The rear driver jammed his Suburban in reverse, and Calvo’s driver did the same.
Nestor climbed back into his seat just as his truck went into reverse, throwing him forward again. The bodyguard on Calvo’s right grabbed him and covered him with his body. While doing so, both he and Calvo saw a flash of light on the rocky cliff above and just slightly behind them. The boom of an explosion came a fraction of a second later, and an instant after that, Calvo and his protector watched helplessly as the explosion blasted stone and dirt away from the brown scrub on the cliff. Boulders the size of easy chairs broke from the cliffside and tumbled down towards the convoy, knocking flat shale shingle and trees and dirt free on their way down.
Someone in Calvo’s truck screamed, “Watch out!”
The massive landslide missed Nestor’s vehicle. As the driver slammed on his breaks, the intelligence chief of the Black Suits crashed shoulder-first into his leather headrest, the man who had thrown himself over Calvo’s body collided into him. Calvo looked out the back window just in time to see the rear vehicle in the convoy catch the brunt of the mass of rock and dirt and dust and greenery; tons of falling rubble slammed into the Suburban, spun the massive armored vehicle 180 degrees on its axis before burying it along with the six men inside.
Wet concrete continued pouring onto the first vehicle in the convoy. The driver recovered from the impact with the cement mixer, pushed the deflated airbag out of his way, and jacked the truck’s transmission into reverse. The truck’s wheels spun, but it found purchase and began backing up; men in the truck around the driver shouted and screamed, and the SUV backed hard into the grille of Truck Two. Seconds later the cement mixer itself reversed, backed through hundreds of pounds of gray sludge, and crashed into Truck One.
Cement continued to flow from its chute, now directly onto the hood of the truck.
The two bodyguards in the middle seat of Truck Two, one on either side of Nestor Calvo, pointed their weapons at the windows, awaited the order to exit the car. The leader of the detail, the man in the front passenger seat, hesitated. “Wait!” he shouted. “We don’t know how many there are. Calvo is safe in the truck.”
The men sat silently for a few seconds, then the radio came alive with the voice of an injured man from the rear truck. “We have wounded. Some are dead, I think. Help us.”
The lead bodyguard switched channels and put a call out for the local police.
Behind him a shaken but highly focused Nestor Calvo had already found his mobile phone on the floor, ended the call he was on, and had begun dialing his own contacts in the area.
The driver of Truck One saw him first. A man in dirty blue jeans, a black leather jacket, and a black motorcycle helmet with a smoked windscreen. Hanging low in his right hand was a black pistol, and in his left hand a black backpack swung at his side.
But Truck Two had already seen him. “It’s the gringo!” shouted the guard on Calvo’s left, and he threw open his rear door, raised his short-barreled machine gun.
And then flew back inside onto Nestor Calvo’s lap. On his forehead and left cheek he wore ragged holes that gushed rich red blood all over Calvo’s suit.
The consigliere pushed the man out into the road and dove to pull the door closed, fumbling his phone into the air before his call could be connected.
The leader of the detail attempted to open his door to get out on the far side of the armored truck and engage the Gray Man from over the hood. But yards of thick cement had already pushed back to his side of Truck Two, and he could not get it open.
Instead he turned to the man behind him, on Calvo’s right. “See if you can get out!” He turned back to his own door and began rolling down the window.
The driver of Truck One scrambled across the center console of the front seat, into the passenger side, and he struggled to roll up the heavy bulletproof window left open by the man who’d been ejected during the initial crash with the cement truck. The men in the backseats argued about what to do and screamed into their radios, trying to communicate with the detail commander behind them over the screams and pleas of the survivors of Truck Three.
The man in the motorcycle helmet appeared at the driver-side window of Truck One, pulled a large rectangular object from his open backpack, and slammed it hard against the ballistic glass. When it hit it made a sound like a heavy, wet fish, and it adhered to the clear surface. The armed men inside the vehicle stopped screaming and stared at it for a moment, unsure what they were looking at. It was a black container made of metal, perhaps even iron, and covered in a thick black tarlike material. They saw the Gray Man pick his bag off the ground and move backwards, back up around the side of the huge cement mixer.
“It’s a bomb!” shouted the driver.
“Are we safe?” asked a bodyguard in the back.
“Yes,” replied one, certain the bulletproof glass would protect them.
Another man tried once again to call out to the detail commander in the vehicle behind for instructions, and yet another voiced concern that the side window glass was not as strong as the side armor of the SUV.
Finally, after looking at the sticky box on the glass for five seconds, the driver gave the order. “Bail out!”
Three hands wrapped around three different door handles inside the big black Suburban.
And then the bomb detonated, sent fire, iron shrapnel, and shards of ballistic glass into the SUV’s interior behind a shockwave that moved faster than the speed of sound. All the men inside were turned to pulp in eight- one-hundredths of a second, and the heavy vehicle rocked on its fortified steel chassis. The windshield blew out from the inside, shattered against the chute of the cement mixer, and flames engulfed the dead occupants.
The four men still alive in Truck Two, Nestor Calvo included, just watched. When it was clear the armored vehicle in front of them, a truck virtually identical to their own, did not survive the blast, the detail commander gave the order for his men to bail out.
The driver was the first through his door; he drew his .45 pistol as he stumbled out into the road.
In the black smoke billowing from the windows of the Suburban in front of him, the man in the motorcycle helmet appeared, he still carried the pack low on his left, and now his pistol was aimed high on his right.
The driver began to raise his weapon towards the threat, but three rounds to his chest spun him around, caused his .45 to sail from his hands. A fourth shot to the right side of his skull snapped his head to the side and killed him instantly. He fell dead on the blacktop as the two doors on the opposite side of the SUV opened and then closed again.
Inside Truck Two Calvo screamed at the two surviving members of his detail. “Fight him! Get out and fight him!” The men moved from side to side in their seats, but they were otherwise frozen in terror. They just watched as the man in the motorcycle helmet stood alongside their truck and reached into his bag.
“He has another bomb!” one shouted, but the man instead pulled out a piece of cardboard. He pushed it up to the windshield and the men inside the SUV read the single word written in black upon it.
“Calvo.”
All three men sat silently. The silence was broken by the slapping sound of an iron box covered in tar sticking to the driver-side window of the Suburban. The man in the black helmet stepped away from the vehicle, raised his pistol, and waited.
Twelve seconds later the side door of the truck opened, and Calvo was ejected by the boot heel of one of the two members of his security detail. Immediately, he fell down in thick wet cement that had inched back on the road to his side of the truck. The door shut behind him. He cursed as he tried to stand back up. The man in the motorcycle helmet stepped forward, his pistol still trained on the Suburban, and he grabbed the fifty-seven-year-old by his necktie, pulled him out of the cement and to the side of the road. Court walked backwards up the road, pulling the man with the cement-spackled coal black suit, still covering the SUV with his gun, until he disappeared around the side of the dump truck.
He let go of Calvo and reached into his backpack. He removed a black cell phone and handed it over to the Mexican.
In Spanish the man said, “Press 4. Then Send.”
Calvo did as he was told. Upon pressing the Send button an explosion rocked the canyon road fifty feet behind him. Shrapnel fired into the cement truck and pelted the hillside.
Thirty seconds later the cement mixer moved forward towards the west, and the only men left alive at the scene were buried under tons of rock and dirt.
