The Last Line (29 page)

“She is a
person.
A human being! Not a … a package!”

“You do not understand.”

“Look … I
know
what … what you do! Who you work for! But I never wanted to be part of anything like this! Kidnapping and torture and—”

“¡Cálmate, chica!”
She heard Escalante sigh. “Very well. I will call Renaldo and have a talk with him. No rough stuff. Okay?”

“I want out of this, Juan. I don't want to be a part of this any longer!”

“I'm sorry, little girl. In this business, there
is
no way out.”

“But—”

“Ah! My wife is coming. I must go.”

He broke the connection.

STRIKE TEAM FOX ONE

DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

2315 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

Teller moved with the line of ISA commandos from shadow to shadow as they worked their way between the houses on the west side of the street. The alleys here were quite narrow; in some instances, the walls of one house nearly touched those of the next. After crossing the street far enough to the south to avoid being seen by observers at Hotel Two, they'd made their way north until they were in a tiny lane, clogged with garbage, immediately behind Hotel One.

So far, so good. A dog was barking somewhere, but the team appeared to have made it to the back side of Hotel One without alerting anyone. He looked up the sheer wall of the building, at peeling paint and ancient water stains, and felt his back twinge.

He'd been resolutely ignoring the wound in his back since he and Jackie had survived the firefight in the hotel. The wound wasn't bad, a scratch, really, and he had gauze taped over it, but it
hurt
, damn it, when he moved certain ways—and he was about to have to move in certain ways.

“Ready?” Marcetti asked, looking up the back wall of the house.

“Yeah,” Staff Sergeant Gerald Rogers said; turning, the man pressed his back against the wall and lifted his boots to press against the wall opposite. “Let's get it on. Climbing.”

Teller watched Rogers using an alpinist's chimney climb to begin the ascent. In black utilities and gloves, with a black ski mask over his face, the man was almost invisible in the deep shadow between the houses.

The ISA team had brought plenty of gear for the assault. Teller was carrying an MP-5SD3 strapped across the front of his combat vest—an H&K submachine gun with an integral sound suppressor and retractable buttstock. He had a laser sight clamped to the receiver housing.

His own .45 was holstered at his hip; in the combat vest, he was carrying two M-84 stun grenades, plus two of the more lethal M-67s. He was wearing a LASH II headset connected to his tactical radio, which kept him in constant communications with the other team members, including Procario—designated “X-ray”—back at the OP. Like the others, he wore AN/PVS-21 NVD, which let him see both by amplified and by natural light.

“How we doing?” Marcetti asked over the tactical channel. “Fox Two?”

“Claymore is placed,” Patterson's voice said through the molded plug in Teller's left ear. “Moving to position. Ten minutes.”

“X-Ray, Fox One. What do you see?”

“Looks quiet,” Procario's voice said. “Perez is in the second bedroom. She was on the phone a moment ago, but I wasn't listening in. Right now, I'm tapped into Pascua's phone, and he's in the living room. One guard with the hostage. The other five are downstairs. Hold it. Pascua looks like he's taking a phone call. Let me listen in…”

A rope came down from overhead. Marcetti grabbed it and began climbing. The other commandos waited their turn.

“Shit!”
Procario's voice said, explosive. “Trouble!”

“Talk to me, X-ray.”

“Escalante—the
real
Escalante just called Pascua! They're arguing right now about the money Chris promised him!”

It was Teller's turn to begin his ascent. He tugged on the nylon line and began climbing, knowing that the shit had just hit the fan.

With the assault team not yet in position.

MARIA PEREZ HOUSE

LA CALLE SUR 145

DISTRICTO IZTACALCO,

2316 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

Dominique heard the bedroom door bang open.
“¡Puta!”
Loudmouth shouted. “Whore! What is going on?”

Angry hands grabbed her, and the blindfold was yanked from her face. She blinked, the light in the room painful after hours in darkness. Loudmouth glowered down at her, backlit by the glare of the room's ceiling light fixture.

