by Peter Nealen
As I got back into the Expedition, Larry said, “That looked uncomfortable.”
I grunted as I slammed the door. “It was.” I stared at the Suburbans as the convoy started moving again, letting every bit of malevolence I felt come out. “I'm looking forward to this coming to a head so I can deal with that fucker.”
Larry glanced at me briefly. “You know, if I didn't know you better, I'd say that, sooner or later, that temper of yours is going to get us into trouble.”
“I haven't killed him yet, have I?” I demanded.
“No, but you sure want to,” he replied.
“Of course I do,” I said. “He's an asshole. Worse, he's probably the kind of asshole that we generally get paid to shoot in the face. But killing him isn't the mission now, so look at me being the epitome of restraint.”
It was an uncomfortable fact that I'd had to come to terms with in the last couple of years. The world is not broken down neatly into white-hats and black-hats. A lot of the time, to survive and navigate the murky waters of modern conflict, we had to leave bad people alone in order to get at worse people. This was going to be another case of that unfortunate truth dominating our actions, in spades.
I switched on my red-lens flashlight and went back to tracking our progress on the map. If you're not navigating, you're lost, as an old instructor had told me once.
It was early morning when we approached Zacatecas. We were driving into the rising sun, which was probably why we didn't see what was hanging from the pedestrian overpass over the highway until we were almost right underneath it.
Five corpses dangled from the footbridge. All five were missing their hands. One had a sign hanging around its neck, with a crude scrawl in Spanish across it, along with a similarly crudely drawn skull.
“What the fuck...” Larry murmured as we drove beneath the bodies.
I didn't say anything. I'd heard about the “corpse messaging” being done in Mexico, but this was the first time, so far, that I'd actually seen it. It reminded me of some of the savage shit ISIS had done in Iraq.
We didn't stay on the highway, but moved into the city, paralleling the railroad tracks. The architecture had changed a lot since Hermosillo. Most of the buildings were now brick and stone blocks, some painted red, green, or blue. It reminded me of Sulaymaniyah, in Kurdistan, just with everything in Spanish (except for the big DuPont sign painted on the side of one building).
Of course, Sulaymaniyah hadn't had corpses hanging from the overpass. ISIS hadn't gotten that far into Kurdistan. As we drove through the outskirts of the city, graffiti proclaimed the presence of Los Zetas in one area, Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación in another, and big death's heads with “Los Hijos de la Muerte” scrawled around them, in several places over the Zetas or CJNG tags.
Those handless corpses kept weighing on my mind. I'd thought the jihadis were some special kind of psychos, but it looked like Mexico was going to teach us all just how wrong that assessment was. I'd grown up focused on a protracted, multi-national guerrilla war with Islamists, centered on the Middle East, North Africa, and Southwest Asia, while all the while, this shitstorm had been raging right on our doorstep, producing atrocities that would make some Al Qaeda motherfuckers puke. The more I saw, the more I realized how much we'd gotten fixated on just one front out of many. Chaos and savagery wasn't limited to the Muslim countries; it was everywhere, and it was spreading.
I wondered how many of the people making up stories about Caliphate armies lurking on the border understood just what kind of a horror show was actually down here, without any need for Islamists to perpetrate it.
The Suburbans pulled over. We had pushed a couple of miles in, but we really weren't all the way into the city yet. Several of the dark-suited goons got out and took up a halfway decent security posture before Ernesto got out and stood there, looking back at us, waiting.
“Well, I guess we shouldn't keep fuckhead waiting too long,” I muttered. In the interests of attracting no more attention than we already had, I left my rifle in the vehicle, and made sure my shirt was over my pistol before I got out and walked forward to join Harold and Eric at the Yukon. Together, the three of us walked up to Ernesto.
“Now that we're in the city, you stay close and you don't get separated from us,” Ernesto said matter-of-factly. He still managed to sound like an asshole in spite of the businesslike words. “Zacatecas is a battleground right now. Los Zetas, the Mata Zetas, and Los Hijos are all fighting for control of the city. There has been open fighting during the day. If we find ourselves in the middle of a shooting, we must push onward. We will not wait for you; keep up.”
