He wasn’t alone.
He had a woman with him, someone he hadn’t mentioned in his call, a local who’d been cooking and cleaning for him during his incarceration. A woman he’d bonded with. Deeply, evidently, since she’d risked her life to sneak in a phone to him, the one he’d used to call us. She had a kid with her, her son, a boy of three or four—that thought now made me feel like I was swallowing my fist. She was also pregnant. With McKinnon’s baby. She had a pretty big bump on her.
He wasn’t leaving without her. Or the kid.
Which was a problem.
A huge problem.
We didn’t exactly have a limo waiting outside. We had to get around the guards again. Quietly. Then there was the three-mile trek back to the chopper. Over rough ground. In total darkness.
Munro refused.
He told McKinnon there was no way the woman and the kid would be able to make the trip. Not without seriously slowing us down or unwittingly giving up our presence, which would blow the mission and possibly get us all killed. There was a small army of coke-fueled, trigger-happy pistoleros out there, and the last thing Munro wanted was for them to know we were around.
McKinnon was incensed. He flat out refused to leave without them.
Munro wouldn’t budge and got angry.
Then it got ugly.
McKinnon said it wasn’t negotiable.
Munro told him he wasn’t the one dictating the play and mocked his naïvete, asking him how he even knew the woman’s baby was his and mocking him by saying he’d probably been duped by the woman who saw him as a ticket out of that miserable hellhole and into the United States.
I tried to mediate and interceded on behalf of the woman and her kid, telling Munro we could carry the boy and the woman probably knew the terrain better than we did. Munro turned on me and growled about how this wasn’t a mission to rescue innocent hostages, but rather to bring back a scumbag who was working on new ways to wreck people’s lives. We didn’t owe him anything, Munro hissed. We weren’t rescuing him—we were there to make sure his work never saw the light of day, period.
McKinnon told him to go fuck himself and said he was staying.
And Munro just lost it.
He pulled out his Glock and, without so much as a blink, pumped a bullet into the kid, then another into his mother.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I can still see the shock and horror on the woman’s face for that split second after the bullet hit her kid and the way her head snapped backward like it had been punched by a blast of wind when he shot her before she collapsed onto the floor, already dead.
McKinnon just lost it.
He started shouting, hurling abuse at us, moving around frantically, just incensed and raging and out of control. Munro was yelling back at him, ordering him to shut up while jabbing his gun angrily at his face. I tried to calm them both down, but they were beyond that. McKinnon started throwing things at us, lab equipment, stools, anything he could get his hands on.
Then he ran.
We scambled after him, but he was at the lab’s door before we could get to him, flinging it open and storming out while screaming from the top of his voice.
And everything went haywire.
I was on him first and just managed to grab him when the first shots crackled in the night. Shouting echoed in the darkness around me, the guards snapped to attention at his outburst and rushed out from all directions. Bullets ate up the timber walls around me as I dragged McKinnon back inside, wild, nonsilenced bursts from the Mexicans’ AK-47s flying all over the place while, from beyond the perimeter of the compound, short, three-bullet snaps were coming in from our guys who were positioned in various spots to cover our exit, the whole chaotic mess mixed in with urgent, clipped commentary coming through the earpiece of my comms set.
Between the weed, the lechuguilla bootleg tequila, and the coke, the pistoleros weren’t thinking straight, and it went manic. I was hustling McKinnon back through the lab, my left arm around his neck, the other leveling the snub-nosed UMP at the door way, when the first guards burst through, three of them. I cut one of them down and saw another get hit by Munro’s fire, but the third took cover behind a counter and started spraying gunfire recklessly from behind it.
I pulled McKinnon and we both dove for cover behind another cabinet, landing heavily under a shower of debris from the torrent of bullets blasting everything around us, while Munro slipped out of sight, his voice in my earpiece telling me he was going to secure McKinnon’s files, which were farther back, at the very back of the lab. Then another pistolero charged in, laying down more gunfire randomly, firing at everything that moved, tacking left, away from his compadre, snaking his way farther down the lab, and before I knew it I was separated from Munro and pinned down by the two gunmen.
Then I heard McKinnon curse and groan, and noticed his thigh.
He’d taken a slug there, right through the middle of it halfway up from his knee. I couldn’t see if it had gone through, and while it didn’t look good, at least blood wasn’t gushing out, which meant maybe his femoral arteries had been spared. His face was taut with pain, his eyes bristling with fury, his hands covered with blood, and I immediately knew there was no way he was going to make it back to the chopper. I wasn’t sure I was either—not with the two shooters doing a pincer move on me.
Munro was in a bind of his own, cornered by more shooters, and I heard him growl through my earpiece that he was pulling out and heading for cover.
I was left alone with McKinnon, pinned down, with the scientist cowering next to me and two half-crazed Mexicans closing in.
Outside, the battle was raging. Life was cheap down here, and Navarro had a small army based in the compound, a small army that was now coming out of the woodwork, full force, guns blazing. Our guys were racking up the kills, but the sheer number facing them meant that we were taking losses, too. I heard one, then two of them get hit—and knew I had to pull out, too, and fast.
I wasn’t sure I could get out of there in one piece, but if I managed it, I sure as hell couldn’t do it with McKinnon in tow. Even if I cut down the pistoleros, I couldn’t take him with me, not in the shape he was in.
But I couldn’t leave him there either.
Not with what he knew.
Munro was in my ear, haranguing me, pushing me to do what needed doing.
I can still hear his words, crackling in my head. “Just cap the sonofabitch, Reilly. Do it. You heard what he’s done. ‘It’ll make meth seem as boring as aspirin,’ remember? That’s the scumbag you’re worried about wasting? You happy to let him loose, is that gonna be your contribution to making this world a better place? I don’t think so. You don’t want that on your conscience, and I don’t either. We came here to do a job. We have our orders. We’re at war, and he’s the enemy. So stop with the righteous bullshit, pop the bastard, and get your ass out here. I ain’t waiting any longer.”