His ring name was the Hellhound. He had chosen a dogman as his character, obviously, out of respect for his father’s dog—his family, teacher, and close friend. The various techniques he had picked up horsing around with the dog as a child played an important role in his fighting, albeit in more refined forms. That was how, at the age of fourteen, the Hellhound became the Hellhound. He was transformed from an ordinary human into a human capable of turning, at any moment, into a dogman.
The Hellhound was never, however, exclusively a wrestler. He continued attending school until he turned sixteen, and then he started helping his father. By then he had already found his way out of his moral quandary. He was doing good as a luchador, so even if he was involved in organized crime, and organized crime was evil, that was okay. By giving himself over to these two different aspects of his life, he achieved a kind of balance.
Once again, two.
The public face, the hidden face.
His father was assassinated by a competing organization in the winter of the Hellhound’s twenty-second year. The Hellhound took over the leadership of the cartel. Of course, even then he didn’t retire from the ring; the Hellhound remained his public face. Two. He was now the second man in his family to run the cartel. For two years, he struggled to keep things going, both in public and behind the scenes. By then everyone he worked with as a luchador—from his manager to his handlers, his drivers, everyone else—belonged to the organization. They made certain that security at stadium entrances was very strict and took extra precautions to prevent information relating to the Hellhound’s true identity from being leaked. The Hellhound’s underworld doings kept him so busy early on, when he first took over, that he competed in matches only in Mexico City and the small cities nearby. Even so, he managed to appear in 150 matches a year. At the same time, he worked hard to keep his other business thriving as it had when his father ran the organization. He found ways, little by little, to get in with corrupt state police officers and buy off tax officials, gaining a reputation as a promising newcomer in the world of North and Central American drug trafficking.
All this in order to be recognized by La Familia.
To convince the Don to give him a dog like the one his father had received.
That, ultimately, was his dream. That was the future he could hardly wait to make real. Then I’ll be just like you, right, Dad? He heard no answer from heaven, but he knew that if only he could get that dog, he would be number two. The second leader, a powerful presence in the underworld with a dog, an alter ego, as a symbol of his status.
He turned twenty-four. At last, he was presented with a dog. The Don sent the Hellhound a male pup, three months old. The dog’s father—his seed—was a boxer, and something about his features brought to mind a bulldog. Young as he was, he had incredible fighting instincts. When you got him going he would rear up on his hind legs, looking as if he were really getting ready to box. At the same time, he obviously had more than boxer blood; the traces of his mongrelization were unmistakable. Traces, that is, of everything he had inherited from his mother. That dog was you, Cabron. You.
The dog on the twentieth parallel north. You.
Here you were at last. You had made your way south from Texas to Mexico City. As a pup, you weren’t known by the name Cabron. When you lived on your family’s original territory, on the Mexican-American border, people had called you by a different name. The Hellhound had used that same name until you were a year and three months old. But then he renamed you. He christened you Cabron.
Cabron meaning “male goat.” Not, of course, that he would have preferred your being a goat or anything like that. In Spanish, the word cabron was used as slang in various senses, all negative. You could call someone cabron when you wanted to point out that he was a f*cking shit, or a pathetic loser, or to ridicule him for letting another man sleep with his woman. This last meaning was the meaning the Hellhound had in mind. You were the cuckold. Not that anyone had slept with your wife. That had happened, not to you, but to your master.
La Familia was impressed with your master. They anticipated that in time, he would become an even more capable boss than his father. So they invested in him. In his future, his promise—his youth. When La Familia presented a man with a dog, as it had presented you to your master, it showed that he had been recognized as “one of the family.” Your master got more than just you, however. The Don also sent your twenty-four-year-old master his eighteen-year-old second daughter. You and his new bride had both come down from Texas at the same time, to Mexico City, to the twentieth parallel north. Naturally, the Hellhound was delirious with joy. Now he and La Familia really were family! The Don was his dad, and the Don’s wife was his mom! And to top it all off, his new wife was a pretty piece of work—not exactly the slim big-breasted type he usually preferred, but he certainly had no complaints.
