Suicide Mission (20 page)

That left him wide open for a split second, and his opponent recovered from the missed swing in time to seize the opportunity. He brought his machete around in a chopping, backhanded blow. The blade struck the other man at the juncture of his neck and right shoulder and bit deep into muscle and bone.

The wounded man screamed and staggered. His right arm wouldn't work anymore, so he couldn't raise his blade and defend himself as his opponent ripped the machete free and struck again, swinging it so hard this time that the blade went halfway through the man's neck and lodged in his spine.

That finished him. Blood gouted in a grisly fountain as the man toppled over to lie twitching while the rest of his life poured out onto the sand. The victor planted a foot on the dying man's chest and wrenched the machete loose.

The shouts from the men around the pit were deafening.

Tariq leaned closer to Sanchez and said, “They fought well, for amateurs.”

“They had good reason to fight. Not only were they promised that the victor would have his freedom, but that his wife would be turned loose as well. A man always fights more desperately for his loved ones than for himself.”

Tariq nodded. Sanchez was right about that.

A couple of men lowered the ladder into the pit again. Several others descended while the winner of the battle tossed his bloody machete aside and fell to his knees. He covered his face with his hands as he tried to catch his breath. A shudder went through him. As far as Tariq knew, the two men had been friends. But they had been forced to battle to the death anyway.

One of the cartel men picked up the machete that the dead man had dropped. He nudged the victor with the point and spoke to him. Tariq couldn't hear the words, but he saw the horrified expression on the man's face as he looked up at his captors.

“Now he must fight again,” Tariq guessed.

“Yes,” Sanchez said. “Delicious, is it not?”

Tariq smiled in agreement.

The surviving prisoner suddenly turned and tried to scramble away on hands and knees. The other men went after him, grabbed him, forced him to his feet, and marched him back to face his new opponent, who stood there patiently tapping the flat of the machete blade against the palm of his other hand.

As the cartel men backed off again, the prisoner looked down at the weapon lying at his feet. Evidently recognizing the inevitability of what was going to happen, he scooped the machete from the ground, let out an incoherent yell, and charged his new opponent.

“If by chance he wins . . . ?” Tariq said to Sanchez.

The slimly handsome man shrugged.

“Then another will test him . . . and another and another, if necessary.”

It wasn't going to come to that, however, as Tariq saw almost right away. The prisoner was too exhausted, too weak from his own wounds, too unskilled to match the deadly abilities of the cartel man. The blades rang together several times as the cartel man fended off the ferocious but awkward attack, and then the prisoner's luck ran out. Steel winked brightly in the sun as a fierce, powerful stroke by the cartel man sent his blade shearing completely through the prisoner's neck.

The man's head toppled from his shoulders and thudded to the ground as his body remained on its feet, swaying for several seconds while blood bubbled out of the severed windpipe. Then the headless corpse fell over, too.

The cheering was even more thunderous this time.

“Once more the
hondura de sangre
has drunk deep,” Sanchez said.

“I don't know the words,” Tariq said.

“It means
pit of blood
,” Sanchez explained.

Tariq said, “Ah,” and nodded slowly.

He would not be satisfied until all of America was a
hondura de sangre
.

 

Bill was sitting at the desk in the living room of his quarters, a laptop open in front of him as he studied satellite photos of a rugged, mountainous region. Barranca de la Serpiente was located somewhere in that wasteland, according to the sketchy intelligence they had been able to obtain. But they didn't have an exact location, and it would be best to know where they were going before they launched their attack.

Unfortunately, with every day that passed, Bill worried that whatever new hell they were brewing up down there below the border was that much closer to fruition.

A knock sounded on the door. Bill knew how secure the base was, so he didn't hesitate to call, “Come in.”

Henry Dixon opened the door and walked in, his gait somewhat deliberate as always but not so much so that anyone would notice it if they didn't know he had lost both legs in Africa. Bill grinned and said, “Henry. Good to see you. I didn't know exactly when you'd get here.”

“I came in a little while ago,” Dixon said. “Been clearing up a little family business. I could have been here sooner if you needed me, but I figured you'd let me know if you did.”

“Yeah, I would have. We're not ready to go yet, by any means. The last two members of the team aren't even here yet. They were supposed to be, but there was some last-minute holdup. Somebody at the DOJ found out that Madigan and Watson were being ‘transferred'—” He made air quotes around the word. “—and got a bug up his ass about it. Clark had to do some fast tap-dancin' to get it all straightened out.”

