by Mark Greaney
Daniel stopped in the hallway. Turned back to Calvo, and Spider took up his position at his boss’s side. De la Rocha said, “Her information has proven better than yours in this matter, consigliere. You would do well to improve your value to me.” DLR and Spider turned away again and disappeared up the corridor.
FIFTY
Gentry found refuge in a disused silver mine near La Rosa Blanca, a small mountain town a convenient drive to Guadalajara, with access to the Pacific coast and Mexico City. Both were within a few hours’ drive. Hector Serna had equipped Gentry with an old Mazda pickup, and Court used the entrance to a long-dormant horizontal mining shaft in the side of the mountain to store the vehicle during the nights. Court had visited a camping store in Guadalajara and purchased thousands of dollars in gear so he would not be uncomfortable during cool nights on the mountain. His gas stove, his small tent, his dried foods, and his gallon jugs of water kept his needs met. His battery-operated generators kept his mobile phones and his GPS charged, as well as giving him light when he needed it to work on one project or another on the cold ground by his truck.
Court had a lot of projects going in the mine shaft.
And he had a lot of targets to hit around western Mexico. In the past two days he had been busy: he’d killed a territory boss of the Black Suits in Nayarit, he’d destroyed two aircraft at an airport in Tepic owned by de la Rocha, and he’d torched a warehouse northeast of Magdalena.
Now it was the morning of his fourth day of his full-scale war on the Black Suits. He’d been up past three but still managed several hours of fitful sleep in his sleeping bag in the bed of the Mazda. Twice he woke up startled by noises close by; both times he grabbed one of his AK-47s and cut open the darkness around him with the tactical light attached to the fore end of the rifle. Both times hunched furry creatures ran off, deeper down into the black mine shaft.
Even though he was getting a late start, Court had big plans for the day. Hector Serna had passed Court some intel about the Black Suits’ locations in the area, and Gentry had noted them on his GPS. He’d set up a series of waypoints that would take him to each target on the way to his most distant destination of the trip. With luck he’d get to five sites before the end of his workday; he did not expect to return to his mine until the middle of the night, though he was not sure he would find things to destroy or Black Suits to kill at each of the stops on his route. Each piece of mayhem he planned had to be weighed against the chance for death or capture, and each location had to be somewhere he felt he could get out of quickly and cleanly.
Before noon he’d pulled into a warehouse district in Guadalajara and watched several train cars off-load crates that Serna promised contained pot grown down south in Chiapas and Guatemala. Court watched from a distance through his binoculars, and he believed Serna’s intelligence to be solid, but the loaded trucks idled there within the well-guarded fences of the station for over an hour. He’d tried to pick up the FM radio broadcasts from the walkie-talkies of the men by the trucks, but their handhelds were using some sort of encryption, and Court couldn’t read enough of their traffic to find out what the problem was. He’d planned on hitting the trucks on the highway, but they showed no sign of leaving the station, even at two p.m. Reluctantly, he made the decision to call off this mission, anxious to get on to the next waypoint and blow some shit up before the day was done.
His second site was a bust as well. It was a safe house for the Black Suits, but when he entered, kicking in the door and clearing the rooms with his AK, he found no one there and no drugs, guns, or money. He thought about just torching the house, but it was on a city street in the Zapopan district of Guadalajara, and he couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t end up burning down an entire block. So he climbed back into the Mazda and sped off to the east.
There were three more places on his to-do list; he hoped like hell he could find something worth destroying in at least one of them. He looked at his GPS.
Next stop, another Black Suit safe house, this one in Chapala. Court hoped this wasn’t a dry hole as well.
* * *
De la Rocha slept on a chaise lounge on the cool balcony just outside of his bedroom. He liked the feel of the outdoors. It reminded him of his time in the army, though in the army he wasn’t exactly sleeping on a balcony off an opulent master bedroom in a hacienda on his own 200-hectare property.
Spider was behind him, in the bedroom, sitting on a high-back chair positioned in front of the door. His M4 rifle lay across his lap. Extra magazines jutted from a bag next to him.
