Iron River (32 page)

Vogel leaned forward and spoke quietly. “Agent Ozburn, this is possible. But my people have used the very best of their skills in negotiating with Vascano, and they tell me that he is more interested in collecting the ransom than in killing a Mexican policeman and an American ATFE agent. He has already pitted our government against yours through Mr. Holdstock. It is a worldwide event. It cannot have gone better for Vascano. Now all he wants is the money. We have all the assurances we can have.”

“From a man called the Executioner,” said Bly.

“The situation is perilous but not hopeless,” said Vogel. “And even so, it is the very best we can do. So discuss this among yourselves and decide who will take the money down with Sergeant Luna. My people have talked to Soriana and Mars, but that is all. We are a very small group of men and women trying to accomplish a large thing. Now, my ATFE friends, I suggest you follow me.”

They trailed the two soldiers through the small kitchen, then out the back of the bar, then across a flat lot. Waiting near a windbreak of greasewood trees were two more soldiers and two military jeeps and an American SUV and an armored half-track. The half-track had a Mexican army logo on the machine-gun station, and a third soldier seated before the .50-caliber gun.

“Bring your vehicle around,” said Vogel. “The sooner we finish this, the better.”

A minute later a soldier lifted a large canvas backpack from the storage hatch of the half-track and hefted it over his shoulder for the short walk to Ozburn’s truck. The weight bent him. Vogel said it was all hundreds, as demanded by Vascano, just over one hundred and four pounds of them, packaged in one-pound bundles of forty-eight thousand dollars. Confiscated cartel money, he said, weighed and packaged in the United States and smuggled down into Mexico by car and sea. The soldier backed against the truck and shrugged off the pack onto the tailgate. Bly insisted on inspecting it. As she did, Hood watched the bundles accumulate on the tailgate of the vehicle.

“The bills are not short and not marked,” said Vogel. “There is no transmitter hidden in them or in the pack. We will give them no reason to keep Jimmy from you.”

“No, you won’t,” she said.

Bly continued her inspection unhurriedly, then replaced the bundles in the big pack. She had to lean a shoulder into it and push with both legs to move it off the tailgate and into the back of the Land Cruiser. When she had finished, Vogel and one soldier climbed into one of the jeeps, and the other two soldiers dispersed into the other.

Hood watched the half-track roar to life and the gunner lock down his weapon. The big machine pivoted madly and lurched forward through an already flattened section of greasewood, then powered off across the desert toward the border like some enormous warthog. The jeeps screamed along behind, throwing clouds of dust into the dark, and even through these clouds Hood could see the world of stars above.

The Blowdown team and Luna stood beside him and watched. “I belong to you until the Executioner calls,” he said. “After that, one of you will belong to me. But when we cross that border again, we will both belong to the devil. After all, we have made a deal with him.”

There behind the Corral among the empty booze boxes and beer kegs and the foul trash cans and the slumping garbage bags and the dripping hose and the sticklike mantids fixed to the screen door beneath the naked lightbulb, Sean Ozburn spread an old newspaper upon the hard ground and weighted its four corners with rocks for butts and barrels.

Because of his seniority, they used his gun and he spun it first.

Ozburn defeated Bly.

Ozburn defeated Hood.

Hood eliminated Bly.

Hood beat Ozburn twice, the barrel of Ozburn’s gun locating Hood with the seeming confidence of a compass hand swinging north.

Even though Hood had prevailed, in deference to Ozburn’s age, he offered to let Ozburn go get Jimmy. Ozburn said a deal was a deal and so it was.

Luna looked on with his hands folded before him and his shoulders stretching the fabric of the vaquero coat, his neck a taut column, his shaven scalp shining except for the flat black berm on top, his eyes lightless, and at Hood he smiled his smile that was not a smile, and the chill imparted to Hood was as true as any he had experienced in the streets of L.A. or the alleys of Anbar or the tunnels of Jacumba.

 

 

 

 

T
he Executioner called at ten minutes after noon. Hood watched Luna step from the bustling lobby into the courtyard of the Hotel Majestik, cell phone pressed to the side of his head, nudging past a senior U.S. congressman, who turned and glared at him. Hood saw two other Southern California representatives and, briefly, the Secretary of Homeland Security pressing through the lobby, surrounded by a phalanx of her bodyguards. The Guardsmen and reporters were thick, and the camera crews were shooting interviews in every nook and cranny of the old hotel.

Luna stood by a fountain with his back to Hood. He appeared to be arguing. A moment later he lowered the phone and flicked it shut with a snap of his wrist and barreled back through the lobby. Hood followed. They walked to the parking lot of the ATFE offices, where Ozburn and Bly were standing guard over Hood’s Tahoe. The vehicle had been outfitted with two GPU transponders so it could be tracked over long distances, and loaded with two spare gas cans that were strapped into the rear compartment beside the five million dollars. The cash had been divided into two backpacks, which would give each man a fifty-pound load and still leave them free to use both hands for weapons. Hood had chosen a drum-fed 12-gauge and he carried his usual Glock .40 on his hip and the AirLite eight-shot on his right calf. He also wore a pair of bull hide cowboy boots, and the left boot heel contained the ivory-handled two-shot derringer given to him by Bradley Jones. Late the night before, Hood had carved an exact place to fit the piece. It had taken him hours to create this opening and get the fit just right and still leave one side of the sole intact to fit back over the weapon and lock puzzlelike into place and not come open when he walked. Luna had requested an M16. He wondered if Luna would bring his bow and arrows, but he did not. Luna considered the weapons with what looked like amusement.

