“Oh.”
“Yeah, the one with the platoon that committed the My Lai Massacre. Uncle Willard didn’t take part in that, thank God, but he got there a year later. A terrible time. The policy back then was that troops and officers were rotated out after a year’s service…which meant no unit cohesion. And let’s say you’re a poor kid, you’ve got a month left in-country, and some hard-charging fresh lieutenant comes in and starts risking your life and the lives of your buddies for stupid missions. What do you do then?”
“I’m not sure, sir,” Wenner says.
“Yeah. Fragging. Know the term?”
“Ah…”
Denton says, “You got a green lieutenant who’s about to get you and others killed, he goes into a latrine, somebody tosses in a fragmentation grenade. Boom. The official story is that he was hit by a VC mortar round or the latrine blew up because of a methane gas buildup, but the new L-T who came in will no longer be a problem, as brutal as it is. And his replacement will catch the news of what happened to his predecessor and will act accordingly.”
Denton picks up the piece of paper he had been reading from and crushes it in a hand, tosses it in a nearby black wastebasket. The crumpled-up piece of paper hits the rim and falls to the carpet.
He says, “Fragging. A brutal method, to be sure, but it solved the problem. Now we have the problem of Captain Cornwall, whose desertion and actions are threatening you, me, this unit, and the Army.” He pauses. “It makes you think—dream, actually—that a troubled officer like that can face the same discipline.”
Wenner can’t believe what he’s hearing. “Sir, really, I—”
Denton holds up a hand. “Dismissed.”
“Sir.”
Wenner gets up and Denton says, “I know who you are, Bruno, and I know your reputation in this unit. You’re a fixer.”
He just nods.
Denton says one more thing, like he’s repeating something heard earlier.
“Fix this,” he says. “Fix it now.”
CHAPTER 68
BENITO ZAMORA is from Nogales in Sonora, just across the border from Arizona. He has always worked with tools and his hands, having started out working for his uncle at one of the local trucking companies, doing all sorts of maintenance. He knows he’s considered a simple man with simple talents, which is fine, because it has led him to his latest job, working for a business in Florida.
The climate is wonderful, the pay is superb, but he’s under no illusions about the men he works for, and has worked for, in the years since his uncle’s trucking firm went bankrupt. He maintains a strict focus, keeps his mouth shut, and never gossips or talks about his work.
This morning he is in a small cement-lined room in the basement of a new hotel that is under construction, and is accompanied by one of the young, hard men who also work here. Inside the room is an Anglo male who has a bandaged arm and a sweet-looking blond girl Benito assumes is his daughter. He has been told to fix a toilet in this room, and with a tool belt around his ample waist and a toolbox in his callused right hand, he goes to work.
He won’t look at the two Anglos. That will gain him nothing, though he will say a prayer for their souls when he leaves here and goes to the little room that he has been gifted to live in while working here. He has nothing against Americans, although he doesn’t like their arrogance and how they blame his country for the drug trade, though without their own appetites, the drug traffic would collapse in a month.
Benito also remembers a phrase his local priest had said over and over again, Poor Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States.
The priest was a good man, teaching classes at night about economics and politics, and he took particular interest in Benito, telling him that he shared the same name as Benito Juárez, a past president of Mexico and one of its greatest leaders, as well as a child of Zapotec peasants. He taught Benito and others to have pride in their poor nation, to have hopes for its future, and their neighborhood dearly missed the priest after the army came in one night and took him away forever.
He lays out his tools, gets to work, uses some rags to mop up some of the leaking water. It looks like a simple repair job, and Benito should be out of here in a few minutes. He accidentally looks toward the two beds. The Anglo male is sitting on a bed, his back against the wall, his face puffy and red, looking like a defeated man.
The blond girl is cute, and Benito feels a sharp pang, remembering his own little girl, Gabriela. Oh, such a black-haired beauty, and he has to pause for a moment, remembering the year after she graduated from high school, how she went to work for a cousin in Ciudad Juárez, across the river from El Paso, Texas. She worked as a restaurant manager, was young, beautiful, with her whole life ahead of her…
He wipes at his eyes. One night she went out with some friends, driving a car across the border as a “favor” for someone. The car was part of a mule effort, smuggling cocaine across to the United States, and the car passed through the border checkpoints without any problem. The real problem came when the car was to be delivered to some sort of dealer in El Paso but ended up being seized by his rivals. The drugs were taken, the car was driven into the desert, and young, sweet Gabriela and her three friends were shot in the car and burnt.
“Hey!” comes a little girl’s voice. “Hey, mister!”
He ignores the girl’s voice. The toilet seems to have shifted on its base, which has led to leaking and a backup, and with a soft shove from his shoulder, the toilet returns to the proper place.
“Mister, please! Look at me! C’mon, look at me!”
Benito doesn’t want to look, but the pleading tone of the girl’s voice makes him turn his head. The cute Anglo blonde is standing straight up on her tiptoes, arms stretched out, and then she does a perfect cartwheel on the cement floor.
She stands, smiling, arms back straight up.
“Did you see? Did you?”
Benito nods and turns away, eyes filling with tears. He doesn’t want to think of what will happen to this sweetie at some point. Her father, sitting on the edge of the bed now, a dead look on his face…well, Benito thinks he is here because of something he has done. He is the guilty one. The little girl?
She is an innocent.
“Look! Please! Look again!”
And damn it, he does look again, and even the hard man standing guard looks, glancing up from his cell phone where he’s been playing some game, and the girl spins out again in a cartwheel, and her foot slips and she falls in a tumble.
She screeches and her father comes down and checks her, and she cries out for a moment, and says, “It’s okay, Daddy, it’s okay. I’m fine.”
He picks her up and gives her a hard, squeezing hug, and Benito’s hands shake as he gathers up his tools and nods to the other man.
“I’m finished,” he says.
The hard man goes to the door, unlocks it, and Benito follows behind him and keeps on walking, for he never wants to see that man and his daughter ever again.
The air in the room is still stuffy and smells lousy, but Tom doesn’t care. His little girl is safe, she’s with him, and that’s all that counts.
He says, “You okay?”