Battleship Boys

by Paul Lally

  “That much I know. And because I’m working hand-in-hand with the DEA on mission coordination, I’ll know more very soon.”

  “Excellent.”

  The agent looks up and squints at the bright morning sunlight. Already close to 80 degrees even at this early hour, sweat trickles down his chubby face.

  “I will not miss this place.”

  Iván grins. “A month from now...” He pats the steering wheel. “You’ll be driving one of these in America.”

  The agent makes a face.

  Iván laughs. “Trust me, you will. We are on the right side of the gringos’ drug war. They’ll welcome us with open arms, and wide-open bank accounts. You’ll see—so tell me, what color?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Your car...like mine... what color?”

  He looks at the curvaceous Spider and frowns. “Ferraris should be red.”

  “Then red it will be. One day we shall race each other along the California coastline. What say you to that?”

  The agent shakes his head slightly. “If so, will obey the speed limit—as you should have.” He rips off the ticket, hands it over to an astonished Iván, then waddles back to his patrol car.

  Only then does Iván look at the “speeding ticket.” Nothing but scribbles in the information blocks. He laughs at the joke.

  A millisecond later, a familiar thrill of excitement ripples through his body. For an instant, it reminds him of those long-ago days when he did lines of cocaine at the university. But being drug-free for years, the high he’s feeling doesn’t come from artificial means. Instead, it’s the thought of Miguel Vargas finally out of the picture and his own path to the top once again smooth and assured.

  Are there risks? Of course. He fully admits that his career candle’s lit on both ends and the flames are burning brightly.

  Señor Garcia thinks that Iván’s:

  Doing all he can to ensure that the cartel’s day-to-day operations meet their forecasted delivery dates.

  Making sure the money-laundering avenues remain open and safe from interference.

  What Senor Garcia does not know is that Iván’s:

  Convinced DEA and SOCOM that he’s a trusted traitor to the cause.

  And thusly, doing his best to help them fight the war on drugs.

  Ivan Zambadas is a busy, two-faced man.

  But if there’s one thing he can do—and make no mistake, he can do a lot—it’s multi-task. Especially, when it comes to money. For the past five years he’s kept the cartel’s financial heart healthy, strong by vigorously pumping graft money to the hundreds of people involved in making, collecting, and distributing addictive substances to tens of thousands of victims, not only in the United States but around the world.

  Or “clients” if you prefer, which is the word Iván uses whenever he thinks of the poor suckers who snort, swallow, and shoot up cartel products.

  Up until the recent, highly unwelcomed ascension of Miguel Vargas to “most-favored-nation” status with Garcia, Iván’s path to inherit the organization was inevitable. Now, not so much. In fact—and he hates to admit this—at the center of his ruthless, unforgiving, unprincipled heart he knows that Miguel is the better man. And he will get the job.

  Unless he’s out of the picture for good.

  Iván folds the speeding ticket in half, in half again, then slowly tears it into pieces. With each rip he imagines Miguel’s naked throat, exposed, vulnerable, taking the blow of Osito’s machete.

  He starts the Spider, glances unconcernedly at the tidal wave of oncoming traffic almost upon him, and then SLAMS the Ferrari into gear It goes from 0-100 in 9.4 seconds, tires screaming, rubber smoke rising, leaving in his wake a fluttering snowstorm of bits and pieces of his speeding ticket to dust the asphalt.

  If you visit Cancún as a tourist, it’s best to get half-drunk—and stay that way. Because if you stay sober, your sensory system may not survive certain harsh realities.

  Before you start disagreeing, I’m not talking about the beautiful coastline beaches that comprise Zona Hotelera and the tourist traps along the eastern fringe of the city. They’re fun and diverting, and you can spend a day there in peaceful play. Most everybody does.

  I’m talking El Centro, downtown, the gritty, grimy, honest heart of the city, including the belly of the beast where the locals live—or try to, as the case may be.

  However...

  While it’s true, the Conquistadors did what colonizing nations always do to indigenous peoples—in this case Maya—and squashed them into their proper place, the Maya soul did not surrender. On the contrary, it grew stronger.

