Weapons

by Matt Rogers

  Serious, serious tension.

  Luckily, Slater didn’t care in the slightest.

  The kid pulled out his piece instantly, making a show of it. The Glock was in his hand before Slater or Ruby could blink, and he waved it around in a way that immediately demonstrated he had no idea what he was doing.

  He pointed the barrel at Slater, then Ruby.

  He said, ‘If one of you motherfuckers touches me again, I’ll have gasoline poured down your throats. I’ll track down your families and I’ll tie them up and let them watch as I burn you. Is that fucking clear?’

  Slater said nothing.

  Ruby smiled.

  The kid ran a hand through his mop of hair. He was irritated now. This hadn’t gone as planned. He turned the gun on Ruby and kept it there, and said, ‘Walk.’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  She flashed a smile at him.

  Her eyes burned bright.

  She didn’t move.

  He reached out to grab a handful of her hair.

  She kicked him so hard in the balls that Slater thought he might pass out on the spot. But he kept some level of dignity by going down on one knee, and all the colour drained from his face, and his body started to shut down on itself. Full survival mode. And what the kid should have done right then was raise the Glock and shoot her in the face, because Slater knew those were the orders. He’d wanted to take her alive for bragging rights, and probably because he’d seen a surveillance photo and figured if he was going to take anyone alive and have his way with them, it’d be Ruby Nazarian.

  But he’d severely underestimated her, so now he found himself gasping for breath and plagued by indecision. He could barely concentrate on what was happening because of the agony, so he hesitated.

  He still didn’t shoot her — he saw some way to salvage the situation, even at his most desperate hour.

  She ripped the gun out of his hands, threw it away, and instead of mixing up her attacks she kicked him in the balls again.

  He threw up on the hot pavement.

  Slater stepped forward and dragged him to his feet, even though he could barely stay conscious. He took the kid’s head in his giant hands — like gripping a bowling ball tight — and smashed the jeep’s side mirror clean off with it. There was an explosion of sound as the glass shattered, and the scion dropped to the ground, sprawling out on his stomach. He wasn’t unconscious, but he was in more pain than he’d ever been in in his life. His head was cut open in five or six different places, and he’d probably ruptured both testicles.

  Slater said, ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Ruby said.

  They got in the jeep, and Slater fired up the engine and accelerated out of the parking lot, toward the convoy of Suburbans.

  49

  In hindsight, his next move was an act of pure genius.

  As they drove toward the main road, Slater said, ‘Put your hands behind your back.’

  Ruby looked across. ‘What?’

  ‘Do it.’

  She obliged.

  ‘And look down.’

  She looked down.

  Slater artificially inflated his aggressiveness, and let pure discontent spread across his face. As if there was nowhere else he should be in the world.

  The convoy of SUVs were out of sight of the parking lot — they’d maintained a respectable distance to allow the young scion to act on his own. They’d given him privacy. Slater could see the hoods sticking out from the line of trees, preventing anyone from barrelling past without their approval, but there wasn’t a sicario in sight. The trail was narrow, and the woods pressed in, restricting their line of sight.

  So they hadn’t seen what had happened.

  Slater drove the jeep out of the trail and stamped on the brakes in the middle of the convoy. There were six Suburbans in total, and the sicarios were on him in a heartbeat. There was an army of them, and they swarmed him like flies to shit.

  Even he recognised the danger he was in.

  Ruby did too.

  They could have all the firepower in the world, but it wouldn’t achieve anything here.

  Slater screwed up his face in a look of pure frustration and said, ‘You stupid fucks sent that kid to do the job?’

  He was met with silence.

  Guns hovered in place, but no-one shot him.

  Slater didn’t even pause to take a breath. He said, ‘They sent me up from Chiapas this morning. I’d already taken care of it. I’m bringing her back. Not that little puta back there. Where’s the fucking communication? I thought you were professionals.’

