Blood Tide Read online

  Chapter Seventeen

  IT WAS CHRIS and Caitlin’s last night, and Teresa popped around for a farewell drink.

  Her vivacity, humor and exuberance won the Stones over. So much so, that Chris actually called me aside and asked if she was anything like her narco dad.

  “Nothing. She must have been swapped at birth.”

  “Carl seems smitten.”

  “Nah. Carl is as tough emotionally as he is physically. There’s no problem about that. The only problem is if the narco bosses find out.”

  “Will they?”

  “Carl lives dangerously. But we’re hoping this gig will be resolved soon, one way or another.”

  “Don’t forget my promise to Pablo.”

  “The last bullet? That could be out of our hands.”

  We took the Stones to the airport the next morning. Caitlin gave me a tight hug. Unfortunately, she did the same to Carl, so I couldn’t gauge her sincerity.

  Our break was also over, and we drove to the Guerra hacienda. As we approached the gate, a soldado came running up.

  “El jefe wants to see you.”

  Carl was driving and turned towards the villa. Guerra was outside. He strode to the vehicle as Carl stopped.

  “Have you seen Teresa?” he demanded.

  Carl shook his head. “What do you mean?”

  “She is missing.”

  “Since when?”

  “She has not answered her phone so I sent some people to her apartment. She was not there. A neighbor said she hadn’t seen her since the previous evening.”

  I decided to take over the situation in case Carl blurted out something untoward out.

  “Then where did she sleep?”

  “We do not know. She went into Tijuana in the evening. That’s all we know.”

  Teresa had been with us, but the fact her minders said she had gone into the city indicated she’d had the good sense to take a backroad route from there to Califia in case she was being watched. That meant she wasn’t linked to us.

  “What can we do?”

  “I have every policeman on my payroll looking for her. There is nothing you can do that is not already being done.”

  “Maybe we can grab a Sinaloan and persuade him to talk?”

  “My people have done that. No one knows. The bastards are denying they took my daughter. They say it’s the DEA trying to break the peace deal.”

  “Can we interrogate the prisoner as well?”

  “You could if he was alive.”

  “Jefe,” I said. “We are skilled at surveillance. We have crawled into terrorist hideouts in Afghanistan and not been discovered. Give us a list of all the known Sinaloan dens and we will find her.”

  He took us to the boardroom where there was a largescale map of Tijuana pinned on the wall. He pointed to several buildings, and we took down the addresses. This was absolute gold dust to the DEA.

  “There are more that we don’t know about. Just as they don’t know all of ours.”

  “It’s at least somewhere to start,” I said.

  “You will earn a five-million-dollar reward if you bring her back alive,” he said.

  “Thank you Jefe. We are starting the search now.”

  Once out the gate, Carl shoved the paper with the addresses into his pocket.

  “She won’t be in any of those. But John Peters will love this.”

  I nodded. “She’s more likely to be locked up in some derelict house. If she’s in Tijuana.”

  “They must have picked her up soon after she left us. That means they’ve had the whole night to hide her. Or dispose of the body.”

  “No. She’s alive. Why kidnap her otherwise? They could have just shot her in her car if they wanted to send a message. The fact the Sinaloans are denying it means they are planning something else, something in which a narco boss’s only daughter may be a major bargaining chip.”

  “But what? Ransom money? These guys are rolling in loot. A couple of mill payoff is peanuts.”

  “Exactly. It’s not money. So what’s the most valuable asset to a cartel?”

  “Smuggling routes. Particularly when the most useful one has just been destroyed.”

  “Nail on the head. And where is the new drug route?”

  Carl smiled. “Let’s give Don Geraldo’s estancia a visit.”

  ...

  OUR HUNCH PROVED wrong. The estancia was still guarded by the CT. Andrea’s theory of a Sinaloan takeover was surprisingly off-target.

  I recognized one of our recruits at the gate. I even remember his name, Esposito. I called him over.

