Against All Enemies

3 FERTILE GROUND

Dante Corrales hated being away from home in Juárez, mostly because he missed his woman, Maria. He kept flashing back to last weekend, to the way she’d lifted her legs high in the air and had pointed her polished toenails, to the purring she’d made, to the claws she’d dug into his back, to the way she spoke to him and the expressions on her face. They’d made love like hungry, violent animals, and Corrales felt dizzy as he relived that moment yet again, standing there, inside the burned-out Pemex gasolinera, watching as the men unloaded the banana boxes, removed the blocks of cocaine, and placed those blocks inside their backpacks. There were twenty-two runners supervised by Corrales and five other sicarios. Their group was known as Los Caballeros, The Gentlemen, because they had a reputation for being exceedingly well dressed and well spoken, even as they lopped off heads and sent corpse messages to their enemies. They were smarter, braver, and certainly far more dangerous and cunning than the other enforcer gangs attached to the rest of Mexico’s drug cartels. And as Corrales liked to joke, they were just polishing their machismo!

Some of the shipment, Corrales knew, had gone up to Texas, moving through Brewster County, and he’d just received a call from his lead man, Juan, who said they’d had trouble. His team had encountered a Border Patrol unit. One of the guys Juan had hired for the run had chopped off a border agent’s head.

What the fuck was that?

More epithets escaped Corrales’s mouth before he could finally calm down and remind Juan that he was not supposed to hire any outside guys. Juan said he’d had no choice, that he’d needed more help because two of his regulars had not shown up and were probably drunk or high.

“The next funeral you attend will be your own.” Corrales thumbed off the phone, swore again, then tugged at the collar of his leather trench coat and picked a few pieces of lint from his Armani slacks.

He shouldn’t allow himself to get so upset. After all, life was good. He was twenty-four years old, a top lieutenant in a major drug cartel, and he’d already made 14 million pesos — more than a million U.S. dollars — himself. That was impressive for a boy who’d grown up poor in Juárez and had been raised by a housekeeper and maintenance man who had both worked at a cheap motel.

The burned-out station and the lingering stench of all that soot made Corrales want to leave soon. The place was beginning to smell like another night, the worst night of his life.

He’d been seventeen, an only child, and had joined a gang who called themselves the Juárez 8. Their group of high school kids was standing up to the sicarios of the Juárez Cartel, fighting back against their threats and forced recruitment of their friends. Too many of Corrales’s friends had wound up dead because of their involvement with the cartel, and he and his buddies had decided that enough was enough.

One afternoon, two boys had cornered Corrales behind a Dumpster and had warned him that if he didn’t quit that gang and join Los Caballeros that his parents would be killed. They’d said it very clearly.

Corrales could still remember the punk’s eyes, glowing like coals in a fire pit, from the shadows of the alley. And he could still hear the punk’s voice echoing through time: We will kill your parents.

Unsurprisingly, Corrales had told them to fuck off. And two nights later, after coming home from a night of drinking, he’d found the motel engulfed in flames. The bodies of his parents were recovered in the rubble. Both had been bound with tape and left to burn.

He’d gone crazy that night, stolen a gun from a friend, and driven at high speeds throughout the city, looking for the scumbags who’d ruined his life. He’d crashed his car into a fence, abandoned it there, and just gone running back to a small bar, where he’d passed out in the bathroom. The police took him away and delivered him to relatives.

After going to live with his godmother, and after working as a janitor himself while trying to finish high school, he decided that he could no longer toil away like his parents had. He just couldn’t do it.

There was no other choice. He would join the very group that had murdered his parents. That decision had not come easily or quickly, but working for Los Caballeros was his only ticket out of the slums. And because he was much smarter than the average thug, and perhaps more vengeful, he’d risen quickly through the ranks and had learned far more about the business than his bosses were aware of. He’d discovered early on that knowledge is power; thus he studied everything he could about the cartel’s business and its enemies.

As fate would have it, the two boys that had killed his parents had been murdered themselves, only a few weeks before Corrales had joined their ranks. They’d been killed by a rival cartel because of their bold and foolish acts. The other Caballeros were glad to see them go.

Corrales shuddered now and glanced over at his team of runners dressed in dark hoodies and jeans and weighed down by their bulging backpacks. He led them over to a rear corner of the convenience mart. He lifted a large piece of plywood from the floor, and the tunnel entrance lay below, a narrow shaft accessible via an aluminum ladder. Cold, musty air wafted up from the hole.

“When you get inside the other house,” Corrales began, “do not go outside until you see the cars, and only then you go out three at a time. No more. The rest of you stay in the bedroom. If there is trouble, you come back through the tunnel. Okay?”

