Night of the Assassin

  Chapter 5

  Ten & a half years ago, Veracruz, Mexico

  The battered, rusting hull of the freighter ground against the old tires fastened to the concrete dock at one of the more remote cargo offloading piers on Veracruz harbor. Flying a Panamanian flag, Caruso was at least forty years old, and had made the long trip from South America countless times. The dark green paint on her dented steel sides bubbled at the rivets from underlying rust. She looked to be on her last legs, as did many of the freighters that made their way into the busy deep water port. The old ship was manifested as delivering coffee and bananas from Colombia, which was largely true, although the money-making haul was the ten tons of cocaine stashed in the specially constructed compartments in her lower hold, which to cursory inspection appeared to be the floor of the cargo area inside the hull. Even if a nosy customs inspector had cared to pry open one of the scarred hatches, all he would have found was what appeared to be the slimy metal lining of the waterlogged bilge. It was an ingenious design; the modifications had taken place at a discreet shipyard in Colon, Panama while other refits were being attended to.

  A veteran of the ongoing, frequent trade between South America and Mexico, Caruso was just one of thousands of vessels that offloaded cargo each year in Veracruz, the principal importation hub for Eastern Mexico. Under normal circumstances she would have rendezvoused with a commercial fishing boat out in the Gulf of Mexico to transfer her illicit wares, well away from prying eyes, but the shrimper that had been the scheduled drop-off had experienced engine problems eighty miles en-route, so the hook-up had been cancelled. That had left the captain with two choices – toss ten tons of cocaine overboard and lose the shipment and his tidy slice of the profits, or hope that the receiving group could arrange for an alternative offloading plan while the ship was laid over in Veracruz for two days. Worst case, she could steam out, supposedly empty, on her way back to Colombia for more fruit and java, and meet with another boat; but every minute Caruso sat in the harbor she was in jeopardy.

  Particularly tonight, when La Familia, a rival splinter faction of the Gulf cartel, had decided to use the Mexican marines as a vehicle to cause their competitors grief, by tipping law enforcement off to the shipment. It was not unusual for the cartels to exchange information with the military or the police to create problems for their enemies – most of the drug seizures that took place did so because of the constant infighting and jockeying for advantage that was a routine aspect of the trade. It was far more ergonomic to use the military’s muscle instead of your own, and if the rivals got into a firefight in the process, so much the better.

  The marines had long been considered the only incorruptible branch of the military. The army was notoriously riddled with rot but the marines, for whatever reason, couldn’t be bought off, and so were the most feared of the law enforcement branches. In Mexico, the army and navy worked alongside the police and Federales for internal security, which included battling the drug cartels, especially since the recent reorganization into more specialized groups. It hadn’t been broadly publicized, but since 2000, when Vincente Fox became president of Mexico, the country had been embroiled in a de facto civil war, with the cartels having far greater resources than the army and navy. The total budget for the army was less than a percent of GDP, which put it at considerably under a billion dollars. Contrast that to the over fifty billion dollars per year in wholesale value of cocaine that moved through the cartels. At an eighty to ninety percent margin, that left the narcotraficantes with vastly greater resources than the army.

  Since the Mexicans had taken over cocaine trafficking for the Colombians, and begun manufacturing methamphetamines in earnest, the money had gotten crazy. Mexico found itself in much the same situation Colombia had faced in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was routine for judges, police chiefs and army generals to be executed en masse by the Colombian cartels, or rather their armed enforcers; the myriad purportedly revolutionary groups that controlled half the country and increasingly acted as private armies for the drug lords.

  The lion’s share of the profits had shifted from Colombia to Mexico as Colombia contented itself with the far lower-risk and less violent business of production, leaving the transport and distribution to their better-positioned Mexican associates. The profits in Colombia were still significant, with one to two hundred percent markup to the Mexicans, but the margin in trafficking internationally was five to tenfold. A kilo of cocaine that cost the Mexicans twenty-five hundred to three-thousand dollars in Colombia would fetch twenty-five thousand a kilo wholesale across the U.S. border, and that was usually significantly cut with buffering agents in order to dilute the nearly pure cocaine, thereby increasing the apparent quantity once repackaged for the States; so in actuality it was more like an effective thirty to thirty-five thousand sale price for that original kilo by the end of the day.

