The MCV jolted to a stop. Court slammed the transmission into park, unbuckled himself, and spun into the back. Behind him the confused and tentative smattering of gunfire that had chased the truck up the drive now turned into a heavy fusillade as the Policía Federal quickly came to the realization that this was not a wayward vehicle of theirs but, instead, a breakout attempt by the family under siege.
In the back Gentry fell down twice, stumbling from his dazed headache and lost a moment in the darkness, tripping over weapons that had fallen from their shelves. Seconds later he recovered, found the two items he’d been looking for, and opened the back doors.
Diego knelt in the sitting room behind the couch and fired at movement on the back patio. His grandfather had gone upstairs to shoot from the mirador, but he had not heard his abuelo fire the M1 carbine in over a minute.
An unreal amount of automatic fire shredded the front of the house. Diego knelt behind the couch as if it would give him some sort of cover; he only lifted his head when he heard an engine’s roar. The rear of a huge blue truck crashed into the entry way of the casa grande and continued several feet inside the building. In a panic Diego stood and fired with his pistol, the bullets just making sparks on the rear door. His weapon clicked open and empty.
The sixteen-year-old boy fumbled his reload, dropped a magazine on the tile floor, and chased it to the edge of a wingback chair before retrieving it and seating it in the grip of his gun. Long before his weapon was back in the fight the black doors of the vehicle flew open, and Diego saw a man crouched there in the truck with two massive weapons in his hands.
“Diego! It’s me! It’s . . .” In the excitement Court had forgotten his pseudonym. “It’s the gringo! Get everyone up here and in the van! Ándele!”
It took the young boy five full seconds to comprehend, but when he did, he nodded, spun on his tennis shoes, and ran towards the kitchen. He shouted as he ran. “Mi abuelo is upstairs!”
Courted nodded, but he did not go upstairs; instead he turned towards the shattered front doorway. There was little space between the hulking truck and the broken stone and stucco, but Gentry found a firing position, and he raised his right hand. In it he hefted a Hawk MM-1 handheld grenade launcher, loaded with a dozen high-explosive shells. The weapon was heavy and bulky and Court normally would have used both hands to fire it, but the weapon did not require both hands. He pulled the heavy trigger, and with a sound akin to a massive cork popping from an agitated champagne bottle, the first grenade left the barrel.
Boom!
Forty yards away an explosion of fire and smoke and broken earth and spinning federales. He fired three more times at the wall lined with attackers before lowering the weapon, lifting an identical device that he held in his left hand, and popping off three missiles loaded with CS agent, a powerful crowd-dispersing tear gas. With the last canister still in the air, he spun in the other direction, fired rounds from both weapons one at a time; they arced through the house, through the broken sliding glass doors to the patio, over the pool, and exploded in the garden behind the casa grande.
Court had lived by luck, but he had no real expectation of hitting one single sicario attacking the rear of the house. No, he just wanted to show them the rules had changed; their cowardly attack on women, a kid, and an old man would now subject them to high-explosive rounds being shoved down their motherfucking throats.
He fired one round of CS up the hallway that ran from the main room to the west, hoped like hell he’d have everyone out of here before the gas wafted back inside and made this living room unbearable.
He dropped the CS grenade launcher as he ran up the stairs; it was too heavy to wield along with the high-explosive launcher. He turned to the right, shouted for Ernesto, wished like hell he’d grabbed a shotgun or a pistol or something other than a weapon that he could not use in the short range of a hallway.
He turned towards the rear mirador, and he saw the old man there, lying on his back in a pool of blood.
THIRTY-TWO
Ernesto’s eyes blinked, and he drew a shallow breath. He looked up at the American standing over him on the dark veranda.
Gentry reached over the railing of the mirador and fired two HE rounds at movement in the moonlight by the corral in the distance. Wood and stone and fire blew twenty feet into the air.
Court knelt back to Ernesto. “Can you wa—”
He saw it now; the old man’s left leg was bloody, twisted to the side. Only held on by bits of meat and the denim in his jeans. Blood covered the tile of the mirador in the darkness.
Eddie’s father had been hit squarely in the femur with a round from a high-powered rifle.