Operation Zone Hawk—the unofficial code name was the Professor’s creation—got under way with the detention of the mariachi and norteño bands hired to perform at Ernesto Salazar’s birthday fiesta. The two groups, numbering twelve in all, were quietly rounded up the night before, brought to the air force base outside Hermosillo, herded into a hangar, and assured that they would not be held for long, a day or two at most. Each entertainer owned several costume changes, so there was enough clothing in their collective wardrobe to outfit the Professor, Captain Valencia, and the two dozen federales and paratroopers they had handpicked to crash the party. The men would be wearing bulletproof vests under their disguises, however, and this, along with the size differences between them and the musicians, created fitting problems. These were sorted out, though a few men had to make do with mismatched outfits, like the lanky Sublieutenant Almazán, whose pants reached only halfway to his ankles. The Professor attired himself in a black charro jacket, a black sombrero, and blue trousers, while Valencia, who considered mariachi suits ridiculous, got himself up as a norteño guitarist: flashy shirt, white cowboy hat, lizardskin boots.
They were crammed together in the hangar, the real entertainers and the masqueraders, the former sitting in glum silence until the Professor handed each bandleader an envelope containing $500 in U.S. currency, less than what they would have earned performing for Salazar but sufficient to cheer them up. They got into the spirit of things, helping the masqueraders rehearse “Las Mañanitas,” the tune sung at birthday parties from Mexico to Argentina. Some of the troops and policemen could play instruments, and the musicians gave them tips on improving their technique. The lighthearted atmosphere irritated Captain Valencia, wrapped as tight as the coils around an armature. Singing, yodeling, plucking guitars, his troops were behaving like boys on holiday rather than disciplined soldiers about to embark on a critical mission. It would be different if they were in their combat uniforms. These silly outfits—that was what accounted for their goofing off, Valencia decided. It galled him no end to think that he and they were going to meet his big moment decked out like cheap nightclub acts.
Loosen up, take it easy, the Professor urged. The prelude to a dangerous action was always harder on the nerves than the action itself. Think of the costumes as camouflage, like the markings on a zone-tailed hawk’s wings.
“There is nothing the matter with my nerves,” the captain grunted.
At a little past two in the afternoon, Rubén Levya signaled by cell phone that the guests had begun to arrive.
The frivolities stopped; the men assumed appropriately serious attitudes and boarded the planes, thirteen in each of two air force Cessna Caravans, with the logo of a private air charter service—AEROMUNDIAL—pasted over the military markings. A couple of the instrument cases stacked in the luggage compartment actually contained instruments; the rest concealed FX-05 assault carbines with folding stocks. Sitting in the copilot’s seat—not because he knew how to fly but to get a better view—the Professor watched plains rise to foothills, foothills to the crooked spine of Mexico, the Sierra Madre Occidental. The plane bounced in the turbulent air over the mountains, and he recalled the invasion of Panama in 1989, Operation Just Cause. (Though deposing Manuel Noriega wasn’t a cause, and its justice had been doubtful; Noriega had simply outlived his usefulness to the world’s only remaining superpower.) The Professor was then a young soldier in the 1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry, 82nd Airborne, which seized Fort Amador in a nighttime air assault. Noriega, who’d profited from the Colombian cocaine trade, was holed up elsewhere; but he soon surrendered. With a great deal of poetic license, the Professor could say it was the first time he’d taken part in the capture of a drug lord. And he’d been capturing, killing, and investigating drug lords ever since, when he wasn’t working for them.
Actually, he had been employed by only one for all these years since he’d deserted the DEA, and that was Joaquín Carrasco. If the Professor was nothing else, he was loyal to those who were loyal to him. The DEA had not been, abandoning him before he’d abandoned it. The investigation into his partner’s torture and murder had been called off to protect the Mexican general who had ordered the assassination. He was a friend to the Juárez Cartel and was related to the defense minister, a friend of Washington’s. It was the minister who made a few phone calls and got the investigation quashed. The Professor set off for Mexico on a mission of vengeance—or, as he preferred to think of it, of justice, tracking down and killing his partner’s three killers. One turned out to be a top informant for the CIA, which pressured the DEA to rope and tie its renegade agent and bring him back to the reservation. If it failed, the spooks were going to go after him themselves—with extreme prejudice. The Professor fled deep into Sonora and found sanctuary in Carrasco’s organization, then at war with Juárez. He offered his considerable skills to Joaquín, if Joaquín would aid him in his hunt for the main target, the general. Carrasco pulled strings and arranged for the Professor to join the Federal Police. In that guise, he developed informants in the general’s retinue and then set up the sabotage of a private plane flying the officer to a vacation spa. He died in its crash, an accident to all appearances. Grateful to the drug boss who had made this possible, the Professor honored his end of their deal, taking on every assignment Carrasco gave him. They had stuck together for almost twenty years. Until now. The plaza had been promised to Rubén Levya. Sometimes necessity trumped loyalty.
