Revenge of the Assassin a-2 Page 2

  The submarine had been crafted in the jungles of northern Colombia and had taken twelve days to make the journey to Mexican waters. Equipped with two nearly silent diesel engines that charged the battery-driven electric motor, the handmade fiberglass vessel could do fourteen knots and submerge comfortably to a depth of twenty-five feet. Forty yards in length, she was equipped with primitive climate control for the crew, was virtually invisible to radar, and carried twenty-five hundred kilos of pure cocaine, with a street value of seventy-five million dollars, uncut. Once it was adulterated, the precious cargo would bring more like a hundred million. Wholesale cost in Colombia had been a cool six million dollars. The sub had cost seven hundred thousand dollars to fabricate and equip, with the crew costing three million. All told, the trip was a ninety percent profit margin transaction, even after all costs were factored in.

  The loading took four hours of fast movement. By the time the sub was empty, the seas had built to nine footers. The crew of the sub hurriedly placed explosive charges along the fiberglass hull of the craft, and once they were aboard the fishing boat, the captain depressed a transmitter, and the submarine’s waterline ruptured. The men stood on the back of the boat and watched as their conveyance sank beneath the waves, then quickly moved into the pilothouse and down into the ship’s bunk room. After almost two weeks submerged in cramped conditions they were ready for showers and drinking. It was the kind of trip you only made once or twice in a lifetime, and then you were done.

  Mario checked the radar and noted that there were no other ships within twenty miles. With a grunt, he spun the wheel and pointed the struggling bow north, on a course that would get them closer to the less turbid shore within a few hours — if their luck held out. From there they’d be two days to Mazatlan, maybe three, where their cargo would be offloaded to other craft for the trip up the Sea of Cortez.

  Commander Villanuevo watched the blip on his radar screen with interest. It had remained stationary for a full day, and now was moving in their direction at a snail’s pace. By his calculations, they’d be within striking distance in five hours at the current course, assuming that the Durango-class offshore patrol vessel Villanuevo captained stayed immobile.

  That wasn’t the plan. His ship could easily hold twenty knots in any sea conditions, which would put them alongside El Cabrito in a little over three hours. Villanuevo barked a series of terse orders to his second in command and advised him to ready the men. They’d move on the boat at flat-out speed and call in the helicopter when the patrol boat was twenty miles away so the fishing boat didn’t have time to jettison its cargo or prepare in any way.

  A team of ten marines were standing by at the military base outside Manzanillo, ready to board the chopper and move on El Cabrito. It could reach them in a little over two hours, which would work out perfectly. Villanuevo radioed the coordinates of the ship and told the assault team to scramble the helicopter. It would be airborne within half an hour and in a holding pattern over the destroyer by six a.m.. Once they were ready, he’d send the team in, and within a few minutes the little shrimper wouldn’t know what had hit it.

  Villanuevo gave the signal and the patrol boat surged forward, impervious to the chop as it cut through the waves. At two hundred forty feet, with a crew of fifty-five and another twenty marines below decks, there were few vessels that could outrun or outfight the ARM Sonora. By his calculations, they could be boarding their target by seven a.m., with the mission hopefully concluded shortly thereafter.

  They’d received the tip on the drug shipment a week before, with surprisingly detailed information. If it was even close to correct, this would be one of the biggest seizures in his career, and a major blow to the Sinaloa cartel, which was the purported trafficker of this particular load. The new administration wanted to send a message to the Mexican people that it wasn’t going to be business as usual, and this interception would be critical in establishing the tone of the next six years in office. Of course, the information had likely come from a competitive cartel looking to cause maximum discomfort to its competitor, but that wasn’t Villanuevo’s concern. His job was to stop the shipment, and that’s what he’d do. The politicians could fight over who got the credit.

  Villanuevo checked his watch and pushed the button that activated the stopwatch function. If all played as he hoped, it would be a very bad morning indeed for the crew of El Cabrito.

  Mario jolted awake from his brief slumber. His first mate was shaking his shoulder. Julio’s eyes were wide with a look he’d never seen during the sixteen years the man had been his second in command: terror. Mario quickly shook off the sleep stupor and bolted upright, to be faced with an image that was his worst nightmare.

  A Sikorsky helicopter in full battle regalia bearing the colors of the Mexican Navy hovered a hundred yards away, the side panel open and a fifty caliber machine gun trained on the pilothouse. Inside, a group of grim-faced marines in assault gear were grouped behind the weapon.

  Waiting.

  Dawn had broken a few minutes earlier, but even in the dim light of the new day it was glaringly obvious to Mario that this was a full-scale disaster. The massive blades of the chopper churned the water below; its downdraft from the buffeting whipped the sea into an angry froth.

  Mario throttled back to near idle. Keeping his eye on the aircraft, he barked at Julio, “What the…when did they show up?”

  “They came out of nowhere. There was nothing on the radar, and then suddenly, there they were.”

  Mario grimaced. “Shit. They must have been flying at a high altitude, which is why it didn’t pick them up.”

  He was interrupted by an amplified voice from the copter.