  “What’s happening, hermano? Have the Sinaloans been here?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No Capitán.” It was the first and probably last time I was addressed as Captain. “But we are leaving. The Jefe wants all fighters to go to meeting points and be ready for war.”

  “Is everyone going?”

  He nodded. “The boss’s daughter had been kidnapped.”

  I was surprised the news had travelled this quickly. “So there is no war here?” I pointed to the estancia.

  He shook his head. “We are going to kill them in Tijuana. There will be much blood.”

  We saluted as I drove off.

  “That makes sense,” said Carl. “The Sinaloans kidnap Teresa. Guerra calls all fighting men out to man battle stations, leaving Don Geraldo’s ranch empty just as a tunnel is about to be dug. Seems a bit too convenient.”

  I nodded. I was thinking exactly that myself.

  Carl’s cellphone buzzed. It was Guerra.

  “We have a prisoner who may know something. He is still alive, but maybe not for long. Come to the hacienda quickly.”

  Guerra was not kidding. The man had been brutally tortured. Using my paramedic skills, I immediately lay him on his one side, knee up in a recovery position, and cleared his mouth and airways of obstructions. He coughed up blood and phlegm. His eyes flickered open.

  “Where is Teresa?” I asked in Spanish.

  He shook his head.

  “You are going to die,” I hissed in his ear. “You and all your family. Your parents, sisters, uncles, cousins, nephews ... anyone with your name. If you tell us where Teresa is, they will live.”

  “My family?”

  “Yes. Otherwise every blood relative will be murdered. They will be gone. Forever.”

  I called Guerra over. “Tell him we will spare his family if he talks. Otherwise we will kill everyone with his surname.”

  “It is so,” said Guerra. “Talk, or your bloodline dies here. We will kill people with your name even if they are in America, Honduras, Guatemala ... anywhere. This is your last chance to tell us.”

  “Tecate ... Policia.”

  He passed out again. This time he did not recover.

  Guerra dialed a number, and from the rapid-fire Spanish, I gathered he was instructing a Tijuana cop to check whether his daughter was being held by the Tecate police. The Sinaloans bankrolled many Tecate cops — but to actually hide a rival cartel boss’s daughter in a station? That was really stretching it.

  Guerra paced the room, waiting for an answer. It came soon enough.

  “Maybe.”

  It appeared that one police station was fully controlled by the cartel. The cop told Guerra that if his daughter was in Tecate, as the tortured man said, she would be there.

  That was all Guerra needed. Within minutes, three trucks loaded with CT militia sped off. Luckily, he didn’t instruct us to join them, wisely considering that Yanqui mercenaries should not attack government institutions. That would be an international incident, forcing the reluctant Mexican government to get involved. It also gave us the time to go outside and phone John Peters.

  “Have you heard about Teresa Guerra?”

  “Narco radio chatter is full of it. But the Sinaloans are denying everything, saying that if they had wanted to kidnap her, they could have done so anytime.”

  “Our info is that she’s being held at a police statio
n in Tecate.”

  “Which one?”

  “Don’t know. Tijuana cops on Guerra’s payroll mentioned there is a station run by the Sinaloans.”

  “That must be east district. Hold on.”

  We heard Peters talking to someone in the background. He came back on the line.

  “That cop station has CCTV. We’re hacking into it. Hold the line.”

  After a couple of minutes, I thought the phone had gone dead. Then Peters’ voice came through.

  “There’s a car leaving in a hurry. Three people in the back. One seems to have long hair. The video quality is bad, but we’re almost certain that it’s Teresa Guerra.”

  “How far can you follow the car?”

  “Just down the street. Fuck ... we’ve lost it. But it was heading west.”

  Carl was about to click off when Peters’ shouted, “Hold on, the army have arrived.”

  “What are they doing?”

  They’ve formed a barrier around the cop station. Looks like they’re expecting trouble.”

  Sure enough, ten minutes later Guerra’s phone rang as he received the same news we had. He was weeping with rage as he ordered his men to return to base. They could not take on the army. At this stage, anyway.

