The Devil You Don't Know (American Praetorians Book 4) Read online

  “That was Reyes and a close personal friend of his, Francisco Salazar, who also happens to be a high-ranking member of the Venezuelan Popular Defense Units, and a known member of the Cartel de los Soles. For those who can't follow the Spanish, they are discussing a deal for support from Reyes' Guatemalan business interests for some of the PDUs. At one point, Reyes specifically mentions that they'll have to deal with El Duque to make sure it's kept under the radar. So yes, we know that Reyes is connected to El Duque.

  “If Reyes does in fact know who El Duque is, or even can lead to another link in the chain, then we may finally have a shot at this guy.”

  “This is going to require a lot of support, you know,” I said. “And a lot more time to plan and prepare than last minute before going down into Mexico. That country isn't exactly permissive for this kind of thing, at least not when gringos are doing it.”

  “I realize it's short notice,” Renton said. “But this is why we gave you the list of names of interest in the first place. Harmon-Dominguez has enough outside interests involved in it that if it was dirty, it was bound to cross paths with one of El Duque's connections eventually. Apparently, it has.”

  “There's another unanswered question here,” Jim put in. Jim didn't often say much, even in his spot as my assistant team leader, but when he did, people generally shut up and listened. He was one of the oldest of us, with a pair of gray stripes through his thick beard that made him somewhat resemble a badger. He sometimes had the temperament of one, too. “MS-13 is out to hijack this cargo, for whatever reason. Do we have any idea why? Especially if this is somehow connected to El Duque, that would make the stakes a little higher for them than just a cash score.”

  “Assuming they actually know about the connection,” Renton pointed out. “The underworld is increasingly networked, yes, but that doesn't necessarily always mean that everybody is read in on what everybody else is doing. These are loose networks; they fluctuate with the loyalties and feuds of the moment, not to mention sheer bloody opportunism. Under the circumstances, I suspect that whoever launched that ambush probably only knew that there was money to be made.”

  There was silence around the table. None of us really bought it. That had been a professional ambush, not a neighborhood gang drive-by.

  “Maybe Juarez knows,” Ben suggested. Ben was one of the newer guys. Tall, skinny, and black as the ace of spades, he was a solid performer in training, but hadn't quite found his niche yet. He had taken his callsign, “Carlton,” with good humor, though. “Let's ask him.”

  “You really think he knows jack shit about what's going on?” Bryan asked.

  “Maybe,” Ben replied. “I mean, you saw the relief crew when they came to pick up the cargo from the crashed truck. They were nervous as fuck around that sheriff's car. Even if they don't know specifics, they know something sketchy is going on. Maybe Juarez knows more.”

  “And if he keeps his mouth shut?” I asked quietly. “This isn't Iraq. We can't lean on him here the way we might have over there.”

  “There are ways,” Renton said quietly. “Though I don't think he knows anything. Not anything immediately useful, anyway.”

  I eyed him skeptically. “You've already checked him out, haven't you?”

  He nodded unapologetically. “Of course. We've suspected Harmon-Dominguez of being dirty for a while. Naturally we were going to check out the people in managerial positions.”

  “So he's just a dupe?” I asked. “Or a 'see no evil' type?”

  He shrugged. “A little from Column A, a little from Column B.”

  I thought about it for a moment. “Can you give us a minute?” I asked Renton.

  “Sure,” he said. He left the laptop on the table. As soon as he was gone, I looked around at the rest of the team.

  “Thoughts?” I may have been the team leader, but this wasn't the military, and these guys weren't boots. Even the new guys were seasoned, and nobody can see every angle, regardless of what his billet is.

  “I think we're getting into another East Africa,” Larry said, folding his arms across his barrel of a chest. “Don't take that the wrong way; I'm in. But really? We've got a nom de guerre, a couple of blurry photos, and a legend, and that's it.” He pointed to the dot-covered map on the screen. “That's one hell of a spread of activity, and we've got no pattern of life to narrow any of it down. Nobody even knows the guy's name, much less where he hides out.”

