Conquistadors

by Jeff Kirkham

  Beto shook himself like a dog, releasing his pre-battle jitters. “I like it. I’ll get a recon team over to the cathedral now. But, what’s to keep the Mexican military from launching an op first? It’s not like we’re the only Catholics in town who know how to shoot.”

  “They might.” Tavo considered. “That’d save us the trouble. Does Hermosillo have a police paramilitary unit?”

  “No. Half the cops work for Los Negros.” Beto clearly wanted to assault tonight, but he folded into Tavo’s more deliberate manner.

  “Let’s plan on assaulting tomorrow night. Score some solid intel tonight, get your guys from Tucson here by morning, and we’ll do a couple rehearsals at the ranch before we go in. We’ll hit them when they’re dead asleep and hung over tomorrow night. Good?”

  Beto smiled and nodded. “That’s why you get paid the big bucks, Canoso. Always using your melon. Fucking rehearsals… Who even does that?”

  “Just the professionals.” Tavo gave him a sideways glance. There had always been an operational tension between him and Beto. A former SEAL, Beto liked to rely on hard-hitting violence of action. He liked to throw himself into the meat grinder and let the adrenaline flow.

  “Yeah. We didn’t do a whole lot of rehearsing, downrange,” Beto admitted. “We left that shit to the ODA guys.”

  Tavo had watched Sofía out of the corner of his eye during the entire exchange with Beto. She stood with her arms folded, observing her father and his lieutenant like a biologist watching gorillas in the wild.

  “So, you’re going on the warpath,” she summarized, cutting through the military bravado.

  “We can’t let rabid dogs like Los Negros run this close to home,” Tavo explained. “And someone needs to protect the church.”

  Sofía was a devout Catholic. She attended faithfully, did confession regularly, even volunteered at the parroquía. Much the same could be said about Tavo himself.

  Was her faith part of her ruse? A white cloak over a dark heart?

  It felt alien to doubt her—the girl he’d known her whole life, and half of his own. Flesh of his flesh. When he winnowed down the purpose of his own life, it could be reduced to one word: Sofía. The last thing in the world he wanted to consider was that she had betrayed him.

  But above all else, Tavo would not lie to himself, and that made him unique. Tavo understood the keystone of the human psyche. He knew the lie upon which all of humanity predicated their hundred years of life. Tavo had been born with a flaw in his brain and while that flaw had stripped away most human emotion, it also revealed a gaping, secret weakness within nearly every other human being.

  Every man, woman and child on the planet endlessly persuaded themselves into a fantasy they longed to believe. From birth to death, they layered stone upon stone in a monument that described who they were, why they should be loved and why their life mattered. Those stones of belief—the fictional tale of each human life, erected tirelessly in the human mind—became an altar of devotion to the fantasy that the person belonged. That their life mattered. With that at their back, they could live another day, inveigled by their own specialness.

  But most people were not special. Most people were average, and many were much less than average. Mumbling prayers to self-deception guaranteed that their life would be consumed defending their fantasy rather than discovering the uninspiring truth—that every person was just another flesh popsicle, grubbing their way through a handful of decades, leaving almost no mark on the history of man.

  Tavo would leave a mark, of that he was certain. He would not dedicate his life to propping up a fantasy of specialness.

  He would dig into the truth about Sofía, regardless of the damage to his self-concept. Perhaps he’d built a castle in his mind—an empire, a fortune, a story that involved his daughter. And perhaps she was nothing like he had imagined.

  Tavo’s stomach twisted in on itself as he regarded her open face, framed by wisps of tawny hair. He could see his Castilian, Spanish genes in her highlights and in the rose-blush of her skin when she disagreed with him.

  Could a lifetime with his daughter have been a carefully-architected lie?

  Sofía put her hands on her hips and said nothing.

  Tavo stared at her, wondering what thoughts were clicking and whirring behind that stern expression and perfect face. His suspicion that his own daughter might have set him up for arrest needed to be locked down. It was a binary consideration—either it was true and he would have to rebuild the purpose of his life from scratch, or it was false and he would have to let it go. But would it matter if the U.S. fell?

