Ghost Sniper (32 page)

81

TOLUCA, MEXICO

22:45 HOURS

Vaught closed the hatch, moving across the roof in a combat crouch, relieved to be free of the death trap below. Was he abandoning the others? Possibly, but not out of cowardice. He had a score to settle with Rhett Hancock, and if he made a mistake, the sniper would make him pay with 42 grams of lead moving at 3,000 feet per second. The FX-05 was fixed with a red dot scope, giving him a small measure of “night vision” when it came to aiming, but until he could close the distance, Hancock would hold every advantage—not the least of which being that Vaught had no idea where the hell he was.

He crossed to the next rooftop and went to the edge, stealing a glance at the street below and pulling quickly back. Men were converging on the shoe store with rifles and RPGs. He could shoot some of them and buy Crosswhite some time, but if Hancock was watching, they'd be his last shots. Still, his instincts were telling him the
sniper was not set yet, so he swung the rifle over the parapet and fired a grenade at the lead RPG man.

The grenade hit the wall next to the rocketeer, blowing a hole in the brick wall and killing the man instantly.

Vaught immediately opened up with the FX-05, cutting down six more men as they scrambled to find cover where there was none. The weapon ran through ammo a little faster than he was accustomed to, but he hit everyone he meant to before pulling back to reload. He would not go back to the well a second time, no matter how tempting.

Hancock, meanwhile, had been moving along a rooftop on the opposite side of the street when Vaught opened up. He heard the grenade explode and saw the flashes of Vaught firing on full automatic. But by the time he got the Barrett unslung, Vaught had disappeared behind a large plastic water tank called a
tinaco
. So he set the bipod of the giant rifle on a ventilation duct and waited for Vaught to reemerge on the opposite side. When he didn't reappear, he began to suspect he'd been spotted.

VAUGHT STOOD WITH
his back against the tinaco, indeed having spotted a shadowy figure on the far roof. Confident he'd come within a breath of having his guts blown out, he tapped on the tinaco with his knuckle to make sure it was full of water, which would stop even an armor piercing round from coming all the way through.

The cannon across the street went off a few seconds later, and he felt the impact of the round reverberate through the tank. Water began leaking out onto the roof—and not from one hole but two. Hancock had shot the side of the tinaco near the bottom, leaving entrance and exit holes no more than six inches apart.

A second shot boomed out, and water began running out from two more holes.

“How much water you got over there?” the sniper shouted.

Vaught wasn't sure, but he doubted the tank held more than three hundred gallons. The great gun went off again, and two more holes appeared on the opposite side.

After a fourth shot, water was literally gushing from the tank.

“
Goddamn
, that's gotta be scary!” Hancock taunted, his laughter carrying over the distant echo of the battle being fought on the east side of town. “Two minutes from now, you'll be dead!”

Vaught sank into a deep crouch against the side of the tinaco, measuring the distance to the next rooftop, where a three-foot-high parapet encircled the edge. But the truth was that even if he made it to the next roof, Hancock's armor piercing rounds would easily defeat the simple clay-brick and mortar parapet, which had not been built with the intention of stopping antiaircraft bullets.

“The bastard's right,” he muttered, thumping the muzzle of the rifle against his forehead in frustration. He double-checked the distance to the south, back the way he'd come, where the parapet was thicker, but the distance was twice as far.

Then he remembered the smoke grenade in his trouser pocket. “Dumb-ass!” he hissed at himself, pulling the grenade and popping smoke on the north side of the tinaco.

“You'll still never make it!” Hancock shouted. “Too far!”

Vaught jumped out on the south side of the tank where there was no smoke, firing the grenade launcher and pulling back.

The grenade detonated, and he took off north through the smoke, sprinting across the roof and vaulting the thin parapet to run clean across to the next building and into a concrete cupola encasing a stairwell.

Hancock, covered in mortar dust, sat up behind the air duct and rested back on his hands, a loud ringing in is ears.

“Clever prick,” he muttered, spitting out bits of grit.

He got back behind the Barrett and saw the smoke dissipating over the far rooftop. His prey had escaped—but only for the moment. He used his phone to call the men below, ordering them to hunt Vaught at street level.

The narcos in the street fired an RPG through the door of the building into which Vaught had escaped and stormed inside.

Vaught heard the explosion and started back up the stairs. Hid
ing inside the cupola, he waited and fired on the first shadows to appear below, killing three men and forcing back the rest.

Vicious threats were called up to him, but he ignored them. He did not step out onto the roof, believing that Hancock would burn him down the second he showed himself.

Knowing he had the angle on the men below and plenty of ammo to keep them at bay for the time being, he was content with a standoff.

“We'll let the situation develop,” he said quietly, crouching down and tucking a pinch of tobacco into his lip. “Good shape here . . . good shape.”

