Keeping his grip on the collar of the vest, Scorpion pulled him up to a sitting position. “Cracked a rib in the worst case,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”
Scorpion turned to Maria. “Come on up front. Help us navigate out of here.”
Maria lingered for just a second or two. She touched his cheek and smiled. It was a look he didn’t know how to interpret. Surely, it didn’t mean what he wanted it to.
“What?” Tristan asked.
“You remind me of someone I once loved very much. I’m glad you are not hurt.” She turned and moved to the front with the others.
What the hell had she been telling him? Could it really be that-
The world erupted in blinding white light.
Big Guy yelled, “Holy shit!” Their vehicle swerved violently and hit something hard. This time, whatever they’d hit won the battle.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
As soon as Palma told him the story of Maria’s rescue, and the bombings, Felix realized that they would attempt to use his tunnels as a means to get out of the country. The question was which one?
He had a vast array of smuggling tunnels-at least eight of them currently in operation-that circulated literally tons of drugs into the United States every year. The Americans were such morons. While they distracted themselves with debates over whether or not to built a multibillion-dollar fence along the border, Felix and a few of his competitors owned the subterranean real estate-just as surely as they owned American Border Patrol agents and the owner of the properties on the other side where the tunnels rose back to the surface.
Every now and then, Felix would tip off the El Paso police and the local news media so that they could discover one of his less productive tunnels and make a show for the American public about the hard work they were doing to stop the flow of drugs into their country. Each new discovery would boost a bureaucrat’s career. In their gratitude, they would only look but so hard for the next tunnel.
As a new generation of politicians and civil servants came to power in America-many of them current or reformed consumers of the products Felix created-it became progressively easier to smuggle drugs into the United States. As long as he handed the Americans enough victories in their drug war to allow the politicians to preen, and he cooperated with the Central Intelligence Agency to provide protection for their clandestine launch platforms and listening bases throughout Central America, they stayed out of his way, going so far as to falsify reports to their handlers back in Langley. For that last part-the falsified reports-Felix paid several chiefs of station up to twice their legitimate salaries in thank-you gifts.
Of them all, Trevor Munro had been the most demanding-and, in the end, the most ungrateful.
Until yesterday, Felix had never believed Munro’s claims that he’d had no knowledge of the Colombian incursion that had killed Mitchell Ponder and cost him so much. Who but the American military, after all, could have pulled off that kind of operation with such precision? Now that they’d lured the same operators into Mexico, their ingenuity and capacity for violence made Munro’s denials more credible.
But the American commandoes were still but a few against many, and soon they would be dead. Palma’s guess that they would choose the nearest tunnel had turned out to be correct. And now, according to his last report, they were surrounded.
Soon, they would be dead, and this long, annoying distraction would finally be over.
Even better, if Felix’s intelligence gatherers were correct, Munro would soon be the associate deputy director of the CIA, with access to all of that agency’s assets. He’d be in a position where one word from Felix could bring him down, with a future measured in prison time.
This blooming reality was far greater than any fantasy Hernandez had ever dared to dream.
One million candlepower.
For the last twenty years, that had been the standard wattage for helicopter searchlights. Jonathan figured that was the minimum wattage of the beam that lit them up, and he could tell from the way that Boxers ripped at his NVGs that the blast of light had damn near blinded him. When he swerved, he ran head-on into three steel-and-concrete bollards that stood sentry outside a warehouse building.
“God damn it!” Boxers yelled. The plume of steam from under the hood told them that the Sandcat was dead.
As the chopper continued to circle overhead, the floodlight remained fixed on the ruined vehicle, a beacon to the horde of pissed-off soldiers who would soon be racing after them.
“Big Guy, you all right?”
“I so want to kill somebody right now!” Cursing, he undid his harness and shouldered his door open. He grabbed his ruck and shouted, “Where’s my weapon?”
Jonathan handed it to him, and without pausing even a beat, Boxers rolled out of the Sandcat, pressed the weapon to his shoulder and fired two quick rounds into the artificial sun that had lit them up.
The chin light flared and went black. You just don’t get to see marksmanship like that very often.
Palma saw the shooter step out of the vehicle and drop to his knee, and as the enormous man took aim, he thought for sure that his bullet was somehow going to go straight between his eyes. In the wash of the light, the muzzle flash registered more as smoke than light. The world went dark, and Palma could not have been more impressed.
“Set us down!” he commanded.
Instead, the pilot pulled pitch and they rose higher.
“Down there!” Palma yelled. “Our prey is down there!”
The gunfire had frazzled the pilot. He was not trained in combat tactics. His job was to track traffic and deliver VIPs to their venues of choice. Getting shot at was not part of the deal.
“Everybody out!” Jonathan commanded. “Everybody bring weapons.” God knew they had a big enough selection. Jonathan shrugged back into his ruck, and by the time he stood to his full height outside the vehicle, the others had gathered in a semicircle.
“Where are we going, Maria?”
She seemed startled by the realization that they were depending on her to be their guide. “I haven’t been paying attention,” she said. “I don’t know where we are, exactly.”
In the distance, Jonathan heard the sound of approaching vehicles. If he used his imagination, he could see the distant phantoms of red and blue emergency lights. Staying put was out of play. He had to assume that the people in the chopper had weapons, and a stationary target would be their greatest gift.
“Okay, this way,” he said. Relying on instinct and his memory of the map he’d studied on his GPS, he led them off in what had to be north. “Stay close to the buildings and move fast.”
In the canyons created by the low-rise warehouse buildings, the chopper overhead appeared to be everywhere. The grinding hum of the rotor blades pounded the night from all directions.
The fact that the aircraft had had a chin light in the first place gave Jonathan hope that the flight crew didn’t have night vision, but hope was a lot like prayer-always welcome, but rarely dependable for results. The chopper would find a place to set down soon, and in the meantime, the crew was no doubt working the radio to coordinate ground forces.
They needed to keep moving.
“Maria, is any of this looking familiar?”
“It all looks familiar,” she said. “The buildings all look the same. It’s been a long time since I’ve been here.”
“What’s the unit number again?”
“Twelve-seventy, I think.”
“You think?”
“That’s what I remember.”
“Is that the number you gave to the FBI?”
“I think so, yes.”
Jonathan felt a swell of anger, but he swallowed it down. What was it about civilians that once the tension ratcheted up, made everything become a question? No one was sure of anything anymore. Well, there was a solution for that.