Even so, he’d waited until nightfall and then one hour more because the defenders might have been expecting an attack as soon as darkness covered the property. Now, at nine in the evening, he could wait no longer. It was time to hit these worthless cabrones in the house, kill every last thing that moved — every man, woman, and child, and then the dogs and cats and the chickens and goats.
He wanted to check with the other teams who should just now be approaching from other directions, but one of his damn officers had apparently depressed the transmit button on his radio, and it prevented the comandante from sending commands or hearing from any of his other men. He’d waited thirty seconds for el chingado cabrón to realize his error and fix his radio, but still he could not communicate.
In another twenty seconds he would be ready to call for the attack, and if this hijo de puta didn’t fix his chingado radio, the comandante was going to string the pendejo up by his chingado—
Behind him, lights through the forest. Moving up the driveway towards the house.
He looked to the men around him as he quickly dove behind a low stone wall that rimmed the parking circle in front of the casa grande. He had to get out of the driveway before he was silhouetted by the approaching headlights.
He turned back around, stared at the lights, and he could not believe what he saw.
The mobile command vehicle bounced wildly up cobblestones towards his position.
He’d left the two drivers in the MCV at the front gate, but they had no reason whatsoever to even run the engine much less take part in the attack.
Even though his radio was not functioning, he pressed the button and screamed into it. “¡Cabrones! What the fuck are you doing?”
Fifty yards away the vehicle’s red brake lights illuminated in the forest.
The MCV stopped in the woods, began turning around in the tight confines of the narrow driveway.
The comandante turned back towards the house. Whatever the hell his drivers were doing, they had eliminated any further surprise. He rose and opened fire on the front of the house with his M16 rifle; this was the only way he had to begin the attack without the use of his worthless radio.
Men on either side of him followed suit; their rounds sparked against the stone facade and tore through the wooden door.
The comandante heard a sound through the gunfire, and he turned back towards the noise. In his utter astonishment he stood up from behind the low wall and lowered his rifle to his waist.
The massive armored MCV moved up the rocky driveway in reverse, its speed increasing by the second. The huge blue truck bounced and heaved, its chassis straining under the weight of tons of ballistic steel.
The comandante had driven armored cars enough to know the view out of the rearview mirror was lousy; this pinche driver was blindly accelerating up towards the casa grande at a speed that he could not control.
“¡Alto!” Stop! The comandante screamed into his radio; the problem with the mike seemed to have been rectified, although every other aspect of this attack was turning to mierda in front of his eyes. The MCV shot backwards towards the other armored truck, the BATT that was parked in the parking circle and shining its headlights on the big dark house.
The armored vehicle doing what it was fucking supposed to be doing!
The MCV looked like it would flip as it bottomed out at forty miles an hour; it missed sideswiping the other vehicle by no more than a foot, knocking off the driver’s side mirrors of both trucks.
Suddenly, the comandante standing at the wall realized three things in rapid-fire succession: One, if his driver had had trouble seeing what was behind him before, now that his mirror was smashed and bouncing up the drive behind him he would not be able to see a thing. Two, that his driver was not his driver! And three — that the federale MCV moving at forty miles an hour was going to crash up the front steps of the house.
Court let go of the transmit button and tossed the radio onto the floor of the truck and then stomped on the gas. The lumbering vehicle slowly accelerated up the driveway in reverse, bouncing and bumping up the hill. He buckled himself in, and only this allowed him to keep his foot planted firmly on the pedal. The buffeting inside the top-heavy vehicle made him feel like he was a rag doll being shaken by a giant. Still, he did not let up on the gas for an instant.
He’d been aiming, if you could call it that, more or less at the front door to the casa grande, but when he lost his mirror, he gave up on any pretense of precision in his targeting. Instead he just floored it, hung on to the steering wheel for dear life, and pushed his head back hard into the headrest, unsure when the impact would come or even if he would survive it.
He felt a jolting crash that rocked him hard, slammed him tight into his seat, and caused his foot to slip from the gas pedal, but he knew he had not yet hit the house. As the bottom of the vehicle scrapped over stone, he determined it was the angel fountain in the center of the drive. This told him he was heading too far to the left to hit the front doors squarely.
He turned the steering wheel slightly to the right, jammed his foot down on the pedal again as automatic-weapon fire raked across the thick glass plate of the windscreen. He streaked by the broken-down farm truck with Ignacio Gamboa’s body in the front seat.
Court’s armored bus crashed straight up the steps of the casa grande; it smashed with brute violence into the western side of the archway and turned the two-hundred-year-old oak doors into logs and splinters.
The MCV jolted to a stop. Court slammed the transmission into park, unbuckled himself, and spun into the back. Behind him the confused and tentative smattering of gunfire that had chased the truck up the drive now turned into a heavy fusillade as the Policía Federal quickly came to the realization that this was not a wayward vehicle of theirs but, instead, a breakout attempt by the family under siege.
In the back Gentry fell down twice, stumbling from his dazed headache and lost a moment in the darkness, tripping over weapons that had fallen from their shelves. Seconds later he recovered, found the two items he’d been looking for, and opened the back doors.
Diego knelt in the sitting room behind the couch and fired at movement on the back patio. His grandfather had gone upstairs to shoot from the mirador, but he had not heard his abuelo fire the M1 carbine in over a minute.
An unreal amount of automatic fire shredded the front of the house. Diego knelt behind the couch as if it would give him some sort of cover; he only lifted his head when he heard an engine’s roar. The rear of a huge blue truck crashed into the entry way of the casa grande and continued several feet inside the building. In a panic Diego stood and fired with his pistol, the bullets just making sparks on the rear door. His weapon clicked open and empty.
The sixteen-year-old boy fumbled his reload, dropped a magazine on the tile floor, and chased it to the edge of a wingback chair before retrieving it and seating it in the grip of his gun. Long before his weapon was back in the fight the black doors of the vehicle flew open, and Diego saw a man crouched there in the truck with two massive weapons in his hands.