Hunting El Chapo Read online

  BACK AT THE THREE, the entire block looked like a bizarre luxury car show in the middle of the hood. The immaculate Mercedes sedans and coupes were parked bumper-to-bumper on the dirt-and-gravel street.

  Another message came fresh from the El Paso wire room.

  Lic-F to Chapo and Condor:

  Por otra parte hay nos sacaron unos carros duros de la agencia esos del agua, y andan duros aun.

  “On another note, the ones from the water took some hard [armored] cars belonging to the agency [Chapo’s DTO]. They’re running hard.”

  Condor answered almost instantly.

  Buenas tardes sr. Dise su compadre kesi los carros eran suyos. O los menores.*

  “Good afternoon, sir. Your compadre is asking if the cars were yours or the minors.”

  Lic-F replied:

  Unos duros eran mios, pero sacaron otros de lujo que yo creo si eran de los menores.

  “Some of the [armored cars] were mine, but they took other luxury ones that I believe were the minors’.”

  This was confirmation that Chapo’s DTO was using the Mercedes dealership as a ruse, a place to store their most prized possessions so they wouldn’t be seized by SEMAR as they tore through the city. It was also clear that they thought they could still weather the SEMAR storm.

  Leroy and Admiral Garra were standing in the driveway at Location Three.

  “We need to go after Kava,” I told Garra. “He can tell us where every single lightbulb is, where every trapdoor and secret passage is tucked away. He constructed all the tunnels on every piece of property Chapo owns. If we’re going to destroy this place, giving him nowhere to return, then we’ve got to find Kava—he’ll give us everything.”

  Leroy, Nico, and the marines hit the streets again, carving circles within the city, trying to locate Kava’s phone. But they had no luck, and by now everyone was at the point of exhaustion.

  The clock was ticking, and Admiral Garra was getting stressed again. The Mexican Attorney General’s Office was taking over all the locations in Culiacán, booting us all out of the safe houses and stash pads we’d been using as our makeshift bases. Rumor had it that they wanted to begin filling up all the tunnels beneath Chapo’s safe houses with concrete.

  “You’ll never keep this guy from going underground,” I told Admiral Garra. “He’s like a mole—he’ll try tunneling again in no time—trust me.”

  Garra said they might have no choice but to wrap up the mission soon.

  I shook my head.

  “Tenemos que mantener la presión,” I said. We couldn’t let up with the pressure. I reassured Garra that I was still confident we’d get Top-Tier soon.

  “We’re almost there,” said Brady. “One more day—tops—we’ll have it.”

  Chapo simply couldn’t function without his communications in place.

  “We just need a bit more time, sir,” I said.

  “More time?” Garra said somberly. “That’s the one thing I can’t promise you.”

  Miramar

  “PACK YOUR BAGS, GUYS—ROLLING OUT!”

  It was Chino, shouting from the doorway. We had to vacate the safe house. It wasn’t hard to snatch up our possessions—I could carry everything I had in one hand: a leather laptop case containing one MacBook, and a few phones. Brady had just his BlackBerry. Neither of us had changed clothes or underwear in more than a week.

  “I can feel my shirt rotting off my skin,” I said.

  But I didn’t like that we were leaving home base; it was just beginning to feel secure. Chapo’s place had become our safe haven.

  Su casa es mi casa.

  I realized I was going to miss the camaraderie, not to mention the marines’ home-cooked meals. One thing I wasn’t going to miss: the bathroom with the sign Chino had duct-taped on the door: EXCLUSIVO CAPITANES Y OFICIALES. Every morning, marines lined up by the dozen, waiting to use a filthy toilet that lacked both a seat and toilet paper.

  Brady and I jumped into an armored Volkswagen Passat—another of Chapo’s customized cars. No orders had been given on a destination, but I could see that it was deeper into urban Culiacán. Eventually we passed a water park and drove onto the city’s main baseball field. The well-groomed lawn quickly filled with all the glossy Mercedes, mixed in with the mud-caked SEMAR rápidas.

  “A baseball diamond?” Brady said, laughing. “Sleeping in the open air?”

  “May not be that crazy,” I said. “It’s probably the safest place to be in the entire city. At least we can control the perimeter and see everyone coming and going.”

