Revenge of the Assassin (Assassin Series 2) Read Free

soldiers activated the low voltage lighting that ran the length of the excavation and noted that it stretched on seemingly forever. Wood and cement blocks supported the walls and ceiling of the passageway, ten feet wide and seven feet high. The rails of the electric trolley gleamed in the light. It was obvious that the system had been in place for some time and was well used.
    A storage room sat just adjacent to the shaft, and when the lock was cut off with a welding torch, five hundred and thirty kilos of cocaine sat neatly packaged in orange plastic, with a distinctive scorpion logo stamped on the outside of each bundle. The room was large enough to accommodate ten times that amount, and there was no question in any of the men’s minds that this was only a few days’ worth of shipments waiting to make their way to the other end of the passage – a small, decrepit warehouse on the U.S. side of the border that ostensibly sold used automobile parts.
    Further examination revealed an advanced ventilation system and numerous battery chargers to keep the trolley rolling, an additional indication that the tunnel was regularly used to move large amounts of contraband into the U.S.. How long it had been in operation was anyone’s guess, but by the looks of some of the debris, it had been years, not months.
     
    The next day’s newspapers on both sides of the border were quick to herald a victory for the anti-drug forces and skimmed over the casualties as well as the obvious fact that many thousands of tons of cocaine and heroin had been making their way across undetected. Nobody was ever connected to the U.S. warehouse, other than a pair of low-level brothers who claimed they only paid the property taxes and utilities and hadn’t been to the building in years. Their case was remanded into the system and would take over a year to be heard in the overcrowded courts. They would ultimately wind up spending less than six months behind bars, along with credit for time served, having no criminal records other than an unrelated burglary from a decade before.
    Twelve marines and Federal Police were killed during the assault, including the helicopter crew – six more were wounded. A total of fourteen cartel gunmen died during the gun battle, with no survivors. Nobody claimed any of the cartel fighters’ corpses, which were buried in a mass grave with no ceremony.
    One month later, two more tunnels were discovered and shut down. By the best estimates over twenty are in operation at any given time – an inevitable fact of life in an environment where a laborer who works to excavate the tunnel makes five to seven dollars a day, and a kilo of cocaine that costs two thousand dollars in Colombia wholesales for twenty-five to thirty on the U.S. side of the border.
     
    ~
     
    One Week Ago, 80 miles west of Ixtapa, Mexico. 11:18 p.m.
     
    Six-foot swells with frothing white crests surged relentlessly from the northwest, driven by a twenty knot wind. The cloudy night’s crescent moon scarcely illuminated the inky water’s surface, its roiling unbroken except for the battered steel hull of an aged seventy-five-foot shrimp boat lurching against the waves’ pounding.
    El Cabrito had departed Mazatlán two weeks before and had plied her way down the Pacific coast at a dismally slow eight knots, under way twenty-four hours a day until she arrived in the warmer waters off the coast of Zihuatanejo. There, she’d worked the nets, accumulating what she could by way of catch as she waited for her true cargo to arrive.
    Her gray paint was ravaged by sea salt; patches of rust bled through along the waterline, signaling that soon it would be time to haul her out and weld new steel plates where corrosion had taken its toll. The topsides were slick from the windy spray, and the crew was inside below decks, waiting for the signal that they were needed. The captain, Mario, a thirty year veteran of the coastal waters, puffed on a hand-rolled cigarette as he