  The incredible margins were a direct function of the illegality of the substances in the target market – the United States. As with alcohol margins during the ill-fated experiment of Prohibition in the 1930s, criminalization of drugs turned what would have been a five percent profit business into a thousand or more percent trade, which created windfall profits for everyone in the supply chain and also created a situation where every aspect was worth killing for. There were no open gun battles over cigarette or alcohol profits because once a substance was legal, the efficiencies of the distribution chains kicked in and it became a boring commercial enterprise. But keeping the substances illegal, especially since they were in huge demand, caused profits to go through the roof.

  And so it was that a group of provincial, unsophisticated Mexican farmers became the most powerful narcotics trafficking empires in the world, commanding the sorts of budgets that were the envy of many medium-sized countries. Mexico bore the brunt of the violence that ensued from the power struggles, principally because it was the geographic gateway to the largest market for drugs in the world – the United States.

  The harbor was quiet at three a.m., and the wharf area where Caruso was tethered was deserted, save for two men smoking cigarettes on the concrete pier, and an uninterested security guard at the massive dock’s entry point, where it connected to land. The marines had taken position in the surrounding buildings, having been told that there was a complement of at least a dozen heavily armed men on board, guarding against any incursions to steal their precious cargo.

  The leader of the commando team made a series of hand signals, and the men fanned out, while Raul set up his rifle tripod and adjusted his scope. Range was six hundred meters at the closest point, which would be a cakewalk for him were it not for the twenty knot gusting breeze he’d need to factor in. This was his first active operation since graduating from the special forces course so he felt a tingle of anticipation before finally testing his skills in a real-world environment. Shooting at paper targets or silhouettes on a range was one thing, but being in the thick of it with enemies who were shooting back was quite another.

  This operation would be a tricky one, in that the commander didn’t want to get into a gun battle if he didn’t have to. His first plan was to use subterfuge and approach the vessel with several plain-clothed men under his command, subdue the two lookouts with stun guns, and then move the bulk of the commandos swiftly down the dock to the gangplank, boarding the old scow before anyone knew what had happened. Raul had questioned the logic involved but didn’t say anything. If it had been his operation he would have approached with a half dozen well-armed divers from the waterside, and used lines to climb up the side of the ship, or alternatively, taken out the two smoking sentries from the harbor end of the dock, firing from the waterline and killing them instantly before moving his squad onto the pier from the water, where nobody would be expecting any attack.

  If he was one of the smugglers on the ship, and the marines’ intelligence on the number of armed men was correct, he would have had at least two lookouts, one with a night-vision scope, surveying the dock for the slig
htest hint of trouble. If there was going to be a gun battle, you’d want to pick the distance at which you engaged wisely, in order to be able to hold off any assailants while you made an escape. He’d have had a high-speed tender secured to the ship’s stern as a get-away contingency, and would also have had a man watching the water approach, just in case. Because you never, ever really knew – you had to expect the unexpected.

  But it wasn’t his place to second-guess his superiors and he was interested to see how the exercise would play out. He gave the marines a less than twenty percent chance of taking the ship without a battle, which meant that he’d see some real action. Finally. Albeit from a distance but, in truth, that was preferred. He’d long ago concluded that it was far safer to be sniping from afar than to be a hero rushing into a hail of slugs. Leave that to his peers. He’d pick off his targets with surgical precision before they knew what hit them.

