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.