Ballistic(138)

Before an evening of wreaking havoc, Gentry went into a grocery to resupply with beans, soft drinks, instant coffee, and water, and he stepped into a cantina next door to use the men’s room in the back. After using the restroom and washing a small fraction of the grime from his hands, he turned halfway towards the door but stopped suddenly. There, on a wall and staring back at him, was a man’s face on a Wanted poster.

Like nothing he had felt in years, unease ripped through his body.

It was him. The fucking picture was of him.

WANTED FOR MURDER

American Assassin of the Madrigal Cartel

A local mobile number was written below.

Gentry realized now that, even if he survived this, even if he got out of Mexico, the U.S. government would label him an assassin for the Mexican mob, and he would never, ever, get back into the USA.

Was the girl worth all this?

Court shook his head, hated that the question had entered his brain.

Yes. Of course she was.

He ripped the paper sign from the wall and tossed it in the garbage.

The door on his left squeaked open.

Gentry spun as he drew his weapon, dropping low to his knees in front of the sink.

He centered the weapon on his target’s chest, his finger had already taken up the slack of the Glock’s trigger safety.

The man’s arms flew over his head. He cried out in panic, “¡Madre de dios!”

Court looked past the front sight of his Glock 19, felt his finger tight on the unforgiving trigger, and he saw an overweight man in a cowboy hat, just a simple farmer, just a guy in a bar looking to relieve himself after a couple of Coronas.

Court released the slack on the trigger, stood and holstered his weapon, walked past the panicked laborer without giving him a glance.

Dammit, Gentry. Keep it together.





FIFTY-ONE



It took Gentry an entire day to get into position. For most of that time, while he drove the Mazda into the mountains, while he climbed and crawled, while he hid under a footbridge as armed guerreros passed just overhead, while he checked his GPS coordinates against the location given him by the Black Suit who now lay dead back in a ravine near Court’s mine-shaft hideout—all the while, he lamented this delay. He wanted to hit the Black Suits every single day, multiple times a day, so he worried that spending twenty-four hours doing nothing but moving unseen through the Sierra Madres, towards a location that might not even exist, would cause his operation to lose momentum crucial to its success.

He did not know, of course, that the day before Daniel de la Rocha had initiated a war against the Madrigal Cartel. This day of travel for Court was still very much a sixth day of bloodshed for the Black Suits, and the fact that Gentry himself was not involved in the fighting had gone completely unnoticed by Los Trajes Negros.

By measure of the number of incidents, by the number of dead and wounded, by the number of convoys hit or safe houses raided, momentum against the Black Suits was only growing.

Court moved through the darkness, the second-generation night-vision goggles provided by Hector Serna were nearly antiques compared to some of the gear that Court had used in his past, but they got the job done. He crossed a valley floor, got close enough to a village full of DLR’s men to smell the cooking fires and hear the dogs bark, but he remained invisible to the locals. At one in the morning he found a stream that was right where the dead Black Suit said it would be, and this lifted his spirits. He followed it into a black canyon; in the distance a waterfall roared, but he was not close enough to see it.

He moved on, his night-vision goggles and his GPS leading the way, but his ears, his sense of smell, his knowledge of the wilderness and how to move through it silently, this kept him alive.

By five a.m. he was in position. He shimmied halfway down a rock face that hung over a tiny canyon, and then Court slid below the treetops.

Dawn was still two hours off, but Court smelled tortillas and coffee from his perch in the sheer rock face. A rooster crowed. Dogs barked and goats bleated; there were all the sounds of human habitation. Occasionally, the scent of marijuana wafted up to his hide in the rock wall ten feet above the dirt road. Soon engines fired, large gaspowered generators, and as the natural light trickled into the jungle from above, electric lighting emanated from a clearing fifty yards ahead. A wide building, prefabricated metal painted a mute olive drab, appeared under headlights as a jeep backed up and turned around. A few seconds later it passed under Court’s position, full of men and guns.

Still enshrouded in darkness, Court Gentry prepared to attack.





A seven o’clock that morning Nestor Calvo hung up his mobile phone in his office at Hacienda Maricela. He’d been at his desk since five thirty, sitting in his tie and shirtsleeves, his coat draped over a leather chair in the corner. He drank mango juice and sipped coffee while he fired off phone calls and e-mails to his contacts in the United States. While his organization’s conflict with Constantino Madrigal grew by the hour, he’d been forced to spend his morning pursuing all leads related to Elena Gamboa. There was evidence that the Gamboas had left Tucson by bus, possibly to the northeast. On that vague nugget of questionable intelligence, Calvo spent ninety minutes contacting members of his network from Chicago to Boston, tasking people with checking all their sources, hunting for a pregnant Mexican woman, aged thirty-five years.