Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Doom
We leave the compound a few minutes before two in the morning.
Four bikes, two trucks.
Python's running point because Amara doesn't send prospects into cartel territory without a patched member at the wheel, and Python's the kind of man who treats bloodshed like a trade skill.
Zorro rides beside him. Brick and I are in the first truck with Ramiro, one of Alejandro’s men, behind the wheel.
Rooster's in the second truck with Ismael and César, two more of Alejandro’s men.
Amara pulled in her uncle on this op, since Mateo has an established working relationship with him.
The road from Chihuahua to Juárez is four hours of desert highway and not much else—scrub brush and sand and the occasional cluster of lights from a town too small to have a name on a map.
Nobody talks.
Ramiro drives with his left hand on the wheel and his right resting on the Beretta in his lap.
Brick sits in the back seat with the med kit between his boots, running through the supply list in his head the way he does before anything that might involve blood.
I can see his lips moving in the rearview.
Inventory. Gauze, saline, tourniquets, the Narcan he packed in case whatever Diego's pumping into Mateo includes opioids.
I'm in the passenger seat with the satellite images on my thighs, but I don't need them anymore.
I've had the compound layout memorized for a week.
Every fence line, every camera angle, every rotation pattern.
The blind spot on the southwest corner where the dry wash meets the chain-link. The cinder block building in the center with the generator humming behind it.
Fourteen minutes. That's the roving patrol's cycle on the north side.
We've got a fourteen-minute window between passes, and inside that window we need to cut the fence, cross forty yards of open ground, breach the building, find Mateo, and get out.
The desert sky is enormous, black, and loaded with stars.
The Sierra Madre is a dark ridge line on the western horizon.
The truck's headlights cut a narrow tunnel through the darkness, and the engine drones steady beneath us.
My hands are still. My breathing is even. My heart rate is exactly where I want it. This is what I'm built for.
The plan, the approach, the execution.
I've done it before—eleven men in one night, a lifetime ago, for reasons that still wake me up at odd hours.
Tonight I'm doing it for good reasons as well, with better men beside me, and the difference between then and now is a club patch I haven't earned yet and people who actually give a damn whether I come home.
We pull off the highway twenty miles south of Juárez and kill the headlights.
The trucks idle onto a dirt road that Ramiro seems to know by feel, navigating ruts and washouts in near-total darkness.
The bikes are already parked behind a rock formation a quarter mile from the compound.
Python and Zorro are crouched beside them, checking weapons.
"South approach?" Python asks when we reach him. He doesn't waste words either.
"Same as the brief." I kneel and spread the satellite image on the hood of the truck, using my phone's red-light mode to illuminate it.
"Wash runs along here. Fence is chain-link, standard gauge, no razor wire on the south face.
Bolt cutters get us through in under thirty seconds.
Patrol hits the north side on a fourteen-minute loop—he passed the northeast corner on Tuesday, so if he's consistent, we've got our window. "
"And if he's not consistent?" Zorro adjusts the strap on his AR.
"Then we adapt. But he will be. Bored men on repetitive patrol routes don't innovate. They walk the same path because their feet remember it."
Python looks at me for a few moments. I hold it and he nods once.
"Ramiro, César—you've got the east gate. Don't engage unless they engage. Ismael, you're on the trucks. Engines running, lights off. If we come out hot, we need to move."
He turns to us. "Doom, Brick, Rooster—you're with me and Zorro through the south fence. Doom's on point since he's laid the groundwork. Brick, you're on Mateo the second we find him. Rooster, you cover our exit."
"Zorro and I handle whoever's inside," Python finishes. "Prospects don't engage unless I say so. Clear?"
"Clear," the three of us say.
It's not entirely true.
If someone's shooting at me, I'm shooting back whether Python authorizes it or not.
But the chain of command matters, and I respect it even when it isn’t what I want to do.
We gear up. Kevlar under our shirts. Sidearms, suppressors, bolt cutters, zip ties.
Brick straps the med kit across his chest.
I tighten my red bandana around my head and check the magazine on the Sig Sauer I've been carrying since Montana.
After everyone is settled, we move.
The wash is deeper than I expected.
Four feet of dry riverbed carved into the desert floor, the sandy bottom littered with rocks and dead brush.
Good. The depth means we're below the sight line of anyone standing at ground level inside the compound.