  “Put the engine in neutral and stop. Prepare to be boarded. Get your crew on deck where they can be seen,” the voice boomed across the water as the chopper closed the distance, now no more than sixty yards from the boat.

  Julio glanced around wildly. “You think this is some kind of a drill or random inspection?” he asked, obviously panicked.

  Mario shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Look at them. They’re geared up for a small war. No, I’d say we’ve been sold out.”

  “Dammit,” Julio spat. “What do we do?”

  “Look at the radar. See there?” His grubby finger jabbed at the screen. “That’s a huge ship, and it’s moving very fast.”

  Mario had to make a quick decision. They had several automatic assault rifles on board, but they would be no match against the entire Mexican navy. His mind raced over alternatives, and then he shook his head again.

  “We’re finished. Get the men on deck and tell them to keep their mouths shut. The last thing we want is a gunfight with the marines on the open sea,” Mario said.

  “So we’re going to just give up?”

  “Do you have any better ideas?” Mario seethed. “We’ve got a ship bearing down on us, and that chopper has enough firepower to blow us to Japan. Do you really feel like dying today? I don’t. We can always let our lawyers deal with the fallout from this.” He shook his head and sighed. “It’s better than the alternative…”

  Julio took a deep breath and wordlessly descended the stairwell to where the crew was asleep after a mini-fiesta following the loading.

  A few minutes later, the men filed onto the deck with their hands in the air or behind their heads, and watched as the distinctive outline of the warship moved towards them. The chopper held its position, fixing the boat with its full attention as it waited for the Sonora to get within range.

  Mario caught movement in the pilothouse as he squinted at the horizon from the deck; upon seeing the source, he dropped his arms and began gesturing wildly with his hands. The crazy Colombian submarine captain had stayed below, and now peered through the doorway with an AK-47 pointed at the helicopter.

  “Noooo-” Mario screamed, but it was too late.

  The captain emptied the weapon at the chopper. Julio and Mario watched in horror as the slugs tore into the side of the aircr
aft, cutting down several of the armed marines. The fire was answered by the staccato high-speed chatter of the big fifty caliber gun as it issued forth a broadside of rounds that riddled the old pilothouse, annihilating the foolhardy submariner in a rain of lethal fury.

  The last thing Mario saw before his world went black for good was the stream of tracers from the chopper shredding the deck around him, mangling his crew in a hail of death as the spooked marines opened up with everything they had. A few of his men tried to find cover from the slaughter, but there was nowhere to hide. It was finished in a matter of a few seconds, and when the shooting stopped, nothing remained but corpses.

  When Villanuevo arrived on the Sonora twenty minutes later, the drifting boat was awash in blood, the slug-torn bodies of the hapless crew scattered across the deck. The marines rappelled from the helicopter and moved cautiously over the boat before descending to the lower compartments, wary of another attack. After a few minutes, the leader emerged from the pilothouse and shook his head.

  “There’s nobody left alive.”

  An hour later, Villanuevo radioed in one of the largest drug busts on the high seas in Mexican history — a triumph owed entirely to an anonymous tip from parties unknown.

  In the end, El Cabrito was only one of many shipments that made its way from Colombia every month, and even though it was a large seizure, there were infinite amounts of both criminals and drugs from where it had originated. Submarines continued to be fabricated in the hidden depths of the guerrilla-controlled jungle, and men desperate to make one big score that would set them up for life remained eager to pilot them north to the largest drug market in the world. As it had been for decades, and as it would remain for generations to come.

  Yesterday, Los Mochis, Mexico. 6:04 a.m.

  The yard of the paint supply company’s storage facility was particularly well fortified, with gleaming new barbed wire and hurricane fencing to keep trespassers at bay. Several ill-tempered Rottweilers prowled the grounds, further dissuading potential thieves from picking it as a target. Four armed sentries sat positioned at the corners, where they remained every night until they were relieved at eight a.m., an hour before the yard opened for business.

  It was still dark out, but the first orange rays of dawn were beginning to seep over the hills to the east of town, providing scant illumination of the road that led to the facility. At the far end of it, three military Humvees swung onto the pavement and raced towards the gates, followed by two trucks loaded with soldiers. The security men, alerted by the roar of the engines, hurriedly discussed their alternatives. They were there to protect the building — not take on the Mexican army. The head of the sentry detail told his men to stash their weapons where they wouldn’t be found, and one of the four ran to the far end of the yard where an old pickup truck sat on blocks, its engine long-ago dismantled for parts. He pushed the Kalashnikovs under the seat and was just moving back to the group when the vehicles pulled to a stop in front of the gate.

  A Federal police officer wearing a bulletproof vest eyed the men dubiously from the safety of the lead truck’s cab, and satisfied that there was no imminent danger, he swung his door open and stepped onto the hard-packed dirt. He approached the obvious leader of the security guards and held out a piece of paper.

  “Open the gates. I have a court order to search this bodega,” he announced perfunctorily.

  The leader read the document, taking his time, and then nodded.

  “I’ll be happy to, but I need to call the owners first and get their permission.”

