Ghost Sniper (33 page)

84

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

00:30 HOURS

Pope sat staring with bloodshot eyes at a television monitor, watching an aerial view of the battle for Toluca in infrared. Midori stood behind him, her arms crossed in bitter disapproval. After Crosswhite had thrust his finger toward the sky, there had been no doubt that it was him.

“I hope he kills that son of a bitch and comes for you,” she said, ashamed to have been even a small part of what was happening.

“Perhaps he will,” Pope said quietly. “The UAV's at bingo fuel. I have to bring it back to American airspace.”

“Do something!” she implored. “Help them!”

He turned to look at her, a slightly incredulous look on his face. “What do you suggest I do?”

She pointed at the screen. “Call somebody down there!”

“There's no one to call. It's quite out of my hands.”

“Is the drone armed?”

“Of course not.”

She smirked, her emotions getting the better of her. “You say that like it's an impossibility.”

He gave her a frown. “I don't send armed UAVs over allied countries; you know that very well.” Returning his attention to the monitor, Pope gripped the joystick and banked the aircraft northward. “I shouldn't have invited you to watch.”

“Why did you?”

“I don't know. I thought . . . I thought we might reestablish a trust. I see now that all I've managed to do is make things worse between us.”

Midori had worked for Pope for over ten years, and she knew him well enough to understand how sincere a gesture this had been. Because of that, she was unable to help feeling compassion for him. “You really don't understand what you've done, do you?” she said. “You've started a war down there. Those men are dying, Robert.”

He put the UAV on autopilot and turned in the chair, gently taking hold of her hands. “We've watched thousands of people die on these monitors. Tonight is nothing different. Don't forget that two nuclear weapons came across that border—
two
. I cannot allow that to happen again. Not if it's within my power to prevent it.”

She pulled her hands free. “Do you still think that's what this is about? Tonight has nothing to do with the border—nothing.”

“I've already admitted to you this operation got out of hand. But it got out of hand only because Vaught exceeded his mission parameters—an accident of fate—an unknown variable that I could not have accounted for ahead of time. What's happening down there now is fate playing itself out, nothing more.”

“And when the smoke clears?”

“I have no idea. We have to see who's left standing.”

Midori stared at him, her slow eyes dark and sad—a sadness brought on by the irrevocable truth that the Pope she had respected and admired for so many years no longer existed. He had evolved into a man who could reduce a human life to nothing more than a
blip on a screen. And he could do so with little more care than it took to brush his teeth.

“I'm going home now,” she said quietly.

“Good night,” he said in his gentle voice.

She put her hand on the doorknob. “By the way, it's official: Lena Deiss and Sabastian Blickensderfer are getting married in eight days. Do you still want me to continue surveillance?”

“No,” Pope replied, turning back to the monitor and placing his hand on the stick. “Discontinue all surveillance. We've wasted enough time on Blickensderfer.”

85

TOLUCA, MEXICO

23:30 HOURS

Vaught waited for his moment and then fired a 40 mm high-­explosive grenade into the doorway at the bottom of the stairs. He charged down and machine-gunned the survivors, stomping a crawling man's neck on the way out the door.

“Jackasses,” he sneered contemptuously.

Stepping into the street, Vaught could hear the fighting on the east side of town reaching a gut-wrenching crescendo—sustained bursts of automatic fire and multiple explosions—and he was hit with the dreadful realization that Diego and his men were being slaughtered.

Down the block, he heard Crosswhite and Hancock harangue each other a last time. Vaught immediately zeroed the sniper's position and dashed across. “Got you now, motherfucker!”

HANCOCK HAD BEEN
hit straight across the back by one of Vaught's NATO rounds. Both shoulder blades were grazed, and his
infraspinatus muscles spasmed painfully every time he attempted to lift and aim the rifle. His fingers were tingling, and he was going into shock.

“Time to go,” he groaned, dragging himself and the Barrett into the stairwell. Hancock trotted down to the ground floor, ducking into the street, where the narcos were gunning it out at almost point-blank range with the policemen in the shoe store.

He knew from the ferocity of fighting on the east side that the city was about to fall. “My work here is done!” He ran off up the sidewalk through the dark until he made it to the corner where his bodyguards stood waiting impatiently beside the midnight-blue Dodge Charger.

“Let's get the hell out of here. I need a medic.”

The other two men gladly loaded up, and the car sped off.

