The Cartel

by Don Winslow

  They settled into a siege as the battle slowed to a match of sniper against sniper. Marshaling ammunition, two rocket launchers, and some grenades, the six gathered with Nazario in a house at the west edge of the village, nearest a tree line, and waited for dark.

  Two of the six were already hit, their wounds bound up with strips torn from their shirts.

  As the sun went down, Nazario led them in prayer.

  Our Father, Who art in Heaven

  Hallowed be Thy Name

  Thy Kingdom come

  Thy will be done…

  Two comrades who volunteered to stay laid down cover fire as Chuy burst from the door, shielding Nazario behind him. Another comrade had Nazario’s left arm, a third his right.

  The rocket from a launcher blasted the soldiers and Chuy ran for that space. Tracer fire cut the night. The man to Nazario’s right went down, and Chuy dropped back and took his place, firing his rifle with his left hand and running, and then they were in the trees and then they were through and then Chuy felt Nazario slow down and get heavier and when he turned to look he saw the gaping hole and then he was too small to hold the Leader up, and Nazario staggered and fell to the ground. They picked him up and carried him but he died before they got a hundred yards.

  They hid in some trees until some comrades made it in from Morelia, and then they put the Leader in the back of the truck and drove into the hills and buried him in a secret place where no one could desecrate the grave.

  But three days later people were saying that they had seen Nazario, that he came to them and told them that everything would be well, that he would never leave them, but Chuy didn’t see Nazario and didn’t hear him say that everything would be well.

  Chuy walked into Morelia.

  He found a cheap room in a slum and slept for two days. When he finally got up, he realized that it was over.

  Flor was dead.

  And now the Leader was gone.

  Chuy decided to go home. He took what money he had and bought a bus ticket to Uruapan, and from there to Guadalajara, and from there to Nuevo Laredo. From there, he planned to cross the bridge one more time and be home.

  He hasn’t seen home in five years.

  A war veteran, he’s just sixteen years old.

  Now he looks out at the mesquite, creosote, and prickly pear, and beyond them the reddish-brown fields of sorghum.

  The bus is hot and crowded.

  There are maybe seventy people on board, three-quarters of them men, most of them immigrants from El Salvador and Guatemala trying to make it el norte for the work. Chuy sits beside a woman and her small child, a little boy. Chuy figures that she’s Guatemalan, but she keeps mostly to herself and so does he.

  Chuy looks like any other teenager.

  Blue jeans, a black T-shirt, a dirty old L.A. Dodgers ball cap.

  The bus stops in the town of San Fernando, where Chuy buys an orange soda and a burrito and gets back on board, eats the burrito, drinks the soda, and falls asleep.

  The hissing of the bus’s brakes wakes him up and he’s confused. It’s way too soon to be stopping in Valle Hermoso. Chuy looks through the windshield and sees four pickup trucks pulled across the road, blocking it. Men with AR-15s stand beside the trucks and Chuy knows they’re either CDG or Zetas.

  The men come up to the bus and one of them hollers, “Open up, asshole! Unless you want me to shoot you dead!”

  He wears a black uniform, bulletproof vest, and kit belt.

  It’s Forty.

  Chuy slowly pulls the bill of his cap lower over his face.

  If Forty recognizes him, he’s dead.

  Trembling, the driver opens the door and the men get on the bus, point their guns at the passengers, and shout, “You’re all fucked!”

  Forty orders the driver to pull off on a dirt road, and the bus bounces for about ten miles until they’re on a flat, desolate piece of ground in the middle of nowhere. Chuy sees some old army trucks with canvas hoods and a few old buses with broken windows and flat tires.

  The Zetas order all the men off the bus.

  Chuy gets off, looking at the ground. It’s hot out. No shade under the blazing summer sun.

  The Zetas push the men into a line and then start to sort them by age and physique. The older and the weaker are cut out, tied foot to foot, and shuffled off into one of the trucks. Chuy watches as Zetas take the better-looking young women off the bus and load them into a different truck, separating them from their children.