  Someone went to speak, but Slater shook his head in disbelief at the sheer incompetence.

  Then, without hesitating or thinking twice, he gently pressed down on the accelerator and rolled on past.

  He wasn’t looking to give them answers. He wasn’t even looking to make them believe him. He was stirring the pot. Causing confusion. Making them pause. Making them think, Wait — did we fuck this up? Could it be possible?

  They put it together fast. They realised that their bosses would almost certainly have told them of a third party, despite this mystery man’s confidence. And their cartel wouldn’t have outsourced it to an American. They would have kept it within their ranks, no matter what. But by the time the shock of being confronted had faded, and they put two and two together, Slater had driven on past.

  Because he’d only been looking to get through the roadblock without getting shot.

  And he’d done it.

  Someone cried out in protest, and he said, ‘Get down,’ and stamped on the accelerator.

  The jeep’s rear tyres kicked up dust as Ruby flattened herself down, out of the line of sight. Slater ducked too, and gunshots erupted. Chaos exploded in the serenity of the seaside resort, but they were out of harm’s way when the jeep shot onto the main road and put a line of trees between itself and the gunmen.

  Slater sat up, and corrected course to avoid running off the road, and crushed the pedal to the floor.

  Wind howled over the open frame as the jeep picked up speed, and when he turned to check on Ruby, he saw a brilliant shine in her eyes.

  She was alive.

  She said, ‘I missed this.’

  ‘You’re insane.’

  ‘Only in the best way.’

  She took the Beretta M9 out from under her tube top and tested its weight in her palm. She twisted in her seat and peered back to check whether they were being pursued.

  They were.

  All six Suburbans were on the move. Slater flashed a glance in the rear view mirror, and a pang of dread coursed through him. He hadn’t established the lead he’d wanted. He’d be cutting it close.

  He voiced these concerns.

  She said, ‘The cartels are scum. Pure scum. Let’s kill them all.’

  ‘Having combat IQ means recognising when you’re outgunned. We can’t win a war right now.’

  She reached back under the tarpaulin, and came up with the M4A1 carbine.

  She said, ‘This might do the trick.’

  But common sense prevailed. She looked back again, and hesitated at the size of the force. Six SUVs packed with testosterone-fuelled sicarios were a nightmare by anyone’s standards — even two highly-trained black operations killers. She nodded her acceptance, and turned back to Slater.

  ‘How far’s the airfield?’

  ‘A couple of miles, tops.’

  ‘Best step on it then.’

  He obliged.

  The speedometer climbed faster and faster. Slater spotted the turn that would bring them inland, toward the naval base. He slowed and pulled the wheel to the left and veered off the beach road. The next road opened up before them…

  …and Slater slammed on the brakes.

  Because there was a convoy of federales and their official police vehicles blocking the way forward.

  At first, he debated how to proceed. If they were responding to cartel activity in the area, perhaps he’d lucked out and
found protection during a time of need. He could sail on past, and wait for the federal police to intercept the charging SUVs behind them.

  But then Slater took one look at the rifles being raised in his direction, and he remembered he was in Mexico.

  Where the authorities were in bed with organised crime.

  And he realised the federales were about to open fire.

  50

  But Ruby beat them to the jump.

  She’d acclimatised to the power dynamic in Mexico, and knew what was coming when she saw the federales. They had no reason to be out here unless they’d been paid a handsome fee to dispose of a particularly troublesome tourist. So she had the carbine up and aimed at them before they’d even registered her and Slater barrelling towards them.

  Their guns came up, and Slater threw himself down below the line of sight.

  And gunshots blared in his ears.

  This is it, he thought.

  But then he realised the noise was coming from inside the jeep.

  And he looked across to see Ruby transfixed on the blockade, the carbine raised to her shoulder, firing through the jeep’s windshield. The windshield exploded from the first shot, and glass fragments rained down on Slater. He focused on keeping the vehicle moving in a straight line as Ruby picked off one, then two, then three, then four policemen. She was utterly remorseless, and Slater didn’t blame her.

