“Since now.”
The admiral pinched the bridge of his nose.
“You know how sorry I am about Sara, your family, but Sanchez is barreling down on us. I need you.”
At the mention of Sanchez, Dillon’s stare cut to the newspaper, headache forgotten. Hatred twisted down his spine, shooting him forward in his seat.
“No. Absolutely not.” But deep inside, pushed into the blackest corner of his mind, a bonfire still raged. “No way in
hell
am I going back--”
Only he was. Dillon was going to hunt Sanchez down like a dog and kill him no matter how far he had to go, no matter what he had to do. But dammit, he wanted, needed, to do this his way.
Without rules.
Without some government leak trying to get him killed.
“Please.” The Admiral blew out another sigh. “Just read.”
Dillon finally pulled the newspaper closer and read.
San Diego Times Top News
Innocent Americans Slain by Drug Cartel
By Suzanne Clements,
Staff Writer
Billionaire drug lords fly our friendly skies with huge jumbo jets crammed to capacity with cocaine. Narco-subs hover just off the coast. Border bandits and drug barons thumb their noses at law enforcement.
With bases all over the world, the SBC, also known as the Sanchez Brothers Cartel, is one of the most powerful, violent, and aggressive drug trafficking groups in Mexico. When the Mexican government took an anti-drug stance in the mid 1990s, the Sanchez Brothers drug cartel reacted with a never-before-seen wave of narco-terrorism. Hundreds of Mexican police officers, judges, government officials, and journalists were murdered by drug mafia assassins under the Rafael Sanchez regime. This horrific violence included the bombing of Calidad flight 312 which killed 218 people, and the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City which killed 80 people and wounded 170. Nationwide, more than 1,400 people have been killed in Mexico this year, all attributed to the SBC.
The SBC has been a U.S. nightmare for some time now, but last night they went too far. They slaughtered an entire busload of innocent American tourists in Guadalajara, and in so doing, have moved themselves out of the shadows and into the spotlight of a nation in turmoil.
Something about the writing style poked at him before a red haze had him shoving the paper across the desk in fury. “You’ve been fighting those bastards for more than a decade. So why are you calling me back in on this? And,” his breathing shallow, he tried to temper his anger, wishing he had something vicious, something savage and horrible enough to make Sanchez and his fucking cartel quiver and beg and fucking die, “why now?”
“Headlines, Commander. Lost innocence. Nine-eleven cost us. You know the one thing pisses people off more than war, recessions, and bullshit politics?”
Dillon shrugged. “Global warming? Taxes?” Dammit, he knew what was coming next and he didn’t want to hear it. Hearing the words would suck him in.
“Losing faith in the country you believe in,” the admiral continued as though Dillon had never spoken. He had that look in his eye, the outraged expression people wore when a helpless child has been beaten to death with a steel pipe until that child lay broken and mutilated and unrecognizable. The one that is at first shock, then denial, then profound personal injury. The look that, in the end, inevitably said, “I will hunt you down, and no matter your penance, there will be no absolution.”
There will only be justice.
So there he sat, getting sucked back in, feeling torn and resentful and unforgiving.
He wanted to kick loose of this place and close his mind to all feeling. But his mind hovered, not ready to leave, not ready to give in, not ready to ground itself. Loss was still ghosting around, playing tag with rage, but rage had the advantage because it always burned hot and never stilled. He wanted vengeance, and he wanted it on his terms.
John continued on about America’s Grave Injustice until Dillon finally stopped him mid-sentence. “I hear what you’re saying. I get that. I agree with you. But again, I’m asking, why me? Why now?”
John slipped his wire-rimmed glasses on as though he needed them to figure out why Dillon, one of his top operatives, was sitting in his office, in a burgundy leather chair, asking such moronic questions. “Last month ten members of a special Senate Judiciary subcommittee spent a week in El Paso taking a closer look at the drug-related violence at the border. Now three of them are riding my ass on this. Including the chairman.”
“Senator Cummings?”
John nodded. “Cummings wants this stopped yesterday. The SBC is responsible for the majority of what’s happening along our border. You know how Sanchez thinks better than anyone else. His drug money is buying weapons and funding wars. We need you to end this.”
