The Return: A Novel (53 page)

She waited, gun in hand, facing the door. Silence. Perhaps the crew thought he had killed her and was now enjoying a session of necrophilia. She opened the door and looked both ways down the corridor, which proved to be deserted. She ran, reversing the direction she had come, up the two flights of stairs and then to the door that led to the deck. She looked through the glass set into the door and saw two men sitting at one of the tables with drinks, smoking, their backs to her, looking out to sea. She opened the door as quietly as she could, took a careful two-handed firing position, and shot one of the men in the back of the head. The other one spun around, leaped to his feet. He was reaching to his beltline when she put three hollow-point bullets into the middle of his chest. The man looked surprised, pulled his own gun, sat down, and died. Then, still holding her grandfather’s Colt .22, she went over the rail into the sea.

Diving below the surface, she swam under the stern of the boat, where she bobbed up under the overhang of the dive platform, grasping one of its supports, invisible from the deck. The yacht was moving slowly in a southerly direction. The tender that had brought her here still towed along on its line. For a moment she considered stealing it but instantly dismissed the thought. The yacht could travel much faster than the tender, and they would have the weapons on board to kill her from a distance. Instead, she floated silently, taking deep slow breaths. She heard shouts, commotion, the tread of many feet. Perhaps they had already discovered the dead piglet; perhaps they were arguing about what to do and who was in charge. No one would be in a hurry to tell El Jabalí that his son and heir had been killed by a girl. They would
really
like to have her head in a box when they brought that news.

Someone turned on a spotlight and swept it over the sea. After a while, that person might think to look under the dive platform. She had to leave. She placed the pistol butt-down in the capacious breast pocket of her shirt and secured the button around the jutting barrel. Taking one deep breath, she dived and started to swim underwater, east toward the land. She had swum more than a hundred meters underwater before this, and now she was going for a personal best. The water was blood-warm; she swam easily, breaststroking and frog-kicking, streamlining her body after every kick to maximize the glide. When she finally surfaced and looked back, the yacht was at a gratifying distance, and the traverse of the searchlight’s bright disk stopped twenty meters short of where she floated. She waited, dog-paddling until a roller could lift her up so she could spot the lights of the shore.

But there were no lights. She was in the middle of a dark bowl, lit by a crescent moon and speckled with stars, the sea interrupted only by her head and the increasingly distant yacht. The yacht had been moving during the hours she’d been confined and she had no idea of how far it had traveled. If it had been heading directly out to sea, she might be thirty miles from land. But why would it head out to sea? So that the pieces of a chopped-up woman would not wash up onshore? At least she knew in which direction to swim, for an imaginary line dropped from the points of the moon’s crescent would touch the southern horizon. She floated on her back and strained her eyes. Was that a faint glow in the east? She convinced herself that it was and started swimming toward it. The pistol dragged at her with every stroke, but she was not about to let it fall to the bottom of the sea.

*   *   *

Before he went to bed that night, Marder had a brief conversation with Bartolomeo Ortiz. They were at the long table under Skelly’s big map, alone; the other men had been sent away. Marder looked at the soiled piece of notebook paper on which Ortiz had written, in a schoolboy scrawl, the ammunition inventory of his little army. It was pathetically meager but not as meager as it had been, for in the hours of darkness a crew of picked men had opened up the wrecked narco-tank and extracted thirty-two AR-15 assault rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition from among the shattered corpses of their enemies.

“What do you think? Can we hold the existing perimeter with the weapons at our disposal?”

Ortiz looked uncomfortable. His eyes wandered and his huge scarred hands twisted around each other, as if trying to wring a solution from the space between them.

“Well? You’re the commander, Ortiz. This is a command decision.”

“Don Ricardo, I know how to shape iron. I can tell men what to do and usually they do it or, you know, I use this.” He held up a massive fist. “And I was in the army, and this is why Don Eskelly chose me to lead a platoon. But I was only a motor-pool corporal. I welded, I cut and fitted and pounded metal. I did not dispose of troops, you understand?”

