Age of Blood

by Weston Ochse

  In the immediate silence that followed, plaster dust rained down on Holmes and Colonel Inquisidor Juan Francisco de la Vega, whom he held in front of him, his left forearm cutting off the air supply of the Knights’ leader.

  “Stop!” Holmes shouted. Blood trickled from the right side of his nose and he had a black eye swelling above it. A small skirmish broke out by Yank and he fired again, this time sending plaster dust on top of the fighters. “I said fucking stop!”

  All eyes focused on him.

  Walker felt the pressure of bodies increase as those in the hall tried to push their way into the room to see what was going on.

  “Vega, I think we need to call this a draw. No good can come of this if we continue.”

  Like a switch, all gazes shifted from Holmes to Vega.

  Vega swallowed and nodded.

  Holmes released him but kept his pistol at shoulder level, the barrel pointing into the air. “Please tell your men to disperse. If you will allow, I’ll have my people organize their withdrawal and we’ll try and be out of your place within the hour.”

  Vega nodded. “I think that is best.” He spoke in rapid-fire Spanish and all but four of his men left the room. They did so grudgingly and it took almost five minutes for them all to back out. When the room was finally clear, it was Vega who looked upon Holmes with something worse than contempt. “Why did you do this?”

  Holmes wiped away the blood dripping from his nose with his gun hand. “I have no excuse. Please apologize to your man for me.” He turned to Laws, who had a fat lip and blood seeping from a gash above one eye. “See to it that SPG is ready to go in an hour.” To Walker and Yank, he ordered, “Secure all weapons and equipment and have them staged by the front door. I’m going to arrange transportation.”

  “This is not the way I expected you to behave when I allowed you into our home,” Vega said, scolding him like a disappointed father.

  Holmes, who had seemed willing to take a bit of it, wasn’t willing to accept this. He nodded to Laws, who pushed his way out of the room and down the hall. Walker heard him yelling for Musso and Jen.

  “I find it hard to believe that your man lost Ramon so easily,” Holmes said in a barely controlled voice. “There was probably a vantage point that allowed a view of both the front and the rear. Why didn’t he choose the rear?”

  Vega lowered his eyes and shook his head.

  “What I’ve found in your country is a complete duality of loyalty, Colonel. I am sure that the men are loyal to you and the Knighthood. But I am also sure they are loyal to cartels. After all, if they can’t be home to protect their own, it is the cartels with whom their loved ones must deal.”

  “It is time for you to leave now,” Vega said.

  “Your cartels are worse than our mafia ever was. Our mafia had a rule that civilians were not meant to be harmed. When it was broken, the mafia made their own pay. In your country, it seems that life has very little worth. Your cartels kill at will and the Mexican people still support them.”

  Vega gave Holmes a pained look. “I don’t need you to come to my country and tell me how bad it is when you have armed men going into your schools and shooting children.”

  Holmes held up a finger on a hand that shook with anger. “The difference, Colonel Vega, is that the American people rise up against such things. We fight to make it not happen again. When are the Mexican people going to rise up against the cartels? When are the Knights of Valvanera going to do something for the people of Mexico other than protecting an icon?”

  Vega stepped back as if he were struck. He glared at Holmes for a long moment, then resurrected his pride. He straightened his shoulders and his shirt. “My people fight in their own way as they always have. My Knights fight things you can’t imagine. As for you, I expect you gone within the hour.” He bowed slightly. “Thank you for removing the foul cult of Los Desollados.” Then he spun and strode away.

  Holmes watched him depart, staring at the empty doorway for a moment. Then he realized Yank and Walker were still there, watching him. “What? You didn’t hear me earlier?”

  Both Walker and Yank hurried from the room, intent on being away from the ire of their leader. But not fast enough that they weren’t able to hear Holmes ask quietly, “Why’d you do it, J.J.? Why did you do it?”

  39

  ALAMOS PRIVATE AIRFIELD. MORNING.

