Return of the Assassin (Assassin Series 3) (12 page)

The first guard shook his head. “We’re forbidden to go near it. All we’ve been told is there’s special security in place. We aren’t allowed within a hundred yards of the walls, so I don’t know.”

Briones cursed under his breath and then radioed the news. Cruz had anticipated the issue and gave them the go-ahead to knock down the gate and gain entry however they could.

The darkened vehicles moved towards the high concrete walls; without slowing, the lead Humvee crashed into the iron gates, using its heavy steel bumper as a battering ram. All the Humvees had reinforced bumpers for exactly that purpose. After the initial impact, the doors sagged inward. One final run at it, and they sprang open.

Gunfire immediately erupted from inside the main largest concrete building, exploding from the dozen small windows that punctuated the façade. Bullets slammed into the Humvees, and several of the GAFE commandos went down with pained grunts. The ERC-90s swung around and brought their heavy machine guns to bear, even as the fifty-caliber guns on the Humvees returned fire.

Within moments, the shells from the ERC-90s tore into the structure, but the firing from inside continued. The walls didn’t fall away as cinder block would have. These had been reinforced using high-density concrete and rebar, making it as tough as freeway overpass support columns.

As the hail of rounds pummeled the fortifications, several of the commandos fired grenades at the windows. Two made it inside.

The whump of the blasts silenced the gunfire within, and then a concussive eruption blew a massive orange fireball into the air. Even from outside the compound walls, Cruz’s ears popped from the shockwave. Two more explosions hurled flames into the inky sky, and black oily smoke belched from the now ruined building.

“What the fu–” the driver exclaimed as another blast shattered the night.

The radio crackled in Cruz’s hand.

“Base. The target has been destroyed. Detonations from inside. Over.” Briones sounded panicked.

Cruz keyed the radio transmit button. “Get back over here, now. That whole area has poisonous chemicals in the storage tanks. Nothing could have survived that, so clear out to a safe distance and I’ll get on the horn with the fire department and also get a hazmat team deployed.” Cruz paused, the implications of the destruction sinking in. “They blew the lab. That’s the only answer.”

“God damn it.”

“Move. There could be more explosions. I don’t want any more casualties. Pull back. Repeat. Pull back.”

Briones wiped away a trickle of blood from one of his earlobes and screamed commands, his ears ringing to the point where he could hardly make out his own voice. The rest of the assault force slowly pulled itself together and reversed away from the inferno, returning to the front gate through which it had entered. The skyline was a vision of hell, flames shooting skyward as smaller eruptions continued from the burning outline of the concrete building, the roof blown apart and now open to the night.

The assault vehicles pulled up to the command center van. Briones leapt out, staring at the chemical fire spewing toxins into the sky. Army vehicles filled with soldiers awaiting instructions screeched to a dusty halt, the quiet of the preceding minutes replaced by pandemonium. Several smaller blasts sounded from within the compound’s walls – the chemical tanks were starting to go.

The cartel had obviously been prepared to destroy the laboratory, and it didn’t surprise Cruz that the defenders had willingly given their lives in the process. That was one of the things that made Los Zetas extremely dangerous. They routinely did the unthinkable, whether it was grenade attacks in populated areas or massacres in busy casinos or butchering hundreds of innocents who happened to cross them.

The explosive charges must have been set in position as part of the lab’s defenses. There was no other possibility.

Cruz caught Briones’ eye, and shook his head. The futility of the exercise was disheartening.

All they could do now was mop up the mess.

He climbed out of the van and approached the commanding army officer.

It was going to be another endless night.

The sun rose over the mountains that ringed the Culiacán valley, bringing with it a summer heat that could easily reach triple digits. As morning arrived, the silence of the drowsing city was replaced by the rumble of buses and the hum of traffic, the early morning rush hour quickly clogging the streets with an endless procession of vehicles.

The capital of the state of Sinaloa, Culiacán was a city famous for its tomatoes, its marijuana, and its attractive population. The metropolis was burgeoning, now with a population of over a million, in spite of the violence pulsing in this heart of the Sinaloa cartel’s territory and operations.