  You won’t see this, and you never will. What you will see in the faces of everyday Maya who live here are placid, unconcerned, almost resigned looks. But beware. What you’re really seeing is an impenetrable mask hiding centuries of discrimination that you’ll never get beyond—unless you’re a fellow Maya.

  Which you are not, if you showed up in Cozumel in a big-ass, passenger ship, bored to death with onboard delights and ready for a good time onshore delivered to you on the backs of the locals.

  Or unless you’re coming from a battleship...

  As the Pez Vela slowly approaches the ferry terminal at Puerto Juarez, Major Williston’s the center of attention as he speaks to the gathered crowd on the upper deck.

  “I want to thank y’all for doing this. It might be the only time you ever volunteered for something that turned out to be worth it. Am I right?”

  Nods and smiles.

  “Let me tell you right now, it’s worth it. We’re not only going to damn well rescue American citizens, but we’re also doing the same thing for Mexican citizens, too. Guys who signed up to do the job, just like you did way back then. Guys with families, kids, friends...just like you.”

  He lowers his voice, and a frown furrows his brow.

  “We’re too late for some of those poor men. They’re gone for good. But a couple hours from now—God willing and thanks to you—we’ll get there in time to save the rest.”

  He scans the crazy-looking group: his Delta Force team mixed in with the others into a homogenous mob of guys wearing matching shirts and matching bright blue baseball caps.

  “You know the drill. We stay together until we reach town. Then group A splits off to do the insertion job with us, while the rest of y’all have drinks on the house over at Señor Frog’s, courtesy of the United States Marine Corps—and this.”

  He holds up his American Express credit card.

  Appreciative smiles and a few whistles.

  “Any questions before we cast off—that is what you squids say, right? ‘Cast off’?”

  “You got that right, jarhead!” a voice hollers from the back.

  CW salutes his heckler. “Touché, brother!”

  The group erupts in laughter.

  “One last thing. Don’t forget the twenty-four-hour security blackout. No cellphones, no selfies, not a peep out of anybody. My team and the hostages need time to transit safely north. The Garcia cartel has a long reach, and we’ll not be safe until we arrive back in the states—roger my last?”

  “Loud and clear, sir,” another voice shouts. “The Rock’s got your back.”

  No laughter this time. Stern faces and determined looks on everybody’s face.

  CW salutes and says, “Anchors aweigh, guys.”

  Someone shouts “OORAH!” and the others join in, chanting it over and over again.

  It takes four chartered busses to gather up the Battleship Boys and whisk them away from the ferry terminal and onto Mexican Federal Highway 180 for the quick trip into downtown Cozumel. Jack, Tommy, JJ and Stanley are in the lead bus, along with Major Williston’s assault team and their assorted “fathers.”

  Timeout for a brief history lesson while the boys head for il Centro.

  Won’t take long. Neither will their trip.

  Before Spain invaded Mexico in the sixteenth century and brought the Aztecs and Maya to heel, these two anci
ent civilizations had been doing just fine, thank you very much. In fact, as far back as 1500 B.C. they cooperated with trade and culture, each benefitting from the other. Corn, tomatoes, chocolate, guacamole delivered by the Maya sailing the seas, while the Aztecs shared their bounty by land.

  Think about it: almost two thousand years of co-existence. Not without war and strife, mind you. But to give you an example of how they “stylized” their combat and made it more theater than reality, neither Aztecs nor Maya ever killed on the battlefield.

  Think about that.

  A lot of shouting and waving, and battering and beating, but no death. That was taboo. Life was what mattered to these two cultures. From plants to people, living was their ultimate goal.

  Such noble sentiments aside, war and strife did come and go over the course of thousands of years. But on balance, at the end of the day, the month, the year, the decade, the century, a broad measure of relative peace existed between the Aztecs in the Valley of Mexico and the Maya in the Yucatan Peninsula.

