The men were local campesinos, farmworkers in blue jeans and straw cowboy hats, but they weren’t tending to their fields. They’d been hired by someone to patrol the perimeter.
Seconds later a federale on a motorcycle came up the road from the other direction.
By the time the biker disappeared around the southern edge of the outer wall, Court could already hear the rumbling of a pickup. It appeared; it was black and bore PF markings. A pair of officers stood in the bed and held on to the roll bar with one hand while propping their M4 rifles on the roof of the pickup with the other.
This old dirt farm road surely hadn’t seen so much traffic since the hacienda had been a working agave farm and tequila distillery.
Court tucked himself deep into the tree, found a semi-comfortable position, and prepared to wait there until dusk. He hoped there would be some sort of break in the action while the attackers prepped to hit the casa grande, and he hoped to take advantage of that lull.
But waiting till nearly the time of the attack meant that he would have no chance to make it back out onto the main road to commandeer a vehicle or create any other way to help those in the casa grande before the assassins attacked in force. No, waiting until the last moment to escape would force him to rush to save them.
He could still, with little doubt, save himself. He could wait for the raid on the house behind him, and then he could drop down off the wall into the darkness on the outside of the hacienda, and he could walk off into the agave fields and the forests, and he would survive. He could shit-can this lost cause; he could live to fight another day; he could return to Europe and target Gregor Sidorenko, the Russian mobster who had pursued him all the way into the Amazon jungle. He could kill Sid and then get a small measure of his life back. He could find work, and he could forget about Daniel de la Rocha and this horrific civil war here in Mexico, and he could never look back.
All this he would love to do.
But he could not run out on the five people behind him.
They were counting on him. Only because there was no one else, but that did not matter. He would help if he could, and if he could not, then he would die trying.
He would not, could not, leave them behind.
THIRTY-ONE
At dusk the patrols became much less frequent; Gentry pictured a meeting back at the main gate, imagined the leader of the operation laying out his assault plan to a large group of men kneeling in the dirt with their weapons hanging from their necks.
Court knew he’d have to act fast. Part of any attack would surely include a blocking force outside of the walls on all points of the compass, ready to keep anyone from escaping.
At six p.m. he found the entire east side of the hacienda wall clear, so he slid out of the tree, hung by his arms, and dropped the rest of the way to the one-lane dirt road, rolling to the ground to absorb the jarring shock in his ankles and knees and spine. Quickly, he shot across the hard surface and buried himself into the tall grasses of the overgrown blue agave field. There he knelt for a moment, listened for shouts or gunshots or approaching vehicles. Hearing nothing that worried him, he stood, began moving north through the grass along the road, ready to tuck down into the foliage to duck the next patrol.
The valley had darkened to black by the time he turned at the northeast corner of the hacienda wall. While he made his way through the brush, a half dozen pickup trucks ambled by on the road to his right; they were driven by civilians, and more civilians sat in back with rifles. These were local farmhands, granjeros. Deeply tanned men with mustaches and cowboy hats, they were manual labor from the neighborhood, probably offered a week’s wages for a day’s work. These unskilled laborers would not take part in the attack. No, these men would just patrol the perimeter, perhaps set up a couple of roadblocks, just to make sure that if anyone in the hacienda managed to squirt out during the assault on the building, they would be mopped up before they made it out of the valley.
They weren’t evil killers, Court knew. They probably thought they were working for the federales and not the Black Suits, though there was no way to be sure. These were not beneficiaries of the drug profits of Mexico in any appreciable sense; they were just laborers who’d lucked into a little work. The Black Suits had access to all the labor they could ever want or need, and Court knew he needed to remember that if he ever got out of this damn valley.
Court knew these were not necessarily bad men. But they were in his way, and he would kill them just the same.
Ahead of him in the distance, at the hacienda’s front gate two hundred yards away, Court saw the headlights of several vehicles along the road. Big black SWAT-style armored cars, pickup trucks, a beat-up sedan, even a huge armored Policía Federal mobile command vehicle the size of a bus. He decided to get closer, maybe to grab a weapon or a hostage or a car that he could drive right up to the casa grande and rescue the Gamboas. He moved around an open pasture, dug into a low copse of pine trees, and neared his objective. There were dozens and dozens of men with guns here to prevent him from carrying out this plan, but still he moved towards them in the night. He heard barking dogs but knew the scent of all the other men, and all the other dogs for that matter, would render them worthless as early warning devices.