The Hellhound was happy. He threw himself more wholeheartedly than ever into his work—his secret work, that is—and into his wrestling. His new wife couldn’t believe it. She had been looking forward to immersing herself in the delicious, melting joy of newlywed life, and instead just look at this guy! What was he thinking, going off and leaving her like this, packing whatever time was left after he finished dealing with business into that silly pro wrestling, and taking it so seriously? His new wife was Mexican-American, not a true Mexican, and she had no sense of the significance of lucha libre. Her husband’s side of their double bed was often empty, and so naturally she began bringing in a lover to share it with her. This had been going on for a year when her husband found out.
The new wife left the compound. The Hellhound couldn’t just rub out the jerk she’d slept with because she had the upper hand. “Listen,” she told him, “if you kill my lover, I’m going to have my great-uncle cut you out of La Familia’s business.” And so, in an instant, the Hellhound was plunged into despair. That was when he decided, rather masochistically, to rename his dog Cabron. Your master was fond of you, Cabron. He kept you constantly in his presence. And he took a sort of bitter, self-mocking pleasure in talking to you, addressing you by your new name. Hey, cuckold, how about it, cuckold? Don’t you agree, cuckold? At the same time, the Hellhound wasn’t the sort of simple young man to do this simply to vent his emotions; the new name was the result of careful thought. If someone in the business ever happened to call him “cabron,” even as a joke, he might fly into a rage and shoot the guy dead before he even realized what he was doing. That would be really bad.
But what if that word were also the name of his constant companion, this dog?
What, your master thought, if it were your name?
“It’s okay,” he could tell himself then, “he’s just talking to my dog.”
And so you became Cabron. Three months into your second year. Your master was twenty-five. He was still emotionally malleable. Day after day, as he talked to you, called you by your name—Cabron! Cabron!—he began to forget his pain. Hey, what’s the big deal? It’s a dog’s name. And though his wife had now run off with another man, he remained as tight as ever with La Familia. No, please, the Don said, call me Dad, just like before. Your master had been “bought,” as it were, as a promising young leader in the business, and his position in La Familia didn’t change. He was still free to come and go as he pleased in the orchard in Texas. He was family. And there was someone there who tried to comfort him as best she could. “I’m sorry my sister was such a bonehead,” the girl said. She was the Don’s third daughter. Thirteen years old. “Don’t let it get you down. I think you’re great.”
Huh? Me? You do?
Six months later, he had recovered.
So that was your master’s story. The melodrama of your alter ego’s life until 1971. But you, Cabron, you were living your own melodrama. From the time you turned eight months old and spilled seed for the first time, you rarely had a problem getting it. Who could resist you? As long as your alter ego had his private face on, no bitch’s owner would ever refuse to let you have her. And when he wore his public face, they let you have their bitches because of the love and desire they themselves felt for the Hellhound—they were more than happy to let the Hellhound’s dog knock up their pets. And then there were the strays who knelt for you, overwhelmed. You mated with this bitch, took that one, littered all of Mexico City with your progeny. You…you betrayed your name. You were no cuckold; you were a lady-killer. But then, toward the end of 1974, everything changed. You fell in love.
Love. Melodrama.
Your master had gotten involved in something big. His bodyguard had brought him the lead. The bodyguard was a huge dude from American Samoa, upward of six foot two and a champion underground boxer. He had an astonishingly thick neck, fat arms, and a massive stomach. Samoans and Tongans were legendary among professional boxers. Lucha libre wasn’t real fighting, of course, but this only gave the Hellhound greater respect for true strength. He was still a fighter, he told himself, even if he wasn’t much of one. And what point was there in being protected by bodyguards weaker than he was? He had first been introduced to this guy, whose arms and torso and thighs were covered with traditional Samoan tattoos, by the nephew of the Don’s wife, a producer. The introduction alone wasn’t enough to convince him to hire the Samoan. If the bodyguard was going to be with him all the time, he had to be totally sure he was trustworthy. The Samoan had two other characteristics that made him attractive. One was that this towering giant, who spoke Spanish with a Samoan-English accent, was a twin. “You mean you’ve got a brother exactly like you?” “That’s right, man. An identical twin.” “That’s so cool! It’s like having a f*cking alter ego!” It turned out, furthermore, that the older twin—the bodyguard—was also a devout Christian. “Are you kidding? The Samoan Islands are Catholic?” “Sure, man. The first missionaries came to Samoa in 1830, so what do you expect? Sometimes when I hear a hymn I get teary.” “That’s terrific!” “My brother, though, he’s Muslim.” “He’s a…but why?” “Lives in Asia. Went there to work. Does the same kind of shit I do, in Indonesia I think it is. Or maybe it’s Pakistan? He swore to obey the Koran in order to get in good with the people there.” “That’s awesome! That’s the kind of dedication I like to see in this line a work!”
