by Peter Nealen
The grass was almost knee-high between the trees, which presented some advantage, even though he’d left his ghillie hood-over behind. The desert camouflage still blended well enough, especially when one of them got low. He glanced from side to side. Wade was off on his left, Hancock on his right. They were moving from tree to tree, crossing the gaps as quickly and quietly as possible.
So far, there hadn’t been any sign of the bad guys since they’d parked the trucks off the side of Highway 2. If El Destripador and any of his cronies had headed to the house, they either had already gotten there, or the Blackhearts were ahead of them.
Noting that Hancock and Wade had stopped, he moved forward. They were going downhill, now, and he was careful to keep several of the trees between himself and the hollow where he knew the house was sitting. It was slightly disorienting, coming at it from the south, since he’d only ever seen the target in the dark, from the north. But he was a good enough woodsman to know where he was, and where the target was. His callsign wasn’t “Woodsrunner” for nothing.
They were getting close. There were bluffs ahead, the trees suddenly dropping away to reveal the long, empty slope toward the border, dotted with sagebrush and cactus. The house was at the bottom of the bluffs.
He slowed, searching more carefully. If they were smart, they’d have a sentry on the high ground…
But scan as he might, he couldn’t see anything. He stayed where he was, kneeling just behind a low, stout juniper tree, utterly still except for his eyes. The faint wind stirred the yellow grass, and a bird flew from a juniper to one of the bigger, thorned trees. Nothing else moved.
He had three magazines left of the eight he’d brought south. It would have to do. The Rhodesians, he remembered, had gone on patrol for long periods of time with only four magazines, including the one in the gun. Shot placement counted.
A rattle off to his right, past Hancock, drew his attention. Curtis had been busy before they’d left; he had his OBR slung across his back and was carrying what looked like a cut-down SAW at first glance. It was a belt-fed AR conversion on a full-auto upper.
Leave it to Curtis to find a machinegun when they hadn’t been able to get one beforehand. The little man liked his firepower.
He’d been still for almost two minutes, and nothing had stirred but the birds and the grass in the wind. He got up and moved forward, going into a crouch before he reached the lip of the bluff, keeping his profile low. Before he actually got to the edge, he sank down to a crawl, and wormed up on his belly, his rifle held in front of him.
The house was down below, less than two hundred yards away. Setting his bipods down and getting a good position, Flanagan put his eye to the scope and started to scan.
There was one man outside, carrying an AR or M-16. Two vehicles were parked out front of the little adobe, both mid-sized SUVs. There was definitely movement visible through the one window he could see, but it was too obscured by the reflections off the glass and the small size of the window to tell for sure what was going on.
Brannigan crawled up next to him and studied the setup through his own scope. “You good with staying up here and covering our approach?” he asked in a low murmur.
“Sure,” Flanagan said. “What’s the word on squirters?”
“If they’re a potential threat, drop ‘em,” Brannigan said. Flanagan nodded fractionally. That meant that anyone who looked like a sicario got blasted. This didn’t look like a home, it looked like a staging area. Which meant the likelihood that there were any innocent civilians down there was slim to none.
Brannigan was peering through his scope, his face hard. “All right,” he said. “I’m going to leave Curtis with you. Make sure he watches his fire with that damned belt-fed. The rest of us are going to go down that draw and move on the house.” He checked his watch. “If you don’t see us in five minutes, go ahead and drop that sentry outside.”
“Got it,” Flanagan answered, his eye to his scope. Brannigan disappeared, crawling back into the grass. A few moments later, he could hear the faint rustle as the rest of the team started down a gap in the bluff toward the house.
Curtis crawled up next to him, the OBR sliding across his back and the belt on the FightLite Industries AR conversion clinking slightly.
“Watch the noise,” Flanagan hissed, without looking over at him.
“They’re not gonna hear it down there,” Curtis said. “Relax.”