The pilot, not much older than the Professor had been in his paratrooper days, tapped him on the shoulder and pointed out the window. The mesa lay ahead, a swath of greens and browns ringed by peaks and lumpy hills; in the near distance the cell tower resembled a giant exclamation point. A few second later, the Santa Bárbara ranch became visible: the flat-roofed main house umbrellaed by trees; the long bunkhouse behind; the reddish-brown scar that was the airstrip, private planes parked in a row beside the pole barn where coke shipments were stored. The plan was to achieve complete surprise and capture Salazar, Mora, and the others without firing a shot. Actually, that was as much a hope as it was a plan. Mike Tyson had spoken eternal truth when he’d said, “Everyone has a plan until he gets hit in the mouth.” The remainder of Valencia’s company was assembled at the Hermosillo air base: one hundred troops waiting to be summoned in case things went seriously south.
The altimeter spun: three thousand meters, twenty-five hundred. Below, a single-engine plane, probably with late arrivals on board, was taxiing to a stop. The Caravans swooped low over the ranch headquarters on their downwind leg. The Professor caught glimpses of gunmen loitering by the parked aircraft, a crowd clustered around a smoking barbecue pit in the front yard, a wooden platform—the stage. The Brotherhood’s entire leadership gathered in one place: he practically salivated. The plane’s radio crackled. He picked up the mike and put the headset on.
“I see you,” Levya said, speaking through a handheld Motorola. “You see me? The two delivery vans at the end of the runway. I’m in the blue one; one of my boys is in the white one.”
Cargo planes had flown the vans into Salazar’s roadless ranch months ago. They served as taxis for his visitors, mostly Colombians.
“Where are Uno and Dos?” the Professor asked, using the code names for Salazar and Mora.
“The main house. They’ve been in there all day.”
As the plane banked to turn into the wind, the Professor toggled the sound-system switch and announced to his passengers, “We’ll be on the ground in about two minutes. There are thugs guarding the landing field. When you get off, don’t look at them, just get into the vans. Thank you for flying with us today,” he added to lighten things up.
The Professor’s Caravan touched down, turboprop churning up cyclones of dust, and rolled to a stop. Valencia’s plane landed minutes later. Joking and clowning as instructed, the men disembarked, grabbed their instrument cases, and wedged themselves into the vans, the federales into Levya’s blue van, the paratroopers into the white one. The vehicles must have transported mojados at one time: their exteriors looked to have been beaten with hammers; inside, the seats had been ripped out to make room for twenty migrants in a space meant to hold nine people. Levya drove the half kilometer to the bunkhouse in what seemed like five seconds, the other van close behind.
“You remember what to do?” asked the Professor, sitting in front with his knees in his chest.
“Yeah, yeah. Sí. Yeah, I know,” Levya said. The ice-veined sicario was jumpy, not from fear, the Professor assumed, but from unfamiliarity with his role as a traitor. “He’s still in the house. Him and Mora. Drinking. Tea! Fucking tea. Or maybe Mora’s blowing him.”
“Get him to come out.”
They wanted Salazar outside to prevent a getaway through the escape tunnel.
There hadn’t been time, during the rehearsals for the raid, to prepare for the unexpected, like the fornicating couple who almost fell out of bed as more than two dozen federal policemen and paratroopers in musicians’ garb burst into the bunkhouse. The woman squealed, covering herself with a bedsheet, the man leapt to his feet, mouth ajar, erection wilting. It shrunk to nothing when the Professor, taking no chances on a breach of security, drew a pistol from under his charro jacket.
“Back in bed, facedown! Both of you!” he said in a low voice. “Hands behind your back!”
The lovers obeyed, and a federale gagged and cuffed them.
In the front yard, blocked from view by the ranch house, Levya was at the stage microphone, playing master of ceremonies. The raiding party in the bunkhouse could hear him clearly. “Hey, everybody, sit down. The music is here.… We’re going to sing ‘Las Mañanitas.’ … You over there … Come on, muchachos! Sit down.… That’s it.… Okay! Muy bien!… I’m going to go inside and get our guest of honor. When he comes out, everybody sing ‘Las Mañanitas.’” He shouted: “Oye! Músicos! We’re ready for you!”
