Viper: A Thriller

by Ross Sidor

  “Money is not a concern,” the Viper said.

  “It should be,” Sidran sneered. There was an edge to his voice now, and he leaned in closer to the Viper. He felt like he dealt with a child. “In case you haven’t noticed, we are now stranded here. The Mexicans will not let us out of their sight. There is the possibility they will contact the Americans, and the Americans will offer them more money for you than what we can pay. You can be certain that, as we speak, the cartel is considering this option and weighing the risks and rewards. They will do what is in their best business interests, whether that is raising the price and honoring their agreement with you, or selling you to the Americans.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Ten hours later, under a late night sky lined with stars, a DEA Learjet landed on the runway outside Tijuana International’s Old Airport Terminal, the terminal reserved for government and military flights, located opposite the airport’s larger and busier general aviation section. The Learjet entered on a blocked flight plan since the cartels kept watchers at the airport to keep track of inbound government flights.

  Dismounting from the Learjet, the night air felt cool and breezy; about 55° F. Avery knew that tomorrow the temperature would rise some twenty degrees with the sun out in full force.

  They were met on the tarmac by black Dodge Chargers of the Mexican Interior Secretariat’s Federal Police, and two civilian Toyota Forerunners with tinted windows, armored panels, and US Government diplomatic plates.

  The armored Forerunner was the vehicle of choice for DEA agents in Mexico, and it had proven its durability. Two years ago, Mexican cops doing side gigs for the cartel ambushed a DEA Forerunner on a highway after it left the American Embassy. The SUV stopped 152 bullets. The agents inside remained completely unscathed.

  Avery and the others were greeted by a Hispanic-American with a trim, athletic physique, wavy black hair, relaxed demeanor, and an easy going smile. He already knew Slayton, who introduced him as Special Agent Nick Contreras (DEA Ops Division; Office of Diversion Control). Avery found Contreras at once affable, but knew from the way he spoke and carried himself that he was a seasoned pro who knew his way around this part of the world.

  Contreras was accompanied by Captain Hector Padilla from the Federal Police’s Anti-Drug Division. Middle aged with short graying hair, a thick, sturdy build, serious face and intense eyes, not as quick as Contreras to smile or engage in small talk, Avery thought Padilla looked more like a hardened combat soldier than a cop, and he wasn’t far off in that assessment.

  Additional Mexican police officers stood nearby, creating a perimeter. Their eyes were alert, taking everything in, and their fingers rested along the trigger guards of their MP5 submachine guns. They wore dark blue uniforms with body armor and tactical helmets, plus black balaclava facemasks that left only their eyes visible through narrow slits, and their names weren’t printed on their uniforms, so that they or their families would not be identified and targeted by the cartels.

  Given that the cartels had eyes and ears everywhere, it was best not to linger around, so everyone quickly piled into the Forerunners and got underway.

  Avery didn’t know what Slayton had told Contreras, but it was apparent that Padilla was skirting the normal rules. No one from customs had checked Avery’s or Aguilar’s passports. There was no record of their entering the country, and Avery hoped to keep it that way. Their gear wasn’t searched either, which was also just as well since they’d brought assault rifles and full combat kit with them. Avery and Aguilar were in the country totally covert, and that would make it easier for them to do what they needed to do when they caught up with the Viper.

  Avery trusted Contreras and the DEA agents, but he had mixed feelings about Padilla’s involvement. Aside from the widespread corruption that plagued Mexican police forces, Avery knew he might have to do something that the Mexican cops might not like.

  This was Avery’s first time to Mexico, but he’d read up on the country during the flight, studying the CIA World Factbook entry and listening to Slayton’s firsthand accounts of the ongoing drug wars being fought here.

