Savages

  Anyway, Barney is happy to see Chon.

  “What can I do you for?”

  “A Barrett.”

  That is, a Barrett Model 90. A humongoid sniper rifle that can send a .50-cal bullet into a target with accuracy from a mile away.

  “Jesus, who are you going to shoot with that?” Barney asks.

  “Cans,” Chon answers truthfully.

  “My man,” Barney says.

  Yeah, it’s that kind of world.

  Chon buys the Barrett and a 10X Leupold M-type scope to go with it.

  219

  O writes Paqu:

  Dear Mommy,

  Rome is GR8. The Colisiam is awesome. Everyone rides around on motor scooters and the men are beautiful. So are the women. So is the food. I mean, you think you’ve had pasta until you’ve been here, but you haven’t. (Don’t worry, I’m not eating too much of it.)

  I miss you.

  How RU?

  Ophelia

  220

  Ben goes to Home Depot, Radio Shack, and HobbyTown USA.

  With Chon’s shopping list.

  Because …

  221

  Chon’s going Sunni on them.

  IED.

  You don’t have bombers, missiles, and drones, so you come up with Improvised Explosive Devices. Plant them by the side of the road, hit the remote trigger device as the convoy comes by.

  It takes Chon three days to build them.

  Happy hours on the old dining room table.

  “You’re not going to blow us up, are you?” Ben asks.

  “We should be okay,” Chon says. “Unless the BC has a drone overhead or something. Then we’re fucked. But I wouldn’t use the TV remote for a while.”

  Just to be on the safe side.

  Ben asks, “What should I do if I hear you mutter, ‘Fuck’?”

  “At this range? Nothing.”

  A lot of existential questions will be answered just after the “Fuck.”

  As in life itself.

  222

  The caravan comes up the twisted road.

  Like a coiled snake, the Cajon Pass. Way the fuck out there in the empty desert, miles away from anything that could pass for civilization.

  Moonscape on either side of the road.

  God threw a temper tantrum and tossed boulders around like marbles on the steep slopes.

  Turning red in the dawn light.

  The reflection makes it tough on Chon, high up on the opposite slope, sighting the Barrett.

  He hopes Ben is cold enough to throw the switches.

  223

  Lead car, cash car, follow car.

  Escalade, Taurus, Suburban.

  The Escalade is far out in front, maybe fifty yards, the Suburban is tight on the Taurus.

  Ben crouches in the rocks not far from the road.

  Remote controls for toy airplanes in his hand.

  Two toggle switches.

  They’ve been out there all night, planting the IEDs. Studied this road on Google Earth, looked for the right narrow hairpin curve, close to rocks that will contain and channel the blast.

  Non-symmetrical conflict.

  It won’t be self-defense this time, it will be out-and-out murder.

  The men in the caravan must be fairly relaxed. They came up from the flat desert and could see any car for miles, and saw nothing.

  There’s nothing out here.

  Ben waits.

  Hand trembles.

  With adrenaline, or doubt?

  224

  The caravan comes into the narrow switchback.

  Chon sights in. In his mind’s eye, though, he sees—

  —Taliban

  moving like scorpions across a similar landscape

  his own caravan blown to shit

  blood streaming from buddies

  Now I’m one of them

  He sights in again.

  No time for

  Lack of PTSD

  He only hopes that

  Gentle Ben

  Increase-the-Peace Ben

  is one of them, too, now.

  Now, Ben.

  Find your inner Taliban.

  225

  Ben peeks above the sheltering boulder and sees the three vehicles come into the pass.

  The cars themselves are nothing—assembly-line products of plastic and steel, little Bunsen burners of global warming. Dinosaur carbon prints on the sere landscape. They are things, and Ben has no compunctions about things (“we are spirits in the material world”). Tries to tell himself that they are only things but he knows the truth—there are people inside the things.

  Beings with families, friends, loved ones, hopes, fears.

  Capable, unlike the vessels that carry them, of pain and suffering.

  Which he is about to inflict.

  Index finger and thumb poised on the switch.

  A simple muscle fiber twitch but

  There is no Undo button.

  No Control Alt Delete

  Ben thinks about suicide bombers

  Murder is the suicide of the soul.

  He takes his hand off.

  226

  Now, Ben, Chon thinks.

  Now or never.

  Now or not at all.

  Two more seconds and the moment will have passed.

  227

  Ben flips the switch.

  A blast of flame and the lead car hops sideways.

  Shredded.

  The cash car speeds up to pull around it but

  Chon squeezes the trigger of the Barrett Model 90 and

  The driver’s face disappears, red (incarnadine) with the daybreak, then

  Its passenger leans in to take the wheel as

  Chon slides the bolt back, reloads, sights, and shoots a big ragged hole into the would-be hero’s chest and then the car rolls into the rocks, stops, and bursts into flame.

  Men, rifles in their hands, start to get out of the follow car but

  Ben flips the second switch and

  fragments of the Escalade become shrapnel, tearing, ripping, killing, and what it doesn’t do

  Chon does.

