by Peter Nealen
Hart scrambled for the phone, almost as desperate to find a way to break the grim silence in the hospital room as to shut off “Fortunate Son” before it echoed through the hallway too far. “Yeah, it’s Don,” he said, answering the phone before he really saw who it was.
“Don, it’s Vinnie,” Bianco said. “Are you with Sam right now?”
“Yeah, I am,” he said, looking at Childress. Childress turned sluggishly to look at him, but there was no life, no interest in his eyes. “What’s up?”
“Hey, we’re gonna be moving, and I need a tech backup,” he said.
Hart switched the phone to speaker so that Childress could hear. “Neither one of us is exactly a tech-head, Vinnie,” he said.
“I know,” Bianco said, “but we’re getting in the shit, and I can’t hang back and do it from a hotel room. I need help, guys.”
Childress had turned his head to look more closely at Hart. There might have been a renewed light in his eyes. “What kind of stuff are you needing, Vinnie?” he asked. Hart angled the phone to make it easier for the microphone to pick up his voice. “I don’t know much about any of it, but if there’s something I can help with…”
“I know you don’t know much of it, Sam,” Bianco replied. “Can you get a computer in the room there?”
Childress looked up at Hart, who nodded. “Yeah, I can get a laptop up here, and I’m pretty sure the hospital has wifi,” Hart said.
“Okay,” Bianco continued. “I’m going to send you guys some links for some quick-and-dirty training in open source collection, including some of the sites I need you to sift through. We need every bit of information on a family named Espino-Gallo in Chihuahua, Juarez, and Sonora.”
“Is that the opposition?” Childress asked.
“Got it in one,” Bianco replied. “You up to it?”
“I’ll see what I can find in between surgeries,” Childress said. Hart noticed that there was a renewed firmness in his voice, and his eyes didn’t seem quite so dead.
“Good deal,” Bianco said. “I’ve gotta go; I’ll send you that stuff as soon as I can. Good to have you back in the fight, Sam.”
As he hung up, Hart looked at Childress. He was staring at the ceiling again, but he didn’t look as down and wishing for death as he had when he’d first walked in. There was a new spark there. And Hart thought he knew what.
Bianco’s last words might have been thrown off as an afterthought, but they’d meant something to Childress. He might not be able to run and gun with the boys anymore, but he could learn to do something else. He wasn’t useless, and crippled as he was, he wasn’t dead. His life wasn’t over.
He looked over at Hart. “Can you go get that laptop, Don?” he asked. “I don’t want to keep Vinnie and the boys waiting any longer than necessary.”
“Sure thing, Sam,” Hart said, standing. “I’ll be back in a few.”
***
“Damn, this bastard’s heavier than he looks,” Curtis complained. “And his clothes keep catching on the brush.”
“So tear ‘em,” Flanagan retorted, dragging another corpse toward the draw a hundred yards from the house. “He ain’t going to care anymore.” He half-turned, bringing his own grisly cargo to parallel the draw, and dropped the dead gangbanger. The dead man’s head bounced a little, before Flanagan gave him a rough shove with his boot, sending him rolling down the slope into the draw. “Besides,” he said, turning back to Curtis, who was lagging about ten yards behind, “shouldn’t you actually be able to use those muscles for something?”
“These are beach muscles, Joseph!” Curtis panted. “Like plumage for a mating bird. You know that.” He grunted as he dragged the body the rest of the way to the edge and tipped it in. The corpse rolled the ten feet to the bottom of the wash, joining the other half dozen that were already lying there. There were flies already beginning to buzz, despite the cooler weather of the desert winter.
“Seems kinda cold, just dumping ‘em in the desert,” he said quietly.
Flanagan glanced at him. “No time for a proper burial,” he said, equally quietly. “Besides, it’s probably better than what they’d do to us.”
“I know,” Curtis said. “Hey, ‘Buzzards gotta eat, same as worms,’ right?”
Flanagan tilted his head slightly. “I’m surprised you’ve even ever seen that movie,” he said.
