The Devil You Don't Know (American Praetorians Book 4) Page 18

  A few sporadic shots from the house reminded me of that problem. Whether or not the guys in the house were aligned with the ones outside, they might come investigate when we stopped shooting back. That was a problem. Unfortunately, we had an open road south of us, the house north of us, and we didn't know how many others were moving around, or how many there were. This was a bad, bad spot we'd gotten into.

  There were a couple of gaps in the brush that I could just barely see through to glimpse bits of the house and grounds. A glimmer of movement went past one of them, then another. Somebody was moving out by the house. My worst nightmare was coming true. We couldn't get out of that stretch of brush without facing possible compromise on one side, and bad guys were coming toward us from the other direction. We were going to have to fight our way clear, in relatively unknown territory, without much of any support.

  Larry turned just far enough to look at me. He slowly pointed toward the house. I nodded. That was probably going to be the direction we'd have to push; we had at least some idea of the situation in that direction. We could bust out the other way and run into a platoon for all we knew.

  A footstep crunched on dead branches, not far away. I wasn't pointed the right direction; I had no shot, and I didn't dare move to try to get one, either. That would make noise, which would definitely bring whoever was out there down on us. As long as we stayed still, there was a chance we wouldn't be found. A slim chance, but a chance.

  A voice said something in Spanish. He couldn't have been more than about ten yards away. Another answered him. Another footstep, sounding even closer. Even with the regular sounds of the day outside, I could hear branches being parted. I strove to keep my breathing quiet, as adrenaline pulsed through my body until I was almost starting to shake. I felt out of position, vulnerable. I just knew the killing shot was going to come any second. I wanted to move, to strike, to do anything but lie there and wait for something to happen.

  I could see the branches move out of the corner of my eye, as the gunman started to force his way into the brush. They were coming in. I took a deep breath, hoping I could roll onto my side and bring my rifle to bear quickly enough. Then another shout in Spanish and the rattle of AK fire stopped everything.

  The shout had come from off to the east, and I could hear the rounds snap past. There was more shouting nearby and then the guy who was pushing into the brush turned and shot back. Apparently, the guys in the house and the guys out in the fields were not friends. Either that, or they'd mistaken each other for us.

  Whatever was going on, the hornet's nest had well and truly been kicked over. There was suddenly a storm of AK fire going in multiple directions. Bullets were chopping through leaves and smacking into branches and tree trunks. There was more inarticulate yelling in Spanish, and the reports of AK fire seemed to move away, back toward the house. There was too much noise to tell what was going on, and that wasn't my primary concern, anyway.

  The roar and crackle of gunfire was going to drown out a lot of the noise we might make crawling through the brush. Even so, we had to stay low and move slowly, so as not to become targets ourselves. Without a word, Larry and I started moving back toward the road; there wasn't really any other way to go. Staying in place right there was no longer an option.

  It takes a lot of willpower and focus to move slowly, steadily, and quietly when there's a shitstorm of flying metal going on over and around you. The instinct is to move quickly, to either fight or get the fuck away from the fire. But especially when you don't know who is who, drawing attention to yourself is likely to get you shot, and moving quickly was probably going to draw attention. So we crawled as if we were stalking a target instead of trying to get out of a kill zone.

  There were only a few meters between us and the road. It felt like a mile. Even after the fire moved away from us, converging on the hacienda, we still kept going. That position was no longer tenable.

  I got to the edge of the thicket just before Larry, and, keeping at least one layer of leaves between my face and the open, I scanned up and down the road. I didn't want to dash out there only to find myself staring down the muzzles of another fifteen Kalashnikovs. But the road was empty. By some miracle, there hadn't been a group on it, or they might have charged right over us to get to the guys from the hacienda.

  I slowly, carefully, got my legs under me and got ready to move. I didn't have eyes on anybody else but Larry, but we'd prepared for that; we had trained specifically to move in pairs or even singly, scattering across the landscape until we could rendezvous at a later time and place. It was dangerous, sure. But so was having a larger footprint in hostile territory without the ass to take on the locals. So Larry and I would make our own way out of this encirclement, and work our way to the RV point. Hopefully.