  The survivors of the blast—stunned, shocked, and bleeding—look up and around as if to ask the question

  where does death come from

  it comes from

  Chon, sliding the bolt, pulling the trigger, and in seconds

  It is quiet except for

  The crackling of flames and the

  Groans of the wounded.

  228

  Chon drops the rifle, it

  Clatters on the rocks and he

  Scampers down the slope, gets into the work car, pulled off on the side, covered in brush, and he races it down to where

  Ben

  his face lit by flame

  stands among the dead and dying.

  “Get the money,” Chon says. He reaches under the dead driver’s legs and releases the trunk.

  It opens with a dull pop.

  Canvas bags full of cash.

  They heft them and carry them to their own car and come back for more and Ben hears the shot and sees Chon whirl and fall and Ben

  Head on a swivel, turns and shoots the shooter, dying anyway.

  Ben pulls Chon up from the dust, helps him to the work car, sits him in the passenger seat. Starts to get behind the wheel but Chon says, “Get the rest of the cash. And Ben, you know what you have to do.”

  Ben grabs the two remaining satchels and tosses them into the car.

  Then he walks back.

  He does know

  What he has to do.

  Wounded survivors could identify them

  And kill O.

  He finds three men still alive.

  Fetal, curled in pain.

  He shoots each of them in the back of the head.

  229

  Fuck that.

  Chon’s response to Ben’s “We have to get you to a hospital.”

  Chon rips off a piece of his shirt, presses it to his
shoulder, down on the wound, and keeps pressing.

  “Where’s the nearest hospital?” Ben asks.

  “You go to a hospital with a gunshot wound,” Chon says calmly, “the first thing they do is call the cops. Drive to Ocotillo Wells.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?” Ben answers, his hands trembling on the wheel. There’s no hospital in Ocotillo Wells. It’s a little desert shit-hole that services the four-wheeler, off-road types.

  “Ocotillo Wells,” Chon answers.

  “Okay.”

  “You’re doing great.”

  “Just don’t die,” Ben says. “Stay with me. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to say?”

  Chon laughs.

  Chon is so cool.

  Been There Before.

  In Stanland. Convoy ambushed. Narrow mountain road. Shit flying, people hurt, you either stay cool or your people die, you die. You don’t do that, you stay cool, you get—

  Everybody Out.

  Speaking of which—

  230

  Ben pulls alongside the Airstream trailer off a dirt road in the Middle of Nowhere.

  Tumbleweeds tossing around like they blew off a movie set. Jury-rigged power line jacked from a phone pole to the trailer. An old pickup and a Dodge GT parked under a homemade remada built of willow poles.

  “Pull it up close,” Chon instructs. “Go knock on the door, tell Doc you got me with you and that I took one.”

  Ben gets out.

  Legs feel like old rubber, loose and shaky.

  He goes up the wooden steps to the trailer door and knocks. Hears, “Oh-three-thirty, this better be fucking good.”

  Door opens, a guy about their age stares at him. Boxer shorts and nothing else on, disheveled, eyes red, he looks at Ben and says, “If you’re some fucking Jehovah’s Witness or something I’m going to kick your ass.”

  “It’s Chon. He’s shot.”

  “Get him in here.”

  231

  Ken “Doc” Lorenzen, former medic on Chon’s SEAL team, is one cool cat.

  You don’t believe it, you should have seen him at that ambush scene—dry ice in triple-digit heat—moving from one wounded man to the next with deliberate haste—as if bullets weren’t coming in at him, as if he weren’t a target. If it hadn’t been so serious it would have been comical, Doc out there with his weird body shape—short legs, short trunk, long arms—distributing life-saving medical assistance. What Doc did that day should have earned him the MOH but Doc didn’t care.

  Doc did his job.

  He got Everyone Out.

  Now he lives in this trailer off his pension and disability, pounds beer, eats Hormel chili and Dinty Moore beef stew, watches baseball on his little TV and looks at porn except when he can pull a four-wheeler chick off her dune buggy, one who doesn’t mind a trailer.

  It’s a decent life.

  He sweeps crushed beer cans, newspapers, porn mags, and a bag of Cheetos off the “kitchen” table. Chon hops up and then lies down.

  “Is that sterile?” Ben asks.

  “Don’t tell me how to do my job. Go boil some water or something.”

  “You need water boiled?”

  “No, but if it will keep your piehole shut …”

  He finds his kit under a crumpled wet-suit, scissors Chon’s shirt off, and probes the shoulder. “You got a movie wound, brother. Fleshy part of the shoulder. Must have nicked the Kevlar and bounced up.”

  “Is it still in there?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Can you get it out?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  You kidding me? Simple surgery in a (sort of) clean, air-conditioned trailer with no IEDs going off and nobody shooting at him?

  Gimme putt.

  Tap it in with your foot if you want.

  He takes out a wound pad and creates a sterile field. Pours a glass of iso and dips his instruments into it.

  Ben sees the scalpel.

