Fisk pushed up out of the snow. It seemed to take forever in his head, speed at war with silence, and the crunching of the parting snow roared in his ears like artillery explosions.

He was on the near Swede as the man turned. Fisk buried the dagger edge of the broken scraper in the side of the man’s neck, just above the shoulder. He pulled out the blade fast, uncorking a spray of blood, and went for the Swede’s rifle.

Fisk twisted it from the falling man’s grip. The Swede had let out a strange cry, and his partner—spooked—fired a burst into the mound, thinking it the source of the threat.

Fisk barked at him. The man froze. Fisk had one boot on the Swede bleeding out below him.

Fisk barked again. Fisk spoke fluent Arabic—his mother was a Lebanese Christian—but the only language available to him at this moment was his native tongue. What he said, he wasn’t even certain. But the other Swede heard the murderous rage that translates fluently across language barriers.

He had hunted terrorists long enough to know that the chances of this guy winding up unarmed and spread-eagled with his hands clasped behind his head were slim verging on none. And on the one hand, that was fine. Fisk was ready to light this guy up for what he’d done.

On the other hand, nobody had any intel on where the bomb was supposed to be detonated, or by whom.

The guy was waiting. Maybe praying. Fisk barked at him again, and the Swede wheeled around.

Fisk opened up, firing on the man’s hands as he swung the AK around. He shredded the man’s forearms and saw sparks play off the chromium-plated chamber.

The rifle popped out of his hands, sinking muzzle down into the bloody snow.

The man stood staring at his arms and hands, howling in pain.

Below Fisk, his partner’s strength was fading, the arterial flow slowing to a dull pulse. He had pulled off his balaclava, exposing a short, strawberry blond beard, rimed with ice. The man’s blood was warm against Fisk’s pant leg.

Fisk felt him check out beneath his boot, relaxing into a lifeless heap.

“La ilaha illa Allah, Mohammadun rasulu Allah.” It was the other Swede. His howling had turned to praying. He was trying to chant his pain away.

Fisk rushed up to him and chopped him on the back of his head with the butt of the AK, just enough to put him down.

He cut open the man’s coat with the blade. In the inside pocket, Fisk found a small, stainless steel vial, carefully machined, about the dimensions of a small bottle of aspirin.

Fisk squeezed the vial in his fist. No sense of victory. No sense of achievement.

He pocketed the vial and tossed the ruined coat aside. No coats for anybody now. He pulled the Swede up by the collar of his thick sweater, and with him began the long march back to Champlain.

CHAPTER 4

July 23

Nuevo Laredo, Mexico

2.7 miles from the U.S. border

Ramon’s uncle stopped what he was doing. Ramon followed the man’s eyes—dark beneath his New York Yankees baseball cap—to a spray of bright red hibiscus flowers in the bushes next to the Palacio Municipal.

A tiny bird, hovering in the air. Brilliant feathers glinting in the pallid light of dawn. It darted back near Ramon for an instant, close enough that Ramon could hear the sound of its tiny wings thrumming, just barely audible over the sound of the men screaming.

“See it hover,” said Ramon’s uncle, marveling at the bird. He was a small, compact man, with an expression of earnest concentration on his face. He was one of those men, Ramon noted, who took up very little space. The Zetas around the plaza, the ones now pulling naked corpses out of a stake-bed GMC and throwing them onto the ground, were generally loud, bullying men. Not Ramon’s uncle.

He noticed things like birds. They were beautiful to him, or at least, in his world, rare. But they also came as signs. Omens. And Ramon’s uncle paid great attention to them.

Not all of the bodies were corpses: not yet. Several of the people lying in the back of the truck were still alive, howling piteously now, begging for their lives, but mainly making a lot of noise.

Twenty armed Zetas occupied the square in front of the long white colonnaded government building that lined the west side of the Plaza de Something-or-Other. (Ramon’s uncle had told him the name of the town square, but Ramon had already forgotten it.) The government building had rounded arches running along the entire front, such that it looked like a cheap stucco version of a Roman aqueduct. Most of his uncle’s men were lounging around smoking, their AR-15s hanging from their necks on black nylon slings. Some wore bandannas over their faces, others balaclavas. But not all of them. They didn’t seem overly concerned about being caught. And the masks were sweaty in the early morning heat.

One of the Zetas, a fat, powerfully built man with a blue Tecate T-shirt stretched over his pendulous gut, was cutting the heads off of the bodies. The fat man used a strange tool for the beheadings, a sort of spade-shaped blade attached to a heavy, rough-hewn piece of wood about three inches thick and six feet long. The tool was crude and appeared to have been handmade, perhaps by a blacksmith. But the cutting edge was very sharp. The fat man used the tool much like a post-hole digger. He straddled the bodies, one foot on either side of their chest, lifting the heavy tool up in the air with the blade pointing down. Then he would drive it straight down with a heavy thunk on the necks of the dead and the not-yet-dead, severing their heads with one stroke. With each cut he muttered curses under his breath—coño chinga puta madre pendejo, an unconnected string of obscenities—the way a man might curse his work while digging a well in stony ground.

Then another Zeta grabbed the head by its hair and tossed it back onto the truck bed, where it thudded and bounced like an American football before settling still.

“Won’t someone hear all the screaming?” Ramon said to his uncle. The desperate howls of the three or four live prisoners were starting to wear on Ramon’s nerves. He was sweating and feeling a little like he might throw up, and he did not want his uncle to know.

His uncle seemed to read Ramon’s distress in the way that he shrugged. “Take some water if you want.” The hummingbird zipped overhead again, returning to the red hibiscus flowers. “You are among friends here in Nuevo Laredo. And we have work that must be completed.” He turned away from the grisly work being done behind the truck, briefly more interested in the flight and habits of the hummingbird. “Selasphorus rufus. The rufous hummingbird. The only bird capable of hovering. So still, and yet so alive with movement.”

Ramon thought: This is why you identify with them, Uncle.

“They only feed in the earliest morning and the latest afternoon,” his uncle said, continuing. “Feeding and hovering takes so much effort, you see, that they must spend most of their time resting.”

Another thunk behind them. Ramon tried to listen to his uncle, he wanted to learn . . . but it was impossible to concentrate while the fat man was beheading bodies. Ramon’s eyes cheated back to the fat man; specifically, his blade. Ramon wanted to look at hummingbirds instead, but he could not.

Who were these dead and near-dead people? And why desecrate their bodies with such workmanlike efficiency? His uncle had not said, and so Ramon did not ask. Some had been burned or beaten. Some had had their eyes gouged out. Some were already missing their feet and hands. After the fat man cleaved the heads from the bodies, two other Zetas would drag the headless corpses by their feet over near the front door of the Palacio Municipal, where they laid them in a shoulder-to-shoulder line.