The Power Of The Dog (63 page)

They didn’t get much beyond “Nuestro Padre” before a bunch of Tangueros sprayed them with bullets. Callan turned away, only to see two of his other comrades chaining the bus driver to the steering wheel.

“What the fuck are you doing?!” Callan yelled.

They siphoned gasoline from the fuel tank of the bus into a plastic water jug and then poured it on the driver, and as he screamed for mercy Fidel turned to the passengers and announced, “This is what you get for transporting guerrillas!”

Two of the Tangueros held Callan back as Fidel tossed a match into the bus.

Callan saw the driver’s eyes, heard his screams and watched the man’s body twist and dance to the flames.

He never got the smell out of his nose.

(Sitting here now in this Puerto Vallarta bar, he can smell the burning flesh. Ain’t enough scotch in the world to cleanse that smell.)

That night Callan hit the bottle hard. Got good and fuckin’ drunk and thought about picking up the old .22 and putting a deuce into Fidel’s face. Decided he wasn’t ready to commit suicide and started packing instead.

One of the Rhodesians stopped him.

“You don’t leave here on your feet,” the guy told him. “They’ll kill you before you walk a klik.”

The guy’s right, I wouldn’t make it a kilometer.

“There’s nothing you can do,” the Rhodesian said. “It’s Red Mist.”

“What’s Red Mist?” Callan asked.

The guy looked at him weird and then just shrugged.

Like, If you don’t know …

“What’s Red Mist?” Callan asked Scachi on Sal’s next visit to Las Tangas to adjust Callan’s ever-shittier attitude. The fucking mick was just sitting in the barracks having long conversations with Johnnie Walker.

“Where’d you hear of Red Mist?” Scachi asked.

“Don’t matter.”

“Yeah, well, forget you heard it.”

“Fuck that, Sal,” Callan said. “I’m a part of somethin’, I want to know what it is.”

No, you don’t, Scachi thought.

And even if you did, I can’t tell you.

Red Mist was the code name for the coordination of scores of operations to “neutralize” left-wing movements across Latin America. Basically, the Phoenix program for South and Central America. Half the time, the individual operations didn’t even know they were being coordinated as part of Red Mist, but it was Scachi’s role as John Hobbs’s errand boy to make sure that intelligence was shared, assets were distributed, targets were hit and nobody stepped on anyone else’s dick in the doing of it.

It wasn’t an easy job, but Scachi was the perfect man for it. Green Beret, sometime CIA asset, made member of the Mafia, Sal would just disappear on “detached duty” from the army and work as Hobbs’s waterboy. And there was a lot of water to be carried: Red Mist encompassed literally hundreds of right-wing militias and their drug-lord sponsors, a thousand army officers and a few hundred thousand troops, dozens of separate intelligence agencies and police forces.

And the Church.

Sal Scachi was a Knight of Malta and a member of Opus Dei, the fervently right-wing, anti-Communist secret organization of bishops, priests and committed laypeople such as Sal. The Catholic Church was at war with itself, its conservative leadership in the Vatican fighting the “liberation theologists”—left-wing, often Marxist, priests and bishops on the ground in the Third World—for the soul of Mother Church herself. The Knights of Malta and Opus Dei worked hand-in-glove with the right-wing militias, the army officers, even the drug cartels when necessary.

And the blood flowed like wine at Communion.

Most of it paid for, directly or indirectly, with American dollars. Directly from American aid to the countries’ militaries, whose officers made up the bulk of the death squads; indirectly by Americans buying drugs, the dollars for which went to the cartels sponsoring the death squads.

Billions of dollars in economic aid, billions of dollars in dope money.

In El Salvador, right-wing death squads murdered left-wing politicians and labor organizers. In 1989, on the campus of Central American University in San Salvador, Salvadoran army officers gunned down six Jesuit priests, a maid and her little girl with sniper rifles. In that same year, the United States government sent half a billion dollars in aid to the Salvadoran government. By the end of the ’80s, approximately 75,000 people had been killed.

Guatemala doubled that figure.

In the long war against the Marxist rebels, over 150,000 people were killed and another 40,000 were never found. Homeless kids were gunned down in the streets. College students were murdered. An American hotelier was beheaded. A university professor was stabbed in the hall of her classroom building. An American nun was raped, killed and thrown onto the corpses of her companions. Through it all, American soldiers provided training, advice and equipment, including the helicopters that flew the killers to the killing grounds. By the end of the ’80s, U.S. president George Bush was so disgusted by the carnage that he finally cut off funds and armaments for the Guatemalan military.

Everywhere in Latin America it was the same—the long shadow war between the haves and the have-nots, between the right wing and the Marxists, with the liberals caught, deer-in-the-headlights, between them.

Always, Red Mist was there.

John Hobbs oversaw the operation.

Sal Scachi ran the day-by-day.

Liaising with army officers trained at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. Providing training, technical advice, equipment, intelligence. Lending assets to the Latin American armed forces and militias.

One of these assets was Sean Callan.

The man is a fucking mess, Scachi thought, looking at Callan—long, dirty hair, his skin yellow from days of hard drinking. Not exactly the specimen of a warrior, but looks are deceiving.

