Navarro’s lab was in the middle of nowhere, high up in the lawless and impenetrable Sierra Madre Occidental, a volcanic range of tall mountains that were cleaved by steep gorges, ravines, and plunging canyons known as barrancas, some of which were deeper than the Grand Canyon. Neither the Aztec emperors nor the Spanish conquistadors had ever been able to impose their authority on the violent and fiercely independent villagers who lived in the Sierra’s folds, and the Mexican government hadn’t fared any better. The mountains, rife with marijuana and poppy fields, were controlled by regional strongmen and warring drug mafias. Gangs of armed bandits and renegades still roamed around the wild hinterland on horses and mules, like they did a hundred years ago and more. Navarro had chosen his compound’s location well.
We didn’t have that much to go on. McKinnon’s position had been pinpointed by homing in on the signal of the cell phone during his call. After that, the mission had been planned hastily, and in the interest of not alerting any bought-and-paid-for Mexican law enforcement personnel in Navarro’s pay, we put together the intel we needed ourselves using one of the Air Force’s Predator drones, without involving the local authorities.
The plan was for us to be choppered in, but the landscape around our target wasn’t doing us any favors. The compound sat on a high mesa, and the terrain around it was too hostile and inhospitable for a ground infiltration. Given its high altitude setting and its commanding allaround views, chopper approaches were also highly vulnerable to detection. The best we could do was land about three miles away and cover the rest of the journey on foot over rough terrain that, we knew, was home to scorpions, rattlesnakes, mountain lions, bears, and weird, mythical mutant cougar-like beasts called onzas to boot.
A cakewalk.
We hit the ground about three hours before sunrise, figuring that would give us enough time to get to the compound under cover of dark - ness, get McKinnon out, and make it back to the chopper by dawn. We moved fast and sleek across steep, rocky slopes and rushing creeks, through pine forests and thickets of oak saplings, juniper, and cactus. There were eight of us in the strike team: me, Munro, a couple of DEA combat troops, and four Special Forces soldiers. We knew we were venturing into a well-guarded compound, so we were armed to the teeth: Heckler and Koch UMPs with sound suppressors, silenced Glocks, Bowie knives, body armor, night vision goggles. We were also wearing head-mounted video minicams that were sending a live feed back to the DEA’s field office inside the embassy in Mexico City, and we had a Predator flying overhead, giving us real-time visuals via the drone’s operators at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado. The plan, obviously, was not to engage. We were meant to sneak in and get our man out before they knew we were even there.
Didn’t happen.
Munro and I made it through the sleepy security without too much trouble. There was only one guard we couldn’t get around stealthily, and Munro had used his knife to put him down. We found McKinnon where he said he’d be, in his lab. He looked like he was in his late fifties and was of average height, a bit on the skinny side, with a silvery goatee and clear blue eyes that were shot through with intelligence. He was wearing a white straw cowboy hat with a silver scorpion clipped onto it and a snapbutton Western shirt, and he had a battered old leather satchel on the counter beside him. He seemed scared and thrilled in equal parts to see us there, and was all raring to go. But there was a wrinkle.
He wasn’t alone.
He had a woman with him, someone he hadn’t mentioned in his call, a local who’d been cooking and cleaning for him during his incarceration. A woman he’d bonded with. Deeply, evidently, since she’d risked her life to sneak in a phone to him, the one he’d used to call us. She had a kid with her, her son, a boy of three or four —that thought now made me feel like I was swallowing my fist. She was also pregnant. With McKinnon’s baby. She had a pretty big bump on her.
He wasn’t leaving without her. Or the kid.
Which was a problem.
A huge problem.
We didn’t exactly have a limo waiting outside. We had to get around the guards again. Quietly. Then there was the three-mile trek back to the chopper. Over rough ground. In total darkness.
Munro refused.
He told McKinnon there was no way the woman and the kid would be able to make the trip. Not without seriously slowing us down or unwittingly giving up our presence, which would blow the mission and possibly get us all killed. There was a small army of coke-fueled, trigger-happy pistoleros out there, and the last thing Munro wanted was for them to know we were around.
McKinnon was incensed. He flat out refused to leave without them.
Munro wouldn’t budge and got angry.
Then it got ugly.
McKinnon said it wasn’t negotiable.
Munro told him he wasn’t the one dictating the play and mocked his naivete, asking him how he even knew the woman’s baby was his and mocking him by saying he’d probably been duped by the woman who saw him as a ticket out of that miserable hellhole and into the United States.
I tried to mediate and interceded on behalf of the woman and her kid, telling Munro we could carry the boy and the woman probably knew the terrain better than we did. Munro turned on me and growled about how this wasn’t a mission to rescue innocent hostages, but rather to bring back a scumbag who was working on new ways to wreck people’s lives. We didn’t owe him anything, Munro hissed. We weren’t rescuing him—we were there to make sure his work never saw the light of day, period.
McKinnon told him to go fuck himself and said he was staying.
And Munro just lost it.
He pulled out his Glock and, without so much as a blink, pumped a bullet into the kid, then another into his mother.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I can still see the shock and horror on the woman’s face for that split second after the bullet hit her kid and the way her head snapped backward like it had been punched by a blast of wind when he shot her before she collapsed onto the floor, already dead.
McKinnon just lost it.
He started shouting, hurling abuse at us, moving around frantically, just incensed and raging and out of control. Munro was yelling back at him, ordering him to shut up while jabbing his gun angrily at his face. I tried to calm them both down, but they were beyond that. McKinnon started throwing things at us, lab equipment, stools, anything he could get his hands on.
Then he ran.
We scambled after him, but he was at the lab’s door before we could get to him, flinging it open and storming out while screaming from the top of his voice.
And everything went haywire.
I was on him first and just managed to grab him when the first shots crackled in the night. Shouting echoed in the darkness around me, the guards snapped to attention at his outburst and rushed out from all directions. Bullets ate up the timber walls around me as I dragged McKinnon back inside, wild, nonsilenced bursts from the Mexicans’ AK-47s flying all over the place while, from beyond the perimeter of the compound, short, three-bullet snaps were coming in from our guys who were positioned in various spots to cover our exit, the whole chaotic mess mixed in with urgent, clipped commentary coming through the earpiece of my comms set.
Between the weed, the lechuguilla bootleg tequila, and the coke, the pistoleros weren’t thinking straight, and it went manic. I was hustling McKinnon back through the lab, my left arm around his neck, the other leveling the snub-nosed UMP at the door way, when the first guards burst through, three of them. I cut one of them down and saw another get hit by Munro’s fire, but the third took cover behind a counter and started spraying gunfire recklessly from behind it.
I pulled McKinnon and we both dove for cover behind another cabinet, landing heavily under a shower of debris from the torrent of bullets blasting everything around us, while Munro slipped out of sight, his voice in my earpiece telling me he was going to secure McKinnon’s files, which were farther back, at the very back of the lab. Then another pistolero charged in, laying down more gunfire randomly, firing at everything that moved, tacking left, away from his compadre, snaking his way farther
