The Devil You Don't Know (American Praetorians Book 4)

by Peter Nealen

  He didn't like that. But I didn't give him a chance to retort, as I walked back to my Expedition, pulling my own phone out. Before I dialed, I joined Larry, who was examining the bodies in the Crown Vic.

  “Look at that,” he said, pointing to the tattoos adorning a limp arm. “Seen those before?”

  I nodded. “Mara Salvatrucha.” MS-13. One of the most vicious street gangs in the Western Hemisphere, the gang had been founded by refugees from the El Salvadoran civil war living in Los Angeles. They'd gone from a vicious street gang to a trans-national criminal syndicate in their own right, with a reputation for ferocity that came near to rivaling the paramilitary Los Zetas in Mexico. We'd crossed paths with them briefly the last time we'd worked the border, almost five years before. “Question is, are they here on their own initiative, or are they hiring out again?” MS-13 had acted as mercenaries for other cartels off and on through the years.

  “What were they doing here in the first place, and why were they after us?” Larry asked.

  “We'll find out pretty soon,” I replied, as I hit speed dial and raised the phone to my ear. “Harold just invoked the name of Alonzo Reyes.”

  The phone rang once. Renton's voice was completely deadpan as he said, “Talk to me.”

  “Alonzo Reyes,” I said by way of greeting. Alonzo Reyes was one of the names we'd been instructed to keep an ear open for before we started this job. In the military we would have called him a Person of Interest.

  I filled Renton in on the ambush and Harold's phone conversation. He didn't interrupt, but just listened.

  Renton was a spook, and not in a “works for Langley” sort of way. He had, once upon a time, but those days were past, and he pretty much lived “in the cold” anymore. He'd gone underground years ago, only cropping up, to my knowledge, the year before, when he contacted us about The Project. He worked for a quiet network of military and intelligence professionals that was, apparently, trying to act to stem the tide of chaos and terrorism from inside and outside the system.

  We were an instrument to generally be used outside the system.

  When I finished, he was quiet for a short moment, as if thinking over what I'd told him. He wasn't terribly forthcoming when he did speak, however. “Where are you now?”

  “About three miles south of Green Valley,” I said.

  “Don't go far,” he said. “Juarez will probably want to push as soon as possible, but I need you to stall him. I'm on my way.”

  “Do I need to get a mission package coming south?” I asked.

  No hesitation. “Yes. Expedite it. I'll see you in a few hours.”

  As soon as he hung up, I dialed The Ranch. Clyde answered after only three rings. “Get Package Fifty heading to Tucson, Clyde,” I told him. “Most ricky-tick.”

  “It'll be on the way within the hour,” he replied. I hung up and pocketed the phone, walking back toward the overturned box truck. Nick and Jack were standing near the front, shotguns slung in front of them and eyes out.

  Nick was another former Marine, though you probably wouldn't be able to tell looking at him now; burly and shaggy-haired, his beard was down almost to his collar. He looked more like a lumberjack than a clean-cut, poster Marine anymore—not that he'd ever been much of a recruiting poster Marine in the first place. Nick and I had never been in the same platoon as Marines, but we'd been to hell and back more than once as Praetorians.

  Jack was new to the team, though he'd cut his teeth with Praetorian the year before, on Caleb's team. He'd gotten shot, rotated home, and cross-decked to my team when we started training up again. He was a skinny, unremarkable-looking former SF dude, sandy-haired and soft-spoken, but he meshed with the team pretty well, and was a hell of a shot.

  Harold was still on the phone, looking less and less happy. The sirens were still wailing in the distance, but looking around, I saw no flashing lights or any sign that the cops were getting any closer. That merited a frown.

  “What the fuck is taking those boys so long?” I asked.

  Jack snorted. “This is No-Man's Land, dude. Nobody's going to raise a finger south of Tucson until they know that no cartels are involved.” He spat on the ground, still watching the horizon with a squint. “They'll make noise to reassure the locals, but that's where it'll end if they get a whiff that narcos are within a mile of the shooting. The Gila Bend Massacre made sure of that.”

