Viper: A Thriller (25 page)

Avery scanned
their surroundings—it was clear—and contemplated his next course of action. Now
that they were here, they still needed a means of escape, otherwise they’d
quickly become pinned down alongside the DEA agents.

 “I’m going to
secure us transportation to the LZ,” he told Aguilar. “Layton has too many
wounded to move out on foot, and the Empresa will overrun us anyway if we stay
around too long. Stay with Layton’s team until I get back, and tell Diego to be
ready to move.”

Aguilar set a
new magazine into the bottom well of his Galil, and asked, “You’re sure you’ll
be okay on your own?”

“No, but Layton’s
guys will need the extra gun more than I do.”

“Watch yourself.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Avery covered
Aguilar as the Colombian approached the building’s back entrance. Aguilar
announced his arrival, and a haggard-looking DEA agent appeared in the doorway
with the muzzle of his MP7 directed safely toward the ground. He waved Aguilar
in.

Avery watched
the Colombian disappear into the back of the apartment building, and then he
took off down the alley in a sprint, holding his M4 in front of him with stock nestled
in the crook of his arm. He swept his rifle left to right, across windows and
rooftops on either side, and then he swung it around to check his six.

The alley was
clear, but Avery still found himself jumping at the slightest sound. The
frequent exchanges of gunfire coming from the other side of the block didn’t
concern him, but when a rat scurried out of an overturned trash receptacle, he swiveled
fast around with the M4 and took first pressure on the trigger as he acquired
the source of the noise in his sights. He exhaled with relief when he saw the
rat running toward him. Then it stopped short, looked up at him, and, seeing
him for the first time, screeched and fled in the opposite direction.

Avery emerged from
the end of the alley where there was a T-intersection with the main street. He
searched the line of houses and apartments running perpendicular with the alley,
and caught movement in his upper peripheral. He passed his sights over a third
floor window in time to see the shades flutter.  

A small boy peeked
out. Avery kept his finger on the trigger, sights trained on the window. He
assessed the boy as a non-threat and moved on. Even if the boy’s dad had the
Empresa leader on speed dial right now, it wouldn’t make much difference at
this point.

Avery turned
right onto the intersecting street, putting the battleground behind him, and
continued running down the center of the street. He turned the corner onto the
next block. Looking over the lines of parked vehicles, his eyes were drawn to an
old, beat-up GMC half-ton with an open bed. The truck was from the ‘80s and
didn’t much look fit to drive, but then neither did any of the other parked
cars and trucks. The GMC was rusted, weathered, dented, and looked like it
still sported its original paint job, but it was the largest vehicle in sight,
and it was old enough to not have a built-in immobilizing alarm system or any
other modern hindrances.

Avery sprinted
to the truck. He smashed out the driver side window with the butt of his M4,
reached inside, unlocked the door, and opened it. He brushed the bits of glass
off the seat with his gloved hands and climbed into the cab, positioning
himself beneath the dashboard.

He pulled a
utility knife from his pants pocket and used it to pry open the plastic covers
housing the massive bundles of colored wires under the steering column. He
sifted through the wires until he found the grouping that ran into the steering
column itself. The time consuming part was identifying the individual wires in
the bundle for the power and starter. Once he located these, he separated them
and carefully stripped them of their plastic covers with his knife. He twisted
the ends of the wires together and knew he was on the right track when
everything in the truck suddenly switched on, though he grimaced at the
particularly loud Cuban dance music suddenly blaring from the radio. He touched
the two ends of the wires together and involuntarily flinched at the resultant spark.
He heard and felt the engine cough to life and sputter a couple times before
easing into a low, steady rumble.

Avery sat up
behind the wheel and shut the door. He set his M4 on the passenger seat with
the butt facing him, and switched off the radio.

Five minutes had
elapsed since he left Aguilar. Under the circumstances, anything could have
happened during that time, but he hadn’t heard anything from the Colombians or
Layton, so he optimistically assumed that they were holding up okay.

 Avery threw the
gear shift into drive and hit the gas. The truck accelerated loudly down the
street, coughing and sputtering thick black diesel exhaust into the air. He
made the sharp turn into the alley without slowing, and was at once barreling
down on two Empresa shooters a hundred plus feet ahead. Both men shouldered
their rifles, and one man raised a hand to wave Avery down, commanding him in
Spanish to stop, not yet sure if Avery was just some local asshole who hadn’t
heard there was a firefight taking place or if he was one of the American
agents.

 Avery pressed
the accelerator to the floor and felt the truck give a kick as it picked up
speed.

The Empresa
would have no doubts now.

Avery ducked his
head down as they opened fire. The windshield shattered, raining glass around
him. Then he heard the front right tire take a hit and burst, and he felt the
forward weight of the truck shift and the turbulent recoil of the suspension.

The truck veered
forcefully to the right. Avery eased his foot off the gas and slowly applied
the brake as he steered through the blowout. To keep the vehicle from flipping
over or crashing, the idea was to steer in the direction of the drag until you
reacquired stability and control, but the alley was tight and didn’t offer sufficient
space. If the truck kept turning, he’d hit a building or offer his broadside to
the shooters, and fiberglass vehicles didn’t stand a chance against bullets.

Avery added more
pressure to the brake and clutched onto the wheel tight, two handed.

The truck came
to a sudden and violent halt when its front bumper collided into a wooden
utility pole, cracking the wood and bending the pole inward over the now
crumpled hood of the truck. Power lines sagged, dangling over the roof of the
cab, and Avery was thrown forward, while his rifle flew off the seat next to
him and onto the floor. His forehead smacked the edge of the dashboard, and the
wheel dug into his ribcage. He took the pain and lay still and listened.

A couple more
shots plinked through the left fender, and then the gunfire let up.

