They’ve practiced the operation a few hundred times.

Their best intelligence says that Ochoa has turned the empty church into his personal quarters, whereas Forty resides in the abandoned school just next to the church, on the west end of the village.

Each seems to have four personal bodyguards living in quarters with him, while the rest of the Zetas are quartered to the east of the village in the bivouac that had first been detected from the satellite reconnaissance.

A new clearing has been made to the west of the village. Another neat military rectangle, it has tents and what appear to be two C-containers that have been turned into living quarters, with small wooden porches covered with corrugated tin shade roofs.

Keller and the team have surmised that this new camp is for the Sinaloan guests, with the C-containers for Adán and Nacho.

The operational plan is simply but tightly timed.

Two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, each carrying ten men and a pilot, will fly the team across the Mexican border into Guatemala. The first chopper will hover over Dos Erres itself while its team fast-lines into the village and then separates into two “kill teams” of four men each. Kill Team “F” will attack the school and eliminate Forty. Kill Team “G” will hit the church and take out Ochoa. Downey will stay back with a medic who will double on communications.

The second chopper will land at the eastern edge of the village, along the narrow belt of jungle between the village and the Zeta camp. Its men will deploy and screen the kill teams from any counterattack coming from the camp.

There shouldn’t be one—the raid should be quick. Just in, just out, and then the first chopper will land, the kill teams will board, and then a fast “exfil” back across the border into Campeche, where the FES will pick them up and fly them to a military base outside Juárez.

From there they’ll “smurf” into small units, cross back into the States, and disappear.

The element of surprise will be critical.

Keller will be on Kill Team G with Eddie Ruiz. The special-ops guys didn’t really want Keller there; in fact, they wanted him to stay in the chopper. He’s too old, too slow, not a highly trained combat fighter, and there’s no time for him to catch up on the learning curve.

Keller told them to go fuck themselves.

“This is my op,” he told them. “I go, and I go in the front, or nobody goes.”

They grudgingly accepted it, more so as they learned more about “Killer Keller,” his background, and his personal losses. Rumors went around the camp about his relationship with the beautiful Médica Hermosa—who was promptly Googled and ogled—and how the Zetas shot her to pieces. The guys also learned about Erika Valles and Pablo Mora, and they decided that if Keller wanted to get some revenge, they were going to walk him in and take his back.

They’ve given him the radio call name “K-1.”

He surprised them in training.

Slow, yes, but precise.

And motivated.

And his briefings on the Zetas were comprehensive—their habits, their tactics, their training, their armaments—even the psychology of the two targets. He brought a treasure trove of photographs and video clips.

Eddie Ruiz brought something different.

Eddie was chilling out in his pad at Bliss when Keller came in and dismissed the babysitters.

“Pack,” Keller said.

“Where am I going?” Eddie asked.

“You’re coming with me,” Keller said. “To kill Forty and Ochoa.”

Eddie whistled. “Holy shit. That couldn’t have been easy.”

It wasn’t. Everyone and his dog had fought the idea of taking Crazy Eddie on the mission to Guatemala, but Keller argued that Ruiz was the only person who could personally identify both targets, that he was certainly a proven fighter, and that, at the end of the day, Ruiz was a free citizen who could walk out of Bliss anytime he wanted.

“We’d charge him five seconds later and arrest him,” Taylor answered.

“I promised him,” Keller said.

“You had no authority to do that.”

Keller shrugged.

“What if he runs?” Taylor asked.

“He won’t.”

Keller knew that he’d prevail on the issue. Eddie was damaged goods now that PAN had lost the election.

“You take him,” Taylor said, “you bring him back.”

“Sure.”

Eddie’s briefings—if you can call them that—have been invaluable. Ruiz had sat down with Zetas, ate with them, talked with them, partied with them. He knows how they talk, how they think, how they react. Along with Keller, he’s the only one who’s fought them, who’s killed them.

The ex–special ops on the team were resistant to him, too—at first—looking on him as an undisciplined, drug-dealing, homicidal dirtbag. But once Eddie freely admitted that’s exactly what he was, they relented a little. And there was no question about one thing—Crazy Eddie could shoot the balls off a mosquito if mosquitoes had balls.

He told them so, and backed it up on the range.

So did Keller.

But the physical training, Keller has to admit as he studies the latest intel images, about killed him. The guys are right—he is too old and too slow. His legs and reflexes just won’t do what his mind tells them to do, and it’s infuriating. He’s in the best shape of his life, and exhausted. If there were two missions instead of one, he wouldn’t make it. This is his last operation.

The other thing that’s killing him is the waiting.

He waited for weeks, sweating out whether Barrera could even get the meeting with Ochoa. Then weeks more to learn where the location was going to be. Once they knew that, the tactical planning and training went into overdrive, but then it was more waiting to find out the exact date. When the date was established, there were five more days of excruciating tension to see whether it would actually come off.

Now it has, Keller thinks as he studies the photos.

Barrera is in Dos Erres.

The meetings are scheduled to begin in the late afternoon tomorrow.

They’ll go all day and into the night—at which point there will be a fiesta and partying, if everything goes well. There will be no more meetings the next day because by the time the sun comes up, the Zeta leaders will be dead.

Adán Barrera will be the undisputed patron.

And the pax narcotica can begin.

Because that’s the deal.

There will be one cartel trafficking drugs into the United States and we can all go back to playing the perpetual game of coyote and sheepdog along the border. Business as usual, and the gigantic trafficking and antitrafficking machines can grind on. Without me, Keller thinks.

In two days, I’m out of it.

Maybe less than that, he admits, if you die in Dos Erres, which is a very real possibility. Face it, they’re all right—you have no business coming on this mission, you’re the weakest link, probably the least skilled combatant on the ground. There’s a very good chance you won’t come back.

But what if I do? he asks himself.

What then? What next? What do you do with what’s left of your life? You can’t go back to Marisol, she doesn’t want you, so the happy retirement you pictured with her is out of the picture. You can’t go back to tending the bees—the monastery won’t have you, and besides, you’re not that guy anymore. That guy believed in the possibility of serenity and faith. The past seven years have beaten that out of you.

There is no such thing.

Not in this world, anyway.

So what are you going to do?

Take your pension, find a condo in Tucson, become that pathetic middle-aged guy you find at sports bars at two in the afternoon? Take up golf? Brew your own beer? Read the great books? Hang around until you get the bad biopsy and in the meantime try to convince yourself that you haven’t done what you’ve done, seen what you’ve seen, that your nightmares are the stuff of fantasy and not just a slightly more surreal depiction of your surreal life?