Return of the Assassin (Assassin Series 3) (14 page)

Inside the inner wall that protected the main buildings, a large colonial flat-roofed hacienda was surrounded by guest houses and two stables. Four SUVs sat in the expansive open area between the darkened structures, where groups of two and three guards lounged at their posts. At midnight, the countryside and hills were quiet, other than the occasional distant roar of a semi-rig air-braking on the highway twelve miles from the property.

An ancient delivery truck whose home-made plywood cargo box stretched nine feet above its bed puttered and groaned along the road, the odor of undetonated fuel and raw exhaust belching from its un-muffled pipes, headlights dim owing to a faulty alternator. The front wheels wobbled from countless collisions with curbs. The two guards looked on as it made its unsteady way up the road’s slight incline. As it approached their station, the engine gave out with a bang and it coasted to a stop across from the main gate.

The guards remained in their little bunker and watched with mild curiosity as an old man, wearing a battered straw hat and clothes that would have been an embarrassment on a beggar, swung the rusting driver’s door open with a squeal and stepped down onto the ground. The bang of the hood release disengaging sounded through the trees like a firecracker, then the driver propped open the hood with a nearby branch and went back into the cab to get a flashlight.

He flicked on the beam, which immediately faded from poor to non-existent. Cursing richly in Spanish, he kicked the front tire with his shabby huarache sandal. Resigned to a long and horrible night, he rooted around in the breast pocket of his filthy long-sleeved shirt and retrieved a hand-rolled cigarette, which he lit with a match fished from his trousers.

Only once he was smoking did he notice the two men, forty yards away in their structure inside the gate, a meager glow flickering from a portable black and white television inside.

“
Oye
. You, over there. Do you have a flashlight?” he called in a rasp worn by years of hardship.

“Fuck off. Deal with your own problems,” one of the guards called back to him.

“I think I can – it’s the carburetor again. But I can’t fix it if I can’t see. Come on, guys, please. All I need is a little light…”

The two guards exchanged a glance, and then the shorter of the two shrugged. It was either help the loser out, or have a truck parked across from their gate all night, and possibly all day tomorrow. Given how much the boss loved his privacy, that wouldn’t sit well.

He leaned under the counter supporting the little TV and pulled out a large battery-powered spotlight. Resting his Heckler and Koch MP7 submachine gun against his chair back, he opened the wooden door and reluctantly made his way to the main gate. After fiddling with the unwieldy ring of keys, he unclasped the heavy padlock and moved the iron gate open far enough to squeeze through, then trudged across the road to the dilapidated truck.

The silenced low velocity slug from the driver’s pistol tore half his face off, entering below his right cheekbone and shredding through the lower part of his skull. A dozen muffled slugs from the truck’s makeshift cargo container slammed into the guard house, several pummeling the hapless sentry before he had time to squeeze off a burst. Another salvo destroyed the security camera mounted on the stone posts, and then, just as suddenly as the onslaught began, it was over.

Eight men in head-to-toe black leapt from the rear of the truck, and sixty seconds later two SUVs pulled to a stop. A dozen commandos jumped out, all carrying sound-suppressed M4 assault rifles with grenade launchers, and toting backpacks with grenades and explosives. More troops emptied from the back of the truck, and two hefted heavy machine guns, ammo belts slung across their shoulders. A final personnel carrier rounded the bend, towing a trailer carrying a dozen blacked-out dirt bikes. The men hurriedly rolled them off the road and pushed them through the gates, out of sight from any casual passers-by.

Four of the commandos peeled off inside the walls and jogged down the private drive in the direction of the second guard outpost. Within fifteen minutes, the two dead guards at the main guardhouse would miss their assigned checkin, so the soldiers had only that much time, at most, to make it a mile and a half, if they were to dispatch the second guards before they could sound the alarm.

Standing with his men by the motorcycles, the team leader checked his watch and then keyed his helmet mike, switching the transmitter to an encrypted long range channel. He uttered a clipped sentence, waiting for acknowledgement before changing the frequency to local again.