  Out of nowhere, a dented, rust-flecked white pickup pulled up outside the fence. Chapo’s halcones? I nudged Brady, glancing in the direction of the truck.

  “Fuck,” I said. “Here we go.”

  Why would any outsider be approaching a field full of heavily armed marines? I instinctively looked for a place to dive; there wasn’t much cover besides a few shabby-looking trees.

  “Dude, look at all those cots,” Brady said, laughing.

  As the truck got closer, we had realized that the flatbed of that old truck had been stacked fifteen feet high with rudimentary military beds, constructed of wood and strung with potato sacks. It sure would be a step up from sleeping on the cold tile floor without blankets in Chapo’s safe houses.

  As the sun set on Culiacán, Brady and I went to find Admiral Garra and Captain Toro. We didn’t want to be overheard, so we met in the growing darkness behind the concession stand at the baseball field. Leroy, Nico, Chino, and another young SEMAR lieutenant, Tigre, were there, too.

  “What’s the latest intel?” Admiral Garra asked.

  “Gárgola’s instructed Lic-F to find two houses for him on the coast. We’re still waiting for Top-Tier, but I think we need to move down to Mazatlán. Set up shop at a resort and begin working our intel there.”

  “We need to get down there before he has a chance to flee,” said Brady.

  Admiral Garra nodded, then gave us the bad news: Captain Toro had to leave Culiacán immediately—his brother had been struck in a hit-and-run accident in Mexico City and it didn’t sound like he would make it through the night. With Toro leaving, frontline command would be in the hands of Chino and Tigre.

  “We’ve got about two more days before we need to wrap this up,” Admiral Garra said. “Then I’m pulling everyone out of Sinaloa.”

  We all agreed it was best to move to the Mazatlán resort strip and continue working from there.

  But it was crucial to avoid all tails and countersurveillance.

  “We can’t all go down there in a convoy,” Chino said.

  “You’re right—none of these rápidas,” I added. “Gárgola’s people will spot them the second we leave town.”

  “Agreed,” Brady said. “We leave all the SEMAR vehicles here. Make a covert approach to the south, taking different routes.”

  “We’ll use all of his own blindados,” Chino said.

  What better vehicles to use than the fleet of Chapo’s own armored cars and trucks we’d seized?

  Under cover of darkness we drove over to Soriana—a Target-style chain popular throughout Mexico—still wearing our camouflage fatigues, boots, and black balaclavas.

  Brady, Nico, Leroy, a few marines, and I spent an hour loading up on sleeping bags, toothpaste, shorts, shirts—and the first fresh socks and underwear I’d seen in weeks. Brady and I would have to look like typical Americans on vacation, so we also grabbed the most basic red-and-black T-shirts, baggy boardshorts, and flip-flops.

  The Soriana shoppers stared at us like we were nuts. I realized how out of place we looked, as if we’d just parachuted in from Iraq . . . Or maybe we resembled a couple of narcos come to kidnap someone in the store. One of the customers, a middle-aged woman, stared into my eyes. Then she cracked a smile: she must have realized they weren’t the eyes of a narco hidden behind my black mask . . .

  Back at the baseball diamond, we grabbed platefuls of tacos al pastor just outside the fence, and the marine
s let in a kid on a banana-seat bike with a cooler full of fresh tamales con pollo, fifty pesos each.

  With our bellies full, Brady and I walked toward a large open-air room with bare orange-painted steel pillars and screens to keep the bugs at bay, filled with tightly spaced cots. The warm wind was wafting through as I sprawled out on my cot.

  “God, these potato sacks are better than a Sealy Posturepedic,” I said.

  I unlaced and kicked off my boots. It was the first time my feet had been out of those sweaty things in five days, and my big toes had water-filled blisters.

  In a brand-new black T-shirt and BDU pants, barefoot, I took one last stretch and muttered two words under my breath: “The blind . . .” Delirious, I shut my eyes and was instantly more than a thousand miles away.

  I LOVED LIVING right on the river—there was no fence separating our backyard from the water’s edge—and on warm days, my brother, Brandt, and I would wade out to a nearby island, claiming it as our personal playground, building forts out of sticks and poking around in muskrat dens.

