everyone below. Moore tackled Corrales, wrenched away his rifle, then rolled him over and delivered a roundhouse squarely into the kid’s jaw. “I’ll fuck you up even more if you do that again! You hear me?”
Corrales looked odd.
And Moore realized he’d screamed in English.
“You
The whomping of that approaching helicopter, along with its lights, caught their attention — and the notice of the gunmen below, who switched fire on the bird as it thundered overhead, searchlight panning across the house. The pilot wheeled around and descended toward the backyard, where he had a wide-enough and level-enough swath of land to set down. There was no mistaking the bird’s insignia: POLICIA FEDERAL, the words lit by the ricocheting rounds sparking off the fuselage.
But were these Corrales’s allies come to pick him up? If so, Moore wasn’t sure he’d be welcome to tag along. He fished out his smartphone, checked the most recent message from Towers: I’m in the chopper. Get to it.
“Aw fuck, look at that,” said Corrales, shifting his head to spot the helicopter. “It’s over. We’re all going to jail.”
“No, those are my guys,” Moore told him.
“You’re a gringo who works for the Federal Police?”
“We’re just borrowing their ride. Stick with me. My deal with you is much better than the one you had with him. You’ll see.”
Moore rose and shouted to the guys on the roof to cover them once more, but the guys told him to fuck himself and ran off, through the rooftop door and back into the house.
As Moore helped Corrales to his feet and over to the ledge and the drainage pipe, muffled gunfire came from inside the house. Zuniga’s men had been met by more Aztecas, no doubt, and it was safe to assume they’d lost that debate and that the Aztecas were coming up.
“I can’t climb down that,” cried Corrales, the rotor wash whipping in their faces now, as the chopper was a few seconds from touching down.
“GET DOWN THAT PIPE!” Moore screamed, summoning up a fiery tone from the past, echoing one of his own instructors from BUD/S. He repeated the command two more times.
Shuddering, Corrales climbed over the parapet and set his shoe on the first support strap. The straps would serve as rungs of a ladder down, but admittedly, Moore wasn’t sure that Corrales, with his bad arm/shoulder, could make it.
“No, no way,” said Corrales, trying to lower himself to the next rung.
Moore screamed at him again.
The rooftop door swung open.
“GO!” Moore hollered, craning his head toward the banging door.
Two Aztecas appeared, one armed with a rifle, the other with a machine gun.
They didn’t see Moore at first, because all the rotor wash forced them to squint and Moore had dropped to his rump, shoved his back up against the parapet, and kept low, with the stock of the M16 jammed squarely into his shoulder. It really was a beautiful piece of steel and felt perfect in his hands. For just a few seconds, he was back in the SEALs, and Frank Carmichael was still alive.
Then, either out of nervousness or gut instinct, he reached back, thumbed the selector to three-round bursts, and shifted his aim to the machine-gunner.
The first triplet of fire kicked the bastard sideways, away from his buddy, who swung toward the sound of Moore’s weapon. That the Azteca had turned was his final mistake, as Moore now had a clear bead. All three rounds pierced the guy’s left breast. If he still had a heartbeat as he hit the ground, then you could chalk that up to a miracle.
As Moore turned back to see how Corrales was doing, the dumbass kid lowered himself to the next support strap, lost his grip, and plunged the remaining ten feet to the ground. His feet struck hard, then he fell back, landing across Zuniga and letting out a cry. Then he wailed in pain.
Two Federal Police officers from the chopper were already rushing over in full combat regalia, letting their Heckler & Koch MP5 nine-millimeter submachine guns lead the way. Moore shouted down to Corrales, “Go with them! Go with them!”
He wasn’t sure if the kid heard him or had been knocked unconscious, but he wasn’t moving.
The two cops dropped to the dirt as gunfire came from the corner, at least two muzzles flashing. Moore rose and rushed along the parapet to the corner of the roofline, looking directly down on the two Aztecas who’d pinned down the cops. They never knew what hit them — that is, until they were lying in pools of their own blood and staring up at the sentinel, who shifted away from the roofline. The last image they’d ever see.
“You’re clear, go!” Moore shouted to the cops. Then he raced once more along the opposite edge of the roof, toward the garage doors, where he spotted three more Federal Police cars heading up the dirt road, with lights and sirens.
“Hold it right there! Don’t move!” came a voice from behind him.
He thought of turning his head slightly to identify his assailant, but then again, he already knew. The Aztecas weren’t taking prisoners, so they wouldn’t have ordered him to halt. And that voice …familiar?
“Senor, I’m Federal Police, just like you,” Moore told the guy.
The rifle was removed from Moore’s hands, as was the pistol from his waistband. Moore didn’t raise his hands. He just whirled around, surprising the guy, because no one in his right mind would make a sudden move like that, not with a weapon on him. The guy was neither Federal Police nor an Azteca.
It was the young kid from the Range Rover, the one who’d said he’d hoped Zuniga would let him live, the kid with the skull earring in his right lobe.
“You brought this on us,” cried the kid. “I saw him down there. My boss is dead because of you!”
In one fluid movement, Moore drove the heel of his hand up into the kid’s nose. An old myth persisted that you could kill a man this way. Nonsense. Moore had wanted only to stun the kid. Besides, his face was far too pretty for his own good, anyway. As the kid shifted back, about to scream, Moore wrenched back the rifle, then drove the stock into the kid’s head, knocking him to the roof.
Moore rushed back to the drainpipe, shouldered the rifle via the sling, then climbed over the parapet. He was about halfway down the pipe when the straps buckled under his weight and the whole damned pipe pulled away from the wall. Only a six-foot drop but enough to stun his legs as he hit the ground. No time for delays, though, as more Feds were pulling into the driveway. He rolled, rose, and with the needles still rushing up and down his thighs, he bounded for the chopper, reached the bay door, and was hauled inside by Towers. Corrales was already there, his eyes narrowed in pain. One of the officers slid shut the bay door, and the chopper’s nose pitched forward as they took off.
Towers cupped his hand around Moore’s ear and said, “All I can say is, this kid had better be loaded with secrets.”
Moore nodded. With Zuniga dead, the Sinaloa Cartel’s operations would be disrupted — at least for a while, and they’d be vulnerable to further attacks and to a takeover by the Juarez Cartel. If that happened, then the joint task force’s mission to dismantle the Juarez Cartel would have not only failed but would’ve caused Rojas’s criminal empire to grow even stronger.
37 TWO DESTINIES
It was nearly eleven p.m. by the time they made it back to the diversion control office and took Corrales into the conference room. He’d already received attention from a medic onboard the chopper, who repeatedly assured him that he hadn’t broken both of his legs and that his right ankle was only sprained. He still had full range of motion. Moore and Towers told him they would get him to a hospital if he insisted, but he needed to talk first.
