Against All Enemies

15 THE BUILDER AND THE MULE

Pedro Romero estimated that within a week they would finish their digging. The home they’d chosen in Calexico, California, was in a densely populated residential district of lower-middle-class families whose breadwinners worked in the nearby retail businesses and industrial parks. The Juárez Cartel had already purchased the home at Romero’s suggestion, and he had carefully gone over his plans for the tunnel’s construction with the cartel’s youthful “representative,” Mr. Dante Corrales, who had recruited Romero off another engineering project he’d been doing in the Silicon Border area, where most recently some of his colleagues had been getting let go from their jobs. As the economy had tightened, so had corporate expansion and the jobs created by those projects.

Romero shifted down the tunnel with two of his diggers behind him. The shaft was nearly six feet tall, three feet wide, and when complete would be nearly 1,900 feet long. It had been dug at a depth of only ten feet because the water table was frustratingly shallow in this area, and twice, in fact, they’d had to pump water from the tunnel when they’d accidentally gone too deep.

The walls and ceiling were reinforced with heavy concrete beams, and Romero had set down temporary tracks for carts loaded with dirt to be hauled out by the workers. The dirt was loaded onto heavy dump trucks and hauled away to a secondary site some ten miles south, and would be used on another project.

In order to remain silent, the digging had begun with shovels and continued that way throughout the entire operation. Romero had teams of fifteen working around the clock to drive them forward. While they were ever wary of cave-ins, they’d lost four men in a most unexpected way. It had been about 2:30 a.m. and Romero had been awakened by a phone call from his foreman: a huge sinkhole nearly two meters wide had opened up in the tunnel floor, had swallowed four men, and then its sides had collapsed. The hole was nearly ten feet deep, its bottom filled with water. The men had been forced under the water by the collapsing sand and had drowned or suffocated in the heavy mud before they could be rescued. While the entire crew had been unnerved by the accident, the work, of course, went on.

The Mexican side of the tunnel began inside a small warehouse within a major construction site for a Z-Cells manufacturing facility. Five buildings were being constructed for the photovoltaic cell builder and the dump trucks coming and going from the job helped disguise the ones leaving from the tunnel operation. This was not Romero’s brilliant idea. Corrales had revealed that it had come down from the cartel’s leader himself, a man whose identity remained a mystery for security reasons. The “regular” construction workers on the Z-Cells site never questioned the tunneling operation, which made Pedro believe that everyone was on the cartel’s payroll — even the CEO of Z-Cells. Everyone knew what was happening, but so long as they were paid, the wall of silence would not come down.

According to Romero’s blueprints, the tunnel would be the most audacious and complex dig ever attempted by the cartel, and because of that, Romero was being paid the equivalent of one hundred thousand U.S. dollars for his services. He had been skeptical of working for the cartel, but that kind of money, paid upfront and in cash, had been too hard to resist — more so because Romero was nearing forty and the oldest of his two daughters, Blanca, who’d just turned sixteen, had been suffering from chronic kidney disease to the point where she would now require a transplant. She’d already been treated for anemia and bone disease, and was going through very costly dialysis. The money he earned from this operation would surely help to pay for their mounting medical costs. While he’d shared those facts with only a few of his workers, word spread quickly, and Romero had learned from one of his foremen that every man on the job would work his hardest in order to help save his daughter. Suddenly, Romero wasn’t a thug taking a bribe from the cartel; he was now a family man trying to save his little girl. The men had even taken up a collection for him and had presented the money, along with a thank-you card, to him at the end of the previous workweek. Romero had been moved, had thanked them, and prayed with them that they would finish their work and not be caught.

