Chapter 36

Enrique DaSilva followed his men into the converted barn and gaped at the destruction, a great hole in the side and one in the back. Workbenches torn up and equipment shattered. Product had leaked all over the floor from burst sacks.

Incredible. “Fan out,” he ordered, waving his pistol. “Search the room. Find out where they went.” But DaSilva had a pretty good idea where the pair had gone, considering they had a plane at their disposal.

He jogged to the hole in the back wall where the door used to be. “There,” he shouted, jabbing a finger.

Two figures huddled together, one obviously wounded, making for the airstrip. It was a long shot for a pistol, but DaSilva attempted it anyway, venting his anger by emptying the fourteen-round magazine at the retreating pair. They fell, disappearing from view. Were they wounded, or taking cover?

“To me!” DaSilva dropped his empty magazine and inserted a new one. He toggled the slide release to chamber a round. “Come. Let us finish this.”

“Condor One, Red Ball here. Over.” Yeager crouched in a shallow depression, the airstrip a few feet behind him.

Victor lay beside him. He was starting to come around and was not happy about it. “Ow! My fucking head.” He reached up to touch the gash where a bullet had creased his scalp and hissed in pain. “Man, this shit sucks.”

Yeager nodded and clicked to transmit again. “Condor One, Red Ball. Do you read? Over.”

“I gotcha, Red Ball,” Cujo voice crackled in his ear. “You about ready to come home? Over.”

“Roger that. Quit fucking around and get down here. Out.”

Yeager took inventory of his remaining weapons. He changed mags on the MP5 and put the partially spent one back in its pouch. The full one in the weapon was his last. He did the same to his .45. Plenty of ammo there, forty-two cartridges in six clips, plus two grenades.

Victor had his sidearm, a Beretta 92, and four grenades. The Beretta used a high-capacity magazine, and he carried six more like it, adding up to almost a hundred rounds of 9-millimeter. But the remaining guards carried assault rifles and could fire at greater range and accuracy.

“We’re gonna have to see the whites of their eyes before we fire,” Yeager said.

“Who’re you? George Washington?”

“No.” Yeager shifted to ease the pressure on his bruised ribs. “I’m one beat-up, tired, Marine ex-truck driver stuck in a firefight in the Mexican desert”—he keyed the transmit button—“waiting for a crazy sumbitch in a Cessna to land his fucking plane so I can go home.”

Cujo’s voice crackled through the small speaker. “I’m comin’. Keep your panties on.” The drone of the plane’s engine changed pitch as Cujo leveled it out for approach.

“I hope he can see to land,” Victor muttered.

“Pray.”

So far, the enemy troops had kept their heads down, except for that initial smattering of pistol fire. Several men—Yeager couldn’t be sure how many—had deployed into the field and taken up positions about fifty yards away.

The Cessna touched down about a quarter of the way down the runway. The brakes squealed, and the little plane fishtailed as Cujo reversed prop and tried to bring the aircraft to a halt.

One guard popped up like a gopher, rushed forward, and fired his weapon, then dropped back to the ground. Then the others did the same. Through luck or skill, they all advanced at random times, making it hard to target any single individual.

When none of the fire came near Yeager’s position, he risked a look over the rim of the shallow ditch. The guards, instead of firing at him and Victor, were targeting the Cessna. One lucky hit would disable their ride home. NVGs on, Yeager rose to one knee and fired short, controlled bursts at everything he saw moving. He didn’t think he made any clean kills, but it slowed the advance somewhat.

“Red Ball One, Condor. Over.”

Yeager slid back down and keyed his mike. “Go.”

“Where are you?”

“Get stopped and ready for takeoff. We’ll come to you. Over.”

“Roger that. I’m ready now.”

Yeager watched as the Cessna completed a turn at the end of the runway. That would be a long run for two sore and aching Marines, but it beat waiting for a bullet. “You up for this, Por Que?”

“Oh, hell yes.”

Yeager snapped out the pins of his last two grenades and chucked both of them in the general direction of the oncoming security detail. Victor did the same with all four of his. Six loud cracks fired off in rapid succession, but neither looked back to gauge the effectiveness of the grenade barrage.