Whatever Callan isn’t, Scachi thought, he is talent.

And talent’s hard to come by, so …

“I’m taking you out of Las Tangas,” Scachi said.

“Good.”

“I got other work for you.”

No shit he did, Callan remembers.

Luis Carlos Galán, the Liberal Party presidential candidate who was miles ahead in the polls, was taken off the count in the summer of ’89. Bernardo Jaramillo Osa, the leader of the UP, was shot to death as he got off a plane in Bogotá the following spring. Carlos Pizarro, M-19’s candidate for president, was gunned down just a few weeks later.

After that Colombia was too hot for Sean Callan.

But Guatemala wasn’t. Neither was Honduras, nor was El Salvador.

Scachi moved him around like a knight in a chess set. Jumping him here, jumping him there, using him to take pieces off the board. Guadalupe Salcedo, Héctor Oqueli, Carlos Toledo—then a dozen others. Callan started to lose track of the names. He might not have known exactly what Red Mist really was, but he sure as hell knew what it was to him—blood, a red mist filling his head until that’s all he could see.

Then Scachi moved him to Mexico.

“What for?” Callan asked.

“Chill you out for a while,” Scachi answered. “Just help provide a little protection for some people. You remember the Barrera brothers?”

How couldn’t he? It was the cocaine-for-guns deal that had started all the shit back in ’85. Got Jimmy Peaches sideways with Big Paulie, which started his own strange trip.

Yeah, Callan remembered them.

What about them?

“They’re friends of ours,” Scachi said.

Friends of ours, Callan thought. Weird choice of words, a phrase that made guys use only to describe other made guys to each other. Well, I ain’t a made guy, Callan thought, and a couple of Mexican coke dealers sure aren’t, so what the fuck?

“They’re good people,” Scachi explained. “They contribute to the effort.”

Yeah, that makes them fucking angels, Callan thought.

But he went to Mexico.

Because where else was he going to go?

So now he’s here at this beach resort for a Day of the Dead party.

Decides to have a couple of pops because they’re in a safe place on a holy day, so there ain’t going to be no problems. Even if there are, he thinks, I’m better a little drunk these days than totally sober.

He throws back the last of his drink, then sees the big aquarium shatter and the water burst out and two people drop in that particular twisting way that people do only when they’ve been shot.

Callan drops behind the bar stool and pulls his .22.

There must be forty black-uniformed federales busting through the front door, firing M-16s from the hip. Bullets strike the fake rock walls of the cave, and it’s a good thing they are fake, Callan thinks, because they’re absorbing the bullets instead of deflecting them back into the crowd.

Then one of the federales unhooks a grenade from his shoulder strap.

Callan yells, “Get down!” as if anyone could hear or understand him, then he pops two rounds into the federale’s head, and the man drops before he can pull the pin and the grenade falls harmlessly to the floor, but another federale flings another grenade and it hits near the dance floor and explodes in a disco-pyrotechnic flash, and now several partyers go down, screaming with pain as the shrapnel rips into their legs.

Now people are ankle-deep in bloody water and flopping fish and Callan feels something hit his foot, but it isn’t a bullet, it’s a blue tang fish, pretty and electric indigo in the nightclub lights, and he loses himself in a peaceful moment watching the fish, and it is pandemonium now inside La Sirena as the partiers scream and cry and try to push their way out, but there is no way out because the federales are blocking the doors.

And shooting.

Callan’s glad he’s a little buzzed. He’s on alcohol-Irish-hired-killer autopilot, his head is clear and cool, and he knows now that the shooters aren’t federales. This isn’t a bust, it’s a hit, and if these guys are cops, they’re off-duty and picking up a little extra money for the upcoming holidays. And he realizes quickly that no one is going to get out through the front door—not alive, anyway—and there must be a back exit, so he lowers himself into the water and starts to crawl toward the back of the club.

It’s the wall of water that saves Adán’s life.

It knocks him off his chair and sends him to the floor, so the first round of gunfire and shrapnel passes over his head. He starts to pick himself up, but then instinct takes over as he feels bullets zinging over him and he sits back down. Looks stupidly at the bullets chopping into the expensive coral, now dry and exposed behind the shattered aquarium, then jumps as an agitated moray eel twists beside him. He looks over to the other wall, where, behind the waterfall, Fabián Martínez is trying to twist himself back into his pants as one of the German girls sitting on the rock shelf does the same, and Raúl stands there with his pants around his ankles and a pistol in his hand and shoots back through the waterfall.

The faux federales can’t see through the waterfall. That’s what saves Raúl, who stands there blasting away with impunity until he runs out of ammo, drops the gun and reaches down and pulls up his pants. Then grabs Fabián by the shoulder and says, “Come on, we have to get out of here.”

Because the federales are pushing their way through the crowd now, searching for the Barrera brothers. Adán sees them coming and gets up to head for the back, slips and falls, gets back up again and, when he does, a federale points a rifle in his face and smiles, and Adán is dead, except the federale’s smile disappears in a whirl of blood and Adán feels someone grab his wrist and pull him down and then he’s in the water on the floor, face-to-face with a Yanqui who says, “Get down, asshole.”