Against All Enemies

20 DIVERSIONS

It was seven A.M., and Dante Corrales was not in the mood to wait for a man who was supposed to be working for him, a man who answered to him, a man who knew better than to disrespect him like this. Corrales had yet to have his morning coffee, and he’d wanted to get this meeting over within five minutes, but the workers in the tunnel had told him that Romero had still not arrived and that he usually didn’t show up until eight a.m. What kind of bullshit was that? The man was being paid good money to get the job done, and he thought he could float in every morning at eight? Did he think he was a banker? Hell would be paid — with interest — and his failure to answer his cell phone was salt in the wound.

And so Corrales waited for him inside the warehouse, listening to the clunks and roars of heavy construction equipment being used next door. The vibrations worked their way up into his legs and back. Those guys got to work at dawn and finished at dusk. They didn’t stroll in at eight. They had a sense of urgency that Romero needed to learn.

“Go get me some goddamned coffee,” Corrales finally shouted at Raúl, who was loitering near the metal roll-up door with Pablo.

Raúl shook his head, muttered something under his breath, then headed outside, the sky washed pink by the rising sun. Pablo shifted up to Corrales and said, “Are you okay?”

“This fucking guy won’t be here till eight, you believe that shit? And why isn’t he answering his phone?”

“Something else is bothering you,” said Pablo. “You want to talk about it?”

“What’re you, my shrink?”

“You still upset about the two guys we lost at the V Bar? Don’t be. Those assholes screwed up the job big-time. I told you from the get-go they were cabrones.”

“I don’t give a shit about them. It’s the American I’m worried about. Can’t find him now. He could be working with the Federal Police, who knows …”

“Aw, that dumb shit probably just got scared off. He didn’t look like a Fed. Just some asshole business guy who thought he could come down here and get some Mexican slaves for his company, the fucker …”

“No, there’s something happening, and if we don’t keep our eyes wide open, this …all of this …is going to come tumbling down, and the boss will make sure you get buried right here.”

Corrales sighed and waited another five minutes for his coffee. Pablo continued to make small talk, most of which Corrales ignored. Raúl finally returned, and Corrales practically wrenched the cup from Raúl’s hand and took a long sip. His nose crinkled. This was hardly as good as the Starbucks he’d get on the other side of the border, but he’d drink it anyway, and as he reached the bottom of his cup at exactly 7:39, Pedro Romero dragged himself into the warehouse. He shoved his glasses farther up his nose and tugged at his jeans, which were dropping below his potbelly. He frowned at Corrales and the others and lifted his voice, “Buenos días.”

“Where the fuck you been?” Corrales asked, marching up to the man, whose gaze widened.

“I was at home, then I came here.”

“You don’t know how to answer your cell phone?”

“My battery died. I was recharging it in the car. Did you try to call me?”

“Uh, yeah. They told me you come in at eight a.m. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

Corrales smacked the man hard across the face. Romero recoiled and raised a palm to his cheek.

“Do you know why I did that, old man? Do you? Because you are a digger! You are not a fucking banker! You get here when the sun comes up, and you leave when the sun goes down. Do you fucking understand me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You want to save your daughter?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You want to collect your money?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you get here when I say! Now, tell me right here, right now, that we have broken through to the other side and will be ready to begin shipping tonight.”

“I need a few more days.”

“What? ‘A few more days’? What the fuck is that?”

“I will show you how far we are, but we’ve had some trouble. As I told you in the beginning, the water table is very shallow here, and we’ve had to pump water out of the tunnel quite a few times already. It is a complicated operation.”

“Maybe if you got to work earlier, this wouldn’t be a problem.”

“Señor Corrales, I want to assure you that my being here one hour earlier would not make a huge difference. It takes all night to pump out the water, and we cannot dig while that’s happening.”

“Don’t challenge me, old man. You better make me a believer. Let’s go.”

“All right, but you must know that these men are working as hard as they can. I have two shifts, as you ordered, but I cannot remain here around the clock. I have my family to take care of, and my wife needs help.”

“Then you’d better find her some help, because I want this tunnel opened up and ready to go by tonight.”

“Tonight? There is too much dirt and rock left to remove. It is physically impossible.”

“No, it’s not. You’re going to make it happen. Trust me.”

Corrales’s smartphone rang. Fernando Castillo was calling. “Hello?”

“Dante, the boss has another job for you. We need you back right away.”

