by Peter Nealen
She wasn't a beautiful woman, but she wasn't ugly, either. A few pounds overweight, facial features perhaps a bit plain, her smile was beatific. She wasn't smiling as she started through the intersection as the light turned green, her mind evidently elsewhere.
An old, rusty F-150 T-boned her Jeep, traveling at almost fifty miles an hour, plowing the vehicle across the intersection. The driver's side of the Jeep was caved in by two feet. Luisa wasn't moving as the driver of the F-150 got out and pumped three 9mm bullets into her head from two feet away. Then he stepped into the passenger side of the Land Cruiser that pulled up next to the wreck and drove away.
Los Hijos was going to have to get someone else to recruit their halcones.
Ochoa Nissan had once been a Chevy dealership, but Herman Ochoa had bought it out a little over a year before. He had added a quite large and extensive shop, and bought and sold used cars. At least, that was the public face of Ochoa Nissan. Like Alvarez' relatively new Jeep, few people remarked on the provenance of a lot of the “used” cars coming into Ochoa's shop. Nor did they comment on the large farm trucks pulling in at odd hours with their panel beds covered with tarps, and then leaving empty.
Ochoa Nissan was guarded, so this wasn't a singleton assassination or a simple bombing. Instead, two vans pulled up to the front and Eddie's team piled out, kitted up and masked. It was just after 2200, so there weren't the usual legit clientele there; the place was officially closed. Ochoa and his henchmen were there, though, along with the handful of gangbangers who had brought in the first of the night's haul of stolen cars. One such car had just pulled up to the entrance, and the gangsters were getting out. They never had a chance. Eddie and his boys gunned them down then swept into the building, clearing it cubicle by cubicle, shop by shop.
From outside, where we were sitting at opposite corners of the dealership in F-250s, weapons just out of sight, we could hear the reports of rifle fire, and occasionally see the flashes. There didn't seem to be much resistance. Surprise had been almost complete.
There was movement at the back wall, drawing my eye. “Looks like we've got a squirter,” I said. Larry squinted toward the two men scrambling away from the dealership and grunted.
“Looks like,” he agreed. “We can't have that, now, can we?”
We both had our doors open and the windows rolled down, so it was an easy enough matter to lay our rifles in the V of door and frame, line up the fleeing gangsters, and open fire. We were both running suppressed, so as not to attract too much extra attention, aside from what was happening inside. Larry's target went down on the first shot. Mine took a round, stumbled, and kept running, albeit with a painful hitch in his stride. I shot him again and he fell, but kept trying to crawl away. A third round stilled him.
The shooting from inside died down, then went silent. “Target is clear,” Eddie called over the radio.
“Roger,” I replied. I could already hear the sirens. The cops were moving particularly quickly now that it was a Los Hijos target in town getting hit. It highlighted another issue that needed to be addressed. “We're pulling off. The Bronze are on the way. Get gone as fast as possible.”
“Finishing setting the charges now,” he replied. “We'll be off-site in two minutes.”
We were five minutes and almost a mile away when Ochoa Nissan blew up, a mushroom cloud of burning gasoline rising into the night sky over Culiacan. Eddie and his boys knew just where to put the explosives, as well as the gas cans they'd brought along. Los Hijos had one less asset and drug transport staging area now.
Police Chief Renaldo Herrera was scared. There were uniformed policemen, wearing full kit and balaclavas, stationed outside his house, and he was escorted to and from the Policia Ministerial by no fewer than three cars, with at least six heavily armed policemen nearby at all times. We were fairly sure that he was scared for two reasons; the first was the fact that we were running rampant through Culiacan, killing people and burning their shit down, and he had no idea who was doing it, except for rumors of gringo special operations troops. The second, though obviously publicly unstated, was that it was Los Hijos' property and people getting destroyed and slaughtered. We'd noticed the increasing alacrity of the police trying to stop the violence directed toward the cartel's holdings. It could be that they were simply attempting to put a lid on the violence, period. But given the hold the Santisima Muerte-worshiping thugs had on the city, I doubted it. Still, we kept him under surveillance until we had something a little more solid.
It didn't take long. An older, customized Buick pulled up to the police station, with Santa Muerte iconography plastered all over the back window and the hood, and a tall man with long hair and a thin, pencil mustache got out. He was visibly armed, carrying a pistol in a leather holster at his side, but the cops didn't disarm him or even search him as he walked into the police station.
We waited for almost an hour. Finally, the long-haired man, whom we'd tentatively identified as Angel Ortega, one of the youngest of the brothers and generally considered the least unstable, came back out the front door next to Herrera. They embraced at the door, at which point, Larry fired twice. The suppressed rounds still made a loud crack, but the muzzle blast was quieted and invisible from inside the bed cover on the truck. Both men crumpled to the concrete, dead before they even hit the sidewalk. We were already rolling. The truck had been stripped, and would be left outside of town, to be found without license plates or anything else left to identify who had used it.
As soon as the shots had been fired, I had sent Derek a pre-set message. He was already uploading an announcement of the death on several Dark Net websites. The announcement was simply a photo of Herrera, with a death's head superimposed on his face, and an image of the same wet-work ad, with Raoul's improvements.
