The Power of the Dog

by Don Winslow

  The jeep stops.

  The motor idles.

  Hands grab Art above the elbows and lift him out of the jeep. He can feel leaves under his feet; he trips over a vine but the arms won’t let him fall. He realizes that they’re taking him into the jungle. Then the hands push him down to his knees. It doesn’t take much force—his legs feel like water.

  “Take off the hood.”

  Art knows the voice giving the crisp order. John Hobbs, the CIA station chief.

  They’re at some kind of military base, a training camp by the looks of it, deep in the jungle. To his right, young soldiers in cammies are running an obstacle course—badly. To his left he sees a small airstrip that has been carved out of the jungle. Straight ahead of him, Hobbs’s small, tidy face comes into focus—the thick white hair, the bright blue eyes, the disdainful smile.

  “And take off the handcuffs.”

  Art feels the circulation come back into his wrists. Then the burning pins-and-needles sensation as it does. Hobbs gestures for him to follow and they go into a tent with a couple of canvas chairs, a table and a cot.

  “Sit down, Arthur.”

  “I’d like to stand for a while.”

  Hobbs shrugs. “Arthur, you need to understand that if you weren’t 'family,’ you would have been disposed of already. Now, what’s this nonsense about a safe-deposit box?”

  Now Art knows he was right, that his last-gasp Hail Mary had hit the target—if the cocaine-running out of Hangar 4 was just the work of renegades, they would have capped him back on the road. He repeats the threat he made to Scachi.

  Hobbs stares at him, then asks, “What do you know about Red Mist?”

  What the hell is Red Mist? Art wonders.

  Art says, “Look, I only know about Cerberus. And what I know is enough to sink you.”

  “I agree with your analysis,” Hobbs says. “Now, where does that leave us?”

  “With our jaws clamped on each other’s throats,” Art says. “And neither of us can let go.”

  “Let’s go for a walk.”

  They hike through the camp, past the obstacle course, the shooting range, the clearings in the jungle where cammie-clad soldiers sit on the ground and listen to instructors teach ambush tactics.

  “Everything in the training camp,” Hobbs says, “was paid for by Miguel Ángel Barrera.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Barrera understands.”

  “Understands what?”

  Hobbs leads him up a steep trail to the top of a hill. Hobbs points out over the vast jungle stretching below.

  “What does that look like to you?” he asks.

  Art shrugs. “Rain forest.”

  “To me,” Hobbs says, “it looks like a camel’s nose. You know the old Arab proverb: Once the camel gets his nose inside the tent, the camel will be inside the tent. That’s Nicaragua down there, the Communist camel’s nose in the tent of the Central American isthmus. Not an island like Cuba, that we can isolate with our navy, but part of the American mainland. How’s your geography?”

  “Passable.”

  “Then you’ll know,” Hobbs says, “that Nicaragua’s southern border—which we’re looking at—is a scant three hundred miles from the Panama Canal. It shares a northern border with an unstable Honduras and a less-stable El Salvador, both of which are struggling against Communist insurgencies. So is Guatemala, which would be the next domino to fall. If you’re up on your geography, you’ll know that there is very little but mountainous jungle and rain forest between Guatemala and the southern Mexican states of Yucatán, Quintana Roo and Chiapas. Those states are overwhelmingly rural and poor, populated by landless helots who are perfect victims for a Communist insurgency. What if Mexico falls to the Communists, Arthur? Cuba is dangerous enough—now imagine a two-thousand-mile border with a Russian satellite country. Imagine Soviet missiles based in hardened silos in Jalisco, Durango, Baja.”

  “So what, they take Texas next?”

  “No, they take Western Europe,” Hobbs says, “because they know—and it’s the truth—that even the United States doesn’t have the military or financial resources to defend a two-thousand-mile border with Mexico and the Fulda Gap at the same time.”

  “This is crazy.”

  “Is it?” Hobbs asks. “The Nicaraguans are already exporting arms across the border to the FLMN in El Salvador. But don’t even take it that far. Just consider Nicaragua, a Soviet client state that straddles Central America. Imagine Soviet subs based on the Pacific side from the Gulf of Fonseca, or on the Atlantic side along the Gulf of Mexico. They could turn the Gulf and the Caribbean into a Soviet lake. Consider this: If you think it was hard for us to spot missile silos in Cuba, try detecting them in those mountains, over there in the Cordillera Isabelia. Intermediate-range missiles could easily reach Miami, New Orleans or Houston with very little response time available to us. That’s not to mention the threat of submarine-launched missiles striking from somewhere in the Gulf or the Caribbean. We cannot allow a Soviet client state to remain in Nicaragua. It’s that simple. The Contras are willing to do the job, or would you rather see American boys fighting and dying in that jungle, Arthur? Those are your choices.”

  “That’s what you want me to choose? Dope-pushing Contras? Cuban terrorists? Salvadoran death squads that murder women, kids, priests and nuns?”

  “They’re brutal, vicious and evil,” Hobbs says. “The only worse people I can think of are the Communists.