  “You going to give him some whiskey or something?” he asks.

  “Seriously, who are you?” Doc answers. He takes out a vial of morphine. “By the way, what mischief have you children been up to that my boy here isn’t at Scripps?”

  Chon answers, “You got any beer left?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Morphine and beer?” Ben asks.

  “Is not just for breakfast anymore,” Doc replies.

  He fills the syringe and finds a nice vein.

  232

  Ben goes out and counts the money.

  $3.5 million.

  O numbers.

  Mission accomplished.

  233

  Even in Southern California, even in the middle of the desert, you don’t leave six dead Mexicans among the smoldering ruins of three cars without attracting some attention.

  SoCal takes its cars very seriously.

  Mexicans die in the desert all the time.

  It’s not a daily event, but it’s not headline news, either. Mostly these are mujados trying to cross the border in the hot wild region between San Diego and El Centro and either they get lost on their own or the coyotes dump them out there and they die of sunstroke or thirst. It’s gotten to the point that the Border Patrol leaves caches of water marked with red flags on high poles because the BP agents don’t want the endless game of hide-and-seek to be actually lethal.

  Mexican drug dealers?

  That’s another story, literally.

  You expect this sort of shit South of the Border—it is a daily event, a tedious tsk-tsk headline-cum-photos of dead and or decapitated bodies, shot-up, bombed-out vehicles with a confusing enchilada plate of Spanish names and words like “cartel” and “war on drugs” and usually a comment from a DEA official.

  You expect it down there, that’s what you expect from those people.

  And you expect the occasional gang echo in the barrios of San Diego, Los Angeles, and even certain parts of Orange County. (Certain parts—that is, Santa Ana or Anaheim—you leave it out of Irvine and Newport Beach, amigos. Just clean the pools and go home.)

  But a full-out Mexican-style firefight—freaking bombs and burned-out cars—on this side of the border?

  That’s too much, Jack.

  That is outrageous.

  That’s downright scary is what that is.

  This has the radio talk-show hosts so titillated they’re shifting their fat ass cheeks in their chairs because it looks like

  La Reconquista

  The Mexican Invasion

  What Everyone Has Been Warning About All These Years but the Federal Government Just Won’t Listen. (Bush needed the Mexican vote and Obama … well, Obama’s an illegal immigrant, too, isn’t he? An undocumented worker in the White House. Too bad there’s no fucking deserts in Hawaii.)

  Suffice it to say

  There’s heat on this one.

  It even gets Dennis off his butt. His supervisor tells him to get his ass out to East County and find out just what the hell is going on out there because

  It is what it looks like.

  A tombe, in the jargon of the trade.

  Dennis is up on developments.

  He knows about the BC Civil War.

  Not, by the way, the worst thing in the world, if you can get over your squeamishness; Dennis is firmly of the opinion, for instance, that the U.S. was better off when Iran and Iraq were bleeding each other to death, but the bodies are supposed to be stacked up South of the Border or in Designated Gang Areas, not on a public highway.

  Californians take their highways very seriously. It’s where they drive their freaking cars.

  Dennis knows of Lado’s new rules and regs, knows that he’s looking at a lead car–cash car–follow car parade that didn’t quite make it to the finish line.

  Another agent out there who recently completed an informational tour of Afghanistan recognizes the signs of IED explosions—two of them—which seems to confirm the rumor that the cartels have taken to hiring recently discharged American servic
emen.

  Dennis fervently hopes the cartels haven’t also taken to hiring recently discharged Taliban, because that would cause a cluster-fuck of monumental proportions with the professional paranoids at Homeland Security.

  (Condition Scarlet!!!!)

  The other interesting little bit of forensic joy is the presence of horrible gaping wounds apparently caused by .50-caliber bullets and the local CHP troopers’ somewhat overenthused opinion that they were fired by some apparent superweapon called a Barrett 90, hard to acquire and reputedly harder to handle, so we’re looking at a professional job here.

  Really? Dennis thinks as he looks at a scene straight out of the evening news. (Please, merciful God in heaven, don’t let the networks pick this up.) No shit? Three cars full of narcotraficantes taken out with IEDs and a superrifle and you don’t think it was done by a bunch of local high school kids with nothing else to do so we need to build them a freaking community center with a Ping-Pong table and a skateboard tube?!

  Dennis drives back to the relative civilization of urban San Diego with the stomach-churning thought that things are

  Out Of Control.

  234

  Doc has radio streaming on his laptop.

  Satellite reception.

  He uses it to listen to Jim Rome.

  Now he gets news of a Stanland-style shootout not so far from here and Doc is no idiot. He looks at Chon.

  Chon hasn’t changed much since back in the day.

  When Chon announced that AQ stood for

  Asses Qicked.

  And ass-kicked a whole unit of them barricaded inside a compound in Doha. It took him all day but Chon was patient, methodical, in no hurry at all. Came back, scoffed three MREs, and went horizontal. Slept like a sated baby. So a six-pack of narcos? Not a problem, piece o’ cake.