  Maybe it didn’t matter if she had betrayed him.

  Tavo ground down the agony churning in his gut, pushed it aside and replaced it with the hard metal gears of reason.

  Sofía controlled two assets that might be crucial to Tavo: Mexican gas and the Mexican army. His daughter’s opinion of her father and his drug business had been a curiosity until this moment. With the U.S. collapsing, and endless opportunity opening up north of the border, her opinion of his drug business could get in his way. Whether she was his deadly nemesis or the blood-of-his-blood, either way, enrolling her into the direction he wanted to go should be his next gambit.

  “If the government is tied up with other problems,” Tavo soothed, “we should help with peacekeeping, shouldn’t we? If we maintain order in the region, everyone benefits. Especially the common people.”

  Sofía chewed her lower lip.

  Tavo continued, “You wanted us out of narcotics. With what’s happening in the U.S., we’re probably out of narcotics.” He glanced at Beto and his lieutenant shrugged, as though saying it’s over my pay grade. “We have over 250,000 street soldiers under our command if we count the affiliated gangs in the U.S., and that’s just the pledged guys. If the American and Mexican armies fragment, we’ll have the largest organized peacekeeping force in the region. Should we disband them because they used to sell drugs?”

  “I don’t know your business—I don’t want to know your business,” Sofía finally spoke. “But are you seriously proposing that your street gangs will stop preying upon people and help maintain order? Will they wake up tomorrow morning and suddenly become shepherds instead of wolves?”

  He had maneuvered her exactly where he wanted her. “There’s no way to get our soldiers to be entirely compliant, and we’ll lose a lot of them to communication breakdown and chaos in America, but we can still probably maintain a hold on a significant percentage of them. We have over 20,000 soldiers in our organization with paramilitary training and those men will follow orders. With this op tomorrow, we move in a new direction. We become the church’s protector.”

  Beto shifted on his feet, struggling to cover his astonishment.

  Tavo pressed, “We’re all Catholics, at least on this side of the border. We can help the church take back the whole region.”

  Sofía stood, wide-eyed. “You can’t be serious. The church won’t do that. The church hasn’t wanted to govern in a hundred and fifty years.”

  “But what if that was the only way to stop millions of people from dying?” Tavo held out his hands. “What if the church was the last, remaining organization? Would the bishops and archbishops step up? From what I see on that television screen, we might be within forty-eight hours of that exact scenario.”

  “I’m going with you.” Sofía sat down on the couch. “I need to see it.”

  Tavo recoiled. “No. You don’t. You don’t need to see this.” He could think of a hundred reasons why Sofía joining an op was a bad idea. “You’re not coming.”

  She leaned her head back on the couch. “If I’m going to support you in this, I need to see it with my own eyes—men killing and dying. Because that’s what this is: men being killed to save other men from death. That barely even makes sense… and I’ve never seen a man die.”

  Tavo sifted through her possible motives and came up with nothing. What could she possibly hope to gain from coming on the
op?

  “I don’t even know why you’re trying to talk me into this,” she continued, staring at the ceiling. “You’ve never cared what I thought about your criminal activities before. Why now?”

  It was a good question and Tavo knew the answer: Mexican gas.

  But his doubt circled with storm-darkened curiosity: Was his daughter trying to take him down?

  Like an itch on his back he couldn’t reach, it vexed him. He kept reaching for it. There was nothing he could do but worry and prod—and time would eventually tell—but he goaded the festering question: was she a super-human creature like him?

  …and could he survive the answer?

  Chapter 9

  Noah Miller

  Rio Rico County, Near Lochiel, Arizona

  “9-1-1. State your emergency.”

  “Hey, Glenda. How’re things up in Sierra Vista with my favorite sheriff’s deputy?” Noah didn’t need to lay on the charm, but he did anyway. He and Glenda had gone to school together. At six foot-two, blond hair, just now fringed in gray, and with six-pack abs that could still be recognized beneath his slight whiskey gut, Noah was the designated bachelor of Rio Rico County. But because of the violent death of his wife and daughter, the three ladies who knocked the edge off their loneliness with Noah’s company kept it on the down low. They were in their late thirties, and given Noah’s circumstances, maturity won out over possessiveness. Nobody asked too many questions.