Dixon grunted and said, “They ought to call it the Department of Injustice the way it's been run the past dozen years. Whatever happened to upholding the law the way it's written, rather than to suit your own political agenda?”

“Why, that's the old-fashioned way of lookin' at it, Henry. We've all got to be modern and progressive now, not tied down to some moldy ol' Constitution.”

Dixon rolled his eyes and said, “You know the wheels are all going to come off one of these days, don't you?”

“Sure. And by the time they do, I plan on bein' so far back in the woods nobody'll ever find me.”

“Assuming you live through this mission. Assuming any of us do.”

“Yeah,” Bill said. “There's that to consider, too.”

“Hiram Stackhouse wants me to do this, and I owe that man big-time, so I'm in all the way.” Dixon sat down in one of the armchairs. “You might get me a beer, though.”

Bill grinned and got up to go into the kitchen.

As he came back with the beer, someone else knocked on the door. He handed the bottle to Dixon, then went over and opened the door.

Megan Sinclair stood there with a sheaf of documents in her hand. She wore jeans and a short-sleeved silk blouse and looked as elegant and lovely as ever. She looked past Bill at Dixon and said, “I'm sorry, I didn't know you had company.”

“Henry's not company, he's part of the team,” Bill said as he stood aside. “Come on in and I'll introduce you.”

“Don't get up,” Megan told Dixon as she came into the room. “I know who you are, Mr. Dixon.”

“Then you know I was raised to be a gentleman,” Dixon said as he stood. He held out a hand to her.

As they shook, Bill introduced them, adding for Dixon's benefit, “Megan is Colonel Sinclair's daughter.”

“Old Iron Ba—”

Megan smiled when Dixon stopped short in what he was saying. She said, “It's all right, Mr. Dixon. I know some of his men called my father Old Iron Balls. He deserved the name, too.”

“Yes, Miss Sinclair, he did. But he was a helluva commanding officer.”

Bill asked, “You want a beer, Megan?”

She shook her head.

“No, thanks. I came across something that's got me thinking.”

Bill gestured at the papers in her hand and said, “I figured as much. Why don't we take a look at it?”

They gathered around the coffee table as Megan spread out the documents on it.

“Some of these are news reports,” she explained. “Others are intel I picked up from hacking into Mexican law enforcement networks.” She said that matter-of-factly, obviously knowing that no one connected with this mission was going to object to a little cyber-piracy in a good cause. “In the past six months, more than a dozen buses have been hijacked in the northern part of the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Passengers have been robbed and sometimes killed, and many of them have been kidnapped, carried off by the attackers. The victims have been both men and women.”

“Sounds like somethin' those lowlife cartel hombres would do,” Bill said, remembering how that busload of high school students had been kidnapped and held for ransom several years earlier. “Have there been ransom demands?”

Megan shook her head.

“These aren't the sort of people whose families could pay a big ransom, or even any ransom,” she said. “They're working people. Farmers and small businessmen for the most part.”

“Why would the cartel go to the trouble of kidnapping them if they couldn't make a profit?” Dixon asked.

“I wondered about that, too. In fact, that's what caught my eye and made me see the pattern here. After that it didn't take long to come up with a possible answer.”

Bill smiled and said, “You may not know it, but when you were in Special Forces, the CIA tried to steal you away a time or two. Seems they thought you'd make a good analyst for them. They were right.”

Megan didn't seem to hear the compliment, but Bill figured she really did. She said, “This ties in with that training camp. If you're going to teach people how to kill, you need victims for your students to practice on.”

Bill had already made that same leap of logic. He nodded and said, “Those poor devils taken off the buses would work for that.”

“The men would,” Megan said. “The female prisoners would be forced to serve as prostitutes for the men being trained at the camp.”

Dixon cleared his throat. He and Bill were both of a generation that felt a little uncomfortable at hearing a young woman speak so bluntly about such a thing, but they both had no doubt that Megan was right.

“You're thinkin' that we'd be able to put this to use?” Bill asked.

“I thought it might help us locate this so-called Snake Canyon.”

“How can it do that,” Dixon said, “if nobody's been able to find those people who were kidnapped?”

“Well,
those
people can't help us . . .” Megan said.

“But if the right fellas were to be on another bus that was hijacked . . .” Bill said.

Dixon frowned.

“Ah. I see now what you're talking about. Walking right into the jaws of a trap.”

