The two Suburbans were wedged into a narrow, filth-covered...alley, for lack of a better term, stopped bumper-to-bumper, nearly half a mile into this...this what? Cesspool? And these alleyways, paths, goddamned game trails-whatever the fuck you wanted to call them-weren't even wide enough for one vehicle, yet they were the only way to navigate through this shithole. Gavin couldn't legitimately call it a neighborhood. It was some kind of barrio slum, filled with mounds of rotting garbage and the absolute dregs of the human race. Just breathing the fetid air made him want to retch. Goats in Afghanistan lived better than these assholes.
Snyder, Camp, and Gavin were dismounted and set up in a tight defensive triangle around the two vehicles. Buck was still behind the wheel of Gavin's Suburban, and Dwayne, who'd gotten sufficiently patched up to make him-self at least partially useful, was behind the wheel of the sec-ond Suburban. Marcus and Cyril, the tech geek, had wan-dered off with some kind of handheld signal tracking device to find Greene's phone, which had in the last ten minutes gone pretty much stationary behind one of these pigsties.
In just the few minutes since Gavin and the others had stopped and climbed out of their SUVs, at least fifty of the savages who lived in this dump had surrounded them. Gavin could smell the stink coming off their bodies.
A woman, rail thin, with no tits, a scarred face, and arms covered with leaking sores, strolled up to Gavin and almost brushed against him. He shoved her away with a gloved hand. "Get back."
Undeterred, she said something to him in Spanish, in what he guessed was her best effort at a seductive, sultry voice. He stared at her. A fucking hooker. In here. Of all places. If he squeezed her, he wondered, would puss ooze out from her needle tracks? "Get the fuck back," he told her, waving her away with the muzzle of his M-4. She shrugged, mumbled something else in Spanish that ended with the word gringo, and melted back into the sea of brown bodies.
Where the fuck was Marcus and that geek bastard?
Gavin scanned the crowd, looking at these wretched, brown-eyed, brown-skinned, dumb-as-dirt motherfuckers. Knowing it was just a matter of time before one of them upped with a gun. Then he and his men would be caught in a real shit storm.
There was some movement behind the crowd, along with curses in Spanish and English. Then Gavin saw Marcus shoving his way through the cordon of stinking human flesh with Cyril following close behind him. Marcus held up a cell phone.
"Greene's?" Gavin asked.
Marcus nodded. "Found a kid back there hiding with it under a pile of shit."
"What about the Mexican cop's phone?"
Cyril held up a second phone. "Found it too."
"Those motherfuckers," Gavin said.
The crowd was growing larger every second and press-ing closer. A bottle sailed through the air and shattered against Gavin's Suburban.
"We need to exfil this shitsty right now," Marcus said.
A shirtless teenage boy stepped up and threw an empty quart beer bottle straight at Marcus. Marcus ducked and the bottle hit the second Suburban. Before the kid could dissolve back into the tide of hostile faces, Marcus lunged forward and grabbed him by his bushy hair. After dragging the teen into the narrow no-man's land that surrounded the two SUVs, Marcus shoved him down to his knees and pressed the muzzle of his M-4 against the back of the kid's neck. He scanned the crowd. "Throw one more fucking bottle and I put a bullet through Jose's head. Comprende?"
No one threw anything else.
One by one the contractors piled back into the Subur-bans. Gavin remained outside until everyone else was in. The others covered him, their rifles jutting through the open windows as he climbed into the passenger seat. Then the Suburbans raced out of the slum known as el Ciudad de Esqueletos.