  The woman who was sitting next to him screams as a Zeta puts his hand over her mouth and drags her away from her little boy. Chuy knows that she’ll be raped, and, if lucky, survive to be put out on the streets. Other Zetas take the older or homelier women off the bus and put them into another truck.

  Chuy knows their fate, too.

  Now Forty stands in front of the rest and asks, “Okay, who wants to live?”

  A teenage boy pisses himself. Forty sees the stain spread across the front of the boy’s faded jeans, walks up to him, pulls his pistol, and shoots him in the head. “Okay, I’ll ask again! Who here wants to live? Raise your hands!”

  All the men raise their hands.

  Chuy stares off a thousand yards and raises his.

  “Good!” Forty yells. “So here’s what we’re going to do! We’re going to test your skills and see who has balls!”

  He whistles and the other Zetas bring out baseball bats and clubs with nails driven into them and toss them in front of the men. Then Forty yells, “Pick up a weapon, pair off with the man next to you, and fight. If you win, you become a Zeta, if you don’t. Well…then you’re fucked.”

  An older man near Chuy starts to cry. He’s nicely dressed in a white shirt and khaki pants and talks as if he’s from El Salvador. “Please, sir. Don’t make me do this. I’ll give you all the money I have. I have a house, I’ll give you the deed, only please don’t make me do this.”

  “You want to leave?” Forty asks.

  “Please, yes.”

  “So leave.” Forty takes the bat from the man’s hand. The man starts to walk away. As soon as he steps past, Forty swings his bat into the back of his head. The man staggers and falls to the dirt, raising a small cloud of dust. Forty chops with the bat until the man’s head is just a smear on the dirt. Then he turns back to the men and asks, “Anyone else want to leave?”

  No one moves.

  Forty yells, “Now, fight!”

  Chuy’s opponent is clearly a campesino—big, hard hands, big knuckles, but not a fighter—and he looks scared. Still, he has six inches and fifty pounds on Chuy and he advances swinging the bat at Chuy’s head.

  Chuy ducks under, swings his nailed club and shatters the campesino’s kneecap. The campesino goes down face first, then tries to push himself back up, but Chuy finishes him with two blows to the back of the neck.

  Forty yells, “This skinny one can fight!”

  For a horrible moment Chuy thinks that Forty recognizes him, but the Zeta’s attention goes to other fights. Most of them last a long time—these men don’t have combat skills and their struggles are long, slow, and brutal.

  Finally, it’s done.

  Half the men are left standing, some of them badly wounded with cuts, broken bones, and fractured skulls.

  The Zetas march the ones who can walk back to the bus.

  They shoot the others.

  The bus drives the survivors farther into the countryside, to a camp that Chuy remembers.

  The party goes on that night.

  As Chuy and the others sit in a line in the dirt, he hears the women’s screams coming from inside a corrugated steel building. Fifty-gallon barrels are set outside, and every few minutes a body—dead or still barely alive—is shoved into a barrel and lit on fire.

  He hears the screams.

  And the laughter.

  Chuy will never forget the sound.

  Never get the smell out of his nose.

  Forty walks over to the eleven survivors and sa
ys, “Congratulations. Welcome to the Z Company.”

  Chuy is a Zeta again.

  They don’t send him to Nuevo Laredo or to Monterrey.

  They send him to the Juárez Valley.

  Valverde, Chihuahua

  It’s the nightmare call.

  Keller rolls over in bed to answer the phone and hear Taylor say, “One of our people has been killed.”

  Keller’s heart drops in his chest.

  It’s Ernie Hidalgo all over again.

  “Who?” he asks.

  “You know him,” Taylor tells Keller. “Richard Jiménez. A good man.”

  Yeah, he was, Keller thinks. “What happened?”

  Jiménez and another agent were on the highway from Monterrey to Mexico City. No one knows what the two agents were even doing on that road by themselves, in a car marked with diplomatic license plates. All they know is that their car was run down, forced to pull over, and surrounded by fourteen armed Zetas demanding that they get out of the car.

  The agents refused, and yelled that they were American agents.

  “Me vale madre,” the Zeta leader said.

  I don’t give a fuck.