Relentlessly modern, shopping malls and convenience stores abounded, and the waves of pedestrians moving down the sidewalks on their way to work sported fashionable clothing as they chatted on cell phones or texted away on iPhones. This was not old colonial Mexico, with white-garbed peasants in sombreros leading reluctant overloaded burros to market through cobblestone streets. Mercedes and BMW sedans glided along the teeming boulevards, completing the sense of prosperity and progress and bustle.

El Rey
made his way down the sidewalk, still groggy after snatching only a few hours of sleep.

Upon landing in Culiacan, he’d gotten settled at a small industrial workshop that had been arranged for his use, and checked into a hotel by the airport under his newly-minted name. Once he had stowed his gear, he’d driven his rental car to the downtown area to spend several hours nosing around his old haunts.

Some things never changed, and by midnight he’d gotten a line on the latest hangout for some of the cartel bigwigs – a club on the edge of town called
El Tucan
; a seedy establishment best avoided unless one was a member of the underworld or had a death wish. It was owned by a lieutenant in the Sinaloa cartel, Andres Zaraspe, also known as ‘
El Guapo
’ – the sexy one – because of his refined good looks and charming manner with the ladies. Zaraspe had a reputation as a Don Juan, and it certainly didn’t hurt that he was worth many millions from his illegal activities.

El Rey
had braved the crowd at
El Tucan
, putting up with the clumsy advances of the inevitable prostitutes until he’d gotten a fix on
El Guapo
, who’d been holding court in a corner of the club, surrounded by his entourage of bodyguards. Once
El Rey
had identified the drug lord, he finished his beer and departed, circling back to stake the bar out from across the road.

At two seventeen a.m.,
El Guapo
had left with his crew, and by two thirty his soldiers were dead and he was bound and gagged in the rental car’s trunk.

Several hours after they’d embarked on an earnest discussion in a moonlit field seven miles from town,
El Rey
had been satisfied that
El Guapo
had told him the truth about Paolo’s whereabouts – being forced to eat your own nose and ears tended to ensure a certain veracity, he’d found.

After begging for his ordeal to end,
El Guapo
had blazed bright even as his shrieks had filled the night, the five gallons of gasoline he’d been doused with ensuring that the last moments of his life were the most memorable of them all.

The effort had been worth it, as now
El Rey
had a line on one of the cartel captains who was known to work closely with
Don
Aranas.

Paolo Ramirez had been with the
Don
since the early days, when they had all been working for Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, the original Godfather of the illegal drug trade in Mexico. When Gallardo had split up the growing industry and segmented the country into territories for his loyal subordinates,
Don
Aranas had gotten the job of directing the plum Sinaloa cartel, originally at the top of the criminal hierarchy.

After Gallardo had gone to prison for life, Aranas had stepped into the position of supreme authority, but within a few years, the heads of the other cartels had agitated for larger cuts of the profits, and eventually a series of ugly internecine skirmishes had escalated into full-scale turf wars.

Through it all,
Don
Aranas had ruled the Sinaloa cartel with an iron fist. It had grown into the most powerful cartel in the world, expanding its reach into Africa and Europe to create trafficking arms to supply the growing demand in the former Soviet Union and the European Union, as well as throughout Central America.

In a world where many of the cartel heads had been killed or captured, Aranas and his group seemed untouchable, and he was one of the richest men in the world. While official estimates of the wholesale value of drugs trafficked through the Mexican cartels deliberately pegged the numbers low, ranging from twenty to fifty billion dollars per year, the true value was double that, and projected to explode now Europe had come on line.

The Mexican cartels had developed relationships with regional gangs in the U.S. and had operations in every American city – an inevitable function of economics, as the profits on the retail side could triple to quadruple the wholesale trade. The price of a kilo of cocaine had doubled over the last decade in the U.S., further swelling the cartel coffers.

