by Matt Rogers
He didn’t get the chance to finish that thought.
A six-foot-five giant of a man rounded the side of the forklift, spotted King cowering behind the vehicle, and raised his pistol. The man bared his teeth as he aimed, milliseconds from having a lock on King.
King dotted his bare pectorals with a triangle of expertly-placed bullets from the Five-seven. Each steel-core round tore through muscle and bone, like heat-seeking missiles locked onto vital organs. The giant man jerked unnaturally with each impact and collapsed in a sweaty heap, knocking over one of the open-topped barrels in the process.
It had been filled with gasoline.
King sensed an opportunity. He darted over to the closest fertiliser barrel and fired the last two bullets in the Five-seven’s twenty-round magazine into the dry heap of mulch. Then he tossed the empty firearm away. The heat of the rounds singed a small patch of the fertiliser. King reached in, snatched a handful of the burnt gunk, and tossed it over to the expanding puddle of foul-smelling fuel.
Flames powered out in all directions from the impact point, spreading fast. They snaked their way up the nearest workstation and set the coca leaves atop its surface ablaze. The leaves cracked and popped under the heat, drawing enough attention for King to slip behind the wall of barrels and sprint for the other side of the warehouse, still clutching the Sig-Sauer P226 in his right hand.
He couldn’t suppress the panic much longer. The warehouse was a ticking time bomb, packed full of high-testosterone cartel-employed killers intent on causing as much chaos as humanly possible. He was relying on the distraction of the inferno near the entrance in a desperate bid to buy himself some time. With each passing second, he realised the unlikelihood of finding and eliminating Ramos. There was no guarantee that the man was even here in the first place.
If he was, he almost certainly would have fled the premises by now.
But King wasn’t a quitter.
He pushed himself faster, racing down the empty stretch of concrete floor, shielded by the wall of barrels to his right and the corrugated iron wall to his left.
Suddenly, a group of four cartel thugs appeared at the end of the corridor. All of them were in the process of backing into cover, avoiding a sudden burst of fire from the opposing party. King couldn’t tell whether they were members of the Draco cartel or Ramos’ men — every thug in the building was dressed in loose casual clothing.
They saw him, though.
And they seemed to know exactly who he was.
King’s heart spiked into his throat as he saw four assault rifle barrels swinging in his direction. There was nowhere to take cover, no viable alternative to getting his torso shredded to pieces.
Then he saw an exit door set into the wall to his left. It was firmly shut, probably locked. Acting with animalistic intensity, he powered off one leg and threw himself into the door, lacking the time it would take to reach for the handle. A handful of initial gunshots sounded from the other end of the corridor, just as he went airborne.
If the door didn’t give, he would very likely knock himself unconscious from the impact, rendered helpless to stop the cartel thugs gunning his limp body into a bloody pulp.
He forced the thought out of his mind and hoped for the best.
He crashed shoulder-first into the door, hitting it with an almighty thud. His brain rattled inside his skull, dazing him, but he was brought back to the realm of the living by bright sunlight flooding his senses.
The door had burst outward from the impact.
King sprawled awkwardly across the parking lot outside the building, slapping the smooth concrete with his hands first. He rolled in ungainly fashion onto his back, keeping an iron grip on the P226. It was his only lifeline.
He brought his aim around to lock onto the open doorway he had just burst through. It wouldn’t take much effort for the four thugs to follow him out of the building. King didn’t fancy his chances against the group.
One sidearm against four heavily-armed adrenalin-fuelled gangsters weren’t the best odds.
At some point, sheer firepower overwhelmed even the most acutely refined reflexes.
He spent so long fixated on the dark space in the side of the warehouse that he tuned out everything happening behind him. He didn’t hear the howling sirens — they were drowned out by his heartbeat pounding in his ears.
As he vaulted to his feet, he didn’t sense the movement behind him, approaching fast.
He heard the yelling, the frantic authoritative commands blurted out in Spanish, but didn’t turn in time. He kept his vision tunnelled onto the open doorway, expecting the four cartel thugs to come barrelling into view at any moment.
He realised his mistake far too late.
The police officers closed in on him and tackled him to the concrete.
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He squirmed and bucked and writhed, with no success. The pair of bodies outweighed him heavily, and he found himself unable to resist arrest.
Firm hands yanked his arms behind his back and the cold bite of steel sunk into his wrists. The cuffs were wrenched tight, pinning his arms against the small of his back. Someone tore the P226 out of his grip, disarming him in the space of a second.
He struggled to get his vision under control, head swimming from where it had smacked face-first against the concrete. He tasted rivulets of blood in his mouth — he’d bitten his tongue in several different places. A couple of the cuts from the previous day had re-opened, sending crimson rivers dripping off his chin into his lap.
The two police officers sat him up and one of them trained their rifle on him.
King gulped back apprehension.
Unless something changed, he was going to jail for a long time.
Or worse.
