Iron River (11 page)

“No numbers,” said Litrell.

Luna continued to pull dark treasures from the briefcase: six fifty-count boxes of forty-caliber ammunition, three used-looking passports, three fat stacks of used U.S. twenties held with rubber bands.

“When do we leave?” asked Bly.

“Now.”

“We’ll need clothes and toiletries.”

“They are in the helicopter. We can fly almost to Cataviña. After that, the helicopter will draw suspicion. We need to go now. But before we leave, you need to understand that this is my operation in my country and I am in charge. There will be no dispute or discussion. There may be unusual circumstances. I am supported by some powers within my government and hated by others. Mexico is in a state of change. Mexico is a state of change.”

Luna stood before Ozburn. He looked him over from toe to head, and Hood saw him peer into Ozburn’s eyes. Then Luna did likewise with Bly, and when it was Hood’s turn, he looked back into Luna’s hard black eyes and he nodded but didn’t look away.

“Sean, Janet, Charlie,” said Litrell. “The Calderón government knows but it does not know. Washington knows but it does not know. They have taken an extraordinary step. You are the first. If you are successful, it will mean something even beyond the life of Jimmy Holdstock, maybe a new way of fighting this ugly war. If you fail, you will be denied and denied absolutely. Mexico and the United States have washed their hands of you. Those hands are already dry. Good luck.”

A few minutes later, the Bell engine wailed and Hood felt the machine corkscrewing backward up into the sky, felt the untethering of his body and his soul from the laws of gravity and of men.

 

 

 

 

H
e watched the rusted brown earth of Baja California scrolling under the chopper, rimmed by a vast curved horizon that defied measure. He could not tell by looking if this was an expired land or one still waiting to be born. There were occasional farms and there were sandy washes squiggling down from the hills where water had once raced, and the farmhouses had corrugated metal roofs and the tiny outbuildings huddled under stands of paloverde and mesquite. The dirt roads were etched in pale paths, and Hood saw only one vehicle moving there, drawing a cloud of dust behind it and moving so slowly, it looked to be not moving at all.

The Bell put down in the desert ten miles from Cataviña, just east of the Baja spine, a few miles south of the 30th parallel. Two rental cars were waiting. Hood and Luna took the lead. Luna drove the two-lane fast, passing the old cars of the natives and the ponderous travel trailers of the gringos, and he passed an eighteen-wheel semi on a blind curve negotiable by faith alone. Hood looked out at the boulders and ocotillo and cardon. A long red snake with its black head high off the ground whipped across Highway 1 in front of them and Hood looked over his shoulder and saw it serpentining over the shoulder gravel toward an outcropping of rocks. Behind the snake came the Ford containing Ozburn and Bly.

Half an hour later, Luna and Bly played table tennis in the rec room of the La Pinta Hotel in Cataviña while Hood and Ozburn inquired about lodging. The hotel was full, as they knew it would be, but they raised their voices and complained loudly, establishing themselves as gringo tourists who were now inconvenienced by a long drive south to Guerrero Negro.

The boulder-strewn beauty of Cataviña gave way to an incline at the top of which lay a great dry lake bed. It stretched on for miles, flat and hard beneath the blue sky. Gradually the barren landscape became generous again and Hood looked out at the sharp yucca and the spine clusters of the cholla deceptively backlit by the lowering sun to appear downy, and the elephant trees squatting among the boulders. The highway gradually lowered as they entered the Vizcaino Desert, seething with wind, immense. The thermometer read ninety-three degrees and the road ahead of them became a wavering mercurial slick. Two vultures ate at a roadside carcass, and as the car approached, one hopped cumbersomely away and the other withdrew its poached pink head from the spoil and blinked. Hood saw buttes rising flat in the east and for a moment he could see the Pacific Ocean, then it was gone.

They crossed from Baja California to Baja California Sur just above Guerrero Negro. The Blowdown team found lodging there at the Nationale. Luna checked in later and ordered food to his room while the three Americans demanded the six-top in the middle of the dining room and spoke loudly through the dinner, as suggested by Luna. They continued loudly in the cantina after dinner and the men took turns dancing with Janet, her movements infused with anger. She was strong-bodied and pretty when she smiled, but there was no smiling at all that night and Hood thought how easy it was for them to look like miserables straining for fun.

