Chapter Ten: Chase
Uzocarriaga District
Ignacio, Costa Luna
5 October 2013
1615 hours Costa Luna time
Carter Mason and Rosalinda Fiore saw Leo Argus and Vyacheslav Klimov long before the men saw them. Of all the cars they could have brought into Ignacio, they had to bring the most ostentatious one: a silver Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano. Carter, who was driving a much, much more modest Ford Crown Victoria, parked the car behind the Ferrari and then walked up to Leo, who was leaning on the driver's door of the sports car. "You always have to have the thing that attracts the most attention, Leo," Carter said to him.
"This is actually an agency car, Carter, believe it or not," Leo replied. "At least I didn't get the Bugatti Veyron."
"Get the fuck out! The agency has a fucking Bugatti!?"
"Yeah, well, the Director's really doesn't want that particular factoid to become public." Leo then put his finger to his lips just for emphasis.
"Yeah, anyway… So, what's this lead of yours that Alex told me about and said that you two assholes needed backup? Something that could connect the Army of Socialist Revolution to a drug cartel or some shit?"
"Oh, that. Yeah, I have a contact in the Costa Lunan underworld saying that the Sons of Sinaloa are planning on making a big hit today, right here."
"Sons of Sinaloa?" Carter parroted. "Are they, by any chance, related or affiliated with the Sinaloa drug cartel over there in Mexico?"
"The Sons of Sinaloa are affiliated with the Sinaloa drug cartel of Mexico in the sense that the Hijos do everything that the mainland tells them to do," Vyacheslav said for the first time. Although he looked like an ignorant airhead, his passive demeanor hid a very smart, calculating, and ruthless mind that knew everything there was to know about the current mission Vyacheslav Klimov was in. "The Sinaloans had big plans of setting up shop in Costa Luna and lording over the then-untapped narcotics trade in the country," he continued. "And, boy did they get the shock of their lives when they came ashore and found out that the Halcon Syndicate of Santiago had not only beaten them to the punch, but it had also successfully monopolized the entire illegal drugs trade in Costa Luna in such a way that they and only they could profit. The Sinaloans, thinking that they're such big hot shots just because they Mexican government couldn't even touch them, tried to scare off the Halcons, not knowing that they just pissed of an organized crime syndicate that dated back to at least 1900. Let's just say that the Sinaloans are not as experienced in crime as the Halcons, but the sad thing is that the Sinaloans don't know that they're already beaten and refuse to bow down to the Halcons, and it's only a matter of time before it all explodes into a massive and deadly turf war."
"Do you have any idea of what they might hit?" Carter asked.
"No idea," Leo admitted. "But my contact was positively sure that it would involve the Halcon Syndicate and will happen right here in Uzocarriaga, or maybe in neighboring Nueva Sinaloa, which coincidentally is the home turf of the Sons of Sinaloa."
"And that's the real name of the place, by the way," Vyacheslav chipped in. "It's been around long before there's even been a Sinaloa drug cartel or even a Halcon Syndicate."
"So what do we do now?"
"We wait," Leo replied. "We wait. Patiently. Hopefully."
It had taken the better part of an hour for Panchito Gomez's men to collect all of the money that they had in the top-floor office of his nightclub. After sorting them by type and denomination, Yelena Abashina ran the cash through the four money-counting machines that she had in her truck. When that was finished, she came up with a grand total of five million Costa Luna solars, three million US dollars, and three million euros.
"So, Panchito," Yelena said once that was all done, "let me lay out the basics for you. I used a variable logarithmic-count algorithm that guarantees mixed bills in all of these cases, and that no sequential bills will be placed in the same case."
"I hate math," Gomez muttered as he wiped sweat from his forehead. Anything beyond the four basic operations and some algebra left him with headaches.
"You will be keeping a total of eight million solars in solars, dollars, and euros," Yelena continued, unabated. I will be taking seven hundred thousand as a middleman's fee—I don't come cheap, boys—and I will be taking the remaining four million solars to your partners." She then picked up two suitcases filled with the aforementioned amount of cash.
"Panchito, we need to talk," Pepe Quenca said as soon as Abashina was out of earshot. When Gomez approached him, Quenca switched to Spanish and said, "The man's fee is too high. We will have to renegotiate if we want to keep raking in the cash. Our profits have gone down ever since the Army of Socialist Revolution came back."
