The Cartel

by Don Winslow

  “If I pay you for every kilo of coke that I bring through Guatemala,” Adán says to Ochoa, “I might as well just go to work for you.”

  “That would be acceptable.” Ochoa smiles.

  Adán is growing tired of the game. But the game must be played, and on the chance that the raid doesn’t come off or fails, he needs an arrangement with the Zetas, so he says, “We’ve bled each other dry, it makes no sense to come to the peace table and try to bleed each other to death financially. I’m offering you a market in Europe in exchange for a supply route in Central America.”

  Ochoa confers with Forty and then agrees.

  What follows is a long, tedious discussion about security arrangements between now and the end of the present administration. Adán verifies that the AFI and the army will make no overt moves against the Zetas if they will not fire on agents or soldiers.

  “What about the FES?” Ochoa asks.

  “I have no influence there,” Adán says.

  “Then why do they only come after us and not you?”

  “Perhaps because you killed their families,” Adán suggests. Perhaps because you’re animals without the slightest restraint. Perhaps because you’re sociopaths and sadists. Perhaps because you crippled Keller’s woman and butchered a young woman he thought of as a daughter. Perhaps because you killed my unborn child. “I can’t help you there.”

  Ochoa seems to accept it, and then asks, “What do you intend to do about the new administration?”

  “Same thing we’ve done with every administration,” Adán says. “Try to influence it with money and reason. If we pool our resources and present a common front we might gain some ground there. The best thing we can do is to stop fighting. I truly believe that if we give this government peace, it will reciprocate.”

  “And the North Americans?”

  “Are the North Americans,” Adán answers. “They’ll do everything they can to force the government to come after us. The government will make a show of it but be ineffectual. That is, unless you continue to commit atrocity after atrocity, and continue to do frankly idiotic things such as challenging them with press releases boasting that you rule the country, in which case you force the government’s hand.”

  “We do rule the country,” Forty says.

  “Which is totally irrelevant to the point I’m making,” Adán says. He tries again. “We can have a business. We can have the most profitable business in the history of the world—outside of oil, which I believe you’re moving into—if we manage it in an orderly way. Or we can have chaos that will eventually ruin us.”

  The talks continue, focusing on details of how to disengage on the various fronts, how to announce the cease-fire, how to enforce it and make sure that no small organizations go off on their own and break the truce.

  Much of this is delegated to Forty and Nacho.

  By the time the sun starts to go down, they have achieved the pax narcotica.

  Adán and Ochoa shake hands.

  “We’ve arranged some entertainment for this evening,” Ochoa says. “A small party to celebrate the peace and the Day of the Dead. Some refreshments, some women from Guatemala City.”

  “No offense, but I’m a married man.”

  “But not a dead one,” Ochoa says.

  “But a faithful one,” Adán answers.

  He goes back to the camp, takes a hot shower from a Lister Bag hung from the ceiling, and then lies down to sleep under the mosquito netting that the servant opened over his bed.

  He knew there’d be a fiesta, but it worries him. More than one narco has been murdered while celebrating a peace with his enemies, so he only let half the men attend the party, withdrew the other half to the camp, and reminded Nacho that the men should stay relatively sober and completely alert.

  Adán looks at his watch, the gaudy expensive affair that Eva gave him and which he wore only to impress Ochoa, a vulgar hick who would be impressed by that sort of thing.

  In twelve hours, he thinks, if everything goes according to plan, my enemies will be dead.

  Forty.

  Ochoa.

  And, with any luck, Art Keller.

  If there is a God, Keller will die a hero’s death, gunned down in a firefight against the Zetas in the jungles of Guatemala. There will be a private—secret, in fact—ceremony in the back halls of the DEA building, maybe even the White House, and then he will be forgotten and unmourned.

  But every year, on the Day of the Dead, I will arrange for poppies to be placed on his grave.

  A private joke, just between the two of us.

  —

  Ochoa watches the party.

