The Power of the Dog

by Don Winslow

  They trained hard, too.

  Some guy rumored to be an Israeli colonel came in with a bunch of fucking Brits who were all ex-SAS, or claimed to be anyway. As a good mick, Callan hated the Brits and the SAS, but he had to admit that these limeys knew what they were doing.

  Callan was always pretty slick with a .22, but there was a lot more to this kind of work, and pretty soon Callan was getting instruction on the use and handling of the M-16, the AK-47, the M-60 machine gun and the Barrett-Model .90 sniper rifle.

  He also trained in hand-to-hand combat—how to kill with a knife, a garrote, his hands and feet. Some of the permanent instructors were former U.S. Special Forces guys—some of them Operation Phoenix vets from Vietnam. A lot of them were Colombian army officers who spoke English like they were from Mayberry, USA.

  It used to crack Callan up, whenever one of these upper-crust Colombians would open his mouth and sound like some cracker. Then he found out that most of these guys had gotten their training at Fort Benning in Georgia.

  Something called the School of the Americas.

  Yeah, what the fuck kind of school is that? Callan thought. Reading, writing and whacking. Whatever, they taught some nasty skills, which the Colombians were happy to pass on to the group that had become known as Los Tangueros.

  There was a lot of OJT, too. On-the-Job Training.

  One day a squad of Tangueros went out to ambush a group of guerrillas that had been operating in the area. A local army officer had delivered photos of the six intended targets, who lived in villages like your average campesinos when they weren’t out doing guerrilla-type shit.

  Fidel Cardona led the mission himself. Cardona had become kind of a kick, calling himself “Rambo” and pretty much dressing like the guy in the movie. Anyway, they went out and set up an ambush on a dirt road these guys were supposed to be using.

  The Tangueros spread out in a perfect U-shaped formation, just the way they’d been taught. Callan didn’t like it, lying in the brush, wearing cammies, sweating in the heat. I’m a city guy, he thinks. When did I join the fucking army?

  Truth is, he was edgy. Not scared, really, more apprehensive, not knowing what to expect. He’d never gone up against guerrillas before. He thought that they’d probably be pretty good, well trained, know the terrain better and how to use it.

  The guerrillas strolled right into the open top of the U.

  They weren’t what Callan was expecting, hardened fighters in camouflage gear with AKs. These guys looked like farmers, in old denim shirts and short campesino trousers. And they didn’t move like soldiers, either—spread out, alert. They were just walking up the road.

  Callan laid the sights of his Galil rifle on the guy farthest to the left. Aimed a little low, at the guy’s stomach, in case the rifle kicked up. Also, he didn’t want to look at the guy’s face because the man had this baby face and he was talking to his friends and laughing, like a guy does with his buddies at the end of a day of work. So Callan kept his eyes on the blue of the man’s shirt because then it was like shooting this thing, just like target shooting.

  He waited for Fidel to take the first shot, and when he heard it, he squeezed the trigger twice.

  His man went down.

  They all did.

  The poor fuckers never saw it coming, never knew what hit them. There was just a volley of fire from the bushes beside the road and then there were six guerrillas down, bleeding into the dirt.

  They never even had time to pull their weapons.

  Callan forced himself to walk over to the man he had shot. The guy was dead, lying facedown in the road. Callan nudged the body over with his foot. They had strict orders to pick up any guns, except Callan didn’t find one. All the guy was carrying was a machete, the kind that the campesinos used to cut bananas off the trees.

  Callan looked around and saw that none of the guerrillas had guns.

  That didn’t bother Fidel. He walked around, putting insurance shots into the backs of their heads, then radioed back to Las Tangas. Pretty soon a truck rolled up with a pile of clothes like the Communist guerrillas usually wore, and Fidel ordered his men to dress the corpses in the new clothes.

  “You gotta be fuckin’ kiddin’ me,” Callan said.

  Rambo wasn’t kidding. He told Callan to get busy.

  Callan got busy sitting on the side of the road. “I ain’t no fuckin’ undertaker,” is what he told Fidel. So Callan sat and watched as the other Tangueros changed the corpses’ clothes, then snapped photos of the dead “guerrillas.”

  Fidel yapped at him all the way back. “I know what I’m doing,” Fidel said. “I went to school.”

  Yeah, I went to school, too, Callan told him. They held the classes in Hell’s Kitchen. “But the guys I shot, Rambo?” Callan added. “They usually had guns in their hands.”

  Rambo must have bitched to Scachi about him because Sal showed up a few weeks later at the ranch to have a “counseling session” with Callan.

  “What’s your problem?” Scachi asked him.

  “My problem is gunning down fuckin’ farmers,” Callan said. “Their hands were empty, Sal.”

  “We ain’t making Westerns, here,” Sal answered. “There’s no 'code of honor.’ What, you want to hit them when they’re in the jungle with AKs in their hands? You feel better if you take casualties? This is a motherfuckin’ war, Sparky.”