So the Hellhound hired the Samoan hulk—who was simultaneously an older twin and a championship underground boxer—as his bodyguard, and the two survived several bloodbaths together, and the Hellhound came to see that he could trust the Samoan absolutely, and then to regard him as his right-hand man. In 1974, this right-hand bodyguard was one of the main movers in a major incident: he helped lead the Hellhound to attack an officer in the Mexican Federal Police. “This dude’s bad, man,” the Samoan had muttered. “And I mean bad.” “Is he?” the Hellhound asked. “He’s building his own secret organization, Boss. Fixing it so he has access to all the confiscated drugs, building ties with the Colombians, putting all the department heads in Customs in his pocket.” “What the hell? Are you kidding? That is bad. I was thinking the paperwork guys in Customs seemed kind of unfriendly lately—so it’s this guy’s doing, huh?” “It is, Boss.” “How’d you figure this out? Who snitched? One of the little guys in the state police?” “No one snitched, Boss. More like I got him to talk. Gave him a hook to the jaw, smashed the bone. Brraahahahahah! It’s hard work getting these guys to talk, Boss.” “Hilarious. Hahahahah.” “You know that business we got going on in Cabo San Lucas, dropping drugs from the sky? I got wind someone was trying to interfere, so I had ’em tie him up and bring him to me. And let me tell you, when that guy started talking, boy did he start talking.” “So what’s this plan you got for me?”
This officer in the Federal Police lived in a port city on the Gulf of Mexico, and that was where he had his storehouse. They attacked the storehouse. The officer had been put in charge of all the confiscated drugs, and he often went out on busts himself. He had commandeered the best drug dog in the force, a member of a true super-elite, essentially turning her into his own private dog; no one tried to stop him. He would take her to airports and up to the border and have her sniff out only the purest drugs, which he would seize. It would have been hard to find a worse instance of a man abusing the authority of his position. And once he had the drugs, he would sell them back at very steep prices to the Colombians. “You go too far,” the Hellhound told him. “You’re too bad.” He punched him, kicked him (with his torpedo St. Bernard Kick), put him in his mighty Dog-Hold. He got all the information he needed and then, just like that, had his bodyguard kill him. They cleaned out every last packet of shit in the storehouse. They’d brought a four-ton truck for that purpose. No one interfered as they carted the stuff out, but there was this dog barking its head off. A Labrador retriever. A bitch. The officer’s drug dog. “Well, look what we have here,” the Hellhound said. “Want me to shut her up, Boss?” the Samoan asked. “No, no, no. You should never kill unless you have to, not when it’s a dog. Besides, this bitch is the force’s number one drug dog, right? The one everyone talks about? She’ll come in handy. She can sniff our shit, tell us how good it is.” “Nice thinking, Boss. Very nice.”
So they ended up taking the Labrador retriever.
And where did they take her? To the twentieth parallel north. To the estate in Mexico City. And there you were. It was December 1974, when your master brought her in and introduced her to you, Cabron. “Hey there, boy,” he said, beaming. “Look who’s come to visit. The best perro policia in all of Mexico.” What did you feel then? Nothing, at first. You weren’t hot for her then, it wasn’t the season, and besides you had all the bitches you could want. So you just glanced at her and thought, HMM? A NEW FACE? The fact was, she was a very beautiful dog. A purebred Labrador retriever, only two years old, with an iridescent, jet black coat and a nice muscular ass. Before long, Cabron, you would be creeping around, whining up a storm, pining with desire for that ass—but for now, you barely noticed her. A NEW BLACK FACE? you thought, and that was it. You watched as your master tested her, had her sniff a bunch of drugs and pick out the heroin, cocaine, crack, marijuana, speed, and all kinds of other shit, and tell him how pure they were. WHAT KIND OF TRICK IS THAT? you wondered. Two days later, though, the situation changed. All of a sudden, things were different. The Hellhound was in a fight with a Colombian cartel. That business with the officer had deprived the cartel of one of its transport routes, and they were pissed. A gang of South American hit men turned up in Mexico. Your master realized right away what was up. He said, “This isn’t good.” “Sure isn’t,” replied the Samoan.
