Oath to Defend

by Scott Matthews

  He walked quickly out of the banquet room and through the kitchen, where he saw that the restaurant staff had died at their work stations. When he reached the loading dock, he heard the police sirens. He had planned to leave by taxi from the hotel, but now he thought better of it. His men had been told to leave the delivery van’s keys in the ignition. He was pleased to see they had obeyed. He stepped up into the cab and started the engine. Driving carefully down the alley to the Avenue of the Heroes half a block away, he pulled into southbound traffic. He opened the cell phone he’d been given.

  “I’m leaving now, Felipe. Tell your boss the good news. He alone is El Supremo in Tijuana. See you in five minutes.”

  “And your men, señor?”

  “They are in Paradise, as Allah promised. Tell Saleem it’s time for him to keep his promise.”

  “You can tell him yourself,” Calderon replied. “We celebrate tonight. My boss wants to meet you. You have done him a great favor.”

  “Get me out of here safely, and you will have done me a great favor.”

  “No problem. The police here are our friends.”

  14

  When their Gulfstream landed in Tijuana, where the sultry night air was heavy with the smells of burned jet fuel and pollution, it was met by two black Suburbans and men wearing blue and black fatigues.

  “Mike, keep our guys here,” Drake said, as he climbed down the ladder. “No use showing them what we bring to the party before we know if there’s a party.” He walked toward an agent walking toward him.

  The agent extended his right hand. “Drake, I’m Special Agent Cooper. Welcome to Tijuana. Have your men join us and we’ll talk.”

  “I told them to stay in the plane until I know if we’re staying.”

  “Oh, you’ll be staying, all right. Washington pulled in some favors Mexico owes us. They’ve agreed to raid the villa.”

  “Do we get to join you?”

  “Only two of you as advisors, and no guns. They want to be able to take full credit if the raid is successful. My men will be armed, but Mexico’s go in first.”

  Drake nodded. “Fine, but I want to be right behind you. I’ll go tell my guys.” He turned and went back to the Gulfstream.

  Back in the forward cabin, he sat across from his friend. “Only two of us get to go,” he said loud enough for the others to hear. “No guns. And we’re only allowed to observe. Mike, you still have those Glock 30’s and ankle holsters?”

  “Sure do. I thought we might need them.”

  “Are they here in the cabin or stowed with our luggage?”

  “In the back, I’ll get them.”

  As Casey stood up, Drake turned to Gonzalez. “Roberto, you can monitor us on the team radios. Let me know if you hear anything hinky from any of the Mexican army around us. The DEA might trust them, but we don’t have to. We’ll be too far away for you to get to us in time if we need help, but stay with the plane. I don’t want anything missing when we get back.”

  “You want a vest?” Mike asked when he returned with the Glocks. “The radios are in the vest pockets.”

  “Only way to dress for a party like this,” Drake said as he strapped his Glock on his right ankle and pulled on the bulletproof vest. “Now let’s go see if we can find our terrorist.”

  Special Agent Cooper stood beside his SUV talking with a Mexican army officer. “Gentlemen,” he said, nodding at Drake and Casey, “this is Major Rafael Castillo, head of Mexico’s war on the cartels in this region. He will lead the raid tonight.”

  Major Castillo did not look like a Mexican commando. Tall, with blue eyes and a light complexion, he looked more like a California beach boy than a soldier. Those blue eyes, however, showed the toughness required to fight the cartels in Mexico.

  “Gentlemen,” he said in almost unaccented English as they shook hands, “Special Agent Cooper has worked with me before and assures me you will not get in my way. Make it so. We know of the villa you have identified. It is owned by a man we have been watching. He has no connection to the cartels that we have found. He is connected, however, to many of our politicians from Baja Mexico. For that reason, we will be very careful tonight. We will also be very careful because an important cartel member and his family were assassinated at a birthday party this afternoon. The cartels will have blood in their eyes for anyone moving against them. You are welcome to observe, but that is all I can allow you to do. Is that understood?”

