John Gilstrap - Damage Control

Jonathan squinted harder. He couldn’t see any people, but he knew that Venice would get to it. She had her own pace for these things, and she was not to be hurried.

“You’ll note that there aren’t any people,” Venice said. “Now watch when I put in the infrared filter.”

The picture blinked, and there they were: a dozen or more human-shaped heat sources crouched behind vehicles and corners of nearby structures. While their weapons did not show up well, the ghosts of rifles were visible, and the postures of the forms holding them sold it.

“I count fourteen people,” Venice said, “but there could be more. Actually, there are more. Seventeen, counting the soldiers Big Guy spotted.” Clearly, she’d been monitoring the radio traffic.

They’d set up a textbook ambush-not that it was a particularly difficult one to engineer. “They’ve got the front pretty well covered,” Jonathan said. “Show me the black side.”

The image moved again, and when it settled down, he saw an aerial view of a standard alleyway that could have been in any city in America: tiny backyards that appeared to be enclosed by stockade fences, backing up to other backyards with stockade fences. The space in between was barely big enough to accommodate a sedan, let alone the trash trucks that no doubt cruised the space once or twice a week.

The infrared imagery revealed two more people hunkered down back there. “There are numbers eighteen and nineteen,” Jonathan said. “This isn’t going to be easy.”

“Are they ever?” Boxers asked over the radio.

When the odds were this badly stacked, their only chance for success lay in speed and overwhelming violence, and the configuration of the OPFOR confounded both of those factors. Taking out the guys in the alley would be a simple matter of expending about three dollars’ worth of ammunition, but doing so would alert the troops out front, and ignite the kind of firefight that was especially difficult to win. Throw in the fact that these guys were real soldiers-as opposed to the thugs and posers that Jonathan so often encountered in his job-and the odds diminished even more.

There had to be a way, though, because there was always a way.

“Can you pull up engineering drawings for the house?” he asked. He had no idea what he was looking for, but if you didn’t look, you couldn’t find anything.

“Stand by,” Venice said.

“Holy shit,” Jonathan said off the air. He was in Mexico, for God’s sake. How could she possibly “Hey, Scorpion, I’ve got good news. I just got a call from Wolverine. The house has a tunnel.”

Veronica Costanza left the way she had come, through the panel in the bathroom, and from there to wherever the tunnel led. A sewer. How appropriate. If Maria had a brain in her head, she’d have used the escape route herself by now. This waiting was killing her. It had been hours, and the phone Veronica had left behind hadn’t rung.

Was it possible that this was an elaborate setup? Had Maria’s safety been traded by the FBI for some larger prize? She’d heard of such things happening before. The Americans were famous for turning their backs on one friend in favor of a newer, more important friend. Just ask the citizens of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan about that. Americans’ priorities changed with the wind. Perhaps Maria’s usefulness had been expended, and now they needed to give her over to Felix to gain some larger prize.

Maria told herself that these were foolish thoughts-the paranoia of the moment-yet they continued to nag at her. Was it so different from what Veronica promised would be her fate if she failed to wait for the Americans whose lives were so important? Yet wait she did, even as soldiers surrounded her house.

She never looked out a window-in fact, she made a point of staying away from the windows lest she present too enticing a target, bullet-proof glass notwithstanding-but she knew they were out there, and she knew that they were planning to hurt her.

But she would not go quietly. Or peaceably. Her six-shot revolver would see to that. Weighing over a kilogram once it was loaded, her Taurus. 44 Magnum was designed to kill attacking bears. She imagined it would stop Felix and his men. It would stop five of them, anyway. The sixth bullet would be for herself.

She knew the horrors that awaited her if Felix ever got his hands on her. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

So she continued to wait in the dark, both literally and figuratively. She’d turned off the lights so as not to throw shadows across the windows, and at the same time to be able to better see shadows that were thrown from outside. She sat in a fat padded chair in the only windowless corner in her house. The front door stood to her left, the kitchen and its back door to her right. Through the kitchen and into the bedroom lay the route to her survival-perhaps the route to the soldiers’ invasion.

And she waited. If the soldiers charged, it would end in seconds. If she fled, the end would be delayed-perhaps for moments, perhaps forever-but at least the end would come on her terms. That was worth something, wasn’t it?

You will do this, Maria. You must do this. These people are more important to my boss than you are.

As Veronica’s word replayed through Maria’s mind, she remembered the glare of the agent’s eyes. The coldness of them. All of those meetings they’d had exchanging information, all those friendly chats, she realized now had never been about friendship. They’d never been about good triumphing over evil. In the FBI agent’s mind, it had only been about a job. It had been about getting a conviction against Felix Hernandez. Maria was important only so long as she was useful.

And she didn’t doubt for a moment that Veronica Costanza and her FBI would hunt her down and see that she was killed if she did not do exactly as she had been told.

And so Maria waited for the American fugitives who were more important than she.

“You were a fool to be a patriot,” she said aloud. If there were listening devices, so be it. Let there be a record of her final thoughts.

Saying those words aloud, though, made her cringe. This had never been about patriotism. It had never been about justice or about returning her beloved Mexico to the way it used to be. From the very first days, it had been about revenge.

Maria closed her eyes and forced herself to recall the images that she had spent so many years pushing away. She made herself look once again at her big brother Jaime, and the gaping wound in his throat, cut all the way back to the bones in his neck. She remembered the dullness of his once-bright brown eyes, lifeless under their drooping, half-open lids. She remembered the brightness of his blood-soaked T-shirt. He was only sixteen when Felix’s men murdered him and left the body on the hood of her father’s car, a piece of paper stuffed into his mouth, scrawled with the word, ladron — thief. Skinny and awkward, he’d been seeking respect when he began running money for the drug lords. One day, he took enough pesos for himself to buy a sandwich and a Coke.

For that, they took his life.

For weeks afterward, men stalked Maria on her way to and from school. They wanted her to know that they were watching, and that she would live or die at their whim. They wanted her to know that they were above the law-better still, that they were the law-and that murder was but one of the enforcement tools at their disposal. That was twelve years ago. She was only ten years old, but like everyone else in her neighborhood, both her virginity and her life were as fragile as the desires of the men who paid allegiance to Felix Hernandez.

After Jaime’s murder, Maria’s parents had moved her away. Her father was an engineer by training and education, but to be an engineer one had to live in the city, and where there were cities there were drugs. So they moved to the country, where her father dedicated himself to farming, yet nothing grew at his hand. When her mother died of a heart attack two years later, the pressure and the stress became too much for Papa. Maria was only sixteen when he hanged himself in the barn. His note apologized for his weakness. Apologized for leaving her alone in the world.