They murmured their assent.

And down they went, one by one, a few carrying flashlights. This was one of the cartel’s smaller but longer tunnels, nearly one hundred meters long, a meter wide, and just under two meters high, with its ceiling reinforced by thick crossbeams. Because there were so many out-of-work masons and construction engineers in Mexico, finding crews to construct such tunnels was ridiculously easy; in fact, many crews were just standing by, ready to jump on the next project.

Corrales’s men would keep close and hunched over as they hurried down the shaft. The tunnel passed directly under one of the checkpoints in Nogales, Arizona, and there was always a concern that a larger vehicle like a bus might cause a cave-in. It had happened before. In fact, Corrales had learned that various cartels had been digging tunnels in Nogales for more than twenty years and that literally hundreds had been discovered by authorities — yet the digging of new passages continued, making Nogales the drug tunnel capital of the world. In recent years, though, the Juárez Cartel had begun to expand its tunnel operations and now controlled nearly all of the most significant tunnels passing into the United States. Men were paid handsomely to protect the tunnels and to stop rival cartels from using them. Moreover, the shafts themselves had been dug deeper so ground-penetrating radar would miss them and/or agents would mistake them for one of the many drainage pipes that ran between Nogales, Mexico, and Nogales, Arizona.

Some shouting from the doorway behind sent him reaching for his mata policía tucked into his shoulder holster. He produced the pistol and walked toward the door, where two of his men, Pablo and Raúl, were dragging in another guy with blood pouring from his nose and mouth. The bleeder struggled against the men holding him, then spat blood, the glob missing Corrales’s Berluti loafers by only inches. Corrales was certain that the fool had no idea how much the shoes cost.

Corrales frowned. “Who the fuck is this?”

Raúl, the taller of the two, piped up: “I think we found a spy. I think he’s one of Zúñiga’s boys.”

Corrales sighed deeply, raked fingers through his long, dark hair, then suddenly shoved his pistol into the man’s forehead. “Were you following us? Do you work for Zúñiga?”

The man licked his bloody lips. Corrales shoved the pistol harder into the man’s forehead and screamed for him to answer.

“Fuck you,” the guy spat.

Corrales dropped his voice to funereal depths and got in closer to the man. “Do you work for the Sinaloas? If you tell me the truth, you’ll live.”

The man’s eyes went vague; then he lifted his head a little higher and said, “Yes, I work for Zúñiga.”

“Are you alone?”

“No. My friend is back at the hotel.”

“On the corner?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

With that, Corrales abruptly — and without a second’s hesitation — put a bullet in the man’s head. He did this so quickly, so effortlessly, that his own men gasped and flinched. The spy fell forward, and Corrales’s men let him drop to the dirt.

Corrales grunted. “Bag up this motherfucker. We’ll leave this garbage on our old friend’s doorstep. Get two guys to the hotel and take that other scumbag alive.”

Pablo was staring at the dead man and shaking his head. “I thought you’d let him live.”

Corrales snorted, then looked down and noticed a bloodstain on one of his shoes. He cursed and started back for the tunnel, reaching for his cell phone to call his man inside the house on the other side of the border.

A U-Haul truck had pulled up outside the big tent, and FBI Special Agent Michael Ansara watched as two men climbed out of the cab and were joined by two more who’d come out of the tent. One guy, the tallest, unlocked the back of the truck and rolled up the door, and the men began passing boxes to one another, forming a line toward the tent’s entrance. This area was a hub for supply distribution to the groups farther north. That the Mexican drug cartels were smuggling cocaine across the border into the United States was hardly as audacious as the operation that Ansara had been reconnoitering for the past week.

The cartels had established extensive marijuana farms within the rugged hills and backcountry of the Sequoia National Park. While there were many hiking trails, large swaths of land were still off-limits to hikers and campers. Foot patrollers were few and far between, meaning the cartels had at their disposal enormous areas of remote, well-camouflaged land protected from aerial surveillance. They were growing their product on this side of the border with impunity and quickly distributing it to their customers, even as the money got shipped back home to Mexico. Ansara had more than once shaken his head in disbelief over those very facts, but the cartels had been doing this for years.

Audacious? Hell, yes. And more so when you’d spent as much time around the area as Ansara had. He’d already noted the extensive security measures put in place, layers of defense beginning with those areas running parallel to the main trails. Any adventurers who strayed far enough off the path might encounter foothold traps of various sizes all the way up to bear, along with trapping pits dug six feet deep and covered with twigs, leaves, and pine needles. At the bottom of these traps lay two-by-fours impaled with nails. The idea was to injure the curious so they’d turn around and seek medical help. Farther in, Ansara found trip wires that again had unsuspecting hikers falling forward onto hidden beds of nails. While admittedly crude, these means of “discouragement” were just part of a more sophisticated network of defense closer in.

