Iron River

11

He 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.

Luna ordered first in Spanish, then in English, that they would take any man prisoner who cooperated fully and they would kill the rest without hesitation. A human silence rippled through the room, but there was the wind outside.

Hood wondered where the other two men would be. He looked at Ozburn and Bly. As if reading his mind, Luna said that Officer Blandon would be staying here to guard the armory and the communications gear, and Dr. O’Brien would be here also, waiting to treat the wounded and do what he could for the American.

“His name is Jimmy,” said Hood. “Jimmy Holdstock.”

“Jimmy Holdstock,” murmured someone.

“Right on,” said Ozburn.

Luna now left his place and slowly walked around the table. He looked at every face. Then he softly spoke another command in Spanish. Hood heard it clearly and it surprised him not for what it demanded but for what it implied.

He watched as the Mexican officers shook their heads and grumbled and cursed. They reached for their belts and pockets and deposited their cell phones on the table before them. Luna said something, and each man arranged his cell phone faceup directly in front of him.

The gray-haired man in the fatigues moved around the table with a dirty pillowcase and he and Luna watched them drop their phones into the bag. A uniformed cop with blue eyes and a drooping mustache caught Hood watching him, and his face colored in shame.

I have men I can trust and men I cannot trust.

Hood carried the combat 12-gauge slung over his right shoulder. The wind nudged him forward. The sky above was black and clear enough that the stars stood in relief, some near and some far and some in a dense middle belt. The night-vision headset was hot and tight and it cast the world in the same green highlights through which he had seen the murderous alleys of Anbar province. Hood listened to the rhythms of his boots on the gravel and to his breathing, and he felt the grit of the headset against his face and he could hardly believe he was doing this again.

They trod across the desert four abreast and fifty feet apart, well off the rough dirt road, picking their way around the boulders and the cholla and watching for rabbit holes and western diamondbacks. Sand drifts passed them from behind, then settled, then rose and hurried past them and settled again. To Hood’s right was Bly and beyond her Ozburn. They advanced methodically and Hood sensed their eagerness. To his left, Luna moved through the desert with a lightness that belied his size. He carried an M16 muzzle down in his right hand, and over his left shoulder hung a compound bow with an attached quiver of six arrows. They were big-game arrows, tipped with cross-blade heads with razor facets designed for penetration and the letting of blood, and in the green-limned world of the night-vision goggles, they glittered like huge emeralds at the ends of the shafts.

Hood topped a rise and the hacienda came into view. It was a kilometer away. The main house was large, two stories, and made of adobe brick. It was lit inside and out. There was a barn and three outbuildings visible in barnyard lights that twinkled in the wind. These all sat on flat ground in a small valley from the edges of which rose steep hillsides covered in mosaics of enormous pale boulders grouted with black desert scrub. Hood glassed the hacienda and saw two SUVs parked beneath a metal sun shade. There was a compact car tucked close to the barn, and three dirt bikes leaning against what had once been a chicken coop. The door of the coop stood open in the wind.

Just a few hundred yards away stood the spotter. Hood looked to Luna, but Luna had already seen him. Hood tossed a rock at Bly and pointed out the spotter and Bly turned toward her right. Luna signaled Hood to down and stay, and Hood passed this on to Bly, and she to Ozburn. Up on his elbows Hood could see Luna crawling forward on hands and knees, the bow and the M16 strapped crosswise to his back in a lethal X.

Through the binoculars, Hood saw that the spotter was young and slender. He wore a baseball cap backward. A satellite phone was clipped to his belt, and the blued steel of his AK-47 shone slightly in the faint moonlight. The collar of his black shirt flapped in the wind and his pant cuffs rippled.

Hood saw Luna moving slowly through the desert, watched the distance between the men close by inches, wondered at the punishment being taken by the sergeant’s hands and knees, wondered at his slowness and his silence in the wind. In the night far beyond, a shooting star dropped and crumbled and vanished. Then another. To Hood they appeared to be sliding down the last plane of creation, but he knew they were close.

Half an hour later, Luna stopped and very carefully sat back on his heels and unraveled his weapons. He was a man in slow motion. He set the assault gun on the ground. He unslung and brought up the bow and pulled an arrow from the quiver and notched it. He drew the string, and the bow arms flexed acutely and the pulleys turned and when Luna rocked upright, his string hand was already steady at his jaw. Hood felt the wind gust, then subside. Through the glasses he saw the squeeze of Luna’s finger on the trigger. The spotter cocked his head alertly, then turned toward Luna and collapsed. The arrow had flickered across the desert. Within seconds, Luna was standing over the man, and Hood saw the big knife in his hand, but Luna knelt and put the blade tip to the ground while he genuflected. Then he raised the knife into the air and motioned the others.

