Viper: A Thriller (32 page)

Re-joining
Trujillo, she set the launcher onto her shoulder. She flipped the safety switch
to “arm” and heard the electronic hum of the battery powering up, bringing the
missile to life. She slowly panned the thermal seeker across the sky, searching.
After several seconds, she found the target. The drone was within range and
emitted sufficient heat for SA-24’s infrared sensor to track. She pressed the
trigger, releasing the missile.

Despite its
namesake, the Predator made for easy prey, as the militaries of Serbia,
Saddam’s Iraq, and Iran have each demonstrated. The propeller-driven drone
loitered in the sky, weighing a thousand pounds, and possessed no defensive
capabilities.

 The missile
slammed through the Predator and detonated, demolishing the UAV.

The pilots in
the command trailer immediately lost their satellite link-up with the Predator,
and the drone’s flaming, destroyed remains dropped from the sky and smashed
into the cactus-strewn desert floor.

The Viper handed
the expended launcher off to Trujillo, and walked back to re-join the Mexicans,
who had stopped unloading the trucks to watch. The Zetas exchanged looks with
one another, suddenly viewing the woman in a different light. They also thought
that this location was compromised and could not be used in the future. In
fact, the entire day had presented numerous setbacks for the Tijuana cartel
that were hardly worth the cash the Viper was paying.  

Carlos shouted
to his men, “Faster! We’re running out of time.”

Eager to be rid
of this woman, Carlos unlocked the door on the wooden shed and pulled it open.
The interior was empty. The Viper watched as the Mexican stepped inside, hit a
switch on the wall, and squatted down over a square-shaped hatch in the floor
that was secured by another padlock. He keyed the lock, removed it, and lifted
the hatch.

Peering past
Carlos’s shoulder, the Viper saw through the open hatch, down a twelve feet
deep shaft that led into a tunnel.

“Follow this tunnel,”
Carlos instructed her, eager to see this woman on her way. “It will take you
across the border,”

“What’s on the
other side?”

“It will exit
into the California desert. Transportation is waiting for you, two vans.”

“They’re here!”
Trujillo shouted over the sound of rotor wash.

___

Coming over the ranch, everyone aboard
the DEA choppers saw the thin coil of black smoke extend into the air from the
crashed Predator. Unaware of the disposition of enemy forces, only that they
were armed with anti-air capability, the two Hueys split up over the ranch,
each coming in from a different direction, the pilots searching for the closest
spots to set down.

On their first
pass at eight hundred feet altitude, Avery, strapped into a safety harness,
leaned out over the open cabin door to see half a dozen figures scattering
across the ground below, behind the barn, looking like cockroaches suddenly
caught in the light. He identified a distinctly female figure disappear behind
the barn, out of sight. In addition to the rifle slung over her shoulder, she
carried a long, tubular launcher.

 Muzzle flashes
lit up from multiple points on the ground.

Avery flinched
and moved deeper into the cabin as a couple shots punched holes through the
Huey. Another bullet cut through the air past his face and went through the low
ceiling. Avery held on tight as the helicopter banked around in a sharp turn,
the pilot steering them out of the way of the enemy fire. Avery turned to the
Colombians and the flight crew, to check that they were unharmed. Aguilar gave
him the thumbs up.

 Avery ordered
the pilot to set them down nearby, anywhere he could, and the man was happy to
do so, unaccustomed to evasive flying and taking incoming fire from military
grade weapons. Avery thought it was stupid bringing the choppers in this close,
when they knew the enemy carried SA-24 and had already twice demonstrated their
proficiency with the weapon. But on the ground, it was a different story.
There, Avery held supreme confidence in his ability to outmaneuver and
eliminate the enemy.

The Huey touched
down on its skids off the west side of the barn, some three hundred feet from
the cartel shooters, putting the barn between the chopper and the shooters. It
was a hard landing, jolting the passengers against their restraints.

The second
helicopter remained in the air, whipping by overhead on a second pass over the ranch,
calling the attention of the Zeta shooters scattered about.

They were barely
grounded before Avery, Aguilar, and Diego got up, disengaged from their safety
harnesses, readied their rifles, and jumped down from the cabin, ducking their
heads beneath the spinning double blades, squinting against the cloud of grit
and sand swarming in the air around them.

The trio
leapfrogged their way to the broadside of the barn, dodging Los Zetas’ incoming
fire along the way. One of the cartel shooters was crouched on a knee, the
other lay prone, and it sounded like they had M16s. Their shots went too low,
drilling through the ground and kicking up dirt and dust, or too wide, whipping
past their intended targets.

 Covered by
Diego, who dropped to his belly with his NG7 cradled in front of him, Avery and
Aguilar dashed across the remaining forty feet to the cover of the barn and flattened
their backs against the exterior west wall. They heard the thundering staccato
bursts of the NG7 as Diego sprayed the machine-gun left to right, decimating
the two Zetas.

Diego then searched
for more targets before getting up and running over to re-join his teammates.

Avery opened his
mouth to plan their next move, but he was interrupted by the sudden,
distinctive
whoosh
of a speeding projectile, the sound cut short by the
impact and the explosion that instantly followed. 

They looked up into
the sky and saw the second Huey, engulfed in flames and spewing gray and black
smoke, appear overhead seconds later. Its tail sheared off, the burning chopper
spun through the air and descended into the earth a thousand feet away from
Avery and the Colombian soldiers.

Fuck
.

Avery shut his
eyes, swallowed hard, and reminded himself to breathe.

The Huey rested
partially on its side, one of its skids collapsed beneath its weight, a twisted,
charred heap of metal. The cabin was bathed in and filled with orange and
yellow fire. Thick black smoke trailed into the sky from the burning engines
and fuel tanks, which had kicked off a secondary explosion. Debris and
shattered rotor blades lay several meters out from the wreckage, along with Slayton’s
burning body. He’d fallen from the Huey in flight.