Another Ortega down, along with the core of Los Hijos' police protection.
Those were only the highlights. We didn't get a lot of rest over those three days.
None of us were under any illusions that we were ending the drug cartels' influence or activities in Culiacan. Even before anyone quite figured out what was going on, other Sinaloan elements were moving into the vacuum our actions had caused. The industry was far, far too big to shut it down by targeting one cartel, especially one among so many.
But that wasn't the point. That war was going to take a lot more than two teams of shooters, especially in Sinaloa. This state had a tradition of being untameable going back at least five hundred years. The name of the Los Hijos nightclub hadn't been picked randomly. A lot of the locals thought of the cartels as the brave rebels defying the corrupt authorities in Mexico City. Los Valientes, “The Valiant Ones,” had been a nickname for the narcos for years. They were seen as violent Robin Hoods. Not everyone thought that way, of course; there were plenty of Sinaloans who would violently protest such a characterization. Pablo Gutierrez had been one of them.
We had some information that a Jose Manuel Sainz, one of Herrera's staff, was quietly one of these people as well. He kept his mouth shut professionally, since he understandably didn't want to get fired and then tortured to death. But Gray had included a few notes about quiet conversations where Sainz had expressed his disgust and disillusionment about the corruption among the cops in Culiacan, and particularly his hatred for Los Hijos.
So we called him over the phone.
I was using a voice distorter, and Raoul, Jim, and Mia were gathered around, listening. The phone started ringing. It would just show a random jumble of numbers on Sainz's caller ID.
“Si?” He sounded suspicious. I would be, too.
“Jose Sainz,” I said. My voice would come across as an unnaturally deep, robotic sound. “I hear that your boss is dead.”
There was a long silence. I was fairly sure that Sainz spoke English, and if he hadn't, there probably would have at least been a, “Que?” in response to my statement.
“You are very well informed,” he said. “That is not public knowledge yet. Who is this?”
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br /> “Someone who dislikes Los Hijos de la Muerte as much as you do, Señor Sainz,” I said. “You may have noticed that they are taking a considerable beating this week.”
Another pause. “I may have noticed that they have been among the dead more than usual,” he allowed.
“Within the next few days, Los Hijos will no longer be a player, Señor Sainz,” I told him. “With your boss out of the way, you have an opportunity to take advantage of this fact before too many of the narcos do. You will have to move quickly; some of them are already taking advantage. But I think that you are up to the task.” This was pure guesswork on my part; I'd never met the man, but we had figured that trying to get a cop into place who at least was less likely to be bought by the narcos was a good idea. The truth was, there wasn't any sort of organized resistance to the narcos in Culiacan like there had been with Al Hakim's militia in Basra. The closest there was would be other narco cartels, and for obvious reasons, we weren't terribly interested in trying to build rapport with them.
“I'm not exactly in the running for police commissioner,” he said, after another pause. “If you know that I have some bad feelings for Los Hijos, then you should know that.”
“Doesn't matter, does it?” I said. “You're still one of the ranking officers in the department now that Herrera is gone. You can make some progress, even if the corrupted politicians head you off eventually. Small victories, Señor Sainz. Wars are won one battle at a time.” That was enough. If I'd read him right, he was probably trying to trace the call even while we talked. I hung up.
“Well, hopefully that's a seed planted,” I said.
“I think it might have been,” Mia said. “He was receptive, in spite of his caution.”
“What makes you so sure?” Raoul asked. “He didn't sound like he thought he had much of a chance to make it work.”
“It was in the tone of his voice,” Mia replied. “He was thinking about it. He's skeptical that it will work, certainly, but he wants it to work. I think he'll give it a shot. Probably not as aggressively as we'd like, but he might throw a wrench in the other cartels' gears a bit before he gets shut down.”
I stood up and handed the modded phone back to Raoul. “We'll just have to hope that he's feeling froggy,” I said. “We've got other fish to fry.”
After a week straight of death and destruction, the remaining Ortegas were in a state of near-panic. There weren't many of the Los Hijos gangbangers on the streets in Culiacan anymore, and most of those were moving in large, heavily armed groups. Even that wasn't enough; the wolves were circling. A pack of about twenty Los Hijos gangsters, sporting the ubiquitous death's head iconography and armed with AKs, G3s, and a few FN2000s, were ambushed and slaughtered by a group of Guzman-Loera sicarios. Hours later, another Los Hijos packaging nexus was burned to the ground, and we were nowhere near it. We'd wounded the beast and now the scavengers were tearing its guts out.
But we still had the throat to tear out. Papa Ortega was still breathing.
He'd pulled most of the family and his most trusted gunmen back to his mansion, a former hotel up to the northeast of Culiacan. He'd turned it into a veritable fortress, but the more we looked at it from across the river, the more it looked like he'd directed all his defenses toward the road. This was going to be a far easier target than Sergio's farm.