“We’re at war.”
In next to no time, the estate in Mexico City was transformed into a fortress. Preparations were made so that when the hit men came for the Hellhound, they’d be ready. And you, Cabron, were holed up in the fortress with your master. You held the fort together. Your master, by the way, had had to give up on his wrestling for the time being. This meant you no longer had the pleasure of traveling from one arena to the next, going from city to city, growling and glaring at your master’s trading partners. You no longer even got taken out for walks. Someone might kidnap you and use you to get at your master. You were your master’s alter ego, so if he was going to be stuck in one place for a few months, so would you. There was a difference, though, because while your master could always bring in women from outside to satisfy his sexual urges, you didn’t have that option. No matter how horny you got. And you got very horny. You were frustrated, the frustration built up, until you wanted to explode. You noticed that bitch in the fort. That drug dog, the Labrador retriever with the firm round butt. But she gave you the cold shoulder. You, Cabron, were supposed to be a lady-killer, and yet she was ignoring you. You put the moves on her, turned on the charm, to no avail. It was worse than that: she used her police-dog training to tell you to go to hell. Buzz off, mutt! She knew how to fight—in fact, she was at least as good as your master, with his surefire moves like the Top-of-the-Head-Dog-Bite. You’d yelp and retreat, instantly. But you were still horny. WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO? C’MON, you pleaded. LET ME DO YOU. Again and again, you pleaded. I WON’T SPLIT AS SOON AS WE DO IT, I PROMISE, I WANT TO HAVE KIDS WITH YOU, I WANT TO MAKE YOU MY WIFE!
Uuuuuuurrrr…wooooof! you barked sadly.
It was love. Melodrama. What’s up, Cabron? your master asked, laughing. Can’t get her in bed? What the hell happened to you, stud? He didn’t even try to help. So what did you do? You followed her around, trying to make her like you. You groped for a solution to the problem. You tried hard to seem interested in the things that interested her. You didn’t see the point, but you tried. OKAY, I’LL LEARN TO DO THE SAME TRICKS!
There in that closed fortress, you poured all your energy into realizing a dream. You were absolutely determined to have sex with that bitch.
Three months later, your master was staring wide-eyed, calling his bodyguard over. “Hey! Look at that! Just look!” “What’s up, Boss?…Huh? Wait a sec, he’s…isn’t he?” “I know! It’s incredible! Cabron actually found the marijuana—just look at him, scratching the bag like that with his paws!” “Like a real police dog, huh?” “Seriously.” “He can tell the difference…that it’s not cocaine.” “Wow.” “That’s that trick magazine with the drugs in it, right? And he found them with no problem!” “Wow, he’s totally turned—” “Into a drug dog.”
Ah, the power of love. Love had helped you memorize the scents of different drugs. You taught yourself, and you made it to the more advanced stages. You could differentiate among various levels of purity, to a limited extent. Generally speaking, in order to be employed as a professional by the police or any other organization, a dog had to have started specialized training between its fourth and seventh months. Once you got to be an adult, it was too late. So the trainers said. But you proved them wrong. You, Cabron, had pulled off the impossible. It was quite a trick. All on account of love. Finally even the Labrador retriever was moved by your attentions and stopped snubbing you.
CAN WE DO IT NOW? you asked.
She proffered her rear.
In June 1975, as the siege continued, the Labrador retriever gave birth in the basement of the estate-turned-fortress. You had recognized her as your official wife, and you watched over her as she bore your puppies. It took hours, testing your powers of endurance. More than half the day, in fact. Why? Because the litter was astonishingly large. Eleven puppies, each one different from the others. Their father’s mongrel blood had shown what it could do. Your master was stunned when he saw how many pups there were. “Man, Cabron, your sperm must be like jelly, huh?” he said. “He hadn’t done it for a while, Boss,” the Samoan said. “I saw some, actually, and it was yellow, not white.” The Samoan named one of the pups. Overall his coat was brown, but he had six narrow black lines on his left side and a black spot on his haunch that made him look vaguely like a stringed instrument. His appearance made him stand out from the rest. The Samoan called him Guitar.
MY CHILDREN, you thought.
MY LINEAGE, MY CHILDREN.
