Ballistic (31 page)

Court was as shell-shocked as the rest of them. The room just seemed sucked dry of all life. As if even though de la Rocha's people had not yet accomplished their mission, they had already killed much of the defenders' will to survive.

Court searched his brain for a silver lining, no matter how narrow the strand. Damn, he wished he was a leader, an officer, a motivator. Fuck, just like he'd been told many times before, at this moment he felt like he was just a “door kicker.” A “breach bitch.” A “gun monkey.”

Finally, he lightened a bit. “As for good news . . . there is a little. It's almost dawn, and I do not think they will hit us during the day. They know we have a bunch of new weapons at our disposal, and they can't fight us from inside their armored trucks, so we have until nightfall to find a way out of this mess. We'll come up with something.”

Not exactly the speech Patton would have made at a time like this, Court realized.

Laura shook her head. “Joe, you have not slept . . . you cannot function like—”

“I'll be okay.” He dismissed her with a wave of his hand. He didn't have time to talk about how he needed a nap. “I've picked over the dead marines, and in addition to the sub guns, I found radios, a set of binoculars, and a mobile phone. They've apparently already changed their radio codes. I've got to figure the mobile will be tapped or traced, and the tower around here is down, but we can hang on to it. It may come in handy at some point.

They all discussed going to the U.S. for a few minutes, and then it was everyone back to their defensive positions. Court took guard duty on the back
mirador
, still the most likely avenue of any attack. He told Martin and Diego and Ramses and Laura to wander the house, keep an eye out all the windows as best they could, and the wounded and elderly Ernesto was ordered to lie down with Luz and Elena in the cellar. Laura gave her father a pistol to hold, to give him the honor of still taking a nominal role in the protection of his family.

Twenty minutes later Court lay on the second-floor balcony, facing east, and he watched the soft light of a clear dawn roll slowly over the forest. The white of the back wall of the property appeared slowly, as if it were being painted before his eyes on a black canvas.

Although Court did not expect a daylight attack, he recognized a new danger. With the light of day came the potential for snipers in the distant hills; anyone out on these verandas would have to remain on their hands and knees to stay below the level of the railing.

The rooster continued to crow. Damn rooster. Court's veins had been filled and then sapped of adrenaline so many times in the past twenty-four hours, he just needed to sleep now, now that it was time to begin a new day.

He heard a noise in the distance, just on the other side of the wall, and his vision cleared with a fresh rush of adrenaline. A man's shouting. Court fixed his attention on the part of the wall from where it came; he could just see the white band sixty yards from his position. Another shout, and just then something dark flew through the air, over the wall, over the jacaranda vines, and it hit the long grass, bounced high and awkwardly like an oblong ball. It rolled and came to rest in lower grasses, twenty-five yards from the far edge of the murky swimming pool.

Ramses and Martin appeared on the balcony next to Gentry. They had been “floating” through the house on patrol, and they had seen it, too.

“What is that?” asked Martin.

Court took the binoculars he'd pulled from a dead marine and peered through them; there was not enough light for the small optics, but he could see the roundish shape lying there in the grass.
“No sé,”
he answered. He did not know.

“A bomb?” asked Martin.

“If it's a bomb, we're okay,” said Court; it was still a good distance away from the house.

“A head?” asked Ramses while picking at the bloody bandage on his arm. Everyone knew that
narcos
loved to chop off heads.

Martin chuckled. “Did you see it bounce? That's not a head.”

Ramses chuckled, too, though he winced from the pain in his wounds as he did so. “Yeah. It's not a head.”

Court entered into the gallows humor while he scanned the length of the wall. “Plus, we would know if we were missing any heads. We're not, are we? Should we do a head count?”

Ramses laughed and translated for Martin, who chuckled as well. Court knew they were all near delirious from stress and exhaustion.

Court put down the optics and rubbed his eyes. Sipped the last dregs of coffee that Luz had brought him earlier.

A few minutes later the light improved as the sun rose and morning glowed over the peaks of the Sierra Madres to the east. Court took the binoculars again, squinted, cocked his head, willed the daylight to grow and show him what was there. There was no question the
sicarios
wanted him to see it. They'd called out so that someone would be looking right there when the object came over the wall.

Suddenly, his delirium-induced humor was gone; he had a deep sense of foreboding about this . . . thing, out there in the grass.

Whatever it was, he knew only that it could
not
be good.

Wait . . . A little more light shone on the left side of the object. It became clearer slowly. “It's . . . it's a soccer ball.” He blew a slow sigh of relief. Held some of the exhalation. Could it just be a soccer ball kicked over the wall at six in the morning?

“Is there a note on it?” asked Martin.

Court kept looking; he just needed a bit more light on the righthand side.

Laura appeared out on the back balcony. Court had no idea if she recognized the threat of distant snipers, but she mimicked the three men, dropping to her hands and knees as she crawled in from the bedroom. Her hands and knees made no sound on the stone tile as she shouldered up to the American and lay down flat. “What are you looking at?”

Martin explained that someone had kicked a ball over the back wall. He and Ramses and Laura speculated about this, but Court was not involved in the conversation. His eyes were in the binoculars.

