Chapter 35

Over northern Mexico

 

Cujo hummed “Dock of the Bay” and adjusted for a slight crosswind with a gentle nudge of the rudder pedal. His single-engine Cessna buzzed over the rough terrain of the Mexican desert at fifty feet off the deck. Running without lights and guided by a GPS, dead reckoning, and divine influence, he scanned between instruments and terrain.

He loved flying, especially night flying. Even better, he loved combat flying. Piloting his tiny plane into a firefight, in the dark, over enemy territory—well, kind of enemy territory—made him maybe the happiest man in the world. Even if he sometimes had difficulty with the real world, and struggled to remember his birth name—David Milton Quattlebaum III—he could fly anything with wings or rotors and fly it better than anyone he knew.

On hold at the tiny airfield, Cujo chewed his nails and almost prayed that Victor and Abel’s mission would go sideways so they could call in a Plan B Dust-off. So when Victor called, Cujo was in the air before the call terminated.

At one mile out, Cujo brought the Cessna into a gentle climb, gaining some altitude to assess the situation. He overflew the target at five hundred feet and took a long look out the right hand window.

He spotted the barn immediately. The moon had risen, three-quarters full, and gave plenty of light for his NVGs to make out the men clustered on either side of Abel’s truck, which looked as though it had mated with the barn. Fifty yards beyond the barn, an airstrip ran north to south. His job was to find the airstrip and land. Abel and Victor would hightail it overland and jump into the plane, then they would all fly off into the wild, black yonder.

From behind the barn, a green streak of light burned across his view. A bloom of fire temporarily whited out his goggles. Seconds later, a detonation on the ground rocked the plane.

“Looks like Plan A turned to shit.” He grinned and almost bounced in his seat.

“Victor!” Yeager felt for a pulse, found it, and breathed a short prayer. He slapped his friend’s cheek, trying to bring him around. “Por Que! Wake up, buddy. Time to go.”

Victor’s eyes cracked open, seeming bleary and unfocused. “Wha’ happened?”

“They shot you in the head. It bounced off.”

“Well,” Victor mumbled, “tha’s okay, then.” His eyes sagged closed again.

“C’mon, man. No sleeping on the job. We gotta get moving.”

Yeager looped Victor’s arm around his neck and hoisted his friend to his feet. They stumbled toward the back of the barn, down the same aisle where Yeager had felled Goliath. The giant was still down. Yeager smiled at that, pretty sure he wasn’t up for a rematch with the big son of a bitch.

He headed for the back door, willing his legs to move faster. Victor’s feet bumped along, more hindrance than help. Yeager was on the verge of picking him up and carrying him when the back door blew up. The explosion knocked him on his ass, and he took Victor down with him.

“Aw, fuck me, not again.” If he said it aloud, he couldn’t tell it over the ringing in his ears.

“Less C4,” Victor mumbled then closed his eyes again.

Men piled through the smoking gap. Yeager’s M4 lay a dozen feet away, but he still had his MP5 strapped across his chest. Snapping it up, he ripped off a sustained burst, completely ignoring fire discipline and Sergeant Masterson’s wise advice. He simply needed to get lots of rounds downrange to make the bastards cringe and wet their shorts.

The guards dove for cover down the back aisle. Without shouting a warning—after all, the only other friendly in the area was right next to him—Yeager tossed two grenades, one left and one right. They blew almost simultaneously.

Shrieks of pain and fear erupted, dimly heard through the ringing in his ears. Yeager swapped magazines, letting the spent one clatter to the floor. He struggled up and chugged forward, breath rasping in his throat and arms swinging for momentum. He had to follow up the grenade attack before the enemy recovered their wits.

At the end of the bench, he had a choice: go right or left. He went left.

And dropped, hit in the back by a sledgehammer blow.

Cujo banked hard left with one hand on the yoke. With his other hand, he worked the latch on the window and slid it open. Night air blew in, cool but not too cold.

Perfect, in fact.

Reaching out the window, he grabbed a lanyard and pulled. The catches released, and the clamshell cover he’d fashioned to look like an external fuel tank came free, peeling apart to fall away. He laughed and pumped his fist when the .50-cal was revealed.

Lining up the Cessna to pass north to south across the mouth of the barn, where the men were clustered on either side of the trailer, took only seconds. He trimmed out the plane, steadied the yoke, and dove.

