Russell Blake - Revenge of the Assassin

The storyteller was surprised when a hole appeared in the older man’s forehead, mid-exhalation, and he had almost gotten his Kalashnikov AK-47 swung around when two silenced rounds found him, knocking him against one of the scrub trees, dead before he hit the ground.

A lone figure in jeans and a cowboy hat approached calmly through the brush, and when he was a few feet away, fired another round into the second man’s head for good measure. He fished a telephone out of his shirt pocket, muttered into it, and peered down the long winding white sand drive. Several vehicles pull up to the barrier a few minutes later. A man hopped out of the back of one of the vans with bolt cutters and expertly severed the lock’s shaft. The two vans pulled down the track, and the man re-attached the chain, then trotted after the vehicles to resume his position in the rear of the van. The man in the cowboy hat walked to the passenger door of the lead van and hopped in, carrying the two assault rifles he’d retrieved from the dead guards with him.

The vehicles inched down the track until they were roughly three hundred yards from the ranch, over a small rise and around a bend. They stopped and disgorged twenty men, armed with a smorgasbord of assault rifles — Kalashnikovs, M-4s and M-16s, Heckler and Koch HK416s. Nobody spoke as they moved carefully off the road and into the surrounding trees. The leader of the group removed his cowboy hat and tied a navy blue bandana around his hair to absorb any sweat, and then motioned to the men to split up in two groups. He prowled closer to the buildings, followed by his group, the second bunch barely visible fifty yards off to the right. Once they made it over the ridge, he counted eight guards loitering around outside the ranch’s large rustic barn, weapons slung over their shoulders or leaning up against the wooden ramshackle walls.

The leader made an abrupt gesture with his left hand as he was sighting in with his rifle in his right hand, and then opened fire. It was no contest — the guards collapsed in bloody heaps onto the dirt, dead before having a chance to shoot back. Once they were all down, the attackers stopped firing and raced to the buildings, the team on the right approaching the ranch house, wary of more sentries.

An old man appeared in the doorway brandishing a battered shotgun and took a potshot at one of the assailants, liquefying his chest with a load of double-aught buckshot. He pumped the reloading mechanism to try for another of the attackers, but a bullet caught him in the throat, ending his brief resistance. The area went silent again, then three women bolted from the back of the barn, running for their lives. All three were cut down by gunfire before they made it thirty yards.

When the bandana’d leader kicked in the door to the barn, he was greeted with a few pistol shots from within, one of which tore through his left shoulder. He tumbled to the hard dirt floor, firing even as he dropped, and caught the shooter in the abdomen, ending the failed defense. His men shouldered through the doorway after him, but all held their fire — the remaining occupants of the barn were unarmed, and mostly female, with a few young men in their twenties interspersed.

The leader stood, and after briefly checking his wound, barked a series of orders. The women shrieked in panic, and one of the young men began sobbing. The armed men rounded them up and herded them outside in the harsh sun, while the leader surveyed the methamphetamine laboratory. Large drums of liquid sat to one side, and along the other wall were two large metal reactor containers and assorted processing hardware, including a number of industrial ovens. The liquids were all marked flammable, and the leader knew from practical experience that the entire compound would go up like a natural gas explosion when detonated, leaving toxic residue throughout.

He winced from the pain of the wound and grabbed some matting material off a work table and stuck it inside his shirt, where it would staunch the flow of blood until one of his men could rig a field bandage. It was a crude improvisation, but an effective one. This was not the first time he’d taken a bullet, so he was familiar with the pain. He gauged the amount of bleeding and grunted. He’d live. This time.

Two shots echoed from the interior of the ranch house, followed by the distinctive chatter of a Kalashnikov, and then the shooting stopped. His men must have found more people inside. There was to be no quarter given, no mercy shown. Anyone found was an enemy.

He spun and exited the barn, where nine women and two men were kneeling in front of the house, most of the women crying in terrified gasps. He studied them dispassionately, many of them clearly of Indian extraction, and then nodded to his second in command, who pulled a cell phone from his shirt and made a call. The two vans rolled down the dirt road to the house and skidded to a stop in a cloud of dust. Two of the men moved to the van side doors and slid them open. When they turned from the interior, one held a machete and the other an aluminum baseball bat.

The task was finished within a few minutes, and the men loaded back into the van after carting sixty-two one kilo packages of crystal meth out of the barn and wedging them into the cargo area of the second van, cutting the space for passengers by sixty percent. It was a tight fit, but nobody complained. It was just a matter of time until the gunshots attracted the military, even in this rural area, so everyone was anxious to get on the road.

The second in command jogged over to the barn and pulled a pin from a hand grenade. With a grunt, he tossed it through the doorway and then ran for the vans. He made it in seven seconds. The vehicles were pulling away when a huge series of explosions blew the structure apart, a massive fireball billowing into the sky as the drivers accelerated dangerously down the rustic trail in a white haze of dust.

Briones stood in Cruz’s office, sorting through reports at the small circular table set up for three and four person meetings. They were expecting their counterparts from CISEN to appear at any moment, and Cruz multi-tasked as they waited, signing documents and creating piles of paper in his outbox. In the larger main room, uniformed men and women circulated between the cubicles, busy with the business of battling the cartels.

“Which do you think he’ll hit?” Cruz asked Briones.

“I think the president’s security detail has a nightmare with having an open speech on the congress steps. I don’t know whose bright idea that was, but it stinks.”

“Fortunately, that’s not our problem. I don’t envy the poor bastards responsible for it.”

Briones nodded in accord. “It’ll require a massive outlay of manpower to lock down every possible place in the area where an attack could come from. Sniper at up to a thousand yards, bomb threat, a gas attack…it’s a lot of ground to cover. I’d recommend to them that they move it inside, like they normally would. This is a reckless risk.”

“We’ve already had that discussion, and they’re adamant that the president doesn’t want to appear to be skulking around hiding. He’s hell bent on being the brave bull in public, no matter how much difficulty it presents.”

“Then we do what we can to track down El Rey , and pray a lot,” Briones said.

The receptionist entered, followed by the two men from CISEN. Cruz motioned for them to take a seat. She closed the door behind them as she left, her offer of soda or coffee rejected by all.

Cruz greeted the pair, Dario Pareto and Solomon Quiniente, of unknown rank. Solomon seemed to be the senior of the two, but as with all the others of their ilk, they weren’t big on sharing information, including what office they held. They shook hands with Briones and Cruz, and then Dario set a yellow legal pad on the desk and uncapped his pen.