The Devil You Don't Know (American Praetorians Book 4)

by Peter Nealen

  “It's been a week,” he said, “and her story hasn't changed one iota.” He nodded. “Looks like this Gray person was telling the truth. She's got no connections with Reyes, holds the guy in contempt, and has only heard of El Duque as a vague rumor.” It had taken a week of constant interrogation, with Raoul and Mia switching off to keep Olivarez from ever getting a break, to reach that level of certainty. “So now what?”

  I stood up. “Now we change the mission,” I said.

  Chapter 19

  “Hello, fuckstick,” Little Bob murmured, as we watched Jose Luis Ortega, youngest and most flamboyant of the Ortega clan, walk into the brand-new bar and nightclub that had sprouted up on the bank of the Rio Tamazula. The place was garish as hell, with murals plastered all over the walls depicting old-time Mexican bandits and narcos, all watched over by the grinning skull of La Santisima Muerte. A glaring neon sign declared the name of the place to be “Los Valientes.” The Valiant Ones. Los Hijos sure had a high opinion of themselves.

  Little Bob, Larry, and I were lying on the roof of the Teatro Pablo de Villavicencio, the theater across the river from the nightclub. We weren’t supposed to be up there, of course, but we’d gotten pretty good at sneaking in and getting up top via the service catwalks in the theater without being spotted. We weren’t humping a lot of gear; just a spotting scope, suppressed pistols, and a couple of phones with the satellite uplinks, along with a little bit of water and chow. We stayed up there during the hours of darkness, getting back down just before dawn, long after the theater had closed. Jose had usually staggered out of Los Valientes long before then.

  We’d been watching the Los Hijos-owned bar for four days. It hadn’t taken a lot of narrowing down; while Gray’s flash drive might not have been a tailor-made target package, his information was extremely thorough. Names, patterns of life, known associations, known hangouts...it was all there for Los Hijos, the Venezuelans, the most likely advisors from the FARC, the Hezbollah mercenaries (in case any of them had survived), the Fusang Group, and several groups, people, and companies with connections to the Fusang Group. We could build a hell of a target deck out if it, if we trusted it one hundred percent. Of course we didn’t, so we were starting small.

  The three of us weren’t the only element watching Jose Ortega. We had groups of three trading off all day, following him and watching, documenting his every move. So far, everything we’d seen was matching up with Gray’s information.

  Jose had gotten out of a shiny, custom low-rider, of all things, surrounded by three other toughs, and swaggered into the bar, right past the line of people waiting for the bouncer to let them in. He was dressed all in black, but with silver embroidery over his sleeves and pant legs, cowboy boots, and a holstered Desert Eagle on his hip. It was too big to be anything else, and the way it gleamed when he turned, I suspected it was either gold or silver plated. It matched the chains around his neck.

  “Man, it’s barely over two hundred meters,” Larry whispered. “We could pop the little fuck right now if we had rifles up here.”

  “Patience, my large friend,” I murmured. “Remember, this can’t just be a one-off. We’re not just after little Jose, but every Los Hijos fuckstain that is in there at the same time. Think big. Jose’s just a little fish. We’re not looking to catch just one; we want to poison the whole fucking pond.”

  “I know,” he said, “but my trigger finger’s getting itchy. I think we’ve pretty well established that this is a good target. When do we hit it?”

  “We’ll pull off in the morning and start planning for tomorrow night,” I said. “I agree; this is as good a place as any to start.” We had found out that the Ortegas weren’t actually from Culiacan, though they had essentially claimed the city as their own. They were still trying to settle that claim with the remnants of the Beltran-Leyva Organization and the Guzman-Loera family, mainly through a combination of assassinations, kidnappings, graphic corpse-messaging, and IEDs. The day before we’d hit town, an entire city block had almost gone up when a car bomb had gone off in the middle of the street, and a shop owned by the Guzman-Loeras had opened its doors to find three of their more prominent narcos, their heads, hands, and genitals missing, lying inside.

