Iron River

31

The 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.

They continued down. The pine and juniper gradually gave way to oak and to tan grasses that seemed to grow from the rocks themselves. Then yucca and scrub oak appeared as they descended farther into the barranca. The temperature rose. Hood wriggled out of the new sweater and threw it into the back. Hours later, Hood realized that they had dropped into the lowland vegetation of agave and mesquite and cactus and he smelled the Urique River below them, marked by the palm trees that grew along its winding course. The outdoor thermometer in the Tahoe read eighty degrees. Here, nearer the river, there was no wind and the air was humid and still.

Around a turn a blue mountain rose from the canyon floor, a blue softer than the sky. He had never seen such blue, much less a mountain of it.

“Copper tailings from the mine works at Bufa,” said Luna. “ La Bufa village is not far.”

In La Bufa they met with agente de policía Evangelista Limones in a small office with a rough-hewn pine desk and three metal folding chairs and a timber-pole ceiling. There was a framed picture of St. Christopher on the wall and a bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling, and bright afternoon sunlight rushing through a window. Limones was slender and wore jeans and a big buckled belt and a short-sleeve plaid shirt knotted over his navel, as did many of the vaqueros of the Sierra Madre. He spoke in English for the benefit of Hood.

“First there were rumors of Zetas in Batopilas. Then the government soldiers come here two days ago. They confiscate my pistol and ammunition. They were fourteen men in four vehicles. Three were… how you say, Jeeps? Jeeps with machine guns on them. One vehicle was armored. They leave La Bufa after only one hour. They drive toward Batopilas. The soldiers they have not return. Since they leave here, no vehicles are coming from Batopilas. Two days, no vehicles. No Tarahumara. No burros. Nothing. And now no vehicles are leaving La Bufa for Batopilas. People are afraid of what has happen. When no one comes from Batopilas, they become afraid and they do not go down the road.”

“We will go down the road,” said Luna.

“Yes, I know.”

“Were the soldiers Federales or Chihuahua police?”

“Federales from Calderón.”

“Tell us the rumors of Zetas in Batopilas.”

“A Tarahumara boy say he saw them. Maybe ten men. If this is true, then they come from another direction. Not through La Bufa. Through San Ignacio or Satevo or from the river. Or maybe they fly. Do Los Zetas have airplanes?”

“I have not heard that,” said Luna. “But it must be possible.”

“The Tarahumara boy is the only witness. If he is lying, then the soldiers have come for nothing.”

Hood looked through the window to the narrow rock street where a pig snorted along the gutter and a shopkeeper swept the sidewalk outside her door. Two vaqueros walked by, looking into the police station silently.

Hood and Luna slept at the one pensión in La Bufa. Early in the morning they had eggs and tortillas and coffee, then set out for Batopilas.