  Known colloquially as TJ, Tijuana and the surrounding urban area comprise a large modern metropolis seated in rugged mesas and canyons. The largest city on the Baja California Peninsula and economically linked to San Diego, Tijuana is Mexico’s industrial center, especially known for manufacturing most of the medical equipment used in North American hospitals. Many American companies have factories here, taking advantage of Mexicans who are happy to work overtime under poor conditions for $8 a day. Despite the city’s importance to the Mexican and American economies, poverty was still widespread, with most people living in slums.

  After a 2007-2010 high of gang violence between the Tijuana cartel and its Sinaloa rival, rife with chainsaw massacres and gun battles in the streets, Americans were slowly starting to visit the city again. Tijuana’s beaches and its small downtown strip are popular tourist destinations, and the low drinking age attracts droves of California kids on the weekends.

  Over the past decade, Mexico has become the new frontline of the drug wars. Throughout the nineties, rampant poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and government corruption and failure brought about the rise of the cartels. The current conflict started in 2006, when President Calderon launched a massive operation to arrest the heads of the cartels, and deployed the army to the country’s most dangerous areas. Since then, the cartels, with their private armies and death squads, battle each other and the federal government’s security forces on a daily basis, unconcerned about the civilians who get in the way. For many Mexicans, the cartels offered the only source of work and income.

  Nearly 100,000 people, many of them civilians, have been killed since 2006. Another 30,000 have disappeared, most of them dead or sold into slavery. Mutilated, dismembered, and burnt bodies of police officers, soldiers, undercover agents, vigilante paramilitaries, and rival gang members, plus their family members, regularly appear in piles on city streets or hanging from lamp posts or on the sides of highways, or turn up buried in mass graves around the country.

  Countless more civilians are slaughtered across the United States and Central America as they inadvertently enter the crosshairs of the rival street gangs and paramilitary groups who thrive off trafficking and selling Mexican drugs. From Colombia’s FARC and Peru’s Shining Path, to California and El Salvador’s MS-13, Mexican cartel operations put cash, guns, and drugs in the hands of gangs and terrorist groups across the Western Hemisphere.

  Together, the top Mexican drug lords earn up to $50 billion annually. Nearly all South American cocaine in the United States first passes through Mexico, and much of Americans’ recreational marijuana is grown in Mexico. American cities from Los Angeles to Chicago and Indianapolis have seen a steady increase in gang violence as the Mexican cartels expand their operations, buying and arming allies, and eliminating competition in urban turf wars.

  Avery personally thought that combating drug cartels was a waste of resources. The drug lords and gangs only profited because of America’s insatiable appetite for narcotics. Half of Americans have used marijuana, a quarter of them have tried cocaine, and most of them weren’t addicts or criminals living in the alleys of inner city ghettos. They were college students, lawyers, artists, doctors, bored suburban dwellers, and yuppies, weak individuals craving stimulation in one form or another, and escape from their insecurities, empty lives, and loneliness; and they were as responsible for the carnage and death in Colombia and Mexico as the cartels and their killers. Washington could pour as much as money as it wanted into counternarcotics operations, but it wouldn’t do much good as long as American citizens demanded cocaine and marijuana.

  The small convoy drove south on a two-lane road, the Forerunners packed between the Federal Police Chargers. Avery travelled in the same vehicle as Slayton, Contreras, and Captain Padilla. He looked out his window, watching the flat land, a mix of grass and dirt fields, passing by. Moon and star lig
ht shining through Tijuana’s heavy pollution cast an orange glow to the sky, the result of the city’s increasing industrialization. Traffic was light, consisting mostly of eighteen wheelers making their way to or from the border on late night hauls.

  Padilla took the opportunity to quickly fill Avery and Slayton in on the Tijuana cartel.

  Originally one of the largest, most powerful cartels in the country, after the arrest of its leaders, the TJ cartel is now essentially a loose coalition of smaller gangs operating in the Tijuana cartel’s former territory in northwestern Mexico and southern California. They maintain their influence and power through violence and from the fact that they control a third of key Mexican smuggling routes into the United States. When these gangs aren’t fighting the police or the Sinaloa cartel, they’re fighting each other.