There was an exchange
of Spanish-speaking voices. Avery heard enough to know they were talking about
checking to see if he was alive. One man sounded confident that he’d hit the
driver, and Avery was happy to have them believe it since that would buy him a
few seconds.

The voices grew
louder as the men approached the truck. Avery pictured them walking slowly and
cautiously, with their weapons trained on the cab. He heard the clicking of a
mag release disengaging, followed by an empty magazine clanging against the
ground.

Careful to stay
below the dash and out of sight, Avery repositioned his body so that he could
draw his Glock from the holster on his right side. Glocks have no external safeties;
just draw and fire. He took a couple deep breaths to clear his head and pump
oxygen into his brain. White dots speckled his vision, but he couldn’t sit
around waiting for his vision to clear. The Empresa were drawing nearer, and he
needed to act before they reached the truck.

Avery took in one
more breath and exploded up in his seat as quickly as his battered body allowed.
He felt the effects of the blow to his head; his senses and reaction time
impaired. Blood dripped into his left eye, stinging. His ears rang. He felt
overcome by dizziness, and he wanted to vomit. Everything seemed to transpire
in slow motion as he aimed the Glock over shards of jagged, broken glass through
the shattered windshield.

The approaching
Empresa men stopped in their tracks, twenty-five feet away. One of them yelled
out in Spanish and readied his AK, while his partner desperately reloaded,
fumbling for a magazine from the pocket of his baggy, oversized cargo shorts.

Avery’s mind
assessed the former as the more immediate threat. He aimed through the windshield,
aligning the white dot over the blurry shape of the target, and his index
finger firmly pressed the trigger back again and again, three times. He saw the
.40 caliber bullets strike against the target’s center mass, red clouds materializing
briefly with each impact, and the body jerked with each hit.

Before the first
target was on the ground, Avery already shifted aim onto the next one as the Empresa
man slammed a fresh banana-shaped magazine into his AK’s magazine well and
wracked the bolt. Avery’s first shot missed as the Empresa man dropped to a
crouch and shouldered his rifle, but he caught Avery’s next pair of bullets
through his abdomen. He dropped the AK and groaned as he fell over with one hand
clasping his ruptured guts.

Avery shifted the
truck into reverse, gently gave it some gas, and turned the wheel left, backing
away from the utility pole. The pole lurched a couple more inches, but remained
planted into the ground. The truck handled sluggishly, and Avery felt the drag
from the blown out tire and heard the metal of the wheel grinding loudly against
concrete, metal grinding and sparking.

He put the truck
back into drive and hit the accelerator. He reached forward with the Glock to
knock a couple remaining glass shards out of the windshield.

Fifteen feet
ahead, the wounded Empresa worked his way onto his knees, one hand against his
stomach, one of the most painful places to catch a bullet. He stared at the
oncoming truck. Avery plowed right through him. The Empresa’s head smacked
against the grill, cracked open, and he went under. Avery felt the truck bounce
along as one of the rear tires tumbled effortlessly over the body. When Avery
saw him again in the rearview mirror, he was an unmoving heap sprawled over the
cement, his body twisted around at an unnatural angle.

Avery stopped twenty
feet later, behind the target building. He grabbed his M4 off the floor and
flung his door open. Standing up in the doorframe, he aimed the rifle over the cab’s
rooftop and fired twice into an Empresa shooter sneaking up along the back wall
of the building.

Twenty seconds
later, Avery’s eyes caught movement through the building’s back door. He sighted
on the center of the doorway and relaxed his finger on the trigger and averted
aim when he saw who came out.

Weaver appeared
first, sweeping his MP7 left to right. Aguilar and Layton followed, carrying a
wounded, limp agent whose pants were soaked in blood. Behind them was a white
man with his hands secured behind his back. Harris exited last, covering the
team’s six. He spun around once to fire his MP7 back into the building a couple
times.

Avery surmised
that the Empresa had already made entry from the front. He came around to the
front of the truck as Aguilar and Layton loaded the wounded agent into the cab’s
rear seating.

Three Empresa
men crept up alongside the building’s exterior wall in the gangway. Avery
managed to get off a single shot before they spotted him. He hit one of the
gunmen high in the shoulder, but it didn’t put the man out of action. Avery
dropped as they acquired him and opened fire. The rounds passed over his head or
struck the truck.

Aguilar shouldered
his Galil, loaded the under-barrel grenade launcher, and let one fly. The blast
wiped out the three Empresa, leaving one survivor on the ground with his leg cut
off at the knee, bone sticking out,  and a piece of shrapnel lodged in his
intestines. Aguilar shot him twice in the chest, ending his suffering and
everything else about him.

Then Aguilar
reloaded the grenade launcher and popped off another one through the back door
of the building where it exploded in the hallway, decimating another group of
Empresa who had breached the building from the front when the DEA agents made
their retreat.

The rest of the
team loaded into the pick-up.

Harris and
Weaver pushed Nolan into the cab, and piled in next to him.

“Where the fuck
is Diego?” Avery asked Aguilar, after doing a head count and realizing that
someone was missing.

“He should be on
his way down now.”

Avery swore, got
behind the wheel, and gassed it the eighty feet to Diego’s building.

Here, he
stopped, opened the door, and jumped from the truck, still swearing.

“I’ll cover him.
If the shit hits the fan here, leave. Do not wait for us,” Avery instructed
Aguilar, who was in the bed of the truck, aiming his rifle over the cab’s
rooftop.

While Avery took
off in a sprint, the DEA agents dismounted and took firing positions around the
truck.

It was quieter
now. Avery didn’t even hear Diego’s machinegun going at it anymore from above,
but he heard engines starting up and vehicles on the move nearby. He couldn’t
imagine that the Empresa had too many guys left. The bodies were scattered
everywhere.