82

TOLUCA, MEXICO

23:00 HOURS

Chief Diego Guerrero had the makings of a disaster on his hands, and he didn't need Special Forces training to see it. His force was outgunned and outnumbered at least two to one. He'd tried calling again for federal assistance, but the phone lines were down, and the enemy had managed to knock out cellular service as well. He supposed they had destroyed the cell towers, a common tactic.

Wounded men were being brought into the coffee shop by twos and threes now, leaving blood all over the place. One machine gun emplacement had already been hit by an RPG from the roof of the bank, and the enemy was moving in and out of their perimeter almost at will. There were no more motorized patrols. The trucks that weren't burning were being used to move or provide cover for the wounded.

“There's no more word from Sergeant Cuevas,” said another sergeant, tossing aside the radio. “They must be dead.”

“It doesn't matter,” Diego said. “We're going to lose the city.
There are too many of them. And with the rockets . . .” He shook his head. “I've failed. It's time to consider surrender.”

“Surrender?” the sergeant blurted. “Are you crazy? They'll line us up and shoot us!”

Diego shook his head. “No. Only me. I will offer my life in exchange for yours. Ruvalcaba is smart enough to see the sense in sparing the men. A slaughter will only make it more difficult for him to buy friends in the government.”

The sergeant, a man named José, pointed out the window. “Ruvalcaba's not out there! He's probably hundreds of miles from here! Do you think you can negotiate with wild animals?”

Diego was calm. “What choice do I have but to try, José? The men will certainly be killed otherwise—all of them.”

“Then let them die fighting,” José insisted. “Not stood up against a wall!”

Diego looked around at the almost twenty bleeding men crowding the coffee shop, many of them barely conscious. “What do you men think?”

“We fight on,” one of them said. He gestured with a pistol. “Or we kill ourselves.”

“No surrender,” said another.

“Never surrender!”

“Never!”

The others nodded in stubborn agreement.

“Very well,” Diego said. “Then we will fight.” He accepted a carbine from an officer too badly wounded to walk and collected his spare magazines. “Let's go, Sergeant. Our Calvary awaits.”

They ducked outside and darted across the square to the nearest machine gun emplacement.

Diego took a knee beside the gunner as bullets flew through the trees over their heads. “How much ammunition do you have?”

“After this belt, one box,” the officer said. “We're going to lose the square,
Jefe
. You should take a truck and try to get through to the capital. Someone has to tell what happened here.”

Diego patted him on the back. “That will be a story for someone else to tell. I will never abandon you men.”

The officer squeezed the trigger, putting a burst into a parked car where a couple of narcos had just taken cover. One of the narcos sprawled out dead, and the other scurried back around the corner of the bank.

“There!” José exclaimed, pointing above the courthouse. “I saw a man with an RPG.”

Diego looked around. His men were pulled into a protective perimeter in the town square, using their trucks, as well as park benches, statues, and trees, for cover. He estimated that half his force was dead or wounded. “Let's go,” he said to José. “We have to kill the man with the rocket.”

“
Jefe
, no!” the gunner said. “It's too dangerous. We you need you here.”

“He's right,” José said, grabbing Diego's arm. “I'll take someone else. You stay and lead the men.”

Diego watched him pick a man, and the two officers ran off toward the courthouse. “I wish my brother were here,” he said plaintively.

“You're the
jefe
,” the gunner said. “We stayed to fight with
you
.”

Diego nodded and said a silent prayer, asking for help—not from the Virgin, as he normally might have done, but from his brother:
Juan, if you are watching, and if there is any help to send these men, now would be very a good time.

Then he made a separate pact with God.

JOSÉ USED HIS
key, and both officers slipped unseen into the courthouse, dashing to the back of the building and up the staircase. José noticed the officer wheezing during the climb.

“What's wrong?”

“I was hit crossing the park.”

José saw him holding his side in the dim light. “Can you continue? You can wait for me here.”

“There are many men on the roof,” the officer said. “I've seen them taking shots at us. You're going to need me, but we'd better hurry. I'm losing a lot of blood.”

Putting from his mind the fact that the officer would be dead soon whether or not they were successful, José continued the climb to the third floor. There he found the door to the roof locked, as it should have been. He grabbed his key ring. “They must be using ladders,” he observed.

“I'm sure they're accessing the annex roof in back—climbing up from there.”

“I hadn't thought of that.” José put the key into the lock. “Are you ready?”

“Yes, but what's the plan?”

“Open the door and shoot everyone.”

The wounded officer couldn't help laughing. José laughed with him. “Okay? Let's go!”

He turned the key, pushing open the door, and they scrambled out onto the rooftop, where better than twenty
narcotraficantes
were crouched behind the parapet overlooking the park—four of them armed with RPGs for delivering a coup de grâce to the police forces below.

“Puta madre!”
José hissed, having expected to find five or six men.

