Cartel (21 page)

Scott kept jerking the trigger of the AK-47 until his bul-lets tore through the man's stomach. Wet entrails, like greased rope, exploded from his abdomen. The man dropped his pistol and grabbed at his spewing insides for several sec-onds; then he collapsed.

Scott kept running, following Benny, unsure how many rounds he had left, hoping like hell for more than one. Then he saw the original shooter standing in front of him, trying to shove a fresh magazine into his rifle. Scott couldn't shoot because Benny was in his line of fire, charging straight at the man, Glock pistol extended in front of her. The gunman fumbled loading the new magazine and had to try again. The second time he got it seated properly and banged it into place with the heel of his hand, then ripped the bolt back to chamber a round.

Benny was ten yards from the man and still charging at him when she opened fire. POP, POP, POP, POP, POP. Three of her five shots hit him in the chest and neck. He crumpled to the floor. Benny stopped firing and stopped running. Her face was chalk white and she was gasping for breath. She bent over, braced her hands on her knees, and vomited on the concrete floor.

A gunshot echoed from their left. Scott turned and raised the AK-47. Benny sank to one knee but aimed her pis-tol in the direction of the shot. There was another gunshot, but no rounds were coming at them. They heard a banging sound, like someone kicking metal. Then another gunshot and another bang. Then a rectangle of light split open in the far wall, and they saw the silhouette of a man dart out of a door and heard running footsteps. Whoever he was he had just shot and kicked his way out of the building.

"Are you all right?" Scott asked.

Benny nodded and rose to her feet.

"Then you better explain what just happened."

Benny wiped a sleeve across her mouth and pointed to-ward the man she had just killed. He had fallen beside an electric hoist that straddled an eight-foot by eight-foot square hole cut through the concrete floor. The earth beneath the floor had been excavated and an aluminum extension ladder dropped down into the hole. A thick steel cable ran from a spool at the base of the hoist up through a pulley and down into the hole.

"What is this?" Scott said.

"A tunnel," Benny said. "Under the river."

Scott stepped to the edge of the hole and looked down. It was twenty feet deep, with wooden slats reinforcing the dirt sides. The steel cable was attached to a harness, and the harness was connected to a wooden pallet. The pallet sat on a flatbed cart that looked to be powered by an electric motor. And stacked on top of the pallet were at least 200 kilos of cocaine.

Scott turned to Benny. "How did you know about this?"

She pointed to the open door the last man had escaped through. "He's already made his phone call. We have to hur-ry."

Scott stared at the open door. She had a point. The only way out was to keep going. He looked back at Benny. "What's on the other side?"

"A building like this one."

"And more men?"

"Probably."

"Then we need weapons," he said.

They looted the dead. Scott picked up a pistol and Ben-ny took a rifle. They scavenged extra magazines. Then stood again at the edge of the hole.

"You ready?" Scott asked.

Benny nodded.

Scott slung the AK-47 across his back and tucked a Glock 9mm into his waistband. Then he climbed down the aluminum ladder.

Benny followed him.

The tunnel was eight feet tall and six feet wide. It ran north on a downward slope, and the floor was laid with a set of narrow-gauge steel rails. The flatbed cart on which the mound of cocaine sat had steel wheels that fit the rails.

There was no way to control the hoist from inside the hole, so Scott pulled the pin that connected the hoist cable to the pallet's harness. Then Benny clambered over the pile of cocaine to the front of the cart where a metal post stood, on top of which was mounted a small control console with a lever protruding from it. The lever looked like the throttle on a boat, and Scott thought that it must control the forward and backward movement of the cart.

Benny glanced back at him. "Are you ready?"

"Ready as I'll ever be," he said.

Benny shoved the lever down and the cart lurched for-ward, almost toppling Scott off the back. He only managed to stay onboard by grabbing onto the stack of cocaine to steady himself. The cart accelerated to what Scott guessed was about fifteen miles per hour, which on a city street might seem barely above a crawl, but starting at twenty feet underground in a makeshift tunnel and going even deeper to pass beneath a river, it seemed to Scott like they were flying.

