Chapter 35
And there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great.
—Revelation
El Oso shaved the part of his new beard that irritated his neck, his boot knife gliding nicely over the cold, hand-soap lather. In this brief standoff he had lost nearly ten kilos, and the image that regarded El Oso from his mirror was hard, lean, noble.
‘Take your time, Oso,” El Tigre called from the sniper’s roost. “We are in charge here. The albino pendejo’s message is mierde, nothing more.”
El Oso rinsed his face and neck, then toweled himself dry. He put on Hernan’s clean shirt, since Hernan would no longer have need of shirts, and called back.
“Pay attention. We lost four men who did not pay attention. We have to think of food, soon, or we will be too weak to shoot the gringos when they come.”
“We can eat Hernan,” El Tigre said. “He was hit yesterday, but he didn’t die until this afternoon.”
El Oso shook his head, chuckling at the joke, but when he looked up and saw the fear in the others’ eyes, he stopped.
“No more talk of eating Hernan,” El Oso ordered. “No more talk of eating, period.”
“They say they come tonight,” Guillermo said. “Then what? If we kill them all, they’ll send more tomorrow night. We will run out of ammunition. They pick us off one by one. . . .”
“What would you have us do?” El Oso interrupted. “Surrender, and be shot against this wall like pigs? No, when the phony earthquake never comes—one day, two days more—the city will fill up again and we will all leave here rich men.”
“But how . . . ?”
“El Oso has a plan,” El Tigre cackled in his unnerving way. “And shadows collect on the roof across the street. It is time, Oso.”
El Oso heard the hard blat-blat of Tigre’s compressor.
“One less shadow, Oso,” El Tigre said. “Tell them the plan.”
“Osvaldo, bring me that tape!” Oso ordered. “Umberto, Miguel, unpack two of those cartons. With care, you two! Don’t do to us what the gringos cannot.”
Osvaldo handed Oso three rolls of duct tape that he’d found in a tool box. Oso pulled off a dozen meter-long strips and placed them on a workbench beside the pallet of cartons. Twice more El Tigre’s compressor coughed.
“These are very careless men, Oso.”
“Continue to instruct them in their carelessness, Tigre,” El Oso said. “Osvaldo, Umberto, over here.”
El Oso unpacked one of the shiny cylinders from its protective carton and carefully twisted off the top. He lifted out the rack of cold, blue vials and set it gently atop the carton. Wisps of vapor slipped from the vials as Oso removed them one by one and stuck them onto the tape. Then he wrapped the tape around their chests and foreheads.
“Everybody see this?”
“Sí, Oso.”
“Sí.”
“Sí.”
“Then come down here one at a time and prepare yourselves this way. We will transmit a portrait of each of you to those gringos, and we will see how many want to come in here shooting. Come!”
Umberto picked up his shoulder launcher and tested his mobility.
“Oso,” he said, “I ask only one thing.”
“What is that, Umberto?”
“My little bottles. If any of them break . . . please, shoot me right there. Don’t let this devil-bug kill me.”
“If you will promise me the same courtesy,” Oso said. “You have my word, I will not let you, or any man here, die of the devil-bug.”
“You speak of money,” Miguel said, “yet I see none. Nor do I see how we will live to spend this money that I do not see.”
El Oso prepared a few strips of the vials for himself and attached them gingerly around his chest.
“This is the plan,” Oso said. “The northamericans provide each of us with a driver, car and tickets to a different continent. Each of us gets a briefcase with ten million dollars as traveling money. Accounts will be set up later through the Swiss for a suitable ransom. . . .”
Oso was interrupted by a very disorienting flex in the floor and a cascade of dust from the ceiling. A deep-throated groan, like that of a woman in labor or lust, issued from the concrete walls around them.
“Terremoto!” El Tigre shouted. “To the doorways!”
By then the floor had upended, tumbling the small band of guerrillas and the pallet of deadly cartons into a pile against one wall. Those who remained conscious tried to rip the taped vials from their bodies, but most of them had already broken.
The wild, rolling motion was replaced by a severe back-and-forth jerking of the earth that severed each floor of Coyote Warehouse from the floor below and tumbled the pieces together into a heap of concrete and a billowing cloud of dust. Propane lines to their basement generator ruptured, and the generator itself touched off a flash fire that added steam and smoke to the dust-choked air.
The earth continued its seizure, leveling Mexico City from the Zocaló nearly to the airport. Its fresh shroud of dusty smoke caught in a breeze and sifted down on the international airport, the bus blockade, the four hundred and fifty evacuee encampments along all four major highways and onto the only water supply for twenty-two million people.
Within minutes, international rescue teams were on their way to help.