pushed her to the floor. “Get down!” he commanded. “Tristan, undo those belts and hunker down on the floor in front of your seat.”
Another burst of gunfire didn’t produce any hits that Jonathan could see or hear.
“What is it?” Jonathan asked Boxers. The view through the back windows was too blocked with a mesh of expanded metal brush cages for them to see any useful detail.
Boxers’ foot got heavier on the gas and he checked his mirror again. “Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a technical,” he said. He started driving zigzags, S-turns that took the Sandcat from curb line to curb line, with the intent of providing a tougher target.
Jonathan had no idea what the derivation of the term was, but technicals were the preferred vehicles of Third World terrorists everywhere. Consisting of a pickup truck with a mounted machine gun of some sort-usually a thirty-cal M60, but he’d seen a few with a fifty-cal Ma Deuce-they were frighteningly efficient killing machines. In Jonathan’s experience, though, marksmanship was an issue.
With the next burst, three rounds punched through the back of the Sandcat. One went on to spider the windshield.
“You want to take care of him for me, Boss?” Boxers asked. His tone had no more edge to it than if he’d asked for the salt to be passed at the dinner table.
“Let me have your Four Seventeen,” Jonathan said.
Boxers lifted his rifle from where he’d stashed it next to his right leg and handed it back to Jonathan. Slightly larger and heavier than Jonathan’s M27, Boxers’ Hechler and Koch Model 417 looked nearly identical, but fired a bigger 7.62-millimeter bullet that had way more penetrating power than the M27’s 5.56-millimeter round.
“Here’s a couple of spare mags, too,” Big Guy said, handing back two thirty-round magazines.
“What are you going to do?” Tristan asked from his perch on the floor. His eyes were huge.
“I’m going to finish what they started,” Jonathan said.
He squat-walked to the back bulkhead, to the door in the center. The gun port was tempting, but he dismissed it. Gun ports were for terrified armored car guards who cared less about hitting a target than about putting out a large volume of fire to put people’s heads down. That offended Jonathan’s sense of professionalism. Suppressing fire had its place, but this was not it. When he pulled the trigger, he wanted to hit what he was shooting at.
As he reached for the handle of the personnel door in the center of the back panel, the technical released another burst of gunfire-a longer one this time-and four more bullets slammed through the bulkhead. The gunner was finding his aim.
Nearly as tall as the crew cab was high, the door was designed for rapid deployment of troops, so when Jonathan pulled the latch and swung the door out, he opened up an enticing vertical trench for the technical’s gunner.
The technical’s driver, however, read the lethality of the situation for what it was and backed off the accelerator. As the pickup truck fell away, Jonathan heard the gunner yelling for the driver not to be a coward.
Jonathan dropped to his belly on the Sandcat’s floor and assumed a classic prone shooter’s position.
“Slow down, Big Guy!” he commanded.
Boxers hit the brakes harder than he’d expected, and while the distance between the vehicles closed, the technical hit its brakes hard, too. As the gunner opened up again, his rounds went wild.
Jonathan’s didn’t. He centered the red dot of the 417’s gun sight on the technical’s grille, on the driver’s side and he unleashed a long burst that shredded the pickup’s engine, and then probably went on to shred the driver.
The technical veered sharply to the right-its left-then hit a curb and flipped. While it was hard to see details this far away, there was no mistaking the silhouette of the gunner cartwheeling through the air and skidding into the street.
“All right, Scorpion!” Boxers whooped. “Nice shooting!”
Actually, it wasn’t. Anybody who couldn’t hit a target that big as it raced straight toward him deserved to be on the other end of the gun. The fact that it had happened at all spelled very bad news.
It meant that the bad guys had connected the dots and knew exactly where they were.
Armed with a compass point and the direction of travel, Hernandez would be able to figure out that that they were headed to the tunnel in the industrial park.
“Maria,” Jonathan said, louder than he’d intended, and causing her to jump. “Where’s the next nearest tunnel to the U.S.?”
“I already told you. The warehouse-”
“No, you said that one’s the closest. Your boss has to know that’s where we’re going now. Where’s the
“Much farther,” she said. “Fifteen, maybe twenty kilometers east of the tunnel off Hermanos Escobar.”
“Scorpion, we’re only about three klicks out now. With the world chasing us, I don’t want to do another twenty on the open road.”
“They’ll have roadblocks,” Jonathan said.
“And we’ve got a big-ass battering ram. Besides, they haven’t had time to set up a good ambush. By the time they do, we’ll have already blown past them.”
Boxers was spinning himself up for some measure of unearned optimism. There’d been plenty of time. The question was whether or not the bad guys had utilized it efficiently.
It didn’t matter. The one thing Boxers was right about was the fact that there was no turning back. With their cover blown, and wrapped in such an identifiable vehicle, a twenty-kilometer open-road sprint would be suicide.
“Have you ever been to these tunnels, Maria?” Jonathan asked. “Any of them?”
“I have been to one-the one we’re going to now-but I have not been inside.”
“Do you know how to
“Yes,” she said.
Relief.
“The entrance is really just a hole in the floor with a ladder.”
“Is that the only entrance to the tunnel? One way in and one way out?”
“I don’t know. I never asked.”
“There have to be vents,” Boxers said. “Tunnel that long would have to have some form of forced ventilation.”
The complexity of the engineering challenge was stunning-made all the more so by the fact that it had presumably all been done by amateurs.
“Why don’t we just charge the border crossing?” Tristan asked. “We’re close to that aren’t we?”
“Can’t risk it,” Jonathan said. “We’ve got to get past the Mexican Border Patrol before we get to the American Border Patrol. Even if we made it to the U.S., they’d just hand us back to the Mexicans.”
“If they all didn’t just shoot us first,” Boxers said. “Those guys get jumpy when they’re approached by speeding vehicles.”
Jonathan’s earbud popped. “Scorpion, Mother Hen. SkysEye shows a barricade across the road not too far from you.”
Jonathan saw it just as she said the words. It looked like six or seven emergency vehicles across the road, painting the night with red and blue flashing lights.
“The turn into the park is just beyond them,” Maria said. “Half a kilometer.”
Boxers slowed, but not much. “Tell me what you want to do, Boss.”
“Ram ’em,” Jonathan said. He moved to the escape hatch in the roof-the spot where he so wished he had a gun turret-and threw it open. “I’ll keep their heads down. Tristan.”
The kid’s head jerked up.
“Climb on back here. Hurry.”
The kid pulled himself off of the floor and back across the center console to squat next to Maria.
“There’s gonna be a bump, and then there are going to be a lot of people behind us shooting at us.”
“I know,” he said. “My safety is on.”
“Well, take it off, then,” Boxers barked.
