Conquistadors

by Jeff Kirkham

“I need to see that refinery. I’m tracking the cartel and rallying the locals ahead of them.”

  Rocco’s eyebrows shot up in the light of the campfire. “You’re a tracker? Search and rescue?”

  “No. It’s just something my old man taught me. He used to be an instructor for the Border Patrol too.”

  “Bill McCallister?” Rocco threw out the name.

  “That’s him…er. That was him. The cartels blew him up at his ranch.”

  Rocco shook his head. After a time, he spoke. “Oh man, I’m sorry to hear that. Bill was a piece of work, for sure, but he deserved a warrior’s death.”

  Noah nodded. “Oh, he got his warrior’s death. There was more blood on the ground than a slaughterhouse. Those gangbangers paid in gallons to kill Old Bill.”

  Rocco poured a splash in Noah’s red, plastic cup and raised his bottle of Leadslingers. “To Bill McCallister. May his pecker work in heaven.”

  Noah raised his Solo cup to the stars. “Amen. That we should all be so lucky.”

  “What do you plan to do at the refinery?” Rocco asked after a quiet moment. “There’s at least a hundred cartel soldiers encamped there. It’s no soft target.”

  “I’m not sure what I’ll do. I do know this: we can’t let them have that gas. I’ve got a feeling they have plans for it. Big plans. The kind where a lot of people die. One way or another, we need to set that place on fire.”

  Rocco sat in silence for a minute. The sage in the fire crackled.

  “I know where the Border Patrol guys are camped in the desert. They pulled up stakes and moved out of town so the cartel couldn’t find them so easy. They’ve been running harassment raids with a few locals. You might like their way of thinking.”

  “Nah. You don’t need to take me. Just give me directions and get your kids out of here.”

  Rocco shook his head. “It’ll only take a couple hours to take you there and for me to get back here. It’s the least I can do for…running you off the road and all.”

  Noah nodded. “I’d appreciate it.”

  “Bill wasn’t the most popular guy with the brass, if you know what I mean. He left Artesia on less than stellar terms. Don’t expect that being his son will buy you much say-so with the super troopers.”

  “I didn’t think so. I don’t need to trade on his name, anyway. I can carry my own water. Thank you for the heads up, though.”

  “Daddy, I’m thirsty.” A little girl, maybe ten years old, sat up in her sleeping bag. Noah picked his water bottle up off the ground, stood and walked over to her. He flicked a look at Rocco. “Do you mind?” Rocco nodded.

  “Here you go, princess.”

  The girl stared at the blond man hovering over her sleeping bag with her big, brown eyes. The eyes swam with doubt. The man definitely wasn’t her daddy.

  “It’s okay, cariña, he’s a friend.”

  She reached up for the water, unscrewed the cap and drank—keeping one eye on Noah. His own ten-year-old daughter had dishwater blonde hair instead of brown hair and her eyes had a bit of hazel instead of deep brown. Otherwise, the two ten-year-old girls could’ve been sisters. The girl made a tiny smacking sound as she finished drinking. Noah remembered Katya making the same delicate noises when she ate and drank.

  Is anything in this world more-worthy of giving one’s life than a little girl?

  She handed the water bottle back to Noah and gazed at him with a face as open as Sunday morning. She brushed the hair that’d drifted over her eyes.

  “He’s not one of the bad men, right Daddy?”

  “No, darling…lay down and go back to sleep.”

  She remained, looking up at Noah.

  “Can you make them go home?” Noah knew exactly who she meant.

  “I surely can try, little one. Sometimes I can be pretty convincing.” Noah smiled at her and she smiled back. Then, she lay down and closed her eyes.

  Noah walked back to the fire and lowered himself into the camp chair.

  “In the morning, I’ll draw you a map to my ranch and my dad’s ranch and you can take the kids there to sit this thing out. The wife too.”

  “Ex-wife,” Rocco corrected. “And thank you. That’s beyond gracious, particularly given how we met.”

