I began counting as I squatted to confirm the heads of both men were positioned directly in front of my tires.
“Why are you doing this? Who are you?” Dedos wailed, coughing blood as he tried to sit up.
With my foot, I forced the man to the ground. Then gave it a beat before I told them both in Spanish, “No more time. You assholes have no idea who I am. But you’re about to find out.” To convince them my Spanish was good, I added an insult that’s common in Mexico.
I heard Calavero swear, groaning, “The Gomer understood us. Everything we said!” as I swung into the truck, limping a little because my leg muscles were beginning to knot from being kicked.
As I positioned myself behind the wheel, the VHF radio beside me crackled, and I adjusted the squelch to hear, “Calavero! Get your fingers out of your ass. Why haven’t you called?”
I hit the button and replied, “I tried. Where were you?”
“Don’t give me your shit. What happened to the Gomer? That’s all I want to know.”
I kept the radio a foot from my mouth and tried to make my voice higher and hoarser, to imitate Calavero. “Dedos is an idiot, but the white guy is gone. How much longer?”
I didn’t want to risk his suspicion by saying more.
The man-Chapo, I guessed-was suspicious anyway.
“What’s wrong with your voice? You sound different.”
I snapped, “I’m bored shitless, I’m thirsty. Maybe you’d rather talk to Dedos.”
The voice paused… more suspicious now? Even when the man laughed, saying, “Dedos is an asshole. What else is new?” I wasn’t convinced.
I kept an eye on the wooded road, expecting Chapo, or his partners, to come and check things out for themselves.
The interrogation technique we’d used in Libya is called the Spare Tire Switch, although I have never heard the term again as it relates to intelligence gathering. It was called that by CIA officers running the operation-presumably CIA, because such information is never offered.
A spare tire, handled by two quiet men, is bumped against the head of a blindfolded enemy. A third team member sits next to them in a truck, engine running, that alternately accelerates, then decelerates, as the spare tire rocks in sync, as if attempting to climb over the enemy’s face.
The interrogation subject, of course, doesn’t know it’s a spare tire. He’s convinced he is lying under the truck. It is a powerful motivator.
My variation worked well.
When I got my truck into first gear, I accelerated slowly forward until I felt the first hint of resistance. It was accompanied by a duo of howls from Dedos and Calavero.
Instantly, I shifted to neutral, then stepped quietly out of the truck.
Using my left hand on the doorframe, my right on the accelerator, I began to rock the truck forward and back. With my hand, I added more gas with each forward thrust. The terror the two men endured-and the pain they imagined-was caused by the engine noise that grew progressively louder. It was the noise that convinced them their skulls were about to crack like eggs.
After just a few seconds of this, Calavero was begging me to stop.
“Anything,” he pleaded, “I’ll tell you anything.”
He did, too. But he wasn’t nearly as eager to share as Dedos, who I had to threaten just to shut him up.
“Crazy with fear” is just a cliche-until you have actually interacted with someone whose brain has been addled by terror. They weep, they slobber. Their sense of time and balance has been scrambled.
“Sick with fear” is another cliche, yet it accurately described the visceral dread I felt after what the two men confessed to me.
They were members of the Latin Kings. The Kings were killers and proud of it. Members were holding Squires and the girl captive at a hunting camp that consisted of an RV and a couple of outbuildings, half a mile away through the woods. There, a man named Victorino-a Latin King captain-and a woman called Frankie were filming a sex video, using Tula Choimha as their victim.
It made no sense to me when Dedos explained that the woman was Squires’s girlfriend, but I didn’t press for details. I grabbed the radio after a moment of indecision, pressed the transmit button and called, “Chapo! Stop everything! I think maybe the cops are here. Chapo?”
I waited… called again, but no reply. It was maddening.
Dedos referred to the girl as la chula virgen. The Mexican slang he used to describe how she would be raped was particularly disgusting: Romper el tamor con sangre.
His boss was going to bust through the girl’s screen in search of blood.
Equally disgusting was the indifference with which Dedos offered details. He wasn’t referring to a teenage girl. He was discussing a worthless object, a young Guatemalan, no better than an animal.
