by Matthew Rief
“Actualización de estado?” a voice said through the speaker, asking for a status update.
“Callado como una tumba,” the sentry replied.
Quieter than a grave.
The man clipped the radio back onto his belt. We couldn’t have asked for better timing. We’d have at least ten minutes before anyone was likely to call in for another update, probably more like thirty.
When the guy took one more step, Ange sprang around the corner and pounced on him. She placed a hand around his mouth to keep him quiet, then wrapped an arm around his neck and brought him steadily to the ground. He kicked and groaned and struggled, then went motionless.
“Nicely done, Fox,” I said, calling her by her maiden name.
We dragged his body into the shadows, grabbed his radio, and hid him under a pile of discarded leaves. After taking one more look around, we moved along the corner and straight for the small back door of the farmhouse. We both grabbed hold of our handguns, unsure of what we were going to encounter when we barged in and said hello.
On a silent count of three, I pushed open the door and we both swarmed in. My eyes scanned over every inch of the massive space, the sights of my Sig following every move. We took a few steps, and within seconds we had the whole place covered. Most of the space was filled nearly floor to ceiling with stacks of dried tobacco leaves. The truck was parked beside the massive doors, but there was nobody in or near it. No movement of any kind.
The smell was powerful, but actually pretty good. More sweet than anything else. Aside from the voices of the two guys talking just outside, it was perfectly silent.
We moved to the center of the room. When we got there, we looked at each other confused.
There were no partitions. It was just one big space, with two visible points of entry or exit.
So where is the driver? And what is he hauling into the barn at this time of night?
I peeked into the cab of the truck. Completely empty. I moved around to the back and pushed aside the canvas. Empty as well. The bed was dirty and contained a few old stray leaves and nothing more.
I listened to the muffled conversation just outside the door, and my head naturally dropped down. It was then that I saw it. Tracks on the floorboards. A cluster of fresh muddy boot prints that led around the left side of the truck. Keeping my head down, I followed them.
They didn’t lead to the half-empty stacks of bags of processed tobacco. Instead, they led to an open space in the floor with a wooden cart. There they ended. Just vanishing into thin air. I knelt down and examined them. It was dark, but my natural night vision had adjusted. None of the tracks headed back toward the truck.
“Ange, check this out,” I said as I stepped toward the cart.
She strode over from the far side of the room.
I grabbed the edges of the cart. They were in serious need of some WD-40, but I managed to force the reluctant wheels to turn and pushed the cart aside.
“A trap door?” she said.
She arrived just as the cart rolled away, revealing a square cut in the floorboards. One of the sides was covered in dents and scratches. I dropped down, pressed my fingers into the edges, and pulled up. The floor came loose, then swung skyward on a hinge. The secret passageway was nearly pitch black, but the light bleeding in from the outside lights allowed me to see deviations.
“There’s a staircase,” Ange said, leaning over my shoulder. “Now why would an ordinary tobacco farm need a secret hatch and an underground passageway?”
I grabbed my flashlight from the backpack and switched it on at low power. The wooden stairs dropped down into the earth, then the path disappeared under the edge of the opening.
I glanced up at Ange. I’d tell her “ladies first,” but she’d hop right in. Regardless of her experience and ability to hold her own, if someone was going to fall into a trap, I wanted it to be me.
Keeping the light shining, I dropped down onto the creaky steps. Ange was right on my heels and we moved down the steps and onto a dirt base. After a few minutes of playing Indiana Jones, the dirt-and-wood-framed passageway shifted to solid rock. The space widened dramatically and the air became noticeably cooler.
We’d entered a cave.
“You’d mentioned earlier at the hotel that this province was known for large cave systems,” I said.
“Some of the largest and most beautiful in the Caribbean. Or so I read. The caves were apparently created by underground rivers through the mogotes.”
We followed the cavern for a minute before it opened up. The top extended up to over forty feet and was covered with stalactites that reached down to corresponding stalagmites below. It reminded me of Luray Caverns in Virginia, and more recently, the caves Scott and I had explored in Sierra Gorda, Mexico, while tracking down the Aztec treasure. Had we been there under different circumstances, I would have spent some time appreciating it.
“Wait a second,” Ange whispered, raising a hand. “I hear something.”
We both paused and listened. Sounds were coming from deeper in the cave. Muffled voices that reverberated off the cool, smooth rock face. And what sounded like a woman crying.
Ange and I glanced at each other, raised our handguns, and moved in. We’d been tracking down Scarlett, putting our necks on the line to find her all day, and we were finally closing in on her.
I switched my flashlight to the lowest setting and watched my step as we moved in the direction of the sounds. Soon they became distinct. It was three men talking. The crying had quieted to a whimper, but it was clear that the girl making the sound was close by.
We moved into a sharp turn. I quickly switched off the light as a well-lit chamber came into view. The three guys we heard were sitting at a table playing poker. Along the far wall of the chamber, there were rows of openings in the rock. Small spaces with metal bars. They were each very dark inside, but I could see the outline of a seated woman in one of them, her long dark hair covering her face.
