Two years ago
WHILE ALL THE other girls in kindergarten would doodle pictures of ponies and rainbows, I would draw myself parachuting out of helicopters and landing on dictators. My little stick figure would karate-kick twelve other stick figures, somehow making them explode in the process, and then I’d aim my portable missile at the obvious target: a dragon.
Nearly thirty years later, I’d be a Marine Corps colonel riding on a Huey. The only difference between the girl in my crayon drawings and the real me is that I didn’t have a parachute, I’d use rope. And the dragon caught in my crosshairs wasn’t a big lizard with wings—he was a little lizard with total dominance over the US–Mexican narcotics trade.
His name was Diego Correra.
We were midflight, northwest of Diego’s location, which was a compound tucked in the outskirts of a Mexican town called Matamoros. It was nearly midnight. Dark. Hot. Damp. Eighteen members of my platoon were riding in three separate Bell Huey helicopters. Flying low enough to read road signs and fast enough not to bother.
I scanned the terrain below using the scope on my M16. The goal was to spot anyone who might be on a rooftop with heavy weaponry. Was I scared? No. Was I lying to myself about not being scared? Yes.
We’d been hunting Diego Correra for three years. I personally had been assigned to six different raids on his drug fields and had been introduced to his legendary “business etiquette” firsthand. Yet I never got the pleasure of introducing him to my M16.
Our helicopters banked left. We were avoiding the city’s population. It was a sizable town but not sizable enough that the growl of a chopper would go unnoticed.
The entirety of our intel came from an anonymous source who divulged only a single detail about himself: his name was the Fat Man. We knew nothing else about him. We had no idea if he was a defector from Correra’s cartel or if he was the governor of Maine. Fat Man? I pictured a bloated, balding car salesman with crusted mustard on his tie, running to pay-phone booths with borrowed quarters to call me.
This morning he gave us the best news we’ve ever had. “Correra is in Matamoros. Tonight.”
Two hours later, we were airborne. I kissed my kids good-bye and tried super hard to seem like a normal mom.
I’m not, though.
There are three main things that can go wrong while jumping out of a helicopter. You could get shot before you jump. You could get shot while actually falling. You could get shot after you complete your fall.
On this mission, we didn’t anticipate there would be a fourth thing that could go wrong: your enemy kicks your teeth in.
I had on heat-protective gloves, but I let my boots absorb the majority of the work. I pinched the cord with the arch of one foot against the instep of the other. I don’t know how the friction didn’t cause a small forest fire, but, honestly, my boots have never shown signs of burn. Credit the US Marine Corps for that. Or me eating salads.
The ground greeted me like a speeding truck. Wham. Release, roll, get to position, crouch, aim, hold. Lieutenant Rita Ramirez hit the field second, taking front watch. She was my no-nonsense assistant team leader, so she’d be the caboose once our human caravan got going. Sergeant Kyra Holmes, the best navigator and the best shot, led on point as our sniper. My allies; my two best friends.
I’d never had less intel on a situation, and it was making me an anxious wreck, but my job as colonel was to win the Academy Award for seeming nonwrecked. The shrubbery up ahead was starting to afford us a view as we approached it. I could see the backyard of Diego’s compound in front of us.
Showtime.
In general, this hombre used two to three roaming guards even when he was the visitor to a location. I’d have loved to believe these men would be his worst troops: the ones who drew the short straws and had to take the graveyard shift by obligation, the majority of their thoughts on whatever discount porn they might be missing out on.
But that’s a dangerous assumption. These could be his best soldiers.
We divided into our three teams: two to engage from the sides and one to come over the back wall. Alpha Team, Bravo Team, Charlie Team.
Rita and I took Alpha toward the driveway.
Quiet and invisible. Those are the golden adjectives. We moved with as much silence as our boots would allow. No scuffling. No talking. Moving along routes that yield as much visual cover as possible. Bracing ourselves for the most complicated phase.
The entry.
Ideally, you fast rope directly onto a target, but Diego had used RPGs in the past: rocket-propelled grenades. So, no, the prospect of hovering in the air like a noisy piñata while angry men with rockets watched you from below was not desirable. Fifteen seconds up there would be an eternity. Too much potentially bad luck involved. No thanks.
My platoon didn’t like bad luck. My platoon didn’t even like good luck. We preferred drawing up two hundred different football-style diagrams with X’s and O’s, staring at maps and sketches, and letting everyone verbally shoot holes at our plans until we found one plan that seemed logistically bullet-proof.
We passed quietly through the gate. And we arrived in the courtyard.
Already? Wait a second. This breach took no effort.
Oddly, this was the first sign that things were about to go horribly wrong.
The place was fully abandoned. From above, the compound looked like a normal set of buildings, but here at ground level, you could see this interior was hollow. Literally hollow.
Another group had already met us from the far end of their horseshoe-shaped journey. Bravo Team. We were all kind of staring at each other through a very empty structure: just some pillars and an old house with zero furniture.
