The Cartel (61 page)

It’s like Six Flags for narcos.

The Mexico Ten finishes him off, he zips up and rejoins the party. Diego comes up to him and hands him a gift-wrapped box.

It’s a diamond-studded Audemars Piguet.

Eddie figures the watch goes for about a half mil.

“I feel bad, Diego,” Eddie says. What he got Diego for Christmas was a pair of Lucchese alligator boots, custom made. True, they cost him eight grand, and Diego’s proudly wearing them now, but still.

“You got me Salvador Barrera,” Diego says, and then wraps Eddie in a bear hug and says in his ear, “I love you,
m’ijo.
”

Now Eddie really feels bad about the boots.

—

They stay on Diego for five long days.

While Mexico City bustles with all the usual holiday activity, Keller and Orduña bunker down, track Diego Tapia’s moves, and wait for him to go somewhere that they can take him. They have to be careful—the government won’t tolerate another civilian casualty, nor do they have much stomach for one themselves.

The tracking device homes in on Diego, but he also makes several cell phone calls to María Fernanda, which they have monitored.

In the meantime, Diego doesn’t go far, from one safe house to another in the Cuernavaca area. One is near a school—no good. Another near a busy shopping street—same. Finally he settles for two days in an apartment in one of five fifteen-story towers in the Lomas de Selva neighborhood of Cuernavaca.

“Elbus Complex, the Altitude Building,” Orduña says. “But we don’t know which floor.”

Thirty minutes later, María calls.

“Where have you been?” Keller asks. “If you’re playing some kind of double game here—”

“Nobody’s playing.”

“He’s in the Altitude Building,” Keller says. “Lomas de Selva. Which floor?”

“Second. 201.”

Diego’s planning a dinner with a general and three officers from the 24th Military Zone tonight.
“Maybe you won’t chicken out this time.”

They have no intention of chickening out.

The FES are the elite troops that Keller wanted back in the early days of hunting Barrera. This is no clumsy AFI full frontal assault, but a highly professional, well-planned operation.

Plainclothes FES operatives move onto the street outside the complex, and report back that the forty Tapia
sicarios
are in three concentric circles—two of them around the building, the innermost in the lobby. Six additional men have gone inside the apartment, and listening posts outside Altitude confirm the presence of seven distinct voices in addition to Diego Tapia’s.

The best FES marksmen take position on the rooftops of the surrounding buildings, ranged in on all exits, with permission to shoot if Diego comes out.

Orduña is taking no chances with civilian casualties. Over the course of five hours, starting at noon, the plainclothes ops start to quietly remove residents from the other buildings into the basements.

Others start removing Diego’s security on the street, approaching with knives and pistols and quietly taking them away, putting on their clothes, taking their phones, replacing them. Diego’s outer security ring is now Orduña’s outer security ring.

And three officers from the 24th Military Zone, on their way to dinner, are stopped in their car and arrested.

Two hundred FES wait a kilometer away in armored cars. Others are loaded into Mi-17 helicopters. A pair of M1A2 Abrams tanks, part of the Mérida package, stand by.

Orduña is not fucking around.

—

Diego is pissed off that his guests haven’t arrived.

Maybe, Eddie thinks, they heard about some of El Jefe’s previous menu items. He’s sitting at the table with Diego, waiting to eat. Five
sicarios
are on guard around the apartment, more in the lobby.

“I don’t think they’re going to show,” Eddie says.

“Why not?” Diego asks.

He’s stressed out, and Eddie gets it. The army is his protection—if they’ve flipped to Barrera, he’s in deep shit. And now the army guys haven’t shown up and aren’t answering their phones.

“Fuck this,” Eddie says. “I’m out of here.”

“You’re leaving?”

“I don’t know, man,” Eddie says. “I just don’t feel good about this.”

“Relax,” Diego says. “I got forty men out there. What are you worried about?”

“I got shit to do, Diego,” Eddie says. “The
waifa
’s on my ass about getting a bassinette, baby clothes…I got two dealers in Monterrey need straightening out…”

“Go ahead,” Diego snaps. “Get the fuck out.”

“Diego…”

“How about that watch I gave you?” Diego asks. “You like that, right?”

