“Marianna,” he hissed. “I have news. Good news.”
He lifted some of the sheets and slipped past others, wending his way to a corner of the room. I followed tentatively. The fluorescents on the ceiling were off, but a dim blue light filtered through the wall-length windows and their blinds at the far end of the room.
“Marianna, this man was sent by Veronica,” said Mr. Cortina as he reached his destination. “Mr. Marsinkoo.”
I parted a pair of sheets and found myself standing in front of a cluster of men and women. There was an even dozen. None looked to be under seventy.
“You know Veronica?” said a woman in the corner, rising from her chair. I recognized her, just as I had her husband, from the photos Veronica had shown us. She was an inch or two taller than her husband and a lot wider. She gripped my arm like a marine.
“She sent me to find you,” I told her. “Are you all alright? Why are you in jail?”
“It’s a long story,” said her husband. “Tonight we have planned our escape. They will be busy with the illegals they brought in and unable to go after us. We have been thinking about this for a while. Will you join us?”
“How can I refuse?”
“Good.”
“I don’t think we should trust him,” said one of the others. “What if he’s another spy?”
“What did you say your name was?” asked a small, frail looking woman who walked up close and put her face practically in my chin.
“I didn’t. It’s Richard Marcinko.”
“I thought so,” she said with a self-satisfied nod. She turned to the others. “I’ve read all his books in the library. We can trust him.” She turned back to me. “You really should clean up your language, you know. You use an awful amount of four-letter words. Do you kiss Karen Fairchild with that mouth?”
* * *
The pair had realized they made a mistake very soon after arriving. There were a number of things wrong with the condo, shoddy construction, wires unconnected, misaligned plumbing, molding that kept falling off the walls—all the sorts of things you get when you hire cheap unskilled labor. Within days, they also realized that the developers were having serious money problems. New units were left half built, roads unpaved.
“They were having definite cash-flow problems,” said Mr. Cortina. “Everything I’d already seen in the U.S. at the start of the housing bust.”
“I’m surprised that they lasted as long as they did,” said his wife.
“Probably they had some cartel money all along,” said Mr. Cortina. “And at some point the cartel decided to pull the plug. Maybe that was the plan from the start.”
“Then they wouldn’t have sold us that house, would they have?” said his wife. “Not that house. Because it ran right along their tunnel.”
“You wanted that house. You insisted on that lot.”
“Big mistake,” admitted Mrs. Cortina.
Largely out of pride, they pretended they were happy when Veronica visited. They weren’t very good actors, but vanity kept them from admitting they had made a big mistake.
The development stopped deteriorating when the cartel itself moved in, though by then the Cortinas were extremely dubious about what was going on. One day, Mrs. Cortina heard banging in the basement. Mr. Cortina went to investigate, but of course couldn’t see anything. He walked around outside, but naturally there was nothing to see.
“I went up the hill to have a look and to stretch my legs,” said Mr. Cortina. “My wife likes to watch her stories in the afternoon and I get bored.”
“Soap operas,” said Mrs. Cortina. “Never miss them.”
Mr. Cortina noticed large tire tracks in the area near the community center. It was obvious that there had been earth-moving machines there recently, yet there were now none to be seen. He walked around some more without finding any. Finally he went home, confused.
He took another walk the next day. Again, he spotted tire tracks; again he saw nothing that might have left them.
“Tread marks, too. Like from a D7 dozer. You know what a D7 is?”
“Bulldozer,” I said. “Sure.”
Now any work going on in the condo development would be pretty big news—positive news, Mr. Cortina thought. So he started asking his neighbors if anyone had seen earth-moving machines or any activity at the development.
“A lot of people had already moved out, or never moved in,” said Mr. Cortina.
“You can blame them?” said his wife.
“I don’t blame them. I’m just explaining.”
“You have a funny way of telling a story. Always stopping and starting.”
“Always being interrupted.”
Mr. Cortina decided that whatever was going on must be going on at night. So he took an early nap—during the soap operas—and after his wife had gone to bed, went out to find out what was going on.
“They were working near the community center,” said Mr. Cortina. “And inside it. They were bringing out loads of dirt through the garage door at the base.”
“There’s no garage door there now,” I said.
“Exactly. They were very careful not to be seen, and then covering up their tracks. They had an army of people working. At some sort of hidden signal, they all ran inside the building.”
Probably to escape aerial surveillance, I thought. Someone must have been watching the drones employed along the border, or maybe timing the satellites.
“I watched from the backyard of one of the neighboring units, for a few nights in a row,” continued Mr. Cortina. “I wasn’t sure what was going on. But I didn’t think it would be a good idea to be seen. Someone digging in the ground? What I thought was—they were digging for some sort of mineral. That maybe gold was buried beneath the development.”
“Always with gold on his mind,” said his wife, shaking her head.
Mr. Cortina liked the mystery. It gave him something more exciting to do than watch Mexican soap operas.
“I didn’t think it could be a tunnel, though,” he told me. “It was too far from the border, I thought.”