Six paratroopers stayed behind to guard the rear of the house and the couple who had suffered coitus interruptus; the remaining twenty men grabbed their cases and filed outside, led by Valencia’s bugler playing brassy norteño riffs and another musically inclined soldier strumming a guitar. Precise as a marching band, which in a sense they were, the soldiers formed an L around the yard, a maneuver they’d practiced at the base. They opened the cases, the tops facing outward to hide the weapons from the guests. There were about thirty, seated at two long tables, under piñatas hung from poles. Favorable odds, the Professor thought, fighting to keep his excitement under control. He estimated that slightly better than half were men, swilling cans of Tecate and Dos Equis. A bit drunk already, their attention on their girlfriends. And lightly armed, pistols in waistbands or back pockets, but no assault rifles in sight. They felt secure up here in Salazar’s aerie. Very favorable odds.
The Professor and his men took the stage and pretended to be hooking up speakers. The trumpeter and the guitarist continued to play, rather badly; but no one seemed to notice. Levya was taking a long time to produce the birthday boy. The Professor sensed a tension rippling through his team and Valencia’s. The guests, too, were growing restless. A narco in a sequined shirt yelled toward the house, “Ernesto! Jefe! Come on out so we can sing to you,” and then, facing the stage: “C’mon, you guys, start playing! Start singing!”
The trumpeter blew the opening bars of “Las Mañanitas.” The man in the sequined shirt jumped up and, raising his beer can, began to sing:
Estas son las mañanitas
que cantable a el rey David.
Hoy por ser cumpleaños
te las cantamos aquí.
These are the dawns
that King David sang about.
We sing here today
Because today is your birthday.
The Professor’s synesthesia switched on. He saw brass cylinders pumping up and down, like organ pipes in motion, as another man joined in, and another.
El día en que tú naciste
nacieron todas las flores.
Ya viene amaneciendo
ya la luz del dia nos dío.
All flowers were born on the day
you were born.
Dawn is arriving and
the light of day is upon us.
Someone else yelled to the musicians, “Play! Play! Where are the guitars and violins?” Another, looking toward the front door, shouted, “Oye! Don Ernesto! Feliz cumpleaños! Ven afuera!”
But Salazar remained inside with Levya and Mora. The Professor could feel, as a tangible sensation, control of the situation slipping away. He removed his sombrero, prepared to give it a Frisbee toss—the prearranged signal to make the arrests. A single gunshot cracked inside the house. “Now!” the Professor shouted as he sailed the sombrero across the tables. The well-drilled men quickly pulled their assault carbines from the cases as he drew his pistol and called out: “Federal police! You are all under arrest! Nobody move!”
At that instant, there was a burst of automatic fire from inside, bullets shattering a front window, ripping chunks out of the veranda posts, and smashing a piñata, which spilled candy bars and airline bottles of tequila. The partygoers dived under the tables or ran toward cover, narcos pulling their pistols. The Professor shot one; someone else dropped two others as Valencia and a squad of soldiers charged the house and flattened themselves against the wall, three on each side of the door. The Professor sprinted to them. A paratrooper—it was Sublieutenant Almazán—kicked the door open and stepped inside, the Professor and Valencia behind him. They had a half second’s glimpse of a man vanishing down a long hallway.
“Alto!” Valencia commanded.
Enrique Mora spun and fired four or five rapid shots, two rounds striking Almazán’s armored vest, flinging him backward into Valencia, who tumbled into the Professor, all three falling into a heap. To an outside observer, they would have looked like the Keystone Kops.
“Hijo de puta!” the captain cursed, untangling himself. The Professor pulled Almazán away from the door. His fancy frilled shirt was perforated: there would be bruises under the vest’s Kevlar plates, but he was otherwise unhurt.
Levya lay facedown near the shattered window, in what looked like a gallon of spilled maroon paint. His pistol was still in his hand. What had happened was a question to be addressed later. The Professor noticed blood drops leading across the clay-tile floor into the hallway. Mora had been healthy enough to squeeze off a few rounds; the blood must have come from Salazar.