“I did a deployment with you, remember?” Curtis replied. “After a while, even your ancient westerns were enough of a distraction.”
Flanagan grunted, even as something caught his eye in the distance. He squinted, looking south, shading his eyes with his hand.
“What?” Curtis asked. He wasn’t joking around anymore; he’d picked up on the fact that something was off.
“Look,” Flanagan said, pointing. Curtis craned his neck to see, shading his own eyes.
“Those dust clouds?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Flanagan said, turning back toward the house. “At least three trucks. We’ve got to get set in before they get here. Because offhand, I seriously doubt that they’re friendly.
“Not when they’re coming from Mexico.”
Chapter 12
Roger Hancock forged up the hill as fast as he could move, already puffing and starting to sweat. He’d be the first to admit that he was hardly the fastest runner in the bunch. He was more like a tank. Slow, but steady.
He’d also forgotten just how heavy an AR-10 could get, especially when you were running with it.
Getting old, Roger. Damned sure not nineteen and in RIP anymore. He didn’t want to think about how long ago his time in the Recon Indoc Platoon had been.
Fortunately, it wasn’t a big hill. He got to a good vantage point and threw himself flat, keeping his muzzle high by instinct and snapping the bipods out before lowering the rifle to rest, snugging the buttstock into his shoulder and finding the scope with his eye, searching for the oncoming trucks.
Hancock hadn’t been a sniper, but he could shoot. He wasn’t a hunter like Flanagan, Childress, or Brannigan, but he knew he wasn’t half bad at range estimation. He started figuring out his shots as the three trucks got closer.
If all else failed, he knew that he could always spot the impact of the first round and adjust. There was enough dust out there, and Brannigan had specified that they wait until the sicarios, or whoever they were, were a lot closer before opening fire. Spotting his rounds shouldn’t be hard.
He did wish that Gomez, Flanagan, Wade, and Javakhishvili had held off, had waited until the rest of the Blackhearts had gotten there. They wouldn’t be in such a hurry to get set in for the ambush if they had.
The ambush itself didn’t bother him. None of the job at hand did. Roger Hancock knew how to say the right things, but he was probably more at home with the idea of taking the law into their own hands than anyone else on the team, aside from maybe Wade. It was part of the way he’d lived for years.
Hancock was an adrenaline junkie. He knew it. It had been a major factor in getting him to sign on with Brannigan. Whatever he’d done on the civilian side hadn’t been enough, whether it was surfing, skydiving, racing, or any other extreme sports that he indulged in. He had long ago realized that all of those little diversions were just that—diversions. Substitutes for the only thing that really made him feel alive.
Combat.
Any other man, with any other wife, would probably be best served getting out of the business and taking care of his family. But Tammy had long ago resigned herself to Roger’s nature, and had actually been worried about him rotting away before Brannigan had approached him on that beach and offered him a job, rescuing hostages in the Persian Gulf.
But a life shaped by combat, by killing men for country and wallet, had inured him to certain things. He’d kept his nose clean over the years, but Roger Hancock knew things, and he knew people who weren’t exactly the most upstanding citizens. He had the accumulated knowledge and contacts to be a very shady individual, should he decide to go that way.<
br />
Offing a bunch of cartel hitmen without the law’s say-so? That was child’s play to Roger Hancock. He wouldn’t even worry about it.
The three trucks were closing in fast, big clouds of dust billowing from their tires. Two were big, quad-cab GMCs, and the third was a jacked-up Jeep Wrangler. The pickups’ beds were empty, but the cabs were clearly full of shooters.
He put his crosshairs on the windshield of the rightmost truck and waited.
They came up the valley, paralleling the ridge to the west, bouncing over the desert floor and plowing over the sagebrush where it got in their way. They weren’t being cautious, and they weren’t driving in any kind of formation. In fact, it looked an awful lot like they were racing each other, just tearing up the terrain toward the Lazy GR, more intent on avenging their fellows than on being careful.
What do they have to be careful about? For all they know, it was just a bunch of local hayseeds who jumped their guys. They don’t know about us.