In the morning they drove south into the oasis town of San Ignacio. The date palms planted by Spaniards nearly three centuries ago rose dense and cooling from the arroyo floor, and Hood could see the rolling hills of figs and grapes and oranges. There was a breeze and on it Hood smelled the citrus and the sweet green smell of fresh water.

“The water comes from a river and the river is underground,” said Luna. These were the first casual words he had offered since Hood had gotten into the car with him the day before. The tone of his voice implied great volume unused. “It comes to the surface here and there is a dam.”

“It’s tranquil,” said Hood. He looked out at the thatched-roof dwellings and the tree-lined plaza and the magnificent domed mission rising above the palms.

“It is the last tranquility you will see. On this assignment.”

“Are you hopeful, Sergeant?”

“What does it matter?”

“Hope counts.”

“Does hope or lack of hope cause anything that happens?”

“I think it can.”

“But maybe this is a superstition, that men can influence events by what they believe. The gambler. The priest. That ills can be remedied by a hoped outcome. That American hope can be expressed through power, and that this power is deserved and eternal.”

“Luck comes to the hopeful. Luck comes to those who are ready for it. I’ve seen it happen.”

“Oh, we will be ready, Mr. Hood. You see the mission? Its walls are four feet thick and made from lava blocks. The blocks were not made with hope but with the opposite of hope. They were made with fear that they might not last.”

Hood thought about this. “That’s fine, Sergeant. But I’m going to hope we can get Jimmy out of here and back across the border alive. I’m going to hope that real hard and I’m not going to stop hoping it until it happens.”

Luna cracked the smile that was not a smile but did not take his eyes off the road. “A discussion of hope is a small thing. If you want the killing down here to stop, you must stop the guns. Simple.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“My country is being torn apart by yours. America supplies the guns and the need for the guns. I don’t understand your people. You are insatiable for power and luxury. You are insatiable for improvement. You are insatiable for drugs. You take drugs to wake up and drugs to fall asleep. You take drugs in the morning to become alert and drugs at night to sleep. You take drugs to have sex and drugs to not have children. You take drugs to keep your legs from twitching. For your children it is an easy step to the pleasure drugs that come up through Mexico. But we of the police cannot defeat this way of thinking. We cannot eradicate your degeneracy. So it’s the guns. You need to stop the guns.”

“But you need to stop the dope, Sergeant. The cartels crave the guns and the money just like our people crave the coke and smack. Your poisons are made for our young. Your people profit from what you yourself admit you can’t change. And if you want to use the word
degenerate
you can apply it to the cartels and the Zetas. Mankind doesn’t suddenly become pure south of the border.”

Luna looked at Hood, then back to Highway 1. “So,” he said. “This.”

Hood waited, but Luna said nothing more. “Yep. This.”

Near Santa Rosalia they pulled off onto a dirt road that led back into a narrow valley. There were white boulders and cardon cactus reaching sedately into the air, and their arrangement was harmonious enough to have been planned. The breeze had become a steady wind now, and across this vista dervishes of sand whirled with sudden fury, then collapsed. Hood and Luna came to a gate made of barbed wire and old branches grayed by the sun. A uniformed officer walked it open, his pant cuffs trailing in the dust.

Hood turned to see the second car follow. When they came over a rise, he saw the low pink stucco building at the end of the road. There were four satellite dishes and various antennae sprouting from the roof. And there were six beaten white sedans and the six black-and-white radio cars parked without order in the circular dirt driveway.

