by Peter Nealen
I was on top of the guy I'd hit with the door, who had fallen down. I tried to kick his rifle away, but he had it slung, so it didn't get far. He was trying to grab it, but I stomped on his groin as I dropped to a knee on his gut, trying to get lower as my team flowed into the courtyard behind me, engaging the three more shooters who were already blazing away at us. I felt more than heard the rounds snap past my head in both directions. There were a few hard grunts of men getting hit, but I found I had to concentrate on the guy on the ground, who was now trying to grab my own rifle. I yanked it up, pointed the muzzle high, and butt-stroked him in the face, shifting my weight to put more of it on his balls. He faltered under the battering, but was still fighting. He hit me twice in the side, and grabbed for the rifle again. I hit him with the buttstock again, then again. Something crunched on the third blow, and he faltered. I took the chance, stood up suddenly, and shot him in the face. His head seemed to bounce at the impact, and he went still.
I looked around. The shooting had suddenly stopped. Eric was down on one knee, a pained expression on his face, blood soaking his trousers. Larry was similarly bloodied, having apparently taken a round to the side, but when I went to check him, it had skipped along his ribs, tearing the flesh but not doing much else. His plates had kept the other four rounds from killing him, though one of them had been half an inch from plunging into his guts. Jim and Little Bob were moving with the tenderness and hitch in the breath that suggested their own plates had stopped a few rounds as well.
“Jeff, come check this out,” Ben called. His entire shoulder was now darkened and wet from the blood still trickling from his mangled ear. He was standing over one of the corpses in the door to the warehouse. Nick and Jim had already entered and cleared the building itself.
I walked over. While the face was somewhat distorted from the bullet hole just below the left eye, it was unmistakably Xi Shang. So, the boss himself had been there. Fucking bonus.
“Drag him to the middle of the yard where he won't get mangled when we blow the weapons and ammo in the warehouses,” I said, “and put a death card on him. He may as well carry one last message to his bosses.”
It took almost another hour to make sure everything was wired. There were crates of hundreds of Type 56 AK clones, QBZ-95s, and CS/LS-5 submachine guns, along with pallets upon pallets of ammo for same. There were other pallets loaded with Semtex and PETN. Some of the cases had AT-4 antitank rockets, and there were four Type 89 heavy machine guns. There was enough weapons and ordnance in those warehouses to outfit a small army, which I was sure had been Xi Shang's entire purpose in the first place.
Jack got in contact by phone. The IEDs had done their work well; they'd intercepted no fewer than ten vehicles packed with shooters that had scrambled north as soon as we initiated the raid. None had escaped; while he was sure a few of the contractors and Chinese soldiers had survived, the vehicles were toast and they hadn't been able to interfere with our op. All three men were now in the car they had prestaged, heading for rendezvous. One of the boats from the Frontier Rose would pick them up; we didn't have room on the helos.
We pulled off to the LZ and made sure we staged behind the far southern compound as the helos came in one at a time. The time fuse had been cut accurately, but there was a lot of boom-boom in that compound.
We loaded up the wounded first. Eric was limping badly, a tourniquet around his leg, though it didn't look like the artery had been hit. The rest were walking wounded.
I was the last one on the bird. As we rose up out of the dust cloud, I could see the fires burning from the IEDs, and the flashing lights of the policia responding to the reports of gunfire and explosions at the old storage unit. I hoped the charges went off before they got too close.
Even as we pulled away to the north, the city briefly dwindling behind us before we circled back toward the ocean, the charges detonated, an orange triple mushroom cloud rising into the night sky until it merged into one towering storm of flame and black smoke. I hoped the Fusang Group's little operation died with it.
Either way, it was time to get the hell out of Dodge.
Chapter 26
Harmon-Dominguez' main offices were in a swank, glass-fronted building in downtown Tucson. The lobby screamed, “we've got a shitload of money and can afford to blow it on fancy buildings.” The floor was dark tile and the walls were all green-tinted glass. The place would have looked like a dungeon if the glass wasn't letting some of the bright desert sunlight in the front.
