was 'Passage of the Centuries.' It meant nothing to Shane.
Finally, they reached Avenida 15 and hung a left. One after the other, the trucks and Toyotas rounded the corner, then proceeded north through the new part of Maracaibo.
Tall skyscrapers and flat-roofed, one-story shacks stood within yards of one another, giving the place a feel of unstructured growth.
Soon they were in the countryside, passing arid fields and slanting wooden fences, blowing road dust out from behind each truck as they headed into the desert.
La Guajara was described in Shane's Caribbean guidebook as a semi-desert, but to him it looked bleaker and hotter than Death Valley. Brown cactuslike vegetation clung to the few sandy washes, hoarding precious drops of moisture like thirsty castaways.
They passed straggling tribes of nomadic Indians herding half-dead burros along the dirt road. The nomads ran to get out of the way of the caravan, as the smugglers blasted the air horns in their shiny new Land Cruisers. The Indian men shouted at their frightened children, grabbed the halters of their braying donkeys, and glared with impotent hostility at the trucks that sped past, leaving them engulfed in a curtain of brown dust.
Shane tried to ask one of the guards about the Indians, but the boy just shrugged. 'Wayu,' was all he would say. Shane wondered if that was the name of the tribe or a curse, or both.
Soon they crossed out of Venezuela into Colombia. The border was marked by an old yellow sign shot full of bullet holes, outside the small town of Paraguacion.
Paraguacion seemed right out of a Sam Peckinpah western. The trucks slowed only slightly as they jounced down the dirty main street, past dusty cinder-block stores with broken glass windows. Rough-hewn corner posts supported tin roofs on buildings that leaned precariously. A dry fountain dominated the center of town, across from a general store.
The trucks and SUVs swept through Paraguacion like a Panzer division. A few Indian children stood on the boardwalks, holding on to their mothers' cotton dresses. They watched with black-eyed wonder while a few of the trucks carelessly clipped the circular base of the fountain as they rushed past.
The convoy had just passed out of Venezuela, into Colombia. There were no Customs stops, no government officials, nothing.
Nobody in the town of Paraguacion, or the two nations it separated, seemed to care that ninety-six million cigarettes had just been converted from duty-free product into illegal contraband. It had happened in the blink of an eye as they shot through that little village under the uninterested gaze of a few desert Indians.
They picked up speed again, heading across the 'semi-desert,' scattering jackrabbits and rattlesnakes in their path, heading west toward a lawless hell town known as Maicao.
Chapter 40
SHANE COULD ACTUALLY smell the town before it came into view, a malodorous combination of sewage and rotting garbage drifting east on the desert wind.
They soon reached what Shane assumed was the airport, according to the Colombian guidebook he'd picked up at the hotel. But it was unlike any airport he'd ever seen.
What had first been a meandering dirt road, rutted and treacherous, suddenly became a two-way, poured- concrete highway that ran for a mile and then miraculously widened into six perfectly straight lanes complete with runway arrows, footage markers and landing lights. The caravan of trucks rolled over old rubber landing marks left there by the four-ply jet tires that had touched down in both directions. After five miles, the six lanes narrowed again, becoming a two-lane highway and then, as if it had never been there at all, they were back on dirt bouncing along again. The field had no tower, no hangars, no gas pumps or support buildings. The Maicao International Airport was just six lanes of concrete, some telltale skid marks, arrows, and a few landing lights. Shane guessed that night flights put down unannounced to offload cargo and left just as quickly.
'Aeropuerto?' Shane asked a teenaged celador, whose scraggly new chin whiskers stubbornly announced the coming of manhood.
'Si, aeropuerto,' the angry youth answered. Two words this time. They were having a verbal festival.
Shane's guidebook said that Maicao was a town that should not be visited. Shane could never remember seeing that kind of statement in a guidebook before. Under this startling warning, it said the town had a population of fifty-five thousand, all of it apparently living on the outskirts of town in slum housing with no plumbing or electricity. Shacks now dotted the sandy desert on both sides of the road, without the slightest hint of organization or city planning. The terrain was littered with shanty tilt-ups and lean-tos made out of wooden packing cases and discarded sheets of corrugated metal. Worse still was the smell that became more intense as they pulled into town. Every block or two they passed six-foot-high mounds of reeking garbage. Big greenback flies strafed the piles of refuse, prospecting ferociously.
Very few people could be seen standing outside, as the oppressive midday heat pushed into triple digits.
They bounced around a curve and saw a Colombian military garrison located on the east end of town, protected by a nine-foot-high razor-wire fence. Two white-helmeted gate guards stood in the sweltering heat but paid no attention as the five truckloads of contraband rattled into town.
They entered the business district, which Shane thought was even more depressing than the slum housing they had just encountered. The first and most remarkable thing about this section of Maicao was the prodigious amount of discarded packing material. It was everywhere.
It seemed that the boxes full of contraband, once opened, had simply been shucked out onto the street. Bubble wrap, as well as old wood and cardboard from broken-down containers, covered everything. A layer of white Styrofoam popcorn was blowing over it all. It scattered in the trucks' wake, finally piling up against the curbs. In a curious example of urban eco-balance, human waste ran in the gutters, rotting the packing material from the bottom, slowly making room for next week's load. Concrete lane dividers, once intended to be planters to enhance city beauty, were now just catch basins for old cardboard boxes and rusting metal banding tape.
The trucks slowed to ten miles an hour as they drove down Calle 16.
The few men walking on the heat-shimmering sidewalks turned to watch as the five-truck caravan with its Toyota SUV escorts rumbled into town.
Shane noticed that there were no women, and the men he saw were all packing dangerous-looking weapons. Pistols were stuck into webbed canvas belts. Machine guns of every make hung by faded leather straps.
They drove past the Heda Hotel, where there was supposedly a cantina called the Corraleja. The guidebook said it was named after a particularly dangerous bullfight where the spectators could come down from the stands, enter the arena, and take their chances with the bull.
The center of town was more of the same, except as they got closer to the warehouse district, the refuse and garbage grew in height, overflowing the curbs. The Styrofoam popcorn now dominated the landscape, swirling over everything, drifting like Rocky Mountain snowbanks.
They finally turned off Calle 16 into the warehouse district, and it looked like no place Shane had ever seen. Most unusual and out of place were the half a dozen or so untended and underfed cows that wandered aimlessly in the street, grazing on God knows what, blowing the popcorn aside with angry snorts to get at the rotting garbage below.
Each of the five San Andresitos families had magnificent warehouses there. The first one they drove past was located at the mouth of the street: a large, paranoid building that seemed designed to repel an invasion force. The windows resembled gun ports. Castle-type exterior doors were banded with heavy metal. CORTEZ LTD was written in silver letters across the side of the building.
Farther down, Shane could see four more mammoth buildings, two on each side of the street-one to each square block. In front of every warehouse was a modern, architecturally designed showroom that displayed the San Andresitos families' black-market products.
Santander Cortez's showroom followed his castle motif: steel and granite walls with narrow slit windows, each containing spotlit radios and watches. The glass looked thick enough to be bulletproof.
