by Mark Greaney
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 le
ather 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.
It was a needle in a haystack, Calvo knew, but it was also his job to do the bidding of his master.
His mobile rang again, it was his first incoming call of the day, and he flipped the phone open and answered. “¿Bueno?”
And five minutes later he stormed out of his office, pulling his Kevlar suit coat on as he shut the door behind him.
Daniel de la Rocha worked the gym’s heavy bag like an experienced middleweight boxer. He wasn’t the only man on the large teak floor—two more Black Suits stood around, already dressed for the business day, and shouted encouragement to him while he sparred with his trainer or worked the speed bag or pounded his gloved fists into the heavy bag. His trainer stood behind the bag in the corner giving instructions.
And Javier “Spider” Cepeda was there as well; he never left his boss’s side now, even though he also spent time giving orders to his underlings who came and went to execute their boss’s wishes regarding the war with los Vaqueros.
As was becoming his custom, fifty-seven-year-old Nestor Calvo Macias entered the room quickly, ignored the security detail and the others standing around, and walked purposefully up to his patrón.
DLR saw his man in the mirror on the wall. He dropped his arms to rest and turned to face Calvo. “You bring more bad news, don’t you, Nestor?”
“Super lab number six has been destroyed.”
“What do you mean, ‘destroyed’?”
“Destroyed, Daniel. It was there, and now it is not. There is fire. There is wreckage. Twisted metal. Dead bodies. A complete loss of the complex there and all its material.”
DLR just nodded as his trainer wiped his brow with a towel.
Calvo next said, “The Gray Man destroyed two full batches of product. Plus the capital equipment there. And he killed a few men. Some of the foreigners working there are gone. We don’t know if he kidnapped them or if they were killed or if they ran off on their own.”
De la Rocha flexed his chest and arms, then smashed his right fist into the heavy bag.
“Something else,” said Calvo, quietly. “A laptop was taken from the office of the administrator of the laboratory. The administrator has told my men that everything was locked and encrypted, with one exception. There was one file that was open at the time of the theft. This file had sensitive information on it, which we must assume is now in the hands of the Gray Man.”
De la Rocha punched the bag once again, then turned back to his consigliere. “What information?”
“Physical addresses of our real estate in Mexico.”
“Shit!” shouted DLR. “Madrigal now knows the location of all of our properties?”
“If the Gray Man is working for Madrigal . . . then yes.”
“¡Hijo de puta!” Son of a bitch! De la Rocha screamed, punched the heavy bag with all his might. He turned back quickly to his consigliere. “Cuernavaca? Was the Cuernavaca house on the—”
“Sí, jefe.”
“Nestor . . . my kids. My wife. That is my fucking home!”
“I know.”
“He said he would not touch my family!”
“With apologies, Daniel, he has not touched your family.”
De la Rocha waved away his last comment. “What do we do?” He stuck his arms out for his trainer to begin removing his gloves. The older man rushed over to comply.
Calvo shrugged. “Two days ago we complained he has cost us fifty million dollars. But now? To establish new routes and safe houses, to change distribution channels from our current properties into the United States? This could cost us ten times that amount.”
Spider had been silent, but he said, “Jefe, we must get you out of here, now!”
“My family,” DLR said softly. “Move them.” A Black Suit spun away, out of the room, pulling a phone from his belt to contact the Cuernavaca detail and have them move de la Rocha’s wife and six children.
But he did not get far. The man ducked his head back into the room. “I am sorry.” He looked around, did not know whom to address. “But where do I tell them to go?”
DLR said, “The property in Portugal. Get them to the airport in Mexico City and have the jet meet them there tonight!”
Calvo shook his head. “No. The address of the Faro estate was in the file.”
“Motherfucker.” The drug lord said it in English. He’d learned it while serving in the Mexican military, training in the United States. “He is destroying us.”
“No,” said Calvo. “Because you will not let that happen. You will give the Gamboa woman back to—”
“No!” DLR grabbed Calvo by his lapels and slammed the older man up against the mirrored wall. “I will not!”
“Daniel, this fiasco is simply costing us too much money, too much time, too much—”
“I don’t care! I don’t care about any of that. I want Elena Gamboa and this gringo assassin dead! Now they threaten my children?”
