The Border

by Don Winslow

  “How long before I know?”

  “A day or two.”

  “I’ll wait here,” Nora says.

  “Okay,” Callan says. “But then go back to Bahia.”

  They make love to the sound of the waves crashing on the beach.

  Callan sits in the C-12 and studies the sat photo of the Esparza compound.

  When the plane took off from Mazatlán, he distributed a photo to each guy on the plane and went over the rough tactical plan and assignments—who will move on the house, who will fire on the guards’ quarters, who will hold the airstrip. The assignments are redundant for each plane so in case one crashes, the other team can still go on with the mission.

  He can smell weed from the cockpit.

  “How can you fly doing weed?” he’d asked Buffalo Bill.

  “Can’t fly not doing it,” Bill answered.

  Bill is pretty relaxed, but the atmosphere in the back of the plane is tight. Guys sit staring straight ahead, a couple of them mumble prayers, others fidget checking gear for the three hundredth time—ammo clips, Velcro straps on their Kevlar vests, morphine ampules taped to sleeves or caps.

  A few of the men wear religious medals, some have IDs taped inside their shirts. The Mexicans wear no identification of any kind—in case they’re killed or captured they don’t want retaliations against their families.

  Callan hears Bill shout, “Five minutes, boys!”

  Two of the Mexicans finish their prayers and cross themselves, kiss the tips of their fingers.

  The C-12 is the lead plane, the Pilatus with Lev and the other team about ten seconds behind. It’s critical that there’s not more of a gap or each of the teams could be chopped up piecemeal.

  An instrument landing on a mountain in the dark, but Buffalo Bill brings it in like a United flight coming into O’Hare. The wheels bounce wickedly on the rough strip, though, jarring Callan and giving him a neck ache he knows he’ll have for days.

  The plane rolls to a stop.

  Callan unbuckles, grabs his HK and goes out the door.

  He sees the Pilatus coming in behind him. It hits the landing strip, bounces once and then settles and rolls in. The door opens and Lev trots toward him to head to the house.

  Then they’re hit by white light.

  Blinding.

  Huge spotlights.

  Bright as day.

  They’re out in the open of the landing strip as fire comes in from all sides. Callan hears the rounds ripping the air or the hollow, bass thunk of bullets hitting bodies as his guys start to go down.

  Callan flattens on the ground and has time to think, They knew we were coming, when he hears the whoosh of an incoming rocket and the C-12 explodes in flame. Buffalo Bill staggers out, his beard on fire. He frantically slaps at his face. Then the flames ignite his hat and he twirls like a drunken clown.

  The Pilatus blows up. A shard of metal spins across the strip and slices the marine in half.

  Callan hears screams of pain.

  Pleas to gods and mothers.

  He always thought death would be quiet, but it’s noisier than hell.

  Another explosion and then blackness.

  It’s night again.

  And silent.

  Callan awakes, if you can call it waking, sitting with his back against a metal wall. His hands are plastic-tied behind him, his legs are stretched out in front of him, his ankles shackled.

  Dried blood cakes his ears and his nose from a concussion. He feels sick to his stomach and dizzy, he can barely hear.

  His head throbs.

  The building is large, a warehouse . . . or maybe a hangar because a small plane sits in the center. Sicarios armed with machine pistols wander around. A couple sit in folding metal chairs.

  Across the room he sees what must be bodies—lumps under sheets of bloodstained canvas.

  Callan turns his head.

  The pain of just doing that is horrific and he fights off the urge to vomit.

  Lev, still unconscious, his chin dropped on his chest, sits beside Callan. Beyond him, Callan can make out a row of men—he thinks there are seven but his vision is blurry and it’s hard to count—all that are left from the raid.

  He tries to see who they are, who survived. There’s Lev, then another one of the Israelis. The Rhodesian, he thinks, two of the Mexicans, maybe one of the Brits. Beyond them he can’t see.

  The effort is exhausting. He just wants to go back to sleep.

  But Callan forces himself to stay awake.

