Mexican Heat (Nick Woods Book 2) (17 page)

And
finally, nearly at the end of their useful life, the weapons had received new
barrels from an average armorer, who had half-assed installed them, and given
them to the Coyutla Police Department. But, even with all the age, shoddy
workmanship, and heavy wear and tear, they far exceeded the capabilities of the
officers’ pistols. Best of all, they provided hope since the officers knew they
could fight off their attackers with them.

Out in
the street, the Butcher studied the scene. His men on both sides had raked the
building with probably three mags apiece; some four. The Butcher calculated the
carnage: roughly twenty of his men per side, so forty men total with thirty
rounds per magazine, or ninety rounds per man. He rounded the ninety up to one
hundred to simplify the math and estimated that almost four thousand rounds had
ripped through the building.

Of the
twenty officers inside, at least five were probably wounded and bleeding. He
hoped his count was conservative and that the actual number of wounded was
higher, but that wouldn’t matter.

“Phase
two!” he yelled. “Commence phase two, and spread the word down the line.”

Some of
his gunmen ceased firing and snatched duffel bags from vehicles. Three men from
the Butcher’s side of attack, and four from the other flank of the “L” shape,
rushed toward the building. The remaining shooters switched to single shot and
more carefully fired at the building, taking care to avoid hitting their own
men.

The
police officers couldn’t see the action on the outside, and in the horror of
the attack, they never noticed the reduction of fire. But inside the building,
the prior army soldier had twelve of the officers rallied, assembled, and armed
with M-16A2s.

“All
right,” the former soldier said. “Pair off and set up on windows. Work together
to fire back and find targets. We have to get them off us. There’s no one
coming to save us.”

The
officers split up and scurried toward firing positions, hunched over and low.
The battle appeared to have slacked off. Rounds still snapped through, but with
less frequency. Return fire from officers wielding pistols remained practically
non-existent.

But with the
task from the former soldier assigned, the officers felt this could all end
soon. They moved forward with their M16s with purpose and confidence.

In one room, two officers -- a man and woman who normally
shared a patrol car and served as partners -- scurried from the hallway through
a door and toward a shot-out window inside the room. An officer lay curled up
on the floor, bled out and obviously dead, but the room was otherwise empty.
They moved forward bent over and alert when suddenly bullets started slicing
through the room. The two dove to the ground and crawled forward the final
distance.

The woman
led the man and saw their opponents first.

“I see
four of them behind a car,” she said. She looked out across the window, not
straight through it, to keep her body behind the wall. She aimed at the one who
provided the largest target, her body in the prone position at an angle to the
window and six feet back, prepared to provide enfilade fire. Thus, the
Butcher’s men had no idea they were in her sights.

She
fired, but saw no reaction from the man, who continued to fire slow, aimed
shots toward the building to his front. Then she noticed a chunk of concrete
chipped off over the man’s head. Shit, she thought. The damned rifle wasn’t
sighted in properly. She altered her position and aimed lower. She fired again,
this time with her sights centered on the man’s sternum.

The man’s
head yanked back and he fell to the ground. She missed where the impact landed,
and thus had no idea if it hit the top of his head or dead center. Regardless,
it was a hit and she shifted to her next target.

Above
her, her partner’s weapon fired, also on single shot. He was kneeling above her
and his weapon’s roar caused her ears to ring and knocked her equilibrium off
balance. She shook her head to regain her senses and slid back on the tile
floor. She couldn’t be in front of his barrel for any more shots.

In other
rooms inside the building, other officers -- now armed with M-16s -- engaged
their enemy. The fire from the previously silent building was surprising and
deadly. The Butcher’s men recoiled from the lethal and savage return fire. The
cops felt cornered and frightened, and their targets assaulted them from a mere
forty yards away. And unlike the female’s rifle, most of the rifles were
sighted in.

The
Butcher’s men took to ducking and firing bursts over the tops of their
vehicles, afraid to aim at the officers hidden in the shadows. Their only
concern was not hitting their men who had closed with their objective.

The
officers noticed their attacker's fire was no longer accurate. It now sailed
high and skipped over their heads, and the officers applied themselves more
fully to the task of repelling their assailants. Now, the momentum was
shifting, and they focused harder and aimed truer. Indeed, a wave of relief
passed through the building and the panic shifted to elation.

Some
grinned. Some shouted. “Come on, you bastards. Come get some more.”

And then,
then it happened. A grenade floated into one of the rooms inside the police
headquarters and bounced about. Other grenades followed in other rooms, as the
Butcher’s men who had rushed the building threw M67 fragmentation grenades
through the narrow, shot-out windows.

The
baseball-like weapons exploded with massive booms, hurling fragments in all
directions. Several officers were wounded, but many more were rattled.

The
Butcher emerged from behind the cover of his vehicle and laughed maniacally.

“Stay
down, sir,” one of his men warned, but the Butcher didn’t move. He was bent over
laughing so hard that he held his side. He coughed and said, “You stupid
bastards thought you were going to be okay with your rifles. Well, we’ll see!”

And he
laughed even harder, while his men at the vehicles picked up their rate of fire
to cover their half-mad leader.

The
cartel men against the building realized they had driven their defenders back
with their frag grenades and they switched to their real weapon: tear gas
grenades. The CS grenades looked like tall coke-cans and the Butcher’s men
pulled the pins and threw them in windows now spewing smoke and dust from the
frag grenades.

Billionaire
cartel leader Hernan Flores had bought the M7A3 CS hand grenades from his
Mexican Army contact, and the weapons had come straight from the supply depots
of the U.S. Army. The cylindrical grenades were designed for riot control, but
in an enclosed building the tear gas from them was designed to produce
coughing, vomiting, and difficulty in breathing.