In point of fact, disguising all the dirt they were removing from the tunnel wasn’t their only challenge; there was another very serious concern: Both the Mexican and American governments employed ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to detect the cavities associated with a digging operation. Again, the adjacent construction site would help mask most of their initial excavation sounds, which were also detected by remote REMBASS-II sensors adapted from military operations and monitored by the Border Patrol. Additionally, the tunnel itself had been constructed in a series of forty-five-degree angles instead of simply a straight line heading due north. Its shape would help mask it as a fragmentary section of drainage pipes. Romero knew that all the seismic data was being recorded at the same time, even if the computers being used were looking at only one spot. Border Patrol agents could examine a set of seismic-event-density maps in an attempt to discern traffic patterns and other activity in and around the site. The tunnel itself would affect the seismic field as it absorbed sounds passing through it and sometimes delayed the passing of that information, creating an echo or reverberation that would appear as a “ghost” on the agents’ detection equipment. To address that issue, Romero had ordered and received thousands of acoustical panels that lined the tunnel walls to not only help absorb much of the sound of their digging but to try to mimic the natural surroundings as best they could. He’d even brought in a seismic engineer he knew from Mexico City, who’d helped him brainstorm and implement the plan. But soon it would all be over, the job complete, Romero issued his last payment in full. With God’s help, his daughter would have her transplant.

Romero consulted with one of his electricians, who was in the process of extending the power cables into the newer section of tunnel, even as two other men worked on hanging some air-conditioning ducts. His diggers had asked if they could set up a small shrine just in case of an accident — at least they’d have somewhere to pray — and Romero had allowed them to carve out a small side tunnel where they’d set up candles and photos of their families, and where the men did, in fact, come to pray before each shift. These were hard times, and they were engaged in hard work that could ultimately result in their arrests. Praying, Romero knew, gave them the strength to go on.

Romero slapped his hand on the electrician’s shoulder. “How are you today, Eduardo?”

“Very well, very well! The new lines will be finished this evening.”

“You are an expert.”

“Thank you, sir. Thank you.”

Romero grinned and shifted farther into the tunnel, careful not to trip over the tracks. He fired up his flashlight and began to smell the cool, damp earth being removed by his men with only shovels, pickaxes, and all the power they could muster in their backs and shoulders.

He tried to deny the tunnel’s use, the millions of dollars’ worth of cash, drugs, and weapons that would move through thanks to him and his team, the lives that would be affected in both unbelievable and tragic ways. He told himself he was a man with a job, and that was all. His daughter needed him. But the guilt clawed away, stole hours from his sleep, and made him shudder at the thought of being arrested and sent to prison for the rest of his life.

“What will you do when this is over?” asked one of the diggers following him.

“Find more work.”

“With them?”

Romero tensed. “Honestly, I hope not.”

“Me, too.”

“God will protect us.”

“I know. He already has by making you our boss.”

“All right, enough of that,” Romero said with a grin. “Get up there and get back to work!”

When the main Calexico-Mexicali station got very crowded, and the delay was going to last more than one hour to pass through the checkpoint to enter the United States, seventeen-year-old American high school student Rueben Everson had been instructed to drive the six miles east of the main crossing in order to use the alternate port of entry, the one that handled the spillover during overcrowded times and was known mostly by the locals, not the tourists.

Rueben had been a “mule” for the Juárez Cartel for nearly a year. He had made more than twenty mule runs and had grossed more than $80,000 in cash — enough to pay for all four years of college at the state university. He had spent only about $1,500 of the money so far and had banked the rest. His parents had no idea what he was doing and were certainly unaware of his bank account. His sister Georgina, who’d just turned twenty, suspected something was going on, and she repeatedly warned him, but he just blew her off.

Rueben had first learned about becoming a mule from a friend at a party, who’d responded to an ad in a Mexican newspaper promising well-paying jobs with benefits. Rueben had met with a man named Pablo, who had “interviewed” him and given him about two thousand dollars’ worth of pot to carry on foot across the border. After that job had gone well, they’d supplied him with a Ford SUV whose dashboard and gas tank had been modified to hold huge stashes of cocaine and marijuana. The dash had a secret code you typed in via a remote, and the center console where the radio and A/C controls were located would pop open and rise on motors to allow access to a secret compartment that extended all the way to the firewall. Rueben couldn’t believe how sophisticated the operation was, and because of that, he’d built up the courage to take on larger shipments. The car’s gas tank had been cut in half so that the side facing the car could carry blocks of drugs while the bottom masked the scent of the drugs with gasoline. The tank had then been sprayed with mud to disguise it from the border agents, who used mirrors to check for recent work to the underside of any car. Twice Rueben had been pulled off the line, his car inspected, but during both times he had not been carrying any drugs. That was part of the operation as well — establish a frequent traffic pattern that some agents became familiar with, and a solid alibi, like a job in Mexico while you lived in California. The cartel had covered that part for him, and many of the Border Patrol agents remembered him and his car, so more often than not, he glided on through, just another high school kid who’d found some part-time work in Mexicali.

