He raised his eyebrows.
“You have five seconds, and then I make the decision for you.” He smiled. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Dinah,” he said and reached into his pocket.
“Wait. What…how do I know I can trust you?”
“Dinah, every day that you breathe from this moment on will be because I have kept my word to you. Every breath will be proof of my trust. And most importantly, nobody is paying me to kill you. This is merely a means to an end – a way to make my life easier. As I said, I’ll still do my job, but it would be better for me if I knew what your boyfriend was up to. And I can guarantee that nobody else tries to kidnap you. If you’re helping me, however reluctantly, they don’t need to kidnap you to get his cooperation. This is a win-win, Dinah. You get what you want – a life with Cruz – he gets what he wants – life with you – and I get what I want. Everybody wins.”
Her face collapsed, and her shoulders hunched in humiliated resignation. She’d chosen. Now she would need to live with herself.
“How do I contact you?”
~
El Rey exited the room and walked to the next air-conditioning vent, dutifully measuring the temperature. The guard took no notice of him, being otherwise occupied trying to contend with his cramps, and within thirty seconds the maintenance man had finished his duties and moved through the doors to the emergency stairs.
El Rey was a little shaken by the similarity between Dinah and his first and only love, Jasmine. They could have been twins, separated at birth. It was uncanny. He’d never seen anything like it. She was older, maybe four or five years, but still – the resemblance was more than striking.
Perhaps it was some sort of an omen? Not that he believed in such things, but the odds against two people looking so…exact…were astronomical. If there were a deeper meaning, what could it be? Was he meant to meet her for some reason?
He quickly dismissed the speculations. They were foolishness and would do nothing but distract him. And he needed to stay focused. The clock was ticking, and his date with the president was rapidly approaching. A date that wouldn’t be denied.
Whatever the case with Dinah, who he was and what he did wouldn’t change.
He was the reaper, the bringer of death.
And he would be victorious.
Chapter 17
The small cargo ship was tied to the long concrete wharf next to the massive dry dock boatyard in Tampico. The oil refinery next door dwarfed everything else on the ugly waterfront, and huge tankers rested at their berths as they on-loaded oil. It was a muggy evening, one of many for the town, and the river mouth that was the entrance to the port was redolent of decay and pollution, raw sewage and chemicals combining to create a toxic stew. Rust streaked the burgundy steel hull of the hundred and eighty foot ship, from which a Panamanian flag hung limply off the stern. The name was barely legible for the decay. Toledo.
Three SUVs swung into the dark parking lot, their headlights off but moving at high speed, and fifteen heavily-armed men leapt from the vehicles once they pulled to a stop, running in a crouch the remaining twenty yards from the lot to the gangplank entrance. After a few moments the barking report of assault rifles greeted them from the vessel, and several of the men uttered distressed grunts as the slugs found home. The attackers returned fire, and soon there was a full-fledged gun battle underway, with bursts of shooting angrily punctuating the dark of night. The bodies of fallen men lay scattered near the trucks, with the ten remaining assailants having taken cover behind several dumpsters on the periphery of the dock.
The whoomp of a grenade exploding on the boat was quickly followed by another. The two men clutching M203 grenade launchers affixed to their M4 rifles peered determinedly from their shelter nearby, surveying the damage they’d inflicted. All but two of the dozen guns firing from the ship had been silenced, and the grenade launchers sighted carefully at either end of the ship, where the remaining defenders were ensconced. Two detonations sounded nearly simultaneously, momentarily blinding them, and then the old ship fell silent, straining against its lines from the tow of the current.
The surviving attackers approached the gangplank with grim determination, wary of another salvo from the boat. Just as they were moving up the ramp, two pickup trucks filled with armed men screeched into the lot and sped towards them, the standing men in the truck beds firing into the attackers. A swath of death rattled the sides of the hull, denting the aged metal while leaving trails of blood and flesh on the paint. The fully exposed assailants never stood a chance and were cut down by the new arrivals in a hail of lead. Two of the SUVs peeled off and tore for the road, hoping to escape the newly-arrived attackers. One made it, but the other exploded in a brilliant orange fireball as a slug ignited its gas tank, bathing the lot in a fiery glow.