  It’s quite a scene, lit by a bonfire in the middle of the Zeta camp, men and women in black-and-white skull masks dancing to the blaring music, women going down on the men right out in the open, or sneaking off to the edge of the light to fuck. His only disappointment is that Barrera chose not to attend.

  That will complicate things.

  Barrera is a slimy piece of shit, not nearly as clever as he thinks he is. Ochoa knew that “El Patrón’s” peace offering was disingenuous when Barrera didn’t as much as mention his dead mistress, even when practically invited to. If he’d demanded something—some sort or recompense, even an apology—Ochoa might have believed him. Now Barrera will do what he always does: pretend to make peace and then buy off the government to make war.

  Except this time, he won’t have the chance. Ochoa watches the party—beer, whiskey, and champagne flow generously, and most of the partiers are snorting cocaine.

  Well, the Sinaloan guests are snorting cocaine laced with heroin, and the women aren’t whores, they’re Panteras.

  —

  Nacho Esparza is having a hard time getting it up, and he doesn’t understand it. Coke usually makes him harder than a diamond, he took a Viagra, and the girl is beautiful—lustrous black hair, big tits, and, under the half mask, full lips that are made for giving blow jobs, which she’s doing now, on her knees the way he likes it.

  She tilts her head back and just flicks at the head of his dick with her tongue, like a snake, and that does the trick. He feels himself getting hard, the pornographic scene of the orgy around him helps, and then she swallows him deep and he’s relieved when he feels the blood pump down into him, he gets hard and thick in her mouth, and he closes his eyes in pleasure.

  The pain is horrific, unimaginable.

  Nacho looks down to see his blood seeping around the knife blade embedded in his stomach, and then the girl with the lustrous hair and full lips smiles and pulls out the blade, and his blood squirts out into the dirt.

  Staggering backward, Nacho looks around at a nightmare. In the red of the firelight, beautifully dressed, elegantly masked women slaughter their lovers with knives and guns, with garrotes or just their bare hands. Zetas pull pistols from their belts and gun down Sinaloans at close range. Other demons come out of the shadows and drag dead and wounded men into the bonfire. Nacho hears their screaming as he feels a deep dull ache in his belly and then he realizes through his disbelief that he’s going to die and then the beautiful woman with the lustrous hair behind the white skull takes him by the hand and walks him toward the fire.

  —

  Chuy watches the Sinaloan camp from the brush at its edge.

  The Sinaloans have sentries out, two each in front of the quarters where their bosses are. There are probably more, peeking out from tents or, like him, lying in the brush outside the camp, but he can’t see them.

  He doesn’t drink, do drugs, or fornicate with women, so other than the music—norteño mariachi that he doesn’t like anyway—the pagan Day of the Dead fiesta held nothing for him. And Forty had told him and the rest of his cell to refrain—there would be work for them later and he wanted their heads on straight.

  Chuy was just as glad—the scene at the party was satanic, disgusting. Now he hears screams coming from the camp, sights in on the sentry outside Barrera’s cabin, and waits for the signal, one
blink from a laser.

  It comes just seconds later and he squeezes the trigger.

  The sentry’s head snaps back, his rifle clatters on the cabin’s porch.

  Chuy swings his erre onto the second sentry, who is looking to see where the shot came from. A dumb mistake—he should have hit the ground and then looked. Chuy’s shot takes him in the chest.

  Five yards away from Chuy, the muzzle flash of a grenade launcher goes off and the armor-piercing missile spins its way toward Barrera’s quarters.

  Now gunfire is coming back toward him and the fight is on.

  Then, in the distance, Chuy hears helicopter rotors. Shit, do the Sinaloans have a chopper? Where did they hide it? He shifts position and looks up into the night sky. A helicopter gunship like the army and the federales had in Michoacán could wipe them out in seconds.

  He sees the chopper.

  The man with the grenade launcher panics, drops the weapon, and runs. Chuy picks up the launcher, hefts it onto his shoulder, and points it toward the sky until the chopper comes into the range finder.

  —

  A red streak comes up out of the predawn darkness.

