Mexico

by Josh Barkan

  They pulled Charlie off the rooftop—two bouncers—and held his arms behind his back. The bouncers were dressed in crisp white suits, similar to the one of the rooftop manager. They escorted us toward the door. I spoke to the two bouncers in as much broken Spanish as I could. “Please tell your manager and the señorita we are sorry,” I said. “We are sorry and we didn’t mean any disrespect.”

  “The fuck I didn’t,” Charlie said. “I meant every word I said in there. These fancy Mexicans think they’re better than everyone.” When they got us to the front door he said, “Come on, let’s go find ourselves some place that’s got some real women to fuck.”

  Outside, he insisted on grabbing his car. He wouldn’t give me the keys. He was so worked up, he was going to drive. He was drunk and on his way to getting drunker.

  The rest of the night is more or less a blur. We drove to the Zona Rosa, where the prostitutes hang out. We chose two women. They wore tight miniskirts, the way none of the local women ever did. One had long black hair that cascaded down to her knees. She had on a red skirt, and she let most of her breasts show out of a loose, leopard-patterned camisole. She oohed and aahed at the car as we drove by. “I want that one,” Charlie said. “I want her to give me a fuckin’ blowjob.”

  I had no interest in really getting it on with any of these women, but I realized my mission for the evening was going to be to keep Charlie out of any serious trouble and that he’d need me along for the ride. In the military, when you go swimming, when you are out in the bush, you know you always need to have one buddy who’s going to keep your ass safe. That’s the person you can count on, no matter what. It doesn’t matter what they say or what they do, you stick to them like a fly on shit. You are their eyes and ears. You hump them home, if necessary.

  I chose the prostitute I thought was the prettiest, but who wouldn’t get in the way. I chose a petite thing that looked like she was a good daughter, just trying to make a buck. We went to a bar called the Cuatro Aces, and we sat around with these women getting one drink after another.

  “You see,” Charlie said to me later in the night, leaning in close to hug his gal, “these women know a good man when they see one.” The woman he was with pulled a cherry out of her drink and put it in Charlie’s mouth.

  We went to some hotel and grabbed a pair of rooms, and the walls were so thin I could hear Charlie in the next room yelling, “Come on lady, ride ’em cowboy! Ride it!”

  “Don’t you want to make love?” the woman I was with asked me. “Come on, let me make you happy. Let me give you a party.” It was two in the morning, and I couldn’t get out of my mind that we had a ride down to Cuernavaca we were going to have to make the next day, with a couple of Mexican military officers, at 1500 hours, but the booze was pulling at my mind. I’d had a bunch of vodka and tequila. I couldn’t help but hear Charlie in the other room saying, “Yes, yes, more, more. Give it to me. Give it to me. Give it to me, little lady. Give it to me.”

  I may be a soldier, but I’m not a saint. I didn’t like paying for my loving, or for whatever sleeping with a prostitute meant. Call it the relief of manly urges. I had no illusions that the women giving us the blowjobs and sex liked it. I knew they were just trying to make some money. Know the real face of the enemy. Don’t be fooled by the smiles locals will give you, I remembered from my training. I let the woman get on top of me and ride for a bit. My head was swimming. I remembered the tension of going in to see Sosa with the briefcase. It was just “the mission,” but it had been a tense one. I tried to let out some of the tension. I got on top, and with the booze flowing through me, I felt more like an animal, spurred by the sounds of Charlie in the other room, and I thrust hard until I came.

  That night was the beginning of something new with Charlie, something that seemed odd to me, after knowing him and living with him in the next-door bunk from base to base and operation site to site for a few years. A couple days later, I saw him with a gold Rolex. He didn’t wear the Rolex when we were with the other soldiers, but he put it on when we went out for a drink.

  “What’s up with the new watch?” I said. “You get it at one of those pawn shops in el Centro?” I had been walking around the center of Mexico City, where there are plenty of shops where they buy and sell gold by weight. I figured he must have gotten a deal at one of those places.

  “Nah. Not at a pawn shop,” Charlie said. “My whole life my dad used to buy things at those pawn shops. This one’s for real.” He pulled it off his wrist and held it in front of his face like he was holding the Promised Land.

  “Must have been expensive,” I said. “How’d you get it?” Our salaries were shit in the army. People always thought we made good money, because we were Special Forces, but we didn’t.