  “Look at the globe,” Hobbs continues. “We ran away in Vietnam, and the Communists learned exactly the right lesson from that. They took Cambodia in the blink of an eye. We did nothing. They marched on Afghanistan, and we did nothing except pull some athletes out of a track meet. So it’s Afghanistan, next it’s Pakistan and then it’s India. And then it’s done, Arthur—the entire Asian landmass is red. You have Soviet client states in Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, Iraq and Syria. And we do nothing and nothing and nothing, so they think, Fine, let’s see if they do nothing in Central America. So they take Nicaragua, and how do we respond? The Boland Amendment.”

  “It’s the law.”

  “It’s suicide,” Hobbs says. “Only a fool or Congress couldn’t see the folly of allowing a Soviet puppet to remain in the heart of Central America. The stupidity beggars description. We had to do something, Arthur.”

  “So the CIA takes it upon itself to—”

  “The CIA took nothing on itself,” Hobbs says. “This is what I’m trying to tell you, Arthur. Cerberus comes from the highest possible authority in the land.”

  “Ronald Reagan—”

  “—is Churchill,” Hobbs says. “At a critical moment in history, he has seen the truth for what it is and has had the resolve to act.”

  “Are you telling me—”

  “He doesn’t know any of the details, of course,” Hobbs says. “He simply ordered us to reverse the tide in Central America and overthrow the Sandi-nistas by whatever means necessary. I’ll read chapter and verse to you, Arthur—National Security Department Directive Number Three authorizes the vice president to take charge of activities against Communist terrorists operating anywhere in Latin America. In response, the vice president formed TIWG—the Terrorist Incident Working Group—based in El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica, which in turn instituted the NHAO—the National Humanitarian Assistance Operation—which, in accordance with the Boland Amendment, is meant to provide nonlethal 'humanitarian’ aid to Nicara-guan refugees, aka the Contras. Operation Cerberus doesn’t run through the Company—that’s where you’re wrong—but through the VP’s office. Scachi reports directly to me, and I report to the VP.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I’m appealing to your patriotism,” Hobbs says.

  “The country I love doesn’t get in bed with people who torture its own agents to death.”

  “Then to your pragmatism,” Hobbs says. He takes some documents out of his pocket. “Bank records. Deposits made to your accounts
in the Caymans, Costa Rica, Panama . . . all from Miguel Ángel Barrera.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Withdrawal slips,” Hobbs says, “with your signature.”

  “It was a deal I had to make.”

  “The lesser of two evils. Exactly,” Hobbs says. “I understand the dilemma completely. Now I’m asking you to understand ours. You keep our secrets, we keep yours.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Art turns and starts to walk back down the trail.

  “Keller, if you think we’re just going to let you walk out of here—”

  Art holds up his middle finger and keeps walking away.

  “There must be some sort of arrangement—”

  Art shakes his head. They can take their domino theory, he thinks, and shove it sideways. What could Hobbs offer me that would make up for Ernie?

  Nothing.

  There is nothing in this world. Nothing you can offer a man who’s lost everything—his family, his work, his friend, his hope, his trust, his belief in his own country. There’s nothing you can offer that man that means anything.

  But it turns out there is.

  Then Art understands—Cerberus isn’t a guard, he’s an usher. A panting, grinning, tongue-lolling doorman who eagerly invites you into the underworld.

  And you can’t resist.

  Chapter Six

  The Lowest Bottom Shook

  . . . and every bolt and bar

  Of massy iron or solid rock with ease

  Unfastens: on a sudden open fly,

  With impetuous recoil and jarring sound,

  Th’ infernal doors, and on their hinges grate

  Harsh thunder, that the lowest bottom shook

  Of Erebus.

  —John Milton, Paradise Lost

  Mexico City

  September 19, 1985

  The bed shakes.

  The shaking merges into her dream, then her waking thoughts: The bed is shaking.

  Nora sits up in bed and looks at the clock but has a hard time focusing on the digital numbers because they seem to be vibrating, almost liquefying, in front of her eyes. She reaches over to steady the clock—it’s 8:18 in the morning. Then she realizes that it’s the side table that’s shaking, that everything is—the table, the lamps, the chair, the bed.

  She’s in a room on the seventh floor of the Regis Hotel, the gracious old landmark on Avenida Juárez near La Alameda Park in the heart of the city. The guest of a cabinet minister, she was brought down to help him celebrate Independence Day, and she’s still here three days later. The minister goes home to his wife in the evenings. In the afternoons he comes to the Regis to celebrate his independence.

  Nora thinks she might still be asleep, still dreaming, because now the walls are pulsing.

  Am I sick? she wonders. She does feels dizzy, nauseated, all the more so when she gets out of bed and can’t walk or even stand, as the floor seems to be rolling beneath her.

  She looks over to the large wall mirror across from the bed, but her face doesn’t look pale. It’s just that her head keeps moving around in the mirror, and then the mirror bows and shatters.