With no warning Nestor Calvo Macias barreled through the door. Spider launched to his feet, hefting his weapon as he did so, but the older man ignored him, stormed past, shouted out to his sleeping patrón on the balcony.
“The Gray Man hit the safe house in Chapala!”
De la Rocha sat up slowly on the chaise lounge and rubbed his eyes. “Chapala? Madre de dios. Did he steal the money we have cached there?”
“He did not steal it. He burned it.”
DLR cursed, rubbed his face some more. “¡Qué chingado! How much?”
“All of it. We had roughly seventeen million U.S. dollars palletized and awaiting transfer to the banks. I’ll get the figures from accounting and give you the exact amount.”
“And he just burned it? Set it on fire?”
“Sí.”
“What about the men guarding the—”
“One dead. One more missing that we assume—”
“And all the rest? Surely, we had more men guarding seventeen million dollars!”
“We had a dozen men there. The rest are alive; they did not know there was any problem until the fire started. They never saw the Gray Man.”
“Fucking execute every one of those stupid pendejos.”
“Sí.” Spider said, and he leaned out into the hallway. He barked commands to one of his underlings, sealing the fate of the survivors at the Chapala safe house.
“Daniel,” Calvo said, a soft pleading in his voice. “In four days he has performed nearly one dozen operations against us. I estimate the value of capital loss and production loss to be, conservatively, somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty million dollars.”
“He is costing me more than twelve million dollars a day?”
“Conservatively.”
“But how long can he continue?”
Spider spoke frankly. “Mi jefe. Our organization is set up to effectively fight the military, the federal police, and the rival cartels. We are less equipped to target one man with the mobility and skills of the Gray Man. There is no way to know how long he can operate before we get him.”
Calvo interjected, “We think it is possible he is getting his intelligence from Madrigal, but we don’t know that he is working with the Madrigal organization.”
“Your counterpart in los Vaqueros, remind me of his name.”
“Hector Serna Campos.”
“Right. Reach out to him. Tell them it is war.”
“Daniel, going to war with Madrigal right now would only cost us more money. We cannot—”
De la Rocha screamed as he stormed from the balcony into his bedroom. “Do not tell me what I cannot do! They are fighting a war with me right now, through this one man!”
“We do not know for sure!”
“I know!” de la Rocha screamed, spit flew from his mouth, and he screamed again, a guttural cry of anger and frustration, pent-up rage without an outlet. “I had this man! I had this man in front of me in chains! I could have pulled the trigger on my pistol and ended this madness a week ago! Why did I not do this? Why did I not kill that pendejo? I’ve lost so many men because I did not pull the trigger.”
Calvo said, “He’ll keep killing your men if you keep chasing him. He’s too good!”
De la Rocha regained control of himself. He took a few breaths, rubbed the back of his bare neck, and then waved a dismissive hand. “Doesn’t matter. Men are easy to lose. Pride? Pride is a very difficult thing to lose.”
He turned to Spider. “My decision is made. As of this moment, it is all-out war on los Vaqueros.”
“Entendido, señor.”
“Anywhere we find them, anywhere in the country…
Spider looked into his leader’s eyes. “They die.”
“Correcto.”
Calvo did not throw in the towel just yet. “Don Daniel. I beg you to listen. Spider wants war with Madrigal so that he can show you that his men can fight. They can’t kill the Gray Man because of his skill and cunning, but they can shoot a bunch of pinche Vaqueros in the streets.”
Javier “Spider” Cepeda scowled at Nestor, giving him a look countless men had seen shortly before Spider chopped off their heads. “Mi jefe, the old man just wants to avoid war with los Vaqueros because he is soft. We have been too easy in our dealings with Madrigal for too long, and look how the Sinaloan Cowboy repays us! We will fight them until they kill the Gray Man or turn him over to us. My men will turn their plaza red with their blood, and within a week the Cowboy will see that the American assassin is only a liability to his operation. Then we can back off, if you order us to do so.”
