Ballistic Read online

  “I’ll punish him for sending you to me. You can rest now.”

  Gentry pulled the spear out of the door, out of the man; the manhunter did not even feel the movement, nor did he feel himself being helped to the bed. He watched the American lay him down, lift his feet up one at a time, and pull off his boots, but he did not feel anything.

  He wanted to rest. His eyes softened even more, and the last thing he saw before the lids shut was his target looking through his suitcase, taking his wallet and a first-aid kid and some clothes, and leaving through the front door.

  The manhunter’s eyes shut then, and he thought of his tulips.

  He would not see them soon after all, and that was a shame.

  SIX

  Thirty-eight-year-old Major Eduardo Gamboa surfaced slowly, his black neoprene head covering, the black waterproof greasepaint on his face, the black swim mask, and the black covert breathing regulator in his mouth all helping him blend in with the three a.m. black water shifting here in Banderas Bay. Fifty meters in front of him, a one-hundred-twenty-foot luxury yacht floated, backlit by the late-night artificial illumination of the Malecon, the boardwalk running the length of Puerto Vallarta’s downtown. To the north, to Gamboa’s ten o’clock, the bright lights of PV’s hotel district twinkled like fireflies.

  The yacht was called La Sirena; it lay at anchor here seven miles out in the bay, wide of the shipping lanes that ran to the port or the marina but close enough to shore so that its owner and his entourage could enjoy all that Puerto Vallarta had to offer. It was long and sleek and beautiful, and crowned by a state-of-the-art black Eurocopter helicopter resting on the helipad above the upper aft deck. But Eduardo Gamboa ignored the style of the ship in front of him and focused fully on the substance. After forty minutes under water his night vision was tuned to its peak. With his naked eye he saw two guards on the upper sundeck standing near the bow. He imagined the same number on the opposite side.

  Slowly another head rose from the water to Eduardo’s right. Then another. Then three more men on Eduardo’s left. Then two more men just behind him.

  Eight divers in total bobbed in the water fifty meters from the La Sirena. And after a nod from Major Eduardo Gamboa, they each released a few ounces of air from their buoyancy-control devices, and as one they slowly lowered back below the black surface, leaving not a trace of their existence.

  Gamboa and his men were from the GOPES, the Grupo de Operaciones Especiales, the Mexican Federal Police’s elite special operation’s group. But these eight cops were a level of elite unknown to all but a few. They’d been pulled from other police and military commando units and organized separately from the rest of the GOPES. Together they comprised a special assault-team task force run secretly by the attorney general in Mexico City.

  Their mission? Extrajudicial execution of Mexico’s top drugcartel bosses.

  Their target tonight? The owner of La Sirena, one Daniel Alonzo de la Rocha Alvarez. In a world where everyone had a nickname, de la Rocha was known simply by the initials of his last name, DLR, pronounced in Spanish as “de, ele, ere.”

  DLR was the leader of Los Trajes Negros, the Black Suits, one of the nation’s leading criminal drug and kidnapping organizations.

  Four minutes later, two of Gamboa’s team resurfaced at the stern of La Sirena. Martin and Ramses had removed their scuba gear, their masks and their fins, and they carefully climbed the sea stairs onto the lower deck. They carried suppressed Steyr TMP submachine guns and held them at the ready as they crouched at the top of the stairs. Their night vision gear helped them peer up the deck towards the galley and the bow. After a moment Ramses spoke into his headset.

  “We’re on board, moving into position.”

  Gamboa had come along the portside hull with two more of his team. “Entendido,” he whispered into his radio. Understood.

  A minute later Martin and Ramses had hoisted themselves up the helipad ladder, climbing silently in the dark. Then they lay prone on opposite sides of the Eurocopter, their weapons trained ahead on the four guards on the sundeck, some seventy feet forward on the yacht. Martin and Ramses’s job was to prevent any attempt by those on board to flee in the chopper during the assault and to eliminate the deck guards when given the order by their commander. “Team One, listo,” said Ramses into his headset. Ready.

