by Don Mann
Akil laughed. Suárez hopped out the side door and rang the bell by the gate. When that didn’t work, he banged on it with the butt of his weapon. When no one answered, he climbed over and opened the gate from inside.
“What the fuck happened to that Ramón guy?” Akil asked.
“Who’s Ramón?”
“The old Mexican dude. The guard. Remember?”
“Maybe he took the day off.”
Mancini braked to a stop on the gravel. They were all soaked with sweat and out of water.
“What do you want to do now?” Akil asked.
Crocker thought fast. “You stay here and man the thirty cals,” he said. “Manny, you and Suárez help me carry Nieves and Davis out so they can get some fresh air. Then I want you to hydrate and guard the front gate. I’m gonna go find Lane.”
“Got it.”
“What about me?” Akil asked from the turret. “I need some fluids, too.”
“Suárez, on your way to the gate, bring a water bottle for Akil. See if you can find one with a nipple on it.”
“Very funny.”
It was all in fun, but then it wasn’t. Because as soon as Crocker stepped outside, he heard the Black Hawk roaring overhead. Looking up, he saw the helmeted gunners of the .50 cals leering down and gesturing.
He ignored them and with Suárez’s help lugged Nieves inside and set him on the porch sofa.
“Anyone home?” he called out. “We need help here.”
He hurried back to get Davis with Mancini’s help.
Suárez shrugged when he returned. “There’s no one here.”
“Where the hell did they go?” Crocker asked, trying to catch his breath as he peered into the shadow-filled living room.
Suárez shrugged, then seemed to notice a dark stream of something slowly creeping out through the living room door.
“What’s that?” asked Crocker.
The second he finished posing the question, he knew the answer. Stepping over the dark puddle on the tile floor, he entered the living room and was hit by the thick, musky smell of death. His eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness and made out four stacked, headless bodies in the middle of the floor.
“Holy shit.”
“God have mercy,” Suárez groaned at his side.
“Look.” Mancini pointed to four heads lying on the coffee table like Halloween masks. Lane, red-haired Karen Steele, Sheriff Higgins, and some blond-haired guy Crocker hadn’t met. Karen had the added indignity of a severed penis stuffed in her mouth.
“Savages,” Crocker groaned as he ripped down one of the mustard-colored curtains and laid it over the heads. Then he used its partner to cover the bodies.
“That’s what they plan to do to us,” Suárez muttered as he made the sign of the cross.
“Fuck that,” Crocker growled. The savagery of the deaths unleashed a rage inside him that was almost uncontainable. Finding the handheld, he pushed a button and said, “Akil, you read me?”
“Yo. Where’s my fucking water?”
“That Black Hawk still hovering over you?”
“Say fifty feet with assholes in the doors shooting me the bird.”
“You got a good bead on them?”
“You know it.”
“Take it down!”
“Now?”
“Yeah, now!” Crocker shouted.
“Copy.”
He stood seething with anger and listened to the twin .30 cals roar outside, which had a strange calming effect. And he realized that he had reached a state of absolute freedom that he’d almost never felt before. He didn’t care about orders, or protocols, or whether he died in Mexico or not. He was going to pay the fuckers back who had kidnapped Lisa and Olivia Clark, wounded Nieves and Davis, and desecrated Lane, Steele, and the others, no matter what it took.
The cacophony of firing continued. Mancini screamed in his ear. “Boss. Boss, what the hell are you doing?”
Crocker pushed him in the direction of the front gate. “You and Suárez go. Don’t let anyone in the gate! Do whatever it takes.”
Mancini opened his mouth to say something but was drowned out by an explosion. As the sound dissipated, Crocker heard Akil shout over the radio, “Got ’em! Mission accomplished!”
His ears followed the whining sound of the injured Black Hawk as it spun out of control, clipped the branch of a tree, and crashed somewhere in the yard. He didn’t take the time to look.