Larry and I had cleaned up, both wearing suits that at least looked reasonably expensive. We were both also armed, as earlier research hadn't shown a great deal of security on the building; for all of the increasing lawlessness of southern Arizona, the middle of Tucson was still generally considered a pretty civilized, non-violent place. Larry was carrying a briefcase, but otherwise we were empty-handed.
The two of us walked up to the receptionists desk, which was the same dark gray tile as the floor. The receptionist was a pretty blond who looked up at us distractedly; I could just barely make out the tablet playing some vapid TV show on the desk in front of her. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“We have an appointment with Mr. Harmon,” I said. I wasn't actually bluffing; Mia had run most of the groundwork, and had gotten us an appointment, with a bunch of vague, businesslike mumbo-jumbo that used a great many words to not actually say anything about what we had to talk to him about. Which was just as well; if he knew the real agenda for this little meeting, he wouldn't have talked to us at all.
She took a couple of minutes to find the schedule, confirmed that we were in fact Mr. O'Niell and Mr. Machado, and then pointed us to the elevator. “Mr. Harmon's office is on the fifth floor,” she said, “straight ahead from the elevator doors.”
I thanked her, Larry remaining an imposing, silent mountain beside me, and we headed for the elevator. It was a short trip to the fifth floor. We didn't talk on the way; there was no need, and for all we knew, with Harmon-Dominguez being as deep into dark, illicit shit that they were, they might have surveillance of all kinds throughout the building just to cover their asses.
Harmon's office was huge. The doors, unlike most of the rest of the building, were actually solid, instead of the green-tinted glass that seemed to cover everything else, providing the executive a degree of privacy that none of the rest of the drones in the building got. The office itself was sort of a triangle, with two of the three sides being floor-to-ceiling windows, looking out over the city. Harmon's desk was facing toward the door, leaving his back to the view. I wasn't sure what to make of that; frankly, I didn't care except for how it would help me read the guy just enough to destroy him.
Harmon was in shirtsleeves and a tie, and didn't get up from his desk as we approached. He was a round-faced, balding man with a comb over and too much of a tan. “Mr. O'Niell and Mr. Machado,” he greeted us, mispronouncing Larry's alias. “Please, have a seat.” He motioned to the overstuffed armchairs in front of his desk. The cushions sank when we sat; if we'd relaxed, we would have been a few inches below Harmon. Cheap executive power trick.
“I must confess,” he said, leaning back in his chair, “I'm not entirely sure what this is about. Your secretary wasn't terribly forthcoming.” Under other circumstances I might have snorted at the idea of calling Mia my “secretary,” but this wasn't the time.
“We'd like to talk to you about one of your employees,” I said. “A certain Harold Juarez.”
He looked at me blankly. He probably didn't know the names of anybody he'd sent south. “I'm sorry, I don't know the names of everyone who works for the company,” he said, “if you've got a complaint, then you really should be talking to Human Resources...”
“Well, I thought you'd like to know that the last time I saw Harold, he was in the custody of a very pissed-off Mexican cop,” I said. “It turns out that a lot of Mexicans don't really like American companies trafficking laundered drug money back into their country any more than th
ey like the narcos trafficking drugs through it.”
He reddened a little beneath the orange tan. “If one of our employees was involved in the drug business, then they will have to face the consequences of that,” he said. “We will not tolerate illegal activity among our staff.”
“Oh, I'm sorry,” I said, mock-obsequiously, “I must have given the wrong impression. You see, Harold didn't realize that he was moving dirty money for bad people until he got into Mexico. He was under the impression, given him by your company, that it was a legitimate cash investment he was transporting.” I leaned forward, starting to let the edge into my voice. “He didn't know until Zacatecas that it was intended to buy paramilitary support and training for a cartel that called itself Los Hijos de la Muerte.”
