48

Barely an hour later he’s awakened by Quino, who’s shouting at him from the bedroom door to grab his gear and get out to the driveway, fast.

In minutes Axel is dressed and out the door, the M4 in his hand, three thirty-round carbine magazines in the ammo belt at his waist, his shoulder holster holding the .45 under one arm and a double-magazine pouch under the other, his phone in his jacket pocket.

Quino’s Ram pickup truck and a black SUV—a Jeep Grand Cherokee—are idling in the driveway. He glimpses Vaquero at the wheel of the Cherokee, Alto in the shotgun seat, two other men in the back. “Move it!” Quino yells at him from the truck. Axel scrambles into the backseat and the truck roars away, its sudden acceleration slamming the back door shut. In the front passenger seat, Sino is speaking into a satellite phone. With the Cherokee following, they speed through the already opened front gate and turn onto a narrow trail bearing to the northwest.

Axel braces himself against the front seats as the truck gains speed, rocking over the rough road. The Cherokee’s headlights are hazy orange in the trailing dust. He leans forward and sees a half-folded topography map on Sino’s lap in the glow of a dashboard lamp. Yes, I’ve got it, Sino says, pressing the phone hard to his intact ear against the rumble of the truck. He draws a small circle on the map with a ballpoint pen, then states its coordinates and asks for a verification, listens for a moment. How fast are they going? he asks. Axel follows his glance at the speedometer—the Ram is doing 80, the truck swaying and jouncing, leaving the ground at every roll in the road.

I estimate forty minutes, Sino says into the phone. Let me know immediately if anything changes. He sets the phone on the console and says to Quino that the call of a few minutes ago was correct, the transfer will be at Dos Burros. They’re in two vehicles, he says, one security, one the payload. Our contact’s tailing them in a Volkswagen bug. He started out of Piedras Negras in the traffic ahead of them so they’ve got no reason to be suspicious that he stayed behind them after they passed. They’re sticking to the speed limit and he’s holding a long way back but keeping them in sight. He’ll let us know if they speed up. If they don’t, we’ll get to Dos Burros twenty minutes to a half hour ahead of them. Plenty of time to get set. The tail will let me know when they make their turnoff onto the trail to the clearing, then he’ll head back.

Quino nods and says, Very good.

Where and what’s Dos Burros? Axel asks.

Sino tells him it’s a riverside clearing about eighty yards off the border highway and well concealed by an extended stretch of high, dense brush. It’s a fairly narrow and shallow crossing with solid footing to permit the load to be hand-carried across. It was a popular crossing point for wetbacks before the Golfos took it over for drug shipments.

Quino slows down, makes a turn onto the northbound trail, and then they’re doing 80 again, then 85.

Crouched in the thick scrub growth on the river side of the two-lane border highway, Axel awaits the coming smugglers, M4 in hand. Mosquitoes whine at his ears. Quino’s pickup and the Cherokee are hidden in a clump of mesquites on the other side of the road, which is twenty yards behind him. Even if he stood up to look back he wouldn’t be able to see the highway for the foliage. This is an isolate stretch, sparingly traveled at night, and the few vehicles that whoosh by seem in a great hurry to be away from here.

By the frail light of a low crescent moon and through gaps in the foliage, he can vaguely discern where a rude trail bends into the narrow entry to the clearing. The smugglers will be coming on this trail after exiting the highway at a gap in the brush a couple of miles westward. Quino and the others are hidden in the scrub along the west edge of the clearing, set to ambush them. Axel’s assignment is to ensure that nobody escapes by retreating through the clearing entrance. Positioned as he and the other Malos are, all their lines of fire will be eastward to some degree, reducing the possibility of shooting each other.

A breeze kicks up and rustles the riverside reeds and he catches the ripe, mucky smell of the Rio. Another vehicle whisks by behind him. Minutes pass. Then he hears an engine, guttural and revving low, approaching from his left along the trail. He thumbs the M4’s selector lever from “safe” to “burst.”

Headlights appear out of the darkness, moving slowly. As the bulky vehicle passes abreast of him, not ten yards distant, he sees it is a pickup truck about the same size as Quino’s, several men standing in its bed. The security unit. The brake lights flare and the truck stops at the clearing’s entrance, and the men, five of them, debark from the bed. The truck’s headlights brighten and dim into the forward darkness three fast times, and a moment later there is a single spark of white light through the obscurant brush and from somewhere beyond the truck. The buyers, responding from the other side of the river. The men on the ground advance into the clearing and out of Axel’s sight as the truck’s brake lights flare one-two-three times, and seconds later he hears the rumble of another vehicle coming up the trail and then sees another set of headlights. Another pickup, this one carrying the payload. Two men in the bed. It stops a short distance from the first truck, engine throatily idling, and then the first truck proceeds into the clearing.