  It was late fall—I was ten years old—when our father told us that we could both come along on a hunt. We’d been preparing for this day since we were toddlers, walking around the living room blowing old wooden duck calls our father handed down until our mother would beg us to stop. Whenever our dad came home from a hunt, we’d help him unload the pile of ducks from the flat-bottomed, sixteen-foot PolarKraft and toss the plastic mallard dummy in the yard for our black Lab, Rough, to retrieve.

  The night before the big day, Brandt and I had both been so excited that we’d crawled into our bunk beds all ready, wearing our brown camouflage jackets and face paint. At 5 a.m., our father snapped on the bedroom light, and we sprang out of bed and threw on our black snow pants and gloves. It was still pitch-black outside, and I clutched my brand-new Remington shotgun mid-barrel as we walked together over the frost-covered lawn and down to the forest-green boat tethered at the river’s edge.

  The ride upriver was ice cold and wet. My ears were numb, but I didn’t reach for the stocking cap my dad had given me. He didn’t wear one—why should I? The cold wind whipped across my face. The heavy steel boat pushed through the water, the front edge of the hull splashing cold waves up over the sides, soaking my jacket and catching me on the side of the face. I caught sight of a group of ducks splashing out of the river, kicking up near the bank.

  My father cut the twenty-five-horsepower Mercury motor and the PolarKraft drifted on in silence. Under the moonlight, I felt as if we’d been floating in the middle of that river for hours, my father flashing the fifteen-million-candlepower spotlight along the shore, trying to locate the well-hidden duck blind.

  I saw the outline of the blind that Brandt and I had helped build out of wood, camouflaged with cattails, downed tree limbs, and other foliage. We threw out the decoys one by one so they floated near the front of the blind.

  With my Remington loaded, I sat on the five-gallon bucket, peering through the narrow open slots between cattails.

  The sun began to streak the horizon in shades of orange and pale gold through the trees across the riverbank. I was startled by the sound of whistling above my head: faint at first, trailing off in the distance. I looked up but couldn’t see anything. My father pointed up to the sky.

  “They’ll be back.”

  Eventually we heard the whispering whistle above us once again, and this time we spotted the flock, their wingtips catching the faint rays of the sun. But once again the ducks disappeared.

  I picked up my duck call and gave a couple of quacks through the double-reed lure. Brandt and I took turns letting out the sounds we’d been practicing since we were old enough to walk. The noise of the calls soon filled the river valley.

  “Get down—they’re coming back,” my father whispered. In a few moments, the ducks were out in front, circling over the tops of the floating decoys. “Let them come in close,” my father said.

  My leg began to shake as I tried to keep myself still. I could see the flock out in front starting to descend rapidly, wings locked, a couple of the mallards dropping their shiny orange legs like the landing gear on a jet.

  “You ready, Drew?”

  I was silent, just a quick nod to my father, the ducks no more than thirty yards away now. I could make out the colorful green heads and bright yellow bills of the drakes.

  “Take ’em!” my father yelled.

  I quickly stood up and shoved the Remington deep into my shoulder. I saw nothing except that green head hanging in front of my barrel, the wings seeming to flap in slow motion. My right shoulder jerked back and the yellow plastic shell flickered in the corner of my eye as I ejected the first round. Miss. I swung the gun slowly, tracking the bird as it flared across the sky, and pulled the trigger again. Miss. The duck kept flying.

  Last shot.

  The Remington held only three shells.

  Start behind the bird, pull through the bird, and fire. I repeated the precise words my father had taught me like a catechism. The mallard was gaining distance quickly, just beginning to exit the kill zone, when I gave one last, slow squeeze of the trigger.

  “Dead bird!” my father yelled to Rough, who was panting eagerly at the blind’s edge. “I thought he was gone, Drew, but you stayed on him . . .”

  AND WITH THAT LAST SHOT, I awoke with a start in Mexico, still thinking for a moment that I was in that Kansas duck blind, feeling a wet scraping on my bare cheek.

  “What the hell?”

  It was bright daylight, and a little dog was licking my sweat.