  “Entendido,” replied Gamboa again from the softly rolling surface of the bay. He removed his scuba gear as he spoke. “Team Two, execute.”

  “Executing,” came the call, and three men began climbing the anchor chain at the port bow, forty feet below the guards on the sundeck.

  Two minutes later these men were aboard, and their suppressed weapons scanned the bridge deck. “Team Two, listo.”

  “Team Three, vamos,” said Gamboa, and he and two men rose dripping out of the water at the rear stairs, climbed to the upper deck, passed a large lifeboat covered with a tight canvas tarp, and began moving forward, proceeding cautiously. They made it to the hallway to the galley, heard noises and saw lights coming from the great room ahead, and flipped up their night vision goggles. They entered the room slowly, found two guards seated on the large white leather sofa in front of a fifty-two-inch plasma-screen television.

  Gamboa took the man on the left, shot him once through the skull as he stood. The report from his suppressed weapon was drowned out by a protracted gunfight on the TV.

  The officer behind Gamboa shot the guard on the right three times in the chest; both guards tumbled back to the sofa, handguns falling out of their hands and blood pools spreading out and meeting between their bodies on the white leather.

  The three federales moved across the room quickly now. The television was running a movie that Eduardo easily recognized: Los Trajes Negros 2, the second in a very popular series of Mexican-made films romanticizing the life and exploits of Daniel de la Rocha, the man sleeping in the master suite just beyond.

  Arrogant pendejo, Gamboa thought. It was typical of the narcissistic drug lord to have films glorifying his evil playing on his yacht. Gamboa continued across the room with his men stacked behind him and entered the hall to the master suite. They passed two other guest suites; they would clear them all after dealing with de la Rocha, but they did not expect them to be occupied. Forty-eight hours of surveillance of La Sirena had indicated that Daniel was on board tonight with only a few bodyguards and the crew of his yacht.

  Once in place at the door to the master suite, Team Three waited. Within seconds, one deck above them, Team Two announced they were outside the crew quarters.

  “All teams, execute in three. Uno . . . dos . . . tres.”

  On the helipad Martin and Ramses each fired two suppressed rounds from their Steyrs into the head of each guard on the sundeck.

  Team Two opened both the crew quarters and the captain’s stateroom; one man trained a weapon on the captain’s bed, and two more flipped on the lights of the crew’s quarters and held their weapons on the eight men expected to be sleeping there.

  Team Three, with Major Eduardo Gamboa in the lead, kicked in the door of the master suite. They actuated the flashlights attached under the barrels of their submachine guns but found the room already awash with light. The fifty-two-inch plasma in this room was on as well; this screen was broadcasting an interview with Daniel de la Rocha. He spoke to a reporter off camera. Gamboa ignored it and rushed to the king-sized bed. A large lump under the silk sheets was his target.

  But before he made it to the bed, his weapon raised to fire, a voice to his right caught his attention.

  “Welcome to La Sirena, Major Eduardo Gamboa.” It was de la Rocha’s voice. Gamboa looked up in shock. DLR was on television looking right into Gamboa’s eyes. He appeared to be in a studio, dressed in his impeccable and ubiquitous black Italian-cut suit. “A government assassin, here, to eliminate me. Dios mio!” The handsome face on the screen said it with a slight smile; his slick hair, goatee, and thin mustache gleamed black; his eyes seemingly locked on Gamboa.
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  Eduardo looked back at the hallway door. Both of his men stared at the television with wide eyes.

  Over his earpiece the major heard Team One check in. “All four targets eliminated.”

  And then Team Two. “Major . . . most of these bunks are empty. There are only three men up here. No capitán.”

  And then, from the television, de la Rocha continued to address the stunned federal officer. “Major Gamboa, let me ask you something. If you work for the federales, and I own the federales, where does that leave you and your men?”

  Gamboa looked to the lump in the bed, he lifted back the sheets with a gloved hand.

  C4 plastic explosives, easily one hundred pounds in bricks wired together with a red detonator attached. “¿Qué chingados?” muttered Gamboa. What the fuck?

  “Do you have your answer yet? Dead! It leaves you and your fucking team muerto, pendejo!”