CROSSWHITE VERY NEARLY
shot Vaught when he appeared on the rooftop across the street. But Vaught gave him a wave and fired an HE grenade into the narcos below, killing four men and opening up and full automatic.

With apparently no sniper to worry about, Crosswhite stood up and opened fire as well.

The narcos were now caught in a murderous cross fire with nowhere to run. Within ten seconds, fifteen men lay dead in the street.

“Is the son of a bitch dead?” Crosswhite shouted over.

Vaught took a small flashlight from his harness, flashing it around. “I don't see him!”

“He's gotta be there! Look for a blood trail—he's hit!”

Vaught found the trail of blood and followed it down to ground level, where Crosswhite and five other police officers met him in the middle of the street, all of them looking at one another in dismay.

“He can't have disappeared!” Crosswhite said. “He's hit—I hit him!” He turned toward the bodies. “Check these assholes!”

Everyone took out a flashlight and checked the corpses for the face of a gringo, but Hancock was not among the dead.

“Goddamnit!” Vaught shouted. “How did you lose him?”

“What the fuck are you talkin' about?” Crosswhite retorted. “He was on your side of the fucking street!”

“Fuck!” Vaught kicked a body. “We had him, Dan!
We fucking had him
!
”

The fighting on the east side suddenly fell off to nothing, and everyone knew the city had fallen.

“Well, shit!” Crosswhite said in disgust. “There's no time to worry about it now. We gotta get the wounded outta here. We'll escape across the west side.”

A pair of trucks came roaring around the corner, and everyone brought their weapons to bear.

“Hold fire!” Vaught shouted, seeing that the trucks were loaded with federal troops.

Chief Diego jumped down from the running board of the lead truck, his left arm in a sling and blood dripping from his fingers. “Thank God some of you are still alive!”

Lieutenant R. Felix got out on the driver's side, his troops already dismounting to form a defensive perimeter around the shoe store, spreading out up the street. The officers led the medics inside, shining their lights on the wounded men who were covered with the dust and debris of battle.

Vaught recognized Lieutenant Felix from the morning after the quake. “We didn't lose the city?”

Felix shook his head. “Toluca still belongs to the people. Where is Sergeant Cuevas?”

“He's over there.” Vaught gestured at the body. “The sniper got him. I'm sorry. He was a damn good man.”

“Yes, he was,” Felix said, going to the body and making the sign of the cross upon seeing the face of his dead friend.

Crosswhite led Diego into the shoe store so that he could see his wounded men. “How many did we lose?”

“Half, I think,” Diego said, kneeling down to take the hand of a young officer who was obviously dying. “Yes, I think half.”

“Who sent the army?”

Diego had already begun to say the last rights over the young officer. When he finished, he kissed the man's forehead and rose to his feet, thumbing the tears from his eyes. “I'm sorry. What did you ask me?”

Confused, Crosswhite looked down at the dead young man and then back at Diego. “You're a priest?”

“No. I am not ordained, but I hope that God will accept this man into his Holy Kingdom long enough for me to become so.”

“I don't understand. We just won! You're going back to the seminary?”

“I promised God that if he saved the city, I would return to the priesthood. He sent the soldiers, and the city was saved. I will keep my promise.”

Crosswhite opened his mouth, but seeing the look in Diego's eyes, he knew there would be no point in trying to dissuade him. “Well . . . well, good job, then!” He bumped Diego briskly on the shoulder with a bloody hand. “You're a brave man, Diego. You kept your men together, and you saved the city. Juan would be proud of you.”

“The Holy Father saved the city, and my brother sits at his right hand. Thank you for shedding your blood with us. I am forever in your debt.” Diego shook Crosswhite's hand, turning for the door and stepping out just as Vaught was striding in.

“Who sent the army?” Crosswhite asked him quietly.

Vaught glanced outside. “That lieutenant out there, Felix, he was good friends with Cuevas. Cuevas got through to him just before the attack, and Felix talked a battalion of men into acting without orders. The federal government doesn't even know they're here yet.”

“Well, you can bet your ass they'll be taking credit for the victory by sunrise. Come on, let's get these men loaded up. I wanna get home to my wife.”

“Hey, ya know,” Vaught said, following his lead, “I've been meaning to ask you something.”

“What?” Crosswhite positioned himself to lift one of the wounded men by the shoulders.

Vaught took the man's ankles. “Does Paolina have a sister?”

“Yeah, she does,” Crosswhite said, grunting as they lifted the man from the floor. “She's about four years old. Want her number?”