  “Did you receive the briefing packet I forwarded to your office earlier?” Slayton asked Contreras.

  “Sure did. I knew there was more to what went down in Buenaventura than the official story and the bullshit in the media. We also received the alert earlier this week from CIA and Homeland Security that the Viper—cute name, by the way—is looking to get into the States to cause some havoc. She’s been our top priority the past five days, putting nearly everything else on hold.”

  Contreras didn’t sound happy about this, but the fact that the Viper was already responsible for the deaths of several DEA agents made him more willing and cooperative than he otherwise would be putting his agents and informants to work for CIA.

  “Well for once Homeland Security’s not overreacting,” Slayton said. “I’ve been on this from the beginning, and Moreno’s as dangerous as they come. This is our last chance to interdict her and the missiles before they enter the US.”

  “I’ll tell you right now, I’ll do everything I can to help,” Contreras said. “I knew two of those guys we lost in Buenaventura two days ago. Came up through the Academy with them, and I worked with Foster in Honduras. They were good agents. They had families, kids. They deserved a hell of a lot better.”

  Slayton nodded his agreement, feeling partly responsible for what happened in Buenaventura.

  “Anyway,” Contreras said. “I think we may already have a lead.”

  Slayton smiled, a look of relief on his face, and eagerness to move away from the topic of Buenaventura, and he said to a stoic Avery, “I told you this guy gets shit done.”

  “Let’s not get too excited yet,” Contreras said. “It’s just coincidence really, and it might be nothing. We caught wind of something just before you landed. We’d investigate it either way, but after the news about the Viper, well, maybe there’s a connection.”

  “What is it?”

  “One of our local informants alerted us to a meeting tomorrow with Arturo Silva. For those of you who don’t know, Silva is Tijuana’s logistics coordinator with Colombia’s North Valley Cartel, which, as I’m sure you already know, is allied with FARC. Silva’s in charge of moving Colombian cocaine up north, and he’s real tight with Los Zetas, making him no small player around here. We’ve been after him for a while.”

  “Who is he meeting?” Slayton asked.

  “We haven’t identified the contact yet, but we know he, or maybe she, is a foreigner and was due to arrive from Colombia earlier this afternoon. Doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me that our investigations are intersecting here.”

  “There are no coincidences,” Avery observed, repeating the mantra ingrained into recruits at CIA’s training program at the Farm. “Did your source say anything about the purpose of the meeting?”

  “They’re re-negotiating the terms of some business deal.” Contreras shrugged. “Our informant doesn’t know anymore than that, and it would look too suspicious, out of character, for him to make inquiries, so he kept his mouth shut. But he got the impression it involves moving something over the border, and he doesn’t believe it’s cocaine. I’m inclined to agree.”

  “Why’s that?” Avery asked.

  “Silva wouldn’t personally get involved in negotiating a run of the mil coke deal. He has people to do that sort of thing for him. His involvement means this is something big.”

  “Who’s your source?” Avery asked.

  “Drug smuggler and thug for the TJ cartel turned confidential informant,” Contreras answered.

  “Until he had a change of heart and decided to switch sides?”

  “Sure,” Contreras said, catching the sarcasm, “plus a little coercion on our part. Not to mention cash and cancellation of federal charges against him in the US. He’s a total scumbag, but generally reliable, and he has good reason to keep us happy. The prosecutor in DC is willing to offer him immunity from arrest and prosecution if he continues to prove his worth, maybe even a new identity under WITSEC, but we’ll talk about that after Arturo Silva and his friends are in custody.”

  Avery was well aware that DEA, in order to catch the bigger fish, often had to work with the very type of people they sought to take down. When a particular incident became publicized, the media jumped at the chance to paint the DEA in a negative light for collaborating with drug dealers and smugglers.

  “Frankly,” Contreras said, “when we’re through with him, I’d rather out him to his buddies in TJ, let’em give him the full chainsaw treatment, but I guess it’s better for business if we follow through on our end of the deal.”