Miguel Rojas and Sonia Batista sat in two of the three backseats of a twin-engine corporate helicopter whose cabin boasted utility seating for up to seven passengers in addition to the pilot and copilot. The helicopter was one of several Jorge used for short business trips, and while it was merely a corporate transport and not armed like a military craft, his pilots always carried pistols. As with all of Jorge’s other means of transport, no expense had been spared in regard to accents and trim: rich Italian leather and exotic hardwoods, along with small flat screens and headphones to watch corporate presentations and/or movies. Miguel and Sonia had forgone the idea of watching a film in favor of taking in the views. They had donned their headsets and microphones so they could hear and speak to each other over the drone of the aircraft’s powerful Rolls-Royce engines.

In front of them were the dour-faced bodyguards/chaperones they’d been forced to drag along: Corrales, Raúl, and Pablo. Well, it could be worse, Miguel thought. Jorge had said he was sending a team of twelve men to travel with them, and some members of that team would arrive ahead of them. They would rent four SUVs to move in a caravan everywhere they went. Miguel had pleaded against this. He wanted a nice, intimate vacation with Sonia — not a security spectacle/parade everywhere he went. Besides, per his father’s insistence, he’d kept a low profile for most of his life, and the average citizen in Mexico could not identify him the way they could identify Jorge. There was no reason to believe they needed such a big team, which would, in fact, call a lot of attention to themselves and perhaps even invite criminal activity as local citizens pointed their fingers and said, “There he goes, the rich guy with all his bodyguards.” Jorge had finally agreed to send along three men, and Miguel thanked his father profusely for reaching a compromise. What Miguel hadn’t counted on was Corrales’s attitude. Miguel had made it quite clear to the man — the most arrogant of the bunch — that he needed to keep his distance and stop ogling Sonia. Even Corrales’s simple “Yes, señor” sounded sarcastic. Miguel was certain that the man hated the fact that he’d worked for nothing, been handed everything on a silver platter — while Corrales had probably been a street punk who’d been lucky enough to get a job working for Jorge Rojas.

“How long will it take to get there?” Sonia asked, staring out the window.

“About three hours or so,” Miguel answered. “But we have to make one stop to refuel. Have you ever been on a helicopter before?”

“A few times with my father. There was this famous cyclist — I can’t even remember his name, because I was only ten or eleven at the time — but he’s like a living legend and had his own helicopter. He took us on a vacation.”

“I’ll tell you something funny. There’s a big nut on top of the rotor, and you know what the pilot calls it?”

She shook her head.

“He calls it the Jesus nut, because if that nut falls off, then you better start praying to Jesus …”

“Gee, that makes me feel better,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Are you scared?”

She shook her head, her hair gleaming in the light filtering in through the window.

“It’s worth the flight, trust me,” he told her. “And we’ll be getting there during a special carnival they put on for tourists. You’re going to love this place.”

She grabbed his hand and squeezed it. “I know I will.”

It was pretty damned obvious that Moore, aka Scott Howard, couldn’t return to the hotel owned by Dante Corrales, as he’d have some explaining to do about why the men following him had been killed. He’d smiled inwardly over actually going there anyway, walking nonchalantly past Ignacio, who might ask, “How was your day, señor?”

“It was great. I got kidnapped by this sicario from the Sinaloa Cartel, but thank God Corrales’s two boys were following us, because they killed my kidnapper, but then they got killed by more guys, so maybe it wasn’t so great — because I was really hoping to be kidnapped by the Sinaloas. Long story short, it all worked out. Have I received any calls or packages? And also, I’d like the maid to leave me some extra towels.”

Instead Moore chose the safer and far less audacious route of finding another hotel, but why scour the streets for a nice one when Johnny Sanchez had found himself a little slice of heaven right near the U.S. Consulate? Thus Moore got a room three doors down from Johnny’s and rented himself a new car. Johnny wasn’t happy with the arrangement and threatened to check out. Moore warned him about that.

JTF leader Towers sent a text message: Rojas’s son, Miguel, had just left with his girlfriend, in a helicopter heading westward. Dante Corrales and two others were with them.

That Rojas’s son was fraternizing with a known cartel member did “seem” to link Rojas to the cartel, but that evidence was, at the moment, purely circumstantial.

Yet something about that bothered Moore. A lot. Their joint task force had already received intelligence that identified Dante Corrales as a cartel member. This intelligence had been gathered well before the joint task force’s formation. It was reasonable to assume that the Agency had kept their electronic and human eyes on Corrales since first identifying him as a player. Moore would have to check the file to see how long ago that had occurred — because if Rojas was involved, then it was reasonable to assume that this wasn’t the first time Corrales had been around the family, in which case the Agency would have more clearly identified Rojas as more than a “person of interest.”

Or maybe this was the first time Corrales had been seen with the family? Moore still had a difficult time believing that. So what was happening now? Where were they going? Moore leaned on Sanchez, and the writer called Corrales, who’d said he couldn’t work on the screenplay for a week because he’d be in San Cristóbal de las Casas on a babysitting job.

