by Tom Clancy
With that, Corrales hung up, cursed, and pulled into the club’s parking lot.
There were only two strippers onstage, day workers who’d had children and weren’t shy about revealing their cesarean scars. Two other patrons sat at the main bar, old men wearing wide-brimmed hats, thick leather belts, and cowboy boots.
Corrales went to a back table, where he met his friend Johnny Sanchez, a tall, long-haired Hispanic-American screenwriter and reporter who wore tiny glasses and a UC Berkeley college ring. Johnny was the son of Corrales’s godmother, and he’d gone away to the United States and received his education, only to return to contact Corrales because he wanted to write some articles about the drug cartels in Mexico. He’d never accused Corrales of working for the cartels. He’d said only that he guessed Corrales knew a lot about them. And they’d left it at that.
For the past few months, Corrales had been talking to the man, helping him develop a screenplay that would chronicle Corrales’s life. Their lunch meetings were often the best part of Corrales’s day, when he wasn’t having sex with Maria, of course.
With Corrales’s permission, Johnny had just had an article published in the Los Angeles Times about cartel violence along the border. The article focused mainly on how police corruption was so widespread that authorities could no longer tell the good guys from the bad guys. That was exactly how the Juárez Cartel wanted it.
“The article was very well received,” Johnny said, then took a long pull on his beer.
“You are welcome.”
“It’s a pretty exciting time for me,” he said.
They spoke in Spanish, of course, but once in a while Johnny would break unconsciously into English — like he just did — and he would lose Corrales. Sometimes that would annoy Corrales to the point that he’d bang his fist on the table, and Johnny would blink and apologize.
“What did you say?” Corrales asked.
“Oh, sorry. I received over a hundred e-mails about the article, and the editor would like to turn it into a series.”
Corrales shook his head. “I think you should focus on our movie script.”
“I will. Don’t worry.”
“I’m talking to you because you are my godmother’s son, and because I want you to tell the story of my life, which would make a very good movie. I don’t want you to write any more articles about the cartels. People would become very upset. And I would be afraid for you. Okay?”
Johnny tried to repress his frown. “Okay.”
Corrales smiled. “Good.”
“Is something wrong?”
Corrales traced a finger along the sweat covering his beer bottle, then looked up and said, “I lost some good men today.”
“I didn’t know about it. There was nothing on the news.”
“I hate the news.”
He glanced at the table. The Juárez Cartel had their hands firmly planted on the shoulders of the local media outlets, which sometimes defied them, but the more recent murders of two well-known field reporters who’d been beheaded outside their TV news stations had resulted in some significant “delays” and omissions of stories altogether. Many journalists remained defiant while others feared reporting on anything related to the cartels and cartel violence.
“I want to talk about the day those sicarios threatened you,” Johnny said, trying to lighten the mood. “That would be a very good scene in the movie. And then we would show you falling to your knees outside the hotel, with the fire raging in the background, and you …there …weeping, knowing your parents are dead inside, their bodies burning because you stood up to the cartel and refused to give in. Can you see that scene? Oh my God! What a scene! The audience will be crying with you! There you are, a poor young boy with no future who just wants to stay out of a world of crime, and they punish you for it! They punish you! And you’re left with nothing. Absolutely nothing. And you need to rebuild from the ashes. You need to rise up again, and we’re rooting for you all the way! And then there really is no choice. You’re trapped in a city with nothing to offer, with only one true business, and so you do what you must because you need to survive.”
Johnny always whipped himself up into a fit of passion as he discussed the film, and Corrales couldn’t help but become infected by the writer’s enthusiasm. He was about to comment on Johnny’s suggestion that he was in fact in a cartel — but Johnny turned his head, focusing on something out near the main bar.
“Get down,” he screamed, as he dove across the table and knocked Corrales onto the floor, just as a gun boomed from that direction, followed by at least a half-dozen more shots that pinged into the table and thumped into the wall behind them. The strippers began hollering, and the bartenders were shouting about no shooting, no shooting.
Then, as Corrales rolled onto the floor, it was Johnny who shocked the hell out of him and returned fire with a Beretta clutched in his right hand.
“Is this what you want?” Johnny screamed in Spanish. “Is this what you want from me?”
And the gunman near the bar spun around and sprinted off as Johnny emptied his clip into the man’s wake.
They sat there, just breathing, looking at each other.
Then Johnny said, “Motherfucker …”
“Where did you get that gun?” Corrales asked.
It took a moment before Johnny answered. “From my cousin in Nogales.”
“Where did you learn to shoot?”
Johnny laughed. “I only shot it once before.”
“Well, it was enough. You saved me.”
“I just saw them first.”
“And if you hadn’t, I’d be dead.”
“We’d both be dead.”
“Yeah,” Corrales said.
“Why do they want to kill you?”
“Because I’m not in the cartel.”
Johnny sighed. “Corrales, we’re like blood. And I don’t believe you.”
He slowly nodded.
“Can’t you tell me the truth?”
