Standoff: A Vin Cooper Novel (30 page)

But despite the death and destruction, the Chihuahua assault was continuing. I saw a man walk out of a building nearby, wearing jogging gear and white buds in his ears, probably wondering about the racket interfering with his music. A rider rode past him, firing a carbine one-handed, and the jogger was dead from a burst of automatic fire before he could scratch his head.

Three riders jumped the curb into the parking lot and skidded to a stop. They snatched carbines from scabbards and started unloading on us. I took aim and shot one through the visor. Gomez raked the second guy with a burst of full auto, which disintegrated the guy’s gas tank. The fuel ignited on the hot engine and burst into a ball of flame that also consumed the rider stopped beside him.

Around fifty of us were assembled within the parking lot’s little auto-fort. The platoon’s commanding officer, a young black lieutenant, wanted to move. “El-Tee, get your troops into fire teams,” I shouted. “The residential quarters are west and southwest of our position three blocks over, less than half a mile. The situation’s straightforward. The cartel is here to kill. We’re here to stop ’em. There’s plenty of weapons and ammo on the enemy if you run out. The accuracy of fire from these guys when they’re on the move is low, but don’t take it for granted. When they stop, they’re vulnerable. Questions?”

There weren’t any.

“Oorah,” said Lieutenant Sommers. The rest of the platoon repeated it.

“You and you,” I said, nodding at two men from the weapons section armed with M249 SAWs – a couple of specialists, a Korean and a black guy. I read the names off their tapes. “Kim and Roslyn. On me.” Other units were already on the move. “Gomez, cover me.”

Sommers, the medic, and the rest of the weapons section went off at an angle while I ran at a crouch toward Liberty Drive and then across it, firing three-shot bursts from the hip at the riders motoring along the street. Gomez, Kim and Roslyn on over-watch also fired. Two riders went down, half a dozen others scattered. One of those RVs with a .50 caliber Browning got off a ranging burst before a long yellow tongue reached out from a Black Hawk’s M134 Minigun and virtually sawed the vehicle in half.

Ahead was a building with a sign on it that read A
VIONICS
. There was a parking lot out front. I ran for it across open ground. Making it to a Lexus in the lot, I turned and took a knee. Gomez jumped up and ran across the same open ground. Two riders left the road and sped off after him, firing. I shot one of them. He slumped forward on the bars and ran straight into a tree. Unlucky. Not many trees around here. Kim and Roslyn dismounted two more bikers with well-aimed fire as they rode past their cover. They got up, ran to the bikes and picked them up. The remaining rider in that group might have been in a panic at being fired on, or maybe he was just distracted, but he misjudged a turn and hit a pole, smashing his leg. Gomez changed direction and ran to the motorcycle as the downed rider rolled onto his side, holding his leg. Running up to him, Gomez booted the downed rider’s helmet, connecting under the chin like he was going for three points at the Super Bowl.

“Cooper!” Gomez called out, picking up the bike. “You ride?”

Kim and Roslyn were stationary, weapons up, sweeping through the angles, keeping over-watch as I ran across and jumped on behind the handlebars. For a little while, at least until friendlies arrived and shot at anything on two wheels, perhaps being on a motorcycle wasn’t such a bad idea. The bad guys might believe we were on their side until we fired on them. And, of course, we could cover the remaining ground to base housing faster. Gomez leaped on the back and tapped my shoulder, ready to go. I stomped down on the gearshift, gave it a fistful of throttle and dumped the clutch, the front wheel pawing the air as we accelerated.

The sky was fast gathering light. With more peripheral vision, my attention was caught by two joggers lying unmoving on the running track around a football field. They were probably dead. Apostles’ militia were going about their work methodically, efficiently, their training and a thirst for blood kicking in.

Three riders came at us from a cross street, gave us a friendly hand signal. Gomez and Roslyn made them pay for the familiarity, ending their lives with full automatic bursts. Gomez dropped the magazine out of his M4 and it clattered onto the road as he jammed a fresh one home.

