Conquistadors Read online

  Tavo and his men planned to hit the guards simultaneously in two teams, since Beto’s overwatch couldn’t cover the man on the far side of the house. Tavo went solo and was to give the “go” signal over the radio before taking down the guards.

  A split second before he keyed the mic, a woman staggered out of the servant’s quarters, slamming the door. Both police guards jumped to attention, probably afraid of being caught slack-jawed in their chairs. The woman stumbled across the courtyard, half asleep, and headed toward a building that must have contained the toilet. The fact that the servant's quarters had no toilet had been missed by Tavo during his recon of the target.

  He called in the new threat over the radio.

  “One straggler in the courtyard. Three threats total. Execute on my shot.”

  His AR15 spat two suppressed rounds hitting the young sentry in the head both times. He shot the sleep-drugged woman three times in the chest. The woman’s thick legs folded to the side and she collapsed in the courtyard. Her ample bust heaved as she struggled for life even as her blood sieved into the crabgrass. The woman keened a loud, dying breath and he lined up for another shot—this one to the head. But, the sentry on Tavo’s side—gushing blood from a double head wound—wobbled to his knees and fired a thundering burst of 7.62 from his FN.

  Tavo dove back around the edge of the house. Within ten seconds, Alejandro and Saúl circled behind the wounded man and ripped him full of holes. But the cat had been let out of the bag. The big FN rifle had undoubtedly woken up half the town.

  Three minutes later, Beto radioed from the water tower, “Two trucks approaching from the police substation. Permission to engage.”

  The combat rifle training Tavo had received in American shooting schools hadn’t offered him much in the way of force-on-force scenarios like this one. He’d read a couple books on mission planning, but fighting in a three-dimensional threat matrix was different than reading about it.

  He pictured the federal police commandant still alive in the hacienda, probably arming himself. He factored in additional guards inside. He considered the police truck. He saw each of his men on the tactical map, spread out in the courtyard and hovering over the battle space from the water tower. With the chess board arranged in his mind, Tavo acted.

  “Negative, Raven. Hold for now.” Once Beto opened up with the SAW, the forces on the ground would focus on his muzzle flash. It’d be a bitch for Beto to climb down out of the tower. Tavo decided to save his wild card for later.

  “Jaguar One is breaching the side door,” he informed his team. “Jaguar Two and Three, engage hostiles at the front gate.”

  Given the compressed timeline now forced on them by the police response, he would have to kill the wife and teenage daughter. Tavo preferred to keep that brand of killing off his mens’ conscience whenever possible, so he went in alone. He suffered no qualms about killing women and children. A murder was a murder, and he hadn’t seen anything to convince him that women and children cost more penance than a man.

  He changed his mag, kicked in the side door and cleared the hacienda in a relentless, fluid movement. From room to room, Tavo repeated the same cadence taught in American close quarters battle schools: throw open the door, step to the position of dominance, sweep from the area of greatest threat to the center of the room, check behind any obstacles, kill anything that moves, withdraw to the hall, check his six, then move to the next room. It was far from a perfect system—a person hiding in a closet could blast even a proficient shooter. But extreme violence of action gave the assaulter a distinct advantage.

  Tavo burst into the master bedroom and found the police commander partially hidden behind his wife, pointing a revolver at the door. Tavo stepped inside so quickly that the man shot the doorframe. Before the commandant could work the sluggish, double trigger again, Tavo placed two shots in his chest and two into his wife’s chest. Both slumped to the ground. Tavo leaned forward and placed one more round into the commandant’s forehead.

  Ever the meticulous professional, he finished clearing the room—behind the bed, the closet, the armoire—then stepped back into the hall. He cleared all the rooms in the hacienda, but the daughter never appeared. Either he’d missed her or she wasn’t home.

  He shrugged. “Jaguar One. House clear. Exfil, exfil, exfil.”

  “Good copy,” all three men replied. Gunfire boomed from the front gate as the police response arrived.