  All that changed with a BANG in the 1500s, when ruthless legions of Spanish conquistadores landed with both boots—and gunpowder—on Mexican shores, with every intention of taking what didn’t belong to them and handing it across the ocean for the greater glory of Spain ruled over by King Charles V and his gang of thieves.

  While one of the leaders, Hernan Cortés, was pounding shit out of the Aztecs up north, the other, Pedro Alvarado, was busy gutting the Maya civilization in the Yucatán peninsula.

  These two old boys knew their job and did it well.

  Thanks to superior armor and weaponry, Spain subdued these indigenous peoples in a matter of a few short years. And in doing so, thousands of years of civilization, culture, art, and language faded into oblivion.

  Almost.

  Despite the Franciscans’ determined attempts to convert the “heathens” to the “one, true faith,” the Maya resisted—even more so, in fact, than their neighbors, the Aztecs. What the good friars never got into their thick, tonsured heads was that real change comes from within, never without. It comes from a personal decision, not an impersonal decree or violent threat, backed up by your army pals wearing funny-shaped, shiny steel helmets and carrying matchlock-muskets.

  No dice.

  The more you force an unwanted belief, the harder the resistance, until resistance turns into revolution.

  Don’t get me wrong; the Maya did not rise up and revolt against the Spanish colonizers. That’s not in any history books. Their guts and determination didn’t stand a chance against rapiers and crossbows.

  While it’s true, their small raids and hit-and-runs freaked out the Franciscans enough to build thick walls around the Catedral del Espíritu Santo for protection, by and large, the Maya appeared to bow down to their conquerors and became their dutiful lower-class citizens, that even to this day remains largely the case.

  One of the most prominent historic place markers that hearkens back to Spain’s ruthless efforts to colonize indigenous peoples and supplant their multi-deities with neat-as-a-pin monotheism are their lofty catedrals, beautiful to look at and built like fortresses of both fear and faith.

  Not only in Mexico.

  Back then, the long arm of the Roman Catholic faith—attached to the Pope in the Vatican—reached around the world, planting religious roots into unsuspecting cultures that, with the proper application of the milk of human kindness, combined with the stern hand of merciless oppression, blossomed into chapels, churches, and at the top of the Christian pyramid, the mighty cathedrals.

  Whether they be in Paris or Tokyo, Beirut or Bombay, Rome or Romania, Christian cathedrals around the world stick out like religious sore thumbs.

  But they’re not a bit sore for their devoted church members.

  On the contrary, they’re glorious.

  That said, these ornate, over-decorated edifices do take up major real estate in a city and declare to all who care to know that they are the repository of choice for the Christian faith.

  All who dare enter their hallowed, stained-glass interiors had better do so with proper deference as they regard this monument raised in praise of a one-of-a-kind “Blessed Trinity” made up of Almighty God (an old man with a white beard) his crucified son (Jesus Christ), and a white dove (much more than just “a bird”), AKA the celebrated but conveniently invisible “Holy Ghost.”

  And that’s just your ordinary run-of-the-mill cathedral.

  Then there’s Cancún’s famous Catedral del Espíritu Santo.

  In an odd way, the fortress-like layout of the compound reminds you of the Rock: four-foot-thick adobe walls surround the cathedral grounds the way belt armor surrounds the battleship’s welded steel hull.

  But instead of protecting against torpedoes and shell fire, the compound walls protected the good friars from Maya rabble who wanted to string up the saintly Franciscans by their sacred thumbs and skin them alive for tearing apart their primitive world for the sake of Christianity.

  Besides thick walls enclosing the cathedral, the compound also features four separate “chapels” located at each corner, sort of like the Rock’s 16-inch main batteries; but instead of dishing out armor-piercing rounds, the chapels dished out monotheistic religion, Vatican-style.

  Not all was smooth sailing for the Spaniards, however.

  An earthquake back in the late 1880s toppled the upper part of the cathedral’s tower. But just as the Rock was in the good hands of Frank Marchetti and his gang at Bath Iron Works for an extensive refit, willing—and not-so-willing—hands swiftly repaired the Catedral .