They pelted down the runway, legs and arms pumping at full speed. But they still ran about as fast as a kiddie car.

Victor clapped his hand to the back of his right leg and went down. Yeager leaned down, grabbed his stocky friend around the torso, and heaved him over his shoulder with a grunt. He kept running.

Ducking under the wing of the plane, Yeager found the door already open. He dumped Victor into the right front seat then clambered over him to get in the back.

Before Yeager’s butt met the seat, the plane shuddered into motion. The single-engine Cessna growled as Cujo applied maximum throttle and then some. A hole starred the window next to Yeager’s head, the bullet passing somewhere in front of him.

“We’re taking fire!” the pilot yelled.

“Well, no shit, Cujo,” Yeager said.

Yeager shoved the window and forced it to slide open a few inches. Sticking the nose of his Wilson .45 outside, he fired at the muzzle flashes, emptying the pistol in seconds. The volume of incoming fire tripled. “Take off!”

“Working on it!” Cujo shouted.

The engine shrieked, taxed to its upper limit, as the shaggy-haired pilot worked the controls. Another bullet hit the window, and shards of glass flew and cut Cujo’s neck.

“Goddammit!”

Hail-like thumps hit the Cessna at increasingly short intervals. Another bullet came through the fuselage and hit Yeager in the chest. Its force spent, the round delivered a small punch and bounced off his vest.

“I’ve been shot again!” Yeager said.

“You win, dude.” Victor worked on trying to get a bandage around his leg.

Yeager clenched his hands on the seat in front of him and willed the plane off the ground. After another thump, something popped! in the aircraft’s body.

“Shit!” Cujo yelled. “My rudder control’s gone to shit. Hold on!” Before the last word was out of his mouth, he eased back on the stick, and the Cessna nosed up and into the air.

“Wooo hooo!” Victor yelled and clapped a bloody hand on Cujo’s shoulder. “You did it, man!”

Cujo grinned like a kid at Christmas. “You want to go back and strafe ’em again?”

“Oh, hell no.”

Yeager let his body be pushed back into his seat by gravity as the plane climbed higher. “Do me a favor,” he said.

Cujo nodded. “Sure, dude. Anything.”

“When you get up to about a thousand feet or so, circle back over the ranch.”

“Okay.” Cujo glanced back at Yeager, his eyebrows coming together in a frown. “Why?”

“Something I gotta do.”

The Cessna climbed higher, and Yeager’s body let him know how it felt about the night’s work. There didn’t seem to be a square inch that didn’t ache, from his toes to his hair.

Charlie. He smiled. She was worth every bit of it.

His thoughts drifted, and he jerked when Cujo shouted, “We’re here!”

“Bank it in a spiral to the right, directly over the barn. Por Que’s gonna want to see this.”

“See what?” Victor asked.

Below, someone had turned about half the lights back on. A couple of tiny figures milled around the back of his truck, looking in the open door of the trailer. He didn’t see anybody else in the vicinity; not that it would have mattered if he had.

Taking out a small device similar in size and function to a garage door opener, Yeager flipped up the safety cover and pressed the white button in the middle of the little black box. A half second later, the fourteen kilos of C4 that he had planted under the diesel tanks of his Peterbilt cooked off.

An enormous fireball mushroomed through the roof of the barn and billowed out of the doors. The two cartel people by the truck were first knocked down then turned into human candles. Chunks of metal roofing spiraled into the sky and fell back to earth a long way from where they’d started.

“Holy Mother of God,” Victor breathed.

Yeager chuckled. “Looks like I’m out of the trucking business, huh?”

“No shit, man.”

The flames soon engulfed the length of the truck trailer and spread to the surrounding warehouse. Within minutes, the entire building was belching fire and smoke.

“Damn, man,” Victor said with awe. “Do you know how much money and dope you just destroyed?”

“No. And I don’t give a rat’s ass.” Yeager leaned back and closed his eyes. “Take us home, Cujo.”