The Devil You Don't Know (American Praetorians Book 4) Page 14

  “Easy,” he replied. “I'll be out in another two minutes.” I nodded, and headed outside.

  I circled around to the back. Little Bob had Ernesto down on his face in the dirt, with a knee in his back and his hands over his head. Little Bob by himself weighed close to two hundred fifty pounds. Add in body armor, ammo, and rifle, and he was closer to three hundred. That's a lot of weight to have concentrated on a relatively short section of your spine. Ben was standing a couple meters away, his rifle pointed at the dirt but facing the two of them; if Ernesto got sufficiently froggy, Little Bob could jump clear and Ben could take a shot. Little Bob was letting his weight do the work to restrain Ernesto, while he kept his eyes and his rifle out into the desert, watching for anyone trying to approach from the way we'd come.

  I scanned the darkened stretch of brush myself as I bent down to take a knee next to Ernesto's head. “How soon can we expect your friends to come for you?” I asked.

  “I don't know...” he gasped as Little Bob shifted his weight.

  “Do not try to bullshit me, Ernesto,” I said matter-of-factly. “I'm not so stupid as to think that your boys didn't get a message out during that fight. How close are the reinforcements?”

  “I don't know,” he wheezed. He was sucking in some dust with every breath, and combined with Little Bob's weight on his back, that can't have made talking easy. “The rest of the security was called to meet up with Señor Reyes' man. He was coming to talk to me about the attack, and losing the money...” he groaned. “I don't know where they are! Por favor...”

  I nodded to Little Bob, and he eased up, just a bit. He'd been bearing down to let Ernesto know where he stood. At about the same time, Jim came around the corner, carrying the meager bag of cell phones that was all we'd gotten from our hasty site exploitation. No words were needed. I just keyed the mic and said, “Collapse back to the breach. We are leaving.” Eric and Ben acknowledged tersely, and then we were moving. Little Bob kept to the middle of the formation, his rifle held muzzle up and one beefy hand clamped on the back of Ernesto's neck. Even in the dark, without being able to see facial expressions that well, it was obvious that our target had no idea just what the hell had just happened. In spite of my little greeting, I was pretty sure he still didn't realize who we were.

  Just before we reached the hole in the fence, I touched Little Bob's upper arm to get him to hold up. I grabbed Ernesto by the chin and dragged his face around to look at me. It can't have been any less disorienting; all he saw was a helmeted, bearded man with his upper face obscured by night vision goggles with strange attachments on the tubes. “Listen very carefully, Ernesto,” I said. “We're going over that hill. If you play fuck-fuck games and try to slow us up, we hurt you. If you yell to try to bring your friends down on us, we kill you. Understood?” We couldn't really afford to kill him at that point, but he didn't need to know that.

  He nodded jerkily. He was scared shitless. The arrogant, tough-talking fuckhead from the convoy was gone, fled away at the sight of his security detachment getting smoked to a man. I let go of his jaw and let Little Bob manhandle him onto the ground, to follow Ben and Eric through the hole in the fence.

  While they crawled through, Jim and I stayed on a knee, watching back toward the house. I keyed my radio again. “Key-Lock, Anarchy, this is Hillbilly. Fall back to Hippie and Monster. We'll link up at the assault position.”

  “Hillbilly, Monster. Company's coming,” Larry called over the net. I looked toward Guadalupe. There were indeed headlights on the road, moving toward the house. It looked like we were getting clear just in time. Glancing behind me, I saw that Little Bob had laboriously wormed his way through the hole in the fence. It was my turn.

  It was just as shitty going back out as it had been on the way in; shittier, actually, since I hadn't had a bruised torso from getting shot in the plate on the way in. Life was going to suck for a few days while that healed. But I got through, put my dusty helmet back on, and covered Jim as he crawled through after me. Then it was back through the brush, working our way up the hill toward that slump where we'd staged before.