DLR was nodding before Spider finished. He turned to Calvo. “Nestor. I want you to communicate with your counterpart in los Vaqueros. Tell him that we know they are running the Gray Man, and we see this as an all-out declaration of war on our plaza. We will hold them responsible for the loss in property and in lives, and we will respond accordingly as long as the Gray Man is alive.”
Nestor was furious and frustrated, but he did not hesitate. He possessed an astute barometer that could measure the moods of his boss, and he knew this was no time to argue. “Sí, Daniel. I will contact Hector Serna immediately and tell him we are at war, and I will then give him the conditions by which we will accept peace.”
* * *
The first attack took place a mere thirty-three minutes later. A pair of low-level sicarios in Mazatlan who’d been tasked to follow a local underboss in the Madrigal organization got the text message declaring open season on los Vaqueros. Immediately, they got up from their table at an outdoor café, tossed paper plates soaked with tamale juice into the trash, walked into the jewelry store across the street, and shot dead the man they had been tailing, along with his wife and two bodyguards.
Nine minutes after that a truck carrying four Vaqueros was pulled over by a Jalisco state police SUV on the highway from Puerto Vallarta to Guadalajara. The men were lined up and shot, execution style, against their vehicle, their bodies left on the hot mountain freeway like roadkill.
By evening twelve more Vaqueros had been murdered and seven wounded. Four members of Los Trajes Negros had been felled by return fire, and one passerby was wounded by shotgun pellets when a firefight broke out between rival factions of the federal police in Mexico City.
Thirty-two casualties in the first twelve hours of the war was only the beginning.
* * *
Two more days passed, and Court worked at a fever pitch through it all. His intelligence from Serna, as good as it was, paled in comparison to the product he was picking up during his raids. In Colima he took the smartphone from a sentry and found an address with the notation “Foco” by the listing. He knew this was the local slang for crystal, so he drove there and found a fenced storage facility full of shipping containers. There were several guards on duty, but Court managed to slip into the complex and place several ANFO bombs he’d built back at his mine shaft, each equipped with a simple radio transmitter detonator on them. Once clear of the blast radius, he dialed a number on one of his many mobile phones, and six containers of crystal went up in a mushroom cloud of black smoke.
On a hillside nearby he stopped to admire his work, but he saw a single man racing from the scene in a black BMW. Court ran the sport coupe off the road with his pickup, found a member of the Black Suits crawling from the wreckage, and took him hostage. Four hours later the man succumbed to his injuries but only after giving the American a treasure trove of information about de la Rocha’s crystal operation in Nayarit and Jalisco.
Court decided to focus on the meth for a few days. According to the dying Black Suit, it was DLR’s cash cow; the product was expensive to produce and, therefore, subject to easy disruption by killing or scaring off the skilled labor or destroying the infrastructure of the labs, and to Court this seemed preferable to burning pot plants or poppy fields. He’d still do that, if opportunity arose, but the foco seemed like the best bet to make a quick impact.
This led Court to Acoponeta, a small river town on the flatlands along on the road to Mazatlan. He had some addresses gleaned from the dying Black Suit that he wanted to hit before heading up into the mountains to go after a super laboratory.
Before an evening of wreaking havoc, Gentry went into a grocery to resupply with beans, soft drinks, instant coffee, and water, and he stepped into a cantina next door to use the men’s room in the back. After using the restroom and washing a small fraction of the grime from his hands, he turned halfway towards the door but stopped suddenly. There, on a wall and staring back at him, was a man’s face on a Wanted poster.
Like nothing he had felt in years, unease ripped through his body.
It was him. The fucking picture was of him.
WANTED FOR MURDER
American Assassin of the Madrigal Cartel
A local mobile number was written below.
Gentry realized now that, even if he survived this, even if he got out of Mexico, the U.S. government would label him an assassin for the Mexican mob, and he would never, ever, get back into the USA.
Was the girl worth all this?
