Mancini reloaded with an explosive round that hit the gas tank and caused the driver to lose control and crash into the armored car.
“Better!” Crocker shouted as he took aim at several armed men escaping in the pickup. Flames engulfed both vehicles.
“I love this fucking pirate gun,” Mancini shouted, setting down the M-79 and picking up an MP7. “Simple as shit but gets the job done.”
A secondary explosion caused the hood of the truck to flip in the air and land on top of an M706 turret. Two men ran from the side door, clutching AKs. Mancini calmly picked them off.
Crocker, meanwhile, had the cell phone in his blood-covered hand and was punching Lane’s number.
“Lane! Lane, you hear me? It’s Crocker.”
“Crocker, how’d it go?”
“Bad. The house was empty. We’ve been ambushed by two dozen Federales with armored cars and rockets.”
“No. How the hell did that happen?”
“Don’t know. We’re pinned down. We need relief, reinforcements, and medevac A.S.A.P.! Do you copy?”
“Medevac?”
“I’ve got two badly wounded men.”
“Message received. I got it. I’ll call the station, the governor. Hold on.”
“Medevac, Lane. I don’t want to lose these men!”
“No.”
“Hurry!”
“I will.”
Chapter Eleven
In a mad world only the mad are sane.
– Akira Kurosawa
Crocker slipped the phone into his pocket and turned to Mancini, who was reloading his MP7. The firing in front of them seemed to have let up. But the sounds from the backyard were still ferocious.
“I’m going upstairs to look after Nieves,” Crocker said. “Suárez’s in the back with Davis. Akil’s upstairs.”
Both men ducked simultaneously as an explosion sent the hood of the burning truck flying in the air.
“You want me to go back and relieve Suárez?” Mancini asked as it crashed to the pavement.
“Make sure the front is covered first.”
Mancini shouted at Crocker’s back, “Tell Akil to get his ass down here. I have an idea.”
“I’ll send him.”
Upstairs on the balcony he found Akil kneeling over a prone Nieves, holding both hands on his neck.
“It’s bad,” Akil whispered. “He’s lost a lot of blood.”
“Let me see.”
Akil removed his hands from the bloody mess. A round had taken a two-inch-long chunk out of the side of Nieves’s neck but had missed the carotid artery. Nieves had already gone into hypovolemic shock due to the loss of blood, but his body temperature was still relatively normal, which meant that the shock wasn’t severe yet.
“Hold this,” Crocker said, applying a blowout patch to the wound. Then he removed his black T-shirt and said, “Now move your hands away.”
He used the T-shirt to tie the bandage in place, then lifted Nieves’s legs and slid a deck chair under them so that they were about a foot off the balcony floor.
“We need to get some blood in him,” Crocker said.
“How?”
“Go see Manny downstairs in front. He needs you.”
Just then several large explosions rocked the back of the house. Crocker grabbed his radio and shouted, “Suárez, you okay? Suárez, report!”
No answer.
He tried Mancini. “Manny?”
“Yeah, boss.”
“I’m going to relieve Suárez. Any sign of medevac or reinforcements?”
“Not yet.”
He found Suárez crouched by one of the back windows, fighting like a manic kid.
“Suárez?”
No answer, so Crocker kicked his foot.
Suárez frowned and pointed to his eardrums, indicating that they weren’t working. Outside, past the patio and cement planters filled with geraniums, eight to ten men had taken up positions and were inching toward the house.
Crocker raked the middle of them with fire, then reloaded and continued left. He shouted, “You take the right, I’ll cover the left!” Then, remembering Suárez couldn’t hear, he slapped his shoulder and pointed. Suárez nodded, his face a mask of grim determination.
Crocker liked the guy more every second. Out of his right periphery he saw a flash and shouted, “Incoming!”
A second later, a shoulder-fired rocket passed through the destroyed window and exploded on impact with the cabinets on the wall behind them. Crocker felt hot shards of wood and metal burn into his back.
He heard Suárez coughing and spitting blood.
“You hit?”
Suárez shouldered his MP7 and continued firing. Crocker calculated that they would soon either run out of ammunition or be overrun.
Shouting into the radio, he said, “Manny, we need the forty mike-mike in back.”
“I got something even better. We’re coming.”
“Make it quick!”
When he raised his head above the sill to fire, he saw three men wearing black helmets circling to the right side of the house. Then a barrage of rounds came at him, causing him to hit the floor again and bruise his mouth.
“Fuck!”
As he readjusted the sight, he saw that he was down to less than a magazine and a half. Suárez continued to cough and choke.
“What’s wrong?”
Squirming over on his belly, he grabbed Suárez under the ribs from behind and pushed up and squeezed at the same time. A piece of plaster the size of a Ping-Pong ball flew out of Suárez’s mouth.
“Disgusting,” Suárez said.
“Drink some water.”
The shooting from the yard had intensified to the point that it was difficult to raise a weapon above the sill to return fire. But he did anyway, and as he fired heard a tremendous crash from the right side of the house.
He thought for a second that the Federales had broken through the barricaded side door, and that maybe he and his men would be joining Ritchie soon. But then a loud, incessant firing deafened him, and he saw that it was directed at the men behind the planters. He watched as they retreated and the big guns from the right mowed them down one by one. Then the guns tore into the Federales on the left side of the yard.
Suárez looked at Crocker, and Crocker looked at him, both men’s expressions asking, What the fuck is going on? Seconds later, a black M706 armored car swung into view.
“Who’s that?” Suárez asked.
It looked like the one Crocker had seen on the front drive with twin.30 cal machine guns and five-foot run-flat tires. Now it was firing at the Mexicans.
“They’re on our side!” Suárez shouted with a rapturous smile on his face.
“Seems like.”
Before Crocker had a chance to say anything about Mancini, Suárez stepped through the broken window with his MP7 and ran to join the mop-up activity in the yard. Crocker followed.
Five minutes later, all the Mexicans had either fled or were dead, or bleeding out. One soldier with a black mask over his face lay in a pool of blood behind one of the concrete planters. Crocker was bending down to grab the RPG-2 that lay next to him when he heard Akil’s voice.
“You gonna fucking thank us, or what?”
He looked up into the slanting sunlight and saw Akil’s dirt-smudged face sticking out of the side door of the M706. Without missing a beat, Crocker said, “Get your lazy ass out here and help me load Davis and Nieves inside.”
“Ungrateful fuck,” Akil groaned as he jumped and hit the grass.
“Nice work,” Crocker said, slapping a hand to his chest.
“By the way, your back’s a bloody mess.”
Crocker reached around and felt sticky blood mixed with grime. It didn’t seem serious, so he said, “Not a problem.”
“What the fuck just happened?” Akil asked as he and Crocker climbed the steps to the balcony.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, who were they and what the fuck was that all about?”
“That was the Mexican police,” Crocker answered.
“You’re kidding.”
“I saw ‘Federales’ painted on one of the trucks.”