Calvo shook his head, undaunted even under the threat of physical violence from his boss. “No one is threatening your—”
Spider got between them in an instant. “Jefe. We have friends who own entire chains of hotels, condominiums, real estate of all kinds. We can send your family anywhere; we can rent out an entire floor, an entire estate! I’ll double protection on your family, and you can tell your kids it is a holiday.”
Calvo and de la Rocha stared at each other a moment more, then the younger man let go of the elder’s suit coat. Without breaking the staring contest, he spoke to Spider. “Triple the guard on them. And notify everyone here. We will leave for Puerto Vallarta within the hour; we have more cops working for us there than anywhere else. I will fly the helicopter. Bring Laura Gamboa with us, we will take over the biggest place we can find there, and we will continue war on Madrigal until the Gray Man is liquidated and Elena Gamboa is found.”
Calvo stormed out of the room without another word. As he walked back towards his office, he decided he would do what he could to end this madness, no matter his master’s wishes. The American called him “adult supervision.” It was an insult to DLR but, Nestor acknowledged, there was some truth to the gringo assassin’s words.
FIFTY-TWO
Court arrived at the predetermined pickup point for supplies from the Madrigal Cartel. He was running low on detonators, ammonium nitrate, and fuel oil; he needed some clean cell phones, a little cash, and more ammo for the Sako.
But when he arrived at the storage unit pickup point, he saw a man standing out front. Still in his truck, one hundred yards from his cache, Court peered through his binoculars.
It was Serna, and he was alone.
He was waiting.
Court pulled up in the truck. Climbed out, looking over the intelligence chief for los Vaqueros. “Why are you here?”
“The Cowboy wants to talk to you.”
“In person?”
“Sí. Immediately.”
This surprised Gentry. “I don’t have time for a face-to-face. Can’t I talk to him on the phone?”
“No. We are to take you to him.”
“We?”
“Yes, I did not want to alarm you, so I am keeping them out of sight, but I have twenty men with me. All around us.”
“What does Madrigal want to talk about?”
“I do not know.”
Court looked hard at the narco from Sinaloa, but he could not tell if the man was being truthful or not. Court weighed his optio
ns. He felt like he could take Serna right now at gunpoint and get the hell out of here, but why? There was no reason for Madrigal to be mad at him. On the contrary, Court had seriously damaged the operations of los Vaqueros’s main competitor. By all rights Madrigal should be commissioning narco corridos, “ballads,” about the exploits of the Gray Man and offering him even more help than before.
Court nodded, lifted his arms, and Serna frisked him. Serna removed four weapons, then used a small walkie-talkie to call in his team. Within seconds several massive Dodge pickup trucks appeared at both the front and side entrances of the storage lot. They pulled up the aisle and collected Serna and Gentry, and then headed in a convoy towards the north.
By noon Serna and Gentry were in a small prop plane flying northwest, and by twelve thirty they had landed on a grass airstrip in the mountains. They climbed into big Chrysler sedans and headed through a large town. Court asked Serna where they were, but the intelligence chief only admitted that they were in southern Sinaloa.
After no more than twenty minutes on the road, they entered the gates of a large cemetery. The sky was clear and cool, and Court began seeing armed men in straw hats standing around the ornate mausoleums on the well-manicured grounds. This was nothing like the cemetery where Eddie Gamboa had been laid to rest. No, these crypts were massive, expensive hand-carved cement and marble tile, gilded roofs and life-sized statues in front of the tombs.
Serna answered a question Court had not asked. “This entire cemetery is for Madrigal’s men. He comes here often to visit his old friends. It is a compliment that he invited you to meet with him here.”
Gentry was pretty sure he hadn’t exactly been “invited,” but he let it go. The Chrysler followed the winding road through dozens of crypts, some as large as small homes. Many sported framed photographs on iron shields above the doorways, other accoutrements to the mausoleums such as AK-47s carved from stone, cowboy hats carved from marble, life-sized bronze horses and even actual grilles and front ends of Cadillacs and Dodge pickups jutted from the masonry. In one case, a life-sized stainless steel Piper twin-engine aircraft had been built into the roof of a massive crypt.