It was not uncommon in the racial hierarchy of Mexican gangs. He mentioned Tula, in fact, as an unimportant aside after Calavero had told me about Harris Squires.
“This person-we call him jelly boy-he disrespected the reputation of our organization,” Calavero said. “For this, he is being punished. How, I do not know. That is up to our jefe. Now, stop this bullshit! Arrest us, if you want. We’ll be out by tomorrow, what do I care? I’m not guilty of anything but being too stupid to kill you when I had the chance.”
Calavero was lying about Squires, and I knew it. When I threatened to put them under the truck again, Dedos was more forthcoming. Squires was to be the victim in a snuff film, he said. With a camera rolling, Squires would be murdered-“Slow, like a kind of ceremony,” Dedos said-then his body would be burned.
“If he’s still alive,” Dedos added. “He attacked the V-man, so the V-man shot him in self-defense. With a shotgun, but I don’t know how bad. When they sent us out to watch the road, jelly boy was still alive. He was bleeding from the face and chest, but the man is big as a mountain, so who knows? I only do what I am told. I have nothing to do with anything that happens at the hunting camp.”
It was then that Dedos told me about the girl.
That’s when I tried the radio. Then again.
Nothing but static.
I felt a panicked need to hurry even though I was unclear about the timing. Had Tula already been raped or was it happening now? More threats didn’t make it any clearer, and I couldn’t waste any more time.
Shock affects different people in different ways. Into my mind came an analytical clarity: I had to do whatever was required to help the girl-do it in a way that didn’t risk my future freedom, if possible, but saving the girl came first.
There is a maxim that applied. At least, I wanted it to apply, because it excused the extreme behavior that might be required of me. An old friend and I had pounded out the truism together long ago in a distant jungle:
In any conflict, the boundaries of behavior are defined by the party who cares least about morality.
The Latin Kings cared nothing of morality. They’d made that clear.
I gave myself a second to review. No one knew I was here. The pandilleros had no idea who I was. They wouldn’t expect a hostile visitor, particularly someone with my training and background. And, tonight, there were no rules, no boundaries of behavior.
Thinking that transformed my strange, restless mood into a resolute calm. I had made the decision to act before giving it conscious thought. The decision tunneled my vision. Thoughts of legalities and guilt-even my fears for the girl-vanished. They were replaced by the necessity of operating in the moment. Of acting and reacting with an indifferent precision.
It was a familiar feeling, a cold clarity that originated from the very core of who I am. I might have been in North Africa or the jungles of Central America. Nothing existed but my targets-threats which I must now find and neutralize.
There were three targets, according to Dedos, not counting Squires or the woman named Frankie, whose role was still unclear. Two fellow gangbangers plus their boss, Victorino-or the V-man, as they called him. All men were armed with handguns and knives. Two ca
rried fully automatic weapons-“T-9s,” Dedos told me.
He was referring to one of the cheapest machine pistols on the market, a Tec-9. Cheap or not, the thing could spit out twenty or thirty rounds in only a couple of seconds, then fire again with the quick change of a magazine.
Daunting. But yet another reason not to hesitate when my targets were in sight.
I was hurrying now, but methodically. From my equipment bag, I took a pair of leather gloves and put them on. The night was warm, but I pulled on a black watch cap, too. Roll it down, it became a ski mask.
I looked at my leather boat shoes. The tread was distinctive, so I found rubber dive boots in my truck.
When I had changed shoes, I tried calling Chapo on the radio again-nothing but static. Then I frisked Dedos and Calavero more thoroughly.
Dedos had pointed a. 45 caliber Glock at me, fifteen rounds in the magazine, one in the chamber. Because Glocks have no safety-and I don’t trust the weapon, anyway-I chose not to slide it into my belt.
That would come later.
Calavero’s derringer was a. 357. The recoil had to be horrendous, but it was a manstopper at close range. I slipped it into my back pocket.