Both cops opened up on full automatic, moving low and fast, as the Americans had trained them. They mowed down six men apiece before the narcos even knew they were under attack, killing all four rocketeers, and ducking behind an air-conditioning unit to reload.

One of the narcos grabbed up an RPG and fired just as the wounded officer was raising up for another shot. The rocket hit him in the face and took off his head without detonating, exploding somewhere behind the courthouse as José raked his weapon along the parapet, knocking over a half dozen more narcos on the first pass. The remaining six men scattered, firing on José from all directions as he ejected the spent magazine and slapped in a new one.

He was hit multiple times as he rose up from behind the unit,
determined to live long enough to clear the roof. Placing controlled bursts in what felt like slow motion, pivoting left to right in a tight corkscrew that carried him through an arc of better than 180 degrees, the sergeant killed or wounded the last of the narcos.

The carbine ran dry, and he landed on his tailbone with bone-jarring force, biting his tongue and falling over onto his back. In the moments before his death, José lay looking up at the stars and remembering—strangely he thought—that his worthless brother-in-law still owed him twenty-six hundred pesos.

83

TOLUCA, MEXICO

23:15 HOURS

An RPG tore through the steel security curtain of the shoe store display window, blasting fragments of molten steel and glass through the shop like a giant shotgun blast. One officer was killed outright, and Crosswhite was thrown across the floor. Shoes and wounded men caught fire, and Crosswhite jumped back up, running to the door and shooting at the shadows in the street.

The carbine shattered in his hands, followed by the instant
boom!
of Hancock's .50 caliber.

He threw himself flat as the great rifle
boomed
again. The big bullet ricocheted off the concrete, sending hot pieces of spall into the wounded. The men screamed and tried to crawl deeper into the shop.

“We have to surrender!” one of the officers shouted.

Crosswhite grabbed his carbine away from him. “Surrender then, goddamnit. Let 'em cut your balls off! See to the wounded!” he ordered another, not knowing what else to say.

He could feel his lacerated hands bleeding as he mounted the staircase to the roof, finding it hard to keep a good grip on the weapon. “Motherfuckin' sonofabitch!” he snarled. “Goddamn cocksucker, I'll blow your fuckin' brains out!”

He threw open the hatch and crawled out onto the roof, knowing exactly how naked he was but too pissed to care. Paolina and the baby were in the back of his mind, but he knew now that he would never see his young wife again—that some other man would raise his daughter.

“Fuckin' Pope! Cocksucker!” he sneered, belly-crawling toward the parapet. “I'm gonna die on a goddamn shoe store, you motherfucker!” He glanced up at the sky on the off chance one of the CIA director's stealth drones might be up there and gave it the finger.

Hancock's rifle went off again, and he sprang into a crouch, firing at a pair of shadows on the far rooftop. Both shadows went down, and he dropped flat, rolling to the south side of the roof without taking any return fire.

The rocketeer beside Hancock was hit in the face and killed instantly. Hancock was hit in the shoulder. He swore a blue streak as he crawled closer to the parapet, pulling the Barrett after him by the strap, not knowing if the smartass on the far roof would have any grenades to pitch across.

“Shit just got real,” he told himself, knowing the bullet was still in him, possibly embedded in the bone, and feeling that the stitches in his leg were torn open.

“Hey!” he shouted, stuffing gauze into the shoulder wound. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Fuck you care?” Crosswhite called back.

“Got me pretty good, asshole!”

“Stand the fuck by! I'm about to do better!”

Hancock laughed, crawling south along the roof in the direction of the voice.

Crosswhite crawled quickly toward the north, keeping low behind the parapet. A few seconds later, Hancock's rifle went off, and
an armor-piercing round blasted a hole in the brick-and-mortar parapet, very close to where Crosswhite had been.

He sprang up and fired at Hancock's silhouette just as the sniper was squeezing the trigger a second time, the carbine slippery in his bleeding hands.

Hancock fell over.

“How'd I do that time?” Crosswhite shouted across. When Hancock didn't answer, he smiled. Crosswhite knew he hadn't killed him—his aim had been off—but he'd hurt him.

“I'll wait for him to come back up for air,” he said to himself, opening fire on the narcos below and shouting to his cops that the sniper was down.

The police downstairs began firing into the street, and Ruvalcaba's men fell back.

Hancock's shadow appeared once again over the parapet, but Crosswhite fired on him before he could raise the heavy rifle, driving the sniper back under cover.

“Come on, show me some more!” Crosswhite taunted. “Lemme air that shit out for ya!”

Hancock's sluggish movement had told Crosswhite that the gringo sniper was badly hurt.

“Don't you die on me over there! You suck that shit up and fight me!”

Hancock sprang up unexpectedly, firing a round through the parapet one foot from where Crosswhite was crouched.

“Fuck me!” Crosswhite murmured, displacing fast and firing at the sniper's silhouette before he could track him.