Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

He turned back.

“Okay, now lead me out of here. I don’t want to have to fight his whole fucking army.”

Alberto came out of his shocked stupor, realized what had and was happening, and said, “This way, quickly, the library.”

They ran, and, here and there, encountered terrified random household staff, who melted before them and did not require killing. They passed the foyer, and Juba called a halt, opened the front door, spied three armed men racing toward him from the sentry house, and, with three shots, delivered languidly but with smoothness, he dropped them.

Then an amazement: the stairway upward. Who was halfway down it, barefoot, but the man with the sock on his head.

Yet Juba did not shoot him as he could have. Instead, he smiled, nodded sportingly, and the fellow drew back.

Alberto pulled Juba along to the library. He knew where it had to be, a section of shelving with faux books, but did not understand what mechanism would spring it.

“There,” he said. “Do you see? The books are fake. It has to be a door.”

“And suppose it leads to a wine cellar,” said Juba, but pushed hard, and indeed the shelves moved backwards on ball bearings, far lighter than its weight should have been, and revealed an alcove and a spiral staircase. The two stepped inside, pulling the door closed, and descended into darkness. Alberto saw a light panel, hit a switch, and the lights came on, revealing a well-engineered tunnel leading away from them.

“There you have it,” he said. “Escape. Is this where you kill me, now that my use is over?”

“I am not a murderer,” said Juba. “I am a jihadi. I have honor. Besides, you are not important enough to kill.”

“Then let’s get out of—”

Even inside the bowels of the house, they heard the roar of mighty engines and shivered as the wave of vibrations poured over them.

“What is—”

“Helicopters,” said Juba. “I think Bobleeswagger is here. Won’t he be surprised?”

La Culebra returned to his room, finding the two women, still naked, terrified on the bed.

Suddenly a roar arose from outside.

What on earth—

He rose and watched as six large machines settled out of the sky amid columns of dust whipped up by invisible rotors. As each landed, men poured from them, armored in the commando style, with all kinds of automatic weapons, shields, lights — the entire modern war-making trousseau. Serious customers, now running hard and low to the house, which they’d broach and penetrate in seconds. Everything was happening at once! The world was ending!

“Boots,” he said. “Get my boots.”

They pulled out a pair of splendid boots and set about putting them on their master’s feet.

“Excellent,” he said. “Now I will depart.”

“What should we do?” asked Rita.

“Ah — tell no one a thing. Do you understand?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Here, this will help.”

He cut her throat. The five-inch slicer, seriously curved to yield but a single, murderously sharp edge. It cut through flesh like butter, especially when guided by a sure, strong hand.

She fell, bleeding, choking, dying.

He turned to Rosa.

“Why do you do this?” she asked.

“Shh,” he said, and cut her throat too.

The ranch

Nick got to the ranch house as soon as it became clear nobody was doing any shooting. Mostly, he found guys dressed like frogmen at a gun show poking around curiously. They had the aspect of children at a new amusement park. Maybe there was a method to it, but chiefly it was guys who thought they might have gotten into a gunfight coming down to the realization that the gunfight had been canceled.

He went to the SWAT commander — Ward Taylor, of course — got a quick summary of the action.

“Those are the bodies?” Nick could see them in the position of the recently extinguished — that is, helter-skelter, limbs awry, grotesque and utterly still, beyond care or menace, pretty much scattered all over the place.

“We got six DOA in the big house. Three more outside. Maybe more as we check more closely. One you gotta see to believe.”

Taylor led Nick into the famous Hanson Ranch’s big, beautiful main room and pointed out a sack of man flaccid on floor in an elegant gray suit, silk shirt, ascot, perfect white teeth, and no upper skull. This sector of the room had been redecorated in Early American headshot.

“You sure this guy Juba isn’t secretly working for DEA?” asked Taylor. “I’m pretty sure this one is, or was, Menendez, the cartel big shot. That’s him. Look up and you’ll see his brains. Now, looking over here, we got a batch of high-speed operators, all with snails in their ears, good tac gear and high-end assault rifles, mainly M4s, with all kinds of flashy optics. The optics didn’t do ’em any good. All look single-tapped, center chest.”

“That’s Juba,” said Nick. “He’s that good a shot. Any sign of—”

“No, but we’re running another, more thorough search. Here’s the odd part. Two women, upstairs bedroom, lookers, naked, throats cut. Cowboy boot tracks in the blood. Not sure who that guy would be, but it definitely wasn’t our boy Juba who took out Menendez and the security people. The tracks led to a closet, the closet led to a secret alcove, which led to a spiral staircase which led to a tunnel. I’m betting this place is honeycombed with tunnels.”

“That’s how Juba made it out too. Goddamn, he’s a slippery eel. Let’s get the dogs in here and see if we can find a track.”

“They’re coming in with the next relay.”

“Okay, everybody,” he said to the room. “Sorry, the night isn’t over yet. We have to get on Juba. Maybe the dogs will bring him down.”

He turned to Chandler, off the walker, still hobbling, but game enough to tag along.

“Where’s Swagger? He’s tracked before.”

“Boss,” said Chandler, “you left him on the perimeter, remember?”

“Yeah, I forgot. Okay, we need him.”

He went to radio.

“This is Command. All units clear and secure?”

One by one, each Hammer element reported in, all objectives taken, no casualties. The street agents had begun to process the bewildered survivors, but that info wouldn’t be collated into a coherent picture for some time.

No Swagger on the ’Net.

“Swagger? Swagger, this is Command. Swagger, report please, give me your sitrep.”

“God, I hope he hasn’t taken off again,” said Chandler.

“I knew I should have left somebody with him. Where the hell could he have gone?”

La Culebra slipped down the low corridor, hunched, tracking his way by flashlight, smelling dirt, feeling along the timber shoring, feeling the fragility of the underground passageway. It seemed as if it could collapse at any second. There were seven tunnels out of the house; this was not the best of them. It didn’t matter. What mattered was, getting out, somehow commanding a vehicle, and fleeing the area under the cover of dark. Like a vampire, he could travel only by night, for the mask made him too obvious. In rural Mexico, daylight travel was possible, but here in el Norte it was beyond question.

He knew he had to escape the raiders. Who were they? Again, it didn’t matter. The Tijuana Cartel? Colombians? Russian gangsters out of Vegas with commando experience? Or any of a dozen other outfits who wanted to extinguish Señor Menendez from the earth and take his place as El Supremo . La Policía? Maybe state operators from a country that wanted the cartel business for itself. Rogue Green Berets? It didn’t matter.