  But Papa Ortega’s real seat of power was up in the hills, in Imala. The information we had pointed to a huge villa up there, surrounded by lots of trigger-happy sicarios with plenty of guns. We’d get to that, but for the moment, we had some targets to clean up in Culiacan. Sure, the other Sinaloa splinter groups would take advantage, but there was no getting around that. We were under no illusions that the twenty of us were going to somehow turn Mexico around. What we could do, however, was put the hurt on a few motherfuckers at a time.

  And that was one thing we were very, very good at.

  We kept watching. At least ten more known bad guys entered in the next fifteen minutes, adding to the list of nearly twenty we already had recorded going in. In all, it was about the same clientèle as the last few nights, so we could expect it to be pretty standard. This was going to be a fucking smörgåsbord of assholes. It also meant we couldn’t afford to be sloppy. There were going to be a lot of bad guys with guns in there. It was going to get ugly.

  “Renton called again,” Raoul said when we got to our safehouse, or what we were calling our safehouse at the moment. It was a small house turned hostel that we’d managed to rent for an exorbitant sum, especially once the owner found out we were gringos. He didn’t know about the multiple kitbags that we shuffled inside, packed with weapons, body armor, NVGs, and explosives, though.

  “What did he want now?” I asked, as I went to our little ops board and made sure that we’d already marked down all of Jose’s friends, either by name or simply photos. There were two newcomers that night. I jotted down photo numbers; we’d get them printed out and put up on the board soon. Of course, the board wasn’t going to be up that long. We’d be moving after we hit Los Valientes.

  “Just some follow-up on the photos we’ve been getting. This place is a fucking gold mine,” Raoul said, joining me at the board. He pointed to a couple of pictures we’d gotten of more conventional gangbanger-looking characters that we’d seen the night before. “Ruben Jarasco,” he said, his finger on the first one, of a skinny guy with sunken cheeks and a mustache, wearing baggy clothes, a collared shirt buttoned at the collar only, and a flat-brimmed ball cap, “formerly a mid-list, semi-independent trafficker for the Sinaloa Cartel, he’s turned into a yes-man for Papa Ortega. He tries to look tough, but apparently he’s a little weasel who hangs on the real tough guys’ coattails.”

  He shifted to the next one, another black-clad, cowboy-booted type with a goatee and a shaved head. “Ricardo Menendez, on the other hand, is supposed to be a real soul-eater. Nobody knows how many people the guy’s killed, but he’s shifted allegiances between the BLO, Juarez, the Gulf Cartel, and then Sinaloa. He’s gotten in trouble with everyone he’s worked for, mainly because he gets a little carried away.”

  “Define ‘carried away,’” Derek said, coming over to join us.

  “Lots of body parts scattered around, not all of them belonging to people he was supposed to kill,” Raoul said flatly. “The guy has every mark of being a total psychopath. He’s been just useful enough to each cartel he’s worked with that they tolerate him for a while, until he starts going over the edge again, and becomes a liability. So far, he’s been just the kind of guy that Los Hijos loves.”

  “I sure hope he’s there tonight,” Derek said. “That would just make my whole day.”

  “Is Renton still pissed?” I asked Raoul, ignoring him.

  “If he is, he didn’t express it to me,” he said. “I get the impression that he's put two and two together, given what he’s said about his sources and support drying up south of the border, and realized that something is leaky. I just hope he’s keeping this shit to himself as much as possible.”

  I agreed. If the leaker found out we were in Culiacan, we’d start to see
a lot more headhunters descending on the city before we were ready for them. Sooner or later, our presence was going to be known for anyone who was in the know, but so far, we’d stayed under the radar.

  Renton hadn’t been happy when I’d called him after Olivarez' interrogation. He didn’t like the thought that the very network he’d thrown his lot in with, the so-called “Cicero Group,” that was supposed to be the great hope of the country in the face of corruption, factionalism, and decay, might not be as clean as he’d thought. I might be doing him a disservice, but I suspected he also didn’t like the fact that a bunch of knuckle-dragging shooters had been the ones to uncover it, albeit with outside help. But it sounded like he’d accepted the apparent truth, and was adjusting accordingly. That was, of course, assuming that we weren’t about to get royally fucked, and just didn’t see it coming yet.

