Rancho Buena Fortuna

by Bill King

  “There’s something else you need to know about, something you’re not going to like one bit.”

  “Tell me, Rhonda. Bad news doesn’t get any better with time.”

  “Miguel went out to check on the old barn exit about an hour ago,” said Rhonda. “When he was late returning to work, we checked the camera footage from the barn area. He was shot in the shoulder and kidnapped. And you’ll never guess by whom.”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense. Who?”

  “By your old friend, Chucho.”

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  Chapter 25

  THE PRIVATE AIRPLANE CARRYING Mateo Calderón made a somewhat bumpy landing at the airport in Teterboro, about twelve miles from downtown Manhattan, in the New Jersey Meadowlands. The unusually strong winds from the northwest were the advance element of a band of severe thunderstorms that was due to descend on the City within the next hour or so.

  The rest of the team had already arrived two days earlier, but Calderón had been in Dallas helping that team set up before flying on to the Big Apple. He planned to stay only one day, long enough to walk them through several rehearsals of their escape plan. He would leave the execution of the plan to them because he was needed more back in Dallas.

  He was met at the executive airport by a limo driver holding a handwritten cardboard sign that read MARK JACOBS, which was the identity he was flying under. For proof of identification, he had a California driver’s license in that name, along with a couple of the major credit cards. His cover was that he was a tech engineer from Silicon Valley traveling to New York City on business for a week.

  He did not have to worry about anyone discovering that his driver’s license was fake, because it wasn’t. In fact, all four members of the New York team had documents identifying them as living in California and working for the same fictitious tech company. California identity papers had blown a hole in the entire fraudulent identity business. The state cranked them out like confetti on New Year’s Eve and, in some jurisdictions, it was almost as if they didn’t even care anymore who they gave them to.

  Like the San Francisco team, they would use the subway to make their immediate exit from the area, trying to get as far away as they could as quickly as they could. The plan was simple. They would make their way to the Fulton Street Subway Station, a block away from the Fed, and take the train to Times Square.

  From there, they would take the steps up to the street level, walk two blocks to an office building in midtown and take the elevator up to the top floor, where they would have access to the rooftop. A helicopter, which would be chartered in advance, would be there waiting to take them on an orientation photo flight over New York and Northern New Jersey, before dropping them off at Newark International Airport.

  Rather than board a flight, however, they would immediately exit the crowded passenger terminal, where an SUV would be waiting to drive them down to Monmouth Executive Airport. There, a private plane would be standing by to fly them back to Texas. Anyway, that was the plan Graciela had mapped out for them, to take maximum advantage of crowds while moving rapidly from one geographic location to another.

  The assault team had already been in New York City for a couple of days, surveilling the Federal Reserve building and the surrounding area. He wanted to personally walk through the escape route with Eduardo, a classmate of Calderón at the university and the person he had put in charge of the team. A lawyer by training, he quickly realized that there was more money and excitement in revolution than in the law, especially in modern day Venezuela.

  He and Isabela had been with Fósforo since the creation of M-28. He was the more thoughtful and analytical of the two, while she was the more impulsive and violent. It was an ironic reversal of the traditional male-female roles in Latin society. That’s why Calderón had chosen him for the New York attack and her for the San Francisco one.

  ◆◆◆

  “Tío Memo, it’s me, Graciela. We have a problem.” She sounded worried.

  “Gracie, my dear, what’s troubling you?”

  He set down his cell phone on the top of his desk and engaged the speaker button. He was semiretired now from his law firm and only came downtown to the office once a week, on Wednesdays. Today was a Wednesday. It was almost seven o’clock and the old man was packing up his things to go home for the evening.

  He had taken care to soundproof his office about thirty years earlier, hidden beneath the rich dark wood paneling that covered the walls of the room. He had modeled the entire suite of offices after the law firms he regularly visited in Argentina and England. Not only did it look luxurious, one could also even mask the sound of a high-powered pistol firing an entire clip of ammunition.

  Overhearing conversations was completely out of the question, especially since he had the room regularly swept for listening devices.

  “We have camera footage of Chucho outside the old barn,” she said, with obvious concern in her voice. “He shot one of my people who was checking on some things near the silo entrance, then kidnapped him.”

  “Kidnapped?”

  “Yes, Chucho shot him in the shoulder and then walked him from the barnyard toward the big hill. When my security people arrived at the scene not more than five minutes later, they found fresh tire tracks, most likely from a pickup truck, that headed off across country in the direction of the highway.”

  “Did you happen to have any drone coverage of the area at the time?” the old man asked.

  “No, they were both down for routine scheduled maintenance. We have about a four-hour gap in our surveillance of the area, except for the cameras mounted on the side of the barn.”

  “Does your man have any information that could put our operations at risk?” he asked. “I’m assuming that Chucho did not take the man away just to get him medical attention.”

  Graciela paused for a moment, collecting her thoughts.

  “He worked in the Bunker, flying one of the armed drones. He’s been with me from the beginning, so he knows quite a bit.”

