Cartel (12 page)

"You got eyes on yet?" Marcus said to Cyril through the open hatch.

"I got eyes on the front of the building," Cyril said. "I don't have eyes on the targets because they're inside the building, and Dynamic International hasn't seen fit to equip us with X-ray lenses."

"Okay, smartass, I get it," Marcus said. "But you do have the front door, so you'll see them come out. Right?"

"I got the front door, yes."

"Did you see them go inside?" Dwayne asked.

"Oh, Rip Van Winkle speaks," Cyril said.

"Fuck you, geek. It was just a power nap."

"Knock it off, you two," Marcus said. "Get your god-damned game faces on. This ain't a training mission. We're about to kidnap a DEA agent and a Mexican cop."

"A sweet little Mexican mamacita cop," Dwayne said.

"Yeah, baby," Cyril said. Then his hand stuck out through the hatch and he and Dwayne bumped knuckles.

Marcus wondered how he'd managed to get stuck with babysitting duty. He decided it would be best to ignore them. He keyed his mic. "Sierra Two is two blocks east on Calle Venezuela, with a clear line of sight to the front of the target location."

"Roger that," Gavin said. "I'm four blocks short of the target, number two lane, and have eyes on. If they come out with something in their hands, take them down."

"Roger, out," Marcus said. In his left ear, he heard noth-ing but repeated metallic clinks and clanks coming from in-side the post office.

* * * *

Scott was on the thirty-eighth mailbox when the key fi-nally turned. Fourth row down, second box from the left. "This is it."

Benny hurried across the outer lobby from the glass front door where she had been watching the street. Scott pulled open the box's small metal door. Inside, leaning over at an angle, was a buff-colored envelope. Scott pulled it out. The envelope was six-by-nine inches and padded. In neat handwritten letters, it was addressed to Miguel Castillo at that P.O. box, Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico. There was no return address.

"I don't know that name," Benny said as she caressed the printed name with her finger. "But that's Michael's handwriting."

"Probably one of his undercover names." Scott squeezed the envelope and felt something small and hard in-side. He tore off one end and dumped the contents into his hand. It was a USB flash drive with a nylon lanyard attached to it.

"That's it," Benny said, excited.

Scott nodded.

"But why did he mail it to himself?" Benny asked.

"Cassidy was a throwback too."

She gave him a confused look.

"Like what he said about me, old school. He wanted to keep a copy where no one could find it." Scott held up the torn envelope. "This is old school, tradecraft one-oh-one."

"Why not just email it to himself?" Benny said. "Then he could have gotten to it anywhere."

"This is more secure."

"Secure from what?"

"Government snooping."

"Your government?"

"Yeah," Scott said. "My government."

"But Michael worked for the government."

Scott shrugged. "I'll know more when I see what's on it."

"I want to see it too," Benny said. "It's the reason my Michael was killed."

"The only computer I have access to tonight is at my house." He felt like a shit saying it. She had just let him, a total stranger, into her house to search for something that he hadn't even known existed until she told him about it, and then once he'd found it, he was basically telling her she couldn't come to his house to find out what it was all about, when his house was no more than a twenty-minute drive away, but on the other side of the river.

She looked up into his eyes, and he saw a hurt there. But she only nodded. "I understand."

"I'll call you tomorrow...and tell you what's on it."

She nodded again, and this time she didn't say any-thing.

Scott looped the lanyard around his neck and stuffed the flash drive under his shirt. "Do you know where he got it?"

"No," she said. "But we better go. I have to get my daughter."

"Sure," Scott said. Then he walked toward the door. On the way he dropped the envelope into a trashcan. He opened the door for Benny, then stepped out onto the sidewalk be-hind her.

Traffic was light and Scott was quick to notice the sud-den noise to his left. A deep engine roar. He turned and saw a pair of lights bearing down on them in the right lane, clos-est to the sidewalk. The profile of the vehicle, even in the shadow behind the powerful headlamps, was familiar to him. It was a Chevy Suburban. The same model vehicle that had chased him and his team out of Mexico this morning.