  “Is that Noah Miller?” Glenda’s voice brightened. “You’re supposed to use the landline for chitchat, Noah, not 9-1-1. Every kid knows that.”

  “Yeah, but nobody’s answering the landline.”

  “Hmm.” Glenda hesitated. “I’m not surprised. The sheriff gave everyone the option of working from home until things got back to normal. 9-1-1 calls are being forwarded to my cell.”

  “That makes sense,” Noah said.

  He had learned what he needed. Now he wanted off the phone. “You take care of yourself, Glenda. Lock your doors at night. No telling how the cartels are going to react to the Border Patrol pulling back.”

  “Will do, Noah. Did you need something from the Sheriff?”

  “Nope. Just checking in on you,” Noah lied.

  “Such a gentleman. Good night.” Glenda disconnected.

  Noah hung up his cell phone, stuck it in his pocket and turned back to watching the caravan approach the border fence through his Schmidt and Bender riflescope. Even with just a half-moon, he could see them as though it were daytime, even at eight hundred yards. And he could tell they were cartel.

  Noah had been watching the Zetas cross this point in the fence for over two years. He knew which men were the mules and which were the mule drivers. He recognized most of them—had even given them pet names.

  Tonight, El Mustachio was in charge of the slave labor. Sixteen men carried bulging backpacks and four men carried just enough kit to survive a couple days in the desert. The four guys with light loads also carried AK-47 rifles.

  El Mustachio favored a big FN/FAL rifle, as though the larger gun lent him greater authority. He walked in the middle of the formation, like any officer should. But this mean sonofabitch was no military officer. He was a smuggler. El Mustachio might die tonight, and maybe one or two of his drug soldiers with him.

  The formation moved slowly. Even before the Border Patrol turned to dust in the collapse of the banking system, the fence between the United States and Mexico had always been a natural danger zone. Competing cartels, American vigilantes, pissed off landowners and Mexican opportunists showed up like chimeras in this twilight margin of law and order. Sometimes, they even left with some of the millions of dollars of drugs strapped to the mules’ backs. A lot of anger and greed got pulled into this five hundred yard section of fence, and that godforsaken place bordered his ranch.

  Noah would’ve expected to show up with his own stewing anger at the border tonight. With all the conditions ripe for some old fashion revenge killing, Noah felt strangely serene. His conversation with Leah the night before hadn’t done much for his bloodlust.

  He watched El Mustachio move up the column as his men halted at the border fence. El Mustachio always led at the crossing.

  This drug crossing didn’t employ bulb-lit tunnels or anything so romantic. Rather, the narcos had cut the fence with bolt cutters and every time they crossed, they wired it back together. It helped that the hole had been cut behind a mesquite bush on the bank of the dry wash. The Border Patrol had driven past a thousand times in the last two years, and they’d never noticed the break in their fence. Simple solutions usually worked better than romantic solutions—it was one of the hundreds of fieldcraft tidbits Noah had been taught by his father.

  El Mustachio unwired the breach and held the fence open while his men crossed, then he slid through the gap, rewired it and trotted back to the middle of the column.

  The group continued their steady movement north toward the choke point Noah had prepared in the bottom of the empty streambed. He’d been watching this spot so long now, he knew every rock, every bush and every jackrabbit in the dry wash where the narcos would pass. Noah knew right where he’d set off the ambush, and he had planned a perfect escape route.

  Bill had taught him never to ambush with less than a three-to-one advantage, but Noah reasoned that there was more than one way to gain an advantage besides more men. He had the advantage of terrain—he lay on a rocky crag at least four hundred yards away and above where the men would pass. He had the advantage of superior intel—he knew everything about the column and they knew nothing about him. And, he owned the first five seconds of the mad minute. When Noah sent his first rounds, it’d be at least five seconds before the narcos would even think about plotting countermoves. Before they did, he’d dash into the hills and down a path he knew better than the route from his bed to the shitter.

