Sheep Dog and the Wolf

by Douglass, Carl;

  He drove east out of town towards the Rocial del Bosque area using the detailed Google map provided by his Company minders. He stopped from time to time to consult the map as he weaved his way along the Paseo del Bosque, then to the Priv. Los Alamos, and to the north-south Calle Del Rio. He turned immediately onto Calle Del Roble and drove to the end of the road and parked in front of the last of a long block of attached apartment buildings. There were few people on the street at that hour, and he was confident that no one paid him any attention. He took another sleep, this time for four hours.

  Now, the night was deep and dark. There were no street lights in that poor neighborhood. The Sheep Dog took his two bags off the truck bed and selected defensive weapons—his throwing knives, combat knife, sound suppressed 9 mm Beretta, a cross bow, and night vision goggles. He picked up a carrying case the size of a lady’s handbag and slung it over his shoulder. His parking place abutted the unpopulated desert to the west, and Sheep Dog walked around the corner to the left and cautiously made his way over the rough terrain to the next street over, Calle Del Romerillo. On Del Romerillo, the scene was different from that on any of the other streets in Rocial del Bosque.

  There were scores of cars in front of the last apartment parked with no attempt at accommodation of other people who lived in the neighborhood. The walls of the three story apartment building were covered with gang signs, with the words, “MS-13”, “MARA SALVATRUCHA”, and the “Devil’s Horns” hand sign and, more esthetically, artistic renditions of a horned demon. This was the Tijuana home base of MS-13, and the gang obviously considered itself to be above the law since it took no pains to conceal its location or activities. It was another one of those places where the police did not patrol, and the neighbors seldom left their homes.

  Unlike the MS-13 house on Malebar Street in Brooklyn Heights, this apartment building at four o’clock in the morning was dark and silent except for the occasional outcry of a baby. There were no guards; the arrogant apartment dwellers felt no need for security beyond the terrifying intimidation they exerted over the people of the neighborhood, the local police, and the federales. These gangsters were a new breed of criminals in Mexico. Although the gang got its start in Los Angeles in the 1980s, most of them were now Salvadorans—the descendants of Salvadoran guerrillas—the source of most of the gang’s early manpower—men used to killing without a moment’s hesitation and for the slightest motive. The most common belief about the etymology of the gang’s name is that Mara refers to the Spanish slang term for gang, and Salvatrucha refers to the Salvadoran guerrillas. The youngest killer-gangster in the building was thirteen, and he could count thirteen notches on his gun handleone for each year of his lifelike the fabled American bandit, Billy the Kid. The oldest man in the house was thirty-four. Longevity was not a common characteristic of the gang members. Almost every person in the apartments, except for three babies, was intoxicated with alcohol or one or another illicit pharmaceutical.

  Sheep Dog silently padded his way across the dirt ground behind the building. Seeing no one, he tried the door and found it unlocked. He slid into the room and surveyed it with his night vision goggles. It was full of overflowing trash cans. The stench was almost overpowering. The floor was slick with grease and the remains of rotten vegetables and fruit. The cans were filled with diapers, liquor bottles, and wrappers from junk food. The gangsterslike most of the Mexicans around themwere addicted to packaged fast food. Most of the containers were greasy from McDonald’s hamburgers and French fries, which outlet appeared to provide the food staples of preference by far.

  He silently reconnoitered the house floor by floor. On the second floor, in the first apartment at the head of the stairs, he heard a baby cry a few times. From most of the apartments, he could hear deep loud snoring. Apparently the occupants were enjoying the well-earned sleep after a long, hard day’s work—intimidation, rape, plunder, murder, and pillaging are fatiguing. Sheep Dog closed every door and every window he found. He tried several doors and carefully peered inside. Not a single apartment had an open window. Latinos have a fear of letting in the cold night air. There in Rocial del Bosque, the night time temperature had to be in excess of 95°s; but apparently, the occupants were comfortable because the air was very dry.

