Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

“Where are the keys?” he asks the warehouse manager.

“Top desk drawer.”

Ramos gets the keys, hops onto the forklift and backs it up. He can hardly believe what he sees.

The mouth of a tunnel.

“Are you shitting me?” Ramos asks aloud.

He hops off the forklift, grabs the manager and lifts him off his feet.

“Are there men down there?” he asks. “Booby traps?”

“No.”

“If there are, I’ll come back and kill you.”

“I swear.”

“Are there lights down there?”

“Si.”

“Turn them on.”

Five minutes later Ramos has Esposa in one hand as he uses the other to climb down the ladder bolted to the side of the tunnel’s entrance.

Sixty-five feet deep.

The shaft is about six feet high and four feet wide, with reinforced concrete floors and walls. Fluorescent light fixtures are attached to the ceiling. An air-conditioning system pumps fresh air down the length of the tunnel. A narrow gauge track has been laid on the floor and carts have been set on the rails.

“Christ,” Ramos thinks, “at least there’s no locomotive. Yet.”

He starts walking along the shaft, north, toward the United States. Then it occurs to him that he should probably contact someone on the other side before he crosses the border, even underground. He goes back to the surface and makes a few phone calls. Two hours later he’s going down the ladder again, with Art Keller right behind him. And behind them, a troop of the Special Tactical Group and a flock of DEA agents.

On the American side, an army of DEA, INS, ATF, FBI and Customs agents are poised in the area across from the tunnel, waiting to rush the exact location as soon as the tunnel party radios in.

“Un-fucking-real,” Shag Wallace says when they get down to the bottom. “Someone dumped a lot of money into this.”

“Someone ran a lot of money through it,” Art answers. He turns to Ramos. “We know this was Mendez, not the Barreras?”

“It’s Guero's,” Ramos says.

“What, someone show him a video of The Great Escape?” Shag asks.

“Let me know when we cross the border,” Ramos says to Art.

“I’d just be guessing,” Art answers. “Christ, how far does this thing go?”

Fourteen hundred feet, give or take, is how they pace it out before they get to the next vertical shaft. An iron ladder bolted to the concrete walls leads up to a bolted hatch.

Art punches in on a GPS system.

The troops will be rolling.

He looks up at the hatch.

“So,” Art says, “who wants to be the first to go through that?”

“We’re in your jurisdiction,” Ramos answers.

Art goes up the ladder, with Shag at his feet, and they each balance with one hand on the rail as they twist open the hatch with the other.

It must take quite an operation, Art thinks, to hoist the dope up from the tunnel shaft. Probably a chain of men stationed on various rungs of the ladder. He wonders if they were planning to construct an elevator.

The hatch opens and light pours down the shaft.

Art firms his grip on his pistol and hauls himself up.

Chaos.

Men are running around like cockroaches when the lights come on, and the blue-jacketed task-force guys are sweeping them up, putting them on the floor and securing their wrists behind their backs with plastic telephone-cord ties.

It’s a cannery, Art notices.

There are three neat, organized conveyor belts, stacks of empty cans, sealing machines, labeling machines. Art reads one of the labels: CALIENTE CHILI PEPPERS. And indeed, there are huge piles of red chili peppers ready to be fed onto the conveyor belts.

But there are also bricks of cocaine.

And Art thinks the coke is meant to be hand-canned.

Russ Dantzler comes up to him. “Guero Mendez-the Willy Wonka of nose candy.”

“Who owns this building?” Art asks.

“You ready for this? The Fuentes brothers.”

“No kidding.”

“I shit you not.”

Three Brothers Foods, Art thinks. Well, well, well-the Fuentes family is a prominent fixture in the Mexican-American community. Important businesspeople in southern California, and major contributors to the Democratic Party. The Fuentes trucks go from the canneries and warehouses in San Diego and Los Angeles to cities all over the country.

A ready-made distribution system for Guero Mendez’s cocaine.

“Genius, isn’t it?” Dantzler says. “They bring the coke in through the tunnel, can it as Caliente Chili Peppers and ship it anywhere they want. I wonder if they ever screw up-I mean, I wonder if someone in Detroit ever goes to buy himself a can of peppers and ends up with twelve ounces of blow instead. In which case, give me a bowl of that chili, you know what I mean? So what do you want to do about the Fuentes brothers?”

“Bust them,” Art says.

Which is going to be interesting, he thinks. Not only are the Fuenteses major supporters of the Democratic Party, they’re also big contributors to the presidential campaign of Luis Donaldo Colosio.

It takes about thirty-seven seconds for the news to reach Adan.

Now we know how Mendez has been getting his cocaine through La Plaza, Adan thinks. He’s been going under it. And now we also know the source of his power in Mexico City. He’s bought the heir apparent, Colosio.

So that’s that.

Guero has bought himself Los Pinos, and we are finished.

Then the phone rings.

Sal Scachi wants to offer some help.

When he says what his offer entails, Adan instantly says no. Firmly, unalterably, absolutely, the answer is no.

It’s unthinkable.

Unless…

Adan tells him what he wants in return.

The quid pro quo.

It takes days of covert negotiations, but Scachi finally agrees.

But Adan has to act quickly.

That’s fine, Adan thinks.

But we’ll need people to do it.

Kids.

That’s what Callan is looking at-kids.

He’s sitting in the basement of a house in Guadalajara. The place is a freaking armory. There’s hardware all over the place, and not just the usual ARs and AKs, either.

This is the heavy stuff: machine guns, grenade launchers, Kevlar body armor. Callan sits on a metal folding chair looking at a bunch of teenage Chicano gangbangers from San Diego as they watch Raul Barrera pin a photograph to a bulletin board.

“Memorize this face,” Raul tells them. “It’s Guero Mendez.”

The teenagers are rapt. Especially as Raul slowly and dramatically takes bundles of cash out of a canvas bag and sets them on the table.

“Fifty thousand dollars American,” Raul says. “In cash. And it’s going to go to the first one of you who…”

He pauses dramatically.

“… puts the kill shot into Guero Mendez.”

They’re going on a “Guero hunt,” Raul announces. They’re going to form convoys of armored vehicles until they find Mendez and then use their combined firepower to blow him to hell, where he belongs.

“Any questions?” Raul asks.

Yeah, a few, Callan thinks. Starting with, How the hell you think you’re going to take on Guero’s professional hitters with the Kiddie Corps here. I mean, is this what we got left? This is the best that the Barrera pasador, with all its money and power, can come up with? A bunch of San Dog gangbangers?

They’re a goddamn joke, with tags like Flaco, Dreamer, Poptop and-honest to Christ-Scooby Doo. Fabian recruited them from the barrio, says they’re stone killers, claims they’ve all made their bones.

Yeah, maybe, Callan thinks. Maybe they have, but it’s a big jump from doing a drive-by on some other banger smoking boo on his front porch to taking on a crew of professional killers.

A bunch of kids on a big-time hit? They’ll be too busy pissing their pants and shooting each other-and hopefully not me-when they panic and start blasting anything that flashes by their peripheral vision. No, Callan still don’t get it-what the fuck Raul is thinking about with the Children’s Crusade here. All it’s going to be is one gigantic mess, and Callan is only hoping that (a) through the chaos he can find Mendez and take him off the count, and (b) he can do it before one of the kids guns him down by mistake.