Edge of Battle

“Entiendo, senor,” the Mexican soldier responded…and then two of his men spun Diaz around, slammed him up against the concrete wall, and stripped his jacket down over his arms.

“What in hell do you think you’re doing?” Diaz screamed. “I am the Minister of Internal Affairs and the acting president of Mexico! Do as I ordered you or I will have you all shot! ”

“Or drugged…like you did to Carmen, you rancid piece of shit?” Diaz gasped and turned around…and saw none other than the Minister of National Defense, General Alberto Rojas, standing before him.

“Rojas!” Diaz exclaimed, forcing himself to choke down his surprise and panic. “Where in hell have you been? I have had the entire ministry out looking for you!”

“Hiding from you and your Sombras, Diaz,” Rojas said. “Making a few phone calls as well—to my new friends in Clovis, New Mexico.”

“You are helping the Americans? You will hang for that, Rojas!”

“I am not afraid of facing a court-martial for what I have done, Diaz—but I cannot say the same about your own prospects in a courtroom,” Rojas said confidently, “especially with the evidence we’ve discovered here.” He turned and watched as a gurney carrying a body under a white sheet was rolled out of the garage to be carried upstairs. “You didn’t even have the brains to dispose of the body, Diaz.”

“Me? Why would I dispose of the president’s body?” Diaz asked incredulously. “The president was being kept here, secure, until an investigation could be concluded. But I think I know who killed the president: Ernesto Fuerza.”

“Fuerza? Comandante Veracruz?” Rojas exclaimed. “How do you know this?”

“I made the mistake of bringing him and the Russian terrorist Yegor Zakharov to meet the president, as she requested,” Diaz said. “I was told to leave them alone, and I complied with her wishes. The next thing I know, Fuerza and Zakharov were gone, and the president was dead.”

“Why did you not report this immediately, Minister?”

“I initiated an immediate investigation and sent agents out across the country to track down Fuerza and Zakharov. But the government was in disarray, and I took it upon myself to preserve the president’s body and continue the investigation in secret. I dared not reveal any of this to the Council of Government, in case one of them was involved in…”

At that moment one of the Cybernetic Infantry Device robots entered the parking garage, carrying a man by his arms in its armored fists…none other than Yegor Zakharov! “You caught him!” he exclaimed. “Where did you find him?”

“Our friends in the United States had him in custody,” Rojas said. “He told us a very interesting story about you and your alter ego—Comandante Veracruz. If you are lucky, Felix, the judges of the Supreme Court will only sentence you to a single death sentence, instead of dozens.”

“What? You are not going to believe this man, are you, Rojas? He is an international terrorist, a mass murderer, and the most wanted man in the world! He would do or say anything to save his skin! He will lie, cheat…”

Diaz stopped…when he saw the Mexican soldiers help Jose Elvarez up. His eyes bulged in horrible realization. “What is going on here?”

“Just helping a key witness to his feet, Felix,” Rojas said. “You are correct, Felix: no judge on earth would believe Yegor Zakharov even if he swore on a roomful of Bibles that the sky is blue. But they might believe your own deputy minister.”

Diaz gulped deeply, his mouth dropping open in sheer numbness. He looked at the faces around him and could not recognize one man who might help him at all. His gaze finally rested on Alberto Rojas. “You win, General,” he said. “But you know that I did all this for one reason: to help our people. Our citizens were dying and being exploited by the United States by the millions. Someone had to do something. Only I had the guts to take the fight to the Americans. I provided the inspiration for freedom and justice that the rest of the government could not.” Rojas said nothing. Diaz took one step toward him and said in a low voice, “You may not like what I did, Rojas, but you know I did it all on behalf of the Mexican people. Yes, I failed, but not for lacking the courage to try.”

Rojas averted his eyes, and Diaz knew he had hit a nerve. “I have the courage for one more thing, General. Give me a gun and put me back in that room and I will save all of you the time and trouble of putting me on trial.”

The defense minister looked at Diaz, put his hand to his holster…then shook his head. “At one time I might have granted your request, Felix—but then I had to walk into your torture chamber and identify the body of my dear friend, President Carmen Maravilloso, lying on a slab in your house of horrors down there,” he said. “You are not a patriot or a revolutionary, Felix Diaz—you are nothing but a murderous piece of human shit.

“You will be taken to the United States and put on trial first, and then if you are not sentenced to death you will be sent back to Mexico to face murder and conspiracy charges here. Get him out of my sight.”

Jason carried Yegor Zakharov outside to the waiting CV-22 Os-prey tilt-rotor aircraft, surrounded by both Task Force TALON commandos and Mexican army soldiers. Internal Affairs agents and employees were being escorted out of the ministry buildings at gunpoint, and boxes of records were being carried out and loaded into trucks. “So, Major Richter,” Zakharov said casually, “I have done what you have asked. You should let me go now. That was part of our deal, was it not?”

“It was not,” the robot’s electronic voice replied.

“Then you intend to kill me, after all I have done for you?”

In the blink of an eye, the robot spun Zakharov around so he was now facing the robot, still suspended in the robot’s grasp; then, Richter deployed the twenty-millimeter cannon in his weapon backpack. The huge muzzle of the weapon was now pointed forward over the robot’s right shoulder, inches away from Zakharov’s face.

“I could do it now, Zakharov,” Jason said, the robotic voice slow and measured, “and no one would say a damned thing about it.”

“I could have slaughtered Vega’s entire family…!”

“Everyone expected you to do it. We were prepared for it, believe me.”

“But I did not do it, Major. I spared them, turned myself in, and helped you get Diaz.”

“You think you’re a big hero now?”

“There is so much more I could tell you, Richter,” Zakharov said. “I could give you information that would put you within reach of thousands of the world’s greatest criminals. Your task force could capture them, and then you would be the hero. All I am asking for is my freedom. I will give you my information. You check it out and verify its credibility. Then you fly me to a wadi in the Sahara or a deserted island in Indonesia, and we both live out the rest of our lives free from ever having to deal with one another again.”

The robot suddenly turned away from the CV-22 and ran quickly out of the Internal Affairs Ministry compound, heading east until it came on an open area of the Bosque de Chapultepec. Then, to Zakharov’s complete amazement, the robot dropped him. Zakharov was on his feet in an instant, looking around in the darkness. The brilliant lights of Mexico City illuminated the horizon in all directions except to the west; the light surrounding the Castillo de Chapultepec, the now-vacant Mexican president’s residence, could be seen a short distance away.

“What are you doing, Richter?” Zakharov asked.

Jason said nothing for several long moments; then, Zakharov heard him say: “Run.”

“What?”

“Run, Colonel,” Richter said. “I’ll give you five minutes. You might be able to make it to the Castillo, probably to Constitution Avenue, and once you cross there you’ll be in the heart of that residential neighborhood. Run.”

Zakharov took several steps backward and looked around himself again. Yes, he thought, he could easily make it to Constitution Avenue, and immediately he’d be in the San Miguel Chapultepec neighborhood, a mixture of wealthy homes and upscale businesses—perhaps even sympathetic Russian expatriates or oil company executives that he once did business with. The robot was good out in the open but bad in narrow alleyways and terrible indoors…yes, he might just make it. Go, he told himself, go, now…!

But as he stepped back, he saw the muzzle of that twenty-millimeter cannon tracking his head, aimed right between his eyes, and he knew that Richter had no intention of letting him go. He would let him run a short distance, then open fire. Like he said, no one in Mexico, the United States, or most anywhere in the world would blink an eye over his death.