“Make sure you finish off any survivors,” he said into the radio. “Then stay on alert. Anyone who approaches this house either by air or on land, you shoot them unless I tell you not to.”
“Yeah, boss. Balls to the wall!”
He reached Nieves as his body started to convulse. There was nothing he could do except clear his tongue with one hand so he didn’t choke on it, and wrap the rug on the floor around him to keep him warm.
No more casualties, he said to himself, praying to God and remembering the recent string of rotten luck. I can’t allow another one.
He punched one of the emergency numbers Lane had programmed into the cell phone.
A smooth woman’s voice came on the line. “Who’s this?”
“Crocker. I’m with Black Cell at the FBI safe house in Zapopan. It’s been hit. Four people are dead.”
“What do you mean, it’s been hit?” the CIA station duty officer asked.
“You heard me. Find Jenson and tell him Crocker called and the mission went to shit. We just got back to the safe house and found Lane, Steele, and two others dead in the living room. Decapitated.”
“Lane? David Lane?”
“Yes!”
The woman on the other end gasped, “Oh, my God!”
“It’s awful.”
“David Lane?”
“Yes.”
“That was you who battled the police in Puerto del Hiero?” she asked.
“Yes,” Crocker answered. “We were ambushed by Federales. We’re back at the safe house now. I’ve got two severely injured men with me who need emergency medical assistance. I’m not going to let them die. How long is it going to take you to get a team out here?”
“I’ll have to check.”
“Where are you?”
“Mexico City. Hold on.”
She came back half a minute later and said, “Twenty minutes, maybe less.”
“They’ll be dead by then,” Crocker responded. “Is there a hospital nearby?”
“You’re in Zapopan now?”
“Correct.”
“Hospital San Javier is off Calle Parra about three minutes away.”
“I need directions.”
She transmitted them over the phone, and Crocker scribbled them down—a right at the first intersection and two lefts past a big park. “We’re going there now,” he said.
“How?”
“We’ve got an M706 that we took from the Federal Police.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Have your people meet us at the hospital. Call the consul, the ambassador, the mayor, anyone you think can help. We’re going in armed and the Mexicans are on our tail.”
“That’s ill advised. Let me get Mr. Jenson on the line.”
“Goodbye.”
Crocker radioed Suárez and Mancini and asked them if they saw any police activity on the street.
“Not yet,” Mancini reported.
“Any sign of Ramón?”
“Negative.”
“Okay,” Crocker said. “I want you to hurry back here and help reload Nieves and Davis onto the 706.”
“Aye-aye.”
Through the screen porch door, he watched the Black Hawk continue to burn out at the far end of the swimming pool as the men ran toward him.
They reloaded the two injured men; then Mancini climbed into the driver’s seat and asked, “Where’re we going?”
Crocker read the directions. Five minutes later, he pointed to the INGRESO DE EMERGENCIAS sign and Mancini steered the metal beast up to the entran
ce and stopped in front of a circular green-glassed atrium.
Seeing the armored car, the guard at the entrance dropped the M-1 he was holding and ran into the two-story hospital. The four-man construction crew that was repaving an outdoor staircase watched openmouthed as the grime-covered Americans stepped out of the vehicle, armed and ready. Crocker was still bare-chested. He and Suárez were bleeding from superficial wounds to their faces and backs.
Suárez took charge, grabbing orderlies and shouting instructions in Spanish.
Medical personnel wearing light-green tunics scrambled. Gurneys and nurses appeared. The wounded men were wheeled inside.
A weary Crocker turned to Mancini and said, “Relieve Akil in the M706. You and Suárez guard the door. Don’t let anyone in or out.”
“Looks like we’re taking the whole hospital hostage.”
“If that’s what it takes to save our men, yes.”
Chapter Twelve
Common sense is not so common.
—Voltaire
An hour later, Crocker stood as he watched a young Mexican doctor pass through swinging double doors and remove the white surgical mask from his face. He squinted, expecting the worst.
