Blood & Tacos #1 (12 page)

"Outlaw thugs, it says," Vaquero read, "I guess that means us. Return what you have stolen and we will return your families."

Professor traced the angle of the bullet hole to the wall: A nest of splinters held a gold wad. He plucked it free, weighed it in his palm.

"Then it gives a time and place for the drop." Vaquero finished. They all looked to Professor. He displayed the slug on his hand.

"A solid gold bullet."

"Manuel Segura," Vaquero said.

"The one that got away, huh?" Jasper said, swatting Banzai on the shoulder. Banzai kept his mirrors fixed on the photo. Jasper turned from being ignored, spat on the floor. "Knew we should have smoked that greaser when we had the chance, ‘stead of just freeing all them
chicas
he had locked up in his plantation."

"At least we know where to find him," Vaquero said.

"That's what bothers me," Professor said.

All of them watched him. He led them out the rainbow screen of beads curtaining the loft's exit.

"How you figure?" Confusion crushed Jasper's expression. "Who else uses gold bullets for his executions? Got to beSegura."

"Think about the angle of the bullet," Professor said, voice a rasp below the hollers of the French Quarter crowd as he led Tiger Team Bravo into the swelter ofNew Orleans' streets. "Where have we seen that before?"

"Only in ‘Nam." Vaquero was quick to answer. "In one temple, out the other. That's how the ARVN used to do in the captured Cong."

"Well, other than that little hitch in our giddy-up," Jasper said, "Makes sense that it'd beSegura. He deals with the Cartel and has a grudge."

Professor answered only with the deepening of the worry lines in his dusky face.

Manuel Segura's antebellum mansion sat on a sprawl ofLouisianaland abandoned by the census to the teeming of the bayou. But even before its moss-draped ivory columns were raised, pirate maps had been drafted in Indian ink by smugglers shuttling slaves and tobacco into the Colonial territories.

Those maps were ash now. Their embers still glowed only on the tongues of the Cajuns, passed down through generations.

Government forgot those weedy canals, but to Jasper Babineaux they were vivid as the lines in his palm.

Tiger Team Bravo glided up their mystery in a flatboat, skin shadow-torn with black camo, night vision crisp as jungle cats.

The channel ended in the green gum of undergrowth, fifty yards from a grove of spruce by theSeguraplantation's slave quarters. Vaquero took point, slipping them through roots gemmed with blue lichen, past wire snares laid bySegura's hired trappers, into the heart of the plantation.

They clipped through the chain link gate bordering the mown lawn.

They fanned out around the house, adrenaline prickling at the absence of guards.

They encircled the manor, its wedding-cake height lit sparingly on all floors, a ghostly orange watched by Banzai as he waited at the tree line to deliver covering fire at an instant's demand.

Doors were forced at the same moment. Vaquero led Professor up the back porch. Jasper stormed the kitchen's side door with sawn-off shotgun goring ahead.

No gunshots came to Banzai's pitch-perfect hearing. Only the grumble of bull frogs and the rippling of gar in the bayou. He dashed to join the others.

Their room-to-room took five minutes. Colonel Professor spent half of that watching out the windows. He didn't need to say what was written in his scowl:

This was a trap.

When the shapes of men with rifles drifted like smudges of cinders from the plantation's borders, Professor keyed his radio.

Jasper was already on it, calling in from the third-floor bedroom.

"FoundSegura. He's got and in-and-out hole through his head."

"Incoming Tangos," Professor whispered back. "Move to the upper floors to lay down fire."

"Eighty-six that idea, chief," Jasper answered. His boots thumping down the stairs were the only sound. "Head to the basement."

"We'll be blockaded in there," Professor answered.

Jasper bounced down the last step, slapped his commander on the shoulder, and flashed a crooked grin. "Just trust me."

They dashed for the cellar as machinegun fire shredded the silence. Glass popped. Wood clattered with a hundred dashes of lead.

Tiger Team Bravo fled into the cellar door with puffs of butchered furniture behind them.

Banzai slammed the cellar door. He shot the iron bolt home. A leap brought him onto the soil of the basement floor with his comrades.

He found Professor staring at the central support beam.

"I don't hear them comin' in," Jasper yelled above the snarls of gunfire overhead. "No boots or nothing."

Professor clicked on the flashlight affixed to his combat webbing vest. The light shone on a bulk taped to the beam, amidst the clutter ofSegura's pinball machine collection.

Atop a column of compound explosive, a clock's third hand sped away the final thirty seconds. Professor's jaw went tight as his haircut.

"Time bomb."

"Well, don't that beat all," Jasper said with a smirk. "Should have figured something like that."

"You figure how we get out of this?" Vaquero said.

The clock spun past twenty seconds. The gunfire above faded as the hostiles withdrew. Professor sized up the bomb: Four pounds. Enough to atomize the house.

"Better figure it fast," Professor said. "Fifteen seconds."

Jasper angled a thumb at a colossal wooden armoire against the wall. "Then we better duck behind that, pronto."

They ran for it, with ten seconds ticking away faster than even Professor could keep up.

