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.
10 INDOC AND BUD/S
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.