“Yeah, this looks familiar,” Hunter acknowledged as he glanced around the interior. “This is the same kind of design I remember from our original strike… Can’t fault the fuckers for their consistency.”
We were in a large entrance room, apparently meant to host a mobile fleet to transport kidnapped cargo. The walls and ceiling were all adobe, reinforced by steel foundations and braces. Exposed wiring ran in the walls, only demonstrating further how unprepared this compound was for a siege.
A couple of vehicles were already in here, highlighting their intended expansion into a rolling armada of trucks and vans.
“Hmm. That’s new,” Hunter murmured, kicking at an open panel in a corner of the room. It exposed a staircase running downward, and he glanced at a few similar panels in the other corners.
“They built down?” I asked, swallowing my fear. If they’re constructing down into the earth, then there’s no telling how far deep this place goes…
“They’ve learned,” he muttered in annoyance. “Well, I’ll be damned. The rest of this might be a façade… they’re more prepared than I gave them credit for.”
“What does this mean?” I asked him. A few of the nearby bikers shuffled their boots with tension, signaling their support to my question.
“It means we don’t underestimate them,” he answered obliquely.
The other two teams returned into the main room before he could continue.
“Killed every fucker we found,” one of them informed us loudly.
“What about the girls?” Hunter asked.
“None to be found.”
Hunter glanced back at the staircase, lifted his pistols, and then started descending. “The real fight’s down here, boys… pull your wits together, because there’s no telling what we’ll find…”
I trotted down by his side, both hands on my Glock. The combined teams flanked us as we descended; on the next floor down, we spotted a familiar face in some bad shape.
“Grizz!” Hunter shouted, dropping down to his second-in-command’s side. Grizz was gasping for air and clutching his leg. In his stead were two dead bikers, and half a dozen cartel corpses.
He checked Grizz’s wound briefly, then held up his head and asked: “What the fuck happened in here?”
“We just got ambushed,” Grizz groaned, painfully trying to shift into a more comfortable position. “Took out a couple of us in this corridor. We chased them from another stairwell… led us right into gunfire.”
“Dammit,” Hunter snarled, slamming the side of his fist into the wall. “Any of you fuckers know how to extract and patch up a bullet?”
“I’ll be fine… bullet passed clean through,” Grizz grumbled, his piercing eyes slightly dulled of their intensity. He barely even looked at me. “This corridor is clear,” he motioned to the side, “although I don’t know about that one. A few of my men chased after the assholes…”
Hunter directed a team of six that way, and pointed out another six. “Guard this man,” he said. “See to it that he stays safe and conscious. I want him with us when we ride out of this hellhole, understood?”
Grizz glanced up slowly, his fresh sweat splattered across his face. “I’m sorry… for holding you back, boss…”
“Not another fucking word,” Hunter growled in retort. “You conserve your strength. I can’t lose you here, Grizz. Understood?”
Grizz nodded painfully. “Crystal clear,” he acknowledged.
With his conviction renewed, Hunter gave him a nod, and then led the rest of us down the next flight of stairs. It was the bottom floor, and all that greeted us was a thick, steel door: it waited ominously with silence on the other side.
“There’s no way this goes any further down,” Hunter told us. “Must be bedrock below this…”
We could hear staggered gunfire from further into the complex above us. Sharing a glance, we steeled ourselves for a fight… and Hunter threw open the heavy, solid door.
The bikers released rapid-fire from their assault weapons to fend off the surprised cartel members. They had apparently been too compartmentalized to hear the fighting above their heads, and couldn’t draw their pistols fast enough.
Hunter and I put a few rounds in the chests of a few hostiles, pausing to reload our weapons behind cover.
“That is some Dirty Harry shit,” I muttered to him as I hastily slammed bullets into my pistol chamber.
He finished loading his gun, and we nodded together before rising up from cover. With reflexes just quicker than mine, he let off a couple of shots from both wrists, missing once or twice but downing three cartel fighters in the process. We continued to mount our assault, aided by our team of fighters – most of whom were members of the Devil’s Dragons. They defensively stuck close to their leader, ready to annihilate any threat that appeared.