Yeager's Law

by Scott Bell

  The guard was huge. Yeager had seen smaller offensive tackles in the NFL. And the guy was quick, too. Before Yeager could get properly oriented, the enormous guard twisted with a wrestler’s speed and slapped the M4 out of Yeager’s hands. He punched Yeager in the face, sending his NVGs flying. Lights flashed twice: once with the punch, next when his head bounced off the hard floor.

  Yeager didn’t see the second punch coming. He managed to get his hands up enough to partially block the big fist before it crashed into his nose. There was a reason getting hit in the nose ended most fights right away. The pain was excruciating.

  Had the giant landed that punch squarely, Yeager would have been down for the count. Even so, lights flashed in his brain for the third time in as many seconds.

  The heavy guard straddled Yeager’s waist, pinning him to the ground. He cocked his massive right fist. The position held Yeager like a bug on a board, but it also left his attacker’s family jewels wide open.

  Doubling his fists together, Yeager hammered the guard’s crotch. Once. Twice. A third time—mustering all the passion and anger he could generate. When the big man doubled over and groaned, Yeager tried rolling out from under him. His opponent protected his groin while struggling to keep Yeager pinned. They twisted and writhed, wrestling for position. Everything Yeager tried resulted in a lot of nothing.

  The guard grinned at him through stained teeth. He managed to get both hands around Yeager’s neck, and he began to squeeze. Yeager’s vision darkened almost at once, and he strained his neck tight to keep from getting his larynx crushed.

  Enough of this shit. Yeager fumbled past the big man’s leg, found the butt of his Wilson Combat .45, and popped the safety strap. The pistol was cocked and locked, which meant it was only a matter of…

  …disengaging the thumb safety…

  …and…

  Boom!

  The 185-grain jacketed hollow point slammed into the guy with the power of a freight train. It took him under the ribs and must have blown through heart and lungs. Blood sprayed from his mouth, splattering Yeager’s face.

  “Get off,” Yeager gasped then shot the big sonofabitch twice more.

  With the ponderous grace of a redwood, the guard toppled left and thumped onto the concrete floor with a wet smack. Wheezing and scrubbing his face with a shirt sleeve, Yeager tossed the guard’s leg aside and rolled onto all fours. From there, it was a matter of willpower to push himself upright. He stood for two seconds until a wave of dizziness made him drop back to one knee. When the blackness at the edges of his vision passed, he struggled up again.

  “See, that wasn’t so bad,” he muttered. “Now let’s try walking.”

  Yeager weaved through the tables to the pallets. He found Victor with his back against the barricade, like a man taking a break from a hard day’s work, without a care in the world.

  Except for the blood streaming down his cheek.

  DaSilva strode toward the barn, approaching the men crouched against the wall to the right of the gaping door. Sounds of fighting inside the building had died, but no one had come out. That meant Lopez had either failed or succeeded and died in the attempt, but DaSilva wouldn’t have bet on the latter result.

  With a half dozen men on the right and another half dozen on the left, there was nowhere for the infiltrators to hide. Instead of feeding his men into the battle a little at a time, allowing the tiny number of defenders an even fight, he would flood them with a full dozen men and five from the rear as well.

  He had dispatched the man who had killed the lights with an RPG to blow open the rear door so that team could enter without setting off any traps. The explosion in back would be the signal to move.

  “Marco?” he barked. “Who is Marco?”

  A young man with a goatee, shaved head, and bodybuilder arms stood up and raised his hand like a schoolboy. “I am.”

  “When the back door blows, all your men will charge the gap. We will overwhelm the intruders with numbers.”

  Marco smiled and bobbed his head.

  “Any minute now,” DaSilva said. “Get your men ready.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Over northern Mexico

  Cujo hummed “Dock of the Bay” and adjusted for a slight crosswind with a gentle nudge of the rudder pedal. His single-engine Cessna buzzed over the rough terrain of the Mexican desert at fifty feet off the deck. Running without lights and guided by a GPS, dead reckoning, and divine influence, he scanned between instruments and terrain.

