Ballistic (55 page)

Now it was the morning of his fourth day of his full-scale war on the Black Suits. He'd been up past three but still managed several hours of fitful sleep in his sleeping bag in the bed of the Mazda. Twice he woke up startled by noises close by; both times he grabbed one of his AK-47s and cut open the darkness around him with the tactical light attached to the fore end of the rifle. Both times hunched furry creatures ran off, deeper down into the black mine shaft.

Even though he was getting a late start, Court had big plans for the day. Hector Serna had passed Court some intel about the Black Suits' locations in the area, and Gentry had noted them on his GPS. He'd set up a series of waypoints that would take him to each target on the way to his most distant destination of the trip. With luck he'd get to five sites before the end of his workday; he did not expect to return to his mine until the middle of the night, though he was not sure he would find things to destroy or Black Suits to kill at each of the stops on his route. Each piece of mayhem he planned had to be weighed against the chance for death or capture, and each location had to be somewhere he felt he could get out of quickly and cleanly.

Before noon he'd pulled into a warehouse district in Guadalajara and watched several train cars off-load crates that Serna promised contained pot grown down south in Chiapas and Guatemala. Court watched from a distance through his binoculars, and he believed Serna's intelligence to be solid, but the loaded trucks idled there within the well-guarded fences of the station for over an hour. He'd tried to pick up the FM radio broadcasts from the walkie-talkies of the men by the trucks, but their handhelds were using some sort of encryption, and Court couldn't read enough of their traffic to find out what the problem was. He'd planned on hitting the trucks on the highway, but they showed no sign of leaving the station, even at two p.m. Reluctantly, he made the decision to call off this mission, anxious to get on to the next waypoint and blow some shit up before the day was done.

His second site was a bust as well. It was a safe house for the Black Suits, but when he entered, kicking in the door and clearing the rooms with his AK, he found no one there and no drugs, guns, or money. He thought about just torching the house, but it was on a city street in the Zapopan district of Guadalajara, and he couldn't be sure he wouldn't end up burning down an entire block. So he climbed back into the Mazda and sped off to the east.

There were three more places on his to-do list; he hoped like hell he could find something worth destroying in at least one of them. He looked at his GPS.

Next stop, another Black Suit safe house, this one in Chapala. Court hoped this wasn't a dry hole as well.

De la Rocha slept on a chaise lounge on the cool balcony just outside of his bedroom. He liked the feel of the outdoors. It reminded him of his time in the army, though in the army he wasn't exactly sleeping on a balcony off an opulent master bedroom in a hacienda on his own 200-hectare property.

Spider was behind him, in the bedroom, sitting on a high-back chair positioned in front of the door. His M4 rifle lay across his lap. Extra magazines jutted from a bag next to him.

With no warning Nestor Calvo Macias barreled through the door. Spider launched to his feet, hefting his weapon as he did so, but the older man ignored him, stormed past, shouted out to his sleeping
patrón
on the balcony.

“The Gray Man hit the safe house in Chapala!”

De la Rocha sat up slowly on the chaise lounge and rubbed his eyes. “Chapala?
Madre de dios.
Did he steal the money we have cached there?”

“He did not steal it. He burned it.”

DLR cursed, rubbed his face some more. “
¡Qué chingado!
How much?”

“All of it. We had roughly seventeen million U.S. dollars palletized and awaiting transfer to the banks. I'll get the figures from accounting and give you the exact amount.”

“And he just burned it? Set it on fire?”

“What about the men guarding the—”

“One dead. One more missing that we assume—”

“And all the rest? Surely, we had more men guarding seventeen million dollars!”

“We had a dozen men there. The rest are alive; they did not know there was any problem until the fire started. They never saw the Gray Man.”

“Fucking execute every one of those stupid
pendejos
.”

“Sí.”
Spider said, and he leaned out into the hallway. He barked commands to one of his underlings, sealing the fate of the survivors at the Chapala safe house.

“Daniel,” Calvo said, a soft pleading in his voice. “In four days he has performed nearly one dozen operations against us. I estimate the value of capital loss and production loss to be, conservatively, somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty million dollars.”

“He is costing me more than twelve million dollars a day?”

“Conservatively.”

“But how long can he continue?”

Spider spoke frankly. “
Mi jefe.
Our organization is set up to effectively fight the military, the federal police, and the rival cartels. We are less equipped to target one man with the mobility and skills of the Gray Man. There is no way to know how long he can operate before we get him.”

Calvo interjected, “We think it is possible he is getting his intelligence from Madrigal, but we don't know that he is working with the Madrigal organization.”