  I grunted. The Gila Bend killings had been gruesome. A celebrity Sheriff had been visiting the little town with his family and sizable entourage. Sicarios had attacked with overwhelming firepower, slaughtering the sheriff, his family, and everybody else nearby. The Sheriff's head, along with his wife's and his chief deputies', had been left on the streets of Phoenix two days later.

  It had been meant as a message, and it was received, loud and clear. The cartels owned southern Arizona, and since the Border Patrol had been drawn down to next to nothing after the collapse of the dollar, local law enforcement was on its own trying to fight them. After Gila Bend, they quit trying. Better to stay alive.

  I walked over to Harold, who was staring at his phone as if it had personally betrayed him. As I did so, Eric came around from the side of the wrecked semi. There was blood on his hands. He met my eyes and just shook his head.

  Motherfuckers. I felt a reflexive flash of hatred for the tattooed scumbags who'd kicked this off. The only thing that poor bastard had done was drive down the fucking road in front of us.

  “Harold,” I said. I only had to say it once this time; he broke his reverie and looked up at me. There was something close to panic in his eyes. “Are there recovery vehicles coming from Tucson?”

  “What?” He seemed surprised; I don't think he was expecting the question. He was focused on his previous conversation.

  “Recovery vehicles,” I repeated. “Something to pick up the cargo, replacement trucks or SUVs for the two I've got back there shot to shit.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, starting to fiddle with his phone again. “I should get a couple of trucks on the way.” I rolled my eyes. The guy was a nice enough guy, but he was fucking lost most of the damned time.

  “What is the cargo, anyway?” I asked. He looked up at me, startled.

  “That's proprietary,” he protested. “You know that.”

  I took a step closer to him. “It was proprietary,” I said. “When this was a simple, ordinary transfer, it wasn't our business to know what we were escorting.” That wasn't strictly accurate, but Harold didn't know that Renton had hired us on the sly for this job; he didn't even know Renton existed. For all I knew, he had no idea that his bosses were possibly doing business for international criminal organizations. “But now, we're not even into Mexico yet, and MS-13 has killed a trucker and tried to kill us to get at it. So I'm making it our business.”

  His eyes went wide at the mention of MS-13. Their reputation was well-known. “I...I don't know why they'd be after this,” he stammered. “I mean...I don't know how they could know what it is...”

  “What. Is. It?” I asked, slowly and inexorably.

  He dithered. I got the distinct impression he was scared stiff of the consequences of telling somebody he wasn't authorized to tell. But I can be fairly intimidating when I put my mind to it, and with the collection of smashed cars and corpses behind me, it was working.

  “It's money,” he said, finally. “Money for a deal that Harmon-Dominguez is acting as an intermediary for down in Mazatlan.”

  “What, wire transfers don't do the trick anymore?” I asked. I knew the answer; Harmon-Dominguez, or whoever was employing them for this, didn't necessarily want any records of the transfer. Which meant Renton's suspicions were bearing fruit already.

  “Get those vehicles down here as quickly as possible,” I said curtly, as I turned aside. “I don't want to be stuck out here in the open any longer than absolutely necessary.”

  The sirens in the distance trailed off. Either the cops had decided discretion was the better part of valor, or somebod
y had made a phone call. Maybe both. I didn't like either option; it meant things had deteriorated further than I'd thought. Fear, corruption, or a combination of both don't bode well for a healthy society.

  I'd spent a good deal of my adult life in deteriorating societies overseas. It was even more disheartening to see the same thing happening at home.

  Chapter 2

  Apparently somebody had decided that there needed to be some kind of response, because a lone sheriff's department vehicle showed up just ahead of the Harmon-Dominguez trucks. The firefight had been over for just over an hour. There were fire-trucks and ambulances just behind the sheriff's vehicle. The deputy pulled up, got out, took a look around at us, walked over to the shattered cars and trucks full of bloating MS-13 corpses, and went back to his car without a word. The other first-responders went to deal with the overturned semi. The wrecker was half an hour behind the ambulances. The EMTs ended up just bagging up the bodies and driving away.