  I was up on a knee. Larry's shoulder bumped mine, and I was up and moving, bursting out of the brush and dashing across the narrow dirt road and plunging into the next row of trees and underbrush. This part wasn't as thick; this particular farm seemed to be a little bit better kept up. I hit the ground, swinging around and dropping to my belly to cover behind us as Larry pounded into the treeline beside me.

  We couldn't stay there; while there were still plenty of bushes, the concealment wasn't thick enough to keep us hidden until dark. At least, I didn't think so. We'd have to keep moving, hoping that the firefight would draw enough attention to let us slip away unnoticed. I really wanted to get on the radio with the rest of the guys, but I knew that at this point we all had to focus on escape and evasion. Radio coordination could wait. Too many times I'd seen an obsession with constant comm contact fuck up the necessary work on the ground. We all knew what to do, especially with Ernesto now out of the picture. Looking around, I found a route and started crawling.

  It took a long time, painstakingly and carefully crawling through irrigation ditches and along brush lines, to find our final lay-up spot. The farm appeared to be abandoned, the fields overgrown with weeds. It was only a couple hundred meters from the hacienda. Instead of going inside the ramshackle farmhouse, we burrowed into the bushes that were growing right up to the wall, as the Veracruz forest started to reclaim the place. We'd stay there until nightfall. I had to agree with Larry. In many ways, it was just like old times.

  Of course, once we stopped moving, there were hours left to sit there and think while we waited for darkness. Hours to think about how the ambush had failed, how I'd failed, and because of it, Mike and Chad were now dead. My plan, my op, my order to execute. My fault.

  It was a long rest of the day.

  The shooting died down after a couple of hours. While we didn't have good sightlines in any direction, we could tell there were still some people prowling around, but by the time we wormed our way out of our little hide, there was no sign of anyone nearby. I still had no idea who had been shooting at who. It ultimately didn't matter. Still keeping to the trees as much as possible, Larry and I set out for the RV point.

  We didn't see a soul, except for a couple of flitting shadows that turned out to be Bryan and Little Bob when we converged on the rendezvous. Jim and Nick were already there when we arrived, and the rest trickled in in pairs, except for Eddie and Herman, who were carrying Mike and Chad. The heat of the day hadn't done anything good for the corpses, but their team wasn't about to leave them for the cartels or anyone else to find. I wasn't going to object. I had enough on my conscience from that day already.

  The vans didn't show for another hour. I had no idea where those guys had gone, but they had probably had to move well away from the area to avoid getting caught in the fight. Jack pulled over to the side of the road first, we exchanged verification signals from the weeds, and then my team was piling in. Lee was only about five minutes behind; he showed just as we finished getting loaded up. Eddie waved to me, and then Jim was pulling the door shut and we were moving.

  Nobody talked much on the way back. My guilt nagged at me the entire time.

  Mike's—no, Eddie's team now—g
ot to the hangar before we did. Jack took a long, meandering route back into Veracruz, trying to both avoid checkpoints he'd spotted during the day and make certain we weren't followed. The guys were just getting out of the van, which was backed up to the entrance to the hangar, as we pulled up.

  The bodies had already been unloaded. Raoul and Sam had pulled bodybags out and had them waiting. Both corpses were zipped up in the black rubber. They weren't Mike and Chad anymore. Now they were just anonymous, lumpy black rectangles on the concrete floor. I stopped next to them, my rifle dangling at my side, and looked down at the rubber-wrapped meat that had once been my friends and comrades. Men I'd failed.

  I knelt down and unzipped one. It was Mike. It had been Mike. His long face was pale and bluish, with a bloody hole where his left eye had been. I guessed he hadn't felt a thing. It had all just gone black. I hoped so.

  Chad's face was deformed from the passage of the two bullets that had smacked through his skull. His eyes were closed, but one was slightly bulged, as if the pressure had tried to force it out of its socket.

