The world turned different shades of green and gray around him, where the thumb-thick stalks blocked out the sun.

It was like peering through rough fingers held over your eyes.

It was tight, claustrophobic . . . submerged, but not like being inside Eddy’s trailer. That had felt more like a coffin, the grave itself. Here, it was almost a world all its own, cut off from everything else. It had its own sights and sounds, somehow both muted and made loud and large at the same time. There was the buzz of insects and the heavy smell and whisper of the water itself. The quick-winged movement of mockingbirds and flycatchers going about their business, casting tightfisted shadows over everything and ignoring the man beneath them. It was hotter here near the mouth of the river, its breath causing him to sweat. It would have been ancient, primeval, if it weren’t for the crushed tins of Spam, some discarded burlap, and a torn sneaker Danny could pick out half buried in the sand.

It was a blue Nike wrapped in electric tape. Men had been here, and recently.

Men moving back and forth from the river, across the Rio Grande.

What little wind there was then turned, shifting toward him, and he caught a new smell. Not the thick sourness of the river, but something else. Something worse. That dead and dying stink from Eddy’s trailer, only tenfold. It stung his eyes and he knew immediately what it was. He’d smelled it before in Nuristan, after Wanat, after Rumnar. After a hundred other battles in places whose names he’d tried to forget. You never forgot the smell of a fresh corpse.

That’s when he saw it through a fresh gap in the cane, right by the river.

It was faceup, staring into the sun. Muddy water was moving gently in and out of ugly, brutal cuts. Pooling in the open, breathless mouth, like the river itself was cleaning those wounds. Baptizing the man, or what was left of him.

That was the first of the bodies.

TWO

Although DEA Assistant Special Agent in Charge Joe Garrison couldn’t see Ciudad Juárez from his window anymore, he knew it was there. In his old office down the hall he’d been able to look right through the thick smoked glass out over that Mexican city every day, and at night could count that unbelievable sprawl of lights that went on for miles and miles. It had been beautiful then, when night fell. A mirage. Close enough to touch though it was a whole world away. Although he couldn’t blame one city or an entire country for all his problems, he wondered if staring at it the way he had for all these years was no different from being holed up in a muddy trench on the Western Front in World War I.

Juárez was now his personal Verdun or Gallipoli or Passchendaele.