Cartel (2 page)

Keying his microphone with his left hand, Scott called out, "Contact front. Contact front. One hostile down."

A window on the second floor broke outward. A rifle muzzle appeared and spit out a stream of gunfire. Garza, ten feet to Scott's right, tapped out a quick pair of three-round bursts. The gunman on the second floor tumbled headfirst through the window, taking the rest of the glass with him. He hit the sloped porch awning, slid off the edge, and landed on the flagstone courtyard with a bone-snapping thud.

"Hitch, Diego, cover the front," Scott shouted over his shoulder to the two drivers. Then he led the other three agents in a charge through the open front door.

* * * *

Kat bailed out of the back seat of the Tahoe before Mil-ler brought the truck to a full stop. Lundy, not quite two years out of Quantico, was right behind her carrying a sledgehammer. A narrow iron gate was set in the stucco wall behind the house, secured with a chain and padlock. Kat stood at the edge of the gate and covered the back of the villa with her M-6 while Lundy attacked the padlock with the sledgehammer.

It took him three whacks to spring the lock.

"You should spend more time in the gym," Kat said. "I could have popped that lock with one hit."

Lundy tossed the sledgehammer aside and brought up his M-6, which hung across his chest on a combat sling. "I missed with my first shot."

Kat smiled. "If I had a dollar for every time I heard a man say that."

"Children," Miller said, "let's go."

They ran through the gate and across the back courtyard toward the rear of the villa.

A blast of automatic fire shredded a ground-floor win-dow. Lundy went down but his momentum drove him skid-ding across the courtyard for several more feet. Kat glanced down and saw a smear of blood on the paving stones. She dropped to one knee and raised her M-6. Behind the shat-tered window stood the vague outline of a man holding the unmistakable silhouette of an M-16. Kat fired off half a magazine in return. When the smoke and debris cleared, the man was gone.

Lundy was holding his right shin and howling in pain. From Kat's admittedly inexpert perspective, the bone didn't look broken, so she doubted it had been a direct hit. A straight-on shot from a .223 at that range would have snapped Lundy's leg in half. So the blow must have been a glancing one that missed the bone, or maybe the bullet had ricocheted off a paving stone.

Kat laid a hand on the kid's shoulder. "You're going to be all right, Lundy. We'll be out of here in five minutes. By ten o'clock you'll be in a private room with your own person-al nurse."

He didn't answer, just gritted his teeth and nodded.

Kat glanced at Miller. "Can you get him back to the truck?"

Miller nodded. "What about you?"

"I'm going see how the guys are doing inside." Then she sprang up and ran toward the back of the villa.

Inside the big front door, Scott and Garza peeled right, while behind them Jackson and Cajun broke left. All four agents moved in the slightly-stooped, quick-paced walk that the SWAT types liked to call tactical advancement: elbows tucked in, M-6 carbines wedged tight into their shoulders, barrels angled down so they could look through the slits in their balaclavas and see over the tops of their four-power ACOG gunsights.

Moving in tandem, Scott and Garza threaded their way through the plush furnishings of a sunken den and up two steps to a large dining room. They slipped around a massive dinner table and its high-backed leather chairs, heading wordlessly toward a double-hinged kitchen door against the far wall. Without pausing, Scott smashed his way through the door and turned right. Garza turned left, the two agents running the walls in opposite directions, clearing the far cor-ners first, then sweeping their weapons toward the center of the room, expecting hostiles but finding none. The kitchen was clear.

Gunfire erupted upstairs.

Scott and Garza ran toward the staircase.

* * * *

Outside the villa, Kat pressed her back against the wall beside the shattered window from which Lundy had been shot. She heard movement just inside the window. The sound of boots walking on broken glass.

Above her someone else was firing from a window. Across the rear courtyard, she saw Miller dragging Lundy toward the back gate. They were almost there, but bullets were tearing up the flagstones all around them.

Another burst of gunshots exploded three feet from Kat's head, rattling her teeth and stabbing her eardrums. Chunks of stucco blew off the wall near Miller and Lundy. Kat was too close to use her M-6, so she snatched the Glock .40-caliber pistol from the drop-down holster on her hip and spun toward the shattered window, shoved the muzzle into the opening and snapped off half a dozen shots. The re-sponse was a guttural cry of pain followed by the thud of a heavy body hitting the floor. She stepped through the win-dow. A Mexican man, wearing just pants and boots, his up-per body covered in tattoos, lay dead on the tile floor, his brown eyes already going glassy.

