Trial By Fire (12 page)
The answer was provided by a friend at the funeral of the captain.
Guajardo, a senior and well-respected member of the Army, was more valuable to Alaman if, through a simple demonstration of power, Guajardo could be won over to Alaman’s side. Failing that, Alaman’s action would serve to frighten Guajardo into inaction.
The shock of the incident and the reasoning behind it were slow to wear off. When it did, however, anger and hatred, not fear and complacency, replaced the shock. It was then, even before Guajardo knew of Molina’s plans to conduct a coup, that Guajardo dedicated himself to purging his homeland of those who made it a prostitute to be exploited by the highest bidder. While the reasons he had given the American TV correspondent for joining the Council of 13 were real, they paled in comparison to his goal of crushing Chinampas, and all who lived there. The coup, even the murder of his president, were merely chores that needed to be tended to before Guajardo could pursue his quest of striking Alaman down, avenging his pride and freeing Mexico of men like him in the process.
Conviction and good intentions, however, would not reduce Chinampas.
Only a well-planned and violent attack with overwhelming force could achieve that. Working on his own, Guajardo had learned everything he could about Alaman’s operations, Chinampas, and the curtains of security that shielded it. He soon knew more about the capability of the defenses of Chinampas than Alaman himself.
Through frequent visits, often at night and always alone, Guajardo had learned everything he could about the terrain surrounding Chinampas and its defenses. Slowly, with the drive of a zealot, the eye of a professional soldier, and the patience of a native-born son of Chihuahua, Guajardo collected information and devised plans of action. When, at Molina’s invitation, he joined the Council of 13, Guajardo found he had access to funds secretly diverted from the Mexican Army budget.
Using Alamin’s.own techniques, Guajardo used the funds to obtain information. This included the purchasing of the original plans for the construction of Chinampas from the American construction firm that had built the fortress. By pretending to be a Colombian businessman, he easily obtained schematics and technical data of the security system used at Chinampas from the Israeli firm that had installed the original. Through a friend, himself a mercenary, Guajardo not only managed to obtain detailed dossiers on every man who comprised Chinampas’s garrison, but, through the Belgian firm that handled Alaman’s weapons contracts, Guajardo purchased copies of every invoice for both weapons and ammunition used to arm that garrison.
Chinampas itself was built for no other purpose than to protect its occupants. Its twelve-foot-high walls, though not overly imposing, were high enough to prevent scaling without the aid of ladders or ropes. Even if these were used, smooth metal rollers that rotated out and away from the interior of the fortress, similar to those that had been used on the former Berlin wall, lined the top of the wall. Anyone trying to climb over the walls would start the rollers spinning, causing the climber to fall off the wall. The walls themselves were reinforced concrete measuring four feet thick at the base, tapering to two feet at the top. The angle of this tapering was all on the outer side of the wall. This reduced but did not eliminate the dead space, or blind spots, at the base of the wall. To cover any dead space that did exist, command-detonated anti-personnel mines were placed in recesses in the outer wall.
A tower standing twenty feet high was located at each corner, with two intermediate towers covering the long northern and southern walls and the north and south gates. These six towers, also built of reinforced concrete, provided the garrison with excellent observation and served as weapons platforms. From them, every inch of ground surrounding and within Chinampas could be covered by automatic-weapons fire. Provisions for the firing of antitank rockets and guided missiles, as well as surface-to-air missiles, stored at the base of each tower, were incorporated in the design.
Even the buildings themselves were built with an eye for defense.
Although the facades of the main house, barracks, stable, and garage were stucco, the core of the walls, like the outer walls and towers, was all reinforced concrete. Apertures, cleverly designed to appear as ornate masonry, provided the occupants with firing ports. Even if the outer walls and towers failed to keep attackers out, each building could defend itself.
As formidable as these integrated defenses were, there were weaknesses.