"Si, Pepe, we do need to talk to them," Gomez replied. "Make the call. He'll want to meet again after four years. He's a businessman; we're businessmen." He then sucked some air through his teeth.
"You call," Quenca said, handing Gomez a cellphone. Panchito grumbled a curse and began to dial a number.
"The Sons of Sinaloa are actually just a bunch of pirates, man," Vyacheslav Klimov muttered as he puffed on a cigarette. "They'll steal anything that catches their fancy."
"Recently, they've actually gone so far as to steal entire trucks," Leo Argus added.
"You mean to tell me that the recent spate of truck thefts and hijackings are actually all the work of the Sons of Sinaloa?" Rosalinda Fiore asked Leo incredulously. "The Royal Metropolitan Police has been struggling to connect all the thefts and hijackings! And it was all the fault of the gangs of Ignacio!"
"I'm sure that some of the disappearing trucks are the work of the Sinaloans, your Highness-ness," Leo said, "but I'm sure that most of them are just drivers hiding from the wrath of their wives or their mistresses."
"Or both," Vyacheslav. The two men laughed and bumped their fists. "Good one, bro," Leo told the Russian.
"Looks like there's something going on in that building over there," Carter said, pointing at a recently-renovated building that had once been a grocery but was now most probably something else. "What's that place?" she asked.
"It used to be called something like the Save-More Shopping Center and Grocery," Vyacheslav replied. "Now, no one knows. The street's got a lot of names for it, though, but the most common are Club Mystique and Café XOXO."
"So it's now a nightclub of some sort. What goes on in there?"
"Word on the street is that it's the place to score some quality Cuban, Afghan, and Santiagan."
"So the Halcon Syndicate owns the place."
"More or less. Look at that truck over there, at the back. It arrived just after we did, and Vyacheslav and I think that it's some middleman's truck, and that the Halcons are going to use it to transport their cash to either their supplier, their capos, or maybe even they've dug a vault out of a mountainside and they're putting all of their cash in there, 'just in case.'"
"Hey, it's beginning to move out," Carter said.
"You wanna follow it?" Leo asked her.
"Wait a minute now. Why should we follow it? Why don't you follow it? You're the one who turned up the intel about this anyway!"
"Come on, Jimmy," Leo said, using his new nickname for Carter. "Our agency car isn't exactly, shall we say, inconspicuous. Don't worry about it, though. We'll be just behind you girls."
The truck carrying Yelena and the Halcons' protection money parked in a secluded alley near the border between the districts of Uzocarriaga and Nueva Sinaloa, just a few blocks from Panchito Gomez's nightclub. Yelena and another FSB agent posing as her driver loaded the cases from the truck to an SUV parked in the alley. As they drove the GMC out of the alley, they had no idea that someone else was watching them. "They've switched cars," the spotter, an unemployed man recruited by the Sons of Sinaloa as a pair of eyes on the activities of the Halcon Syndicate, said in Spanish to a disposable cellphone.
"Don't lose that truck," the man on the other end said before ending the call.
"Now where did that truck go?" Vyacheslav asked as they approached the border. "How are we supposed to know where the cash goes if we've lost the truck?"
"I don't think that's much of a problem right now," Carter replied.
"Look!" Leo shouted. "The Sinaloans are following that SUV!"
"Fuck! They switched cars!" Vyacheslav shouted. "Follow that SUV!"
The SUV led the four PPP agents deep into Nueva Sinaloa, home turf of the Sons of Sinaloa. The lack of a police presence in the area didn't lift their spirits any higher, and they knew that they were good as dead if the Sinaloans attacked them. And that seemed a certain possibility, mostly because of Leo's Ferrari.
Finally, the SUV went into a multi-story public parking lot. The four agents parked their vehicles on the street, with Leo and Vyacheslav keeping an eye on the lot while Carter and Rose kept a lookout on the street. Nearby, a truck bearing the logo of a clothing company catering to the lower and poor middle class also kept watch of the SUV. It was actually an FSB covert surveillance truck. Its interior was fitted with three stations for three agents; one for video surveillance, one for audio surveillance, and the third for a physical spotter with a periscope. "Do you have eyes on the money, Eagle?" the agent leading the operation asked.
