"Ahh, is very good… Yes…" Paco smiled. He didn't seem to have a clue what Jody had just asked him.
They moved out into the hot afternoon sunlight. A line of five trucks were just pulling through the guard gate on the duty-free dock- old Mexican Fords with chipped paint, broken headlights, and fenders redesigned by traffic. Wooden stakes held up stained covers that arched over the truck beds like dirty brown rainbows.
"Los camiones, " Paco announced.
The trucks came to a stop, then ten or twelve private armed guards, known in Colombia as celadores, jumped out of the back of each vehicle. They wore threadbare, faded khakis tucked into shiny new paramilitary jump boots, and each guard carried an identical olive green machine gun-old Mexican Mendozas. The out-of-date thirty-ought sixes had wooden stocks and twenty-round box mags that loaded from the top. For a while the Mexican gangs in L. A. had been using these weapons, but as the drug business quickly became prosperous, they all switched to Russian auto-mags. Shane remembered that the old-style Mendozas were prone to jamming.
Paco rattled off a few sentences in Spanish. Jody looked over at Shane for a translation.
"I didn't quite get it. Sounded like he said you and he should ride in his bubble, whatever that means," Shane said. "He wants the rest of us in the back of the trucks."
"Your bubble?" Jody asked Paco.
"Si, si. Mi bubble es mi carro. Tengo nuevo- Land Cruiser." Paco pointed proudly at a new black Toyota that was parked nearby.
"A bubble." Jody grinned. "Yeah, looks kinda like one, don't it?" Ten minutes later the other San Andresitos arrived, also in new Land Cruisers. The SUVs were all loaded with extras: chrome rims, whip antennas, and roll bars with deer lights. The custom interiors were tuck-and-roll. They all had TMX sound systems that could blow the fur off a rabbit.
An hour later the cigarettes were safely loaded and the caravan was turned around, ready to leave.
"Hokay," Paco said, pushing his ugly brown teeth out from between puffy lips. "We go. Vamos a la ciudad de Maicao."
The Vikings retrieved their gym bags containing the comforting weight of their machine pistols and boarded the trucks, which were now full to the top with All-American's cigarettes: one truckload for each of the three San Andresitos families, two for Paco Brazos. Paco got into his Toyota Land Cruiser, with Jody in the passenger seat beside him, and pulled to the head of the line. Shane was assigned to the back of the second truck with two of Emilio Hernandez's teenage guards.
Shane's vehicle was so filled with cases of cigarettes that there was almost no room to stand. He looked at the guards and guessed them to be about seventeen or eighteen. Their smooth faces and round cheeks had not yet been hardened by adulthood, but their eyes were those of predators. These teenagers had seen death or had caused it-Third World eyes, burning with anger and determination, in faces only slightly older than Chooch's.
The trucks moved slowly off the dock and through the duty-free gates, into the old town of Maracaibo.
They rocked dangerously in and out of deep potholes, rolling down the narrow streets like a parade of lumbering elephants, past a seven-block-long green island that sat in the center of town like a huge grass runway.
"Que es esta?" Shane asked one of the guards, pointing at the rectangular grass strip.
"Paseo de los Siglos," the teenage celador said sharply, and turned his back on Shane. The rough translation was "Passage of the Centuries." It meant nothing to Shane.
Finally, they reached Avenida 15 and hung a left. One after the other, the trucks and Toyotas rounded the corner, then proceeded north through the new part of Maracaibo.
Tall skyscrapers and flat-roofed, one-story shacks stood within yards of one another, giving the place a feel of unstructured growth.
Soon they were in the countryside, passing arid fields and slanting wooden fences, blowing road dust out from behind each truck as they headed into the desert.
La Guajara was described in Shane's Caribbean guidebook as a semi-desert, but to him it looked bleaker and hotter than Death Valley. Brown cactuslike vegetation clung to the few sandy washes, hoarding precious drops of moisture like thirsty castaways.