“I guess maybe now I owe you that. Okay. I’m the head of the Juárez Cartel,” he lied. “I control the entire operation. And those guys were from the Sinaloa Cartel. We’re at war with them over the border tunnels and their interference with our shipments.”
“I thought you were maybe a sicario. But you are the leader?”
He nodded.
“Then you shouldn’t be out in public like this. It’s foolish.”
“I won’t hide like a coward. Not like the other leaders. I will be out here in the street, so the people can see me. So they can know who their true friend is — not the police or the government but us …”
“But that’s very dangerous,” Johnny said.
Corrales began to laugh. “Maybe this can go in the movie, too?”
Johnny’s expression shifted from a deep frown into his more wide-eyed stare, as though he were already staring through a camera’s lens. “Yeah,” he finally said. “Yeah.”
15 THE BUILDER AND THE MULE
Border Tunnel Construction Site
Mexicali, Mexico
Pedro Romero estimated that within a week they would finish their digging. The home they’d chosen in Calexico, California, was in a densely populated residential district of lower-middle-class families whose breadwinners worked in the nearby retail businesses and industrial parks. The Juárez Cartel had already purchased the home at Romero’s suggestion, and he had carefully gone over his plans for the tunnel’s construction with the cartel’s youthful “representative,” Mr. Dante Corrales, who had recruited Romero off another engineering project he’d been doing in the Silicon Border area, where most recently some of his colleagues had been getting let go from their jobs. As the economy had tightened, so had corporate expansion and the jobs created by those projects.
Romero shifted down the tunnel with two of his diggers behind him. The shaft was nearly six feet tall, three feet wide, and when complete would be nearly 1,900 feet long. It had been dug at a depth of only ten feet because the
water table was frustratingly shallow in this area, and twice, in fact, they’d had to pump water from the tunnel when they’d accidentally gone too deep.
The walls and ceiling were reinforced with heavy concrete beams, and Romero had set down temporary tracks for carts loaded with dirt to be hauled out by the workers. The dirt was loaded onto heavy dump trucks and hauled away to a secondary site some ten miles south, and would be used on another project.
In order to remain silent, the digging had begun with shovels and continued that way throughout the entire operation. Romero had teams of fifteen working around the clock to drive them forward. While they were ever wary of cave-ins, they’d lost four men in a most unexpected way. It had been about 2:30 a.m. and Romero had been awakened by a phone call from his foreman: a huge sinkhole nearly two meters wide had opened up in the tunnel floor, had swallowed four men, and then its sides had collapsed. The hole was nearly ten feet deep, its bottom filled with water. The men had been forced under the water by the collapsing sand and had drowned or suffocated in the heavy mud before they could be rescued. While the entire crew had been unnerved by the accident, the work, of course, went on.
The Mexican side of the tunnel began inside a small warehouse within a major construction site for a Z-Cells manufacturing facility. Five buildings were being constructed for the photovoltaic cell builder and the dump trucks coming and going from the job helped disguise the ones leaving from the tunnel operation. This was not Romero’s brilliant idea. Corrales had revealed that it had come down from the cartel’s leader himself, a man whose identity remained a mystery for security reasons. The “regular” construction workers on the Z-Cells site never questioned the tunneling operation, which made Pedro believe that everyone was on the cartel’s payroll — even the CEO of Z-Cells. Everyone knew what was happening, but so long as they were paid, the wall of silence would not come down.
According to Romero’s blueprints, the tunnel would be the most audacious and complex dig ever attempted by the cartel, and because of that, Romero was being paid the equivalent of one hundred thousand U.S. dollars for his services. He had been skeptical of working for the cartel, but that kind of money, paid upfront and in cash, had been too hard to resist — more so because Romero was nearing forty and the oldest of his two daughters, Blanca, who’d just turned sixteen, had been suffering from chronic kidney disease to the point where she would now require a transplant. She’d already been treated for anemia and bone disease, and was going through very costly dialysis. The money he earned from this operation would surely help to pay for their mounting medical costs. While he’d shared those facts with only a few of his workers, word spread quickly, and Romero had learned from one of his foremen that every man on the job would work his hardest in order to help save his daughter. Suddenly, Romero wasn’t a thug taking a bribe from the cartel; he was now a family man trying to save his little girl. The men had even taken up a collection for him and had presented the money, along with a thank-you card, to him at the end of the previous workweek. Romero had been moved, had thanked them, and prayed with them that they would finish their work and not be caught.
In point of fact, disguising all the dirt they were removing from the tunnel wasn’t their only challenge; there was another very serious concern: Both the Mexican and American governments employed ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to detect the cavities associated with a digging operation. Again, the adjacent construction site would help mask most of their initial excavation sounds, which were also detected by remote REMBASS-II sensors adapted from military operations and monitored by the Border Patrol. Additionally, the tunnel itself had been constructed in a series of forty-five-degree angles instead of simply a straight line heading due north. Its shape would help mask it as a fragmentary section of drainage pipes. Romero knew that all the seismic data was being recorded at the same time, even if the computers being used were looking at only one spot. Border Patrol agents could examine a set of seismic-event-density maps in an attempt to discern traffic patterns and other activity in and around the site. The tunnel itself would affect the seismic field as it absorbed sounds passing through it and sometimes delayed the passing of that information, creating an echo or reverberation that would appear as a “ghost” on the agents’ detection equipment. To address that issue, Romero had ordered and received thousands of acoustical panels that lined the tunnel walls to not only help absorb much of the sound of their digging but to try to mimic the natural surroundings as best they could. He’d even brought in a seismic engineer he knew from Mexico City, who’d helped him brainstorm and implement the plan. But soon it would all be over, the job complete, Romero issued his last payment in full. With God’s help, his daughter would have her transplant.
