Another pause in the firing as the shooter changes clips again.
Christ, Keller thinks, how many can he have?
At least one more, because the firing starts again.
People stumble and fall.
Sirens shriek and howl; helicopter rotors throb in deep, vibrating bass.
Keller grabs a man to pull him forward but a bullet hits the man high in the back and he falls at Keller’s feet.
Most people have made it out the west exit, others lie sprawled along the walkway, and still others lie on the grass where they tried to run the wrong way.
A dropped water bottle gurgles out on the walkway.
A cell phone, its glass cracked, rings on the ground next to a souvenir—a small, cheap bust of Lincoln—its face splattered with blood.
Keller looks east and sees a National Park Service policeman, his pistol drawn, charge toward the restroom building and then go down as bullets stitch across his chest.
Dropping to the ground, Keller snake-crawls toward the cop and feels for a pulse in his neck. The man is dead. Keller flattens behind the body as rounds smack into it. He looks up and thinks he spots the shooter, crouched behind the restroom building as he loads another clip.
Art Keller has spent most of his life fighting a war on the other side of the border, and now he’s home.
The war has come with him.
Keller takes the policeman’s sidearm—a 9 mm Glock—and moves through the trees toward the shooter.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
—Plato
Monsters are real, and ghosts are real, too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.
—Stephen King
November 1, 2012
Art Keller walks out of the Guatemalan jungle like a refugee.
He left a scene of slaughter behind him. In the little village of Dos Erres, bodies lie in heaps, some half burned in the smoldering remnants of the bonfire into which they’d been tossed, others in the village clearing where they’d been gunned down.
Most of the dead are narcos, gunmen from rival cartels that came here allegedly to make peace. They had negotiated a treaty, but at the debauched party to celebrate their reconciliation, the Zetas pulled out guns, knives and machetes and set to butchering the Sinaloans.
Keller had literally fallen onto the scene—the helicopter he’d been in was hit by a rocket and spun to a hard landing in the middle of the firefight. He was hardly an innocent, having planned with the Sinaloa boss, Adán Barrera, to come in with a team of mercenaries and eliminate the Zetas.
Barrera had set up his enemies.
The problem was, they set him up first.
But the two main targets of Keller’s mission, the Zeta leaders, are dead—one decapitated, the other turned into a flaming torch. Then, as they’d agreed in their uneasy, evil truce, Keller had gone off into the jungle to find Barrera and bring him out.
It seemed to Keller that he’d spent his whole adult life going after Adán Barrera.
After twenty years of trying, he’d finally put Barrera in a US prison, only to see him transferred back to a Mexican maximum-security facility from which he promptly “escaped” and then made himself more powerful than ever, the godfather of the Sinaloa cartel.
So Keller went back down to Mexico to go after Barrera again, only to become, after eight years, his ally, joining with him to bring down the Zetas.
The greater of two evils.
Which they did.
But Barrera disappeared.
So now Keller walks.
A handful of pesos to the border guard gets him into Mexico and then he hikes the ten miles to the Campeche village from which the raid had been staged.
More like he staggers.
The adrenaline from the gunfight that started before dawn has dropped, and now he feels the sun and the close heat of the rain forest. His legs ache, his eyes hurt, the stench of flame, smoke and death sticks in his nose.
The smell of burning flesh never leaves you.
Orduña waits for him at the little airstrip hacked out of the forest. The commander of FES sits inside the bay of a Black Hawk helicopter. Keller and Admiral Orduña had formed an “anything you need, anytime” relationship during their war against the Zetas. Keller provided him with top-level American intelligence and often accompanied his elite special-forces marines on operations inside Mexico.
This one had been different—the chance to decapitate the Zeta leadership in a single stroke came in Guatemala, where the Mexican marines couldn’t go. But Orduña provided Keller’s team with a staging base and logistical support, flew the team into Campeche, and now waits to see if his friend Art Keller is still alive.
Orduña smiles broadly when he sees Keller walk out of the tree line, then reaches into a cooler and hands Keller a cold Modelo.
“The rest of the team?” Keller asks.
“We flew them out already,” Orduña says. “They should be in El Paso by now.”
“Casualties?”
“One KIA,” Orduña says. “Four wounded. I wasn’t so sure about you. If you didn’t come in by nightfall, a la mierda todo, we were going over to get you.”
“I was looking for Barrera,” Keller says, sluicing down the beer.
“And?”
“I didn’t find him,” Keller says.
“What about Ochoa?”
Orduña hates the Zeta leader almost as much as Keller hates Adán Barrera. The war on drugs tends to get very personal. It had gotten personal for Orduña when one of his officers was killed on a raid against the Zetas, and they came in and murdered the young officer’s mother, aunt, sister and brother the night of his funeral. He had formed the Matazetas—“Zeta Killers”—the morning after that. And kill Zetas they did, every chance they got. If they took prisoners, it was only to get information, and then they executed them.
Keller had different reasons to hate the Zetas.
Different, but sufficient.
“Ochoa’s dead,” Keller says.
“Confirmed?”
“I saw it,” Keller says. He’d watched Eddie Ruiz pour a can of paraffin all over the wounded Zeta boss and then toss a match on