  “It’s your call, Major,” Drake said. “The man we’re after is a danger to both of us, but he’s here in your country. We appreciate you being willing to take him on. We won’t get in your way.”

  “Good. My two Black Hawks will be here soon. You’ll ride in the second one,” Major Castillo said as he turned and walked toward a nearby hangar, where soldiers were mustering.

  “Castillo’s good,” Special Agent Cooper told them. “He attended college at Texas A&M, ROTC, then enlisted in the Marines. He has dual citizenship, but came back home to fight the cartels. He’s a good leader, but he doesn’t exactly have crack troops to lead. So keep your heads down. What he said about a cartel leader getting whacked is troubling. When the cartels are at war, it’s worse than anything the Godfather movies ever portrayed.”

  “Does this assassination have anything to do with our guy?” Drake asked. “Barak had a working relationship with the cartels, and if our intel is correct, he just arrived in Tijuana.”

  “Who knows. All the police here say is that the brother of the Architect—the former head of the cartel—was assassinated by two black Muslims with prison tattoos. Who the hell knows how they’re involved. An opposing cartel could be trying to throw us off. Make us think this was some outside group that did this.”

  Drake looked at Casey, who knew enough to keep silent. If Barak was here using his men to carry out a hit, it made sense if he wanted the protection of the cartels for awhile. Or he was joining in their smuggling enterprise as he had before.

  When the Black Hawks flew in low and landed in front of the hangar, Special Agent Cooper led them to the second helicopter and motioned them in.

  “Since you are their special guests, they saved the window seats for you,” he said with a smile. “Of course, they’ll probably fly with the cargo doors open.”

  Drake returned Cooper’s smile. He and Casey had flown more times in Black Hawks than either of them cared to remember. Flying with the cargo doors open was routine.

  The flight south from Tijuana took less than fifteen minutes. They flew down the Guadalupe Valley and landed in a flat area next to a swimming pool below the villa. No sooner had they touched down than gun fire raked both helicopters as the soldiers jumped out and took positions behind the retaining wall around the pool. Major Castillo gave hand signals to his men to move out in three groups and up a slight hill toward the villa. At the same time, Drake and Casey took cover behind the retaining wall and watched the soldiers advance on the villa, firing controlled bursts from their AK 47’s.

  Drake frowned. “Mike, there’s no sound from the incoming rounds. What are these guys using?”

  “Only thing I know of is the Kalashnikov AK-9,” Casey said, ducking his head as rounds peppered the swimming pool behind them. “Almost no sound, fires 9 mm rounds that can penetrate bulletproof vests.”

  “I hope Castillo knows that. If he doesn’t, he’s going to lose a lot of his guys.”

  As the soldiers moved in on the villa, the fighting intensified, then suddenly stopped. In the silence, Drake signaled Casey to move to the right end of the retaining wall as he moved to the left end. Either Castillo had won or there would be men moving down to finish them as well.

  When he looked up again, the light coming from the veranda revealed Major Castillo turning over a cartel defender with his boot. Satisfied the man was dead, he turned toward Drake and waved.

  “Come up and look for your man.”

  Walking up the gravel path to the villa, they saw that Castillo’s pincer tactic had caught
the cartel men falling back to protect the villa, where they were mowed down in a crossfire. It looked like Castillo had lost several men.

  In the villa’s main room, they found two men lying face down at the foot of a staircase and several others that had fallen around the doorway they had defended. Their bodies had been mutilated by the savage fire from the soldiers.

  “These two were trying to reach the stairs when we came in,” Castillo said. “We haven’t been upstairs, so I don’t know if anyone is there. Would you like to wait for my men to clear the second floor? Or would you rather go look for yourselves?”

  Drake picked up an AK 9 lying next to one of the dead men and headed for the stairs. “We have some experience at this,” he said. “We’ll go look.”