At 10:10 P.M., Luna shot the generator guard, the arrow fixing him to the chair in which he sat, and when the guard looked down to the fletching at his chest, he fell to one side and the chair fell with him. Hood watched Luna slip through the night to the garage and turn off the generator. When the lights in the ranch house flickered out, they attacked. Hood saw the south team streaming toward the front door with a battering ram. The north team at the rear breached the windows, and Hood could hear glass breaking and shouting and gunshots popping from inside. He heard automatic gunfire from the west side opposite him.

He switched on the mounted flashlight and followed Luna and Ozburn into the garage. Jimmy’s Ford Five Hundred stood dust-covered at the far end. There was a door leading into the ranch house. Luna lowered a shoulder and shattered the door and sprawled to the floor inside. Hood leveled his shotgun for cover and when he saw the two gunmen, he blew one off his feet with a scorching boom, and Ozburn and Bly dropped the other with bursts from their M16s, but as they fell, two more emerged from the darkness of the house, and Hood and Ozburn and Bly killed them, too. They advanced through the mudroom and down a hallway to the spacious black of the kitchen, into the far end of which suddenly backed two more Zetas, firing in retreat. When the pistoleros turned into the beam of his flashlight, Hood watched their guns and not their faces and as the barrels swiveled toward him, he unleashed the 12-gauge again while Ozburn and Bly fired, too, and two roaring seconds later when Hood stepped over the bodies, his night-vision goggles were so heavily splattered he shucked them to the floor. They ran down another wide hallway and into the great room lit faintly by moonlight through the high windows and by candles flickering above the tremendous stone fireplace, and there they met most of the west team clomping dazedly in from the far darkness, their flashlight beams skittering and jerking from the old wooden floorboards to the white adobe walls to the rough ceiling timbers of the cavernous room. Then three of the north team ran in from the rear of the house and joined the others roiling up the wide wooden stairs leading to the second story. As he ran the stairs three at a time, Hood heard furious engagement outside the ranch house to the south.

Hood crashed through a locked door. In the beam of his light he saw the bed pushed up against the wall and the bedsheet knotted to the headboard and trailing out the open window. A man holding on to the sheet looked at him through the window opening. Then the man’s face dropped from sight, but his hand came up with a machine pistol and Hood blew the hand and the pistol outward into the night. At the window, he looked down and saw the man stumbling zigzag into the darkness, clutching his handless wrist at eye level. Hood heard more fury to the south and he could see the wavering orange edge of fire coming from the other side of the ranch house. He glided down the bedsheet to the ground and rounded the south corner. Two of the south team officers were down, engulfed in flames, barely moving. The other two, both uniformed officers, staggered backward and dropped their weapons, hands and elbows up as a geyser of fire drove them backward into the dark. The Zeta turned the flamethrower on Hood, but not in time. The man lifted off his feet as if yanked, and the flame roared skyward, then stopped. Hood smothered one of the uniforms with his body and then rolled him over into the desert sand. When he got up, he saw the other burned officer had recovered his weapon and now stood facing the pale desert from which ten men loped toward them.

Hood took cover behind one of the SUVs, racked the shotgun, and slid in four new shells. His hands felt thick and cold, but they obeyed his will. The burned officers retreated behind the other SUV, and Hood watched the Zetas closing steadily from a hundred yards out. He heard voices behind him and when he turned and looked up, he saw the glimmer of gun barrels from a second-story window. To his left, Bly and Ozburn slid into position behind a slouching concrete fountain.

The Zetas came faster now, firing methodically. Hood pressed himself tight to the wheel of the vehicle. He heard the bullets clanking through the sheet metal and slapping against the house wall, and he heard the far-side tires blow, and when he looked over to the fountain, he saw the sand jetting up and lead-smeared divots pocking the concrete. He lurched from his lie and hit the ground hard on his elbows. The Zetas were fifty yards out. Two of them carried flamethrowers and they sent intermittent fire through the dark for effect and when the first of them was forty yards away, Hood aimed the short-barreled shotgun three feet above his head and squeezed off the shot. The man screamed and dropped the flamethrower and jammed his hands to his face, then fell to his knees in the sand. The Zetas came at full run. To Hood’s left, Bly and Ozburn opened fire. Hood heard the barrage from the second-story windows behind him. Four Zetas were down and the remaining six pulled up and stopped and Hood saw them veer away from the gunfire and each other. Luna and four of his men emerged from the desert on one side of them, and three more uniformed cops corralled the Zetas from the other. For ten seconds, Hood on his belly watched as the last attackers were shot to ribbons in the three-way slaughter.

They found Holdstock in one of the outbuildings, a former smokehouse that reeked of meat and smoke. He was ankle-ironed to an ancient ring set into the adobe wall and the chain was just long enough to allow him to lie on a soot-caked mattress on the floor. He lay on his back, everything but his head covered by a filthy blue blanket. He looked up at Janet Bly’s flashlit face, theatrical in the darkness, and Hood saw him smile as the tears flooded from his eyes. He started to move, then stopped. Someone pulled back the blanket. Jimmy’s hands rested on his naked chest, the stumps of his de-nailed fingers and thumbs bloated with infection and vibrating with pain.