  Tavo updated his mental chessboard. The police at the front of the hacienda would be grossly outgunned and out-skilled and leaving a yard full of dead policemen would have long-term benefits for him. Journalists would attribute the assault to a much larger force than just four men.

  “Belay last,” he radioed. “Jaguar Two, maneuver to the west and let the cops into the courtyard. Raven: hit them with the SAW once inside the wall.”

  For the next two minutes, the bloodletting raged. Alejandro swooped over the front wall of the compound and chewed up several of the policemen before they knew they’d been flanked. The surviving police fled into the walled courtyard where Beto and Saúl ate them like a steak dinner.

  When the mad minute subsided, Tavo radioed, “Jaguar One: exfil, exfil, exfil. Route Alpha.”

  They climbed out of the compound the way they’d come—over the back wall—and jogged a kilometer through the fields to where Tavo had stashed four powerful BMW motorcycles. Their escape would’ve been less conspicuous on light bikes, but Tavo’s primary purpose for the mission was better served with burly, 1,200cc road monsters. Putting that sort of shine on an op would be money well spent.

  As dawn broke, the four warriors roared through the town of Ixtlán del Rio, grinning like fools, dodging in and out of early morning truck traffic. They hurtled back to Tepic to offload their gear at a safe house and do some serious drinking and storytelling.

  Three of the four men lived for moments like this—time shared in company of warfighters, the blood of their victory still on their hands. Only one of the four understood the real purpose. Only Tavo could stand above it all—the grand chessboard of life—and enjoy the brotherhood for what it truly was: four men harnessed to one man’s ultimate goal.

  But thinking back to that time in Tepic after the raid, drinking, playing cards and telling war stories, Tavo saw no clues to who might betray him. The four had prospered together. They’d gone to war together. And they seemed to sincerely enjoy one another. Not only was Tavo not seeing who might betray him, he had no idea why anyone would betray him in the first place.

  Everyone benefitted: Isabel, Sofi, Beto, Alejandro and Saúl. Everyone, for the most part, had everything they wanted. They were all rich beyond their wildest dreams, and except for a few details, they all had the life they desired.

  But as someone once said, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

  As his family and his criminal brotherhood stepped out of the whitewashed Sagrado Corazón church, Tavo blinked back the relentless Sinaloa sunshine. His meticulous recollection of the last six months had yielded nothing. All three of his lieutenants had behaved like professionals and friends. His wife, though slightly perturbed by her husband and his guests, was the furthest thing from a conniver. His daughter gave no sign whatsoever of treachery. He was no closer to understanding the Kaibil attempt to arrest him in Antigua than he’d been two days before.

  Tavo’s three lieutenants walked onto the stone steps of the cathedral together, stretching their limbs, slapping each other on the back and ruffling one another’s hair like muscular boys; puppies happy to be free from the hardwood pews.

  The assault on the police commandant outside Guadalajara had been two months previous, and it continued to pay rich dividends. Their fondness for one another and their joy at being reunited buzzed with their secret life as professional killers—locked behind their smiles and their teasing. They were battlefield-tested operators. The four of them had served the Reaper, ridding the
world of another hypocrite and scaring the hell out of corrupt politicians and cops throughout the region.

  He couldn’t care less about all the self-congratulatory nonsense, but he was happy with the shockwaves the assault generated. Anyone the federal police commander might have told about Tavo’s organization had undoubtedly read the same newspaper articles. The all-caps headlines blared about an elite force of at least twenty paratroopers who had descended on a federal police commander’s home, killing everyone around the compound, including eight policemen. Eleven were dead and not so much as a drop of blood or a single hair had been discovered from the assault force—just empty magazines, shell casings and a bunch of used parachutes.

  The message had been clear to anyone looking to profit from their shadowy group: the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. Tavo’s danger with the federal police were buried with the commandant and his wife.

