Hostile Borders

by Dennis Chalker

  “No problem,” said Reaper. “Remember, we’ve got wheels.”

  Chapter Nine

  As far as the world was concerned, Placido Pena died during his escape attempt from an American jail. That was the official opinion of the government of Mexico. There was no body—at least no complete or intact body ever found of any of the men who were on board the escape boat when it blew up in San Diego Bay. And no swimmers could have slipped through the Coast Guard and police cordon that surrounded the area soon after the blast.

  Of the bits and pieces of bodies that had been found, none matched that of Pena. DNA testing determined that a sample of blood found among the floating wreckage and debris did match Pena’s sample on record. Not a single witness could be found that ever saw him get off the boat. The U.S. government reluctantly came to the conclusion that he had been killed in the explosion of a heavy weapons cache, the explosion caused by a fire started from the gunfire of the escape conspirators.

  The only complete body that was ever found was that of one of the jumpers when he impacted the sidewalk outside of the Federal Building. Even that body was of little use, the Mexican government refusing full disclosure of the identity of the man, citing national security issues. By meting out the death penalty to himself, Pena had escaped federal justice in the United States.

  For Pena himself, he agreed with the general opinion that he had died, and that he had to make sure that the body was never found. Once again, Santiago had proven his value by arranging a number of appointments for Pena with some of the contacts he had developed over the years. Pena spent weeks in medical clinics, clinics that specialized in cosmetic surgery. His face, his hair, his entire demeanor changed along with the drastic shifts in his life. Now, Pena considered himself reborn. And he would build his new life on the remains of the old one.

  The midwife for Pena’s new life was Garcia Santiago. Since the time of the high-risk escape from U.S. federal custody, Santiago had done nothing but continue to prove himself more and more trustworthy to Pena. When Pena went under the knife of the plastic surgeons, Santiago was in the operating room to watch over him. With the armed ex-SEAL standing guard, Pena knew that he wouldn’t “accidentally” die from the anesthetic—as Amado Carrillo Fuentes, another Mexican drug lord, had in 1997. The last person Pena saw as the sedatives took effect was Santiago, and he was the first person the new man saw the moment he opened his eyes again.

  High full cheekbones helped outline a narrower chin, patrician nose, and thinner eyebrows. Short silver hair replaced black and the beard remained gone. After the bandages were removed, the man who looked back at Pena from the mirror was unrecognizable. But behind the contacts that now gave him black eyes, was the dark soul of a ruthless killer.

  The new face did not come without cost, there was pain involved even with a rebirth. The thin surgical scars that covered his face faded in the weeks following the surgery. But the signs of the work did not go away completely. When Pena became angry, when he flew into a rage, his face flushed and the scars stood out in stark contrast to his normally olive skin. Instead of being a reasonably handsome man who appeared to have European ancestry, when angry Pena would wear a mask of scars, a network of painful tracings that followed the lines of the surgeon’s knife.

  The baptism of pain and scars that gave Pena his new face also helped him come up with his new name. His brother, Turi, was gone and Pena had no other blood relatives. So his name joined that of his brother in death. The person who would become the new leader of the Mexican drug cartels would be Eduardo Masque. He would lead his men as a priest leads his flock. His word would be law, so he would be much more than a simple priest, he would be a Cardinal, Cardenal Muerte, and his benediction would be death. To his enemies, he would quickly become known as the Red Death.

  For over a year, Masque stripped out the leadership of the drug families in Northern Mexico, securing his position as undisputed leader. Without warning, a new force among the drug lords had come out of nowhere and swept through their ranks like a brushfire. In a business known for sudden violent death, the bloodbath leading to the Cardenal Muerte cartel’s rise to power shocked even the most hardened criminals.

  Securing an initial base of power was simple, Masque went back to the fractured Pena crime family and secured it under his control. The new army Masque used to conduct his takeover came from Santiago’s sources. The ex-SEAL and mercenary recruited a unique group of professional gunmen, mercenaries, to make up the ranks of Masque’s attack squads, hard men for whom fighting and violent death was a common factor of life. For himself, Masque took to wearing a red balaclava mask when he went out on some of the more delicate, and bloody, operations. The drug lords never knew the identity of the man who was killing so many of them.

  The deaths of the drug lords started with the lieutenants in the Pena family, who had tried to fill in the power vacuum left by Placido and Turi’s deaths. Knowing every hideout, safehouse, ranchero, and hacienda in his old network, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each location and person, gave Masque’s people a great advantage. The information allowed the killers working for the Cardenal Muerte cartel to reach an incredible level of efficiency in eliminating all opposition. Those who resisted Masque died, suddenly and violently. Those who accepted his leadership found a place at the table of a new drug cartel.

  And the drugs flowed into the United States. Heroin and cocaine, marijuana and amphetamines, crack and new formulations of old vices, they all were products that the Muerte cartel sent on north. The red ink imprint of a stylized skull found on the packages of cocaine and heroin smuggled into the U.S. were quickly becoming a favorite among street users. Eduardo Masque knew that good product meant good sales, and he made certain that his drug labs used the most up-to-date techniques and materials. The income surging into the coffers of the Muerte cartel illustrated the business logic of that philosophy.

