Hawke's Fury Read online

  Those words for “kill him” sent an icy knife through my stomach. They’d targeted the movie director by name. It was a cartel hit.

  “Ethan! No! This is real!” The smooth Sweetheart Grips of my 1911 Colt .45 filled my hand. I waved at the confused production team and uncertain actors. “Down! Down! Everyone down!”

  You’ve heard of that old saw that in times of stress time slows down. People say it seems they’re moving through molasses, and they’re right. Even more frustrating, the people I was warning simply looked at me without understanding. It wasn’t their fault. Most civilians go through life without experiencing trauma and aren’t trained to deal with life-threatening situations. They also expect nothing bad to happen and aren’t prepared.

  Most law enforcement officers are on the other end of that spectrum. We’re constantly evaluating the world around us, thinking, “what if?” and planning for any and every event that might occur. But there was no training for what was unfolding on that hot desert floor.

  Even Gabe, who’d been in more than his share of fights and gunfights was startled at the sudden change from make-believe to reality. I could tell he was bum-fuzzled for a couple of seconds before he made sense of what was happening around us and shifted from a guy trying to earn a few bucks as a movie extra, to a potential victim.

  I waved him back and drew my Colt, the .45’s Sweetheart Grip smooth in my hand. “Gabe, get down! It’s real!”

  A real gangster leveled an AK-47 and held the trigger down, shredding the director who went backward to land in the dust. The cuerno de chivo, or goat’s horn, as they nicknamed the rifle because of the distinctive curved magazine, sprayed a stream of hot lead that punched holes in anything and everyone around Madigan as he died.

  Ethan and I were on the set of The Mexican Pipeline, a controversial movie targeted by the Coahuila Hidalgo Cartel who threatened to kill everyone involved in filming a fictionalized version of their illegal activities.

  They were also known as 1518, or Quience Die-chiocho, the numbers signifying the year before Cortes landed on the shores of Mexico to conquer the Aztecs. It was the last year of their power before the destruction of an entire civilization.

  Even though we’d been hired to provide security for the movie, there wasn’t a damned thing I could do right then to stop the well-organized assault. A hard-looking tattooed gangster squeezed the trigger of what I took to be a Bushmaster, spraying indiscriminate .223 rounds left and right.

  More men than I could have imagined streamed from the dusty, newly arrived SUVs and strolled casually through the movie set, firing indiscriminately at the terrified actors who scattered like quail. The guns in their hands belched fire, and the assistant director tangled his feet and went down as rounds blew out his chest.

  Actors and crew members screamed, scrambling for cover in the chaos. Ethan and I charged into the melee, not by design, but because the only cover in the area was behind all the equipment used to film the movie. Ethan dropped to one knee behind a stack of thick blue metal cases, using the only concealment he could find.

  The words “thank God, thank God” repeated over and over in my mind, a chant of relief that my wife Kelly and our teenage twins Mary and Jerry weren’t on the set. Since high school was out for the summer, they’d been pestering me to come out and watch one day’s shoot. I’d almost relented that morning.

  Sharing the same cover with Ethan didn’t sound like a good idea, and I was headed for one of the movie SUVs when I saw one of the real masked gangsters pointing his weapon at me. My .45 came up and the guy holding a Bushmaster disappeared behind the front sight. I squeezed the trigger and he went straight down.

  Before I could swing the muzzle to a second guy crouched not far away, he dropped from a round that didn’t come from either me or Ethan. We weren’t the only ones fighting back. My dad, Herman Hawke was thirty feet away, making a few extra bucks acting as the set’s wrangler of two dozen head of cattle and horses he brought in as backdrop stock.

  A retired Texas Ranger, he was always armed. The Old Man sighted from behind his pickup parked just off camera. His own Colt .45 barked. It bucked in his hand, and he shifted targets, firing again and again as if he were on a live-fire range.

  His presence and demeanor in the suddenly real shootout was as calming to me as a Xanax. Cameras exploded from the impact of high-velocity bullets, bodies fell, and the roar of gunfire filled my ears.

