Iron River by T. Jefferson Parker Page B

nothing more. “Yep. This.”
    Near Santa Rosalia they pulled off onto a dirt road that led back into a narrow valley. There were white boulders and cardon cactus reaching sedately into the air, and their arrangement was harmonious enough to have been planned. The breeze had become a steady wind now, and across this vista dervishes of sand whirled with sudden fury, then collapsed. Hood and Luna came to a gate made of barbed wire and old branches grayed by the sun. A uniformed officer walked it open, his pant cuffs trailing in the dust.
    Hood turned to see the second car follow. When they came over a rise, he saw the low pink stucco building at the end of the road. There were four satellite dishes and various antennae sprouting from the roof. And there were six beaten white sedans and the six black-and-white radio cars parked without order in the circular dirt driveway.
    Luna waited for Ozburn and Bly, then led the Blowdown unit into the building. There was one main room and it was heavy with cigarette smoke and filled partly with uniformed police and the rest with what Hood took to be plainclothes officers. He counted twenty. They sat in folding metal chairs around two long tables set end to end in the middle of the room, and when the Americans came in, they all pushed back their chairs in a clamor of metal on concrete and stood. The men wearing hats doffed or tipped them to Janet. The smokers crushed out their cigarettes in ashtrays and on the floor. Luna introduced the Americans, then rattled off a few sentences of such rapid Spanish that Hood caught only a few words. There was another table against a far wall, with two ancient spiral-corded landline phones and charging stations for six satellite phones, and a computer, monitor, printers, faxes, and a large tilting stainless coffee percolator with the spigot near the bottom.
    Along another wall were racks of M14 and M16 rifles and Mossberg 12-gauge combat shotguns. The older M14s were fitted with night scopes and the M16s and shotguns had flashlights mounted on their barrels. There were vests and night-vision headsets and binoculars hung from hooks on the pegboard wall, and dozens of canisters of ammunition stacked knee-high on the floor. Hood studied the gear and thought of his tour in Iraq and wondered if he was drawn to the hardware of death or if it was drawn to him. We cannot eradicate your degeneracy. The wind lashed the windows and he looked outside to see a nearby paloverde break into a shiver of spines and small green leaves.
    One of the uniforms brought over four folded chairs, and Luna and the Americans sat. A slender gray-haired man in a desert camo suit rose and handed out maps. Hood studied his. Mulege was a village of six thousand. It sat beside the Rio Mulege. It had an airstrip and a museum and even a U.S. consular building. It was one hundred sixty-one kilometers from here.
    Hood looked down at the ink-heavy copy, noted the hand-drawn rectangle with the black X marked through it, south of town, five kilometers from the shrine of La Virgen Maria. The gray-haired man discussed the map first in Spanish, then in English. He said the black X was an abandoned hacienda where the American was being held captive. When he said this, he looked one at a time at Hood and Ozburn and Bly, and Hood saw gravity in his eyes. The man explained that the crosshatched pathways around the hacienda were dirt roads passable by four-wheel-drive vehicles. None of them passed within two kilometers of the hacienda, he said. Lookouts would be deployed throughout the area, but there was no way of knowing where, so the sooner they stopped the vehicles and proceeded on foot, the better.
    Luna stood and spoke again in Spanish, then English. Just after sunset, five of their men would set out in two cars along the north dirt road. They would use their global positioning units to halt four kilometers from the hacienda, then continue on foot. They would have one satellite phone. He named the