  She throws her arm up in front of her eyes and feels little shards of glass hit her. Then she hears the sound of a hard rain, but it isn’t rain—it’s debris falling from the higher floors. Then the floor seems to slide like one of those metal plates in a funhouse, but this isn’t fun—it’s terrifying.

  She’d be more terrified if she could see outside the building. See it literally waving, see the top of the hotel bend and sway and actually smack the top of the building next door. She hears it, though. Hears the wicked, dull crack, then the wall behind the bed falls in and she opens the door and runs into the hallway.

  Outside, Mexico City is shaking to death.

  The city is built on an old lake bed, soft soil, which in turns sits on the large Cocos Tectonic Plate, which is constantly shifting under the Mexican landmass. The city and its soft, loose foundation sit just two hundred miles from the edge of the plate, and one of the world’s largest faults, the giant Middle American Trench, which runs under the Pacific Ocean from the Mexican resort town of Puerto Vallarta all the way to Panama.

  For years there have been small quakes along the northern and southern edges of this plate, but not near the center, not near Mexico City, which the scientists refer to as a “seismic gap.” The geologists compare it to a string of firecrackers that have exploded along both ends but not in the center. They say that sooner or later, the center has to catch fire and explode.

  The trouble starts about thirty kilometers beneath the earth’s surface. For countless eons the Cocos Plate has been trying to sink, to slide under the plate to the east of it, and on this morning it succeeds. Forty miles off the coast, 240 miles west of Mexico City, the earth cracks, sending a giant quake through the lithosphere.

  If the city had been closer to this epicenter, it might have held up better. The high-rise buildings might have survived the high-frequency, rapid jolting that happens near the actual quake. The buildings might have jumped and landed and cracked, but held up.

  But as the quake moves from the center its energy dissipates, which, counterintuitively, makes it more dangerous because of that soft soil. The quake fades into long, slow rolling motions—a set of giant waves, if you will, that get under that soft lake bed, that bowl of Jell-O the city is built on—and that Jell-O just rolls, rolling the buildings with it, shaking the buildings not so much vertically as horizontally, and that’s the problem.

  Each floor of the high-rises moves farther sideways than the floor below. The now top-heavy buildings literally slide out into the air, knock heads and slide back again. For two long minutes the tops of these buildings slide sideways, back and forth in the air, and then they just break.

  Concrete blocks fall off and tumble down onto the street. Windows burst; huge, jagged pieces of glass fly into the air like missiles. Interior walls collapse, support beams with them. Rooftop swimming pools crack, sending tons of water to collapse the roofs beneath them.

  Some buildings just snap off at the fourth or fifth floors, sending two, three, eight, twelve stories of stone, concrete and steel slamming into the street below, thousands of people falling with them, buried under them.

  Building after building—250 of them in four minutes—collapses in the quake. The government literally falls—the Secretariat of the Navy, the Secretariat of Commerce and the Secretariat of Communications all topple. The city’s tourist center reads like a roll of casualties, name after name—the Hotel Monte Carlo, the Hotel Romano, the Hotel Versailles, the Roma, the Bristol, the Ejecutivo, the Palacio, the Reforma, the Inter-Continental and the Regis all go down. The top half of the Hotel Caribe snaps off like a stick, dumping mattresses, luggage, curtains and guests through the crack and onto the street. Whole neighborhoods virtually disappear—Colonia Roma, Colonia Doctores, Unidad Aragón and the Tlatelolco Housing Project, where a twenty-story apartment tower collapses on its occupants. In a particularly cruel twist, the quake destroys the General Hospital of Mexico and the Juárez Hospital, killing and trapping patients and desperately needed doctors and nurses.

  Nora doesn’t know any of this. She runs into the hallway, where room doors that have fallen in look like cards in a sophisticated house of cards that has started to collapse. A woman runs ahead of her and presses for the elevator.

  “No!” Nora yells.

  The woman turns and looks at her, wide-eyed with fear.

  “Don’t take the elevator,” Nora says. “Take the stairs.”

  The woman stares at her.

  Nora tries to remember the words in Spanish, but can’t.

  Then the elevator doors slide open and water pours out, like a scene from a bad, grotesque horror film. The woman turns around, looks at Nora, laughs and says, “Agua.”

  “Vámos,” Nora says. “Vámonos, whatever. Let’s go. Come on.”

  She grabs the woman by the hand to try to
pull her down the hall but the woman won’t budge. She yanks her hand back and starts to press the elevator’s Down button again and again.

  Nora leaves her and finds the exit door to the stairwell. The floor ripples and rolls under her feet. She gets into the stairway and it’s like being in a long, swaying box. The force knocks her from side to side as she runs down the stairs. There are people in front of her now, and behind; the stairwell is getting crowded. Sounds, horrible sounds, echo in the confined space: cracking, breaking, the noises of a building tearing itself apart—and screams—women’s screams and, worse, the shrill keening of children. She grabs on to the handrail to steady herself, but it’s moving, too.