  When the Harmon-Dominguez convoy finally got there, they slowed way down and hesitated for close to five minutes, hanging back a good hundred yards from the scene. When they finally crept forward to the crashed box truck, they were slow, hesitant, and gave off the appearance of staring fearfully at the sheriff's department vehicle. I just shook my head.

  We'd been contracted because some of the people Renton worked with thought that Harmon-Dominguez was a front company for Mexican cartel interests. They wanted some inside reconnaissance, and we were it. And maybe my perceptions were being colored by that knowledge. But these guys just seemed extra nervous around law enforcement, as they carefully backed up to Harold's truck and opened the back doors of the new box truck.

  Of course, if the sheriff's deputies noticed, they didn't set a foot out of their white-and-green car to do anything about it.

  It took a while to get the cargo transferred. Harold got in the new box truck, but the original driver stayed with the wreck to get it towed away. The rest of us were already in the two new trucks that had come to pick us up.

  Harold came over to my vehicle. “Okay, we're loaded back up,” he said. “We can get back on track now. We'll have to move quickly to make up lost time.”

  I just shook my head. “No, we're going back to Tucson,” I said. “After what just happened, we need to reset.”

  He got a little bit of that panicked look in his eyes. “We can't afford the time,” he said.

  “I don't care,” I replied. “We just got fucking ambushed. Your schedule is dead. We were hired to ensure your safety, and that's what we're going to do. We've got to take the time to re-examine our plan, possibly re-route, and take additional measures to lower our profile and harden ourselves as a target.”

  Harold was fidgeting now. “I'm telling you, we have a very strict time-schedule!” he insisted. “We have to get back on track!”

  “Better if it gets there late and intact than if it doesn't get there at all because it got intercepted by MS-13, now isn't it?” I asked. I motioned toward the border to the south. “If you are really that intent on going, go. You won't have an escort, though, because we'll quit before we'll half-ass security for the sake of your timeline.”

  That made him look positively sick. The prospect scared him badly enough that he seemed to crumple right in front of my eyes. He slumped back to the box truck without another word.

  Of course, I was bluffing. We weren't getting paid to make sure the shipment got to where it was going; we were getting paid to find out who Harmon-Dominguez was doing business with. I just had to delay our departure to the south until we could get our toys from The Ranch and link up with Renton.

  I made eye contact with Jim, who would be leading the way back north, and nodded. He waved, and we started back to Tucson.

  The drive was short and quiet. Larry and I were thinking over the implications of what had just happened, and we didn't know the Harmon-Dominguez driver who'd brought the truck down, so there wasn't much conversation. He didn't need to know any more than Harold could tell him.

  When we got to the Harmon-Dominguez warehouse on the north side of Tucson, we pulled our trucks up and retreated into the little side office we'd annexed as a “security office.” We didn't do much more than re-stock ammunition and recharge radio batteries; there wasn't much to do right away. We did spread out the map and start looking for other options route-wise; the I-19 to Nogales was apparently compromised. Unfortunately, there wasn't another legal crossing short of Yuma, and going the sneaky way wasn't going to go over well with Harold.

  We'd been there all of about two hours when my phone rang. It was Clyde. “Jeff, we just touched down in Tucson. Got all your goodies. We'll be by the private aviation terminal when you're ready.”

  “Good deal,” I replied. “Hang tight for the moment. The Godfather's on the way and we've still got to figure out just how much things have changed and how we're going to handle this.”

  “We'll be here,” he answered. I dropped the phone on the table and went back to the maps and imagery.

  Renton must have set records. He was on the ground in Tucson three and a half hours after we'd spoken on the phone. He got to the warehouse less than an hour after that.

  I met him at the gate, in order to forestall awkward questions from the rent-a-cops guarding the warehouse. He was dressed as nondescriptly as ever, with a laptop and a thick manila envelope under his arm. He simply nodded to me and followed me inside, not saying a word until we were in the office and the door was closed.

  “I'm assuming that your 'employers' are champing at the bit to get moving, so I'll make this as concise as I can,” he said. He set the laptop on the table and fired it up. After fiddling with it for a moment, he brought up a picture. We crowded around to get a better look.