  Seventy-two minutes later they had a couple of Vietnam War–era two-and-a-half-ton trucks with canvas tops, provided by the local militia, waiting for them out front. Triple Six loaded their gear while several Knights watched. They all had bruises from the fracas and were eager for the SEALs to go.

  Walker noted the presence of several men across the street. Although they were leaning casually against the side of a building and smoking cigarettes, their attention was resoundingly on the events in front of the old factory the Knights called their castle.

  Once loaded, the trucks carried them from the castle and along Las Auroras Boulevard to the private airport that served the greater metropolitan area of Alamos. Used mostly by Mexicans and the rare vacationing American, there wasn’t so much as a terminal. Yet as desolate as it was, the airport boasted a five-thousand-foot runway. Overkill for private airplanes, but something necessary for the billionaires and jets hauling cargo from sketchy South American countries.

  Laws sat in the front seat of the first truck, with Walker, Yank, Jen, and two techs in back. Holmes was in the front of the other truck with YaYa and Musso in the back. They brought J.J. with them, his corpse wrapped in a body bag and resting on top of the gear in the second truck.

  The airport was surrounded by a ten-foot-high chain-link fence, but the entrance was nothing more than a guard shack with a piece of wood that could be raised and lowered at the doorway. A laconic guard pulled himself away from a black and white television set and approached the driver’s door of the first truck. He wore military fatigues, a New York Yankees baseball cap, and flip-flops. He carried an AK-47.

  After a few moments of conversation, including the donation of two hundred American dollars, the guard let them through. Walker watched the man return to his seat, then pick up the telephone.

  The trucks roared to the far end of the tarmac. The distance to the fence was across fifty meters of dead grass. Yank and YaYa climbed out first. Holmes had decided to uparmor everyone and put them on alert. Not that he was worried about the Knights retaliating, but he needed to keep his men and the SPG personnel safe at all times. Everyone else stayed inside. A GAFE C-130 was inbound, but it would take the better part of an hour to arrive.

  It was ten o’clock in the morning and the temperature was beginning to rise. The insides of the trucks were stuffy, but at least it kept them out of the sun. Jen got Holmes’s attention and beckoned for him to join them in the back of their truck.

  As Holmes passed Walker, he squeezed his SEAL’s shoulder, then found a seat along one of the benches. “What gives?”

  “We have some information about our mystery beeper.” Holmes raised his eyebrows expectantly. “SPG-JSOC took the task while we were down,” she continued. “They found a choke point a hundred and fifty klicks north of Mexico City. Construction has routed everyone along a frontage road that then siphons traffic through a tunnel. We have a platform on task to provide overhead visual.” She paused, seeing the surprise on his face. “Yeah. Suddenly we get a satellite. I wonder how that happened?”

  Walker and the rest of them knew the answer to this hypothetical. Senator Withers had happened. He’d probably been saving up markers for quite some time.

  “Go on,” Holmes said.

  “We have the vehicles narrowed to a line of ten. Six cars, three trucks, and a motorcycle. We’ve discounted the motorcycle, but have left the other nine vehicles open as possibilities, although we’re thinking one of the trucks might be the best bet.”

  “Can’t we just call and narrow it down further?” Holmes asked.

  Jen nodded. “The number of the caller
appears on the beeper. We did it once, but don’t want to do it again. They can explain away one wrong number, but more would compromise the device.”

  “What’s the plan, then?”

  “We’re going to take a few snaps and run the faces through databases. It’s a long shot, but if one of the nine men driving has been affiliated with a cartel, we’ll know.”

  “What if all of them are affiliated with a cartel?” Holmes asked, the same question Walker had.

  “Then we’ll stop all of them. My agency has been in contact with SEDENA, the Mexican Secreteria de la Defensa Nacional, which governs our counterpart. They’re more than pleased to cooperate. Moving closer to Mexico City is to our benefit, really. The U.S. can call in some favors on multiple levels, unlike out here in the country.”

  “I don’t want this to become some huge party. Remember, Ms. Costello, we don’t exist.”