  But that message hadn’t reached Guatemala. Or, maybe it had. Maybe it explained why the Guatemalan Ministry of Defense had employed top shooters to take down Tavo at the Filadelfia Hotel. But Beto’s and Tavo’s aliases lived in a different universe. Tavo was Beto’s son’s godfather, and other than their family get-togethers two or three times a year, there was nothing to tie Beto to Tavo. No financial or corporate linkage existed between the men.

  Tavo toyed with the idea that the American FBI had gotten involved but that seemed unlikely. The FBI would’ve picked him up last week in Charleston instead of using Guatemalans and hassling through the extradition process.

  The most likely leak would be a back-channel whistleblower, mouth-to-mouth, from Tavo’s organization to the Guatemalan Ministry of Defense. In his experience, that was usually how things worked in Latin America: somebody’s cousin talked to his uncle’s padrino who was drinking buddies with the Guatemalan Deputy Minister of Defense. Nine times out of ten that’s how things got done from the Mexican border down to the Amazon River: people shot off their mouths and weird connections were made. But that meant someone had shot off their mouth in the first place, and Tavo only connected to the organization through these three men.

  Tavo sincerely doubted that Beto, Alejandro and Saúl were the source of the leak, since their egos prevented them from seeing Tavo as their leader anyway. They had no reason to talk to anyone—even each other—about how Tavo’s fifty percent added up to a bigger piece of the pie than any one of them received individually. People generally avoided seeing things that made them feel small. “Fifty percent” had a very nice ring to it, and the split had been engineered to keep friction between him and his lieutenants to a minimum. Even one more percentage point in Tavo’s favor would’ve increased the risk of jealousy tenfold. He’d structured the deal perfectly, managed his lieutenants perfectly and he’d comported himself without error—never saying or doing anything that would sow jealousy toward himself. In his experience, people were predictable, and the rollicking Special Forces operators goofing off on the steps of his cathedral were more predictable than most. Tavo looked out over the square in front of the cathedral as he struggled in his mind to see what he might have missed.

  Tavo’s wife, Isabel, stepped up to his side after paying her respects to Father Andrade.

  “How long will they be staying?” she asked about the men screwing around down by the street. “How many do I need to feed?”

  With their Sofi now grown, the couple rarely had anything to talk about other than family logistics. These days, it seemed like Isabel did little more than cook and watch television.

  “They’ll be leaving tomorrow morning.”

  ‘Very well.” She ambled down the stone steps toward their waiting SUV.

  When they returned to the hacienda after church, Sofía was there, perched on a barstool in her mother’s kitchen, leaning toward the small television, where most days, her mother watched telenovelas.

  Sofía launched off the barstool when she saw the men.

  “Tios!” She hugged and kissed each man on the cheek, greeting the men who had been her “uncles” for half her life. All eyes drew back to the little TV.

  “Someone hit Los Angeles with a nuclear bomb,” Sofía explained after giving her father a quick kiss.

  It only took Tavo a few moments to revise the meeting agenda in his mind. They probably wouldn’t be talking much about their leak. Much greater concerns had arisen.

  For the first time, Tavo asked if Sofía could join them for their meeting.

  “Amor,” Tavo started the meeting by turning to his daughter. “Tell us about the American economy.”

  “They’re in trouble.” Sofía gestured toward the TV in the kitchen. “With this nuclear bomb, I don’t know if they can recover. It seems like an isolated terrorist thing, but the markets were already coming apart a few days ago. I don’t think they can take two hits in a row. At best, they’ll slide into a depression like the nineteen thirties. At worst, the economy will collapse. The bomb will zero-out hundreds of billions, maybe a trillion, in real estate values in California. They can’t absorb that kind of loss. It’s bigger than insurance companies. It’s even bigger than government.”

  Tavo shared a knowing look with his three lieutenants. They’d invested heavily to prepare for an economic disaster, but their preparations were nothing to discuss in front of his daughter.

