Against All Enemies Read online

  Corrales had just bought the hotel a few months prior and was in the process of having it completely renovated—paint, carpeting, furniture, everything. He wished his parents could see him now. “I don’t work here,” he would have told them. “I own the place.”

  The building was only four stories, and they had only about forty rooms. He intended to make at least ten of them “luxury” suites, within which he would entertain more important clients. He’d had a little trouble finding engineers, since most of the best ones were being employed in the tunneling operations along the border. He found that ironic. The plumbers and drywallers were already on the job. He hired an interior designer from San Diego, and Maria had talked him into bringing on a friend and real estate agent who practiced feng shui so they could get the “energy” aligned in every room. That made Maria happy, so he’d agreed without rolling his eyes.

  He drove out along Manuel Gómez Morín, following the wide road along the border until he reached a small neighborhood of town homes whose driveways lay behind tall, wrought-iron gates and whose windows were protected by similar bars. These were newer homes, with tiled roofs and high-end bulletproof touring sedans parked in the driveways. Most residents were members of the cartel or relatives of members. Corrales reached a cul-de-sac, wheeled around, and waited. Finally, Raúl and Pablo appeared from one doorway and hopped into the Escalade, both wearing tailored slacks, shirts, and leather jackets.

  “Let’s make a statement tonight,” said Corrales. “Are the other four assholes ready?”

  “Yes,” answered Pablo. “No problem.”

  “That’s what you said last time,” Corrales reminded him. He was referring to the hotel in Nogales, where they’d gone after the second of Zúñiga’s spies, but the man had escaped. They’d dumped the body of the first on the doorstep of a house they knew Zúñiga owned in Nogales, but they hadn’t heard anything from the man since. Ernesto Zúñiga, aka “El Matador,” had homes in many cities throughout Mexico, and he’d recently built a ranch house in the foothills southwest of Juárez. It was a four-thousand-square-foot residence with a brick-paver driveway and security gates and cameras, as well as men posted outside and throughout the foothills.

  There was no sneaking up on the place, and Corrales didn’t care about that. The point was for their rival to know they were there—and to send him an unforgettable message.

  Corrales had spent the last few years studying Zúñiga, his men, his operation, and his history. You kept your enemies closer than your friends, of course, and Corrales frequently lectured new sicarios about how cunning and deadly the Sinaloa Cartel was and continued to be.

  Zúñiga himself was the fifty-two-year-old son of a cattle rancher and was born in La Tuna near Badiraguato, Mexico. He’d sold citrus as a kid, and rumor had it that he was growing opium poppy on his father’s ranch by the time he was eighteen. Zúñiga’s father and uncle helped him get a job working for the Sinaloa Cartel as a truck driver, and he’d spent the better part of his twenties helping to transport marijuana and cocaine to their destinations within Mexico.

  By the time he was thirty, he’d impressed his bosses enough to be put in charge of all shipments moving from the Sierra to the cities and border. He was one of the first men to use planes to transport cocaine directly into the United States, and he coordinated all boat arrivals of coke. He began establishing command-and-control centers throughout the country and often engaged in operations to rip off other cartel shipments en route. The Juárez Cartel had been robbed by his men on no less than twelve occasions.

  A massive undercover operation in the 1990s, one spearheaded by the Federal Police, left the Sinaloa Cartel without a leader, and Zúñiga easily filled those shoes. He married a nineteen-year-old soap-opera star, and fathered two children with her, but the boys and wife were executed following his theft of two million dollars’ worth of Juárez Cartel cocaine. Zúñiga sent a thousand red roses to the funeral but did not appear himself—and that was a smart decision. He would have been summarily executed by Juárez members waiting near the funeral home and church.

  Corrales had dreams of launching a military-style attack on Zúñiga’s house with rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns, and a Javelin missile that would race upward like a flare, arc higher, then roll to make a top-down strike on the man’s roof, obliterating him and his little palace in one burst, like a star exploding. He’d watched that weapon in use on the Discovery Channel.

  However, as his superiors pointed out, Corrales’s attacks must remain very small in scale, just enough to give Zúñiga pause until they received permission to make a bold move and attack the man head-on. It was also true that if they took Zúñiga alive, they could more easily confiscate his assets and take over his entire smuggling operation by torturing the details out of him. When Corrales had asked why they couldn’t attack yet, all he got were vague replies about timing and politics, so he decided to carry out a few small plans of his own.

  Corrales drove his men out to the demolition site of an old apartment building, which now lay in heaps of concrete blocks and stucco, with wooden struts jutting up into the night like fangs. They parked, ventured around the first two piles, and found their four new recruits holding two other men at gunpoint. None of the recruits was older than twenty, all wearing baggy pants and T-shirts, two of them heavily tattooed. The two men they were holding were similarly dressed, and both had thick tufts of hair under their lips.

  “Great work,” said Corrales to the men. “I really thought you’d fuck this up.”

  One lanky kid with a giraffe’s neck shot Corrales the evil eye. “These bitches were easy to catch. You have to give us more credit, you know.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yeah,” spat the punk. “It is.”

  Corrales walked up to the man, studied him, then asked, “Let me see your gun.”

