When he came back out, Jessup was coming in from the balcony.
“Turn on the movie,” Hancock said. “Loud.”
Jessup slipped the disc of an old war movie into the DVD player and ran up the volume all the way: machine guns firing, artillery blasting away. Then he returned to the balcony to check the scope a second time, scanning the growing crowd for the mayor of Acapulco. He spotted the dark Mayor Guillermo Cruz dressed obligingly in all white, standing by the glass parapet on the nearside of the pool with two other men, looking out over the ocean. “Target acquired.”
Hancock went back into the room, put on his ear protection, and got behind the rifle, finding the mayor in his own scope.
Jessup stood up and closed the curtains and the sliding glass doors to an aperture of twelve inches, to keep the sound of the shot inside the hotel room. Then he sat back down and put his eye back to the scope.
Mayor Cruz was standing broad chested before them at three hundred yards. The shot could not have been more pristine. “Rhett, what the fuck are you waiting for?” Jessup whispered to himself. “Shoot him, goddamnit!”
Hancock studied the mayor’s face, the dark eyes beneath thick black eyebrows, and was reminded briefly of an actor from some Mexican beer commercial he’d seen in the US.
Cruz had been the mayor of Acapulco for just six months, but already he was causing the Ruvalcabas a lot of aggravation. The city’s tourist industry had fallen off dramatically over the past ten years due to ever-escalating drug violence, and Cruz had based his election campaign on promises to restore the city to its former greatness as an international tourist destination. So far he was working very hard to keep that promise, and not only was he hurting the narcotics trade but also setting the wrong example for other mayors across the country.
So, as they had with Police Chief Juan Guerrero of Toluca, Lazaro Serrano and Hector Ruvalcaba had sent Hancock to make an example of him.
The gringo sniper held Cruz dead to rights in the crosshairs. The mayor was doomed no matter what, so Hancock decided to get creative; to wait for the moment to ripen. After fifty long seconds, it appeared that the target was turning to step out of the sight picture, which would have forced Hancock to shoot him before he was ready, but the moment suddenly blossomed as a woman in a yellow dress — along with a man wearing a soccer jersey — stopped to chat directly in line behind the mayor.
Hancock squeezed the trigger. The .50 caliber armor-piercing round blasted from the muzzle of the Barrett with a muffled boom, covering the 300 yards to target in just under three seconds to strike Cruz dead-center in the chest at 2,900 feet per second. The mayor virtually exploded from hydrostatic shock, as did the woman directly behind him and the soccer player standing just in front of her. To the naked eyes of the other partygoers, it appeared that all three bodies exploded at the same time.
The party fell into instant pandemonium. People were knocked into the pool as others scrambled to get back inside the suite. Others stood in horrified shock, splattered with blood and viscera. The mayor’s three bodyguards took up cover positions, pistols drawn, but there was no way to discern where the shot had come from.
Hancock got to his feet as Jessup came into the room and closed the curtains. “See that shit?” he said with a laugh. “Three in one!”
“I saw it.” Jessup set the spotting scope down on the table and switched off the movie, secure in the knowledge that the rooms on either side of them were reserved by Ruvalcaba’s people. “Look, I think this is my last op.”
“Oh, come on,” Hancock said. “What the fuck does it matter? The other two were rich assholes like everyone else on that roof.”
Jessup shook his head. “It’s not that, man. You enjoy this shit too much. You’re gonna push it too far one of these days, and I don’t wanna be there. I know you don’t give a shit about dyin’, but I do.”
Hancock grabbed a handful of little tequila bottles from the minibar and sat down on the bed. “You gotta do what you gotta do, Billy.”
Jessup disassembled the rifle, and a few minutes later, there was a knock at the door. He gave the guitar case to a young man, and the man disappeared.
Jessup closed the door and locked it, turning to Hancock. “What are you gonna do now?” They were beginning to hear sirens down on the street.
Hancock grinned. “First, I’m gonna get fucked up. Then I’m goin’ down to the beach and have a swim.”
27
There was still no official body count, but thousands were already known dead in Mexico City. The public transportation system had been devastated by the quake. Key bridges, along with the elevated highway that ran through the center of the city, had collapsed, crippling the public transportation system. This left stranded citizens to the mercy of profiteering cab drivers, and Crosswhite knew it would take time for Paolina and Vaught to make their way to Toluca.
His Jeep had enabled him to drive a more direct route out of the city than most cars were able to manage, and he now stood facing a group of sixteen Toluca police officers in the empty parking lot behind the police station. There was still no cellular service out of Mexico City, so he was worried about Paolina and Valencia, but he reminded himself that Vaught was with them and tried to put the dilemma out of his mind. There was nothing he could do for the moment anyhow. If he left Toluca to go look for them, his chances of finding them would be almost nil. It was best to stick with the plan and wait for them to show up.
Each Toluca police officer had an M4 carbine slung over his shoulder, but their dark-blue fatigue-type uniforms, like those of many Mexican police forces, were not exactly uniform. No four cops were dressed the same, and a few of them wore uniforms a size too big.
“Doesn’t matter,” Crosswhite muttered in English — but he knew that it did.
He walked up to the youngest cop, a man of about twenty-one years, and offered his hand, introducing himself. He did this with all sixteen men and then stepped back in front of them.
Acting Chief Diego Guerrero came out the back of the station and stood watching.
Crosswhite faced the men. “I can see in your eyes that most of you don’t trust me, and I don’t blame you. I’m a gringo, so why should you? I could say that Chief Guerrero trusted me, and that should be good enough for you, but Juan is dead, killed by another gringo.
“So instead, I’ll tell you a secret: I’m the great-great-grandson of Captain John Cavanaugh. That name doesn’t mean anything to any of you, but it should. He was a member of the Saint Patrick’s Battalion of the US Army during the Mexican-American War. The San Patricios were two hundred Irish Catholic soldiers who refused to kill Mexican Catholics, and so they deserted to fight for Mexico. They fought with great distinction against the Americans — especially at the Battle of Churubusco — and when Mexico eventually lost that war, every surviving San Patricio was hanged as a traitor by the American army.
“That means one member of my family has already died for this country. That’s part of why I’m here, gentlemen. The other reason is that this is what I was trained for: teaching you men how to fight like American soldiers. If you listen to me, if you follow my instructions — and if you trust me — I can train you to outfight the Ruvalcabas on equal terms.”
The cops looked at one another, one of them asking, “What about the francotirador? It doesn’t matter how a good solider you are if a man can shoot you from so far away. We are not an army. There are less than one hundred men in the department now.”