Mustering his remaining strength, Jake flipped onto his back and flung the knife at his attacker. He’d had enough knife-throwing practice to hit pay dirt, but the blade sank into the meatiest part of Efren’s thigh. To Jake’s dismay, the huge man’s face showed not the slightest indication of pain. But the contact provided enough of a distraction for Jake to reach his Glock.
No sooner had Jake produced his weapon than the hulk fired his gun.
At first, Jake didn’t know what to feel. When he tried to squeeze off a shot of his own, nothing happened. Then the pain came with the intensity of a speeding train. Warm blood oozed out a sizable hole in Jake’s hand, where a bullet had gone through.
Efren fired again, but Jake rolled to his right, just in time, and that bullet missed by inches. Jake’s Glock didn’t roll with him. No way to hold on to the gun with most of the bones in his hand shattered.
Jake was on his back, scrambling to get away. Efren lurched forward and took aim with his weapon. He straddled Jake, but he didn’t shoot. Instead, he set his boot down hard on Jake’s bloodied hand and applied tremendous pressure. The screams that blew out of Jake’s throat were hardly human. Efren grinned.
With his right hand still pinned under Efren’s boot, Jake ignored the pain as he lifted part of his body off the ground. Reaching with his left hand, he seized the handle of the knife protruding from the Goliath’s leg and gave a hard yank. The razor-sharp blade sliced through muscle and tendon as if cutting air. Jake opened a gash that extended the length of the thigh. Efren fired his weapon, but the discharge went toward the ceiling as his big body fell toward the ground.
With his hand freed from the boot, Jake scrambled to his feet and jumped onto Efren’s back to try and pin him down. The monster bucked and thrashed beneath him, but could not get Jake dislodged. Reaching with his left hand, his good hand, Jake yanked down a slack portion of cable and wrapped it like a noose around the man’s beefy neck. With the cable secured, Jake pushed his knees into Efren’s back as he pulled with his arm.
Underneath him, the hulking man went wild. His enormous body thrashed in every conceivable direction. With each thrust, each twist, Jake tightened his grip on the cable, and through gritted teeth pulled on it like a horse’s reins. Maybe it was thirty seconds. Maybe a minute. But at some point, all that bucking, and thrashing, and moving about just stopped.
Breathless, Jake slid off the dead man, clutching at his bleeding hand. He retrieved the flashlight from nearby and examined his wound, a nasty red hole ringed black with gunpowder. The bullet had passed clean through, but the hand was useless to him now.
Jake took off his shirt and used the fabric to stanch the blood flow. He staggered over to Solomon and, with the flashlight, saw where a bullet had struck the Kevlar. Jake pulled the makeshift shield away to reveal Solomon’s panic-stricken face.
“I did it,” Solomon said. “I kept quiet. I kept quiet.”
The boy’s cheek was red and bruised, marking the spot on the Kevlar where the bullet had struck.
“Yeah, you did it,” Jake said in a shaky voice.
Jake’s body was covered in blood, dirt, grime, and smeared greasepaint from his camouflage, but Solomon took no notice. Relief radiated off the boy like light from a star. The good vibes didn’t last long. Jake’s ears filled with sounds of footsteps and gunshots. The third man was coming, and fast. Light from one of the dropped flashlights revealed the location of Jake’s Glock. He took a wobbly step toward the gun. It seemed so far away. Jake felt completely enervated, and his breathing bordered on hyperventilation. Pain commanded every nerve in his body. Even if he reached the gun, Jake hadn’t trained at weak-hand shooting.
“Get that shield back up,” Jake said to Solomon. His voice came out lacking authority. Solomon got his protection back in place.
Jake assessed the probability of his getting to the gun before this armed man appeared and started shooting. It was somewhere between zero and none. The shirt wrapped around Jake’s injured hand was already heavy with his blood. His vision came in and out of focus. He was going to lose consciousness at some point, he could feel it, and those footsteps were getting louder. But Solomon’s body blocked the only way out.
Jake swallowed hard and took another uneven step toward his weapon. From behind, Solomon shouted, “Hey! Hey!”
Jake spun around just as Solomon vanished into the hole. Somebody must have grabbed his legs and used tremendous force to yank him through. A second later, Andy, flashlight in hand, poked his head through the opening where Solomon had been stuck.
“Dad!” Andy yelled. “Let’s get out of here. It’s go time.”
Jake didn’t need a second invitation. He spun around and slid through the narrow opening just as a hail of bullets came screaming from the darkness.
CHAPTER 48
Fausto Garza stepped over the lifeless bodies of Efren and Armando so he could take aim at the man at the end of the hall. Rage owned him. The mission was gone; he had nothing left to salvage.
Fausto did not know how many fighters his team had gone up against. Five? Had to be that number, at least. His entire team was dead, that much he knew. He also knew that he had followed the wrong path. While Efren and Armando went to investigate the commotion they heard, Fausto followed the other trail, thinking they could have split up. He wasn’t sure what had made him turn around. Instinct, perhaps. At some point, he knew he had fallen for a trick and so he returned.
As this played out, Fausto contemplated his options. They were limited. He could hide in the tunnels, but eventually he’d be found. They’d bring dogs down that would sniff him out like a fox in the hunt. He could try to escape into the woods, but he could be caught. The response from law enforcement would be intense, massive. The game was over, but there remained one thing for Fausto to accomplish.
Revenge.
Efren’s and Armando’s bodies meant nothing to him. They were just carcasses, pieces of meat. What mattered to Fausto was whoever had put them down. He would shoot at anybody he found down here. Though bullets to the body would not provide much satisfaction. He’d prefer to flay those responsible alive. No matter what happened, Fausto would not be taken into custody. Oh, no, he wouldn’t. He would go out in a fiery blaze of bullets, like the outlaw he believed himself to be. He was born into a world of violence and death, and he refused to leave it any other way.
But a question burned in his mind, one he did not know would ever be answered: What happened to Soto’s money?
The kids would have given it up if they had it, Fausto believed. He had guns to their heads. The countdown was no joke. The money really was gone. Soto would take over from here. He would keep up the hunt and never rest. Money was like air to that man-it kept him alive.
Fausto leveled his assault rifle and uncorked a flurry of bullets that would have taken out the knees, had the man up ahead not vanished through a narrow opening. Fausto screamed with rage and sent a volley of gunfire into the concrete. Some of them might have flown through that hole, but Fausto had a feeling his bullets hadn’t killed anybody.
And so the chase was on.
“Go! Go! Go!” Jake screamed as he shoved Solomon hard from behind to hurry the boy along.
He had no weapon and no plan but to flee from his pursuer as fast as possible. Jake was well aware his son had just saved their lives. But that was seconds in the past, and irrelevant now. They were sprinting once again; this time, Andy, with flashlight in hand, was taking the lead. The blood-soaked shirt functioned as a pretty decent makeshift bandage, but the pain in Jake’s hand was brutal and throbbing. It pulsed with its own beating heart.