Fear No Evil(Alex Cross #29)(61)

He could see the silhouettes of cartel men streaming off the hillsides, firing their weapons in short bursts. Cortland stood his ground, picking them off one by one, while Big DD retreated to a large pi?on pine. This was how a controlled retreat worked, one man covering the other as they made their way safely to the rear.

Purdy and Vincente rushed by Butler, who turned to cover their exit, spraying bullets at the men coming down his side of the cove.

“Got your six, Cort,” Big DD said.

“Same here, go, Cort,” Butler said, glancing to his right to see his sniper spin around and race away from his position in a zigzag toward that big pi?on pine.

Big DD opened up to cover him. So did Vincente and Purdy.

Butler saw several cartel men drop before one of their shots connected. In mid-sprint, Cortland staggered, pitched forward, and sprawled in the dirt ten feet shy of the tree trunk where Dawkins was crouched.

Big DD saw the sniper go down, leaped out into the line of fire, grabbed Cortland, and dragged him to safety.

Feeling like a wave of cartel men was about to crash on him, Butler ran toward the canyon as he heard Big DD say, “Cort’s gone. Heading your way.”

“We’ve got the canyon mouth covered,” Purdy said. “We’re high left and right.”

Butler sprinted past his cabin and up a slight incline, not caring a whit for everything that was being left behind, focused only on the black maw of the canyon ahead of him and on reaching its safety before a cartel bullet could strike him down.

He heard feet pounding over the sound of guns and picked up Dawkins coming hard to his left. Bullets slapped off tree trunks to their right and left. They pinged off the rock ledges at either side of the canyon mouth.

Butler and Big DD vanished into the blackness of the narrow canyon. But when they turned around, they could see a mob of cartel men coming up the incline behind the cabins and moving through the trees.

Butler found a boulder, got behind it, reloaded, and aimed at the killers rapidly approaching. “Give them hell, now,” Butler said. “Make them pay before we get out of here.”

All four of them opened fire at once.





Chapter





70




I had never been to Laramie, Wyoming, much less in a state police helicopter flying fifty miles northwest toward the ten-thousand-acre Circle M Ranch. We arrived around noon mountain time, landing in a hayfield below barns, loafing sheds, and cabins set in a large oval of gently rising ground surrounded by pine trees and steep, rocky hillsides.

It was hot. Thunderclouds rumbled to the west as Mahoney, Sampson, and I hustled out from under the chopper blades toward flashing blue lights atop two Wyoming State Police cruisers that blocked the gravel road into the ranch yard.

“We know who this place belongs to yet?” I asked.

“Some Brazilian company that owns big working cattle ranches all over the world.”

Sampson looked around, awestruck. “I don’t think I have ever been to a prettier place for a massacre. Or a mass murder, for that matter.”

“Forty-plus dead?” Mahoney said. “I’d say that’s a massacre in anyone’s book.”

But when we were given protective booties and gloves and led onto the scene by FBI agents out of Cheyenne, Mahoney was grim.

“Looks more like a battlefield,” he said as he scanned the lower yard, seeing bodies baking in the sun—four adults around a picnic table to our right, a couple of teenagers who’d died in each other’s arms to our left, and three younger kids apparently shot in the back as they’d tried to flee.

On the side of the barn behind those children, someone had spray-painted Death to Maestro! Long live the cartel!

Vultures and crows circled above nine other bodies strewn on the hillsides. Through binoculars we could see that most of them were heavily tattooed, Hispanic, and armed with war weapons: machine guns and grenade launchers.

Behind a huge pine tree about halfway up the gentle rise, the body of a tall, gaunt man in his forties lay beside a scoped rifle.

I went over, skirting the dark pool of dried blood where he’d fallen and the ribbons of it where he’d been dragged behind the tree. Two steps more and I saw his face and the gun, which was no hunting rifle.

“It’s the same guy we caught on that camera at the country club,” I said. “Dale Cortland. The sniper who died in Afghanistan five years ago.”

The state troopers and FBI agents on the scene had told us that most of the dead were up behind the cabins, near a canyon mouth about twenty yards wide. We walked up there and found twenty-seven Hispanic men sprawled dead, with hundreds of brass rifle casings lying in the pine duff around them.

“The Alejandros didn’t kill all of M’s men,” I said. “A group of survivors defended the canyon, shooting anyone who tried to come at them until the surviving cartel gunmen gave up.”

Mahoney said, “Jesus, how many men did Emmanuella send after them?”

“Fifty? Sixty?”

Sampson walked into the mouth of the canyon, studying the dirt, then sniffing the air. “Smells like a grenade or two went off in here,” he called.

Mahoney and I followed him into the canyon, smelling the acrid odor of a blasted place, seeing debris thrown against the wall and the charred spots where the explosives had gone off in addition to dozens of empty bullet casings on the ground.