As sirens sounded far in the distance, the men jumped from the trucks and ran for the ship. Within a few minutes they descended again, the leader shaking his head, helping one wounded man to the dock. Two more gunmen started down the gangplank carrying another man from the vessel, who was moaning and bleeding from shrapnel wounds. They were loading the two survivors onto the vehicles when a small convoy of military trucks approached from the road – Humvees with fifty caliber machine guns mounted on turrets, plus four armed personnel carriers followed by three large trucks filled with soldiers.
The army weapons opened up, shredding the bodies of the second group of armed men as they futilely returned fire at the military trucks. The heavy army guns sounded like anti-aircraft artillery as they boomed across the water. The leader of the men who’d taken the ship by storm sprinted for the nearest vehicle, but he was seconds too late. The driver’s head tore apart while he was frantically trying to get the vehicle in gear, and the leader was shredded into a bloody pulp by the relentless shards of death.
Rounds from the ship’s defenders tore into the soldiers as the deadly convoy rolled to a stop, and one of the combatants with the grenade launchers successfully drew a bead on the lead Humvee. The vehicle exploded in a burst of debris, the men inside vaporized by the warhead. The second grenade launcher operator prepared to fire his round, but was cut down by a lucky burst from one of the soldiers’ M16 rifles, his chest riddled with smoking bullet holes. His finger reflexively jerked the trigger of the launcher as he went down, sending the projectile in a smoking arc through the air in the direction of the refinery and the shipyard.
The explosion from the grenade’s impact created a minor firestorm in the dry dock when it landed and ignited a pool of oil in the concrete work area. Flames danced in the darkness, illuminating the corpses of the dead and dying lying on the pavement, creating a panorama straight out of hell. The soldiers made quick work of mopping up the rest of the resistance, and within five minutes, silence pervaded the killing field. A total of forty-seven cartel fighters had been slaughtered, with no survivors. Military casualties were six wounded, twenty-one dead.
Four hundred kilos of uncut Colombian cocaine were found ferreted away in the ship’s cargo amidst coffee beans and produce. Street value was eleven million dollars, which worked out to be a hundred and sixty four thousand dollars per corpse, not counting the cost of vehicles, equipment and weapons.
The average worker in mainland Mexico earns a hundred and fifty dollars a month.
~
Don Aranas was sitting with two of his captains having breakfast. They were gathered in the smaller of his two dining rooms at a nineteenth century red cedar table in his Guadalajara retreat when the call came in. He listened intently, asked a few questions, and then issued a terse instruction before hanging up. He turned to his men, who had stopped eating once he’d begun his phone conversation.
“The Los Zetas cartel attacked one of our shipments in Tampico. We lost four hundred kilos and all our men. Apparently it was a big deal. Soldiers showed up and it turned into a war,” he recited dryly, returning to his food.
“What the fuck? Don, this can’t be tolerated. We need to hit
these pricks hard and fast. They need to learn the price of taking us on,” Mauricio, the plumper and younger of the two, blurted.
“I know. I told them to move against the Zetas today. We know of several of their meth plants in Quintana Roo we can take out. I already gave the order.” Don Aranas sipped his coffee. “They lost all their men in the attack as well. So nobody benefited from this…except the newspapers.”
“These events are becoming too regular for my liking. If it isn’t the police or army, it’s one of our rivals. There was a time when this would have been unimaginable. Now it’s business as usual. We have to do something,” Hernandez, the other captain, said, spearing his eggs with his fork for emphasis.