Linked extension cords strung along the tunnel powered work lights spaced out every fifty yards, leaving enough of a gap between them so that when the cart was near the mid-point between two lights, it spent several seconds traversing through darkness.

"You should have told me what you were planning," Scott said, almost having to shout to be heard above the grinding of the steel wheels on the rails.

Benny turned to look at him. "If I had, what would you have said?"

"I would have said no. That we could find another way."

"There was no other way."

They rode in silence for a few minutes. Then Scott felt the angle of their descent getting shallower. Soon it flattened out and the air became cold and damp. As they passed one of the lights, he could see the mud and rock wall was wet with condensation. They were deep under the river, near the halfway point and close to the U.S. border. He looked at the stacked kilos of cocaine. He was still leaning on them for balance. "I'm a DEA agent," he said, "and I'm smuggling a couple hundred kilos of cocaine into the United States."

"That's not what we're doing."

"Maybe not," he said, "but that's exactly what it will look like to the Justice Department if we get caught coming out of this tunnel."

A light flashed past and Scott saw fear on Benny's face. "It's not the American government I'm worried about right now," she said. "It's the people at the other end of this tun-nel."

"I'll go up first," he said.

She nodded. Then the cart plunged into another stretch of blackness. From that darkness, Benny said, "I'm sorry I didn't tell you."

"About the tunnel?"

"And about me."

"What about you?"

"I know about this tunnel because it belongs to Los Zetas," she said. "And so do I." They were approaching an-other light and Scott saw Benny's face materialize out of the darkness. "That's why the guard let me in," she said.

"But you killed two of them."

"I have to get out," she said, her voice breaking. "I have to get my daughter out of Mexico."

Scott felt the rail cart slow as the track began to slope upward. "Why did you do it?"

"Take their money?"

He nodded. Then he realized they were between lights again and she couldn't see him. "Yes," he said. "Why did you take their money?"

"Weren't you listening?" Benny said. "They don't give you a choice. Plata o plomo, remember? Right now Los Zetas control the Nuevo Laredo plaza. I work in Nuevo La-redo. I live in Nuevo Laredo. And so does my daughter."

"Did Cassidy know?"

"No," she said. "And I never wanted him to find out." Scott heard a sob catch in her throat as she said, "It would have broken his heart."

"How were you planning to get out?"

"I don't know."

As the cart trudged up the steepening grade of the track, they passed another work light. Now it was getting warmer in the tunnel.

"So you knew all along it wasn't Los Zetas who killed your boyfriend," Scott said. "Even before you saw the pic-ture of Estrada."

She was crying and didn't answer. Just a slight nod.

"And you were protecting them," he said. "Protecting Los Zetas." It was another statement, not a question.

"I told you about the video," she said, her voice crack-ing under the tears. "I let you search my house."

"Why?" Scott asked.

"So you could catch the people who murdered Mi-chael." She looked like she wanted to say more, but there was a light up ahead, different than the work lights they had been passing. They were getting close to the end of the tun-nel.

"We need to get ready," Scott said.

Benny wiped her face and nodded.

"How many do you think are up there?"

She shook her head, then turned away from him and pulled back the control lever. The cart slowed. The light at the end of the tunnel was getting brighter. It reminded Scott of the stories people told about near-death experiences, trav-eling down a long dark tunnel toward a bright light. He wondered if the stories were true and if the ones who didn't come back saw the same thing. Did it look like what he was seeing right now?

Scott thought about the man who had escaped from the warehouse at the other end. He hadn't seen them go into the tunnel, at least Scott didn't think he had, and he probably thought they had come to rob the warehouse, not take the tunnel across to the United States; but if he had seen them, or if he had sneaked back in and discovered that the rail cart was gone, then his first call would have been to the ware-house across the river. Which meant that somebody-or several somebodies-could be waiting for them.

Scott scrambled around the stacked kilos of cocaine and crouched beside Benny. The cart was fifty yards from the end of the tunnel. The light was much brighter now, and he could also hear the drone of a motor, probably a generator. "Stop the cart," he said. "We'll walk the rest of the way."