They passed straggling tribes of nomadic Indians herding half-dead burros along the dirt road. The nomads ran to get out of the way of the caravan, as the smugglers blasted the air horns in their shiny new Land Cruisers. The Indian men shouted at their frightened children, grabbed the halters of their braying donkeys, and glared with impotent hostility at the trucks that sped past, leaving them engulfed in a curtain of brown dust.
Shane tried to ask one of the guards about the Indians, but the boy just shrugged. "Wayu," was all he would say. Shane wondered if that was the name of the tribe or a curse, or both.
Soon they crossed out of Venezuela into Colombia. The border was marked by an old yellow sign shot full of bullet holes, outside the small town of Paraguacion.
Paraguacion seemed right out of a Sam Peckinpah western. The trucks slowed only slightly as they jounced down the dirty main street, past dusty cinder-block stores with broken glass windows. Rough-hewn corner posts supported tin roofs on buildings that leaned precariously. A dry fountain dominated the center of town, across from a general store.
The trucks and SUVs swept through Paraguacion like a Panzer division. A few Indian children stood on the boardwalks, holding on to their mothers' cotton dresses. They watched with black-eyed wonder while a few of the trucks carelessly clipped the circular base of the fountain as they rushed past.
The convoy had just passed out of Venezuela, into Colombia. There were no Customs stops, no government officials, nothing.
Nobody in the town of Paraguacion, or the two nations it separated, seemed to care that ninety-six million cigarettes had just been converted from duty-free product into illegal contraband. It had happened in the blink of an eye as they shot through that little village under the uninterested gaze of a few desert Indians.
They picked up speed again, heading across the "semi-desert," scattering jackrabbits and rattlesnakes in their path, heading west toward a lawless hell town known as Maicao.
Chapter 40
MAICO
SHANE COULD ACTUALLY smell the town before it came into view, a malodorous combination of sewage and rotting garbage drifting east on the desert wind.
They soon reached what Shane assumed was the airport, according to the Colombian guidebook he'd picked up at the hotel. But it was unlike any airport he'd ever seen.
What had first been a meandering dirt road, rutted and treacherous, suddenly became a two-way, poured-concrete highway that ran for a mile and then miraculously widened into six perfectly straight lanes complete with runway arrows, footage markers and landing lights. The caravan of trucks rolled over old rubber landing marks left there by the four-ply jet tires that had touched down in both directions. After five miles, the six lanes narrowed again, becoming a two-lane highway and then, as if it had never been there at all, they were back on dirt bouncing along again. The field had no tower, no hangars, no gas pumps or support buildings. The Maicao International Airport was just six lanes of concrete, some telltale skid marks, arrows, and a few landing lights. Shane guessed that night flights put down unannounced to offload cargo and left just as quickly.
"Aeropuerto?" Shane asked a teenaged celador, whose scraggly new chin whiskers stubbornly announced the coming of manhood.
"Si, aeropuerto," the angry youth answered. Two words this time. They were having a verbal festival.
Shane's guidebook said that Maicao was a town that should not be visited. Shane could never remember seeing that kind of statement in a guidebook before. Under this startling warning, it said the town had a population of fifty-five thousand, all of it apparently living on the outskirts of town in slum housing with no plumbing or electricity. Shacks now dotted the sandy desert on both sides of the road, without the slightest hint of organization or city planning. The terrain was littered with shanty tilt-ups and lean-tos made out of
wooden packing cases and discarded sheets of corrugated metal. Worse still was the smell that became more intense as they pulled into town. Every block or two they passed six-foot-high mounds of reeking garbage. Big greenback flies strafed the piles of refuse, prospecting ferociously.
Very few people could be seen standing outside, as the oppressive midday heat pushed into triple digits.
They bounced around a curve and saw a Colombian military garrison located on the east end of town, protected by a nine-foot-high razor-wire fence. Two white-helmeted gate guards stood in the sweltering heat but paid no attention as the five truckloads of contraband rattled into town.
They entered the business district, which Shane thought was even more depressing than the slum housing they had just encountered. The first and most remarkable thing about this section of Maicao was the prodigious amount of discarded packing material. It was everywhere.
