“Don’t you die on me over there! You suck that shit up and fight me!”
Hancock sprang up unexpectedly, firing a round through the parapet one foot from where Crosswhite was crouched.
“Fuck me!” Crosswhite murmured, displacing fast and firing at the sniper’s silhouette before he could track him.
84
Pope sat staring with bloodshot eyes at a television monitor, watching an aerial view of the battle for Toluca in infrared. Midori stood behind him, her arms crossed in bitter disapproval. After Crosswhite had thrust his finger toward the sky, there had been no doubt that it was him.
“I hope he kills that son of a bitch and comes for you,” she said, ashamed to have been even a small part of what was happening.
“Perhaps he will,” Pope said quietly. “The UAV’s at bingo fuel. I have to bring it back to American airspace.”
“Do something!” she implored. “Help them!”
He turned to look at her, a slightly incredulous look on his face. “What do you suggest I do?”
She pointed at the screen. “Call somebody down there!”
“There’s no one to call. It’s quite out of my hands.”
“Is the drone armed?”
“Of course not.”
She smirked, her emotions getting the better of her. “You say that like it’s an impossibility.”
He gave her a frown. “I don’t send armed UAVs over allied countries; you know that very well.” Returning his attention to the monitor, Pope gripped the joystick and banked the aircraft northward. “I shouldn’t have invited you to watch.”
“Why did you?”
“I don’t know. I thought … I thought we might reestablish a trust. I see now that all I’ve managed to do is make things worse between us.”
Midori had worked for Pope for over ten years, and she knew him well enough to understand how sincere a gesture this had been. Because of that, she was unable to help feeling compassion for him. “You really don’t understand what you’ve done, do you?” she said. “You’ve started a war down there. Those men are dying, Robert.”
He put the UAV on autopilot and turned in the chair, gently taking hold of her hands. “We’ve watched thousands of people die on these monitors. Tonight is nothing different. Don’t forget that two nuclear weapons came across that border—two. I cannot allow that to happen again. Not if it’s within my power to prevent it.”
She pulled her hands free. “Do you still think that’s what this is about? Tonight has nothing to do with the border — nothing.”
“I’ve already admitted to you this operation got out of hand. But it got out of hand only because Vaught exceeded his mission parameters — an accident of fate — an unknown variable that I could not have accounted for ahead of time. What’s happening down there now is fate playing itself out, nothing more.”
“And when the smoke clears?”
“I have no idea. We have to see who’s left standing.”
Midori stared at him, her slow eyes dark and sad — a sadness brought on by the irrevocable truth that the Pope she had respected and admired for so many years no longer existed. He had evolved into a man who could reduce a human life to nothing more than a blip on a screen. And he could do so with little more care than it took to brush his teeth.
“I’m going home now,” she said quietly.
“Good night,” he said in his gentle voice.
She put her hand on the doorknob. “By the way, it’s officiaclass="underline" Lena Deiss and Sabastian Blickensderfer are getting married in eight days. Do you still want me to continue surveillance?”
“No,” Pope replied, turning back to the monitor and placing his hand on the stick. “Discontinue all surveillance. We’ve wasted enough time on Blickensderfer.”
85
Vaught waited for his moment and then fired a 40 mm high-explosive grenade into the doorway at the bottom of the stairs. He charged down and machine-gunned the survivors, stomping a crawling man’s neck on the way out the door.
“Jackasses,” he sneered contemptuously.
Stepping into the street, Vaught could hear the fighting on the east side of town reaching a gut-wrenching crescendo — sustained bursts of automatic fire and multiple explosions — and he was hit with the dreadful realization that Diego and his men were being slaughtered.
Down the block, he heard Crosswhite and Hancock harangue each other a last time. Vaught immediately zeroed the sniper’s position and dashed across. “Got you now, motherfucker!”
Hancock had been hit straight across the back by one of Vaught’s NATO rounds. Both shoulder blades were grazed, and his infraspinatus muscles spasmed painfully every time he attempted to lift and aim the rifle. His fingers were tingling, and he was going into shock.
“Time to go,” he groaned, dragging himself and the Barrett into the stairwell. Hancock trotted down to the ground floor, ducking into the street, where the narcos were gunning it out at almost point-blank range with the policemen in the shoe store.
He knew from the ferocity of fighting on the east side that the city was about to fall. “My work here is done!” He ran off up the sidewalk through the dark until he made it to the corner where his bodyguards stood waiting impatiently beside the midnight-blue Dodge Charger.
“Let’s get the hell out of here. I need a medic.”
The other two men gladly loaded up, and the car sped off.
Crosswhite very nearly shot Vaught when he appeared on the rooftop across the street. But Vaught gave him a wave and fired an HE grenade into the narcos below, killing four men and opening up and full automatic.
With apparently no sniper to worry about, Crosswhite stood up and opened fire as well.
The narcos were now caught in a murderous cross fire with nowhere to run. Within ten seconds, fifteen men lay dead in the street.
“Is the son of a bitch dead?” Crosswhite shouted over.
Vaught took a small flashlight from his harness, flashing it around. “I don’t see him!”
“He’s gotta be there! Look for a blood trail — he’s hit!”
Vaught found the trail of blood and followed it down to ground level, where Crosswhite and five other police officers met him in the middle of the street, all of them looking at one another in dismay.
“He can’t have disappeared!” Crosswhite said. “He’s hit — I hit him!” He turned toward the bodies. “Check these assholes!”
Everyone took out a flashlight and checked the corpses for the face of a gringo, but Hancock was not among the dead.
“Goddamnit!” Vaught shouted. “How did you lose him?”
“What the fuck are you talkin’ about?” Crosswhite retorted. “He was on your side of the fucking street!”
“Fuck!” Vaught kicked a body. “We had him, Dan! We fucking had him!”
The fighting on the east side suddenly fell off to nothing, and everyone knew the city had fallen.
“Well, shit!” Crosswhite said in disgust. “There’s no time to worry about it now. We gotta get the wounded outta here. We’ll escape across the west side.”
A pair of trucks came roaring around the corner, and everyone brought their weapons to bear.
“Hold fire!” Vaught shouted, seeing that the trucks were loaded with federal troops.
Chief Diego jumped down from the running board of the lead truck, his left arm in a sling and blood dripping from his fingers. “Thank God some of you are still alive!”
Lieutenant R. Felix got out on the driver’s side, his troops already dismounting to form a defensive perimeter around the shoe store, spreading out up the street. The officers led the medics inside, shining their lights on the wounded men who were covered with the dust and debris of battle.