Night of the Assassin: Assassin Series Prequel by Russell Blake (people reading books .TXT) 📗

who stood by the pair with their pistols and cowboy boots. A gunshot rang out, deafening the little girl – her mother fell forward onto the bloody dirt, her suffering ended, gone to join her husband and baby. The little girl cried to the silent god who had abandoned her, an innocent, even as she continued to recite the words she’d been assured would protect her through anything.

“Thy king done come…”

She closed her eyes against the horror of the scene and imagined a place where she would be forever young, playing in a beautiful grass field with puppies and ponies; her father, young, healthy and vibrant running beside her as her mother tossed her baby sister into the air, eliciting squeals of glee from the delighted tike. She sensed the cold menace of the gun barrel against the back of her tiny head, and redoubled her efforts to send her m’aidez to her creator.

“Thy will be–”

The lead ripped through her cerebrum, abruptly terminating her brief sojourn on earth. Her frail body tumbled lifelessly to the ground.

For her, the ordeal was over.

The men watched as the cannabis caught fire, fed by the gasoline that had been so frugally saved for the family’s power, their butchery merely another day’s work in their brutal world of enforcement of their absolute power. Both would sleep well that night, their consciences long ago having been discarded as impediments to their working for the group that would later become the Sinaloa cartel – the most powerful and brutal of the Mexican narcotraficantes. The night’s drama had been another in a long line of horrors they’d inflicted on their fellow men in order to solidify their jefe’s control over the region. The citizenry only understood and respected one thing, and that was brute force. They were the delivery system for that primal justice, and they knew that nobody would ever miss the peasant family or question the events of that night. It was all business as usual; nobody wanted to have the men visit their home if they were too inquisitive about what had happened or where the farmer and his family had gone. The events would remain just another footnote in the brutality that was an ongoing part of the drug traffic in Mexico. There was nobody to defend the innocents, and so they perished, as countless others had before them in brutal episodes that determined nothing. Mexico’s soil was steeped in the blood of the helpless – the men knew that nobody would mourn them. They had no power, no clout, and so were disposable.

The enforcers returned to their truck, which started with a roar, and they tore off into the night down the dirt track that led to civilization, such as it was.

~ ~ ~

Sinaloa, Mexico, Twenty Years Ago

Horses galloped around the periphery of the open field. The men gathered in the center whistling at the ponies as they celebrated their temporary freedom. A sprawling mission-style hacienda sat imposingly in the distance – easily twenty-thousand feet of interior space built on a bluff overlooking a river which burbled softly below it as it carried fresh water from the mountains, so vital for the irrigation of the region’s crops, which were mainly tomatoes and marijuana.

The majority of the cannabis grown in Mexico came from Sinaloa, and it had been this harvest that had been instrumental in the creation of the modern cartel system. Originally, only a few families engaged in the trafficking of marijuana to the U.S., along with heroin of moderate quality and purity produced in modest, local fields. It had been a small business, operated like a cottage industry, tightly held with a minimum of violence other than turf wars over growing and distribution rights.

Then, in the late 1970s, the dynamics had shifted; the smuggling networks that had been engaged in this relatively benign trade took on the burden of moving cocaine through Mexico for the Colombian cartels, and then the money got much bigger as the Cali and Medellin cartels grew increasingly reliant on their Mexican smugglers to get the product to the U.S.. This naturally led to a situation where the Mexicans began getting paid in product, versus cash, driving them to become distributors, as opposed to transporters – and the money involved took another quantum jump. By the early 1990s, the Mexican cartels were handling much of the distribution for the Colombians, whose cartels had disintegrated in the late 1980s with their survivors now focused mainly on manufacturing.

Within a little over a decade, a small business had become a multi-billion dollar industry and the various factions fought it out for the rights to their geographical areas. By 1990, the Sinaloa cartel was the most powerful in all Mexico – in all the world, in fact – primarily because the ‘Godfather’ of the Mexican drug trade, Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo, was from Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa. It was he who ran a hundred percent of the trade through Mexico during the Seventies and Eighties, and he who had the relationships with the Colombians. In the mid-Eighties, he decided to divide up Mexico into regions, so the power that was naturally concentrated in Sinaloa remained there, with the other cartels acting as satellites to that main central group.

That changed when Gallardo went to prison in the late Eighties, which created a vacuum in the leadership and opened the door for the smaller, less important cartels to assert a better foothold. In particular, the Tijuana cartel and the Juarez cartel had jockeyed for greater sway and a larger chunk of the profits, leading to often bloody wars with their Sinaloa brethren.

The group of men watching the horses laughed easily together, cans of Tecate tempering the worst of the mid-day heat. It was fall, the storm season was largely over, but the temperatures could still reach the high nineties during the day, bringing with it substantial humidity. The oldest of the men, Don Miguel Lopez, a tall, lean man with the leathery complexion