  Casey picked up the other AK 9 on the floor and followed Drake up the stairs, at the top of which they moved down each side of the hallway that ran the length of the second floor. There were doors on both sides. The first two rooms they cleared were empty bedrooms, with unmade beds and clothes on the floor. The third room was a den, complete with a massive flat panel TV, a pool table, and a poker table where men had been sitting, judging from cigars left in the ash trays.

  Next to the den was a larger bedroom with a balcony. The bed was neatly made, but here, too, they saw a cigar left in an ash tray. There were several magazines and a brochure on a mahogany writing desk. Drake picked up the half-smoked cigar, made sure it was cold, then looked at the magazines. The first was titled Mallet, The International Magazine of Polo, the second was Polo America. The brochure announced a charity polo match in Bend, Oregon. Drake didn’t know anything about polo, but he pocketed the brochure just in case. He doubted the cartel guys cared about polo in Oregon, but if Barak had been in the villa there might be a connection he could look into.

  After they finished clearing the second floor, they returned downstairs and found Major Castillo talking to Special Agent Cooper.

  “We were able to have a conversation with one of the sicarios, or cartel hit men,” the major was saying, “before he unfortunately died. I did not think he was so badly injured, but you know…things happen. He told me the one they call El Verdugo, the Executioner, had been here with his bodyguard and two others he did not know but who were not Mexicans. He said they left in a helicopter, after they got a message we were coming.”

  “Damn it!” Cooper said. “I’m so tired of them always being one step ahead of us.”

  Castillo smiled sympathetically. “Until we pay our people as much as the cartels do,” he said, “they will always be ahead. But tonight, not all of them got away. We lost a few, but they lost many more.”

  Drake tapped the major on the arm. “Did the unfortunate sicario describe the ones who weren’t Mexican?” he asked.

  “Only that one was older, maybe sixty, and spoke only English. He said he was only here for several days.”

  That had to be Barak, Drake thought. Where was he headed now?

  15

  Barak looked down at the silver sea below reflecting the full moon’s light. The cartel’s Bell 429 helicopter was flying west from the coast of Baja Mexico. Back at the villa, after taking care of the Architect’s brother, he had been treated with respect and served a Mexican feast of green poblano chiles stuffed with meat, fruits and nuts, lamb shank with chiles, tequila and garlic and the favorite of El Verdugo, a brick red mole served with grilled iguana. Unfortunately, the celebration had been interrupted by a phone call warning them that the army was on its way.

  Now, Barak had been informed, they were headed for an island in the Pacific where the cartel sponsored a research station at an abandoned abalone fishing village. Two university students who were sons of his cartel’s familia were doing legitimate research there, studying the shrinking abalone beds. The true purpose of the facility, however, was to serve as a base for the cartel’s helicopters as they retrieved drug shipments from oil tankers from Venezuela headed to Los Angeles. Special shipments like his demolition nuke were also brought in this way.

  He had to admit that he had underestimated the sophistication of the cartel. He knew it was international in its reach, but now he was learning it was also a finely tuned business. Violence was a tool it used with great effect, obviously, but its real power lay in its wealth and growing influence both in Mexico and elsewhere. Investments in real estate, the construction of new resorts, marinas and hotels, and even philanthropic involvement all served as legal means to influence local authorities. When that wasn’t enough, outright bribes were usually successful. When they weren’t, those who refused to cooperate simply disappeared.

  The cartel’s leader, El Verdugo, wasn’t what Barak had expected. In appearance, he was ordinary, a short, thin man with thinning hair who wore round, wire-framed glasses that made him look like a professor. Behind those modest glasses, his eyes burned with a cruel ferocity that was intimidating, even if you didn’t know his reputation. Those eyes softened slightly only when he smiled, which was infrequently. As a host, however, he was as gracious as a desert sheik welcoming a weary traveler into his tent.

  When they landed in front of a concrete block house at the end of a row of four metal Quonset huts, El Verdugo waved for Barak to follow him as they climbed out of the helicopter.