A nice, prosaic answer. Dillon closed his eyes, imagining a long, narrow rifle slug entering Rafe’s frontal lobe. Then watching the back of his head explode in a spray of justifiable vengeance.
He opened his eyes and quietly asked, “Then why did you pull me out in the first place?”
“Sanchez made you. End of story.”
Oh, no. No, no, no. “Tell me, John, how exactly did Sanchez make me? You figure that part out yet?”
“I’m working on it.”
Dillon pushed his hand angrily through his hair. “This is bullshit. You covering your ass or saving your pension?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? You had no problem shoving me back in six months ago. After, I might add, my cover had been blown.” He lowered his voice, made it cold, hard. “You remember that night, don’t you, John? You snapped your manicured fingers and I jumped just like you knew I would. Only everything went wrong, didn’t it?” Dillon leaned toward the Admiral, grief and rage blazing, “Did you know Sanchez would be there?”
“My intel said Vega would do the hand-off. Sanchez was nowhere in the picture. Your cover, blown or not, shouldn’t have played into it. That op was supposed to be simple. Cut and dried. I had no idea--”
“No idea?
No idea
about what? That I was being set up? That Sanchez had organized a fucking death squad? Hell, Vega didn’t even show!”
“Like I said, I--”
“Isn’t it your
job
to know such things?”
A ghost of pain flickered in the admiral’s eyes. “I didn’t know Sara would be there.”
“Either way, I was still a dead man. And okay, my life’s expendable, I accept that. Only, gee, I didn’t die, my wife did. How would you like to see your wife blown to hell because your boss didn’t have his friggin’ act together?”
“My wife, as you know, is deceased.”
Dillon sat back. “With all due respect, Admiral, no. You’re using me. Again.”
“I’m sick and damn tired of having my hands tied!”
“Find. Someone. Else.”
“I’m giving you a shot at vengeance. After everything that’s happened to you, your entire family--”
“I tried. I lost.”
“You didn’t lose. You quit.”
And, snap, there went Dillon’s control. He shot out of his chair. “Damn straight I quit! I gave you three years of substantiated evidence. Three long, miserable years’ worth. Enough to put Sanchez, and his brothers, away for twenty lifetimes. And what happened to all that evidence? Hmm, let me see. One day it’s there, the next it’s just, poof, gone. My cover’s blown to hell and back, I’m almost killed, and that would’ve been all well and good. But no, I got to live while Sanchez murdered my sister, my parents, and my wife!”
Grief thrummed in his chest, up to his throat, and suddenly Dillon couldn’t do this. He clamped his mouth shut and let the admiral have his say.
“And after all that, you’re going to let Sanchez win?”
Dillon said nothing.
“Commander?”
“I--” Dillon started. Then stopped and cleared his throat. “Your bureaucratic big shots want Sanchez extradited. No way I’m bringing him in so he can buy, or kill, his way out of the system.” No, Dillon wouldn’t bring Sanchez in. Not this time. He had plans of his own and they damn well did not include a government op.
“Maybe I’m not asking you to…bring him in.”
Dillon sat down hard, just collapsed backward, stunned. After all this time…“You’re issuing me a kill order?”
John picked up a Montblanc pen. Fiddled with it. “I’m saying…terminate with extreme prejudice. The op has been sanctioned. Sanchez is in either Peru or Colombia. Get your team ready. You start in Bogota.”
Dillon thrust a hand through his hair in frustration. “Why now?”
“Things change, Commander. And now, well, now you have nothing left to lose.”
No, Dillon thought, no he didn’t. Nothing at all.
Dillon nodded at the admiral, hating the truth, and silently wondered what unknowns the admiral was leaving out. Like who’d blown his cover. And why. “This runs deeper than Sanchez doesn’t it?”
The admiral didn’t answer. Which, of course, was an answer in itself.
“Who screwed me over, John?”
John laid the pen down with, Dillon sensed, a great deal of suppressed anger. “I’m starting to get a picture. Like I said, I’m working on it.”
“You do that.” Dillon stood. “Am I done here?”
The admiral nodded.
Just as Dillon hit the door, John quietly said, “Commander? One more thing.”
Dillon paused, impatient to be gone. “What’s that?”