The little aircraft dropped like the proverbial rock. Cujo made a slight correction, and the five or six men at the back of the truck looked up. Their faces grew in his forward windscreen until he could almost make out individual expressions. He poised his feet on the rudders, ready to compensate for the recoil, and reached for the second lanyard he’d installed. This one trailed overhead, like an engineer’s whistle on a locomotive, and was attached to the machine gun’s trigger. With a tug, he triggered the .50-cal at three hundred feet away. Three hundred feet became one hundred, then fifty, then nothing, all within a few seconds.

The little plane shuddered and bucked and tried to crab sideways in the air. Cujo danced on the rudders and twisted the yoke, fighting to hold it straight. A line of slugs as big as a man’s thumb walked across the tarmac and ripped through the half dozen men. The Browning M2 mounted under his wing fired over five hundred rounds per minute with a muzzle velocity approaching three thousand feet per second. The guards were shredded like paper dolls.

Flashing overhead low enough that his wheels almost hit the top of Abel’s trailer, Cujo applied power, and fought for altitude. He winced. Abel’s trailer had taken a considerable number of hits as the plane jerked and wobbled under the heavy recoil. Cujo had pretty much managed to rip it to shit.

“Oops. Sorry, Abel.” He pulled up and banked to the right to set up another pass.

DaSilva stared, mouth open, at the small plane as it climbed over the roof of the hacienda, making a sweeping turn to the right. He froze, forgetting the pistol in his hand, as stupefied as the men around him.

The men from the other side of the trailer, who’d taken position at its rear in order to assault the inside of the barn, littered the ground like so much chopped meat, some moaning and twisting in agony.

DaSilva shook his head, eyes still fixed on the plane as it banked back to the left. An airplane? Where’d they get an airplane? What now? Was he coming back? Yes! Yes, he was! “Bastard!” DaSilva screamed, spittle flying.

With a third of his assault force wiped out in one pass, he had been reduced to six men, plus the ones from the back, who had to be engaged with the enemy. The choice was simple: stay outside and be slaughtered like pigs or enter the barn and kill the foot soldiers. If the foot soldiers were dead, the plane wouldn’t matter.

With one last glance at the Cessna as it lined up for another pass, DaSilva slapped Marco on the back. “Go! Go! Go!” he shouted, shoving the muscle-bound guard. DaSilva tried to get under cover by sheer force of will.

Marco grunted and motioned to his men. They hit the gap between the trailer and door, pouring into the barn and firing blindly as they ran.

The bullet that hit Yeager in the back had enough impact to break a rib and knock him flat on his face. Yeager had been shot before and more than once while wearing body armor. He’d never grown to enjoy the experience. A small projectile traveling at a multiple of the speed of sound imparted a tremendous amount of kinetic energy when it struck a target. Yeager likened it to being kicked by a very large pissed-off horse.

He blacked out for a few seconds then came back to his senses in a rush, completely aware of his surroundings and the impending danger. He’d fallen forward, so the shooter was behind him, probably taking aim to shoot him in the ass and claim a glorious kill in the name of drug traffickers everywhere. He jerked and rolled to his right, bringing the MP5 up in one motion. Acquiring the target took a nanosecond.

A bald-headed guard with a goatee knelt nearby, blood dribbling from his nose. Armed with a semi-automatic pistol, the guard twisted to bring his weapon up, even as Yeager brought the MP5 to bear. The guard fired, and the bullet whipped past Yeager’s head, close enough for him to feel the heat.

Yeager triggered a burst, the suppressed MP5 sounding more like a sewing machine than an automatic weapon. The rounds hit the guard in the center of his chest and slapped him backward. He didn’t move again.

Yeager swiveled his head, checking the remaining guards. He confirmed they were all out of the fight, either dead or too wounded to care. Slinging the MP5, Yeager jogged back over to Victor and hoisted his friend onto his feet.

“Time to go?” Victor mumbled.

“Yep. Time to go, buddy.”

He helped Victor through the gaping hole in the back wall of the warehouse and headed into the night. The breeze chilled his exposed skin and felt wonderful after the smoke and death of the enclosed barn.

He had no time to enjoy it. More guards stormed the barn and started spewing rounds everywhere. Some bullets zipped through the thin metal walls and kicked up dust near his feet or whizzed past with an angry whine.

“Won’t take ’em long to figure out which way we went,” Yeager said. “We need to make the airstrip and hope that crazy bastard has the plane ready.”

“Yes, Mama.”

Yeager couldn’t tell if Victor was that out of it or being his usual smartass self. “C’mon, buddy. Let’s move it.”