Ballistic

After a moment, the mouth opened. A trickle of blood ran down the Dutchman’s chin. He tried to speak; a small sound came out but no words.

Court leaned close to the man’s face.

The Dutchman winced with pain; his eyes relit somewhat, tempered with new concentration. He wanted to speak.

And finally he did. So softly Gentry had to lean almost into the man’s lips to hear him say it.

“Sidorenko.”

Gentry leaned away. Stood fully erect in front of the man. Nodded. Gregor Sidorenko, the Russian mafia kingpin and Court’s old employer, was apparently still sore about a double-cross Gentry had engineered the previous spring.

“I’ll punish him for sending you to me. You can rest now.”

Gentry pulled the spear out of the door, out of the man; the manhunter did not even feel the movement, nor did he feel himself being helped to the bed. He watched the American lay him down, lift his feet up one at a time, and pull off his boots, but he did not feel anything.

He wanted to rest. His eyes softened even more, and the last thing he saw before the lids shut was his target looking through his suitcase, taking his wallet and a first-aid kid and some clothes, and leaving through the front door.

The manhunter’s eyes shut then, and he thought of his tulips.

He would not see them soon after all, and that was a shame.

SIX

Thirty-eight-year-old Major Eduardo Gamboa surfaced slowly, his black neoprene head covering, the black waterproof greasepaint on his face, the black swim mask, and the black covert breathing regulator in his mouth all helping him blend in with the three a.m. black water shifting here in Banderas Bay. Fifty meters in front of him, a one-hundred-twenty-foot luxury yacht floated, backlit by the late-night artificial illumination of the Malecon, the boardwalk running the length of Puerto Vallarta’s downtown. To the north, to Gamboa’s ten o’clock, the bright lights of PV’s hotel district twinkled like fireflies.

The yacht was called La Sirena; it lay at anchor here seven miles out in the bay, wide of the shipping lanes that ran to the port or the marina but close enough to shore so that its owner and his entourage could enjoy all that Puerto Vallarta had to offer. It was long and sleek and beautiful, and crowned by a state-of-the-art black Eurocopter helicopter resting on the helipad above the upper aft deck. But Eduardo Gamboa ignored the style of the ship in front of him and focused fully on the substance. After forty minutes under water his night vision was tuned to its peak. With his naked eye he saw two guards on the upper sundeck standing near the bow. He imagined the same number on the opposite side.

Slowly another head rose from the water to Eduardo’s right. Then another. Then three more men on Eduardo’s left. Then two more men just behind him.

Eight divers in total bobbed in the water fifty meters from the La Sirena. And after a nod from Major Eduardo Gamboa, they each released a few ounces of air from their buoyancy-control devices, and as one they slowly lowered back below the black surface, leaving not a trace of their existence.

Gamboa and his men were from the GOPES, the Grupo de Operaciones Especiales, the Mexican Federal Police’s elite special operation’s group. But these eight cops were a level of elite unknown to all but a few. They’d been pulled from other police and military commando units and organized separately from the rest of the GOPES. Together they comprised a special assault-team task force run secretly by the attorney general in Mexico City.

Their mission? Extrajudicial execution of Mexico’s top drugcartel bosses.

Their target tonight? The owner of La Sirena, one Daniel Alonzo de la Rocha Alvarez. In a world where everyone had a nickname, de la Rocha was known simply by the initials of his last name, DLR, pronounced in Spanish as “de, ele, ere.”

DLR was the leader of Los Trajes Negros, the Black Suits, one of the nation’s leading criminal drug and kidnapping organizations.

Four minutes later, two of Gamboa’s team resurfaced at the stern of La Sirena. Martin and Ramses had removed their scuba gear, their masks and their fins, and they carefully climbed the sea stairs onto the lower deck. They carried suppressed Steyr TMP submachine guns and held them at the ready as they crouched at the top of the stairs. Their night vision gear helped them peer up the deck towards the galley and the bow. After a moment Ramses spoke into his headset.

“We’re on board, moving into position.”

Gamboa had come along the portside hull with two more of his team. “Entendido,” he whispered into his radio. Understood.

A minute later Martin and Ramses had hoisted themselves up the helipad ladder, climbing silently in the dark. Then they lay prone on opposite sides of the Eurocopter, their weapons trained ahead on the four guards on the sundeck, some seventy feet forward on the yacht. Martin and Ramses’s job was to prevent any attempt by those on board to flee in the chopper during the assault and to eliminate the deck guards when given the order by their commander. “Team One, listo,” said Ramses into his headset. Ready.

“Entendido,” replied Gamboa again from the softly rolling surface of the bay. He removed his scuba gear as he spoke. “Team Two, execute.”

“Executing,” came the call, and three men began climbing the anchor chain at the port bow, forty feet below the guards on the sundeck.

Two minutes later these men were aboard, and their suppressed weapons scanned the bridge deck. “Team Two, listo.”

“Team Three, vamos,” said Gamboa, and he and two men rose dripping out of the water at the rear stairs, climbed to the upper deck, passed a large lifeboat covered with a tight canvas tarp, and began moving forward, proceeding cautiously. They made it to the hallway to the galley, heard noises and saw lights coming from the great room ahead, and flipped up their night vision goggles. They entered the room slowly, found two guards seated on the large white leather sofa in front of a fifty-two-inch plasma-screen television.

Gamboa took the man on the left, shot him once through the skull as he stood. The report from his suppressed weapon was drowned out by a protracted gunfight on the TV.

The officer behind Gamboa shot the guard on the right three times in the chest; both guards tumbled back to the sofa, handguns falling out of their hands and blood pools spreading out and meeting between their bodies on the white leather.

The three federales moved across the room quickly now. The television was running a movie that Eduardo easily recognized: Los Trajes Negros 2, the second in a very popular series of Mexican-made films romanticizing the life and exploits of Daniel de la Rocha, the man sleeping in the master suite just beyond.

Arrogant pendejo, Gamboa thought. It was typical of the narcissistic drug lord to have films glorifying his evil playing on his yacht. Gamboa continued across the room with his men stacked behind him and entered the hall to the master suite. They passed two other guest suites; they would clear them all after dealing with de la Rocha, but they did not expect them to be occupied. Forty-eight hours of surveillance of La Sirena had indicated that Daniel was on board tonight with only a few bodyguards and the crew of his yacht.

Once in place at the door to the master suite, Team Three waited. Within seconds, one deck above them, Team Two announced they were outside the crew quarters.

“All teams, execute in three. Uno . . . dos . . . tres.”

On the helipad Martin and Ramses each fired two suppressed rounds from their Steyrs into the head of each guard on the sundeck.

Team Two opened both the crew quarters and the captain’s stateroom; one man trained a weapon on the captain’s bed, and two more flipped on the lights of the crew’s quarters and held their weapons on the eight men expected to be sleeping there.