Ballistic

any ideas?”

Laura Gamboa held her pistol up. “Si. I have an idea. How about we just shoot all the pendejos when they come?”

Court shrugged. “Well . . . yeah, that’s the plan, I guess.” He stiffened. “Everyone to your positions. You know what to do.”

Court stormed past the family towards the first set of sconces and blew out the candles there.

He passed the family again in the living room as he headed to the back door. “Buena suerte,” he mumbled. Good luck. With his hand on the latch he stopped, turned back, and looked at them one last time. They stood like stone statues there in the dark, staring back at him. Luz and Inez stepped out from the kitchen with a tray of rolls.

“Come on, goddammit!” he shouted, utter frustration at their predicament getting the best of him. “Elena, Luz, and Inez to the basement! Ernesto to the cellar hallway to guard the women; Diego and Ignacio to the kitchen to guard the basement access; Laura on the upstairs landing to overlook this room! Blow out all the candles on the way. Move! It’s not that fucking complicated! And stay away from the damn windows!”

Everyone moved off in different directions and, more or less, Court was somewhat relieved to see, in the directions of their duties.

“Fuck,” he said to himself.

He looked up at the landing; Martin had gone back to his post, but Ramses looked down at him. In the darkness the Mexican officer said, “Good luck, amigo.”

“We’re going to need it,” Court replied.

And then he stepped out the back door into darkness.

There were sixteen in the first wave. They were not elite sicarios, but they were nevertheless cold, ruthless men, trained in the use of their weapons and well “encouraged” by their leadership to fulfill the wishes of the head of their cartel.

In the nomenclature of the Mexican cartels, these men were referred to as soldados, “soldiers,” or more dismissively as estacas, in this sense meaning “fence posts.” They weren’t the top-of-the-line, but they could stand there with a gun in their hand and do their job.

Their ages ranged from seventeen to sixty-one; there were two sets of fathers and sons, and two more sets of brothers. All of them had served in the army, and one of them had been an officer, and that made him the leader of this ad hoc group of killers.

These men weren’t the best that the Black Suits had to call on, but they were the closest to the hacienda, and for that reason they would have to do. They all lived up here in the hills and mountains; most had worked together on other assignments at one time or another for Los Trajes Negros.

Three of them were judiciales, state police from Jalisco, and six more were municipales from nearby Tequila. State and local squad cars sat parked alongside the dirt track on the other side of the hacienda’s back wall, alongside two pickup trucks and three old sedans.

Spider had contacted the leader of his enforcers in this region just after eleven p.m., and it had taken all of three hours to get the muscle into the area. They’d pulled down two cell towers with a chain and a truck, and then waited for a radio call ordering them to cut the landline.

Most of them carried police issue shotguns or M1 carbines, a sixtyyear-old American rifle that is still seen all over Mexico, mostly in use by security guards at banks, department stores, and the like. Though venerable compared to any current frontline rifle, it fired a potent .30-caliber bullet from a fifteen-round magazine, and it got the job done.

Just as Gentry and the two GOPES had suspected from their inspection of the terrain, the attacking force came over the back wall, dropped down into the dark.

They moved through the overgrown grasses in pairs, kept their eyes on the dark building in the distance, still fifty yards beyond the patio and the pool. They ducked down behind the few lime and orange trees growing wild in the back, and then they ran in short, labored zigzags to the statues, and ducked down behind these as well.

They were close now; all sixteen had made it to the edge of the back patio. Seventy-five feet from the colonnade, where the rear doors to the main room sat invitingly. The teams of men began a disorganized leapfrog advancing maneuver, some nearly colliding with one another, others ducking down behind planters alongside the pool.

Fifty feet now, the former army officer, the man who was nominally in charge of this array of shooters, stood and waved all forces forward. He had not anticipated making it this far without resistance and had not planned for everyone to hit the same entry point, but the patio doors were closest, and once inside the house, his men could separate and begin the killing.

The man could already count the money that Spider would give him.

“?Ataque!” he shouted.

Then, without warning, there was the rumble of a big engine to the right of his position on the patio, on the other side of the rectangular pool. A huge pickup truck had somehow been pulled up against the outer wall of the colonnade and covered with vines, far away from the front driveway and totally hidden from view. The sixteen men stood like the statues around them for stunned, precious seconds as the high-beam lamps and spotlight rack of the big F-350 flipped on and the entire rear patio flooded with blinding white light.

The leader spun towards the origin of the light, shielded his eyes from its glare, and raised his rifle one- handed to fire at its source.

But ten feet from the tips of his boots, in the filthy black pool, a noise and a movement caught his eye.

The Gray Man had spent nearly three minutes under the water, had spent the previous ten with only his head and shotgun above the thick, greasy surface of rotten leaves. When he heard the faint whistle from Martin that the attackers were coming, he submerged, breathing through a bamboo reed with his eyes shut tight, just waiting for the noise from the truck to tell him it was time to act. Ramses started the vehicle with the remote key fob when the sicarios were close enough to engage.

When Court surfaced, he was careful to do so facing away from the massive flood lamps. He immediately saw targets before him like fish in a barrel, and he showed no mercy. He rose from the water, spitting the hollow length of bamboo from his mouth as he did so, leveled the long side-by-side shotgun at the first man he saw, and he fired a barrel of birds hot into the man’s ample gut.

Boom!

Above him, to his right, he heard the short belching of a 9 mm submachine gun, Ramses firing from the mirador on the second floor. Another pistol cracked from ground level, coming from the patio door of the house. Court did not know who that was; he had assigned no one to that position.

Boom!

He fired his remaining chamber, sending over one hundred tiny beads of steel shot into the lower torso of a man in a green police uniform who spun away from him on the patio.

Splashes of water stitched close to him, and he ducked back under the lily pads to reload his shotgun while submerged. He kept the shells in his front pockets. He exchanged two fresh ones after dumping the two spent rounds, and he kicked himself into the shallower end of the pool as he did so, so he could come back out of the water at a place other than where he’d gone under.

He shot up again from the black water into the cool night air, found two targets who had just passed his location as they ran towards the casa grande, and he shot both men in their lower backs, sending them tumbling forward. Again he ducked below the surface to reload and swim to another part of the pool.

Six matones were down in under ten seconds; those to the rear of the attack had retreated out of the bright lights from the truck and dived back into the tall grass. But two men, both Jalisco state police, had been advancing up the right side of the pool, near to the truck, as it was turned on remotely. They fired