  “Yeah, I get it’s a war.”

  Scachi said, “You’re getting paid, aren’t you?”

  Yeah, Callan thought, I’m getting paid.

  The eagle screams twice a month, in cash.

  “And they’re treating you well?” Scachi asked.

  Like fucking kings, Callan had to admit. Steaks every night, if you wanted them. Free beer, free whiskey, free coke if that was your thing. Callan blew a little coke now and then, but it didn’t do it for him like the booze did. A lot of the Tangueros would snort a pile of coke, then hit the whores that were brought in on weekends and fuck them all night.

  Callan went with the whores a couple of times. A man has needs, but that’s about all it was, just meeting a need. These weren’t high-class call girls like at the White House, either—these were mostly Indian women brought in from the oil fields to the west. They weren’t even women, if you wanted to be honest about it. They were mostly just girls in cheap dresses and heavy makeup.

  First time he used one, Callan felt more sad than relieved afterward. He went into a little cubicle in the back of their barracks. Bare plywood walls and a bed with a bare mattress. She tried to talk sexy to him, saying things she thought he’d like to hear, but he finally asked her to shut up and just fuck.

  He lay there afterward thinking about the blond woman back in San Diego.

  Nora was her name.

  She was beautiful.

  But that was a different life.

  After Scachi’s pep talk Callan soldiered up and went on more missions. Los Tangueros bushwhacked another six unarmed “guerrillas” on the banks of a river, gunned down another half-dozen right in the town square of a local village.

  Fidel had a word for their activities.

  Limpieza, he called it.

  Cleansing.

  They were cleansing the area of guerrillas, Communists, labor leaders, agitators—all the fucking garbage. Callan heard talk they weren’t the only ones doing the cleansing. There were lots of other groups, other ranches, other training centers, all over the country. All the groups had nicknames—Muerte a Revolucionarios, ALFA 13, Los Tinados. Inside two years they killed over three thousand activists, organizers, candidates and guerrillas. Most of these killings took place in isolated rural villages, especially in the Medellín stronghold area in the Magdalena Valley, where the entire male populations of villages would be herded together and machine-gunned. Or chopped to pieces with machetes, if bullets were deemed too expensive.

  And there were a lot of people other than Communists getting cleansed—street kids, homosexuals, drug addicts, winos.

/>   One day the Tangueros went out to cleanse some guerrillas who were on the move from one base of operation to another. So Callan and the others waited for this rural bus to come down the road, stopped it and took everybody but the driver off. Fidel went through the passengers, comparing their faces with photos he had in his hand, then pulled five men from the group and had them taken into the ditch.

  Callan watched as the men dropped to their knees and started praying.

  They didn’t get much beyond “Nuestro Padre” before a bunch of Tangueros sprayed them with bullets. Callan turned away, only to see two of his other comrades chaining the bus driver to the steering wheel.

  “What the fuck are you doing?!” Callan yelled.

  They siphoned gasoline from the fuel tank of the bus into a plastic water jug and then poured it on the driver, and as he screamed for mercy Fidel turned to the passengers and announced, “This is what you get for transporting guerrillas!”

  Two of the Tangueros held Callan back as Fidel tossed a match into the bus.

  Callan saw the driver’s eyes, heard his screams and watched the man’s body twist and dance to the flames.

  He never got the smell out of his nose.

  (Sitting here now in this Puerto Vallarta bar, he can smell the burning flesh. Ain’t enough scotch in the world to cleanse that smell.)

  That night Callan hit the bottle hard. Got good and fuckin’ drunk and thought about picking up the old .22 and putting a deuce into Fidel’s face. Decided he wasn’t ready to commit suicide and started packing instead.

  One of the Rhodesians stopped him.

  “You don’t leave here on your feet,” the guy told him. “They’ll kill you before you walk a klik.”

  The guy’s right, I wouldn’t make it a kilometer.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” the Rhodesian said. “It’s Red Mist.”

  “What’s Red Mist?” Callan asked.

  The guy looked at him weird and then just shrugged.

  Like, If you don’t know . . .

  “What’s Red Mist?” Callan asked Scachi on Sal’s next visit to Las Tangas to adjust Callan’s ever-shittier attitude. The fucking mick was just sitting in the barracks having long conversations with Johnnie Walker.

  “Where’d you hear of Red Mist?” Scachi asked.

  “Don’t matter.”

  “Yeah, well, forget you heard it.”

  “Fuck that, Sal,” Callan said. “I’m a part of somethin', I want to know what it is.”

  No, you don’t, Scachi thought.

  And even if you did, I can’t tell you.

  Red Mist was the code name for the coordination of scores of operations to “neutralize” left-wing movements across Latin America. Basically, the Phoenix program for South and Central America. Half the time, the individual operations didn’t even know they were being coordinated as part of Red Mist, but it was Scachi’s role as John Hobbs’s errand boy to make sure that intelligence was shared, assets were distributed, targets were hit and nobody stepped on anyone else’s dick in the doing of it.