Loud screams echoed from an adjoining room. A man wearing a white lab coat stepped into the chamber. He was carrying a metal briefcase in one hand and a syringe in the other.
The girl’s sounds from the other room grew louder. I heard punches being thrown, a man cursing, and the woman struggling.
This was it. The Ranch. The place where they brought kidnapped women to be “processed.”
I felt a deep sickening feeling in my gut. Few things ticked me off more than sex trafficking, and we’d stumbled into the well-organized and evil heart of a large-scale operation. I wasn’t sure how many girls were there, but there were over twenty cells in that chamber alone. For all we knew there were a handful more chambers just like it.
There was no explaining or justifying what we were seeing. These guys were all stone-cold killers, soulless gangsters making their living at the expense of the moral fiber that makes us human. They’d made their decision, and it was time for us to make ours.
No more recon, no more exploration. This is strike hard with everything you’ve got time.
I looked over the three guys drinking and playing cards. One had an AK-47 hanging over the back of his seat by its sling. The other two each had handguns on the table in front of them. Those two would be our first targets. Their weapons would be much easier to grab and aim than a rifle would be.
“I got revolver on the right,” Ange said, reading my mind.
We both raised our weapons.
Here we go.
“Three…,” I whispered. “two… one.”
We popped around the corner, took aim, and fired. The loud cracks of gunpowder thundered in the confines of the cave. Near-perfect synchronization. Near-perfect shots. Both center mass. The unsuspecting card players jerked sideways. Blood splattered against the cavern wall behind them, and they fell to the ground.
The third guy freaked out and spun around. He knocked his beer over, spilling the liquid onto the table. Before he could grab his AK, Ange and I both took him down. Two 9mm rounds tore
through his chest. He flailed back lifelessly, slammed onto the table, then fell to the ground beside his dead poker buddies.
Ange and I stormed into the chamber, both on a mission. The clock was ticking now. Everything with ears in those caves knew that something was going down.
The guy in the white lab coat fell to his knees as we approached. He was paralyzed by fear. Paralyzed by the loud noises, the sight of death, and the sudden danger.
By the time we reached him, he’d summoned just enough courage to make him a target. He dropped the briefcase. Dropped the syringe. But reached for something in his coat pocket. Something metal and pointy.
He lunged toward Ange and tried to skew her with his medical scissors. Before I could pull the trigger on my Sig, she handled the situation.
Sliding back, she grabbed his wrist with her left hand and twisted. More than one bone snapped. He yelled and she pulled him close, slammed her Glock into his forehead to shut him up.
I covered her, keeping a sharp eye on the two other passageways jutting out from the main chamber.
A few girls had taken cover in their cells. A few others were peeking down at the activity. They were all pretty but overcome with despair. I counted six in all.
None of them were Scarlett.
Suddenly, angry yells echoed from down the opposite passageway. Stomping feet followed.
Ange and I took off. The passage dug thirty feet or so into the rock before turning into another chamber. This one was just as big as the first. More cells and large chambers lined one of the walls. It was two stories high with a metal set of stairs.
Two guys with guns ran along the center of the chamber. A third covered them from above as he approached the top of the staircase.
We darted sideways and took aim just as they came into view. Two more quick shots. Two more down and out. I managed to strike the guy on the right in the neck. Ange caught her mark in the face. Both whipped back and slammed hard onto the ground.
The third guy had a minuscule window of opportunity to make a retaliation. Ange and I dove off in separate directions to avoid his gunfire.
He managed to fire off a slew of sporadic automatic rounds before I took aim and put a bullet through his left thigh. The blow knocked his feet out from under him. His momentum did the rest. He fell forward, his face slamming into the edge of a metal stair with a crack before the rest of his body rolled down to the bottom.
In the calm after the storm, Ange and I fell silent, listening intently for any signs of enemy life. It was silent aside from a few crying girls and the distant sound of rushing water coming from a cave across from us.
We crossed the chamber and scanned over every inch of the place. There were only two ways in or out of that one, and we didn’t hear anyone else in either direction. We were in the clear, at least for the time being.
We moved along the cells, one at a time. Two more girls at the bottom. A third up top. Still no sign of Scarlett. While looking over the girls, I stumbled into a large space with folders stacked on tables, and pictures and maps all over the walls.
Holy shit.
It was an intel room. A treasure trove of vital information. It was intel that, if utilized properly, could be used to put an end to their entire operation.
Ange stepped in behind me and we started taking pictures. I focused in on a map that appeared to show the traffickers’ movements throughout the western part of the country. It showed lines from Havana to where we were at the farm. A different-colored line was drawn from the farm to a spot along the coast near a town called Santa Lucia.
I froze when I saw pictures and names of police officers. A few were circled in red, most were crossed out. A few of the names had lines connecting them to Sanchez’s countertrafficking task force, with her picture at the top. I took a quick snap of the top of the hierarchy. Not only was this Sanchez woman trusted by Wilson, but it looked like she was also on the gang’s watch list. A good sign.