  He focuses on sounds—Lev’s labored breathing, a man weeping, another whimpering. He looks down the row to see why—the Brit’s left leg is fractured, the bone jutting through his skin.

  Light comes into the hangar as the door opens.

  It hurts, like being stabbed through the eyes. Callan shuts them tight to try to stop the pain.

  He feels a man stand in front of him, examining him, then hears, “Look at me.”

  Callan opens his eyes and looks up.

  From old photos, he knows it’s Iván Esparza.

  “You came here to kill me?” Esparza asks. “How’s that working out for you?”

  His voice sounds like it’s fifty yards away.

  Callan doesn’t answer.

  Esparza hauls off and hits him hard in the side of the face. Callan’s head explodes with pain. He lurches over and throws up.

  “How it’s going to work,” Esparza says, “is when I ask you a question, you answer me. Do you get that now?”

  Callan nods.

  “Who are you? What’s your name?”

  “Sean Callan.”

  “Who sent you?”

  “What?”

  “Jesus, you are messed up,” Esparza says. “Who . . . sent . . . you? Núñez? Tito? Elena? Don’t lie to me, pendejo, because I already know. I just want confirmation.”

  Callan tries to think. “What was the question?”

  Esparza hits him again.

  Callan throws up again.

  He can barely hear Esparza say, “Listen, asshole, I have a team flying in here. All they do is hurt people. They like their job and they’re very good at it. They’re going to start hurting people in ways you can’t imagine. I’ll have them hurt my countrymen down there until they give me their names and where I can find their families—I guarantee you they’ll give up their wives, their parents, their kids—and I’ll have them all killed. Or—”

  The Brit screams.

  “Help him,” Callan says.

  “Sure.” Esparza walks down the row, pulls a pistol, and shoots the Brit in the head. He comes back to Callan. “Anyone else you want me to help?”

  “No.”

  “Where were we?”

  “Elena Sánchez.”

  “Sent you.”

  “Yes.”

  “That dumb cunt,” Esparza says. “Núñez swings and misses. Elena swings and misses. Would you blame me for thinking that I’m immortal? I asked you a question.”

  “No.”

  “Good answer,” Esparza says. He inspects Callan for a few seconds. “Sean Callan. I’ve heard of you. ‘Billy the Kid’ Callan. You’re a fucking legend. Is it true you saved Adán’s life once?”

  “Yes.”

  “I heard that story,” Esparza says. “Heard the song, too. Haven’t seen the movie, though. But I’m impressed. Then again, whatever you can say about Elena, you can never say she’s cheap. Only the best for La Reina.”

  “That’s right . . .” Callan loses his thought, then, “These guys . . . they’re talented . . . they have skills you can use . . . they’ll work for you . . .”

  “How about you?” Iván asks. “Will you work for me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s tempting,” Esparza says. “It is. But here’s the thing—I want to be the legend. And to be the legend, I have to break the legend.”

  Iván walks to the end of the row.

  One of his guys walks behind him, holding up a cell to get the video.
/>   One by one, Iván shoots each prisoner in the head. When he comes to Lev, he says, “Wake him up.”

  One of Iván’s guys slaps Lev conscious.

  Lev looks up, blinks.

  “Shalom, motherfucker.” Iván shoots him.

  The blood sprays the side of Callan’s face.

  Now Iván stands in front of him. “See, I’m just sick of people coming to try to kill me. It really pisses me off. And YouTube loves this shit. It’ll go viral.”

  He points the gun at Callan’s forehead. “Any famous last words?”

  “Yeah,” Callan says. “Fuck you.”

  Callan wants to close his eyes but forces them to stay open and glare at Esparza.

  Live tough, die tough.

  Iván lowers the gun. “Never waste a good legend.”

  He has one of his guys hose the puke off Callan.

  Callan sits soaked, shivering.

  Nora waits for three days.

  When she doesn’t hear from Callan, she takes Flor and heads out.

  She doesn’t go to Costa Rica, though.

  Nora goes to Mexico.

  The woman is stunning.

