“How many shooters?” Azuela asked, as Ortega dropped beside him, bruising both knees on impact.
“I’ve seen two,” Ortega replied. “Who knows if there are more?”
“This was supposed to be an easy job,” Azuela said.
Standing above them, now reloading, one of Infante’s gunners snarled, “Shut up! Stand and fight, before I drill your ass myself.”
Ortega knew he was addressing both of them, muttered, “Shit!” underneath his breath, then shrugged at Azuela and struggled to his feet again, using his free hand to support himself on the RAV4’s fender. It was hot from baking in the Texas sun, but that brief pain was nothing, next to the anticipation of his gruesome death.
This was the price Ortega knew he’d someday pay for choosing the life he had: smuggling drugs, beating and killing men he’d sometimes never met before, though others had been his friends before orders turned them into targets.
Hearing a sound rise from his throat that soon became a battle cry, Ortega lunged around the RAV4’s grille and rapid-fired the M9 toward his enemies until its slide locked open on an empty, smoking chamber.
He was fumbling with a second magazine, inside one of his cargo pockets, when they cut him down.
* * *
Jack Grimaldi watched the pistolero fall, his breastbone drilled and shattered by a tumbling 5.56 mm slug, and felt no triumph from the kill he’d made. In fact, the only thing he usually felt after slaying an enemy—whether on foot and face-to-face or in an airborne duel—was sweet relief.
A stranger had meant to kill him, but had died himself, instead.
Grimaldi knew that any fight you walked away from was a win.
The man he’d shot had died circling around the nose of one RAV4, but the gunners standing behind it plainly didn’t feel like making targets of themselves, when they could snipe at their attackers from behind their SUV.
No problem, he decided. Not unless the windows of their vehicle were bulletproof, that was.
From jogging forward, slightly off to Bolan’s left, Grimaldi stopped and took a knee, then leaned into the Steyr AUG’s stock, cushioned by a synthetic rubber shoulder plate. The rifle was selective fire, but had no switch to make the change; instead the weapon came equipped with a selective trigger—pulling it halfway meant semiautomatic fire, while squeezing it back all the way loosed a full-auto spray.
For this job, he bore down on the trigger and gave up counting rounds expended, sweeping back and forth across two dusty windows on the RAV4’s right-hand side. The safety glass—not bulletproof—shattered on impact, as did the glass in the windows along the driver’s side. Grimaldi’s 55-grain full-metal-jacket projectiles cleared both sets of panes, flying at some 3,200 feet per second, possibly diverted from their course a bit, but still finding the gunmen who had threatened him, piercing their centers of mass.
They fell together, dropping out of sight behind the SUV. One of them strafed the sky with a short burst as he was going down, and then Grimaldi dismissed them from his mind, knowing both men were dead or getting there.
Off to his right, Bolan was firing, dropping bodies. The Stony Man pilot glanced at his Steyr’s see-through magazine and counted roughly fifteen rounds remaining before he had to reload. A blur of movement from the second SUV in line drew him in that direction, while Bolan was taking down a couple of gunmen who’d kept their workers pinned at gunpoint, near the secret tunnel’s exit hatch.
As Grimaldi approached the second vehicle, a short gunman broke from cover, carrying what looked to be a Mini Uzi, trying to reload it on the run. The ace pilot didn’t know why he’d exposed himself before he primed his weapon, but it wasn’t his place to reject the shooter’s suicidal urge. Stroking the Steyr’s trigger twice, he punched holes, around lung-level, into the runner’s torso, and the fight went out of the guy for good.
How many active shooters left?
A hasty look around the battlefield showed him more hostiles down than up and moving. Two of those still on their feet were tunnel laborers, with their hands raised as high as they could reach, unless a sci-fi tractor beam hoisted them into the air. Their effort to surrender was in vain, though, as the last gunman who’d brought them through the tunnel stitched them both with automatic fire and laid them facedown in the sand.
Dumb move, Grimaldi thought, as Bolan shot their killer in the face. Of course, the odds of that one living through the firefight had been minimal, at best.
They still needed someone to question, though, and Grimaldi hoped that they hadn’t overplayed their hand. Bolan seemed to have no concern on that score, as he palmed a fragmentation grenade, released its safety pin and pitched the bomb down the tunnel’s gaping throat. Somewhere below ground, the explosion thumped and rumbled, bringing down a portion of the tunnel’s roof.
“Is anybody left?” Grimaldi called to Bolan.
The big guy turned back to answer him, but didn’t have a chance to speak before a high-pitched voice cried out, somewhere behind the forward SUV.
“¡No me mates, por favor! Lo dejo!”
The best translation of those words, for Grimaldi, came when a pistol sailed over the vehicle’s hood and landed in the dirt, followed a moment later by its magazine.
* * *
Ignacio Azuela didn’t want to die. While death was inevitable for everyone, he preferred that event to occur at some distant time, rather than today.
He’d watched the other members of his team get cut down around him—some of them killed outright, while others were left twitching and gurgling through their death throes while the Texas sun beat down upon them mercilessly. Even the workers who had hauled the pallets of cocaine from Mexico, below ground, were now dead, some shot by Infante’s gunmen, who wouldn’t let them run away, others by the two Anglo riflemen who had ambushed their party.
Dead was dead, no matter who had pulled the trigger. Azuela had no idea whether the strike was some kind of hijacking by a rival drug cartel—perhaps reprisal by survivors of the raids his own cartel had staged in recent months—or if the killers were a pair of gringo vigilantes. Such things happened on the border, he’d been told, by private groups such as the Texas Minutemen and California Desert Hawks. According to reports, they shot first, rarely asking questions afterward, and might be prone to seizing drugs for later resale on their own—all in the name of Free America.
Azuela calculated that his life was definitely forfeit if he fought whoever had wiped out his comrades today. But if he surrendered, offered to tell everything he knew, then perhaps...
“Come out of there and show your hands,” one of the gringos ordered, trusting that Azuela understood enough English to do as he was told.
“¡Ya voy!” he answered, then added, “I’m coming now. Don’t shoot!”
Azuela’s legs were trembling as he rose and walked atound the RAV4, empty hands held high. Surrender might be shameful, but at least he hadn’t wet himself so far, in the process of self-abasement. He would willingly obey, and tell them all he knew, unless he saw an opportunity to shade the truth a bit and thereby gain some extra time.
What did they call it in the north? Fudging.
Both men covered him with matching rifles, while the shorter of the pair came forward, frisked him thoroughly and then told the man who seemed to be in charge, “He’s clean.”
“Okay,” the other Anglo said. “We’ve still got a few minutes. I just want to send a smoke signal.”
That said, the taller gunman took a can of what Azuela thought was lighter fluid from a pocket of his baggy desert camo pants