A low whistle from Priest and Pig halted and took a knee, eyes focused and sights trained on the 180 view of the trail ahead.

  The time for the drone’s scheduled low frequency location burst was on them. Priest listened to the hand held UHF receiver through an earbud. Just buzz and static. Another low whistle as he restowed the receiver and they stood as one and moved on.

  Single file, with fifty feet between them, they moved as swiftly as silence would allow to cover as much ground as possible before daylight forced them into a hide.

  The bughunt was on.

  CHAPTER TEN

  CASA SECRETO, ARIZONA

  Gordo lay back on the sofa and surfed channels looking for tits or blood or both. The AC in the ranch house was intermittent at best and he lounged with a fan trained on him. Like most fat men he sweated a lot. He sweated gallons every day but never lost a pound. The only solution was to stay in a cool place and move as little as possible.

  Over the soft shush of the fan and the sound coming from the Sony 80 inch, he could still hear his old lady bitching. She didn’t like it here. She hated this house. It was hot. It smelled. Her cell didn’t work unless she walked outside. There was no pool. The closets were full of other people’s shit. The list of complaints went on in an endless stream.

  She wasn’t talking to Gordo and her cell was out of range so she couldn’t talk to her mother in Nogales without stepping out into the desert heat. And she needed to tell someone what a miserable, fat, lazy chúntaro she married. She was talking to that freaky plaster statue of hers that she picked up at a swap meet outside Scottsdale. It was a garishly painted woman in a black robe crossed with bandoliers of ammunition like a bandito; a real bonita except for the grinning skull she had in place of a head. The head was topped with a sombrero painted red and gold. In one skeleton hand she held a revolver and in the other she gripped a bouquet of marijuana leaves. It was like two feet tall and sat on top of a table in one corner of the room.

  She was Santa Muerte, Sister Death, and she had more power than God, Jesus or the Holy Mother in many parts of Mexico.

  The bitch sat before this ugly statue and talked to it like they were girlfriends. She complained about the house and Gordo and she smoked cigarettes for what seemed like hours. She even lit cigarettes and stuck them between the statue’s teeth as a gift. His cigarettes. Well, at least she wasn’t bitching directly at him. He only had to raise the volume on the Sony or, if it got worse, put on his headphones.

  Gordo was sweaty and irritable and the fresh ink on his back itched like a fucker. It was a week old and still hadn’t healed. It was an extension of the ink he’d been adding to since he made his bones in Pecadores Diez. It was a three-color beauty of a Roman gladiator holding a bloody gladius in his fist. Gordo saw the Russell Crowe movie when he was sixteen and since then Maximus was his hombre numero uno. Beneath the image that spanned across his upper back was a row of hash marks; one for each kill either he or his crew were responsible for. Thirty-seven in all. The final five were recent and still scabbing over; they were from the last job the crew went out on by direct order of the Benitez cousins.

  The pride he had for his body count was eclipsed by the burning itch he couldn’t reach. It was all the way around the folds of his love handles. He used ointment on it but the sweat kept washing it away and now it burned like fire. His bitch’s constant drone to that fucking statue didn’t help at all.

  He prayed for something, anything, that would get him out of the house.

  But there was no action.

  No action meant no money.

  No money meant he had to move his bitch out of the big-ass apartment in Camelback to a plaza house in Maricopa; out in the ass-end of nowhere. He should have had a cash reserve but that got eaten up every month by expenses. Gambling, payments on a half dozen cars, the high rent on a five bedroom apartment way too big and way too expensive for him and the bitch. He made good money but never knew where it went or when more was coming.

  Moving to the plaza house in the county meant his bitch would never stop riding his ass about what a fuckup he was.

  That was Gordo’s understanding of economy.