  Having assured himself that all doors and windows were sealed, Sheep Dog went down to the first floor and began his night’s work. He selected the main room, a cluttered open area that could possibly have been termed a parlor had it ever had a woman’s touch. He opened his satchel, put on white cotton gloves, cleared an eight foot square space, and covered it with aluminum foil. He then opened four bottles of Fumitoxin aluminum phosphide tablets packaged in resealable aluminum flasks, 500/flask, and enclosed in cardboard cases—tablets which produce phosphine gas.

  The gas was the principle poison gas during World War I and thereafter banned by the Geneva Convention. The tablets originated in a Pestcon Systems chemistry lab as a colorless solid which was prepared cheaply and sold as a grey-green-yellow powder—due to impurities—formed into tablets. One tablet releases one gram of phosphine gas, enough to produce 25 ppm of phosphine gas in a volume of 1000 cu. ft. of space. Phosphine gas has an odor like carbide, garlic, or decaying fish, and even the miniscule amount of dust from the opened flask assaulted Sheep Dog’s nostrils. He hurriedly spread about 60 tablets per square foot taking care to avoid contact between individual tablets.

  He now worked with maximum speed to limit his own exposure. The tablets react with moisture from air, water, acids or other liquids to release phosphine gas. The chemical reaction is AIP (aluminum phosphide) +3H2O→Al(OH)3+PH3. Sheep Dog found two humidifiers and a fan to activate the process and spread it into the air. He did not turn the machines on for the moment.

  Sheep Dog washed his hands thoroughly in the fetid bathroom then rushed upstairs to the apartment where he had heard the baby cry out. He opened the apartment door, gun in hand; he need not have bothered. A naked man and woman lay with limbs akimbo on their sweated bed. Two children—one a girl of about a year of age, and a boy that looked to be two—lay naked on a filthy, fecal soiled mattress. Sheep Dog stood over the babies, took out a flask and poured just enough chloroform to moisten a handkerchief and put the anesthetic cloth over the children’s faces. When he was sure they were fully unconscious but still breathing, he picked them up and rushed them down the stairs and ran to a car parked on the street. He put the children gently down on the rear seat and, on the front seat, left the same calling card and receipt as he had left in the gaudy low-rider in Brooklyn Heights the night before.

  He dashed back to the house, all of his senses operating at maximum adrenalin warp speed, and placed a pan of water in front of the fan and turned on the fan and the humidifiers. He took a moment to evaluate his work while holding his breath then turned and ran out of the building and back to his truck.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Before Sheep Dog reached his destination at noon the next day, every person in the MS-13 apartment building was dead. Usually, death from Fumitoxin rodent poison takes hours or even days to work in humans, but the huge excess of poison he spread on the aluminum sheets that wafted as deadly phosphine gas spread throughout the tightly closed apartment building rapidly produced dizziness, cyanosis, unconsciousness, severe pulmonary edema, and a suffocating death. When the bodies were discovered by gang members coming in the next day, all of the bodies were bloated; a frothy red foam was drying around their mouths; and they had soaked their beds with bloody urine, victims of their own overarching arrogance and the wrath of their great account keeper, the Sheep Dog.

  Sheep Dog drove out of the city on Benito Juarez Highway well to the east until he turned north onto Presidente Lazaro Cardenas road in Tecate. He parked his truck in a back alley and abandoned it. He carried his bags two blocks north to Tecate Industrial Road and found the caretaker’s shack on the east side of the wide expanse of concrete roadway and loading ramps with lines of semi-trailer trucks parked
in neat rows. The shack was tucked between two tall cypress trees behind six over filled Dempsey Dumpsters. No one appeared to be anywhere around, but his instructions and directions had been explicit. This was the right place.

  He found an obscure piece of shade behind a stack of plastic bags of trash and drifted off to sleep. Nearly four hours later, the sound of voices coming from the vicinity of the caretaker’s shack alerted him to the presence of people and danger. He became instantly alert and felt for the reassurance of the handle of his knife in its belt scabbard. He left his bags by the trash bags and walked warily towards the voices.

  “Buenas tardes, señor,” he said to a thin light skinned Latino with the Cassius face wearing a yellow guayabera decorated with white lace work.

  “Qué tal, Viejo?”

