The ranch
The jolt of landing awakened him. No dreams of American snipers this time. Instead, he saw the blank look of existential nothingness on Jared’s face as he went down, bullet in head. This was fiction. As Jared had been turned, Juba had not seen the expression, and the flash of the pistol’s cartridge from the muzzle did not illuminate it. Still, awaking, he could not shake the grief and the hurt, which surprised him. Mission discipline, he ordered of himself: push it all out, make it go away.
He shook his head and came fully awake as the plane came to a halt.
“Enjoy the nap?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not far now.”
The steward opened the door, sliding it sideways on its rollers, then pushed a button to lower the stairs. As the door cracked, bright light flooded in. Juba blinked, but felt the rush of natural air, warmth with perhaps a tang of grass to it, a suggestion of wildflowers. He stepped out to cooler temperatures and a sense of being engulfed by mountains. They were everywhere, green and lofty, some cragged with solemn old faces, others, higher up, still capped with snow. It was a small airport somewhere, presumably for rich people, as the other planes on the ground all seemed to be jets, with swept wings and sporty paint jobs featuring impressions of blur, speed, lightning, and other symbols of modern, comfortable transportation for the elites.
A Land Rover waited, with its driver inside. Next to it sat a Mercedes S, with four men deployed, well-dressed, but of the thick variety that reminded him of the American contractors in Baghdad, standing about, hands loose. Bodyguards, they’d have weaponry secured in the vehicle, quick to come out or packed against their bulked-up bodies. All wore sunglasses, all had snail earplugs, all watched warily, not the arrival but the horizon, for threats.
“Now, my friend,” said Menendez, “it’s just this last little bit, and you will have everything you require, most of all absolute security and privacy, as required.”
“I am very impressed with your preparations,” said Juba.
“We are bigger than many Fortune 500 companies,” said Menendez. “I am proud to say our growth, though stymied at times, has been remarkable in the past several years. There is money for everyone. I know money means little to you, and politics everything, but it is only with money that political ends may be achieved.”
“True. But that’s not my concern. I leave it to others. Allah has seen to give me a gift for a certain kind of war and I will use it in the infidel heartland to strike a vital blow.”
“And that is why I am so eager to assist. The money, it’s nothing. It’s the ends, really, that make all this so interesting.”
They climbed into the Land Rover, and the S fell in behind. The convoy set off along roads through a valley, beneath the peaks on either side, and again, in more time than he expected, drove and drove and finally reached a gate of no particular interest.
“From the road: nothing,” said Menendez.
The car passed through and rolled down a one-lane blacktop, climbed a small hill. There it encountered a second perimeter, this one of barbed wire, with a sentry post at its locked gate. Two men with M4s, also sunglassed and earplugged, operated the gate to let the two cars pass. They surmounted the crest and started downward.
Juba had no sense of architecture and had no way of knowing the elegant log mansion in the valley before him was famous and dated back to Teddy Roosevelt’s time, though of course it had been much upgraded. In fact, TR had stayed there on one of his many western hunting trips. To Juba, it was just an immense log house, and his idea of a palace involved marble columns, cupolas, and gold fixtures. This building reminded him of cowboy movies he had seen as a boy, all juts and angles, with gables and balconies in roughly cobbled wood.
Jorge the translator was kept busy, as this Menendez, after so much silence, had much to say.
“If the editors of Architectural Digest understood who owned the famous Hanson Ranch, they’d be stunned. Especially if they comprehended that it was their own children’s enthusiasm for our product that paid for it.”
The grandee was a man of boastfulness. He could not help himself.
“I own several houses—Mexico City, Acapulco, Cap d’Antibes, the U.S. Virgins, even Malaysia—but this is my favorite. It is very private. A small army guards it. Come, you’ll see.”
Juba had no interest in a tour, but he had been raised in the tradition of hospitality and pretended to appreciate the rooms through which he was led. He saw lots of tribal patterns on the walls and floors, brown-leather furniture of the heavy sort, paintings of bears and mountain lions and prairies and cowboys, sculptures of animals—what was “an original Remington”?—and a glistening gun cabinet, presumably full of the famous American Winchesters.
“This will interest you,” said Menendez.
He opened the gun case and pulled a weapon out—but it was no Winchester.