And they never will. Not really.
He kept adjusting his position as the trucks closed in on the house and corrals, making sure he still had a shot. The sun was glaring off the windshield, so he couldn’t see any of the occupants, but there were only so many places that a target could be inside a quad cab pickup. He’d err on the side of caution. He’d use two shots per.
Of course, he wasn’t the one to trigger the ambush. The Colonel had reserved that for himself.
From his vantage point, Hancock could barely hear the shot. The suppressors that Lamberte had fabricated were superb. But he saw the Jeep’s windshield spiderweb around a neat, round hole just in front of the driver, and it was suddenly out of control, swerving sharply to the right and almost clipping the back of one of the GMCs before it hit a rock and started to tip over.
At the same instant, Hancock’s own finger tightened on his trigger, which broke like glass. The 7.62mm OBR thumped into his shoulder, the report muffled to a loud cough. He was slightly off; the bullet smacked into one of the door posts, scarring the dark paint. Hancock was still too far away to see the bullet hole, but he knew he’d missed. He adjusted and fired again, even as three more bullet holes appeared in the GMC’s windshield.
The truck surged forward, but twisted to one side, even as one of the back doors flew open and two bodies sailed out, hitting the ground and rolling and tumbling. The driver must have been hit, and had mashed the gas pedal in his death throes. More glass shattered as more bullets punched through the windows, but Hancock was already shifting toward the two who had jumped.
One of them was clearly hurt, crawling away from the kill zone, or what he thought might be the killzone. The other one was trying to run, half doubled over, dodging toward the nearest wash. Hancock put his reticle on that one, let out his breath, and squeezed.
He fired just as the fleeing man started to jink to the right. The bullet caught him high in the torso, and he staggered. He kept going a dozen more steps, but he was already starting to slump before he’d gotten three feet. Just short of the wash, he fell on his face.
Hancock was already searching for the second man. That one had clearly seen his buddy get hit, and had suddenly gone very still, flat against the ground behind a clump of sagebrush. But he didn’t know exactly where the bullets were coming from, and therefore he wasn’t quite as well-concealed as he thought he was.
Hancock spotted his boot, sticking out from behind the brush, and mentally calculated about where the rest of him ought to be. Leaning into the rifle, loading the bipods to keep it steady, he fired four times, spreading the shots out along roughly where he thought the hiding man’s torso was. He figured he was about six hundred meters away; there was a good chance that some of them might well be diverted just enough by the stiff brush to ruin the shot. So he kept shooting, even as he just barely saw the man’s leg jerk, stiffen, and slowly draw in.
The man didn’t come out from behind the brush.
He came up off the glass to look around and assess the battlefield. The Jeep had tipped over, and a few of the bad guys who had survived were using it as cover and spraying fire at the house and the hills around them. Hancock doubted that any of the Blackhearts, even Gomez, were still in the house. And none of those boys down there seemed to be carrying anything heavier or with longer reach than a couple of AKs and ARs.
The shot-up GMC had come to an abrupt halt, the wounded or dead driver having slammed it into a boulder just beyond the flipped Jeep. Steam or smoke was pouring out from under the hood, and the windows were all shattered, the broken glass spattered with blood that was visible even in the view of Hancock’s scope.
The other GMC had successfully turned around, and was even then racing back south.
A bullet whined past his head, and Hancock turned his attention back to the three men crouched behind the overturned Jeep. They were firing wildly; he was fairly certain that they didn’t have a good target, even though he was still in civilian clothes; jeans, t-shirt, and jacket. He was in a good position, though, and the suppressor did a good job of keeping the muzzle blast down. They didn’t know where he or any of the other Blackhearts were. They were hosing down the hills in the hopes of keeping their enemies’ heads down.
He had a good shot on two of them from where he lay on the hill. He set his reticle on one, quickly guessing the range and the hold, and fired. The suppressor coughed again, kicking up a little bit of dust that quickly drifted away in the slight breeze. He recovered quickly from the recoil, to see that none of the three were down; he’d missed.