Court shook his head, hated that the question had entered his brain.
Yes. Of course she was.
He ripped the paper sign from the wall and tossed it in the garbage.
The door on his left squeaked open.
Gentry spun as he drew his weapon, dropping low to his knees in front of the sink.
He centered the weapon on his target’s chest, his finger had already taken up the slack of the Glock’s trigger safety.
The man’s arms flew over his head. He cried out in panic, “¡Madre de dios!”
Court looked past the front sight of his Glock 19, felt his finger tight on the unforgiving trigger, and he saw an overweight man in a cowboy hat, just a simple farmer, just a guy in a bar looking to relieve himself after a couple of Coronas.
Court released the slack on the trigger, stood and holstered his weapon, walked past the panicked laborer without giving him a glance.
Dammit, Gentry. Keep it together.
FIFTY-ONE
It took Gentry an entire day to get into position. For most of that time, while he drove the Mazda into the mountains, while he climbed and crawled, while he hid under a footbridge as armed guerreros passed just overhead, while he checked his GPS coordinates against the location given him by the Black Suit who now lay dead back in a ravine near Court’s mine-shaft hideout — all the while, he lamented this delay. He wanted to hit the Black Suits every single day, multiple times a day, so he worried that spending twenty-four hours doing nothing but moving unseen through the Sierra Madres, towards a location that might not even exist, would cause his operation to lose momentum crucial to its success.
He did not know, of course, that the day before Daniel de la Rocha had initiated a war against the Madrigal Cartel. This day of travel for Court was still very much a sixth day of bloodshed for the Black Suits, and the fact that Gentry himself was not involved in the fighting had gone completely unnoticed by Los Trajes Negros.
By measure of the number of incidents, by the number of dead and wounded, by the number of convoys hit or safe houses raided, momentum against the Black Suits was only growing.
Court moved through the darkness, the second-generation night-vision goggles provided by Hector Serna were nearly antiques compared to some of the gear that Court had used in his past, but they got the job done. He crossed a valley floor, got close
enough to a village full of DLR’s men to smell the cooking fires and hear the dogs bark, but he remained invisible to the locals. At one in the morning he found a stream that was right where the dead Black Suit said it would be, and this lifted his spirits. He followed it into a black canyon; in the distance a waterfall roared, but he was not close enough to see it.
He moved on, his night-vision goggles and his GPS leading the way, but his ears, his sense of smell, his knowledge of the wilderness and how to move through it silently, this kept him alive.
By five a.m. he was in position. He shimmied halfway down a rock face that hung over a tiny canyon, and then Court slid below the treetops.
Dawn was still two hours off, but Court smelled tortillas and coffee from his perch in the sheer rock face. A rooster crowed. Dogs barked and goats bleated; there were all the sounds of human habitation. Occasionally, the scent of marijuana wafted up to his hide in the rock wall ten feet above the dirt road. Soon engines fired, large gaspowered generators, and as the natural light trickled into the jungle from above, electric lighting emanated from a clearing fifty yards ahead. A wide building, prefabricated metal painted a mute olive drab, appeared under headlights as a jeep backed up and turned around. A few seconds later it passed under Court’s position, full of men and guns.
Still enshrouded in darkness, Court Gentry prepared to attack.
* * *
A seven o’clock that morning Nestor Calvo hung up his mobile phone in his office at Hacienda Maricela. He’d been at his desk since five thirty, sitting in his tie and shirtsleeves, his coat draped over a leather chair in the corner. He drank mango juice and sipped coffee while he fired off phone calls and e-mails to his contacts in the United States. While his organization’s conflict with Constantino Madrigal grew by the hour, he’d been forced to spend his morning pursuing all leads related to Elena Gamboa. There was evidence that the Gamboas had left Tucson by bus, possibly to the northeast. On that vague nugget of questionable intelligence, Calvo spent ninety minutes contacting members of his network from Chicago to Boston, tasking people with checking all their sources, hunting for a pregnant Mexican woman, aged thirty-five years.