"Stand by, Nest," Eagle, the undercover FSB spotter, replied from a building near the parking lot. "Da, she's coming up."
On the building opposite the FSB spotter, in a high-rise building under construction, two more men were watching the SUV. "Come on, baby, park it at the top," Dimitri Caballero muttered. He had spent the better part of his day in the building, waiting for the car delivering the protection money that the Halcon Syndicate had to pay the Army of Socialist Revolution for the privilege of operating without hindrance. Dimitri ripped off a large chunk of his fast food burger and said on his radio, "Narciso, she's coming to you."
"I see her," Narciso Echeverri, another long-time member of the Army of Socialist Revolution, replied to Caballero's call. He was sitting in a car parked on top of the parking lot, giving him a good view of the coming SUV.
"Nest, this is Eagle; Sparrow is on the roof," Eagle reported. Suddenly, another car appeared on the top floor. "Heads up, comrades," he said. "I have a red Volkswagen tailing Sparrow. Looks to be four male Hispanic occupants."
"It's out of our field of vision," the lead agent noted. "Yuri, try to bring it up."
"Occupants are exiting the Volkswagen," Eagle reported. "Be aware, Sparrow, they're approaching you—chyort! Chyort!"
One of the Sinaloans had brought up a gun and fired at the FSB agent in the driver's seat of the SUV. The bullet tore through his left ear and struck the point where his jaw was attached to his skull. The gunshot attracted the attention of everyone watching the SUV, from the PPP agents to the FSB agents to the soldiers of the Army of Socialist Revolution.
"Fuck! It's a hit!" Eagle shouted.
As the driver screamed in pain, the gangster that shot him hauled him out of his seat roughly, and as he turned to face Yelena Abashina, she drew her firearm and fired at the gangster and another one coming from her side of the car. Yelena slammed the driver's side door shut and pressed her hand on the accelerator, but not before the two remaining Sinaloans had grabbed hold of the SUV. The gangster on the passenger side slammed into another parked car, and he lost his grip as his body crumpled to the ground of the parking lot.
"Agent down!" Eagle shouted. "Agent down!"
"Narciso, fucking follow them!" Dimitri Caballero shouted.
"I'm on it!" Narciso Echeverri shouted back! "I'm on it!"
"Fuck," Dimitri muttered as he bolted for the stairs of the high-rise.
The gangster hanging on to the driver's side door was one tough son of a bitch. Despite Yelena's most vigorous efforts to shake him off, the gangster clung resolutely to the door. More Sinaloans in their cars followed the SUV as it descended the parking lot, and some of them were even beginning to fire handguns, submachine guns, and assault rifles at her. A lesser man or woman would have crumbled under such pressure, but not Yelena Abashina. She saw an opportunity to shake off the last remaining gangster, so she opened the door, just as she passed a supporting column. The door was torn off of its hinges, and it and the gangster hanging on to it flew, until both landed on a vending machine on the street.
"Oh, it be raining men today!" Leo shouted as he and Vyacheslav covered themselves from the flying glass. Just then, the SUV burst out of the parking lot, and the missing door gave them a good glimpse of who was driving the vehicle. "It's Yelena!" Vyacheslav shouted.
"Man, what is your girlfriend up to now?" Leo asked.
"Girlfriend?" Carter asked, clearly having no idea of what was happening.
"No time to explain!" Vyacheslav shouted. "Just get in your car and let's go!"
Yelena Abashina turned onto Avenida Paret, followed closely by the Sinaloans. Carter managed to barely make the sharp turn, but Leo's Ferrari overshot due to its sheer speed. "Sidewalk!" Vyacheslav shouted. "Get on the sidewalk!"
It was a tight fit for the Ferrari. There was barely enough room for pedestrians to jump to the sides. "Move! Move!" Leo shouted to the people.
Carter reached for a radio mounted on her Crown Victoria. "Control, this is Alpha Six," she said. "I need backup on Avenida Paret, now!"
"Copy that, Alpha Six," the dispatcher that answered Carter's call replied. The dispatcher then switched to the entire police bandwidth, and he said, "All units make your way to Avenida Paret. The use of automatic weapons is authorized."
"You just get ready to shoot," Leo told Vyacheslav as the former brought the Ferrari up to the trailing Sinaloan car.
"Police!" Vyacheslav shouted at the gangsters, holding up an authentic-looking badge. "Stop the car!"
