Existential Read online

  And so it had. Greg didn’t turn his head. He couldn’t yet bring himself to look. But he knew it was there. His newly discovered instincts served him well, albeit for only a brief time.

  From the right came a vicious, gurgling noise.

  Greg’s boots rooted where he stood. With running no longer an option—if ever it had been—he turned and gazed upon the horror rising over his shoulder. A kaleidoscope of blackness overtook him. Greg had never thought the color black could vary in shade and brightness, black being the absence of all color. Yet there it stood, a fact Greg’s mind was still trying to fathom. Its alien eyes gleamed, large flat orbs of polished jet that saw only death and reflected only the same.

  He didn’t suppress his scream this time. Even so, no sound came. A great pressure pushed against his chest, presaging an instant of the most intense pain imaginable. When it came, he felt as though his chest had been split open with one mighty blow of a giant ax. He stood on his feet an instant longer before crashing backward into the mud.

  Steam rose and clouded the air as a tepid rain pattered down on him in fits and starts. Opening his eyes one final time, Greg witnessed his own death from afar. His heart lay in the creature’s palm, still beating, each pump spitting blood from the ragged ends of lacerated arteries. The creature, in rapt fascination, examined the organ with its gleaming jet eyes. Greg Ramone left the world as billions before him had done, thinking of the one he loved most, his image of Elana slowly fading. She called faintly from the phone’s speaker, more urgently now, sensing something amiss. “Greg! Greg!”

  Max Ahlgren could feel the beads of sweat forming under his combat shirt as he crouched in the shadow of some bushes waiting for the cartel sentry to pass. Past midnight, the temperature still hung close to a hundred degrees. The guards would be finished changing, just settling in for their shift.

  For the past two days, Max’s team had surveilled the compound. He had grown familiar with the habits of the man about to approach. As the sentry walked past, nearing the entrance to the compound, Max uncoiled his muscular six-foot-four frame and rose up from the shadows, stalking his prey like a panther.

  The sentry started to turn around.

  I must be getting old, Max thought, disgusted that the man had heard him. It wouldn’t matter much but it was inconvenient. Max took a final step, shot his left hand up to cover the sentry’s mouth, and jerked the man’s head back violently. He stabbed the sentry’s throat with the razor-sharp KA-BAR in his right hand, pushing the blade forward and around viciously. He pulled the sentry down and back into the darkness as he thrashed. Max held him in an intimate embrace as the blood sprayed in spurts from his throat. With a faint gurgle, life seeped from the sentry with every pulse. As he completed his final death throes, Max gently eased the guard to the ground. He did this all as if it were a matter of routine.

  Max reflexively wiped the blood on his ATACS camo pants, not out of disgust, but knowing the blood could cause the blade to stick in its Kydex sheath.

  The second sentry, Miguel, stood about ten feet away, guarding the main gate. Max’s team had identified him by his cell phone calls during their previous surveillance. Standing inside the makeshift guard shack, he was pouring himself a cup of coffee from a thermos and listening to mariachi music on a small radio next to him. Max silently observed his movements for a few seconds and raised his suppressed HK416 rifle as he strode toward him. Though a gunshot in Mexicali, Mexico was like a lightning strike to the people of Florida—a deadly force of nature but commonplace, familiar, and harmless as long as you weren’t standing helplessly in the open—he’d chosen suppressed gear to make the other guards misjudge the distance of the shots. Max shot the man in the head twice, never breaking stride, firing so quickly that the two shots sounded like one. The spent shell casings dropped by his feet as he observed the man fall back, painting the wall in blood and brain matter. There were few constants in the business of warfare and killing, yet in all but the most elite units, one maxim usually held true: the shitbags pulled watch in the dead of night, ironically the most likely time for an attack.

  Mexican drug cartels weren’t elite units, but they still could be a formidable force. They recruited many of their members from the Mexican military. Rather than tactics and skills training, they focused on intimidation. No one in Mexico had the balls to silently storm one of their compounds in the middle of the night. Or perhaps they possessed common sense enough not to do so.

