possessed were cheap labor and time. He didn’t know how long rotating crews might take to span that distance, digging night and day, nor did he care. The point was that transporters planned on moving through the tunnel here and now, clueless that they were being watched.
The pickup team wasn’t afraid of being seen by daylight—that much was apparent. Maybe they had worried more about missing their contacts in the dark, driving without headlights and only stars to guide them. On the other hand, perhaps they’d greased Border Patrol officers in advance to take a coffee break just now or simply look the other way. It had been true in Prohibition and throughout the modern War on Drugs.
Mexico particularly suffered from a scourge of bought-off law enforcement spanning decades, worsening as towns and villages descended into chaos. Its Federal Judicial Police force was dissolved in 2002, after one-fourth of its officers were linked to drug cartels, and its successor—the Federal Investigative Agency—likewise collapsed in 2005, with the arrests of its deputy director and 457 of its agents. After a four-year hiatus, the Federal Ministerial Police appeared, but nothing much had changed—at least if you believed the DEA and Texas Rangers.
The corruption wasn’t hard to understand: Mexican cops earned meager pay, and they were subject to the fear of having loved ones slaughtered by sicarios—hit men—the same as anybody else. Why swim upstream and be devoured by piranhas, when an officer could make a killing by just going with the flow?
The two RAV4s had stopped, disgorged their occupants—six of the eight packing assault weapons, and the drivers making do with pistols. Bolan heard them speaking rapid-fire Spanish, too fast and too far away to comprehend. Still, he had no trouble picking out the man who seemed to be in charge, the dark and bearded face filling his Steyr’s telescopic sight.
Waiting to see what happened next, he told Grimaldi, “On my call.”
“Call them,” Altair Infante ordered. “Now.”
His driver, Manuel Ortega, took a compact walkie-talkie from the cargo pocket of his khaki pants and pressed the talk button, saying, “Coyote calling Mole. Come in, Mole. Do you copy?”
Nothing right away, but then a voice came back at him through static. “Copy that, Coyote.”
“Where are you?”
“We’re at the hatch, just waiting for your signal.”
“This is it. Get out here, will you?”
“Yes, yes, give me a minute to lift this thing.”
“So, lift it!” Infante snapped, as if the team below ground could make out his words.
There was another brief delay, and then a hatch approximately ten feet square swung up and backward on hinges, with sand streaming from it as the adit of the tunnel was revealed. Blinking like real-life moles after their journey through the shaft, some of them coughing up stale air, four men emerged and stretched, feeling the sun before they turned around again and started dragging wooden pallets heaped with shrink-wrapped kilos of cocaine into daylight.
“Start counting them,” Infante ordered his soldiers. “And be quick about it. We need to get loaded up and gone before we have to deal with the Border Patrol, eh?”
“I thought you paid them off,” Ortega said, hoping it didn’t sound like he was whining.
“Who told you to think, idiot? Just do what you’re told and get a move on.” Turning toward the SUVs, Infante muttered, not quite underneath his breath, “Asshole.”
Ortega thought that he should say something, defend himself, but Infante was right: he wasn’t paid to think, only to follow orders without question, never mind what they might be or what he was required to do. Still, if only he had the nerve...
Half turning, driven by a wild impulse, Ortega had actually opened his mouth, could feel words forming in his mind and pressing on his vocal cords, ready to burst free from his tongue. It meant his death to speak, but how long could a man live once he was stripped of all his self-respect? That didn’t make him a man, someone to admire. It made him appear to be weak.
He was on the tipping point of suicidal madness when a bolt from heaven saved Ortega from himself, striking Infante’s head and blowing it apart, as if it were a mango with a firecracker inside.
Ortega had seen men killed before—had killed a few himself, in fact—but never had he seen a skull disintegrate, the brain within it taking flight and shredding while it tumbled through the air. One second he was staring at it, mouth agape, then suddenly a mist, red and gray and uncomfortably warm, spattered his face, smearing his Ray-Ban sunglasses. And—God Almighty—some of the muck was even in his mouth!
Ortega gagged and spat, while Infante’s gunmen and the hired transporters cried out in alarm. Then, a split second later, Ortega knew it couldn’t be a bolt from heaven that had slain Infante.
Would a bolt from heaven leave the flat crack of a military rifle floating on the desert breeze?
It was foolish even to suggest it.
But if they were under fire, that meant...
Ortega hit the dirt, shouting to his companions, “Incoming gunfire! Hit the ground!”
Instead of dropping to save themselves, the gunmen who’d accompanied Infante and Ortega in the SUVs were firing back at someone, something—maybe nothing, if the truth be told—with submachine guns and assault rifles. Ortega guessed they had to feel better, making so much noise, even if they couldn’t pick out a living target in the sandscape that surrounded them.
Thinking he ought to do something, Ortega reached for his own weapon, a Beretta M9 chambered in 9 mm Parabellum, with an ambitxterous safety and decocking mechanism making, it convenient for both right-and left-handed shooters. As a left-hander himself, Ortega babied the Beretta, cleaning it religiously and treating it as what he sometimes thought it was: his only true-blue friend on Earth.
But he still needed a target before he could use the weapon to good advantage.
So far he couldn’t tell if someone was still shooting at the pickup crew. Five other gunners, together with Ignacio Azuela, the driver of the second RAV4, were unloading into the desert to Ortega’s left, northwest of where he lay, the discharge of their weapons drowning out whatever hostile fire might be incoming now. Streams of bright cartridge casings glittered in the air and bounced across the desert floor as they landed.
Ortega squeezed off two shots in the general direction his companions were unloading, virtually blind until he realized that Infante’s blood and brains still smeared his Ray-Bans. He ripped them off, and had to squint against the glare of morning sun.
One target—that was all he needed to acquit himself with courage, but he still couldn’t find one.
Behind him, frightened cries and scuffling feet told him the underground transporters were retreating to their tunnel and, no doubt, would soon be fleeing back across the border to Mexico. Ortega wished that he could follow them, get lost somewhere in Coahuila and forget about the life he’d chosen, and never return.
But then he thought about his boss, who would never stop looking for a deserter from his family, and Ortega knew that sudden death, right here and now, was better than the screaming, inescapable alternative.
