by Tom Clancy
The sub was diesel electric-powered, thirty-one meters long, and nearly three meters high from deck plates to ceiling. It was constructed of fiberglass and could cut through the water via twin screws at more than twenty kilometers per hour, even while carrying up to ten tons of cocaine. The vessel had a three-meter-tall conning tower with periscope and the ability to dive to nearly twenty meters. It was a remarkable feat of engineering and a testament to the creativity and tenacity of the leaders of their operation. The submarine belonged to the Juárez Cartel, of course, and it cost more than $4 million to construct inside a carefully hidden dry dock beneath the triple canopy of the Colombian jungle.
Although two other submarines had been discovered and confiscated by military forces before they could be deployed, the cartel had plenty of money to keep building these vessels, and this was one of four they had in continuous operation.
Ballesteros remembered the days when they’d used slow-moving fishing boats, sailboats, and if they were feeling bold, a few cigar boats here and there. But now they’d made huge strides in payload capacity and stealth. The old semi-submersibles could sometimes be detected from the air, but not this submarine. He was helped onto the deck and would exchange places with one of the sub’s crew members. They would rendezvous with yet another fishing vessel about a hundred nautical miles off the coast of Mexico, offload the cargo, then turn back for Colombia. Ballesteros would not sleep until he knew the shipment had arrived. He descended into the submarine and found himself in a narrow but air-conditioned compartment while the men outside began the transfer.
Mexican Border
Brewster County, Texas
Two Days Later
U.S. Border Patrol Agent Susan Salinas had parked her SUV along a small ditch, shielding it from view across the open desert that swept out toward the curving horizon of mountains. The sun had set about two hours ago, and she and her partner, Richard Austin, had crawled up on their bellies to survey the border with their night-vision goggles, the desert now a fluctuating course of shimmering green. They’d received a tip from one of the local ranchers, who’d seen a truck cutting across the valley, heading toward his land, and that truck had tripped one of the remote electronic sensors put in place by the CBP (Customs and Border Protection).
“Could be those kids four-wheeling again,” said Austin, issuing a deep sigh as he panned to the right while she surveyed the southeast side.
“No, I think we’re going to score big tonight,” she said slowly.
“What makes you say that?”
“Because I’m looking at the bastards right now.”
A slight dust trail swirled out from behind a battered F-150 whose flatbed was piled high with banana boxes tied down with bungee cords and partially covered by torn canvas. No, those guys were not transporting produce through the rough and mountainous terrain of Brewster County, and yes, they’d done a piss-poor job of concealing their stash. Either that or they were just too brazen to care. She zoomed in, saw three men jammed into the front bench seat with movement behind them in the cab. There could be as many as six.
She calmed herself. Salinas had been with the CBP for nearly three years now, and she’d caught hundreds of people attempting to illegally cross the border. The truth was, she’d never imagined she’d be out here on line watch and carrying a gun. She’d considered herself a “girly girl” in high school as the captain of the cheerleading squad and had ambled her way through those locker-lined halls with low B’s. She’d then wandered her way into community college, where she couldn’t get excited about any of the majors. When a friend’s brother had joined the Border Patrol, she’d done some research. Now she was twenty-seven, still single, but loving the adrenaline rush of her job.
The position had not come easily. She’d spent fifty-five days in Artesia, New Mexico, taking courses in immigration and nationality law, criminal law and statutory authority, Spanish, Border Patrol operations, care and use of firearms, physical training, operation of motor vehicles, and antiterrorism. And no, they hadn’t let her fire a gun at community college. This was by far the most exciting thing she’d done in her short life. And now, as her pulse rose, she had further confirmation of that.
“What did you think? We were the puppy patrol up here?” she asked one sicario she’d busted last week. “They just handed me a gun and told me to stop the bad guys?”
Ironically, her mother wholeheartedly approved of her job and expressed how proud she was that her daughter had become a law enforcement officer, especially since, as Mom put it, “There’s always been such a fuss about protecting the border.”
