Revenge of the Assassin

smoking arc through the air in the direction of the refinery and the shipyard.

The explosion from the grenade’s impact created a minor firestorm in the dry dock when it landed and ignited a pool of oil in the concrete work area. Flames danced in the darkness, illuminating the corpses of the dead and dying lying on the pavement, creating a panorama straight out of hell. The soldiers made quick work of mopping up the rest of the resistance, and within five minutes, silence pervaded the killing field. A total of forty-seven cartel fighters had been slaughtered, with no survivors. Military casualties were six wounded, twenty-one dead.

Four hundred kilos of uncut Colombian cocaine were found ferreted away in the ship’s cargo amidst coffee beans and produce. Street value was eleven million dollars, which worked out to be a hundred and sixty four thousand dollars per corpse, not counting the cost of vehicles, equipment and weapons.

The average worker in mainland Mexico earns a hundred and fifty dollars a month.

~

Don Aranas was sitting with two of his captains having breakfast. They were gathered in the smaller of his two dining rooms at a nineteenth century red cedar table in his Guadalajara retreat when the call came in. He listened intently, asked a few questions, and then issued a terse instruction before hanging up. He turned to his men, who had stopped eating once he’d begun his phone conversation.

“The Los Zetas cartel attacked one of our shipments in Tampico. We lost four hundred kilos and all our men. Apparently it was a big deal. Soldiers showed up and it turned into a war,” he recited dryly, returning to his food.

“What the fuck? Don, this can’t be tolerated. We need to hit these pricks hard and fast. They need to learn the price of taking us on,” Mauricio, the plumper and younger of the two, blurted.

“I know. I told them to move against the Zetas today. We know of several of their meth plants in Quintana Roo we can take out. I already gave the order.” Don Aranas sipped his coffee. “They lost all their men in the attack as well. So nobody benefited from this…except the newspapers.”

“These events are becoming too regular for my liking. If it isn’t the police or army, it’s one of our rivals. There was a time when this would have been unimaginable. Now it’s business as usual. We have to do something,” Hernandez, the other captain, said, spearing his eggs with his fork for emphasis.

“I think it’s safe to say that this is temporary. It’s all related. Once the military backs off, the other cartels will get the message and retreat. I’m confident that the push to eradicate our operations will end sooner than later. Call it a hunch,” Don Aranas assured them with a humorless smile. He waved to the woman at the brightly-tiled kitchen island and motioned for more orange juice. “You’re right. This can’t continue. But don’t worry. Things have a way of working out.”

Fourteen miles outside of Cancun, a dilapidated private ranch sat two miles from the desolate road connecting the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza and the highway that ran along the southern coast. A rusty chain hung across the pale dirt track that led to the compound, secured in place with a padlock. Two armed men were nestled among the trees, bored from months of guard duty where nothing happened. One of them sat on the ground, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, while the other recounted his weekend in Cancun at one of the strip clubs. It had been a raucous evening, and he was boastful of his prowess. The older man cackled as he exhaled a long plume of smoke into the air, nodding appreciatively at the younger man’s exploits.

The storyteller was surprised when a hole appeared in the older man’s forehead, mid-exhalation, and he had almost gotten his Kalashnikov AK-47 swung around when two silenced rounds found him, knocking him against one of the scrub trees, dead before he hit the ground.

A lone figure in jeans and a cowboy hat approached calmly through the brush, and when he was a few feet away, fired another round into the second man’s head for good measure. He fished a telephone out of his shirt pocket, muttered into it, and peered down the long winding white sand drive. Several vehicles pull up to the barrier a few minutes later. A man hopped out of the back of one of the vans with bolt cutters and expertly severed the lock’s shaft. The two vans pulled down the track, and the man re-attached the chain, then trotted after the vehicles to resume his position in the rear of the van. The man in the cowboy hat walked to the passenger door of the lead van and hopped in, carrying the two assault rifles he’d retrieved from the dead guards with him.