“Yeah, it’s beautiful. You’re still wearing the boots, huh?” He kisses Diego on the cheek and gets up. “See you later,
Tío.
”

“Later.”

Eddie takes the elevator down, walks out onto the plaza.

—

Keller hears the radio call from the helicopter.

“Target acquired.”

“Hold,”
Orduña says.
“Repeat, hold. Let him go.”

A long five minutes later, Keller hears him say,
“Go.”

The helicopter takes off, flies over the Lomas de Selva neighborhood, and lands on the roof of the Altitude Building. The roof secured, some of the FES evacuate tenants in the higher floors of the building while Keller and the others move down the stairwell toward the second floor.

Then the armored vehicles race up to the front of the building and start pouring 7.62mm rounds from the machine guns and M-16 fire into the lobby, mowing down Tapia’s
sicarios
before they can react. Marines rush into the lobby, secure the wounded, and then head up to the second floor.

As the commandos burst into the second-floor hallway, one of the men inside apartment 201 throws a grenade out the door. Other
sicarios
fire out the second-floor windows at the troops outside the building, while the others make a fight of it in the stairway.

Keller is coming down the stairs behind a marine lieutenant when a grenade clatters into the stairway. The lieutenant takes the brunt of the blast and shards of the fragmentation grenade hit him in the neck above his Kevlar vest. Keller squats to feels his pulse, but there is none—the severed artery quickly bleeds him out.

Drawing his pistol, Keller fires down the stairway as other FES come in behind him. They’re well trained, alternating cover and motion, and drive the
sicarios
back into the apartment.

Diego and his five men make a siege of it, holing up in the apartment. Through his headset, monitoring phone traffic, Keller can hear Diego calling Crazy Eddie Ruiz.

“Where are you,
m’ijo
? We’re getting fucked to hell here. We’re about to get taken.”

“Give it up, Diego. There’s nothing I can do.”

“Fuck that. I’m fighting. Get over here with some men.”

“It’s no good, Tío. They’ve got hundreds of guys out there. Helicopters. Tanks. Give up.”

Keller listens to a few moments of silence and then hears Diego say,
“Okay,
m’ijo,
you take care of my kids, okay? I’m going to take some of these
pendejos
with me. Last bullet for myself.”

They hold out for three more hours.

Tipping the tables and sofas on their side for cover, they use up most of the ammo for the AKs and AR-15s. Then all they have left are grenades. The FES, already furious at the death of the much-loved lieutenant, are in no hurry to take more casualties. They just keep up the pressure, keep tightening the noose, and force the narcos to expend ammunition.

At nine that night, when it’s relatively quiet, Orduña gives the order to finish it.

A small C-4 charge blows the apartment door off.

Three FES go through the door, M-16s at their shoulders. Each kills a
sicario
with a two-shot burst to the chest. Keller sees another one of Diego’s men put his pistol in his mouth and pull the trigger. The last jumps out the window, a burst of fire from a rooftop sniper catches him in midair, and he’s dead before he somersaults onto the concrete courtyard.

Keller sees Diego go through a back door into the hallway toward a freight elevator.

I guess he decided not to fight it out after all, Keller thinks as he goes after him.

The elevator door slides open.

The two FES inside fire bursts of 5.56 hollow-points into Diego’s chest. He staggers backward into the apartment and falls to the floor.

But still breathing, still alive.

Orduña comes in from the hallway. He stands over Diego and then looks at Keller.

Keller turns his back, then hears two shots. When he turns back again there are two neat bullet holes in Diego’s forehead. El Jefe de los Jefes, La Barba, is dead.

He already looks like an anachronism—the long hair and beard, the tall frame, once heavily muscled, now as thin as some crippled beast starved over the course of a long hard winter.

Diego Tapia was from another time, and that time is gone.

Orduña walks out.

Keller squats down and pulls off Diego’s boots.

He removes the monitoring device from the left boot and slips it into his pocket.

What happens next shouldn’t have.

