The pickup truck plan was a nonstarter.
If there was still an armored car here at the front gate, and if that armored car happened to be unlocked with the keys in the ignition, well then he’d be in business.
But the BATTs were gone, and with them any chance for—
A young PF officer stepped from the side door of the trailer-sized command vehicle, and the door locked back behind him. The officer turned away from the famers, walked across to the bushes along the far side of the road, and undid his belt. He shook as he tried to force himself to take a quick piss; he rolled his neck to scoot the shotgun that hung in front of him out of the way of the impending stream.
Gentry looked at the locked door of the command vehicle, wondered if the man taking a bathroom break had a set of keys on him. He wished the truck wasn’t so fucking big. Still, it was armored. It had the plating necessary to stop a rifle round cold; its thick front windshield would hold back dozens of direct hits before failing.
The vehicle would be nearly impossible for Court to drive, but he knew he did not have the luxury of being choosy at the moment.
Dammit.
Across the narrow road the officer pulled up his pants and zipped them, then reached into his pants pocket. Gentry recognized the glint of a key chain.
Court leapt to his feet, and he struck like a cobra.
He ran low and fast across the road as the policeman began to turn back towards the command vehicle. The gaggle of cowboys and farm hands was twenty-five feet off Gentry’s left shoulder and still looking up the drive towards the casa grande. Gentry moved like a shadow across the hard surface, drew his knife at the last second, simultaneously slipped it between the turning man’s floating ribs on the left side and covered the federale’s mouth with his right hand. He pushed the knife to the hilt and kept pushing the man forward into the bushes; Court turned the blade like a key as he followed the man into the thicket and fell with him, on him, onto the hard earth.
Court used his own dead weight on top of the man to stifle his kicks and thrashes. This hombre was probably a soccer player, Gentry thought; he was exceedingly fit, and his body did not play by the rules. Court expected the man to be limp in five seconds; it was nearly twenty before the life left his extremities. Court found himself exhausted, as if he’d been trying to stay atop a bucking bronco while preventing the bronco from making a sound for the entire ordeal. Court reached forward, pulled the keys out of the brush. He felt them for a moment, settled on two possible choices for the door of the vehicle. He held them in his fingers and retrieved the shotgun with his other hand.
Then he stood. Headed towards the armored command vehicle.
Seconds later he was inside. He’d shut the door behind him, turned right, away from the front of the vehicle and towards the back cabin. A man called out from the cab, a question to his partner who was now dead in the brush. Court pulled out his knife, began to turn to deal with the other driver, but he stopped, noticing a metal rack that ran head high along the length of one side of the cab.
All manner of weapons and ammunition rested in the rack or hung from hooks above it.
Gentry’s eyes widened, and his face tightened into a cruel smile. “Oh, hell yes.”
He turned away, headed to the front to kill the driver.
The comandante led his men up the driveway towards the front of the house. They had been protected from any threat of fire from the windows or verandas of the hacienda’s casa grande by the armored vehicle ahead of them, but his men had widened out as they neared the building and now moved slowly, tentatively in the night. The truck slowed and stopped and shone its bright lights on the front door.
Normally, the comandante would have nothing to do with a frontal assault, straight up the middle towards a defended stone building. But after sending in spotters that morning and seeing the property from the inside, he understood how concealed the driveway was from the hacienda itself. With the thick growth of bushes and trees on both sides, the archways at the front door, even the tall weeds between the cobblestones, twenty-five men heading in two columns straight up the driveway at noon would be more covert than if they jumped over the back wall in the middle of the night.
Even so, he’d waited until nightfall and then one hour more because the defenders might have been expecting an attack as soon as darkness covered the property. Now, at nine in the evening, he could wait no longer. It was time to hit these worthless cabrones in the house, kill every last thing that moved—every man, woman, and child, and then the dogs and cats and the chickens and goats.
He wanted to check with the other teams who should just now be approaching from other directions, but one of his damn officers had apparently depressed the transmit button on his radio, and it prevented the comandante from sending commands or hearing from any of his other men. He’d waited thirty seconds for el chingado cabrón to realize his error and fix his radio, but still he could not communicate.