  The agents phoned the U.S. consulate in Monterrey, and then the American embassy in Mexico City. They were told a federal helicopter would be there in forty minutes.

  They didn’t get those minutes.

  The Zetas emptied their clips through the car windows. By the time the chopper got there, Jiménez had bled to death, the other agent was in traumatic shock, badly wounded but expected to live. He’d been medevaced to a Laredo hospital.

  “Get down to Monterrey,” Taylor says. “Now.”

  “What is it?” Marisol asks.

  “I have to go.”

  She’s knows better than to ask where. “Is everything all right?”

  “No.”

  Keller gets on the phone again while he’s still dressing and gets Orduña on the special line. The FES commander picks up on the first ring. “I heard. I’m on my way. A plane is waiting for you in Juárez.”

  Marisol is out of bed now, balancing on her cane while she puts on her bathrobe. She looks at Keller questioningly.

  “One of our guys got killed,” he says.

  “I’m so sorry,” Marisol says.

  She’s too kind, Keller thinks, to note that Mexicans are killed every single day and that it’s considered nothing special.

  “Yeah,” Keller says, “me too.”

  —

  Marisol sits at her desk and works her way through piles of paperwork.

  The red tape required to manage even a small town is endless, and she wants to finish so that she can get over to the clinic for afternoon hours. She decides to eat lunch at her desk, and calls Erika to see if she wants to join her, but the girl is out in the countryside looking into the theft of someone’s chickens.

  Chicken theft, Marisol thinks.

  She’s glad for a bit of normalcy.

  Maybe Erika can come for dinner.

  —

  “What was the motive?” Keller asks Orduña as they stand at the scene of the attack. The car has been pushed off to the edge of the highway, its body riddled with bullet holes like a Hollywood movie prop. The blood inside is all too real. “Why would the Zetas kill an American?”

  Then he sees the answer.

  On the floor by the gas pedal, spotted with Jiménez’s blood—a jack of spades.

  The Zetas know that American intelligence has been working with the FES, and this was payback.

  They couldn’t get to me, Keller thinks, so they took the first agents they could find. But what were Jiménez and his partner doing on Highway 57, a dangerous road in the middle of the CDG-Zeta war?

  Then again, the drug war is getting very real for Americans. A FAST team in Honduras had just been in a firefight with Zeta cocaine traffickers, and several American citizens had recently been killed in the Juárez area. But there hasn’t been an American agent killed in Mexico since Ernie, and Keller knows that the response will be massive.

  Maybe the Zetas don’t care.

  Maybe they think they’re invincible.

  Just a week ago, another mass grave site was discovered near San Fernando, with the story that the Zetas had once again hijacked a bus off Highway 101 and killed most of the passengers.

  Stories of grisly torture and forced gladiator-style combat were making the rounds. Hard to know if they’re true, but this much is a fact—the Zetas are establishing a reign of terror over whole parts of Mexico, and Americans have no immunity.

  Later that day, while Keller, Orduña, and FES are combing the countryside for the attackers, the Zetas make their position absolutely clear. Heriberto Ochoa releases a communiqué in the press that directly challenges the governments of both Mexico and the United States:

  “Not the army, not the marines, not the security and antidrug agencies of the United States can resist us. Mexico lives and will continue to live under the regime of the Zetas.”

  —

  Chuy’s estaca moved in like morning fog.

  They came up Carretera 2 from the east, got out of the vehicle before they hit the army roadblock at Práxedis, and then hiked the countryside, using the riverbank as cover, until they came to the outskirts of Valverde.

  Now they wait.

  Chuy takes a nap.

  Wakes up when an elbow digs into his side and he sees the woman come out of the building, walking with a cane.

  The woman police they told him about is nowhere to be seen.

  Neither is the North American DEA agent.

  Forty told Chuy that he’d get the man out of the way, and he did.

  —

  Marisol stands at the kitchen counter and chops onions for the stew she’s making. Erika is coming over and she’s already late. Where is that girl? Marisol wonders.