I found a key to the gate and keys to what Dedos said was a Dodge Ram pickup hidden in the trees fifty yards down the hunting camp road. Because a priority was getting my own truck out of sight, I opened the gate, backed my truck into the shadows, then jogged back to Calavero and Dedos. I used my Randall knife to free their ankles-but not their hands-then ripped the tape from their eyes.
“Get up, get moving,” I told them, pointing Dedos’s Glock at them. If I was going to shoot someone, I wanted the medical examiner to find rounds from a gangbanger’s gun, not mine.
“Show me you where you parked your truck,” I ordered them. “You can lay in the back while I look for the girl. Or stay here if you want. Let the ants eat you, that’s your choice.”
It was a lie. They were going with me.
From my equipment bag, I removed the night vision monocular, then hid the bag behind the seat of my truck. The monocular is fitted on a headband that holds the lens flush over one eye.
When I flicked the switch, the gloom of the woodland ahead vanished. I was in an eerie green daylight world, details sharp. My right eye is dominant, yet I prefer to shoot using natural night vision, which is why I wore the monocular over my left eye. It is a personal preference that wouldn’t have held true were I carrying a rifle or a full automatic.
As we jogged toward the hunting camp-I had to literally kick both men in the butt to get them going-I stayed behind them off to the side. Because I couldn’t get Chapo on the radio, I had no choice now but to go into the hunting camp fast and hard.
Twice, I told Calavero to shut up, stop talking, but he continued to goad me. Breathing heavily, he made threats about what the V-man would do when I found him, then said, “When our lawyer gets you in court, man, how you gonna explain to the judge about my broken ribs? Dedos’s fucked-up face? You going to jail, faggot. Police brutality. We got lots of Latin King brothers in the joint, they’ll love meeting you. Man, those brothers gonna have some fun!”
That caused him to laugh, imagining what they would do to me.
By then, I could see the grille of their Dodge hidden in trees. To silence Calavero, I considered hammering him in the back of the head with the Glock but didn’t. Pointless demonstrations of power-like anger-is for amateurs.
Instead, I timed his steps, kicked his right foot into his left ankle, then brought my knee down hard, between his shoulders when he fell. I taped his mouth, then pulled the man to his feet. As I forced Calavero to lean his head against the fender of the truck, I told Dedos, “You seem like the smart one. Keep your mouth shut until I tell you to speak.”
Dedos nodded eagerly, his face through the night vision lens a misshapen montage of silver eyes and glittering blood.
Dedos got his chance to speak sooner than expected. As I forced Calavero, then Dedos, into the passenger side of the Dodge, the radio squelched with a muffled voice. Pulling the radio from my pocket, I heard a man say, “Calavero, you there, man? Come in.”
It wasn’t Chapo’s voice.
I touched the transmit button and replied, “Hang on a minute. Talk to Dedos.”
Then I pressed the radio to my chest and told Dedos, “Tell him cops just busted through the gate. In a truck. Tell him to leave the girl where she is and run. But”-I slapped him behind the ear for emphasis-“ listen to what I’m telling you. If you screw this up, if they hurt that girl, I’ll kill you. I’ll shoot you in the back of the head.”
To make my point, I touched the Glock to his temple, mildly amused that, beside him, Calavero leaned toward the dashboard so he wouldn’t be hit if the bullet exited his partner’s head.
Dedos looked at me as if I were crazy. “You kidding, man. The truth? That’s what you want me to say to my boys?”
I replied, “Do it!” then held the radio up to Dedos’s mouth.
Dedos was so frightened, his voice had a hysterical edge, the pitch of nervous laughter.
“The hell you talking about?” the pandillero replied. “Stop with your joking. V-man is sick of that little virgin, so we need something in the truck. The chain saw. Check, make sure it’s there.”
I took a deep breath, steadying myself. As I did, the man spoke again, saying, “Wait a minute. You serious? Put Calavero on. You’re joking about cops, right?”
I ignored him, thinking it through. If they needed a chain saw, it was to dismember Tula’s body. And if the girl was already dead, I was better off going in quietly. It was safer, cleaner. Take the men by surprise, one by one. Or just wait for them to finish up and jump them as they left the camp.