  No wonder, Elena thinks, my brother loved her. And the little girl with her is lovely, although clearly not her daughter. She looks at the darling girl. “Sweetheart, could you go with Lupe here so your mother and I can talk? She’ll give you something nice.”

  Flor looks to Nora, who nods.

  The girl goes off with the maid.

  “We met years ago,” Nora says.

  “I remember, of course,” Elena says. “My brother was the Lord of the Skies, and you were ‘La Güera,’ his famous lady. I was a little jealous of you, to tell the truth. And you’re even more beautiful now. How is that possible?”

  “Where’s my husband?”

  “Right to the chase,” Elena says. She looks out the window. It’s one of those rare rainy winter days—the Pacific is gray and rough. “To answer your question, I don’t know. But if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that he’s dead.”

  “He went to do some kind of job for you.”

  “And didn’t come back,” Elena says. “I take it you haven’t seen the video clip?”

  Nora shakes her head.

  “Iván Esparza was thoughtful enough to send it to me,” Elena says. She walks Nora over to a desk and opens a file on the computer. “I suppose I should issue some sort of warning as to content.”

  “I’m all right.”

  Nora watches the video.

  Sees Sean—wounded, hurting, dazed—look up at Iván Esparza and say, “Yeah. Fuck you.”

  She says, “Esparza didn’t shoot him.”

  “Not on camera,” Elena says, “but it’s hard to imagine him tolerating that kind of defiance. Then again . . .”

  “But we don’t know Sean is dead,” Nora says.

  “No.”

  “What are you doing to get him back?”

  “Nothing,” Elena says. “What can I do?”

  “Everything in your power,” Nora says.

  “I have no power,” Elena says. “I’m beaten. The new powers have turned on me, set me up. As we speak, people are packing my things so that I can go somewhere. The problem with that is, I have nowhere to go.”

  Iván, Caro and maybe even Tito are hunting her in Mexico, indictments for her and Luis wait across the border.

  She’ll go to Europe, maybe.

  For as long as it lasts.

  “You can’t just leave him there,” Nora says.

  “You don’t understand,” Elena says. “Women like you and me, our days are over. We’re the defeated. We believed in some level of decency, decorum, even beauty. The loveliness that comes from order. All that’s gone now. We depart the scene, leaving only chaos.”

  Elena sees it now.

  I should have seen it before, but now it’s too late, she thinks.

  Tito Ascensión will take it all.

  But he’s only Caro’s puppet.

  The old man manipulated us into destroying each other so he can pick up the pieces and run Tito like the dog he’s always been. Sooner rather than later, Tito will kill the Esparzas, not even knowing he’s doing it at Caro’s behest.

  The government will back Caro, thinking he’ll restore order.

  But they’re wrong.

  The genie of anarchy is out of the bottle and they’ll never get it back in. There are too many demons now for any one devil to control, and they’ll viciously, mindlessly slaughter one another on the streets of Tijuana, the beaches of Cabo, the hills of Guerrero. They’ll kill in Acapulco, in Juárez, in Mexico City itself.

  The killing will never stop.

  “Go back to Costa Rica,” Elena says. “I can’t protect you there, but I’m sure you can make some sort of accommodation with whoever takes over. You know these men—they’re fools for beauty.”

  Nora leaves Elena’s house in Ensenada and drives to the airport.

  Five hours later, she and Flor are in Washington.

  Keller watches the video.

  He’s seen similar ones before, too many times. It was Eddie Ruiz who started the whole vid-clip thing, years ago when he captured four Zetas sent to Acapulco to kill him. Eddie interviewed them on camera like a talk-show host, then shot each one of them and posted the clip everywhere.

  It started a trend.

  Now Keller watches the executions and puts the pieces together.

  Through Cirello, they fed Caro the location of the Esparza haven in Sinaloa. Just days later, an airborne raid on the place is ambushed. And that’s what it was—the Esparzas clearly knew the raid was coming—satellite photos show the skeletons of two charred planes on the landing strip. They were hit on landing. Most of the raiders were killed outright, some captured, the men he’s looking at now being executed in what looks like a hangar.

