The cityscape sped by faster.
Thank God for the early hour, Jonathan thought. Boxers drove as if Ciudad Juarez were an open racetrack. Traffic lights didn’t matter. Stoplights didn’t matter.
“Getting there doesn’t matter unless we get there alive,” Jonathan said. He knew better than to make an overt suggestion that the Big Guy slow down. When he was this close to the barn, any criticism was likely to result in even faster speeds.
“This thing’s got lights and siren if you want to use them,” Boxers replied.
Jonathan had already considered and rejected that. While it might help clear the way at individual intersections, he didn’t like giving such vivid audible and visual clues to a city full of emergency responders who would relish the chance to hurt the people who had done so much damage tonight.
“Didn’t think so,” Boxers said.
Jonathan undid his five-point restraint and rolled out of his seat into the back. “Tristan!” he yelled over the engine noise.
The kid jumped.
“Come up here. Take my seat.”
“What are you doing?” Boxers asked.
“If only one of us survives a wreck, it needs to be the PC,” Jonathan said. “Tristan! Now!”
Tristan half walked, half crawled the distance to the front.
“Sit in that seat,” Jonathan instructed. He helped the kid climb over the center console.
Tristan continued to have trouble maneuvering all his equipment in such a small space.
“Is that safety on?” Boxers asked as Tristan’s butt made contact with the seat.
“Yes! Jesus, yes. I haven’t touched the friggin’ safety.” He pushed Jonathan’s hands away from the belts. “I can do that. I’m not a kid in a car seat.”
The TPV hit a pothole, and Jonathan literally hit the overhead. He landed on his side.
“Sorry, Boss,” Boxers said in a tone that spoke far more amusement than apology.
Jonathan flipped him off, eliciting a laugh. At least Tristan was still secure.
He looked to Maria, who somehow had remained on the bench. Maybe if you grow up in this shit-hole town you get used to the road conditions and don’t get bounced around. “You okay?” he asked.
She smiled and nodded.
Even with all the speed in the open spaces, corners and the occasional obstacle still made it slow going.
“We just passed the halfway mark,” Boxers announced.
Jonathan looked at his watch. Twelve minutes to go a little over four miles. If he’d read the map properly, the second half of the trip would be on wider, straighter roads. Maybe they might just make it after all.
The thought had barely formed in his mind when he heard the chatter of automatic-weapons fire and the distinctive tink, tink of bullets hitting their vehicle.
“We’ve picked up a tail, Boss,” Boxers said, checking his driver’s side mirror.
Jonathan reached across the open space of the backseat, cupped his hand at the nape of Maria’s neck, and pushed her to the floor. “Get down!” he commanded. “Tristan, undo those belts and hunker down on the floor in front of your seat.”
Another burst of gunfire didn’t produce any hits that Jonathan could see or hear.
“What is it?” Jonathan asked Boxers. The view through the back windows was too blocked with a mesh of expanded metal brush cages for them to see any useful detail.
Boxers’ foot got heavier on the gas and he checked his mirror again. “Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a technical,” he said. He started driving zigzags, S-turns that took the Sandcat from curb line to curb line, with the intent of providing a tougher target.
Jonathan had no idea what the derivation of the term was, but technicals were the preferred vehicles of Third World terrorists everywhere. Consisting of a pickup truck with a mounted machine gun of some sort-usually a thirty-cal M60, but he’d seen a few with a fifty-cal Ma Deuce-they were frighteningly efficient killing machines. In Jonathan’s experience, though, marksmanship was an issue.
With the next burst, three rounds punched through the back of the Sandcat. One went on to spider the windshield.
“You want to take care of him for me, Boss?” Boxers asked. His tone had no more edge to it than if he’d asked for the salt to be passed at the dinner table.
“Let me have your Four Seventeen,” Jonathan said.
Boxers lifted his rifle from where he’d stashed it next to his right leg and handed it back to Jonathan. Slightly larger and heavier than Jonathan’s M27, Boxers’ Hechler and Koch Model 417 looked nearly identical, but fired a bigger 7.62-millimeter bullet that had way more penetrating power than the M27’s 5.56-millimeter round.
“Here’s a couple of spare mags, too,” Big Guy said, handing back two thirty-round magazines.
“What are you going to do?” Tristan asked from his perch on the floor. His eyes were huge.
“I’m going to finish what they started,” Jonathan said.
He squat-walked to the back bulkhead, to the door in the center. The gun port was tempting, but he dismissed it. Gun ports were for terrified armored car guards who cared less about hitting a target than about putting out a large volume of fire to put people’s heads down. That offended Jonathan’s sense of professionalism. Suppressing fire had its place, but this was not it. When he pulled the trigger, he wanted to hit what he was shooting at.
As he reached for the handle of the personnel door in the center of the back panel, the technical released another burst of gunfire-a longer one this time-and four more bullets slammed through the bulkhead. The gunner was finding his aim.
Nearly as tall as the crew cab was high, the door was designed for rapid deployment of troops, so when Jonathan pulled the latch and swung the door out, he opened up an enticing vertical trench for the technical’s gunner.
The technical’s driver, however, read the lethality of the situation for what it was and backed off the accelerator. As the pickup truck fell away, Jonathan heard the gunner yelling for the driver not to be a coward.
Jonathan dropped to his belly on the Sandcat’s floor and assumed a classic prone shooter’s position.
“Slow down, Big Guy!” he commanded.
Boxers hit the brakes harder than he’d expected, and while the distance between the vehicles closed, the technical hit its brakes hard, too. As the gunner opened up again, his rounds went wild.
Jonathan’s didn’t. He centered the red dot of the 417’s gun sight on the technical’s grille, on the driver’s side and he unleashed a long burst that shredded the pickup’s engine, and then probably went on to shred the driver.
The technical veered sharply to the right-its left-then hit a curb and flipped. While it was hard to see details this far away, there was no mistaking the silhouette of the gunner cartwheeling through the air and skidding into the street.
“All right, Scorpion!” Boxers whooped. “Nice shooting!”
Actually, it wasn’t. Anybody who couldn’t hit a target that big as it raced straight toward him deserved to be on the other end of the gun. The fact that it had happened at all spelled very bad news.
It meant that the bad guys had connected the dots and knew exactly where they were.
Armed with a compass point and the direction of travel, Hernandez would be able to figure out that that they were headed to the tunnel in the industrial park.
“Maria,” Jonathan said, louder than he’d intended, and causing her to jump. “Where’s the next nearest tunnel to the U.S.?”
“I already told you. The warehouse-”
“No, you said that one’s the closest. Your boss has to know that’s where we’re going now. Where’s the next closest?”
“Much farther,” she said. “Fifteen, maybe twenty kilometers east of the tunnel off Hermanos Escobar.”