Into the Crossfire

CHAPTER 1THE WHIR OF THE HELICOPTER drowned out every other noise around Caleb, even his own thoughts. It was a welcome respite. An intricate web of tactical planning had filled the recesses of his mind for the past 24 hours, but it was time. No more planning. It was another routine operation; go in, grab the bad guys and get out. He knew each move he was about to make, and every single step the seven men sitting next to him would take. He was sure of it; it was his job. He was responsible for the safety and well-being of every man in his squad, and simultaneously, for the success of the mission at hand. “Five minutes, Lieutenant,” the man seated in the pilot seat hollered back to him, breaking up the monotonous whir. Every man around him straightened his spine and their muscles grew taught. It wasn’t fear that had them at the ready, it was anticipation; the same anticipation that surged through his veins. In four minutes and thirty-nine seconds, they’d be on the ground. In fifteen minutes and nine seconds, they’d be in position, a mile and a half away from the landing zone. Within thirty minutes, their task would be complete: suspects apprehended, intel gathered and building secured. The two-thousand kilograms of cocaine housed in the building wasn’t his problem, only the men selling it and their list of buyers. “Just get those bastards, Caleb,” his S.O. had told him. “We’ll clean up their mess later.” In other words, another team would be deployed to round up the drugs once the area was secured. And that was fine by him. He never could stand the low-lives who made their fortunes poisoning as much of the globe as they could with their drugs. He’d gladly rid the world of every one of them. Though, he’d found in his years of experience that for every cartel a team like his took down, two arose to take its place. A futile battle sometimes, but one that had to be waged. On the ground, the team moved together like a well-oiled machine, their footsteps barely more than a whisper through the overgrown grass. It was a long hike to the target, but nothing any of them couldn’t manage with ease seven days a week—and twice on Sunday. And being on the move was better than sitting in the helicopter waiting, or in the briefing room, planning. It was productive; they were actively moving closer to their goal every second. He spotted the building up ahead. “Keep your eyes open and wait for my signal. If you see a problem, you know what to do.” And the squad broke apart on his command, moving into position as they approached Nuevo Refugio, the unassuming building that housed the two-thousand kilograms of cocaine, a small arsenal of weapons and at least twenty armed men and women. The occasional child had been spotted coming and going from the building, but there had been no predictable pattern to their routine, so it was up to his team to make sure no children present were harmed. Caleb moved into position amid the brush about thirty feet from the building’s front, left corner. From his vantage point, he could see the front entrance clearly, but he could also keep watch for trouble rounding the corner. His second-in-command—Adam Mitchell—signaled he was in position at the front, right corner. It was a more exposed position than any of the others, and he didn’t often leave it to another man in the squad to take the most vulnerable position. But satellite images had shown the majority of foot traffic came from the makeshift parking lot at the left of the building. It would be the area most likely to run into unexpected resistance. He surveyed his surroundings as we waited for the signal from the rest of the squad, but all of a sudden, he heard footsteps. None of the men in his squad would move around so carelessly. Besides, there were too many footsteps to be coming from just one or two men. It was an entire group—eleven, no, twelve men—and they moved almost in tandem. By the sound he could tell they were still at least thirty yards away, but their strides were angry, like the determined step of a mob, and they approached the building quickly. He remained crouched down in the brush, waiting for the group to come into view from behind, to the right of him, and they did soon enough. He’d been right—twelve men in total, all of them armed with automatic and semi-automatic weapons. “Twelve Tango’s at five-o’clock,” he whispered into his throat mic. At first, he couldn’t identify the men because of their distance, but as they marched nearer, he recognized several of them, all from a cartel that had no previous association with the nameless cartel in the building. What were they doing there? And more than that, what was the likelihood their unexpected arrival had no connection to his team’s presence there? He smelled a setup of some sort, clumsily organized maybe, but intentional nonetheless. “Hold your positions,” he breathed into the mic. He wanted to see what these guys were up to before making a move. Just then, a woman exited one of the doors at the building’s corner—not his corner, Adam’s corner. She stood still and whipped her head from left to right; she was looking for something. But it wasn’t possible—there was no way their approach had been detected. He was certain of it. And the thick growth of trees and brush inhibited her view of the oncoming group of men, so it wasn’t them who had drawn her attention. So what was she looking for? She wasn’t armed; the knee-length dress she wore provided no place for her to conceal a weapon, and her attire told him she didn’t work in the lab beneath the building. She was likely a toy for one of the men inside. She wasn’t a hooker—the clothes she wore and the way she carried herself told him that. She was probably just some doe-eyed girl looking for love in all the wrong places. Looking closer though, he recognized her. She was one of the few women they’d captured on surveillance. He remembered her well—she was beautiful. But she’d been sighted at the building often enough there was no way she was just some doe-eyed girl. She played some role in what went on at Nuevo Refugio, or “New Haven”—the name of the building by which the group had been colloquially termed. Though how on earth they believed what they did there was a kind of haven to anyone, he had no idea. “Lieutenant, what do you want us to do?” one of his men’s voices whispered into his earpiece. “Just sit tight,” he replied as another unexpected visitor rounded the back of the building and started up the left side toward him. What the hell? It wasn’t a member of some rival cartel this time. It was a child. She couldn’t be more than five or six years old. What the hell was she doing there, skipping along the dusty gravel? The woman had started across the building’s long front, and if she didn’t get her ass out of there real fast, she was going to be the sole member of the greeting party for the angry on-comers. Couldn’t she hear them by now? Though he was thirty feet from the building, he could hear the crunch of grass beneath their feet loud and clear now. But she froze, looking out past where Adam was poorly concealed. “Lieutenant, I’m going to move back to position two before she spots me,” Adam whispered but it was more likely she’d finally noticed the angry cartel headed her way. The woman’s scream rang out as she started to dash across the building’s front. Though he didn’t recognize the language, she screamed the same words over and over, a warning to the group inside, no doubt. It was time to pull back for now. But just as he was about to give the order a group of armed men stormed out the front door, firing into the brush at random. Within seconds, the angry mob retaliated in kind. “Pull back!” He gave the order but he wasn’t about to follow it. The little girl, she stood no more than ten yards from him, frozen in fear as shots whizzed by around her. The woman who was darting in her direction was still yards away—she might not reach her in time. “Damn it!” he whispered harshly under his breath as he stood from his crouched position in the brush. He hadn’t planned on dying that day, but he couldn’t leave her there. His squad would escape and return later to finish the job but it was the end of the line for him. He started forward without hesitation. Any second one of those bullets could hit her. He wasn’t going to let that happen. “There’s one of them,” he heard a deep voice yell from the building’s front steps as he lunged through the overgrown grass. That was fine. Three more steps and he’d have the girl. He’d make it to her before he went down. “To hell with this,” a second voice replied, an undercurrent of sadistic delight in his tone. And then…