“I keep it to remind me of how I got here,” Menendez said. “Of course, it reflects the gauche tastes of the Mexican peasantry, but what it lacks in class it makes up for in earnestness.”
Jorge had trouble with “gauche,” but Juba didn’t care. Menendez handed him the gun.
It was an AK-74, but plated in gold. It was also encrusted with diamonds and rubies in a somewhat primitive array along the receiver, as if dribbled into place by a child. It glittered with surreal brilliance, the two themes—lethality and decadent bad taste—making even less sense than the mistranslated word.
“It was presented to me by my former competitors, now vassals, when my absorption of their organizations became complete. It is an object of veneration, respect, and, I suppose, fear. The gems, by the way, are real, and the gold is indeed twenty-four karat. Estimated value: about three million dollars. A fighter like you would think, what a waste of rifle! A connoisseur like me would think, what a waste of three million in diamonds! But to the men who gave it to me, it had real meaning, and, thus, I keep it, enjoying it both literally and ironically.”
This made no sense whatsoever to Juba, but much of what the slick and sophisticated Menendez said made no sense. He did get that it was in some sense special.
“Magnificent,” he said. “But, then, I would expect no less from a man of such accomplishment.”
“Yes, yes, appreciated. But I know you yearn to see the shop we have built and equipped for your work and the ranges to which you will have access. But first”—he gestured emphatically—“this fellow will be seen lurking about. He is my body man, my most trusted bodyguard, my assistant, a very large part of what I do and how I do it.”
A lithe but powerfully built man appeared at a door, advanced to Menendez, and bowed. Like the others, his duty uniform was a well-fitted black suit; like the others, a radio wire ran to his ears; like the others, he crackled with messages of skill and intensity; but, unlike the others, he was wearing a tightly fitted black hood, its tightness more akin to a sock than a hood. Only his eyes showed.
“As a part of his commitment to his craft, Señor La Culebra prefers to keep his face mysterious. He values his anonymity. He will always see you before you see him. He has the gift of cunning, stealth, and grace. He would have made an extraordinary sniper, but his hunger is to kill at more intimate levels, with the blade, at which he excels. His skill level is perhaps the world’s most dangerous. Policemen, detectives, journalists, competitors—they have all been awakened by the hiss of their own throat being cut. His very presence at my shoulder is an extraordinary asset when I am in meeting with my peers. Of course, when I meet with, say, my fellow suburban Los Angeles Subaru dealers and Carl’s Jr. franchise holders, I leave him in the car, behind tinted glass. He is not for the bourgeois.”
“My respects to such a talented man,” said Juba, nodding in greeting.
The hooded man nodded back, his eyes intense behind the slits of the hood.
That ceremony completed, Menendez led Juba first to a bedroom—nice, but Juba had no interest in bedrooms—and laid out eating arrangements, as well as laundry and maid service, and then out a back entrance, through a garden, across a stable yard, where Mexican boys could be seen exercising and otherwise caring for some beautiful horses, and finally to a small, corrugated prefab cottage, clearly temporary.
“Sir,” said Menendez. “To your liking, I hope. If not, corrections will be made.”
Juba took the key and entered.
It appeared perfect. Every item he ordered was displayed on a heavy worktable against the wall. He went quickly to the heart of it, the yellow packaging from L.E. Wilson, and saw several containers of neck bushings that ran from .366 to .368, as well as the crucial boxes containing neck sizer and bullet seater. Another box contained a Whidden bullet-pointing die, to sharpen the tips of the missiles themselves, and they were close by, boxes of Match bullets from Sierra, Nosler, Hornady, and other makers, all .338 Match grade. Next to the bench was packaging from Oehler, signifying a high-grade chronograph, to measure velocity. And an iPhone 8, lying on the bench. Seemingly innocuous, it had been programmed by its original owner with data onto a ballistic app, the Hawkins Ballistics FirstShot software, which offered instant solutions to the equations that ruled the universe of long-range. Canisters of smokeless powder, bright as pennants leading the Saracen army, stood on higher shelves, and a brand-new arbor press, as well as boxes of Federal 215M large-rifle Magnum primers, chamfer tools for both neck and primer hole, seven reloading manuals—all had been placed around the central icon in what was almost a crèche of infidel devotion.
And its icon was a rifle.