Ballistic

their SWAT uniforms; they had already broken off into fire teams. Dozens of men rechecked weapons and strapped extra ammo magazines to their bodies. Court heard the fire teams run through their coms checks. Dozens of radios squawked and beeped and crackled through the cool evening.

Then the teams broke apart completely, ten or twelve men to a unit, some piled into two Policia Federal armored trucks that Gentry recognized as Ford BATTs, or Ballistic Armored Tactical Transporters, and the big black vehicles rumbled to life. Another dozen men boarded the beds of two pickup trucks. Even at this distance Gentry could tell the white trucks were pressed low on their chassis accommodating all the men and their gear.

The two pickups turned right at the road around the hacienda and disappeared into the distance. One of the big BATTs turned left and headed slowly in Court’s direction.

The remaining BATT remained at the front gate with its engine running. Court watched federales file into it, and the side door was closed and secured. Then another unit stacked up behind it in formation. The Policia Federal armored mobile command vehicle sat behind the rest of the vehicles; men came and left through a side door.

The truck moving to the east passed fifty yards off his left shoulder, everything outside of its bright headlights was black to the driver, and Court knew he could not be seen.

He understood the federales’ attack plan now, more or less. Three units, each with a dozen men, would assault the hacienda simultaneously from the south, east, and west. A larger force, twenty or twenty-five maybe, would be heading right up the driveway.

The farm hands with the cowboy hats and the scatterguns were outside the walls on the perimeter, ringing the action in clusters on all sides of the hacienda as a sloppy blocking force.

So there it was. Sixty heavily armed, highly trained Mexican Federal Police officers, plus another two-dozen armed locals hanging back in support.

Against a pregnant woman, an elderly woman, an injured old man, a sixteen-year-old boy, and a girl who cries the rosary over assholes who lost their shitty lives trying to earn a paycheck by killing her.

Goddammit, Court thought. Guess it’s time to go out in a blaze of glory.

Gentry was only twenty-five yards away from the rear of the BATT at the front gate when it drove forward, lumbered into the hacienda proper. The cops on foot jogged behind it in two columns. The driveway to the casa grande was a lumpy, bumpy, winding two hundred yards, and the big heavy armored truck moved slowly up the hill, disappeared into the forest; its headlights and taillights flickered through the trees and made a horror-show dance of ominous shadows all the way back to the gate.

The dogs disappeared up the drive with the foot patrol.

Court got down on his knees, crawled through the brush and grasses and around wild agave plants the size of kitchen tables. He moved slower and more quietly with every inch of progress; he expected there would be sentries back here around the command vehicle, and even though he could not see anyone yet, he knew any sound he made would travel through the night.

Soon he found himself at the road between two parked pickups. He was less than fifty feet from the gate; he could hear a group of men talking over the drone of the auxiliary power unit of the big armored command vehicle.

He looked ahead, across the road, and in a shallow run-off ditch on the other side, he saw a dead body, stripped to the waist. Even in the moonlight he could still see the big black bruise on the man’s jaw.

It was Sergeant Martin Orozco; a dozen bullet holes perforated his legs, arms, and chest. A final coup de grace wound was centered on his forehead.

“Sorry, amigo,” Court mumbled as he continued forward on his hands and knees.

Looking around the pickup on his left, towards the gate, past the command vehicle, he saw five or six Mexican farmer types with shotguns, their butt stocks resting on hips.

Most of the men stood right up by the gate, as if trying to catch a glimpse of the action two hundred yards away through the forest. Their body postures and tonal inflections showed their excitement. They were spectators; not one of them thought for a second any of them would be in danger or would even be called on to fire their old scatterguns.

Court knew he could hotwire one of these pickup trucks in under a minute. With it he could race up the driveway, get past the armored truck and the men, get the Gamboas in it and then drive through the hacienda, break out at one of the small gates on the west wall, making sure to avoid the sicarios who would be attacking from that side.

It would be easy.

Except for the one thousand or so copper-jacketed spikes of lead that would be flying at him and those he tried to protect at three thousand feet per second, each one with the potential to turn a human head into pink mist.

The pickup truck plan was a nonstarter.

If there was still an armored car here at the front gate, and if that armored car happened to be unlocked with the keys in the ignition, well then he’d be in business.

But the BATTs were gone, and with them any chance for—

A young PF officer stepped from the side door of the trailer-sized command vehicle, and the door locked back behind him. The officer turned away from the famers, walked across to the bushes along the far side of the road, and undid his belt. He shook as he tried to force himself to take a quick piss; he rolled his neck to scoot the shotgun that hung in front of him out of the way of the impending stream.

Gentry looked at the locked door of the command vehicle, wondered if the man taking a bathroom break had a set of keys on him. He wished the truck wasn’t so fucking big. Still, it was armored. It had the plating necessary to stop a rifle round cold; its thick front windshield would hold back dozens of direct hits before failing.

The vehicle would be nearly impossible for Court to drive, but he knew he did not have the luxury of being choosy at the moment.

Dammit.

Across the narrow road the officer pulled up his pants and zipped them, then reached into his pants pocket. Gentry recognized the glint of a key chain.

Court leapt to his feet, and he struck like a cobra.

He ran low and fast across the road as the policeman began to turn back towards the command vehicle. The gaggle of cowboys and farm hands was twenty-five feet off Gentry’s left shoulder and still looking up the drive towards the casa grande. Gentry moved like a shadow across the hard surface, drew his knife at the last second, simultaneously slipped it between the turning man’s floating ribs on the left side and covered the federale’s mouth with his right hand. He pushed the knife to the hilt and kept pushing the man forward into the bushes; Court turned the blade like a key as he followed the man into the thicket and fell with him, on him, onto the hard earth.

Court used his own dead weight on top of the man to stifle his kicks and thrashes. This hombre was probably a soccer player, Gentry thought; he was exceedingly fit, and his body did not play by the rules. Court expected the man to be limp in five seconds; it was nearly twenty before the life left his extremities. Court found himself exhausted, as if he’d been trying to stay atop a bucking bronco while preventing the bronco from making a sound for the entire ordeal. Court reached forward, pulled the keys out of the brush. He felt them for a moment, settled on two possible choices for the door of the vehicle. He held them in his fingers and retrieved the shotgun with his other hand.

Then he stood. Headed towards the armored command vehicle.

Seconds later he was inside. He’d shut the door behind him, turned right, away from the front of the vehicle and towards the back cabin. A man called out from the cab, a question to his partner who was now dead in the brush. Court pulled out his knife, began to turn to deal with the other driver, but he stopped, noticing a metal rack that ran head high along the length of one side of the cab.

All manner of weapons and ammunition rested in the rack or hung from hooks above it.

Gentry’s eyes widened, and his face tightened into a cruel smile. “Oh, hell