They also
created a thick smoke that was impossible to see through, even if tears weren’t
pouring out of your eyes in a feeble attempt to purge the burning chemical.

The
officers had trained against CS -- it was a fairly decent-sized police
department, after all -- and they rushed away from the CS fumes.

“Grab our
gas masks,” someone yelled.

They knew
it would be more difficult to fire their M16s or pistols accurately with gas
masks on, but they had trained for that, at least some. A small group of
officers huddled around the gear locker, and the former army soldier saw that
his group had dwindled. Worse, some of those around him had caught quite a bit
of shrapnel from the fragmentation grenades and bled or limped.

“We’re
going to be all right,” he said, coughing and choking through the haze of the
growing CS fog as it creeped into the hallway. “We’ll get our masks, regroup,
and hang together.”

An
officer removed the lock and jerked the doors open. The locker lay empty, a
sheet of paper taped horizontally with the following words written in thick
black magic marker: “The joke’s on you!!!”

One
officer screamed “Noooo!” in terror, while two others leaned back against the
hallway wall and slid to the ground, their weapons clanging to the floor. They
buried their heads in their arms to try to offer relief from the tear gas.

“We can’t
run,” one said between gasps. “They’ll murder us if we run out those doors.”

“Come
on,” screamed the soldier. “We can’t give up.”

And then
they heard the laugh, one they had heard moments before off in the distance,
but it sounded closer.

The
Butcher couldn’t stop laughing. His right hand held his cross-slung Uzi, which
was aimed at the ground, while his left hand rested on the handle of his sword,
which hung from his webgear on his left hip, handle facing forward. On his left
and his right, two of his most trusted gunmen stood protecting him, their AK’s
aimed down the hallway and their eyes probing for danger.

The
Butcher roared with hysteria and watched through the thick fog of tear gas as
officers in the hallway remained frozen, clustered, and panicked. Two locker
doors hung open, revealing empty shelves and no possible hope of salvation. The
tear gas was too thick for them to breathe or see or function at a level of
even ten percent of their capability. They were like infants, barely able to
think, move, or act.

The
Butcher strode toward them, laughing gleefully. Men exactly like these police
officers were responsible for arresting him, when he was a young man merely
trying to earn a living. And officers no different than these in this hallway
were responsible for his safety when they had disarmed him of his pistol and
placed him completely unprotected in a jail full of muscle-bound animals, who
hadn’t seen the light of day or a woman in years. Instead, the officers had
failed to safeguard him and had allowed him to be molested and raped hundreds
of times in the six years he was in prison.

Now, it
was payback time...

The
Butcher paused at the door, his laugh gone and his grin and eyes transformed
into a psychotic mask of anger. He choked and coughed as CS tear gas emerged
from the hallway. The man to his right leaned into his AK to fire at movement
from the officers down the hallway, but the Butcher used his Uzi to push the
man’s weapon to the right and off target.

“No!”
said the Butcher. “Give me a mask, and wait on me. If I don’t come out in five
minutes, grab the men and come in and kill anyone who’s still alive.”

The man
on the right swallowed down his anger over having his weapon knocked to the
side. He removed his finger from the trigger and lowered his weapon until it
hung by its sling across his chest. He reached in his backpack and handed the
Butcher a gas mask.

The
Butcher turned his head and coughed, spitting out phlegm and snot caused by the
CS even at this distance.
He put the mask on and
blocked the filter with his hand, b
lowing out the small amount of CS
that had crept into the mask. He removed his hand and inhaled the clean,
filtered air. Blinking his burning eyes, he tried to clear them of tears and
pain.

He cursed
himself for walking so close to the building and getting hit by his own shit.
But then he remembered that he didn’t give a shit if he died. He lived every
night with too many nightmares and too much anger and it was only heavy drugs
that allowed him to sleep. To hell with whether he lived or not. You didn’t go
through what he’d gone through in prison without coming out completely nuts.

And as he
thought of the injustices and horrendous acts he had endured because of asshole
officers like the ones cowering before him, rage took over. He checked the Uzi
and confirmed it hung in its cross-chest sling, falling (thanks to a half-foot
extension that he’d added) to the right side of his right leg. It lay against
the side of his right quad, out of the way, but also where he could grab it
quickly with his firing hand if needed.

The
Butcher reached for the handle of his Japanese katana on his left side, which
faced forward and extended beyond his waist by about six inches. He pulled it
from its sheath and entered the building. He moved down the hall, staying close
to the wall. He didn’t want to catch a bullet moving down its center, but no
shots came from the building. Likewise, his men had ceased firing after the
signal had been passed that their leader had entered.

It was
eerily quiet following all the gunfire, with the exception of gagging and
choking. Thick CS clouds drifted down the hall, searching for the opened door
that he had entered. Other than the gagging, a few officers whispered and
argued up ahead, but compared to the eardrum-shattering firing from earlier,
this was blissful serenity.

The
Butcher tiptoed down the hall, his rubber-soled boots silent. He saw an open
door on his right. He quietly sheathed the sword so that he didn’t enter the
room with it extended before him, which would have provided early warning to
his entry and allowed someone the possibility to grab the blade if they passed
on shooting him.

He
gripped his Uzi and slowly pulled it up to his shoulder, creeping through the
door, his body lowered and his split-toe ninja boots providing not a sound on
the tiled floor. The room looked devastated. Glass fragments littered the
floor. Wood splinters, concrete chunks, and scattered papers added to the
mayhem.