  With its tower fully functional once again, its bells ringing out the good news—to Spanish occupiers’ ears, not Maya’s—the Blessed Trinity was back in business, ready and willing to save your soul, and fully prepared to yank out your fingernails and stab you—and your family—with red-hot pokers if you didn’t head for the baptismal fount and praise Jesus.

  But if you think the Maya culture gave up trying the way the Aztecs did, and as a result are nothing more a footnote in ancient pre-Colombian era history, you’re making a big mistake.

  Evidence of Maya long-standing resistance can be found not only in the tunnels burrowed beneath the walls of the Catedral. They’re part of a catacomb-like underground complex of interconnected tunnels beneath the entire city of Cancún.

  During times of persecution, they became a source of safety, plus a place of deity worship. Rather than pursuing the Maya into their dark, twisting, underground world and suffer a slit throat or crushed skull for their trouble, marauding conquistadores left the Maya to their fates.

  Like many threatened cultures worldwide, the Maya preserved and perpetuated their ancient culture by passing it down from generation to generation, where it lives and breathes today.

  Especially by a woman with the tongue-twisting name of Ix Cuat Acholay.

  From her tightly braided, jet-black hair coiled like a serpent on the top of her head and covered with a coarse cotton scarf, down to her beat-up running shoes soaked with mop water, Ix is a pure-blooded, sturdily built Maya female in her early forties.

  Far above her in the cathedral, tourists wander about, heedless of her existence down here in a crude, subterranean men’s bathroom, on her knees, scrubbing the urine-soaked floor. The smell of disinfectant rises like a pungent fog and makes her squint.

  Men from Vargas’s drug manufacturing operation in the north tunnel barge in and out of the bathroom to do their business without even noticing her doing her nasty work. To them. she is invisible, including Vargas who, despite his own Maya ancestry, is a self-centered, supercilious, typical modern-day male when it comes to females and freely urinates while humming a tune.

  Ix thinks to herself, “Sing while you can, señor, because soon you’ll be praying instead.”

  She thinks this because a month earlier here’s what happened...

  Ix is nearing the end of her ten-hour cleaning shift. She empties her wash bucket into a primitive gutter
that runs along the base of the wall of the central tunnel beneath the Catedral. No fancy sewage system down here. Back in the 1500s, the Maya were too busy trying to survive the conquistadors’ relentless persecution to worry about disposing bodily waste, beyond a common gutter system.

  Only centuries later, when the tunnels became an historic attraction did the Mexican government improve the situation with proper drainage that ties into Cancún’s sewage system.

  But not here in the isolated and forgotten north tunnel, where Vargas now maintains his busy drug-manufacturing “factory” for the fentanyl/heroin. And it’s here, near one of the many dead-ends leading out like spokes on a wheel that Ix spots a gleam of light appearing momentarily where light shouldn’t be.

  Long trained in the art of being invisible, this mother of four children (two boys, two girls) stays hidden in the shadows, scrub bucket in hand, sensing the approach of a figure who—as far as Ix is concerned—has materialized out of thin air like a ghost. Or in this case, out of the velvet blackness of the tunnel..

  He passes directly behind her as if she doesn’t exist—typical male. Only then does she dart a quick glance at his retreating figure and recognizes Miguel Vargas on his way to the factory.

  Once convinced he’s gone, Ix moves down the tunnel and into the shadows, sweeping the damp, rocky floor as she goes. But then, from beneath her apron she pulls out a tiny, finger-sized LED penlight. After making certain no one is in the tunnel, she plays it along the crudely carved walls.

  Here and there the beam sweeps over native Mayan scribbles and initials carved into the stone-and-clay by Ix’s ancestors. As always, her lips tighten at the sight of these long-ago markings and the memory of her peoples’ suffering.

  Compared to the long-ago beheadings, rape, and murder that must have happened down here, watching men piss while she cleans up after them is child’s play. Even easier because she’s diapered and breast-fed four of her own and knows what it means to serve a higher cause.