  We got back to work. There was a lot of prep to do before running a hit on a nightclub. I shook my head as I looked at the floorplans we’d managed to cobble together. This was going to be a fucking nightmare.

  We came up with several plans of attack, ranging from the possible, if risky, to the ridiculous. At one point, I was sorely tempted to sneak into the club after hours, wire the entire place with explosives, and blow it five minutes after Jose walked in. That had too many problems, though, not the least of which being the fact that there were going to be noncombatants in there along with the narcos and sicarios. Granted, the whole “noncombatant” label got a little fuzzy in this environment, but if we hadn’t fingered them as a target, and they didn’t have a weapon, we weren’t going to kill them. Unless they reached for a weapon. It was probably going to get messy, any way we approached it, but just blowing the damned place up wasn’t going to fly.

  It ultimately boiled down to the hardest part being the approach and the cordon. We were going to get spread a little thin any way we looked at it. We finally figured out a compromise that would still put almost an entire team on the target, while still being able to pick off any squirters, and hopefully not get all of us smoked on the way in.

  It was dark as all hell in the back of the van. The beat-up, old, plain white Ford panel van wasn’t the usual sort of vehicle that would be pulling up to Los Valientes. Neither was the utility truck behind us, but we were kind of banking on that.

  The whole team was kitted up more heavily than we had been since Iraq. Front and back plates, helmets, mags galore and plenty of flashbangs. Frags were a no-go on this target, but I really didn’t give a fuck if we blinded or deafened a bunch of assclowns who liked to party with narcos and their associated butchers.

  While we’d stripped the back of the van to the bare walls, there still wasn’t a lot of room back there for ten guys in full kit with rifles, especially when two of those guys were Larry and Little Bob. We were crammed in there so tight that I was really starting to look forward to getting on the target; we might be getting shot at on one of the messiest target sites I think I’d ever even contemplated hitting, but we wouldn’t be stuffed into this tin can smelling each other’s sweat and farts anymore. Plus, the position I was in was starting to hurt, and I couldn’t move to ease it.

  “Thirty seconds,” Eddie said from the driver’s seat. “Overwatch is in place, and the cordon is five seconds behind us.”

  The van, with the utility truck right behind it, pulled into the parking lot, still moving fast, and Eddie brought us to a short but smooth halt. I couldn’t see shit from in back, but I heard one of the bouncers yell, “Eh! Pendejo!” I imagined he was coming over to threaten the stupid, lost bunch of menial peóns who had pulled into the wrong parking lot. He didn’t get much more out, as Eddie stuck his Glock 17 out the window and pumped two Hydra-shoks into the bouncer’s face.

  That was the signal. Johnny and Sid had been watching through their rifle scopes from the roof of the theater that we’d used as an OP for four days. With a pair of supersonic cracks so close together they might have been one catastrophic sound, that we could hear from inside the van, the other two bouncers went down, their heads splashed open by two 300-grain .338 bullets.

  Larry ripped the door open as the screaming from the line of would-be patrons started, and we piled out, rifles up. Men and women in party clothes tried to scatter away from us, several of the women stumbling and falling. Tight skirts and stiletto heels aren't the most practical clothing for making a fast getaway when bullets start flying.

  We sprinted the short distance to the front doors. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the rest of Eddie’s team jumping out of the utility truck and running for the two opposite corners. They were weighed down rather more heavily than we were, with two M60E6s per corner, and extra ammo. We’d decided that the cordon needed to be firepower-heavy, just in case.

  Larry was in the lead, but put his head down as Derek, right behind him, chucked a nine-banger through the double doors ahead of him. It went off a second later, right in the faces of the gunmen who had come running at the sound of shots. We all knew to look away, and had earpro in, so we were up and shooting while they were still staggering and unable to see. Rifles thundered, flame stabbed across the lobby, and the four of them were down and dead or bleeding out before they knew what the hell had happened. Follow-up shots to heads as we stepped over the bodies ensured that the dying weren’t going to try to take a shot at any of us as we went past.