Bingo.

Moore called Towers with a plan. Rojas made only rare public appearances and was otherwise never seen. Moore had a plan to draw him out, and when he finished going over it, Towers gave him the blessing.

An hour later, Moore was sitting in the backseat of Luis Torres’s Range Rover. The fat man was at the wheel, with DEA agent Fitzpatrick riding beside him.

“You guys need to fly down there and kidnap the son and his girlfriend. You’ll have some great leverage if you can do that. We’ll draw out Rojas, and I’ll take care of the rest. You bring this plan to Zúñiga and see what he says. And tell him he needs to start returning my calls.”

“He doesn’t trust you, Mr. Howard. And I doubt he’ll start trusting you anytime soon.”

“I’ve got intelligence photos of them leaving on the chopper. I’ve got an informant who personally spoke to Corrales and confirmed they’ll be there for a week. You go down there, you kill Corrales and the other bodyguards, you kidnap the kid, and you’ve got Rojas by the balls. Which part are you failing to understand? I’m going to help you take out your main rival. Your enemy is my enemy. How many other ways do you want me to spell it out?”

“You could be setting us up, getting us to go down there so you and your little overseas group can take us out. Maybe you work for Rojas.”

“Dude, if we wanted you dead, there’d already be weeds on your grave. Don’t be fools. You need to do this. Tell Zúñiga this is the plan.”

“I think he’s right,” said Fitzpatrick, trying not to make his endorsement too obvious. “Let’s look at what he’s got, and then Señor Zúñiga can make a decision.”

“Don’t waste too much time.” Moore opened the back door and got out. “You need to be on an airplane today.”

Moore walked across the alley to his rental car, climbed in, and drove off.

Miguel Rojas’s little vacation with his girlfriend was an excellent lead and opportunity, and Moore had already shared the news with FBI Agent Ansara, who was working with his new mule/informant to penetrate one of the Juárez Cartel’s primary smuggling routes.

Fellow CIA operative Vega was still keeping a close eye on inspector Alberto Gómez, the legendary veteran of the Federal Police who’d been dirty since his rookie year. However, Vega had shared some troubling news. Gómez, along with several other inspectors, was trying to “expose corruption” by setting up another inspector to take a fall, thus pointing the spotlight elsewhere. Vega suspected that he knew he was being watched, so this ploy was his answer.

ATF agent Whittaker reported that a large shipment of guns might be coming down from Minnesota very soon. Cartel members up there were amassing what he contended was their largest cache to date.

Fitzpatrick called later on in the day to confirm that Zúñiga was still mulling over the intel photos and plan, but he also said that the Sinaloa Cartel had just picked up some information from a spotter about a sizable shipment coming up from the south, and their spotter believed that this group of mules would use one of the cartel’s smaller tunnels that ran for about 130 feet under a concrete-lined section of the Rio Grande near Juárez and the Bridge of the Americas.

Moore sent a message to Fitzpatrick: Tell the Sinaloa boys to stay away from the tunnel and go after Miguel Rojas. Moore would personally intercept that shipment and deliver it to Zúñiga as a clear sign of his willingness to help. That Moore would take out one set of drug smugglers to help another was the price they paid in order to catch the biggest fish of all. He’d done likewise in at least four different countries and no longer questioned the moral or ethical implications of his actions. It was the only way to fight an asymmetric enemy with no rules. He contacted Ansara and told him to have a Border Patrol force waiting at the predesignated storm drain in El Paso. Ansara was on it and would be ready with the net.

Moore was a bit surprised that JTF leader Towers himself met him in a parking lot about three blocks away from the drainage ditch. Moore’s watch read nearly 1:08 a.m., and according to Towers, the mules would arrive within fifteen minutes in a white cargo van.

“They’re not only moving drugs,” Towers said, “but women and children. Big-time coyotes employed by the cartel. These guys might have a deal with a group of snakeheads in China — because the young girls we saw were all Asian. They bring them over here as sex slaves.”

“Damn, it’s just keeps getting uglier. Drugs, human trafficking …”

“Just stick to the plan.”

“I will. So what brings you to this beautiful part of town?” Moore figured he’d pose the question, since the assumption had been that Towers would remain back in San Diego.

“I’m a field officer. They knew that when they hired me. Did they think they could get me to sit behind a desk the whole time? Hell, no …”

“I hear you.”

“All right, then, buddy, let’s get you ready.”

Moore grinned and began to suit up in nondescript black fatigues, Kevlar vest, and balaclava. He was wearing nearly the same clothes as the two guards the Juárez Cartel had posted at the tunnel entrance.