  There was nothing more we could do. We had no idea where Teresa was being taken. And we could not tell Guerra that his daughter had in fact been at the police station, as our intel came from the DEA. The army presence more or less confirmed his suspicions anyway. The CT had annihilated Los Zetas, a cartel initially formed by rogue army officers, so Guerra knew he could not buy off military support even if he tried.

  The CT war room, for want of a better word, was absolute chaos, with everyone at the hacienda giving opinions, pointing to maps, checking if their weapons were loaded, or else swigging tequila. It would have been comical if a woman’s life was not at stake.

  Some order was restored when another man, whom Carl and I discovered was a representative of the CT’s chief ally the Jalisco Cartel, arrived to say that the Sinaloans had been in contact claiming Teresa had been kidnapped by the Mexican government. Why else had she been in a police station?

  “Who said she was in a police station?”

  “It was on the news that the army was protecting the police,” the man said.

  This gave Guerra some food for thought. He phoned his tame Tijuana cop, who denied it was a government operation. It was the Sinaloans, he insisted, who had the Tecate military commander on their payroll. The military had been sent in to prevent the CT from taking over the police station. Teresa had been there all along. The army’s presence confirmed it.

  Guerra’s face turned puce. He was close to breaking point. He called his sicarios, and told Carl and I to join them.

  “How many soldiers do we have?”

  Juan Veloza answered, “About thirty at the hacienda. But we can get more than a hundred if we call in our people from Tijuana. We are also withdrawing soldados from the Geraldo ranchero.”

  “That will take too long. Mobilize every fighting man on the property. We go to the Enrico Guzman hacienda tonight. We destroy the Sinaloan Tecate base. There will be no prisoners.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  THEY WERE WAITING for us. Not just the Sinaloans, but the Mexican army and the rogue Tecate police unit.

  Despite the fact that Guerra had withdrawn his men when confronted by the army at the police station, one of the Sinaloan leaders with a good tactical brain obviously suspected we would return to attack the safe house — the same one where we had caused such devastation a few months ago.

  They ambushed us about a mile from the gates. As Carl and I were in the front Jeep, we took the brunt of the firestorm. That was the bad news.

  The good news was that we were highly trained soldiers, unlike almost everyone else in what became known as the ‘Guerra Rout’, and knew how to respond.

  As soon as we saw army vehicles blocking the road, Carl floored the accelerator and smashed our way through. How we survived that maelstrom of lead, I do not know. Possibly because both of us ducked, whereas the three soldados in the back did not as they tried to fire back. They died instantly.

  The Jeep careered off the road into the scrub as Carl and I flung ourselves clear. We both knew what we had to do. Get away as soon as possible. This was not a battle we could win.

  The men behind weren’t so lucky. Even though we had punched a hole through the deadly crossfire, none of the drivers had the presence of mind to follow us. Instead they instinctively braked, trying to reverse. After a brief but spirited fightback, most of our soldados still alive decided they were not prepared to lose life or limb for a billionaire narco boss. They fled, fortunately for us, in the direction of Tijuana. The Sinaloan attackers gave hot pursuit.

  Carl and I, on the other hand, ran the other way. Towards Tecate. I looked behind to see the Jeep exploding as a ricochet hit the fuel tank. No one would expect survivors from that flaming wreckage.

  We kept up a mile-eating jog for most of the night, arriving at Tecate at about three a.m. We found a gas station, slaked parched throats from a filthy tap hoping like hell the water was filtered, then stole a decrepit pickup.

  The owner obviously didn’t think it was worth stealing as it wasn’t locked. Not that it would have mattered, as we could have ripped the rusty front door off its hinges. It had a quarter of a tank of gas, which was all we needed to get to Mexicali. Well, almost. The noisy engine spluttered and died a few miles short of our destination, but it was as good as we were going to get.