  Beto smacked his hands together and jumped out of his chair with a big smile, like a man who just hit twenty-two black on the roulette wheel. Sofia raised her eyebrows and jumped from face to face, one-at-a-time, looking for an explanation as to why Beto would celebrate a calamity.

  “How does this affect us?” Tavo asked her, drawing her attention away from Beto.

  “Many of my businesses will get wiped out by a depression—they’re too young to survive a market collapse. But my Mexican petroleum play could make millions, maybe even billions. The Iranian attack against the Saudi pipeline made my investment in Mexican gas look like a winning lottery ticket.”

  Tavo had secretly assured the success of her investments in Mexican petroleum. What she had been chalking up to good fortune and smart investing had actually been a masterstroke engineered by her father. Three years before, the Mexican government changed their national constitution to allow American energy companies to return after over eighty years of being exiled. The Mexican national oil company, Pemex, pumped almost a billion barrels of oil per year, but more than half of Pemex’ production was being stolen—some by illegal taps drilled into their sprawling network of gas pipelines, but most stolen from within the rotted-out bureaucracy of Pemex itself. As a result, Mexico was forced to import seventy-five percent of its oil and gas even though they had billions of barrels just off their coast.

  Tavo didn’t give two shits about Mexican energy independence, but he knew an opportunity when he saw one. The other Mexican cartels had captured most of the gasoline graft, building oil and gas theft into a criminal industry as profitable as drug trafficking. Rather than fight for a slice of the criminal pie, Tavo architected a scheme to stamp out the corruption, channel the profits toward his daughter and launder hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.

  In a pact with the Zeta cartel, Tavo redirected his chunk of drug profits from the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado to the Zetas in exchange for backing out of gas theft. The Zetas had been the biggest gas thieves of all, so he choked the theft issue down to a minor nuisance with that one swap. To have his cartel pay tribute to the Zetas sweetened the deal for those idiot egomaniacs. It made the Zeta boss feel like hot shit.

  Simultaneously, Tavo paid Alejandro, his lieutenant over the southwestern United States, to train and equip a team of Mexican-American assassins, turning them into a professional hit squad on par with any Tier One military unit. He spent lavishly on the project, resulting in a razor-sharp team to conduct ambushes against the white collar gas thieves within the Pemex bureaucracy. After a dozen assassinations of the most corrupt Pemex executives, word got around. The tie-wearing crooks stopped
stealing almost overnight. Once Alejandro’s team finished its intimidation kills against Pemex executives, Tavo sent them to teach paramilitary tactics to their gang soldiers. The shadow cartel claimed thousands of young dealers; surprisingly disciplined, armed and now, militarized.

  Sofía moved into the gap left by the retreating thieves with a legitimate energy corporation, and took over a huge chunk of oil and gas distribution. It made her look like the hero of the hour. Tavo shut out the criminal enterprise and then set Sofi up as a catcher’s mitt for Mexican petroleum profits without having to move a single dollar across the U.S./Mexican border. Both her energy company and the Mexican military were winning big points with the Mexican president, the news media and the Mexican public. The oil shortages lifted, and Mexicans could buy their own gas again.

  In the gas scheme, Tavo had weighed much more than just profits, money laundering and public approval. His Pemex shell game had been part of a larger plan—an opportunistic strategy to dominate the region if anything should shake the American economy. Controlling the distribution of Mexican gasoline gave him a stranglehold on trucking. Trucking gave him a stranglehold on food. Food gave him a stranglehold on everyone.

  These were exactly the kinds of bets Tavo liked—and the kinds of bets his psyche armed him to win against lesser men. Human beings were beset by psychological fallacies: irreparably broken thinking patterns that ignored long-odds risks and focused on the here-and-now. Tavo didn’t mind placing scores of long-odds bets against unlikely outcomes, especially since those bets were usually cheap to place. The Mexican gas bet had been the perfect example of a long play with good short term gains and a chance to sweep the table if things went really bad. Not only had it paid off in the medium term, but it looked like it might make him powerful beyond his wildest predictions.