  Noah took another sip of whiskey. “Don’t worry about it. I’d do the same. I mean, I would’ve done the same. My family’s gone now. You’re a lucky man… Do me a favor and mind the cows back at my ranch. I left them a half-dozen round bales and they’ll need a new bale every week. The hay’s in the old barn and the key to the tractor is in the scissor drawer in the kitchen.” Noah had blasted right past the part about his family being gone. After looking the little girl in the eyes, he definitely didn’t want to talk about it.

  Rocco seemed to notice the hiccup, but he didn’t pry. “I don’t know nothing about cows, but I can sing them a pretty tune now and again.” Rocco admired the stars for a few moments, and a companionable silence fell over the desert camp.

  “You know,” Rocco said. “I don’t think you have to set the refinery on fire. Seems like with the right rifle you could poke holes in the fuel tanks without closing to contact with the enemy. In Iraq, when we didn’t feel like assaulting a compound, we’d have our snipers shoot a couple holes in their rooftop water tanks with the big Barrett fifties. After a day without water, ain’t nobody gonna stick around a dry compound. They’d always sneak out after a day or two. Seems like the same principal applies here: if you want to make the refinery at Artesia inhospitable, put holes in all the tanks. With a .50 BMG, you should be able to do that from a couple miles away. Maybe more.”

  Noah considered the idea. It had the aura of destiny, and he’d come to trust that gooey halo as much as his own horse sense. “Do you have fifties at the Border Patrol training facility?” he asked.

  Rocco laughed. “I wish. There’s no use for Light Fifties in the Border Patrol. We call in the DEA when things get hot with the cartels. Lots of locals around here shoot long-range, particularly over the border in Texas. Their precision shooting club holds its annual shoot in Brownfield. It’s one of the few natural resources this godforsaken place has in abundance—long ranges for shooting. I don’t know how you’d reach out to those guys, but I’m sure they’d love to practice on the cartel. It’d probably make their year.”

  Chapter 25

  Tavo Castillo

  Rancho Santiagito, 65 Miles outside of Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico

  He had strategized this conversation on the road back from Phoenix—seven hours of role playing and predicting his daughter’s reaction to each argument. He worked the conversation out in his mind, handled her objections and then started the process over again, each time improving his talking points and delivery. With each iteration, Tavo realized that he didn’t want so much to be king as he wanted his daughter to be queen.

  But she had likely betrayed him. Her own father…

  He decided that it didn’t matter. In fact, if that was the case, he should feel proud of her. He needed her to be canny and headstrong. The last thing he wanted was another version of her mother. There were enough women in the world to sort beans. The world needed kings and queens. If Sofía had chosen to have her father imprisoned in order to assume command, maybe it was good news. It would mean she hadn’t waited for him to grow old and retire, but instead had attempted to take his place at the time of her choosing.

  In retrospect, he could see how, for decades, she had ingratiated herself to his lieutenants—carefully building emotional ties to her “uncles” stronger than anything Tavo could, even as their brother in arms—ties even stronger than money. She had played her beauty and her innocence like a virtuoso, even drawing Tavo into forgetting himself.

  If he couldn’t be proud of her skill, her artistry in pulling others into her orbit, then Tavo had no business calling himself a father.

  He couldn’t be sure that she had done any of this, but he was doing his best to see it from a dispassionate perspective. His mind wa
s working overtime to engineer a frame for her treachery that allowed him to love her still. Like a carpenter building a bathtub beneath a roof that would not stop leaking, Tavo needed a proper container for his anger. Most of the time, when people intruded on his personal peace, he vanished them. Perhaps, this time, God was teaching him about the inevitable progression of fatherhood—that we create our children to surpass us.

  He knew for a fact: she had spoken to his half brother in Guatemala and hadn’t told him. Tavo had only recently discovered the man through a chance revelation in his five-year investigation into his father.

  Locating Tavo, for a savvy criminal like his father, wouldn’t have presented a problem. Looking at it from his father’s perspective—from the eyes of a shot-caller for MS-13—he would be easy to find. He’d done nothing to erase his connection to his mother or her parents. Tavo had even kept the family name: Castillo. Finding Tavo and then manipulating his daughter into mounting a coup, would fall squarely within his father’s likely skillset. Tavo had educated Sofía for the world of business, not to absorb punches from the likes of his diabolical father. If he’d gotten his hooks into Sofía, Tavo’s father would undoubtedly make the most of the opportunity.