  The kid frowned but handed it to Corrales, who abruptly stepped back and shot the asshole in the foot. He gave a bloodcurdling cry, and the other three punks visibly trembled. One pissed his pants.

  The two guys they had captured started crying as Corrales whirled to face them and groaned, “Shut up.” Then he shot each man in the head.

  The impact wrenched them back, and they fell, lifeless, onto the dust-caked ground.

  Corrales sighed. “All right, let’s get to work.”

  He faced the kid he’d shot in the foot. “It’s too bad you have so much attitude. We could’ve used you.”

  Corrales raised the pistol, answered by the kid raising his hand and screaming. The gunshot silenced that terrible noise, and Corrales took another deep breath and raised his brows at the others. “Five minutes.”

  They drove immediately to Zúñiga’s place, reached the front gates, and were about to be accosted by two security men who were approaching. Corrales’s remaining recruits dragged the bodies of the captured men and dumped them near the gate. Then Corrales hit the gas and drove back down the dirt road, only to slow a moment as the guards called in backup, and four men opened the gates and shifted out to examine the bodies.

  Corrales watched them from the rearview mirror, and once they were in close enough, he lifted the remote detonator and thumbed the button.

  His men began hollering as the explosion shook the ground, blew off the front gates, and swallowed the security guys in a fireball that rose like a mushroom cloud.

  “We told him to keep his men away from the border, or things would get worse,” Corrales said, for the benefit of his group. “You see what happens? He doesn’t pay attention. Maybe now he will wake up …”

  At the bottom of the hill, a dark sedan approached, and Corrales slowed, then stopped beside the car, lowering his darkly tinted window. The other driver did likewise, and Corrales smiled at the leonine man with gray hair and thick mustache who was just lowering a walkie-talkie.

  “Dante, I thought we had an agreement.”

  “I’m sorry, Alberto, but you broke your promise, too.” Corrales
tilted his head back toward the rising smoke on the mountainside. “We caught two more trying to blow one of our tunnels, and they had to be dealt with. You promised me you would help keep them away.”

  “This I did not know.”

  “Well, that’s a problem. Are your men too afraid to help now? Are they?”

  “No. I’ll look into this.”

  “I hope so.”

  Alberto sighed in frustration. “Look, when you do this, you make it very difficult for me.”

  “I know, but this is something that will pass.”

  “You always say that.”

  “It’s always true.”

  “All right. Go now, before the other units arrive. How many this time?”

  “Only two.”

  “Okay …”

  Corrales nodded and floored it, kicking up dust in their wake.

  Alberto Gómez was an inspector with the Mexican Federal Police with more than twenty-five years of service. For nearly twenty of those years he had been on the payroll of one cartel or another, and as he neared retirement, Corrales had witnessed him grow more cranky and annoyingly cautious. The inspector’s usefulness was drawing to an end, but for now Corrales would use the man because he continued to recruit others within his ranks. The Federal Police would help them finally crush the Sinaloa Cartel. It was good public relations for them and good business for the cartel.

  “What are we doing now?” asked Pablo.

  Corrales looked at him. “A drink to celebrate.”

  “Can I ask you something?” Raúl began, nervously stroking his thin beard in the backseat.

  “What now?” Corrales fired back with a groan.

  “You shot that guy. He might’ve been a good man. He had attitude. But we all did—especially in the beginning. Is something bothering you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, are you, I don’t know …mad about something?”

  “You think I’m taking out some anger on these punks?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Let me tell you something, Raúl. I’m only twenty-four years old, but even I can see it. These punks today lack the respect that our fathers had, the respect that we should still have.”

  “But you told us that there weren’t any more lines, that everyone was fair game: mothers, children, everyone. You said we had to hit them as hard as they hit us.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, then, I guess I’m confused.”

  “Just shut up, Raúl!” Pablo told him. “You’re an idiot. He’s saying we have to respect our elders and each other, but not our enemies, right, Dante?”

  “We have to respect how deadly our enemies can be.”

  “And that means we have to rip their hearts out and shove them down their throats,” said Pablo. “See?”

  “That guy could’ve been useful,” said Raúl. “That’s all I’m saying. We could’ve used a punk with a big mouth.”

  “A guy like you?” Corrales asked Raúl.

  “No, sir.”

  Corrales studied Raúl in the rearview mirror. His eyes had grown glassy, and he kept flicking his gaze toward the window, as though he wanted to escape.

  Now Corrales lifted his voice. “Raúl, I’ll tell you something …a guy like that cannot be trusted. If he mouths off to his boss, you know he’s always thinking about himself first.”

  Raúl nodded.

  And Corrales let his statement hang. The punk he’d shot was indeed a lot like him—

  Because he, too, could not be trusted. He would never forget that while he worked for this cartel, his parents’ blood was still on their hands.

  INDOC AND BUD/S

  Naval Special Warfare Center

  Coronado, California

  ON A COLD NIGHT in October 1994, Maxwell Steven Moore was lying on his bunk in the special warfare barracks, a few seconds away from becoming a quitter at a place where men never said “quit.” In fact, if the word took root in your psyche, then you weren’t a Navy SEAL in the first place. Getting through BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training would forever change the eighteen-year-old’s life. It had meant everything to him.