His expression went blank again, but I could see a mix of fear and anger in his eyes. “That is a very serious allegation, Mr. O'Niell,” he said. “And I will be speaking to the company's lawyers about it.”
“Oh, it's not an allegation,” Larry said, speaking for the first time. He reached into the briefcase and pulled out a flash drive. “It is an accusation, backed up by considerable first-hand documentation.” He set the flash drive on the desk. “Feel free to keep it; we've got plenty of copies.”
Harmon put his hands on his desk, a frown furrowing his features. He still thought he was in control. “I don't know who you are, gentlemen, but if you think you can come in here and make these claims...”
I cut him off, pulling a printout of the wet-work ad and slapping it on the desk in front of him with a bang. He froze. “Your information security people should have been more careful,” I said. “We have the records of the transfer of several hundred thousand dollars from this company's accounts to the Fusang Group at roughly the time this ad went up on the Dark Net.” He had gone pale. “Two of the men on here are dead now, Mr. Harmon,” I said, my voice going as bleak as my expression. “One of them was my good friend for more than fifteen years. Now not only has your company been directly involved in attempting to support a narco-insurgent group in Sinaloa, but it looks very much to me like you put up some of the reward money for this little wet-work ad. I also wonder how much of the information on it came from your people. We were, after all, contracted by your company to secure the shipment in the first place.”
In the space of about two minutes, Harmon had gone from in-control executive, to blustering, offended executive, to a man deeply, deeply frightened for his life. “What do you want?” he asked, his voice suddenly very small. “What do you need me to do?”
“What do I want?” I asked, standing up and looming over him. “I want my friend back. I want corrupt, soft-clothed motherfuckers like you, sitting in your plush office hundreds of miles from the carnage, to pay the price for your actions.” I leaned forward until I was only inches away from his face. “But you can relax. I'm not going to kill you. I'm just issuing a warning. Every bit of this is getting dragged into the light. The Fusang Group is finished. Los Hijos de la Muerte is finished. However much you were directly involved, or only complicit through approval, that's all going to be found out. I'm going to burn this ivory tower down around your ears, Mr. Harmon. Rest assured of that.”
As Larry and I turned to leave, I paused, and half-faced Harmon again. He was already starting to reach for a phone. “Oh, and as for Senator Colter?” I said, “He's getting a similar visit today. And the investigation into his activities has already started.” Of course, just how far it was going to really go, I didn't know. I had a sinking feeling already that many of the players in this shit-show were going to go Scot-free. They had too much money and too much influence to be taken down by what was left of the system.
We still weren't quite ready to go full vigilante in the States, though. Not yet.
“This isn't going to be much more pleasant than the meeting with Harmon was, is it?” Larry murmured. We had just gotten out of the truck outside of Stoney's. The place looked like a pretty typical dive; no windows, the siding painted dark red, with various beer signs emblazoned all over the outside.
“I doubt it,” I replied. “I don't think Renton's going to take our suspicions all that well.”
“He wasn't the one getting shot at,” Larry commented dryly, as we walked in.
It was just as much a classic dive on the inside as it had been outside. The bar was a big L-shape that took up fully a third of the room, and the tables were lit by a flickering combination of red and orange neon and the bluer light from the four TVs, all of which were playing some sport or another. There was a thick miasma of cigarette smoke in the air, and the music and chatter was deafening compared to the street.
Jim was at the bar, with Nick and Little Bob. He made eye contact, and tilted his head toward the back of the room. I followed his gesture, until I spotted Renton sitting at a table with Mia and another guy I didn't recognize. I started toward the table, Jim angling to do the same, while Larry moved toward the bar.
“Renton,” I said by way of greeting, as I pulled up a chair and sat down. “And who is this?”
“This is Janson,” he said. He seemed distinctly uncomfortable. Janson looked pissed.
