He switched on the mounted flashlight and followed Luna and Ozburn into the garage. Jimmy’s Ford Five Hundred stood dust-covered at the far end. There was a door leading into the ranch house. Luna lowered a shoulder and shattered the door and sprawled to the floor inside. Hood leveled his shotgun for cover and when he saw the two gunmen, he blew one off his feet with a scorching boom, and Ozburn and Bly dropped the other with bursts from their M16s, but as they fell, two more emerged from the darkness of the house, and Hood and Ozburn and Bly killed them, too. They advanced through the mudroom and down a hallway to the spacious black of the kitchen, into the far end of which suddenly backed two more Zetas, firing in retreat. When the pistoleros turned into the beam of his flashlight, Hood watched their guns and not their faces and as the barrels swiveled toward him, he unleashed the 12-gauge again while Ozburn and Bly fired, too, and two roaring seconds later when Hood stepped over the bodies, his night-vision goggles were so heavily splattered he shucked them to the floor. They ran down another wide hallway and into the great room lit faintly by moonlight through the high windows and by candles flickering above the tremendous stone fireplace, and there they met most of the west team clomping dazedly in from the far darkness, their flashlight beams skittering and jerking from the old wooden floorboards to the white adobe walls to the rough ceiling timbers of the cavernous room. Then three of the north team ran in from the rear of the house and joined the others roiling up the wide wooden stairs leading to the second story. As he ran the stairs three at a time, Hood heard furious engagement outside the ranch house to the south.

Hood crashed through a locked door. In the beam of his light he saw the bed pushed up against the wall and the bedsheet knotted to the headboard and trailing out the open window. A man holding on to the sheet looked at him through the window opening. Then the man’s face dropped from sight, but his hand came up with a machine pistol and Hood blew the hand and the pistol outward into the night. At the window, he looked down and saw the man stumbling zigzag into the darkness, clutching his handless wrist at eye level. Hood heard more fury to the south and he could see the wavering orange edge of fire coming from the other side of the ranch house. He glided down the bedsheet to the ground and rounded the south corner. Two of the south team officers were down, engulfed in flames, barely moving. The other two, both uniformed officers, staggered backward and dropped their weapons, hands and elbows up as a geyser of fire drove them backward into the dark. The Zeta turned the flamethrower on Hood, but not in time. The man lifted off his feet as if yanked, and the flame roared skyward, then stopped. Hood smothered one of the uniforms with his body and then rolled him over into the desert sand. When he got up, he saw the other burned officer had recovered his weapon and now stood facing the pale desert from which ten men loped toward them.

Hood took cover behind one of the SUVs, racked the shotgun, and slid in four new shells. His hands felt thick and cold, but they obeyed his will. The burned officers retreated behind the other SUV, and Hood watched the Zetas closing steadily from a hundred yards out. He heard voices behind him and when he turned and looked up, he saw the glimmer of gun barrels from a second-story window. To his left, Bly and Ozburn slid into position behind a slouching concrete fountain.

The Zetas came faster now, firing methodically. Hood pressed himself tight to the wheel of the vehicle. He heard the bullets clanking through the sheet metal and slapping against the house wall, and he heard the far-side tires blow, and when he looked over to the fountain, he saw the sand jetting up and lead-smeared divots pocking the concrete. He lurched from his lie and hit the ground hard on his elbows. The Zetas were fifty yards out. Two of them carried flamethrowers and they sent intermittent fire through the dark for effect and when the first of them was forty yards away, Hood aimed the short-barreled shotgun three feet above his head and squeezed off the shot. The man screamed and dropped the flamethrower and jammed his hands to his face, then fell to his knees in the sand. The Zetas came at full run. To Hood’s left, Bly and Ozburn opened fire. Hood heard the barrage from the second-story windows behind him. Four Zetas were down and the remaining six pulled up and stopped and Hood saw them veer away from the gunfire and each other. Luna and four of his men emerged from the desert on one side of them, and three more uniformed cops corralled the Zetas from the other. For ten seconds, Hood on his belly watched as the last attackers were shot to ribbons in the three-way slaughter.

They found Holdstock in one of the outbuildings, a former smokehouse that reeked of meat and smoke. He was ankle-ironed to an ancient ring set into the adobe wall and the chain was just long enough to allow him to lie on a soot-caked mattress on the floor. He lay on his back, everything but his head covered by a filthy blue blanket. He looked up at Janet Bly’s flashlit face, theatrical in the darkness, and Hood saw him smile as the tears flooded from his eyes. He started to move, then stopped. Someone pulled back the blanket. Jimmy’s hands rested on his naked chest, the stumps of his de-nailed fingers and thumbs bloated with infection and vibrating with pain.

12

Dear Mom & Dad,

I apologize for not writing the last two days. I won’t go into details, but we were part of a diplomatic mission south of the border. We were successful at great cost. Jimmy is back with us, but eighteen are dead-all fourteen narcotraficantes and four Mexican policemen. Jimmy was treated very badly, but he’s going to heal up. Blowdown departed Mexico that very night and left it to Baja authorities to make some sense of it. I’m trying to make my own sense of it. At a certain point, fighting is your only choice, and I brought myself to that point willingly. I now own a full soldier’s soul, something I never quite earned in my months in Iraq. I don’t know what the cost will be to me. Right now I am numb and very tired. I’ve been here for ten days now, and they have been the bloodiest and deadliest days I’ve ever seen. I still don’t know if I’m shaping my life or if my life is shaping me. I suppose most of us never answer this question finally. I met a little man who claimed that God can put dreams into the minds of sleeping people and the devil can, too. But they don’t ever know how the person is going to react to the dream. That stuck with me though I’m not sure why. Maybe because I used to believe that God and the devil are in competition for us. I believed that when I was a kid, anyway. Or maybe because I’ve had some very strange dreams lately! I continue to believe that I belong here. What this says about me, I honestly don’t know. Yet.

Love to all,

Charlie