Then one day, two young men in suits knocked on the door and asked to talk to him. They said they were engineers and had plans to do work on the sewer system. They unfurled plans showing that the line was going to run very close to the Cortinas’ house.
“You’ll have to move,” said one of the men. While both were Mexican, they spoke perfect English, with only the vaguest hint of an accent.
“We don’t want to move,” said Mr. Cortina.
The two men looked at each other. Mr. Cortina thought they were going to offer him a bargain—a new unit and some cash, maybe.
Instead, they took out pistols.
Mr. Cortina apparently had been spotted the night before; management had also heard that he was going around making inquiries. And so, they made the pair an offer they couldn’t refuse. They were tied and bound, then locked in the garage. Later that night, a group of men came and got them, carrying them out to a van.
“They were very careful with us, very gentle,” said Mr. Cortina. “But still I thought we were going to die.”
Why they weren’t killed was a bit of a mystery. It may have been because they were more valuable alive than dead: their Social Security checks were routed to the cartel, and new credit card accounts opened and quickly drained. Most of that could have been done with them dead, however; maybe whoever was supposed to kill them got cold feet.
The Cortinas were taken to a pair of Mexican prisons and kept in custody there. But they stuck out there, clearly Anglos in a Mexican prison. The afternoon of the second day, Mr. Cortina started making friends with the common criminals around him; his age gave him a certain status, though it’s doubtful it would have lasted very long.
It didn’t have to. His fluent Spanish made him a real risk, and someone apparently realized this wasn’t a good place to keep him. That night he was packed up again and taken to a location that sounded very much like the barn where I
rescued Melissa Reynolds. There he was reunited with his wife, and another couple from Angel Hills who also had been a little too nosy about the goings-on there. The next night they were packed into a van and shipped off to the Arizona prison where I found them. Like the illegals, they had been told they were still in Mexico, and in fact didn’t realize they were across the border until a few weeks before. Until then, escape had seemed futile; Mr. Cortina figured they’d never make it out of Mexico.
At first, the Cortinas and the other couple were kept with the illegals, segregated from the handful of legitimate American prisoners. With the exception of a man who was clearly a schizophrenic—and was kept locked in a special cell—the Americans were all short-timers who were bused into town every day for various municipal work projects.
One by one, the legitimate prisoners were released. A few other Americans, apparently also prisoners of the cartel, were brought in, but the place was basically a ghost town. One day, Serena Gomez, the assistant prison director, came into the barracks and had a talk with them.
“Bitch Serena,” snarled Mrs. Cortina.
“Oh, she’s not that bad,” said her husband.
“You think anything in a skirt isn’t that bad.”
“She wasn’t wearing a skirt,” he retorted. “She had those nice tight khakis that showed off her pert derriere.”
“I’ll give you a pert derriere, right where it’ll do some good.”
Gomez—there didn’t appear to be an actual director above her, or at least they had never seen one—told the prisoners that they were now the trustees of the jail. As such, they had two choices: cooperate, or be sent back to the jails where they’d started.
“If you cooperate, you will have the run of the place,” she said. “We are getting new prisoners in very soon. You can boss them around and instruct them. You will be treated well—your own food, baths every night, television—every privilege we can provide. If, however, you break any of our rules, you’re out of here. Understood?”
“When are we being released?” asked one of the men.
Gomez smirked and walked away.
After that, inmates began arriving every week or so, maybe a hundred at a time. With rare exceptions, they were quickly shipped out. It soon became obvious to the Cortinas and others that it was useless to try to make contact with them.
“Scared of their own shadows,” said Mr. Cortina. “Not that I blame them.”
Eventually, the trustees began realizing what was going on. Finally convinced that they were in the U.S., Mr. Cortina and some of the others began looking for a way to escape. They studied the prison routines, taking advantage of the small security staff. They learned when to expect shipments of illegals. They gathered intelligence from the administrator’s office, working there as janitors. Holding down all the jobs, they gradually came to control enough of the routine to prepare their escape.
And now, they were ready to go.
* * *
While I was in the prison waiting for H hour, Shotgun and Mongoose were having their own encounter with justice. Grabbed by the police, they were brought before the local magistrate for arraignment. He took one look at Mongoose and stopped the proceedings.
“Is your name Thomas Yamya?” asked the judge.
“Uh, yessir.”
“Were you in Iraq?”
“Uh—”
“You were, goddamnit. You’re the SEAL that saved my kid in Ramadi.”
Mongoose shifted around uneasily.
“You’re next to him in the photo. My God, I’d know you anywhere.”
“I, uh—”
“Release them,” ordered the judge. “Both of them. Mr. Yamya, I never want you to darken the streets of my town again. Now come here and let me shake your hand.”
* * *
Mr. Cortina led the small group of escapees around the back of the building to a shed. Two large garbage bins sat at the side. He went over to the first and pulled up the cover.
“Let’s go,” he said. “We have ten minutes before the truck arrives.”
Compared to everything else I’d smelled over the past twenty-four hours, the garbage bin was … even worse.