  She puts some butter and olive oil in the pan, smashes a clove of garlic into it and turns on the heat to brown the chicken before she puts it in the pot. It’s one of Arturo’s favorite dishes and she wishes he were here to enjoy it. But he’s out doing whatever it is that he does, so he’ll just have to miss out.

  Marisol hears something outside.

  A car engine. Must be Erika.

  Peeking out the window, she sees headlights pass by. For some reason it spooks her. She dismisses it as silly but nevertheless looks to see that the Beretta is on the chopping block, within reach.

  The way we live now, she thinks.

  And where is Erika? Where is that girl?

  She calls her on her mobile but just gets voice mail.

  —

  Keller turns onto Carretera 2.

  After a futile hunt, he’d flown back to Juárez. There’ll be an emergency meeting at EPIC tomorrow, Taylor’s flying in from D.C., and Keller figures he can get an evening in with Marisol before going up. All DEA and ICE personnel in Mexico have already been called back or put under heavy security in the consulates, but Keller decides he’s exempt from that.

  He’s been under a death threat since the day he came here, so what’s the difference? He’s been in Mexico—just on this last incarnation—longer than the U.S. was in World War II. When you ask people, “What’s America’s longest war?” they usually answer “Vietnam” or amend that to “Afghanistan,” but it’s neither.

  America’s longest war is the war on drugs.

  Forty years and counting, Keller thinks. I was here when it was declared and I’m still here. And drugs are more plentiful, more potent, and less expensive than ever.

  But it’s not about the drugs anymore, anyway, is it?

  He calls Marisol to tell her that he’ll be there for dinner. The line is busy. He’s asked her to get call waiting but she’s so stubborn about “being rude.”

  He dials Erika.

  No answer. Voice mail.

  —

  Magda likes her new car—a powder-blue Volkswagen Jetta perfect for navigating the traffic of the greater Mexico City metropolitan
area and easy to park, as it is now at the Centro Las Américas shopping mall in the suburb of Ecatepec.

  As much as she enjoyed Europe, and as successful as her trip was, she’s glad to be home. And it’s somehow symbolic of the “new Mexico” that her gynecologist’s office is in a sparkling new shopping mall with the Nordstrom, the Macy’s, the Bed Bath & Beyond.

  Everything is commerce now, she thinks, even babies.

  She wonders how Adán will react to the news she just got.

  Or should she even tell him?

  A lot of women have children on their own these days, and certainly she has the economic wherewithal to raise a child by herself. The fact that she’s a multimillionaire still surprises her, but certainly she doesn’t need a man to provide formula, diapers, and all the other paraphernalia that comes with a baby. She can hire platoons of nannies, if she wants, and she doesn’t have to worry about some company granting her maternity leave.

  After her diplomatic mission to Europe, she’s going to be even richer.

  The Italians, the ’Ndrangheta, loved her—more important, they respected her—and she’s confident that they’ll give her new customers not only in Italy but in France, Spain, and Germany as well.

  So which good news shall I give Adán first, she asks herself as she slips behind the wheel: that he’s going to make billions of dollars in new money in Europe, or that he’s finally going to be a daddy?

  And how will he react?

  Will he divorce his young queen to marry me?

  Do you want him to?

  She’s become used to her freedom and independence; she’s not sure she wants to saddle herself with a husband. At the same time, the son of Adán Barrera—if it does turn out to be a boy—will inherit vast wealth and power. And if it’s a girl? Fuck them all—she’ll inherit a nice piece of change and influence herself.

  Her mother is a buchona.

  Magda pulls out of the mall parking lot and has only gone a couple of blocks when she sees the flashers behind her.

  “Damn it,” she says.

  Ever since the arrest that put her into Puente Grande, she’s had a fear of the police. It’s irrational, she has no reason for fear, because Mexico City is Nacho Esparza’s plaza, and she’s protected.

  She pulls over, looks in the rearview mirror, and sees two cops get out of the car. One of them comes up, and she winds down the window. The cop wears a mask over the bottom half of his face, but this doesn’t worry her. Most police disguise themselves these days. She gives him her best beautiful-woman smile. “What did I do?”