Each magazine held thirty-five rounds, which he could burn through in seconds, requiring him to pause for a few seconds to reload. With all of the vehicles advancing simultaneously, he’d be lucky to knock two or three of them out of commission before they overwhelmed the SUV and moved on to overtake the Fishers’ vehicle. Maybe these crazies were smarter than they acted, luring him into expending all of his higher-capacity ammunition drums before the big attack.
“Switch to three-round bursts,” said Alpha. “Take one vehicle down at a time.”
“Got it,” he said, flipping the selector switch to burst.
Dozens of cartel gunmen simultaneously leaned out of the windows and stood up in pickup truck beds behind them and began firing on full automatic. Bullets pinged against the back of the SUV and cracked past the side windows, some rattling through the cabin.
“Here they come!” said David, pressing his rifle’s fore grip against the seat back.
Before he stared firing, the SUV veered left, and for a fraction of a second, he thought Alpha had taken a ricochet to the face. When he looked over his shoulder to check, he saw the Fishers’ SUV drop rapidly into place next to them.
A puff of white smoke left the back of the adjacent SUV, trailing away behind them as the Fishers’ SUV rocketed ahead of them again. David turned his head toward the approaching swarm in time to see the chrome grille of a black lowrider pickup truck explode. The truck instantly swerved right and decelerated, barely clipping the back end of a red sedan before disappearing behind the swarm.
“Direct hit!” yelled David.
A white SUV raced from the back of the pursuing pack to take the lowrider truck’s place. One down. Too many to go.
David fired, concentrating his bursts on the raised yellow pickup in the middle. The pickup took several hits across the windshield before it slowed and tucked behind the front line. He switched to the adjacent sedan, placing his first burst into the glass directly in front of the driver. The vehicle swerved left into the void left by the yellow pickup, dropping out of formation.
Two down. And the cartel had closed two-thirds of the gap. This was about to get interesting.
Alpha changed lanes again, letting the Fishers’ SUV fall rapidly into place next to them. Another puff of smoke sailed toward the advancing horde, followed by a crunching detonation at least twenty feet behind the farthest cartel vehicle. Shit. Fisher had gotten lucky with his first shot. A dozen bullets slapped into the back of the adjacent SUV before it sped forward again, leaving David’s vehicle to absorb the brunt of the cartel’s fusillade.
They were about to take more than bullets. A white truck veered diagonally from the left side of the formation, heading straight for the SUV.
“Speed up and turn right!” yelled David.
The truck drifted quickly into his rifle sight, taking two successive bursts to the windshield, which failed to stop the rapidly closing vehicle. He pressed the trigger until the magazine was empty, then braced for impact. The truck slammed into their rear right corner, violently jarring them forward. David was knocked backward against the front passenger seat, dropping his rifle in the foot well. By the time he’d retrieved it, the white truck loomed in the rear passenger side window, at least three gunmen aiming rifles into the SUV.
“Hang on!” said Alpha, slamming on the brakes.
The white truck zoomed past, exploding a moment later from a grenade fired by Fisher from the back of the lead SUV. Alpha kept on the brakes, sending them straight into the swarm. The cartel drivers reacted instinctively to the unexpected maneuver, swerving desperately out of their way. They scraped down the side of the shiny yellow pickup truck, dropping back a dozen or more car lengths before Alpha hit the accelerator.
David reloaded his rifle and leaned through the space between the two front seats, aiming through the front windshield. “Looks like that fucked them up.”
“Not for long,” said Alpha, speeding back into the group.
The semiorganized formation broke apart, more than half of the cars decelerating. David fired several bursts, spread between the slowing vehicles, as Alpha swerved past them to reach the Fishers’ SUV, which led a small cluster of cartel cars by a mere car length. Their surprise move had only delayed the inevitable.
“How far out is Jose?” yelled David, reloading.
“I don’t know!” said Alpha, ducking when a bullet struck the top of the steering wheel.
Another bullet hit the top of the dashboard and ricocheted into Carlos’s shoulder, splashing David’s face with the dead man’s blood.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” he said, snapping off bursts into the yellow truck’s rear window.
“He’s close!” said Alpha. “Left side! Left side!”
David shifted to the window behind Alpha and began emptying the magazine into a car that had sped next to them. Dozens of bullets answered, thumping against the ballistic glass and protected door. A few passed between the front and back doors, striking the driver’s seat back and exploding into the cabin. If David had been at the opposite window, he would have taken a few of them in the back. At this point, it was only a time before a cartel bullet found its mark.
“We can’t keep this up much longer!” he yelled, slapping a new magazine home.
“We don’t have a choice!”
I guess not. David returned to the window, searching for the car he had just riddled with bullets. The scene around them had changed dramatically in the past few seconds. They were sealed in on the left. A quick glance behind them and to the right revealed the same problem. They were boxed in.
“Get down!” screamed Alpha, sending David diving flat onto the backseat.
The highway on both sides of them exploded, lifting the back of the SUV into the air. When the vehicle slammed down on the road again, it didn’t bounce hard off the road like he expected. It slammed flat into it with a heavy metallic crunch and screeched as metal ground against concrete until the SUV slowed to a stop.