I’m afraid if I describe it accurately you won’t be able to go on reading. Even thinking about it now makes me a little queasy.
We hunkered down in the bins, gagging as the tops were closed. It seemed like an eternity before I heard the sound of a large truck pulling up nearby. The jaws of the lift mechanism clanked against the side, and we were lifted into the back of a large truck. We waited while the second bin was lifted and slapped down next to us.
“Won’t be long now,” whispered Mr. Cortina.
Just then there was a loud clank on the side of the bin. We were lifted up, then deposited back down. I slipped the lid upward to see what was going on.
Serena Gomez was standing a few feet away, grinning. She was flanked by two guards with shotguns.
“Going somewhere?” she said. “Or just nostalgic for the smell of Mexican jails?”
XI
Mathematically, there was no way the two guards and their shotguns could take out all thirteen of us if we spread out and then attacked together. The problem was, when you’re in a situation like that, you tend not to think mathematically.
I climbed out of the garbage bin with the others and shuffled to the right, trying to look inconspicuous while figuring out a plan. Unfortunately, I was about as inconspicuous in that group as a polar bear at a wedding.
“Who are you?” demanded Ms. Gomez.
“¿Que?” I asked, pretending I didn’t understand English.
“Come on, you’re an American.” It wasn’t a question. “But you must have come in with the Mexicans, didn’t you? Did you arrange this?”
She stepped toward me. My mind quickly flicked through the options. It was very quick, since there weren’t many:
a) grab Gomez and use her as a shield while leaping at one of the guards,
b) fold my head into my knees and kiss my ass good-bye.
Neither was particularly inviting. But before I made up my mind, I discovered there was another option—grab the shotgun as it flew from the guard’s hands as he pirouetted to the ground.
I took the gun and spun toward the second guard. But he, too, was falling to the ground, a massive hole where his right eye had been. Stoneman, watching from the summit of the pit, had shot both of the guards with the Stoner.
I turned to Gomez. She had a stunned expression on her face. She kept it just long enough for me to whack her in the temple with the shotgun.
Meanwhile, Mr. Cortina grabbed the other shotgun and pointed it at the driver of the garbage truck. The man pleaded for his life in rapid Spanish.
“You’ll live as long as you do what we tell you,” I said. “Hook the gear up to that garbage bin.”
We took the belts from the guards and bound Serena’s hands and feet, then threw her and the dead men into one of the Dumpsters. The rest of the escapees stuffed themselves into the second one; I went up front with the driver.
“Take us out of here, and don’t stop,” I told him. I put the shotgun in my lap, my finger on its trigger.
The guard at the gate didn’t even stop us. He’d never heard the commotion, let alone the rifle shots, over his blaring iPod.
* * *
I’m not exactly known for being teary-eyed, but even I grabbed for a hankie when Veronica and her grandparents reunited just outside of Rabbit Hole.
“You stink,” she said, folding her arms around her grandmother. “You stink, too,” she added, pulling her grandfather close to her.
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard more touching words.
XII
The Cortinas’ rescue brought closure to that little sidebar of our adventures, but we were still left with the prospect of doing something about the prison and its enabler, mayor/Senate candidate James Vincent. I could of course simply alert the Border Patrol to the smuggling operation (something I inten
ded on doing anyway), and hope they could trace back the line to Vincent.
Right. Anyone want to give me odds on that?
* * *
The sun rose bright and strong a few hours later, shining in all its God-given glory over the rugged Arizona hills. The scent of coffee and breakfast tortillas hung in the crisp desert air as a pair of black SUVs drove down the county highway to Rabbit Hole, turned up the first street at the start of Main, and pulled in front of the low fence that surrounded the mayor’s house.
It happened that the mayor was inside drinking coffee and fiddling with his laptop, which for reasons unknown (to him) was not able to connect to the Internet that morning.
His phones were out as well, though as he hadn’t tried to make a phone call, he didn’t realize it.
A pair of burly bodyguards got out of the first SUV. Two rather shapely women—Veronica and Trace—got out of the second. The bodyguards checked the area, then escorted the women to the front of the house.
Veronica rang the bell. She had a small valise in her hand. It was lime-green, which clashed terribly with the black jeans and white blouse she was wearing. Louis Vuitton would have been scandalized.
We’d wanted a real attaché case, but couldn’t come up with one in time for our little op. I’d left a bunch back at the ranch with the weapons we’d stolen from de Sarcena, but they were miles and miles away. We needed to complete our mission before the mayor found out what had happened at the prison; we calculated word would get out shortly after the shift change, which according to Mr. Cortina happened at eight.
Reynolds answered the door himself.
“Mr. Vincent,” said Veronica. “We need to talk. I was sent by Senor de Sarcena.”
The mayor’s face turned several shades of color, briefly matching the hue of Veronica’s bag before settling on red.
“I’m afraid I don’t know who that is,” he said finally.
“I’m sure you do. Please, we’ll all feel much more comfortable discussing this matter inside.”
“I don’t know a Mr. de Sarcena,” insisted the mayor. “I have a full slate of appointments this morning.”
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