Getting to his current vantage point had required a healthy dose of climbing skill. He’d hiked in with a light pack, scaling hills with grades of more than eighteen percent to navigate his way along several rocky cliffs, slipping at least a half-dozen times in order to beat a path wide enough and remain undetected. Loose rocks, low-hanging limbs, and the sheer grade left him gasping.

About an hour north of the big tent he was now observing, and a two-hour hike away from the nearest road, lay what Ansara had nicknamed “the garden.” Shaded by the towering sugar pines were more than fifty thousand marijuana plants, some fanning up to more than five feet tall and planted in neat rows six feet apart. These rows swept up the steep terrain and were planted in the rich soil. Many of the plants lay amid thick brush and near streams that the cartels used for irrigation. Pipes had been buried along the hillside, the streams dammed up, and an elaborate drip-line system complete with gravity-fed hoses was in place so that the plants were not overwatered. This was a professional operation, with no expense spared.

Along the growing area’s perimeter lay knots of small tents where farmers and security personnel lived, most of their food stored in large sacks and suspended from tree limbs to protect it from black bears roaming the area. The fields themselves were watched twenty-four-seven by as many as thirty armed men at any one time. Supplies were brought in by those who were presumably not told about the operation, only that food, water, clothing, fertilizer, and other essential items were needed. Harvested plants were smuggled out at night by teams of farmers protected by guards. Teams that worked by day actually rode expensive mountain bikes and moved swiftly and silently through the unforgiving valleys. Ansara guessed that many of the workers were relatives and friends of the cartels, people they could trust. Every main entrance and exit of the park was protected by rangers, and Ansara’s surveillance had revealed that at least one night guard had been bribed to allow the entrance or exit of a vehicle between midnight and five a.m., about every ten days or so.

Ansara was no stranger to marijuana farming. He had grown up in East L.A., in one side of a Boyle Heights duplex. His mother’s older brother, Alejandro De La Cruz, lived on the other side. During the week, his uncle was a “gardener to the stars” in the affluent community of Bel Air. Nights and weekends De La Cruz grew and sold pot to those very same rich clients. Ansara was his trusted assistant.

By ten, Ansara could spell, as well as pronounce, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active chemical ingredient in pot that enabled the user to get high. He’d spend hours scrounging up and prepping foam cups. He’d start by punching drain holes in the bottom, add potting soil, and last inserted, pointy end up, a dark brown seed with mottled-looking marbling. He’d line thirty or forty cups in a flat, which was a tray similar to his mother’s cookie pan, and then he’d turn on the heating coils lining the underside of the long benches for bottom heat.

He learned how to transplant the germinated seedling, leaving plenty of soil on its root ball, and about the importance of an oscillating fan running twenty-four hours a day. He skimmed newspapers, especially the inserts and flyers, looking for sales on 600-watt, high-pressure sodium grow lamps.

A marijuana plant’s nighttime, or dark period, was equally critical to its growth. Twenty-four-hour timers were a challenge. The grow lamps easily burned out regular timers, so his uncle had taught him that expensive high-power switches known as contactors, or relay switches, were necessary.

The demand for specific amounts of daylight and darkness created two security issues. Covering over windows to facilitate total darkness aroused suspicion from the street. Drug and law enforcement officials looked for it. Chronic above-average residential power consumption could trigger a Southern California Edison heads-up report to those same drug and law enforcement officials. Also, a grow space could become quite humid. Open windows at odd hours, regardless of precipitation or outside temperatures, was risky business.

By twelve, Ansara could recite the top dozen most potent marijuana strains in descending order of their THC content, from White Widow seeds to Lowryder seeds. And during all that time Ansara never once smoked pot — and neither did his uncle, who said they were businessmen supplying an important product. If you sell cookies, he’d told Ansara, you don’t sit around eating all the cookies.

It all came to a screeching halt when his mother discovered why he spent so much time with Uncle Alejandro. She didn’t speak to her brother for months.

That Ansara had gone on to join the FBI and had already busted individuals who grew pot was one of life’s true ironies, and yet another irony was, at the moment, fully alive before his eyes. There were only a handful of drug enforcement agents assigned to police California’s twenty million acres of federal forests, and unfortunately Ansara was not one of them. He was up there because he’d been hunting a particular smuggler, one Pablo Gutiérrez, who’d murdered a fellow FBI agent in Calexico and who he believed had direct ties to the Juárez Cartel. During his pursuit of this man, Ansara had found the Oz of pot farms in California — yet he and his colleagues were hesitant to bring down this operation because they hoped to use it to gather more intel on the cartels. It was clear to all that they needed to remove the lieutenants and bosses. If they struck too soon, the cartels would just plant another field a couple miles away.