 “Come on, let’s
go,” Aguilar finally said, setting a hand on Avery’s shoulder. “There’s nothing
we can do.”

Avery knew
Aguilar was right. There was no point in risking their lives crossing the open
field hoping to help anyone over there. Helicopter crashes were the worst, almost
always fatal—Avery had seen plenty in Afghanistan, and they were always the
biggest unspoken fear of heliborne troops—and there was simply no way anyone
survived this one.

“Yeah,” Avery
agreed, finally taking his eyes off the wreck. He heard the fires crackling and
felt the heat from here.
Fuck.

Keeping
alongside the wall of the barn, Avery advanced forward to the front of the structure.
Lowering his body, leaning forward in a half-crouch, he followed his M4 around
the corner. He flinched as a shot instantly drilled through the wood inches
away from his face. Splinters pelted his cheek and forehead. He sidestepped
right and took another step forward, while shifting his M4 to track the lone Los
Zetas shooter. Avery squeezed the trigger on his target, once, twice, three
times. The cartel gunman’s unprotected body jerked as it absorbed the bullets.
Atomized blood misted briefly in the air before dissipating as he dropped onto
his knees and then fell forward onto his face. Avery took another couple steps
forward and drilled the Mexican once through the head to make sure he wouldn’t
get back up.   

Without stopping,
Avery continued forward. He stopped just before the barn’s open set of double doors.
He heard voices coming from inside, followed by a diesel engine sputtering to
life and revving, and tires squealing.

 Avery stepped
back to get clear and hand signaled Diego.

The pick-up
rolled out of the barn doing 20mph and quickly gaining speed. Two men carrying
AKs were crouched in the bed, searching for something to shoot at. They sighted
Avery, and he hit the ground as shots flew overhead, blasting the barn wall
behind him.

 Diego ripped
into the truck with his machine-gun, stitching a stream of fire through the
gunmen in the pick-up’s bed, and then through the rear windshield, into the
cabin, and then the tires. The truck swerved, slowed, and continued rolling
forward, eventually easing to a stop two hundred plus feet away, its driver
slumped over. Nothing moved, and no one climbed out.

Followed by
Aguilar and Diego, Avery stepped around the corner of the open barn doors,
swung his rifle around to the interior of the barn, and swept his aim left to
right, up and down, right to left.

 It was clear.
No one in sight. No movement.

Then, far
behind, the distinctive crackle of AK fire picked up from the direction they’d
just come. Avery craned his head around the open door and then stepped out.
Retreating back along the wall to the side, he saw DEA agents firing their M16s
from the open cabin of the landed Huey.

Jogging to and looking
around the next corner of the barn, Avery saw four Zetas, two lying prone with
their AKs in front of them. Two more covered each other as they attempted to
leapfrog across the open land toward the chopper. One of the Zetas fired a rifle-mounted
grenade launcher, but it landed several yards short of the Huey and exploded.

Avery was aware of
Aguilar and Diego coming up behind him, saw their shadows across the ground in
front of him, and he turned around to face them.

“Stay with these
guys,” Avery told them. “I’m going after the Viper.”

Aguilar opened
his mouth to protest, but Diego and Avery were already splitting up and moving
in opposite directions, so Aguilar took his Galil into the ready position and
ran after the former. Along the way, Aguilar spotted an easy target of
opportunity. He sighted the back of an oblivious cartel soldier crouched a
hundred feet away and fired twice.

Hearing more
gunfire sound off behind him as Aguilar and Diego joined the fight, Avery ran
forward with his M4 shouldered in front of him. He crossed the front of the barn
and, coming up to the east side, stopped, and kept his ears open, trying to
tune out the exchanges of gunfire behind him.

After several
seconds, he heard a voice yell something in Spanish.

Avery proceeded slowly
around the corner.

The two
Silverados sat idle near the tool shed. One truck’s doors were left open, its
engine running. Spent brass littered the ground, along with the empty missile
launcher. There were also nearly a dozen open and empty SA-24 transit cases.

 Two men stood in
the open doorway of the shed, their backs to Avery, oblivious to his presence
several meters away. The one on the left had two launchers slung over his back,
and he reached down to lower a third through the open hatch in the floor. Then
the man on the right likewise passed off another launcher into the shaft.

Avery acquired
the left-side man in his sights and pressed the trigger.

The M4
thundered, and Avery’s shoulder absorbed the recoil.  

The man reeled
from the hit, fell forward, and, carried by the extra weight of the missiles,
went headfirst through the hatch into the tunnel and broke his neck.

The man on the
right was small and fast.

Reacting
instantly to the discharge of the M4, before his partner even went down, Benito
Trujillo jumped, spun around, and opened up on his Uzi.

Avery’s vest
caught a three round burst of .45 ACP. It felt like taking a swing from a
baseball bat, and Avery was knocked clean off his feet. He instinctively rolled
over onto his side, missing a second burst that drilled through the ground. He
repositioned his rifle in front of him and returned fire without aiming,
cutting Trujillo’s legs out from under him.

Dark red spots erupted
from his thighs, and Trujillo screamed. His legs flayed, and he plopped flat onto
his ass, his back leaning against the doorjamb of the shed.  

Still in too
much pain to move, each breath caught painfully short in his chest, Avery lifted
his rifle’s barrel an inch and let off three more shots from the ground, catching
Trujillo once in the shoulder and twice in his plated vest.

The little
Peruvian reeled from the hits and, still clinging to his Uzi, fell over onto
his back. He fired back without aiming, holding the Uzi one-handed in his good
arm across his body.

The bullets hit
the ground a few feet to Avery’s right and behind him.