  Regardless of her motives, he knew this: Sofía was the only person who knew he would be in Antigua during their meeting. Tavo followed the chain of events: she had called his half-brother, then his half-brother went to Antigua. That same day, the Kaibiles showed up to arrest him.

  Tavo wasn’t in the business of lying to himself, so he wouldn’t start now. The thought of Sofía setting him up had wounded him and angered him, as much as that was possible. But after spending hours on the road, the hot, sticky blacktop rolling past, contemplating the betrayal, Tavo had gathered himself. He wasn’t Pablo Escobar and he wasn’t Chapo-fucking-Guzmán. He had more intelligence than both those men combined, and he wasn’t a man to have family murdered because they hurt his feelings.

  Sofía brought a lot to the table. She had co-opted the Mexican army into Tavo’s petroleum scheme and had manipulated them into protecting fuel assets in Mexico. She had won the hearts of his lieutenants by batting her eyes and calling them “uncle.” She had even blinded her own father to the fact that she had inherited every ounce of his ruthless ambition.

  Sofía had become a formidable woman, and Tavo was not a man to cast talent aside. Her betrayal meant only one thing: that she was ready.

  Tavo asked Sofía to take a walk in the desert. The ranch overflowed with street soldiers and commandos recently arrived from the smoking embers of urban America. The ranch’s paramilitary intentions could no longer be concealed, and the flatlands were now divided into firing ranges, force-on-force combat training grounds and outdoor classrooms where the men were being indoctrinated in a fusion of Special Forces combat and Caballero Templario doctrine. Since the assault to rescue the priests, Tavo had been adding more and more quasi-Catholic dogma into their command routine. Something told him that a religious backbone would be needed in the days to come.

  They walked along rolling hills that rose toward a jutting mountain of iron-grey basalt. Their walk skirted the base of the mountain, and it would take them at least two hours to circumnavigate the one peak on the ranch. He needed those two hours to recalibrate his sense of his daughter. Now that he had concluded she had made a move on him, he needed to know what had motivated her.

  What did she want? Once he knew, he could maneuver her.

  For certain, confronting her about Antigua was off the table. He would never reveal a piece of inside information unless he had no other choice, particularly to an adversary. She couldn’t know that he knew.

  “Papi, when are we going to talk about all these soldiers? When are you going to tell me what you plan to do with them?”

  “Did you study the Roman conquest of the ancient world?”

  “Yes… Western Civilizations. Sophomore year at Vanderbilt.”

  “The people that the Romans conquered experienced an increase in birth rate and a decrease in infant mortality. The Roman Legions brought war, and after that populations flourished.” Tavo didn’t know if it was entirely true, but it sounded like it should be.

  Sofía refused the bait. “So then tell me how you’re planning to conquer because I’m worried. I’m worried about your soul. I’m worried that you’ll be killed.”

  Such a masterful answer, Tavo thought in a flash before picking up the thread of her new argument.

  “Julius Caesar didn’t go to hell for building the Roman Empire, Sofía.” The counter-argument sounded weak even to Tavo, so he shifted to a more direct, emotional appeal. “I hope you understand that I’m doing all of this for you. I’m building this for your benefit.”

  Sofía stopped at the top of a rise in the sand and looked her father in the eyes.

  “You don’t really believe that, do you? That you’re doing this for me?”

  “Why else would I build a legacy? Why would I do this except for you?”

  She searched his eyes, looking for something. For a moment, he felt like a child who had wandered into a laboratory. He had no idea what she hoped to find in his eyes.

  “Papi… you do it because you can’t stop yourself.”

  Tavo marveled. People could live together their whole lives and not know one another at all. How could she be so totally wrong about him? Tavo was aware of his every feeling and thought. He’d built his world on faultless control, achieving life-or-death leverage over thousands of people. His results couldn’t lie: he’d created the biggest, most-secretive cartel the world had ever known. For his daughter to picture him as some kind of obsessive-compulsive who built sprawling empires because he “couldn’t stop himself” … the suggestion was ludicrous and insulting.