  But the narcos weren’t likely to chase him with a quarter million in cocaine strapped to their backs. Noah could shoot them at will and they probably weren’t going to move more than fifty yards from that dry wash. His biggest concern had always been the American cops, but they’d all taken the night off. It’d been the window he’d been waiting for.

  As the first narcos in the column passed the tamarack bush that marked the forward edge of the ambush zone, Noah shook his head, but it did nothing to clear the cobwebs.

  Now was not a good time for a surge of conscience, but that was exactly what was happening. He’d hoped killing a few shit bags would put a little spring in his step, but as he watched El Mustachio walk into the ambush, Noah knew it wasn’t true. El Mustachio hadn’t killed his family, and even if he had, Noah didn’t think blasting him would make him feel any better.

  Who was he to judge the hard-hearted, anyway?

  Like a blacksmith hammering carbon into steel, Noah had hardened his own heart. Most days, only ferocious bouts of loneliness could get him thinking of anyone beside himself.

  Some nights, adrift in booze, he would remember when they lowered the caskets—one big and one small—into the ground of the Rio Rico cemetery. Halfway between a Mexican cemetery and an American cemetery, the Rio Rico County Memorial Park didn’t offer a single blade of grass. Half of the graves were faded blue, pink or purple mausoleums. The other half were American-style stone grave markers surrounded by nothing but sand and dust. In the booze haze, Noah would often obsess on the dust and wonder if it had seeped into Katya’s casket. Was her face covered in a thin layer of grime for eternity? Her little nose? Her dishwater blonde hair?

  Noah shook off the familiar loop of images and returned to the night and his predations. His grief had begun to turn, and along with it, his desperation. The mental pictures of his wife and daughter in the Rio Rico cemetery didn’t cut the furrows in his soul that they did just a few nights previous. The horror had lost its hold and gratitude had begun to rise in him.

  He held the big Schmidt and Bender scope on El Mustachio and centered the crosshairs on his chest.
r />   “Pew, pew, asshole,” Noah whispered. “You can thank Leah you’re not facedown in the dust, hombre.”

  Noah ran the bolt of his Sako rifle and caught the fresh cartridge as it hopped out of the chamber. He poked his pinkie into the breach to make sure it was clear. Old habits die hard and no matter how little he cared about the criminals downrange of his rifle, he still cared plenty about firearm safety.

  Chapter 10

  Tavo Castillo

  Cathedral Metropolitana de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, Plaza Zaragoza, Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico

  Cradling the heavy rifle, Tavo leaned against the low concrete wall atop the OXXO mercantile building. Across Plaza Zaragoza, he watched the state office building where the Los Negros gang had been partying. It was five a.m., and true to her word, his daughter stood beside him, wearing workout clothes and a dark jacket.

  A woman had been shrieking for over ten minutes in a dark corner somewhere near the state building. It seemed like she would never stop; shrieking, shrieking, shrieking.

  Tavo came out from behind his rifle and cast a sidelong glance at his daughter. She stared into the darkness, covering her mouth, searching for the suffering woman. Tavo had already told her once not to speak, so Sofía glanced back at him, the white around her eyes visible in the dim light.

  The gangbangers held the archbishop, the vicar and several priests inside the state building, doing God-knew-what to them. Why the gang had taken the priests was beyond Tavo’s comprehension. Street gangs like Los Negros were little more than packs of feral dogs. Kidnapping priests made no sense, even for them. It wasn’t like the gangbangers were going to rape the old men. Maybe they had some vague idea of using them as hostages for ransom.

  Either way, mopping up gangbangers gave Tavo something he would soon require: moral authority. He didn’t give a shit what people thought about him personally, but if he could cover himself in the patina of law and order—and maybe add an implied partnership with the Catholic Church—he could prop himself up as the protector of the region. For that to happen, he’d need the Mexican army and the local government to settle down long enough for him to slip into the gap. This mess with Los Negros was just the window he required.