  There was no meth coming up from Sinaloa. Someone had put a serious hurt on the Benitez cousins. Nobody knew who was responsible for that. Money was on the Zetas or some gang of bent cops. The truly paranoid, and the crank business was fueled by paranoia, thought it was a smackdown from the jefes high in the Sinaloan hierarchy. Oscar Benitez’ ranchero was raided and blown up like something from a movie. Lots of people dead and even his horses run off. Esteban Benitez washed up on a beach at Mazatlan pumped full of bullets after being missing for two days. Those two were the core of the Pecadores and now there was a scramble for the top spot and that would mean more bodies and more delay in product. Millions of dollars of pseudoephedrine, the magic ingredient that made crystal methamphetamine into a powerhouse high, went missing or destroyed. The meth labs dotted all over the hills of Sinaloa were sitting idle.

  Whatever happened and whoever made it happened, the pipeline had dried up and that meant no work for Gordo’s crew.

  No pseudo, no crystal, no work, no money.

  Gordo’s crew were Pecadores but only worked the northern side of the border. And they were strictly security and transport. They moved the meth by truck and handed it off to caiques who ran their own plazas selling the shit to the tweakers. For this they were paid on both ends and life was good. Meth heads were customers for life even if they didn’t live long. But there were always new addicts coming along and, as fucked up as they were, they sought quality. Now they’d move away from the Pecadores’ brand to find whatever they could scrounge up. Business was being lost and the Pecadores brand was impacted.

  The chance of picking up some sicario work was slim too. Any fight for the top slots in the plaza would happen south of the border, a thousand miles away. That’s where the family was and the blood would be spilled between cousins there. Gordo lived in the USA since he was a kid. Mexico was a foreign country to him. He could take the crew down there and pick up some fat money as pistoleros. But he could just as likely walk into a situation he didn’t understand or pick the wrong side. That meant making dangerous enemies and winding up a headless corpse in a ditch. No, he’d stay in El Norte and wait to see who was standing when the gunsmoke cleared and the body bags had been dragged away.

  Then he and the crew would be back to comercio as usual. They would be back to moving the crank from storage to market and picking up side cash torturing, raping and killing anyone the plaza aimed them at. Right now he’d give all his Marlboros to Santa Muerte to get out of the house and get back to work. He’d even be happy if the war inside the Benitez family spread north and he and the crew could pick up a few hires. Gordo would risk getting on some caique’s shit list to get away from his goddamn bitch and this goddamn house.

  The phone rang; the land line that ran to the house because the house was outside any reliable cell footprint up here in the hills and he goddamn sure wasn’t going out in the blast furnace heat to talk to anyone, vato. Gordo snatched up the cordless and mouthed a prayer. The screen said the call was from the Phoenix area code.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “That you? It’s Nando.”

  “Which Nando? I know a hundred Nandos.”

  “Pussy Nando.”

  Gordo remembered him; a squirrelly little joto from down Tucson. He ran white ass to the plaza and sometimes moved a little crank.

  “You in Phoenix?”

  “Yeah, I need to talk to you, Gor—”

  “Shut up, pendejo. No names. We talk in person.”

  “Where?”

  “Denny’s.”

  “What Denny’s? There’s Denny’s all over.”

  “South loop of 202 near the airport.”

  “When?”

  “Give me an hour.” That would give Gordo time to pick up Cuchillo and get there early and scope Nando coming in. He hung up with no goodbye.

  “Going out,” Gordo said and went to the back bedroom to grab some fresh clothes out of a box.

  “Vaya y morir, puto,” his wife called back from the wreath of smoke around herself and Santa Muerte.

  “Die yourself, bitch,” he growled on his way out the door.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  TIMBER CAMP, BASILAN

  He was melting. He could feel it. He lay in the hammock and ran with sweat until it dripped through the netting to form a puddle on the dirt floor beneath him. Soon, he believed, all that he was would join that puddle as his body turned to soup and dripped away to nothing.

  Adding to his misery was a case of diarrhea that was churning his guts. He was forced into a humiliating run for the covered trench they used for a latrine when the spasms grew too painful. Everything he ate turned to a greasy water and further dehydrated him.