Vaught laughed, backing out the door. “You're such an asshole.”

“PULL OVER,” HANCOCK
said, seeing an army truck flash through an intersection up ahead. “Stop the car!”

The driver stopped in the center of the road. “What's wrong? We have to go. The army is here!”

“I can see that. Put the car in park.”

The driver shifted into park. “What are we doing, cabrón? We don't have time for this!”

“That's no shit.” Hancock raised his .357 Sig and shot him through the face. Then he quickly shot the passenger in the back of the head, blowing out his teeth.

He took off his US Army dog tags and slipped them around the passenger's neck before getting out of the car and jamming the Barrett into the front seat butt-first, leaving the barrel sticking out the window. Stripping his battle gear and extra magazines, Hancock dumped it all in the passenger's lap and pulled the pin from a grenade, tossing it into the backseat and ducking away down an alley. The grenade exploded, engulfing the car quickly in flames.

86

STATE OF CHIAPAS, MEXICO

18:00 HOURS

Gil and Poncho sat smoking Delicados cigarettes in the undergrowth near a winding jungle road just after a rain, ten miles south of the pueblo Frontera Comalapa near the border with Guatemala. Their faces streaked with charcoal, each wore the digital-camouflage battle dress uniforms of the Mexican army, and each was armed with an FN SCAR Mk 17 CQC rifle with a thirteen-inch barrel, chambered in 7.62×51 mm NATO.

Poncho was a dark-skinned Mexican with distinct Aztec features, handsome and somewhat short of stature at five foot six. His English was nearly perfect, with only a slight accent. A former GAFE operator like Antonio Castañeda, he had trained with the Green Berets in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in the early 2000s.

Gil took a deep drag from the Delicado. “Shit,” he muttered, suddenly light-headed. “There's nothin' delicate about this fucker. It's like smokin' a tire.”

Poncho chuckled. “Delicados aren't for little girls.”

Gil snickered. “I wish you'd'a warned me. I feel like I oughta put on a dress.”

Poncho smiled. He'd been paying Gil close attention for the past ten hours. “What the hell are you doing down here sweating your balls off in the jungle? I can tell from talking to you that you don't have an interest in our problems—our politics.”

Gil took another drag and shrugged. “This is where the fight is right now.”

Poncho felt he understood. “I know who you are, you know. I don't remember your name, but I recognize your face from a magazine. You're the SEAL sniper who won the Medal of Honor.”

Silence hung in the still jungle air, the sun beginning to shine down through the trees in smoky rays. “Partner, you got me confused with some whole other body.”

“No, I don't.”

Gil scratched his unshaven neck where the sweat was beginning to irritate his skin. “Then I'll ask you to keep it a secret, soldier to soldier. The world thinks I'm dead, and I want it to stay that way.”

“Why?”

“I got taxes I don't wanna pay.”

Poncho snorted, deciding the real answer must be none of his business.

“Let me ask
you
something,” Gil said. “What are you doing working for a butcher like Castañeda? You're a soldier through and through. It's obvious.”

Poncho crushed the cigarette against the trunk of a giant fig tree, tucking the butt into a pocket. “I didn't come to work for him until after the truce with the government. I accept only special operations like this one. He pays very well, but I won't make war on civilians. He knows that.”

“You helped him kill off the
Zetas
?” Pronounced “
seta,”
for the letter
z
, the Zeta cartel had terrorized Mexico for decades until Castañeda had crushed it with military-style tactics.

“Yeah,” Poncho said. “Those we didn't kill either went into hiding or came to work for us.”

“So where does your loyalty lie? With Mexico? Or the money?”

Poncho looked at him. “If it was with Mexico, I wouldn't be working for Castañeda. I'd be a bricklayer like my father.” He hesitated. “I'll tell you a secret, though: solder to soldier.”

Gil waited to hear.

“If he ever breaks the truce and starts warring on civilians again, I'll kill him myself. That, he
doesn't
know.”

“Sounds like maybe your loyalty lies with Mexico.”

“I'll let you say it.” Poncho averted his eyes. “I'd feel like a hypocrite.”

“All war is hypocrisy.” Gil took a drag. “It's a thing we gotta live with.”

Poncho's radio crackled in his earpiece, and he touched the throat mike, acknowledging the transmission. “We're on,” he said, getting to his feet.