Inside the apartment, the FES discipline breaks down. Whether out of revenge, or adrenaline, or the sheer heady relief of surviving, some of the commandos yank Diego’s black jeans down around his ankles and pull his shirt up to his neck, displaying his wounds. Then they take some money they find in the apartment—peso and dollar bills—and toss it on the body, then take photos and videos and start texting and tweeting.

By the time Orduña, furious, gets up there to stop it, the damage is done.

The images are out on the Net.

—

Keller walks away from Lomas de Selva to find “María Fernanda.”

Crazy Eddie waits in the Zócalo in the shadow of the
fresno
trees. He looks cool and fresh in a plum polo shirt, white jeans, and loafers.

Narco Polo, Keller thinks. He walks up to Eddie and says, “He’s dead.”

Eddie nods. “Diego wasn’t a bad guy, you know? The drugs fucked him up. And the Skinny Lady. I just couldn’t go down with the ship.”

“You have a chip with me,” Keller says. “Why don’t you cash it in now? I can bring you in safe.”

“ ‘Let that pickup man haul in’?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Old song about rodeo,” Eddie says. “No, I ain’t done with my ride yet.”

“You’re on the list, Eddie.”

Actually, he just moved up one slot.

“Right,” Eddie says. “Because that’s what you guys do now, isn’t it? You just kill people.”

“Doesn’t have to end that way,” Keller says.

“The Zetas,” Eddie says, “that’s who you
should
be going after. They’re pure evil, man.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

“Fuck you.” Eddie looks around the Zócalo for a second and then says, “You know? Someone’s always going to be selling this shit. It might as well be someone who doesn’t kill women and kids. If someone’s going to do it, you guys might as well let someone like
me
do it.”

Keller lets him walk away. Could have taken him right there, but that wasn’t part of their deal.

—

Adán looks at the photos of his old
primo
’s bullet-shredded corpse and tells Nacho, “You’d think I’d be happier.”

“We were all friends once.”

“I think about Chele and the kids.”

Nacho has no answer for that. He’s fond of Chele, they all are.

“Drive home the message,” Adán says.

They talk business for a few more minutes—Martín Tapia might keep up the fight, but will be at most an annoyance. Eddie Ruiz won’t pick up Diego’s fallen banner. He’ll start his own organization, and as long as he stays out of the war, Adán is willing to let him be. Payback for Sal can wait until the war is over.

When Nacho leaves, Adán goes into his bedroom. Eva is already asleep, or pretending to be.

It’s odd, Adán thinks, how life gets lonelier.

The next morning, two bound and beaten bodies of Tapia
sicarios
are found hanging by the necks from a bridge in Culiacán with a banner that reads
THIS TERRITORY ALREADY HAS AN OWNER—ADÁN BARRERA
.

—

Looking at the photos of Diego’s body, Heriberto Ochoa, the head of the Zetas, is furious.

And concerned.

The government has finally figured out that to fight special forces you need special forces. No one saw it coming, and no one—not Diego or Martín, not even Barrera, managed to find out about this new unit, much less infiltrate or suborn it.

And this FES is very, very good.

A direct challenge to the Zetas.

As a special-ops vet, Ochoa recognizes the Lomas de Selva raid for what it was—not a law enforcement operation, but an execution.

Well done.

But
this,
he thinks, looking at the photos that are all over the Internet, this was unnecessary. To strip Diego and mock him, boast about murdering him, and then post pictures of it on the Net?

The FES needs to be taught a lesson.

Taught not to behave this way.

Taught that we’re not going to be intimidated.

Taught that
we’re
the ones who intimidate.

He gives the orders.

—

Keller stands to the side as six FES, in their cammie fatigues, with blue vests marked
MARINA
in white, carry the flag-draped casket of Lieutenant Angulo Córdova from the funeral home in his small hometown of Ojinaga, on the south bank of the Río Bravo in Chihuahua.

Trumpets and drums from a military band play as the casket is carried through the crowd of family, friends, and townspeople, who quietly applaud as the casket passes by. Middle-class or poor, Keller notices, they’re dressed in their best clothes—the women in plain dresses, the men in jeans and white shirts. They’re subdued and respectful, some weeping quietly, and Keller is struck again by the difference between Americans and Mexicans. Americans take their strength in victories, Mexicans’ strength is in their ability to suffer loss.