by Peter Nealen
Bryan and Nick had already secured the gravel pit by the time we rolled up the arroyo to the entrance. They were set into the trees that overshadowed the road, and weren’t visible until after we rolled up and stopped. Larry flashed the headlights in the recognition signal, while the rest of us in the vehicle waited tensely, weapons ready. The truck wasn’t an up-armor, so we were ready to shoot through the glass if necessary.
Bryan stepped out into the road, his OBR slung in front of him, and waved us in. It was clear.
“Who else is here already?” I asked as we pulled up next to him.
“Just Sid and George,” he said. “They got here about fifteen minutes ago.”
“Any activity?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. It’s like nobody’s come here in a couple of years. Which is kinda strange; I mean, this would be an awesome dump site for bodies.”
Ordinarily I’d make some crack along the lines of, “You would know,” but especially with Gutierrez’ mutilated head in a bag in the back, somehow I wasn’t feeling up to it. “Let’s make sure we’ve got OPs up on the fingers once we’ve got enough guys in,” I said, pointing to the sagebrush-clad shoulders of the hills looming above us on either side. Bryan just nodded, sensing that something was off.
Larry pulled us into the pit itself. It wasn’t so much a pit as a layered excavation into the walls of a small valley. It was pretty well closed in; if it hadn’t been low ground, I probably would have been more comfortable with it, but as things stood, it was concealed enough that we could be reasonably certain of not being observed. We could have the main approaches from the north, south, and west covered easily enough, and nobody was coming at us from the east without making a lot of noise thrashing through the brush. It was possible that one or more of the cartels had small surveillance drones, but they’d need to know where to look first. Once security was set on the high ground, we’d be reasonably secure to finish planning and prep. I checked my watch. We were planning on hitting Sergio’s farm in about six hours.
Before doing anything else though, as soon as Larry had stopped the truck in a small cloud of fine dust, I got out and went to the back. I carefully took the bag with Gutierrez' head out of the bed, and carried it over to a pile of rocks on the edge of the pit. Scraping a shallow depression out of the hard, dusty dirt with my hand, I set the head in it, and then carefully piled the rocks over it in a cairn. People might wonder what had happened to it, but it was the only gesture of respect I could make to the man who had died because of us. And his family didn’t need to see what El Torcido had done to him.
I stood up, brushing the dust off my hands and my knees, and looked down at the little cairn. “I’m sorry, Pablo,” I said, the guilt gnawing at me again. “We never wanted you to pay this price.” I took some tiny comfort in the fact that the sadistic monster who had murdered him was gone, but the people who had brought that sick fuck to Culiacan were still out there, and still had to pay.
And pay they would. I turned back to the trucks and started getting my mind back on the night’s killing.
Chapter 21
I was really wishing for a couple more teams.
The farm was big, and recon had picked out close to fifty people there. We had eighteen shooters, and four of those were up on the hills above, watching through sniper scopes and the sights of a couple of M60s. They’d be able to pick off quite a few targets, but we still only had fourteen guys going on-site. It was going to be a tough target, no matter what.
A tree-lined arroyo ran north to south through the middle of the farm, and that was our primary line of approach. I’d expected some security to be watching it, especially with the FARC teaching these yokels, but as we got closer, there was no sign that it was guarded, booby-trapped, or even taken into consideration. Sergio was pretty confident in the terror he and his family had been spreading through Culiacan, and apparently didn’t think a lot of security was necessary.
At least that was what we’d observed so far. Los Hijos were by far the most confident, and lackadaisical, of all the organizations in and around Culiacan. All the other gangbangers had covered their faces; Los Hijos strutted around wearing their death iconography and toting AKs openly. They weren’t afraid of anyone. Whether that was because they had sufficiently terrorized everyone else in the vicinity into leaving them be, or because they knew they had some big-time sponsors who were interested in seeing them succeed, they were going to learn to be afraid of someone that night.