As he sat on the scorching ground underneath the intense glare of the sun beating down overhead, he narrowed his vision in an attempt to make out what was going on. Everything was unfolding too quickly.
An officer stood on either side of him, both dressed in plain olive uniforms and communicating back and forth in Spanish. He had no idea what was being said. He waited to see what would happen next.
Then the four cartel henchmen materialised in the open doorway, just as King let his head droop onto his chest from fatigue.
He bolted upright, suddenly terrified.
As far as he could tell, he was about to be caught in the no-man’s-land of a devastating shootout. Cartels and law enforcement spelled nothing but disaster.
But nothing happened.
King sat helplessly on the ground between the two parties, wincing involuntarily, ducking his head in a feeble attempt to protect himself. No gunshots followed. There was no panicked screaming, no rapid outbursts of commands.
Just silence.
One of the policemen piped up. ‘Draco?’
The four-man team of cartel thugs nodded simultaneously.
‘Go!’ the policeman yelled to his colleagues.
A cluster of law enforcement officers hurried inside the building, letting the Draco thugs lead them to their pre-determined destination. King couldn’t believe his eyes. One of the officers stayed back to watch over King, keeping the barrel of his sidearm trained on the top of his head at all times.
King realised he shouldn’t have been surprised.
Lars had explicitly told him that local law enforcement was on the payroll of the Draco cartel. That had been the main obstacle in Ramos attempting to seize control of Tijuana. It seemed that once the Draco cartel had located one of Ramos’ facilities, they had stormed the place themselves, but called in bribed officials as reinforcements in the event that their attack didn’t go as planned.
The police would move in to clean up the rest.
King stared at the ground, riding out the pounding headache that had flared to life behind his eyeballs. He contemplated just how far the influence of the cartels reached. In the end, he was out of his depth. His initial questions to Lars had been spot-on.
What can one man
do against this system?
He had entered this dark city with a single goal — eliminate Joaquín Ramos. When that hadn’t unfolded according to plan, he’d foolishly allowed himself to get wrapped up in the quagmire of the cartel wars.
Now, he would pay the price.
With gunshots echoing off the walls inside the building, accompanied by ear-piercing screams, he considered the ramifications of his actions. He would no doubt be treated as a member of Ramos’ cartel, seeing that he had been apprehended outside one of the man’s facilities. That would lead to a back-alley firing squad, or an unobstructed trial and a life sentence in one of Mexico’s toughest prisons.
Neither option appealed to him all that much.
Why would Ramos have been here? he thought.
Realisation dawned on him. He had been acting on a wild hunch, based on the idea that Ramos would be foolish enough to hang around one of his packaging facilities and risk arrest or murder. The man was smarter than that.
Evidently, King was not.
He tuned out the distant din of gunfire, detaching himself from the war taking place within the warehouse. He never should have let himself get involved with it. He should have accepted defeat when Ramos first escaped from the apartment complex and retreated back over the border with his tail between his legs.
Instead, he had only worsened the situation. Lars would no doubt be vilified for believing in an inexperienced, twenty-two year old prodigy with no extensive training in solo operations. He had worked off his impulses, having bought into Lars’ belief that the tunnel vision he experienced in the heat of battle would be enough to pull him through death-defying situations.
It had been.
But the only result of those actions were a few dead gangsters.
He was no closer to the people in charge.
And he was headed for a corrupt police station next.
King barely noticed the conflict reach its conclusion. Policemen emerged from the side exits to the warehouse, dragging their wounded comrades with them, bloodied and bruised. A pair of the hard-faced officers hauled King to his feet, ignoring his questions.
‘What did I do?’ he said as they dragged him toward one of the sedans that had pulled into the otherwise-empty parking lot. Its lights were still flashing.
The policeman to his left backhanded him across the face. King spat blood onto the hot concrete.
‘I’m not involved with this,’ he said. ‘I’m not with them.’
No-one cared.
They were on the Draco payroll.
They would do as their financiers requested.
Which clearly meant delivering King and anyone else who had lived through the shootout into their open arms.
He forced all thoughts of what they might do to him out of his mind.
How long would it take them to realise he knew nothing about Ramos’ operation?
How damaged would he be by that point?
Another police officer caught up to the pair hauling King, and the trio began to babble back and forth in Spanish, gesticulating wildly as they did so. They were in the midst of debating what to do with him. King kept his mouth shut and let them figure it out amongst themselves.
Maybe one of them was feeling merciful.
When they reached the police cruiser, fat fingers pressed into the back of his neck and forced him into the vehicle. A thin sheet of wire mesh separated the rear compartment from the driver and passenger’s seat. With his hands still crushed behind him, King found himself helpless to resist. One of the officers piled in on either side of him, pinning him into the middle seat. They kept their weapons trained on him.
They think you’re dangerous, he thought.
Their caution meant there was nothing he could do. The third guy skirted around to the driver’s side and slipped into the car. He placed a hand on the wheel and fired the sedan to life.
