Ballistic (59 page)

The driver was the first through his door; he drew his .45 pistol as he stumbled out into the road.

In the black smoke billowing from the windows of the Suburban in front of him, the man in the motorcycle helmet appeared, he still carried the pack low on his left, and now his pistol was aimed high on his right.

The driver began to raise his weapon towards the threat, but three rounds to his chest spun him around, caused his .45 to sail from his hands. A fourth shot to the right side of his skull snapped his head to the side and killed him instantly. He fell dead on the blacktop as the two doors on the opposite side of the SUV opened and then closed again.

Inside Truck Two Calvo screamed at the two surviving members of his detail. “Fight him! Get out and fight him!” The men moved from side to side in their seats, but they were otherwise frozen in terror. They just watched as the man in the motorcycle helmet stood alongside their truck and reached into his bag.

“He has another bomb!” one shouted, but the man instead pulled out a piece of cardboard. He pushed it up to the windshield and the men inside the SUV read the single word written in black upon it.

“Calvo.”

All three men sat silently. The silence was broken by the slapping sound of an iron box covered in tar sticking to the driver-side window of the Suburban. The man in the black helmet stepped away from the vehicle, raised his pistol, and waited.

Twelve seconds later the side door of the truck opened, and Calvo was ejected by the boot heel of one of the two members of his security detail. Immediately, he fell down in thick wet cement that had inched back on the road to his side of the truck. The door shut behind him. He cursed as he tried to stand back up. The man in the motorcycle helmet stepped forward, his pistol still trained on the Suburban, and he grabbed the fifty-seven-year-old by his necktie, pulled him out of the cement and to the side of the road. Court walked backwards up the road, pulling the man with the cement-spackled coal black suit, still covering the SUV with his gun, until he disappeared around the side of the dump truck.

He let go of Calvo and reached into his backpack. He removed a black cell phone and handed it over to the Mexican.

In Spanish the man said, “Press 4. Then Send.”

Calvo did as he was told. Upon pressing the Send button an explosion rocked the canyon road fifty feet behind him. Shrapnel fired into the cement truck and pelted the hillside.

Thirty seconds later the cement mixer moved forward towards the west, and the only men left alive at the scene were buried under tons of rock and dirt.

A phone call was intercepted by intelligence agents from the Black Suits at three p.m. The call was recorded and then played back for Daniel de la Rocha and Spider Cepeda just twenty minutes later. It was determined that the call was placed from a mobile phone, and the caller was the American known as the Gray Man. The call was received on a landline at a Vaqueros safe house in Mazatlan and then patched through to the mobile phone of Hector Serna, chief of intelligence for los Vaqueros.

The entire conversation was in English.

“Who is this?”

“It's me.”

“Why did you call that number? Where did you get it?”

“The number you gave me is compromised by the Black Suits. Calvo told me himself. I got this number from Jerry Pfleger the other day. I knew whoever answered could get in touch with you eventually.”

“You have Calvo?”

“Yes.”

“Incredible. Still, this line cannot be trusted.”

“It's clean.”

“How do you know?”

“Calvo doesn't know about it.”

“What if he's lying?”

“He is too scared to lie.”

A pause. “Very well. When will you deliver him to us?”

“Calvo says the Black Suits know about the safe house in Tepic. We need to change the location.”

A long pause. “All right.”

“I can take him to the safe house where he was going today.”

“No. They obviously know the location of—”

“It's the only other place I know of. They won't be expecting us to hand him over. There is no reason to suspect they will be there.”

“I don't like it.”

“Do you want him back or not?”

“Of course we want him back.” A short delay. “What time?”

“Midnight.”

“Why not earlier?”

“I think there are others looking for me. CIA. Russians. It will take some time to cover my tracks and get there.”

“We will come to you. Tell me where you—”

“Midnight. The ranch in Concordia. I'll be there. Bring a lot of men and a lot of guns.” The call ended.

At five p.m. the leadership of the Black Suits met in the huge main
sala
of the Casa de las Olas, an eleven-thousand-square-foot modernistic mansion overlooking the beach fifteen minutes south of downtown Puerto Vallarta on Federal Highway 200.

The men present in the meeting were protected by two dozen more
sicarios
patrolling the lush ten-acre estate, and they, in turn, were surrounded by Puerto Vallarta municipal police on the payroll of DLR. The cops patrolled the neighborhood in squad cars and sat in a pair of small, armed speedboats out on the water, just past the breakers.

Spider ran the main portion of the meeting while DLR stood next to him.

“Four teams will hit the Concordia ranch at 12:05 a.m., four separate vans will attack from each point on the compass. A fifth team will come in behind the main attack with the objective of receiving Nestor and then taking him out of the area. We will all meet back here by dawn.”

