Steve Martini - Guardian of Lies

A few minutes later another vehicle, this one a small, dark sedan, came rocketing through the open door and hit its brakes inside the building.

The man pulled the rope and the large door came screeching down along the track until it hit the concrete floor with a bang. This time the man pushed the locking bolt into the slot, sealing it tight from the inside.

Two more men got out of the car, and the six of them, the three who were originally talking, the man by the door, and the two from the car huddled together some distance away from the sixth man, who was now wandering all alone near the rear of the rental truck.

Liquida watched as the five cohorts stood in a small circle near the container truck. One of them who seemed to be the leader was doing most of the talking while the others listened. The language was not something Liquida had ever heard before. He knew it must be Arabic and that the man talking had to be the boss man from Colombia. Language barrier or not, Liquida could clearly see that he was barking the orders and the others were listening. He got a good look at the man.

Liquida reached over on the platform next to where he was lying, opened the coat, and pulled apart the two snaps inside. Having freed it from the inside of the coat, he picked up the weapon. It looked like something from a space movie, with a silencer the size of an exhaust pipe on the muzzle end, and a box clip for the 5.56-millimeter rounds at the other end where it slipped into the receiver up inside the shoulder stock under the shooter’s armpit. The weapon had a strange-looking device mounted underneath the barrel and a small scope on top.

The modified bull pup had the advantage of a full-length rifle barrel in a gun that, without the silencer, was little more than twenty inches long.

He held the gun close as he continued to watch the conference down below.

The lone wolf wandering near the rear of the rental truck apparently saw something out of place. He approached the lift gate and played with the heavy latch for a moment. Apparently it wasn’t closed. He lifted the gate a little, and then seemed to stand there for a moment as if he were frozen in place.

Afundi said something and one of the others hollered out in perfect Spanish, telling the man at the rear of the rental truck to leave it alone and come out where they could see him. The one who spoke Spanish separated himself from the others and walked toward the rear of the rental vehicle.

Before he could get there, the other man lowered the lift gate and quickly moved around the truck where he rapidly closed the distance between the two of them with his hands out, turning the other, fatter man around. “It was nothing. A piece of wood caught under the door. I took care of it. It’s fine.”

The other man stood there for a second looking at him, and then pushed past him, walked to the back of the truck, and checked it out. The other, taller man was close behind him.

Liquida heard the metal of the hooked lever lock on the back of the truck as the fat man tested it to make sure that the catch was working and the door was sealed.

While the two of them were still standing at the back of the truck, the leader stopped talking, stepped away from the others, and started walking over to join them. By then the fat man was satisfied that everything was fine. He headed back the other way, said something to his leader, and the two of them joined their comrades in discussion once again.

Liquida thought about popping Afundi as he stood there talking, but that would be too easy. Besides, he’d probably end up in a gunfight with the others, and taking rounds through the bottom of the catwalk was not something he wanted to think about. Liquida would wait them out. He’d whittle them down with the silencer a shot at a time, so they wouldn’t know where it was coming from.

The conversation went on for a couple more minutes, until Afundi handed two of the men a piece of paper and began talking to them. He pointed to the sheet as if he was giving them directions of some kind.

They nodded, one of them took the sheet of paper, and the two men headed toward the car. But they didn’t get in, instead they grabbed two assault rifles out of the backseat.

Afundi said something to one of them and pointed toward the back wall of the building. As he watched the man walk in that direction, suddenly the diesel engine on the container truck started up. Liquida turned to look back at the trucks as another of the men climbed up into the container truck. He closed the truck’s doors and waited with the engine running. The other three men, including the tall one who didn’t seem to fit, got into the rental truck and started its engine.

Liquida wondered where they were going. No one had opened the large overhead door. The fumes were beginning to build up. Suddenly an overhead door on the other side of the building opened up. It was being opened by a heavy electrical motor. Liquida looked at it and realized that the door was surrounded not by metal, but heavy concrete. The opening was cut into a retaining wall where the building backed up to an incline in the earth outside.

Once the door was fully up, Liquida could see that the concrete floor beyond the opening dropped off in a steep decline. It was ramped down. Within seconds the two trucks drove through the opening and down the ramp, disappearing in a blue haze of exhaust as the noise of their engines slowly receded into the distance.

After spending millions of dollars of his government’s money, Alim was gratified by the results. It had taken seven months for the cartel to acquire the two buildings, one on each side of the border, to engineer and dig the tunnel, and to shore it up with concrete and steel rebar.

It had been a seamless operation. The cartel knew that the U.S. border patrol and customs watched the Mexican side of the border for unusual traffic volume and patterns. So the cartel purchased the trucks from the original maquiladora operator just as the manufacturer folded. They used the trucks to remove the earth from the excavation of the tunnel as well as to deliver the building materials. To anyone watching, the volume of truck traffic coming and going from the building never changed, as if the manufacturing concern was just humming along. The cartel greased some palms in the city government and no one ever looked.

The joint venture between Afundi and the cartel meant that a good portion of the cash Alim received from his government went to finance the tunnel’s construction. The cartel oversaw construction and built the tunnel. Alim then had an option for its exclusive use for thirty days, after which time the entire project would revert to the cartel, which could then continue to use it as a narco highway for as long as they could maintain the secret.

The tunnel was only a few hundred meters east of the Tijuana airport and less than three hundred yards long. The building on the Mexi can side was less than a hundred feet from the border fence. The tunnel, sixty feet underground where thermal imaging and motion and vibration detectors sealed off by the heavy concrete walls would never be able to detect a thing from the surface, spanned the distance between the two buildings. Alim smiled at the thought that the cartel had employed a retired engineer from the California Department of Transportation to design the whole thing, though the man never had a clue as to where it would be located or what it would be used for.

In a little more than a minute the trucks were on the surface once more, inside the building on the U.S. side of the border. They wasted no time opening the doors and exiting from the building to merge with the surrounding California traffic.

Alim looked at his watch. Amazingly, they were still on schedule. It was just after three in the afternoon. According to the news reports, festivities were not scheduled to get under way until just before five.