by Don Winslow
Claudio Maldonado is one of Ruiz’s most effective gunmen in Acapulco, Orduña tells Keller. Keller feeds it through Hidalgo that Maldonado is under SEIDO surveillance and could be arrested at any moment.
Eddie pulls him from Acapulco.
A processing lab in Guerrero is producing high-quality product. Hidalgo clues Ruiz that the marines have located it and are planning a raid. The lab is abandoned, the opium and equipment moved until a new site can be found.
The play gets darker, dirtier.
Eddie wants the identities of snitches.
Orduña provides Keller with the names of two of the most violent Tapia veterans fighting in Acapulco and in the mountains of Guerrero. Only one of them, Edgardo Valenzuela, is a dedo. But he’s a slimy, psychotic rapist who’d been feeding Orduña’s people mostly little balls of shit, so the admiral considers him expendable. The other, Abelino Costas, “El Grec,” is a stone sociopath who ambushed a marine column and killed three of them.
Valenzuela and Costas are both tortured to death.
Valenzuela gives it up.
Costas spits in their faces before they hand him his guts.
It bothers Hidalgo.
“They were murderers and sadists,” Keller says. “They got what was coming to them.”
Giving up informers boosts Ruiz’s trust in Fuentes, because DEA never gives up snitches under any circumstances.
The scope of information he wants expands.
Does DEA know where Núñez is?
Where Mini-Ric is?
Do you have a line on where the Esparza brothers are holed up?
No, no and maybe, but the last question presents a dilemma. Crypto-traffic analysis and satellite imagery have given them the location of an estancia deep in the Sinaloan mountains where the brothers might be.
But Ruiz wants this information for Caro, so the problem is, how far do they go in helping Rafael Caro? How far do you ever go in helping one DTO over another, and why?
The Mexican drug world is in chaos, the violence is worse than ever, and the government is turning to the old guard, los retornados like Caro, to try to restore order.
But is restoring order in Caro’s interest?
As long as there are multiple, competing groups, the narcos need Caro as a supposedly neutral “godfather” who can mediate disputes, mete out rough justice, guarantee agreements, cease-fires and truces. A man who’s not at war with any party and so can solicit money from several parties to form a syndicate?
He’s valuable because he doesn’t have a dog in the fight.
Paradoxically powerful for his lack of power.
But if one party—a Núñez, an Esparza, an Ascensión—wins and becomes dominant, Caro becomes unnecessary, superfluous, just another old gomero living out his life telling tales of past glories.
What if Caro isn’t trying to hold the Sinaloa cartel together but is trying to keep it divided? He owes them nothing; they sat and let him rot in Florence for two decades.
If that’s the case, Hidalgo thinks, he might be using Tito Ascensión as a stalking horse, because none of his requests or actions have been directed at Jalisco, and when we gave him the name of a Jalisco-connected dealer in Brooklyn, he let him slide.
So first Caro allied himself with the old Tapia organization, a Sinaloa enemy, then he apparently cooperates with Tito Ascensión, another Sinaloa rival. Damien Tapia is dead and Caro is still running heroin through the network that Tapia and Caro set up with Ruiz.
What if Caro has figured out that, at least for the time being, the position of godfather, the padrino, is a liability, that it’s smarter and more profitable not to control one whole thing, but to take a piece out of a lot of things? What if he’s moved on from merely running Ruiz to taking a percentage from every other organization?
Then it would be in his best interests not to subdue the confusion, but to encourage it, to nurture a perpetually unstable situation in which he’s the only stability. What if he manipulates a balance of power, now supporting Ruiz, then Tito, suborning Núñez, maybe going after the Esparzas—playing one against the other when all the while he seems to the government to be the great hope for peace, the reasonable man that they can turn to?
Like they turned to Barrera.
Adán Barrera was the Lord of Rule.
Rafael Caro is the Lord of Chaos.
And he’s going to let the chaos continue until it all falls apart, the other potential leaders are gone, and they have no choice but to come to him.