“What the hell
is
that?”

A little more light shone in the valley. He forced his eyes open wider to take in more light. Yes, that helped.

It was a . . .

No . . . not that.

Gentry shut his eyes tightly.

Now he knew. He whispered to himself in English. “What the fuck is wrong with you people?”

“¿Qué?”
asked Laura.

Court lowered his optics and looked back towards Eddie's sister. “Laura. I need you to find me a large plastic bag, a towel, a water bottle, and I need your cell phone.”

“The phone doesn't work.”

“Does it have a camera?”

“Bring it to me.”

“Just do it!” he snapped at her. He was tense and angry, but he then caught himself. “Please.” She turned and crawled off the balcony.

Ramses asked, “What is it? What did you see?”

“I . . . I'm not sure.”

Martin said, “It's just a soccer ball, right?”

Court climbed up to his knees, took the double-barreled shotgun in his hand, and began crawling back through the door to the second floor of the house. “I wish.”

Five minutes later he was out on the patio, crouching low behind a planter full of azaleas. He used the overgrown landscaping and stayed as low to the ground as humanly possible to make his way back to the swimming pool, stopping every few feet to listen for the presence of human noises and the absence of animal noises. He heard chirping birds and even the croaking of frogs at the pool, and this relaxed him a little. He was reasonably certain he was the only person in the back garden of the hacienda, and he used this confidence to propel himself onwards. If the
sicarios
came over the wall, still forty yards away from him, he was well aware he would be fucked. They'd be able to see him lying there in the grass. He only had a weapon that fired two shots without reloading, and reloading from a pocket full of shotgun shells would not be terribly efficient.

He carried the gun as a last resort, but he knew, the last thing he wanted to get involved with right now was a gunfight. Ramses and Martin were up on the
mirador
, covering him with the MP5s taken from fallen marines, but otherwise, he was on his own.

He passed several bodies from de la Rocha's first two waves of killers. Court, Martin, and Ramses had already picked the corpses clean of any useful equipment or intelligence, so he only used them now for concealment as he crawled across the patio, alongside the smelly pool full of mosquitoes and frogs, the pool he'd swam in five hours earlier.

He heard voices again on the other side of the wall. A loud shout, a cackle, like a laugh from an insane person, and he halted his low crawl. It did not take him more than a few seconds to recognize that they would not attack—who would divulge their location only to then come over the wall, exposed to the defenders that they had just alerted? No, Court understood, they were trying to get the attention of the defenders of the hacienda so that they would notice the thing they'd slung over the wall fifteen minutes earlier.

This worried Gentry almost as much as a direct attack.

He started moving again, covered the cold tile a little more quickly now, though he did not actually want to arrive at his destination. He had seen enough through the lenses of the binoculars to understand what he would find. He'd brought along the bag sticking out of the waistband of his pants and the water bottle rolling around inside it as well as the camera in his back pocket for a reason.

He'd brought the binoculars with him as well. Not because he would need them here, crawling along the patio on his belly like a grass snake. No . . . he took them because he did not want those back at the casa to see the soccer ball. To see what he was doing. He'd do this alone, make the best of a terrible situation, and then explain the terrible situation to those back at the house as best he could.

Morale was crucial for a population under siege, morale had become terrible in this house of death, and now, Gentry was pretty sure, morale was about to go straight down the goddamned motherfucking toilet.

He entered the tall grass, passed more bodies of corrupt policemen and low-rent civilian killers, and went on towards the object lying in the grass ahead.

Due to literally hundreds of experiences in his life and the things he had seen during those experiences, Court Gentry was a man who, simply put, was almost impossible to gross out. But his face tightened as he reached the ball in the grass, his body recoiled slightly as he noticed the blood smeared on the ground next to it, and his hand did not want to reach out and roll it closer to him. But he did; he extended his arm and put his fingertips on the ball and pulled it to him. His hand felt something cold and soft as he did this, and he almost vomited there in the grass. He steeled himself as he brought the ball in close and looked at it.

The loose and slack face of a human being, a young man, had been sewn with thick black leather thread onto the ball, which was smeared with blood, scuffed with grass stains. There was a tuft of turf lodged into one of the hollow eye sockets. He had no idea who the face was, but he was certain that someone back at the house would know.

This would not be some random local chopped up and made into a grisly toy.

No, this would be someone's loved one.

Someone's family.

This was a message.
Give up, come out, or everyone you love will die.

Court put the ball in the bag, rose to his knees, and sprinted low back towards a dilapidated stone garden shed. Inside it was moldy and dark; he left the door open to give him enough light to work with, and he took the ball with the face sewn to it, and washed it with the water from the plastic bottle. He then took the towel and blotted the face as clean and dry as possible. Doing this nearly sickened him, but he saw no other alternative to his plan. When the face was as clean as he could make it, one could not possibly call it “presentable”; he looked it over a long time. It was only semi-recognizable as being part of a human; the sewing had torn off along the forehead and a flap of skin hung down; Court pressed it back where it belonged. The chin was extended down a little too tightly, pulling the face out of normal proportion like the opposite of a bad facelift.