Her father, on the other hand, was about as thrilled as a football fan without beer. Dad had always been a quiet man who’d spent a quiet life as a tax attorney in a quiet office on the outskirts of Phoenix. He enjoyed quiet weekends and was the antithesis of the alpha male. He just couldn’t see his daughter handling a weapon when he never would. At one point he’d even quoted Gandhi and gone so far as to tell her that men would no longer view her as feminine, that she’d have trouble dating, and that some might even question her sexuality. And then, of course, she’d get fat. All cops did. Border Patrol officers included. She had never forgotten those words.
Austin was a lot like her: single, pretty much a loner, with a strained relationship with his parents. He was a workaholic and a by-the-book kind of guy, except when it came to their relationship. He’d already hit on her, but she wasn’t interested. His facial features were severe, his body just a bit too doughy for her taste. She’d gently let him down.
“All right,” he said. “I’m calling for a second unit. You’re right. This could be big.”
“Roger that,” she said. “Get Omaha involved and the ATVs. Send them GPS.” Omaha was the call sign of the Black Hawk helicopter that supported their unit, and the three guys who drove the small, rugged all-terrain vehicles that propelled them at high speeds across the heavily rutted desert.
He rolled over, about to key his handset, when he just bolted up and started running. “Hey, you! Hold! Border Patrol!”
She turned and called after him—
As a gunshot sent a lightning bolt of panic straight through her chest.
She rolled away from the mound, drawing her weapon, and found two men standing near their SUV, both Mexicans clad in denim jackets. One with grizzled hair held a pistol that was probably a Belgian-made FN 5.7, a gun nicknamed the mata policía, or cop killer, in Mexico because it fired a round that could penetrate police body armor. The other guy clutched a long curved fillet knife. The knife wielder smiled, flashing a single gold tooth.
The first guy screamed in Spanish for her to freeze.
She was panting.
Austin lay on the ground with a gunshot wound to his chest. His armor had, indeed, failed to protect him against that pistol. He was still breathing, clutching the wound and groaning softly.
The guy with the knife started toward her. She looked at him, then at the man with the pistol, and suddenly fired at him, striking him in the shoulder, even as the pickup truck roared within a hundred yards.
She got to her feet as the guy with the knife went for his buddy’s gun, which had fallen to the dirt. She was about to shoot him as the pickup truck drew closer and gunfire flashed from the passenger’s side, rounds ricocheting near her boots.
She took off running for the gully ahead, practically diving for it, not looking back, just running, the sound of her own breath roaring in her ears, her pulse thumping hard, her footfalls rhythmic across the rocks and dirt. The plan was to get far enough away, then pause to get on her radio.
But she didn’t dare stop now.
A shriek echoed across the valley, and she couldn’t help but stop, whirl around, and there he was, the knife man, holding up Richard’s decapitated head for the men getting out of the pickup truck to see. They all howled as she swung around and dropped down into the gulley, listening as they got back in their truck.
She hit the dirt, du
g herself in deeply behind a shrub, and tucked her warm pistol into her chest. She willed herself to control her breathing and heard her father’s voice in her head: “You’ll die like a dog out there, and no one will remember you.”
But then the sound of hope, the truck engine growing not louder but fainter. A miracle? They weren’t coming after her? Had they run out of time? She reached for her radio’s handset, and, pricking up her ears once more, keyed the mike.
“Road Runner, this is Coyote Five, over.”
“Susan, what the hell is going on out there? No contact?”
“Richard’s dead,” she whispered.
“I can’t hear you.”
“I said, ‘Richard’s dead’!” She hit a button on her wrist-mounted GPS. “I need everyone over here!” Her voice cracked as she fed him the GPS coordinates, and then she turned off the radio and listened once more to the truck engine beginning to fade into the wind.