"Man, a badge?" Leo asked incredulously. "He has a gun! Shoot him!" Vyacheslav immediately complied, emptying the seven-round magazine of his Desert Eagle into the Sinaloan car. One of the car's tires went flat, and the driver lost control and smashed into a parked hatchback. Some of the other Sinaloans, seeing this new threat, fired their guns at the Ferrari, but most of them still concentrated their fire on the SUV, whose driver could only fire back with her pistol a few times.
"Leo, Yelena's in trouble, man!" Vyacheslav said. Argus stopped the Ferrari, pressed a button on the dashboard, and watched as the rear seat folded down to reveal two Heckler & Koch USP machine pistols. He took one gun, checked the safety, and then chambered a round before handing it over to Vyacheslav. "You take that one, man," Lev told him. "I have another one right here."
"Lev, you should know that I would rather have a machine gun than a tiny-ass assault rifle!" Vyacheslav said.
"That's not an assault rifle, you stupid Russkie," Leo replied. "Now man up, take it, and go save your girlfriend!"
"Move!" Yelena yelled as her SUV barreled into an intersection. "Get out of the way!" Unfortunately for her, just as she approached the intersection, another car came in from the left and smashed into her. She stamped her foot hard on the brakes, and her abrupt braking attempt led to other civilian cars behind her crashing into her rear and each other. The result was a ten-car pileup that the Sinaloans tried to use to their advantage by trapping the wreckage with their own cars. They only had a little time to do that, though, as the Royal Metropolitan Police, led by a gray Ferrari and a red Ford, were mere meters behind them. Leo parked the Ferrari in a relatively secluded area near the intersection before joining the fray and firing at the Sinaloans with his UMP. Vyacheslav, Carter, and Rosie were right behind him, and the four of them took cover behind a pair of junction boxes. Three cars of the Royal Metropolitan Police formed a defensive that effectively blocked off Avenida Paret.
"This shit is crazy!" Carter yelled.
"I know, right?" Leo replied.
What followed was something that could only be properly called as a gunfight. The Sinaloan gangsters did not seem to know much about gunfights, as they stood atop of their cars, visible to everyone within a few hundred feet of the fight. These fools were easily taken down by the police and the PPP agents. Soon after, agents of the Russian FSB also began to arrive at the scene to provide covering fire for their stricken colleague. Literally every car in the area, except for Leo's Ferrari and maybe Carter's Ford, were marked with bullet holes. Almost every weapon imaginable, from pistols to shotguns to submachine guns to assault rifles, was fired in that intersection on that day. And through it all, Yelena Abashina was trying to ram her way out of the pileup. Unfortunately for her, her SUV's positioning against the car that she smashed into was awkward, and the car refused to budge.
A Sinaloan gangster saw his opportunity. He climbed the roof of the car behind the trapped SUV, and fired a burst from his SMG at the rear window. Shards of tempered glass flew into the vehicle. "Shit!" Abashina shouted. She grabbed a shotgun stowed beside the driver's seat, pumped it, and fired on the gangster about to enter the SUV. Pink mist bloomed from behind the gangster, and bits of flesh and bone sprayed the interior along with the tempered glass.
Abashina finally rammed her way out of the pileup, and she sped away from the intersection as fast as her overtaxed engine would allow. The Sinaloans saw this, let out a cry of outrage, and then they stood around with no idea of what to do until one of the apparently high-ranking gangsters shouted, "Follow me!" and they rallied to this guy. The flight of the Sinaloans gave the police and the agents from two different agencies time to squeeze off a few more shots at the gangsters, and to haul away injured comrades from the fight.
The lead Sinaloan ran over to the nearest vehicle, a car carrier."Get the fuck out!" he commanded the driver before yanking him out. "You, drive!" he yelled to one of his goons.
The chase for Yelena Abashina now took the participants to the Rio de Sanreal Bridge, the longest bridge in Costa Luna, at least until the Costa Luna-Costa Estrella Causeway Bridge was completed. "Let's kill this fucker!" one of the Sinaloans shouted as he brought out his rifle and fired at Abashina's SUV. Yelena could only curse as the bullets struck her vehicle. Meanwhile, the other gangsters on the truck had finally noticed that a Ferrari and a Ford had been following them this whole time. But despite their numbers, only one of them managed to hit the Ferrari, and those shots hit the car's headlights.