  Headlights swept across the hillside as the reinforcements' vehicles pulled up to the house. I could hear the yelling as they discovered the bodies, and felt the need to speed up, to run, to get the hell away before they spotted us and started shooting. But thrashing through the brush while still that close to the objective was only going to ensure that they did spot us. So we kept low, moved carefully and quietly, and steadily put distance between ourselves and the house.

  I kept looking back, especially as we moved higher up the hill. There were at least a dozen men milling around the house and grounds, using bright weapon lights to search for any signs of our presence. It made it easy to track them, but I carefully scanned around them, looking for any who might be on NVGs and not showing any light. But if they were trying to track us, they weren't having any luck. There wasn't anyone on our back trail, at least not yet.

  It took a lot longer to get up to the shelf on the hill than it had to get down, especially with Ernesto. He wasn't actively trying to slow us down, at least not that I could tell; he was just soft and scared. He stumbled a lot, and didn't move quickly. He was obviously out of his element in the bush. It's easy to be a tough guy surrounded by muscle in an environment you're used to, but alone, surrounded by hostile men with armor and guns, and climbing up a hillside in the middle of the night is something else.

  Both overwatch teams were waiting when we got back to the shelf, sniper rifles slung and ready to move. I just pointed up the hill. Hanging around was not a good idea. We hoisted the gear bags we'd hauled over the ridge and got set to move out. Ben stayed on point and clambered up past the slump in the hillside. The four guys who had been on overwatch took up the rear. We slipped into the draw, and the shoulder of the mountain eclipsed the house behind us.

  After about a mile, I called a halt, and moved up to Ben. “Security halt,” I whispered. “Once we start moving again, take us south. We'll get back to the vehicles later; I want to get somewhere empty and away from the towns.” He just nodded. I moved back to my spot in the column and got down on a knee, grateful for the momentary rest. I really hurt. I took a moment to explore my front plate; it was designed to take several impacts, but I wasn't going to trust it too far. There was a pit from the bullet strike in it, but I didn't feel much else in the way of cracks. Oh, well; I was going to call in some support shortly anyway, I'd have them bring a couple of spare plates.

  We just stayed in place for a few minutes, watching, listening, sipping some water, and catching our breath. We were all in good shape but none of us were exactly young anymore. I remembered when this kind of hoofing it through the brush was a lot easier.

  Far too soon, Ben was getting up and moving, angling off to the south. The ridge was almost more of a plateau up there, so it was fairly easy going, albeit still uphill. We kept moving for about another hour, covering close to a mile and a half before halting again. I moved back up to kneel beside Ben once we'd stopped. “How's this?” he asked. “The only things that should hear anything out here are going to be the rattlesnakes and the coyotes. And we've got a nice, long line of sight to see if anybody is still coming up our back trail.”

  “Fucking perfect,” I murmured. I looked back at where Little Bob had once again put Ernesto on his face, knee in back. “I don't think this will take long, but be ready to go to ground through the day if we have to.” I didn't want to have to do that, but if the next step took long enough, it would be preferable to trying to move back to the Suburbans in daylight.

  I moved around to the rest of the team, letting Ernesto wait and think about what was going to happen to him out here in the middle of nowhere. Anticipation can be far worse than any actual punishment. It eats at the mind and erodes the will. He was already shaken by what had happened, and had had a couple hours of being frog-marched through the desert to consider what might be in store when we stopped. I'd let that percolat
e through his mind for a little while longer before we started asking questions.

  Don't get me wrong; none of us were trained interrogators. In Iraq, we'd had Haas for that. But Haas wasn't here; he was still in Kurdistan with Alek and three other teams. We really didn't have a Latin America specialist, something I was mentally grumbling about. We'd gotten too focused on the Muslim world; if we were going to function as the go-anywhere-and-do-what-needs-doing company that we acted like we were, we needed more wide-ranging intel capabilities. Tom Heinrich, the retired colonel who handled most of our Stateside support, had started building a stable of spooks a few years before, but we obviously still needed work in that area.