FERTILE GROUND
Nogales, Mexico
Near the Arizona Border
DANTE CORRALES hated being away from home in Juárez, mostly because he missed his woman, Maria. He kept flashing back to last weekend, to the way she’d lifted her legs high in the air and had pointed her polished toenails, to the purring she’d made, to the claws she’d dug into his back, to the way she spoke to him and the expressions on her face. They’d made love like hungry, violent animals, and Corrales felt dizzy as he relived that moment yet again, standing there, inside the burned-out Pemex gasolinera, watching as the men unloaded the banana boxes, removed the blocks of cocaine, and placed those blocks inside their backpacks. There were twenty-two runners supervised by Corrales and five other sicarios. Their group was known as Los Caballeros, The Gentlemen, because they had a reputation for being exceedingly well dressed and well spoken, even as they lopped off heads and sent corpse messages to their enemies. They were smarter, braver, and certainly far more dangerous and cunning than the other enforcer gangs attached to the rest of Mexico’s drug cartels. And as Corrales liked to joke, they were just polishing their machismo!
Some of the shipment, Corrales knew, had gone up to Texas, moving through Brewster County, and he’d just received a call from his lead man, Juan, who said they’d had trouble. His team had encountered a Border Patrol unit. One of the guys Juan had hired for the run had chopped off a border agent’s head.
What the fuck was that?
More epithets escaped Corrales’s mouth before he could finally calm down and remind Juan that he was not supposed to hire any outside guys. Juan said he’d had no choice, that he’d needed more help because two of his regulars had not shown up and were probably drunk or high.
“The next funeral you attend will be your own.” Corrales thumbed off the phone, swore again, then tugged at the collar of his leather trench coat and picked a few pieces of lint from his Armani slacks.
He shouldn’t allow himself to get so upset. After all, life was good. He was twenty-four years old, a top lieutenant in a major drug cartel, and he’d already made 14 million pesos—more than a million U.S. dollars—himself. That was impressive for a boy who’d grown up poor in Juárez and had been raised by a housekeeper and maintenance man who had both worked at a cheap motel.
The burned-out station and the lingering stench of all that soot made Corrales want to leave soon. The place was beginning to smell like another night, the worst night of his life.
He’d been seventeen, an only child, and had joined a gang who called themselves the Juárez 8. Their group of high school kids was standing up to the sicarios of the Juárez Cartel, fighting back against their threats and forced recruitment of their friends. Too many of Corrales’s friends had wound up dead because of their involvement with the cartel, and he and his buddies had decided that enough was enough.
One afternoon, two boys had cornered Corrales behind a Dumpster and had warned him that if he didn’t quit that gang and join Los Caballeros that his parents would be killed. They’d said it very clearly.
Corrales could still remember the punk’s eyes, glowing like coals in a fire pit, from the shadows of the alley. And he could still hear the punk’s voice echoing through time: We will kill your parents.
Unsurprisingly, Corrales had told them to fuck off. And two nights later, after coming home from a night of drinking, he’d found the motel engulfed in flames. The bodies of his parents were recovered in the rubble. Both had been bound with tape and left to burn.
He’d gone crazy that night, stolen a gun from a friend, and driven at high speeds throughout the city, looking for the scumbags who’d ruined his life. He’d crashed his car into a fence, abandoned it there, and just gone running back to a small bar, where he’d passed out in the bathroom. The police took him away and delivered him to relatives.
After going to live with his godmother, and after working as a janitor himself while trying to finish high school, he decided that he could no longer toil away like his parents had. He just couldn’t do it.
There was no other choice. He would join the very group that had murdered his parents. That decision had not come easily or quickly, but working for Los Caballeros was his only ticket out of the slums. And because he was much smarter than the average thug, and perhaps more vengeful, he’d risen quickly through the ranks and had learned far more about the business than his bosses were aware of. He’d discovered early on that knowledge is power; thus he studied everything he could about the cartel’s business and its enemies.