  “Does he know about the Venezuelans?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  This time it was El Indio’s turn to pause to collect his thoughts. After a few moments, he said, “Then it sounds to me like we need to find this little Chucho fellow quickly…and dispose of him.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “You just focus on the Rancho, Gracie. I’ll take care of Chucho.”

  Like millions of other calls made around the world each day, this one was recorded by the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. However, whether it was ever translated from information into intelligence, or remained buried under the sheer volume of electronic fodder, was an entirely separate matter.

  ◆◆◆

  It was just past midnight when two men wearing sleeveless shirts and droopy jeans got out of the red pickup truck and walked over to the corrugated metal storage door. The overhead security light shined down on the entrance, revealing the number forty-three. One of the men, sporting wall-to-wall tattoos that covered every inch of his left arm, pulled out a ring of keys and unlocked the high-security padlock. He removed the lock and slid the bolt back, away from the door frame.

  The two, positioned at either side of the entryway, bent over and grabbed the two leather loops attached to the bottom of the storage door. As they lifted it up, the door rolled up just like a residential garage. Inside was a ten-foot by twenty-foot climate-controlled storage unit. Two more men got out of a second pickup and all four walked inside the storage unit. The last one to go inside pulled down the roll-down door.

  Just inside the unit was a fake wall of simulated wooden crates stacked all the way to the ceiling, effectively blocking the outside view of the contents inside the unit from anyone who happened to walk by while the door was open. Blending into the fake wall was a door, which opened by pressing four digits into the security pad on the side wall of the unit.

  Hidden behind the wall was a steel-framed securi
ty cage covered with heavy duty cyclone fencing, just like the military uses in expeditionary arms rooms. The steel frames were bolted securely to the cement floor. The ceiling of the cage was likewise protected by heavy-duty cyclone fencing, all welded together. Chucho flipped the switch just inside, instantly lighting up the entire unit.

  Inside the security vault were hundreds of rifles, pistols, light and heavy machine guns, as well as crates of ammunition. There were also several crates containing antitank weapons. Chucho had a supply of explosives, too, but he kept them at a different site out in the countryside, buried underground.

  They were at a self-storage facility in Oilton, a tiny town located midway between Hebbronville and Laredo. Chucho had leased a large storage unit several months earlier and they had done most of the buildout late one night, when nobody else was around.

  “Load up about ten AR-15s,” said Chucho, standing just inside the chain link security cage. Then he pointed over to the right. “Oh, and grab about five of the Mossberg 500s, too. Nothing clears a room quite like a twelve-gauge shotgun.”

  Three of his men started removing the weapons from the arms racks and cradling them in their arms to carry them out to the pickup truck.

  “Don’t forget the ammunition, Miguel, especially the shotgun shells,” said Chucho. “I don’t want to find myself in the middle of a fight again and discover that the only thing I can use the Mossberg for is as a club. I won’t be so easy on you next time.”

  What a cluster that had been, he thought to himself. Miguel was lucky they’d known each other since they were both six. Otherwise, he’d be a dead man. Friendship counted for a lot. Not everything, but a lot.

  Unlike the group they had seen leaving the old barn under cover of darkness a couple of nights earlier, Chucho and his men did not maintain good light discipline that night. They left the exterior roll-down door open while they carried the weapons and ammunition boxes outside to load them into the two pickup trucks. Nor did they maintain good noise discipline, either, as the two younger men started playing grab ass and laughing outside by the vehicles.

  The only thing missing was music blaring from the radio, but Chucho always told them not to turn on the radio when they were working. Chucho always knew best about these things.

  ◆◆◆

  A Webb County sheriff’s deputy was driving past the isolated self-storage facility in Oilton when he noticed lights spilling out from one of the storage units. He slowed down and pulled his vehicle off to the side of the road. Inside the fenced facility, he noticed two pickup trucks were parked in front and several men appeared to be loading something into the bed of the vehicles. The digital clock on his dashboard read twelve-thirty.

  The deputy keyed the radio mic in his vehicle.

  “Dispatch, this is four-seven. I am at the self-service storage facility on highway three-five-niner. There appears to be four males in two pickup trucks unloading property from one of the storage units. I am going in to check it out.”

  “Roger, four-seven,” said the dispatcher. The County had just purchased new radio equipment six months earlier for the sheriff’s department. A year ago, it would have been a fifty-fifty proposition at best that the call would have been received clearly.

  The sheriff’s deputy drove his white Chevy Yukon up to the access gate. The gate was securely locked and he didn’t know the combination. He turned off the engine, got out of his vehicle and walked along the fence line to where he could get a clear view of the storage unit.

  “Dispatch, this is four seven,” he said into the mic clipped to his uniform. “Be advised that four Hispanic males, believed to be in their twenties or early thirties, are loading what appears to be weapons and boxes of ammo into two pickup trucks. First truck, white, Ford F-150, Texas plate lima-niner-Charlie-eight-six-five. Second truck, late model red Chevy Silverado, Texas plate mike-six-x-ray-two-seven-three. Request backup. Over.”