  Eduardo Gamboa turned away from the bomb, pushed the transmit button on his radio. “It’s a trap! Off the boat!”

  Eduardo’s men turned in front of him, began running down the hallway. He sprinted behind them; they had just made it into the saloon, had just passed the television playing the movie exalting the crimes of Daniel Alonzo de la Rocha Alvarez, when a flash erupted from behind them. The hot blast of fire enveloped them, and they died in the spectacular explosion of the thirty-three-million-dollar vessel.

  Daniel de la Rocha bobbed in the water, one hundred yards from the wreckage of his beautiful La Sirena. He waited patiently while Emilio and Felipe, his two bodyguards, got the emergency life raft inflated, and then they helped him aboard. Once all three men had climbed onto the tiny dinghy, they tossed away the snorkeling gear they had been wearing since they slipped out of the wooden life raft on the upper deck and into the water of Banderas Bay. They’d managed to swim one hundred yards before the four men left behind on the sundeck were shot, and this told Daniel it was time to press the waterproof remote control that began the sequence both on his DVD player and on his bomb.

  Now he and his men watched the flames burning on the water. He hoped it would not be long before the local harbor fire patrol came to rescue the three survivors. Daniel knew he would be a living martyr after this act of aggression by the federales; indeed, he had worked for months so that he could capitalize on this moment.

  He would miss La Sirena, without question. But it was insured, his Eurocopter was insured, and a great deal of artwork that was not even on board was insured. It was time for an upgrade anyway. There was a one-hundred-sixty-foot gem that he’d seen a few months earlier in Fort Lauderdale, and he’d have his people begin working immediately on the owner to encourage him to sell it.

  Sergeant Martin Orozco Fernandez and Sergeant Ramses Cienfuegos Cortillo bobbed in the black water. Both men were injured: burns to Ramses’s legs that would scream in the salt water as soon as his adrenaline dissipated enough for him to feel them, and a slightly sprained left wrist for Martin that would make seven miles of swimming a special kind of hell. But they were excellent swimmers, and their wetsuits were buoyant. They would not drown.

  But that did not make either of them feel much better. Because the rest of their team was dead, and it was obvious to both of them that they had been set up by their leaders, and their leaders were somewhere on the shore they swam towards. Only a few knew of tonight’s attack, and Ramses and Martin knew that at least one of those few had tipped off de la Rocha.

  SEVEN

  As a general rule, Court liked third-world bus stations. Here he could people-watch with a minimum of return scrutiny, sit by himself in a dark corner, and soak up the experiences of others. His personal predicament, the fact that many highly dangerous people wanted him dead, necessitated a solitary existence, a distance from and a general mistrust of other human beings. For this reason the thirty-seven-year-old American by and large learned about normal everyday life and family and relationships by proxy, often in bus stations. Watching a father scold a misbehaving child, a young couple cuddle and laugh together, an old man eat his dinner alone. Court had been living this way exclusively for five years, the time that the former CIA asset had been on the run from the Central Intelligence Agency, ducking a shoot-on-sight sanction. But to one extreme or another, sitting alone and watching others live their lives had been Court’s life as long as he could remember.

  Nine days had passed since Brazil; he’d traveled overland ever since—bicycles and buses and shoe leather into Central America. He hadn’t remained for more than six hours in a single place. He now sat at a bus station in Guatemala City, waiting on a chicken bus that would take him into the northern jungle near the border with Mexico and Belize.

  He had a little money now but not much. He’d sold the manhunter’s pistol in El Salvador, and he still had some of the euros he’d pulled from the Dutchman’s wallet. But he’d bought secondhand clothing in Panama and a green canvas gym bag to carry it in. That and food and bus tickets had not been much. Gentry could get by with less than virtually any other American; nevertheless, cash would become an issue before too long.