* * * *

Scott took the stairs three at a time with Garza right be-hind him. They hadn't found Ortiz, and they had just heard more gunfire upstairs. Scott would not be surprised at all to find out that Ortiz was more a prisoner than a protectee, or that the men guarding him had orders to kill him rather than let him be captured by the Americans.

The top of the stairs opened onto a long hallway running to Scott's right. Midway down the hall a man was backing away from them. When he saw them he opened fire with an M-16. Scott and Garza dove in opposite directions, trying to bury themselves in the thick carpet as .223 rounds ripped through sheetrock and molding barely a foot above their heads. When Scott looked up the man was gone, but he saw a door at the end of the hallway slam shut.

Scott sprang to his feet, carbine up and ready. "Cover me," he shouted to Garza as he charged down the hall. The door was the last one on the right. Scott passed it and squeezed into the open space at the far end of the hall. He waved to Garza, then aimed his M-6 at the door. Garza ad-vanced down the hallway until he was crouched on the op-posite side of the door.

Scott shredded the lock with six rounds of high-velocity .223 ball ammo, then kicked open the door and tossed in a Def-Tech stun grenade. As soon as the grenade detonated, Scott and Garza stormed into the room. And froze.

On the far side of the bedroom, near a picture window, the gunman who had fired at them in the hallway stood with an arm clamped around Sergeant Felix Ortiz's neck and a pistol pressed to his temple. The gunman's empty M-16 lay on the floor.

Garza shouted at the man in Spanish. Scott, who didn't speak much Spanish, only caught the gist, something like "Drop the gun!"

Scott took a long step to the left and pressed his right eye to his ACOG scope. He settled the glowing red dot on the gunman's forehead.

Garza shouted again in Spanish. The man shouted back. Both of them used the word pendejo, which Scott under-stood was the Spanish equivalent of asshole, or maybe dum-bass. He wasn't sure. What he was sure of was that he had a good sight picture. He squeezed the trigger. The man's head literally exploded as the bullet tore through it and plastered the wall behind him with bone fragments, blood, and gobs of brain. The gunman collapsed like an imploded building. He didn't topple; he just sank, straight down.

Felix Ortiz dropped to his knees and clasped his hands in front of him like a supplicant praying for deliverance. He was sobbing and blubbering in Spanish. Scott couldn't un-derstand a word of it. Garza shoved Ortiz facedown on the floor and handcuffed him.

The three DEA Tahoes sat idling in the front courtyard. Scott stood beside the passenger door of the third Tahoe watching Diego-the team's de facto medic-wrap a pres-sure bandage around the lower part of Lundy's right leg as the agent squirmed and groaned. The wound was a nasty, bloody mess, and the lack of an exit wound meant the bullet was lodged somewhere in Lundy's calf. The rest of the agents were milling around the vehicles, eager to get back across the border. All of them had shed their balaclavas.

Kat, who sat in the rear seat behind Lundy, squeezed his shoulder. "It was just a ricochet, you big baby. Stop all that squalling. You sound like a girl."

Before Lundy could respond with a crack of his own-agents never got tired of ragging each other, regardless of the circumstances-Diego tapped a finger on the pressure bandage. "Hold that while I tape it." Lundy held the band-age but didn't put enough pressure on it to keep it from slipping when Diego tried to tape it in place. "I said hold it, goddamnit," Diego snapped.

Speaking through gritted teeth, Lundy said, "I am hold-ing it, but my fingers are slippery. With my own blood."

Diego repositioned the pressure bandage. "Hold it tight-er."

Lundy did as he was told and Diego wrapped a wide strip of medical duct tape around Lundy's lower leg.

"How bad is it?" Scott asked.

"He'll live," Diego said, "but we need to get him across the river and to a hospital."

Scott glanced at the lead Tahoe and saw Ortiz hand-cuffed in the back seat. He thought about how tough this operation was going to be to explain. An unauthorized and illegal armed incursion into Mexico was a potential career killer, especially if you got caught. But getting out clean with a high-value cartel target would be considered a major, if not officially acknowledged, success. Getting an agent shot on the wrong side of the border, though, was almost as bad as getting caught. So as far as his career was concerned, Scott knew there was probably no coming back from this. Still, he had a job to do, and that job wasn't finished until he got all of his people and his prisoner safely back across the border.

