Weston Ochse - Age of Blood

Nicely done , thought Walker.

Yank nodded, then said, “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. This is just fucking with my head.”

Laws began to laugh. “This is nothing, SEAL. If you think this is fucking with your head, just wait. It gets better.” He laughed again. “It gets so much better!”

Walker stood at the Hotel Majestic’s floor-to-ceiling window staring out at the Zócalo, or Plaza de la Constitución. The immense plaza had been a gathering place since Aztec times. Surrounding the Zócalo were government buildings and modern museums. Beneath the Zócalo were temples from the time of the Aztecs, most of them still unexcavated. The Zócalo was a place where kings and queens were received, where military parades celebrated Mexico’s liberation from Spain, where speeches by everyone of influence occurred. Even now there were a thousand people chatting, eating lunch, reading, playing chess, kicking soccer balls, and flying kites. If this was the population in microcosm, then it didn’t seem so bad, these thousand people standing in a historic concrete field, the Mexican flag rising from the center on a hundred-meter-high flagpole.

But like anywhere, if you looked closer, you could see the stain of sin, like watching the universe through a flyspecked screen, and Walker was beginning to wonder if the stain in Mexico, like it was in so many other places, wasn’t something permanent. From the moment conquistador Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro rode into what was now modern-day Mexico, perhaps he’d brought with him the seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. The country’s entire bloody history was carved by these sins, as a conquering army came and took everything. The only problem was that they never really went home. The conquerors stayed and in the staying realized the only people they had now to conquer were themselves. YaYa had been right.

The other SEAL had said something once, when they were talking about going on a weekend vacation to a Mexican resort. They hadn’t gone because cartel violence had put it off limits to the American military, but YaYa had been against it from the start.

“Sounds like a bad idea to me. You’ve seen the way people are down there. Greed is in their blood. They’ll do anything to get more of everything. I bet if I took down a bucket of sand they’d steal that, too.”

“Kind of harsh, don’t you think?” Walker had said. “People get like that when times are hard.”

And YaYa had shaken his head viciously. “No. Not at all. Mexico is different. They’ve been living in an Age of Blood ever since the first Aztec rolled the head of a farmer down a temple stairs. Never in the history of the world has there been one place with so much violence, so much self-hate, so much revulsion at the reality of how great they were and how far they’ve fallen. It’s like the conquerors came, never left, and became their own victims.”

Walker thought that much the same could be said for America. Although there was no great Aztec nation present when the first Europeans began to plunder the bounty of the nation, the indigenous peoples had their own way of doing things. Early American Indians were called savages because of how they acted. But wouldn’t anyone act in the same manner if everything they knew was being taken from them? In the end, who were the savages? The conquerors or the conquered?

And now SEAL Team 666 was living in their own personal Age of Blood. Walker turned from the window and sat on the edge of the bed. He reached down to pet Hoover. Yank was already snoozing in the bed next to his. He could hear Laws, Billings, Jen, and the two techs talking in the other room. Musso had been taken to the hospital. He’d been shot. Correct that. YaYa had shot him in the stomach.

Everything was so fucked up.

Holmes had decided to put them in a hotel because there were issues. He didn’t want to return to the embassy or else he knew he’d lose command and control. As it was, he’d gone radio-silent from all support so he wouldn’t have to answer the messages from NSW Command that unequivocally stated the FBI had current jurisdiction on the missing senator and his aide, and that Triple Six was to stand down, despite having successfully saved the senator’s daughter.

They’d tried to drop her off, but she refused to leave. She’d said she was tired of being part of the problem and wanted to be part of the solution. Holmes had decided to keep her, just in case she could shed some light on her captors.

Because Holmes was furious.

SEAL Team 666 would get the senator back.

Period.

But Walker realized how hard it would be. They were off the grid, which meant no help from anyone back in the States and no help from anyone connected to the embassy. They were all alone, except for Holmes’s and Laws’s contacts inside the Mexican military.

They had none of their equipment, except that which had been on their persons. Everything on their plane had been confiscated because the FBI considered it a crime scene. The FBI had also confiscated the plane the senator came down in, which held much of their additional ammo and equipment requests. Gone were their other weapons, ammo, computers, and surveillance devices. Unless there was a local Spy-Mart or SEAL-Mart, they’d be hard-pressed to figure out how to MacGyver their way to figure out where the senator was and save him.

According to the official statement, immediately after Senator Withers’s plane had set down, YaYa had received a phone call. He then began acting strangely, barking and laughing much like he had prior to his exorcism. Then when the senator’s plane had pulled next to the open ramp of the C-130 Hercules, and right after he got out to meet the fine young Americans aboard the plane, YaYa had opened fire. He shot the commo box in the rear of the C-130, then leaped atop two Secret Service agents, knocking them both unconscious. Musso had tried to be a hero and was gut-shot for his daring. Everyone had screamed for YaYa to stop, but as Jen had described him, he was less a man and more animal. After coldcocking the Mexican crew chief who tried sneaking up behind him, YaYa had dragged the senator away.

No one followed. Instead Billings, who’d stayed in the jet and had seen it all, radioed their emergency. They managed to shut down the airport, but not soon enough. YaYa and the senator were gone. They had no leads. They had no evidence. All they had was a member of SEAL Team 666 who’d gone batshit crazy and taken the senior serving senator on the Sissy.

The door opened and Holmes came in, his face a cartographic merging of worry lines. He went straight into the other room. Walker woke Yank, and they joined him.

Jen, Billings, and Laws sat on one of the beds, while the other two techs, whose names turned out to be Goran and Patrick, fussed with two tablets, trying to maneuver through the local wireless using their own shadow IPs. Holmes sat heavily on the other bed. Out of habit, Yank went to the window to check outside. Walker remained where he was in the doorway, hoping their commander had a plan.

“So here’s the deal,” Holmes said. “I had some friends in Dam Neck contact USSOCOM to check our status and it’s not good. We’ve been put on the blacklist, which means any contact has to be reported and they’re not going to stop until they find us.”

“They don’t think we did anything, do they?” Yank looked from one SEAL to the other.

Holmes shook his head. “They don’t know. The operators have probably figured it out, but the bureaucrats learned all their strategy from Hollywood, therefore we have to be involved somehow.” He laughed hollowly. “So we’re not going to be getting help from our own anytime soon.”