  “That's why we're going after Reyes first,” Eric said reasonably. “If nobody on our side knows where the target is, then we roll up the ones on the other side who do.”

  “Let's not get ahead of ourselves,” Jim said. “Let's assume that we are going to take the job.” That was kind of a given at this point; after close to a year on the bench, a challenge was past due. Going after HVT Number One was a challenge that I don't think any of us could have passed up at that point. Of course, some of us were more gun-shy than others, having faced more than a few hasty, relatively unsupported missions in the last few years. The clients rarely had all their ducks in a row, and we usually ended up holding the short end of the stick because of it. “Short term, let's bring Harold in here and see what insights he can offer.”

  There wasn't any disagreement. I pulled out my phone and called Harold's cell. He answered quickly, probably hoping we were ready to get back on the road immediately. I was about to disappoint him. “Can you come to the security office?” I asked. “We've got some questions that you might be able to answer.”

  Harold looked pretty hesitant when he came in; he hadn't been too happy about my request, but he realized that we had him over a barrel. He wasn't going to be able to find another security company to escort his trucks south in time to fit his time schedule. He was stuck with us, and he wasn't about to try to take those trucks into Mexico—or outside the warehouse compound, for that matter—without an escort.

  The eleven of us, including Renton, were spread around the small meeting room, watching Harold when he walked in. He looked around like a man thinking of running for it; he was not comfortable. Considering he was half a head shorter than Jack, who was the shortest of us by a couple inches, I can't necessarily say I blame him. He was like a more personable version of the State people we'd dealt with, albeit peripherally, in Iraq the year before. He wasn't a meat-eater, and he was a little scared of us, even though we were there to ensure his safety and that of his cargo.

  “What is it?” he asked, looking around from face to face.

  “We need to know why MS-13 is after your cargo,” I said flatly.

  He looked like I'd slapped him. “I don't know. I don't know why they want it, and I don't know how they found out we would be on that route at that time.” He looked down, then back up at me. He looked kind of lost and scared. If he hadn't been a grown man working for an international company suspected of doing business with transnational mafias and terrorists, I'd almost have felt sorry for him. “None of this was supposed to happen. It was supposed to be a simple delivery to an agent in Mazatlan. There wasn't any mention of threats of violence or any of this.”

  I frowned at him. “But your company hired us to protect the shipment. You do know what we do for a living, right?”

  He looked confused. “I know you're a security company.”

  Renton chuckled from where he was leaning against the wall, next to the door. Harold jerked his head around to look at him; I don't think he'd realized the spook was even there until then. “Most people aren't all that aware of Praetorian's rep, Jeff,” he said. “They might have heard your name in conjunction with the shootout in Kismayo a couple years ago, but you've been good enough at keeping a low profile since that, outside of certain circles, you just kind of fade into the background.” He chuckled again. “Don't take that the wrong way; it's a good thing. It just means that Mr. Juarez here has no idea what you're really capable of, or why we hooked you up with this contract.”

  “Who is this?” Harold stammered at me. “I haven't seen
him before.”

  Renton surprised me a little. “That's because I haven't been around here before. Consider me something of a facilitator, who is going to help with your little security problem. Come on, let's talk while these guys get prepped to get moving again. I can fill you in on the details.” He opened the door, holding out a hand to invite Harold to go with him, and looked at me. “All the information I've been able to scrounge up on this business is on that laptop. The password is in the envelope; I'd suggest memorizing it and then getting rid of the paper. But be sure you memorize it right; three wrong entries and the laptop wipes itself.” He ushered Harold out and closed the door after him.

  Jack squinted suspiciously at the closed door. “That was convenient,” he said. “What does Juarez know that Renton doesn't want us to hear?”

  Jim shook his head. “I don't think he knows shit. Renton was getting him out of our hair so we can finish planning and prepping without him pestering us about his timeline every five minutes.”