  “Why would I want to stop myself? We’re on the verge of achieving everything we ever wanted. I realize that you’re restless and ready to take my place, but please just wait while I settle this new opportunity. Let me pacify this region and get it under control. It’ll only take a few months and then I’ll hand you the reins. I’ll step back and you can manage the landholdings. Isn’t that how our partnership works? I conquer new territory and you build a fence around it? I make gains and you make those gains permanent? You are the Augustus to my Julius Caesar. I am a conqueror, Sofi. The people need a conqueror now more than ever. After I’m done, the people will need you.”

  It had been the big speech he’d practiced on the drive back to Hermosillo. But, as his words trailed off and he watched his daughter’s cheeks go slack, he felt like they were two swimmers on a black ocean, paddling past one another in the night without hearing the slightest splash.

  How could she not know him? Not know her own father?

  “Papi…” She touched his arm. “I don’t want to control anything. I don’t want to conquer anyone. We can help people without stripping away their self-determination. I’m no Augustus Caesar. That was two thousand years ago, and people are different today. People…know better than to conquer one another.”

  She talked to him like an idiot, like Tavo used to talk to his senile father-in-law. Fresh-faced out of college, his daughter now regarded him as the fool. He was a man that millions feared. They feared him like they feared the Chupacabra or El Sacomán, a dark specter who could snatch away their lives and their families’ lives on a whim. Yet this girl felt like she could touch his arm and patronize him like a decrepit, defanged wolf.

  She hadn’t seen what he’d seen in Tucson. She hadn’t seen men blow each other up with roadside bombs. She hadn’t watched as some maniac tried to drop barrels of poison gas on their countrymen. She hadn’t watched Americans shoot at each other for a bite of kale. She might be ready to have him arrested or killed, but she wasn’t ready to face the new reality. Like all the other castaways wandering in this broken civilization, her mind was still marooned on an island of modern dreams, even after a hurricane had swept that island down to naked sand. Without a doubt, she was the fool. Not him.<
br />
  What did he really need her for anyway? The gasoline she and her pet general guarded in Monterrey was a backup plan to his backup plan. This girl who had her hand on his arm—she wouldn’t dare stand in his way if he decided to take the Mexican refineries. What harm was there in allowing her delusions of prissy humanity? Let her think that people were somehow different now than they were when Genghis Khan rolled over endless fields of the dead, or when Mao Zedong culled tens of millions from his own country. Eventually she would see the truth.

  Tavo brushed her hand off his arm and her liquid, brown eyes reflected the sting of it.

  “You will see. People aren’t any less brutal now than they were in the Roman Empire.” Tavo hadn’t meant to imply that he was the brutal one, but brushing her hand away had unwittingly sealed that impression. At this point, he didn’t really care.

  Sofía reached up and gently pulled his face around to look at hers. “Even if that’s true—and I understand that you’ve seen more evil than me in this life. I know that terrible things have happened to you. But even if people are just as brutal now as they always were, I won’t be part of it. People may be the same, but I’m not. And neither are you.”

  She said the last sentence with more hope than conviction in her voice.

  “You might as well know it,” Tavo gave up attempting to convince his daughter, “I’m going to pacify the borderlands. You’ll see: the people will be better off.”

  They’d stopped walking. Sofía looked away from her father and turned toward the horizon. “For every Julius Caesar or Ghengis Khan, there were hundreds who died trying to be conquerors. I don’t want you to die,” Sofía said, her eyes swimming with concern. She turned back, and again touched his arm.

  Tavo hardened, but didn’t bother removing her hand. “The Spanish had the weapons and they had the moment. They took down America, from Mexico City to Canada. The Conquistadors erased the brutality of the Aztecs and the Apaches and replaced it with order and progress. If I don’t do the same now, nobody will. If I don’t succeed, this region will descend into violence that you could never imagine.”