  It’s either them or us.

  A couple returned fire, but she was onto them in a flash. Slater figured the tide had shifted, and he sat back up and pulled the Sig Sauer from his waistband and fired out the open windshield frame, hitting one federale in the neck. The guy twisted and spun away as blood sprayed from a severed artery, but his finger twitched on the trigger in his death throes. A round whipped by Slater’s face, shockingly close — so close he could almost taste it. He aimed the hood of the jeep for a slim gap between two of the police vehicles parked nose to nose, and he yelled, ‘Hold onto something.’

  Ruby clutched the top of the passenger door with white knuckles.

  The jeep smashed into the two cars in a mind-numbing display of force. Slater lashed against his seatbelt and grunted as he took the majority of the impact to his collarbone. But it didn’t break, and although the jeep’s hood crumpled inward it smashed the two cars away like opening a pair of giant gates, and it coughed and spluttered and carried on through.

  Ruby swivelled in her seat and shot a federale through the open visor of his helmet on the way past.

  The guy had been milliseconds away from gunning her down.

  Slater exhaled a long breath and worked on building the momentum he’d lost through the impact.

  And behind them, the cartel SUVs gained ground.

  What little of the federale forces remained stumbled aside to let the convoy through. Slater watched in the rear view mirror as the SUVs formed a single line and barrelled through the gap he’d cleared, piggybacking off his own work. He grunted his disapproval and thrashed the jeep to its limits, willing it forward.

  They were approaching the main road.

  Beyond, the naval air base loomed.

  Slater clenched his teeth and said, ‘We can’t go straight to the runway if they’re this close.’

  Ruby spun in her seat and loaded the carbine with a fresh magazine. She said, ‘Slow down, and I’ll give them something to make them hesitate.’

  ‘They’ve got as much firepower as you do,’ Slater said. ‘And there’s thirty of them.’

  ‘If we make it to the jet, we’ll be fine.’

  ‘No, we won’t. They’ll shoot it down before it has the chance to take off.’

  ‘Aren’t the guards on your side?’

  ‘Not if the federales convince them otherwise. We need to lose them first.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘What’s nearby?’

  Ruby thought hard. Then she said, ‘Go left.’

  ‘Into Tulum?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t want civilian casualties. Best to minimise—’

  ‘Go left,’ she hissed. ‘We’ll turn off before we get to the town centre.’

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘There’s a cenote close by. We can lure them into it and use it as cover if needed. We have to hope there’s no tourists there.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A sinkhole. Like an underground pool.’

  Slater stared at her.

  She said, ‘You want to make things difficult for them? That’s where we go. Otherwise it’s just open roads and trees.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  He twisted the wheel, and went left.

  They raced onto a new road devoid of traffic, and a gunshot blared behind them. Then another. Then a few more. One of the rounds came close, but the rest went wide. Slater gripped the wheel with two sweaty palms and tried not to panic. Ahead he saw the urban sprawl of Tulum’s town centre, and he looked at Ruby with concern.

  She said, ‘Here. Go right.’

  ‘You sure about this?’

  ‘It’s a small clearing with plenty of cover and the cenote in the centre. That’s the only way we win against this many hostiles. Surely you can see that. What other options do we have?’

  Slater swallowed a ball of unease, and again he said, ‘Okay.’

  He went right and they barrelled north, passing a supermarket chain on the left and a hotel on the right. There were civilians about, carting groceries to their cars and ambling down the sidewalks. They probably thought the procession speeding past was nothing but a gang of hooligans — that is, until the shots rang out. The SUVs continued to gain ground, and Slater looked back to see sicarios hanging out the rear windows, brandishing rifles, openly firing. He heard the faint screams of pedestrians as the jeep roared past civilisation.

  They were back to dense forest and foliage on either side of the road, and Slater kept thrashing the jeep until it reached top speed.