Base housing was separated into two distinct areas by an Olympic pool, a golf course, a circular park with more mounted aircraft and a baseball diamond. The ground was billiard-table flat, making it easy to see what was going on and, Jesus, it wasn’t pretty. The cartel was slaughtering the residents in their homes and on their front lawns. It was like something from a medieval sacking. I pulled to the curb. Ahead, one of our teams was already at work, shooting the killers where they stood, the cartel’s attacking force still unaware that there was an organized opposition among them. I did a U-turn and went two streets over, Kim and Roslyn following. Screams filled the dawn. We arrived to see a man in a motorcycle helmet ripping the nightie off a woman on her front porch, under the Stars and Stripes. The woman’s husband was on his knees, the barrel of the man’s rifle in his mouth. I pulled to a stop. Gomez rested the stock of his M4 on my shoulder, took careful aim and shot out the back of the man’s neck. With no spine he collapsed at the woman’s feet, unable to do anything other than die. The woman ran naked inside her home and slammed the door while her husband stayed on his knees and retched.

We rode slowly up the street like that, Gomez using my shoulder as a rest, shooting cartel killers. The Ranger was a good shot. I could hear more screaming and the sound of glass breaking. I tried to zone in on the source of the sound when a picture frame came flying out a front door. I stopped. Gomez leaped off the bike and ran into the home. In the house next door, I could hear a man shouting. Shots fired. I grabbed the carbine out of the bike’s scabbard, let the machine fall over and ran in through the splintered front door. Inside on the lounge-room floor, a man in pajamas lay dead on the carpet in a pool of blood. A woman sobbed beside him, covered in blood, trying to make him move. Another man was standing nearby, wearing Desert Storm camos and a helmet, pointing his rifle at the woman. I shot him through the chest as he looked at me. He staggered back a step and regained his footing. I took two steps toward him and stomped him with a front kick where the blood was spurting from the hole in his clothing and the killer sailed backward through a plate glass window behind him, shattering it. Shards of glass rained down on him, slicing through his neck.

I lifted the woman off the dead man, dragged her into the bedroom. I made some noises to try to calm her but she was beyond reason. Her eyes were wild, terrified, her face covered in tears, blood and mucous. As I pulled her down onto the floor, she became hysterical so I pushed her under the bedframe and told her to stay there. Somehow the message got through to her and she calmed down in the darkness under the mattress. If there was somewhere safer to take the woman, I couldn’t think of it.

Running back outside, I picked up the bike and saw Roslyn fighting hand-to-hand with a man armed with a machete. Kim was down on the ground with a bloody gash across the side of his head, holding his ear in his hand. Pulling my Sig from the holster, I walked up to the machete wielder and shot him in the mouth as he turned toward me. Kim was bleeding badly, but wounds to the ear do that.

Two riders turned into our street and stopped when they saw us. I shot one with the Sig; I’m not sure where but he fell backward off the bike and didn’t get up. Kim picked himself off the ground, grabbed the machete and ran screaming at the remaining rider. The man stomped down on the gearshift lever with his boot, but I guessed the gearbox had jammed. Kim caught up with him, a downswing with two hands on the handle burying the blade deep in the meat of his shoulder. And then for some unexplained reason, the bike slipped into gear, the engine raced and the machine performed an instant ground loop, landing on top of the rider with the machete sticking out of him like a Halloween gimmick. The rear wheel spun wildly until the man’s hand became tangled in its spokes and that suddenly stopped it.

Kim stuffed his bloody ear in his pocket, picked up his helmet and put it on. Roslyn got back onto a bike and Kim took the seat behind him.

“You okay?” I asked him.

“Better than them,” he said, nodding at the dead cartel militia on the road.

“The bleeding’s slowed,” I told him. “We’ll work through this street, turn right if we can, then come down the next street over.”

Gomez sprinted out of the house he’d gone into and jumped on the pillion seat behind me. I rode slowly down the road, the Ranger firing at cartel militia with deadly accuracy. But then bullet holes appeared in the fuel tank, thankfully above the level of gasoline it held.

“Shit!” Gomez yelled. “I’m hit.”

This was no place to stop.

“Hang on,” I called out.

Several militia had set themselves behind bricked-in garden beds. One of them jumped up and raised his fist. Roslyn, coming along behind us, saw them and rode over the curb, exposing their flank. Kim mowed three of them down, emptying a magazine on full auto into their position. A fourth man got up and ran for another position of cover. I pulled the Sig and fired. The third shot rolled him into a bed of daisies.

“How bad is it?” I shouted, half turning.

“My leg’s broken,” Gomez screamed out, presumably as the bones moved against each other.

Down the far end of the street, where we’d just been, I saw a black Texas State Trooper cruiser race past with lights flashing. Seconds later, a Del Rio PD cruiser came around the corner sideways, siren and lights blazing. The vehicle skidded to a stop and the police inside threw their doors open and took cover behind them. Cartel militia came out of several homes and concentrated their fire on the officers wearing body armor and firing AR-15s. Another PD cruiser rounded the corner, an officer firing a shotgun out the passenger window. The militia were starting to pay as the officers took control.