Right from the start, the next generation was faced with a problem. There were eleven pups. Dogs have only ten teats. Worse still, the top two don’t produce milk. The bitch could only raise seven or at most eight puppies, so inevitably there was competition for her teats. “Man, I know it’s great to have lots of kids, Cabron,” your master grumbled, “but this is ridiculous.” Still, he had a servant prepare bottles of milk, and he and the bodyguard fed the puppies that had been left at loose ends, as it were. “Shit, just look at this little cutie-pie,” said the towering Samoan as he cradled a pup in his arms. Your master went so far as to consult a veterinarian. On her advice, he mixed powdered milk with cow’s milk to thicken it so it would be better suited for puppies. The two men couldn’t look after those loose-enders twenty-four hours a day, though, and during the first two weeks of July two pups dropped out of the game. They couldn’t survive.
Another died in the last week of July, as the bitch started weaning her puppies. The lack of adequate milk in the first days had taken its toll.
Then it was August 3, the first Sabbath of the month. Men armed with light machine guns and howitzers forced their way into the fortress where you and your master were holed up, shattering the peace of the Catholic world. Obviously these were the hit men the Colombian cartel had hired. Expecting the situation to come to a head soon, your master had tripled the number of guards stationed around the estate since the previous year. Each guard had an automatic rifle. The shoot-out began. Sometime later, your master would describe this day to his second wife as “Bloody Sunday.” The blood was not only human. You and your wife and your children—the eight surviving puppies—were holed up in the estate as well. Ten dogs in total. Of those ten, only one shed blood. Your wife. Because your wife, Cabron, was a police dog. She had been trained to respond to gunfire—to burn with righteous anger. It was tantamount to suicide to react that way. She dashed up out of the basement, eager to find the villains, and ended up caught in the gunfire, shot through.
Intruders stomped on two of the puppies.
When the shooting ended, seven dogs were left. You, the father, and your kids.
Guitar was alive. Guitar had made it through the first test—the competition for his mother’s teats—managing to live because the Samoan had kept an eye on him, encouraging the mother to let him suckle or giving him a bottle if he was pushed out of the circle. Then there was “Bloody Sunday,” which Guitar survived by staying put, not scampering this way and that through the landscape of hell which the estate had been transformed into. He didn’t lose his wits in the sudden explosion of violence—or rather he had, but he didn’t let his terror lure him into making the same mistake as his siblings, who ran around in a panic, barking their heads off. Instead, he hid in a kitchen cabinet until the noise stopped and only then ventured out in search of his mom. He found her immediately. A bullet had left two holes in her body: one at the top of her skull where it entered, the other in her neck where it exited. There she was, sprawled in the hallway that led into the living room. His mother’s corpse. Blood had pooled around her. Red blood, starting to congeal. Maybe Guitar understood something as he inhaled the smell of that blood; maybe he didn’t. He whined, nudged her stomach with his little nose.
He felt how cold she was.
How stiff.
He sensed that he was losing her.
Guitar was too old to drink his mother’s milk now, but he groped for her teats, nuzzling them one by one. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. The last two had never meant anything. But now, even when he sucked the others, no milk streamed forth. There was no warmth.
He sucked furiously.
Twenty minutes later, Cabron, you stumbled upon the scene. There, in a corner of the hall surrounded by the tumult of an estate still in chaos, was your wife, the bitch whose ass you had pursued with such passion, stretched out in the solemnity of death, with one of your children, a puppy with stripes like a guitar, beside her—beside her body, trying to suck her teats. You stood stunned, you hung your head. Soon another of your children padded over, and a second, then three more. They all, one after the other, followed Guitar’s lead, clustering around their cold mother’s teats, to suck.
The third trial continued through the rest of August and into September. Slowly your children began to die. The reason was simple: their mother was gone. The shock of her sudden death was more than they could bear. By the last week in September, only two puppies were alive. It wasn’t as though you weren’t trying to help—you were doing everything you could. Ever since “Bloody Sunday” you were spending all your time looking after the puppies. You were unbelievably careful. You never let them out of your sight, you kept watch over them twenty-four hours a day. You had, in fact, started raising them yourself. Even though you were a male dog, not a bitch.
MY CHILDREN, you thought.
MY RIGHTFUL DESCENDANTS.
LIVE. STAY ALIVE. LIVE.