  I squeezed the trigger, heeling a gangster when the bullet’s impact knocked one foot out from under him. I never said I was a good shot. A firm believer in the anchor shot, the Old Man drilled the wounded gangster twice more to keep him down.

  The cartel members continued to hose the area, spraying at random. Everything snapped back into real time as I juked behind a large metal box full of electronics, using the shoulder-high container as cover.

  Panicked movie people ran for cover in all directions. One of the only things on our side was that most of the bad guys weren’t certain who was sending in return gunfire. Incongruously, I saw two of the actors return fire with their weapons loaded with blanks. Maybe they thought the new arrivals were also actors. In shock, they might have thought it was some ad lib scene thought up by the director. Their response caused some of the cartel gangsters to take cover behind their own vehicles, but others zoned in and murdered the terrified extras.

  A hard-edged young gangster swung his cuerno de chivo in my direction. He was standing in the open, probably the way he’d seen it done on television or in movies. I shot him twice and he crumpled. I caught a glimpse of Ethan dropping the empty magazine on his Glock and slapping in a fresh one.

  A string of explosions stitched the dirt around me. The guy who popped up slightly behind me would’ve had us both had his own mag not run dry. He was close enough for me to see the surprise and fear in his eyes as he fumbled to reload.

  Together, Ethan and I shot him bone dead.

  As his surviving men continued to hose the area, their tattooed leader struck a pose beside the car, fists on his hips, and shouted above the gunfire. “La Mujer del Diablo de Coahuila, the Devil Woman of Coahuila says that this movie will not be completed. Next time we will kill everyone here! I am Incincio, and I am not afraid to tell you my name, because I am protected by La Jefa, who owns Coahuila and all this land as far as we can see.” He waved. “Vamos chicos!”

  Doors slammed seconds later, and the three SUVs filled with their surviving gangsters spun in tight circles, speeding away back down the same dry pasture road they rolled in on. I rose and punched holes in the windows and sheet metal of every car I could hit until they were out of range.

  As soon as they were gone, the air was filled with dust, cries, and screams. In the chaos that followed, I slapped in a fresh magazine as shocked crew members rushed in all directions. Ethan and the Old Man moved through the chaos, kicking weapons away from the real cartel members on the ground, just in case they weren’t as dead as they looked.

  Ethan joined me beside the first young man I’d shot, the one aiming his rifle at me. “I think I’m gonna go back to smoking again.”

  Before I could answer, the wounded man’s arm rose, beckoned, then fell.

  “This guy’s still alive.” I knelt beside him, patting the kid down to make sure he didn’t have any other weapons. Finding none, I pulled the bandana with a skeleton’s face down to reveal a smooth, unlined face.

  Gabe slid to a stop on one knee and ripped the boy’s blood-soaked shirt open to reveal a dark puckered hole in his upper chest. He covered the wound with the palm of his hand. “This looks bad.”

  The Old Man’s voice came from behind me. “It is. There’s two more holes down lower.”

  Blood welled from between Gabe’s fingers, his eyes filled with sadness. “He looks like he’s not much older than Angie.”

  I understood how he felt. Angie was his high school-age daughter, and my twins were the same age. I swallowed the lump rising in my throat. “Those wrinkles at
the corners of his eyes tell me he’d older than he looks.”

  The man’s eyes flicked open. He raised one hand in a faint plea of agony and whispered. “Padre.” It took a second to realize he was looking at the priest collar on Gabe’s costume. “Quiero confesion.”

  Gabe shook his head and answered in Spanish. “No soy un sacerdote.”

  I’m not a priest.

  “Confesion.” The man turned his pleading gaze to me. He must have recognized the cinco peso Ranger badge on my shirt. “Guardebosque, to lo ruego. Pidele que me confesion.”

  Guardebosque is what some Mexicans call us Texas Rangers, when they’re trying to be nice, while some of the really old folks remember the past and call us rinches, a derogatory term that arose way back around 1916.

  “It won’t hurt to hear him, Gabe.” The Old Man’s voice was soft.