After taking a handful of pictures, I stepped back out into the chamber then headed up the cave toward the entrance until I got a signal on my sat phone. Once there, I looked around then called Sanchez. It was a quick conversation. We didn’t have any time to waste. I told her where we were, that we’d taken down a handful of gang members and that we had a group of scared girls who needed help and pickup right away.
She and a team were already on their way. As I’d expected, they’d left Havana right after our conversation earlier. They were on the road, roughly twenty minutes out from the farm.
I ended the call and stepped back down into the main chamber. I returned just as Ange found a large two-pole knife switch and slid it to the on position. A loud mechanical groan filled the air, then all of the cell doors screeched open in unison.
“Sanchez’s twenty minutes out,” I said.
She nodded and we went through each holding cell one at a time. We cared for each of the women as best we could. Most of them were so delirious that they didn’t know what was happening. They were scared and dirty. The smell of the cells was rank.
As fast as we could, we ushered them to the first chamber and gathered them up with the rest. I was amazed at how easily they responded to orders. It was like they were brain-dead. I glanced down at the broken syringe beside the guy in the lab coat and wondered at the type and amount of drugs they’d put into each girl to make them so submissive and calm.
“You’re all safe now,” Ange said, addressing the group. If they were listening or had any understanding of what was happening, their body language didn’t show it. “We’re going to get you all out of here. But first, we need your help.”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and brought up my pictures.
“Have you seen this girl?” I held up the screen, which displayed the picture I’d taken of Ange and Scarlett on the swim platform of the Baia before her first time scuba diving.
I zoomed in and pointed at Scarlett’s face.
We showed each of the girls the picture, one at a time. A few were too out of it to even respond. The ones who did said only one painful word. No.
No. No. No.
We were running out of time. Ange and I both knew that at any moment, an army of backup could arrive and engage us.
But when I held the screen in front of the second to-last-girl, a very young-looking black girl with bright blue eyes, she hesitated.
“Mi si har todeh,” the girl said in a Jamaican accent. “Shi here very short time. Less dan one day mi tink. Days run togeddah here. Many girls come an guh.”
“Where is she?” Ange said. “What happened to her?”
The girl swallowed.
“Dem tek har away. Dat way.” She pointed across the cavern, toward the cave that split off toward the sounds of rushing water.
“How long ago?” I said, kneeling down beside her and staring into her eyes. “When did they take her away?”
“Nuh lang. Maybe a hour.”
“Ange, stay here,” I said, rising to my feet. “Yell out if anyone comes. I won’t go far.”
I took off across the cavern, through the passageway and the adjoining cavern. I grabbed my flashlight and switched it on. The narrow cut zigzagged a few times, and the flowing water sounds grew louder and louder.
Moving deeper, I came upon a strong wrought-iron gate. It was secured by a thick-linked chain and a big lock.
Looking past the metal bars, I spotted a waterfall. It cascaded to a deep murky channel below. I could just barely make out what looked like a small dock.
Holy shit. An underground river. That’s how these guys are transporting the girls out of here.
I pictured it in my mind. Girls taken from all over. Transported to Cuba via cargo ships. Conditioned at this hellhole. Then transported via boat back to the coast.
I grabbed hold of the bars and shook the gate with all my strength. It barely budged. The chain was strong, the lock high quality. It would take a hell of a lot more than a few well-placed rounds to break it. It would take some
heavy explosives.
All out of options, I turned and darted back toward Ange and the girls. I felt a wave of disappointment rush over me. We’d been so close. So close to finding Scarlett and liberating her. Less than an hour close. And we were left in the bowels of a powerful crime syndicate’s pride and joy with a group of kidnapped girls. I could practically feel the furious beast breathing down our necks. An angry army of criminals that I had no doubt was at that very moment grabbing their pitchforks and closing in on us.
THIRTY
My heart sank as the sounds of a woman’s screams echoed throughout the cave.
I ran as fast as I could toward the sound. It was coming toward the first chamber, where I’d left Ange and the girls.
I sprang around the corner with my Sig raised. Ange was kneeling down beside the wailing woman, trying to comfort her. There was no danger. Nothing aside from the harm that had already been caused. A scar that these women would have for the rest of their lives.
I ran over and knelt down beside them. The girl was talking nonsense to herself. Ange tried to calm her down and snap her out of it, but nothing helped.
“She needs water,” one of the girls said. “We all do. The drugs make us dehydrated.”
I looked over my shoulder at the girl who’d spoken. Before I could ask, she pointed to a barrel in the corner. I ran over and filled an aluminum bottle, then gave it to Ange, who eased it into the frantic girl’s mouth. She spat out most of it, but what did make it down her throat seemed to help.
“Please, help yourselves to it,” I said softly to the other women.
They looked at me with wide eyes. For however long it’d been since they were taken, they’d been ordered what to do at all times. It had clearly been a while since they’d been allowed to help themselves to anything.
I ushered a few girls over and broke off the top of the barrel. They used the cups to quench their thirst, then all the other girls joined in. After a minute, I helped Ange and the girl to their feet.
“Scarlett?” Ange said.
“The way is gated and locked. There’s an underground river beyond and a dock. I’m sure she’s a long ways away by now.”