  Max sprinted the few feet to the dead cartel enforcer, picked him up, and sat him on a milk crate, slumped over as though he’d fallen asleep on watch. Reaching inside the guard hut, Max pressed the green button on the control board. The gates opened a couple feet and Max hit the red button.

  “Main gate down,” he whispered into his headset.

  He then ran for the closest cover—an old Mercedes sedan that sat on blocks, slowly rusting from the wheels up. He scanned for movement. The compound appeared to be a construction contractor lot and conducted business like one during the day, all as the front for a cartel’s kidnapping safe house, like a wolf hiding in sheep’s clothes.

  “LT, status?” Max asked.

  “We are in position. Moving to west side.”

  Max glanced behind him and saw Sugar and Diaz emerge from the shadows to slip through the gate. They eased toward the Mercedes.

  The main building consisted of a two-story, run-down, flat-roofed square of crumbling cement blocks, very typical of modern Mexican construction except for the lack of windows on the ground floor. Max ran a few feet, took cover briefly behind a small bulldozer, then sprinted for the southwest corner of the building. Glancing back, he spotted Sugar’s shadow crouched behind the Benz, his Mk 48 machine gun leveled at the steel double doors of the main building. Since a guard inside could potentially sense something amiss and raise an alarm, he would remain posted there in hopes that someone inside would first see the watchman “asleep” at his post and open the doors to investigate. Bottom line: move fast and control the action.

  “Tango, that’s two,” Red said through the headset, busy clearing the north side of the compound.

  Max adjusted his night vision goggles, NVGs, since their recon showed the west side of the compound had poor illumination.

  He peeked around the corner and came face to face with another sentry. Normally, Max would have reflexively raised his rifle and wasted the guy in an instant. Except this guard was just a gangly kid, who couldn’t be more than fifteen. The kid jumped back in shock, dumbstruck, mouthing soundless gibberish as if Max had been a demon of death emerging from the darkness. Then he fumbled for the M16 strapped across his back.

  Max put a 5.56 round through the kid’s forehead. The back of his head exploded like a melon. The kid crashed to the dirt on top of his M16, the body and weapon raising an awful clatter in the still night. You picked the wrong friends, kid.

  In his line of work, those who hesitated died, or worse yet, they second-guessed their buddies into a rubber bag. Max cursed his hesitation as he put another round into the body.

  “Tango, another down,” Max whispered into the headset.

  “You owe me a coke,” Red replied.

  “Location?”

  “Northwest corner.”

  “Copy that. Got a visual on you, Red. Move up. I’ll cover you.”

  Red moved carefully forward. Max watched him somehow duck his massive frame behind some fifty-five-gallon drums of God-knew-what. He swept the area in front of him with his silenced Sig, then moved forward again. Max spied Diaz posted at the northwest corner of the building, covering Red from behind.

  Max’s headset crackled just as the three men were meeting at the southwest corner. “We’ve got company, Chief!” The transmission came from Coach, the team sniper, stationed some six hundred yards away, atop an abandoned warehouse. Coach had started the party a few minutes earlier by taking out the two sentries posted atop the compound’s main building. “We got two inbound vehicles approaching
at high speed.”

  “LT, your twenty?” Max asked.

  “East side of the compound, ground level.”

  Max heard a cell phone chirp faintly inside the building. Fuck! “We are compromised. Breach immediately. LT, do you copy?”

  A moment of silence followed.

  “Copy that.” LT didn’t sound amused, but he would get his breach team into position ASAP. They all knew from experience that plans usually gave way to improvisation.

  Coach asked, “Take out these vehicles, Chief?”

  “No, let them come. Sugar and I will give them a welcome out front. You pick off the ones who hide behind the vehicles.” Max knew that Coach could, with a high degree of probability, take the drivers out even at that speed and distance. However, once the passengers dismounted, they would become more problematic. Max preferred to know where his enemy was going to be.

  “Copy, Chief,” Coach replied.

  “Let’s move!” Max urged Red and Diaz.

  He ran back to the rusting Mercedes and took cover behind the engine block as a stream of automatic fire erupted from a gun port through one of the front doors. The sound of men cursing in Spanish emanated from the building. Two more short bursts of fire came from the front doors, rounds pinging on the Benz and the bulldozer as they either lodged or ricocheted. The car’s glass shattered. Bullets whizzed over Max’s head. Bits of shattered adobe wall rained down on him and Sugar.