  A loud bang, a flash of yellow light, and the helicopter jolts sideways like a toy that’s been hit by a bat.

  The blast tosses Keller to the deck.

  Shrapnel sprays, exposed wires spark, the ship is on fire. Red flame and thick black smoke fill the cabin.

  The stench of scorched metal and burned flesh.

  Keller struggles back up and sees that Ruiz’s face is a bloody smear. Then Ruiz wipes the blood off and Keller sees that it came from one of the other men, whose carotid artery spurts in rhythm with his racing heartbeat. Another keels over, shrapnel obscenely jutting from his crotch, just below his protective vest, and the team medic is already crawling across the deck to help.

  Now the voices come from grown men—howls of pain, fear, and rage as tracers fly up and rounds smack the chopper’s fuselage like a sudden rainstorm. But it’s too late to abort the mission, Keller thinks, even if we wanted to, because we’re going down.

  The chopper spins crazily as it falls toward the earth.

  —

  Adán topples out of his quarters.

  His hair is singed, his face scorched, and he’s deaf—all he can hear is a horrible ringing. He realizes that he’s on his stomach in the dirt, and thinks that he should be doing something, but he can’t figure out what it is.

  Looking up, he sees one of his men run toward him, yelling something, but Adán can’t hear his words, only sees his mouth open and close in what seems to be slow motion, and then Adán slowly comes to the realization that he’s concussed.

  The man runs right past him. It’s almost funny because he has no pants on, only a shirt, and his ass is skinny and flabby at the same time, and then Adán realizes that he’s naked as well and he yells out—or thinks he does, because he can’t hear his own voice. Yells out to stop and wait for him, come back and help him get up, but the man just keeps running, his ass bouncing, then bullets cut him down from behind and he claws at the air before toppling forward into the dirt.

  Adán thinks he should be doing something but can’t think of what it is and then remembers that he’s the leader, El Patrón, he should be taking command, giving orders, organizing his men who are running around shooting in all directions, but then he realizes that would mean standing up and he’s too afraid to do that. A bullet smacks into a man near him and he wants to get up and take command but his legs won’t let him do it, they’re like water under him.

  Adán belly-crawls toward the bush.

  —

  The landing is “hard.”

  The pilot manages to bring the spinning helicopter down at the western edge of the village, but it hits hard, rattling Keller’s spine and snapping his head back against the bulkhead, and he almost blacks out.

  The interior of the chopper is on fire. A couple of men work to suppress the flames as others get the wounded men out. Keller realizes that half his kill team is already out of action and then he hears Downey yell, “Out! Out! Deploy!” so he jumps out of the chopper bay.

  Muzzle flashes crackle and bullets zip around his ears, so he flattens himself to the ground, flips his night-vision goggles over his eyes, and then risks looking up to get his bearings.

  The school and the church are ahead to his right; in front of him and to the left, Zetas are taking position in huts, houses, and in the bush. Heavy firing is coming from about a quarter of a mile ahead, and Keller realizes that Zetas were attacking Barrera in his camp when the chopper came in. The Zeta camp is directly behind him, on the other side of the narrow belt of jungle, so they have enemy on all sides.

  The second chopper has landed safely and its men are deploying, creating a firing line between them and the Zeta camp behind them. But there’s no screen between them and the Sinaloan camp in front, and Zetas are starting to come back from there.

  Our only advantage is chaos, Keller thinks. The Zetas seem to be confused as to who the crashed helicopter belongs to, and they’re running in all directions, pouring fire at the chopper but also fighting in the Sinaloan camp and back in their own.

  He notices that some of the fighters are women, dressed up as if to go to a party, some in masks, but carrying AR-15s and pistols, even lobbing grenades. They must be Panteras—he thought it was an urban legend, the “Zeta Amazons,” but now he sees that it’s true as figures move in and out of the darkness toward cover and good firing positions.

  The old dictum is that “no plan survives first contact with the enemy,” and the special-ops team is already regrouping and improvising a new plan. He hears the sharp, disciplined fire as they use their night-vision advantage to pick out targets and create space to form a defensive perimeter. Short bits of talk come across the earpieces as Downey distributes his people and firepower.

