Russell Blake - Revenge of the Assassin

Six Weeks Ago, Mexico City, Mexico. Midnight.

The pounding from the front door of the high-rise condo seemed to resonate eerily with the tinny ringing of the phone in the kitchen. Captain Romero Cruz of the Federal Police flicked the hallway light as he pulled a bathrobe on. The phone stopped its insistent trilling as he shuffled down the entry hall and then peered blearily through the peephole. Satisfied there was no obvious threat, he fumbled with the deadbolt and then opened the door.

A man in the distinctive blue uniform of the Federales saluted, ignoring the disheveled hair of his superior officer. He shifted nervously as he stared into space at some neutral point a thousand miles beyond his commander’s shoulder. Cruz ignored the circumstances and gestured for him to speak up.

“ Capitan . I’m sorry to intrude. But you wanted to be alerted as soon as we had confirmation on the Tijuana situation. We’ve been calling for half an hour, but there was no answer…”

“That’s fine. I’m sorry. I had the bedroom door closed, and this phone isn’t very loud. I must have slept through it. What’s the update?” Cruz asked, cinching the robe ties around his waist as he shook off his grogginess and became more alert. Unlike when he’d been younger, now that he was in his mid-forties it took a while for him to fire on all cylinders, especially since he’d only gotten to sleep two hours earlier.

“We received word that five hundred kilos arrived at the suspect warehouse this evening, to be transported tonight or tomorrow morning at the latest. That means if we want to catch them red-handed-”

“I get it. Do we have sufficient assets there to go in on a frontal assault? And can they be ready in an hour?”

“Yes, sir. I already took the liberty of putting out the word.” He hesitated. “We have a jet standing by to get tactical leadership there by three in the morning, worst case,” the officer confirmed.

Cruz paused and considered the alternatives, and then nodded. “Then we go in. I’ll put on a pot of coffee and be ready to get to headquarters shortly. Have my car ready for me. I’ll run the operation from there.” Cruz studied the man’s face, hardened from years on the force and strained with fatigue. “It’s going to be a long one. What time did you come on duty today?”

“I got in at ten this morning, Capitan . I was going to quit by eight tonight, and then we started getting chatter from our sources, so I decided to stay on for a little while.”

“No good deed goes unpunished. Do we have any idea whose dope this is? Or do I even need to ask?”

“Sinaloa.”

“Ahhh. Well, let me take a shower and get ready, then. I’ll be downstairs in forty-five minutes. That’s all,” Cruz said, then waved off the officer’s parting salute.

Five hundred kilos of cocaine. Now that was worth getting out of bed for.

“ Corazon ? Who was that? Is everything okay?” a female voice called from the bedroom once the front door had slammed closed.

“It’s fine, mi amor . But I need to go into the office. I’m sorry. I’ll probably be getting back around the time you’re up for work,” he apologized as he moved into the bedroom. “It’s an emergency. Go back to sleep. I’ll be as quiet as possible,” he reassured the woman peering at him from the far side of the bed, beautiful even with no makeup and roused in the middle of the night. He padded over to her and gave her a fleeting kiss. “Close your eyes, Dinah. I need to get a uniform out of the closet.”

Six Weeks Ago, Tijuana, Mexico. 3:27 a.m.

Monday nights in Tijuana were usually calm, the weekend’s lunacy and tourist rush having ebbed, leaving the town worked, but marginally wealthier. The weather was chilly in late March, in the low sixties, with a light drizzle having clogged the poorly drained streets with refuse and murky runoff. The industrial row of warehouses along the border wall was a no-man’s land in the best of daylight hours, and approaching midnight, only the foolhardy, the desperate or the suicidal ventured into the menacing district.

Junkyards and body shops dotted the area’s mean streets, with decrepit buildings and darkened half-completed construction punctuating the rows of tin-roofed shacks and wrecking yards. An occasional car prowled along the unlit thoroughfares, bass-heavy reggaeton booming from the lowered chassis as the shady occupants crept about their nocturnal business. Near one of the larger gray cinderblock edifices, a pair of bony stray dogs rooted through bags of refuse dumped on the sidewalks for morning collection, their furtive movement ample evidence that, even for scavengers, danger was a constant.

One of the armed guards standing watch outside the ten-foot-high, broken-glass-topped walls of a compound at the end of the cul-de-sac flicked his cigarette at the mutts, causing them to bolt from their paltry find. He grinned to himself and wiped a sheen of moisture from his brow, then glanced over to the other two men lurking at the far end of the wall, also toting weapons and on the alert for any threats. The rain had stopped twenty minutes earlier but there was still a pall of humidity mixed with raw exhaust and the reek of overflowing sewage pipes that coated everything with a noxious film. The smell of the tobacco offered slim relief from the ever-present stench that was part of the duty of guarding the complex.

The gloom was shattered by the roar of heavy vehicles tearing up the street, then the guard was blinded by spotlights mounted on the turrets of the BTR-70s. He fumbled for his two-way radio while simultaneously raising his M-4 assault rifle and barely barked out a warning before he was cut down by a stream of silenced rounds from the leading truck. The other two sentries met with the same fate, though one managed to get off several bursts of sub-machine — gun fire before being hacked to pieces by the muffled shooters in the vehicles.

Within thirty seconds, the sidewalk in front of the wall was bristling with black-clad marines in full combat gear, augmented by Federal Police carrying Heckler amp; Koch UMP45 machine pistols with specially-fitted sound and flash suppressors. The leader of the squad made a curt hand gesture to his lieutenant, indicating the security camera mounted near the gate — a well-aimed volley from his weapon shattered the device.

An armored assault truck slammed through the steel-plated gates, and three dozen armed commandos followed it through. The percussive burp of machine guns strafed from the largest of the three warehouses as the defenders inside engaged their attackers. Several of the marines uttered cries, cut down as they ran, their body armor slim protection against the armor-piercing rounds spraying from the windows.

Three of the personnel carriers rolled into the yard and focused their gun turrets on the building, unleashing a devastating volley of lethal fire, the neon orange of tracer rounds illuminating the windows as they streaked to their targets. A federal police sergeant ran in a crouch under the cover of the shooting, and rolling to the side of one of the large, partially-open steel doors, he tossed a grenade inside before ducking away from the volley of shots that greeted his silhouette. A muffled explosion blew out the glass from the windows above his head, and he quickly threw in two more grenades, shielding himself by hugging the concrete foundation as the detonations hurled shrapnel throughout the interior.

The leader watched helplessly as another of his men had his throat torn out in a bloody spray by gunfire coming from the roof, and he ducked behind the relative safety of one of the BTR-70s as he barked commands into the radio. Thirty seconds later a helicopter shredded the air above the building with its rotors and rained destruction down upon the shooters on the roof.