  Ruby screamed, ‘Here!’

  He slowed down, and figured he’d put an acceptable distance between themselves and the convoy of SUVs.

  They had a little breathing room.

  There was a sign reading: Cenote Calavera.

  Slater pulled into a dusty parking lot entirely devoid of vehicles, and he took that as a plus because this sinkhole — ordinarily a tourist trap — was about to become a war zone.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Ruby said.

  ‘Out, then.’

  They piled out of the jeep and Slater made sure he had the Sig Sauer and a handful of spare magazines for the carbine on him. Ruby brandished the M4A1 in one hand, and her Glock in the other. Together they sprinted for a trail leading deep into the woods — once again, she reassured him they were on the right track. They left the jeep doors open and the engine running. The sicarios would know exactly where they were headed.

  The question was whether they would follow, or establish a perimeter in the parking lot and turn it into a siege.

  But there were multiple ways out of the forest, and Slater didn’t think they’d leave it to chance.

  He and Ruby vanished between the trees as the SUVs tore into the parking lot.

  Cartel hitmen piled out, juiced up on adrenaline and stimulants, and raced into the jungle in pursuit.

  51

  The trail spiralled deeper into the foliage for perhaps a hundred feet.

  They passed a toll booth, ordinarily manned by staff charging a handful of pesos to access the cenote. Slater managed a quick look at the information board and noticed it was only staffed between nine a.m. and four p.m. He figured it was somewhere near eight-thirty, and he gave a silent thanks that they wouldn’t run into any civilians.

  The ground was uneven grey rock, and in the centre was a sinkhole.

  If not for the chaos of their arrival and the thirty sicarios hot on their heels, the view would have taken Slater’s breath away. But he didn’t have any breath to begin with, so he ignored
the stunning turquoise water and the small wooden ladder leading down into a dark underground chamber.

  Ruby said, ‘This is perfect.’

  Slater said, ‘Is there level ground down there?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. We’re not going down there. There’s only one way into this clearing that makes any sense. We’ve funnelled them into a bottleneck.’

  Slater glanced down. ‘So the sinkhole isn’t important?’

  ‘Unless you want to die,’ she said. ‘The terrain is where we’ll get the tactical advantage.’

  Slater said, ‘Okay. You know what you’re doing?’

  She gave him a dark look, and shifted the carbine onto her shoulder. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’ll try to get around behind them,’ Slater said. ‘You take the high ground up there, past the cenote, and we’ll squeeze them like pincers.’

  She nodded. ‘That puts you in the most danger.’

  He said, ‘I’ll be okay.’

  She tossed him the Glock, and he nodded gratefully. If he was up close, he didn’t need to focus on accuracy. He could easily go akimbo with two handguns.

  She sprinted around the lip of the giant gaping hole in the rock. The calm surface of the water, perhaps ten feet below ground, sparkled under the sunlight. Ruby took up position behind the cover of a cluster of trees, a couple of dozen feet up past the cenote.

  Slater ducked low and hurried into the undergrowth near the mouth of the trail. His heart hammered in his chest. He flattened himself to the dirt and swept a bunch of ferns over his back.

  Then he lay still as a statue.

  Insects buzzed, and birds chirped, and the hot fizz of the jungle simmered all around him. He wiped sweat beads off his forehead and searched for Ruby up the back of the clearing. She was barely visible — she’d burrowed in deep. And, he realised, she was right. This was their best chance at catching the sicarios off-guard, but it would take expert marksmanship, and there was no room for hesitation.

  The serenity was shattered by the sound of racing footsteps coming up the trail.

  He waited for the majority of the force to slip past. He could hear their laboured breathing. Brazen insults were unleashed in Spanish as they cursed out their targets. This was supposed to have been an easy job, and now they were running through unknown territory in the heat. At some point they should have realised the prudence of retreating and regrouping, but, thankfully, the narcos were known for their hotheadedness — especially this generation.