His inventory included two Glock 21 .45-caliber pistols with attached wet/dry suppressors whose inside chambers had already been greased up to get the ultimate sound attenuation. He also grabbed a couple of smoke grenades and a couple of flash bangs, in case the group was not as “cooperative” as they could be. He slipped on an earpiece with attached boom mike, and took off running across the parking lot, with Towers’s voice in his ear: “Next left and the ditch will be straight ahead. Good cover along the south-side wall. Once you get in past the big grating, your two buddies will be just inside.”

An automotive junkyard’s chain-link fence lined the left side of the street, with a row of ramshackle buildings collapsing to the right, all of them unoccupied — abandoned machine and tool shops, judging from the faded placards above their doors. Even the graffiti that slashed across some of the crumbling walls looked washed out. It was difficult to see much more detail, since the streetlights that towered overhead were all dark, their bulbs either shot out or burned out. Flickering light came from the block next door, and Moore wasn’t sure of its source.

He reached the meter-high concrete wall along the south side of the ditch and kept tight, shifting hunched over until he found the two main grating plates lying on the opposite side of the ditch, about ten meters away: the main entrance to the storm drains and smaller tunnel inside. It’d been a considerably dry season, with only a few shallow puddles dotting the ground and a carpet of weeds spreading up to the grating. He grimaced over a faint sewage smell that he hoped would not get stronger once he crossed the ditch.

“ETA on the truck: five minutes,” said Towers.

That wasn’t much time. Moore tugged from his hip pocket a portable night-vision monocular. He raised the device to his right eye and zoomed in on the grating. Through the cross-hatched pattern he spotted one of the two guards sitting beside a circular hole burrowed in the side wall, the shadows beyond it fluctuating like pale green heat waves. The guard was about five feet tall, no mask — just a shaved head with tattoos forming a talon across his neck. Moore imagined a perfectly placed sniper’s round sailing through one of the grating holes and taking out the man where he sat. Moore was a good shot, but hell he wasn’t that good …

After a deep, calming breath, he pocketed the monocular and took off running across the ditch. He reached the grating and knew that lifting the door would cause a commotion. There just wasn’t a way to sneak up on these guys. A section of the grating had been cut out to form a one-meter-by-one-meter hatch. Moore gave it a tug. Locked. Shit. He told Towers, who said, “Well, fuck it, dude, get them to open it.”

“Hey,” shouted one of the guards from inside. “You’re here already? You’re early.”

“Hurry up!” Moore answered in Spanish. “We have a big shipment here!”

Moore raised one of his Glocks and waited for the man to unlock the grating. Despite the suppressor, his shot would hardly be silent. Even though his bullet would exit the barrel at subsonic speeds — which would help in the suppression of the sound — the Glock’s slide would still make a loud enough click to alert anyone within the immediate area, most notably the other guard. The word silencer implied a blowgun-like thump, but that was a misnomer. Moreover, when you saw guys “limp-wristing,” or one-handing a suppressed pistol and firing it, the kinetic energy from the slide would transfer to their wrists and not only make the shot go wide but possibly injure them, so you always held the pistol tightly with both hands, as Moore did.

Some might argue that the more silent way to kill the guard would be with a knife, but again, killing someone with a single knife blow was exceedingly difficult. After the first blow, you more often than not still had a struggle on your hands and several more blows to deliver while you tried to gag the guy. The whole affair was sloppy and much more dangerous — and Moore knew this firsthand from his SEAL training and from taking out several pirates in Somalia who’d each needed a half-dozen blows from his knife before they properly died. Moore preferred to take his chances with the clack of the slide and the assurance that one round would finish the job without him having to lay a hand on the man.

A lock clicked from inside, followed by the rattle of a chain. The grating squeaked upward, and the man thrust out his head and faced Moore.

His eyes widened first on Moore and then on the suppressor attached to Moore’s Glock. He opened his mouth to scream.

Moore fired, the round hitting the guard just above his left eye and booting him back past the grating.

Before the brass casing from Moore’s round could hit the dirt, he was on the move, lowering himself past the grating and down into the wider storm-drain conduit, a rectangular shaft of concrete about seven feet high by nearly fifteen feet across. He had to climb over the first guard’s body and peer into the darkness, searching for the second guard.

Where was the son of a bitch? Surely he’d heard that round — and damn, there wasn’t time to waste looking for him.

“I had to kill one of the mules!” Moore shouted, his voice echoing off into the conduit as he lifted the night-vision monocular to his eye. “He tried to steal from us.”

Movement ahead.

Moore threw himself forward into a puddle spanning the floor. A shot rang out, striking the water at his elbow. He rolled away, onto his back, realizing that if he didn’t sit up and return fire in the next two heartbeats, he was dead.