  We lay in the outskirt shrubs of the city, the capital of Baja California, and weighed up our options. The simplest one was to stroll across the border to Calexico. There was a pedestrian crossing, and Carl and I kept our passports on us at all times. It was essential survival gear when running with narcos. Once in Calexico, we could get instructions from Col. Beckenham.

  But Carl was not keen. Virulently so. He was sure Delta would pull us off the mission once we crossed the border as it was now a full-scale cartel war with a significant section of the Mexican army openly supporting the Sinaloans. It was one thing to be undercover investigating cartels as DEA support, quite another for American military personnel to be shooting at a friendly nation’s soldiers. If Delta pulled the plug on us, Teresa’s fate was sealed. With Guerra’s army on the retreat after the recent rout, the Sinaloans would have no further use for her. They would not need to bargain.

  “Teresa is dead without us. But even worse is that Caysee’s killers will never be brought to justice.”

  I nodded. I didn’t like the idea of us being pulled off the case either. Caysee was definitely one of us. We had vowed her death would be avenged, one way or the other. But Teresa?

  Carl saw the doubt on my face. “I’m not leaving her,” he said.

  “What do you have in mind?” I asked.

  “I think you should go back to San Diego and say I was killed in the ambush. That will give me the perfect cover while I find her.”

  “OK, let’s stop right there. I’m not leaving you here alone against the cartels. So what’s the plan?”

  “I’m convinced your initial thinking was right. The Sinaloans want Don Geraldo’s estancia as a new route into California. So they will go there, build a route, and take Teresa with them. If the CT attack the property, the Sinaloans put a gun to her head.”

  I looked skeptical. Carl grabbed my arm. “Think about it.”

  I did. It made sense.

  Even so, it was a long shot, but in Delta, most missions would be called long shots. I have been on at least two rescue raids where we were — at best — only fifty per cent sure hostages were being held. We were right in one of them but the other went horribly wrong. I lost two good friends that night outside Kandahar.

  “Should we let the Unit or DEA know we’re alive?” I asked.

  “No. This way we can play it out how we want. I don’t see Delta buying our Don Geraldo estancia drug-route story anyway.
Even if they do, they’ll hand it over to the DEA. We’ll be called back.”

  There was a tattered straw hat in the stolen pick-up. Carl put it on his head as he looked more Caucasian than me. We were filthy dirty and sweaty, having run for much of the previous night, so didn’t look out of place when I waved down a rural bus with the destination “Tijuana” painted on the windscreen

  Two hours later we stole another barely-roadworthy vehicle at a run-down city car park and drove to our rented cottage in Calafia. There we had a shower, and more importantly, retrieved our weapons stashed under the floorboards — two M4s with four hundred rounds and two Glock 34s with fully-loaded magazines. My credit card came in handy at a store down the road and we stocked up with a week’s worth of provisions. Bizarrely, the supermercado also sold camping equipment, possibly for surfers living rough, so we bought sleeping bags and a butane stove as well.

  Next stop was Don Geraldo’s estancia. It was deserted. All men were now manning battle stations in Tijuana, as my man Esposito had told us a few days ago.

  We drove the stolen car deep into the chaparral, covered it with branches, climbed over the gate, and cautiously approached the main house about a quarter of a mile from the road.

  I use the word ‘house’ lightly. It was just a pile of scorched sand and stone. But at the edge of the garden, about eighty yards away, stood a three bedroomed cottage. I peered in through a window. It was sparsely furnished, although no linen on the beds, and no provisions in the kitchen.

  “It’s not set up for anything, but anyone coming here will use this as a base,” I said. “We need to set up a camp overlooking it.”

  There was a small clearing in the bush under a stunted grove of scrub oak, which was perfect. Carl lit the stove and a can of beans bubbled while I scrounged for pine needles to make a mattress. This was going to be an uncomfortable few days.

  The key advantage of our camp was that it faced the road. Any vehicle headlights would wake us. This meant we did not have to keep watch at night, and Carl and I slept as only soldiers can on rough ground when exhausted. In other words, like babies.