exploding in an orange fireball that momentarily blinded the assault team. A second detonation erupted from the shattered hulk and a cloud of sooty smoke redolent of burning flesh belched into the dank breeze.
The leader fired through the haze at the few remaining defendants, and then held up three gloved fingers and murmured into his com line. The shooting gradually subsided, replaced by an uneasy silence. The blast from the copter crash and the booming of the turret guns still echoed in the team’s ears as they waited cautiously for direction. Seeing no further fire from the building, the leader made two hand signals. His men divided up and raced for the warehouse door that the advance man had pitched the grenades through.
After a few moments of hesitation, the men dropped night vision goggles into place and tore through the opening, weapons ready to cut down anything that moved. The bodies of their foes lay strewn around the floor near the windows, where the brutally effective onslaught from the BTR-70 main guns had cut any resistance short. The goggles illuminated the gloomy depths of the warehouse with a distinctive green glow, and it quickly became apparent that nothing remained alive to threaten them.
The leader crept into the area, and once satisfied that all danger was neutralized, he motioned to one of his men to hit the lights. The team members flipped their goggles up, and an officer at the entry threw the breaker into the on position.
The overhead bulbs flickered to life, revealing a tableau of carnage. Corpses littered the floor in pools of blood alongside pallets of cardboard boxes accumulated in haphazard piles. Studying the scene, the leader approached an ancient forklift that sat idle in a far corner, in front of a crudely-formed cinderblock room with a steel roll-up door. That had to be the elevator they’d been told about.
A sound caused him to whirl around. A man lay on the ground, his arm and half his torso blown off by a grenade, along with much of his face. His one good eye regarded the interloper as his breath gurgled in his chest, and then he groaned and lay still. The leader paused to consider the now lifeless carcass, and then returned his attention to the elevator. He gestured to his men, and three of them hurried to take position on either side, their weapons trained on the steel roll-up door.
On the leader’s nod, the tallest of his men pulled it up, revealing a shaft twelve feet square. He cautiously shone a flashlight into the depths; its beam reflected off a steel platform four stories below. Glancing around, the leader summoned a group of his men and conducted a hurried discussion. A sweating marine trotted out to the vehicles and returned with three bundles of rappelling line.
Five minutes later, six commandos stood deep in the earth below Tijuana, peering down a long tunnel with an elaborate rail car system. One of the soldiers activated the low voltage lighting that ran the length of the excavation and noted that it stretched on seemingly forever. Wood and cement blocks supported the walls and ceiling of the passageway, ten feet wide and seven feet high. The rails of the electric trolley gleamed in the light. It was obvious that the system had been in place for some time and was well used.
A storage room sat just adjacent to the shaft, and when the lock was cut off with a welding torch, five hundred and thirty kilos of cocaine sat neatly packaged in orange plastic, with a distinctive scorpion logo stamped on the outside of each bundle. The room was large enough to accommodate ten times that amount, and there was no question in any of the men’s minds that this was only a few days’ worth of shipments waiting to make their way to the other end of the passage — a small, decrepit warehouse on the U.S. side of the border that ostensibly sold used automobile parts.
Further examination revealed an advanced ventilation system and numerous battery chargers to keep the trolley rolling, an additional indication that the tunnel was regularly used to move large amounts of contraband into the U.S.. How long it had been in operation was anyone’s guess, but by the looks of some of the debris, it had been years, not months.
The next day’s newspapers on both sides of the border were quick to herald a victory for the anti-drug forces and skimmed over the casualties as well as the obvious fact that many thousands of tons of cocaine and heroin had been making their way across undetected. Nobody was ever connected to the U.S. warehouse, other than a pair of low-level brothers who claimed they only paid the property taxes and utilities and hadn’t been to the building in years. Their case was remanded into the system and would take over a year to be heard in the overcrowded courts. They would ultimately wind up spending less than six months behind bars, along with credit for time served, having no criminal records other than an unrelated burglary from a decade before.
Twelve marines and Federal Police were killed during the assault, including the helicopter crew — six more were wounded. A total of fourteen cartel gunmen died during the gun battle, with no survivors. Nobody claimed any of the cartel fighters’ corpses, which were buried in a mass grave with no ceremony.
One month later, two more tunnels were discovered and shut down. By the best estimates over twenty are in operation at any given time — an inevitable fact of life in an environment where a laborer who works to excavate the tunnel makes five to seven dollars a day, and a kilo of cocaine that costs two thousand dollars in Colombia wholesales for twenty-five to thirty on the U.S. side of the border.
Six-foot swells with frothing white crests surged relentlessly from the northwest, driven by a twenty knot wind. The cloudy night’s crescent moon scarcely illuminated the inky water’s surface, its roiling unbroken except for the battered steel hull of an aged seventy-five-foot shrimp boat lurching against the waves’ pounding.
Her gray paint was ravaged by sea salt; patches of rust bled through along the waterline, signaling that soon it would be time to haul her out and weld new steel plates where corrosion had taken its toll. The topsides were slick from the windy spray, and the crew was inside below decks, waiting for the signal that they were needed. The captain, Mario, a thirty year veteran of the coastal waters, puffed on a hand-rolled cigarette as he watched the waves moving in a steady procession, the red illumination of his primitive gauges and the ancient radar unit bathing the pilothouse in a warm glow.
The diesel engine chugged quietly, driving the old single screw with just enough power to make headway against the building seas. They were in position, the handheld GPS unit near the throttle confirmed that the waypoint marking the rendezvous spot had been reached. The instructions were to hold position — for days, if necessary — while they waited. It was usually easy duty, but the squall that was eighty miles southwest of them was beginning to cause problems. Reports of fifteen to twenty foot swells had come in a few minutes earlier over the radio from a cargo ship making its way north. It was just a matter of time until the six footers doubled in size, and then it would get rocky.
Comfort wasn’t the concern. Rather, it would be impossible to transfer their cargo in huge waves with the boat pitching uncontrollably. Under normal circumstances they’d have been in four to five foot, gently rolling swells, the undulations of the surface easily timed. But with confused conditions and a tropical depression looming further out in the Pacific, all bets were off. If their contact didn’t show up soon, it could be days before a handoff would be practicable again.
Mario scanned the ocean’s murky form, searching for a beacon, as he had every fifteen minutes since the black of night had fallen. The rolling didn’t make it any easier. Worst case, he had his second radio tuned to a frequency that was rarely used, and he hoped that the captain of the other vessel would avail himself of the channel discreetly. One never knew who could be listening, and in a high-stakes game, there was no such thing as being too careful.
His first mate, Julio, mounted the stairs from the crew quarters below, two cans of Tecate beer clenched in his left hand as he steadied himself with a series of practiced grips on the handrail. Mario took one gratefully from him, and they toasted.
“It looks like it’s going to get snotty soon,” Julio remarked, before savoring a mouthful of cold brew.
Mario peered into the blackness outside. “There’s a big one blowing from the west. I figure we have maybe three more hours before we need to break off and head inland some. If the storm turns towards us, we don’t want to be here in sixty knot winds if we can help it.”