They squealed out of the lot, rubber burning against the asphalt as the driver hurried away from the scene. King got the sense that they wanted to hide the fact that they had him in their possession. A broad-shouldered American male would be noticeable, an odd sight amidst the army of Latino thugs and maquiladora factory-workers occupying the warehouse.
Maybe they thought he was in charge of the facility.
Maybe they were going to hand-deliver him to the Draco cartel as fast as possible.
And Draco wouldn’t know any different.
The thought made him squirm slightly in his seat, causing the police officer on the left to jam the barrel of his sidearm into King’s ribs. He froze in an attempt to calm the situation. The last thing he wanted was a trigger-happy cop ending his life before he had the chance to try and flee.
The possibility of escape began to grow less likely with each passing second. Their sedan mounted a curving single-lane path that ran around to the front of the complex. King peered through the open roller doors as they passed the warehouse entrance. He spotted corpses everywhere — some were clearly wearing the cheap, baggy clothes of factory workers.
Maquiladora workers who didn’t know any better, trying to make a hard-earned peso and caught in the crossfire.
Ruthless bastards, King thought.
Already, commotion had unfolded around the entrance to the property. The scene had been cordoned off by a makeshift barricade of similar-looking police sedans. Local law enforcement, out in full force at the request of the Draco cartel.
They weren’t here to keep the peace.
They were here to hinder Ramos’ operation.
King didn’t condone what Ramos was doing, but the Draco cartel were no better.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend…
Not in this case.
Two of the sedans in the barricade reversed away from each other to let the cruiser through. King glanced out the windows on either side of him, making eye contact with a handful of local police officers standing guard out the front of the warehouse. They all gave him the evil eye as the sedan he sat in roared out onto the open road.
The driver stamped on the accelerator and gunned it away from the warehouse.
King bowed his head, struggling to control his nerves. It was the first time he’d found himself in a truly dangerous situation, helpless to the decisions of a corrupt handful of police officers in a foreign country.
The drug war was not a safe place to make mistakes.
Suddenly, King realised that also applied to the corrupt policemen all around him.
It began with the man in the passenger seat arching forward in his seat, peering out the windscreen at an odd angle. King saw the guy’s eyes widen significantly. As they reached the T-junction at the end of the long, factory-lined street, the man started to babble incoherently in Spanish. He gesticulated ahead, turning to the driver, his voice rising in volume with each passing moment.
‘Federales!’ the man screamed.
The driver cursed and yanked on the handbrake…
… just as an armoured police cruiser cut them off, crushing into the sedan’s bonnet with enough force to send the car squealing into an uncontrollable centrifugal spin.
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No-one had bothered to put on their seat belts, let alone secure their prisoner.
King went airborne, crushing the officer to his left. He smacked his head against the roof and suppressed a grunt of agony. At the same time, the officer he’d thrust into the door accidentally fell against the handle, releasing the mechanism. The door swung outward.
With the sedan still fishtailing wildly across the intersection, King and the policeman were helpless to resist the laws of physics. The officer tumbled out of the moving vehicle, and with no handhold to snatch at, King tipped across one shoulder and sprawled out of the open doorway.
He saw nothing but a blur of motion before the hot asphalt rushed up to meet him. He rolled as best he could, his hands still secured behind his back by the cuffs. He was still largely inexperienced in volatile situations like these, but he used the massive do
se of adrenalin to full effect, ignoring the bumps and bruises that were smashed into existence as he slapped the hard road in the middle of the intersection.
He rolled to his feet in one smooth motion and sprung out of the path of an oncoming pick-up truck. The driver shook his fist at King out the open window, infuriated by the commotion. Then he noticed what was unfolding in front of him and carried straight on, accelerating away from the madness.
King struggled to comprehend what was going on.
The armoured truck that had destroyed the front half of their sedan wasn’t haphazardly thrown together like Ramos’ monster truck in the mountains. This was a legitimate, official vehicle, stamped with the insignia of a law enforcement division.
Which division that was, King had no idea.
Federales, the local officer had said.
Federal police.
Traffic screeched to a standstill as the altercation played out in the middle of the intersection. Federal police in riot gear spilled out of the back of the truck — at least four men, maybe more. King couldn’t focus on one aspect for long enough to get an accurate estimate. But the masked, heavily-armed policemen made straight for the destroyed sedan. King watched as they methodically swept the barrels of their automatic rifles from window to window, checking for signs of movement.
One of the federal officers noticed the man in the driver’s seat of the sedan sitting up, blood dripping onto his uniform from his injured mouth.
The federal officer fired a three-round burst through the shattered passenger window.
The uniform got a whole lot bloodier.
King froze in his tracks, suddenly acutely aware of how vulnerable he was. There was no available cover nearby, and his hands were locked behind his back. Without making a wild, awkward break for the nearest alley, he wasn’t sure what his options were.
One of the federal officers saw King standing there, and held up a gloved hand, palm facing towards him.