The Power Of The Dog (34 page)

Not at Tío.

At Art Keller.

They’re Salvadoran regular army troops, and, with them, a Yanqui in civilian clothes and shiny black shoes.

Sal Scachi.

“Keller, I told you the next time I’d just shoot.”

Art looks around and sees snipers perched on the walls.

“There was a little difference of opinion within the Salvadoran government,” Scachi says. “We got it worked out. Sorry, kid, but we can’t let you have him.”

As Art wonders who “we” are, Scachi nods and two Salvadoran soldiers take the hood off Tío’s head. No wonder he was fucking smiling, Art thinks. He knew the cavalry couldn’t be far off.

Some other soldiers bring Pilar out. She wears a negligee now, but it accents more than it hides and the soldiers gape at her openly. As they walk her past Tío, she sobs, “I’m sorry!”

Tío spits in her face. The soldiers have her hands behind her back and she can’t wipe it off, so the saliva runs down her cheek.

“I won’t forget this,” Tío says.

The soldiers march Pilar to a waiting van.

Tío turns to Art. “I won’t forget you, either.”

“All right, all right,” Scachi says. “Nobody’s forgetting anybody. Don Miguel, let’s get you into some real clothes and out of here. As for you, Keller, and you, Ramos, the local police would like to throw you both in prison, but we talked them into deportation instead. There are military flights waiting. So, if this little pajama party is over …”

“Cerberus,” Art says.

Scachi grabs him and hauls him off to the side.

“The fuck did you say?”

“Cerberus,” Art answers. He thinks he’s figured it all out now. “Ilopongo Airport, Sal? Hangar Four?”

Scachi stares at him, then says, “Keller, you just earned first-ballot entry into the Asshole Hall of Fame.”

Five minutes later Art’s in the front seat of a jeep.

“I swear to Christ,” Scachi says as he drives, “if it was up to me, I’d put one in the back of your head right now.”

Ilopongo’s a busy airfield. Military aircraft, helicopters and transport planes are everywhere, along with the personnel needed to maintain them.

Sal steers the jeep to a series of large Quonset-hut-type hangars, with signs on the front designating them numbers 1 through 10. The door of Hangar 4 slides open and Sal drives inside.

The door closes behind him.

The hangar is bustling. A couple dozen men, some in fatigues, some in cammies, all armed, are unloading cargo from a SETCO plane. Three other men are standing around talking. It’s been Art’s experience that any time you see a bunch of men working and other men standing around talking, the ones talking are the ones in charge.

He can see one of their faces.

David Núñez. Ramón Mette’s partner in SETCO, Cuban expatriate, Operation 40 veteran.

Núñez breaks off the conversation and walks over to where the crates are being stacked. He barks an order and one of the worker bees opens a crate. Art watches Núñez lift a grenade launcher out of the crate like it’s a religious idol. Bitter men handle weapons differently than the rest of us, he thinks. The guns seem connected to them in a visceral way, as if a wire runs from the trigger through their dicks and to their hearts. And Núñez has that look in his eye—he’s in love with the weapon. He left his balls and his heart on the beach in the Bay of Pigs, and the weapon represents his hope of retribution.

It’s the old Cuba–Miami–Mafia drug connection, Art realizes, hooked up again and flying coke from Colombia to Central America to Mexico to Mafia dealers in the United States. And the Mafia pays in armaments, which go to the Contras.

The Mexican Trampoline.

Sal hops out of the jeep and goes up to a young American who has to be a military officer in mufti.

I know that guy, Art thinks. But from where? Who is he?

Then the memory comes back. Shit, I should know that guy—I did night ambushes with him in Vietnam, Operation Phoenix. What the hell is his name? He was Special Forces back then, a captain … Craig, that’s it.

Scott Craig.

Shit, Hobbs has the old team here.

Art watches Scachi and Craig talking, pointing to him. He smiles and waves. Craig gets on the radio and there’s another confab. Behind him, Art can see packages of cocaine stacked to the ceiling.

Scachi and Craig walk over to him.

“This what you wanted to see, Art?” Scachi asks. “You happy now?”

“Yeah, I’m fucking thrilled to death.”

“You shouldn’t joke,” Scachi says.

Craig’s giving him the bad look.

It isn’t working. He looks like a Boy Scout, Art thinks. Boyish face, short hair, clean-cut good looks. An Eagle Scout going for his Dope for Guns Badge.

“The question is,” Craig says to Art, “are you going to be a team player?”

Well, it would be the first time, wouldn’t it? Art thinks.

Scachi’s apparently thinking the same thing. “Keller’s got a reputation as a cowboy,” he says. “Out on the lone prairieee …”

“Bad place to be,” Craig says.

“Lonely, shallow grave,” Scachi adds.

“I’ve left a full account of everything I know in a safe-deposit box,” Art lies. “Anything happens to me, it goes to The Washington Post.”

“You’re bluffing, Art,” Scachi says.

“You want to find out?”

Scachi walks away and gets on the radio. Comes back a little later and snaps an order: “Hood the motherfucker.”

