Mexican Heat (Nick Woods Book 2) Page 15

  “Let’s go. Let’s go!” the Butcher screamed. His driver floored it and the 4Runner peeled out and raced into the street. As the two garbage trucks departed the scene without their cargo, the Butcher’s 4Runner and several other SUVs descended on the primary entrance, which was on the east side of the building. The west and south side of the entry was now blocked.

  The first truckload of men attacked from the building’s north side. They jumped from their vehicle and ran to the opposite side of it for cover. They hoisted AK’s and M-16s and aimed toward their target. None of the officers saw this, though, as nearly every one of them had run toward the two opposite doors to investigate the crashing sounds they had heard through the walls.

  The four men from the first vehicle poured fire into the door and windows of the building from its north side. The Butcher’s vehicle slid to a stop on the building’s east side, and he and the men in it jumped to the street and rushed behind it for cover. They opened up with glee, their plans working perfectly so far.

  The Butcher heard automatic weapons open up to his right on the building’s north side. He smiled. Now the police officers were taking automatic fire from two sides and each opposite exit was blocked by dumpsters.

  The windows for the police department headquarters were narrow, long slits -- maybe six or nine inches wide and probably eight feet tall. Designers purposefully installed slender windows to prevent onlookers from seeing in, as well as suspects from breaking out through them. From his earlier recon of the building, the Butcher had assumed a man couldn’t slide through them to escape, but he’d left a couple men watching both of the sides blocked by dumpsters just in case. They’d have no chance though. Anyone trying would have to bust out the glass, clear out the shards, and then try to slide out sideways. And in all that time while they were focused on the windows, they’d be sitting ducks for his men.

  Inside the building, rounds slammed into walls and skipped off metal lockers. Officers dove for cover and slid behind desks and file cabinets.

  “What the hell is going on?” one screamed.

  “We’re trapped!” yelled another, who came running down the hall from one of the blocked entrances. “There are dumpsters in front of both doors!”

  A rookie officer screamed, “There are about a dozen of them on this side!”

  From the other side of the building, another answered, “There’s probably that many over here, too.”

  Panic spread as officers waited to hear what they should do. They lay about, pistols drawn and fear growing. No manual or training exercise had instructed them on what to do if someone waged an all-out assault on the police department. After all, who would be that crazy?

  A fat, soft captain, who should have been in charge, lay curled up in the fetal position, screaming his head off.

  “God help us! God help us!”

  And perhaps he could be forgiven. It wasn’t like he could call for reinforcements. The city was too isolated and reinforcements from the state capital of Xalapa, which sat nearly seventy miles away, would take almost an hour to arrive, at best. And that’s assuming they were loaded up and ready to go. And while some officers in Coyutla were out on patrol, no way would many of them respond to such an overwhelming attack from men so heavily armed. Given morale these days among the officers, some might drive the other direction or possibly even abandon their car, shed their uniform, and rush home for safety. Many were so scared for their family’s safety that they wore balaclavas to cover their faces when cartel facilities were raided.

  Besides the captain curled up in terror, other officers sprawled under chairs and desks, or clustered in groups in the halls, hoping for safety in numbers. But the rifle fire from the two sides formed a perfect L-shaped crossfire that cut through walls and obstacles and officers. The full-size battle rifles with their military-designed ammo were doing precisely what they were issued to do: cut through reinforced buildings and wound or kill the occupants inside. And on this late afternoon, they were performing perfectly.

  Screams and shrieks spread inside the building and panic set in among the officers. Some crawled toward windows to return fire with their pistols, but few could see through the windows to find a target, and those who could, quickly found themselves prime targets for the roughly twenty men on each side of the building.

  It was a turkey shoot, and it was completely one-sided. A few officers, seeing the ease with which their enemies’ bullets cut through the walls, decided to fight fire with fire. They aimed at the walls at the same level of the entry holes and shot back in an attempt to mount at least some defense.

  But their smaller, slower pistol rounds barely penetrated the walls and lacked the accuracy of the long weapons firing from outside. A former soldier, who was only a low-ranking police officer and had been hired barely weeks ago, couldn’t take it anymore. If their pussy, paper-pushing captain and scared-shitless, sack-of-shit sergeants wouldn’t lead, then he would.

  “Let’s go!” he yelled. “We need to get to the storage lockers and grab the rifles. The SWAT Team has M-16’s stored there.”

  No one responded, so he screamed it again. Louder and with more authority this time. Several officers near him crawled toward the locker and he stood to encourage others.

  “Let’s go!” he screamed. “It’s our only chance!”

  And like that, with the herding instinct taking hold, officers jumped to their feet to join the others. They scrambled for the desperately needed weapons. The small police department had received fifteen surplus M-16A2’s several years ago, which replaced their World War II vintage, .30 caliber M1 Carbines. The M16 rifles were shot-out hand-me-downs, which the U.S. Army had given to the Mexican Army as used weapons more than fifteen years ago. And from there, the weapons had been heavily used and beaten up by the Mexican Army for several more years until finally they were “retired,” transferred, and issued to officers in the Mexico City SWAT Team.