  He loved flying, especially night flying. Even better, he loved combat flying. Piloting his tiny plane into a firefight, in the dark, over enemy territory—well, kind of enemy territory—made him maybe the happiest man in the world. Even if he sometimes had difficulty with the real world, and struggled to remember his birth name—David Milton Quattlebaum III—he could fly anything with wings or rotors and fly it better than anyone he knew.

  On hold at the tiny airfield, Cujo chewed his nails and almost prayed that Victor and Abel’s mission would go sideways so they could call in a Plan B Dust-off. So when Victor called, Cujo was in the air before the call terminated.

  At one mile out, Cujo brought the Cessna into a gentle climb, gaining some altitude to assess the situation. He overflew the target at five hundred feet and took a long look out the right hand window.

  He spotted the barn immediately. The moon had risen, three-quarters full, and gave plenty of light for his NVGs to make out the men clustered on either side of Abel’s truck, which looked as though it had mated with the barn. Fifty yards beyond the barn, an airstrip ran north to south. His job was to find the airstrip and land. Abel and Victor would hightail it overland and jump into the plane, then they would all fly off into the wild, black yonder.

  From behind the barn, a green streak of light burned across his view. A bloom of fire temporarily whited out his goggles. Seconds later, a detonation on the ground rocked the plane.

  “Looks like Plan A turned to shit.” He grinned and almost bounced in his seat.

  “Victor!” Yeager felt for a pulse, found it, and breathed a short prayer. He slapped his friend’s cheek, trying to bring him around. “Por Que! Wake up, buddy. Time to go.”

  Victor’s eyes cracked open, seeming bleary and unfocused. “Wha’ happened?”

  “They shot you in the head. It bounced off.”

  “Well,” Victor mumbled, “tha’s okay, then.” His eyes sagged closed again.

  “C’mon, man. No sleeping on the job. We gotta get moving.”

  Yeager looped Victor’s arm around his neck and hoisted his friend to his feet. They stumbled toward the back of the barn, down the same aisle where Yeager had felled Goliath. The giant was still down. Yeager smiled at that, pretty sure he wasn’t up for a rematch with the big son of a bitch.

  He headed for the back door, willing his legs to move faster. Victor’s feet bumped along, more hindrance than help. Yeager was on the verge of picking him up and carrying him when the back door blew up. The explosion knocked him on his ass, and he took Victor down with him.

  “Aw, fuck me, not again.” If he said it aloud, he couldn’t tell it over the ringing in his ears.

  “Less C4,” Victor mumbled then closed his eyes again.

  Men piled through the smoking gap. Yeager’s M4 lay a dozen feet away, but he still had his MP5 strapped across his chest. Snapping it up, he ripped off a sustained burst, completely ignoring fire discipline and Sergeant Masterson’s wise advice. He simply needed to get lots of rounds downrange to make the bastards cringe and wet their shorts.

  The guards dove for cover down the back aisle. Without shouting a warning—after all, the only other friendly in the area was right next to him—Yeager tossed two grenades, one left and one right. They blew almost simultaneously.

  Shrieks of pain and fear erupted, dimly heard through the ringing in his ears. Yeager swapped magazines, letting the spent one clatter to the floor. He struggled up and chugged forward, breath rasping in his throat and ar
ms swinging for momentum. He had to follow up the grenade attack before the enemy recovered their wits.

  At the end of the bench, he had a choice: go right or left. He went left.

  And dropped, hit in the back by a sledgehammer blow.

  Cujo banked hard left with one hand on the yoke. With his other hand, he worked the latch on the window and slid it open. Night air blew in, cool but not too cold.

  Perfect, in fact.

  Reaching out the window, he grabbed a lanyard and pulled. The catches released, and the clamshell cover he’d fashioned to look like an external fuel tank came free, peeling apart to fall away. He laughed and pumped his fist when the .50-cal was revealed.

  Lining up the Cessna to pass north to south across the mouth of the barn, where the men were clustered on either side of the trailer, took only seconds. He trimmed out the plane, steadied the yoke, and dove.