“Holy shit,” muttered Alpha.
David lifted his head far enough to look through the front windshield. The shiny yellow pickup truck drifted slowly across the right shoulder of the northbound lanes, continuing its trajectory until it came to a sudden, brutal stop against a short, stout tree.
Nathan’s SUV was stopped on the opposite side, a little farther down the highway. A white puff of smoke appeared in its rear lift gate window, followed a sharp detonation that engulfed the pickup truck.
“Holy shit is right,” said David.
“Take a look behind us.”
David peeked over the seat back. The shattered, smoking remains of six automobiles lay scattered across the highway several hundred feet back. He stared at them for a few seconds before he noticed that the entire back quarter of their own SUV was missing.
“Uh . . . we seem to have a problem.”
“And I smell gas,” said Alpha, opening his door in a hurry.
“I’m pretty sure the gas tank is gone, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Alpha opened his door and helped him out, then walked ahead of him to the back of the SUV, where he stopped and shook his head. David saw it, too, when he joined him: the jagged metal edge where the back had been torn away. Smooth, evenly spaced symmetrical holes riddled the frame.
Nothing either SUV might’ve done could’ve produced these results. Jose must have placed a line of claymore mines across the highway and detonated the mines in the adjacent lanes.
“Your boss is fucking crazy,” David said.
“More like a fucking asshole,” muttered Alpha under his breath.
“What?”
“Nothing,” said Alpha, an unsettled look on his face.
David looked at him for a moment before glancing back at the shredded metal. A few of the claymore mines’ steel balls had struck within a foot of the rear passenger door. It finally fully hit him. “Jesus,” he mumbled.
“Yeah,” said Alpha, patting him on the
back. “Let’s get out of here.”
CHAPTER 49
From the side of the interstate a quarter mile north, Jose scanned the ambush point with his rifle scope, seeing nothing he could classify as a remaining threat. Some of the vehicles caught in the detonation had tumbled across the median into the southbound lanes, and others had careened into the desert brush on the other side. Judging by the damage done to the cars in plain sight, he wasn’t at all concerned about survivors.
He shifted the magnified view to the lone SUV several hundred feet beyond the first piles of wreckage. Carlos sat lifeless in the front passenger seat, head hanging forward over his bloodied vest. Judging by the dark color of the blood covering the headrest and door window, Jose assumed that Carlos had been killed long before they reached the ambush point.
David Quinn and Alpha stood next to the rear of the disabled vehicle, examining the damage. Alpha patted Quinn on the back, and they both started jogging in the direction of the other SUV and Jose.
Jose was confident the two of them had put it together after a look at the condition of the back of the SUV, given the depth of their familiarity with claymores. They’d also know it would have been impossible to remote-detonate the mines and guarantee their safety. It had been pure chance that Quinn and Alpha had survived.
In a few minutes, he’d have to face the men he’d essentially sacrificed to keep Fisher safe. Until then, he had work to do. They were still hundreds of miles inside cartel-controlled territory, with zero confirmed information regarding what to expect from the Sinaloa in terms of a wider response.
Cerberus had no shortage of money to throw at the problem, so they should assume for now that the Sinaloa would make a real effort to find them. With Tucson less than thirty miles north, they needed to reach the first of the Green Valley exits within no more than ten minutes. Moving west on the side roads out of Green Valley would give them a shot at avoiding the primary cartel lookout points. Of course, if Cerberus threw serious cash at the cartel bosses, they could face a cartel snitch at every intersection from here to Las Vegas.
He jogged across the highway to Jeremy Baker, who had just dispatched a two-person team to check the yellow pickup truck. The rifle grenade fired by the surprisingly resourceful Nathan Fisher appeared conclusive, but nobody was taking any chances.
“Jeremy. Get in touch with Vegas station and have them deploy a scout team to clear Route 93. Ideally, I’d like to know if that route’s viable by the time we reach Phoenix.”
“That might be a little tight.”
“We can go twenty miles past Phoenix on Route 60 before making a hard decision, so they have some leeway.”
“Maybe we should default to the western route and head up through Havasu City. The closer we move to California, the less cartel activity.”
“I’m worried about the dust storm moving in,” said Jose. “The western route adds close to three hours to the trip.”
“We’d be moving away from the storm.”
“Until we turn north. This one is going to sweep well into California. If 93 is clear, I want to shoot straight up from Phoenix. We should be able to reach Kingman before the storm hits. I’d feel a lot better about getting stranded in Kingman than along the side of the road.”
“I’ll get Vegas station moving,” said Jeremy, glancing south on the highway toward Quinn and Alpha. “You’re really going to make them run the whole way?”
“I’m hoping they’ll be too tired to punch me in the face when they get here,” said Jose.
“I don’t know, they look like they’re in pretty good shape.”
Jose shot him a sideways glance.
“Hey,” Jeremy said. “You made the right call. Mission comes first. Neither of them is a stranger to that concept.”
“I know, but it doesn’t make it any easier to face them,” said Jose. “Or the rest of the crew.”
“They understand the stakes, or they wouldn’t be here. The crew believes in you. Believes in what you’re trying to accomplish,” said Jeremy. “If you think Fisher is the key to our mission, then protecting Fisher is the mission.”