Ozburn handed Hood a thousand dollars in small U.S. bills, mad money, he said, and Hood folded it once and put it in the left back pocket of his jeans. Bly replaced the U.S. federal plates with Baja plates.

A few minutes later, Hood watched the Customs booths fall away in the rearview mirror. Luna directed Hood not west as he had expected but east along the border on Highway 2, out of Baja and around the Gulf of California, then down into the Mexican state of Sonora. Hood had never been here. He looked out at the mounded white desert and at the saguaros and the cardoons with their arms lifted to the sky. Then the towns fell away as if the land had refused the idea of towns and there was nothing but the intrusive road and the few cars on it. In the clear Sonoran air, twenty miles looked like ten and in his heart the impossible seemed not impossible. He wondered if hope could be as illusory as vision in this stark and untouched place.

“Where is Jimmy?” he asked.

“The Sierra Madre Occidental.”

The mother mountains, thought Hood, centuries of violence— murderous Apaches, scalp-hunting Comanches, bandits, kidnappers, rapists. The Aztecs couldn’t control the Sierra Madre, and the Spanish couldn’t. Now the drug lords and their armed hyenas had moved in. Even the Mexican military hadn’t been able to bring order there. “Then it’s going to be a while, Raydel. Talk to me. Tell me what you can.”

Miles rolled past before Luna spoke. “Vascano is in the mountains. We will get instructions in Creel, the mining town. It is a place for the Tarahumara and vaqueros and cattle. The Tarahumara hunted deer by running them into exhaustion. Now there are fields of yerba and poppies. There is production of opium and heroin.
Narcos
everywhere
.
These are now the treasure of the Sierra Madre. In the mountains, a man isn’t considered a man until he has killed another. Outsiders are killed on sight unless they are sponsored. We have Vascano’s protection until he decides to revoke it.
”

“But Vascano’s power is in the south.”

“After the Buenavista hospital attack, President Calderón sent soldiers to Vascano’s
plazas
in Quintana Roo and Tamaulipas and Veracruz. But they found nothing because Vascano is not in the south. He is in Chihuahua state.”

“But he won’t be for long,” said Hood.

“If Calderón learns that Vascano is in the Sierra Madre, he will send thousands of soldiers. You and I will either be shot dead or arrested as allies of Vascano.”

Hood thought of Jimmy and looked out at Mexico and felt the miles compounding and compounding. The mountains materialized before him and Hood saw the great parallel ranges of the cordillera stacked skyward and into the distance.

“Vascano is sick,” said Luna. “An illness or an injury, no one says. His son is with him.”

“How old?”

“Eighteen years.”

Hood looked out the window. More time. More miles.

“This is not what you think it is,” said Luna. “This so-called war against the cartels? The war is not about stopping drugs. Our country is corrupt. The rich hoard wealth for themselves. We have a few of the very rich and many millions of the very poor and no one in between. But now a new rich class is beginning. The cartels have created it. They have amassed money, which becomes power through violence, and later through legitimacy. The cartels crave legitimacy, and the ruling class will not surrender it. So the cartels use Zetas, and the ruling class uses government soldiers. This is a war of the classes. It is a struggle for power and privilege.”

Nineteen hours later, they saw the lights of Creel high above them in the Sierra Madre. The last miles were a vertical struggle up switchbacks upon switchbacks that built pressure in Hood’s ears and raised the engine temperature of the vehicle. The pine and juniper forests were fragrant in the still cold night, and the escarpments were black and bottomless. A chill morning fog dampened the narrow dirt streets. A train rolled into the station like an exhausted cyclops, its headlight steady in the mist. They took rooms at the Hotel Chavez and Hood slept a dreamless six hours.

 

 

 

In the afternoon they filled the tank and purchased one more spare gas can, which they filled and strapped in with the others, and two inflated spare tires only roughly the proper size. They bought food and bottled water, and Hood bought a thick red-and-white woven sweater that he immediately put on.

Then he drove south into the first immense gorge of the Copper Canyon. The afternoon smelled of wet rocks, and the junipers dripped mist, and the hot part of the day was cold. Luna said that they would not stop for approximately six hours, until they reached the tiny village of La Bufa. There would be instructions from Vascano. The road was bad but passable, and the government had confiscated the weapons of the police in La Bufa.

Hood drove down the steep rocky road in first gear, letting the transmission be his brake. He picked his way around towering columns of rock that blotted out the sunlight and looked too precariously assembled to stand for long but had instead stood for millennia. Tarahumara men and women labored uphill on foot, the men dark-faced in loose white blouses and shorts and scant sandals with tire treads for soles, some of the sandals laced high up their calves, their feet the same rough brown as the road. Hood imagined running down deer in a pair of those. The women’s dresses were white and loose and buttoned high at the neck and some had piping across the shoulders and some of the girls wore necklaces of leather and beads and carved wooden crosses that dangled forward as they leaned into their steep ascents. The Tarahumara moved slowly and some had blankets and scarves against the cold.