Long seconds pass. Over the sound of the idling engine of the payload truck he hears a loud but unintelligible voice. Someone calling across the river? Another minute passes and then a man appears in the headlight beams of the payload truck and beckons it into the clearing. The truck advances and slowly turns into the entry and the man hops onto the rear bumper and then this truck, too, vanishes into the clearing. Axel eases forward, closer to the trail, finds a spot with a better view of the entry and with more room to move to his left or right.

It happens fast. A pair of M4 three-round bursts shatter the silence—and then the night erupts into a raging fusion of gunfire, curses, screams. The thick brush between Axel and the clearing permits him only a few glimpses of muzzle flashes. He hears the rising roar of an engine and in the next second the payload truck comes barreling out of the clearing in reverse, a lone man in the bed, leaning over the cab and shooting back into the clearing with a handgun.

Axel fires a burst at him, the carbine muzzle flaring whitely, and the man lunges sideways and tumbles from the truck as it crosses the trail and plows rearward into the heavy brush to Axel’s right. Axel shoots at the driver’s obscure form through the window and he slumps out of view and the truck keeps moving in reverse, slowly rocking and lumbering through the heavy scrub for another few yards before it jams in a denser thicket, its wheels spinning in mud. Axel moves over a few feet for a better angle at the front of the vehicle and shoots two bursts through its grille, and the truck sputters and quits. The rear right-side door swings open and someone drops to the ground in a crouch and fires three rapid-fire pistol shots before Axel triggers a burst at him and the man flings back in a supine sprawl. Keeping the carbine pointed at him, Axel is astonished to hear him wheezing. Then realizes all other gunfire has ceased, all screaming. Now the man is gasping, speaking softly to who knows whom. Praying? Axel starts to walk up to him, then halts. He tried to kill me, he thinks. Then shoots him with another burst, the man flinching, and the gasping ceases. He then goes up to the truck window and peers in and sees the driver’s crumpled, soundless form.

Quino comes out of the clearing, his M4 trained on the man Axel shot out of the truck bed. He prods the man with his foot, steps back, and shoots a burst into him, then comes over to where Axel is standing beside the disabled payload truck and the dead smuggler on the ground. He looks into the cab and says, Excellent work, Maestro, he says. Three of them.

Two, Axel says. You just did the third one.

Him? He was good as dead, I only hurried him along. He’s your kill.

The Malos come out of the clearing, jabbering and laughing, describing to each other how well the ambush worked, how fast the buyers across the river hauled ass when the shooting started. Too damn bad. Woulda been nice to kill them, too, get the money. Their only casualty is Alto. A bullet through the outer part of a calf. In and out without touching bone. Won’t sideline him long.

Quino sends Vaquero and another man to retrieve their vehicles from the other side of the highway, then checks out the load in the shot-up truck. It consists of four duffle bags full of tightly wrapped two-kilo plastic packs of what is supposed to be cocaine. Quino removes one of the packs and has Axel hold it directly in front of a headlight. With a pocketknife he makes a small cut in an upper corner of the pack, extracts a little of its content on the blade, presses a finger to one nostril, and snorts the powder with the other. He wipes at his nose and sniffs as if testing the air. Then says, Excellent! The Zetas will be pleased.

Their vehicles come around and the men make fast work of transferring the heavy duffles to the Cherokee. Quino appoints Axel to drive the Ram and gets in the backseat and they drive off on the little trail, headed for the gap in the brush and then onto the highway, then the back-road ride for home.

The Ram’s great power is palpable in the steering wheel under Axel’s hands, in the accelerator under his foot. He had thought to remind Quino that he hadn’t driven in more than twenty years and maybe wasn’t the wisest choice of driver for a speeding night drive through the desert. Then thought, What the hell, Quino knows that. And he anyway has been wanting to drive. And a chance to drive something with as much muscle as this? Bring it on.

He’s holding their speed at a hair above 70 when Quino says, Move this thing, Maestro! I’m hungry for a steak and want to get to it!

He presses the accelerator and the truck surges up to 80, 85. They’re flying through the night, the headlights swaying over the low-rolling road, the truck seeming to dance its way over it in skips and hops, wagging its ass, the Cherokee lost in its dust behind them.

“Wooo!” Axel yells.

Sino laughs and withdraws a small bottle of tequila from his jacket, takes a drink from it, and passes it to Quino, who takes a swallow and returns the bottle. Sino starts to hand it to Axel, then draws it back and says, No, it is against the law to drink and drive. Axel snatches the bottle from him—the truck veering off the road for a moment, jarring hard—and Sino says, For the love of God, man, don’t kill us! They all laugh and Axel takes a sip, starts to give the bottle back to Sino, then jerks it away and takes another drink before giving it up. He’s never cared much for tequila, but at the moment it tastes glorious.