Now you have an in with him, Hidalgo thinks, via Ruiz, and the question is, how much do you work with him? If you believe your own theory about him perpetuating chaos, then you bring him down as fast and hard as you can.
Or do you?
Or do you help him play it out, help him damage the other organizations as much as he can, and when you think he’s inflicted maximum damage, reel him into the boat?
Do you let him run his game, see where it goes inside the Mexican power structure—banking, finance, government? Hell, see where it goes inside the American government.
Help him climb as high as he can.
Then kick the ladder out from under him.
Because if Caro is manipulating all the other organizations, and if you can manipulate Caro . . .
You’re el padrino.
Cirello meets Ruiz at the Palomino Club (“alcohol and full nudity”) in North Vegas, and Cirello has to sit in a booth in the VIP room looking at T&A while he tries to brief Eddie. “You asked for a location on the brothers Esparza.”
“You got one?”
Eddie’s eyes don’t leave a tall black dancer wearing, well, nothing.
“You know how traffic analysis works?”
“I know to avoid rush hour,” Eddie says.
He’s a funny motherfucker, Cirello thinks. “This comes from Fuentes. Shortly after the Esparzas were wounded in that ambush, DEA monitored unusually heavy telephonic and internet traffic in the area of La Rastra, Sinaloa, way down south near the Durango border just north of Nayarit. They intercepted some encrypted messages but our codebreakers determined that they were referring to a certain ranch. Satellite surveillance shows increased activity and an increase in vehicles and personnel at this place.”
He slips Eddie a satellite photo of a few buildings in a clearing on the top of a heavily wooded ridge in the Sierra Madre between La Rastra and Plomosas.
Eddie glances at it.
“Check this out,” Cirello says, pointing out a brown rectangle amid the green. “Looks like a landing strip to me.”
“Speaking of landing strips—”
“Focus,” Cirello says. “You want this or not?”
Eddie slips the photo into his pocket.
“The coordinates are on it,” Cirello says.
“I’m thrilled,” Eddie says. “You want a lap dance?”
“No.”
“Are you gay?” Eddie asks.
“No.”
“I mean, it’s all right if you are,” Eddie says. “It’s just that we’re in the wrong club.”
“You have a good time.” Cirello gets up.
The black chick is fantastic. Even better when she comes back to Eddie’s suite to finish the job. After she leaves, Eddie gets on a burn phone to Culiacán. “Our guy came through.”
He reads out the coordinates.
After he clicks off, he scans the photo onto his laptop and sends that.
So many ways to play this, Caro thinks.
You could reach out to Iván’s people here and let them know that he’s been compromised, earn his gratitude. Or you could give the location to Tito and let things take their course.
He decides.
Gets on the line to Elena Sánchez and tells her where she can find Iván Esparza.
“My gift to you,” he says. “Avenge your son.”
Callan pores over the satellite photo.
And Google Maps.
He looks at Lev. “It’s a bitch.”
&n
bsp; One road in, one road out. Both will be heavily guarded with no way to get in undiscovered. They could hoof it, but it would be miles through steep, heavy forest and bush and there’s no good staging area where they wouldn’t be seen by locals who are doubtless loyal to the Esparzas.
“The smartest thing to do,” Callan says, “would be to leak this intel to the FES, let the marines go in with choppers.”
“But would they?” Lev asks.
The Sinaloa cartel pretty much owns the federal government, and while the marines have been aggressive against all the other organizations, they’ve been notably passive against Sinaloa.
“Elena wants Iván dead, not arrested,” Lev says.
And what La Reina wants, La Reina gets, Callan thinks. But the complex on top of the ridge is a virtual fort, a firebase surrounded by fences topped with razor wire. It’s hard to tell from the photos, but what look to be the living quarters seem to have been reinforced with metal screens and fire slits. He knows that there will be sound and motion sensors that will touch off searchlights. There might even be underground bunkers with reinforced concrete.