"Oh, shit! Shit!" Leo moaned. "Definitely shoot the motherfucker that just—oh, man, my headlight!" Vyacheslav leaned out of the Ferrari and fired the UMP that Leo had loaned to him earlier. "Shoot back!" Leo told him. "Shoot! Shoot!"
There was an intense exchange of gunfire. As Vyacheslav ducked back into the Ferrari to cover himself, his finger pulled the trigger, and when the smoke cleared, five bullet holes had appeared on the Ferrari's glove box. "What the? What the f-? What—what are you doing, man!" Leo managed to say.
"That's my bad," Vyacheslav replied.
"Shoot outside! Pay attention to what you're doing!"
"I told you I'm not used to assault rifles!"
Behind them, Carter took the opportunity to take the lead. Rosie fired off a few bursts from her M4A1, but the truck was literally bristling with bad guys, and she had to duck back into the Ford for cover. "You okay?" Carter asked her.
"I saw tracers, Carter! Those stories about your life flashing before your eyes at a point near death are nothing but myths! I can tell you that much now!"
The gangsters were now beginning to run out of ammunition, and they saw an opportunity to conserve when they saw the cars inside the car carrier trailer. Two gangsters fired at the chains securing the car, and four more pushed the first car out of the trailer. Two police cars immediately smashed into the car. "Oh, these dudes are off the chain!" Leo shouted once he saw the Sinaloans' new maneuver.
The second car in the trailer suffered much the same fate as the first car, but this time it was a civilian that smashed into the second car. The Sinaloans rolled off a third car, but a chain got caught in the car's axle, and the car got dragged along for the ride. It sideswiped a police car before swiping Carter's Ford. "Jesus! Fuck!" she shouted reflexively.
"Get it off!" a Sinaloan gangster shouted. Another gangster wasted an entire magazine of his SMG trying to shoot off the chain hauling the car, and finally they shot it off, but not before the car smashed into a taxi and turned turtle. "Shit!" Carter shouted as she nearly collided with the overturned car.
"Watch out! Watch out!" Vyacheslav shouted as they passed the wreckage.
"Hey, come on, man!" Leo shouted. "Stop with the screaming and shit!"
The Sinaloans disengaged the locks securing the cars on the top of the car carrier to allow them to push off the cars to distract the police. The first one landed on its trunk and began to roll down the road. "Did you see that?" Vyacheslav asked.
"They're throwing cars!" Leo replied. "How can I not see that?"
"I'm just trying to help out, okay?"
"You know what would be real fucking helpful, Vyacheslav? Just shut the fuck up and let me drive! Let's try that!"
"Push!" The Sinaloans pushed with all of their might, and they got another car off of the truck. A police car crashed into the car, and Leo barely managed to swerve away from the collision. "Oh!" Vyacheslav shouted.
"Hey, come on, man!" Leo shouted back. "I'm trying to concentrate on dodging these motherfuckers!"
The last car in the carrier finally went over the edge. It landed trunk first, and its momentum soon brought it rolling down the road like a barrel. At first, it was just merely rolling, but then it was suddenly flying. "Just relax," Leo said to try to calm Vyacheslav down, but the damage was done. Vyacheslav, contrary to all common sense, leaned out of the window and watched as the car flew above the Ferrari just an inch or two above his head.
"Whoa! That was a flip!" Leo shouted.
"That motherfucker flipped!"
"Oh, that one puckered up my butthole!"
"Almost fucking crushed my fucking head!"
By now, the Sinaloans had used up all of their ammunition, and now they were just trying to ram Abashina's SUV from the road. In their pursuit, they bumped into a pickup hauling a trailer with a boat loaded on it. The truck sideswiped the boat from the trailer, causing it to fall to the road. A police car literally not expecting the present sequence of events smashed right into the boat's engine block.
"The boat!" Vyacheslav shouted. Leo and Carter managed to stop their vehicles just before reaching the wreckage that was once a boat and a police car, but two more cop cars weren't quick enough to react. One smashed right into the boat wreckage and the other flew into the air after hitting the now-detached engine block, and the two cop cars were thoroughly wrecked. Flames even burst out of the underside of one of the panda cars.
"Whoo!" was all Leo managed to say before he and Carter drove off from the scene.