Flanagan didn’t respond. He was focused on the man with the M-16 down below, his reticle held just high enough to put a bullet through the man’s sternum, his breathing slow and even. He opened his off eye just long enough to check his watch. Two minutes.
He could hear the faint rustling as Curtis got situated, planting the mutant AR’s bipods and settling in behind the gun. He didn’t have an optic like Flanagan did, but at less than two hundred yards, it was hardly necessary.
One minute.
Flanagan’s finger moved to rest on the trigger, as his thumb switched the rifle off safe.
Faint movement was visible in the draw, as someone moved up behind a juniper tree, less than twenty yards from the house.
Close enough.
The trigger broke cleanly, the suppressor coughed loudly, and the buttstock rammed back into his shoulder, the shock traveling straight down the length of his body. His position was good; the scope hardly moved at all, and he saw the bullet strike, punching through the man’s torso just below his left clavicle. Given the angle, that was a “hydraulic” shot; it had probably just taken out his heart.
He staggered at the shock, looked down at the widening red stain on his shirt, and fell on his face in the dirt.
There was an explosion of yelling from inside the house, and another sicario came running out. But by that time, it was too late for any of them.
Flanagan shot that one at the same time as Brannigan. Brannigan’s bullet struck a fraction of a second before Flanagan’s, sending the man spinning to the ground. That minute difference in time meant that Flanagan’s round blew off the top of the man’s head.
Next to him, Curtis opened fire with the belt-fed, ripping off a long, rattling burst at the window. Whether he hit anyone or not, Flanagan couldn’t tell, but the head and rifle that had suddenly appeared at the window disappeared, even as Curtis’ bullets blasted pockmarks in the adobe, kicking up a small storm of dust.
The assault element was sprinting for the door by then. They went around the front corner and disappeared from Flanagan’s view.
***
The door was closing as Wade ran up to it. He’d had to push to get ahead of Brannigan; the Old Man seemed driven by something. It was as if something back in the hacienda had really, truly pissed him off, in a way that Wade hadn’t ever seen before.
He didn’t mind, especially. It was one of the things he liked about working for Brannigan; you always had to bring your A-game to keep up with the Old Man.
He hit the door moving, driving his shoulder into it as he made entry, the sudden dimness inside almost blinding him in its contrast with the sunlight outside. The man on the other side of the door resisted, but wasn’t ready for two hundred thirty pounds of angry Ranger, wearing another thirty pounds of gear, to hit the door. Wade drove it open, trying to keep his own rifle leveled as he pumped his legs to crush the sicario against the wall.
A silhouette loomed in front of him as he moved. He could see just enough to make out a weapon, something stubby and black. He fired almost without using the sights; it wasn’t a big house or a big room. The suppressed 7.62 sounded like a door being slammed, and the man staggered backward under the savage impact of the round at bad-breath distance.
More gunshots hammered behind him as the others flowed in, engaging targets as they came. Wade hit the extent of the door’s swing, at least with a body between it and the wall. He crushed the man against the adobe with a grunt that was answered by a similar noise of pain.
“Got a live one,” he snarled, bracing himself to k
eep the guy pinned.
Jenkins was suddenly behind him, his rifle leveled. “Got you,” he said. Wade stepped back, clearing the door, and Jenkins fired into the man behind it twice.
The man wasn’t that old; he might have been twenty. He slumped to the ground with a choked-off scream that ended as his lungs ran out of air. The big Desert Eagle pistol he’d been trying to bring to bear sagged and fell from fingers that suddenly didn’t work right. He crumpled on his face on the floor and was still.
“Clear,” Jenkins called.
“Clear,” Brannigan replied. He was standing in the center of the room, looking around.
With the fight suddenly over, Wade had a chance to do the same. The adobe’s single room was dominated by a card table with four plastic lawn chairs gathered around it. Two submachineguns and a gigantic pile of cash were on the table, along with what looked like a meth pipe. There were stacks of ammo crates in one corner, most of them marked as 5.56x45 or 7.62x39mm. Another was piled to the ceiling with bags of white powder.