A B-52 might do the job, but Callan doubts that even Elena can call up a B-52.
Callan counts what look like five vehicles—four SUVs and a flatbed truck—under camouflage netting. A low concrete building outside the wire is probably a barracks and a kitchen for . . . twenty, thirty? . . . guards. Another building, prefab steel, probably houses more vehicles, equipment, maybe a plane, because there isn’t one on the landing strip, at least when the photo was taken.
There’s too much they don’t know. They need a thorough reconnaissance, but that would be just as difficult and risky as the actual mission and risk spooking the Esparzas. And they have to move fast. The brothers are there now, but who knows if they’ll still be there tomorrow or the next day?
We don’t have enough intel and we don’t have enough time to plan, Callan thinks. We’ll be going into a fortified location we don’t know and we’ll be outnumbered.
Other than that, it’s all good.
“First problems first,” he says. “Access. How the hell do we get in there?”
“The airstrip?” Lev asks.
“I’m thinking the same thing,” Callan says.
It isn’t good—it isn’t even close to good—but it might be the only option. Two small planes, go in at night, hope you can stick the landing. One team lays fire on the guards, pinning them down; another goes into the house to take out the Esparzas, the third holds the airstrip.
If everything goes well—which it never does—your guys hold the strip and the planes are intact when you come out of the house for the “exfil,” as Lev calls it. If not, you come out of the house—if you come out of the house—to bodies strewn around burning airplanes, and you hump across the mountains into Durango.
Drug cartels have air fleets.
They use them to carry drugs and move people around.
Callan and Lev choose two—a Pilatus PC-12 and a Beechcraft C-12 Huron, the military version of the King Air 350. Each can hold ten people with enough fuel capacity to fly to the target from Mazatlán and back. Importantly, both have good reputations on rough airstrips and are used by various armed forces.
Good, tough little airplanes.
The next decision is personnel.
They have to be the best—not just street thugs who can loose a clip from a speeding car, but trained, disciplined paramilitary types who will do their jobs, only their jobs, and trust their teammates to do theirs.
The Barreras have been in the business a long time and have used former special forces since the nineties, bringing them in from Israel, South Africa, Britain, the US, Mexico and elsewhere.
Callan and Lev have eighteen spots to fill. Lev chooses three men from his own regular team, but he wants to leave the rest to provide security for Elena and Luis.
Four Israelis, including Lev.
They’re very good.
Callan fills out the mission with two South Africans, a former Rhodesian Selous Scout, three former SAS guys, a former American marine and eight Mexican guys from the air force, army and marines. Two of the guys double as combat medics—if both are hit, well, the wounded are just fucked.
He has to be up front with them. He won’t tell them where they’re going until they’re on the planes, but these guys aren’t stupid, and experience is going to tell them that the odds of coming back aren’t great. So Callan gives them the choice of opting out.
None take it.
Maybe because this war has been going on long enough for them to have lost buddies they’d like to get payback for, or they have a genuine loyalty to Elena, or they’re just macho sons of bitches. More likely because Callan offers a bonus of $50,000 a man—payable in cash or coke—as well as a “death payment” of $100,000, deposited straight into offshore accounts, for the family of any man who doesn’t make it back.
Then Callan has to find pilots crazy and cocky enough to make a night landing in the mountains on a rough, unknown strip, stay in the cockpit during a firefight, and then (hopefully) take off under fire. And he doesn’t need just two of these guys, he needs four, he needs copilots, because about the stupidest thing in the world would be to pull this off and then die outside a perfectly good airplane because your pilot caught one in the head and you have no one to fly it.
Narco pilots are notoriously nuts. Free-spirit adrenaline junkies who have thrown away lucrative military and airline jobs for a shot at bigger money and bigger thrills. A lot of them leave the gigs but usually come back. They get hooked on the blow, the parties, the women that come with the narco lifestyle, so the “real world” becomes just too dull.