I was crouched at the bank of the arroyo with Ben and Larry. The rest of my team and half of Eddie’s team were spreading out as silently as possible, just north of the first set of buildings. I peered through my NVGs at the house.
It was a small, classically Spanish farm house, with white stucco walls and a red tile roof. It was almost identical to the other three that were clustered nearby. They were all dark, but I thought I’d seen something moving, some glimmer of light under the trees.
I touched Ben on the arm and pointed toward the porch, which was facing slightly away from us. I’d seen it again; the faint glow and fade of a cigarette. There was somebody up and smoking. It might not be a sentry, but at 0330 in the morning, there weren’t that many other options. Considering that pretty much everybody on the farm was marked to die anyway, it ultimately didn’t make that much difference.
Still, we hoped to keep this hit as quiet as possible for as long as possible. The disparity in numbers meant stealth was our best option. So, instead of shooting him, I got up into a crouch, slung my rifle onto my back, and slowly, moving from tree to tree, staying in the deepest shadows I could find, I approached. Ben and Larry were right behind me, barely making a sound. As big as Larry is, he can move like a cat, and Ben was a fucking ghost. We were cammied up and as lightly loaded as possible. Each step was taken carefully and deliberately, toe-first to keep from rolling the foot down on a twig. It took some time to cover the distance, but we didn’t make a sound, and in the blackness under the trees, we were all but invisible. If there was somebody on thermals in the window, of course, we were burned, but as we got closer and closer, there was no reaction.
Pausing right around the corner from the porch, I slowly eased my knife out of its sheath. It wasn’t some gigantic short sword like some of the Tactical Timmies like to carry; it was just a knife, not too far removed from a Kabar. I took a deep breath and stepped around the corner.
There was a single guy sitting in a chair on the porch, with the front legs kicked up off the planks, leaning against the wall. He was still smoking the cigarette, staring straight ahead, an AR leaning against the wall next to him. He sensed the movement as I came around the corner, and whipped his head around, his eyes widening at the sight of an alien-looking silhouette, the head strangely shaped with two tubes projecting in front of it where the eyes should be. He froze for exactly too long to survive, then made a grab for his rifle, but I’d been two steps away from him when I rounded the corner, and I was on him before he could even touch the weapon, knocking him away from it and clapping a hand over his nose and mouth as I plunged the knife into his neck.
I didn’t aim for his throat; we were making enough noise as it was thrashing around on the floor as the chair tipped over and he fell sideways. If I’d slashed his larynx open, he could have still screamed through the hole in his throat. I came in from the side, stabbing him several times in the junction between neck and shoulder. He was beating on me with his hands, his feet scrabbling on the porch floor, but I outweighed him by several pounds even without my kit, and he was weakening fast as his blood spurted out of his carotid artery. He struggled for a few more seconds, and then went limp. I kept him pinned down until I was sure he was gone.
It’s a very personal thing, killing a man with a knife. It wasn’t the first time I’d done it; I’d stabbed that Project fuck, Carnivore, through the guts in Iraq. It’s not something that gets any easier. I had to focus to keep from shaking as I got up off the corpse. My gloves were soaked an
d sticky with rapidly clotting blood. I wanted to peel them off. Don’t ask me why it affected me so much. I’d killed my fair share of people, and was about to kill a lot more.
Larry and Ben were next to me now, covering the other buildings and the front door, then shifting to the door and windows of our target house as the rest of the teams moved in on the other three houses, or, rather, two houses and a shed. We waited, still and utterly silent, heartbeats and breathing roaring in our ears, listening for any sign that we’d been heard.
There was nothing. Whoever was inside must have been dead asleep. I hoped they were doped out of their minds; that would make matters a lot easier. The more successful cartels didn’t allow their members to use the product, but I hadn’t seen a lot of that kind of discipline with Los Hijos. I was sure it was coming, given their sponsors, but they weren’t there yet.
And they weren’t going to get there.
Carefully, quietly, I eased open the door. It didn’t even squeak. Then the three of us were moving inside. Larry kept his rifle in his hands, but Ben joined me in slinging his FAL and drawing his own knife.
