Revenge of the Assassin

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 aircraft, 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