I thought that maybe now might be a good time for us to ditch the motorcycle before we became mistaken for tangoes. And then ahead, I saw something strange. A man on horseback, a sombrero pushed off his head and waving around behind his back in the airflow as his horse galloped across a lawn and then the road, jumped a garden bed and disappeared between two homes. I felt the weight shift on the bike as Gomez climbed off. “You go.” He winced, his voice hoarse with the pain, his leg useless. He waved me on. “Bring that fucker down.”

Kim appeared. “I’ll stay with him,” he shouted, maybe a little deaf, and Gomez used him as a crutch to get to some cover behind an SUV parked in a driveway.

I dumped the clutch and raced after … Pancho Villa. Or should I say Apostles. The bike’s knobby rear tire tore up the lawn as it fought for traction, the front wheel off the ground as I gave chase. I shot around the side of a house and saw the horse’s rump working hard as Apostles whipped it along. Dropping back a gear, I leaned over the front forks and wound the throttle to its stop. The ground was sandy and flat and I was gaining on the animal. The bike and I burst into open space between a couple of homes, and raced across a front lawn littered with children’s toys, furniture and a dead dog. A State Trooper was wrestling a man to the ground, while his partner looked up and fired his service pistol at me as I flew by, thinking I was one of the bad guys, the round taking out a chunk of masonry just in front of me as I raced between another two houses.

Apostles knew I was closing. He glanced over his shoulder, tried to change direction, head left and then right, jump a flowerbed, but the horse was no match for horsepower. The animal galloped across the street and onto the golf course. Out on the fairway there was nowhere to hide. I closed the distance fast and soon overtook horse and rider. The animal’s flanks were lathered. It had had enough and began to slow. And then it decided to stop altogether, throwing the rider over its ears. He landed heavily on the grass. I skidded sideways to a halt, dropped the bike from under me and, taking the last few steps at a run, launched myself through the air at Apostles struggling to get to his feet. I hit him in the shoulder with my shoulder and felt his bones give way. He hit the ground hard again, only semiconscious this time. I grabbed a handful of his fucking shirt and smashed my fist into his fucking cheek. And then I pulled my Sig and lifted Apostles’ bloody chin with the muzzle.

“Freeze, motherfucker. Don’t you fucking move, y’hear?”

It wasn’t me talking, it was someone behind me. Red and blue flashing lights announced that we were on the same team.

“Lower your weapon or I’ll shoot you dead, I promise you …”

Over my shoulder I shouted, “Special Agent Cooper, United States Air Force.”

“You’re on a bike. You’re lucky I haven’t already blown your brains out.”

Yeah.

“Put your weapon on the ground,” he shouted, “and your hands behind your head.”

Out the corner of my eye I could see two of them, both young, both experiencing sensory overload having witnessed all the death and destruction around them, and probably having had to deliver a share of it themselves. They were jumpy and jumpy is trigger happy. I placed the Sig on the ground and put my hands where they wanted them.

“Interlock your fingers. Do it.”

Yessir.

An approaching roar suddenly became deafening as an Apache Longbow gunship passed low overhead. The cavalry had arrived – the First Cavalry to be precise. I looked down at the man under me with crossed bandoliers on his chest, his beard matted with blood and bits of grass and twigs. It wasn’t who I expected to see. “Who the fuck are you?”

Gomez was transferred to the Scott & White Medical Center in Killeen, the state’s hospital system severely tested by the numbers of wounded. Kim got his ear sewn back on by some world-famous plastic surgeon in Dallas. Casualties were ferried all over the country, everyone wanting to help. The States united.

Calling a spade a spade, the attack on Laughlin AFB was a disaster for US intelligence and law enforcement. The media went crazy, blaming the CIA, the Army, the Texas Rangers, local PD, the State Troopers, Homeland Security, the US President, the Mexican President, the Mexican Army, the
Federales
– any and all law enforcement and officialdom elected to keep America safe, and some that weren’t. We’d all failed the people, according to the press. And, for once, the press was right.

The body count at base housing, where the cartel had concentrated its forces, was over two hundred and fifty with sixty more wounded, half of which were critical. If there was a consolation it was that these numbers could’ve been far worse.

