Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

“You gotta be fuckin’ kiddin’ me,” Callan said.

Rambo wasn’t kidding. He told Callan to get busy.

Callan got busy sitting on the side of the road. “I ain’t no fuckin’ undertaker,” is what he told Fidel. So Callan sat and watched as the other Tangueros changed the corpses’ clothes, then snapped photos of the dead “guerrillas.”

Fidel yapped at him all the way back. “I know what I’m doing,” Fidel said. “I went to school.”

Yeah, I went to school, too, Callan told him. They held the classes in Hell’s Kitchen. “But the guys I shot, Rambo?” Callan added. “They usually had guns in their hands.”

Rambo must have bitched to Scachi about him because Sal showed up a few weeks later at the ranch to have a “counseling session” with Callan.

“What’s your problem?” Scachi asked him.

“My problem is gunning down fuckin’ farmers,” Callan said. “Their hands were empty, Sal.”

“We ain’t making Westerns, here,” Sal answered. “There’s no 'code of honor.’ What, you want to hit them when they’re in the jungle with AKs in their hands? You feel better if you take casualties? This is a motherfuckin’ war, Sparky.”

“Yeah, I get it’s a war.”

Scachi said, “You’re getting paid, aren’t you?”

Yeah, Callan thought, I’m getting paid.

The eagle screams twice a month, in cash.

“And they’re treating you well?” Scachi asked.

Like fucking kings, Callan had to admit. Steaks every night, if you wanted them. Free beer, free whiskey, free coke if that was your thing. Callan blew a little coke now and then, but it didn’t do it for him like the booze did. A lot of the Tangueros would snort a pile of coke, then hit the whores that were brought in on weekends and fuck them all night.

Callan went with the whores a couple of times. A man has needs, but that’s about all it was, just meeting a need. These weren’t high-class call girls like at the White House, either-these were mostly Indian women brought in from the oil fields to the west. They weren’t even women, if you wanted to be honest about it. They were mostly just girls in cheap dresses and heavy makeup.

First time he used one, Callan felt more sad than relieved afterward. He went into a little cubicle in the back of their barracks. Bare plywood walls and a bed with a bare mattress. She tried to talk sexy to him, saying things she thought he’d like to hear, but he finally asked her to shut up and just fuck.

He lay there afterward thinking about the blond woman back in San Diego.

Nora was her name.

She was beautiful.

But that was a different life.

After Scachi’s pep talk Callan soldiered up and went on more missions. Los Tangueros bushwhacked another six unarmed “guerrillas” on the banks of a river, gunned down another half-dozen right in the town square of a local village.

Fidel had a word for their activities.

Limpieza, he called it.

Cleansing.

They were cleansing the area of guerrillas, Communists, labor leaders, agitators-all the fucking garbage. Callan heard talk they weren’t the only ones doing the cleansing. There were lots of other groups, other ranches, other training centers, all over the country. All the groups had nicknames-Muerte a Revolucionarios, ALFA 13, Los Tinados. Inside two years they killed over three thousand activists, organizers, candidates and guerrillas. Most of these killings took place in isolated rural villages, especially in the Medellin stronghold area in the Magdalena Valley, where the entire male populations of villages would be herded together and machine-gunned. Or chopped to pieces with machetes, if bullets were deemed too expensive.

And there were a lot of people other than Communists getting cleansed-street kids, homosexuals, drug addicts, winos.

One day the Tangueros went out to cleanse some guerrillas who were on the move from one base of operation to another. So Callan and the others waited for this rural bus to come down the road, stopped it and took everybody but the driver off. Fidel went through the passengers, comparing their faces with photos he had in his hand, then pulled five men from the group and had them taken into the ditch.

Callan watched as the men dropped to their knees and started praying.

They didn’t get much beyond “Nuestro Padre” before a bunch of Tangueros sprayed them with bullets. Callan turned away, only to see two of his other comrades chaining the bus driver to the steering wheel.

“What the fuck are you doing?!” Callan yelled.

They siphoned gasoline from the fuel tank of the bus into a plastic water jug and then poured it on the driver, and as he screamed for mercy Fidel turned to the passengers and announced, “This is what you get for transporting guerrillas!”

Two of the Tangueros held Callan back as Fidel tossed a match into the bus.

Callan saw the driver’s eyes, heard his screams and watched the man’s body twist and dance to the flames.

He never got the smell out of his nose.

(Sitting here now in this Puerto Vallarta bar, he can smell the burning flesh. Ain’t enough scotch in the world to cleanse that smell.)

That night Callan hit the bottle hard. Got good and fuckin’ drunk and thought about picking up the old. 22 and putting a deuce into Fidel’s face. Decided he wasn’t ready to commit suicide and started packing instead.

One of the Rhodesians stopped him.

“You don’t leave here on your feet,” the guy told him. “They’ll kill you before you walk a klik.”

The guy’s right, I wouldn’t make it a kilometer.

“There’s nothing you can do,” the Rhodesian said. “It’s Red Mist.”

“What’s Red Mist?” Callan asked.

The guy looked at him weird and then just shrugged.

Like, If you don’t know…

“What’s Red Mist?” Callan asked Scachi on Sal’s next visit to Las Tangas to adjust Callan’s ever-shittier attitude. The fucking mick was just sitting in the barracks having long conversations with Johnnie Walker.

“Where’d you hear of Red Mist?” Scachi asked.

“Don’t matter.”

“Yeah, well, forget you heard it.”

“Fuck that, Sal,” Callan said. “I’m a part of somethin', I want to know what it is.”

No, you don’t, Scachi thought.

And even if you did, I can’t tell you.

Red Mist was the code name for the coordination of scores of operations to “neutralize” left-wing movements across Latin America. Basically, the Phoenix program for South and Central America. Half the time, the individual operations didn’t even know they were being coordinated as part of Red Mist, but it was Scachi’s role as John Hobbs’s errand boy to make sure that intelligence was shared, assets were distributed, targets were hit and nobody stepped on anyone else’s dick in the doing of it.

It wasn’t an easy job, but Scachi was the perfect man for it. Green Beret, sometime CIA asset, made member of the Mafia, Sal would just disappear on “detached duty” from the army and work as Hobbs’s waterboy. And there was a lot of water to be carried: Red Mist encompassed literally hundreds of right-wing militias and their drug-lord sponsors, a thousand army officers and a few hundred thousand troops, dozens of separate intelligence agencies and police forces.

And the Church.

Sal Scachi was a Knight of Malta and a member of Opus Dei, the fervently right-wing, anti-Communist secret organization of bishops, priests and committed laypeople such as Sal. The Catholic Church was at war with itself, its conservative leadership in the Vatican fighting the “liberation theologists”-left-wing, often Marxist, priests and bishops on the ground in the Third World-for the soul of Mother Church herself. The Knights of Malta and Opus Dei worked hand-in-glove with the right-wing militias, the army officers, even the drug cartels when necessary.