EDDIE AND ALBERTO
The Gulf of Mexico on a moonless midsummer night. Star-clustered sky over placid black water. A frail and tepid offshore breeze. Eddie Gato Wolfe throttles back the engines as the boat closes in on a barrier island partitioning the Gulf from the southernmost reach of the Mexican Laguna Madre and the long stretch of uninhabited marshland beyond it. The vessel is an artfully customized trawler model fitted with a reinforced shallow-draft hull and powered by supercharged twin Hemis. Even with a full load it can fly, and empty of cargo it can outrun almost anything short of a speedboat. Its hull registration number belongs to a commercial fishing boat whose sinking eight years ago was never reported, and its registered owner is a man who perished in a Veracruz nightclub fire six years ago with fifty-two other victims, his remains never identified. The name Bruja and home port of La Pesca displayed on the transom are also falsehoods.
Eddie’s crew consists of Romo at the bow with a pair of night-vision binoculars, scanning for signs of other boats; Tomás at the stern and doing the same; and Gustavo in the wheelhouse, attending the navigation screen and keeping Eddie advised of the heading for the lagoon inlet. They have all slathered themselves with repellent in readiness against the mass of mosquitoes. Each man carries a Beretta nine-millimeter pistol, and the wheelhouse locker holds three fully loaded M4 carbines and three extra thirty-round magazines per man.
The island is profuse with mangroves. Its width ranges from sixty to eighty yards, and the breadth of lagoon between it and the mainland is less than a quarter mile. Both the island and a sizable expanse of the marshy coast are owned by Eddie’s Mexican kin. The inlet he approaches was excavated by them decades ago and is not to be found on any nautical charts but their own and those of their Texas relatives. It is hidden from aerial view by a canopy of dense tree growth, and the design of its channel—like a horizontally elongated N that on the chart looks like a wide, wry smile and inspired its name of Boca Larga—obscures offshore detection of its entrance. The inlet is never used in daylight lest the boat be seen entering or exiting, and to navigate it at night, even with GPS assistance, requires an expert hand at the wheel. The spotlight at the fore of the wheelhouse roof is strictly for emergencies. Eddie knows this night passage well. He has steered through it many times before.
The inlet’s mouth is barely twice the width of the boat, and not until they’re within forty feet of it can they distinguish the deeper blackness of its gap against the extensive wall of mangroves. Eddie slows the Bruja to a brisk walking pace and they pass into the channel with the engines growling low. The darkness in here is nearly absolute, the air danker. GPS emitters implanted at intervals along both banks enable Gustavo to keep Eddie on a course exactly in the center of the channel. They make the starboard turn into the long middle portion of the passage, which is also its widest and allows the boat almost six feet of leeway to either side, and at the end of this stretch Eddie wheels left into the channel’s other short arm and they pass through it into the lagoon. Though the depth here does not at any point exceed four feet and in places is around three, the Bruja’s shallow draft easily clears the bottom. From somewhere in the darkness comes the loud splattering of a school of fish in flight from a predator. Eddie’s watch shows 9:45.
They’re moving even more slowly now, holding to the centerline of the lagoon, and Eddie brings the boat to an idling halt. Romo turns on a large flashlight, pointing it directly ahead, slowly raises its beam straight overhead, and as slowly sweeps it to the left and right three times and turns it off. Several seconds elapse and then a row of low-watt yellow lights appears along a short stretch of cleared bank. Eddie heads toward it. As they advance on the landing, they make out the figures of four men standing in the ground lights’ hazy glow.
Shortly the Bruja ties up at mooring posts alongside the clearing and a Mexican cousin of Eddie’s named Alberto Delmonte hops aboard. They greet each other with laughter and backslapping hugs.
Been waiting long? Eddie asks in Spanish. Like all their family on both sides of the border, he and Alberto are fluently bilingual.
About half an hour, Alberto says. Left the capital early this morning and made good time. Gonna be a long night for me and my guys, though. We gotta deliver this load to Irapuato by tomorrow afternoon, two o’clock. Thirteen-fourteen-hour drive and the first hour is on this slow-ass turtle trail back to the graded road.
Eddie takes a flashlight off his belt. Well, hell, let’s get to it.
They go belowdecks and into the dimly lighted hold. Because of the reconfiguration of the hull, the hold’s headspace was much reduced and they can stand no higher than a half crouch. The load comprises two crates of M4A1 carbines and two of M240 machine guns, plus a crate of 5.56 ammunition and one of 7.62. Each crate is stenciled with U. S. ARMY and abbreviated military descriptions of its contents.
Eddie opens a carbine crate and shines the light into it, and Alberto takes a look. Every load Eddie has ever delivered to Boca Larga has been collected by Alberto, and their examination of the cargo before its transfer between them is simply a rite of formality by which they assure themselves they are not becoming lax in their professional roles.
“I said it before and say it again,” Alberto says in English as he pats one of the M4s. “This baby’s the best there is for both open-field and street fighting, and I mean the AK, too. I know some say these jam too easy in sandy conditions, but I don’t know anybody it’s happened to.”
“Neither do I. M4’s our steady bestseller.” Eddie closes the crate and opens one that contains machine guns.
Alberto grunts as he raises one of the guns partway out of the crate with both hands. He works its action and dry-fires it with a loud snap. “I shot one of these at a ranch in Puebla last year. Felt like God.” He puts it back in place. “Gotta have some muscle to tote the son of a bitch, though. Weighs, what, twenty-five pounds?”
“Twenty-seven,” Eddie says. “Add a tripod and that’s another eleven. So yeah, takes an ox to haul it around.” He resets the crate cover. “Wasn’t easy for Charlie to get them on short notice, let me tell you.”
“It’s a special fast-lane order, but Rigo knew Charlie could fill it. I’ve always wondered how the hell he does it. Got inside men at a thousand armories or what?”
“Got his ways is what he’s got. Who’s the buyer?”
“Zetas.”
“Woo. Serious people.”
“Fucking A,” Alberto says. “Pay top dollar for what they want, though. The word is, they’re getting it for one of their enforcement crews along the lower border, but you know how it is with the word. About as reliable as Tina Maria.”
“Tina? Didn’t you break up with her three, four months back?”
“Yeah. Gotta tell you, though, I kinda miss her. I mean, she really knew how to deal with a dick. I ain’t kidding, Ed, soon as I’d ring her doorbell I’d get a boner. I told her that once and she said, ‘Pavlov’s dong.’ Another thing about her, she was good for a chuckle.”
“Always tough to lose a sex artist,” Eddie says, “but one with a sense of humor is a major loss.”
They go topside and tell the crews to get busy, then help them to unload the cargo and transfer it to a large pickup truck about fifty feet away—a dark Dodge Ram with a buttressed chassis, a quad cab, and a bed topper. Despite its big backcountry tires, Alberto did not park the truck any closer to the bank for fear of miring in the soft ground under the additional weight of