  But he couldn’t go on.

  The journey had started nearly two months prior when he’d arrived at the Naval Special Warfare Center to begin the INDOC course. The class’s proctor, the leather-faced Jack Killian, whose eyes were too narrow to read and whose shoulders seemed molded into a singular piece of muscle, had addressed Moore’s class with an oft-heard question at Coronado: “So I heard you boys want to be Frogmen?”

  “Hooyah!” they responded in unison.

  “Well, you’ll have to get through me first. Drop!”

  Moore and the rest of class 198, some 123 candidates in all, hit the beach and began their push-ups. Since they were still only candidates, they were not yet permitted to exercise on the hallowed blacktop square of the BUD/S “grinder,” where only those who’d made it through INDOC could perform their calisthenics and other assorted forms of physical torture that were part of BUD/S training First Phase—seven weeks designed to test a man’s physical conditioning, water competency, commitment to teamwork, and mental tenacity. No man would begin First Phase without passing the two-week-long INDOC course. The initial endurance test included the following:

  A five-hundred-yard swim using breaststroke and/or sidestroke in less than twelve minutes and thirty seconds

  A minimum of forty-two push-ups in two minutes

  A minimum of fifty sit-ups in two minutes

  A minimum of six dead-hang pull-ups (no time limit)

  A run for 1.5 miles wearing long pants and boots in less than eleven minutes

  While Moore’s upper-body strength still needed work, he excelled in both the swim and the run, routinely beating his classmates by wide margins. It was during this time that Moore was introduced to the concept of a “swim buddy” and the tenet that you never leave your swim buddy alone and that no man, alive or dead, is ever left behind. “You will never be alone. Ever,” Killian had told them. “If you ever leave your swim buddy, the punishment will be severe. Severe!”

  Moore’s swim buddy was Frank Carmichael, a sandy-haired, blue-eyed kid easily mistaken for a surfer dude. He had an easy grin and spoke in a laid-back cadence that had Moore doubting this guy could ever become a SEAL. Carmichael had grown up in San Diego and had traveled a similar path to INDOC as Moore had, going to boot camp, then being recommended for the SEAL program. He said he wished he’d gone to Annapolis and become a member of the Canoe Club, the nickname given to the Naval Academy, but he’d goofed off too much at Morse High School and his grades weren’t competitive enough for admission. He hadn’t even bothered getting into JROTC. There were a number of other candidates who were officers—Annapolis graduates, guys who’d come out of Officer Candidate School as O-1 ensigns, and even those who’d served in the fleet for a while. BUD/S, however, leveled the playing field—every candidate had to pass the same tests, no special treatment for officers.

  Moore and Carmichael hit it off immediately, middle-class guys who were trying to do something extraordinary with their lives. They suffered together through the four-mile beach runs they had to complete in less than thirty-two minutes. Killian seemed to punctuate every command with the phrase “Get wet and sandy.” The entire class would rush down into the freezing surf, come out, roll around in the sand, then, standing there like mummies, like the undead, they’d be sent into their next evolution. They learned immediately that you ran everywhere, including a mile each way to the chow hall.

  This was 1994, the year Time magazine described the Internet as a “strange new world.” Moore griped that today’s candidates could get on the Web and learn ten times as much about their upcoming training than Moore could back in those days. Today’s crop could review websites dedicated to BUD/S, watch streaming videos and slickly produced Discovery Channel specials. All Moore and his buddies had had were the tall tales passed on from previous classes,
the rumors and warnings about the unspeakable horrors to come posted on a few newsgroups. Hyperbole? In some cases, yes, but Moore and Carmichael had faced their challenges with hardly as much preparation as the current group did.

  Of all the training evolutions they went through during INDOC, Moore enjoyed the swimming work the most. They taught him how to kick, stroke, and glide, and to, above all, make the water his home. This was where the SEALs excelled over other branches of the service. The intel they gathered by being stealthy in the water assisted Marines and many other combatants. He learned to tie complex naval knots while submerged and did not panic when his hands were bound behind his back during the drown-proofing test. He relaxed, swam up to the surface, took his breath, came back down, and repeated the process, while several members of the Canoe Club near him freaked out and DORed right there. Moore’s reaction to that was to demonstrate just the opposite to his instructors, who were floating around him in their scuba gear, waiting for him to panic. He lowered himself to the bottom of the pool and held his breath—

  For nearly five minutes.

  One instructor came up to him with bug eyes enlarged by his mask and motioned for Moore to get back to the surface. He smiled, waited a few seconds more, then swam up and took his breath. He’d learned to increase his anaerobic tolerance by doing running and swim sprints, and he’d felt certain he could hold his breath even longer than that.

  Killian learned of the “stunt,” and warned Moore not to try that again. But he’d winked when he’d said it.

  The underwater fifty-meter swim proved interesting for many guys. Killian concluded his description of the test with the following: “And don’t worry—when you pass out, we will revive you.” But Moore did the fifty meters and then some, gliding through the water as though he’d always belonged there, a Frogman through and through. Carmichael told him that even a few of the instructors had cursed in awe.