Twenty-seven thousand feet above the drama being played out on the road, a gray Lockheed C-130 Hercules roared through the clouds. Inside, the green jump light illuminated and six men hurtled out of the behemoth into the cold sky, the frigid air tearing at their insulated jumpsuits as they spread apart from one another, their pattern allowing for room for their parachutes to deploy when they were within range of the target. Each jumper was equipped with oxygen and specially-fabricated goggles to further protect them from the altitude’s effects, but even so, it was like being dropped into an ice bath after the warmth of the plane’s interior.

The darkened hulk continued on its way, two of its turbo-props idling to minimize the noise reaching the ground. It had been gauged unlikely that the sound of a distant plane would raise any sort of alarm on the ground, but the pilots were taking no chances. It gently banked to return to Culiacán, where it had been brought in especially for this mission, its crew under instructions to wait at the airport there for further orders once it touched down.

The formation of black-clad jumpers exceeded terminal velocity in the thin atmosphere, cutting through two hundred miles per hour on their way to three, and the temperature of the surrounding air slowly began to warm from sub-zero. They would wait until they were only a few thousand feet above the target before deploying their chutes, by which time, if everything went according to plan, the men guarding the compound would be too busy to be scanning the heavens for the unimaginable.

El Rey
studied his wrist-mounted GPS/compass combo and made a few adjustments to his fall, forcing himself south another three hundred yards. He could only hope that the men above him were paying as much attention and would do the same. All he could focus on was his own trajectory – the members of the GAFE who shared his drop into the unknown were all seasoned professionals who had done high altitude jumps countless times before, so they were as competent as it got.

The atmosphere thickened as he passed through fifteen thousand feet, and then ten. He could make out the distinctive flashes of a gunfight in the gloom beneath him. Tiny orange blossoms lit up the dark jungle surrounding the main house and the inner perimeter wall. All the lights had been extinguished as the battle raged, which he had expected – the men defending the hacienda were highly trained, and they wouldn’t make rookie mistakes like providing light for their assailants to use against them.

The small altimeter on his left wrist told him he was at two thousand feet. Bracing, he pulled his ripcord, the black rectangular canopy chute snapping him sharply as it slowed his drop from two hundred feet per second. He immediately pulled off his oxygen mask, and from the zippered compartment in his harness, he fished out night vision goggles, pulling them carefully over his head and powering them on. The world was suddenly bathed in green luminescence, the outline of the buildings clear. He adjusted his descent so he would alight on the flat roof of the main house. Thankfully, there were no sentries up top, the guards now fully engaged far from his landing point.

He pulled on the two chute handles as the roof rushed to meet him and alighted silently in a textbook maneuver. Even before the momentum had completely stopped he was hitting the harness release and swinging his MTAR-21 compact assault rifle around to where it would do him some good. He shrugged out of the straps and, without breaking stride, moved to the building’s edge before looking up into the sky, where he could make out the other members of his drop team floating soundlessly towards the roof. Satisfied that none of the gunmen below had seen him, he stripped off the insulated jumpsuit and oxygen and tossed it on top of his parachute to hold it in place.

He heard a set of boots clump onto the concrete near him, and then another, and another. Once the other five jumpers were accounted for,
El Rey
clicked his com line active and whispered a confirmation.

The cartel gunmen were firing in disciplined bursts at the assailants who had penetrated their defenses, unaware of the lethal group that was now in their midst. But rather than engage, the men on the roof waited, and two minutes later, the distinctive thumping sound of large helicopter blades raced towards them from the south. First one gunship, and then another, swept over the tree line and began mowing down the exposed defenders with their three thousand round per minute machine guns.

Upon seeing the helicopters join the fray, the men on the roof opened fire, and while they were mowing down the gunmen,
El Rey
dropped a black nylon rope over the side of the house and slid down, firing a single short burst at a lone cartel guard. The assassin’s job wasn’t to participate in the annihilation or engage the enemy – it was to locate Paolo and take him alive.