“I'd like to know right off,” he said, “just why we shouldn't make you disappear into a black site somewhere for the rest of your natural lives,” he said. “We hired you to go after El Duque, the guy that everybody wants, the guy JSOC would sacrifice their first born children to catch, and instead of following up on it, you go rogue, take apart a cartel, and violently dismantle a publicly-known Chinese company's operations in Mazatlan. You essentially went to war in Mexico, and dragged the Chinese into it! Do you have any idea at all what kind of a mess you've made?”
I just looked at him levelly for a moment. “You finished?” I asked. “Because I've got some questions of my own.” I looked at Renton. “Did you know? Did you know, before The Broker told us, that El Duque was a blind? Did you send us into that fucking snake pit after a fucking ghost?”
He held up his hands, Janson's anger momentarily fading into the background. “Jeff, I didn't know. I doubt anybody knew. Why would I hire you to go into that situation after a fairy-tale? It makes no sense.”
“It makes plenty of sense if you need a stalking horse to run through the AO, just to see who pops up to snap at it,” I said. “I'm thinking that we might have been just as much of a decoy as El Duque himself, except he doesn't exist, so he can't get killed in the process.”
“Now you're being paranoid,” Renton started to say, but Mia interrupted him.
“Is that right, Janson?” she demanded. “Was this all a decoy operation?”
He looked a little taken aback at the question coming from her. Maybe he figured she was bought and paid for or something. “You should know better than that,” he started to say, but she interrupted him again.
“Give me more credit than that,” she said. “You reacted. Did The Network know about this the entire time?”
He stared at us, some of his angry bluster diminishing. “There was speculation about it,” he finally admitted. “Going back to the first time he popped up on the radar. Some considered it about a fifty percent chance that he didn't actually exist, or that he was an alias for several different people. The background wasn't there. Bin Laden had photos, a history. Even Abu Bakr al Baghdadi had more of a legend than El Duque, and people still thought he didn't exist. But there wasn't a consensus about it. It was considered a workable risk to send you after him.”
I glanced at Renton. He was staring at Janson, his eyes narrowed. “And you didn't see fit to let me or my people know about this,” he said flatly.
Janson shrugged. “Need to know.”
“So was leaking the identities of the teams sent in to the bad guys also need to know?” I asked quietly. “Because that's the only way I can think of that our entire team roster, including Mia here, got on the Dark Net with a king's ransom on our heads.”
He hesitated. Renton's expression went very still and very c
old. “I would suggest you pick your next words very, very carefully,” he said to Janson.
“It was not my idea,” he said finally. “In fact, I argued against it. But several of the more...influential members of the inner circle thought it might reveal more of who was involved; if El Duque himself didn't show his face in the course of the hunt, we could tell who was part of his network by who went after the bounty.”
I leaned back in my chair. “So, we were bait.”
“Not entirely,” he said. “The possibility did exist that you would manage to hunt down El Duque. The rest was considered...contingency planning.”
“Your 'contingency planning' got some good people killed,” I snarled. “I'd introduce you to Pablo Gutierrez, but he was murdered for your fucking contingency planning.”
“Fortunes of war,” Janson said. “Are you telling me you didn't hit anyone who wasn't a narco in that attack on the nightclub in Culiacan?” I saw red. I had to grip the chair to keep from launching myself at the smug asshole in his polo shirt. “At any rate, going off mission as you did, you pretty well destroyed what hope we had to infiltrate that network, whether it was El Duque's or someone else's just using the name. It's going to take years to rebuild what you tore through in your little rampage. Just for that, I should have you detained. As it is, I suspect security reasons may mandate it in any case.”
“Over my dead body,” Renton said savagely. “Not to mention yours.”
I just smiled at Janson coldly. “Try it,” I said. “Your little pseudo-SWAT team won't make it five feet from their vehicle. As for you, you won't make it six inches off your chair.” It wasn't a bluff, either. My HiPower was in my hand, under the table.