Romero consulted with one of his electricians, who was in the process of extending the power cables into the newer section of tunnel, even as two other men worked on hanging some air-conditioning ducts. His diggers had asked if they could set up a small shrine just in case of an accident — at least they’d have somewhere to pray — and Romero had allowed them to carve out a small side tunnel where they’d set up candles and photos of their families, and where the men did, in fact, come to pray before each shift. These were hard times, and they were engaged in hard work that could ultimately result in their arrests. Praying, Romero knew, gave them the strength to go on.
Romero slapped his hand on the electrician’s shoulder. “How are you today, Eduardo?”
“Very well, very well! The new lines will be finished this evening.”
“You are an expert.”
“Thank you, sir. Thank you.”
Romero grinned and shifted farther into the tunnel, careful not to trip over the tracks. He fired up his flashlight and began to smell the cool, damp earth being removed by his men with only shovels, pickaxes, and all the power they could muster in their backs and shoulders.
He tried to deny the tunnel’s use, the millions of dollars’ worth of cash, drugs, and weapons that would move through thanks to him and his team, the lives that would be affected in both unbelievable and tragic ways. He told himself he was a man with a job, and that was all. His daughter needed him. But the guilt clawed away, stole hours from his sleep, and made him shudder at the thought of being arrested and sent to prison for the rest of his life.
“What will you do when this is over?” asked one of the diggers following him.
“Find more work.”
“With them?”
Romero tensed. “Honestly, I hope not.”
“Me, too.”
“God will protect us.”
“I know. He already has by making you our boss.”
“All right, enough of that,” Romero said with a grin. “Get up there and get back to work!”
Calexico — Mexicali Border Crossing
East Station — Northbound
When the main Calexico-Mexicali station got very crowded, and the delay was going to last more than one hour to pass through the checkpoint to enter the United States, seventeen-year-old American high school student Rueben Everson had been instructed to drive the six miles east of the main crossing in order to use the alternate port of entry, the one that handled the spillover during overcrowded times and was known mostly by the locals, not the tourists.
Rueben had been a “mule” for the Juárez Cartel for nearly a year. He had made more than twenty mule runs and had grossed more than $80,000 in cash — enough to pay for all four years of college at the state university. He had spent only about $1,500 of the money so far and had banked the rest. His parents had no idea what he was doing and were certainly unaware of his bank account. His sister Georgina, who’d just turned twenty, suspected something was going on, and she repeatedly warned him, but he just blew her off.
Rueben had first learned about becoming a mule from a friend at a party, who’d responded to an ad in a Mexican newspaper promising well-paying jobs with benefits. Rueben had met with a man named Pablo, who had “interviewed” him and given
him about two thousand dollars’ worth of pot to carry on foot across the border. After that job had gone well, they’d supplied him with a Ford SUV whose dashboard and gas tank had been modified to hold huge stashes of cocaine and marijuana. The dash had a secret code you typed in via a remote, and the center console where the radio and A/C controls were located would pop open and rise on motors to allow access to a secret compartment that extended all the way to the firewall. Rueben couldn’t believe how sophisticated the operation was, and because of that, he’d built up the courage to take on larger shipments. The car’s gas tank had been cut in half so that the side facing the car could carry blocks of drugs while the bottom masked the scent of the drugs with gasoline. The tank had then been sprayed with mud to disguise it from the border agents, who used mirrors to check for recent work to the underside of any car. Twice Rueben had been pulled off the line, his car inspected, but during both times he had not been carrying any drugs. That was part of the operation as well — establish a frequent traffic pattern that some agents became familiar with, and a solid alibi, like a job in Mexico while you lived in California. The cartel had covered that part for him, and many of the Border Patrol agents remembered him and his car, so more often than not, he glided on through, just another high school kid who’d found some part-time work in Mexicali.
But today was different. They’d pulled him off the line, and he drove to the secondary inspection area. There he saw a tall, lean Hispanic man who looked like a movie star and whose eyes would not leave him. Rueben parked the car and stepped out to speak with one of the Border Patrol agents, who checked his license and said, “Rueben, this is Mr. Ansara with the FBI. He’d like to talk to you for a few minutes while we check out your car. No worries right now, okay?”
Rueben did as always: He pictured happy thoughts with his girlfriend, eating out, kissing her, buying clothes with the extra money he made. He relaxed. “Sure, man, no problem.”
Ansara narrowed his gaze and simply said, “Follow me.”