by Don Winslow
“We’re in a war,” Hobbs says. “This is no time to go wobbly, Arthur. It’s your war, too. May I remind you that this is the cocaine that empowered such men as Adán Barerra? That money from this cocaine bought the bullets used at El Sauzal?”
I don’t need a reminder, Art thinks.
And who knows where Adán is now? Six months after the raid in Baja and the subsequent massacre at El Sauzal, Adán is still in the wind. The U.S. government put a $2 million reward on his head, but so far, no one has stepped forward to collect.
Who wants money you’d never live to collect?
An hour’s drive later they come to a village that’s totally abandoned. Not a person, a pig, a chicken, a dog.
Nothing.
All the huts look untouched, save for a larger building—the communal storage bin by the looks of it—which has been totally gutted with flame from the inside.
A ghost town.
“Where are the people?” Art asks Javier.
The boy shrugs.
Art asks the officer in charge.
“Disappeared,” he answers. “They must have run from FARC.”
“Run where?”
Now the officer shrugs.
They spend the night at a small army base north of town. After a dinner of steaks grilled over a petrol-fueled fire, Art excuses himself from the party to get a little sleep, then slips off to take a look around the base.
You’ve been on one fire-base, you’ve been on them all, Art thinks. They’re pretty much the same, Vietnam or Colombia—a clearing hacked out of the bush and leveled, then enclosed with barbed wire, then the perimeter around the base cleared to provide a field of fire.
This base is roughly bisected, Art finds out as he prowls around. Most of it is Twenty-fourth Brigade, but he comes to a gate that separates the main part of the base from what appears to be a section reserved for AUC.
He walks along the high barbed-wire fence and looks through.
It’s a training camp—Art can make out the shooting range and the straw dummies hanging from trees for hand-to-hand practice. They’re at it now, sneaking up behind the straw dummies with knives as if taking out enemy sentries.
Art watches for a while, then goes back to his quarters, a small room at the end of one of the barracks buildings, near the perimeter. The room has a window, open but screened with mosquito netting, a cot, a lamp run off the generator and, thankfully, an electric fan.
Art sits down on the cot and leans over. Sweat drips off his nose onto the concrete floor.
Jesus, Art thinks. Me and the AUC. We’re the same guy.
He lies down on the bed but can’t sleep.
It’s hours later when he hears a soft knock outside on the edge of the window. It’s the young soldier, Javier. Art goes to the window.
“What is it?”
“Would you come with me?'
“Where?”
“Would you come with me?” Javier repeats. “You asked where the people went?”
“Yeah?”
“Red Mist,” Javier says.
Art slips his shoes back on and climbs out through the window. He ducks low behind Javier and the two of them sneak along the perimeter, ducking the searchlight, until they come to a small gate. The guard sees Javier and lets them through. They belly-crawl across the fire range and into the bush. Art follows the kid along a narrow trail that leads down toward the river.
This is stupid, Art thinks. This is beyond stupid. Javier could be leading you into a trap. He can see the headlines now: DEA BOSS KIDNAPPED BY FARC. But he keeps following the kid. There’s something he has to find out.
A canoe is waiting on the riverbank.
Javier jumps in and beckons Art to do the same.
“We’re crossing the river?” Art asks.
Javier nods and waves for him to hurry.
Art gets in.
It takes only a few minutes for them to row across. They land the canoe, and Art helps Javier drag it onto the shore. When he straightens he sees four masked men with guns standing there.
“Take him,” Javier says.
“You little fuck,” Art says, but the men don’t grab him, just gesture for him to follow them west along the bank of the river. It’s a hard slog—he keeps tripping on branches and thick vines—but finally they arrive at a small clearing and there, under the moonlight, he sees where the people went.
Headless bodies are washed up on the shore like fish waiting to be cleaned. Other decapitated trunks are stuck on branches that overhang the river. Schools of tiny fish are feeding on their bare feet. Farther up on shore, severed heads have been neatly lined up and someone has closed their eyes.
“The guerrillas did this?” Art asks.
One of the masked men shakes his head then tells him the story: AUC went to the village yesterday, shot the young men and raped the women. Then they locked most of the survivors inside the village’s barn, set it on fire and made the rest watch and listen. Then they took these people to a bridge over the Putumayo, beheaded them with chain saws and threw their heads and bodies in the river to drift downstream as a warning to the villages below.
“We came to you,” Javier says, “because we thought that if you could see the truth, you would go home and tell it. The people in America—if they knew the truth . . . they would not send their money and their soldiers to do this.”
“What do you mean, our soldiers?” Art asks.
“The AUC here,” the masked man says, “were trained by your Special Forces.”