“Yes, I do, because I was a book editor. And Hidalgo was a priest, Zapata was a peon, and Villa was a bandit, but they all led armies much larger than ours. We do what we can and what’s given to us to do. Now, can we hold the perimeter?”

The big man lowered his head for a moment and then raised it and looked Marder in the eye. “No, Señor, we cannot. Even with the new weapons and ammunition, we have only seventy-one effectives, not counting women. I mean with rifles. None of our machine guns has much more than two hundred rounds. We have a total of three hundred rounds for all of the big machine guns together.”

“All right. Pull them back to the secondary positions on Skelly’s map. If I may make one small suggestion…?”

“Of course, Señor.”

“Put a couple of good men on the north cliff. And pull the 12.7 out from the bunker overlooking the beach and re-emplace it—here, outside the village, facing the track through the golf course.” Marder made a cross on the map.

Ortiz knotted his brow and his mouth twisted in a doubtful grimace. “But why? No one can come up those cliffs, and there’s no beach to land on.”

“There
is
a small beach and there
is
a path up the cliffside. If a force should appear there, they would take us by surprise; there are no defenses at all on the northern flank.”

“But who would know about that? And before they came by the big beach and the causeway.”

“Yes, and we stopped them there. I’m sure they’ll try the causeway again, but they won’t come through the beach or the marina. As to how they might find out—it would take only one strong swimmer to swim to the mainland and tell them. Mexican revolutions are always betrayed, as you well know. So let’s be careful. And how are the mines?”

“We have ten filled and enough diesel for two more. They are being buried where you said.”

“Good. Have one brought into the house.”

“The house?”

“Yes. We may lose, but they won’t get the house. I will bring it down on their heads if I have to.”

“Like Samson in the Bible?” asked Ortiz, with an awestruck look on his face.

“Just so,” said Marder.

*   *   *

He was awakened by the firing. He jumped from his bed, dressed, and armed himself. He took his Kimber and his Steyr rifle and a box of bullets for the rifle and two extra magazines. Then he ran down to the living room headquarters to see what was going on. Amparo greeted him with a glowing smile.

“It’s the army. They’ve come, and they’re attacking the Templos. That place on the beach road where they have all their trucks—they’re all exploding. And Father Santana is here. We are saved!”

Besides the torrent of small-arms fire, Marder could hear intermittent loud bangs. But they were the wrong kind of bangs. He said, “Get Ortiz! I’m going up to the roof to take a look.”

He ran up the stairs and onto the roof. To the west the sea was buried in a blanket of mist; to the east the sky showed the faintest blush of the rising sun. It was the hour when a white thread could just be told from a black one, the traditional time for military assaults. The men of Alpha platoon were all gathered at the parapet to watch the fireworks. Red tracers flew back and forth, and it was easy to tell that the Templos’ base was being overwhelmed by a much larger force, an enormous force. This force had probably moved into the surrounding hillside by stealth in the hours before dawn and now was directing torrential fire down into the closely packed vehicles. Other forces had blocked the road on either side, and from these arose an occasional bright flash and then a blazing line, whose terminus was a violent explosion. Marder had not heard the characteristic
bang-whoosh-BANG
of an RPG-7 in a long time, but it was not something one easily forgot.

Ortiz arrived, out of breath, and Marder clasped his thick arm and drew him away from the others.

“You have to pull back to the secondary positions. We might not be able to hold even those for very long. Also, it would be—”

“But, Don Ricardo, we are saved. The army has arrived.”

“It’s not the army, my friend. It’s La Familia. They mean to wipe out their rivals and then take the
colonia
.”

“I don’t understand. How do you—”

“They’re using RPGs. And, look: you can see there are no military vehicles, no armored cars. No, it’s La Familia—they must have pulled troops in from the whole region. There must be a thousand rifles. I think—”

A little tune sounded.

“Answer your phone, Ortiz.”

The man pulled a cell phone out of his pocket. “Alpha actual,” he said, even though he was now Casa actual. He listened, asked a few questions, gave a brief order, and switched off.

