well.