The entryway was empty, as was the small living room and the kitchen. There were four men sleeping in the bedrooms, all with weapons close by. There were more weapons piled in the living room, along with some balls of what looked like mud sitting on an end table. Heroin. So, they were partaking in their product. Bad call, fuckers.
The killings went quickly. I took two rooms, and Ben took the third, where two of them were sleeping, one on a couch and another on the floor. I stepped into my first target room, still moving quietly, and came to the side of the bed. I moved the AK away from where he had it next to his head, but it tapped against the chair nearby as I put it down, and he woke up. Apparently, this guy hadn’t been using. He grabbed for the rifle, realized it wasn’t there, and then I was on him as he tried to lunge up. He died quickly; I jammed the knife up under his chin and into his brain. He stiffened, then went limp, his mouth nailed shut by the blade. He hadn’t made a sound.
It took some doing to yank the knife out; it had gotten stuck in the bone. No sooner had I gotten it loose than there were two loud claps from the other room. I spun, to see the last guy fall to the floor, a SIG clattering out of his fingers. He’d woken up and Larry had shot him as soon as he’d seen the pistol.
Ben was coming back out of his target room, and we all froze at the noise, again listening for any reaction. If the shooting had started already, this was about to get a lot harder.
“Geek, Hillbilly,” I sub-vocalized into my throat mic. “Any movement?”
“There is some around building group Charlie,” he replied. “But it hasn’t changed in the last several minutes. Was that shooting? We thought we heard something.”
“Affirm, Monster had to shoot one of the targets.”
“Well, it looks like you’re still golden. Wait.” He paused, and I held my breath. “There’s some definite movement by the Foxtrot buildings. I think our FARC friends heard something and are going to check it out. You may have company in a minute.”
“Roger,” I replied. “All stations stand by to go loud.”
The house being clear, we moved out and back into the shadows under the trees. As we did, the rest of the two- and three-man elements that had gone into the other houses reappeared, their targets also done. We faded into the dark, moving just as quietly toward the next houses on the target list. Alpha was clear, Bravo was next.
Even though we were probably blown, we kept our movement quiet and kept to the shadows. There was no point in giving the bad guys any advantage at all. They might have known something had happened, but they didn’t know where we were, or, for that matter, that we were even there at all. For all they knew, it could have been a negligent discharge they’d heard.
“I’ve got a five-man element heading for Alpha,” Eddie reported from his perch on the hill. “Two more heading for Hotel.” Hotel was the main house where Sergio appeared to live. It was a big, manor-style house with a pool out front. “Looks like they’re going to wake everybody up.”
“Calm ‘em down,” I sent.
“Roger,” he replied, a split second before twin cracks, so close together as to almost be the same sound, went by overhead. “They’re calm,” he sent. The runners had been struck down by a pair of well-placed .338s.
“Their buddies aren’t, though,” he said a moment later. “They’re moving toward you, and they just picked up the pace. I don’t think they know where the shots came from, but they know they were shots.”
I looked up and down the rough echelon that we’d formed in the trees. It would have been awfully hard without the thermals to pick everyone out, even with NVGs; they require some ambient light to work and there wasn’t a lot of it under the trees. But we weren’t going to be showing any IR if we could help it, not after encountering bad guys with the same night vision capability guarding Ernesto up by Hermosillo. Still, we could see the closest of us well enough to pass hand and arm signals, though even then not for very far. The thermal attachments could make out rough shapes, but not enough to make out hand signals.
I had just signaled to get down and face toward Foxtrot, where the FARC types were based, when a rattling burst of AK fire split the night. Fuck. They’d decided to sound the alarm that way. We were definitely blown. Time to do this the hard way.
I could hear the slamming of doors and yelling in Spanish after a couple of minutes. They didn’t sound that organized, but with the number of guns they could bring to the party, they didn’t need to be. This was going to get tricky.
