Free Ghost Sniper by Scott McEwen Page B

post-traumatic stress of war. Something inside of him had long snapped, and he knew it. He was addicted to riding the meteor of pure adrenaline, and he simply could not get enough of it.
    Today he was in a cantina on the outskirts of Acapulco, a once-thriving vacation destination that had recently been all but eliminated from the world’s tourism brochures due to ever-increasing drug violence in the region. Hancock was thirty-five, a former US Ranger and a veteran of both the Iraq and Afghan wars, with twenty enemy kills to his credit. Diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress shortly after the end of his fifth tour, he was honorably discharged from the US Army against his wishes and offered a meager disabilitypension on his way out the door. With his army career in ruins and no other marketable skills, Hancock had immediately jetted off to Latin America in search of mercenary work.
    First he had sought to offer his skills to the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia through a Colombian national he had met in the army. The AUC, or, in English, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, was a paramilitary organization formed in 1997 to fight left-wing insurgents seeking to take political control of various regions within the cocaine-producing country. By 2008, however, the AUC had been labeled a terrorist organization and was broken up by the Colombian government with the help of the US military. So Hancock had turned to the Mexican cartels.
    An intermediary had introduced him to Hector Ruvalcaba, and the meeting had gone well. Hancock was impressed with the paramilitary infrastructure of the Ruvalcaba cartel, and Ruvalcaba offered him a lucrative one-year contract that same day. It wasn’t until after he’d assassinated two different competing cartel bosses, however, that he finally learned of Lazaro Serrano’s existence. And once he’d met with Serrano himself, Hancock understood that this was the man who actually pulled the strings of the Ruvalcaba cartel.
    Hancock sat in the far back corner of the dimly lit cantina with a half empty bottle of Jose Cuervo tequila and a shot glass resting before him on the roughly hewn tabletop. He was dressed in jeans and combat boots, a black Under Armour compression T-shirt, and a black cowboy hat. Billy Jessup walked up to the table and sat down with a bottle of Estrella beer. Jessup was not a Latino, but his mother was 100 percent Lakota Sioux, so his features were similar to those of many Mexican people, and he did not stick out among them, being generally regarded as Mexican himself until he opened his mouth to demonstrate his terrible Spanish. He was Hancock’s spotter and intelligence collator, keeping in contact with Serrano’s number two man, Oscar Martinez. He and Hancock had met in the army during the war.
    â€œI’ve got some troubling intel,” he said, tossing a manila envelopeonto the table and rocking back in his chair, with the beer resting on his Texas longhorn belt buckle.
    The gringo sniper stared at him with his lifeless blue eyes, downing another shot of tequila. “Troubling how?”
    Jessup took a drink. “Have a look.”
    Hancock opened the envelope and removed a photo of another gringo with dark hair. The man was standing on a street corner with one arm around a pretty little Latina with long black hair, and a small child under his other arm. Hancock put down the photo. “So who the fuck is he?”
    â€œHis name’s Daniel Crosswhite, a Green Beret who served in Afghanistan. Oscar’s contact inside CISEN says the PFM went to visit the dude three days ago in Mexico City. The contact doesn’t know why they went to see him, but it was the day after your hit on Alice Downly.” CISEN was Mexico’s version of the CIA.
    The half-drunk Hancock sat nodding his head. “I got an idea. Why don’t you ask that faggot Oscar why Serrano doesn’t have a guy inside the PFM? If he did, then maybe