  “Agreed,” I said, though I had my suspicions about Renton, too. He took “need-to-know” to pretty considerable lengths sometimes. “Let's get to it.”

  There was definitely more planning to do. I wanted to take a different route, but the best bet was going to be San Luis, just southwest of Yuma, and that was a hell of a detour. We were fine with the extra mileage, but there was no way we were going to bully Harold into accepting a detour of over four hundred miles. It would add an entire day, and, from what little we'd gotten from Harold, that would end up defeating the purpose of the trip in the first place. The agent was apparently not willing to wait that long. So it had to be Nogales. I wanted hardened vehicles, but there weren't any to be had. I also wanted all the firepower we had in that mission package, which Ben and Nick had gone to retrieve from the airport, but that wasn't going to fly going through a legal border crossing, either. We'd even put compartments in the security vehicles to stash our pistols, shotguns, and ammo, just in case the papers didn't get us across without problems, but they were only so large. There was no way we were going to get battle rifles, sniper rifles, 7.62 NATO and .338 Lapua ammo, grenades, night vision, and hardened comms across the Nogales border crossing.

  Of course, we had no intention of leaving any of that behind. If we were going after HVT Number One, you'd better believe we'd have every tool we needed, however we had to get it. So Nick and Ben were going to break away and take the rest of the package over the border on 4-wheeler ATVs about forty miles to the east, near Sierra Vista. That mountainous region of the border hadn't been well-patrolled in years, in spite of the proximity of the US Army's primary intel base, Fort Huachuca.

  We didn't tell Harold about that part. I don't think he noticed the fact that we were down two bodies when we loaded back up; he was a bit nervous and distracted. I don't know what Renton had told him, and the spook had been gone by the time Harold showed back up at the security office, wondering when we'd be ready to go. But he seemed more fidgety than ever.

  It was getting close to sunset when we finally got down to Nogales. We were keyed up and on the alert for an ambush all the way from Tucson to the border. I was really, really wishing for my SOCOM 16 model M1A, but Nick had that on an all-terrain trailer behind his ATV, and was probably getting ready to cross over into Mexico right about then. But nothing materialized. There were a couple of vehicles that we thought might be surveillance vehicles, but they didn't do anything froggy, and, while they continued to pace us all the way into Nogales, they gave us no further indications that they were bad guys. We got to the border crossing unmolested.

  There was a surprising amount of traffic. Even as the sky turned a mix of purple, red, and orange over the hills, there were cars and trucks backed up at the border crossing for a hundred yards, across five lanes. There had been a lot more, once upon a time, but there was still plenty of commerce going north and south. A good chunk of it was legitimate. Some of it was legitimate on the surface, and shady underneath. I had heard that a lot of the cash going south from drug deals in El Norte was hidden in legit vehicles making the crossing.

  I realized that we were probably technically taking part in one such transfer, albeit rather larger than a hundred thousand dollars stuffed in the ceiling of an F-150. I was also keenly aware that we were likely to be denied by Renton and The Network if we got caught. We'd disappear into either the US or Mexican prison systems, just some more hired guns for narco thugs. We'd probably show up in some news story as a cautionary tale about rogue killers for hire like the Iraq vet-turned-narco assassin who'd named himself Rambo, of all things, a few years back.

  We waited in the line of vehicles, lit up by actinic white floodlights, watching every vehicle around us, expecting a shitstorm to erupt at any moment. Nobody seemed to be paying much attention to us, not that we could really see very much. The cars were dark on the inside, brightly lit by the floods, and so the windows may as well have been opaque in most cases. Meanwhile, we crept closer to the border crossing, one car-length at a time.