Bill's brain was working furiously as he turned over the possibilities of using the intel Megan had brought to him. He said, “Nobody would suspect that a couple of poor laborers might have GPS chips implanted under their skin.”

“And with satellite tracking we could follow those chips anywhere,” Megan added. “I don't see any reason it wouldn't work.”

“Other than the fact that no one is going to mistake any of us for Mexican farmers,” Dixon said. “Also, how would you know which bus the cartel was going to hit?”

“They're creatures of habit,” Megan said. “Nearly all of the hijackings have occurred on the highway between the towns of Dos Caballos and Villa Guajardo. And it's been a couple of weeks since the last incident took place, so there's a good chance that they're running low on . . . practice victims.”

She paled a little as she said it. Her background as a thief had been a nonviolent one, other than knocking out a guard now and then, and although she was plenty tough, she had never been exposed to the same levels of carnage that the rest of them had.

“So if we could get a couple of men on that bus in the next few days, there's at least a chance the cartel might stop it,” Bill mused.

“Unless they strike again before that,” Megan said. “I can be monitoring my sources for any news about that.”

Dixon said, “You still haven't said who's going to be the bait.”

“Me, for one,” Bill said without hesitation. “I can pass for Hispanic, I think, and my Tex-Mex is pretty dang fluent.”

“You can't go in by yourself,” Dixon protested.

“Stillman's out. Too blond. Bailey might do.”

Megan said, “He doesn't really look like a Mexican to me.”

“There are gringos in Mexico, too, you know.”

Megan leaned back on the sofa where she was sitting and frowned in thought.

“You know, it would help sell the whole thing if you had an actual Mexican citizen with you. A woman, maybe.”

Bill's forehead creased as he glared at her.

“You're talkin' about Catalina Ramos,” he said.

Megan shrugged. “The rumor is that she badgered Clark into bringing her out here so she could ask you if she can come along on the mission. Maybe that would actually be helpful.”

“How well do you know Catalina?” Bill asked.

“We just met for a moment,” Megan said coolly. “I don't think she liked me much.”

Bill had a hunch the feeling was mutual. It was a cliché to think that a couple of beautiful women would instinctively dislike each other, but like most clichés, it might have a grain of truth to it.

“You know she's not a professional,” Bill said.

“I suppose that depends on what line of work you're talking about.”

Bill ignored that comment and went on, “She's got no business bein' right in the middle of a covert op.”

“And yet that's exactly where she was not long ago. Tell me, how many men did she kill when she was getting that flash drive out of Mexico and into our hands?”

“That's not the same thing,” Bill insisted. “She didn't go lookin' for that trouble. It found her.”

“But she survived it,” Megan said. “If it wasn't for her, you wouldn't have been able to stop Maleef from carrying out that New Sun business.”

Bill couldn't argue with that.

“She can fight, obviously,” Megan went on. “And you'd have a few days to train her. Call it a crash course in being an operator.”

“That's something you can't learn overnight.”

“But if you have an aptitude for it to start with, you might learn enough to stay alive.” She paused. “At least until the mission is done. And that's all any of us are really hoping for, isn't it?”

She was right about that, too . . . damn it.

Dixon spoke up, saying, “I don't work with amateurs. Never have and never will.”

“If we go along with what Megan is sayin', you wouldn't have to work directly with Catalina,” Bill said. “In fact, you probably won't be workin' directly with any of us.”

“Even so, I don't like the idea of somebody like that being involved. Amateurs are unpredictable. You can't really prepare for what they might do.”

“That's true. And we'd be askin' Catalina to risk bein' kidnapped and forced to do Lord knows what.”

Megan said, “I think she's well past the point of worrying about a fate worse than death.”

“That's a mighty cold thing to say,” Bill told her.

“I prefer to think of it as pragmatic. Anyway, she wants to go. She knows the risks. And sure, there are risks to the rest of us in letting her come along. She might do something crazy that endangers all of us. But I keep coming back to the fact that having her with you on that bus might help you get to Barranca de la Serpiente.”

Bill sighed and nodded.

“I don't like it, but I think you're right. I guess I'd better call her over here and tell her that she's goin' along with us after all. If she still wants to when she hears this new angle, that is. This is still a volunteer mission. That's the way it's got to be.”

He wasn't going to send anybody to their death who wasn't willing to go. Not convicted murderers, and for sure not a gal like Catalina Ramos.

Bill had a pretty strong hunch how she was going to react, though.