by Don Winslow
“I started fighting in 1948,” Tirofio says. “During a period they now call 'La Violencia.’ Have you heard of that?”
“No.”
Tirofio nods. “I was a woodcutter, living in a small village. In those days, I had no politics. Left wing, right wing—it made no difference to the wood I had to cut. I was up in the hills one morning, cutting wood, when the local right-wing militia came into our village, rounded up all the men, tied their elbows behind their backs and cut their throats. Left them bleeding to death like pigs in the village square while they raped their wives and daughters. Do you know why they did that?”
Adán shakes his head.
“Because the villagers had allowed a left-wing group to dig a well for them,” Tirofio says. “That morning I came back to find the bodies lying in the dust. My neighbors, my friends, my family. I walked back into the hills, this time to join the guerrillas. Why do I tell you this story? Because you may say you have no politics, but the day you see your friends and family lying in the dirt, you will have politics.”
Adán says, “There’s money and the lack of money, and there’s power and the lack of power. And that’s all there is.”
“You see?” Tirofio smiles. “You are half a Marxist already.”
“What do you want from me?”
Guns.
Tirofio has twelve thousand fighters and plans to have thirty thousand more. But he has only eight thousand rifles. Adán Barrera has money and airplanes. If his planes can fly the cocaine out, they can fly the guns back in.
So if I want to protect my cocaine source, Adán realizes, I will have to do what this old warrior wants. I will have to get him guns to protect his territory from the right-wing militias and the army and, yes, the Americans. It is a practical necessity, but there is also a sweet measure of revenge in it. So he says, “Do you have an arrangement in mind?”
Tirofio does.
Keep it simple, he says.
One kilo equals one rifle.
For every rifle Adán flies in, FARC will allow one kilo of cocaine to be sold from its territory, at a price discounted to reflect the cost of the weapon. That’s for a standard rifle—the AK-47 is the weapon of choice, but the American M-16 or M-2 is also acceptable, as FARC can get the right ammo from captured army troops or right-wing militias. For other weapons—and Tirofio desperately covets shoulder-held rocket launchers—they will allow a kilo and a half, or even two kilos.
Adán accepts without negotiating.
Somehow he feels it would be unseemly to bargain, almost unpatriotic. Besides, this deal will work. If—and it’s a big if—he can get his hands on enough guns.
“So that’s it, then,” Adán says. “We have a deal?”
Tirofio shakes his hand. “One day you will come to see that everything is politics, and you will act from your heart instead of your pocket.”
On that day, Tirofio tells him, you will find your soul.
Nora lays out clothes on the bed of their suite at a small hotel in Puerto Vallarta—shirts and suits she bought for Adán in La Jolla.
“You like?”
“I like.”
“You’ve hardly looked at them,” Nora says.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she says. She walks over and puts her arms around him. “Just tell me what’s on your mind.”
She listens attentively as Adán describes the logistical challenge he faces: where to get the quantity of military weapons he needs to fulfill his end of the deal with Tirofio. It’s relatively easy to get a few weapons here and there—the United States is basically one big gun mart—but the thousands of rifles he’ll need over the next few months, that’s something even the American black market can’t provide.
And yet the guns will have to come through America, not Mexico. As crazy as the Yanquis are about drugs coming across their border, the Mexicans are even more fanatic about guns. As much as Washington complains about narcotics coming across from Mexico, Los Pinos answers with complaints about guns coming in from the United States. It’s a constant irritant in the relations between the two countries that the Mexicans seem to feel that firearms are more dangerous than dope. They don’t understand why it is that, in America, you will get a longer jail sentence for dealing a little marijuana than you will for selling a lot of guns.
No, the Mexican government is sensitive about guns, as befits a country beset with a history of revolutions. Even more so now, with the insurgency in Chiapas. As Adán tells Nora, there is no way that he can import such a large amount of weaponry directly into Mexico, even if he can find a supplier. The guns will have to come into the States, then be smuggled by reverse route through Baja, loaded on a 727 and flown to Colombia.
“Can you even get that many guns?” Nora asks.
“I have to,” Adán says.
“Where?”
Hong Kong
1997
The first glimpse of Hong Kong is always startling.
First there is the endless flight across the Pacific, with nothing but hours of blue water beneath, then suddenly the island pops up, a swatch of emerald green with tall towers glistening in the sun, and the dramatic hills behind.
He’s never been there before. She has, several times, and points out landmarks through the window: Hong Kong itself, Victoria Peak, Kowloon, the harbor.
They check in to the Peninsula Hotel.
This is her idea, to stay on the mainland in Kowloon rather than in one of the modern businessmen’s hotels on the island itself. She likes the colonial charm of the Peninsula, thinks that he’ll like it, too, and besides, Kowloon is a far more interesting neighborhood, especially at night.