  Sheep Dog switched to English. He had taken an instant and instinctive dislike to the man. Maybe it was his greased-down pompadour, or maybe it was the intentional display of a Bowie knife hanging from his belt.

  The coyote shifted into his second language smoothly. “Jou the man that the federales tol’ me to take over?”

  “Um-hmmh.”

  “Jou steel gottu pay. I don’ take notheeng but cash—American cash. Jou got that?”

  “How much?”

  “Two thousand.”

  “More like three hundred.”

  The human trafficker gave Sheep Dog a hard look.

  “Jou keedin’ me, man? Jou really think I’m gonna haggle like one of those Tijuana street punks?”

  “What’s your real price. Let’s get on with it.”

  “I won’ take jou for anythin’ less than a thou’. Thass it.”

  Sheep Dog fought with himself. He so wanted to smash that smirk off the man’s face. The coyote spat a black gob of chewing tobacco through a missing front tooth. Some of the spittle landed on Sheep Dog’s shoe. His jaw tightened.

  “I have two bags that go with me.”

  “No jou don’. Bags hold us back, can’ run from the Migran.”

  “I can run from the border patrol. I can run faster, and I can run longer than you can or they can. The bags go.”

  The coyote did not like the look in the man’s cruel eyes. That look was not a put-on like his sometimes was. This was born in him—generado del Diablo!

  “Jou pay an extra thou’, eets hokay.”

  “500, and no more crap from you, amigo.” Sheep Dog drew out the “aamiigo” so that the disrespect was palpable.

  The coyote shrugged and accepted five crisp 100 dollar notes. He stuffed the money into his shirt pocket, then gave a sharp dog whistle. Seven frightened people peered out of the door of the caretaker’s shack and moved tentatively out into the open.

  “Les get going,” the coyote snapped. “Vamos!”

  Sheep Dog hefted his two precious bags and fell in behind the coyote in front of the line of timid and obedient would-be illegal border crossers. He had time to scrutinize them. Aside from one elderly man dressed in peasant attire that would make him a classical poster of a campesino, there were six members of one family. At least, Sheep Dog presumed that they were one family: a man who was affectionate with and protective of a pretty young woman, three young girlsnone of whom was more than ninewho clung to their mother’s skirts, and a teenage boy and girl, who might have been cousins of the rest. The little snake of followers moved along in near absolute silence. The investment made by the family, Sheep Dog later learned, had been exorbitant—$ 1,200 per person up front in Mexico and another $300 if and when they reached the other side of the border.

  The U.S. Mexico border region is currently experiencing unparalleled trade and exchange as cross-border flows of goods and people continue to reach new highs. The U.S. border economy thrives on the daily influx of tourists, shoppers, workers and immigrants from Mexico. Approximately 700,000 Mexicans cross legally into the United States every day to shop and work, returning at night to their homes in Mexico.

  A much smaller number of border crossers enter illegally. Illegal immigrants represent only about 0.5 percent of total south to north border crossings. Still, the continuous flow of illegal aliens—upwards of 500,000 each year—over the past 35 years has contributed to an illegal immigrant population estimated at between 7 million and 20 million people—about 60 percent of them from Mexico.

  Because the poverty in Mexico is so pervasive—owing in large part to governmental corruption—and U.S. border patrol vigilance is so high, illegal immigrants tend to hire smugglers—human traffickers, known as “coyotes”—and there has been a steady increase in coyote prices over time. Migrants are more likely to hire coyotes when they perceive a higher chance of apprehension were they to attempt a crossing on their own. If coyotes are more in demand or if risks increase—as is the case when criminal penalties on smuggling are increased—use of coyotes and prices rise.

  There are more evils in the system. For U.S. law enforcement, there is drug smuggling and the movement of violent criminals crossing the border to join up with gangs like MS-13 and unfortunates who are pushed to emigrate illegally into the United States. U.S. law enforcement personnel have become somewhat more inclined to engaged in shoot-outs more quickly for their own safety; and coyotes care only for money and have been knownall too oftento cheat the emigrants out of their money, rape the girls, leave the emigrants in the desert no-mans land between Hermosillo State and San Diego County to perish of heat and thirst, and even to murder them outright somewhere out there in the desert.