“Hey, calm down, Renaldo,” the guard said. “What's the problem?”

“I don't know—but this bitch knows, and I'm going to find out right now!”

“Are you crazy?”

“Twenty minutes ago I get a call from Mr. Escalante, promising me a million pesos to make sure this whore stays healthy, okay?
Five
minutes ago, I get a call from Mr. Escalante, and he doesn't know anything about it! And his voice … his voice was different, too. Someone is fucking playing games with me!”

“How would she know about that? She's been right here the whole time.”

“Yeah—but how carefully was she searched when the CISEN guys brought her in, huh? Maybe she has a bug on her, a wire. Maybe they're listening in to us right now! Well, I'm going to find it, and when I do I'm going to take it out of her skin!” The big man took a step back, spread his arms, and looked up at the ceiling. “You hear me up there, gringos?” he shouted in thickly accented English. “I gonna to kill the little bitch! You hear me?”

VICENTE HOUSE

LA CALLE SUR 145

DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

2316 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

Frank Procario leaned his cheek into the Barrett .50's stock, peering through the digital feed sight. A triple-M receiver mounted over the barrel let him see in millimeter waves through the rifle's scope, giving him a low-resolution through-walls view of exactly what he was aiming at. He could hear Pascua's voice over the open mike feed from Pascua's own cell phone, and he could see the man's blurry image as he stood above Dominique's bed, arms spread, head back, as he screamed at the ceiling.

“You hear me up there, gringos?”
the man yelled in English, the words slurred by alcohol.
“I gonna to kill the little bitch! You hear me?”

“I hear you,” Procario said quietly. “Gray Fox, X-ray. We have a situation here. Request permission to engage.”

 

Chapter Fifteen

VICENTE HOUSE

LA CALLE SUR 145

DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

2316 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

20 APRIL

Procario peered through the .50 caliber rifle's scope, finger tightening ever so slightly on the trigger. The scope mount, with a much smaller aperture than the other MMMR receivers, did not yield nearly as much resolution through the eyepiece. Pascua was a man-shaped blur, just barely identifiable as a human being. Even so, Procario could make out details enough to draw down on the target's center of mass—just a bit to the right of where Pascua's heart was positioned in his chest.

The former marine had given a lot of thought to this shot. All along, the plan had been to take out the armed guard seated on an invisible chair in the background. Pascua, though, clearly was the more urgent of the two targets in the room. He was closest to Dominique, and he was raging, acting out of control enough that Procario didn't want to try guessing what the man might do next.

A more serious matter was the wall between Procario and Pascua. Fifty-caliber rounds were designed to penetrate barriers; the round loaded into the Barrett's chamber now was a Raufoss Mk 211, which could penetrate two inches of rolled homogenous armor.

The front wall of the target house was constructed of concrete block, with an outer layer of painted wood and inner layers of drywall and plaster, offering far less of a barrier than two inches of steel. Even concrete, however, could deflect an armor-piercing round like the Mk 211, and if Procario's shot was off by even a few inches, he might hit Dominique, or at the least spray her with high-velocity fragments of concrete and round casing in a 30-degree cone bursting out from the wall. The Mk 211 possessed a heavy tungsten carbide penetrator inside a soft steel cup, packed in behind a charge of RX51-PETN high explosive and an incendiary compound in the projectile's tip. The explosives would punch through the concrete, and the penetrator would keep going to hit the target.

In fact, the Raufoss Mk 211 round was intended as a multipurpose antimatériel projectile, meaning that it could disable a vehicle's engine block or ignite the aviation fuel inside an aircraft but was not intended for use against personnel. The Red Cross had repeatedly tried to have the round banned, and there were various legal challenges to its use. For Procario, however, the question was not whether the round was a humane weapon but whether or not it would do the job that
had
to be done.

Taking a very educated guess, he adjusted his aim point slightly, moving it farther from Dominique … and away from a vertical pipe buried in the wall that would definitely deflect the round if he nicked it.