There were bonfires burning in several places across the grounds, throwing flickering golden light across the lawns, the trees casting weird, wavering shadows. There were also guards with powerful spotlights up on the roof of the house, which was a square, manor-style house rather than a classical “mansion.” I suspected the place had been a farm before it had become a hotel. Patrols of three to four gunmen were walking around the grounds, most of them chain-smoking.
Right at the moment, I was sitting, along with the rest of the team, in the brush on the hill across the river from the target, observing through small binoculars. My NVGs weren't going to give me much of any more detail; there was too much light. The NVGs just kept getting whited out.
Eddie's snipers would drop the guards with the spotlights as soon as we were across the river. Papa Ortega had indeed oriented his entire defense toward the road, figuring that that was where the attack was going to come from. Apparently, cartel strike forces didn't usually take the hard approach.
We'd trained our entire adult lives to take the hard approach that nobody else wanted to.
The hill we were sitting on was the highest point around, and even with what little FARC advice Los Hijos had gotten, they hadn't seen fit to put a listening post on it. It did give us an excellent line of sight on the entire compound, though. It was barely eight hundred meters to the road, and the sniper positions were slightly closer to the river than where we were sitting.
I checked my watch, carefully shielding the the glow with my hand. 0234. Looking back up at the compound, I decided that it wasn't going to get much less active than it already had. Ortega was scared, so the patrolling wasn't going to die down, especially after the mess we'd made of Sergio's farm in the middle of the night. May as well move now.
I briefly wished we had mortars. I'd just bombard the hell out of the place until it was rubble, then go down and make sure we'd gotten Papa Ortega. Of course, we didn't have them, and it was never going to be that simple, anyway. So we started working our way down the hill through the scrub.
There was no sign that anyone noticed our progress as we descended. I started to hear music, which was weird, and probably accounted for the fact that nobody heard the cracking and crunching we were making. That brush was thick, especially as we got closer to the river. There was no way to move through it silently, no matter how hard we tried.
The music kept getting louder. It sounded vaguely like a cross between a hymn and mariachi music. I suspected that was exactly what it was; Papa Ortega was praying hard to the White Lady to protect him. The fact that he was deafening his security at exactly the time they needed to be able to hear was an added bonus.
We finally fought our way to the riverbank. The Rio Tamazula wasn't very deep; it was in a fairly arid area, after all. Keeping Jim's element on one side to cover our crossing, Ben and I led the way across, wading up to our knees but never getting deeper than that. We still stayed low, trying not to silhouette ourselves. There was distressingly little between us and the house. As we got further across the water, I started to wonder what the fuck Eddie was waiting for. We were sitting ducks, and those spotlights were still sweeping the grounds.
Just as one of the spotlights on the roof started to absently turn toward us, a series of shots snapped out, and the roof guards collapsed, spotlights spinning wildly as their holders died. The music was getting louder; I didn't think anyone had even heard the thuds as two of the lookouts fell off the roof. There was no way to miss the spinning lights, though, and shouts went up as the patrols sounded the alarm.
We got to the far bank and hunkered down. The place had once been used as a recreational area, so there really wasn't a lot of cover or even concealment to be found. So we settled for getting flat and getting behind our rifles.
They didn't know exactly where the shots had come from; once again, the suppressors were proving to be worth their weight in gold. Most of them still seemed to be focused on the road. But one group of five was coming back toward the river.
They were moving cautiously, looking all around with their weapons up. They still didn't see us in time. I initiated, double-tapping the first one in the chest. My NVGs were still flipped up, and the illuminated reticle was a red cross on the target's chest.
With a series of slightly muffled, but still loud claps, four of the five went down. The fifth did something I hadn't seen yet on this job. He dropped his rifle with a clatter and ran, yelling in Spanish. He took three rounds high in the back and fell on his face, his shouting stilled with a gasp.
There was more shouting, barely audible over the music still pumping from the house. There was definitely something un
settling about that tune, even though I couldn't make out the words. It may have simply been the fact that I knew what kind of weird devotions these people had. I can't say I particularly liked the sound of the muezzin from a mosque, either, after what I'd been through in the Middle East.
Jim and his element waded across the river, moving a bit more quickly and less quietly than we had. I didn't wait for them; we were definitely compromised already, so our only option was to push the fight as quickly and aggressively as we could. We were up and moving in a fast glide toward the house, rifles up and ready to nail any target that presented itself.
For all the yelling, though, no one else appeared. In fact, it was starting to look like the guard force had broken and bugged out just like the last guy on that patrol. We got to the back door with no resistance. Little Bob hit it at a dead run, smashing it in with his sledgehammer and rapidly rolling out of the way as Ben, Bryan, and I charged in.
The entryway was empty and dark. In fact, there didn't seem to be any lights on at all. We moved deeper in, as Jim and the rest of the team flowed in behind us, weapon lights flickering into corners and shadows as we moved.
The music was even louder inside. It sounded like somebody had a stereo turned up as loud as it could go. There was also a strange smell in the house, kind of like incense, tobacco smoke, marijuana smoke, and something else blended together.
We moved from room to room, battering down each door and clearing every corner and dead space before moving on. Two men to a room, it went quickly. There was no one there.