Damage Control (43 page)

The kid nodded, and Jonathan needed to believe him. He turned to Maria, who’d overheard. “I’ll watch the other end,” she said.

Jonathan smiled. “Thank you.”

While they spoke, Boxers took a pry bar to the hasp and lock of unit eleven-seventy, the storage unit that shared a back wall with their target building. Big Guy won the battle easily, stripping the entire assembly out of the corrugated metal door.

Jonathan wished he could let Boxers set the charges himself, and stay out here with the kids keeping cover, but setting the charges was a two-person job.

The interior of eleven-seventy might have been somebody’s attic, stacked with furniture and toys, or, given that it was in Ciudad Juarez, a disguised meth lab and a few bodies.

Boxers tossed his ruck onto an old sofa, pulled open the top flap, and lifted a customized wooden spool wrapped with ten feet of plastic tubing stuffed with PETN—detonating cord. Also known as Primacord, it had been a staple in Boxers’ rucksack for as long as Jonathan had known him. For all he knew, the Big Guy had taken a roll of the stuff with him as a Boy Scout when he went camping.

Boxers pulled the tactical light off the muzzle of his rifle and shined it on the back wall. Good news there: a concrete block wall, one of the most frangible building materials on the planet. “Cool,” he said.

Boxers started to measure out a length of cord, and then stopped himself. “Screw it,” he said. “We want a hole, so let’s by-God make a hole.”

“You’re using the whole spool?” Jonathan’s jaw dropped. Ten feet of det cord was, in technical parlance, a shitload of explosive. “You’ll collapse the roof.”

“But I can’t mount it,” Boxers countered. “I don’t have epoxy, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have time—” He stopped himself. “When did I start explaining explosive shit to you?”

Point taken. Boxers broke stuff, Jonathan negotiated stuff. That was the division of labor.

The Big Guy reached back into his ruck and pulled out yet another spool. “Cut me off fifteen seconds of OFF and connect it to a detonator.”

Otherwise known as old-fashioned fuse, OFF was at once the most dependable yet imprecise way to set off explosives. Dependable because when the flame got to the ASA compound—a nasty mixture of lead styphnate, lead azide, and aluminum along with a tetryl kicker—it
always
went bang. Imprecise because a fifteen-second length of fuse might burn for ten or twelve seconds, or it might burn for twenty.

Jonathan eyeballed the length of fuse, cut it with his KA-BAR and pulled a detonator from his own ruck and married the two.

As he handed it to Boxers, the world outside the storage room erupted in gunfire.

Tristan was living the nightmare, the one where you spend the entire dream dreading that a thing will happen, and then, in the last instant before you jerk awake, there it is.

He’d been staring into the artificially lit night down the barrel of his rifle, waiting for and dreading the appearance of the people who’d been trying to kill them, and then there they were—a group of four of them. For a couple of seconds, he strained his eyes to see if they really were the people he feared. The one of them brought a rifle to his shoulder, and Tristan’s finger took over for his brain.

He was pretty sure that he saw flashes from some gun barrels down there, but then the flashes from his own muzzle wiped all of those out. The noise, too. The gunfire in the canyon created by the buildings was deafening. The hammering bang of his rifle made his head feel like it had been stuffed with cotton.

It wasn’t till the incoming bullets tore up the wall next to him that the true seriousness of his situation sank in. Christ, they were shooting back!

“Get down!” he yelled to Maria, but she was already ahead of him, having dropped to her stomach.

Tristan didn’t pay a lot of attention to her. He had heads to keep down.

The soldiers at the end of the road had likewise dropped to the ground to shoot back.

He picked one of the four muzzle flashes, aimed at it, and took a deep breath, just as the Big Guy had instructed him to do. He let half of the breath out, and tightened his finger on the trigger. The rifle bucked against his shoulder. He counted three or four rounds— it was actually hard to tell how many bullets were fired with each burst—and let up. Then he did it again. And again and again, until the bolt locked open, and it was time to fish another full magazine out of his vest.

He dropped out the old, slapped in the new, reset the bolt, and started shooting again.

Somewhere in the middle of the second magazine, he heard another long burst of rifle fire coming from above and behind. He assumed it was from Maria, but before he could turn to check, the Big Guy grabbed him by the back of his vest and lifted him as if he weighed nothing. The man moved with remarkable speed, carrying Tristan one unit
closer
to the soldiers he’d been shooting at, and dropping him onto the asphalt. As the Big Guy lay on top of him, he said, “Get down.” As if there was a choice.

Three seconds later, the explosion was the loudest noise Tristan had ever heard.

If Tristan Wagner had been a better marksman, more people would be dead now.

As Palma crossed into the open from behind one row of buildings on his way to the row where he’d expected to engage the enemy, he saw the kid and Maria Elizondo by themselves in the alleyway. By the time he could react, the kid opened up on them.

Palma and his men dropped to the ground and returned fire, but it was all wild and unaimed, just as the incoming fire was.

The lull in the shooting told him that the kid was reloading, and that would be the best time—

Another long burst erupted from the shooter’s location, and this one was both purposeful and effective, hitting Sergeant Sanchez in the head and killing him instantly.

Palma dared a peek and saw the enormous man—Lerner—dragging the boy forward to cover while Harris dragged the girl in the opposite direction, and both covered their protectees with their bodies.

That could only mean one thing.

“Cover up!” Palma yelled.

An enormous explosion destroyed the storage unit where the shooting had come from. The blast wave threw concrete and metal roofing up and out in every direction, and caved in the doors directly opposite the one they blew.