Gil snuffed the cigarette and got up, shrugging to adjust his harness. Seconds later they were moving fast at port arms toward the dirt road. With each footfall, Gil felt the bite of the titanium implant in his right foot, the result of a gunshot wound eighteen months earlier. He was used to the pain by now, knowing the implant wouldn't fail him in combat.

Poncho dashed across the road to take up position behind another giant fig tree. Gil remained on the opposite side, skirting east of Poncho's position to conceal himself behind a boulder that had been pushed there during the road's construction decades earlier.

A small convoy of three shiny black four-wheel-drive vehicles came through the curve at forty-five miles per hour. The first truck passed Poncho's position, and he tossed a spike strip across the road just before the second truck in line went by.

All four tires on the second truck deflated, and the truck slewed around on the road, skidding to a controlled stop.

As the lead truck approached his position, Gil stood up and
machine-gunned the driver, killing him with a burst of .308 caliber fire through the neck and head. The truck crashed off the road into a ditch. He biffed a fragmentation grenade after it and then darted toward the other vehicles. The grenade exploded as the men in the truck were dismounting with their weapons. The explosion tore apart the truck and hurled their mangled bodies into the bush.

Poncho was firing on the third vehicle, which had swerved off the road to avoid crashing into the second. He killed the five men before anyone had the chance to open a door.

All four doors of the second truck, however, were flying open, and armed men were jumping out shooting. Gil shot two of them dead and rolled for cover to reload.

The gunners fired on Poncho, driving him back to cover behind his fig tree, and then quickly jumped back into the truck. The driver gunned the Vortec engine, throwing dirt with the flattened tires and pulling away.

Slapping a fresh magazine into the rifle, Gil sprang back up and shot the driver. The truck swerved sharply, and the remaining gunman dove out with the vehicle still in motion, taking a wild shot at Gil as he bounced on the road. Gil raked him once with automatic fire, and he lay still.

Poncho opened the back door of the truck and found Hector Ruvalcaba cowering on the floor of the backseat. He grabbed the old man by the collar and yanked him out, dragging him into the road. “Welcome home, cabrón.”

Ruvalcaba shielded his eyes from the now-blazing sun. “Wait!” he said in Spanish. “I'll pay you whatever you want—millions!”

Poncho looked at Gil, who stood in the road calmly reloading his rifle. “He says he'll pay us whatever we want.”

Gil drew his 1911. “You wanna do it, or you want me to?”

Poncho pointed south. “Garrucha isn't too far from here, half an hour through the jungle by Jeep.”

“So? What's in Garrucha?”

“This asshole was born there.”

Gil took a second to light a cigarette. “I'm not from around here,” he said carefully, “and sometimes I can be a little slow on the uptake. But why the hell do we wanna take him home?”

“Because they hate him in Garrucha; worse than the devil.”

“I'll pay you!” Ruvalcaba blurted in heavily accented English. “Whatever you want!”

Gil stood looking at the man, the cigarette poised at his lips as he harkened back to Afghanistan, where village justice was swift and final.

“You don't wanna go home?”

Ruvalcaba shook his head. “Please. You are American, no? I'll pay you a hundred times more than the FBI!”

“I don't work for the FBI.” Gil looked at Poncho. “You thinkin' there'll be less hypocrisy this way?”

Poncho shrugged. “Something like that.”

Gil pointed the pistol into Ruvalcaba's face. “Take off your clothes. If I have to tell you twice, I'll plant this Fort Lewis boot so far up your ass you'll have to untie the laces to take a shit.”

Poncho laughed. “What the hell does that mean?”

Gil gave him a wink. “It sounds tough; that's all that matters.”

A HALF HOUR
later, Poncho drove a battered white Jeep Renegade into the small village of Garrucha and stopped near a large pen full of goats. Chickens ran to and fro, and human faces began poking out of shabby brick homes. Having heard the firefight up on the mountain, the villagers had run for cover the second they heard the Jeep come splashing down the jungle trail.

Poncho took Ruvalcaba by the arm and pulled him from the Jeep, shoving him down in the mud naked, with his hands bound behind his back.

“Please!” Ruvalcaba begged Gil in English. “I am a very rich man!”

Recognizing Ruvalcaba, the villagers could scarcely believe their eyes, and figures began darting from house to house, spreading the news of his unbelievable return.

Three men came around a corner and walked out into the trail holding machetes over their shoulders. The machetes were not weapons, but the tools they used to make their living.

Poncho pointed at the naked man sitting in the mud. “If you want justice for your children, here he is.”