  Two large Norwegian wharf rats scurried down the dock, away from the ship and the two smoking men. These were big rodents; their bodies were a good eighteen inches long, with tails to match – scavengers the size of small dogs. The pier area was infested with them and the city had long ago given up on trying to bring the population under control. Poison had been only moderately effective, and one genius had the idea of releasing a horde of hungry felines – which had resulted in a feral cat infestation in addition to the rats, which were large enough to go ten rounds with a cat without breaking a sweat. Slicks of oil floated on the surface of the water from leaking bilges; the port had a pervasive odor of decay and long-dead fish, and the particular petroleum stink common to industrial waterfronts the world over.

  Raul studied the battered ship’s bridge for signs of life, scanning slowly over the superstructure and taking his time at each of the helm’s reinforced windows. Those would pose a problem, as they’d be at least inch-thick glass, designed to withstand the pressure of the massive waves that could surge over the four hundred feet of bow and ship and slam into the tower. He knew from his reading that oceangoing vessels were designed to withstand seas up to sixty feet in height, the theory being that waves didn’t get any larger than that. Of course, the hundred foot rogue waves that had been recorded with some regularity were ignored by the industry because if you built ships that could survive those, they would be too expensive. So everyone pretended that sixty was the maximum, and when hundreds of boats were lost in any given period, it was shoulder shrugs and profit statements that everyone focused on.

  His night-vision scope illuminated the bridge in an eerie green. There were two armed sentries visible on the superstructure, one outside on the bridge walkway, and the other inside. He could just make out the gleam of binoculars from the interior, so in Raul’s opinion the chances of the commander’s scheme working had diminished to less than zero. He was glad it wasn’t his ass on the line for this one.

  Perhaps, instead of the sea approach, Raul might have had a flight of four to six men parachute in, touching down on the rear of the ship, taking out the sentries as they descended. Virtually anything other than a direct assault down the dock. No wonder the military casualties in the drug wars were so high. With operational plans that amounted to brandishing a saber and screaming, ‘Charge!’ there could be little expectation of anything but a blood bath. He didn’t envy his fellow commandos their duty tonight. There was no way this would go well.

  He adjusted his scope to compensate for the stiffening wind, and calculate the distance with his laser rangefinder. Six-hundred seventy-four meters. Like shooting fish in a barrel, he thought, allowing himself the private luxury of a small smile. His face, like those of his fellow commandos, was blacked out with camouflage paint so as to avoid giving off any shine, lending his profile an evil glint akin to that of an escaped demon. The smile was anything but reassuring.

  The commander gave the signal and the two undercover men exited the building, one holding a bottle of mescal in his hand and talking loudly in an inebriated slur. Given that there was no way they wouldn’t be spotted, the bright idea was that they were to be friendly, drunken dock workers, and once the two smoking guards were dispatched, they would pretend to engage in a scuffle and some ‘security guards’ would come running to break up the fight. When there were six men in total by the gangplank they’d breach the ship, and more would pour out of the building and reinforce them from there. In addition to the stun guns, the men on the dock would be equipped with grenades and machine pistols, as would the bogus security guards, so the presumption was that they could take the ship by surprise and keep the foe engaged until the main body of commandos made it down the dock. They had two vehicles waiting to race out, filled with armed men who could be at the gangplank in fifteen seconds from the time the signal was given. It seemed like suicide to Raul, but it wasn’t his job to craft a better plan. He was only there to shoot, which he was now perfectly positioned to do.

  This may have been his first assault but he had enough common sense to understand that even when the commandos prevailed, and they would prevail eventually due to vastly larger numbers, the cost in human life would be high on both sides, whereas a surgical strike could have accomplished much the same result with minimal special forces casualties. It was inefficient, which offended his sense of symmetry more than anything.

  He watched as the two men staggered their way down the pier and then returned his full attention to the bridge. The pair of undercover operatives, by the time they made it to the two sentries, would be out of sight of the bridge due to the angle of the hull. Unless of course, the two guards moved, in which case the plan would be a disaster, or alternatively, would need to be aborted. Walking headfirst into a killing zone was generally bad strategy anywhere in the world, not just in Mexico, and he couldn’t see the commander barreling forward if the plan was doomed to failure. At least he hoped not.