Of course, you weren’t tending to them in the right way. You couldn’t call on your “motherly instincts” because you didn’t have any. Half of what you did was just horsing around. Though even then you were serious. The other half was education. That’s okay, you can do that, don’t do this, remember. You did all you could. And what sort of education did you pour most of your energy into? Into the very same trick you had devoted most of your energies to learning. In order to impress their mother. That, naturally, you had to teach them. You gave them an elite education. Your children, still under three months old.
Learn to smell the difference between these drugs.
Learn to identify their purity.
You taught them all the tricks a drug-sniffing dog needed to know. Almost as though you were engraving their mother’s memory onto their minds.
In November, the last two puppies were alive and well. Guitar was one of the two. One day, the Samoan shouted to your master, his eyes wide with surprise. “Hey, Boss! Boss!” The Hellhound, your master, practically shrieked when he realized what was happening. “What the hell are you hollering for…huh? Wait a sec, he’s…OH MY GOD!” “Amazing, huh, Boss? Look at Guitar there, scratching at the shoe with the marijuana hidden inside, just like his old man, Cabron.” “Looks like a real police dog, huh?” “Seriously. And look, his brother is doing it too!” “He…he can tell the difference between the marijuana and cocaine!” “They’ve totally turned into drug dogs!”
Your master turned and stared at you. He was moved. “Incredible…raising them all on your own, without their mother…and you taught them to do this?”
You sensed that he was praising you. You barked confidently.
Woof!
In the human world too, the same amount of time had passed since that first Sabbath in August. Three months. During that period, as the two puppies had learned how to be drug dogs, similarly momentous changes had occurred in the two-legged world as well. First of all, the conflict with the Colombians was over. So much blood had been shed on “Bloody Sunday” that one of the bosses in Panama, unwilling to stand by and watch the carnage, stepped in to mediate. The conditions of the truce weren’t bad. So a bargain was struck. For the first time in ages, the Hellhound’s Mexico City estate went back to being just that—an ordinary organized crime boss’s compound, not a fort. The security detail was reduced to a few men, though they still carried light machine guns and ammunition belts at all times. Now that there was no need to man the fort, the Hellhound lost no time in flying off to Texas. He wanted to pay his respects to the Don. “I’m real sorry, Dad. Quite a commotion I caused.” “You idiot! You idiot! You idiot!” the Don said, berating him a touch too dramatically. “You sure as hell caused a commotion! You gotta be sharper than that, right? Listen, I want you to remember this. World War II is long over. This is 1975, there are no ‘gangsters’ anymore, not like they used to have ’em in the old days. You’re part of the new generation. I invested in you, right? You’re part of the new guard in this business. So you gotta learn to be a businessman. Wise up. Learn to make it look legal, okay? Look legal.” This exchange with the Don left the Hellhound feeling kind of blue. He hadn’t just been told off, of course—the Don had been trying to impart some serious knowledge—but he hadn’t expected to be bawled out. Not at all. Maybe I’m just not cut out for this, he thought glumly as he stood in the courtyard of La Familia’s compound, chucking bread to the dozen ducks bobbing on the pond. Just then, he heard a bright voice at his back. “Hey, it’s my favorite brother-in-law! Long time no see!” It was his ex-wife’s younger sister, the Don’s third daughter. She was eighteen now. He hadn’t seen her for three years because she had been sent to get an education in Vienna when she was fifteen. The Hellhound gasped. She had grown into quite a woman. A real beauty. A beauty of the slim, big-breasted type.
“Uh…yeah…long time no see.”
“What’s wrong? Feeling blue again?”
“No, no. Just…feeding the ducks.”
“The ducks?”
“Yeah. Bread, see?”
“Bread?”
Soon they were embroiled in a heated discussion concerning the most appropriate food for ducks. Then they left the courtyard to take a stroll through the orchard, and two hours later they were kissing passionately. The Hellhound had fallen in love with the young woman at first sight—though technically this was the second time he’d encountered her—and the Don’s third daughter, then in the throes of puberty, had a megacrush on the Hellhound. They started going on dates. North of the border, south of the border. The Hellhound had gotten back into his work as a luchador by this time, and the young woman actually came to see him in the ring. His ex had never once done that. The Hellhound was so bowled over he devised a brand new killer move that he called the “Love Love Dog-Drop.” They were both sure of their feelings, so in the last week of November the Hellhound broached the matter with the Don. “I’d like to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage,” he said.