Art knows he’s in the back of an open car, probably a jeep, from the bouncy action. He knows he’s moving. He knows that wherever they’re taking him, it’s a long way away because it feels like they’ve been traveling for hours. It feels like that, anyway, but he doesn’t really know because he can’t see his watch, or anything else, and now he understands the terrifying, disorienting effect of being hooded. The floating, fearful sensation of not being able to see but being able to hear, and each sound a stimulus for a progressively frightened imagination.

The jeep stops and Art waits to hear the metallic scrape of a rifle bolt or the click of a pistol hammer being pulled back or, worse, the whoosh of a machete slicing first through the air and then—

He feels the gears shift and the jeep lurches forward again and now he starts to tremble. His legs twitch uncontrollably and he can’t stop them, nor can he stop his mind from producing images of Ernie’s tortured corpse. He can’t stop the thought Don’t let them do to me what they did to Ernie, or its logical corollary, Better him than me.

He feels ashamed, wretched, coming to the realization that when push comes to shove, when the terrible reality is at hand, he really would have them do it to someone else rather than himself—he wouldn’t take Ernie’s place if he could.

He tries to remember the Act of Contrition, recalling what the nuns taught him in elementary school—if you’re about to die and there’s no priest to give you absolution, if you say a sincere Act of Contrition you can still go to heaven. He remembers that; what he can’t remember is the goddamn prayer itself.

The jeep stops.

The motor idles.

Hands grab Art above the elbows and lift him out of the jeep. He can feel leaves under his feet; he trips over a vine but the arms won’t let him fall. He realizes that they’re taking him into the jungle. Then the hands push him down to his knees. It doesn’t take much force—his legs feel like water.

“Take off the hood.”

Art knows the voice giving the crisp order. John Hobbs, the CIA station chief.

They’re at some kind of military base, a training camp by the looks of it, deep in the jungle. To his right, young soldiers in cammies are running an obstacle course—badly. To his left he sees a small airstrip that has been carved out of the jungle. Straight ahead of him, Hobbs’s small, tidy face comes into focus—the thick white hair, the bright blue eyes, the disdainful smile.

“And take off the handcuffs.”

Art feels the circulation come back into his wrists. Then the burning pins-and-needles sensation as it does. Hobbs gestures for him to follow and they go into a tent with a couple of canvas chairs, a table and a cot.

“Sit down, Arthur.”

“I’d like to stand for a while.”

Hobbs shrugs. “Arthur, you need to understand that if you weren’t ‘family,’ you would have been disposed of already. Now, what’s this nonsense about a safe-deposit box?”

Now Art knows he was right, that his last-gasp Hail Mary had hit the target—if the cocaine-running out of Hangar 4 was just the work of renegades, they would have capped him back on the road. He repeats the threat he made to Scachi.

Hobbs stares at him, then asks, “What do you know about Red Mist?”

What the hell is Red Mist? Art wonders.

Art says, “Look, I only know about Cerberus. And what I know is enough to sink you.”

“I agree with your analysis,” Hobbs says. “Now, where does that leave us?”

“With our jaws clamped on each other’s throats,” Art says. “And neither of us can let go.”

“Let’s go for a walk.”

They hike through the camp, past the obstacle course, the shooting range, the clearings in the jungle where cammie-clad soldiers sit on the ground and listen to instructors teach ambush tactics.

“Everything in the training camp,” Hobbs says, “was paid for by Miguel Ángel Barrera.”

“Jesus.”

“Barrera understands.”

“Understands what?”

Hobbs leads him up a steep trail to the top of a hill. Hobbs points out over the vast jungle stretching below.

“What does that look like to you?” he asks.

Art shrugs. “Rain forest.”

“To me,” Hobbs says, “it looks like a camel’s nose. You know the old Arab proverb: Once the camel gets his nose inside the tent, the camel will be inside the tent. That’s Nicaragua down there, the Communist camel’s nose in the tent of the Central American isthmus. Not an island like Cuba, that we can isolate with our navy, but part of the American mainland. How’s your geography?”

“Passable.”

“Then you’ll know,” Hobbs says, “that Nicaragua’s southern border—which we’re looking at—is a scant three hundred miles from the Panama Canal. It shares a northern border with an unstable Honduras and a less-stable El Salvador, both of which are struggling against Communist insurgencies. So is Guatemala, which would be the next domino to fall. If you’re up on your geography, you’ll know that there is very little but mountainous jungle and rain forest between Guatemala and the southern Mexican states of Yucatán, Quintana Roo and Chiapas. Those states are overwhelmingly rural and poor, populated by landless helots who are perfect victims for a Communist insurgency. What if Mexico falls to the Communists, Arthur? Cuba is dangerous enough—now imagine a two-thousand-mile border with a Russian satellite country. Imagine Soviet missiles based in hardened silos in Jalisco, Durango, Baja.”

“So what, they take Texas next?”

“No, they take Western Europe,” Hobbs says, “because they know—and it’s the truth—that even the United States doesn’t have the military or financial resources to defend a two-thousand-mile border with Mexico and the Fulda Gap at the same time.”