Rainbow Six: Bloodlines

"EL LEÓN" - Chapter 21

     A tomb best described what was unearthed that day.

     After nearly one hundred bodies were found during the initial discovery in the room, additional reinforcements were called in, as well as medical teams, forensics specialists, and all manner of investigative units.

     By the time dusk arrived, over 800 bodies were found in makeshift graves throughout the hotel's basement. Some were stashed in ceilings or buried under the floor.

     Unmarked hidden paths were found burrowing deep into the earth, far below the surface. Bodies were stuffed into large earthy chambers. Others were dumped into crudely dug pits, deep and dark enough to prove to be a logistical obstacle in retrieving the bodies.

     Hotel Ceuta sat atop a mass grave. More corpses, all mummified in liberal amounts of plastic wrap, were being found every hour. The extent of the tangled web of tombs became clearer when investigators realized tunnels and chambers had been dug a quarter of a kilometer in nearly every direction.

     Over the following two days, the body count climbed to nearly 2,300.

     When news of the uncovered atrocities leaked to mainstream media, the world was shaken. The Ceutan public reeled, faced with the awful fact that no news headline could quite convey the utter shock gripping their people.

     The nation of Spain struggled to wrap its head around what had happened in its autonomous city to the south. Numerous investigations were launched. Politicians hastily took to television to speak of the terrible news, and how so very sorry they were to hear of such horrors.

     Over the coming weeks, things got worse.

     The body count in the catacombs beneath Hotel Ceuta reached 3,000 - and it was discovered that the vast majority of the pour souls were immigrants and transplants, mostly from Morocco and its neighboring North African countries.

     It was a well-known fact that the late Senator Roberto Casillas Costa was a staunch supporter of tighter border policies. The man always took an aggressive anti-immigration stance and didn't care that the world knew it.

     People understood his views. Many agreed with his stance, and many did not... but people never expected that the man would go to such dark depths in enforcing his policies.

     Ceuta didn't have the border security that Costa lobbied for, and so for years the Senator had been taking law and judgement into his own hands.

     Costa purchased the hotel from its previous owner: his brother-in-law, an underworld kingpin with ties to the Italian Mafia in New York City.

     Detained illegal immigrants were quietly disposed of, wrapped in cellophane so the smell of death wouldn't reach the oblivious world above.

     The Senator was known for his patriotism and love for the country of España... but his literal skeletons in the closet revealed that his nationalist stance was, in fact, horrifically radical. People were already comparing Senator Roberto Costa with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

     Over the course of the investigation, authorities linked Thiago "El León" Pérez to the coverup, and had substantial reason to believe that the tombs under the hotel weren't the only ghastly sins to be discovered.

     After all, if a high-profile politician was so bold to have carried on the murderous operation for years without being discovered, there was no telling what else he might have been hiding.

     A man with his status should not have been able to get away with such a blatant genocidal act... yet, the reality was there, staring world leaders in the face and creating waves of unrest among citizens of all nations.