The man gestures to the corpses and says, in perfect English, “Your tax dollars at work.”
Art says nothing on the trip back.
There’s nothing to say.
Until he gets back to the base and finds Hobbs’ room and bangs on the door. The old man is befuddled, sleepy. He has a thin white robe wrapped around him and looks like a patient in a hospital.
“Arthur, what time is it? Good Lord, where have you been?”
“Red Mist.”
“What are you talking about?” Hobbs asked. “Are you drunk?”
But Art can see in his eyes that the man knows exactly what he’s talking about. “Do you have an op in Colombia called Red Mist?”
“No.”
“Don’t you fucking lie to me,” Art says. “It’s the Phoenix Program, isn’t it? For Latin America.”
“Get off the grassy knoll, Arthur.”
“Are we training AUC?” Art asks.
“That’s on a need-to-know basis.”
“I need to know!”
He tells Hobbs what he saw on the river. Hobbs opens a plastic bottle of water on his little side table, pours himself a glass and drinks it down. Art watches his hand tremble as he does it. Then Hobbs says, “You’re very foolish, Arthur, and surprisingly naÏve for a man of your experience. Obviously FARC committed that atrocity to blame it on AUC and further alienate the local population and arouse international sympathy. It was a common ploy with the Vietcong back in the—”
“Red Mist, John—what is it?”
“You should damn well know, Arthur,” Hobbs snapped. “You used it on your little incursion into Mexico recently. In the eyes of the law, you’re a mass murderer. You’re as deeply into this as any of us.”
Art sits on the bed and slumps over. It’s true, he thinks. From that moment when we last stood in an army camp in a jungle and I sold my soul to you for revenge. When I lied and covered up, when I came to you for help in killing Adán Barrera.
He feels Hobbs sit down beside him. The man weighs practically nothing; he’s like a dead, dry leaf.
“Don’t think about straying off the reservation,” Hobbs says.
Art nods.
“I expect your full support on Plan Colombia.”
“You’ll get it, John.”
Art goes back to his room.
He peels down to his underwear, fixes himself a scotch, sits on the bed and sweats. The fan wheezes in its losing battle against the heat. But it�
��s trying, Art thinks. It’s fighting the good fight.
I’m just a shill for a covert war.
The War on Drugs. I’ve fought it my whole goddamn life, and for what?
Billions of dollars, trying unsuccessfully to keep drugs out of the world’s most porous border? One-tenth of the anti-drug budget going into education and treatment, nine-tenths of those billions into interdiction? And not enough money from anywhere going into the root causes of the drug problem itself. And the billions spent keeping drug offenders locked up in prison, the cells now so crowded we have to give early release to murderers. Not to mention the fact that two-thirds of all the “non-drug” offenses in America are committed by people high on dope or alcohol. And our solutions are the same futile non-solutions—build more prisons, hire more police, spend more and more billions of dollars not curing the symptoms while we ignore the disease. Most people in my area who want to kick drugs can’t afford to get into a treatment program unless they have blue-chip health insurance, which most of them don’t. And there’s a six-month-to-two-year waiting list to get a bed in a subsidized treatment program. We’re spending almost $2 billion poisoning cocaine crops and kids over here, while there’s no money at home to help someone who wants to get off drugs. It’s insanity.
Art can’t decide whether the War on Drugs is an obscene absurdity or an absurd obscenity. In either case, it’s a tragic, bloody farce.
Emphasis on the bloody.
So much blood, so many bodies. So many more night visitors. The usual guests, plus the dead of El Sauzal. Now the ghosts of the Río Putumayo. The room is getting crowded.
He gets up and walks to the window to try to get a breath of fresh air.
Moonlight reflects off a rifle barrel.
Art drops to the floor.
Machine-gun fire rips the mosquito netting to shreds, shatters the window frame, pockmarks the wall above Art’s bed. He presses himself to the floor and hears the wailing of an alarm horn, the sound of boots running, rifles cocked, shouting, confusion.
His door bursts open and the officer in charge comes in with his pistol drawn.
“Are you hurt, Señor Keller?!”
“I don’t think so.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get them.”
Twenty minutes later, Art sits with Hobbs in the mess tent, drinking coffee, letting his nerves come down from the adrenaline high.
“Are you still so fond of the humanitarian agrarian reformers of FARC?” Hobbs asks dryly.
A little while later the officer comes back with three of his soldiers and tosses a young man—scared, shaking and obviously beaten—at Art’s feet. Art looks down at the kid—he could be Javier’s twin brother. Shit, Art thinks, he could be my kid.
“This is one of them,” the officer says, then kicks the kid in the face. “The others got away.”
