He kicked open the door to the roof and stood aside, waiting for a hail of bullets that did not come. Stealing a quick look around the jam, he saw two figures opening another door on the far side of the roof a hundred feet away. One of them disappeared behind it, toting a Barrett sniper rifle. Vaught shot down the second man before he could slip inside; then he ran across. But before he could make it all the way, the Federales came pouring onto the roof behind him, screaming, “Alto! Alto!” Halt!
Knowing they would not hesitate to shoot him, Vaught pulled up short, thrusting his hands into the air and turning around with his weapon dangling from the sling, his DSS badge glinting in the sun. “El francotirador se escapa!” he shouted. “Por ahí, amigos! Por las escaleras!” The sniper’s getting away! Over there! By the stairs!
Seven hard-eyed Federales surrounded him, covering him with M4 carbines and shouting for him to get down on his knees. They didn’t seem to hear what he’d said. Vaught repeated it, and someone kicked him behind his knee to drop him. They shoved him onto his face and shackled his hands behind his back.
“Are you deaf?” he shouted in Spanish. “The sniper’s getting away!”
One of the Federales pressed down on his neck with a lug-soled boot, saying in a sonorous voice, “Cállate.” Shut up.
Vaught was stripped of his weapons and radio, and then brought to his feet. He spit out what was left of the tobacco in his lip and looked at the captain who’d stood on his neck. The patch over the man’s breast pocket read “Espinosa.” He was tall and muscular, with a black mustache and heavy-lidded, obsidian eyes.
“Tell me you’ve got men covering the stairs, Captain. Tell me you’re not just letting that son of a bitch get away.”
The captain jerked his head toward the exit, ordering his men to take Vaught below.
“What the fuck is going on?” Vaught demanded. “Those are our people down there dead in the street! You’re letting the bastard escape!”
Below, Vaught was stuffed into the back of an unmarked car with black-tinted windows. He lowered his wrists and stepped through the cuffs to get his hands back in front of him, and sat watching as the captain spoke with two detectives in plain clothes. At length, they nodded and got into the car.
Vaught asked in Spanish if the sniper had been caught.
The man in the passenger seat said, “Everything is under control. Don’t worry.”
“I need to be debriefed by my people immediately.”
“First, you go to see our people.”
“No, that’s not how this works! I’ve got diplomatic immunity. You have to take me directly to my embassy. Are you federal cops or municipal?”
“La inmunidad diplomática,” the passenger echoed to the driver, and both men laughed.
Vaught sat back with a sigh, muttering in English, “Fuck you both.”
Within a few blocks, it was apparent they were not circling back toward the Federal District but were continuing on a course carrying them ever farther away from el Distrito Federal.
“Where are we going?”
When they ignored him, Vaught lunged over the seat for the steering wheel, hoping to wreck the car. The man in the passenger seat was ready, jamming a high-powered stun gun into Vaught’s neck, shocking him over and over until finally he lay crumpled on the floor behind the seat, virtually paralyzed.
“Cabrón!” the passenger cursed, throwing the stun gun onto the dash and straightening his tie. Asshole!
Ten minutes later, Vaught was dragged from the back of the car by two different men and taken into a building at the end of an alley. There was no doubt that he was now in the hands of the cartels and that he likely didn’t have long to live. He made up his mind to take out one of the bastards the very first chance he got, but with his hands cuffed together, that wasn’t going to be the easiest stunt to pull.
He was thrown onto a musty couch that smelled of cat piss. A different guy with the same stun gun appeared and jammed the weapon into Vaught’s gut, giving him another five jolts. Vaught screamed involuntarily, his muscles contracting uncontrollably until his bladder let loose.
A number of men stood laughing.
“Knock it the fuck off!” someone ordered in English, and the room fell into an abrupt silence.
Vaught opened his eyes to slits, catching a glimpse of a white male dressed in jeans and an olive drab T-shirt. He stood in the doorway holding a Barrett sniper rifle by the carrying handle. His sandy blond hair was cut high and tight above a pair of merciless blue eyes, and there was an Airborne Rangers tattoo on his bulging left bicep. He grunted out orders in heavily accented Spanish and then disappeared down a hall, carrying the weapon that had blown Alice Downly in half.
Someone took away Vaught’s badge, body armor, and boots, leaving him in his stocking feet. He felt like an idiot for having let them take him alive, but what was he supposed to have done? Gun down a bunch of cops on a rooftop in Mexico City? The sad reality was that he’d put himself in this rat-fucked situation by going off the reservation, so he wasn’t about to blame anyone else. He’d just have to get himself out of it — or take the damn bullet without complaint.
Out of nowhere, he was given another jolt from the stun gun and shoved off the couch, onto the floor. One of the handcuffs was released long enough to roll him onto his belly and recuff his hands behind him. This gang wasn’t taking any chances, and Vaught saw his hopes of going down fighting quickly slip away.
A stun gun took a lot out of a man, the electricity forcing the muscles to do a tremendous amount of work in an extremely short period of time, converting the blood sugar into lactic acid and leaving the victim completely exhausted in a matter of seconds. Vaught already felt as though he’d gone ten rounds with a heavyweight fighter, and he was pretty damn sure he hadn’t experienced the last of that fucking stun gun.
There weren’t all that many people to say good-bye to, really. He’d grown up in a Marine Corps family, raised in numerous locations around the world, so he didn’t have what most people would call regular friends. He was the youngest of three brothers (the two eldest both being marines), and his father, a gunnery sergeant, had named him for the Chance Vought F4-U Corsair flown by his paternal grandfather — yet another marine — in the Korean War.
Determined to escape the shadows of his older siblings, Vaught had decided to break with the family’s USMC tradition and enlist in the US Army — one month after the Bin Laden attacks — boldly stating his intention to become a Green Beret.
He’d discovered early that he was a natural leader. Within a month of his first hour in combat, he was promoted to a Special Forces weapons sergeant with the Fifth Special Forces Group out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Vaught then went on to serve multiple tours over the next eight years with an ODA (Operational Detachment — A, or A-Team) in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now as he lay drooling on the floor with his face pressed against the filthy concrete, a commotion flared up down the hall, and there was a heated discussion over the unbelievable stupidity of bringing an American DSS agent to that location.
“Hey, I’m happy to leave,” he mumbled in English, and couldn’t help a sardonic chuckle.
One of the men standing over him kicked him in the ass. “Cállate, cabrón.”
Vaught didn’t say anything more, fearing that another electrical jolt might sap the last of whatever strength he had left. As it was, he wasn’t sure if he could even get to his feet without help, much less put up a fight.
Then a glowering Senator Lazaro Serrano — the head of the Mexican delegation to fight drug trafficking — stepped into the room, and that was the icing on the cake of Vaught’s day. He was hard pressed to stifle an ironic laugh.