Marder could barely see his features in the dim light, only the flash of eyes and teeth, but Ortiz’s voice was shaky.

“It’s what you said, Señor. They’ve beached a trawler under the cliffs and men are pouring out. Dionisio says many men, as many as fifty. I told them to go back to where the big machine gun is.”

“Good. As to that, there’s only one place where they can come over the lip of the cliffs, and you can shoot them down like bowling pins, one at a time. When the 12.7 is out of ammo, tell them to pull the bolt and smash the receiver with a hammer. Do they have a hammer?”

“I will get one to them.” Ortiz looked around the roof and saw a small figure standing on a pile of sandbags, enjoying the fireworks. He called out and Ariel came trotting over. Ortiz told the boy to go to his shop and get his big hammer—not the sledgehammer but the smaller one with the chisel end—and take it to Hector Sosa at the big machine gun on the golf course. And hurry.

Marder saw the flash of the child’s grin before he dashed off, and he thought it was wise of Ortiz to use the kid for an errand like that and not deplete his defenses by detailing an armed man.

The sun now crested the top of the mountain, sending picturesque shafts through the smoke at the foot of the causeway, but it hardly required sunlight to see what was happening. Dozens of vehicles smoldered and blazed there. The Templos had literally circled their wagons, but almost all of them were ablaze, and very little return fire issued from them in response to the continuing fusillade from the Familia positions. Soon the return fire ceased entirely, and Marder could see through his binoculars hordes of men, many wearing camouflage outfits, pouring down out of the brush and along the roads to overwhelm the Templos.

He heard the 12.7’s characteristic roar from the north and he trotted across the roof terrace in that direction, reaching the sandbag palisade only to find that the scrubby growth of Jalisco firs blocked his view of the northern end of the golf course. He used a ladder to climb up onto the roof of the northwest square tower and lay prone at the roof peak, looking through his scope.

He was focused on the place where the trail through the woods joined the main road of the
colonia
. The 12.7 fell silent, and in another minute a Felizista appeared, then another. They took up a position behind tree trunks and began to fire back along the trail. A group of their comrades ran past them down the road, clumped up in a group running for their lives. Some of them were burdened by wounded, although Marder couldn’t see who they were. The rear guards fired until they were out of ammunition, then they ran too.

A Familia
sicario
appeared at the head of the trail and Marder knocked him down with a single shot, then another and another. No more appeared, and Marder imagined that they would take another route out of the woods—it was no impenetrable jungle, but … no they were trying it again, a group of men in a rush. Marder shot two of them, but the others were able to reach shelter in the alleys between the houses of the
colonia
. He simply could not fire fast enough, proving yet again that the fellow who invented the machine gun was no fool. He was about to drop down from his perch when he saw a movement in the field of his scope and paused.

Skelly was standing there at the head of the path, walking slowly onto the road, as if taking a constitutional. He was wearing his pistol but was otherwise unarmed. He looked up, as if he knew he was being watched through the crosshairs of a rifle scope and didn’t much care, and then he walked after the
sicarios
and disappeared among the houses.

Well, yes, of course Skelly would go to La Familia. Where else could he go? And he’d reserved the RPGs that had come in the shipment as a bargaining chip. Marder found that he couldn’t hate him for the betrayal. Pepa had been correct. Skelly was not like a regular person; he was more like weather, as amoral and deadly as a hurricane.

Motion caught Marder’s eye. A man had climbed onto the flat roof of one of the
colonia
structures, in a place where he could not be seen from the roof parapet. He had a rocket launcher. Marder yelled for everyone to take cover and then heard the rocket go off, and the next moment the roof tower that held the cell-phone equipment blew to pieces.

Marder shot the man down and then scrambled off the roof. Someone else must have brought up another rocket, because the tower Marder had just occupied now erupted in dust and flying shards of stone and tiles. Wounded men lay all around, groaning or crying, some for their mothers, and some others lay still. Marder abandoned his rifle and spent the next minutes helping to carry the wounded men down to the sick bay. Every few minutes the house shook with the explosion of a rocket or the blast of one of the defenders’ homemade mines.