De la Rocha sipped bottled water and looked through the fifteenfoot-high windows off his left towards Bandaras Bay. He was distracted for many reasons, not the least of which was that he would not be going on the rescue mission to recover his consigliere. It was determined to be too dangerous for the organization itself to expose DLR to what was certain to be one hell of a firefight.

Spider, the leader of the armed wing, would also be staying behind. Daniel had ordered this, and Spider was not happy about it, but since the execution of Emilio Lopez Lopez, Spider had been in charge of DLR's safety, so it only made since he would stay at the house by DLR's side.

Both men had led forces into battle, and neither man wanted to stay behind at this palace on the beach while their soldiers fought and bled and died and killed one hundred miles north of here. But logic prevailed.

And DLR had a feeling that staying here tonight, with a relatively small contingent of twenty armed men or so, would not be without action of its own.

As the discussions of the coming operation petered out and the men who would soon head off to battle began strapping weapons and gear to their bodies, DLR stepped out of the
sala
and onto a raised dining room open to the great room. As soon as they'd arrived at the rented villa, he'd ordered the long table removed and his largest Santa Muerte idol erected in its place. The skeleton sat on its throne in the center of the room, behind it white curtains hung from the high ceiling down to the wood floor of the dining room, candle sconces ringed the throne and the room itself. Daniel knelt down in front of his patron saint, said a prayer for his family, and said a prayer for the death of the Gray Man.

At the end of his last prayer he looked up slowly into the face of la Santa Muerte, then called out to Spider. Cepeda shot out of the scrum of his men down in the
sala
and up the three steps to the raised dining hall.

“
Sí
, Don Daniel?”

“Do you think the gringo really got the phone number he called today from Jerry Pfleger?”

“No. Calvo gave him that number because he knew his agents were monitoring it. The old bastard is as cunning as they come.”

DLR nodded. “Yes. He is very cunning.”

Spider stood dutifully over his master.

DLR turned and looked up to him. “I want everyone staying behind ready for action tonight.”

Spider nodded. Confused. “Of course.”

Daniel stood and left the dining room through the curtains, heading for his master suite in the back of the mansion.

A cluster of small, uninhabited islands sit in Bandaras Bay, just a few hundred yards off of Mismaloya. Collectively called Los Arcos, they are named for the archlike formations carved out of the rock by centuries of pounding surf. During the day the protected marine reserve around Los Arcos was full of scuba divers, snorkelers, and pleasure boats, but one hour before midnight the only creatures in the waters around the tiny islands were fish, lobster, sleeping blue-footed boobies and other sea birds.

Fifty yards closer to shore a pair of private boats bobbed in the water. In each boat four men sat with M16 rifles in their laps. Two men in each boat had an M203 grenade launcher mounted on their M16s.

Each boat also had a radio and a two-million-candlepower flashlight to scan the calm water in all directions.

They were hardly battleships, but the two converted gunboats would certainly present an obstacle for anyone trying to make it to the back of Casa de las Olas from the water.

Court Gentry knelt waist-deep in water that was surging back and forth in the black recesses of a small grotto in one of the rocks of Los Arcos. His eyes looked past the two small boats and towards the white sand beach beyond them. A pair of men with flashlights strolled back and forth on the sand, rifles hanging on their backs. A wall of white boulders and brown shale ran up to the right of the small beach.

Past the men, past the beach, up the hill, he scanned the palatial estate. It looked a bit like a space station. It was a modern glass-andsteel structure, all hard metal edges and glass walls. The focal point of the back of the house was a balcony than ran along a gargantuan window. On the other side of the glass Court could just make out dim lighting, perhaps from candles. Much of the grounds of the property were well lit and, Court assumed, well protected. But from here the building itself seemed buttoned up and quiet.

On the highest point of the southern wing of the huge mansion, a black Eurocopter EC135 sat in complete darkness. Only the few streetlights and glowing buildings higher on distant hills framed its silhouette.

Court took a few minutes to deflate his small rubber boat and to tuck it into a dry nook in the grotto out of sight of the coast. Then he turned to his equipment arrayed on a rocky shelf just above the water line. He donned his scuba gear and his fins, slung a long coiled rope to his tank, connected his Glock to his Buoyancy Control Device, and attached his bag of clothing, extra magazines, and other items to his utility belt.

He pulled a mobile phone out of a protected case, powered it up, and made a phone call. Court said what he had to say and then hung up as the man on the other end screamed and cussed.

The phone went back in the case; the case went back in the bag.

At twenty minutes past eleven p.m. Court sank slowly below the water in the grotto, pushed off with his gloved hands, kicked his legs, and began swimming away from Los Arcos and towards the shore.