“Watch your back. All your snooping over the last six months has pissed someone off.”
Dillon froze, still facing the door, and asked softly, “You knew?”
“It’s my job to know.”
Dillon closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “And?”
“And now there’s quite a bounty on your head.”
“Sanchez? Vega?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Proof of death?”
He heard the admiral hesitate, then say, “Your head.”
“How much?”
“Ten million dollars.”
Ten
million
dollars.
Dillon’s headache roared back with the force of a twenty-ton nuke. He’d been right. Dark and sinister just nailed him in spades.
CHAPTER FOUR
Team One had just spent the last three days and seven hours trudging silently through the roughest, meanest jungle they’d ever had the miserable luck of dealing with. And that was saying something. Dillon’s team was intimately familiar with just about every hellhole on the planet, but this one was, by far, the worst. What didn’t swarm or slither, sweltered.
Colombia had three climate zones: soggy, soaked, and saturated. The deluge of rain had eased off to a light mist in the last half hour and sunlight was just managing to poke through the canopy. Which meant the steam factor underneath their rain gear was going to increase from woeful to downright wretched.
No one complained, they wouldn’t, but they sure as hell weren’t happy about it either.
Dillon allowed himself an almost-smile in spite of the deplorable circumstances. No, his men didn’t whine, but they did bitch once in a while. And he had no doubt once his team had accomplished their goal, all seven of his men would be giving the old one-fingered salute to this godforsaken place.
Ahead of him by five meters, Bobby Hutchins, the team’s front man, slipped behind a tree and crouched. He turned, and making sure Dillon had a visual, pointed two fingers to his eyes.
Target in sight.
Finally.
Dillon whispered into his throat mike to alert the rest of the team, then signaled to Hutch that they needed to go back half a klick. Idiot Rule Number Six in the Infantry Journal: If the enemy is in range, so are you.
Hutch nodded, and Dillon waved him off to go recon for trip wires, mines, toe poppers or any other sort of let’s-blow-our-rivals-to-hell-and-back bullshit. Drug runners tended to be nasty that way. One simple oversight on Hutch’s part and they’d all be rock’n with Elvis.
Dillon wasn’t in a particularly rock’n mood.
He retraced his steps, turning his men back about five hundred meters. Kneeling, he scanned the muggy, green horizon and wiped the sweat off his forehead. It would be dark soon, and in another three hours they could finally make their hit. Keeping his voice pitched low, he asked, “Everybody good?”
Jarred Wesley, also known as Wolf, grinned. “The humidity’s a real joy, sir. Thermonuclear.”
“That’s because you’re from Vegas, you tumbleweed.” Chase, a preacher’s kid from Tampa, lived for sweat and swamp. Wolf punched him hard on the arm.
Ryan Monolito swatted at something buzzing around his face. “Awesome, sir. Love these bugs.”
Shane Bentley, who could blow a hole through a dime from nearly a mile away, caressed his M86 sniper rifle and said in a loud whisper, “If you’ll hold still long enough, Lito, I could get a lock on the little bastard.”
“Little my ass. The mosquitoes here could carry a tank.”
“Sea and air, liberty and freedom. No one said anything about spending days on end in a friggin’ jungle with coca plants taller than I am.” Doug Jenkins was one of the original valley dudes, hailing straight from the concrete jungles of Los Angeles and in Dillon’s opinion, the best in the teams with explosives. “Whoever said ‘no terrain is too tough’ has never been in this shithole.”
Nick Farrel, the team medic, smacked Doug upside the head. “You’d rather be in Iraq? Afghanistan maybe?”
“Hell, yeah. I can breathe in the desert. It’s what you might call
arid
.”
“And come home with ten pounds of sand in your lungs? Screw that noise.”
“Hey, at least I’d have some IED’s to play with. I’d show those insurgent bastards what a real platter charge feels like.”
As his men BS’d some of their tension away, Dillon hid a smile. Homeland Security would have Doug’s balls if they knew what kind of crazy shit he built ‘for fun’.
Nick caught Dillon’s eye with a raised brow and a hopeful gleam. Dillon rolled his eyes and nodded. “Just keep it down. I’ll stand look-out until Hutch gets back.”