  They had expected to go into a sleeping village in an environment of surprise, not a hot combat zone. The plan was to perform the sanction and get out, not take on the entire Zeta force, and now the helicopter is destroyed and they’re going to have to fight their way out across the border.

  “K-1,” Keller hears on the bone-phone. “This is D-1.”

  “Acknowledge.”

  “Aborting mission.”

  “That’s a no.”

  “Not a lot of time here, K-1,” Downey says. “Kill Team G is fifty percent down, Kill Team F is engaged and I can’t spare them. And we’re going to have to get our wounded back to Chopper 2 and medevac.”

  Keller gets what Downey is saying—

  He and Ruiz are the only members of Kill Team G left, and Team F has all it can do just to keep from getting overrun themselves.

  The mission is fucked.

  And where is Barrera? Dead already, or did he survive the Zetas’ attack?

  First things first, Keller thinks as he hears Downey say, “We’re going to hold this perimeter until we can evac two eagles down.”

  “Acknowledge.”

  It’s the right move, Keller thinks. They have to get two wounded men back to the second chopper and then hold until it can deliver the wounded and then come back for them, because twenty men are too heavy a load for a single Black Hawk, already weighed down with special noise-suppressing gear.

  Looking over his shoulder, he sees F start to move back into the jungle toward the Zeta camp. Bullets zing over his head and he trains his M-4 on a house to his left and returns fire. It feels good to be doing something, it lets loose his adrenaline, and he realizes that he didn’t come here to not kill Forty and Ochoa.

  “Moving,” Keller says into the bone-phone.

  “Negative that,” Downey answers.

  Keller gets up into a crouch and sees Eddie Ruiz to his left.

  Eddie nods.

  It’s on.

  Keller dashes toward the school.

  —

  Forty’s bodyguards lay down a sheet of fire.

  Eddie hits the ground
and looks up to see a woman with a pink Uzi trying to spot him, but he shoots and blows Commander Candy away first. She clutches at her stomach as if she can’t believe that this has happened, drops the pretty pink gun, and sits down and howls for her mother.

  Then Eddie sees Forty make a dash for the jungle. Eddie leads and pulls the trigger. Forty stumbles and then goes down, gets up again, and Eddie’s about to finish him when another spray of gunfire from the Zetas forces him to squeeze the earth.

  Then there’s a whoosh and an explosion and Eddie sees the bodyguards blown off the school’s porch like toy soldiers in a kid’s game. He looks to find Forty but can’t see him.

  He does see Keller get up and head for the church.

  Ochoa.

  Z-1.

  El Verdugo.

  Works for me, Eddie thinks.

  He gets up and follows.

  —

  Chuy’s done.

  He drops the rocket launcher and walks back into the brush. Carefully picking his way along the narrow trail he’s walked so many times, he crosses the stone terrace of the Mayan temple, picks up his fútbol, and crawls into his cave.

  There is nothing to fight for here.

  Not Flor.

  Not Nazario.

  Not Hugo, or God.

  One side will win, one will lose, and it doesn’t matter which. He has his own mission now and he can’t carry it out during this fight.

  He curls up into a fetal position and hugs the ball tightly to his chest.

  —

  Adán trips over a root and falls face first.

  He hurts.

  His right leg is burned and blistered, he’s scratched and cut from the thorns and razorlike leaves, the soles of his feet are cut and bleeding. He’s exhausted, and part of him just wants to stay down and sleep, but if he sleeps they might catch up with him, and he wants to live to see his sons again, to hold them. That’s all he wants in the world, all he wants from life.

  Nacho was right.

  What are they doing this for?

  If Ochoa survives and wants to be patrón, let him.

  All I want is to live.

  Adán fights to his feet and keeps going. The jungle is dark in the predawn and he can’t see where he’s going, he can only move away from the sound of shooting and hope that the North Americans find him before the Zetas do.