“Hillbilly, Geek,” Eddie sent. “If you can move the three or four guys on your left flank out to the east, you should be able to get these guys in a good L-shape.”
I didn’t have to acknowledge, or even pass the word along. Everybody was listening in, so the four guys out on the end started moving, though still with the deliberate quiet we’d been striving for all along. The longer we kept them off-balance, wondering exactly where we were, the better off we’d be.
Carefully but quickly, we got down in the prone, and found something to use for cover. We were all wearing plates, but genuine cover is usually better than armor when you come right down to cases. Better to avoid getting hit at all than be able to soak up bullets, because eventually that steel or ceramic is going to fail.
I found a gnarled root to settle down behind. My plate carrier was pretty much slick, with most of my mags and gear on my belt, because I preferred to get down in the prone if possible, and I don’t like the “fat kid” school of combat equipment. But that fucking helmet simply wasn’t designed for being in the prone behind a rifle, and it kept trying to push my head forward. I fought it and the cramp in my neck as I got ready.
The FARC troops came into view, moving from tree to tree, bent low behind their rifles, which they kept up at the ready. I was actually impressed. I’d seen some pretty fucked-up infantry tactics in the Middle East, from both Arabs and Americans, and the gangbangers in Mexico mostly weren’t that much better, though MS-13’s ambushes had been fairly professional. These guys weren’t quite rock stars, but they knew what they were doing.
What they didn’t know was that we had eyes up on the hill, and were ready and waiting for them.
I hadn’t specified who was going to trigger first. As a result, my finger was tightening on the trigger, the reticle in my dialed-down scope turned up just enough to put a light-colored cross in the green of my NVGs, when the first shot popped off. I don’t know who fired. Doesn’t matter. I finished my trigger draw and my rifle bucked backward into my shoulder with a loud whack. The FARC fighter less than fifty meters in front of me staggered. I followed up with a second shot, and the faint green figure dropped to the ground. When I scanned the front again, there was nothing but the faint outlines of cooling bodies lying flat in the dirt.
There hadn’t been any flame, and the noise had been, while anything but silent, muffled enough by the suppressor
s that it wouldn’t be immediately clear to anyone else what had just happened. I was determined to turn that to our advantage.
Rising up to one knee, I keyed my throat mic, speaking in a low murmur that would nevertheless get translated reasonably faithfully. “Let’s get those satchels placed along the lines of approach from south and east,” I sent. “Keep a couple in reserve, but since they’re reacting, let’s draw them to us as much as we can and whittle them down a bit.”
There was a flurry of brief acknowledgements, then a series of fainter cracks overhead. “Hillbilly, Caesar,” Sid called. He and George were up on another finger, with a slightly different angle of view from Eddie and Herman. “There is a group of about ten or fifteen—it’s hard to say for sure with the trees—trying to come at you from Bravo. We’re keeping their heads down, but you might want to deal with them sooner rather than later.” Going off what I knew about Sid’s shooting, I suspected he was doing a bit more than just “keeping their heads down.” Still, we were awfully close to the Bravo buildings.
Looking in that direction, I could see lights starting to move. Sid’s sporadic rifle fire was suddenly interrupted by a much louder staccato roar as George opened up with the 60. Since we essentially had already gone loud, he apparently figured a full-bore base of fire was called for. I can’t say I disagreed. The only issue was going to be keeping that fire shifted far enough away from us, since we weren’t wearing strobes for the same reason we weren’t flashing IR lasers around.
I moved up and grabbed Little Bob and Derek, who were both humping satchels of Semtex liberally laced with nails and ball bearings. They weren’t claymores, but they would do the trick. Together, weapons up in case some of the cartel sicarios tried to brave the wall of high-velocity metal George was laying down, we dashed forward to set in the satchels. The two of them spread out to make sure they had a good stretch of front covered, and laid in the explosives, making doubly sure that they weren’t pointing the sides with all the metal back toward us. We were still probably going to get rocked by the detonations, but anyone on the other side should get shredded.