The only folks who escaped the nation’s anger and disappointment were the Base Security Squadron, whose members accounted for ninety-three of the enemy casualties while losing eighty percent of its numbers, and the rifle platoon commanded by Lieutenant Sommers, whose troops killed or wounded well over two hundred cartel militia, before the lieutenant was himself shot dead in action. The platoon sergeant who took command of the survivors said that the lieutenant killed over twenty-three himself and died protecting the medic rendering aid to the wounded.

There was talk of Sommers receiving a posthumous Medal of Honor, except that south Texas was not, technically, a declared war zone and the army’s involvement in it deemed a ‘police function’ so there would be no medals beyond the Purple Hearts and those for saving life or service. Somehow a Soldier’s Medal for Sommers just seemed totally inadequate.

This had more to do with appeasing the Mexican President than anything else. If south Texas was deemed a “hostile fire zone”, who was America at war with? Mexico? And, of course, this made anyone who had been fighting the so-called War on Drugs shake their heads. I mean, was it a fucking war or wasn’t it?

The number of fatalities quickly became statistics batted around by the media and politicians, a mechanism hiding the tragic reality – innocent American men, women and children had lives, loves and dreams cut short in horrific circumstances by inhumane sociopaths who resented having their supply chain interrupted.

Soon the funerals would begin. The nation was in mourning. After the sorrow, anger would set in. A desire for revenge would surely follow. Plenty of social commentators feared the worst. Bring it on, was my thought on that. Over three hundred cartel militia had been taken prisoner on the ground at Laughlin, hiding in surrounding areas or trying to get across into Mexico. There were plenty of folks out there who wanted them lined up against a wall and shot. And they were the moderates. All that could be extracted from these people was they’d been poor before joining Apostles’ militia, and now they were prisoners. Few of them knew what the plan had been when they signed up, other than it involved the US town of Columbus and the leader was a great Mexican general. The naivety was breathtaking. Apostles knew exactly what he was dealing with. The thousand riders had crossed the Rio Grande west of the town of Manuel Ojinaga, using the mobile ramps to jump the river. Then they’d simply rode up Highway 90 to Laughlin while the world slept, proving again (if it needed proving) that the best plans are the most basic ones.

In some medieval sandpit where inedible food was cooked on fires of camel shit, people danced in the streets. There were commentators in Mexico who thought it was about time Americans got a taste of what they’d been living with for years.

At home, the lawyers were having a field day. This was another 9/11 event. Who were we going to invade now? Mexico? Sections of congress were all for it, which is what anyone with common sense feared. And, of course, I knew with reasonable certainty that was exactly what Apostles wanted.

I reflected on all this as my gloved hand gripped the M4, the ski mask scratching the skin on my face and neck as the sweat leaked from my pores in the dry heat, the thump of the helicopter’s main rotor pounding behind my sternum. Perhaps no one had failed the public more than me. I could have killed Apostles. I could have done it with my bare hands the night we were drinking that fifty-year-old Macallan. A crushed windpipe, a pen through the eye and into the corpus callosum, a smashed glass into the carotid – plenty of ways to do it. Why hadn’t I? What had I been waiting for? A fucking court of law? And then there was Perez. I could have jumped his desk, taken that pearl-handled knife off him and ran the blade across his neck. It would’ve been over in seconds. I wouldn’t have survived, but think of all the folks who’d still be alive today if I’d turned assassin. Could’ve, should’ve, didn’t.

Now, three days after the events at Laughlin, we were raiding Apostles’ Juárez residence. In the Black Hawk with me and the one behind us were Mexican Army Special Forces, agents from SEIDO and CIA kill team members. Teams of similar makeup on the ground were deployed in an armed cordon blocking escape routes on the Campestre’s roads and pathways. Our orders were to take Apostles and Perez alive or dead, along with any other Chihuahua Cartel members who happened to be in the house. But our chances of finding anyone significant in the Juárez house were a little less than zero. Everyone knew that – as did the politicians on both sides of the border keen to lay blame – but we were here anyway. Finally. My role in this force was to positively identify Apostles now that his penchant for using body doubles was out in the open. And of course, I’d stayed in the house so I knew something of the layout of the place. Looking back on it, I wondered if all the meetings I’d had with Apostles had been with the real McCoy. I was starting to doubt a couple of them.

The truth was, we’d all been played for suckers by a master. Psychologists and profilers picking through the disaster believed Apostles’ infatuation with Pancho Villa was genuine, even down to having a psychopath for a right-hand man. The Tears of Chihuahua was to Apostles what Rodolfo Fierro had been to the revolutionary general. Perez liked to flay while Fierro just got a kick out of killing. He apparently once shot a man dead just to see which way he’d fall – forward or backward. The story goes he fell forward. Yeah, that kind of careless disregard for human life sounded familiar.