  The little aircraft dropped like the proverbial rock. Cujo made a slight correction, and the five or six men at the back of the truck looked up. Their faces grew in his forward windscreen until he could almost make out individual expressions. He poised his feet on the rudders, ready to compensate for the recoil, and reached for the second lanyard he’d installed. This one trailed overhead, like an engineer’s whistle on a locomotive, and was attached to the machine gun’s trigger. With a tug, he triggered the .50-cal at three hundred feet away. Three hundred feet became one hundred, then fifty, then nothing, all within a few seconds.

  The little plane shuddered and bucked and tried to crab sideways in the air. Cujo danced on the rudders and twisted the yoke, fighting to hold it straight. A line of slugs as big as a man’s thumb walked across the tarmac and ripped through the half dozen men. The Browning M2 mounted under his wing fired over five hundred rounds per minute with a muzzle velocity approaching three thousand feet per second. The guards were shredded like paper dolls.

  Flashing overhead low enough that his wheels almost hit the top of Abel’s trailer, Cujo applied power, and fought for altitude. He winced. Abel’s trailer had taken a considerable number of hits as the plane jerked and wobbled under the heavy recoil. Cujo had pretty much managed to rip it to shit.

  “Oops. Sorry, Abel.” He pulled up and banked to the right to set up another pass.

  DaSilva stared, mouth open, at the small plane as it climbed over the roof of the hacienda, making a sweeping turn to the right. He froze, forgetting the pistol in his hand, as stupefied as the men around him.

  The men from the other side of the trailer, who’d taken position at its rear in order to assault the inside of the barn, littered the ground like so much chopped meat, some moaning and twisting in agony.

  DaSilva shook his head, eyes still fixed on the plane as it banked back to the left. An airplane? Where’d they get an airplane? What now? Was he coming back? Yes! Yes, he was! “Bastard!” DaSilva screamed, spittle flying.

  With a third of his assault force wiped out in one pass, he had been reduced to six men, plus the ones from the back, who had to be engaged with the enemy. The choice was simple: stay outside and be slaughtered like pigs or enter the barn and kill the foot soldiers. If the foot soldiers were dead, the plane wouldn’t matter.

  With one last glance at the Cessna as it lined up for another pass, DaSilva slapped Marco on the back. “Go! Go! Go!” he shouted, shoving the muscle-bound guard. DaSilva tried to get under cover by sheer force of will.

  Marco grunted and motioned to his men. They hit the gap between the trailer and door, pouring into the barn and firing blindly as they ran.

  The bullet that hit Yeager in the back had enough impact to break a rib and knock him flat on his face. Yeager had been shot before and more than once while wearing body armor. He’d never grown to enjoy the experience. A small projectile traveling at a multiple of the speed of sound imparted a tremendous amount of kinetic energy when it struck a target. Yeager likened it to being kicked by a very large pissed-off horse.

  He blacked out for a few seconds then came back to his senses in a rush, completely aware of his surroundings and the impending danger. He’d fallen forward, so the shooter was behind him, probably taking aim to shoot him in the ass and claim a glorious kill in the name of drug traffickers everywhere. He jerked and rolled to his right, bringing the MP5 up in one motion. Acquiring the target took a nanosecond.

  A bald-headed guard with a goatee knelt nearby, blood dribbling from his nose. Armed with a semi-automatic pistol, the guard twisted to bring his weapon up, even as Yeager brought the MP5 to bear. The guard fired, and the bullet whipped past Yeager’s head, close enough for him to feel the heat.

  Yeager triggered a burst, the suppressed MP5 sounding more like a sewing machine than an automatic weapon. The rounds hit the guard in the center of his chest and slapped him backward. He didn’t move again.

  Yeager swiveled his head, checking the remaining guards. He confirmed they were all out of the fight, either dead or too wounded to care. Slinging the MP5, Yeager jogged back over to Victor and hoisted his friend onto his feet.

  “Time to go?” Victor mumbled.

  “Yep. Time to go, buddy.”

  He helped Victor through the gaping hole in the back wall of the warehouse and headed into the night. The breeze chilled his exposed skin and felt wonderful after the smoke and death of the enclosed barn.