“Who is Los Hijos?” Harold asked. I hadn't heard of them, either, but I wasn't going to give Ernesto the satisfaction of lecturing like a smarmy fuck.
He didn't lecture, though. He just looked at Harold like he'd just scraped him off his shoe and said, “Los Hijos de la Muerte. They were part of the Gúzman-Loera Federation once. Now they are trying to become a power in Mexico themselves.” Without another word, he turned and got back into his Suburban.
The Sons of Death. That much Spanish I knew. They were sure to be a cheerful bunch. Considering the death's head on the sign that had been hanging around that one corpse's neck at the footbridge, I suspected we'd already seen some of their handiwork.
Getting back in the vehicles, we continued into the city. There didn't seem to be an actual flat space in the entirety of the city limits; there was always a hill or a stone retaining wall on one side of the road or another. The walls provided plenty of space for more graffiti, most of it still aligned with one of the three major groups. Looking down the side streets, it became more obvious just how old Zacatecas was; the main thoroughfares might have been asphalt, but the side streets were mostly cobblestone.
Weaving through the streets, I heard gunfire a couple of times. As we started down yet another hill, I saw what was unmistakably the aftermath of an IED strike. Larry swung his head to look at it as we drove by. “I didn't know they were using IEDs down here,” he said. “All I've ever heard about was shootings and beheadings.”
“Well, shit,” I said, “from what I understand, the beheading idea came from AQI's videos that were coming out of Iraq. If they could get inspired by that shit, who's to say they wouldn't find 'inspiration' from other things those fuckholes did?”
The convoy stayed roughly parallel to the railroad tracks, except when the tracks took a long swing south. Nobody fucked with us, though we got eyeballed by openly armed cartel gunmen and policia alike. Finally, we passed a soccer field and turned into a vaguely industrial-looking building complex. Instead of stopping in the parking lot, though, the Suburbans led the way downhill into an open gravel lot right next to the tracks. A couple of run-down, graffiti-scrawled brick houses squatted at the entrance, and the Zacatecas train station sat just across the tracks, with the red and gold dome and spire of the Parroquia de Nuestra Señora de Fatima looming above it.
The Suburbans fanned out against one of the brick buildings, and a hand stretched out of an open window to wave us alongside. We parked almost bumper-to-bumper; the lot wasn't very large.
We weren't the first ones to arrive, either. There were two really beat-up looking Chevy vans parked parallel to the tracks. Two men in dark slacks and white shirts were standing next to the front van, smoking cigarettes.
I studied them as we sat and waited. I wasn't getting out until Ernesto and his cronies did. I did have my rifle across my lap, both hands on it under the cover. If anything was really going to go pear-shaped, it was probably going to happen here.
The longer I studied the pair waiting by the van, the more my hackles went up. They were both brown skinned, black-haired, and bearded, but they didn't carry themselves like Mexicans, at least not to my eyes. They didn't line up with the machismo aggressiveness of the gangbangers and cartels. I became increasingly convinced that they weren't from around there.
“What the hell are we waiting for?” Larry muttered. He had on
e hand on the steering wheel, one hand on his STI Tactical in his lap. “If these are our guys, why aren't we making the transfer and getting gone?”
I didn't say anything at first. I was still sizing up the situation. “I'd be willing to bet that there's a third party coming,” I said after thinking it over. “I think we're waiting on another player.”
“Awesome,” was all he said. He didn't sound enthused.
It took the third party another half an hour to show up. When they did, I got even more of a sinking feeling in my gut.
They came in two trucks and a BMW. One of the trucks was a fucking technical; sheet steel had been welded over the cab and there was a Ma Deuce on a pintle mount in the bed. They had to be pretty fucking confident to be running around in the middle of the city with that rig in broad daylight. It said even more about the state of the policia, though, frankly. The other two vehicles were dusty, but otherwise kept nice, to include the enormous decals of La Santa Muerte in the back windows.