  I stared at the two of them for a long moment before zipping the bags back up and helping to carry Mike's to the plane. They couldn't go home just yet, but they would soon. At least they were going to go home to be buried, unlike the friends we'd left in East Africa.

  The hot wash was short, to the point, and surprisingly had very little to say. We hadn't been prepared for quite the level of firepower that the PSD had been prepared to put down. They'd reacted more quickly than we'd expected, and we hadn't had time to set in a more complex ambush. It was a time-sensitive-target hit that went bad. The need to take the target alive put us at a disadvantage; we couldn't hose down the escort without possibly killing the target. Too much of my team had been out of position to engage the PSD when all hell broke loose; the vehicles had blocked them. If anything, that had been what fucked us.

  Once the hot wash was done, everybody but Raoul and Dan, Sam's crew chief, found a cot and went to sleep. It had been a hell of a long day, and we were all exhausted, by exertion and loss.

  I couldn't sleep. I didn't even really try. I climbed up into the DC-3 and stared at the body bags instead, sitting on one of the rear seats.

  I'd known Mike for almost fifteen years. I'd known him longer than anyone else in the company, even Alek. We'd rarely been in the same platoon or even company, but we'd been to plenty of schools together. He was one of my oldest friends.

  And I'd gotten him killed.

  There was a faint shudder through the plane as someone climbed the steps and came inside. I looked up to see Eddie standing there in the door, still fully dressed. He hadn't gone to sleep, either. “I figured I'd find you here,” he said, as he sat in the next seat, “blaming yourself.”

  I blinked back the water in my eyes, that I hadn't really even realized was there. “Is it that obvious?” I tried to snarl.

  “Maybe not to the new guys,” he said. “To those of us who know you, though, yeah. It is. And it's bullshit.”

  I looked back at the bodybags. “My op. My call. My fault.”

  “No, fuck you,” he said, suddenly angry. “It wasn't your op. It was our op. You didn't plan it all yourself. We did; you, me, Jim, and Mike, with input from every other swinging dick here but Raoul. It was the best plan we could come up with given the time and information we had, and it didn't work. We all played our parts, we got into the best positions we could find, and when the balloon went up it wasn't good enough. What, you think that just because you initiated, that puts it all on you? Bullshit. You know better than that. If you hadn't, Mike would have. If we'd had objections and you'd gotten high-and-mighty and overruled them, maybe you'd have an excuse to blame yourself for this afternoon, but as it stands, you don't.” He stared at me angrily. “Did Alek get this mopey when Hank and Rodrigo bought it?” he demanded.

  “No,” I admitted, “but...”

  “'But' my ass,” Eddie snapped. “Don't try to tell me Kismayo was any kind of fucking success. I know better. Bad ops happen. Time sensitive ops go bad a lot; you try to tell me you've never had a time-sensitive-target go bad and I'll call you a fucking liar to your face. People die. If any of us planned on dying in bed, we wouldn't be here. One bad op is not going to make either of our teams crumble, so don't you fucking dare let it make you crumble. You're stronger than that, and you're damned sure smarter than that. Get your fucking head in the game, Jeff.”

  For a long time, I just stared at the stretch of fuselage in front of me. Finally, I took a deep breath. “You've got one hell of a bedside manner, Eddie,” I told him.

  He relaxed and grinned, teeth glinting beneath his bushy mustache. “Got through to you, didn't it? Understanding and sympathy doesn't work with us. Guys in our line of work have to hear it straight. Sometimes we've just got to get some sense knocked into our skulls.” He got up. “Glad I could help.”

  “How are you holding up?” I asked.

  He stopped, and his eyes got distant for a second. “I'm not sure. I'm kind of...detached, I guess. It'll probably hit me later. I'm really, really good at compartmentalizing; so good that I've been accused of being a borderline sociopath.” He chuckled dryly. “Maybe I am. I'll be all right. I'll be better if we can get this fucker.” He glanced back at me. “Seriously, you good? Are we going to be able to get back to it in the morning?”