The vehicles inched down the track until they were roughly three hundred yards from the ranch, over a small rise and around a bend. They stopped and disgorged twenty men, armed with a smorgasbord of assault rifles — Kalashnikovs, M-4s and M-16s, Heckler and Koch HK416s. Nobody spoke as they moved carefully off the road and into the surrounding trees. The leader of the group removed his cowboy hat and tied a navy blue bandana around his hair to absorb any sweat, and then motioned to the men to split up in two groups. He prowled closer to the buildings, followed by his group, the second bunch barely visible fifty yards off to the right. Once they made it over the ridge, he counted eight guards loitering around outside the ranch’s large rustic barn, weapons slung over their shoulders or leaning up against the wooden ramshackle walls.

The leader made an abrupt gesture with his left hand as he was sighting in with his rifle in his right hand, and then opened fire. It was no contest — the guards collapsed in bloody heaps onto the dirt, dead before having a chance to shoot back. Once they were all down, the attackers stopped firing and raced to the buildings, the team on the right approaching the ranch house, wary of more sentries.

An old man appeared in the doorway brandishing a battered shotgun and took a potshot at one of the assailants, liquefying his chest with a load of double-aught buckshot. He pumped the reloading mechanism to try for another of the attackers, but a bullet caught him in the throat, ending his brief resistance. The area went silent again, then three women bolted from the back of the barn, running for their lives. All three were cut down by gunfire before they made it thirty yards.

When the bandana’d leader kicked in the door to the barn, he was greeted with a few pistol shots from within, one of which tore through his left shoulder. He tumbled to the hard dirt floor, firing even as he dropped, and caught the shooter in the abdomen, ending the failed defense. His men shouldered through the doorway after him, but all held their fire — the remaining occupants of the barn were unarmed, and mostly female, with a few young men in their twenties interspersed.

The leader stood, and after briefly checking his wound, barked a series of orders. The women shrieked in panic, and one of the young men began sobbing. The armed men rounded them up and herded them outside in the harsh sun, while the leader surveyed the methamphetamine laboratory. Large drums of liquid sat to one side, and along the other wall were two large metal reactor containers and assorted processing hardware, including a number of industrial ovens. The liquids were all marked flammable, and the leader knew from practical experience that the entire compound would go up like a natural gas explosion when detonated, leaving toxic residue throughout.

He winced from the pain of the wound and grabbed some matting material off a work table and stuck it inside his shirt, where it would staunch the flow of blood until one of his men could rig a field bandage. It was a crude improvisation, but an effective one. This was not the first time he’d taken a bullet, so he was familiar with the pain. He gauged the amount of bleeding and grunted. He’d live. This time.

Two shots echoed from the interior of the ranch house, followed by the distinctive chatter of a Kalashnikov, and then the shooting stopped. His men must have found more people inside. There was to be no quarter given, no mercy shown. Anyone found was an enemy.

He spun and exited the barn, where nine women and two men were kneeling in front of the house, most of the women crying in terrified gasps. He studied them dispassionately, many of them clearly of Indian extraction, and then nodded to his second in command, who pulled a cell phone from his shirt and made a call. The two vans rolled down the dirt road to the house and skidded to a stop in a cloud of dust. Two of the men moved to the van side doors and slid them open. When they turned from the interior, one held a machete and the other an aluminum baseball bat.

The task was finished within a few minutes, and the men loaded back into the van after carting sixty-two one kilo packages of crystal meth out of the barn and wedging them into the cargo area of the second van, cutting the space for passengers by sixty percent. It was a tight fit, but nobody complained. It was just a matter of time until the gunshots attracted the military, even in this rural area, so everyone was anxious to get on the road.

The second in command jogged over to the barn and pulled a pin from a hand grenade. With a grunt, he tossed it through the doorway and then ran for the vans. He made it in seven seconds. The vehicles were pulling