He listened a moment longer to Pascua's drunken rant.
“You hear me?”

“I hear you,” he said. “Gray Fox, X-ray. We have a situation here. Request permission to engage.”

“X-ray, Gray Fox,” came back. “You are clear to engage.”

“Copy clear to engage. I'm taking the shot.”

He took a breath … released partway … held … squeezed …

MARIA PEREZ HOUSE

LA CALLE SUR 145

DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

2317 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

Dominique lay on her back in the bed, watching Loudmouth rage … and then his chest opened up like a hideously blossoming flower, accompanied by a searing crack from somewhere behind her and toward the foot of the bed. Blood splashed from the man's back in a spray that painted the far wall so close to the seated guard that he fell out of his chair with a clatter. Loudmouth jerked back a step and collapsed to the floor, his head and right arm very nearly severed from his body.

“¡Madre de Dios!”
the guard screamed, his voice cracking. He picked himself up off the floor, mouth gaping through a mask of Loudmouth's blood.

He'd dropped his rifle. He reached for it …

VICENTE HOUSE

LA CALLE SUR 145

DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

2317 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

Still leaning into the weapon, Procario shifted aim slightly.

That first shot would have made a god-awful racket inside the house, and the bad guys were now alerted that something was going down. The Barrett .50 had a five-round magazine, however, enough for him to engage each of the targets one by one before he reloaded, choosing the order of execution by determining which target posed the greatest threat to the op, first, and to Jackie Dominique second.

“One Tango down,” he murmured into his throat mike. “Acquiring on second target.”

MARIA PEREZ HOUSE

LA CALLE SUR 145

DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

2317 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

Dominique knew immediately what was happening. Someone—Chris? Please, God, Chris?—was outside with an MMMR and a Barrett .50, taking down Tangos by literally shooting them right through the concrete-block walls of the house. That meant that a hostage rescue op was under way, that people—
her
people—were going to be coming through that door any moment now.

Stooping, her guard picked up the rifle he'd dropped when Loudmouth had exploded in such spectacular fashion.

Wrong move, kid,
she thought.

With a thunderous crack, the left side of the man's head vanished in a spray of blood and brain and chips of bone and his body twisted around sharply with the impact and collapsed, sprawled in a bloody tangle across the legs of his dead partner. A small, round hole appeared in the gore-splattered wall behind him, and then she noticed that there were
two
holes, punched through by the devastating power of the sniper's penetrator rounds.

She decided that it would be a good idea if she got under a bit of cover, just in case other cartel gunmen came through that door before the rescue team did. There was a bit of space between her bed and the wall. She rolled over the edge of the bed, falling with a thud onto the floor, then rolled so that she was completely under the bed.

She could hear shouting on the floor below, and the pounding of boots on the stairs.

FOX ONE

MARIA PEREZ HOUSE

LA CALLE SUR 145

DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

2318 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

Teller was halfway up the back of the house when he heard Procario's quiet voice over the tactical channel.

“One Tango down. Acquiring on number two.” Teller heard the second shot, a crash of thunder transmitted over the radio. “Second Tango is down. Hostage has rolled off the bed and is now underneath the mattress.”

Good girl.
Hostage rescues turned into real nightmares when civilians began jumping up and cheering in the middle of a CQB assault. Then again, if Jackie wasn't in the military, neither was she a civilian. She was highly trained and disciplined. She would know what was happening and do what she could to stay alive during the next crucial few minutes.

No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.
Von Moltke's maxim was blending now inevitably with the chaos of Murphy's Law. Their meticulous planning and careful preparations all had been thrown off by the “situation” declared by Procario, whatever it was. The Tangos inside Hotel One would be alerted now—as would the overwatch force in Hotel Two. Fox One was not yet on the roof, much less through the rooftop trapdoor, and Fox Two was not yet in position to watch the front door of Hotel Two.

For the next few seconds,
everything
would depend on X-ray, on Procario, back at the OP.