“The American consul and governor of the state of Jalisco are in the waiting room and want to talk to you,” the tall doctor said, looking at the scratches that had bled through the short-sleeved medical shirt a nurse had given Crocker. “Maybe we should clean you up first.”
“Not necessary,” Crocker answered, peering into the man’s small brown eyes.
He stood at least an inch taller than Crocker, who was six two. The sterling-silver plate on the front pocket of his white coat read RUBÉN WERNER. Crocker’s first wife, who was a German teacher, had told him that Werner meant “uncertain” in German.
“How are my men?” he asked.
“The blond gentleman…”
“Davis.”
“I don’t know if I should be talking to you about this.”
“Why not?”
“Because this is an extraordinary situation, and one that I find deplorable.”
“I don’t give a shit what you think. Tell me about my men.”
The doctor tightened his jaw and nodded. “Mr. Davis,” he pronounced slowly. “His collarbone was badly fractured. We’ve cleaned the wound and set the bone for the time being, but he’s probably going to need a bone graft of some kind.”
“When?”
“I’ve called a specialist from Mexico City who will arrive tomorrow.”
Crocker had spent the last sixty minutes thinking ahead and dealing with hard realities. He knew that the hospital was surrounded by Mexican police and army units that were threatening to raid the building.
“Davis can’t be moved?” he asked.
“Not for the next several days, until the injury is set properly and there’s no risk of infection.”
“What about Nieves?” Crocker asked.
“Nieves is more problematic. As you know, he lost a great deal of blood. We’ve given him transfusions, so his vital signs and stats are improving. But he’s still in a coma.”
Crocker nodded. At least he wasn’t dead.
He said, “Thanks, Doc. I appreciate what you’ve done.”
He followed Dr. Werner down a long hall, his dirty, bloody hiking boots echoing off the pale-blue walls. Nurses and orderlies poked their heads out of rooms and hallways to steal a glance at him. He was totally focused on getting his men out of there and continuing to pursue the Jackal. And he was very aware that the last hours of Lisa and Olivia Clark’s lives were passing by, if they weren’t dead already.
Crocker was so tired that he started to hallucinate. The nurse in the room to his right turned into his mother. Several orderlies standing ahead turned into schoolgirls in uniforms.
Staring at them, he remembered a mission he had gone on with Clark and Ritchie during the First Gulf War. It involved taking out six armed MA2-543 SCUD Transporter/Erector/Launcher missile installations hidden in the garden of a girls’ high school.
They had dyed their beards and mustaches black, parachuted onto a soccer field about a quarter mile away from the school in the middle of the night, taken out the six Iraqi guards, and disabled both the vehicles and the Shabab-2 engines of the thirty-four-foot-long Al-Hussein rockets.
Mission accomplished, they had retreated to an abandoned chemical plant north of the city and hidden in a drainage pipe, where Clark was bitten by a desert horned viper—one of several very lethal snakes native to Iraq.
Crocker had elevated Clark’s wrist, cleansed the wound, tying a not-too-tight tourniquet three inches above the wrist, and applied a Sawyer venom extractor he kept in his EM kit, which looked like a large yellow syringe.
He saw the extractor now. Blood oozed out of it.
“Boss.”
“What?”
Crocker blinked and realized that he and the doctor were standing in a large waiting room. Thirty or so men—visitors to the hospital and personnel—stared at him. They looked up from their positions on the floor, standing, and sitting in green chairs.
Mancini stood facing him with an MP7 strapped across his chest. “You okay, boss?”
Crocker nodded.
“We released all the women and children.”
“Good.”
“The Mexican commander outside has been demanding our surrender and I’ve been telling him to go to hell. I don’t trust any of them.”
“Neither do I.”
“Suárez has been outstanding.”
A helicopter passed over the building, rattling the windows. Through the double doors he saw tanks, news vans, and soldiers in riot gear. They looked real.
