Into the evening, Raul enjoyed his place in the spotlight amongst his peers, as news of his exploit circulated. As much as he enjoyed the adulation, a part of him knew that the hubris that came from being the best was a fickle charm, so he resolved to enjoy it for now, because it would be the last time he allowed others to get a glimpse of what he could actually do. Information was power, and allowing, no, inviting others to understand his capabilities was foolhardy.
His goal was to drain what experience he could from the service and then slip away like a ghost. It would serve no useful purpose to be noticed any more than he already had been. From that point on he would adopt a lower profile and continue to accumulate the pearls of experience until his work there was done. He calculated that another three months of training and perhaps six months in the field would be sufficient, making for a total of a year and a half of his life devoted to the pursuit of excellence with Mexico’s finest.
That night, as he lay his head upon his bunk, he began a silent mental countdown.
To when he could begin his new, new life.
Patience, he told himself, was a virtue that would pay enormous dividends – it became his bedtime mantra. He needed to maximize his learning while he was still in school. That’s how he viewed his life to the point he’d arrived at – it was his education. The time would soon come when the pupil proved himself to be the master, but for now, he had lessons to absorb. He still wanted to master parachuting – not jumping out of planes and controlling his descent, but rather precision-guiding his drop to within a meter of his target point. And he still needed more hours of scuba time, as well as some orientation on flying planes and helicopters. The latter two weren’t on the curriculum, but he was lobbying to get them added. You could never know too much.
With visions of his future cascading through his awareness, he slowly drifted off to sleep, his day’s toil finally at an end.
Chapter 5
Ten and a half years ago .
The battered, rusting hull of the freighter ground against the old tires fastened to the concrete dock at one of the more remote cargo offloading piers on Veracruz harbor. Flying a Panamanian flag, Caruso was at least forty years old, and had made the long trip from South America countless times. The dark green paint on her dented steel sides bubbled at the rivets from underlying rust. She looked to be on her last legs, as did many of the freighters that made their way into the busy deep water port. She was manifested as delivering coffee and bananas from Colombia, which was largely true, although the money-making haul was the ten tons of cocaine stashed in the specially-constructed compartments in her lower hold, which to cursory inspection appeared to be the floor of the cargo area inside the hull. Even if a nosy customs inspector had cared to pry open one of the scarred hatches, all he would have found was what appeared to be the slimy metal lining of the waterlogged bilge. It was an ingenious design; the modifications had taken place at a discreet shipyard in Colon, Panama while other refits were being attended to.
A veteran of the ongoing, frequent trade between South America and Mexico, Caruso was just one of thousands of ships that offloaded cargo each year in Veracruz, the principal importation hub for Eastern Mexico. Under normal circumstances she would have rendezvoused with a commercial fishing boat out in the Gulf of Mexico to transfer her illicit wares, well away from prying eyes, but the shrimper that had been their scheduled drop-off had experienced engine problems eighty miles en-route, so the hook-up had been cancelled. That had left the captain with two choices – toss ten tons of cocaine overboard and lose the shipment and his tidy slice of the profits, or hope that the receiving group could arrange for an alternative offloading plan while the ship was laid over in Veracruz for two days. Worst case, she could steam out, supposedly empty, on her way back to Colombia for more fruit and java, and meet with another boat; but every minute Caruso sat in the harbor she was in jeopardy.
Particularly tonight, when La Familia, a rival splinter faction of the Gulf cartel, had decided to use the Mexican marines as a vehicle to cause their competitors grief, by tipping law enforcement off to the shipment. It was not unusual for the cartels to exchange information with the military or the police to create problems for their enemies – most of the drug seizures that took place did so because of the constant infighting and jockeying for advantage that was a routine aspect of the trade. It was far more ergonomic to use the military’s muscle instead of your own, and if the rivals got into a firefight in the process, so much the better.
The marines had long been considered the only incorruptible branch of the military. The army was notoriously riddled with rot but the marines, for whatever reason, couldn’t be bought off, and so were the most feared of the law enforcement branches. In Mexico, the army and navy worked alongside the police and Federales for internal security, which included battling the drug cartels, especially since the recent reorganization into more specialized groups. It hadn’t been broadly publicized, but since 2000, when Vincente Fox became president of Mexico, the country had been embroiled in a de facto civil war, with the cartels having far greater resources than the army and navy. The total budget for the army was less than a percent of GDP, which put it at considerably under a billion dollars. Contrast that to the over fifty billion dollars per year in wholesale value of cocaine that moved through the cartels. At an eighty to ninety percent margin, that left the narcotraficantes with vastly greater resources than the army.
Since the Mexicans had taken over cocaine trafficking for the Colombians, and begun manufacturing methamphetamines in earnest, the money had gotten crazy. Mexico found itself in much the same situation Colombia had faced in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was routine for judges, police chiefs and army generals to be executed en masse by the Colombian cartels, or rather their armed enforcers; the myriad purportedly revolutionary groups that controlled half the country and increasingly acted as armies for the cartels.
The lion’s share of the profits had shifted from Colombia to Mexico as Colombia contented itself with the far lower-risk and less violent business of production, leaving the transport and distribution to their better-positioned Mexican associates. The profits in Colombia were still significant, with one to two hundred percent markup to the Mexicans, but the margin in trafficking was five to tenfold. A kilo of cocaine that cost the Mexicans twenty-five hundred to three-thousand dollars in Colombia would fetch twenty-five thousand a kilo wholesale across the U.S. border, and that was usually significantly cut with buffering agents in order to dilute the nearly pure cocaine, thereby increasing the apparent quantity once repackaged for the States; so in actuality it was more like an effective thirty to thirty-five thousand sale price for that original kilo by the end of the day.
The incredible margins were a direct function of the illegality of the substances in the target market – the United States. As with alcohol margins during the ill-fated experiment of Prohibition in the 1930s, criminalization of drugs turned what would have been a five percent profit business into a thousand or more percent trade, which created windfall profits for everyone in the supply chain and also created a situation where every aspect was worth killing for. There were no open gun battles over cigarette profits or alcohol profits because once a substance was legal, the efficiencies of the distribution chains kicked in and it became a boring commercial enterprise. But keeping the substances illegal, especially since they were in huge demand, caused profits to go through the roof.