  Charlie looked at me and said, “How the hell do you think I got it? Saving up money. I earned it.”

  But I knew a new watch like that cost thousands, and he was suddenly spending more on a lot of things. He kept going back night after night to that same prostitute we met in the Zona Rosa. I went back with him once, since he was my buddy and I wanted to let him know I was with him, but I couldn’t keep up his pace—either with money or with desire—and I let him just tell me stories of conquering love when he came back to the small base where we lived.

  He started buying fancier clothes, too. He told me he was sending money back to his mother, in Wichita, and the day we were going to meet Sosa for the second time, he had a bag all packed, with some of those nice clothes, next to the foot of our bunk, and he said he was going to go on a nice vacation to Cancún once the operation was over, when we were going to be given a couple days of R&R. The whole thing seemed odd to me, extravagant, and I couldn’t figure out where he was getting the money.

  Three weeks after the first contact with Sosa in the Central de Abasto, Jeremiah lay on top of a roof looking over the parking lot and the area where the delivery trucks came with fish, where a football field’s length of stalls spread one after the other, and where men carried fish in and out of trucks. It was early morning, and the first light of sunrise was hitting the clouds. Looking through the scope of his M86 sniper rifle, trained on the same storefront across the way where he had met Sosa before with the briefcase, to give him the money, he was so focused on his targets he didn’t notice the fiery struggle of dawn. Above his shoulder, crouched on the roof behind him, the head of the Special Operations Group, Colonel John P. Saunders, had come to direct the final sting operation. Saunders had been brought in, unexpectedly, three days ago, and the rumor was he was brought in because the operation might be compromised. He was a veteran of foreign battles, head of a counterterrorism group that had operated in Iraq for three years and then in Afghanistan. He was known as a powerful son of a bitch who didn’t take whining from his soldiers. With gray hair cut close, patches for valor and leadership pasted across his battle fatigues, he looked like a puma ready to spring off the roof, watching in the same direction as his soldier below him, Jeremiah. His right hand formed a fist, and his knuckles pressed into the roof tar.

  Across the way, and walking up a staircase to meet Sosa, Charlie carried a briefcase identical to the one brought by Jeremiah before. They had all picked straws, again, to see who would carry the case this time. It was dangerous being the one who delivered, if anything went wrong. Professional buyers used different mules to bring the cash all the time. It was a game of musical chairs. Everyone had to have trust, but everyone had to know that at any moment both sides could disappear, vanishing in the night. The world of drug deals was like a mirage, water that came in the desert like an oasis and then went.

  It had fallen to Charlie to deliver the cash this time. Below Jeremiah, where he looked through the scope, the same Isuzu truck with the listening equipment was in the parking lot, with four men. Six other men were also stationed, with short-range Uzi machine guns, dressed in plain clothes, pretending to be workers on the fish docks. Charlie was protected and surrounded. The plan was to have Sosa taken ou
t with one shot when he came to meet Charlie. Jeremiah would aim with precision and shoot. One shot, to the temple, and Sosa would fall. Sosa would likely be outside for only a second before he would want to retreat into the back room, where fighting would be more difficult. So they wouldn’t wait to shoot. In the immediate mayhem, Charlie would jump down in front of the concrete platform where the delivery trucks unloaded, to protect himself. He was wearing a bulletproof vest under his loose plaid shirt. While Charlie crouched beneath the concrete barrier, the other six men with guns on the platform would deal with any return fire. It was the most likely way to get Sosa, with a sniper bullet. It was quick, simple, and efficient and sent the right message: this cartel was going to be eliminated. Colonel Saunders had announced the plan to his group three days ago, when he took over direct command. “In the second raid, once we know they have delivered the packages to Houston, we will eliminate Sosa. We will let them know operations in this area are forbidden and will cease to continue. Are there any questions?” Colonel Saunders had asked the group.

  “Why not just bring in Sosa alive?” Jeremiah had said, during the briefing. “Get more intelligence. Make an example of him, publicly.”