It seemed that the boxes full of contraband, once opened, had simply been shucked out onto the street. Bubble wrap, as well as old wood and cardboard from broken-down containers, covered everything. A layer of white Styrofoam popcorn was blowing over it all. It scattered in the trucks' wake, finally piling up against the curbs. In a curious example of urban eco-balance, human waste ran in the gutters, rotting the packing material from the bottom, slowly making room for next week's load. Concrete lane dividers, once intended to be planters to enhance city beauty, were now just catch basins for old cardboard boxes and rusting metal banding tape.
The trucks slowed to ten miles an hour as they drove down Calle 16.
The few men walking on the heat-shimmering sidewalks turned to watch as the five-truck caravan with its Toyota SUV escorts rumbled into town.
Shane noticed that there were no women, and the men he saw were all packing dangerous-looking weapons. Pistols were stuck into webbed canvas belts. Machine guns of every make hung by faded leather straps.
They drove past the Heda Hotel, where there was supposedly a cantina called the Corraleja. The guidebook said it was named after a particularly dangerous bullfight where the spectators could come down from the stands, enter the arena, and take their chances with the bull.
The center of town was more of the same, except as they got closer to the warehouse district, the refuse and garbage grew in height, overflowing the curbs. The Styrofoam popcorn now dominated the landscape, swirling over everything, drifting like Rocky Mountain snowbanks.
They finally turned off Calle 16 into the warehouse district, and it looked like no place Shane had ever seen. Most unusual and out of place were the half a dozen or so untended and underfed cows that wandered aimlessly in the street, grazing on God knows what, blowing the popcorn aside with angry snorts to get at the rotting garbage below.
Each of the five San Andresitos families had magnificent warehouses there. The first one they drove past was located at the mouth of the street: a large, paranoid building that seemed designed to repel an invasion force. The windows resembled gun ports. Castle-type exterior doors were banded with heavy metal. CORTEZ LTD was written in silver letters across the side of the building.
Farther down, Shane could see four more mammoth buildings, two on each side of the street-one to each square block. In front of every warehouse was a modern, architecturally designed showroom that displayed the San Andresitos families' black-market products.
Santander Cortez's showroom followed his castle motif: steel and granite walls with narrow slit windows, each containing spotlit radios and watches. The glass looked thick enough to be bulletproof.
Emilio Hernandez had gone for a massive French Provincial showroom. For Octavio Ramandi, it was Colonial. Greek Orthodox for Spartico Sococo. Paco Brazos had really gone fishing. His showroom was a black and red Japanese pagoda-style building, with Macy's-size front windows filled with merchandise. The glass was protected by silver alarm tape.
The canvas-backed trucks began to peel off, each one heading to its respective family headquarters.
The truck Shane was in stopped halfway down the street, and the engine shut off. He waited while the tailgate was dropped and his two teenage celadores jumped out, then Shane picked his way through the shifted cases of cigarettes and dropped down onto the street. He landed on two feet of compressed packing wrap in front of Emilio Hernandez's French Provincial showroom.
From where Shane stood, he could see the other four trucks parked in front of their respective warehouses. Paco Brazos was standing a block away in front of his large pagoda monstrosity, grinning broadly.
Jody was just getting out of Paco's black Toyota as Tremaine jumped down from Sococo's truck farther up the street. Two blocks ahead, Shane could see Lester Wood was already making his way carefully down the street toward Jody, his boot heels sinking in the muck.
"Que esta alia'?" Shane asked one of the teenage guards, who just turned and walked away without answering. "Eat me," Shane muttered softly.
Suddenly a door opened on the side of the warehouse, and a dozen more armed teenagers jogged out to stand in a semicircle around the truck. They weren't packing the old Mendozas. These guys were strapped with shiny blue-steel auto-mags, which they held at port arms. A pair of elephant doors on the warehouse clattered up behind them, and two battery-powered yellow forklifts hummed out and parked nearby.
"No es necesario que usted quedarse› " Emilio said, dismissing Shane. His sweating round face showed disdain.