“Yeah, I guess my other daughter turned out to be a loser, huh.”
“No, no! That’s not the point. I’m really serious about her, and I—”
“Sure.”
“What!”
“With one condition. This is going to be the second time I’ve given you a daughter, so I want you to expand your operations a bit for me, all right? Think of it as a wedding present to La Familia.”
Nothing wrong with that. And so, once again, twos came into play. The Hellhound had to start running around, east and west, trying to rummage up some big new game he could bag for his second wife. As it happened, the biggest tip of all came from a source very close to home: his bodyguard. “I’ve got a good route, Boss.” “Hmm, I don’t know. Where does it lead? I’ve had enough of these South American connections.” “You can trust this one, Boss. It’s my brother.” “What? You mean your twin brother?” “I told you he’s in the same business, right?” “Come to think of it, you did.” “He’s in Asia. Works for the head of an organization that deals drugs. He’s the guy’s secretary.” “His secretary? You mean his bodyguard?” “You got it, Boss. Brraahahahahah! And this organization, seems they’ve got some fields out in Pakistan, out in the middle of nowhere.” “Fields growing…poppy seeds?” “Bingo.” “I seem to recall that your brother’s a Muslim?” “Sure is. It’s all Allah, Allah, every day. Anyway, this organization…” “All right, I hear you.”
Plans were laid for a corporate tie-up. The Samoan twins (the two of them) were very much part of their respective organizations, and their bosses trusted them implicitly. With the two (two) of them acting as middlemen, might it be possible to bring even two (two) organizations as profoundly distinct as these—one operated in America, one in Asia; one boss was a Catholic, one was a Muslim—together? The twins considered the question and delivered their verdict: Yes, we can! Samoan culture placed great importance on family, by the way, and maintained a social structure based in extremely large families. The ties among relatives were very strong. The twins suggested that since the two bosses would have to talk, maybe they should meet up somewhere in the middle. In between America and Asia was…the Pacific Ocean. Well, then, why not arrange a summit in our hometown?
Sounded good.
Thus, in the middle of December, the two groups arrived in American Samoa, disguised as tourists, and met up in a hotel. The Hellhound decided to take his alter ego along —his second self, his dog, Cabron. “We’ll scare the bejeezus out of ’em,” he’d said before they left. “Show ’em that with this dog we’ve got, we’ll sniff out any funny business, diluting shit down and stuff. Sniff it out in a second. We’ll show ’em what we can do!” “Nice. I like it, Boss,” the Samoan said. “The only worry is—do you think Cabron will leave the puppies?” “Hmm…good point. He’s been fawning over them nonstop, it’s true. How about this, then? They’re six months old now, right? Why not take the little buggers along?” There were only two of them. (Two.) The Hellhound decided this was the best solution. Besides, just imagine the look on those Asian faces when they see those two roly-poly dumplings zipping around, trying to outdo each other in ferreting out carefully concealed heroine, marijuana, and speed! Hats off to the Nuevo Mundo!
“You can have a whole roast pig, Boss,” said the Samoan. The older one, the Hellhound’s bodyguard. The younger twin’s group flew from Melbourne by way of Fiji and landed in Samoa, formerly known as Western Samoa, then moved on to the final destination. The older twin’s group—including the Hellhound and the three dogs—flew first to Hawaii. They changed planes in Honolulu and headed for the South Pacific.
It was December 9, 1975, when Cabron left Mexico City. He and his alter ego. He was no longer a dog of the twentieth parallel north. He passed over Oahu, over the twenty-first parallel north. But Goodnight wasn’t there anymore. The bitch of the twenty-first parallel north was no longer living on that island.
You, dog—you, Goodnight, who no longer reside on the twenty-first parallel north. Where are you now?
You were riding in a double canoe. Taking part in a glorious adventure, heading for Tahiti using ancient maritime navigation techniques. If this magnificent project, part of the Hawaiian Renaissance, was a success, you had been told, you would be awarded a third medal to add to the Purple Heart and the Silver Star you received during your days as a military dog. Your master was the one who told you this. The former lieutenant who had taken you into his family when you retired from the military, then let you go when the family beagle had children—not your master, then, strictly speaking, but your former master. Well, you would never get that third medal. A month after the canoe set out, on November 11, 1975, you were starving. The canoe was adrift. Swept this way and that on the vast sea. Once, earlier, the humans had tried to kill you, to turn you into food. Canine cuisine. Fortunately, however, you had no master now. No new master had appeared. As far as you could see, the boat was populated with idiots.