Ciudad
Juárez was still asleep; 4 am according to my watch. The roofs of the city slid by in shades of NVG green. The team leader, a Mexican Army second captain with a wide grim face, whose name was Medina, gave the signal: one minute to target. Men were getting ready to drop ropes, a hefty coil out the door on each side. No one was talking, the NVGs along with the seriousness of the task at hand forcing silence on the group.

The Black Hawk went into its characteristic nose high flare and then settled into the hover. I heard the signal to deploy the ropes and then each of us went out in turn, down the rope and onto the roof.

We stood back as the Mexican Army guys used a charge to blow the fire door off the stairwell. I followed the grunts down the stairs. The top floor housed most of the bedrooms. Doors were opened one by one. I heard a muffled woman’s scream and then a man charged out of a room with a pistol. He was cut down by a silenced round to the chest and another to the head. After that, everyone else threw in the towel relatively quietly. I checked the room I had stayed in and got a surprise: two men in bed together. A familiar blue and white leotard hung from a cupboard door. It was the Blue Mystery and friend. I rousted them outta the sack, told them to get some clothes on. Mr Mystery wasn’t gonna make it easy. Standing there in his bathing suit wasn’t stopping him from getting some ideas – there were two of them and only one of me, even if I was the only one with a rifle. They pegged me for a gringo straight away, despite the NVGs. The lights in the hallway had gone on so I flipped the lenses up. They were talking about tag teaming, putting a sleeper hold on my ass and making me their bitch. I shot Mr Mystery, grazing the meat of his thigh, which took the steam out of that idea. As the ‘hair’ rolled around on the bed, wailing, I had his partner slip the cuff locks on him, and then I did the same to his chum.

One of the Mexican Army Special Forces guys came in, saw the Blue Mystery and left shaking his head. The wrestler realized what this was going to mean in terms of his image and started going on about how his career would be ruined if the TV stations got onto this. I didn’t give a damn about his career or his preferences in the sack. What I did care about was the company he kept and I didn’t mean his pal. That he was a cartel toy was all that mattered to me. I searched the house until I found the rooms Apostles and Perez had occupied. They were the largest rooms and left vacant. Both rooms contained personal belongings, and I recognized a shirt I’d seen Apostles wear and souvenired it for DNA purposes. In the master bathroom off Perez’s room, I took several items including a disposable razor.

In all, twenty-two people were put into security or paramedics vehicles and taken away. Not one was a high-value target. Six were hookers, five were MS-13 gang members, and two were from a drug transport operation – the rest were just people who found making money off the cartel easier than making an honest living, and I included the wrestler and friend in this bunch.

I doubted anyone would be able to give us a lead on Apostles or Perez as, so far, none of the militia captured at Laughlin knew shit from macaroni cheese on that score.

*

Two days after the Juárez raid I was down in Colombia, involved in a Special Forces mission to infiltrate and destroy the Chihuahua camp on the edge of the Darién Gap. There were militia there, but again no one of high value and the place had already been stripped of most of its intel. What remained had been left for a reason and no one trusted it. The Hacienda Mexico was simultaneously raided by Colombian Police Special Forces and CIA special agents. Nothing and no one of consequence was captured. Apostles and Perez had vanished.

A month after Laughlin, the US Army was still engaged, actively patrolling the border between Texas and Mexico. DEA intelligence reported that the cartels had never been happier, business booming to new levels with corruption rampant in the military cordon. Apostles and Perez were rumored to have made the most of their statement at Laughlin, amalgamating the Sinaloa Cartel, the Gulf Cartel and the Chihuahua Cartel into a super cartel, though how and where they were running it was a mystery.

The system dealt with Chalmers the best way it knew how, promoting him to its Asia bureau with title of Director because, of course, he did such a great job of identifying Perez at the Horizon Airport massacre. The most galling aspect of this was that the disposable razor I’d brought back from the Juárez villa is what did it for him – the DNA found on it matched the DNA recovered from Gail Sorwick’s nasal tract, which finally and positively placed the Tears of Chihuahua at that crime scene.

It would only be a matter of time before Chalmers and I crossed paths again and next time I wouldn’t be so accommodating.

As for me, I was taken off the hunt for Apostles and Perez and put back on chasing enlisted men gone AWOL. Fuck that. I took some damn vacation time. And, of course, I packed the Sig.