  Calling the image blurry was being charitable. The face of the man on the screen was little more than a smudge. “I take it you gentlemen have heard of an individual known as 'El Duque,'” Renton said. It wasn't really a question. Eyebrows went up all around the table.

  El Duque had been in the news since the bombings in Houston a year before. We'd missed most of that ruckus, having been in the Middle East at the time, but there was plenty of talk about the explosives having come from Mexico, used by Caliphate terrorists. The name “El Duque” then began floating around; he was supposed to have been the facilitator who got the Mexican gangs and the Islamist terrorists together, and got the explosives across the border. Some said he was Columbian, a former FARC revolutionary, others that he was former Cuban DGI. Still others maintained that he was a Mexican capo who had gone truly international.

  He was High Value Target Number One. Everybody wanted him. CIA was reportedly after him, the FBI and DHS was watching for him at every port of entry. If half the stories about him were true, he was Osama Bin Laden, Carlos the Jackal, and Viktor Bout all rolled into one.

  “Yeah, we've heard of him,” I replied.

  “We've even heard of the army of Caliphate shock troops he's amassing in Juarez,” Jack put in sarcastically. “Or was it Tijuana this week?”

  “Wait, really?” Nick asked. “Caliphate shock troops?”

  Jack smirked. “Yeah, that was the actual wording. I just about spat whiskey all over the TV when I heard that one.”

  Renton rolled his eyes. “Typical. Trying to conflate every threat into one, to make it easier to comprehend. Meanwhile, the real problems get ignored.

  “El Duque is a serious concern, though. We don't know who he is; he's been very protective of his identity. We have the pseudonym, and these few, very low-quality photos. Besides that, all we have is a pattern of activity.”

  The image on the computer screen changed to show a number of red spots scattered across the Western Hemisphere. “He's known to have ties with just about every revolutionary, guerrilla, and transnational criminal group on this side of the Atlantic, and quite a few on the other side. He's a 'super facilitator,' a fixer for anything that will spread chaos. He deals in weapons, drugs, e
xplosives, information, mercenaries, assassinations, you name it. He's an agent of chaos. And so far he's one that no one can seem to find.”

  I narrowed my eyes as I looked at the screen. “I take it El Duque's the target.” It wasn't really a question. “Are you thinking that Reyes is El Duque?”

  Renton shook his head. “Reyes is too easily accounted for and he doesn't fit the description. He's also taken great pains to keep his hands clean. Some of his connections, though...not so much.” He tapped the touchpad. A picture came up of two men smiling and shaking hands. One was short, thickset, and black-haired, wearing what looked like a red silk shirt and a gold chain around his neck. The other was tall, spare, and balding. He had a thin mustache and was wearing an expensive suit. He had a hand on the red-shirted man's shoulder as they shook hands. “The bald guy is Reyes,” Renton said. “Redshirt there is Joaquin Adolfo Mendez. Mendez is an old-school Sinaloan gangster. He's been whispered about as the next 'Chapo' Guzman.” Another picture. This one showed Reyes sitting at a table with a man in a dark suit and neatly trimmed beard. “This guy is Ahmad Ali Drisawi.”

  “That sounds Iranian,” Little Bob commented.

  “It is,” Renton said, without looking up from the laptop. “He's Qods Force. He's officially persona-non-grata in Mexico, but he keeps showing up in Mexico City, Tijuana, and Cuidad Juarez, and nobody ever rolls him up. He appears to be an IRGC facilitator for non-official Hezbollah and Qods Force operations in Mexico and the Southwest. And, as you can see here, he gets along famously with the upstanding businessman Reyes.”

  “So you think that Reyes is either connected with El Duque directly, or through one of these characters?” I asked.

  “Oh, we're fairly certain it's direct,” he said. He clicked again, and an audio player came up. The conversation that proceeded to play was all in Spanish, and my Spanish is worse than my Arabic, so I wasn't able to follow most of it. But I did catch the name “El Duque” repeated a couple of times.