“I think it’s safe to say that this is temporary. It’s all related. Once the military backs off, the other cartels will get the message and retreat. I’m confident that the push to eradicate our operations will end sooner than later. Call it a hunch,” Don Aranas assured them with a humorless smile. He waved to the woman at the brightly-tiled kitchen island and motioned for more orange juice. “You’re right. This can’t continue. But don’t worry. Things have a way of working out.”
~
Fourteen miles outside of Cancun, a dilapidated private ranch sat two miles from the desolate road connecting the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá and the highway that ran along the southern coast. A rusty chain hung across the pale dirt track that led to the compound, secured in place with a padlock. Two armed men were nestled among the trees, bored from months of guard duty where nothing happened. One of them sat on the ground, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, while the other recounted his weekend in Cancun at one of the strip clubs. It had been a raucous evening, and he was boastful of his prowess. The older man cackled as he exhaled a long plume of smoke into the air, nodding appreciatively at the younger man’s exploits.
The storyteller was surprised when a hole appeared in the older man’s forehead, mid-exhalation, and he had almost gotten his Kalashnikov AK-47 swung around when two silenced rounds found him, knocking him against one of the scrub trees, dead before he hit the ground.
A lone figure in jeans and a cowboy hat approached calmly through the brush, and when he was a few feet away, fired another round into the second man’s head for good measure. He fished a telephone out of his shirt pocket, muttered into it, and peered down the long winding white sand drive. Several vehicles pull up to the barrier a few minutes later. A man hopped out of the back of one of the vans with bolt cutters and expertly severed the lock’s shaft. The two vans pulled down the track, and the man re-attached the chain, then trotted after the vehicles to resume his position in the rear of the van. The man in the cowboy hat walked to the passenger door of the lead van and hopped in, carrying the two assault rifles he’d retrieved from the dead guards with him.
The vehicles inched down the track until they were roughly three hundred yards from the ranch, over a small rise and around a bend. They stopped and disgorged twenty men, armed with a smorgasbord of assault rifles – Kalashnikovs, M-4s and M-16s, Heckler and Koch HK416s. Nobody spoke as they moved carefully off the road and into the surrounding trees. The leader of the group removed his cowboy hat and tied a navy blue bandana around his hair to absorb any sweat, and then motioned to the men to split up in two groups. He prowled closer to the buildings, followed by his group, the second bunch barely visible fifty yards off to the right. Once they made it over the ridge, he counted eight guards loitering around outside the ranch’s large rustic barn, weapons slung over their shoulders or leaning up against the wooden ramshackle walls.
The leader made an abrupt gesture with his left hand as he was sighting in with his rifle in his right hand, and then opened fire. It was no contest – the guards collapsed in bloody heaps onto the dirt, dead before having a chance to shoot back. Once they were all down, the attackers stopped firing and raced to the buildings, the team on the right approaching the ranch house, wary of more sentries.
An old man appeared in the doorway brandishing a battered shotgun and took a potshot at one of the assailants, liquefying his chest with a load of double-aught buckshot. He pumped the reloading mechanism to try for another of the attackers, but a bullet caught him in the throat, ending his brief resistance. The area went silent again, then three women bolted from the back of the barn, running for their lives. All three were cut down by gunfire before they made it thirty yards.
When the bandana’d leader kicked in the door to the barn, he was greeted with a few pistol shots from within, one of which tore through his left shoulder. He tumbled to the hard dirt floor, firing even as he dropped, and caught the shooter in the abdomen, ending the failed defense. His men shouldered through the doorway after him, but all held their fire – the remaining occupants of the barn were unarmed, and mostly female, with a few young men in their twenties interspersed.
The leader stood, and after briefly checking his wound, barked a series of orders. The women shrieked in panic, and one of the young men began sobbing. The armed men rounded them up and herded them outside in the harsh sun, while the leader surveyed the methamphetamine laboratory. Large drums of liquid sat to one side, and along the other wall were two large metal reactor containers and assorted processing hardware, including a number of industrial ovens. The liquids were all marked flammable, and the leader knew from practical experience that the entire compound would go up like a natural gas explosion when detonated, leaving toxic residue throughout.