  He had no time to enjoy it. More guards stormed the barn and started spewing rounds everywhere. Some bullets zipped through the thin metal walls and kicked up dust near his feet or whizzed past with an angry whine.

  “Won’t take ’em long to figure out which way we went,” Yeager said. “We need to make the airstrip and hope that crazy bastard has the plane ready.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  Yeager couldn’t tell if Victor was that out of it or being his usual smartass self. “C’mon, buddy. Let’s move it.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Enrique DaSilva followed his men into the converted barn and gaped at the destruction, a great hole in the side and one in the back. Workbenches torn up and equipment shattered. Product had leaked all over the floor from burst sacks.

  Incredible. “Fan out,” he ordered, waving his pistol. “Search the room. Find out where they went.” But DaSilva had a pretty good idea where the pair had gone, considering they had a plane at their disposal.

  He jogged to the hole in the back wall where the door used to be. “There,” he shouted, jabbing a finger.

  Two figures huddled together, one obviously wounded, making for the airstrip. It was a long shot for a pistol, but DaSilva attempted it anyway, venting his anger by emptying the fourteen-round magazine at the retreating pair. They fell, disappearing from view. Were they wounded, or taking cover?

  “To me!” DaSilva dropped his empty magazine and inserted a new one. He toggled the slide release to chamber a round. “Come. Let us finish this.”

  “Condor One, Red Ball here. Over.” Yeager crouched in a shallow depression, the airstrip a few feet behind him.

  Victor lay beside him. He was starting to come around and was not happy about it. “Ow! My fucking head.” He reached up to touch the gash where a bullet had creased his scalp and hissed in pain. “Man, this shit sucks.”

  Yeager nodded and clicked to transmit again. “Condor One, Red Ball. Do you read? Over.”

  “I gotcha, Red Ball,” Cujo voice crackled in his ear. “You about ready to come home? Over.”

  “Roger that. Quit fucking around and get down here. Out.”

  Yeager took inventory of his remaining weapons. He changed mags on the MP5 and put the partially spent one back in its pouch. The full one in the weapon was his last. He did the same to his .45. Plenty of ammo there, forty-two cartridges in six clips, plus two grenades.

  Victor had his sidearm, a Beretta 92, and four grenades. The Beretta used a high-capacity magazine, and he carried six more like it, adding up to almost a hundred rounds of 9-millimeter. But the remaining guards carried assault rifles and could fire at greater range and accura
cy.

  “We’re gonna have to see the whites of their eyes before we fire,” Yeager said.

  “Who’re you? George Washington?”

  “No.” Yeager shifted to ease the pressure on his bruised ribs. “I’m one beat-up, tired, Marine ex-truck driver stuck in a firefight in the Mexican desert”—he keyed the transmit button—“waiting for a crazy sumbitch in a Cessna to land his fucking plane so I can go home.”

  Cujo’s voice crackled through the small speaker. “I’m comin’. Keep your panties on.” The drone of the plane’s engine changed pitch as Cujo leveled it out for approach.

  “I hope he can see to land,” Victor muttered.

  “Pray.”

  So far, the enemy troops had kept their heads down, except for that initial smattering of pistol fire. Several men—Yeager couldn’t be sure how many—had deployed into the field and taken up positions about fifty yards away.

  The Cessna touched down about a quarter of the way down the runway. The brakes squealed, and the little plane fishtailed as Cujo reversed prop and tried to bring the aircraft to a halt.

  One guard popped up like a gopher, rushed forward, and fired his weapon, then dropped back to the ground. Then the others did the same. Through luck or skill, they all advanced at random times, making it hard to target any single individual.

  When none of the fire came near Yeager’s position, he risked a look over the rim of the shallow ditch. The guards, instead of firing at him and Victor, were targeting the Cessna. One lucky hit would disable their ride home. NVGs on, Yeager rose to one knee and fired short, controlled bursts at everything he saw moving. He didn’t think he made any clean kills, but it slowed the advance somewhat.

  “Red Ball One, Condor. Over.”

  Yeager slid back down and keyed his mike. “Go.”