Shocked to see the man who had tortured and abused their region for the past ten years, the men stood looking at one another. More villagers appeared, and soon twenty men stood talking in a quiet group.

“What's to talk about?” Gil wondered aloud. “Just hack the fucker and be done.”

“This isn't the Middle East,” Poncho said. “These are superstitious people. They believe in the Virgin, and they have to reach a consensus on how to deal with this.”

“Catholic?”

Poncho shrugged. “Mostly.”

Gil was increasingly impatient when it came to religion. He'd seen too many people maimed and murdered over it. “What's
mostly
mean?”

“They're Catholic with Mayan superstitions. It's hard to explain because every village down here is different. But, yeah, they consider themselves Catholic.”

“Learn somethin' new every day, I suppose.” Gil looked down at Ruvalcaba, who sat trembling at his feet. “Whatever you did to these people, I'm pretty goddamn sure you're gonna regret it.”

Ruvalcaba lurched forward, shamelessly attempting to embrace Gil's leg between his neck and shoulder, like a cat fawning its owner. “Shoot me—please!”

Gil stepped away. “This is between you and your people.”

“They're not my people!” Ruvalcaba attempted to stand.

Poncho knocked him over with the rifle butt. “His men come here a couple times a year: steal the boys to work in their meth labs; steal the daughters to use as whores. Most of them are never seen again.”

Three of the older men came forward, leaving their machetes behind near a wall. They asked to talk with Poncho in private.

“Please!” Ruvalcaba hissed. “Shoot me!”

“One more word,” Gil told him, “and I'll kick your face in.”

A couple of minutes later, Poncho returned, hauling Ruvalcaba to his feet and shoving him toward the villagers.

A group of men held him while another group made preparations to tie him to a tree. The women began gathering stones into a pile. The teenagers were told to round up the children and take them down the trail to the church. The kids held hands and sang a happy religious-sounding song as they walked away through the trees.

Gil watched the pile of stones grow. “I expected machetes.”

Poncho shook his head. “No machetes in the Bible.”

Shaking a cigarette from the pack, Gil proffered it, and Poncho plucked it out, lighting it off of Gil's.

“We can leave. Ruvalcaba's in good hands here.”

Gil drew from the cigarette, watching in dull amusement as Ruvalcaba attempted to reason with the villagers, his mournful overtures falling upon deaf ears as they tightly bound his wrists and ankles to the tree. “I wanna stay and make sure. This asshole's cheated death too many times.”

Poncho took a drag. “He won't cheat it today.”

“All the same.”

The first stone was the size of a baseball, cast by a woman whose son had been kidnapped the year before. It struck Ruvalcaba in the sternum with a heavy thud, and the old man let out a deep groan. Another stone was thrown. And another. Soon it became a free-for-all that lasted nearly ninety seconds. Many stones missed, but just as many hit the mark, and by the time the last one was hurled, Ruvalcaba was drenched in blood, his face as unrecognizable, and his chin lolled against his chest.

As the villagers walked away down the trail toward the church, Gil stepped up and found a pulse in Ruvalcaba's neck. “You'd better tell 'em he's still alive.”

Poncho glanced after them. “They know.”

“So where the hell they goin'?”

“He'll be dead soon.”

“Not soon enough. Don't they understand that's how this bastard keeps surviving to fight another day—because people underestimate him?”

“What can I tell you?” Poncho said. “If he survives, they'll say it's God's will.”

“God's will, my ass.” Gil flicked away the cigarette and drew the 1911.

“Por favor?”
someone said from behind. Please?

He turned to see an old cane farmer of at least eighty standing there with his hand out.
“La cuarenta y cinco . . . por favor?”
The forty-five . . . please?

Poncho spoke with the farmer and translated for Gil. “The Ruvalcabas kidnapped his granddaughter four years ago. Some of the kids found her dead along the road a few weeks later. He's got bad arthritis in both shoulders, so he couldn't throw any stones, but he says he carried a forty-five like yours in the army when he was a young man.”

Gil offered the pistol to the farmer butt-first. “Tell 'im there's a round in the chamber.”

As smoothly as if he'd been handling the pistol all of his life, the old man thumbed down the slide lock and put the muzzle up against Ruvalcaba's head, squeezing the trigger and blowing the drug lord's brains out the other side of his skull. Then he wiped the gore from the muzzle with the tail of his shirt and offered the weapon back to Gil butt-first.