We move single file—me, Python, Zorro, Brick, Rooster—crouched low, boots crunching softly on the packed sand.
The compound wall comes into view fifty yards ahead. Chain-link, eight feet, no razor wire on this face.
Beyond it, the compound is dark except for a floodlight on the east gate and the faint glow from the cinder block building in the center.
The generator hum is louder now—a low, steady drone that vibrates in my back teeth.
I hold up a fist and everyone stops.
I check my watch. The patrol should be rounding the northeast corner right now. We've got fourteen minutes.
I signal Python. He nods. We go.
The bolt cutters bite through the chain-link like it's paper.
I peel the fence back and hold it while Python, Zorro, Brick, and Rooster slip through.
I follow, letting the cut section spring back into place behind us. From a distance, it'll look intact.
Forty yards of open ground between the fence and the building.
No cover.
The dirt is packed hard, cracked from the heat, our boots barely making a sound.
Python moves fast for a big man, staying low, his AR tucked against his shoulder. Zorro mirrors him on the left flank.
We reach the building wall and press flat against the cinder block.
The concrete is still warm from yesterday's sun.
I can hear the generator clearly now, chugging away on the far side, and beneath it, faintly, the sound of a television playing.
Someone's watching something inside.
Python signals. He and Zorro take the door.
It's unlocked. Sloppy, but Diego's always been arrogant. He's held Mateo for months without interference. He thinks he's untouchable.
Python goes in first. Low, fast, sweeping left. Zorro sweeps right.
Two men in the front room.
One's sitting in a folding chair watching fútbol on a small TV propped on a crate. He's got a plate of food balanced on his knee and an AK-47 leaning against the wall four feet away.
He doesn't make it to the rifle.
Python is on him before the plate hits the floor, driving him face-first into the concrete, zip-tying his wrists behind his back while Zorro jams a knee into the man's spine.
The second is coming out of a side room, still zipping his pants.
Zorro clotheslines him in the doorway. The man's head bounces off the door frame and he drops. Zip ties. Done.
Both down in under ten seconds. Neither one fired a shot.
Python straightens up and signals us in.
Brick moves past me immediately, already scanning the space.
Two rooms are visible from here—the front room where the guards were, and a hallway leading deeper into the building.
The hallway has one door. Padlocked.
Bolt cutters again. The padlock drops to the floor with a heavy clank and Brick pushes the door open.
The smell hits first.
Blood and urine.
The sour, chemical stink of whatever's been pumped through the IV line hanging from a hook screwed into the wall.
The room is maybe ten by ten, cinder block, no windows.
A bare bulb overhead, buzzing.
And in the center of the room, a man in a chair who barely looks human anymore.
Mateo Torres.
His wrists are zip-tied to the armrests.
His head is hanging forward, chin on his chest.
He's wearing the same clothes he was probably wearing when Diego took him—dress shirt, slacks—except they're stained and torn and hanging off a body that's dropped at least thirty pounds.
His face is what stops me.
Left eye swollen shut completely, the skin around it a deep purple that's gone yellow at the edges—old bruising, days old, which means they've been hitting him regularly.
His lip is split in two places, one wound fresh and still crusted with dark blood, the other scarred over and reopened like someone keeps catching the same spot.
There's dried blood in his hairline and down the side of his neck.
His cheekbone on the right side looks wrong. Not broken, maybe, but close. The kind of swelling that says something cracked underneath.
This isn’t just a random prisoner. It’s Imani's father.
This is the man who ran the Torres organization, who sat across from Alejandro Ramirez as an equal, who sent his daughter to Harvard because he wanted better for her than what he built.
And for months, he's been strapped to this chair in a room that smells like piss and blood while the man he trusted most in the world pumped him full of sedatives and beat him when he surfaced.
The IV bag is half-empty, the line taped to his forearm with medical tape that's peeling at the edges.
Brick is already beside him, fingers on his carotid, checking the pulse.
"He's alive," Brick says. His voice is steady, but his hands aren't. "Pulse is slow. Respiration's shallow. Whatever they've got him on, it's keeping him under." He examines the IV bag, squinting at the label. "Midazolam. High dose. He's been sedated for a long time."
"Can you bring him around?" Python asks from the doorway, where he's keeping watch down the hall.