He quickly corrected, even though he hadn’t seen the impact. He knew his windage was good; it was just a matter of shooting a little bit higher or lower. Given his angle, he shot lower.
The bullet tore through the man in the red polo shirt, punching through his clavicle and bursting out of his back. He staggered and twisted in pain, even as Hancock’s trigger reset and he fired again. That shot went right through the man’s sternum, and he crashed onto his back.
The other man he could see clearly had turned and gaped in shock at his fallen friend, and Hancock was about to drop him when a bullet snapped his head back with a faint spray of red and he dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. A moment later, the third man fell from another unseen shooter, and the valley went quiet.
Except for the roar of engines, as the big black Denali that the dead narcos in the ditch not far away had left at the house came racing out onto the desert floor, pursuing the fleeing GMC.
***
“Ow!” Curtis yelled, as the pickup hit a particularly nasty bump and knocked his head against the ceiling. “Where the hell did you learn to drive?”
“Buckle up, then, Kevin!” Wade snarled as he twisted the wheel to avoid a rock the size of one of the Denali’s wheels. “It’s not like this is a road chase!”
In fact, Wade was doing a phenomenal job, steering tightly around the worst obstacles, plowing over the smaller clumps of sagebrush, and carefully modulating his use of gears, brakes, gas, and steering to get over the smaller rills running down into the larger arroyos that came down off the hills flanking the ranch. He couldn’t simply floor it across the desert; that would be a good way to end up stranded, either high-centered or with a broken axle. All three men in the truck had been there before.
Flanagan was holding on for dear life in the passenger seat next to Wade, his OBR held ready, the muzzle sticking out of the rolled-down window. He hadn’t fastened his seat belt, but seemed to be doing a better job of holding himself steady than Curtis was in the back seat.
Ahead of them, the dust cloud thrown up by the fleeing truck was getting closer. The Espino-Gallo gangsters weren’t as good at four-wheeling as Wade was.
They hit an unexpected rut, and Curtis was flung against the back of Wade’s seat, knocking his rifle against his chin. “Ow!” he barked. “Dammit!”
“If you can’t ride the monster, then buckle up, dammit!” Flanagan yelled over his shoulder without taking his eyes off t
heir quarry.
“’Ride the monster?’” Curtis demanded. “Where the hell did you come up with that one, Joe? That’s bad even for…Ow!”
Someone in the fleeing truck had noticed that they were being pursued. Muzzle flashes started to flicker, barely visible in the afternoon light. Bullets snapped past, with loud cracks audible even over the roar of the engine and the banging and rattling as the truck bounced over the uneven ground.
“Fuckers can’t shoot for shit on the move,” Wade said through clenched teeth, as he twisted the wheel to avoid another stone twice the size of a man’s head.
Flanagan was bracing his rifle against the doorframe, but holding his fire. “Only an idiot would expect to hit anything at this distance and with both vehicles moving like this,” he said, as another lurch made his OBR’s forearm smack into the frame with a bang.
“I’ll get us closer then,” Wade replied, stomping on the gas pedal.
The escaping truck suddenly went down into a wash ahead, and didn’t immediately reappear. “Slow down,” Flanagan yelled. “Stop us short.”
“They’ll open the gap,” Wade protested, though he eased off the gas.
“I don’t think so,” Flanagan said grimly. “They haven’t come back up, have they?”
Wade’s pale eyes flicked over the edge of the wash in front of them. Some faint traces of dust were still drifting away, down the channel, but he had to see just how steep the other side was as it came into view.
“Stop the truck,” Flanagan said.
“They might be running down the wash,” Wade ventured, but Flanagan shook his head.
“We’d see more dust if they were,” he said. “I think they’re stuck.”
Wade nodded as he brought the truck to a halt, more drifting dust floating past and out into the desert. The three men opened their doors, rifles held ready.
Flanagan looked to either side, but didn’t need to tell either of the others to spread out. They were already moving, getting low as they approached the lip of the wash. No one got invited to join Brannigan’s Blackhearts unless they were already a pro.