  The all-encompassing drive that forced Masque into eliminating all of his competition was that of revenge. He wanted revenge on the people who had arrested him, those who had placed him in a situation where he was on trial for his life, and those who had killed the brother of Placido Pena. One person was the primary focus of Masque’s hatred—the undercover agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency who had infiltrated his organization and set up Pena’s arrest. That arrest triggered the gun battle that had killed Turi Pena.

  The tool that Eduardo Masque was using to obtain the information he wanted was the carrot and stick, threats and money. What he wanted more than anything was the real name of the undercover DEA agent who had infiltrated his organization and betrayed his personal trust. That was the man who had killed his brother, shooting him when Turi swung around with a submachine gun in each hand.

  Money was easy to come by with the tons of drugs that were being sent into the United States. Eventually, the price for any information could be reached. Computer hackers penetrated databases, highly placed informants were located, unscrupulous lawyers found ways around the law, and corrupt officials on both sides of the border were found who would willingly sell anyone’s soul for enough money or the promise of power.

  The name of the undercover informant who had penetrated the Pena cartel was Sabino Duran. He had retired from the DEA during the Pena trial and had moved to a family ranch in southeastern Arizona. The Arizona/Mexican border was an active area of smuggling, both illegal migrants and drugs passed through the more than 350 miles of border between Southern Arizona and the state of Sonora in Northern Mexico. Masque relocated to a large ranch in Northern Sonora in order to be near both a major hub of his business, and the primary target of his personal revenge.

  The mercenaries available to Masque had the drawback of sometimes being too ready to use violence to solve any problem. A pair of the men had been discovered while conducting a surveillance of Duran’s ranch. True to form, they killed the man who had found them. When the mercenaries immediately reported back to Santiago, Masque sought to turn the situa
tion to his advantage.

  Duran would be destroyed by the very same people he used to work for. He could be broken and humiliated, punished by the government he had dedicated his life to. The man who had been killed was an old acquaintance of Duran’s, a veteran Border Patrol agent. By planting evidence, Masque would have the man framed for the murder of his friend. It was the actions of a competent attorney that had terminated Duran’s indictment for murder, and earned the man the attention of Masque’s hatred. Masque had placed a half-million dollar bounty on Duran’s head the day after the charges were dropped. For the lawyer who had gotten him off, Masque offered one-hundred thousand dollars.

  Hatred was also what Masque felt for the American people, their legal system, and their government. He wanted to see it all destroyed. And if he couldn’t bring down the system, he would make it hurt. Masque wasn’t so blinded by hate that he couldn’t see how nearly impossible it would be to bring down the government of the United States. But he did know that he could hurt it a lot, and that there were people all around the world who wanted to do the same thing. They would be tools to aid him in his revenge.

  A wide number of people were on the payroll of the Muerte cartel and all of them had something in common, they wanted more money. The commandante of the local military zone had been corrupted by the easy flow of dollars from the drug business long before Masque had arrived on the scene. As long as his bite of the profits stayed steady, General Ricardo Martinez couldn’t have cared less who was in charge of the drug cartel that paid him. His passion was for the glow of gold, no matter where it came from.

  When word of Masque’s bounty offer reached his ears, General Martinez was more than happy to assign a special squad of his very best men to gather that wind-fall for him. His elite unit was a group of airborne infantry, paratroopers, among the toughest and most ruthless men under his command. General Martinez had a career military man’s opinion of the mercenaries the Muerte cartel had been employing—he despised them.

  The disciplined soldiers that General Martinez had at his disposal had been guards and escorts for drug shipments before. The lieutenant in charge of the unit had worked closely with Felix Zapatista, the drug lord who had been working the Sonora/Arizona border before Masque arrived on the scene. The soldiers under the direction of their officer had crossed the border and gone well into the United States before returning. They were experienced, and knew how to keep their mouths shut.

  Martinez knew that proving himself a valuable asset was a good way to make certain that the money kept coming. And it couldn’t be a bad thing to be on the good side of the leader of one of the largest and fastest growing drug cartels in Mexico.

  The plan was a relatively simple one. The men would cross the border along one of the most secure drug routes that Zapatista knew. They would use staging areas that were well known to them as forward bases. They would first lay an ambush for Duran at his ranch. If that proved successful, they would do the same for the lawyer. If Duran proved too difficult a target to reach, the lawyer would be used as bait to get to him.

  As a backup plan, the soldiers would observe the lawyer’s ranch prior to capturing the man at his home. Once he was in their hands, General Martinez knew that his men would be able to persuade the lawyer to ask his client out to the ranch to talk over a legal problem. That would insure that both Duran and the lawyer were eliminated. That had been the plan—only it hadn’t worked out as expected.

  The military men had failed—badly. Duran was dead, but the lawyer had proved a much more difficult target. The men had returned across the border in a shambles, beaten, bloody, and hurt. One of the men would probably lose his arm while several others would be badly scarred for the rest of their lives. The pain and suffering of the men meant nothing to the Muerte cartel, and to Eduardo Masque in particular. Taking those kinds of risks were what they were paid for. What enraged Masque when he learned about it, was their failure to complete their mission, to eliminate both of their targets. And in the process, they had possibly exposed one of his newest and most valuable assets.

