Smiling, he squeezed the trigger. The shot echoed like thunder, and the machine gunner’s head evaporated.
Hancock didn’t roll behind the tree against the chance that someone had seen his muzzle flash. Instead, he kept his eye to the scope waiting to see if anyone would have the balls to return his fire. To his surprise, the police made no attempt to return fire; instead, they were rushing into the shop.
He shifted aim and fired into the clutch of men, hitting two cops with one shot and splattering their bodies. He squeezed the trigger again, and blew off another man’s shoulder. A fourth round took off an officer’s leg, and after that there were no more live targets within view — save for the now one-legged officer writhing on the sidewalk four feet from the doorway.
“That’s right,” Hancock whispered. “Call your buddies to come get you.”
Someone threw a length of rope out the door, and the wounded officer grabbed hold of it. Hancock blew off his arm at the elbow. A smoke grenade was tossed out onto the sidewalk, and he began to lose visual contact, so he squeezed the trigger again, hitting the wounded cop in the belly and blowing him apart.
As the gray smoke billowed up around the trucks, Hancock put an armor-piercing round through the engine block of each one. Then he put a round through the transformer up on the telephone pole. Sparks exploded from the old steel box, and the street fell into darkness. Satisfied that the police inside the shoe store weren’t going anywhere, he pulled back and trotted up to the corner, where his bodyguards stood waiting by the car. Twenty other men, some with RPGs, were fanning out to cover the street.
Fighting could now be heard on the east side of town: automatic weapons fire and the occasional boom of an explosion.
“How’s the attack going?” Hancock asked the man with the phone.
“It goes well,” the man said. “The police have fallen back to the center of town. They have prepared positions… sandbags… machine gun emplacements. It will be hard to dig them out, but you can pick them off easily. We should go.”
“My work is here.” Hancock was loading rounds into the Barrett’s magazine. “At least one of the gringos who can identify me is in that building down there — probably both. Tell our people in the east to take their RPGs to roof level and fire down into the machine gun nests. The police don’t have the men or equipment to hold the center of town against rockets. If our people move aggressively, we’ll own the city by midnight. Once we’ve proven ourselves, Serrano’s friends will support Ruvalcaba, but we have to demonstrate our strength right here, right now, so tell them to get on it!”
The man got back on the phone, and the driver stood looking at Hancock. “I’ve heard that Ruvalcaba is on the run,” he remarked.
“Sure he is,” Hancock said, smacking the magazine back into the rifle. “Wouldn’t you be? With Serrano dead, Mexico City’s not safe for him. He’ll stay in Chiapas until he can negotiate with the government for a safe return. Look, it all hinges on what we do here tonight. By morning, there will be a new chief of police, half of your people will be cops, and it’ll be like this never happened. That will give Ruvalcaba a lot of breathing room.”
The driver nodded. “Okay,” he said, “but it’s good the rest of the men don’t know he’s running away.”
“The rest of the men are idiots.” Hancock slung the great weapon. “Shit, half of them can’t even fucking read.”
The driver took offense. “My mother can’t read. Is she an idiot?”
Hancock grinned. “Not unless she’s lugging an AK-47 for Ruvalcaba.”
The driver was hard pressed to hide his irritation. “How much time are we going to waste here? Those cops down there aren’t a threat.”
“Yes, they are,” Hancock insisted. “They’ve got two Green Berets with them, and Green Berets are too dangerous to let live in a battle like this — and they’re dangerous to me personally. So we stay and kill them.”
Sergeant Cuevas’s body lay on the sidewalk just outside the door to the shoe store, his left shoulder having been blown off and part of his lung hanging out the top of his exploded rib cage.
Much of the smoke from the grenade had blown back into the building, making it even tougher to see in the dark, and no one dared use a flashlight for fear of the sniper.
Purely on impulse, Vaught dashed out the door, grabbed Cuevas’s FX-05 with the 40 mm grenade launcher, and leapt back inside without drawing any fire.
Crosswhite jumped to his feet. “That was a goddamn stupid thing to do!”
“Tell me about it.” Vaught slung the weapon. “I’m going after him.”
“The fuck are you talkin’ about?”
Vaught pointed up. “Along the rooftops. He shot out the lights, and now it’s dark as shit out there. He won’t expect me to come after him — not any more than he did the first time.”
Crosswhite drew from a cigarette, the cherry glowing bright red. “And the first time worked out so well for ya.”
“If it hadn’t been for crooked cops, I’d have bagged his fuckin’ ass.”
Crosswhite wanted to go with Vaught, to carry the fight to the enemy, as had always been his nature. But tonight he had to admit the truth: he wanted to see Paolina again, he wanted to see his baby girl born, and his best chance of that was staying inside the shoe store and waiting for the fight to come to him. “Fuck you,” he muttered, flicking away the cigarette with a shower of tiny sparks.
“For what?” Vaught asked indignantly.
“For being like I used to be.”
Vaught put a hand on his shoulder. “You’re just old and scared, dude. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Crosswhite smirked and knocked the arm away. “Kiss my ass.”
The conversation had been in English, so the other five combat-effective officers hadn’t understood what was being said. When Vaught went to the back of the shop, mounting the stairs to the roof, they asked Crosswhite where he was going.
Crosswhite answered, “Él va a cazar al francotirador gringo.” He goes to hunt the gringo sniper.
81
Vaught closed the hatch, moving across the roof in a combat crouch, relieved to be free of the death trap below. Was he abandoning the others? Possibly, but not out of cowardice. He had a score to settle with Rhett Hancock, and if he made a mistake, the sniper would make him pay with 42 grams of lead moving at 3,000 feet per second. The FX-05 was fixed with a red dot scope, giving him a small measure of “night vision” when it came to aiming, but until he could close the distance, Hancock would hold every advantage — not the least of which being that Vaught had no idea where the hell he was.
He crossed to the next rooftop and went to the edge, stealing a glance at the street below and pulling quickly back. Men were converging on the shoe store with rifles and RPGs. He could shoot some of them and buy Crosswhite some time, but if Hancock was watching, they’d be his last shots. Still, his instincts were telling him the sniper was not set yet, so he swung the rifle over the parapet and fired a grenade at the lead RPG man.
The grenade hit the wall next to the rocketeer, blowing a hole in the brick wall and killing the man instantly.
Vaught immediately opened up with the FX-05, cutting down six more men as they scrambled to find cover where there was none. The weapon ran through ammo a little faster than he was accustomed to, but he hit everyone he meant to before pulling back to reload. He would not go back to the well a second time, no matter how tempting.