  I went back to Little Bob and Ernesto and squatted down, my rifle across my knees. “Let's have a talk, Ernesto,” I said quietly. “I'm pretty sure you understand the rules by now; if I think you're bullshitting me, or my associate here thinks you're bullshitting me, we hurt you. You can make all the noise you want out here; nobody's coming for you.” I stood up and stretched, taking my time, letting him see that I was completely relaxed. I wasn't; the pain was throbbing through my entire body and I was fucking exhausted. I just wanted to lie down and sleep. But work came first. “Oh, one other thing,” I added. “If you decide to go the omertá route and keep your mouth shut, then we really start to hurt you.”

  He didn't say anything, but he didn't struggle, either. It was too dark to see his demeanor, or at least however much demeanor a man on his face in the dirt with a knee on his spine can have. From what I'd seen since we'd grabbed him, though, this was probably going to be easy. Unless, of course, he had discovered his balls on the movement.

  Finally, as I let the silence stretch, he asked, his voice muffled and hoarse, “What do you want to know?”

  “Tell me about your boss,” I said, squatting down next to him again. “Tell me about Alonzo Reyes' dark side.”

  “I don't know what you mean...” His last word was cut off with a grunt as Little Bob leaned on him. He still hadn't quite learned. “I don't know what to tell you!” he insisted, gasping out the words through the weight on his torso. “Tell me what you want to know!”

  I leaned in closer, speaking slowly and precisely. “I want to know everything you know. I want to know about his work with drug cartels and Hezbollah mercenaries. I want to know about his connections with the underworld, north and south of the border. I want to know where he lives, what his patterns are, where he sleeps. Who are his friends, who does he talk to?”

  “I don't know all that!” he protested. Little Bob shifted his weight again, and Ernesto gasped in pain; from the angle it looked like a rib was about to snap. I motioned for the big man to let up just a little. It wouldn't do to put him in too much pain too fast; if we handled this wrong, he'd feed us whatever he thought we wanted to hear, just to make the pain stop.

  “Then tell me what you do know,” I said. “Start with the deal with the Hezbollah mercs.”

  He hesitated. Little Bob leaned again, and cried out in pain. “No más, por favor! We were just the facilitators! The Harmon-Dominguez people had the idea to start with! I don't know why.”

  “Details, Ernesto,” I pressed. The details of the arrangement with Los Hijos and Hezbollah might not be vital to our mission, but the more we knew about the overall situation, the better. Knowing the target's activities could help us close in on the target.

  “Hezbollah needed money,” he said, through gritted teeth. “Los Hijos needed support. Someone on the Harmon-Dominguez side was providing the money. All I was told was to pick up the money and make sure it got to the mercenaries. I didn't do any of the coordination myself.”

  “How closely was your boss involved in the deal?” I asked.

  “I don't know.”

  I held up a hand to tell Little Bob not to get too rough yet. If the operation was properly compartmentalized, then Ernesto likely didn't know. Somehow I doubted that he was Reyes' closest confidant. Somebody like Reyes would probably put some distance between himself and his gray-side operations if he possibly could. At the moment, I was mainly interested in finding the link between Ernesto and Reyes, and then going after that guy. This could be a long hunt.

  But letting Ernesto know what I was really after wasn't necessarily going to be productive. Let him start to think that there was a minimum that I expected from him, and he'd start to hedge his bets. I couldn't allow that.

  “Don't give me that shit, Ernesto,” I said. “Remember what I said would happen if I thought you were bullshitting me?” I leaned in only inches from his face, careful to keep my weapon out of his reach. “You met us as a representative of SCC, which is Alonzo fucking Reyes' primary business concern across the Americas. If you want me to honestly believe that Reyes had no idea what the fuck was going on, then you must think I'm pretty fucking stupid.”

  “No, no,” he protested, a note of panic in his voice. “Yes, all the orders come from Señor Reyes. What do you want?”

  “I want Reyes,” I told him. He responded quickly enough to make me suspicious.

  “He's in Veracruz!” he exclaimed. “He has a suite in the Hotel Fiesta. He has houses and hotels all over Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, but right now he's in Veracruz.”