If anyone would be on the inside and know of Maria’s whereabouts, Paolo would be one of the few. As one of Aranas’ right hand men, he single-handedly ran the Sinaloa cartel’s Culiacán and Mazatlán operations, and as such was a tremendously important player. Unfortunately for the assassin, Paolo was cut from the same bolt of cloth as his mentor,
Don
Aranas, and kept a low profile, eschewing the nightlife and ostentation that the younger cartel players reveled in, preferring to keep to himself. He was hardly ever seen, and nobody knew where his headquarters were located – like Aranas, he understood that a moving target was harder to hit, so constantly changed his residences and his meeting places.

El Guapo
had solved the problem of how to find Paolo and had given the assassin exhaustive directions to a home in the hills south of Culiacán, in a remote and secluded area. Now
El Rey
was preoccupied with how best to get to Paolo – the cartel warlord had at least two dozen ex-special forces soldiers on his payroll chartered with keeping him safe, and as
El Rey
knew from firsthand experience, these were serious, hardened fighters who wouldn’t be easy to defeat. One man against twenty-plus, even if it was
El Rey
, amounted to considerable odds, and his brain was busily turning over how to penetrate the formidable security and interrogate Paolo without getting killed in the process.

He’d have ordinarily taken days, or weeks, to study the layout and calculate the optimum approach, but the clock was ticking on the neurotoxin in his veins. Fortunately, he wasn’t working alone anymore and had a powerful partner who could prove invaluable for a cruder approach than his usual.

El Rey
moved through the stream of pedestrians like a ghost as he made his way to one of his favorite restaurants for breakfast. It had been a demanding evening, but even so, a plan was beginning to gel.

El Guapo
had described the complex in detail, including the high-tech surveillance equipment and the perimeter mine field. Paolo didn’t take the danger from the government or his rivals lightly and had spared no expense in fortifying his homes.

By the time he was done with his eggs,
El Rey
had developed a workable plan. It would require some help, and would probably be messy and inelegant, but he didn’t have a lot of choices.

He reached into his pants pocket for the BlackBerry and powered it on. Hector picked up on the second ring, and
El Rey
softly described what he would need, and when.

Three hours later, he checked his e-mail account and downloaded twenty high resolution satellite images from that morning. Paolo’s complex was indeed remotely located, near El Rincón De Los Montes, thirty miles north of Culiacán. It was an area understood to be under cartel control, so getting near Paolo’s hideout without tripping an alarm would be almost impossible.

There was only one way in that he could think of, and it would have to be surgically precise, with no margin for error. As he studied the photos, he confirmed that the property was large enough so that with a little luck he would be able to pull it off. A wall encircled the outer reaches of the lot, and a second wall ringed the actual compound, with the area between the two the minefield – it wouldn’t be a cakewalk, but not impossible either. He’d seen worse and had pulled off more difficult capers. The wrinkle on this one was that he needed to take his target alive.

The weather forecast called for scattered showers later in the day, clearing by nightfall. Not ideal, but he could work around it.

El Rey
made another call and confirmed his requirements. Hector took detailed notes as the assassin detailed the multi-pronged approach they would employ to penetrate Paolo’s defenses, and by the end of the fifteen-minute dissertation had a list two pages long he’d need to scramble to assemble.

His planning concluded for the time being,
El Rey
flipped over the do not disturb sign on his hotel room door and closed the blackout curtains. Best to rest while he could because things were about to get hectic.

He was asleep within three minutes of his head hitting the pillow.

~

“That’s okay. I’ll just wait here until he has a minute to see me,” Cruz said to the secretary at the court chambers, where the judge was hard at work in his office.

“This is really very irregular. You should have called and made an appointment,” she complained.

“I’ve been calling for days. His assistant hasn’t been able to arrange a meeting and didn’t return my last two calls. I’m afraid that even though he is a judge, my business is not the kind that can be ignored. I need ten minutes of his time, and I’m not leaving until I get it. Notify His Honor that Captain Romero Cruz, the head of the
El Rey
and anti-cartel task forces, is sitting in his waiting room and has committed to stay for as long as is necessary to get a meeting.”