“Gone, man. Vanished.”
Even more suspicious.
“Wait there, Delta Four. We’re pulling out.”
“Copy.”
He and Suárez quickly scanned the second floor for personal items but didn’t find much-some receipts in the desk drawer in one of the other bedrooms, a book in Spanish about Muhammad Ali, a closet full of men’s clothes. Even the phones were gone.
“Strange,” Suárez whispered.
“Very.”
Nothing much, either, on the ground floor. Suárez was standing on a stool looking in kitchen cabinets when Crocker said, “Let’s go.”
Out the side door, he saw Davis and Mancini waiting by the trucks. Without warning, shots came from the direction of the side wall and a burst of blood rose from Davis’s left collarbone. Crocker watched him spin, grab hold of the hood of the Ford pickup, and slide to the ground. Seconds later explosions rocked the front and back walls.
His ears filled with the high-pitched sounds of dogs wailing, Crocker backed inside the doorway and knelt into a crouch. Shielding his eyes from the smoke and flying debris with his left hand and turning left, he saw armed men dressed in dark camouflage with black armored vests and black masks stream through a smoking gap in the back wall. He figured they were probably charging through the front gate, too.
“Move to the main house!” he shouted into the radio. “Manny, you need help with Davis?”
“I’ve got him.”
Nieves: “We’re fucked!”
Akiclass="underline" “Not happening.”
Crocker: “Keep quiet and grab as much ammo as you can from the trucks. Then rendezvous in the main house!”
Lisa Clark dreamt that she was sitting in front of a pasticceria on an old cobblestone Italian street, admiring the yellow tulips in the little park across the street. Her head was numb and soft like a pillow and her body filled with a cottony, fuzzy warmth.
Noticing that some of the tulips hadn’t been colored in yet, she filled them in with her mind, and as she did, a wave of euphoria passed through her body. The scene was perfect now. And she had created it herself according to the plan of the numbered schemata.
All the pain and anguish of the past had retreated far away.
She floated through the air like a feather. Then the air stopped moving and settled around her. Fingers touched her bare arm.
She heard someone say, “This way, Señora,” as though he was singing a song.
Her feet touched the ground. Gravel tickled her feet through the leather sandals. The air was fragrant with the smells of grass and flowers.
Although she couldn’t see, everything felt as though it fit together in a perfect God-like order.
She heard a voice whisper to her right, “Mom.”
She recognized the voice of her daughter, Olivia, which thrilled her. “Olivia.”
“Mom, I’m blindfolded. Are you there?”
“Yes, darling.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. Yes, absolutely.”
“Mom…Mom, I love you.”
“I love you, too,” Lisa responded. “Is something wrong?”
“Are you serious, Mom? Did they give you something?”
“Maybe…it’s not important.”
“Do you understand what’s going on? Do you know where they’re taking us?”
The urgency in her daughter’s voice was something that she didn’t understand and that almost offended her. She had opened her mouth to say something, when a man grunted “Quiet!” and squeezed her arm tightly until it hurt.
Crocker knelt over Davis on the tile kitchen floor and applied pressure to the wound with his left while reaching for a blowout patch in his emergency medical kit with his right. Rounds flew over his head and slammed into the wall and refrigerator behind him. There was glass strewn everywhere, spent shells and smoke. Suárez knelt behind a window to his right picking off the enemy, who had taken cover behind trees, chairs, bushes, and several modern sculptures in the yard.
“Who are they?” Suárez shouted as dogs continued to wail and yelp from somewhere in the backyard.
“Zetas, cops, fucking aliens. Just take ’em down!”
“With pleasure!”
Urgent voices screamed over the radio. “Boss, taking fire out front!”
“Two tangos down near the gate!”
“We need refo! The mofos keep coming!”
Before he could answer, he had to stem the flow of blood so Davis didn’t bleed out.
He spoke to Davis in a low voice throughout the whole procedure. “Just a nick. Routine. I’ll have you patched up in a second, then we’ll get you out of here.”
The round had entered right below Davis’s left clavicle and exited his back near the spine. With the bleeding in the front staunched, Crocker lifted him enough to feel through the blood on his back.
There seemed to be no structural damage, which was a huge relief.
“Missed your spine,” Crocker said as he applied a second blowout patch to the gaping wound in back. “You’re a lucky man.”
“Thank God…” Davis’s eyes had rolled back in their sockets. His skin had turned pale and was covered with sweat.
It wasn’t a full kit, so Crocker used what he could find-combat gauze, QuikClot, tape. Holding Davis’s head up, he said, “Stay with me.”
Davis swallowed and managed a tight smile. “I’m trying, boss.”
Crocker stood by the side of the window, leveled his HK416, and squeezed off a three-round burst that hit some guy in a black helmet crouched behind one of the concrete planters. He heard Akil’s voice over the radio by his foot: “Nieves is down. Fuck. He needs help!”
Crocker picked it up and asked, “Where?”
“The throat!”
“Keep his airway clear and open as best you can. I’ll be there in a second. What’s your location?”
“Second-floor balcony.”
He ran in a crouch to the stairway and had dived behind the hallway wall when on his right periphery he saw a rocket rip through one of the tall windows. He covered his head as it crashed into the wall and exploded. Plaster fell; hot metal hissed through the air. But Crocker’s main concern was the cell phone in his front pocket, which was their connection to the FBI safe house.
He checked it. It seemed fine. With the HK416 clutched in his right and the med kit on his back, he scurried on his hands and knees through the swirling smoke until he found Mancini pressed near a front window, aiming a Vietnam-era M-79 grenade launcher that looked like an old-fashioned blunderbuss.
“Manny…”
Mancini was completely focused on the target through the leaf-type sight. He squeezed off a 40x46mm round at an M706 armored car parked in the driveway.
The round slammed into.25-inch metal armor and exploded. Seconds later, the twin.30 cals in the turret spun their way and opened fire, tearing into the concrete around the front window.
“Fuck!” Manny shouted, ducking. Pieces of plaster and dust flew everywhere.
Crocker fished a chunk of plaster out of his right eye. “You see what you started?”
“How’s Davis?”
“Not good.”
Manny broke the pirate gun open and slammed in another 40mm round as Crocker jumped to the other side of the window and took aim at a black Polícia Federal truck with six or seven men in back that sped into the yard.
“We got to get him to a hospital.”
Hot 5.56x45mm shells cascaded onto the floor around him. Sweat mixed with the grit on his bare chest. The armored car continued to fire, ripping away the wooden border around the window and sending pieces of glass cascading over Crocker’s head and shoulders.
“Do something, Manny. That 706 is pissing me off,” Crocker shouted.
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” Manny fired a beehive round that exploded near the back of the truck and released dozens of 24g metal petals that ripped into some of the men in black.
“That the best you can do?” Crocker asked.
“Kiss my ass!”