After Manuel Segura's mansion vaporized in a bright-red ball, the squad that had surrounded it spread back into the bayou.

The plan was to disperse, check in with Commander Delta to confirm the mission's success, then lay low for a few days.

Sergeant Bear Collins hunkered in the brown-green stew of an inlet, listening to his teammates call in on the radio. Bear was last to key his transmitter.

"All clear here," he said. "Hell of a job, Tiger Team Delta."

Unlike the times in the past he'd said it, Bear didn't smile. This mission felt even more sour than his first. He'd thought nothing could be worse than the slash-and-burn jobs he'd done outside ofHueCity. Knowing otherwise made him sick in his gut, and Bear hardly ever lost his appetite.

That gut dropped as he heard a branch shift behind him.

Bear swung around his M-16. His aim found only darkness. He kept his sights on it a second longer to be sure.

A second too long. A bayonet pressed to his throat from behind.

"Y'all look like you got plenty of dumb ideas in that hairy head of yours," Jasper said, pressing the blade closer. "Don't pay ‘em no heed. Just drop the gun."

Bear weighed his options. Jasper cut them down to one by sinking the knife enough to draw blood.

Bear's rifle splashed to the ground.

Vaquero stepped out from behind the tree that had stolen Bear's attention. Colonel Professor followed. Banzai circled to Bear's side with a pistol to his head.

"How the fuck did you manage it?" Bear blurted.

"Just some local know-how," Jasper said.

"Local know-how ain't enough to survive being blown to smithereens."

"It is when it tells you that these old plantations have secret tunnels out to the slave quarters, so that the masters could have their nightly fun."

"Well fuck me sideways."

"We'll get around to that," Colonel Professor said, shark-dead stare fixed on Bear as Vaquero watched the perimeter of the grove. "Tell us who's behind this."

"You tell me this," Bear said. "Would you give each other up if you were in my position?"

Professor just stared.

"That's what I thought," Bear said. "Same rules apply."

"I figured that," Professor said. "So why's he doing this?"

Tiger Team Bravo showed Professor the same puzzled look. Bear smiled.

"Same reason as got us all into this mess in the first place," Bear said. "He's following orders."

At a snap of Professor's fingers, Jasper brought a pistol butt down on Bear's skull. Bulk splashed into the bayou. Professor turned the knocked-out soldier over to keep him from drowning.

"You want to explain all of that to us?" Jasper said.

Professor looked to Vaquero. He got a nod.

"I know what you're thinking,
jefe
," Vaquero said. "That the Ozark shipping address in the Cartel's records is making a lot of sense now."

"Ozarks?" Jasper said. "You mean…"

"It means," Professor said, "We have a call to pay on an old comrade. Captain Teague has some explaining to do."

"This is a real end run,
amigos
." Vaquero said, giving a sour look to the map Jasper spread.

"Not like we don't know the field." Jasper flashed a smile.

It was true. The Ozark forest they hunkered in, a spot on the edge of the map they gathered around, even smelled as they remembered. The decade of time since they trained here had changed so much in their lives, but the rhythm of the scissoring wind, the pine and soil aroma thick as gravy, even the rustle of animals in the mist, remained.

"Shocked to my spurs you didn't recognize the address on the Cartel list at the first glance, Professor." Vaquero glanced at Professor Colonel, crouched nearby keying a long-range radio. "Getting old?"

"Been old since I was young." Professor lifted the transmitter to the rim of his beret. "No, I didn't suspect the address until we found out Teague's Tiger Team was involved. It's not like I'm an authority on secret Special Forces training grounds' street addresses."

That sobered Vaquero. He tugged a jacket tassel. "Think Teague's behind this? Some kind of revenge thing against us?"

Jasper didn't look up from his study of the map's clouds of green and tributaries of yellow, the rises and vales of the secret training ground. "Maybe he crawled out ofIndochinawith some Golden Triangle heroin connections."

"We'll know soon enough, cowboy." Professor said to Vaquero.

They held each other's stare, Vaquero's demanding certainty, Professor giving only confidence in reply. Vaquero dropped his head first, shook it. "A real damn end run."

"Nobody knows these woods better than us." Jasper tapped the map's right border. "Now look here, y'all."

"I'm looking, I'm looking," Vaquero said. "You looking, Banzai?"

"I'm always looking. You just can't see it."

Jasper grinned big enough for Banzai and him both, then traced their infiltration route. The wind gusted and ebbed, shuttling eddies of mist through the rearing pine. As the radio clicked in answer to Professor, he spoke.

"Hello. Been awhile."

Jasper walked his fingers along a narrow yellow slash—a dead-end valley—on the map. "Right here's the draw where we set up that ambush, back in the day. Wiped out them weekend warriors on our war game finals, you remember?"

"Hard to forget," Vaquero said, smirked, rubbing his sun-ripened neck. "Though I don't remember much about the week celebrating that came after."

Jasper whistled. "All's I got to remember from that's the tattoos, myself. Anyhows, that there draw's got a defilade up on its south ridge we can slip through, right into the heart of the training ground forest."