  It wasn’t an easy job, but Scachi was the perfect man for it. Green Beret, sometime CIA asset, made member of the Mafia, Sal would just disappear on “detached duty” from the army and work as Hobbs’s waterboy. And there was a lot of water to be carried: Red Mist encompassed literally hundreds of right-wing militias and their drug-lord sponsors, a thousand army officers and a few hundred thousand troops, dozens of separate intelligence agencies and police forces.

  And the Church.

  Sal Scachi was a Knight of Malta and a member of Opus Dei, the fervently right-wing, anti-Communist secret organization of bishops, priests and committed laypeople such as Sal. The Catholic Church was at war with itself, its conservative leadership in the Vatican fighting the “liberation theologists”—left-wing, often Marxist, priests and bishops on the ground in the Third World—for the soul of Mother Church herself. The Knights of Malta and Opus Dei worked hand-in-glove with the right-wing militias, the army officers, even the drug cartels when necessary.

  And the blood flowed like wine at Communion.

  Most of it paid for, directly or indirectly, with American dollars. Directly from American aid to the countries’ militaries, whose officers made up the bulk of the death squads; indirectly by Americans buying drugs, the dollars for which went to the cartels sponsoring the death squads.

  Billions of dollars in economic aid, billions of dollars in dope money.

  In El Salvador, right-wing death squads murdered left-wing politicians and labor organizers. In 1989, on the campus of Central American University in San Salvador, Salvadoran army officers gunned down six Jesuit priests, a maid and her little girl with sniper rifles. In that same year, the United States government sent half a billion dollars in aid to the Salvadoran government. By the end of the ’80s, approximately 75,000 people had been killed.

  Guatemala doubled that figure.

  In the long war against the Marxist rebels, over 150,000 people were killed and another 40,000 were never found. Homeless kids were gunned down in the streets. College students were murdered. An American hotelier was beheaded. A university professor was stabbed in the hall of her classroom building. An American nun was raped, killed and thrown onto the corpses of her companions. Through it all, American soldiers provided training, advice and equipment, including the helicopters that flew the killers to the killing grounds. By the end of the ’80s, U.S. president George Bush was so disgusted by the carnage that he finally cut off funds and armaments for the Guatemalan military.

  Everywhere in Latin America it was the same—the long shadow war between the haves and the have-nots, between the right wing and the Marxists, with the liberals caught, deer-in-the-headlights, between them.

  Always, Red Mist was there.

  John Hobbs oversaw the operation.

  Sal Scachi ran the day-by-day.

  Liaising with army officers trained at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. Providing training, technical advice, equipment, intelligence. Lending assets to the Latin American armed forces and militias.

  One of these assets was Sean Callan.

  The man is a fucking mess, Scachi thought, looking at Callan—long, dirty hair, his skin yellow from days of hard drinking. Not exactly the specimen of a warrior, but looks are deceiving.

  Whatever Callan isn’t, Scachi thought, he is talent.

  And talent’s hard to come by, so . . .

  “I’m taking you out of Las Tangas,” Scachi said.

  “Good.”

  “I got other work for you.”

  No shit he did, Callan remembers.

  Luis Carlos Galán, the Liberal Party presidential candidate who was miles ahead in the polls, was taken off the count in the summer of ’89. Bernardo Jaramillo Osa, the leader of the UP, was shot to death as he got off a plane in Bogotá the following spring. Carlos Pizarro, M-19’s candidate for president, was gunned down just a few weeks later.

  After that Colombia was too hot for Sean Callan.

  But Guatemala wasn’t. Neither was Honduras, nor was El Salvador.

  Scachi moved him around like a knight in a chess set. Jumping him here, jumping him there, using him to take pieces off the board. Guadalupe Salcedo, Héctor Oqueli, Carlos Toledo—then a dozen others. Callan started to lose track of the names. He might not have known exactly what Red Mist really was, but he sure as hell knew what it was to him—blood, a red mist filling his head until that’s all he could see.

  Then Scachi moved him to Mexico.

  “What for?” Callan asked.

  “Chill you out for a while,” Scachi answered. “Just help provide a little protection for some people. You remember the Barrera brothers?”

  How couldn’t he? It was the cocaine-for-guns deal that had started all the shit back in ’85. Got Jimmy Peaches sideways with Big Paulie, which started his own strange trip.

  Yeah, Callan remembered them.

  What about them?

 
“They’re friends of ours,” Scachi said.

  Friends of ours, Callan thought. Weird choice of words, a phrase that made guys use only to describe other made guys to each other. Well, I ain’t a made guy, Callan thought, and a couple of Mexican coke dealers sure aren’t, so what the fuck?

  “They’re good people,” Scachi explained. “They contribute to the effort.”