The six towers were built in such a manner that they could not cover the base of the outer wall. Once the command-detonated mines were expended, or neutralized, assault forces could freely move about in the lee of the outer walls. Each tower also depended on overlapping fire from another tower or building to cover its own base. While the loss of one or two towers or buildings would do nothing to break the integrity of Chinampas’s defense, the rapid loss of several would.
The surrounding terrain dominated Chinampas. Though the fortress was well sited to take advantage of the natural beauty of the area, the cool breeze that came down the valley from the north, and abundant water for the garden, the high ground to the northwest and east looked down into Chinampas. Finally, and most significant, while Chinampas could withstand and repel a raid, it could not withstand a siege against a large and determined force. Alaman had no forces, other than those within Chinampas and the benevolent intervention by friendly government officials, that could be rushed in to lift a siege.
Satisfied that he had all the information that could be safely obtained, Guajardo had begun the methodical process of exploring all options of attack available to him. Once all realistic options had been developed, Guajardo would wargame them, looking for the strength and weakness of each, comparing the advantages and disadvantages of each option before making a decision. This process, which took place in almost total secrecy, spanned several months and, like all obsessions, was never far from Guajardo’s mind.
Some options had fallen out almost immediately. A ground attack was impractical. Ideally, such an attack would be conducted at night with no warning. But the Mexican Army lacked night-vision devices and the training that would make such an operation easy and ensure success. The garrison of Chinampas, on the other hand, was lavishly equipped to deal with such a threat. Numerous limited-visibility vision devices, both manned and automated, backed up by several belts of unattended ground sensors and remote monitoring stations, made an undetected approach by more than a handful of men highly unlikely. Besides, all units trained to conduct such commando operations were heavily infiltrated by informers either directly or through those who controlled their deployment and operations.
Unable to use stealth, Guajardo next considered the other extreme: direct and overwhelming conventional attack by regular Army units. As a professional soldier, he could easily organize and conduct such an operation. Though its weapons were not the most sophisticated, the Mexican Army possessed sufficient firepower to wipe Chinampas, and all within its walls, off the face of the earth.
An operation of that nature, however, could not escape detection. As with Mexico’s special operations forces, every unit within his military zone, down to company level, had informers either in Alaman’s pay or in the pay of another drug lord. Guajardo knew that any movement of major forces would be known in Chinampas even before the troops left their barracks. And even if, by some chance, such advance warning from within the ranks could be prevented, it would be impossible to hide the movement of troops through San Antonia, then north over the only road leading to Chinampas. Either way, while the troops and weapons could be brought to bear, and Chinampas destroyed, Alaman would be long gone before the Mexican Army could fire its first round.
Discarding direct ground attack, Guajardo explored the possibility of reducing Chinampas with air attacks. Together with an Air Force colonel who was a member of the Council of 13, Guajardo worked out the mathematics of such an attack. After looking at every possible combination of aircraft and ordnance available to the Mexican Air Force, both officers agreed that such an attack, though possible, could not guarantee success.
Though Guajardo desired to use a simple, direct, and quick solution, all the options that fit that description failed the most critical test: they did not offer a better than even chance of catching, or killing, Alaman and his key personnel. In a fit of frustration, anger, and irrational rage, Guajardo threw all the data, maps, draft plans, and working papers into his safe, changed the combination, locked it, promptly forgot the combination, and walked away from it. There the matter rested for several months.
It was during a conference at Fort Benning, Georgia, that a viable solution to the Chinampas problem began to form in Guajardo’s mind. In one of the sessions dealing with special operations and raids, the briefer presented a short lecture on the American raid on Son Tay. Executed on 21 November 1970, that raid had been meant to liberate sixty-five American POWs held there. Although the operation was expertly executed, it failed because the POWs that had been held there had been moved days before the raid. As Guajardo listened to the lecture and studied the colorful diagrams, he could not help but compare many of the problems that faced the Son Tay planners with those that faced him at Chinampas. Even before the lecture was over, he realized that he had been given the key to the solution. Though a detailed plan had to be developed, from that moment on, Guajardo knew that Chinampas, and all who worked within its walls, would fall to him. All that was needed now was someone to open the safe he had locked.