Benny pulled the control lever back to neutral and the cart coasted to a stop twenty yards from the end of the tun-nel. Scott jumped down onto the hard-packed floor and raised the AK-47 to his shoulder. Benny hopped down be-side him and pulled her own AK-47 up into firing position.

Benny took a step forward. Scott reached out and stopped her. She turned toward him, but he didn't explain, just pressed a finger to his lips, warning her to be quiet, even though he doubted they could be heard above the rapid-fire piston sound of the generator above them. Then he reached up and shoved the cart's control lever all the way forward.

The cart clattered ahead, accelerating as it gobbled up the last twenty yards of track. Then it banged into the far side of the hole. The impact bucked the cart a couple of inches off the rails and toppled a few kilos from the stack before the cart settled back down onto the track.

Multiple machine guns opened fire from the top of the hole. Bullets ripped through the stacked kilos and bounced off the steel cart, some ricocheting down the tunnel. Cocaine dust exploded into the air. Scott shoved Benny to the ground and covered her.

Then the shooting stopped.

And in the silence that followed, Scott heard the famil-iar sound of empty magazines being ripped from rifles. One of the shooters dropped a magazine, and Scott heard the hol-low clank as it struck what sounded like the concrete lip of the hole. Then he saw the magazine fall past the mouth of the tunnel and bang onto the packed dirt and rock floor.

"Follow me," he said. Then he charged out of the tunnel and into the open hole, eyes and rifle muzzle tracking up-ward. An instant later, Benny was raising her rifle beside him. Four men stood around the rim of the hole peering down at them, one on each side of the square that had been cut through the concrete floor. All four men were jamming fresh magazines into M-16s.

Scott fired a short burst into one man, then shifted his aim to a second. Before he could fire again, Benny cut loose with a burst and the man Scott had been about to shoot tum-bled forward into the hole and landed with a bone-cracking thud on top of the steel cart. Scott shifted to the third man and fired again just as Benny fired at the fourth. Scott put two bullets into his target's chest. Then with the natural rise of the muzzle he put a third and fourth bullet into his face. The man crumpled backward and left one leg dangling over the edge of the hole.

For several seconds, Scott and Benny scanned for addi-tional threats. None presented themselves. Just as at the oth-er end of the tunnel, an aluminum extension ladder leaned against the side of the hole. "Cover me," Scott said, slinging the rifle across his back and drawing the Glock from his waistband. He started up the ladder. The climbing was awk-ward because he had to do it with one hand while he aimed the Glock with his other hand.

At the top of the hole he peaked over the edge. No one was there. He pivoted left and right. Still no one. Climbing out of the hole, he moved into a crouched shooting position and scanned 360 degrees. The warehouse was nearly identi-cal to the one across the river, filled with the same machinery and the same pallets stacked high with cocaine. The only difference Scott could see was that in this warehouse, there were also pallets loaded with shrink-wrapped blocks of cash.

But other than the four dead men, there was no one else in the warehouse. The generator droned on. Scott could see it now and realized it wasn't connected to anything. It was just running and making noise, the sound much louder up here as it reverberated off the metal walls. The cartel men had probably cranked it up to cover the sound of their gun-fire.

"Clear," Scott shouted and waved Benny up.

She scrambled up the ladder and stood beside him. "How did you know they were waiting for us?"

"I didn't," he said. "But I thought there was a good chance that the guy who got away from us on the other side of the river might warn the people on this side, and that as soon as we stuck our heads out of that tunnel it would be like shooting fish in a barrel."

"Shooting fish how?"

"In a barrel," he said. "Never mind. We'd be easy tar-gets."

"You saved my life."

"You saved mine last night," he said. "So we're even."

Scott and Benny crept through the warehouse, rifles ready, just in case there was someone else waiting for them. As they threaded their way through the rows of pallets stacked high with cocaine and cash, Scott couldn't help but be astounded. For a DEA agent it was a wet dream come true. The bust of a lifetime. Yet as the local DEA supervisor, he had had no idea there was an active cross-border tunnel in Laredo. He and his group hadn't picked up any chatter about it at all. Which made him wonder what else he didn't know.