“Your counterpart in los Vaqueros, remind me of his name.”

“Hector Serna Campos.”

“Right. Reach out to him. Tell them it is war.”

“Daniel, going to war with Madrigal right now would only cost us more money. We cannot—”

De la Rocha screamed as he stormed from the balcony into his bedroom. “Do not tell me what I cannot do! They are fighting a war with me right now, through this one man!”

“We do not know for sure!”

“I know!” de la Rocha screamed, spit flew from his mouth, and he screamed again, a guttural cry of anger and frustration, pent-up rage without an outlet. “I
had
this man! I had this man in front of me in chains! I could have pulled the trigger on my pistol and ended this madness a week ago! Why did I not do this? Why did I not kill that
pendejo
? I've lost so many men because I did not pull the trigger.”

Calvo said, “He'll keep killing your men if you keep chasing him. He's too good!”

De la Rocha regained control of himself. He took a few breaths, rubbed the back of his bare neck, and then waved a dismissive hand. “Doesn't matter. Men are easy to lose. Pride? Pride is a very difficult thing to lose.”

He turned to Spider. “My decision is made. As of this moment, it is all-out war on los Vaqueros.”

“Anywhere we find them, anywhere in the country . . .

Spider looked into his leader's eyes. “They die.”

Calvo did not throw in the towel just yet. “Don Daniel. I
beg
you to listen. Spider wants war with Madrigal so that he can show you that his men can fight. They can't kill the Gray Man because of his skill and cunning, but they can shoot a bunch of
pinche
Vaqueros in the streets.”

Javier “Spider” Cepeda scowled at Nestor, giving him a look countless men had seen shortly before Spider chopped off their heads. “
Mi jefe
, the old man just wants to avoid war with los Vaqueros because he is soft. We have been too easy in our dealings with Madrigal for too long, and look how the Sinaloan Cowboy repays us! We will fight them until they kill the Gray Man or turn him over to us. My men will turn their plaza red with their blood, and within a week the Cowboy will see that the American assassin is only a liability to his operation. Then we can back off, if you order us to do so.”

DLR was nodding before Spider finished. He turned to Calvo. “Nestor. I want you to communicate with your counterpart in los Vaqueros. Tell him that we know they are running the Gray Man, and we see this as an all-out declaration of war on our plaza. We will hold them responsible for the loss in property and in lives, and we will respond accordingly as long as the Gray Man is alive.”

Nestor was furious and frustrated, but he did not hesitate. He possessed an astute barometer that could measure the moods of his boss, and he knew this was no time to argue. “
Sí
, Daniel. I will contact Hector Serna immediately and tell him we are at war, and I will then give him the conditions by which we will accept peace.”

The first attack took place a mere thirty-three minutes later. A pair of low-level
sicarios
in Mazatlan who'd been tasked to follow a local underboss in the Madrigal organization got the text message declaring open season on los Vaqueros. Immediately, they got up from their table at an outdoor café, tossed paper plates soaked with tamale juice into the trash, walked into the jewelry store across the street, and shot dead the man they had been tailing, along with his wife and two bodyguards.

Nine minutes after that a truck carrying four Vaqueros was pulled over by a Jalisco state police SUV on the highway from Puerto Vallarta to Guadalajara. The men were lined up and shot, execution style, against their vehicle, their bodies left on the hot mountain freeway like roadkill.

By evening twelve more Vaqueros had been murdered and seven wounded. Four members of Los Trajes Negros had been felled by return fire, and one passerby was wounded by shotgun pellets when a firefight broke out between rival factions of the federal police in Mexico City.

Thirty-two casualties in the first twelve hours of the war was only the beginning.

Two more days passed, and Court worked at a fever pitch through it all. His intelligence from Serna, as good as it was, paled in comparison to the product he was picking up during his raids. In Colima he took the smartphone from a sentry and found an address with the notation “Foco” by the listing. He knew this was the local slang for crystal, so he drove there and found a fenced storage facility full of shipping containers. There were several guards on duty, but Court managed to slip into the complex and place several ANFO bombs he'd built back at his mine shaft, each equipped with a simple radio transmitter detonator on them. Once clear of the blast radius, he dialed a number on one of his many mobile phones, and six containers of crystal went up in a mushroom cloud of black smoke.

On a hillside nearby he stopped to admire his work, but he saw a single man racing from the scene in a black BMW. Court ran the sport coupe off the road with his pickup, found a member of the Black Suits crawling from the wreckage, and took him hostage. Four hours later the man succumbed to his injuries but only after giving the American a treasure trove of information about de la Rocha's crystal operation in Nayarit and Jalisco.