  “Coronado Pest Control,” she said, referring to the sign out front of their headquarters back on the island. She winked. “Gotcha. Musso is tracking the movement of the vehicles via his tablet.”

  “Were you able to get a data pack about Tenochtitlán?”

  “It’s downloaded and ready.”

  Static erupted from the MBITR Holmes had draped around his neck. “Ghost One, this is Ghost Five. We have beegees at nine o’clock.”

  Holmes stuck his head out of the back of the truck and looked. On the other side of the fence, two pickup trucks filled with men had already unloaded and another two pickups were at the main gate where no guard currently stood.

  “What the fuck is this, the Wild West?” Laws said over his MBITR. “SEALs, get your game on. Walker, get the cannon ready.”

  Holmes leaped down and assessed the situation.

  Walker opened the case and assembled the SR-25 within moments. He heard Holmes shout and saw their two drivers running away in the direction of the tree line, which meant at least part of the local militia was involved. Had the Knights of Valvanera set them up?

  He also became aware that the canvas would offer no cover if there was a firefight. And judging by the arsenal the men in the pickups were unloading, it appeared that there was going to be one hell of a war. Walker ordered all four members of SPG out of the vehicle and made sure the vehicle was between them and the attackers.

  Holmes assigned YaYa and Hoover to keep the civilians safe, ensuring that no threats would come from the tree line opposite the attacking forces. As YaYa moved into place, he sent Hoover racing to the tree line to find out whether or not hostile forces were lying in wait.

  Walker snapped the tripod into place and shimmied beneath the truck. The M35 two-and-a-half-ton truck, or deuce and a half, as it was better known, had ten wheels, two in front and four on each of two axles in the rear. The fuel pod was on the passenger side, which was the side away from the attackers. Whatever dumb luck had made that happen, Walker hoped for some more. He set up the barrel of the rifle midway beneath the cargo carriage, with his lower body jutting out from under the passenger side of the vehicle. He had a clear field of fire, and was in defilade. The closer their attackers moved toward the vehicle, the more impossible it would be for them to hit him. And with their AK-47s, at their current distance, he felt as safe as a nun during communion.

  The two pickups at the gate were coming through. They were old Toyotas with two men in each of the front seats and a pile of angry men in the back of each one.

  Walker sighted in on the driver’s-side wheel of the lead truck, breathed easy, then fired. The tire exploded. Sparks began to fly as the metal tore into the asphalt. The driver did exactly what he wasn’t supposed to do. He turned the opposite way of the blown tire and flipped the truck. Several men were flung free, but most ended up underneath the truck as it tumbled.

  But Walker had no time to count. He sighted on the driver of the second vehicle, whose mouth was wide open as he watched his compadres become ground meat. Walker fired, sending a 7.62mm round across thirty meters to pierce the glass and enter the man’s mouth, exploding the back of the man’s head onto the rear window. The driver’s reflex sent him turning the wheel to the right in a tight turn, which had he been going faster, would have caused the truck to flip. But when he died, so did the pressure on the accelerator, and the truck rolled to a stop.

  Yank and Laws opened fire with controlled three-round bursts from their HK416s. Without the suppressors, the sound of each bullet leaving the barrel was an assault on the very idea of peace, smashing it with the same sound little boys had once imagined when they’d fired finger pistols against aliens and commies in their backyards and on playgrounds.

  Only this was no playground.

  Nor was it supposed to be a battlefield.

  This was a civilian tarmac on the edge of a town in the center of Mexico, where the thin veneer of civilization was being ruined by the realities of the ruling cartels. These criminal soldiers had probably intimidated everyone with whom they’d come in contact. With murderous diplomacy, they’d bullied and killed until they’d gotten what they wanted. But they’d never come in contact with SEALs, much less the men of SEAL Team 666.

  Yank and Laws stood two meters apart in tactical crouches. Each of their rounds found a home inside the soft meat of a cartel soldier. Whether they were trying to bring their own weapons to bear, were trying to stand, or just trying to hide, they never made it. They fell, shocked and gut-shot, under the controlled, professional violence the SEALs were unleashing. Had they lived, they might have realized that what they’d thought was the art of modern warfare was a far cry from the reality.