  The constant threat of encountering U.S. Border Patrol agents or even Mexican Federales is a severe strain on the emigrants who stand to lose their investment and be forced to return to their meager poverty ridden lives in Mexico and points south. Ever since the 1844 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which established the U.S./Mexico border, the efforts to secure the southern border of the United States have escalated. At the time of the Sheep Dog’s crossing, the border was guarded by more than seventeen thousand border patrol agents. However, they only have effective control of less than 700 miles of the 1,954 miles of total border. Border Patrol activity is concentrated around big border cities such as San Diego which do have extensive border fencing. As a consequence, the flow of illegal immigrants is diverted into rural mountainous and desert areas, or more recently through cross-border tunnels, leading to several hundred migrant deaths along the Mexico-U.S. border each year.

  Sheep Dog was well aware of all of that and did not want to become an accidental casualty in the ongoing border war. He did not let down his guard for a second. He was prepared for a truck ride or a long walk into the desert, but was astonished when the little troupe had advanced less than 100 yards before the coyote signaled a stop. Sheep Dog fingered his knife.

  “Thees is eet.”

  “This is what,” Sheep Dog thought.

  Sensing the bemusement in his little following, the coyote laughed softly but heartily.

  “I love thees part. Thees is where we cross.”

  Despite the darkness, Sheep Dog could easily make out the outlines of the forbidding border fence.

  “Jou there, big one, ayudame with thees cover.”

  He was kneeling in a six foot square flat area surrounded by the trees Sheep Dog had noted to the north as he had reconnoitered the Tecate industrial area when it was still light out. The coyote was working a pry-bar along the edges of the vegetation covered piece of desert among the trees.

  “Here, jou use this bar, gringo,” he said and handed Sheep Dog a crow-bar that he produced from nowhere.

  Sheep Dog thought it was an ingenious hiding spot for a tunnel opening, and he had to hand it to the resourcefulness of the coyotes as they made their fortunes in the human trafficking business. He set to work. Shortly, the two men had the edge of a trap door in view; and they heaved it up until it stood by itself. Sheep Dog peered into a well-made maw of a tunnel. It was as black as a mine shaft below.

  “Vengan,” the coyote called down into the tunnel.

  At his comma
nd, three men clamored out onto the floor of the desert. They were as fine looking a set of pirates as ever raped a captive, scuttled a ship, and cut a throat. The four outlaws gave each other a quick hug and surreptitiously flashed the devil’s head hand sign, unseen by anyone but Sheep Dog. He set himself.

  On their way out, the three fellow conspirators had switched on a light which illuminated a sloping passageway that was as well engineered and lined with support beams and concrete walls, ceiling, and floor. The tunnel had a row of naked light bulbs that lit the entire distance across the border, Sheep Dog presumed.

  The coyote pushed the young husband into the tunnel opening.

  “Catch jour whelps,” he whispered loudly and pushed the little ones down into the opening.

  The father had barely enough time to catch each of them. The old campesino jumped down of his own volition. The pretty young wife was crying softly from fear. The teenagers stood at the margin of the tunnel paralyzed with fear.

  “Now, jou, beeg one. Jump!”

  He pushed on Sheep Dog’s back. Sheep Dog had assumed a very stable karate stance, and the coyote’s push was as if the man was trying to knock over a tree.

  “I stay until she goes, and I come in behind you.”

  “She don’ go until we get a little piece of her, jou entiendes, amigo?”

  “Yo entiendo, but it’s not going to happen. We paid you good money to cross, and cross we will. Leave her alone and get back to business.”

  The coyote and the three pirates laughed—evil, arrogant laughs. One looked directly into Sheep Dog’s face, stretched out a dirty hand and ripped open the girl’s blouse exposing her. Her eldest daughter, watching from the pit, let out a yelp. Her father put his had over her mouth. He had seen this exact scene before, and it was not unexpected. The teenagers covered their faces; they had seen this and worse in their short years of life; but they did not want to see any more than they had to.