Ballistic

board below the passenger door, his right hand holding the open door, his left hand holding the Hawk MM-1 and balancing it on the front door. As the truck bounced and weaved on the bumpy driveway, Gentry found it next to impossible to aim.

They approached the front gate now; Laura concentrated on it. But Court shouted to her from outside the passenger seat.

“I’m going to make us another exit.”

“What?”

Court knew that blasting the cars with high-explosive grenade rounds would damage them, to be sure. But this wasn’t Hollywood; the vehicles would not blow sky high and then land conveniently out of his path.

No, he would try to knock a hole in the old wall large enough for them to fit through. The MM-1 had an effective targeting range of one hundred and fifty meters in optimal conditions. The conditions in which Gentry found himself working were absolutely off the other end of the scale from optimum, but he had no choice but to give it a shot.

As he expected, the federal police BATT pulled in front of the open gate, its headlights staring up the drive at him like taunting eyes. Daring him to keep coming.

Gentry aimed his launcher ten yards to the east of the gate.

Pop.

Boom!

Court’s first shot hit low, exploded a few yards short of the stucco wall.

“You missed!” shouted Laura. Court wondered how she could suddenly see so much through the windscreen.

He fired again and nailed the hacienda’s wall perfectly. Fire, stone, and white dust exploded back and up in the dark. Gentry fired again, hit again, but wide of his last impact. He now saw black openings in the wall, with a five-foot wide “column” of stone between them. He aimed as carefully as he could at this remaining piece, and he pulled the trigger.

His weapon was empty.

Damn. Court climbed back inside, tossed the launcher on the floor in the back between the Gamboas, and quickly buckled up.

“Hit it!” he shouted.

“Hit it?” Laura screamed back her question, disbelief in her voice.

“Right in the middle! As hard as you can!” He then turned back into the back and screamed to the rest of the little clan. “Hold on to something!”

The gunfire came first. A couple of the campesinos at the front gate had gotten in front of the armored cars. Their shotgun pellets tickled the walls and windows of the huge truck looming closer.

Laura Maria Gamboa Corrales slammed the six-ton vehicle through the two-hundred-year-old wall, pulverizing it into stones and dust and whipping moneda vines. Inside the jolt was cataclysmic; the damaged windshield gave in completely, broke apart and away, and slid forward down the stubby hood. The occupants were stunned, but Laura’s new wide vision of the road in front of her greatly helped her driving; she pulled the wheel back to the left, crashed through a few low bushes, and nailed the left rear quarter panel on an ancient Datsun pickup. The impact spun the little truck across the road like a toy, forcing shotgunners to dive for cover, their straw hats flying into the air like leaves kicked up by a breeze.

Court Gentry unbuckled his seat belt, rolled onto his knees, and crawled into the back of the van. He grabbed the MM-1 launcher and scrambled to a case of grenades bolted against the wall by the back door. He worked there for a moment; Diego and Luz and Elena just watched him in the dim red light.

“Laura, stop the truck!” he shouted after another ten seconds.

“Are you crazy!”

“Do it!” She slowed the MCV, and Court opened the rear door. He almost fell out; his legs were weak after the concussion of the crash. Back in the dark, one hundred and thirty yards behind, the dozens of federales sicarios left behind at the casa grande were now making their way down the driveway towards all the cars positioned there. Gentry hefted the grenade launcher, sighted through its notch and post iron sights, and launched five tear gas grenades at the cars and trucks.

When he finished, even before the last canister impacted back at the gate, he dropped the MM-1 in the road and climbed back in the truck. “?Vamanos!” he called forward to Laura, who put the big tank back into gear. It shuddered and scraped as it moved along now; they’d put the command vehicle through a hell of a lot more abuse than it could be reasonably expected to suffer, but it had kept them alive.

“Where are we going?” Laura asked when Gentry made it back up front.

He climbed into the passenger seat and snapped the seat belt tight around his waist. “Fuck if I know,” he admitted.

THIRTY-THREE

If Court hated leaving Eddie’s awesome truck behind, dumping the armored car, damaged though it was, just about killed him. It was battered and smoking, the “run flat” tires were tearing up with each passing mile, and the windshield was gone, but the big MCV still felt sturdy and secure. Still, there was no way they could drive for very long without garnering attention, and refueling would have been impossible without all but drawing a crowd of paying customers to get a close-up look at the shot up federale command vehicle.

It was eleven thirty when they pulled behind an auto-salvage yard in the town of La Venta del Astilero, a suburb just west of Guadalajara. They’d stayed off the main roads, more or less, and they’d avoided virtually all of the Tuesday late-night traffic.

With no front windshield, the cool air in the truck was almost unbearable, especially for Laura behind the wheel. Her small-muscled arms were covered in goose bumps visible even in the low light, and by the time they found the salvage yard, she was shivering.

Shivering and crying. Her father’s death was just one more heinous punishment to her heart. Court felt terrible for her, wanted to reach out and touch her, to hold her hand while she drove, to tell her it would be okay.

But he did not.

He did not because he did not know how to touch the sad, beautiful girl.

And he did not because he did not really believe everything would be okay.

The four family members stood along the side of the road and waited while Gentry climbed a fence and dropped into the salvage yard. Luz Gamboa rubbed her daughter’s arms to warm her, and Elena shifted from one swollen foot to the other, held her full belly to take pressure off her back. Diego stood watch with his hands on his hips. Dogs began barking behind the fence as the family prayed together.

Ten minutes later an engine started and a sheet-metal gate slid open with pushes and grunts. An old pea soup green Volkswagen bus appeared, its headlights off; it pulled into the street, and then Court jumped out, and Diego shut the gate behind it.

Court jogged back to the armored car for a moment, returned with a pair of 9 mm pistols and an extra magazine for each. He passed one weapon to Laura and slid the other in the waistband of his pants.

He looked at Diego. “It doesn’t look like much, but the engine turned right over. I put some plates on it, so you shouldn’t have any problems from the highway cops. Head north, just keep going all the way to the border. Sleep in shifts. One sleeps, two awake. When you get to Tijuana, go to a hotel and wait for us. Two days from today, go to the border crossing at ten a.m. Wait thirty minutes. If we aren’t there, leave and come back at three p.m. If we still aren’t there, do it again the next day. We won’t be able to communicate. No phones, no contact. If we get captured, I want it to look like we have no idea where you are or how to get in touch with you.”

The young boy nodded. Court could see that Diego understood that he was now the man of the family, and he shouldered the responsibility in a way Gentry appreciated. The shock and sadness would come later, Court knew,