  “Shit!” Red grunted.

  Max knew he’d been hit, but didn’t have time to help. Diaz was with him; if the wound needed treatment, Diaz would see to it. Sugar opened up with his machine gun on the front doors in a vain attempt to squeeze some lead through one of the gun ports.

  “ETA fifteen seconds on those vehicles!” Coach warned through the headset.

  Fuck! “Let’s go, LT! Breach that wall!” Max urged.

  Within seconds, the breaching charge replied. Max had complete confidence in LT’s ability to handle the dirty work inside.

  When the firing from the door stopped for a moment, Max peeked around the car and saw the front door swing open to the courtyard. Max spotted LT’s fireplug silhouette crouched in the entrance dropping a green chem light, signifying that room was clear, before disappearing back inside. Johnny Gable, the team’s other breach specialist, moved along behind him.

  But for some frantic cursing within the building, the compound grew eerily silent for an instant. Then the maelstrom erupted. Vehicles screeched to a halt outside the front gate of thick wrought iron. Firing resumed inside the building.

  Max turned his attention to the barred front gate and the action outside. He then peeked back to make sure Red continued covering him and Sugar. Max wouldn’t have done so, except, with Red hit, he needed to know his back was covered before he turned to the cartel crew outside. Indeed, Red had his weapon pointed at the building. Diaz gave Max a thumbs-up to indicate the wound was superficial and Red was still operational.

  Shots echoed from inside the building as LT’s team engaged the men behind the double doors, taking the pressure off the men in the courtyard. Max couldn’t see outside the front gate, but he heard a hell of a lot of voices shouting in Spanish—a language he was far from fluent in. He’d spent most of his time in the Corps stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, alas, knowing some Arabic and Farsi was doing jack shit for him right now. A few Spanish words stood out though, chief among them muerto, dead, Coach’s handiwork.

  Now it was showtime for Max and Sugar.

  “Y’all ready for this?” Sugar asked, teeth gleaming in his black face. The other seven members of the team had blackened their faces for this mission, but Sugar’s deep complexion didn’t require that precaution.

  Max nodded. He traded his assault rifle for the custom 40mm pump-action grenade-launcher slung across his back. With any fire from the building now suppressed by the breaching team, Max stepped into the open and fired a grenade at the front gate. The following blast ripped the gates off their track. A cartel doorman, armed with a pump-action shotgun, knelt dazed before the gates. Sugar cut loose with his machine gun, taking him out.

  Cartel thugs poured from an ancient Ford Bronco and a Toyota pickup that wasn’t much newer. Sugar had them running for cover. Pinned behind the vehicles, they made easy prey for Coach’s sniper rifle. Max fired a grenade into the Bronco. It exploded in a shower of flame that ejected three smoldering bodies into the air.

  Shouts quickly turned to screams. Realizing the Toyota no longer presented safe cover, cartel men took flight from behind it. Max pumped the launcher, fired, and destroyed the pickup, taking out two cartel men who had moved too slowly.

  Max estimated five or six cartel thugs still stood, including one man at the rear shouting orders. Two men split from the group, one going left and the other right to provide flanking fire. The rest of the men stormed the gates, ready to take on Max and Sugar as opposed to Coach’s sniper fire, which they hadn’t any hope of countering. Max and Sugar took cover behind the adobe walls on either side of the gate, ready to turn the cartel’s attack into a suicide charge with their crossfire.

  * * *

  Lance Thompson, LT to the team, peered around the corner and saw stairs leading upward through his NVGs, which painted the tiny, tenebrous world of this cartel outpost in varying shades of ghostly green. The interior of the compound lay cast in dark shadows to unaided eyes after Max’s team had blown the power.

  The first bullet cut a swath through his communications earpiece, ripping his helmet from his head and burning his ear. LT ducked back behind the corner as more gunfire rained down the stairwell. He stood stunned. The bullet hadn’t even grazed him; he’d merely been burned by its velocity. Irish, who was stacked up behind him, picked up LT’s helmet and handed it back to him. LT put it back on but found his headset dead.

