Ballistic (35 page)

Court used his own dead weight on top of the man to stifle his kicks and thrashes. This hombre was probably a soccer player, Gentry thought; he was exceedingly fit, and his body did not play by the rules. Court expected the man to be limp in five seconds; it was nearly twenty before the life left his extremities. Court found himself exhausted, as if he'd been trying to stay atop a bucking bronco while preventing the bronco from making a sound for the entire ordeal. Court reached forward, pulled the keys out of the brush. He felt them for a moment, settled on two possible choices for the door of the vehicle. He held them in his fingers and retrieved the shotgun with his other hand.

Then he stood. Headed towards the armored command vehicle.

Seconds later he was inside. He'd shut the door behind him, turned right, away from the front of the vehicle and towards the back cabin. A man called out from the cab, a question to his partner who was now dead in the brush. Court pulled out his knife, began to turn to deal with the other driver, but he stopped, noticing a metal rack that ran head high along the length of one side of the cab.

All manner of weapons and ammunition rested in the rack or hung from hooks above it.

Gentry's eyes widened, and his face tightened into a cruel smile. “Oh,
hell
yes.”

He turned away, headed to the front to kill the driver.

The comandante led his men up the driveway towards the front of the house. They had been protected from any threat of fire from the windows or verandas of the hacienda's casa grande by the armored vehicle ahead of them, but his men had widened out as they neared the building and now moved slowly, tentatively in the night. The truck slowed and stopped and shone its bright lights on the front door.

Normally, the comandante would have nothing to do with a frontal assault, straight up the middle towards a defended stone building. But after sending in spotters that morning and seeing the property from the inside, he understood how concealed the driveway was from the hacienda itself. With the thick growth of bushes and trees on both sides, the archways at the front door, even the tall weeds between the cobblestones, twenty-five men heading in two columns straight up the driveway at noon would be more covert than if they jumped over the back wall in the middle of the night.

Even so, he'd waited until nightfall and then one hour more because the defenders might have been expecting an attack as soon as darkness covered the property. Now, at nine in the evening, he could wait no longer. It was time to hit these worthless
cabrones
in the house, kill every last thing that moved—every man, woman, and child, and then the dogs and cats and the chickens and goats.

He wanted to check with the other teams who should just now be approaching from other directions, but one of his damn officers had apparently depressed the transmit button on his radio, and it prevented the comandante from sending commands or hearing from any of his other men. He'd waited thirty seconds for
el chingado cabrón
to realize his error and fix his radio, but still he could not communicate.

In another twenty seconds he would be ready to call for the attack, and if this
hijo de puta
didn't fix his
chingado
radio, the comandante was going to string the
pendejo
up by his
chingado
—

Behind him, lights through the forest. Moving up the driveway towards the house.

He looked to the men around him as he quickly dove behind a low stone wall that rimmed the parking circle in front of the casa grande. He had to get out of the driveway before he was silhouetted by the approaching headlights.

He turned back around, stared at the lights, and he could not believe what he saw.

The mobile command vehicle bounced wildly up cobblestones towards his position.

He'd left the two drivers in the MCV at the front gate, but they had no reason whatsoever to even run the engine much less take part in the attack.

Even though his radio was not functioning, he pressed the button and screamed into it. “
¡Cabrones!
What the fuck are you doing?”

Fifty yards away the vehicle's red brake lights illuminated in the forest.

The MCV stopped in the woods, began turning around in the tight confines of the narrow driveway.

The comandante turned back towards the house. Whatever the hell his drivers were doing, they had eliminated any further surprise. He rose and opened fire on the front of the house with his M16 rifle; this was the only way he had to begin the attack without the use of his worthless radio.

Men on either side of him followed suit; their rounds sparked against the stone facade and tore through the wooden door.

The comandante heard a sound through the gunfire, and he turned back towards the noise. In his utter astonishment he stood up from behind the low wall and lowered his rifle to his waist.

The massive armored MCV moved up the rocky driveway in reverse, its speed increasing by the second. The huge blue truck bounced and heaved, its chassis straining under the weight of tons of ballistic steel.

The comandante had driven armored cars enough to know the view out of the rearview mirror was lousy; this
pinche
driver was blindly accelerating up towards the casa grande at a speed that he could not control.

“¡Alto!” Stop!
The comandante screamed into his radio; the problem with the mike seemed to have been rectified, although every other aspect of this attack was turning to
mierda
in front of his eyes. The MCV shot backwards towards the other armored truck, the BATT that was parked in the parking circle and shining its headlights on the big dark house.

The armored vehicle doing what it was fucking
supposed
to be doing!

The MCV looked like it would flip as it bottomed out at forty miles an hour; it missed sideswiping the other vehicle by no more than a foot, knocking off the driver's side mirrors of both trucks.

Suddenly, the comandante standing at the wall realized three things in rapid-fire succession: One, if his driver had had trouble seeing what was behind him before, now that his mirror was smashed and bouncing up the drive behind him he would not be able to see a thing. Two, that his driver was not
his
driver! And three—that the
federale
MCV moving at forty miles an hour was going to crash up the front steps of the house.

