The Power Of The Dog (62 page)

“I think I’ll just go back to New York,” Callan said. After all, Johnny Boy was firmly in charge of the family, and Johnny Boy had no reason to give Callan anything but love and safe harbor.

“Yeah, you can do that,” Scachi said. “Except for there are about three thousand federal indictments waiting for you.”

“For what?!”

“For what?” Scachi said. “Cocaine dealing, extortion, racketeering. The word I get is they also like you for the Big Paulie thing.”

“They like you for the Big Paulie thing, Sal?” Callan asks.

“What are you saying?”

“I mean, you put me there.”

“Listen, kid, I can probably get this straightened out for you,” Scachi says, “but it wouldn’t hurt if you would, you know, help us out on this thing.”

Callan didn’t ask how Sal Scachi could straighten out a federal beef by getting him to go down to Colombia to hook up with a bunch of anti-Communist cocaine vigilantes, because there are some things you don’t want to know. He just took the plane ticket and the fresh passport, flew to Medellín and reported for work with MAS.

Death to Kidnappers turned out to be Death to Winning Unión Patriótica Candidates. Six of them took bullets to the head instead of the oath of office. (Days of the Dead, Callan thinks now, working on his drink. Days of the Dead.)

After that, it was just on, he remembers. M-19 retaliated by seizing the Palace of Justice, and over a hundred people, including several Supreme Court judges, got killed in the fucked-up rescue attempt. Which is what you get, Callan thinks, for using the cops and the army instead of professionals.

They used professionals, though, to hit the leader of the Unión Patriótica. Callan didn’t pull the trigger, but he rode shotgun when they whacked Jaime Pardo Leal. It was a good hit—clean, efficient, professional.

Turned out, though, that was just the warm-up.

The real killing started in ’88.

The money behind a lot of it came from the Man himself, Medellín cocaine lord Pablo Escobar.

At first Callan couldn’t figure why Escobar and the other coke lords gave a rat’s ass about the politics. But then he tripped to the fact that the cartel boys had put a lot of their coke money into real estate, large cattle ranches that they didn’t want to see broken up by some leftist land-distribution scheme.

Callan got to know one of these ranches real well.

In the spring of ’87, MAS moved him out to Las Tangas, a large finca owned by a couple of brothers, Carlos and Fidel Cardona. When they were still teenagers their father had been kidnapped and murdered by Communist guerrillas. So as much as you want to talk about politics and all that shit, Callan thought when he met them at their ranch, it’s personal. It’s always personal.

Las Tangas wasn’t as much a ranch as it was a fucking fort. Callan saw some cattle out there, but what he saw mostly were other killers like himself.

There were a lot of Colombians, cartel soldiers on loan, but there were also South Africans and Rhodesians who had lost their own war and were looking to win this one. Then there were Israelis, Lebanese, Russians, Irish and Cubans. It was a fucking Olympic Village for button men.

They trained hard, too.

Some guy rumored to be an Israeli colonel came in with a bunch of fucking Brits who were all ex-SAS, or claimed to be anyway. As a good mick, Callan hated the Brits and the SAS, but he had to admit that these limeys knew what they were doing.

Callan was always pretty slick with a .22, but there was a lot more to this kind of work, and pretty soon Callan was getting instruction on the use and handling of the M-16, the AK-47, the M-60 machine gun and the Barrett-Model .90 sniper rifle.

He also trained in hand-to-hand combat—how to kill with a knife, a garrote, his hands and feet. Some of the permanent instructors were former U.S. Special Forces guys—some of them Operation Phoenix vets from Vietnam. A lot of them were Colombian army officers who spoke English like they were from Mayberry, USA.

It used to crack Callan up, whenever one of these upper-crust Colombians would open his mouth and sound like some cracker. Then he found out that most of these guys had gotten their training at Fort Benning in Georgia.

Something called the School of the Americas.

Yeah, what the fuck kind of school is that? Callan thought. Reading, writing and whacking. Whatever, they taught some nasty skills, which the Colombians were happy to pass on to the group that had become known as Los Tangueros.

There was a lot of OJT, too. On-the-Job Training.

One day a squad of Tangueros went out to ambush a group of guerrillas that had been operating in the area. A local army officer had delivered photos of the six intended targets, who lived in villages like your average campesinos when they weren’t out doing guerrilla-type shit.

Fidel Cardona led the mission himself. Cardona had become kind of a kick, calling himself “Rambo” and pretty much dressing like the guy in the movie. Anyway, they went out and set up an ambush on a dirt road these guys were supposed to be using.

The Tangueros spread out in a perfect U-shaped formation, just the way they’d been taught. Callan didn’t like it, lying in the brush, wearing cammies, sweating in the heat. I’m a city guy, he thinks. When did I join the fucking army?

Truth is, he was edgy. Not scared, really, more apprehensive, not knowing what to expect. He’d never gone up against guerrillas before. He thought that they’d probably be pretty good, well trained, know the terrain better and how to use it.

The guerrillas strolled right into the open top of the U.

They weren’t what Callan was expecting, hardened fighters in camouflage gear with AKs. These guys looked like farmers, in old denim shirts and short campesino trousers. And they didn’t move like soldiers, either—spread out, alert. They were just walking up the road.

Callan laid the sights of his Galil rifle on the guy farthest to the left. Aimed a little low, at the guy’s stomach, in case the rifle kicked up. Also, he didn’t want to look at the guy’s face because the man had this baby face and he was talking to his friends and laughing, like a guy does with his buddies at the end of a day of work. So Callan kept his eyes on the blue of the man’s shirt because then it was like shooting this thing, just like target shooting.

He waited for Fidel to take the first shot, and when he heard it, he squeezed the trigger twice.

His man went down.

They all did.

The poor fuckers never saw it coming, never knew what hit them. There was just a volley of fire from the bushes beside the road and then there were six guerrillas down, bleeding into the dirt.

They never even had time to pull their weapons.

Callan forced himself to walk over to the man he had shot. The guy was dead, lying facedown in the road. Callan nudged the body over with his foot. They had strict orders to pick up any guns, except Callan didn’t find one. All the guy was carrying was a machete, the kind that the campesinos used to cut bananas off the trees.

Callan looked around and saw that none of the guerrillas had guns.

That didn’t bother Fidel. He walked around, putting insurance shots into the backs of their heads, then radioed back to Las Tangas. Pretty soon a truck rolled up with a pile of clothes like the Communist guerrillas usually wore, and Fidel ordered his men to dress the corpses in the new clothes.

“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 Medellín 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.