“All war is hypocrisy.” Gil took a drag. “It’s a thing we gotta live with.”
Poncho’s radio crackled in his earpiece, and he touched the throat mike, acknowledging the transmission. “We’re on,” he said, getting to his feet.
Gil snuffed the cigarette and got up, shrugging to adjust his harness. Seconds later they were moving fast at port arms toward the dirt road. With each footfall, Gil felt the bite of the titanium implant in his right foot, the result of a gunshot wound eighteen months earlier. He was used to the pain by now, knowing the implant wouldn’t fail him in combat.
Poncho dashed across the road to take up position behind another giant fig tree. Gil remained on the opposite side, skirting east of Poncho’s position to conceal himself behind a boulder that had been pushed there during the road’s construction decades earlier.
A small convoy of three shiny black four-wheel-drive vehicles came through the curve at forty-five miles per hour. The first truck passed Poncho’s position, and he tossed a spike strip across the road just before the second truck in line went by.
All four tires on the second truck deflated, and the truck slewed around on the road, skidding to a controlled stop.
As the lead truck approached his position, Gil stood up and machine-gunned the driver, killing him with a burst of .308 caliber fire through the neck and head. The truck crashed off the road into a ditch. He biffed a fragmentation grenade after it and then darted toward the other vehicles. The grenade exploded as the men in the truck were dismounting with their weapons. The explosion tore apart the truck and hurled their mangled bodies into the bush.
Poncho was firing on the third vehicle, which had swerved off the road to avoid crashing into the second. He killed the five men before anyone had the chance to open a door.
All four doors of the second truck, however, were flying open, and armed men were jumping out shooting. Gil shot two of them dead and rolled for cover to reload.
The gunners fired on Poncho, driving him back to cover behind his fig tree, and then quickly jumped back into the truck. The driver gunned the Vortec engine, throwing dirt with the flattened tires and pulling away.
Slapping a fresh magazine into the rifle, Gil sprang back up and shot the driver. The truck swerved sharply, and the remaining gunman dove out with the vehicle still in motion, taking a wild shot at Gil as he bounced on the road. Gil raked him once with automatic fire, and he lay still.
Poncho opened the back door of the truck and found Hector Ruvalcaba cowering on the floor of the backseat. He grabbed the old man by the collar and yanked him out, dragging him into the road. “Welcome home, cabrón.”
Ruvalcaba shielded his eyes from the now-blazing sun. “Wait!” he said in Spanish. “I’ll pay you whatever you want — millions!”
Poncho looked at Gil, who stood in the road calmly reloading his rifle. “He says he’ll pay us whatever we want.”
Gil drew his 1911. “You wanna do it, or you want me to?”
Poncho pointed south. “Garrucha isn’t too far from here, half an hour through the jungle by Jeep.”
“So? What’s in Garrucha?”
“This asshole was born there.”
Gil took a second to light a cigarette. “I’m not from around here,” he said carefully, “and sometimes I can be a little slow on the uptake. But why the hell do we wanna take him home?”
“Because they hate him in Garrucha; worse than the devil.”
“I’ll pay you!” Ruvalcaba blurted in heavily accented English. “Whatever you want!”
Gil stood looking at the man, the cigarette poised at his lips as he harkened back to Afghanistan, where village justice was swift and final.
“You don’t wanna go home?”
Ruvalcaba shook his head. “Please. You are American, no? I’ll pay you a hundred times more than the FBI!”
“I don’t work for the FBI.” Gil looked at Poncho. “You thinkin’ there’ll be less hypocrisy this way?”
Poncho shrugged. “Something like that.”
Gil pointed the pistol into Ruvalcaba’s face. “Take off your clothes. If I have to tell you twice, I’ll plant this Fort Lewis boot so far up your ass you’ll have to untie the laces to take a shit.”
Poncho laughed. “What the hell does that mean?”
Gil gave him a wink. “It sounds tough; that’s all that matters.”
A half hour later, Poncho drove a battered white Jeep Renegade into the small village of Garrucha and stopped near a large pen full of goats. Chickens ran to and fro, and human faces began poking out of shabby brick homes. Having heard the firefight up on the mountain, the villagers had run for cover the second they heard the Jeep come splashing down the jungle trail.
Poncho took Ruvalcaba by the arm and pulled him from the Jeep, shoving him down in the mud naked, with his hands bound behind his back.
“Please!” Ruvalcaba begged Gil in English. “I am a very rich man!”
Recognizing Ruvalcaba, the villagers could scarcely believe their eyes, and figures began darting from house to house, spreading the news of his unbelievable return.
Three men came around a corner and walked out into the trail holding machetes over their shoulders. The machetes were not weapons, but the tools they used to make their living.
Poncho pointed at the naked man sitting in the mud. “If you want justice for your children, here he is.”
Shocked to see the man who had tortured and abused their region for the past ten years, the men stood looking at one another. More villagers appeared, and soon twenty men stood talking in a quiet group.
“What’s to talk about?” Gil wondered aloud. “Just hack the fucker and be done.”
“This isn’t the Middle East,” Poncho said. “These are superstitious people. They believe in the Virgin, and they have to reach a consensus on how to deal with this.”
“Catholic?”
Poncho shrugged. “Mostly.”
Gil was increasingly impatient when it came to religion. He’d seen too many people maimed and murdered over it. “What’s mostly mean?”
“They’re Catholic with Mayan superstitions. It’s hard to explain because every village down here is different. But, yeah, they consider themselves Catholic.”
“Learn somethin’ new every day, I suppose.” Gil looked down at Ruvalcaba, who sat trembling at his feet. “Whatever you did to these people, I’m pretty goddamn sure you’re gonna regret it.”
Ruvalcaba lurched forward, shamelessly attempting to embrace Gil’s leg between his neck and shoulder, like a cat fawning its owner. “Shoot me — please!”
Gil stepped away. “This is between you and your people.”
“They’re not my people!” Ruvalcaba attempted to stand.
Poncho knocked him over with the rifle butt. “His men come here a couple times a year: steal the boys to work in their meth labs; steal the daughters to use as whores. Most of them are never seen again.”
Three of the older men came forward, leaving their machetes behind near a wall. They asked to talk with Poncho in private.
“Please!” Ruvalcaba hissed. “Shoot me!”
“One more word,” Gil told him, “and I’ll kick your face in.”
A couple of minutes later, Poncho returned, hauling Ruvalcaba to his feet and shoving him toward the villagers.
A group of men held him while another group made preparations to tie him to a tree. The women began gathering stones into a pile. The teenagers were told to round up the children and take them down the trail to the church. The kids held hands and sang a happy religious-sounding song as they walked away through the trees.
Gil watched the pile of stones grow. “I expected machetes.”
Poncho shook his head. “No machetes in the Bible.”