The third corner held two pairs of shackles fastened to the wall, above a single mat. The mat was crusted with obscene stains, but the shackles were currently empty.
“Looks like we hit them between shipments,” Hancock said grimly.
“They’ve handled their last shipment,” Brannigan rasped. “Grab the cash; looks like we’ll get paid for this job after all. Find something to burn the rest of it.”
“Really?” Javakhishvili asked. “Because there’s a small fortune in here. We could finance all kinds of ops with what’s in this room…”
Brannigan turned his glare on him and he stopped talking. “Burn it,” Brannigan repeated.
“I’m all for burning it,” Jenkins put in. “Some of the stuff that’s come out lately, if one of us got caught, I’d take the rap just because I’m a SEAL.”
Brannigan didn’t look at him, but Wade noticed that it was the first time he knew of that Jenkins had said anything remotely self-deprecating about his own background.
Maybe he was making progress.
Wade decided that he needed to keep an eye on Herc. None of them really knew Javakhishvili that well, and he seemed to revel in being the “shady Slav,” even though he was Georgian. None of them had forgotten that it had been Javakhishvili who had quickly sought out the Mafiya elements in Moldova. What kind of underworld connections did he have Stateside?
It wasn’t something that Wade himself had too much of a problem with. He wouldn’t have been the one to give the order to burn the drugs, but Brannigan had. Wade did believe in team loyalty. And he wasn’t sure about Javakhishvili’s. Not yet.
Of course, they’d wondered that about Gomez, too, when he’d showed up late. There was always more to a man’s story than could be figured out from just watching him.
Brannigan stepped to the door, careful to scan his surroundings and stay out of the doorway itself before he reached for his radio. “Woodsrunner, Kodiak. You and Gambler can collapse in. We’re clear down here.”
“En route,” Flanagan replied.
“Hey, boss?” Hancock spoke up, appearing at his elbow. “None of the dead guys look like El Destripador.”
Brannigan turned back to look at the bodies sprawled inside the adobe. His frown deepened. “Damn,” he said. “I was hoping to get him here. If he’s half as bad as the girls described him, he’s going to be dangerous if he’s still on the loose.”
“We can wait for a bit and see if he shows up,” Wade suggested. “Ambush him.”
Hancock was nodding. “I don’t think we want to try to cross the border until after dark, anyway,” he said.
Brannigan thought it over for a moment, his eyes narrowed. Finally, he nodded. “Let’s get the bodies hidden,” he said. “Three men on security at a minimum at any one time. I guess we won’t torch this place just yet.” He glanced at Javakhishvili, who was pointedly looking elsewhere. “But nobody get any ideas. I catch a man swiping drugs before we’ve burned ‘em, and I’ll kill him myself and leave him with the narcos.”
There wasn’t any argument.
“I’ll go up and intercept Joe and Kevin,” Hancock said, stepping out of the door. “We’ll get set up on the higher ground and hold overwatch.”
Wade looked around the room. Javakhishvili was as blasé as ever, but both Bianco and Jenkins didn’t look thrilled to be stuck on corpse detail. “Well, let’s go, boys,” he said. “Look at it this way; it could be worse. We could be digging up month-old bodies with our bare hands. Been there, done that.”
***
With the bodies shoved into a nearby depression and hastily covered with torn-up brush, the Blackhearts settled in to wait. There wasn’t much talking. A few comments were exchanged in hushed tones, but after a while they just sat in their positions, motionless, eyes scanning the country around them, waiting and listening.
It was deathly quiet. The wind whispered faintly across the high desert, barely audible at its strongest, especially to men who had all lost some degree of hearing from gunfire, explosions, and machinery. Everything was still as the sun began to dip toward the horizon.
Brannigan sat in a chair by the window, watching the outside, his rifle held across his lap. He took in every detail with each sweep of his eyes, but his thoughts were disquieted.