“I wish he was a more willing key.”
“He’ll come around,” said Jeremy, taking out his satellite phone.
Jose hoped so. He’d staked everything on it, effectively setting in motion a series of irrevocable events. Money had changed hands. Promises had been sealed. Costly equipment had been purchased. They wouldn’t get a second shot at this.
He walked about thirty feet north along the highway toward the battered SUV that had kept the Fishers alive. Through the dusty, bullet-chipped rear passenger window, he caught a glimpse of Keira leaning her head back. He presumed she was holding Owen, since he didn’t see the boy outside the vehicle. Hugging him fiercely, he imagined, after what they had been through this morning.
The SUV looked barely serviceable. He wished there was an easy way to get the two of them out of the line of fire. Maybe he could charter a private jet to fly them out of Las Vegas to any destination they chose—so long as it was without Nathan.
Jose approached Nathan and Jackson, who were busy emptying the cargo compartment.
“Why are you off-loading?” said Jose. “We’re leaving immediately.”
“You might want to ask Bravo.”
“Where did he—” started Jose, hearing a curse from the unobserved side of the vehicle.
He stepped behind them and glanced around the back of the vehicle. Bravo held a lug wrench firmly with two hands, loosening the rear right tire.
“Can the tire go another twenty miles?” yelled Jose.
Bravo didn’t stop turning the wrench. “I have no idea how they lasted this long.”
“They?” he said, not liking the sound of that.
“Both rear tires are fucked. Didn’t you notice? If I turn the engine on, you can hear the onboard compressor working overtime to keep the pressure at the minimum. The run-flats were designed for one or two holes, not twenty.”
“How long to change them?” said Jose, kneeling next to him.
“Twenty minutes? Maybe faster if we get everyone involved. They’re a little more complicated because of the self-inflation system.”
“We don’t have twenty minutes. Transfer everything to the other vehicles. Including the spare.”
“You have room for seven more passengers?” said Bravo, dropping the wrench to the road.
“We’ll have to make it work,” said Jose, standing up to locate Jeremy.
He spotted him in the brush next to one of their hidden cars on the other side of the highway, speaking on his phone.
“Jeremy!” he said. “We need to pack everyone into the three remaining vehicles. This one is a no go!”
Jeremy nodded brusquely, continuing the call for several seconds before putting the phone away. “Vegas station is sending two cars south. It’ll take them close to four hours to clear the entire route to our decision point north of Phoenix.”
“We’ll probably arrive at the same time, if we don’t run into problems. The back roads around Tucson or Phoenix will take some time,” said Jose. “I want to be on the road in under two minutes.”
“We can make that happen,” said Jeremy before turning to speak into his headset.
Vehicle engines roared to life all around them. Jose returned to Nathan.
“Nathan, is everyone all right?”
“A bit banged up, but considering the circumstances—yes.”
“Excellent. I’m glad to see our modifications held up against heavy gunfire. We’re not out of the woods yet.”
“Where are we headed?” said Nathan, eyeing him skeptically.
“Vegas,” said Jose. “That’s our new base of operations.”
“Yours or CLM’s?”
“Both, eventually.”
“I presume you didn’t choose Vegas for its inexpensive real estate?”
“What can I say?” said Jose. “The Hoover Dam is my new favorite tourist site.”
<
br /> Nathan cracked a grin and extended his hand. “I owe you a second thank-you, even though you followed us.”
Jose shook hands with Nathan.
“Just a precaution, and a lucky one at that. We can talk about this in detail during our four-hour, partially air-conditioned drive north. Right now I have to take care of a few things before we take off,” he said, turning to help the team reorganize the cars.
“One last thing,” said Nathan.
Jose stopped and faced him. “Yes?”
“David rides with us.”
“Sure,” said Jose. “If he doesn’t mind driving.”
“I’m sure David won’t mind driving, especially if it improves his chances of staying alive.”
The mild-mannered water reclamation engineer was even more perceptive than he’d imagined. Nathan’s car would be the most protected vehicle in the convoy.
“You’re critical to our plan, Nathan,” said Jose.
“So is David. You need to consider him just as important if you want my help. We ride together.”
“Very well,” said Jose. “Get your family ready to move. We have a tight schedule. The New Dust Bowl has spawned another dust storm, and it’s headed this way.”
As if on cue, a sudden blast of warm wind swept across the highway, flapping his checkered shemagh scarf. Jose searched the partially cloudy sky east of the highway, bothered by the unexpected gust. The horizon revealed nothing unusual, the storm still a few hundred miles away. He reminded himself to check the weather again once they got moving. Weather patterns across the Wasteland states had become hopelessly unpredictable over the past decade, and micro dust storms had been known to rise up in advance of the massive New Dust Bowl events. Getting stuck this deep in cartel territory during a sandstorm would be a problem.
The sound of dragging footsteps drew his attention south, to the two men who had risen from the ashes of their sacrifice down the freeway. Jose rubbed his chin, absorbing their tired looks as they approached. He started to speak but was cut off by Alpha.
Rogue State (Fractured State Series Book 2) Page 25