But today was different. They’d pulled him off the line, and he drove to the secondary inspection area. There he saw a tall, lean Hispanic man who looked like a movie star and whose eyes would not leave him. Rueben parked the car and stepped out to speak with one of the Border Patrol agents, who checked his license and said, “Rueben, this is Mr. Ansara with the FBI. He’d like to talk to you for a few minutes while we check out your car. No worries right now, okay?”

Rueben did as always: He pictured happy thoughts with his girlfriend, eating out, kissing her, buying clothes with the extra money he made. He relaxed. “Sure, man, no problem.”

Ansara narrowed his gaze and simply said, “Follow me.”

They went into the crowded station, where at least fifteen people in dusty clothes sat in chairs, their expressions long. Rueben immediately concluded that they’d all been trying to sneak through the checkpoint and had probably been caught at the same time. Perhaps they’d been hiding within a tractor-trailer’s load or other such large shipment. A mother and two small girls were sitting there, and the woman was sobbing. Six or seven Border Patrol personnel manned positions behind a long counter, and one agent was trying to explain to an old man that anyone carrying as much cash as he had needed to be searched and detained, the money declared.

Rueben steeled himself against the scene and hurried after Ansara down a long, sterile-looking hall. Rueben had never been inside the facility, and his pulse began to mount as Ansara opened the door to what was a small interrogation room where another young man about Rueben’s age sat at the table, brooding. He was a white kid with brown hair and freckles. His arms were covered in tattoos, and he wore a skull earring made of gold.

Ansara closed the door. “Have a seat.”

Rueben complied, and the other kid just kept staring through the table.

“Rueben, this is Billy.”

“What’s up?” Rueben asked.

“Dude, you have no fucking idea,” the kid groaned, still not bothering to look up.

Rueben looked his question at Ansara. “What’s going on? Am I in trouble or something? What did I do?”

“I’ll cut to the chase. They recruit you kids out of the high schools, so we always start there. A couple of your friends tipped us off because they’re afraid for you. I also made a promise to your sister — but don’t worry …she won’t tell your parents. Now, I brought Billy down here to show you something. Show him, Billy.”

The kid suddenly shoved his chair back and propped both of his bare feet up on the table.

He had no toes.

Every one of them had been hacked off, the scars still fresh and pink, and so ugly that Rueben tasted bile in the back of his throat.

“I lost a load worth fifty thousand. I’m only seventeen, so they worked it out so I only got probation. Doesn’t matter, though. They came across the border for me. Caught me one day after class. Threw me in a van. Look what those fuckers did to me.”

“Who?”

“Your buddy Pablo, and his boss, Corrales. They chopped off my toes — and they’ll do it to you, too, the moment you fuck up. Get out now, bro. Get out right fucking now.”

A knock came at the door. Ansara answered and stepped outside to speak to an agent.

“They really did that to you?”

“What do you think? Fuck, dude, you think I’ll ever get laid again? You think any woman is going to be attracted to a guy with these fucking feet?” He threw back his head and started crying, and then he began screaming, “Ansara! I want out! Get me the fuck out of here! I’m done!”

The door opened, and Ansara appeared, waving Billy outside. The kid rose and hobbled to the door, carrying a pair of odd-looking boots under his arm.

The door closed again.

And Rueben sat there alone for five, ten, fifteen minutes, his imagination running wild. He saw himself in prison, being trapped in the shower by fourteen potbellied gang members who wanted him as their little bitch — all because he wanted to go to college and make some extra money. He wasn’t a rocket scientist. The scholarships wouldn’t help very much. He needed the cash.

Abruptly, Ansara returned and said, “Your car has a very unique dashboard and gas tank.”

“Fuck,” Rueben said and gasped.

“You think because you’re not eighteen you’ll just get released or put on probation?”

Rueben couldn’t help it. He began to cry.

“Listen to me, kid. We know the cartel’s spotters are out there, watching all of this. We made it look like we didn’t find anything. You’ll finish your run today. You’ll deliver the drugs. But now you work for me. And we have a lot to discuss …”