Savages

straight out of the evening news. (Please, merciful God in heaven, don’t let the networks pick this up.) No shit? Three cars full of
narcotraficantes
taken out with IEDs and a superrifle and you don’t think it was done by a bunch of local high school kids with nothing else to do so we need to build them a freaking community center with a Ping-Pong table and a skateboard tube?!
    Dennis drives back to the relative civilization of urban San Diego with the stomach-churning thought that things are
    Out Of Control.

234
     
    Doc has radio streaming on his laptop.
    Satellite reception.
    He uses it to listen to Jim Rome.
    Now he gets news of a Stanland-style shootout not so far from here and Doc is no idiot. He looks at Chon.
    Chon hasn’t changed much since back in the day.
    When Chon announced that AQ stood for
    Asses Qicked.
    And ass-kicked a whole unit of them barricaded inside a compound in Doha. It took him all day but Chon was patient, methodical, in no hurry at all. Came back, scoffed three MREs, and went horizontal. Slept like a sated baby. So a six-pack of narcos? Not a problem, piece o’ cake.
    Chon and Ben watch Doc listen to the news report, add two plus two, and come up with Chon.
    Doc says, “We’d better get rid of your car. You can take my Dodge.”
    “Thank you, man.”
    “Nada.”
    They drive the work car up a ravine, Doc following in his pickup. He takes cans of gas out of the truck bed and douses the work car. Lights a book of matches and tosses it through the open passenger window.
    No time for hot dogs or s’mores, though.
    Instead, Doc hooks Chon up with some ampoules of morphine and a few syringes and wishes him
    Godspeed.

235
     
    Driving back to the OC, Chon is all, like, what did you expect?
    He’s blasé.
    (Yeah, the morphine helps.)
    Six dead Mexicans is a light day in, uhhh, Mexico, and the fact that they’re lying on this side of the border is less than
nada
to him.
    Borders are a state of mind, and he’s accustomed to a certain mental flexibility when it comes to national borders, like the alleged line between Afghanistan and Pakistan. They were both just Stans in his mind, and if the Taliban didn’t care, he sure as hell didn’t. Then there was that border between Syria and Iraq, which was a little nebulous (
good
word, nebulous) for a while until a few people in Syria went for the long walk.
    Ben is too aware that borders are a state of mind.
    There are mental borders and there are moral borders and you cross the first you can maybe make the round trip but if you cross the second you’re not ever coming back. Your return ticket is canceled.
    Go Ask Alex.
    “Don’t do it,” Chon says.
    “Don’t do what?”
    “Don’t waste your energy feeling guilty about these guys,” Chon says, “or Alex or any of them.”
    May I remind you that these are the guys who—
—beheaded people
—tortured kids
and
—kidnapped O.
    “They had it coming?” Ben asks.
    “Yeah.”
    Keep it simple.
    “Collective punishment.”
    “You don’t need to put labels to everything, B,” Chon says.
    The world isn’t a moral supermarket.
    Cleanup on aisle three.

236
     
    Chon has read a lot of history.
    The Romans used to send their legions out to the fringes of the empire to kill barbarians. That’s what they did for hundreds of years, but then they stopped doing it. Because they were too distracted, too busy fucking, drinking, gorging themselves. So busy squabbling over power they forgot who they were, forgot their culture, forgot to defend it.
    The barbarians came in.
    And it was over.
    “So let’s pay them off,” he says to Ben now, “get O back, and get the fuck out of here.”
    It’s over.

237
     
    Elena can’t hear a thing, only the loud incessant throb in her ears and she doesn’t know what happened at first, she only realizes it was a bomb when she looks out the car window and sees the man, one of
her
men, grip his shredded arm, and then the car surges forward, speeding through the streets of Tijuana’s Rio Colonia, running through traffic lights and then through the gate which is open but closes right behind her and then one of the
sicarios
opens the car door, pulls her out, and trots her into the house and it’s several minutes later, quite a few actually, when she realizes that they tried to kill her.
    “The children?!” she shouts as she gets into the house.
    Her new head of security, Beltran, answers, “They’re fine. We checked it out. We have them.”
    Thank