“The consul and governor are waiting in the administrator’s office, down the hall,” Mancini said, pointing to a narrow fluorescent-lit hallway to his right.
“Thanks. See if you can find me a glass of water or a cup of coffee.”
Crocker turned the knob of the pale beige door and entered, holding his HK416 and SIG Sauer. The five men inside regarded him with varying degrees of fear, contempt, and suspicion, then introduced themselves one by one.
The U.S. consul was young and full faced, with short hair and a dark beard. He seemed completely overwhelmed. The governor of Jalisco was a good-looking man with gray hair, dressed in an expensive suit and cowboy boots. He acted like someone who was pleased with himself, which struck Crocker as completely inappropriate.
The other three men included the hospital administrator and two of the governor’s aides. A male nurse brought bottles of water, a cup of black coffee for Crocker, and a bowl of fruit.
Crocker downed the coffee and drank half a bottle of water. His ability to focus quickly improved. In blunt language he described what had transpired that morning, starting with the raid on the house in Puerto del Hiero and the battle with police.
The governor interrupted. “You and your men are in my country illegally, and you have committed criminal acts. I advise you to surrender immediately.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Crocker countered.
“If you surrender now, I’ll try to arrange your safe passage back to the United States, but I can’t guarantee that.”
“We’re not interested in leaving until we’ve completed our mission, which is to rescue Lisa and Olivia Clark.”
“Our security forces are capable of doing that,” the governor said.
Crocker shook his head and glanced at the clock on the wall, which reminded him that valuable time was ticking past.
The consul tried to act as conciliator, explaining the positions of both governments and the negative effect the Clarks’ deaths would have on U.S.-Mexican relations.
The governor stepped forward aggressively and pointed a finger at Crocker. “As Mexicans, we won’t tolerate violations and insults to our sovereignty.”
Crocker wanted to clock him in the mouth but held himself back. Turning to the consul, he said, “Get some people in
here who make sense.”
An hour later the CIA station chief, Max Jenson, arrived with the Mexican deputy minister of defense.
The three men retired to the administrator’s office, and within fifteen minutes, a deal was worked out. First, they waited for a helicopter to ferry Nieves and Davis to a hospital in Mexico City. Then Crocker and his men relinquished control over the hospital and the M706 and were released into the custody of Jenson and the U.S. consul. The Mexican deputy minister promised that once the two wounded men were healthy enough, they would be transferred to a recovery center in the States.
As he sat in the back of an SUV that sped through the streets of Guadalajara, Crocker’s body begged to sleep, but his brain wouldn’t let him, pushing the name Maria to the surface over and over.
Once he focused enough to understand who Maria was and why she was important, he said out loud, “We’ve got to find her.”
But no one responded. Mancini, Akil, and Suárez sat behind him, snoring, and the driver kept staring ahead.
Jenson in the passenger seat finished his cell phone call, pulled the buds out of his ears, turned back to Crocker, and said, “I have good news and bad. The good news is that Nieves was given a blood transfusion and is responding to pain and verbal stimuli.”
“He and Davis have arrived in Mexico City?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the bad news?” Crocker asked.
“We’ve got nothing on the Clarks’ new location.”
“What about the Jackal?” Mancini asked.
“Nothing on him, either.”
“We need to find Maria,” suggested Crocker.
The sandy-haired CIA officer at the wheel looked over this shoulder and finally spoke. “Maria isn’t her real name.”
“What is it?”
“Claudia Matamoros.”
“Find her,” Jenson barked, looking at his watch. “We’ve got nine hours.”
Lisa dreamt that she was in the woods being chased by a pack of jackals like the ones she’d seen in the backyard. Her lungs burned and the muscles in her calves ached as she ran over the mossy, leaf-covered ground, trying to keep from slipping. Struggling, she veered right, into the cover of high green grass that bordered a body of water.