  “And just how, Second Lieutenant Young,” Colonel Saunders said, “do you think we are going to grab a guy like Sosa alive without more manpower down there to do the job, putting them at risk? And what the hell do you think is the probability a Mexican court will not be bought off, or that our own courts in the U.S., if they ever get jurisdiction for the case, and if we can get him extradited to the U.S., won’t give some crap that the evidence we’ve provided is tainted, that we have somehow failed to protect Sosa’s rights, while thousands of young Americans are poisoned in their bodies, through the scourge of drugs, because of this man, destroying the manhood of our country and increasing drug use in the ghetto? This operation is going to be clean and efficient, and legal within the authority vested in this group. It is my final decision, and it will be done this way.”

  Jeremiah had looked forward, standing at attention, chin flat and eyes looking into the distance, seeking not to see anything other than the command he had just heard, after receiving the dress-down and final order.

  On the rooftop now, he felt the presence of Colonel Saunders next to him, tense, chewing gum, surveying the target area. Jeremiah squinted into the scope of the gun. He followed the crosshairs just in front of Charlie as he walked up the concrete stairs to the delivery platform. The scope made everything clearer than in normal reality, Jeremiah felt. It showed a man as he was, as a physical body, as a plane in space rather than a mind. Through the scope he always felt he was finally in control, that he was master of his defects, that he knew why God had put him on this planet, making it harder for him to read in order to give him another gift instead, the gift of being a supreme shooter, slow and steady, one of the few who could breathe calmly in and out, so calmly the gun barely moved, maintaining only the will of his targeting, until he followed orders and took out the necessary target. In shooting he felt the certainty he was completing his mission. He had taken out thirty-nine targets during his two years, so far, in Mexico. He had shot from rooftops in Juárez and rooftops in Guadalajara, and out of hotel rooms in Acapulco. He had watched men with briefcases scatter onto the pavement. He had missed only twice. All other times, it was one bullet, one carefully placed projectile, preferably in the base of the skull area, where the flesh was softer, or higher up, between the eyes, if necessary, or in the chest as a last resort, where there were more bones to protect the heart. The bleeding was longer there before death.

  Through the scope, he could see Charlie up on the platform, mouth pursed, eyes looking around for Sosa. Six men came out to meet him. Two approached to give him a handshake. They looked oddly relaxed as they gave him the shake. Not tense and distant the way they usually interacted with the client. Charlie stood on the platform, and he seemed to ask for Sosa. He pointed to the interior, from where Sosa had come out the last time, and raised his hand in the air, questioning. He waited and waited. The other men with him milled about, looking left and right to see if anyone was coming. The pause was getting longer and longer. It was far too long to be normal. Looking through the scope, Jeremiah ran his finger up against the trigger. Soon, Sosa would appear. Soon he would shoot and it would be over.

  The men on the platform suddenly crouched down, their knees pointing forward in the direction of the Isuzu, and they began firing with all their intensity at the vehicle. The truck was no more than forty yards away.

  The bullets hit the truck and the windshield crashed in. The driver inside, a Mexican in on the surveillance group, who was used to blending in with the locals, was instantly killed. The bullets came more and more, against the rear of the truck where the four DEA and CIA operatives listened in.

  The men in plain clothes, in the team on the platform, came running from the fish stalls. They were a mix of Mexican military. The Mexican military had been brought in on the raid at the last second. If things got violent, it was going to be necessary to have their approval and participation, and they had finally chosen to be in on the mission.

  Jeremiah shot at the men on the platform who were shooting at the Isuzu truck. He aimed, with the precision of a mathematician, and killed one man, with long hair and a black leather jacket, who was firing at the truck. He looked to the left and took out a man wearing baggy jeans and a black T-shirt with a skull. He heard the sound of bullets going back and forth, at the Isuzu truck, pounding harder and harder into the truck and at the gas tank, until the tank gave way and the truck exploded.

  Through the scope he could see Charlie had dropped down to the front of the concrete platform where he was supposed to jump once Sosa was shot. But Sosa had never come.

  “Take him out. He’s a mole,” Saunders said. He put his hand on Jeremiah’s shoulders.

  “Who?” Jeremiah said.

  “You know who. You can sense it, solider. He has betrayed this entire group. He has betrayed his country. I received intelligence last evening that he tipped them off and that Sosa wouldn’t come. Sosa hasn’t come. It’s confirmed true. And now you’ll get rid of the cancer within the unit before it spreads. Take him out.”

