Ballistic

weapons in his hands.

“Diego! It’s me! It’s . . .” In the excitement Court had forgotten his pseudonym. “It’s the gringo! Get everyone up here and in the van! Andele!”

It took the young boy five full seconds to comprehend, but when he did, he nodded, spun on his tennis shoes, and ran towards the kitchen. He shouted as he ran. “Mi abuelo is upstairs!”

Courted nodded, but he did not go upstairs; instead he turned towards the shattered front doorway. There was little space between the hulking truck and the broken stone and stucco, but Gentry found a firing position, and he raised his right hand. In it he hefted a Hawk MM-1 handheld grenade launcher, loaded with a dozen high- explosive shells. The weapon was heavy and bulky and Court normally would have used both hands to fire it, but the weapon did not require both hands. He pulled the heavy trigger, and with a sound akin to a massive cork popping from an agitated champagne bottle, the first grenade left the barrel.

Boom!

Forty yards away an explosion of fire and smoke and broken earth and spinning federales. He fired three more times at the wall lined with attackers before lowering the weapon, lifting an identical device that he held in his left hand, and popping off three missiles loaded with CS agent, a powerful crowd-dispersing tear gas. With the last canister still in the air, he spun in the other direction, fired rounds from both weapons one at a time; they arced through the house, through the broken sliding glass doors to the patio, over the pool, and exploded in the garden behind the casa grande.

Court had lived by luck, but he had no real expectation of hitting one single sicario attacking the rear of the house. No, he just wanted to show them the rules had changed; their cowardly attack on women, a kid, and an old man would now subject them to high-explosive rounds being shoved down their motherfucking throats.

He fired one round of CS up the hallway that ran from the main room to the west, hoped like hell he’d have everyone out of here before the gas wafted back inside and made this living room unbearable.

He dropped the CS grenade launcher as he ran up the stairs; it was too heavy to wield along with the high- explosive launcher. He turned to the right, shouted for Ernesto, wished like hell he’d grabbed a shotgun or a pistol or something other than a weapon that he could not use in the short range of a hallway.

He turned towards the rear mirador, and he saw the old man there, lying on his back in a pool of blood.

THIRTY-TWO

Ernesto’s eyes blinked, and he drew a shallow breath. He looked up at the American standing over him on the dark veranda.

Gentry reached over the railing of the mirador and fired two HE rounds at movement in the moonlight by the corral in the distance. Wood and stone and fire blew twenty feet into the air.

Court knelt back to Ernesto. “Can you wa—”

He saw it now; the old man’s left leg was bloody, twisted to the side. Only held on by bits of meat and the denim in his jeans. Blood covered the tile of the mirador in the darkness.

Eddie’s father had been hit squarely in the femur with a round from a high-powered rifle.

Court looked back at the man’s face, and the eyes had rolled back. A last breath drained from his lungs.

Quickly, Gentry knelt over him, spoke into his ear. “I’ll take care of them. I’ll get them someplace safe. All of them.”

Then he stood and spun back into the house as the stucco walls turned to dust around him.

The family coughed and choked on the CS gas as Gentry shepherded them into the back of the truck. He’d retrieved the Hawk that held the tear gas grenades, and he fired the remaining rounds into the driveway and the trees beyond it, hoping like hell he was shooting in the general direction of the bad guys. When the weapon clicked on an empty cylinder, he let it fall to the tile of the entryway. He climbed into the back of the mobile command vehicle behind the family; Luz was right in front of him, and she looked past him, over his shoulder and back into the dark smoky house.

“Ernesto? Ernesto?”

There was no panic at all in her voice, even with everything happening around her. Court just pushed her deeper into the bus, dropped the high-explosive grenade launcher onto the padded bench next to Elena, and shut and locked the door behind him.

“I’m sorry, I have to—”

Court said the word drive as he was launched back against the door. Luz fell into his arms as he realized that the MCV was moving forward, its rear tires bouncing down the steps of the casa grande, and that whoever was driving was sure as hell stepping on the gas.

He crawled forward up the aisle, the bouncing and the buffeting of the truck’s chassis tossing him about; gunfire raked the walls of armor on both sides, a constant tinging sound like a downpour in hell.

In the front cab he found Laura behind the wheel; she knelt down low, desperately trying to get some sort of a view out of a windshield that was, while still intact, completely white from bullet strikes and cracked from one end to the other.

“I can’t see!” she yelled.

Court reached across her body and buckled her into her seat. He shouted into her ear as he did so. “Don’t worry! Just drive! Anywhere is better than here!”

They sideswiped one of the armored cars, ran completely off the driveway and into a pasture, and then Laura jacked the wheel so hard to correct for her mistake that the truck went up on two wheels for an instant before bottoming out and bouncing back onto the rocky drive.

Behind them in the long truck, police gear bounced and slammed around, knocking into Elena, Luz, and Diego.

Laura hit a small tree, knocking the MCV hard to the left and sending Gentry flinging into the dashboard.

“You suck worse than me!” Court screamed as he crawled across the front passenger seat, opened the heavy armored door, and leaned outside. They needed some sort of idea of their direction, even if it meant Gentry exposing himself to enemy fire.

“Right! To the right!” he shouted in English, and Laura turned the wheel to the left.

“?Derecha! ?A la derecha!” Court shouted.

She fixed her mistake, did not overcorrect this time. “Sorry! Sorry!”

Court spotted for her, though he heard bullets whizzing past him. They clanged off the rear door and the side panel; Gentry brought his body back inside the truck for an instant then darted his head out again quickly to help Laura find her way through the forest on the long, winding driveway.

They were in the woods twenty seconds later, safe from the sicarios at the casa grande, but Court knew good and well that they were not out of the woods, figuratively. The men up at the house had radios, which meant the trucks and the armored vehicle parked near the front gate would now be scrambling into position to block the exit.

Court bobbed his head back into the vehicle. Laura had found a small corner of the windshield that had not been turned smoke white with the impact of bullets. She leaned up and into it, straining against her seat belt, desperately trying to see out of the tiny viewing hole.

Court shouted to the back. “Diego, give me the grenade launcher!” He said the last part in English; he did not know the words in Spanish.

“The what?” shouted Diego from the dark rear of the vehicle.

Laura shouted back the translation, and within a few seconds young Diego appeared with the big gray cylindrical device. Court snatched it and positioned his entire body outside the MCV now, his feet on a small running