  The sentry on the exterior of the bridge was carrying a machine pistol of some sort – it looked like an Uzi to Raul. That meant limited useful range and accuracy. The Uzi was an antiquated design with an effective range of two hundred meters, which was fine for typical close-quarter urban combat, but lousy for applications requiring accuracy at a distance. A better and more popular choice as far as Raul was concerned was the Kalashnikov AKM, the modernized version of the venerated AK-47, which had double the effective range in single fire mode, or at least three hundred meters when fired full-auto; or probably the best weapon, and his personal favorite for dependability and accuracy in a mid-range assault rifle, the American-built M4. Its five-hundred-meter effective range and extremely high muzzle velocity made it the ideal choice for assault applications, which more than compensated for its relatively small slug size. He’d fired all three with Emilio for years and could disassemble and reassemble any of them in a matter of seconds, so he knew whereof he spoke.

  Their luck wasn’t going well so far. The two smoking sentries on the dock moved toward the men, so any engagement would take place in plain sight of the bridge. That would mean a full-blown firefight with no cover, likely with a very high toll on the special forces’ side. He exhaled, stilling his mind in preparation for the imminent attack, and zeroed the Barrett M82 sniper rifle in on the bridge sentry’s upper torso. The .50 caliber M1022 slug would tear a hole through him the size of a baseball at that range so there was no question in his mind that it would only take a single trigger pull to dispatch him. It would be a few more seconds before the shit hit the fan so he slid two more full magazines next to the rifle, where he could quickly change them out once he was empty. The man in the bridge was still his biggest concern. He made a mental note to always carry one magazine of full-jacketed armor-piercing rounds in case he needed to slice through an inch of metal or reinforced glass.

  It was show time. He fixed the bridge target in the crosshairs and waited for instruction. The commander was watching the approach and not liking what he saw. He, like Raul, understood that if the bridge sentries weren’t caught unawares, the assault would become a slaught
erhouse, with his men taking heavy casualties. After struggling with an internal debate, the commander murmured into the com system. One of the two men on the dock had an earpiece, and upon hearing the commander’s instructions, grabbed his friend and turned him around, as if only now noticing the two smoking men cautiously approaching them. The mission had been aborted.

  “Shit,” the commander hissed, and began pacing, mulling over his choices. Now they’d probably have to just pull up in armored vehicles and do this the hard way, shooting it out with no element of surprise.

  Raul bit his tongue, but then decided to advance his idea, purely in the interests of keeping his role in the assault interesting and getting some more practical experience. Taking out a single sentry from almost a thousand meters wasn’t really much of a challenge. It was a single shot. Maybe two, if they would send someone to find some armor-piercing rounds.

  “Sir. Might I have a word?” Raul asked.

  The commander regarded him with surprise. Raul was one of his best men, but he never spoke. He was a loner, with no close relationships within the corps.

  “This isn’t a great moment.”

  “Yes, sir. I know, sir. I just had an observation that came to me as I was watching the target that may be of some use to you, sir,” Raul explained, sucking up his pride and taking the expected supplicant tone.

  “Very well. Make it quick,” the commander barked. “We need to coordinate a frontal assault before this goes on much longer.”

  “Permission to approach, sir?”

  “Get on with it.”

  Raul moved to the commander’s side, and spoke in a low, calm tone, explaining his ideas and arguing for an amphibian assault. The commander listened carefully, and then cut him off after forty-five seconds.

  “That would require far more stealth and luck than we’ve had tonight. It’s a good strategy, and I appreciate your sharing it with me, but I don’t think we can afford to waste two more hours preparing it. No, I think we’ll do a good old-fashioned frontal assault and take our punches. In the end, we’d have to do one anyway if your plan failed, so my call is to just cut to the chase,” the commander declared, summarily dismissing the idea.