Luna waited for Ozburn and Bly, then led the Blowdown unit into the building. There was one main room and it was heavy with cigarette smoke and filled partly with uniformed police and the rest with what Hood took to be plainclothes officers. He counted twenty. They sat in folding metal chairs around two long tables set end to end in the middle of the room, and when the Americans came in, they all pushed back their chairs in a clamor of metal on concrete and stood. The men wearing hats doffed or tipped them to Janet. The smokers crushed out their cigarettes in ashtrays and on the floor. Luna introduced the Americans, then rattled off a few sentences of such rapid Spanish that Hood caught only a few words. There was another table against a far wall, with two ancient spiral-corded landline phones and charging stations for six satellite phones, and a computer, monitor, printers, faxes, and a large tilting stainless coffee percolator with the spigot near the bottom.

Along another wall were racks of M14 and M16 rifles and Mossberg 12-gauge combat shotguns. The older M14s were fitted with night scopes and the M16s and shotguns had flashlights mounted on their barrels. There were vests and night-vision headsets and binoculars hung from hooks on the pegboard wall, and dozens of canisters of ammunition stacked knee-high on the floor. Hood studied the gear and thought of his tour in Iraq and wondered if he was drawn to the hardware of death or if it was drawn to him.
We cannot eradicate your degeneracy.
The wind lashed the windows and he looked outside to see a nearby paloverde break into a shiver of spines and small green leaves.

One of the uniforms brought over four folded chairs, and Luna and the Americans sat. A slender gray-haired man in a desert camo suit rose and handed out maps. Hood studied his. Mulege was a village of six thousand. It sat beside the Rio Mulege. It had an airstrip and a museum and even a U.S. consular building. It was one hundred sixty-one kilometers from here.

Hood looked down at the ink-heavy copy, noted the hand-drawn rectangle with the black
X
marked through it, south of town, five kilometers from the shrine of La Virgen Maria. The gray-haired man discussed the map first in Spanish, then in English. He said the black
X
was an abandoned hacienda where the American was being held captive. When he said this, he looked one at a time at Hood and Ozburn and Bly, and Hood saw gravity in his eyes. The man explained that the crosshatched pathways around the hacienda were dirt roads passable by four-wheel-drive vehicles. None of them passed within two kilometers of the hacienda, he said. Lookouts would be deployed throughout the area, but there was no way of knowing where, so the sooner they stopped the vehicles and proceeded on foot, the better.

Luna stood and spoke again in Spanish, then English. Just after sunset, five of their men would set out in two cars along the north dirt road. They would use their global positioning units to halt four kilometers from the hacienda, then continue on foot. They would have one satellite phone. He named the five. Eighteen minutes later, five men in two cars would begin their approach from the west on the dirt road accessible from Highway 1. They would end their drive within three kilometers of the hacienda and continue on foot. They would carry the battering ram and one phone. He named these five, too. When they were one kilometer away, they would travel only on their hands and knees and stomachs. Simultaneously, another group of four would drive the south road to within two kilometers before setting out on foot with one satellite phone to communicate with the rest. They would go to the ground one kilometer out. He named these.

Hood watched and listened and he thought that Luna looked like Jimmy, the same big neck and shoulders and the stout bowlegs. And Hood saw the shiny smooth mounds of muscle of Luna’s neck and jaws and temples all shaved clean and he thought that the man was very much like a bull in his strength and density and great available power. Jimmy had that, too, he thought, and in him it was tempered by a full and willing heart, and that was why Hood would use all of his tools, even lowly hope, to keep Holdstock from being tortured to death on alien soil at the age of twenty-six.

Luna said that he and the Americans would drive in from the east, then travel by foot and then by hands and knees. They would arrive ahead of the others by a few minutes—it would be ten P.M. by then. Luna would kill the guard at the generator and disable the generator and when the lights went out, they would take the house. The mission was to get the American out alive, he said. He said that certain things were in their favor: surprise, the cover of the wind, the new moon of two nights ago, the satellite phones for communication, the brand-new mounted lights on the rifles and the shotguns, the fact that the Zetas might be tired and perhaps drunk. He said certain things were not in their favor: The American might already be dead, the distances they would have to cover would leave them vulnerable to the lookouts, they didn’t know how many Zetas were there though his information said eight, they were unfamiliar with the hacienda and couldn’t know where the fire would come from or exactly where the American was being held.