  “Roger, four-seven.”

  There was about twenty seconds of silence during which the deputy, who was squatting to better conceal himself as he observed the scene at the storage unit, assessed the situation. Then he had a thought.

  “Dispatch, this is four-seven. You might want to run those numbers by the Laredo FBI. The sheriff was at a meeting with them this afternoon and this might be of interest to them. Over.”

  “Wilco, four-seven.”

  About a minute later, a short man with a parrot beak nose walked out of the storage unit and began walking in the direction where the sheriff’s deputy was located. The deputy’s heart began to race. The little man stopped at the corner of one of the storage unit buildings, unzipped his fly and began to relieve himself. The deputy breathed a sigh of relief.

  The little man finished his business and zipped up his trousers, using his left hand to rearrange his junk before turning around to return to his companions. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a white SUV parked in front of the entrance gate to the storage facility. The SUV had a full-size light bar mounted across the roof. The lights were turned off, which probably meant that the cop was somewhere on foot.

  “Carajo,” he muttered under his breath, instinctively reaching his hand behind himself to feel for the FN-57 pistol he carried in a holster at the small of his back. It was a nervous habit he had developed as a child.

  They had given him his first handgun when he was ten and, early on, he forgot several times to bring it with him. El Coronel, who had recruited him when he was just six years old, would scold him each time, but never once did he strike him. In almost every sense of the word, El Coronel was the father he never knew.

  Chucho normally carried at least three extra twenty-round magazines, which was a good thing since he figured the policeman had already reported the incident. That meant that reinforcements were almost certainly on the way.

  He forced himself to walk at a normal pace back to the storage unit so as not to tip off the policeman that he knew he was there, watching him. He discretely motioned for the men standing by the dark pickup to follow him back into the storage unit.

  “There’s a police vehicle blocking the exit to the facility, which means that there must be a policeman somewhere along the fence line watching us,” Chucho whispered in a hushed voice. “Turn off the lights and everyone casually walk outside. While you pull down the door and lock it, I will sneak around the building and see if I can outflank him without him noticing. You try to distract him without him realizing that he’s being deliberately distracted.”

  The other three men nodded their heads, signifying that they understood. They turned off the lights and walked outside. One of the men made a loud noise, simulating a fart, while the other two men started hooting and waving a hand in front of their noses, as if to blow away the foul smell.

  While this was going on, Chucho crouched and ran around to the side of the storage unit building, dodging the empty boxes and trash left by tenants seemingly unaware of the purpose of the large steel dumpsters positioned at the far end of each building. From there, he circled around to a spot where he was pretty sure he would find the American lawman.

  As he peaked his head around the corner of one of the storage buildings, Chucho saw the deputy crouched down, the man’s attention focused on the trucks and men outside his storage unit. The sheriff’s deputy was about half a football field away. This was out of Chucho’s range for a reasonably guaranteed first-round kill. He liked the FN-57 because it had almost no recoil and, if he could only get another fifteen or so yards closer, he could shoot the wings off a mosquito.

  Unfortunately, as he crept forward, he stepped on a small branch. The sharp snapping sound caused the sheriff’s deputy to instantly turn in the direction of Chucho, who began firing in rapid succession at the policeman. Somewhere between the third and the eighth round he fired hit the cop, causing him to drop to the ground.

  It wasn’t that Chucho lacked experience with his pistol. He was pretty darn proficient at twenty-five or thirty feet but had alwa
ys preferred to take his shots at ten feet or closer. Accurately firing a pistol gets more difficult as the range increases, especially for a guy like Chucho whose extensive experience with gunfights was limited mainly to sudden meeting engagements at close quarters.

  The wounded deputy reached for his radio and keyed it, saying desperately, “This is four-seven. Officer down. Oilton storage facility. Highway three-five-niner.” He pulled out his handgun from his holster and started looking for Chucho, who had sprinted toward him once he knew he had hit his target and was now standing over him.

  An urgent voice came from the officer’s radio. “Four-seven, this is dispatch. Assistance is five minutes out. Copy?”

  Chucho pointed his pistol at the wounded cop and fired two shots into the man’s head. He then bent over the officer, keyed his radio mic, and said, simply, “Roger.”

  He searched the dead man’s pockets and found the keys to the police vehicle. He shouted at his men to get in their vehicles and to meet him at the front gate. Chucho then sprinted to the gate and furiously punched in the security code, entering it correctly the second time.

  He climbed into driver’s seat of the sheriff’s SUV, inserted the key and started the engine. He slammed the transmission into reverse and stepped on the gas, spinning the steering wheel sharply. He backed the car off the gravel entry road and into a gully that, in rural Texas, primarily served as a storm drain.

  He shut down the engine and removed the keys, tossing them into the overgrown grass along the security fence line. Then he climbed into the passenger seat of the red pickup truck and slammed the door.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here, cabrones,” he said.

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  Chapter 26