  A black-and-white television hung from a metal pole in a corner of the waiting room. It broadcast a talk show from Mexico City featuring transsexuals shouting at one another over some nonsense. Court didn’t pay much attention to the TV; instead his eyes were fixed on the old man and his plate of rice. It was the man who mopped the dirty floor and perfunctorily wiped the toilets here at the bus station; the American assassin had been sitting here long enough to see the man at work. Now the janitor sat at a table by the café and picked at his food, sucked the rice because he did not have enough teeth to do anything else with it. Did he have to work all night? Was there anyone to come home to in the morning?

  Court found himself imagining a story for the man, and in many ways it mirrored his own.

  Court did not expect to live as long as the old man, and he found perverse comfort in that because he did not want to be both lonely and old.

  The village in the Amazon had been an eye opener for him. When Court arrived there, he’d been traveling for five months straight. A couple of weeks in Rio, a couple of weeks in Quito, a few days in two dozen other towns. All that time he thought of stopping; it never left his thoughts. He thought he wanted to find a place to stay, a job to do, people around him who, obviously, would never know his true identity but who would know him as someone, which was quite unlike traveling, where he was neither known nor noticed by those around him.

  And the Amazon village had provided all this for him. The people were kind, and they weren’t too inquisitive. The austerity had helped him focus and pushed him further away from the painkiller addiction that he’d left behind him, bit by bit, in each town he’d passed through since Caracas the previous April. He’d been clean for two months by the time he arrived in the Amazon, and the constant exercise and work and danger from nothing more nefarious than God’s nature had helped his body forget about such banal trivialities as the desire for a pill’s relaxation.

  But there was a downside. He had come to the realization that the things which he had sought—stability, relative safety, a routine—did not satisfy him. It disgusted him to admit it, but when young Mauro came and told him about the arrival of the manhunter, he’d felt an undeniable sense of relief wash over his body.

  Action. Adrenaline. Purpose.

  Court Gentry did not like it, but he could no longer deny it. After the Amazon village, after the absurd relief of an attack by choppers full of gunmen, one thing was obvious to him.

  Court Gentry was the Gray Man, and the Gray Man lived for this shit.

  Court had been sitting on a plastic chair with his head back on the greasy wall and his feet up on his canvas bag. But he sat up to move his back, to flex and then stretch the muscles high in his left shoulder where scar tissue from an arrow wound bothered him, the adhesion of the tissue needing a good daily stretch to stay pliant.

  The evening news came on the little television, and Cou
rt distractedly listened to it without looking at the screen, just picking up words here and there as he leaned forward and wrapped his arms around his body to stretch the muscles under his scapulas.

  The words Puerto Vallarta did not catch his attention, neither did yacht nor explosion.

  But the Spanish word asesinato caused him to turn his head. He had an acute professional interest in stories about assassination.

  He watched video of smoldering wreckage in the ocean, taken from a helicopter at dawn. Then a picture of a handsome Hispanic male in an impeccable black three-piece suit. The newscaster said the man’s name was Daniel de la Rocha, and there was speculation that he was the target of a sanctioned murder by the Mexican Federal Police. Court couldn’t understand it all, but he did pick up that de la Rocha had survived and the police who had bombed the yacht had all died.

  Wow, Court thought. That was a fucked-up hit. Why blow up the yacht? Why not just shoot the son of a bitch on land?

  The image on the screen changed again, displayed an official photo of a man in a police uniform sitting in front of the Mexican flag. He wore a smart hat, medals adorned his uniform coat, and his clean-shaven face was serious and stern.

  Court cocked his head a fraction of an inch. Blinked twice rapidly. Otherwise, he did not move a muscle. He just watched.

  The newscaster continued speaking over the cop’s image, and Gentry concentrated on the words, tuned into the grammar, and did his very best to understand.

  “Sources say Major Eduardo Gamboa of the Policía Federal’s special operation’s group led the attempt on the life of Daniel de la Rocha. As previously stated, Gamboa and all his men perished in the explosion of the yacht, along with four of DLR’s bodyguards and three crewmen of La Sirena. Only de la Rocha and two associates survived.”

  Eduardo Gamboa. “Eduardo Gamboa.” Court whispered it softly. The image left the screen, a commercial selling mobile phone plans appeared, but Gentry still saw the face.