La Santa Muerte, or Saint Death. A white-gowned, haloed death's head with a scythe. I was pretty sure our newcomers were Los Hijos de la Muerte. Fucking wonderful.
The four men who got out of the BMW reinforced the impression. One was wearing a white suit with cowboy boots and a wide-brimmed cowboy hat. He had a large, golden pendant of Santisima Muerte hanging around his neck, and a skull ring on a fat finger. The young men who flanked him, all dressed in jeans or camouflage pants and t-shirts, had Santa Muerte or death's head tattoos crawling all over their arms, and one was wearing a bandanna over his face with the lower half of a skull printed on it. These guys definitely had a thing for Lady Death.
They were also armed to the teeth. Most of the youngsters had at least two pistols in shiny leather holsters, and were carrying a couple of AK-47s and an MP-40 of all things. The older man in the suit had an enormous, nickel-plated revolver shoved in his waistband.
As soon as they got out, Ernesto's PSD decided to show themselves, shortly followed by dickhead himself. I guessed that was our cue. I hesitated, trying to decide how to proceed. I finally shoved my rifle back next to the center console, and keyed my radio. “This is Hillbilly. This will be just me and Nigerian. Pistols only. Everyone else, stay on the vehicles and be ready to cover.” We'd be at pistol engagement range anyway, and if I could give our potential opponents a false sense of security, I'd take it. Any advantage in a fight.
Eric and I got out at the same time. Eric's shaved head, sandy-blond goatee, and sunglasses made him look like a biker. Which he was, really. He was also a former Marine who had seen combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. He didn't say anything as we converged on Harold's door. Our game faces were on.
I opened the door and Harold got down. He wasn't looking all that confident; he was trying to keep his own game face on, but he didn't look all that happy at the sight of the rest of the meeting's attendees. There was no way to put a good spin on this; there were bad guys getting the money one way or another.
Ernesto waited for us, his sunglasses hiding some of that look of imperious impatience. It actually didn't bother me as much at that point; I was in the zone, all emotions quashed, ready to simply act if the situation called for it.
The six of us walked to the center of the lot, joined by the Los Hijos group and the men from the vans, whom I was increasingly convinced were Middle Eastern. I thought briefly of some of the wild theories of El Duque coordinating a massive jihadist attack on the US that we'd sneered at, but this didn't feel right. Most of those stories were way overblown anyway. September 11th had only taken nineteen hijackers, after all.
The three groups came together. Bizarrely, it felt vaguely like a surreal version of the standoff from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Nobody said anything at first. We all just stood in a triangle, sizing each other up.
It was Ernesto who finally broke the silence. He spoke rapidly in Spanish; I couldn't catch any of it, but I noticed Harold blanch. “What?” I murmured.
“Oh, no...” he whispered. “This is bad.”
“What?” I repeated, a little more insistently. Ernesto shot us an annoyed glance, but fuck him anyway.
“Those two are Hezbollah,” he whispered, looking sick. “The money is to pay them to act as advisors and mercenaries for Los Hijos. They're just the liaison, too; there's another fifty of them waiting somewhere else.” He swallowed. “What have we done?”
Exactly what your employer intended, I didn't say. I wanted to stop this so badly I could taste it, but if we did our thing we'd probably lose Ernesto, and with him the connection to El Duque. Even so, I was starting to look for any way we could disrupt these little proceedings while still maintaining the primary mission.
I was about to say, “The hell with it,” and initiate when all hell broke loose.
Chapter 7
A shot rang out, and the gunner on the Los Hijos gun truck collapsed over the .50, a good chunk of his face already splashed across the receiver. He bounced off and dropped into the truck bed. The Los Hijos gunmen turned and opened fire, hardly looking to even see where they were shooting. Several shots hit the armored cab of the pickup and ricocheted with loud whines.
I'd grabbed Harold and forced his head down as soon as that first shot cracked through the air. Eric and I dragged him, bent over and squashed between us, back to the box truck and shoved him on the ground underneath it. Then I was sprinting for the Expedition and my rifle.