  I opened up the compartment at my feet, slid my Browning and my 870 into it, then took Larry's weapons and slid them in along with them. Making sure we didn't have any extra ammo where it might be found, I closed the compartment, mag-locked it (we didn't want the covers rattling when somebody stomped on them), and slid the dirty rubber floor mat over it. Unless they tore the SUV apart, they'd never find the weapons. Harold had insisted that the papers we carried included a special arrangement with the Mexican authorities, but I had familiarized myself with the security situation down there enough that I didn't trust that the border guards wouldn't be playing both ends against the middle. It had been a pain in the ass to get those compartments put in at the last minute, but they could very well prove to be worth it.

  Finally, we came to the checkpoint. The green-uniformed US Border Patrol agents didn't even really look at us; the majority of them were concerned with the other lanes, the ones going north. These two were more there for form's sake than anything else. It was the Mexican border guards we had to worry about.

  Two of the men in dark blue uniforms and black combat vests stepped up to the Yukon. I couldn't see the driver's side, especially with Harold's box truck between us and the lead vehicle, but Larry could.

  “Bryan's handed over the papers, and the border guard is looking at them,” he said, leaning his head a little to get a better view. “Everybody still looks nice and relaxed.”

  I kept watching the two border policemen on the passenger side. They were looking over the vehicle, but hadn't made a move otherwise. Both were wearing black combat vests and carrying M-16s. Even in a relatively low-threat post like guarding the US border into Mexico, they had their faces covered.

  Larry let out a deep sigh. “They're waving them through.”

  I didn't relax, exactly, but I got slightly less tense. I still didn't move to pull the weapons out; that could wait until we were well clear. I did have our copy of the clearance papers, just in case.

  The box truck had to stop. They got waved through almost as quickly as Bryan's Yukon had. Then it was our turn.

  Larry rolled down the window and I offered the papers. The border guard skimmed them quickly, then handed them back. It looked like he'd checked for the signature and that was about it. “Bienvenidos,” he said. Larry nodded to him, and we rolled forward.

  “That was too easy,” I said, as we passed under the big, white arch over the checkpoint and continued down the road into the Mexican half of Nogales. I was still scanning. While whoever was gunning for us might not be stupid enough to hit us right at the border control checkpoint, I fully expected there to be surveillance of some sort.

  If it was there, it was too dark to see it.

  “Maybe they weren't bullshitting about the authorizations,” Larry suggested. “Maybe things really have gotten bad enough down here that the government's willing to even let gringos go armed.”

  “More likely the right amount of money got passed to t
he right people,” I said, still staring out the window. The Mexican side didn't look much different from the American side. The roads were still paved, the lights were still on, and the architecture was all the same. A lot of the signs were still in English, even, though just as many on the Arizona side of the border were in Spanish. There were, of course, the tin shacks of the border market hawkers lining the road from the checkpoint, but they were presently abandoned. Apparently it wasn't a good idea to try to sell junk to tourists in Nogales after dark these days.

  “You're a cynic,” he remarked.

  I turned to look at him. He was still watching the road, but I could see a little bit of a smirk inside that tangle of beard. “No shit,” I replied. “When did you figure that out?”

  He laughed. “About five minutes after I met you,” he answered. “So, lets see...about nine, ten years ago?”

  I just shook my head with a grin and went back to looking for threats.

  The border police didn't hassle either the other box truck or Jim's vehicle. We didn't linger in Nogales. We were already behind schedule, and I didn't want to stay in one spot where we were already expected to be. I wanted to get clear as quickly as possible. We sped past Embarcadero Hill and headed south.

  In a few minutes, Nogales was behind us, and we were moving through hilly scrub grassland. There wasn't much more traffic on the road, besides the occasional semi. Our headlights illuminated the trees and bushes alongside the road, but the rest of the landscape disappeared into the dark. I dug the shotguns and pistols out of the compartment under our feet.

  It took about half an hour to reach the designated rendezvous point, just north of Rancho Agua Zarca, a Sonoran horse ranch. We exited off the highway at the Agua Zarca overpass, and took a dirt road up into the hills to the east. I could almost hear Harold wondering what the hell we were doing. I was sure I was going to hear it once we stopped.