  Little Bob looked at me. As unreadable as his expression was in the darkness, I could tell what he was thinking, because it was the same thing going through my head. How was he so sure, and why is he so willing to spill it? No honor among thieves, or are we getting fed into a blind alley?

  “That was quick,” I said after a moment, tilting my head as though examining him more closely. I let the unasked question hang in the air.

  “He's in Veracruz,” he repeated, more quietly. “I had to contact Señor Tenorio to tell him about the attack at the railroad tracks, and he was with him. Please, don't hurt me anymore.”

  “How do I know you're not just trying to tell me what you think I want to hear?” I demanded.

  “Madre de Dios!” he cried. “It's the truth!”

  I couldn't be sure. I'm not a trained interrogator, and we didn't have the time that's usually necessary for such an operation, but I began questioning him again, starting over at the beginning. I was relentless. I changed up the order of the questions. I changed the wording, looking to trip him up. And all the while, Little Bob kept kneeling on his back, bearing down if his answers didn't seem quite right.

  After another three hours, the story hadn't changed. Reyes was in Veracruz, as far as Ernesto knew. He hadn't tried to dissemble; he'd spilled his guts. It seemed the tough, machismo Ernesto was done as soon as he found himself at someone else's mercy.

  The sky was starting to lighten by the time I gave up, bone-weary myself. Little Bob got off of Ernesto, flex-cuffed him, gagged him, and left him lying on the ground, but without the weight on his back, while I stepped away, took a knee next to Jim, and pulled out the sat phone from my gear bag. “That sounded pretty solid,” he commented.

  “For a single source under duress, yeah,” I said. “We need some kind of confirmation, but it might be enough to start this train moving.” I dialed Tom. It was going to be early as fuck; we were only an hour ahead of The Ranch. But we needed to get things moving if we were going to exploit this.

  “Heinrich.” The old man's voice was steady and alert, as if I hadn't woken him at all. I didn't always get along with Tom—he had been an officer, after all, and I can count the number of officers I've gotten along with on one hand—but he was definitely a professional.

  “It's Jeff,” I said, sounding a lot rougher than he did. Granted, I'd been up all night, with a raid and getting shot in the chest plate in the mix. “We've got a possible lead on Reyes, in Veracruz. We'll need some more support; I've got a prisoner who needs to be taken in hand, and another team would be a help.”

  “We don't have any sources in Veracruz,” he pointed out. “Have you got confirmation on this lead?”

  “No, we don't,” I admitted. “We have the results of a tac
tical questioning session with the target of last night's raid. He's been consistent, though. I'm fairly confident in it.” I refrained from going on a rant about how we were supposed to be providing “global solutions” or some such buzzword bullshit, but we had hardly any eyes on Latin America. That was a conversation for another time.

  There was silence on the other end for a moment. I started getting irritated, but suppressed it. Tom wasn't big on pleasantries. He was working on something. Finally, he said, “All right, I'll get the DC-3 on the way to San Luis Potosi in about two hours. You're still in Zacatecas?”

  “Outside of it, yes,” I confirmed. “We may be holding in place until dark, though. The sun's coming up soon, and we're kitted up and look like we've just been through the wars. We'll attract attention if we're moving around on foot like this.”

  “The bird will be there when you get there,” he said. “I'm sending a small security contingent with it, mostly new guys, and one of our in-house spooks.”

  “Do we have an in-house spook who knows this area?” I asked. I hadn't been aware of one, although what Tom and Haas had been doing with the “Spook Farm” wasn't always something we knuckle-draggers were kept up to date on.

  “Raoul,” he confirmed. “Callsign Aztec. He was hiding out on one of the new teams, until I got wind of his background and his time with HET. Native-born Mexican, emigrated and joined the Army. I think he's still pissed at me for pulling him over to the Spook Farm, but he knows the country. He's still got family down there, so he's been keeping up-to-date. He'll take your prisoner in hand, and see what else he can start developing.” He went quiet again for a moment. “I just got confirmation from Speedy; he's getting his team together and heading for Veracruz. They'll get set up and link up with you there.”