He does like the hotel—its old-style elegance appeals to him. They sit on the old veranda (now enclosed in glass) with its view of the harbor and the ferry landing, and have a full English tea (she orders) while they wait for their suite to be ready.
“This,” she says, “is where the old opium lords used to hang out.”
“Is that right?” he asks. He has very little knowledge of history, even of the drug trade.
“Sure,” she says. “That’s how the Brits got Hong Kong in the first place. They took it in the Opium War.”
“The Opium War?”
“Back in the 1840s,” Nora explains, “the British went to war against the Chinese to force them to allow the opium trade.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No,” Nora says. “As part of the peace treaty, the British opium traders got to sell their product in China, and the British crown got Hong Kong for a colony. So they’d have a port to keep the opium safe. The army and navy actually protected the dope.”
“Nothing changes,” Adán says. Then, “How do you know all these things?”
“I read,” Nora says. “Anyway, I thought you might get a kick out of being here.”
He does. He sits back, sips his Darjeeling, lathers his scone with clotted cream and jam, and feels as if he’s one in a continuum of a long tradition.
When they get to their room, he collapses on the bed.
“You don’t want to go to sleep,” she tells him. “You’ll never get over the jet lag.”
“I can’t stay awake,” he murmurs.
“I can keep you awake.”
“Oh yeah?”
Oh yeah.
Afterward, they shower and she tells him that she has the rest of the day and the evening planned, if he’ll put himself in her hands.
“Didn’t I just do that?” he asks.
“And did you enjoy it?”
“That was me screaming.”
“Timing’s critical,” she says as he shaves. “Hurry up.”
He hurries up.
“This is one of my favorite things in the world to do,” she says as they walk down to the Star Ferry landing. She buys their tickets and they wait for a few minutes, then board the ferry. She chooses seats on the port side of the old, fire-engine-red boat, with the best view of downtown Hong
Kong as they cross to the island. All around them, fishing boats, speedboats, junks and sampans ply the harbor.
When they land, she hustles him out of the terminal.
“What’s the rush?” he asks as she grabs him by the elbow and pushes him ahead.
“You’ll see, you’ll see. Come on.” She leads him down Garden Road to the base of Victoria Peak, where they hop the Tram. The Tram, a funicular, rattles up the steep grade.
“It’s like an amusement-park ride,” Adán says.
They get to the observatory just before the sun sets. This is what she wants him to see. They stand on the terrace as the sky grows pink and then red and then fades to darkness and the city’s lights come on like a spray of diamonds against a black satin pillow.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Adán says.
“I thought you’d like it,” she answers.
He turns and kisses her.
“I love you,” he says.
“I love you, too.”
They meet the Chinese the next afternoon.
As arranged, a motor launch picks up Nora and Adán in Kowloon Harbor and takes them out into the bay, where they transfer to a waiting junk, on which they make the long trip to Silver Mine Bay on the east side of Lantau Island. Here the junk disappears into a fleet of thousands of other junks and sampans on which the “boat people” live. Their junk wends its way among the maze of docks, wharves and anchored boats before pulling alongside a large sampan. The captain sets a plank between his boat and the sampan, and Nora and Adán cross over.
Three men sit at a small table under the arch-shaped canopy that shelters the middle part of the boat. They get up when they see Adán and Nora come on board. Two of the men are older. One of them, Nora immediately sees, has the squared shoulders and rigid posture of a military officer; the other is more casual and a little stooped—he’s the businessman. The third is a young man who is clearly nervous in the presence of high-ranking superiors. This, Nora thinks, must be the translator.
The young man introduces himself in English as Mr. Yu, and Nora translates this into Spanish even though Adán knows more than enough English to understand basic conversation. But it gives her a pretext for being here, and she’s dressed for the role in a plain gray business suit with a high-collared ivory blouse and some simple jewelry.
Still, her beauty is not lost on the officer, Mr. Li, who bows when introduced, or on the businessman, Mr. Chen, who smiles and all but kisses her hand. The introductions having been performed, they sit down for tea and business.
Frustrating to Adán, the first part of the business is seemingly endless small talk and pleasantries, made all the more tedious by the double layer of translation from Mandarin to English, then English to Spanish, then back again. He’d like to cut to the chase, but Nora has warned him that this is a necessary part of doing business in China, and that he’d be considered a rude and therefore untrustworthy partner if he were to truncate the process. So he sits and smiles through the discussion of how beautiful Hong Kong is, then of the beauty of Mexico, of how wonderful its food, of how lovely and intelligent the Mexican people are. Then Nora praises the quality of the tea, and Mr. Li responds that it is unworthy garbage, then Nora says that she wishes she could get some “garbage” like this in Tijuana and Mr. Li offers to send her some if she insists despite the fact that it is unworthy of her, and so on and so forth until Mr. Li—a high-ranking general in the People’s Liberation Army—gives a barely perceptible nod to young Mr. Yu, who then starts in on the real business of the day.
