East 142nd Street, South Bronx, New York City
“Is it just me,” Clay Hollister inquired, “or is this neighborhood the shits?”
“It’s not just you,” said Devon Lang, hunched down beside him in the DEA surveillance van.
“I didn’t think so,” Hollister replied. “But you know how I like to be politically correct.”
“Yeah, right.” Lang’s smirk was almost audible.
Hollister couldn’t say the South Bronx was the worst place that he’d seen in sixteen years of service as a drug enforcement agent, but it absolutely ranked among the bottom four or five. Some of the district’s blocks reminded him of photos taken in Berlin, after the bombing raids of World War II, except the old-school Nazis hadn’t scrawled graffiti on their ruins. And, the last he’d heard, they didn’t spend much time killing each other in the streets.
Okay, some parts of the South Bronx were livable, but only just. Hollister wouldn’t want to spend a night in any of the tenements he’d seen so far. Between the roaches, rodents and the roving gangs, he didn’t see how any decent person could relax enough to sleep. A place like this, he thought, you either made escaping from the ghetto your life’s work, or else you gave up as a kid and let it pull you down.
“It’s time,” Lang said.
Hollister spoke into the mouthpiece of his wireless headset. “Entry teams, report.”
“Team A in place and ready,” said the stolid voice of Special Agent David Jones.
“Team B, ditto,” SA Rick Patterson chimed in.
The second-floor apartment they were raiding was a stash house, nothing cooking, if his information was correct, but Hollister had called up members of the DEA’s Clandestine Laboratory Enforcement Team just in case. One thing you could predict about drug traffickers: the pricks were unpredictable.
“Hit it!” he ordered, rising as he spoke and moving toward the van’s back door. He had already sweated through his T-shirt underneath the Kevlar vest with DEA printed in yellow on the chest and back. It was like putting on a target, and the vest was only large enough to help him if he took a slug between the collarbone and navel. His head, neck, arms and everything below the waist was totally exposed, the vest a mere illusion of security.
Hollister hit the street with Lang behind him, trusting in their driver to prevent some local punk from ripping off the van. That would look great in Hollister’s report: a hundred grand and change in rolling stock evaporating while he tried to grab a handful of West Africans and—what?—fifteen or twenty kilos of coke?
Hollister felt a hundred pairs of hostile eyes tracking his progress as he crossed the street, detouring around a junker with its wheels gone and windows smashed, and hit the lobby of his target tenement. Upstairs, he heard a door crash, shouting, then the hammering of guns.
* * *
MAMADOU CISSOKO WISHED there could have been some warning that the cops were coming. At home, he knew the price of things and who to ask about connections, but the law seemed unapproachable to him in New York City. Part of that, he knew, was that the men in charge were mostly white and made no secret of their personal contempt for Africans, Asians—outsiders, in a word. Beyond that, he wouldn’t have known how much to offer, whether he was being robbed or treated to a discount rate.
And now, he realized, it would have made no difference in any case. The officers stampeding through his flat weren’t local police, but federal agents, their vests, jackets and caps emblazoned with initials for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Cissoko’s only saving grace was that he always tried to be prepared. Within an hour of arriving in the States, he had acquired his first black-market firearm, building up his arsenal as cash flowed through his hands, always prepared to fight—and die, if need be—to protect his interests and his family. While not well educated, he had memorized the penalties for cocaine trafficking in the United States: ten years to life in prison for a first offense involving five kilograms or more.
And there were thirty kilograms in Mamadou Cissoko’s shabby bedroom, bagged and ready for delivery.
The moment that he heard the raiders shouting, as his door came down, Cissoko grabbed the mini-Uzi that he always kept within arm’s reach and sprayed the doorway with a stream of 9 mm Parabellum slugs. He saw one agent drop, leaving a puff of crimson mist behind, and looked around for Victor Kalabane. He saw him charging from the small apartment’s tiny bathroom, hoisting khaki trousers with his left hand while the right brandished a .50-caliber Desert Eagle.
The raiders opened fire, then, automatic rifles chattering, stitching erratic patterns on the dirty walls. Cissoko dived behind the swaybacked sofa, lunging for the hatbox where he kept the hand grenades.
A little something extra for the Feds, to see what they were made of.
He yanked the pin from one grenade and lobbed the bomb toward the doorway, followed quickly by another, then reached up and blindly fired off the remainder of his mini-Uzi’s magazine to keep them scrambling for the last few seconds of their lives.
The double blast was music to Cissoko’s ears.
Cackling, his SMG reloaded, he leaped up and charged the enemy. He saw Victor sprawled off to his left, where slugs or shrapnel had come close to disemboweling him. No matter. They would meet again in hell, and soon, if there was such a place.
Laughing manically and firing on the run, Cissoko rushed to meet his death.