Realizing that it is a mistake to take the solution to one military problem and apply it blindly to another, Guajardo carefully created his own plan, selectively using tactics and techniques used at Son Tay. An example was the manner in which the Son Tay raiders used helicopters to neutralize the guard towers in 1970. There, a CH-53 with miniguns on both sides flew between two guard towers, hovered at the same level as the towers, and fired the miniguns directly into them. The wooden guard towers at Son Tay, pulverized by miniguns firing 6,000 7.62mm rounds per minute, were, in effect, sawed off their supports. This allowed the initial assault group to come in and land unhindered in an open space in the compound.
Though Guajardo did not have a helicopter as big as the CH-53, or miniguns for that matter, he could improvise. For aircraft, four Bell 206
helicopters, each with a crew of two and capable of carrying five passengers, would be used. Since the Mexican Army had few helicopters, only the towers in the west and the center would be attacked. These four helicopters and their passengers, code named Group Z because it was staging and launching from Zacatecas, would hit Chinampas first. Coming in from the west, each helicopter would fly directly to its designated target, one of the four towers. Flying nap-of-the-earth, Group Z would use the hills west of Chinampas to mask their approach. Once clear of the hills, the pilots would only have a few seconds to orient themselves and line up on the tower they were to hit, all the while making a final high-speed approach.
The challenge that faced each pilot in Group Z was covering the last few meters of open ground as quickly as possible, clearing the outer wall, then rapidly bringing their helicopter to a hover a few meters away from the tower. With a main blade diameter of 11.3 meters, the closest the Bell 206s could come to the tower, or any other obstacle for that matter, was six to eight meters. That, however, was close enough.
Once the pilot or the co-pilot had brought the helicopter to a hover, the other crewmen, armed with automatic rifles, would fire out of their open windows into the guard tower. Guajardo knew this fire would be wildly inaccurate, especially since the crews would not be permitted to practice before the operation in order to preserve secrecy. But it didn’t need to be accurate. Guajardo was counting on the surprise assault from the air, coupled with the suppressive fire from the helicopter crew, to allow the passengers enough time to rappel out of the helicopter onto the ground at the base of the tower.
The passengers carried by the Bell 206s were four teams of combat engineers armed with automatic rifles and a variety of explosives. Each team, consisting of an officer, a sergeant, and three sappers, had been hand-picked by a colonel of the engineers who was a member of the Council of 13. During the assault on Chinampas, while the helicopter hovered and the crew fired on the occupants of the tower, the engineers would exit the helicopter using the speed-rappel technique pioneered by the U.S. Army’s special operations helicopter group, Task Force 160.
The nylon rope used was two inches thick and stiff. The engineers, wearing leather gloves, would slide down it like firemen dropping down a fire pole. Since the drop would only be twenty feet, even if someone let go, the chances of severe injury would be minimal. Once on the ground at the base of the towers, the engineers, using explosives, would force their way into the tower and clear it as rapidly as possible using gunfire and explosives.
Unlike the pilots, the engineers were allowed to practice exiting the helicopter and the techniques to be used in clearing the towers. To ensure security, each team in Group Z, along with the helicopter and crew that would transport it, was trained in isolation in a different part of Mexico.
None were told what their actual target was. Instead, the men, even the officers in charge, were told that they were being trained to deal with prison riots. To make this’cover story more convincing, the dummy towers and compounds they drilled on were patterned after actual prisons within the state where they were located. Even with this cover story, all rehearsals were classified top secret. Only on June 29, the day before the actual raid, would all members of Group Z be brought together at an abandoned airfield outside of Zacatecas. There, Guajardo himself would issue the actual order for their real target.