  “Sir,” Jeremiah said. “Sir, this is not how we deal with such situations, sir.” He couldn’t believe his buddy had betrayed him. He couldn’t believe he had betrayed the unit. He could not believe he had betrayed his country. He could not believe he would do such a thing. “Sir, is that a direct order, sir?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  And though in his conscious mind, if he had had time, he would have reflected harder on the fact that he had the right to disobey an order he knew directly to be against the law of his country, he felt the hand of the colonel press hard between his shoulder blades. He saw, out of the corner of his eye, the truck in flames. He had heard, on the group radio, the cries of the men in the Isuzu truck. He saw the men firing back and forth on the platform. He saw Charlie run along the base of the platform, running away from the scene with the briefcase, toward the taxis. He knew, looking through the scope, that if he wanted to, he could shoot the target between his head and shoulder, at the back of his brain, completing the order just as he was told. But he chose not to. He knew he could not do that. He could not kill someone in his group, even if he had betrayed the group and led to the deaths of others. He moved the scope ahead of Charlie, running. Yet he could not do nothing at all, with the colonel there, ordering him, even if his order was unacceptable. He would shoot in front of Charlie to scare him, to let him know he had been found out, to complete, in some form, the order of the colonel, while disobeying him. He had to do so. This was his dilemma. It was a direct order. He aimed wide, to the left, in front of Charlie’s feet as they twisted and hurried across the pavement. The bullet sped forward. The gun recoiled. And then it all happened in what felt like a long moment. There in front of him, through the scope, to his surprise, the bullet caught the tips of Charlie’
s toes. It hadn’t totally missed. It had grazed one of his tennis shoes. Charlie bent forward and down, suddenly arrested, as if suddenly realizing he had feet that he had taken for granted while fleeing. He dropped the briefcase and looked for who was shooting, up at the rooftops. He looked in the direction of Jeremiah. He turned back down and reached first for his foot and then for the briefcase on the ground. He hobbled forward with his left foot slightly wounded. And in that moment of arrested running forward, a pause in his running toward the taxis, one of the men on the platform, who had been fighting for Sosa’s cartel, found Charlie was running away and turned to Charlie and fired at him and shot Charlie in the head and in the neck. It was that moment of pause, surely, which led to his death, Jeremiah thought. Charlie lay on the pavement of the Central de Abasto, his head caught in a pothole with the sloppy residue of the fish market, bleeding into a mix of water used to hose off the fish stalls, fish oil from scattered fish bones, and the oil of the idling trucks. His body lay twisted, his hand reaching toward the briefcase, his eyes looking up at the sky, blank now, no longer quivering as they had just done, dead, as Jeremiah looked at him through the scope.

  Had it all been in my mind? Was Charlie really gone? My buddy gone? Certainly his suitcase, which was at the bottom of our bunk, was gone when I got back to base. I sat on the bunk bed, thinking of Charlie, shocked and crying. Could Charlie have really been guilty, as the colonel said? There was the watch and the sudden money. But I needed proof, much more proof than that.

  What I knew is that the colonel had gone crazy. Such a direct order to shoot Charlie could only have come from battle fatigue, from too many tours in Afghanistan and Iraq before being sent to the relative calm of the “pasture” of Mexico. But six months later, stateside, out of the heat of the moment in the field, I wasn’t so sure the order had come from battle fatigue. I had seen headlines in the newspapers that confirmed what I had seen on my own: drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan, taking out people who had never been judged in a court of law. American citizens shot by the drones. Those were true terrorists, true enemies, and before the incident with Charlie, I had never thought about them too much. Yet now I could see, placed within a command environment of choosing who lives and who dies, and deciding that even American citizens could be shot from the sky, and placed in situation after situation where millions of dollars of cash are given out to buy the loyalty of men who are thieves, like the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai—how far of a step was it from those actions, approved every day by my government, to an order that crossed the line, like the one from Colonel Saunders asking me to kill our own man, simply because he had double-crossed us? Yes, in Saunders’s heart of hearts, he must have known somehow that what he had ordered me to do was too much, a crossing into the land of some character like Mr. Kurtz in that novel by Joseph Conrad that I read once called Heart of Darkness. Coming home, I began to read up more and more, even at the slower pace of my dyslexia, to make sense of what had happened to me down in Mexico.