  I nodded. He was right; sometimes guys in our line of work need a harsh wake up call when we start to get off-track. “Yeah.” My voice still sounded a little hoarse, and my throat was still tight, but I was starting to pull out of it, starting to get my mind back in the hunt. I still grieved for my friends; hell, I still woke up nights remembering all over again that Hank was gone, three years after he'd been killed. But the paralyzing guilt was fading. Eddie was right on all counts, and we still had work to do. I got up and followed him out of the aircraft. I found a cot, stripped out of my shirt and boots, made sure my weapons were close at hand, and lay down. Sheer exhaustion chased consciousness away pretty quickly.

  I still didn't sleep well.

  Everybody was a little subdued in the morning. Mike's and Chad's absence was tangible. But we still had a mission, we were still in a technically non-permissive country, and our target was still out there.

  “This might actually work to our advantage,” Eddie suggested, as he, Jim, Herman, and I ate and discussed our next move. “Reyes is going to react to this, and we might find an opening that might not be there otherwise.”

  Jim shook his head. “If anything, he'll probably run and go to ground. He'll surround himself with way more security, and he's going to be even harder to get at.”

  “That depends on what he's thinking,” Eddie countered. “He knows that whoever tried to grab him has to be connected with his dark side operations somehow. That might scare him enough to get him to do something a little more desperate.”

  “Rich motherfuckers who are scared tend to go to panic rooms and call for lots of guys with guns,” Jim replied. “I think you're being a tad optimistic about this.”

  “So what else do we do?” Herman asked. “Reyes was our primary connection to El Duque. Without him, we haven't got a trail to follow.”

  I had a thought. “Eddie might have a point, just not necessarily in regard to Reyes himself,” I said. “A botched hit connected with his illegal operations might be just the thing to get El Duque's network moving. If he was going to send people to interrogate Ernesto about the ambush in Zacatecas, then my guess is that once El Duque finds out that somebody rolled up Ernesto and went after him, he's going to send somebody to see what the fuck is going on. We might just have to get eyes on Reyes, and see who comes to see him. Somebody else on the target deck that Renton gave us just might crop up; somebody that we have a better chance of snatching instead of trying to pry Reyes out of his hole.”

  “Funny you should mention that,” Mia said over my shoulder. She held out a satellite phone. “It's for you, Jeff,” she said.

&
nbsp; I took it, standing up and moving away a few steps. “Yeah,” I said by way of answer.

  “It's me,” Renton said. “Mia told me what happened. For what it's worth, I'm sorry.”

  I didn't say anything. Words didn't seem like they'd be anything but superfluous at that point. When I didn't answer, he forged ahead. “I haven't got a lot for you, unfortunately. For some reason, a lot of my network of resources south of the border seems to have dried up in the last couple of days. I'm looking into why.

  “I do have something, though. One of my associates has an old friend in Nicaragua who goes back to the Contra days. He's a janitor for the main SCC office building in Managua now, if you'll believe it. He also keeps in touch with my associate, and often can pass on interesting bits of information.

  “Anyway, what he told my associate was that Reyes was due back in Managua tonight, and that one of his VPs was setting up a meeting with several investors and 'security specialists.' Furthermore, this information wasn't supposed to go far. Fortunately, nobody pays attention to the janitor.”

  “Does he know where this meeting is supposed to happen?” I asked.

  “I'm afraid not, but it is going to happen in the next week. The old man apparently was convinced that 'security experts' means gangsters. This might be the break we've been hoping for. If the old man's right, then somebody connected to El Duque has to be there. The guy's got his fingers in every illicit pie in Central America. He'll have a rep there. Reyes might become an unnecessary target if we can get a line on somebody closer to the primary HVT.”

  “And if it's another single-source wild goose chase?” I asked. “This sounds awfully thin, not to mention just how the hell a fucking janitor hears all this shit.”