An arms purchase.
This goes through the layers of translation, even though Li speaks more than passable English. But the translation process gives him time to think and confer with Chen, an officer of GOSCO—the Guangdong Overseas Shipping Company—and besides, it preserves the happy fiction that this stunning woman is a translator and not Barrera’s mistress, as is common knowledge in diplomatic circles in Mexico City. It has taken time to set up this meeting, time and delicate overtures, and the Chinese have done their homework. They know that the drug dealer has a relationship with a famous courtesan who is, if anything, as smart and aggressive a businessperson as is her lover. So Li listens patiently as Yu speaks to the woman and the woman speaks to Barrera, even though they all know already that he is here to buy guns that they wish to sell, otherwise he would not be here at all.
—What kind of armaments?
—Rifles. AK-47s.
—You call them “goat horns.” That’s rather good. How many do you wish to purchase?
—A small order at first. Maybe a couple of thousand.
Li is stunned by the size of the demand. And impressed that Barrera—or maybe it was the woman—took the care to phrase it as a “small” order, which gives them much face. Which I will now lose if I cannot fill such a “small” order. Good also how they dangled the at first as bait. Letting me know that if I can satisfy this gigantic order, there will be even more.
Li turns back to Adán.
—We don’t usually deal in such small numbers.
—We know you’re doing us a favor. Perhaps we could make it worth your while if we were to purchase some heavier armaments as well? Say some KPG-2 rocket launchers?
—Rocket launchers? Are you expecting a war?
Nora answers, The peace-loving Chinese people know that one purchases arms not so much to fight a war, but to prevent the necessity of fighting one. Sun Tzu wrote, “Invincibility depends on oneself; the enemy’s vulnerability on him.”
Nora had put the long hours on the airplane to good use. Li is impressed.
—Of course, Li says, given the modest volume, we would not be able to offer the same price as we can for larger orders.
Adán answers, Given as this order is just the beginning of what we hope will be a long business relationship, we were hoping that, as a good-faith gesture, you will offer us a price that will allow us to come to you for future needs.
—Are you saying you cannot pay full price?
—No. I’m saying I won’t pay full price.
Adán’s done his homework, too. Knows that the PLA is as much a business as it is a national defense force, and that they are under great pressure from Beijing to produce revenue. They need this deal as much as I do, he thinks, maybe more, and the size of the order is nothing to sneeze at, nothing at all. So you are going to give me my price, General, especially if—
—Of course, Adán adds, we would pay in American dollars. Cash.
Because the PLA is not only under pressure to produce revenue, it’s under pressure to produce foreign currency, and fast, and they don’t want any unstable Mexican pesos, especially in the form of paper. They want the long Yanqui green. Adán likes the cycle: American dollars to China for guns, guns to Colombia for cocaine, cocaine to the United States for American dollars . . .
Works for me.
Works for the Chinese, too. They spend the next three hours haggling over the details—prices, delivery dates.
The general wants this deal. So does the businessman. So does Beijing. GOSCO is not only building facilities in San Pedro and Long Beach, it’s also building them in Panama. And buying up huge tracts of land along the canal, which not only splits the American fleet in half but also sits astride the two emerging left-wing insurgencies in Central America—the FARC war in Colombia and the burgeoning Zapatista insurrection in southern Mexico. Keep the Americans busy in their own hemisphere for a change. Let them become more concerned about the straits of Panama than the straits of so-called Taiwan.
No, this arrangement with the Barrera cartel can only increase Chinese influence in the Americans’ backyard, keep them busy putting out Communist brush-fires and also force them to spend resources on their War on Drugs.
A bottle of wine is procured and a toast made, to friendship.
“Wan swei,” Nora says.
Ten thousand years.
In six weeks’ time, a shipment of two thousand AK-47s and six do
zen grenade launchers, with sufficient ammunition, will be shipped from Guangzhou on a GOSCO freighter.
San Diego
A week after returning from Hong Kong, Nora crosses the border at Tecate, then takes the long, back-country drive through the desert and into San Diego. She checks into the Valencia Hotel and gets a suite with a view of La Jolla Cove and the ocean. Haley meets her and they have dinner at Top of the Cove. Business is good, Haley tells her.
Nora goes to bed early and gets up early. She changes into sweats and takes a long jog around La Jolla Cove, on the path that skirts the cliffs overlooking the ocean. She comes back tired and sweaty, orders her grapefruit and black coffee from room service and showers while she waits for her breakfast to be delivered.