“Bravo clear,” said the Bravo Team Leader from a back room.
My heart sank.
“Charlie clear,” said the Charlie Team Leader. Charlie had already arrived from the middle.
Is this over?
“Alpha clear,” I said, barely able to hide the disappointment in my voice. I wasn’t getting nominated for that Oscar anytime soon. My platoon quickly began to scour the complex. There was nobody here.
Was the Fat Man lying?
And then Kyra found the first sign of what was to come: Blood. Lots of it.
I was thinking we had just executed the biggest failure ever. I was wrong. The failure was just getting started.
DIEGO CORRERA WAS much more evasive than our mission budgets could handle. Some of our top Pentagon brass said he’s just not qualified to be a priority, but during his rise to glory he butchered nearly twenty-nine hundred human beings, most of them innocent citizens, many of whom were children, with the worst aspect being how he did it.
It’s a process he lovingly calls El Padron.
The first time I saw photos of El Padron, I threw up. I thought I’d seen it all. I’d been on over fifty missions in twelve years and led combat action in five different nation states, but I’d never seen anything as harsh as El Padron. It’s like the guy was setting a world record for the most disturbing usage of pliers.
And there in that empty compound in Matamoros, I was about to get my first personal taste of it.
“Fat Man, this is Spider Actual. Do you copy?” I tried my radio on the off-chance that the Fat Man was patched in. “Fat Man, you there?”
He wasn’t.
Kyra had blood on her sleeve from brushing up against a dark wall that was absolutely drenched with it. Fresh, bright red.
I began making my way to the roof of Diego’s compound. Something was wrong here. Very wrong. Yes, it’s possible that Diego was tipped off ahead of time, but, beyond my annoyance at being evaded, there was a growing unrest in me. How can this place be literally empty?
“Fat Man, do you copy?” I said again as I climbed up the courtyard wall, grabbing a rain gutter to pull myself up to the roof of the compound. My goal was to scout the town from a high position. There would be a decent vantage point up there. I needed to at least “feel” the visual, to satiate my nagging need to see that there was nothing to see.
There atop the second story, I raised my M16 and scoped the horizon with its sight lens. “Fat Man, come in.” I was hoping to snoop around whatever was visible a half mile down the main road.
I wouldn’t need to look that far.
El Padron.
It was on our front porch.
The “message” was set up for us in front of the compound. At first I saw only one. But then I saw another and another. And by the time Rita joined me, there were twenty-three to behold.
Police officers.
All dead.
Two dozen Matamoros police officers, murdered, left in the street like confetti. Killed for no other reason than to tell us, tell my platoon, who we were dealing with. We were being warned.
“How can you be sure this is for us?” asked Rita.
“It’s for us,” I said, wishing it weren’t.
“Colonel!” yelled Kyra.
She was calling me from below. She was already on the street, investigating. The other platoon members were slowly, quietly elbowing each other, calling attention to the spectacle out front. Kyra was the first one to the center and she had found something she wanted me to see.
I went down. And I saw.
Each of the dead bodies was mutilated with an extra type of signature. It was known as Diego’s Cross. He would etch it into the flesh of his victims. The wounds were fresh, the blood still trickling. His violently sarcastic artwork had taken place just minutes ago.
Minutes ago.
That meant our entire arrival was logged on their evening agenda. I grabbed the radio handset off our radio man. No more audio protocol.
Rita tried to slow me down. “Wait, Colonel.” She was going to tell me there’s no connection, no listener, no rational reason to bark what I was going to bark. But it didn’t matter: I had already begun shouting into the void. “Fat Ass, I swear to God, do you have any idea what’s on the street in front of—?”
“Tango, eight o’clock!” Kyra called out, dropping to her knee and aiming her M27 directly at the shadows behind us.
We all instantly spun around, took cover, and aimed, waiting for the silence to usher in a shit storm of trouble.
None of us lit up, though. Our potential tango, as in potential target, as in potential enemy, as in we’re about to reduce you to burger meat, was a little girl.
“Hold your fire!” shouted Rita.
“Hold,” I reiterated to my platoon. We’re not here to kill kids. “Hold!”
The child was about nine years old. Unarmed. Alone. A local. She was emaciated but there was a raw energy to her eyes. She was driven by something deep inside.
She stood in the middle of the street and looked right at me, eye to eye. She knew I was in charge and I could tell she would deliver her message only to the one in charge. Undaunted, unabashed, she faced me directly, then raised her index finger and gradually pointed in my direction.
Slowly, viciously, she pointed at her own throat. She made the cross sign.
“Ya tenemos usted,” she said with a carnivorous smile.
Then she walked away. Her words hung in the air.
We already have you.
ARRIVING BACK HOME in Archer, Texas, usually felt good. It had been only a two-day jaunt, the Matamoros fiasco, but that’s enough to feel like forever.