  The officer shook his head. “That’s not what the order says. It says you let us in, now, and shut up until I say it’s all right to call anyone,” the cop explained menacingly.

  The leader’s eyes narrowed, and then he shrugged. “Suit yourself. But the owners are very powerful, and they won’t appreciate their property being trampled without any notice. I just work here, but I’m glad I’m not in your shoes.”

  “Your concern is noted. Now open up.”

  The leader glared at the cop and the soldiers, who had deployed from the trailing vehicles and now had their weapons trained on his men. He sighed, then fished in his pocket for the key to the massive padlock that held the gates closed.

  Two hours later, eighteen tons of marijuana had been discovered in two shipping containers at the far end of the storage facility, along with ninety kilos of Mexican heroin and several crates of automatic weapons. The Federales clamped a lid on the bust until they could round up the owners, who were going to jail for a very long time. The guards were charged with being accessories, but the police knew that would be a tough charge to make stick, given that they’d cooperated and the seizure had taken place without bloodshed — an anomaly in the ongoing war against the cartels.

  The following week, all four security men were found beheaded, stuffed in the back of an abandoned Chevrolet van on the outskirts of Hermosillo. The leader’s wife, sister, and three children were also found in the vehicle, beaten to death with a tire iron that still bore traces of their blood and hair on it, tossed casually on the floor of the passenger side of the cab. The local papers published lurid photos and made much of the grisly details, but within a few days the incident was forgotten, yet another in an endless parade of cartel violence that showed no signs of abating, regardless of the government’s rhetoric to the contrary.

  Chapter 2

  The president’s security team was in place hours ahead of time in Tampico, where he was scheduled to make an appearance at a local hospital. It had been a lousy week for his entourage, as the president had insisted in venturing out of Mexico City to show that he was a man of the people, unafraid to visit his constituents.

  It would be a welcome break from the bureaucratic grind that was his typical fare. The burdens of running Mexico were considerable, especially having only taken office a few short months before, during a time of upheaval. Infighting from political foes, the routine duties of being a head of state, jockeying to compromise on the host of campaign promises he had no ability or intention of keeping — all added up to a momentous pressure load, but one he gladly shouldered.

  The exiting administration had looted the country’s coffers, as had each administration before it, so one of the most pressing items he had to deal with was rebuilding the nation’s finances. This was problematic, as the windfall staple that had been responsible for much of the country’s prosperity was becoming harder to pump out of the ground — or sea, in this case. Once flush with oil revenues, over the past years the amount of energy required to extract a barrel of oil had skyrocketed as the oil fields matured and the low-hanging fruit had been picked, demanding ever greater effort for each subsequent year’s production. Simply put; in the past, a field would yield a hundred barrels of oil for one barrel’s worth of energy to extract them. Now they were lucky to see four barrels to one. To make matters worse, Mexico’s internal consumption had almost reached the point where it wouldn’t have any oil left to export within a few years — one of its largest sources of revenue.

  His other overwhelming problem was that the U.S. wanted Mexico to fight its war on drugs by pursuing the cartels at every turn, and it paid substantial foreign aid to Mexico in order to continue the nation’s criminalization of trafficking. The reality was that drugs were largely decriminalized within Mexico, and the population consumed them at whatever rate it felt like, without much fanfare or violence. Measures had been floated numerous times to make them legal, in an attempt to end the unprecedented violence that had accompanied the rise of trafficking by the Mexican cartels, when they’d taken over from the Colombians as the transportation arm of that nation’s enterprise.

  The president’s security detail was chartered with performing advance reconnaissance of any area he would be visiting, and today he was scheduled to first fly from Mexico City to be at a new social security hospital to cut the ribbon in Tampico, and then jet to Guadalajara to spend an hour at an orphanage. Both events were photo op
s, nothing more, but much of the role of being president involved kissing babies and feigning interest in the mundane. Nonetheless, the challenges involved with safeguarding him in an environment of constant danger and violence were significant, and the men chartered with doing so were professionals of the highest caliber.

  Once the day was done, the plan was to fly into Durango before dark for a few days of relaxation at a massive ranch the president’s family owned. As with all presidential visits there, a helicopter would wing the president to the rural compound, bypassing any travel on roads. The highways were too much of a question mark, even with a massive military presence, so whenever possible the president eschewed motorcades in favor of air travel. The security detail tried to keep his arrival low-key, however that was generally impossible, and by evening the airport would be temporarily closed down and ringed with army troops to discourage any sort of an attack.

  Major Luis Cena headed up the group of special forces troops assigned to presidential protection duty — the most prestigious posting in the nation, and one that carried with it significant pressure. He preferred when the president remained in Mexico City under rigorously controlled conditions, and hated these junkets for the risk they posed.

  He was agitated this morning because the route from the airport in Tampico to the hospital was riddled with security problems, which he was handling to the best of his abilities but which introduced substantial uncontrollable variables. The president would be there within a half hour, and even after posting men along the way and closing off the streets, he was apprehensive. The president’s new offensive against the cartels had caused consternation at the highest levels and retaliation was a given.