The Viking Funeral

Chapter 39

TREMAINE LANE AND Lester Wood stayed with the cigarettes while Shane and Jody found Paco Brazos in the shipping office on D Dock, where he was getting their cargo manifests logged in at the duty-free desk. A uniformed Venezuelan Customs inspector was banging his rubber stamp on countless egress forms without bothering to read them. Next to him was a uniformed Colombian colonel with shoulder patches that read EFECTIVOS DE COLOMBIA. Despite his nonresident status, the colonel seemed to be in charge of the trans-shipping of their cigarettes.

"Son segurosy " he said sharply, indicating a stack of import invoices.

The Venezuelan Customs official nodded and kept stamping the forms furiously.

Paco finally glanced up at Jody and Shane. "You have nice the travel?" he said in his broken English.

"If you don't mind choking on diesel fumes," Jody answered.

"We go soon. Customs, she all fix, no?"

"What about the other San Andresitos?" Jody asked. "Hernandez, Sococo, and Randhanie. Aren't they supposed to be here to take delivery?"

"Ahh, is very good… Yes…" Paco smiled. He didn't seem to have a clue what Jody had just asked him.

They moved out into the hot afternoon sunlight. A line of five trucks were just pulling through the guard gate on the duty-free dock- old Mexican Fords with chipped paint, broken headlights, and fenders redesigned by traffic. Wooden stakes held up stained covers that arched over the truck beds like dirty brown rainbows.

"Los camiones, " Paco announced.

The trucks came to a stop, then ten or twelve private armed guards, known in Colombia as celadores, jumped out of the back of each vehicle. They wore threadbare, faded khakis tucked into shiny new paramilitary jump boots, and each guard carried an identical olive green machine gun-old Mexican Mendozas. The out-of-date thirty-ought sixes had wooden stocks and twenty-round box mags that loaded from the top. For a while the Mexican gangs in L. A. had been using these weapons, but as the drug business quickly became prosperous, they all switched to Russian auto-mags. Shane remembered that the old-style Mendozas were prone to jamming.

Paco rattled off a few sentences in Spanish. Jody looked over at Shane for a translation.

"I didn't quite get it. Sounded like he said you and he should ride in his bubble, whatever that means," Shane said. "He wants the rest of us in the back of the trucks."

"Your bubble?" Jody asked Paco.

"Si, si. Mi bubble es mi carro. Tengo nuevo- Land Cruiser." Paco pointed proudly at a new black Toyota that was parked nearby.

"A bubble." Jody grinned. "Yeah, looks kinda like one, don't it?" Ten minutes later the other San Andresitos arrived, also in new Land Cruisers. The SUVs were all loaded with extras: chrome rims, whip antennas, and roll bars with deer lights. The custom interiors were tuck-and-roll. They all had TMX sound systems that could blow the fur off a rabbit.

An hour later the cigarettes were safely loaded and the caravan was turned around, ready to leave.

"Hokay," Paco said, pushing his ugly brown teeth out from between puffy lips. "We go. Vamos a la ciudad de Maicao."

The Vikings retrieved their gym bags containing the comforting weight of their machine pistols and boarded the trucks, which were now full to the top with All-American's cigarettes: one truckload for each of the three San Andresitos families, two for Paco Brazos. Paco got into his Toyota Land Cruiser, with Jody in the passenger seat beside him, and pulled to the head of the line. Shane was assigned to the back of the second truck with two of Emilio Hernandez's teenage guards.

Shane's vehicle was so filled with cases of cigarettes that there was almost no room to stand. He looked at the guards and guessed them to be about seventeen or eighteen. Their smooth faces and round cheeks had not yet been hardened by adulthood, but their eyes were those of predators. These teenagers had seen death or had caused it-Third World eyes, burning with anger and determination, in faces only slightly older than Chooch's.

The trucks moved slowly off the dock and through the duty-free gates, into the old town of Maracaibo.

They rocked dangerously in and out of deep potholes, rolling down the narrow streets like a parade of lumbering elephants, past a seven-block-long green island that sat in the center of town like a huge grass runway.

"Que es esta?" Shane asked one of the guards, pointing at the rectangular grass strip.

"Paseo de los Siglos," the teenage celador said sharply, and turned his back on Shane. The rough translation was "Passage of the Centuries." It meant nothing to Shane.

Finally, they reached Avenida 15 and hung a left. One after the other, the trucks and Toyotas rounded the corner, then proceeded north through the new part of Maracaibo.

Tall skyscrapers and flat-roofed, one-story shacks stood within yards of one another, giving the place a feel of unstructured growth.

Soon they were in the countryside, passing arid fields and slanting wooden fences, blowing road dust out from behind each truck as they headed into the desert.

La Guajara was described in Shane's Caribbean guidebook as a semi-desert, but to him it looked bleaker and hotter than Death Valley. Brown cactuslike vegetation clung to the few sandy washes, hoarding precious drops of moisture like thirsty castaways.

They passed straggling tribes of nomadic Indians herding half-dead burros along the dirt road. The nomads ran to get out of the way of the caravan, as the smugglers blasted the air horns in their shiny new Land Cruisers. The Indian men shouted at their frightened children, grabbed the halters of their braying donkeys, and glared with impotent hostility at the trucks that sped past, leaving them engulfed in a curtain of brown dust.

Shane tried to ask one of the guards about the Indians, but the boy just shrugged. "Wayu," was all he would say. Shane wondered if that was the name of the tribe or a curse, or both.

Soon they crossed out of Venezuela into Colombia. The border was marked by an old yellow sign shot full of bullet holes, outside the small town of Paraguacion.

Paraguacion seemed right out of a Sam Peckinpah western. The trucks slowed only slightly as they jounced down the dirty main street, past dusty cinder-block stores with broken glass windows. Rough-hewn corner posts supported tin roofs on buildings that leaned precariously. A dry fountain dominated the center of town, across from a general store.

The trucks and SUVs swept through Paraguacion like a Panzer division. A few Indian children stood on the boardwalks, holding on to their mothers' cotton dresses. They watched with black-eyed wonder while a few of the trucks carelessly clipped the circular base of the fountain as they rushed past.

The convoy had just passed out of Venezuela, into Colombia. There were no Customs stops, no government officials, nothing.

Nobody in the town of Paraguacion, or the two nations it separated, seemed to care that ninety-six million cigarettes had just been converted from duty-free product into illegal contraband. It had happened in the blink of an eye as they shot through that little village under the uninterested gaze of a few desert Indians.

They picked up speed again, heading across the "semi-desert," scattering jackrabbits and rattlesnakes in their path, heading west toward a lawless hell town known as Maicao.