He winced from the pain of the wound and grabbed some matting material off a work table and stuck it inside his shirt, where it would staunch the flow of blood until one of his men could rig a field bandage. It was a crude improvisation, but an effective one. This was not the first time he’d taken a bullet, so he was familiar with the pain. He gauged the amount of bleeding and grunted. He’d live. This time.
Two shots echoed from the interior of the ranch house, followed by the distinctive chatter of a Kalashnikov, and then the shooting stopped. His men must have found more people inside. There was to be no quarter given, no mercy shown. Anyone found was an enemy.
He spun and exited the barn, where nine women and two men were kneeling in front of the house, most of the women crying in terrified gasps. He studied them dispassionately, many of them clearly of Indian extraction, and then nodded to his second in command, who pulled a cell phone from his shirt and made a call. The two vans rolled down the dirt road to the house and skidded to a stop in a cloud of dust. Two of the men moved to the van side doors and slid them open. When they turned from the interior, one held a machete and the other an aluminum baseball bat.
The task was finished within a few minutes, and the men loaded back into the van after carting sixty-two one kilo packages of crystal meth out of the barn and wedging them into the cargo area of the second van, cutting the space for passengers by sixty percent. It was a tight fit, but nobody complained. It was just a matter of time until the gunshots attracted the military, even in this rural area, so everyone was anxious to get on the road.
The second in command jogged over to the barn and pulled a pin from a hand grenade. With a grunt, he tossed it through the doorway and then ran for the vans. He made it in seven seconds. The vehicles were pulling away when a huge series of explosions blew the structure apart, a massive fireball billowing into the sky as the drivers accelerated dangerously down the rustic trail in a white haze of dust.
Chapter 18
Briones stood in Cruz’s office, sorting through reports at the small circular table set up for three and four person meetings. They were expecting their counterparts from CISEN to appear at any moment, and Cruz multi-tasked as they waited, signing documents and creating piles of paper in his outbox. In the larger main room, uniformed men and women circulated between the cubicles, busy with the business of battling the cartels.
“Which do you think he’ll hit?” Cruz asked Briones.
“I think the president’s security detail has a nightmare with having an open speech on the congre
ss steps. I don’t know whose bright idea that was, but it stinks.”
“Fortunately, that’s not our problem. I don’t envy the poor bastards responsible for it.”
Briones nodded in accord. “It’ll require a massive outlay of manpower to lock down every possible place in the area where an attack could come from. Sniper at up to a thousand yards, bomb threat, a gas attack…it’s a lot of ground to cover. I’d recommend to them that they move it inside, like they normally would. This is a reckless risk.”
“We’ve already had that discussion, and they’re adamant that the president doesn’t want to appear to be skulking around hiding. He’s hell bent on being the brave bull in public, no matter how much difficulty it presents.”
“Then we do what we can to track down El Rey, and pray a lot,” Briones said.
The receptionist entered, followed by the two men from CISEN. Cruz motioned for them to take a seat. She closed the door behind them as she left, her offer of soda or coffee rejected by all.
Cruz greeted the pair, Dario Pareto and Solomon Quiniente, of unknown rank. Solomon seemed to be the senior of the two, but as with all the others of their ilk, they weren’t big on sharing information, including what office they held. They shook hands with Briones and Cruz, and then Dario set a yellow legal pad on the desk and uncapped his pen.
Cruz launched into a ten minute briefing of their efforts to date, describing the steps that had been taken, and finished with a glance at Briones.
Solomon was the first to speak. “You have no leads?”
“No. Nobody has heard or seen anything, and even with extra staff on the streets, we’re coming up empty. El Rey works alone, so it’s not surprising. We’ve always believed that the best chance we have is another information leak from your side. We simply don’t have any way of mounting this sort of a manhunt with any hope of success, given the lack of any new info,” Cruz admitted.
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