He’d seen some rough things during his career as a Marine and even more in his second career as a mercenary. He’d done some serious killing. He wasn’t the type to keep count—few men really were. Those who did tended to be of a certain sociopathic bent. He didn’t think even Wade kept count.
But this was the first time that he knew he’d killed a kid. He’d had no choice, and he knew it. He was under no illusions that there had been any other course of action, not when the kid in question had been about to throw a grenade at him.
It still haunted him. Especially since the grenade had been a dud, no matter how much he repeated that he’d had no way of knowing that at the time.
And he knew that it would keep haunting him for a long time to come.
There were still things from long ago that had him waking up in the middle of the night, shaking. Once upon a time, he could sit up with Rebecca and talk them away, or even in the worst times, she’d simply held him until the shakes went away. But Rebecca was gone. And he wasn’t sure if he could have talked about this, even with her.
The sun touched the peaks of the Ascensiòn Mountains behind them. He kept scanning the ground and the part of the bluffs that he could see. Nothing moved. The dying sun didn’t glint off the metal or glass of a car or truck. The desert was silent and still. Just like it had been for the last two hours.
The desert turned red, orange, and purple, as the sky steadily turned a darker blue, shading to indigo, and finally to black. Hands pulled NVG mounts over heads, and soon each of the Blackhearts was watching their surroundings through a filter of pale green.
And there was still no sign of their quarry.
It was about an hour after it had gotten completely dark that Hancock ventured, “I don’t think he’s coming.”
“We hit that place hours ago,” Wade concurred. “If this was his fallback position, he’d be here by now.”
“So, do we go hunting for him?” Bianco asked. The big, heavy-set man was still looking out the back window, toward the mountains.
Brannigan wanted to. He knew that Gomez was going to want to. To erase the cancer that was the Espino-Gallo gang from the world, permanently.
But there were practical considerations to take into account, and as a mercenary leader of a mere ten men, he had to remember them.
“No,” he said. “There are too many places he could run, and Mexico is hardly permissive territory. Word about what we did at the hacienda is going to get around. The Federales might even get involved, especially if they think it was gringos who did it. Chihuahua and Sonora are too big to go searching for a needle in a haystack with eight men.” He took a deep breath. “At the very least, we’d have t
o go back north, reset and rearm, and see if we couldn’t get some more intel.” He shook his head in the dark and stood up, pulling his radio out of its pouch. “Surfer, Kodiak. Bring it in. We’re done.”
For now.
Chapter 26
The bus was already parked beside the Gomez house when the rest of the Blackhearts arrived in the two narco pickups. The lights were on inside, and Sonya Gomez, now fully dressed and with an AK in her hands, was waiting on the porch.
Brannigan got out slowly. He’d gotten in touch with Santelli by radio, but he didn’t know what the girl’s mindset was going to be like, after what she’d been through.
But Sonya got to her feet and came down the steps to meet him as he approached.
“Carlo is inside with the others,” she said, her voice very matter-of-fact. “Lisa’s still pissed that he won’t give her a gun, but I kind of agree with him; I wouldn’t trust her with a weapon, either.”
Brannigan suddenly got the impression that Sonya and Lisa had known each other for a long time, and that there was very little love lost between the two of them, even after their shared ordeal.
“You seem to be doing okay,” he pointed out.
“I’m keeping it together,” she said. “Somebody’s got to.”
He just nodded. “If Carlo’s inside, where’s Mario?” he asked. “I would have expected him to be sticking close to you.”
She pointed. “He’s up in the barn with his rifle. I think he’s actually more traumatized by all this than I am.” She paused. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “It sucked, I hate those animals and I’m glad they’re dead, and I hate myself, and I’m probably never going to sleep well again for the rest of my life. But I still think it hurt Mario worse than it hurt me.”
She didn’t need to explain. He probably understood better than she did. He’d lived through the death of his wife. He knew full well what Gomez was feeling.