  “Who were these failures?” Masque said as he threw a heavy crystal tumbler of whiskey into the fireplace of his hacienda. “They come back beaten and bloody and all they can tell me is that they were set on by a pack of attack dogs and U.S. troops? I want no more of these soldiers General Martinez considers so elite. You have the best of your mercenaries carry out the job.”

  “Jefe,” Santiago said, “if you keep ordering killings on the other side of the border, the authorities will respond—they won’t be able to afford not to. When you had that officer killed, every Border Patrol agent for hundreds of miles came down to help in the investigation. The border was closed for weeks, nothing could move. It cost us millions of dollars in lost revenue. With our new clients paying to use our routes into the States, we can’t afford that kind of heat coming down on us.”

  “Fine,” Masque said as he stalked the room, “then you order your men to clean up the mess that general has made of things. I want the men who conducted this fiasco eliminated. Sterilize everything, everyone who had a hand in that operation is to be gone. Make them disappear into the desert. You can spare General Martinez and our contact in the States. But Martinez is to know that we consider him expendable. Exactly the same thing can happen to him at any time. The only danger we face right now is from the incompetence of the people we have around us, not from the Americans.”

  “Most of the population of the States are sheep,” Santiago said. “They do what they are told if it doesn’t interfere with their daily lives or their pleasures. They don’t want to take risks of any kind. But don’t make the mistake of underestimating them. If the flock feels that they are in danger, the sheep will start bleating. They will tell their government to do something about the situation.

  “The present administration will not just sit on its hands and make empty threats. Saddam Hussein and the Taliban thought the U.S. was nothing but a paper tiger and wouldn’t act. They found out they were very wrong. There are some very capable people in the States who could do us very serious harm.”

  “I understand your concern, but you are mistaken,” Masque said as he continued to pace the room. “The American people won’t do anything to us. They practically pay us to kill them. In fact, in a way they do pay us to kill them, or at least put them out of their misery. The U.S. has an insatiable demand for the products we send them. Marijuana, cocaine, heroin—it doesn’t matter what we send, they want more. And if they want something new, we’ll get that for them, too.

  “The war against drugs is an unwinnable joke. Law enforcement, the DEA, the U.S. government, even the Mexican government, they all know that as long as there’s a demand for drugs, the people will keep their hands tied. The high-and-mighty want cocaine, the inner city wants crack, street addicts want heroin, and the college kids want pot along with everything else. We supply their needs and they give us money. With that money comes power, enough power to buy the protection of governments from governments.”

  “Down in Colombia not too long ago,” Santiago said, “Pablo Escobar thought the same thing. That money was power and with enough of it, no one could come after you. He was wrong and now he’s dead.”

  “Escobar?” Masque said. “Pablo Escobar was an uneducated peon suffering from delusions. He didn’t want to simply control the Colombian cocaine trade, he wanted to control the entire country of Colombia. He rubbed shoulders with that thug Noriega and thought himself a world leader. That slum-raised peon wanted the poor people to worship him and the rich to fear him. He was nothing but a terrorist. That’s why he was hunted down and killed.

  “No one knows who exactly is in charge of the Cardenal Muerte cartel. It’s why I’ve never let my face be seen except by people who were about to die. That’s my protection. And I’m not interested in taking over a country, I want to destroy one, help it rot from the inside. If there are others who hate the Americans and want my help to attack them, I can g
ive it. Terrorists are tools I can make use of. Besides, what are the Yankees going to do? Kill me? They already did that once, there won’t be a second time.

  “I’ll use their own vices to supply the means to destroy them. It’s simple business. The crack smokers don’t like the crash that comes ten minutes after their high? Then we’ll sell them moonrocks, crack mixed with heroin. Their bodies will still crash, only it won’t hurt as much. With our own laboratories, we’ll produce the drugs ourselves, use our own distribution networks for sales, and eliminate the middle man. That makes for even more money coming in to us, and eliminates a possible infiltration route for DEA agents.

  “The Americans want to die stoned out of their minds? Fine, I’ll help them with their wish. And they can pay me for the privilege. The U.S. tried to kill me once, now I’ll help kill them. Those actions you are so concerned about, what the American military has done in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those have made the Americans a lot of enemies in the world—enemies who also have money. I can have my revenge and make a profit at the same time.

  “The other drug cartels have been afraid to take any of the terrorists’ money and help them. They fear that will risk their precious bottom line, their drug profits. Now that I’m in charge, I say what is the bottom line. Besides, if the U.S. becomes more oppressive of its own people in trying to defend against terrorists, that will just push up the demand for our products. This situation will work for us.”

  Not agreeing with the man who paid him so well, Santiago simply sat there in the spacious room and considered the situation.

  “Using our pipelines to help funnel in terrorist finances is one thing,” Santiago said. “We can profit from that and the threat to us is minimal. But further involvement such as you have been considering, that’s what is really dangerous.”

  Eduardo Masque merely smiled softly at Santiago’s concern. The look in his eyes glinted with a hint of madness.