  This place was so wet. Even the air was heavy with moisture. It was an effort to breath. Heat was nothing to him. He grew up in Saudi Arabia. He was a son of the desert and thrived under the hammer of the sun. Only, back at home, the air was dry and clean and swept by pure desert winds. On this damned island, even at night, when it cooled a few degrees, the air was still sodden and stank of rotten vegetation and mold.

  Mukarram Aqil Sadeed, lay still except to reach a hand now and then to the barrel of water by his side. He ladled the tepid stuff from the barrel over his body just to feel the scant relief of it evaporating off his skin. He was dressed only in silk shorts and they were wringing with sweat. He lay in the shade of one of the block buildings and listened to the Filipinos chattering outside. The buildings in the logging camp were little more than open sheds: metal rooftops balanced on breezeblock pillars and covered over with screening to keep the clouds of insects from within.

  The logging crews were here only a few days ago trimming and planing teak logs. But they departed with the threat of the monsoons arriving in just a few weeks. Already there were daily rains—brief but torrential. The big diesel-powered saws and the generators that powered them were silent now and covered over with layers of tarps in the largest of the sheds. The camp belonged to Abu Sayyaf now and would be their refuge when the rains came.

  The native members of his cell always sounded like monkeys to Sadeed. He learned the local dialect of Tagalog back at his madrassa in Riyadh as preparation for leading the jihad here in the East. But the barks, snaps and trilling that passed for a language here was unlike the polite, sing-song language he was taught back in class. Here on the island it was sprinkled with Spanish and English and regional slang until it sounded like an indecipherable babble. He spent all his life around Filipinos. Much of the servant class in his country came from these islands. But those docile, demure and subservient maids and drivers and cooks bore little relation to the hyperactive young renegades he was given to mold into holy soldiers of the faith.

  Even their names, Datu, Dakila, Tito, Bayani, were names more suited to dogs. They had adopted good Muslim names but rarely used them when among one another. Sadeed did not doubt their dedication to jihad. They had shown reckless courage time and again and absorbed many casualties. Even in the setbacks of recent years he had little trouble in finding new recruits. But Sadeed felt that they were drawn more to the adventure than to the words of the Prophet. They were boys playing at bandits. Though many of them were older than Sadeed, they had the thin frames and the short stature of children. They acted much younger than their ages; childish and petty and not terribly serious. So long as they were useful, it mattered little what was in their hearts. Even when the world caliphate was achieved, these islanders would remain servants and workers for their betters.

  He exhaled slowly and swung his legs from the hammock to find a pair of plastic clogs there. Sadeed slid from the netting and stood, feeling the sweat run down his back and into the crack of his ass. His guts felt like they were being tied in a knot. He ran a hand through the fine bristles of hair that remained on his head and flicked a mist of perspiration from his fingers. He pulled on a loose pair of khaki pants and a thin cotton shirt. They stuck to his skin instantly soaked and he chafed under them. But he was the leader here and it would not do to appear before his soldiers dressed as they were in baggy cotton shorts and sandals. Sadeed’s hold on them was tenuous enough. There was little money available to him from Al Qaeda in recent years. Once he could shower them with chocolate, cigarettes and other earthly pleasures. Now they had to be satisfied with rifles and explosives and ammunition. And in the last few months there was damned little of those.

  The government in Manila had Abu Sayyaf and its affiliated jihadists on the run. They were forced from the major towns by the brutal reprisal operations of Filipino army, marines and police. Few prisoners were taken and those who were could expect torture and secret executions. The cells then retreated deep into the bush and could only organize what amounted to nuisance strikes on trucking and river traffic. The strikes were enough to keep the local population cowed and uncooperative to the army and their American advisors. But it left the cell and Sadeed to hide in the jungle and live like animals, moving constantly from one hidden camp to another. It seemed at times, in his saddest moments, that Sadeed had been abandoned by Al Qaeda and God. Certainly Abu Sayyaf, an organization founded with money from Osama Bin Laden’s brother and Sadeed’s distant cousin, had seen better days.