  Raul considered arguing the point and then decided that he didn’t care that much. He’d still get to shoot a couple of bad guys, at least, and what did he care in the end if half the squad got mowed down?

  “Yes, sir. Thank you for hearing me out, sir. If we’re going to do a frontal, could I please get a magazine of armor-piercing rounds? They’ll come in handy to take out the gunman inside the bridge,” Raul requested.

  The commander nodded and called on the com to one of the team members waiting in the next building.

  “Twenty minutes. You’ll have ’em. We’ll move in thirty.”

  The commander spun around and began issuing orders in preparation for a brute-force assault. They’d need a couple of armored personnel carriers – enough to carry forty men. He ordered up two Unimog armored trucks and two BTR-70 armored carriers: eight-wheeled vehicles that could accommodate seven commandos each, along with a three man crew to operate the turret-mounted 14.5 mm heavy machine gun and smaller 7.62 mm machine gun. The fallback plan was much more straightforward. Drive up to the ship. Deploy men if no firing takes place and seize the ship. If the sentries or crew decided to shoot it out, blast away at everything in sight and shoot their way through the ship until the crew either surrendered, or was dead. It was inelegant and would result in a lot of bullets flying but it had the benefit of simplicity.

  Twenty-five minutes later, a young commando approached Raul and handed him a magazine with five rounds of armor-piercing .50 caliber bullets, apologizing that they couldn’t find any more at such short notice. Raul thanked him, and emptied half of one of the spare magazines, counting out five shells and replacing them with the five armor-piercing rounds. He ejected the current bullet in the rifle and chambered one of the new armor-piercing cartridges, then returned to watching the sentries through his night-vision scope.

  The commander checked his watch, and at precisely three-forty a.m. ordered the assault, after which everything happened quickly. The two gray BTR-70s, which resembled small tanks more than anything else, rumbled around the corner and out onto the pier, followed by the two hulking trucks. The sentries on the dock froze, staring in numb disbelief at the apparition, and then hurriedly scuttled up the gangplank and disappeared up into the ship. One man’s head reappeared for a few seconds and then the gangplank collapsed onto the concrete pier below. The crash was almost immediately followed by the steel watertight door slamming shut with a boom. As it was barred from within, the grinding of the cogs was audible halfway down the dock, even over the baritone growl of the vehicles.

  It was going to be considerably harder to take the freighter now because the traffickers were forewarned. The easy access to the ship from the gangplank was gone and the commandos on the dock would be in a siege situation against a ship whose hull rose easily four stories above the pier, with no obvious entry point available. The commander watched in a kind of frozen frustration, and then the shooting started; gunmen emerged from the interior of the ship, moved to the edge of the hull and began firing from behind the protection of the heavy steel from which the hardy old vessel was built.

  Raul took in the situation for a few moments, waiting for the right instant, and squeezed the trigger. The gun’s boom was deafening. Ears ringing, he watched with satisfaction as both the sentry standing outside the bridge and the man inside collapsed. He’d timed it so that he fired when the outside man was directly in front of the man inside the bridge, effectively killing two birds with one armor-piercing stone. No reason to waste his precious ammo, after all.

  He swiveled his attention to the hull, where he could just make out heads popping up here and there, like a nocturnal version of whack-a-mole at a fairground stall. A man wearing a baseball cap leaned over the railing and fired his weapon at the vehicles below. Raul caressed the trigger again and watched as the shooter’s head vaporized. Moving down the line, he waited for an opening and took out another. He was now four down with three shells, which he felt was a fair contribution to the ensuing train wreck of an operation. Raul peered through the scope, trying to find any other obvious targets, but the gunmen along the side of the ship had figured out there was a sniper at work, and had retreated into the superstructure, barring the watertight deck entry door in the process.