  There was an open door immediately to our left, and Larry angled toward it while Eric, right in front of Jim, pushed forward through the rest of the lobby. I had moved up right behind Larry, and tossed another flashbang through the door while Jim’s element flowed past us. At least it would prevent anyone on the other side of the door from getting a clear shot into the lobby before we flooded that space.

  As soon as the bang went off with a stomach-churning thunderclap, flooding the doorway with gray smoke, we pushed through the door. There was a man in a white shirt standing in the door right in front of me, trying to point a gigantic chromed revolver, and I shot him twice in the chest, red standing out against the white. He staggered, staring down at the holes in his chest, and my next shot hit him right below the eye. He dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.

  We continued to move forward, spread out and paralleling the walls. The screaming would have been almost as deafening as the bangs and the gunfire, if it wasn’t for the earplugs. The bar was absolute chaos. People were staggering from the shock of the flashbangs, trying to drop to the floor to avoid the gunfire, or just panicking and trying to run for the exits, shrieking in terror and utterly disoriented, running both towards and away from us. I took a hand off of my rifle to stiff-arm the guy running straight at me, screaming like a girl. I took the split second to identify whether or not he had a weapon, then shoved him aside and behind me before clapping my hand back on the forearm of my own weapon in time to shoot past an overly-made up señorita in a skin-tight skirt and halter top, missing her head by less than three inches to splash the skull of the vato who was on the other side of the bar, about to start spraying with a mini-Uzi. He toppled backward, the weapon falling from nerveless fingers to shatter a couple of glasses on the bar. The woman flinched away from the snap of the bullet, and almost ran into the wall trying to get to safety, where she slid down and huddled near the floor.

  I wasn’t the only one shooting; other figures were dropping with dark splashes in the lurid red and blue light. There was apparently a smoke machine in use somewhere; either that or our bangs were really smoking up the place. It was making target discrimination in an already chaotic situation even worse.

  One of the motherfuckers behind the bar didn’t give a shit. He popped a submachinegun up over the bar and sprayed the room. At least three of the partiers went down in a welter of blood, and Derek staggered with a grunt, as Larry pumped several rounds through the bar and I moved up to come around the end. Hunkering down to avoid Larry’s fire, the little shit didn’t see me there until I put his lights out with three rapid shots, blowing his pureed h
eart and lungs out through his chest.

  Just as I turned toward the main dance floor, which was even more of a chaotic shit-show than the side bar we had just cleared, Bryan tossed a flashbang onto it. I looked away quickly, but caught part of the flash, leaving a pulsing green-purple blotch in my vision. Nick was checking Derek, but was getting pushed off; apparently he’d just been hit in the plate.

  A lot of the patrons had rushed the stage and scrambled out the back doors by then. Most of the people left were either wounded, dead, too disoriented and scared to find their way out, or bringing guns to bear to try to fight back.

  There was a knot of scared partiers who hadn’t gotten out only a few feet from where the bang had gone off. I saw a weapon rise in the middle of them, but I couldn’t get a clean shot, not without hitting one of the noncombatants. Unfortunately, the asshole with the gun didn’t give a shit about that, and opened fire, knocking a skinny guy spinning to the floor before smacking several rounds off the bar that I had just dropped to one knee behind.

  More rifle shots boomed, and I leaned out to see most of the partiers either down on the floor or trying to run away from the gunmen, except for one chick who looked like she was stoned out of her mind, that one mustached sicario was holding by the arm with one hand, while he sprayed bullets at me with the other. I took a half second to line up his head and stroke the trigger. The back of his skull blew off and he fell backwards, dragging the girl down with him. More gunfire tore through his compadres, smashing them to the floor in a welter of blood and shattered bone.

  Another pair of flashbangs thundered near the stage. That would be Jim and his element coming out onto the main floor. I shifted fire to the left, sweeping along the floor. There wasn’t much on the floor itself; the chairs and tables were all along the edges, so the main floor was a killing zone. I moved up to the next wall, barricaded myself on it, and started cleaning house.