  And finally, nearly at the end of their useful life, the weapons had received new barrels from an average armorer, who had half-assed installed them, and given them to the Coyutla Police Department. But, even with all the age, shoddy workmanship, and heavy wear and tear, they far exceeded the capabilities of the officers’ pistols. Best of all, they provided hope since the officers knew they could fight off their attackers with them.

  Out in the street, the Butcher studied the scene. His men on both sides had raked the building with probably three mags apiece; some four. The Butcher calculated the carnage: roughly twenty of his men per side, so forty men total with thirty rounds per magazine, or ninety rounds per man. He rounded the ninety up to one hundred to simplify the math and estimated that almost four thousand rounds had ripped through the building.

  Of the twenty officers inside, at least five were probably wounded and bleeding. He hoped his count was conservative and that the actual number of wounded was higher, but that wouldn’t matter.

  “Phase two!” he yelled. “Commence phase two, and spread the word down the line.”

  Some of his gunmen ceased firing and snatched duffel bags from vehicles. Three men from the Butcher’s side of attack, and four from the other flank of the “L” shape, rushed toward the building. The remaining shooters switched to single shot and more carefully fired at the building, taking care to avoid hitting their own men.

  The police officers couldn’t see the action on the outside, and in the horror of the attack, they never noticed the reduction of fire. But inside the building, the prior army soldier had twelve of the officers rallied, assembled, and armed with M-16A2s.

  “All right,” the former soldier said. “Pair off and set up on windows. Work together to fire back and find targets. We have to get them off us. There’s no one coming to save us.”

  The officers split up and scurried toward firing positions, hunched over and low. The battle appeared to have slacked off. Rounds still snapped through, but with less frequency. Return fire from officers wielding pistols remained practically non-
existent.

  But with the task from the former soldier assigned, the officers felt this could all end soon. They moved forward with their M16s with purpose and confidence.

  In one room, two officers -- a man and woman who normally shared a patrol car and served as partners -- scurried from the hallway through a door and toward a shot-out window inside the room. An officer lay curled up on the floor, bled out and obviously dead, but the room was otherwise empty. They moved forward bent over and alert when suddenly bullets started slicing through the room. The two dove to the ground and crawled forward the final distance.

  The woman led the man and saw their opponents first.

  “I see four of them behind a car,” she said. She looked out across the window, not straight through it, to keep her body behind the wall. She aimed at the one who provided the largest target, her body in the prone position at an angle to the window and six feet back, prepared to provide enfilade fire. Thus, the Butcher’s men had no idea they were in her sights.

  She fired, but saw no reaction from the man, who continued to fire slow, aimed shots toward the building to his front. Then she noticed a chunk of concrete chipped off over the man’s head. Shit, she thought. The damned rifle wasn’t sighted in properly. She altered her position and aimed lower. She fired again, this time with her sights centered on the man’s sternum.

  The man’s head yanked back and he fell to the ground. She missed where the impact landed, and thus had no idea if it hit the top of his head or dead center. Regardless, it was a hit and she shifted to her next target.

  Above her, her partner’s weapon fired, also on single shot. He was kneeling above her and his weapon’s roar caused her ears to ring and knocked her equilibrium off balance. She shook her head to regain her senses and slid back on the tile floor. She couldn’t be in front of his barrel for any more shots.

  In other rooms inside the building, other officers -- now armed with M-16s -- engaged their enemy. The fire from the previously silent building was surprising and deadly. The Butcher’s men recoiled from the lethal and savage return fire. The cops felt cornered and frightened, and their targets assaulted them from a mere forty yards away. And unlike the female’s rifle, most of the rifles were sighted in.

  The Butcher’s men took to ducking and firing bursts over the tops of their vehicles, afraid to aim at the officers hidden in the shadows. Their only concern was not hitting their men who had closed with their objective.

  The officers noticed their attacker's fire was no longer accurate. It now sailed high and skipped over their heads, and the officers applied themselves more fully to the task of repelling their assailants. Now, the momentum was shifting, and they focused harder and aimed truer. Indeed, a wave of relief passed through the building and the panic shifted to elation.

  Some grinned. Some shouted. “Come on, you bastards. Come get some more.”

  And then, then it happened. A grenade floated into one of the rooms inside the police headquarters and bounced about. Other grenades followed in other rooms, as the Butcher’s men who had rushed the building threw M67 fragmentation grenades through the narrow, shot-out windows.

  The baseball-like weapons exploded with massive booms, hurling fragments in all directions. Several officers were wounded, but many more were rattled.

  The Butcher emerged from behind the cover of his vehicle and laughed maniacally.

  “Stay down, sir,” one of his men warned, but the Butcher didn’t move. He was bent over laughing so hard that he held his side. He coughed and said, “You stupid bastards thought you were going to be okay with your rifles. Well, we’ll see!”

  And he laughed even harder, while his men at the vehicles picked up their rate of fire to cover their half-mad leader.

  The cartel men against the building realized they had driven their defenders back with their frag grenades and they switched to their real weapon: tear gas grenades. The CS grenades looked like tall coke-cans and the Butcher’s men pulled the pins and threw them in windows now spewing smoke and dust from the frag grenades.

