highway, heading toward Cuernavaca and his mansion in the suburbs. He suddenly yelled, “I want to know who that guy was!”
“Of course,” said Castillo. “I’m already working on that. The detectives will call me as soon as they know.”
“Okay, excellent,” he said, catching his breath. And then a deep sigh of relief: a text message from Miguel.
He thumbed on the message, which had no text, only a video attached. He double-tapped the video icon, turned his phone horizontally, and watched in widescreen as the camera panned, revealing Sonia …and then Miguel …
Rojas began to lose his breath. “Fernando! Pull over! Pull over!”
A man came into view carrying an ax.
“Don’t look,” Sonia said. “Just don’t look.”
And Rojas’s hands began to tremble. “No!”
It was nearly dusk by the time they finished transferring their gear and all of their personnel onto the trucks, both of which were step vans, one belonging to a plumber whose logo was emblazoned across the side of the vehicle. The other was a seafood-delivery vehicle whose bay reeked of fish and crabs. Samad and his men could only grimace and climb aboard. These trucks were all they had, and he was, despite their confines, grateful to Allah for them.
Samad estimated it would take them about eighteen hours of drive time, averaging fifty-five miles per hour, and so he’d warned his men that the next two days on the road would be long and arduous. Talwar and Niazi, who were in the other van, said they would do their best to keep the men calm and remind them that refueling points were their only chance to use the bathroom facilities. With a group as large as theirs, that would become a serious consideration.
They were but twenty miles into their journey when the other truck pulled to the side of the road with a flat tire, and this made Samad throw his hands up in frustration. Yes, they had a spare; yes, they could fix it; but many, many others already in the United States were waiting for them, and the delay caused his stomach to knot and his hands to ball into fists. The drivers, both Mexicans, were yelling at each other in Spanish as they fixed the flat, and Samad was beginning to realize that the driver of his truck might be having second thoughts. He shifted up to the man, hunkered down, and said in Spanish, “We trust you to deliver us to our destination. That’s all you need to do. To get paid. To stay alive. Do you understand me?”
The man swallowed and nodded.
A commercial airliner cut across the sky in the distance. Samad turned up toward the plane and watched it vanish into a raft of pink clouds.
27 AL RESCATE
Deep shadows had fallen across the graveyard, and the rows of crosses now stood in silhouette against the moldy walls of the abandoned church. Down below, past the church and the marketplace, Moore, who was lying on his belly, scanned the large crowds of locals and tourists gathering around and lining the streets of the main road, where the parade and fireworks show of Carnival would soon commence. Troupes of dancers were already shifting and whirling across beds of burning embers whose sparks rose around them.
Moore panned to the right with his night-vision scope and back to the house where the small blue car and van were still parked. Torres had fetched their rental car and had moved it up behind the pair of smaller houses at the bottom of the road. He’d left the car there with the keys under the mat.
After another long breath, Moore adjusted his grip on the weapon in his hands, one of the Mark 11 Model 0’s, which had earned the nickname “Pirate Killer,” based on their use by Navy SEALs to rescue captured sailors from Somali pirates. Fitzpatrick had feigned surprise over Moore toting them, and Torres had grilled Moore about how he’d acquired such powerful military-issue weapons. “Like I told you,” Moore had said, “the people I work for are very well connected.”
Indeed.
The Mark 11 was a twenty-round semiautomatic rifle equipped with a biped. The rifle’s magazine held twenty 7.62x5-millimeter NATO rounds, and Moore liked to joke that if you needed twenty bullets to hit your target, then you’d best get into politics and out of soldiering. When Moore fired the Mark 11, the round would streak off faster than the speed of sound, creating a small sonic boom that would dissipate as the round slowed to subsonic speeds. At about six hundred meters out in places such as the mountains of Afghanistan, a sniper could shoot and remain silent to his target; however, in more urban environments such as San Juan Chamula, Moore and Fitzpatrick, who also lay on his belly on the other side of the hill, needed the KAC suppressors that would help conceal and confuse the source of their ordnance. If Moore were to take his shot beyond eight hundred meters, he could fire at will without the enemy ever detecting his location. Of course, as Murphy’s Law would have it, the math was not in their favor.
Range to the house and the four guards positioned there was only 527 meters. Current wind was NNE at nine miles per hour. Elevation was 7,410 feet, and they were approximately 29 feet higher than their target with a grade of nine percent heading up into the hills. Between the wind, the calculations for bullet drop, and their current positions, the shots would be difficult but not impossible. They would certainly be heard, and the only thing to help mask them would be the fireworks echoing from town. As Moore had earlier remarked, that was their only stroke of luck, and they’d need a lot more than luck, because the real test would occur after they brought down the guards …
Moore called Towers, who was monitoring the Avenging Vultures’ radio channel. “Anything?”
“Still running through the cell-phone calls. That’ll take a while. Just the usual small talk on the radio. They’re calling one guy Captain Salou, and I pulled up what we have on him: Guatemalan Special Forces, twenty-year veteran before he retired and turned mercenary. In technical terms, he’s a mean-ass motherfucker.”
“And handy with an ax,” Moore added darkly.
“Something else is going on, though, down in Cristobal. Local police are on high alert, and from what we can tell, they’re searching for missing persons.”
“No surprise. Maybe Daddy found out that his little boy’s been kidnapped and put in some calls.”
“Well, if he did, then you need to extract them and get the hell out of there before Rojas’s team arrives.”
“I hear that. I’m just waiting for the party to begin …”
Moore closed his eyes, trying to purge all the extraneous thoughts and simply focus on the shots, on the moment. But his conscience wasn’t cooperating because of how similar this moment was to the past. He unwillingly took himself back to the beach at Coronado and stood there, watching the tide roll in, watching as out there in the dark sea, a hand rose above the waves …and a voice that was really his own came in a bellow,
Moore shuddered violently over those voices.
And then another one:
Not anymore. He’d tricked the Navy into thinking he was worth it, but he should have never become a SEAL. He had broken the most basic rule, and should have been punished for his actions, and because he wasn’t, he thought he should take on that job himself. He didn’t deserve a real life after what he’d done. No, he didn’t.