  “Fuckin’ AK up there,” Gable growled from behind him, his Alabama drawl yowling and practically incoherent.

  All three men recognized the gun’s distinctive metallic clatter as the cartel man emptied a magazine. And then he stopped, likely to reload. Not about to wait for confirmation, Gable jumped out onto the landing, his AA-12 shotgun at the ready and pointed up the stairs, with Irish right behind him. Not for the first time, LT felt impressed by the balls on the former Ranger, which were fortunately backed by solid instincts. If not for the latter, Johnny Gable would have been wasted years ago.

  With Irish and LT following, Gable took the stairs two at a time. Two blasts from Gable’s automatic shotgun tore apart the corner of the wall at the top of the stairs where the cartel thug crouched. The man cried out in pain and did not return fire.

  Gable charged on up the stairs. The top landing consisted of a hallway that ran to the left. He paused on the penultimate step with his shotgun leveled at the corner. LT pulled a flash-bang grenade and tossed it over Gable’s head to carom off a wall and down the hallway. The blast would temporarily deafen anyone hiding up there, but the breaching crew had the corner protecting them.

  The grenade exploded. Gable rounded the corner and shot the AK man twice as he lay bleeding from his upper chest, disoriented from blood loss and the flash-bang. LT took point again, having recovered from the shock of his very near miss a few seconds before. He caught a glimpse of the dying cartel member, two fist-sized holes punched through his chest by the shotgun. He added a 5.56mm round into the guy’s head as he stepped over him.

  LT assessed the hallway: thirty feet long with four doors, three spaced evenly on the left wall and one on the right wall about ten feet away. The situation reminded him of a game show. Their prizes were behind one of those doors, but they had a clock to beat and no time to open the wrong ones. With winning being their only option, the consolation prizes were a trio of shallow graves in the Mexican desert.

  Unlike the other three, the one on the right seemed to be some exotic wood. “That one,” LT said. “Cover us, Irish.”

  “All over it,” Irish acknowledged in a voice that rumbled like
distant thunder over the Texas plains.

  Posted to the opposite side of the door from Gable, LT brushed his fingers over the wood—teak or mahogany. The man in charge likely worked behind it, and therefore the women would not be held in there. He was just about to rescind his last order and search for the victims behind the first of the other doors when he heard an unmistakably feminine scream from within.

  “Well, whaddaya know,” Gable observed. “You the boss for a reason.”

  LT didn’t have time to congratulate himself on his own instincts as they now screamed at him that this was a trap. “Watch it,” he cautioned.

  Gable nodded. “Feelin’ it too.” He reached for the knob. It turned in his hand.

  Trap, indeed.

  Gable pressed his large frame against the wall as he bashed the shotgun butt into the door, which swung inward. Electric light poured from inside. Both men instinctively stepped back, successfully dodging the brunt of the explosion. Temporarily deafened by the blast, LT scanned the wall opposite the door, now blackened and pockmarked with several hundred small, smoldering holes. There were seven hundred bb’s in a M18A1 Claymore mine, LT recalled from his training years before, and it looked as though every single one had missed him and Gable.

  LT and Gable donned their NVGs and put their weapons to their shoulders, then rushed back to the door in a heartbeat. Bullets smacked into the doorframe, fired by two cartel men crouching behind a flipped desk of heavy wood that would have been at home in a lavish New York office. Instincts took over now. The two men had ascertained in nanoseconds that there were no women in this room, only the enemy, and they took them out accordingly. Gable used his shotgun to bore through the desk, taking one hostile out with the fourth blast. LT squeezed a burst into the other as he dove from behind the desk in vain.

  This section of the office lay in ruin. They moved inside, flowing like water; LT and Gable up front and Irish covering their backs, movements choreographed by years of training and experience. Another section of the room lay to the left, partially screened off by a row of decorative mahogany pillars ornately carved into alluring female figures. Beyond the pillars stood an actual billiard table, the sort with no pockets and only three balls, centered within a ring of leather couches and chairs. LT fired three rounds into the back of one couch, moved forward, then eyeballed the floor space beneath the billiard table. The room was empty.