Shooters were swarming onto the road on the hill above us. They didn't have a lot of cover, aside from the brick building up against the road, but then, neither did we. I darted around to the driver's side of the vehicle; the passenger side was going to be a free-fire zone.
I yanked open the back door and scrambled inside, dragging my SOCOM 16 off the passenger's seat. The doors weren't armored, so I didn't bother to try to shoot out the window; they could just shoot me through the door. Instead, I bailed out again and went around to the back corner.
The guys in the rear Expedition were already shooting back; I could hear the thunder of rifle fire and the thud-thud-thud of the M60 being fired in short bursts. I dropped to the prone just behind the rear wheel and looked for a target.
There wasn't a shortage of them. The MS-13 thugs were easy enough to pick out against the trees and the brick of the building behind them; they were still sporting their dumbassed white and blue colors. Of course, they were spraying an unholy amount of fire at us, so that was going to make up for their lack of cover and concealment a little bit. The entire roadway was a flickering hell of muzzle flashes. Bullets were chewing up the Los Hijos trucks, the vans, and our vehicles, and throwing spitting bursts of dust and grit into the air where they plowed into the ground. They weren't too worried about fire discipline.
The guys in the camouflage and black tactical vests, on the other hand, were another matter.
Two of them were setting up behind a SAW, up on the far end of the line of shooters. I didn't have a lot of target aside from the SAW gunner's head, so I aimed in carefully, trying to ignore the rounds smacking into the dirt entirely too close to my face, and squeezed off a shot. His head jerked backward and he face-planted on the pavement. I'd hit him just right, too; there was no spasmodic squeeze of the trigger. His buddy reached for the SAW and I shot him, too. That close, I could see every detail through the scope. I saw the blood spreading from the junction of his neck and his shoulder, but he kept trying to get to the light machine gun, so I shot him again. He slumped, and his head bounced off the concrete.
I glanced around; I didn't trust anybody else in that little firesack not to shoot us in the back while we were occupied with Mara Salvatrucha and whoever their paramilitary buddies were. One of the Hezbollah guys was flat on his back next to a bullet-riddled van, red splashed across his shirt. He wasn't moving. Another one of Ernesto's PSD was down, barely four paces from him.
Los Hijos had taken the worst of the storm of gunfire; all four of the cabrónes who'd gotten out of their vehicles were down, so
aked in blood. It looked like they'd taken enough bullets to sink a battleship. They'd been torn apart. Nobody was moving around either the armored truck or the other pickup.
Somebody had seen my muzzle blast when I'd killed the two guys at the SAW, and they didn't like it. A storm of fire started chewing up the ground in front of me, smacking loudly into the back of the Expedition. I had to shimmy backward, trying to avoid getting hit. Vehicles make shitty cover under the best of circumstances. I almost backed into the Suburban parked right next to us.
I twisted around, looking for Ernesto's PSD. I wasn't going to trust those fuckers an inch, especially after the way I'd mouthed off to their boss. But they weren't there. The vehicle was empty. They'd fucked off instead of fighting, which I suppose was part of their mission; they were there to protect Ernesto, and if we were going to fight, why not use us to cover their retreat? I got my feet under me and scrambled around to the back side of the Suburban. The doors were open, but there was nobody back there.
Still standing, I leaned around the corner and lined up one of the muzzle flashes on the hill. The fire had slackened considerably; we'd taken a chunk out of them. There were shattered, bloody corpses littering the street, and whoever was back there with the 60 was still working them over. I spotted a blue-and-white-clad gangbanger getting up to move, and put a round just below his collarbone. He dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.
Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the shooting stopped. There wasn't anybody on the road left alive to try to kill us.
With the noise of the firefight gone, I was finally able to hear the radio. “Hillbilly, Hillbilly, this is Anarchy,” Jack was calling, sounding a little out of breath.
“Anarchy, go for Hillbilly,” I replied.
“Key-Lock and I are in pursuit of Ernesto, three blocks southwest of your position and continuing to move in that direction,” he panted. “He bolted as soon as the shooting started and we went after him.”