But what if they were killing her now?
I held the radio to my face for a moment, undecided. Then I touched the transmit button and said in English, “If you hurt that girl, you’re dead. Understand me? Tell Victorino. Tell him to stop everything and throw your weapons on the ground. We’re coming in. You’ve got three minutes, then you’re going to jail.”
There was a shocked paused before the man responded in English, saying, “The fuck you talking about? Who is this?”
Hoping the gangbangers would abandon the girl and scatter, I told him, “We’ve got your names, we know where you live. We’ll come to your houses if you run. But don’t hurt that girl-or you’ll be sitting on death row.”
The pandillero was replying as I sprinted around to the driver’s side, saying, “I don’t know nothing about no girl, man! We having a party, that’s all…,” but I didn’t listen to more.
I tossed the radio into Calavero’s lap as I started the Dodge, put it in drive, then transferred the Glock to my right hand. Because I knew I might need the emergency break, I tested it to make sure it worked. Then I floored the accelerator, fishtailing toward the hunting camp.
Dedos was hollering at me, calling me crazy, saying, “I can’t see nothing, man! You’re gonna kill us all!” because I drove with the lights off.
I could see fine. Through the night vision lens, my world was sharp and clear. It was, to me, a familiar world, where shadows are unambiguous, a place without shades of gray.
Dedos was right about one thing, though. If Tula Choimha was dead, I would kill them all.
FOURTEEN
When the Mexican man with gold teeth shot Harris Squires with a rifle, Tula Choimha collapsed on the ground, in shock for a moment, regressing back to the child that life had never allowed her to be.
The lone exception: the night she had watched her father die in flames.
Tula screamed, drawing her body into a fetal position, as her eyes continued to watch what was happening. She screamed again when she saw that blood peppered the giant’s face and chest. But when the big man stumbled… almost fell… then somehow found the strength to keep moving forward, toward the man with gold teeth, Tula’s hysteria was displaced by her concern for Harris Squires.
&n
bsp; The girl got to her feet, yelling in Spanish, “Stop hurting him! Don’t shoot him again!” Then she ran toward the Mexican, her fists clenched.
The Mexican was laughing at Squires, taunting him. He was motioning with his hand for the giant to keep coming. With every step, though, the Mexican took a step backward, staying just out of the giant’s reach.
Behind Tula, the redheaded woman was enjoying herself, calling, “V-man… Hey, Vic! Try to shoot him in the balls. See what kind of marksman you are!”
The rifle the man carried, Tula noticed, had two barrels. So maybe the rifle was a shotgun, although Tula wasn’t sure of the difference. Was the V-man carrying the gun in the crook of his arm because both barrels had been fired with one shot?
If so, Tula believed the giant might survive because his spirit was still strong despite the blood that now soaked his pretty blue shirt. The girl could tell because Squires was saying to the Mexican, “Is that your best shot, chilie? That the best you can do, douche bag?” his voice flinching with pain at each step but his eyes aflame, focused on the V-man.
Suddenly, it was as if the Mexican was done having fun, because he took two fast steps backward. Then he pointed the shotgun at Squires’s pelvis, saying, “I want to do this slow, jelly boy. Maybe shoot off your penga, that’ll make you smile for the camera. Then I’ll use the knife.”
Still grinning, the V-man looked toward the redhead as if seeking her approval… but then his expression changed. His attention shifted to Tula, who, still running and only a few strides away, screamed, “No-o-o-o!” a word that she had transformed into a sustained shriek.
The resonance of a young girl’s scream is fine-tuned by eons of adaptation to repel attackers, particularly human males. The V-man winced, his ears aching, and his awareness of Harris Squires was momentarily jammed. Then he had to stick a hand out to stop Tula, who crashed into his thigh, her fingernails flailing, as she tried to sink her teeth into the man’s arm.
Victorino’s Latin King soldiers had been pillaging the RV. But two of them were now sprinting to help as the V-man hollered, “Ouch, goddamn you!” Then: “Get this little bitch off me!”
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