  “Come inside, my friend,” he said. “We’ll have a drink while I see if we’ve learned why the army came for us.”

  Inside the block house that was part office, with desks, computers, and phones, and part laboratory, with fish tanks, metal trays of specimens, and microscopes, Barak examined a wall of underwater photos of brilliantly colored fish and other sea organisms. If this research station was just a front for a smuggling operation, he said to himself, it was a very convincing front.

  When El Verdugo got off the phone, he joined Barak in front of the photo wall. “The beauty of this is getting paid by the government to study global warming and its effect on abalone,” he said with a smile. “The abalone have not been good here for a long, long time, or the village would not be deserted. They pay us anyway to find out why. Science is a beautiful thing, no?”

  When Barak nodded, El Verdugo went on. “My men tell me the army was looking for you, Señor Barak. They say you are a terrorist. That must be worse than a criminal. They never raided my villa before and like you, I have killed.”

  “Were Americans involved in this raid?” Barak asked.

  “One DEA and two others. You know them?”

  “Maybe, they could be the ones from Cancun.”

  “Then the sooner you are on your way, the better. I know when our army is coming, but America’s president likes to use his drone missiles, and I won’t know when they’re coming.”

  “Don’t worry,” Barak assured him. “When I have my merchandise from Venezuela, I’ll be on my way. Besides, you work with Hezbollah. You already have a target on your back. But America won’t strike here. They can’t even stop your violence along the border.”

  El Verdugo laughed. “They are afraid the ACLU will sue them if they shoot us.” He took a bottle of tequila out of a locked cabinet and raised it in a toast. “I salud the ACLU, my American friends.”

  Barak accepted the shot glass he was handed and raised it in a second toast to the ACLU. It was true, he thought. America was afraid to use its power. If he ran the country, every drug smuggler he caught would be executed, every person critical of the government would be in jail, and homosexuals would lose their heads on TV every day until their abomination was erased from the face of the earth. How America remained powerful for as long as it had baffled him.

  When he had the device he was waiting for, he would be the one to show America that its days were numbered. One small demolition nuke the size of a small refrigerator would blow a hole in America’s confidence and cripple it forever. He would soon have this device. All he needed was a couple more days to get the nuke across the border. He also had to make sure the Mexican didn’t try to snatch it for himself.

  He sipped and s
wallowed. “My friend, when do you expect your helicopter will return from the oil tanker?”

  “It will be back before daylight. You should get some sleep.” El Verdugo put the bottle away. “We’ll sleep in the Quonset hut next door and leave in the morning. You go ahead, I’ll call the pilot and make sure everything is okay.”

  Barak left, but he had no intention of sleeping. There were only six people that he knew of at the research station: the two students; El Verdugo and his bodyguard; Saleem Canaan, the Hezbollah commander and himself. When the helicopter returned, the pilot would make seven unless the pilot brought others back with him. If they wanted to take the nuke for themselves, that’s when they would have to make a move. He wasn’t worried about Saleem, as they were fighting the same war, but a nuke delivered on a silver platter to the cartel without costing them a cent was a huge temptation.

  The Quonset hut, which was newer than it looked, was divided into sleeping quarters plus a large open area for the kitchen and one long, wooden table scarred with the carved initials and the cigarette burns left by past guests. A large marine propane heater was mounted to the bulkhead that separated the eating and sleeping areas on one side of a door to the rear of the hut. To the right of the door was a locked metal cabinet that he guessed served as the research station’s armory. A couple well-worn couches were positioned in front of the propane heater.

  Barak walked through the sleeping quarters, inspecting ten small rooms, five on each side, each equipped with an army cot, a metal wardrobe locker, and a plain wooden night stand with a lamp. All of the rooms were empty. At the end of the hallway was a military-style latrine with two shower stalls, five sinks with mirrors, and two toilets. There were two windows on the rear wall on each side of the row of sinks. These windows opened outward from the bottom as far as short chains attached to them would allow.