As fate would have it, the two boys that had killed his parents had been murdered themselves, only a few weeks before Corrales had joined their ranks. They’d been killed by a rival cartel because of their bold and foolish acts. The other Caballeros were glad to see them go.
Corrales shuddered now and glanced over at his team of runners dressed in dark hoodies and jeans and weighed down by their bulging backpacks. He led them over to a rear corner of the convenience mart. He lifted a large piece of plywood from the floor, and the tunnel entrance lay below, a narrow shaft accessible via an aluminum ladder. Cold, musty air wafted up from the hole.
“When you get inside the other house,” Corrales began, “do not go outside until you see the cars, and only then you go out three at a time. No more. The rest of you stay in the bedroom. If there is trouble, you come back through the tunnel. Okay?”
They murmured their assent.
And down they went, one by one, a few carrying flashlights. This was one of the cartel’s smaller but longer tunnels, nearly one hundred meters long, a meter wide, and just under two meters high, with its ceiling reinforced by thick crossbeams. Because there were so many out-of-work masons and construction engineers in Mexico, finding crews to construct such tunnels was ridiculously easy; in fact, many crews were just standing by, ready to jump on the next project.
Corrales’s men would keep close and hunched over as they hurried down the shaft. The tunnel passed directly under one of the checkpoints in Nogales, Arizona, and there was always a concern that a larger vehicle like a bus might cause a cave-in. It had happened before. In fact, Corrales had learned that various cartels had been digging tunnels in Nogales for more than twenty years and that literally hundreds had been discovered by authorities—yet the digging of new passages continued, making Nogales the drug tunnel capital of the world. In recent years, though, the Juárez Cartel had begun to expand its tunnel operations and now controlled nearly all of the most significant tunnels passing into the United States. Men were paid handsomely to protect the tunnels and to stop rival cartels from using them. Moreover, the shafts themselves had been dug deeper so ground-penetrating radar would miss them and/or agents would mistake them for one of the many drainage pipes that ran between Nogales, Mexico, and Nogales, Arizona.
Some shouting from the doorway behind sent him reaching for his mata policía tucked into his shoulder holster. He produced the pistol and walked toward the door, where two of his men, Pablo and Raúl, were dragging in another guy with blood pouring from his no
se and mouth. The bleeder struggled against the men holding him, then spat blood, the glob missing Corrales’s Berluti loafers by only inches. Corrales was certain that the fool had no idea how much the shoes cost.
Corrales frowned. “Who the fuck is this?”
Raúl, the taller of the two, piped up: “I think we found a spy. I think he’s one of Zúñiga’s boys.”
Corrales sighed deeply, raked fingers through his long, dark hair, then suddenly shoved his pistol into the man’s forehead. “Were you following us? Do you work for Zúñiga?”
The man licked his bloody lips. Corrales shoved the pistol harder into the man’s forehead and screamed for him to answer.
“Fuck you,” the guy spat.
Corrales dropped his voice to funereal depths and got in closer to the man. “Do you work for the Sinaloas? If you tell me the truth, you’ll live.”
The man’s eyes went vague; then he lifted his head a little higher and said, “Yes, I work for Zúñiga.”
“Are you alone?”
“No. My friend is back at the hotel.”
“On the corner?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
With that, Corrales abruptly—and without a second’s hesitation—put a bullet in the man’s head. He did this so quickly, so effortlessly, that his own men gasped and flinched. The spy fell forward, and Corrales’s men let him drop to the dirt.
Corrales grunted. “Bag up this motherfucker. We’ll leave this garbage on our old friend’s doorstep. Get two guys to the hotel and take that other scumbag alive.”
Pablo was staring at the dead man and shaking his head. “I thought you’d let him live.”
Corrales snorted, then looked down and noticed a bloodstain on one of his shoes. He cursed and started back for the tunnel, reaching for his cell phone to call his man inside the house on the other side of the border.