Shane could see Jody waving for him to come over. " Ok amp;y… Bien. Adios" Shane said, then turned his back on the hate-filled eyes of fifteen heavily armed teenage boys and made a slow, treacherous journey across the garbage-filled street to join Jody and Paco and the other two Vikings in front of Brazos International.
He walked carefully past a dozen more celadores who were protecting Paco's two truckloads of cigarettes. They watched him like prison guards until Shane finally pushed open the two-inch etched glass door and joined Jody, who was standing just inside. Entering the showroom was like stepping back into air-conditioned sanity.
The room was cooled to sixty-eight degrees, and Shane's sweat-soaked shirt immediately began drying ice-cold against his skin. The stench of Maicao was left behind, and a sweet lilac scent of an expensive room deodorant took its place.
"Some little township they got here," Jody said softly.
"Jesus, I didn't know there was this much bubble wrap on the planet," Shane answered.
"You see Santander Cortez's place?" Jody asked. "From those gun-port windows on the second floor, he could control the whole street with less than ten guys. What's that about?"
"They got a whole new take on commerce out here," Shane answered.
"I don't like the way this feels. We need to complete our business and get the hell outta town before Santander gets back."
"Back from where?" Shane asked. "I thought he was up here, layin' in the cut, waiting to slit our throats."
"According to Paco, he had to go to Medellin on business."
"Quieren mirar a mi tienda?" Paco interrupted them as he entered the showroom.
Jody cocked a questioning eyebrow at Shane.
"He wants to show us his store."
"Yeah, bueno," Jody said. "But let's not take all day."
Paco led them through his magnificent showroom with its glass cases full of radios from Motorola and TVs from GE. Electronic conveniences glittered under recessed lighting, each one on its own Japanese-style jade marble stand. Tremaine Lane and Lester Wood trailed behind, their eyes flickering across the incredible display of goods.
Paco walked them through the appliance room with its ultra-size Sanyo, Panasonic, and Sony TVs. Dishwashers from Westinghouse, microwaves from Revel, refrigerators and washer-dryers from Maytag and Kitchen Aid. Almost every make and brand imaginable was represented. The cigarette and liquor display was in a hallway about forty feet long that stretched between two appliance rooms. The corridor was walled with glass cases full of every U. S. cigarette brand. Bottles of Russian Stoli sat next to
carved decanters of Chivas Regal-all of this twinkling merrily under recessed product lights.
From there, they walked out into the warehouse.
Shane didn't know how long they were in the cavernous concrete-block building, but the tour was a definite mind bender. The three-story, open-spanned structure was so full of goods that they had to often walk sideways to get down the aisles. Men in straw hats driving forklifts whizzed past on the center aisles, moving things around in the massive air-conditioned building.
It was hard to determine how much product was stored there, but if Shane guessed several hundred million dollars, he couldn't have been too far off.
Paco kept talking as he led them through his black-market kingdom, keeping up a fractured-English spiel worthy of a Disneyland river-boat guide: "General of Electric, aqui. Packard Bell, alii" But he saved the best for last. "Y la plata esta al todo derecho adentro. "
Jody shot Shane a look off the last sentence.
"I think he's saying the money is inside." Shane smiled.
"I like that. Let's go see the money." Jody grinned back.
They climbed a flight of stairs. Paco opened a door, and they entered a plush suite of offices. For the first time since arriving in Maicao, Shane saw women-all young and pretty. Each sat in front of a computer, furiously clicking their mouses and scrolling inventory screens. Paco Brazos was thoroughly enjoying the effect his tour was having on them, and he had obviously saved the best for last.
He punched a code into a very sophisticated computer lock, swung open a three-foot-wide metal door, and turned on the lights; then all of them entered.
The room was about sixty feet square. There were several upholstered chairs, and in the center a computer monitor sat on an antique wooden table. The screen showed the peso exchange rates all over the world. Banded bricks of every kind of currency imaginable were stacked on the shelves that lined the walls, overpowering the room with the sweet, musty smell of paper money.
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