  Billionaire cartel leader Hernan Flores had bought the M7A3 CS hand grenades from his Mexican Army contact, and the weapons had come straight from the supply depots of the U.S. Army. The cylindrical grenades were designed for riot control, but in an enclosed building the tear gas from them was designed to produce coughing, vomiting, and difficulty in breathing.

  They also created a thick smoke that was impossible to see through, even if tears weren’t pouring out of your eyes in a feeble attempt to purge the burning chemical.

  The officers had trained against CS -- it was a fairly decent-sized police department, after all -- and they rushed away from the CS fumes.

  “Grab our gas masks,” someone yelled.

  They knew it would be more difficult to fire their M16s or pistols accurately with gas masks on, but they had trained for that, at least some. A small group of officers huddled around the gear locker, and the former army soldier saw that his group had dwindled. Worse, some of those around him had caught quite a bit of shrapnel from the fragmentation grenades and bled or limped.

  “We’re going to be all right,” he said, coughing and choking through the haze of the growing CS fog as it creeped into the hallway. “We’ll get our masks, regroup, and hang together.”

  An officer removed the lock and jerked the doors open. The locker lay empty, a sheet of paper taped horizontally with the following words written in thick black magic marker: “The joke’s on you!!!”

  One officer screamed “Noooo!” in terror, while two others leaned back against the hallway wall and slid to the ground, their weapons clanging to the floor. They buried their heads in their arms to try to offer relief from the tear gas.

  “We can’t run,” one said between gasps. “They’ll murder us if we run out those doors.”

  “Come on,” screamed the soldier. “We can’t give up.”

  And then they heard the laugh, one they had heard moments before off in the distance, but it sounded closer.

  The Butcher couldn’t stop laughing. His right hand held his cross-slung Uzi, which was aimed at the ground, while his left hand rested on the handle of his sword, which hung from his webgear on his left hip, handle facing forward. On his left and his right, two of his most trusted gunmen stood protecting him, their AK’s aimed down the hallway and their eyes probing for danger.

  The Butcher roared with hysteria and watched through the thick fog of tear gas as officers in the hallway remained frozen, clustered, and panicked. Two locker doors hung open, revealing empty shelves and no possible hope of salvation. The tear gas was too thick for them to breathe or see or function at a level of even ten percent of their capability. They were like infants, barely able to think, move, or act.

  The Butcher strode toward them, laughing gleefully. Men exactly like these police officers were responsible for arresting him, when he was a young man merely trying to earn a living. And officers no different than these in this hallway were responsible for his safety when they had disarmed him of his pistol and placed him completely unprotected in a jail full of muscle-bound animals, who hadn’t seen the light of day or a woman in years. Instead, the officers had failed to safeguard him and had allowed him to be molested and raped hundreds of times in the six years he was in prison.

  Now, it was payback time...

  The Butcher paused at the door, his laugh gone and his grin and eyes transformed into a psychotic mask of anger. He choked and coughed as CS tear gas emerged from the hallway. The man to his right leaned into his AK to fire at movement from the officers down the hallway, but the Butcher used his Uzi to push the man’s weapon to the right and off target.

  “No!” said the Butcher. “Give me a mask, and wait on me. If I don’t come out in five minutes, grab the men and come in and kill anyone who’s still alive.”

  The man on the right swallowed down his anger over having his weapon knocked to the side. He removed his finger from the trigger and lowered his weapon u
ntil it hung by its sling across his chest. He reached in his backpack and handed the Butcher a gas mask.

  The Butcher turned his head and coughed, spitting out phlegm and snot caused by the CS even at this distance. He put the mask on and blocked the filter with his hand, blowing out the small amount of CS that had crept into the mask. He removed his hand and inhaled the clean, filtered air. Blinking his burning eyes, he tried to clear them of tears and pain.

  He cursed himself for walking so close to the building and getting hit by his own shit. But then he remembered that he didn’t give a shit if he died. He lived every night with too many nightmares and too much anger and it was only heavy drugs that allowed him to sleep. To hell with whether he lived or not. You didn’t go through what he’d gone through in prison without coming out completely nuts.

  And as he thought of the injustices and horrendous acts he had endured because of asshole officers like the ones cowering before him, rage took over. He checked the Uzi and confirmed it hung in its cross-chest sling, falling (thanks to a half-foot extension that he’d added) to the right side of his right leg. It lay against the side of his right quad, out of the way, but also where he could grab it quickly with his firing hand if needed.

  The Butcher reached for the handle of his Japanese katana on his left side, which faced forward and extended beyond his waist by about six inches. He pulled it from its sheath and entered the building. He moved down the hall, staying close to the wall. He didn’t want to catch a bullet moving down its center, but no shots came from the building. Likewise, his men had ceased firing after the signal had been passed that their leader had entered.

  It was eerily quiet following all the gunfire, with the exception of gagging and choking. Thick CS clouds drifted down the hall, searching for the opened door that he had entered. Other than the gagging, a few officers whispered and argued up ahead, but compared to the eardrum-shattering firing from earlier, this was blissful serenity.