  Holmes shouted, “Fall back!,” and he opened fire on the survivors so that Yank and Laws could move to safety, check their weapons, and replenish their ammunition.

  Walker shifted his aim to the men outside the fence just in time to see the explosive cloud behind a man holding a small tube.

  “LAW rocket!” he shouted.

  He heard everyone hit the deck as the 66mm antitank missile susurrated through the air. The rocket moved slowly enough for the eye to track it, but Walker didn’t try to look at it. Instead, he had his arms covering his head, well aware of the several tons of steel above him that was about to become an explosive shrapnel factory. But instead of exploding, the missile continued past. He heard the Doppler sound of it receding, then an explosion as it hit a tree somewhere in the tree line. The explosion was followed by brush crashing to the earth, then nothing more.

  “Fuck me,” Laws said in amazement. “It went right through the canvas.”

  Everyone knew how lucky they were. If the missile launcher had been fresh off the assembly line, a mosquito fart would have set off the detonator, but now it was forty years past its sell-by date, and no telling how many times the case had been rattled, shaken, and dropped. The detonator had completely ignored the fabric. Had it hit one of the three crossbeams, or had it hit the side of the truck, they might all be dead.

  Walker wasn’t about to give them a chance to fix their mistake. The M72 Light Anti-Armor Weapon rocket system was a point-and-shoot one-time-use system, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have more. And as he sighted in on the previous location, he saw that they did indeed have another. A man was bringing it out of a box now. Walker waited as the guy depressed two buttons and extended it to full length, then charged the weapon, making it firable. He continued to wait until the man brought it to his shoulder and took aim.

  Walker fired. His round met the missile just as it was coming free of the firing tube, forcing the crystal in the nose section backwards into the warhead, bypassing safeguards, and sending an electric charge into a detonator designed to pierce up to eight inches of steel plate or two feet of reinforced concrete. It detonated at eye level with the shooter and, with nothing to stop the force of the blast, killed everyone within ten feet.

  “Nicely done,” Laws said.

  “Plane. Incoming.” Holmes’s voice was low and steady. “We need to clear the area of beegees or they won’t sit down
.”

  They knew what needed to be done.

  Yank pulled two hand grenades and tossed them toward the two disabled trucks. They cooked down in midair and exploded as they hit. If there’d been anyone hiding, they weren’t any longer.

  Walker, Laws, and Holmes began a systematic takedown of the men near the fence. Like a game of Mexican cartel whack-a-mole, as soon as one showed his head, a round found it. Walker was quicker on the trigger than the other two, but after sixty seconds, they’d cleared the area of anyone alive.

  Walker heard two things next. The deep drone of a C-130 coming in to land and the sound of sirens from somewhere near town. One thing was for sure, they didn’t have time to get rolled up by the authorities. No telling what diplomatic hurdles they’d have to jump through just to get a phone call if they all ended up in a Mexican jail. The impulse would be to shoot their way free, but as protectors of freedom and the idea of law, it wasn’t something they’d ever really do.

  Walker pulled himself from under the deuce and a half. As he turned, he spied the ugly bug shape of the airplane coming in fast and hot. C-130s didn’t need a lot of space to land. This pilot ignored the first two thirds of the runway and came down on their end with a thump, followed by a squealing of brakes.

  “Everyone grab something,” Holmes shouted. “We need to be airborne before the sirens get here.”

  Walker glanced over and saw Jen, fear etched across her features as she grabbed a bag and a pelican case full of computer hardware. Her gaze was pinned to the ground in front of her. She was in shock. He’d seen it before. The brain pretty much shuts down until it can figure out a way to process what it has just seen and heard.

  The plane swung past and nosed back up the runway. The rear ramp was already down. Everyone ran toward it and threw their gear inside. Two more trips, and they had everything they came with. Holmes urged everyone inside and the plane began to gather speed.