Art says, “Don’t—”
“Tell him what you told me,” the officer says, his boot pushing the kid’s face into the floor. “Tell him.”
The kid starts talking.
He’s not a guerrilla, he’s not from FARC. They wouldn’t dare attack an army base.
“We were just trying to make the money,” the kid says.
“What money?” Art asks.
The kid tells him.
Adán Barrera will pay over $2 million to the person who kills Arthur Keller.
“FARC and Barrera,” Hobbs says. “Same thing.”
Art’s not so sure.
He’s only sure that either he will kill Adán or Adán will kill him, and those are the only two ways this thing can end.
Sinaloa, Mexico
San Diego, California
Adán also lives with ghosts.
His brother’s ghost, for instance, protects him. Most of Mexico believes that it was Raúl who conducted the massacre at El Sauzal, that the rumors of his death are a screen to protect him from the police, and most of Mexico is too scared of him to make a move against either Barrera brother.
But what Adán feels is the pain of his brother’s death, and rage that it was Art Keller who killed him. So his brother deserves vengeance, and his ghost cannot be laid to rest until Adán has settled with Keller.
So there’s the ghost of Raúl, and then there’s Nora’s ghost.
When they told him that she was dead, he couldn’t believe it at first. Wouldn’t believe it. Then they showed him the obituary, the Americans claiming that she was killed in a car accident driving home from Ensenada. Her body brought back to California for burial. A closed casket to disguise the fact that they murdered her.
That Keller had murdered her.
Adán gave her a proper funeral in Badiraguato. A cross with her photo was carried through the village, while musicians sang corridos to her courage and beauty. He built a tomb of the finest marble with the inscription TIENES MI ALMA EN TUS MANOS.
You have my soul in your hands.
He has a Mass said for her every day, and money appears daily at the shrine of Santo Jesús Malverde in her name. And every day, flowers appear on her grave in La Jolla Cemetery, a standing order placed with a Mexican florist who knows only that he must bring the best and that the bill will be paid. It makes Adán feel a little better, but he won’t be satisfied until he has avenged her.
He’s put out a $2.1 million reward for the person who kills Art Keller, adding the extra hundred thousand so that the bounty is higher than the one the United States is offering for him. It’s a foolish indulgence, he knows, but a matter of pride.
It doesn’t matter; he has the money.
Adán has spent the past six months patiently and painstakingly reconstructing his entire organization. The irony is, after all the events of last year, that he’s richer and more powerful than ever.
All his communications are on the Net now, scrambled and encoded with technology that even the Americans can’t crack. He sends out orders through the Net, checks his accounts on the Net, sells his product on the Net and gets paid on the Net. He moves his money in the blink of an electronic eye, launders it literally faster than the speed of sound without ever touching a dollar bill or a peso.
He can, and does, kill over the Net. He just types a message and sends it, and someone leaves the physical world. There’s no need to show up anywhere in real space or time anymore; in fact, it would be a foolish indulgence.
I’ve become a ghost myself, he thinks, existing only in cyberspace.
He physically lives in a modest house outside Badiraguato. It’s good to be back in Sinaloa, back in the countryside among the campesinos. The fields have finally recovered from Operation Condor—the soil is refreshed and revitalized and the poppies bloom in splendid shades of red, orange and yellow.
Which is a good thing, because heroin is back.
To hell with the Colombians and FARC and the Chinese and all of that. The cocaine market is in sharp decline anyway. Good old Mexican Mud is in demand again in the States, and the poppies are weeping once more, this time with joy. The days of the gomeros are back, and I am the patrón.
He has a quiet life. Up early in the morning to a café con leche that his old abuela housekeeper has made for him, and then he’s on the computer to check his investments, to oversee the business, to give orders. Then he has a lunch of cold meats and fruit and goes to the screened-in balcony upstairs for a short siesta. Then he gets up and takes a walk along the old dirt road that runs outside the house.
Manuel walks with him, still on guard as if there were any real danger. Certainly Manuel is happy to be back in Sinaloa, with his family and his friends, although he still insists on living in the little casita behind the main house.
After his walk, Adán goes back to the computer and works until dinnertime and then he might drink a beer or two and watch a fútbol or boxing match on television. Some evenings he will sit out on the lawn and the sound of guitars will drift down to him from the village. On still nights he can make out the words they’re singing, of the exploits of Raúl and the treach
ery of El Tiburón and how Adán Barrera outfoxed the federales and the Yanquis and will never be caught.
He goes to bed early.
It’s a quiet life, a good life, and it would be a perfect life if it were not for the ghosts.
Raúl’s ghost.
Nora’s ghost.
The ghosts of an estranged family.