grass or trees or even scrub brush grew. The road through the hills was narrow and rock-strewn and dusty, the wind as hot as a blowtorch, smelling of creosote and alkali and dry stone under the layer of blue-black clouds that gave no rain.
He had seen white hills like these only one other time in his life, when he was marching with a column of marines in the same kind of dust and heat through terrain that was more like Central Africa than the Korean peninsula. The marines wore utilities that were stiff with salt, the armpits dark with sweat, the backs of their necks tanned and oily and glistening under the rims of their steel pots, their boots gray with dust. In the midst of it all, the ambulances and six-bys and tanks and towed field pieces kept grinding endlessly up the road, the dust from their wheels blowing back into the faces of the men. Ahead, Hackberry could see the white hills that made him think of giant wind-scrubbed, calcified slugs on which no vegetation grew and whose sides were sometimes pocked with caves in which the Japanese prior to World War II had installed railroad tracks and mobile howitzers.
That was the day Hackberry had an epiphany about death that had always remained with him and that he called upon whenever he was afraid. He had reached a point of exhaustion and dehydration that had taken him past the edges of endurance into personal surrender, a calm letting go of his fatigue and the blisters inside his boots and the sweat crawling down his sides and the fear that at any moment he would hear the popping of small-arms fire in the hills. When the column fell out, he looked at the red haze of dust floating across the sun and on the hills and on a long flat plateau dotted with freshly turned earth that resembled anthills, and he wondered why any of it should be of any concern to him or his comrades or even to the nations that warred over it. In a short span of time, nothing that happened here would be of any significance to anyone. Ultimately, every cloak rolled in blood would be used as fuel for flames, and the sun would continue to shine and the rain to fall upon both the just and the unjust, and this piece of worthless land would remain exactly what it was, a worthless piece of land of no importance to anyone except those who lost their lives because of it.
Just as he had experienced these thoughts, someone had shouted, “Incoming!” and Hackberry had heard first one, then two, then three artillery rounds arching out of the sky, like a train engine screeching down a track and then exploding, striking the earth in such rapid succession that he’d had no time to react. From where he was sitting on top of a ditch, he saw the barrage intensify and march across the plateau, blowing geysers of dirt and buried pots of kimchi into the air.
The North Koreans were laying waste to a field filled with buried earthen jars of pickled cabbage. Hackberry continued to stare at the rain of destruction on the most ignoble of targets, bemused as much by the madness of his fellow man’s obsession as by the bizarre nature of the event. When clouds of pulverized dirt blew into his face, he never blinked. Nor did he blink when a piece of artillery shell spun toward him like a heliograph, its twisted steel surfaces flashing with light, whipping past his ear with a whirring sound like that of a tiny propeller. He felt neither fear nor self-recrimination at his recklessness, and he did not know why, since he did not consider himself either brave or exceptional.
His lack of fear and his whimsical attitude toward his own death stayed with him all the way to the Chosin Reservoir and his imprisonment in No Name Valley, and up until the present, he was not sure why his fear had temporarily disappeared or why it had returned. With time and age, he had come to think of mortality as the price of admission to the ballpark; but why had this road in Mexico taken him back to Korea? Was he finally about to step through the door into the place we all fear? Would his legs and his mettle be up to that dry-throated, heart- pounding, blood-draining moment that no words can adequately describe? Or would his courage fail him, as it had when he dropped a litter with a wounded marine on it and ran from a Chinese enlisted man who stood on a pile of frozen sandbags and sprayed Hackberry’s ditch with a burp gun and shot him three times through the calves and left him with years of guilt and self-abasement that he came to accept as a natural way of life?
The flatbed truck followed the Explorer between the hills, then emerged into a green valley where a paved road lined with eucalyptus trees led due south through meadowland and cornfields and farmhouses that were built of stone or stucco or both. Finally, the Explorer turned off the road and crossed a cattle guard and passed a burned-out house and pulled into a two-story barn that was filled with wind and the sounds of rattling tin in the roof.
Jack Collins cut his engine and got out of the Explorer and pulled his guitar case after him, then shut the driver’s door. “The sun will dip behind that mountain yonder in about four hours. If you want, you can rest up,” he said.
“What is this place?” Hackberry asked.
“It used to belong to a friend of mine. At least it did until the army burned him out.”
“You’ve spent time around here before?”
“Now and then.”
“Working for Sholokoff?”
“I did some contract stuff for him. I work for myself. I never ‘worked’ for Josef Sholokoff.”
“Why the wait?” Hackberry asked. Through a side window, he could see Eladio urinating inside a grove of citrus trees.
“You want to attack a houseful of armed men in daylight?”
“I don’t know if Ms. Ling can afford to write off the next four hours.”
“She hit me with a pinata stick, but I’m risking my life to save hers,” Collins said. “I don’t think she’s got any kick coming. Maybe Sholokoff will take some of the starch out of her.”
Hackberry kept his face turned away so Collins would not see the emotion he was trying to suppress. Through the window, Hackberry saw Eladio turn his back to the barn and zip his fly, then remove a cell phone from his pants pocket. “What’s your plan?” Hackberry said.
“I’ve arranged to have the cellar door and the French doors left unlocked on the patio. Three of us go through the French doors, and two go straight down the steps into the cellar. In the confusion, we’ll pop two or three of them before they’ll know what’s happening. The others will cut bait.”
“How do you know that?”
“They’re for hire. They go whichever way the wind vane turns. How do you think revolutions get won? You get the religious fanatics and idealists on your side, people with no monetary interest. What kind of weapons did you bring?”
“An AR15, a cut-down twelve, a Beretta nine-millimeter, and our revolvers.”
“Y’all didn’t end up with any of that Homeland Security money?”
“Worry about your own ordnance, Mr. Collins. How far is Sholokoff’s place?” Hackberry said, his gaze wandering out the window, where Eladio was walking back toward the front of the barn.
“Three miles, more or less,” Collins said.
“We go in now.”
“Impetuosity might be your undoing, Mr. Holland.”
“It’s Sheriff Holland to you.”
“Not here it isn’t. The only title that counts down here is the one you pay for.”
“Is there any reason one of your men would be using his cell phone while he’s hosing down a lime tree?”
Collins’s eyes sharpened, but they did not leave Hackberry’s face nor glance in the direction of Eladio, who had just walked through the barn’s entrance.
“You saw that?” Collins said.
“Ms. Ling’s life is hanging in the balance. Why would I try to throw you a slider?”
Collins’s mouth flexed, exposing his teeth, his eyes staring at the straw scattered on the dirt floor of the barn. “You’re sure about what you saw?” he said.
Hackberry didn’t reply.
“All right,” Collins said, his eyelids fluttering. “We go in now. Later, I’ll clean up the problem you just mentioned. How about the woman?”
“You mean my chief deputy?”
“Yeah, that’s what I just said. Can she take the heat in the kitchen?”
“You’re really a test of Christian charity, Jack.”
“Don’t patronize me. I won’t abide it.”
“When this is over-” Hackberry began.
“You’ll what?”