  Sadeed stepped into the painful glare of sunlight and immediately regretted it. He pawed for the sunglasses in his shirt pocket and put them in place before opening his eyes again. Through sweat-washed lenses he squinted to see a half dozen of his skinny warriors hopping and gesturing around the battered Land Rover sitting on a rutted camp road with its hood propped open. They were throwing jabs at one another and banging fists on the body of the Rover to emphasize their points. Sadeed couldn’t tell if they were arguing or joking or even what the subject was. He could only marvel at how animated they could be in this crushing hothouse air.

  With an effort to hold himself upright, Sadeed approached, hands held up for silence.

  The monkeys prattled on, shoving and swinging fists. It was an altercation then. He shouted and, like children, they fell into a sullen silence; eyes on the ground.

  “They will hear you in Manila,” he said and swatted one with the impossible name Dodong on the head with the flat of his hand. “What is this about?”

  “Miguel says he can fix the water pump in the truck,” said one named Jun, tall for a Filipino with a lock of hair always hanging over one eye. “I say he is filled with shit. It cannot be fixed. It must be replaced.”

  “Stupid ba’kla!” Miguel said, shoving his way forward. “He doesn’t know motors. Jun knows tae! He can sipsipin mo ang titi ko!” and more like that until Sadeed’s grasp of the exchange was lost in a flurry of obscenities from all around. Soon all were joining in, shouting and shoving. Some had drawn sides in this pointless debate. Others, he suspected, joined in just for something to do.

  “Putang ina nyo!” Sadeed shouted in a rumble that cut through the high pitched jabber. They quieted to a murmur.

  “Jun!” he shouted and Jun bowed his head. “Do we have another water pump for the truck?”

  “No,” Jun said between clenched teeth.

  “Then we cannot replace the water pump, can we?”

  “No,” a sullen shrug.

  “And, without the Land Rover to drive there, we cannot go anywhere to purchase a new water pump, is this right?”

  An insolent shaking of the head.

  “So, we have little choice but to let Miguel attempt to repair the water pump,” Sadeed said, allowing his voice to return to a more reasonable tome.

  “Yes,” Jun spat, his visible eye rolling toward Miguel balefully.

  “Can you fix the pump, Miguel?”

  Miguel raised a shoulder and tilted his head.

  “Then you should do that,” Sadeed said, voice dripping with condescension. “We need the truck running before the rain starts. We need to bring what we’ve found to Isabella.” That was the name of the largest town on this island. It was two hundred miles away by map but triple that distance along the switchback and uncertain logging roads that wound around the hills between here and there.

  “I can fix it,” Miguel said and met Sadeed’s gaze boldly.

  “See that you do,” Sadeed said and turned from them. The effect of his scolding was blunted when he broke into a hobbling trot for the latrine where he squatted and noisily emptied his bowels in a sudden rush.

  In pain he returned to his hammock, stomach turning and ears buzzing in the dank musk with all eyes on him.

  He parted the screen cover and shook the hammock free of flies and rolled into its embrace once more. Sadeed’s eyes strayed to the heavy saw table that shared their sleeping quarters. Under a mildewed canvas tarp were the guts of the American aircraft they found scattered over a hillside a few miles east of their camp. His orders were to get the whole mess of electronic parts to Isabella for transshipment to the imams who were his controllers. He assumed the pile of wires and steel boxes would then go on to Tehran but that was his guess only.

  Each of his daily contacts with the next link in the chain of command grew more urgent. The importance of moving the drone electronics from the immediate vicinity of the crash site was stressed to him. The encrypted messages coming to him through his laptop via a satellite connection were growing more and more dire with each day’s delay. The pressure from them was troubling but Sadeed was pleased to be of use to the struggle and grateful to Allah for this role in promoting His will.