"Run!" Scott said. He grabbed Benny's jacket and pulled her into the street. There was a car in the far lane, roughly even with the Suburban, and as Scott and Benny cut across the street in front of it the driver jammed on the brakes, but he was too close to stop in time. Scott dove and pulled Benny with him. They rolled across the sidewalk as the car skidded past, missing them by mere inches. But the car did finally stop in just the right spot to block the Suburban, which had also skidded to a stop, from cutting across the street.

As Scott and Benny jumped to their feet, Scott heard the deep roar of another engine, followed by the sound of skidding tires and blaring horns. Down the street, a second Suburban was racing backward, straddling the two lanes, forcing the other vehicles to dodge around it.

Scott glanced around. They had to keep running.

A narrow alley, too narrow for cars, opened onto the sidewalk a few yards away. The entrance was as dark as a tomb. Scott grabbed Benny's hand and pulled her toward the alley. "This way." Behind them he heard the doors of the Suburbans opening and closing and the shouts of American voices.

He ran faster and hoped the alley led somewhere.

The difference between the streetlight-illuminated ave-nue behind them and the pitch darkness of the alley was pro-found. Scott couldn't see. He stepped on things. He kicked things. Benny stumbled and fell. Scott pulled her back up. They kept running. A dim light ahead signaled that there was a way out, but in the darkness, with no point of reference, Scott couldn't tell how far away it was.

Gavin was livid as he bailed out of the front passenger seat of the Suburban. His driver, a twenty-something-year-old ex-82nd Airborne paratrooper named Buck, had totally screwed the pooch. Instead of cruising up to the front of the post office with the regular flow of traffic, Buck had gotten excited and gunned the engine, drawing the DEA agent's at-tention.

Then once they were spotted, instead of straddling the center stripe to block traffic from getting around them, Buck had hugged the right edge of the road, which had allowed another car to come up on their left side and block them in.

So when Greene and the Mexican chick had sprinted across the street, Buck couldn't get over far enough to run them down, as Gavin had repeatedly shouted at him to do. Now the targets had disappeared into a fucking black hole.

"Sierra Two, stop trying to back up," Gavin said into his headset as he dodged around the civilian car that had blocked them in. "Get your ass around the block and find out where this alley comes out."

Once clear of the interfering car, Gavin ran across the street toward the alley. He saw Sierra Two brake hard, then accelerate forward as Marcus headed toward the next turn so he could cut the targets off at the far end of the alley.

Gavin wedged the stock of his M-4 carbine against his shoulder and stepped into the alley. He kept the muzzle an-gled down so he could look over the gunsight with both eyes. The alley was pitch dark. Buck was in front of him, and two more of his men were behind him: Snyder, an ex-Army Ranger, and Camp, who spent three years on SEAL Team Two, but got out because, as he said, he got tired of being immersed in freezing cold fucking water. Gavin won-dered if the DEA agent and the Mexican cop had enough tactical sense to set up a hasty ambush. He hoped not, be-cause with the ambient light from the street silhouetting him and his men from behind, they were easy targets.

Despite Marcus's mental fuckup, trying to back through traffic toward the target, Gavin wished he hadn't split Mar-cus off into the second Suburban. He should have put Snyder in command of Sierra Two and kept Marcus with him. Snyder was a good man, and Rangers were hard-charging, life-taking motherfuckers, but they weren't quite tuned up to the standards of Special Forces. Marcus had been in Special Forces and had served with Gavin in Afghanistan. As for Camp, SEALs had a great rep, especially after they whacked bin Laden, but underneath all the cool gear and training, they were still squids.

Gavin's four-man team moved down the alley in a stag-gered column with Gavin in the number two spot behind and to the right of Buck, Snyder at number three behind and to the left of Gavin, and Camp trailing Snyder to his right in the four spot.

"R.O.E?" Buck said over his shoulder, meaning what were the Rules of Engagement.

"Kill that fucker and take the flash drive," Gavin said.

"And the chica?" Snyder asked in a loud whisper.

"Whatever you want," Gavin said. "Just make it quick." He was a man who believed in the spoils of war. Gavin looked over his left shoulder, and even in the dark he could see Snyder grin.

"Contact front," Buck shouted. Then he opened fire.