  Just as I’d hoped, a blast of air pushed across the valley floor from a collapsed thunderhead, much like the pressure-wave from an explosion. Sage and greasewood bent when the massive wave finally reached us. Hot only moments earlier, I turned my face to the wind, letting the dry coolness wash my face clean of the evil I couldn’t see.

  My eyes burned at the thought of this young man dying from my gunshots. I know, he’d been trying to kill me, but I also saw an older version of my son Jerry lying there, asking for absolution.

  Blood trickled from the dying man’s mouth. He coughed, deep and wet as his lungs hemorrhaged, then switched to unaccented English. “I need to say something. I need to tell you something important.”

  The back of my neck prickled.

  Gabe met my eyes, then leaned down to better hear. “Adelante.”

  The young man held Gabe’s hand and whispered in his ear for a moment, as the ranch hand, cum actor, cum priest, listened intently. The mere breath of a voice weakened then drifted off. The gangster’s eyes lost focus and drifted off to the side as he gasped, convulsed, and went limp.

  His death brought me completely back into the noisy world of panicked victims, crying men and women, and unheard orders issued to people who simply wandered among the bloody carnage with vacant expressions.

  Licking his dry lips, Gabe straightened. “Oh my god.”

  I saw fear in his eyes and leaned in. “What’d he say?”

  “He’s a federal agent, undercover, and says there’s another agent that’s, come se dice infiltrado, with this cartel, too.”

  “Infiltrated,” I translated. “Undercover.”

  Stomach clenched, my head reeled at the thought of shooting a brother in arms. He was firing his weapon. I’d looked directly down the muzzle of the rifle when it was aimed at me and remembered the bright muzzle flashes. But I hadn’t seen anyone fall. Was he shooting over my head? I struggled to recall if I heard the crack of rounds passing close, but there was so much rolling gunfire I couldn’t pin down a specific sound.

  “Is that what he confessed?”

  “No. Worse. He says the 1518 is sending more hit teams between here and Van Horn. They plan to clear a path through the Border Patrol for the traffickers coming across the river. He said something else to watch out for, but I couldn’t understand him. His last words were ‘more people are going to die.’ ”

  My blood went cold. An organized cartel hit team targeting the Border Patrol was in my country, and I wasn’t going to stand for it.

  Chapter 2

  Highway 1776 just south of the West Texas community of Coyanosa isn’t much on scenery. It’s a harsh, sunburned landscape full of scrub, tumbleweeds, mesquite, and low-growing cactus. The two-lane divides desolate rangeland so poor it takes a hundred acres to feed one cow. Visitors are mystified to think cattle can live in the desert. Even in the wintertime, the sunbaked landscape looks dry as a gourd.

  The scenic quality doesn’t get any better at night. When the headlights and the soft glow from the heavens light the lonesome road linking the east and westbound Interstates 10 and I-20, it’s worse . . . stark.

  Cattle ranching wasn’t always the primary source of income. In the 1950s, farmers drilled deep water wells to irrigate cotton, but by the 1970s, the price of fuel made cotton farming unprofitable. Times changed when drilling technology finally found a way to bring oil to the surface, and most ranchers immediately shifted to a much more lucrative income.

  Once they signed on the bottom line, a vast network of caliche roads cut through the ranches, allowing an army of white company trucks to prowl the dusty roads between bobbing pump jacks and back out onto the two-lane highway.

  No matter what the land produced, it was still wide and lonesome country.

  The highway traffic was never heavy, mostly pickups and oil tankers driven by pipeline and oil company workers, with a few tourists and locals thrown in for good measure.

  It was a beautifully sharp night lit by a full moon bright enough to read by, when Incencio Aguierre and Geronimo Manzano cruised northward on the empty ribbon of concrete in a four-year-old black Mercedes C-Class sedan. Incencio, the Hidalgo cartel soldier responsible for the massacre on the set of The Mexican Pipeline, chose the high-end automobile for the pair in the hopes that it wouldn’t attract the attention of law enforcement officers or the highway patrol. Expensive cars driving a couple of miles over the speed limit usually weren’t the targets for law enforcement officers.