A few swift strides and he reached a dark brown wood and glass side door near what looked like the kitchen. He grappled with the handle and swung it open. The lights in the house were off, but the night vision goggles worked their magic and he could see everything as if it were neon green daylight.

He moved through the massive living room, the sound of the gunfire outside now just a few argumentative chatters, and stealthily crept down the hall towards what he knew from studying the aerial photos had to be the owner’s wing.

At the far end a telltale scrape signaled the bedroom door cracking open – he slammed himself against the wall as an explosion of automatic rifle fire hurtled down the passageway. He dropped to the floor and fired at his assailant’s leg-level as the door slammed shut and was rewarded with a sharp cry followed by a muffled thud.

He ran to the door and hurled himself through it with all his might, smashing it open before tucking and rolling. Another burst of gunfire shot over his head, and a ricochet grazed his Kevlar vest; he answered the volley by kicking the shooter in the head with his boot. A grunt was quickly followed by the gun dropping from unconscious hands as the figure slumped to the side by the door hinges.

El Rey
slid the rifle away from the inert form using his foot while simultaneously sweeping the room with his weapon, searching for other threats.

He heard a frightened whimper from the far doorway.

A woman.

“Come out and I won’t shoot. But if you have a weapon, toss it in here before you exit.” He saw a ribbon of blinding light beneath the bathroom door. “Turn the light out and do as I say, or make your peace with your maker. You have three seconds,” he said.

After a few moments of hesitation the door inched open and a snub nose revolver clattered against the travertine floor. A young naked woman with long raven hair holding a towel against her chest stepped slowly out. She bumped into a nightstand, and
El Rey
was reminded that without night vision gear it was pitch black in the room. He looked up at the wall near the door he’d just rolled through and spotted a light switch.

“Stay still. Don’t move,” he said and then got to his feet, kicking the unconscious man’s rifle farther off to the side. “We are going to stay very quiet, and not do anything stupid, until all the shooting is over, okay? Nice and easy. I can see you, so when I give the word, move to the bed and lie on it, face down. Don’t make a sound. If you do as I say, you’ll live to see tomorrow. If you don’t, you’ll be dead before you can blink.”

She looked like she understood, her mouth involuntarily forming a horrified O.

“On the count of three, okay? One, two, three.”

The girl moved unsteadily, feeling her way to the bed, and then lay down as instructed.

“Is there anyone else in the house with you?” he asked quietly.

“No. Only him,” she whispered.

“Paolo?”

“That’s right.”

They waited like that,
El Rey
watching the motionless form of the cartel boss, blood pooling under his legs where at least two bullets had shattered his tibias. The gunfire had stopped outside, and after a few minutes, the assassin’s com line crackled.

“Clear.”

The commandos had instructions to stay outside of the house. Inside was
El Rey
’s domain, to attend to his business as he saw fit. Theirs was threat containment outside the doors and to ensure that he remained undisturbed as he went about his work.

He pushed the transmit button on his helmet. “I’m sending one person out. A woman. Take her and pull back to the perimeter, but leave a few men at the house to make sure it’s clean. After that, wait for me. I’ll be a while,” he said and then flipped up his night vision goggles and turned on the light switch.

Paolo’s legs were a mess, and he was bleeding freely onto the floor.
El Rey
had to stop that if he was going to keep him alive long enough the get the information he’d come for. He reached behind him into his backpack and extracted another length of black rope, and with one eye on the girl, knelt by the drug lord’s fallen bulk.

“Keep lying there. Don’t move until I say you can. Once I do, grab your clothes, put them on, and when you’re done, you’re going to move out of this room and walk out the front door. Nobody will hurt you. Do you understand?”

She was sobbing quietly into the mattress. “Uh huh.”

He looped the rope around Paolo’s left thigh and cinched it tight, until the blood stopped pouring out of the wound on that leg. Satisfied that his makeshift tourniquet was going to work, he repeated the procedure on the other. The exsanguination stopped, he felt the man’s neck for a pulse and felt a faint beating.