Callan needs ex-military pilots, guys with experience at going in hot, who aren’t going to freak out if some rounds start zinging around them. He can’t afford the excess personnel to do what narcos sometimes do—leave a guy on the plane with a gun at the pilot’s head to make sure he doesn’t make a premature takeoff.
Lev has one of his own guys, an Israeli Air Force veteran used to dropping in and out of Syria and Lebanon. Then they get “Buffalo Bill,” an American who’s been around the Mexican narco world since Barrera’s time, and whose long white hair, beard, filthy old cowboy hat and omnipresent joint hanging out of his mouth could scare the shit out of you if you didn’t know he could fly a piano and land it on a submarine deck. A Mexican from the Fifth Air Group, 107th Squadron, has hundreds of hours on the Pilatus; another Mexican Air Force veteran flew C-12s—both went on missions against the Zetas and the Tapia organization.
They won’t bug out.
Then there’s the question of arms.
Cartels have air fleets; they also have arsenals.
Short of an atomic device, you want it, you pick it.
Callan wants each guy to have an assault rifle, but lets each man choose the one he likes working with, so the teams go out with a variety of compact Galils, C-8s, Belgian FNs, an M-27, HK-33s and even a few classic AK-47s.
Two of the Israelis will carry MATADOR (Man-Portable, Anti-Tank, Anti-Door) shoulder-fired rocket launchers to rip a gap into the fence, punch through any walls, or take out an armored SUV. The marine will also take a Mossberg twelve-gauge pump for close action and blowing the locks off doors.
Callan chooses an HK MP7 with a suppressor and an Elcan reflex sight. He’s also going to take a Walther P22, in case he gets in close enough to put two .22 rounds bouncing around inside Iván Esparza’s skull.
They go to Elena’s house in Ensenada and brief her and Luis.
“I want photos,” she says, “of Iván’s corpse.”
“If there is one,” Callan says, “and if we have time.”
“There will be,” Elena says. “And make time.”
Callan reminds her of their deal. He does this job—success or failure, whether he comes back or he doesn’t—Elena and her people leave Bahia alone. Nora . . . and now Flor, he guesses . . . get to go back there and live in peac
e.
Elena reaffirms their arrangement but adds, “You know it’s only good as long as I’m in control. If Iván wins, he’ll do what he wants. Just so you have the added motivation.”
Yeah, thanks, Callan thinks. What I need is added motivation. He’s leaving when Luis follows him outside.
“I want to go,” Luis says. “Avenge my brother.”
“Did your mother send you out here?”
“She doesn’t know,” Luis says. “She wouldn’t allow it.”
“Neither will I,” Callan says. “I respect the hell out of you for asking, but you don’t have the skills, and I won’t have the time to babysit you. No offense, but you’d be a liability.”
“I won’t get in the way. I can take care of myself.”
“Luis, you would be in the way,” Callan says. “Every guy on the mission would know who you are and would feel obligated to keep you safe.”
Despite himself, Luis looks relieved, and he looks ashamed that he looks relieved.
“We’ll just say you came,” Callan says. “We’ll put it out you were there. They’ll sing songs about you.”
In the car, Lev asks, “What was that about?”
Callan tells him.
“That’s all we need,” Lev says.
Callan drives up to Encinitas.
Flor is asleep.
“How’s she doing?” Callan asks.
“She’s remarkable,” Nora says. “But she’s going to need a lot of care.”
“Take her back to Bahia,” Callan says.
Nora looks at him quizzically.
“It’s safe now,” Callan says. “It’s taken care of.”
“Where will you be?”
“Taking care of things.”
“Sean—”
“We’ve had a good run,” Callan says. “For a long time. I hope we have a long time left. But if we don’t, there’s an extra hundred K with your name on it in the Cook Islands.”
“You think I care about that?” Nora asks.
“No.”
“I won’t—”
“You can give this kid a life,” Callan says. “Bring her home; you and María can love her to death.”