It was time to get moving. Except he was missing one agent. "Where's Garza?" Scott said.

"Over here," Garza called out.

Scott turned and saw him on the front porch, leaning over the body of the gunman Scott had killed.

"Come take a look at something," Garza said.

Scott walked over and stared at the body. The man's wife-beater T-shirt, which had already been stained with sweat and food, was now drenched in blood so dark it was almost black. Garza lowered himself onto one knee and bent closer, examining a tattoo of a bird on the man's bare shoul-der.

"What is it?" Scott asked.

"A diving falcon," Garza said without looking up.

"Mean anything?"

"Yeah," Garza said. "Means he's Sinaloa, not Los Zetas."

"That can't be right," Scott said. "Felix Ortiz works for Los Zetas and we know it was Los Zetas who kidnapped Mike."

Garza stood and pointed at the tattoo. "Right or not, that's a Sinaloa tattoo."

"Could he have switched sides?" Scott asked.

Garza shook his head. "Membership is for life. Leaving a cartel is considered desertion and punishable by death. Even if he got away, no other cartel would ever trust him. The way they look at it, once a traitor, always a traitor."

"Take a picture," Scott said. "We'll figure it out back at the office."

Garza pulled his iPhone from his cargo vest and snapped a photo of the tattoo.

Scott checked his watch. It was 6:30. They had been on site less than thirty minutes. "Saddle up," he shouted to the rest of his team. "Time to go home."

The three-vehicle convoy of DEA agents raced north on Mexican Federal Highway 85. They were twenty miles from the border. Traffic was light on the two-lane blacktop and they passed slower cars with ease. In the lead Tahoe, Scott glanced at the speedometer. Hitch was steady at eighty-five. Scott keyed his microphone. "Lundy, how you holding up?"

Miller, Lundy, and Kat were in the trail vehicle.

"I'll live," Lundy responded, his voice coming in slightly staticky over the radio. "Hurts like a son of a bitch, though."

"Hang tough, buddy," Scott said. "I'll get you a medal and a week on the beach with all the beer you can drink."

"Well, in that case," Lundy said, "shoot me in my other leg and give me two weeks."

Scott turned around in his seat. Ortiz sat behind Hitch, hands cuffed behind his back. And not with flexcuffs, but with good old-fashioned stainless steel Peerless handcuffs. Flexcuffs felt temporary. Real handcuffs felt like shackles. They felt permanent. Scott wanted Felix Ortiz to feel the bite of the steel against his skin.

Next to Ortiz sat Garza, staring out the window, not even giving the Mexican police sergeant the satisfaction of looking at him. But Ortiz had recovered some, Scott noticed. He was no longer the blubbering idiot with a pistol pressed to his head that they'd found in the upstairs bedroom of the villa. He was more relaxed now, maybe even growing a little cocky, although what he had to be cocky about Scott could-n't guess. The prospect of spending the next decade on death row, caged in a six-by-eight cell, waiting for the appeals to run out, and then finally being executed for murder was enough to take the starch out of anyone. So why wasn't he scared? Maybe he just needed a reality check.

"Sergeant Ortiz, my name is Scott Greene. I'm a super-visory special agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Ad-ministration. You are under arrest for conspiracy to murder DEA Special Agent Michael Cassidy. You have been indict-ed by a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Texas, and we are taking you to the United States where you will stand trial."

Ortiz smiled and for the first time Scott noticed that one of his upper teeth was silver, one of the canines or bicuspids, whatever the proper name for them was. "No entiendo in-gles."

Garza slammed his elbow into the side of Ortiz's head so hard that it drove the Mexican police sergeant's head into the side window. Ortiz slumped in his seat, his eyes clamped shut in pain. "Dijo que estas bajo arresto, cabrón. En-tiendes?" Garza shouted. He told you you're under arrest, asshole. Do you understand that?

Ortiz nodded but kept his eyes closed.

"Let's get him across the river in once piece," Scott said.

Garza shrugged. "If you say so."

"Sergeant Ortiz?" Scott said.