As security tightened along the U.S.-Mexican border, the cartels expanded their growing operations in the United States. Ansara had spoken to a special agent for the federal Bureau of Land Management, who’d told him that just eight months prior, park rangers had confiscated eleven tons of marijuana in a single week. The agent went on to speculate on how much pot they did not confiscate, how much actually made it out of the fields and was sold …Mexican drug lords were operating on American soil, and there weren’t enough law enforcement officers to stop them. Like soldiers used to say in Vietnam, There it is …

Ansara lowered his binoculars and tucked himself deeper into the shrubs. He thought he’d seen one of the loaders do a double take in his direction. His pulse began to race. He waited a moment more, then lifted the binoculars. The men were back at it and had set aside some boxes whose lids were removed. Ansara zoomed in to find packages of toothbrushes and toothpaste, soap, disposable razor blades, and bottles of aspirin, Pepto-Bismol, and cough suppressant. Larger boxes contained small tanks of propane and packages of tortillas, as well as canned goods, including tomatoes and tripe.

A bird flitted through the canopy above. Ansara jolted and held his breath. Once more he lowered the binoculars, rubbed his tired eyes, and listened to Lisa in his head: “Yes, I knew what I was getting into, but it’s just too much time away. I thought I could do this. I thought this was what I wanted. But it’s not.”

And thus another long-legged blonde with a smoky voice and soft hands had escaped from Ansara’s clutch. But this one had been different. She’d sworn she could put up with his being away and had made a valiant effort for the first year. She was a writer and political-science professor at Arizona State and had told him that it was good when he was away, that she needed time to herself anyway. In fact, on the night of their first anniversary as a couple, she’d seemed completely in love with him. At a party she’d compared him to film and television actors like Jimmy Smits and Benjamin Bratt, and had once described him on her Facebook page as “a tall, lean, clean-shaven Hispanic man with a brilliant smile and bright, unassuming eyes.” He’d thought that was pretty cool. He couldn’t use words like that. But absence did not make the heart grow fonder — not when you’re under thirty. He understood. He let her go. But for the past month he couldn’t stop thinking about her. He recalled their first date; he’d taken her to a little mom-and-pop Mexican place way up in Wickenburg, Arizona, where he’d told her about his own time at ASU and about his work as an Army Special Forces operator in Afghanistan. He’d told her about leaving the Army and getting recruited by the FBI. She’d asked, “Are you allowed to tell me all this?”

“I don’t know. Does hearing top-secret stuff make you horny?”

She’d rolled her eyes and giggled.

And the conversation had gotten serious when she’d asked about the war, about his fallen brothers, about him saying good-bye to one too many friends. After dessert, she’d said she had to go home, and the implication was that she wasn’t really interested in him but that he should thank his sister for setting them up.

Of course, he’d pursued her like any good Special Forces/FBI guy would, and he eventually wooed her with flowers and bad poetry written in homemade cards and more late-night dinners. But it’d all gone to hell because of his career, and he was beginning to resent that. He imagined himself as a nine-to-fiver with weekends off. But then the thought of working in a cubicle or having a boss breathing down his neck made him nauseated.

Better to be up in the mountains with a pair of binoculars in hand and surveying some bad guys. Hell, he felt like a kid again.

The men finished their unloading, got back in the U-Haul truck, and pulled away. Ansara watched them go, then a few more men appeared outside and began filling up backpacks with materials they lifted from the boxes. They finished in about ten minutes and headed off in the direction of the garden.

Ansara waited until they were gone, then turned to head off.

Had he not matter-of-factly glanced down, he would be dead.

Right there, off to his right, was a small device with a laser cone jutting from its top. Ansara recognized the unit immediately as a laser trip wire, its companion unit located on the other side of the clearing. If he broke the laser, a silent alarm would go off. Ansara tightened his gaze, lifted his binoculars, and spotted several more laser units at the bases of trees. They came into view only if you knew what to look for, and the Mexicans had actually taped leaves and twigs to their sides to further camouflage them. Conventional trip wires and claymore mines had been set up all around the garden, but this was a new section of the park for Ansara, and he had not seen these detection devices before. Damn, if he came up here again, he’d have to be even more careful.

Shouting came from below. Spanish. The words: Up on the mountain. East side. Had they spotted him?

Oh, shit. Maybe he had crossed one of the lasers. He took off running, as the men below came rushing out from the tent.