Even as the debris was still falling, Palma realized their plan. By blasting through the shared wall of the storage units, the Americans would have access to the tunnel entrance without exposing themselves to the troops that Palma had stationed on the front side.

Once inside the tunnel, Palma’s tactical advantage would evaporate. Men in a single file, or even two abreast, can bring only one or two weapons to bear at a time—the same number as their opponents, who, in this case, had proven themselves to be outstanding marksmen. As the lead elements of a larger force are shot down in a tunnel, their bodies then serve as obstacles for the passage of others.

If Palma was going to win this battle, he was going to have to win it out in the open in the next few seconds.

Ignoring the concrete and dust and metal that continued to pepper the area, Palma rose to a prone shooting position and brought his rifle to his shoulder. With his elbows pressed against the littered asphalt, he sighted through the haze and saw all four of his targets arising from the ground.

The closest two—the big man and the boy—disappeared into the rubble before he could take a shot. Of the remaining two, one was wearing a ballistic vest, and the other was not.

Palma settled his sights on Maria Elizondo and squeezed the trigger.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-
FOUR

J
onathan felt the bullet reverberate through Maria’s body, and just from the way she dropped, he knew that the bullet had clipped her spinal cord. He dropped with her, whipping his M27 to his shoulder and unleashing an entire magazine load down the street in the direction the shot had come from.

The sound of Jonathan’s gunfire brought Boxers back around the edge of the shattered wall, and he added thirty rounds from his 417 to the fusillade.

Using Boxers’ shooting as cover fire, Jonathan rose enough to heave Maria onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and from there, he ducked into the ruined storage unit. As he’d hoped, the back wall had been reduced to rubble, and the roof was gone, but the blast wave had not communicated to the front wall of twelve-seventy.

“What happened to Maria?” Tristan asked when he saw Jonathan with the girl draped over his shoulder. Outside, Boxers continued to keep people’s heads down

“Shot,” Jonathan said. “Bad, I think.”

As he stepped across the new threshold Boxers had just created, he thumbed his tactical muzzle light to life and scanned the floor. He smiled when he saw the raw hole that had been cut into the concrete. He shined his light down the opening and was even more pleased to see the stout ladder that had been mounted on the vertical face. He had no idea how deep it went, but the bottom was beyond the beam of his light.

“Big Guy!” he yelled. “We’re in business! Let’s go!” To his PC: “You first, Tristan. I’ll be right behind you.” Under different circumstances, he might have gone first to clear the way, but he wanted to get the kid below grade and under cover as soon as possible. “Use the light I gave you.”

A shadow fell over Jonathan, and there was Boxers, towering over him. “Give the girl to me,” he said. “You’ll get a hernia.” He was already lifting Maria from Jonathan’s shoulder to his own.

“You go first, then,” Jonathan said to Boxers. “Tristan, hold up. Let the Big Guy go, and then you follow. I’ll cover from up here.”

“Look out!” Tristan yelled, and he brought his rifle to his shoulder.

Jonathan spun around firing. With all the good guys accounted for, everybody else out there with a heartbeat was a bad guy. He actually didn’t see any targets, but he wasn’t going to argue with the kid.

“Hurry!” Jonathan said, but when he turned, he saw that Boxers was already shoulders-deep into the tunnel opening. He was carrying Maria like a child now, more hooked in his arm than slung over his shoulder.

As soon as the Big Guy’s head disappeared, Tristan dropped to his knees and climbed backward into the hole.

A shadow moved inside the rubble of eleven-seventy. And then another. People were gathering for an assault. If they all rushed at once, he’d never have a chance. And if they all rushed before he and his team were at the bottom of the ladderway and had started moving horizontally, all the bad guys would have to do is stick a weapon down the opening and pull the trigger. If they weren’t hit by direct fire, then they’d most certainly be torn apart by ricochets and fragments.

On the front side of twelve-seventy, people were working at the lock to the front door.

Jonathan fired a long burst through the sheet metal front wall to give them something to think about, and then he turned and fired another burst through the opening they’d blown in the back wall.

“We’re clear!” Boxers yelled from the bottom. “Twenty-eight rungs.”

As Jonathan backed toward the opening in the floor, he let the M27 fall against its sling and he ripped open two of the big flaps on the front of his vest. Each held a fragmentation grenade. He lifted one out, and in one continuous motion, he pulled the safety pin with a sharp twisting motion and tossed it through the hole he’d blown in the concrete. It incited exactly the panic he’d been hoping for, people yelling and pushing to get out of the way.

Out front, someone took a shotgun to the lock on the door as Jonathan dropped chest-deep into the tunnel entrance.

Compared to the other explosions of the night, the grenade blast wasn’t much to listen to, but the effect of a bajillion high-velocity fragments on human tissue and psyches could not be overstated.

With a second grenade clutched in his right hand, the pin pulled but the arming spoon clamped tight, Jonathan waited for the tactical entry through the front.

As soon as they kicked in the door, he lobbed the grenade into the opening and dropped out of sight.

Captain Palma had never experienced this level of combat, never fully understood the level of carnage that a few people with weapons could inflict on greater numbers. In his experience, his opposing force caved at the mere sight of his soldiers. The few who dared to fire on him were quickly dispatched.

But this enemy—these men—were killing machines.

And the grenade had all but wiped out his force. It had landed in the perfect place at the perfect time. He’d just gathered his men to coordinate entry with the larger team in the front when the tiny bomb sailed through the blasted hole and skittered across the floor.

There’d been pushing and shoving, but when it exploded, it left no one standing, including Palma, though he was one of the lucky ones. Three of his men had literally been torn apart by the blast, in the process absorbing more than their fair share of the kinetic energy and fragments.