* * * *

Scott heard the distinctive crack of the first supersonic bullet blow past his head an instant before the sound of the gunshots reached his ears. "Down," he shouted and dragged Benny to the filthy pavement.

He crawled through the dark toward the nearest wall, pulling Benny with him, hoping to find cover as more bullets ripped down the length of the alley, some cracking overhead, others zinging off the bricks. Behind him he saw four sets of muzzle flashes. His hand sank into a puddle of slime that smelled like vomit. Benny retched. "Keep moving," he whispered.

Then the firing stopped.

Scott kept crawling until he ran into something metal. Feeling around it, he found it was sitting on small wheels. A garbage bin. "Here," he said, and pulled Benny toward him. They rose to their knees behind the metal bin. He could hear men stalking toward them. Leaning close to Benny, he whis-pered, "Are you armed?"

"Yes." Benny pulled a Beretta 9mm from under her jacket.

Scott pointed down the alley. "Light their asses up."

"What?"

He stabbed a finger toward their attackers. "Shoot."

"Who are they?"

"Does it matter?"

Benny peaked out from behind the garbage bin. "I can't see them."

"Here." Scott picked up a piece of debris from the ground, it felt like a door hinge or piece of angle iron, and lobbed it down the alley toward the men. It hit the pavement with a loud clank; a second later four rifles opened fire. "There they are," Scott shouted loud enough to be heard over the sound of the guns.

Benny aimed at the muzzle flashes and fired off her en-tire magazine while sweeping her pistol from side to side. The shots from the four rifles stopped, and Scott knew the men were diving for cover. If they were good they would re-cover quickly and advance using bounding overwatch or fire and maneuver, techniques Scott had been taught at DEA's "mini-ranger camp" before deploying to Afghanistan.

Then the very air was ripped apart as two of their pursu-ers unleashed long bursts of full-automatic fire. Benny screamed and pressed herself flat against the pavement, and Scott instinctively tried to cover her as a buzz saw of bullets cut through the top half of the garbage bin.

The firing stopped again. And this time Scott heard at least two men shouting almost simultaneously, "Reloading."

Scott pulled Benny to her feet and they ran, hunched down and keeping the garbage bin more or less between themselves and the men with the big guns. After they had taken about ten steps, Scott noticed Benny lagging behind. He turned to see if she was hit. She wasn't. She was just re-loading. When she finished, and while they were still run-ning in their awkward, hunched positions, Benny angled out just beyond the cover of the garbage bin, pointed her pistol underhand behind her back and fired off several more shots. There was more shouting behind them.

Scott saw they were twenty yards from the end of the alley. They just might make it out, he thought, and from there they could find somewhere to hide and use the darkness to their advantage.

Then another Suburban skidded to a stop in front of them and blocked off the alley. Two men sprang out of the front doors and a third climbed out from the back. All wore military clothing and carried M-4 carbines. Scott pushed Benny against the wall, hoping the darkness would hide them. He tried to get his breathing under control and stop his heart from hammering in his chest.

The three men switched on lights mounted to the grips of their carbines. Scott flattened himself and Benny tighter against the wall. But he didn't feel the brick he had expected. Instead, he felt rough wood. As the powerful lights probed the dark, searching for them, Scott ran his hand along the wooden surface. His fingers found a handle. It was a door. He pressed the latch. It didn't move. He skimmed his fingers across the door until he found the crack between the door and the wall. Then he ran his fingers up and down the crack, but he couldn't find any hinges. Not on this side. Which meant the door opened inward.

"Step back," he whispered to Benny.

She did. He raised his leg and kicked the door as hard as he could, his foot landing just to the inside of the handle.

The door didn't budge.

But the noise gave away their position. One of the gun-mounted lights swung in their direction, but before it could find them Benny fired three shots. The man behind the light dropped. "Son of a bitch," he shouted. "I'm hit."

Benny fired three more shots.

This time Scott didn't see the result because he stepped back, took a running start at the door, and drove his foot into it like a piston. The frame split. Scott kept moving forward, using his momentum and driving his shoulder into the door. It crashed inward, torn completely off its hinges, and toppled to the floor. Scott lost his balance and fell on top of it. Just outside he heard more pistol shots as Benny emptied her magazine at the men with the lights.