where you’re going.”
He and Boxers said it together: “Shit.”
“What?” Tristan asked.
Jonathan keyed his mike. “Any chance we’ll get there first?”
“They’ve got vehicles.”
Not the question he’d asked, but it was an answer nonetheless.
Jonathan played the next few minutes out in his mind, and it all came down to a firefight that they couldn’t possibly win. Surrender was not an option, so that left only a third alternative. If only he knew what it was.
“I’m open to suggestions, Big Guy,” he said.
“I’m sure you’ll come up with something, Boss. Meanwhile, is it your plan to keep jogging toward the ambush?”
Stopping made no sense. They had no defensive positions and they were outgunned. They’d lost the elements of surprise. So, what did that leave? If only storage units had secondary entrances.
Wait. That was it. “We’ll go in through the back door,” he announced.
Boxer gave him The Look. “What back door?”
“How much det cord do you have?”
The Big Guy beamed. “Enough to make a lot of back doors,” he said.
Jonathan keyed his mike. “Mother Hen, I need the name of the street that runs parallel to the one with our target building.”
Tristan was growing tired of the mysterious communications between Scorpion and the Big Guy. He got that they had somebody talking in their ear, but Tristan had a stake in this thing, too, you know? The least they could do was speak in complete sentences, or maybe even relay what it was they were talking about.
He was also tired of being the only one who seemed to struggle with the running. His lungs had burned before, but now with this huge bruise on his chest, the pain was even worse. The vest swung a little on his body with every step, and with each swing, it felt as if someone were poking a finger into the center of the sore spot.
And where were all the police and soldiers? Not to jinx anything, but after all that shooting, he’d have thought there’d be a little more hubbub.
Without warning, Scorpion and the Big Guy slid to a stop in the middle of the road.
“Okay, Tristan and Maria, there’s been a change in plans.”
Tristan felt something dissolve inside him. Every time Scorpion said something like that, life got a lot shittier.
As if to prove the point, the night became day as floodlights jumped to life from high atop God only knew how many poles.
The invaders’ night vision was no longer an advantage. Palma felt proud that he’d thought of finding and throwing the main power switch that he knew had to be here somewhere.
The flanking maneuver was really just an extension of the strategy that Palma had put together to catch Harris and his team at Maria’s house. Surround the one place they had to go, and wait for the prey to arrive. It was the most logical play, and therefore one that he had no choice but to deploy.
Because it was logical, and therefore obvious, he worried that his enemy would once again get a step ahead.
This time, he held back a reserve of eight men, two each to cover the likely escape routes if the criminals tried to get away.
Meanwhile, Palma himself took Sergeant Sanchez and three of the surviving members of his original team and pursued his prey on foot.
Harris and company would have to be near panic now as they realized that they were being driven to a killing zone. Palma would enjoy watching them die.
He and his tiny squad moved carefully yet quickly as they pursued their targets north and east inside the storage compound. Hernandez had been very specific about the location of his smuggling tunnel. It was the single destination for Harris to target, so therefore it made no sense for them to lie in hiding along the way. As they got closer, he’d slow down.
On the other hand, if he heard shooting, he’d know that it was time to run in earnest.
Stealth no longer mattered. Bathed in light, their final advantage had been stripped away. From this point forward, survival was all about speed.
All they had to do was outrun a shitload of people who were all bent on killing them. Jonathan grabbed Tristan by the vest and pulled him close. “Listen to me,” he said. “Do exactly as I say. Are you good with that?”
Tristan’s eyes were twice their normal size and they showed terror.
“You can’t panic on me, son. Do you understand that?”
“Yes. Yes, I understand.”
“Okay.” Jonathan spun him ninety degrees so that he was facing west. “You keep an eye on the end of the block. If you see a person-I mean, if you see
The kid nodded, and Jonathan needed to believe him. He turned to Maria, who’d overheard. “I’ll watch the other end,” she said.
Jonathan smiled. “Thank you.”
While they spoke, Boxers took a pry bar to the hasp and lock of unit eleven-seventy, the storage unit that shared a back wall with their target building. Big Guy won the battle easily, stripping the entire assembly out of the corrugated metal door.
Jonathan wished he could let Boxers set the charges himself, and stay out here with the kids keeping cover, but setting the charges was a two-person job.
The interior of eleven-seventy might have been somebody’s attic, stacked with furniture and toys, or, given that it was in Ciudad Juarez, a disguised meth lab and a few bodies.
Boxers tossed his ruck onto an old sofa, pulled open the top flap, and lifted a customized wooden spool wrapped with ten feet of plastic tubing stuffed with PETN-detonating cord. Also known as Primacord, it had been a staple in Boxers’ rucksack for as long as Jonathan had known him. For all he knew, the Big Guy had taken a roll of the stuff with him as a Boy Scout when he went camping.
Boxers pulled the tactical light off the muzzle of his rifle and shined it on the back wall. Good news there: a concrete block wall, one of the most frangible building materials on the planet. “Cool,” he said.
Boxers started to measure out a length of cord, and then stopped himself. “Screw it,” he said. “We want a hole, so let’s by-God make a hole.”
“You’re using the whole spool?” Jonathan’s jaw dropped. Ten feet of det cord was, in technical parlance, a shitload of explosive. “You’ll collapse the roof.”
“But I can’t mount it,” Boxers countered. “I don’t have epoxy, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have time-” He stopped himself. “When did I start explaining explosive shit to you?”
Point taken. Boxers broke stuff, Jonathan negotiated stuff. That was the division of labor.
The Big Guy reached back into his ruck and pulled out yet another spool. “Cut me off fifteen seconds of OFF and connect it to a detonator.”
Otherwise known as old-fashioned fuse, OFF was at once the most dependable yet imprecise way to set off explosives. Dependable because when the flame got to the ASA compound-a nasty mixture of lead styphnate, lead azide, and aluminum along with a tetryl kicker-it
Jonathan eyeballed the length of fuse, cut it with his KA-BAR and pulled a detonator from his own ruck and married the two.
As he handed it to Boxers, the world outside the storage room erupted in gunfire.