  Incencio was a Regio, short for Regionales, which means regal or royal in the Spanish language, a regional officer overseeing his specific drug and trafficking route into what he considered his territory, the Big Bend region of the Lone Star state.

  The two men in the Mercedes who looked like tourists were in fact mid-level soldiers who’d proven their loyalty across the Rio Grande over and over again to la Mujer del Diablo de Coahuila, the Devil Woman of Coahuila. At first to encompass most of the Mexican state of Coahuila, they murdered anyone she targeted to expand her drug and human trafficking cartel.

  It didn’t matter who they were, people scratching out a living in small communities, travelers, police, military, and especially rival gangs, or anyone she deemed a threat. Sometimes they died clean, with nothing more than a bullet through the head.

  Other murders sent a message with beheadings, mutilations, or worse. A favorite calling card for the Devil Woman was the presentation of an individual’s hands or feet to family members, rival regios, or law enforcement officials.

  Once they had Coahuila under their thumb, her dream expanded.

  Born of dirt-poor parents in the poorest section of El Paso, Chihuahuita, she hit the ground running as Tish Villarreal. Now confident in her abilities and people, she was pushing long fingers from across the border back into her home state of Texas.

  The Mercedes’ tires clacked on the highways expansion joints as mariache static hissed from the Burmester sound system. A cheap, plastic walkie-talkie on the console between the men squawked to life. Brake lights flashed in the darkness as Incencio steered the car onto the shoulder and turned the radio down.

  Startled by the sudden appearance of the sedan, a jackrabbit darted across the highway in the headlights as Geronimo picked up the low-tech communication device and thumbed the talk button on the side. “Que?”

  The voice on the other end spoke in faint Spanish. “La patrulla frontier iza is on the way.”

  Instead of utilizing modern technology and basic drop phones, they used old school walkie-talkies that had baffled law enforcement techs for months. The crackling low-tech signals between the hand-held units bounced through a vast covert network of signal repeaters on existing microwave towers, the tops of mountains, and even a medium-size high-rise hotel in Ft. Stockton. It was a shadow communications infrastructure created and installed by a Hidalgo tech specialist. The relays were impossible to intercept because the innovative tech used commercially available software to scramble their radio chatter into garbled nonsense.

  At the device’s squawk, Geronimo and Incencio exchanged glances in the dim light glowing in the dashboard. He answered in the sam
e language. “How long before they get here?”

  “Fifteen minutes. Their names are Manual Trevino and Frank Nelson. We want Trevino this time. Nelson has betrayed us. You know what the Devil Woman requires.”

  “We’ll be ready.”

  Incencio activated the emergency flashers before he felt under the dash and popped the hood. They stepped out into the warm night air. He’d pulled onto the gravel shoulder beside a barbed wire fence clotted with a thick drift of tumbleweeds. Caressed by a light breeze, he pointed at the mass of dried bushes. “Ahi.”

  Geronimo snapped a flashlight to life and lit the tangle. “This will work.”

  Though they were alone, Incencio’s voice was soft. “Yes. They are close, but you will need to move fast.”

  Keeping one eye on the empty horizon to their south, Incencio probed the drift of dried vegetation with his own flashlight. “You’ll have to stay low when they first get here. They will probably check like this first, then you can come out.”

  Geronimo shouldered into waist-high drift and kicked a clear path in the sandy dirt between the tangle and the tight bobwire fence. Satisfied that he could reemerge without much noise, he dropped to his belly, pulling a couple more of the dead tumbleweeds in place for camouflage.

  Incencio brushed his light across the makeshift blind that appeared undisturbed. He couldn’t see his partner. “Bueno.”

  The farm road was quiet as they waited. Minutes later, the glow from distant headlights on the horizon rose like a weak southern sun before the twin beams finally popped into view.

  Leaving the driver’s door open, Incencio leaned under the hood and waited for the whine of tires to get closer. The tone of the approaching vehicle changed as it slowed, then pulled up behind the Mercedes. He flicked the beam past the raised hood a couple of times, giving the impression that he was looking at the engine, then leaned around the car and gave a friendly wave.