  He freeze-frames on one of them.

  The face matches photos from intel files on Elena Sánchez, her alleged head of security, Lev Ben-Aharon, former IDF. Hence “Shalom, motherfucker.” Two other recognizable faces are of a Mexican national, Benny Rodríguez, and a Rhodesian, Simon van der Kok, both in the files as Sánchez operatives.

  The last man in the line is a problem. We don’t see Iván shoot him. And the exchange:

  “Any famous last words?”

  “Yeah. Fuck you.”

  Sean Callan.

  “Billy the Kid.”

  Was in his early twenties when he ran the Irish mob on New York’s West Side. Made an alliance with the Cimino crime family and became one of their prime hit men. Had to leave New York after he helped assassinate the godfather, ended up as a mercenary in Central America and then a gunman for Adán Barrera. Saved Barrera’s life in a gun battle but left him when the Barreras killed Father Juan.

  Keller knew him.

  Hell, they went on a covert raid in Baja together, to pull Nora Hayden out. That was a long time ago. Callan and Nora went away together, off the radar, Keller never knew or tried to find out where.

  Let them live in peace.

  But what the hell is Callan doing on a Sánchez raid to kill Iván Esparza? Is he back to his old profession?

  Why?

  Christ, it’s all coming back.

  Keller focuses on the issue at hand.

  You give the Esparzas’ location to Caro, he thinks.

  Caro gives it to Elena.

  Then tells Iván that Elena’s people are coming?

  Why didn’t he give it to Tito, Keller wonders, who would have had a better chance of taking the Esparzas out? You answered your own question—he wanted to eliminate Elena first. Set up her best troops to get slaughtered.

  So now two of the three factions of the Sinaloa cartel are crippled:

  Núñez père and fils are on the run, trying to manage their operation from underground.

  The Sánchez wing is damaged, probably beyond repair.

  The Esparzas are what remains, but they’re literally wounded, and at war with
Tito’s increasingly powerful Jalisco cartel.

  The one constant in those developments is Rafael Caro. Keller has to hand it to him. I tried to destroy the Sinaloa cartel for decades, he thinks; Caro has done it in months.

  That’s the good news.

  The bad news is that the Jalisco cartel is the new power.

  Rafael Caro didn’t do all this just to put the crown on Tito’s head. If Tito is king, Caro is Richelieu, he’s Wolsey, he’s Warwick. He’ll use Ascensión to polish off Sinaloa—let Tito take the throne and the heat that comes with it—while he rides the chaos dragon, thinking he can control it, be the real king.

  But there are no kings anymore, Keller thinks.

  The last one died in Guatemala.

  Elena sits in the back of the Escalade.

  Luis is beside her.

  In her purse are two first-class tickets to Barcelona. From there, who knows? She tries not to think about the dubious future. One step at a time. First is the drive to Tijuana International. Her small convoy consists of three vehicles—any more, she decided, would engender more attention than security.

  Security is an issue.

  Nine phone calls to Tito, none returned.

  Seven calls to Rafael, same result.

  Calls out to sicarios, cell runners, police, politicians. No one wants to know her, old friends don’t remember her name.

  She had one incoming call.

  From Iván.

  “Did you get my video?” he asked.

  “Yes, it was charming, thank you.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Iván said. He sounded high. “I didn’t kill your son, you know. I didn’t kill Rudolfo. I never liked him very much, he was kind of a dick, but I didn’t kill him.”

  “Then who did?”

  “Núñez?” Iván said. “Caro?”

  “Caro was in prison.”

  “Bosses have never reached out from prison?” Iván asked. “I don’t know, I just know it wasn’t me.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “So you’ll stop hating me,” Iván said.

  “That matters to you?”

  “Believe it or not,” Iván said.

  “You won, Iván,” Elena said. “I’m taking Luis and leaving. You can have whatever you can take from Tito, or keep from him. And God help you.”