  The gun turrets on the BTR-70s opened up with their armor-piercing rounds, but quickly discovered that their shells, which could easily penetrate up to a one and a half inch steel plate, were just denting the massive hull, which had been fashioned from considerably thicker material. That left the commandos and the traffickers in a classic Mexican standoff. Shooting from the ship had stopped other than from a lone gunman who hadn’t made it inside in time, but was behind the bulk of the bridge’s tower and so out of Raul’s line of sight. Firing from the two BTR-70s had also stopped, though the entire waterfront area still resonated with receding echoes of gunfire.

  The commander barked orders into the radio and the men emptied from the personnel carriers and took up position to mount an assault. The men below flung three grappling hooks affixed to black nylon rope over the hull’s edge. The four-pronged hooks all found a purchase. The problem was that any men on the ropes who got caught in the fire from the remaining gunman were dead meat, so nobody wanted to be the first to climb four stories up onto the deck. Raul decided to shift his position and moved down the row of warehouse windows until he was more symmetrically placed and could see down the entire length of the ship.

  He set his rifle tripod down, careful not to jar the weapon, and resumed peering through the scope. There, at the farthest end of the ship, right near the stern, was the gunman, taking cover below the three-foot-high lip of the boat’s deck edge. Raul calculated the distance and added an additional forty yards and adjusted accordingly, then waited for the man’s head to pop back up. It wa
s just a matter of time, he figured – correctly, as it turned out – and his vigilance was rewarded by the man’s arms and head coming into view as he prepared to empty his weapon at the commandos below. Raul took his shot, and the man’s head dissolved in a bloody spray of fragments.

  The deck was now empty, although it would still be ugly fighting through the ship. Not his problem.

  The commander gave the squad the all-clear signal, and within seconds commandos were moving swiftly up the ropes to the ship above. Raul had shifted his attention to the bridge windows again, figuring it would just be a matter of time until some bright lad figured out that he could shoot from the portholes that stretched another four stories above the ship’s deck, picking off soldiers as they climbed over the rail. Sure enough, one of the glass hatches on the side opened, and a gun barrel poked out. He waited patiently because the angle of the shooter’s barrel wouldn’t allow him to hit the deck, and sure enough, more of the weapon slowly emerged from the window until Raul also saw the arm that was holding it. The first commandos were only a few feet from the edge so he only had a second before they’d be exposed to the gunman. Raul fired, and the assault rifle tumbled harmlessly to the deck below, taking three quarters of the man’s still-attached arm with it.

  That would give the rest inside something to think about.

  From there on out it was a textbook incursion. They had to use explosives to blow the doors open, and for fifteen minutes, bursts of gunfire echoed throughout the boat’s hull. Eventually the commander got an all clear call from the men inside, and a status report. They’d taken out six hostiles, no survivors, and lost nine men in the process. Raul listened to the recitation impassively, his face betraying nothing. The commander glanced at him as he heard the casualty assessment, but Raul was busy packing up his gear, his work for the night finished. The commander approached him and stopped a few feet away, studying the silent sniper as he finished stowing his weapon into a long padded case.

  “Great shooting. You saved a lot of lives tonight,” the commander said.

  Raul bit his tongue, didn’t blurt out his natural reaction, which was that if he’d been allowed to lead an amphibian team they would have likely lost only a few men, if any, thanks to the element of surprise, and that the commander had killed those commandos with his lack of flair and imagination just as surely as if he’d pulled the trigger himself. Instead, he nodded and stood, shouldering the rifle case and hoisting his bag.

  “Thank you, sir. I had some lucky shots tonight. We were all fortunate.”

  There being nothing more to say, he saluted with his free hand before descending the stairs to join the remainder of his team. It would be a long stretch of duty as the bodies were recovered and the drugs inventoried and he wanted to get out of the commander’s sight before his contempt for the man leaked through his veneer. It wasn’t worth it. Most of the world was composed of idiots – the commander was simply one dolt of many, and nothing Raul said or did would change things.

  It was that night, on his first live operation, that he realized he’d probably already learned everything he was going to from the military. The time had already come, after little over a year in the service, to reconsider his options.