Court let go of the transmit button and tossed the radio onto the floor of the truck and then stomped on the gas. The lumbering vehicle slowly accelerated up the driveway in reverse, bouncing and bumping up the hill. He buckled himself in, and only this allowed him to keep his foot planted firmly on the pedal. The buffeting inside the top-heavy vehicle made him feel like he was a rag doll being shaken by a giant. Still, he did not let up on the gas for an instant.

He'd been aiming, if you could call it that, more or less at the front door to the casa grande, but when he lost his mirror, he gave up on any pretense of precision in his targeting. Instead he just floored it, hung on to the steering wheel for dear life, and pushed his head back hard into the headrest, unsure when the impact would come or even if he would survive it.

He felt a jolting crash that rocked him hard, slammed him tight into his seat, and caused his foot to slip from the gas pedal, but he knew he had not yet hit the house. As the bottom of the vehicle scrapped over stone, he determined it was the angel fountain in the center of the drive. This told him he was heading too far to the left to hit the front doors squarely.

He turned the steering wheel slightly to the right, jammed his foot down on the pedal again as automatic-weapon fire raked across the thick glass plate of the windscreen. He streaked by the broken-down farm truck with Ignacio Gamboa's body in the front seat.

Court's armored bus crashed straight up the steps of the casa grande; it smashed with brute violence into the western side of the archway and turned the two-hundred-year-old oak doors into logs and splinters.

The MCV jolted to a stop. Court slammed the transmission into park, unbuckled himself, and spun into the back. Behind him the confused and tentative smattering of gunfire that had chased the truck up the drive now turned into a heavy fusillade as the Policía Federal quickly came to the realization that this was not a wayward vehicle of theirs but, instead, a breakout attempt by the family under siege.

In the back Gentry fell down twice, stumbling from his dazed headache and lost a moment in the darkness, tripping over weapons that had fallen from their shelves. Seconds later he recovered, found the two items he'd been looking for, and opened the back doors.

Diego knelt in the sitting room behind the couch and fired at movement on the back patio. His grandfather had gone upstairs to shoot from the
mirador
, but he had not heard his
abuelo
fire the M1 carbine in over a minute.

An unreal amount of automatic fire shredded the front of the house. Diego knelt behind the couch as if it would give him some sort of cover; he only lifted his head when he heard an engine's roar. The rear of a huge blue truck crashed into the entry way of the casa grande and continued several feet inside the building. In a panic Diego stood and fired with his pistol, the bullets just making sparks on the rear door. His weapon clicked open and empty.

The sixteen-year-old boy fumbled his reload, dropped a magazine on the tile floor, and chased it to the edge of a wingback chair before retrieving it and seating it in the grip of his gun. Long before his weapon was back in the fight the black doors of the vehicle flew open, and Diego saw a man crouched there in the truck with two massive weapons in his hands.

“Diego! It's me! It's . . .” In the excitement Court had forgotten his pseudonym. “It's the gringo! Get everyone up here and in the van!
Ándele!
”

It took the young boy five full seconds to comprehend, but when he did, he nodded, spun on his tennis shoes, and ran towards the kitchen. He shouted as he ran. “
Mi abuelo
is upstairs!”

Courted nodded, but he did not go upstairs; instead he turned towards the shattered front doorway. There was little space between the hulking truck and the broken stone and stucco, but Gentry found a firing position, and he raised his right hand. In it he hefted a Hawk MM-1 handheld grenade launcher, loaded with a dozen high-explosive shells. The weapon was heavy and bulky and Court normally would have used both hands to fire it, but the weapon did not require both hands. He pulled the heavy trigger, and with a sound akin to a massive cork popping from an agitated champagne bottle, the first grenade left the barrel.

Forty yards away an explosion of fire and smoke and broken earth and spinning
federales
. He fired three more times at the wall lined with attackers before lowering the weapon, lifting an identical device that he held in his left hand, and popping off three missiles loaded with CS agent, a powerful crowd-dispersing tear gas. With the last canister still in the air, he spun in the other direction, fired rounds from both weapons one at a time; they arced through the house, through the broken sliding glass doors to the patio, over the pool, and exploded in the garden behind the casa grande.

Court had lived by luck, but he had no real expectation of hitting one single
sicario
attacking the rear of the house. No, he just wanted to show them the rules had changed; their cowardly attack on women, a kid, and an old man would now subject them to high-explosive rounds being shoved down their motherfucking throats.

He fired one round of CS up the hallway that ran from the main room to the west, hoped like hell he'd have everyone out of here before the gas wafted back inside and made this living room unbearable.

He dropped the CS grenade launcher as he ran up the stairs; it was too heavy to wield along with the high-explosive launcher. He turned to the right, shouted for Ernesto, wished like hell he'd grabbed a shotgun or a pistol or something other than a weapon that he could not use in the short range of a hallway.