With Valencia and the others, he followed the trail down the hall to a closed door at its end. A paratrooper kicked it down and tossed a stun grenade into the room. They rushed inside. It was a storeroom with metal shelving units, one of which had nothing in it and had been pulled away from the wall. In the floor behind the empty case, an open trapdoor revealed a shaft about three meters deep. Red droplets on the ladder shone in the light of the bare bulb overhead. The Professor climbed down, into the stale air, and stood in front of a steel door that could have come off a bank vault. He grabbed the handle and gave it a shake and it didn’t so much as rattle. He squinted. The imperfect fit showed him that the door was dogged tight to a mine timber by three dead bolts, top, center, bottom. The latches would be on the other side, and so was the tunnel through which Salazar and Mora had fled.
“Capitán, do you see this?” he said, looking upward.
Valencia’s face showed in the shaft opening above. “Hijo de puta!”
The Professor climbed out of the shaft and went back down the hall to the front room. Squatting, he picked up Levya’s pistol, an H&K like his own. Ejecting the magazine, he found one round missing; on the other side of the room, there were seventeen .40-caliber shell casings.
“What the…” Valencia stammered.
“Looks like Levya took a shot at Salazar or Mora.”
“What the fuck for?”
“Might as well ask him.” He gestured at the corpse. “Maybe they were on to him … and on to us. One of them, maybe both, let him have it. He’s got more holes in him than a colander.”
And we, he thought, have been hit in the mouth.
* * *
But not that hard.
The operation was a partial success: twenty-four people were arrested and flown to Hermosillo, where three were discovered to be high-value targets. One was Salazar’s liaison to Colombian and Peruvian cocaine suppliers; another ran a network of wholesale heroin buyers in the United States; and a third served as the Brotherhood’s bribery chief, distributing mordida on both sides of the border. Three more bosses had been killed in the brief firefight at the ranch.
Twenty kilos of black tar heroin bricks, more than a hundred kilos of high-grade coke—Peruvian pink—and an arsenal of pistols, assault rifles, and grenade launchers were found in the warehouse. Not the biggest haul in history, but sufficient to further blunt the sting of the Butterfly’s underground flight. All the booty was flown back to the San Patricio base with the prisoners, and Valencia’s PR man summoned the media.
It took a full day after the raid to assemble a team of engineers and trackers and fly them to the ranch. The engineers blew the steel door open, and the trackers, with their dogs, followed the tunnel almost a kilometer to its exit in a corral, where any scent left by Salazar and Mora was lost in the piles of manure.
An extensive manhunt got under way—roadblocks, helicopters overflying the mountains, military and police patrols combing them on foot. The media loved it, especially the angle of paratroopers and federal cops disguised as mariachis. Mexico City correspondents for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times showed up at the base. So did CNN, filming Valencia and his men, back in uniform, faces masked, posing with the captured narcos, the confiscated weapons and drugs forming a backdrop.
The Professor had always been mediaphobic. This was a matter not of humility but of survival. Keeping his face off television and his name out of the newspapers had kept his body out of prison or a shallow grave, the two places where most citizens of narcoland ended their careers. But for this occasion, he allowed reporters to interview him, on the condition that he not be filmed, photographed, or identified by name. He thought it prudent to tell the press that Rubén Levya had been killed while attempting to escape with Salazar and Mora. “One down, two to go,” he said.
* * *
A day after the news broke, Carrasco phoned on his encrypted cell phone.
“You guys fucked up,” he said. “How could you let that skinny maricón get away?”
“Good to hear your voice, Joaquín,” the Professor said, pleased that betraying him would no longer be necessary. “He’s wounded, he’s in the Sierra—on foot, most likely. Only a matter of time.”
“How is the weather where you are?”
“Warm. It’s spring.”
“It’s still winter up here. Cold as the tip of an Eskimo’s dick. What am I doing, freezing my ass off when there’s money to be made?”
“Joaquín! You’re worth billions.”
“I don’t mean the money. I mean the action. I miss the action, Profesor.”