  I wiped the sleep from the corners of my eyes, wondering where this puppy had come from. It was a blue-eyed husky with a red collar and a spherical bell around his neck. He was scampering around in the bright sunshine, sniffing and licking everyone.

  Chino told me that a couple of the younger marines had found the dog alone in one of the safe houses—with no food or water—and had brought him along as the new team mascot. Someone had given it a new name, too: El Toro, in honor of our missing street commander.

  Brady and I quickly packed our bags full of all our Soriana gear and jumped in the backseat of Chapo’s Volkswagen Passat, now wearing our new T-shirts and boardshorts. A young marine lieutenant took the wheel while Chino hopped in the front passenger seat.

  “This is the perfect ride,” I told Brady—it was low-key, without any of the bells and whistles of the typical narco car.

  Chino stopped at Plaza Fiesta to grab a few last-minute supplies; I immediately recognized this as the spot where Chapo would always send his people to be picked up by Naris when he wanted to confer with them face-to-face.

  Brady and I walked into a small mercado and bought a plateful of rolled taquitos topped with queso fresco and salsa verde while we waited for Chino to finish up.

  Seeing me weaponless, Tigre had lent me his FN Herstal Five-Seven pistol, a Belgian-made semiautomatic. It was a small-caliber gun—firing rounds of 5.7 by 28 millimeters—but effective at close quarters: the rounds could penetrate a bulletproof vest, giving the FN Five-Seven its street name: “the cop killer.”

  Brady and I were shoulder-to-shoulder in the backseat when both of our BlackBerrys buzzed with news from Texas.

  Joe and Neil, in El Paso, working with Camila and her team of assistant US attorneys, had done it: the roving wire they’d taken so long to write and get authorized had finally hit pay dirt.

  “New Top-Tier!” Brady shouted.

  “Yeah, baby! Condor’s up and running,” I said. “And the prefix six-six-nine.”

  “Yep, six-six-nine.”

  All of Culiacán numbers had a prefix of 667. This prefix, 669, I immediately knew meant the phone was from Mazatlán. I flipped open the screen of my MacBook, balancing it on my knees in the back of the Passat, and hit the ping button. Within seconds I had a hit. The device was active, right along the beachfront strip of resorts.

  Someplace called Miramar.

  Hotel Miramar.

&n
bsp; The Man in the Black Hat

  LEROY HAD LEFT CULIACÁN with Zorro and his crew an hour earlier and was already arriving in Mazatlán. I sent him the new Top-Tier number.

  “El Roy’s headed there now, near the hotel, to confirm the ping,” I said to Brady.

  “I just hope Condor keeps it on long enough,” Brady said.

  This was it—we were on our way down to the water for the last shot.

  In that cramped backseat, I felt my leg beginning to shake. I was becoming more impatient by the minute. “Ándale!” I yelled up to the front, slapping the young lieutenant on the shoulder. The engine revved as we accelerated, but the heavy Passat still felt like it was crawling its way to the coast.

  My BlackBerry buzzed with a new message from Leroy.

  “Confirmed. I’ve got it at Miramar.”

  SEMAR had rented a small house on Calle Bernardo Vázquez—a private home in a sleepy residential section of Mazatlán—so we could set up our base of operations discreetly, away from any of Chapo’s halcones.

  When Brady and I reached Mazatlán and walked into the house, we nearly tripped over all the piles of tactical gear littering the floor. Everyone was in high spirits. Loud laughter boomed in the living room, and someone had just ordered a pizza. Several marines were lounging around on the couches, watching TV, and a few more were sitting around the kitchen table with Leroy and his team of marshals.

  Leroy got up and motioned for Brady and me to follow him to a quiet corner of the house.

  “How confident are you that Chapo’s with this Top-Tier device?” Leroy said.

  “One hundred percent,” I said.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Condor types most of the messages,” I said. “But sometimes Chapo picks up the BlackBerry and types them himself.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Chapo spells like a kindergartener, he doesn’t know how,” Brady said.

  “Like this message—just came in an hour ago.” I handed my BlackBerry over to Leroy and showed him the screen. “Chapo’s talking about a house he’s planning to move to. Look at the spelling.”