  “Do you know the location of the meet?” Avery asked.

  “Yeah, and Captain Padilla is already moving his people into position. We’re going to have the place under surveillance tomorrow, and hopefully you guys can ID Silva’s visitor when he or she arrives.”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” Slayton said. “We know everyone the Viper’s travelling with.”

  “Almost,” Avery said, recalling the foreign operative accompanying her, an invisible they wouldn’t be able to spot even if he was right in front of them.

  After several seconds of silence, Avery asked the question that had been nagging at him since they’d arrived. “I thought this would strictly be a DEA op. We seem to be relying heavily on local police. How far can they be trusted?”

  Avery ignored Padilla’s gaze setting on him and the disapproving look from Slayton. He knew the local cops were easily corrupted. He didn’t blame them. Their choices were between risking their lives doing their job for little money, or take the cartel’s money and take care of their families. But the worst of Mexico’s corrupt cops didn’t just turn a blind eye or feed information to the cartel. The worst went to work directly for the cartels as soldiers.

  Before Padilla could respond, Contreras came to his defense.

  “I’ve worked with Captain Padilla and his men for two years. I’d trust him with my life any day. He’s ex-GAFE. The TJ cartel put a two million dollar bounty on his head after he declined their job offer. They fucking hate him. He’s one of the few cops down here the bad guys actually fear.”

  GAFE is the Mexican army’s airmobile special operations unit, trained by American, French, and Israeli counterterrorism units. Before battling the cartels, Padilla conducted dozens of operations against the left wing, Venezuelan- and Cuban-backed EZLN and EPR insurgents in southern Mexico. He also led cross border raids into El Salvador. Padilla personally knew several of the GAFE troops who deserted the army to join the cartel and form Los Zetas, and he detested them with a passion.

  “That’s great, but can you say the same for all of his men?” Avery said.

  “I carefully select and handpick all of my men personally,” Padilla said. “I have worked with most of them for years, going back to our time in the army. They’re patriots who take their oaths seriously. The people under my command practice the highest operational security, and I have not had a single leak or compromise from within my unit. If I learned of a cop collaborating with the cartels, I’d execute the man myself.”

  And neither Padilla nor Contreras added that he’d done just that once before. He’d also had a fellow cop draw a gun on h
im once, hoping to cash in on the reward the TJ cartel offered for him, forcing Padilla to kill his fellow officer. He knew the realities better than most about the Mexican drug war, and he had no illusions about the rampant corruption in his country.

  It was a nice speech from Padilla, but Avery had heard something similar from Daniel before his identity was compromised and the Viper nearly put a bullet in him in Panama.

  While Avery didn’t like the idea of working alongside the Mexican cops, he realized he had no choice but to deal with it. Pushing the matter and getting on the DEA or Federal Police’s bad side wasn’t going to get him anywhere.

  “What are you?” Padilla asked Avery. “I know you’re not DEA. You don’t look like a cop.”

  “I’m running security for the DEA and the Colombians’ Viper operations.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question, which means you are CIA.”

  The Mexicans accepted the assistance and presence of DEA and the US Marshals Service in their country as an undesirable necessity, but they remained wary and distrustful of CIA. As often did the DEA agents and marshals, since CIA generally ran its own, often secretive ops in the country, sometimes at crossroads to law enforcement’s goals.

  “I’m an independent contractor,” Avery said. “I’ve done jobs for CIA in the past. I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not here with an ulterior agenda or on spook business. I only want the Viper.”

  “Mister Anderson has been a tremendous asset,” Slayton said, using the pseudonym he’d used earlier to introduce Avery. “We wouldn’t be here right now if it weren’t for him.” Shifting his gaze to Contreras, he added, “And he got our agents out of Buenaventura.”

  “What are our options for direct action when we find the Viper?” Avery asked quickly, before Contreras could respond. He didn’t want to talk about Buenaventura.