* * *
Brigadier General Carrillo, the overall commander of Joint Operation Falcon, arrived at the base with Comandante Pérez to personally commend the Professor and Valencia for their courage and professionalism. In addition to the drug and weapons haul, Salazar’s laptop had been seized, its hard drive scoured. Rough drafts of his revolutionary manifesto turned up: a muddle of political rants and religious nonsense that made Ted Kaczynski’s ravings sound reasonable. Copies were distributed to the newspapers and the TV networks. A phone directory listing the numbers of state and federal legislators, police chiefs, and mayors, as well as a spread sheet showing the amounts paid to each, were not brought to the media’s attention. They conveniently vanished, which incensed Valencia the Incorruptible. This was what bred cynicism and made real change impossible! he fumed. This was why the narcos would never be defeated! Corruption at all levels tolerated, kept secret! Did these compromised officials know that they had taken bribes from a man plotting to overthrow them? He had a good mind to call a press conference and expose every one of them. The Professor advised him to calm down, but Valencia unloaded on General Carrillo, who listened with a solemn expression on his jowly face and said he shared the capitán’s outrage; but was this an issue for the army to take on? Of course not. The army was here to protect the nation from external and internal threats, not to concern itself with crooked politicians. Meanwhile, it would be best if the capitán kept his thoughts and feelings private. This counsel was given for the capitán’s benefit—he had been recommended for promotion to major. This news delighted the capitán, and procured his silence.
* * *
It might have been residual anger that needed venting, it might have been his frustration over Salazar’s escape, or his fierce anticlericism, or his bad temper, or all of the above that prodded Valencia into picking a fight with Padre Riordan the next evening. Valencia and the Professor were in the plaza, supervising a changing of the guard: regional troops and state police had been dispatched to garrison the town while the federales and paratroopers hunted the two fugitives. After issuing final instructions to the new men, and spotting the priest standing on the church steps, Valencia made an abrupt turn and went up to him.
“Shouldn’t you be at Vespers or wherever it is you people go at this hour?” he asked brusquely. “What are you doing here?”
“I believe this is my church,” Riordan replied in a tranquil voice. “I wanted to see what was going on.” He made a lazy movement at the military and police vehicles ringing the plaza. An electric sunset reddened the desert-beige Humvees and SandCats. “You would think we were under martial law.”
“You may consider that you are until we have Salazar.”
“I’m quite sure he isn’t in town. The news says that he’s—”
“I know what the news says.”
“Well, congratulations, anyway.” He tilted his head at the Professor. “And you, too.”
“You are being sarcastic?” Valencia said—an accusation rather than a question.
“No, not at all. The news says that you—”
“I told you, I know what the news says.” The captain, who had been standing one step below Riordan, hopped up to put himself on equal footing. “I will be interested to hear what you say in the future. As long as that hijo de la puta is on the loose, the war is not over. Who knows? Maybe someone in your parish this very minute is harboring that criminal. And there is some other unfinished business besides. You know what it is.” He jabbed the priest in the solar plexus. “I remind you: we are to hear what you hear.”
For a brief interval, Riordan shrank back, baffled by the unprovoked aggression. Then, recovering, he leaned forward and traded glares with Valencia. They looked like two fighters trying to intimidate each other before the opening bell.
“I think I know what is aggravating you, Captain,” Riordan said, maintaining his pacific tone. There was a change in him, the Professor noticed. He seemed more confident, more at ease in his own skin. “The fact that you had to rely on a priest to get what you need,” Riordan continued. “You’ve just got to prove that you’re the big dog. I wasn’t going to—”
Valencia interrupted with angry laughter. “Inspector Bonham! Do you hear this? I am being psychoanalyzed by this parasite! This witch doctor!”
“Alberto. Eso es suficiente,” the Professor said, embarrassed by the outburst. “Vamonos.”
Valencia didn’t budge; neither did Riordan. “I was about to say that I wasn’t going to mention this until the right moment,” the priest went on, but with harsher intonations than before. “But here we are—at the right moment. If I hear anything on the street—and I doubt I will, but if I do—you’ll hear it. You’re not going to hear anything said to me in confidence. In what you call my ‘dark little closet.’ You can consider this my resignation.”
A plasticity came to Valencia’s normally stiff, martial face, his features molding themselves into an expression of contempt and astonishment.
“I warned you about the consequences,” he said.
“My bishop is out of the country right now,” Riordan answered. “I have an appointment to see him after he returns. He’ll hear everything I’ve done—from me. And then we’ll see what happens. I’m sure you can capture your man without my help.”
“Correct,” the Professor agreed, attempting to steer the conversation in another direction. “The padre has served his purpose.”
But for the captain, Riordan’s usefulness was not the issue. “If you were wearing a uniform, I would charge you with desertion. I would have you court-martialed for cowardice,” he said, casting a cold gray eye on Riordan. “But since you are not in uniform…” He heaved his chest and spat in the priest’s face.
Riordan wiped the spit off with his sleeve. “I’ll pray for you, Captain Valencia.”
“Better that you pray for yourself.”