You miss everything when you’re away. Everything. The traffic, the radio, the mini-malls, even the trash on the street. Why? Because that trash is hometown trash. That trash is made up of scraps of daily life. My daily life.
But nothing compares to the first glimpse of your front door. Both of my daughters love Halloween more than they love their own birthdays, so at this point our porch was covered with pumpkins and skeletons and Disney witches. Even though it was mid-September.
They were expecting me tomorrow morning, which technically was still five hours away, so I didn’t want to wake them. I didn’t even want to wake my husband. I just wanted to slide under the poofy sheets and reverse spoon him. To disappear into his dreams. True stealth.
He was a heavy sleeper. His fantasy football app would be the last thing on his phone besides one or two naughty texts from yours truly. He’d be out cold. Our hallway floor always creaked, so I took my time with each step. Nothing seems louder than walking to your kitchen at 2:00 a.m. I could even hear the fabric of my pants slide against itself.
I gently pushed open our bedroom door. We always sleep with it slightly ajar. Tonight was no exception. He’d learned over the years—the years and years of unpredictably long or short missions—that his sexy colonel could potentially saunter in at any hour of the night, and if he played his cards right, he could get that “she outranks me” sex he bragged to his buddies about. Though, on this occasion I was already spent, already shell-shocked from what my platoon had seen. We already have you. Drained from a day and a half without sleep. Tonight I’d be using him as a slab of warm comfort. He has his back to me. Curled in a fetal position. Perfect.
I crawled onto the bed.
And then my hand squished into a swamp.
A wet area of the mattress.
My first thought was that our eight-year-old was just here, napping, and probably had wet the bed. She’d probably left, stayed quiet, and thereby Daddy never knew. My second thought was that my husband had a fever and he was sweating out what had become a lagoon.
My third thought wasn’t a thought. It was professional opinion.
My husband is dead.
I finally saw it. Bullet holes through his shoulder and through his temple. Heavy sleeper—they shot him in his dreams. His head was half gone. He’d been dead for at least three hours. Who’s they? My legs were already carrying me down the hall. It wasn’t even an instinct. It was like I was watching myself appear ahead of me. Fast. Inexorable. Who’s they? Already bursting through their bedroom door. Already flicking up the light switch, already prepared …
To scream.
The training manual says to arrive at a violent situation and execute your training with dispassionate precision. Don’t yell out your reaction. The enemy could still be nearby. Don’t gasp. The enemy could get the first attack.
Don’t let anyone know what emotional state you’re in.
Keep quiet. Watch exits. Assess the scene. Keep your weapon up.
I did none of that.
My daughters were dead.
Both of them. Within several feet of each other. I grabbed my limp babies. The manual says to flee a situation where there is clear and present danger and insufficient intel. That’s Chapter Nine.
What chapter is the chapter that says how to carry your dead daughters over to your dead husband? And place them in front of you, in a futile group hug, so that God could see that he might have made a mistake? That there is an undo button somewhere at his console he can press?
God didn’t press it.
Diego’s Cross was permanently etched on my family’s flesh.
I made the only phone call my hands and my spinal cord were capable of making. I called Rita. I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. I couldn’t make my mouth emit words. But she could hear my throat cracking in the air. She could hear all she needed to hear to know that this isn’t Amanda’s normal communication. And so Rita was gonna do what Rita would then do.
“This is your home phone?” she asked without expecting a reply. Calm. Decisive. Bankable. “Be there in four minutes.”
Present Day
THAT WAS THE beginning. That was what led me here to this freeway underpass, parked under a tree just beyond it, eighty miles east of El Paso. A million miles south of paradise.
Waiting. Watching.
I was in a sedan, waiting for the arrival of a particular truck. Rita was parked five miles away, watching from a small hillside. Page one of that manual I mentioned earlier says that heat is a state of mind. You can decide to be uncomfortable. You can decide not. I stopped feeling things entirely. It had been two years since I became a person without a family. At this point in my life, my skin doesn’t feel. My skin merely assesses.
“Badger Three to Badger Eight.”
I was talking to the Fat Man. I was using identification codes that intentionally misrepresented the size of our team. When your numbers are small, you want your enemy to think you are large. When you are large, you want them to think you are small. So says Sun Tzu.
I was no longer an active Marine. I was freelance.
“How’s the road?” asked the Fat Man.
“Empty.”
“What about the temperature?”
“Hundred and five,” I replied. “About to get hotter.”
Rita’s voice then came on the radio. “Eyes on tango, Badger Three. Point-eight klicks. Barrel-assin’ your way.”
I looked up. I saw the truck. A big rig. Unmarked. Driving well over the speed limit, heading toward my position.
Time to rock.
“Good luck,” said the Fat Man.
“Don’t need it,” I told him.
I PUT MY police beacon on the roof of my sedan, flicked on the siren, and stomped on the gas. The enemy was on eighteen wheels and moving fast.