DO YOU REALLY THINK YOU CAN SACRIFICE ME? ARE YOU FOOLS CRAZY? That was your answer to them. And so you revolted. You sank your teeth deep into one man’s biceps, tore off the hands of two others at the wrists, and that was that—you had beaten them back. All your years as a military dog came back to you, erupted within you. You ate the body parts you had taken. Then you sucked the bones. You had been starving since the second week of the voyage. The Polynesian navigator had revealed himself as a useless, run-of-the-mill fraud. Unable to read the stars in unfamiliar seas. The Hawaiian Islands and the Cook Islands were part of the same Polynesian cultural sphere, it was true, but they were just too far apart. The navigator was from Rarotonga Island, and the ocean here was nothing like the ocean there. This was too far north. To make matters worse, he couldn’t see what was happening with the waves. He wasn’t sensitive to his surroundings. By the third day, the canoe had started moving off course. You heard the humans quarreling.
“Secret techniques my ass!” the wealthy researcher shouted. “Where’s this f*cking ‘wisdom of the ancients’ you were talking about, you f*cking bluffer!” As it happened, the researcher’s insults were right on target: the navigator had been bluffing his way through life for years. And he didn’t stop now. “I swear to you, sir, that I will carry us onward to Tahiti using the traditional techniques I have inherited. I would be grateful if you would address me more politely. That’s the problem with these academics…” His voice trailed off into muttering. The researcher was so incensed at this that he took out the precision watch, sextant, and radio he had brought in case of emergency and threw them all overboard. “All right, then, great! We didn’t need those, right? That’s what you’re telling me? Ha ha ha!” He howled. From then on, the trip no longer felt like an adventure. The canoe was heavy with despair. The direness of the situation became apparent when they entered the doldrums. They had reached the equator, at least, but now they weren’t going anywhere: not east, not west, not north, and not south. The humans tried desperately to catch fish, to capture seabirds. Then one morning, two of them were dead. Starved to death. That was the day the others attacked you, right around noon.
At the hour when the sun beat down most ferociously, fourteen members of the crew held a meeting—you were part of the crew too, but they didn’t invite you to participate—in which it was decided that if they couldn’t get any fish or any birds, they had no choice but to eat the dog. They chased you to the prow of the canoe. And then you attacked. You owed them no loyalty. Isn’t that right, Goodnight? You…you were merely exercising your basic rights. You had as much right to live as those humans did. So you made it clear that if you couldn’t get any fish or any birds, you had no choice but to eat the humans. You demonstrated this beyond any doubt by devouring the hands of the two crew members you had beaten back. And you didn’t just devour them, you relished them. They could see that. You showed them, too, that there was no point in holding meetings. That evening and later that night, one, two, then three died. The two men whose hands you had torn off and the one whose biceps you had bitten. They had lost too much blood, and they were already on the edge of death anyway. The survivors didn’t dump the bodies overboard. They converted them into “food.” You observed them from your position at the prow. One of the haole crew members was so unnerved by the steely glitter in your eyes that he tossed you his companions’ livers. Also their penises and testicles, which the survivors found somehow unappetizing. You devoured it all. It was tasty.
Morning came. You were still sitting at the prow. Naturally, the humans ended up clustered at the stern. There were eleven left, but they had split up into three factions. There was no point trying to reach a universal consensus: it went without saying that the haole, the pure Hawaiians, and the Rarotongan would each form their own groups. No one attacked you anymore. The secret fighting techniques you had acquired during your time in the military protected you. There was a ritual now, starting that morning. When one of the fatigued crew members finally died, only the humans in his faction would share the “food.” Cut it up, divvy it up. They always tossed the dead man’s raw liver, as well as his penis and testicles, up to the prow. To you. As an offering, so to speak. This had become the custom. As long as they did this, they believed, that terrifying dog wouldn’t attack them in their sleep. They didn’t need to fear being attacked, that is to say, by you.
The most dangerous thing they could do, they decided, was let you starve.
The humans had come to regard you as a ferocious, wild beast.
Soon the three factions became two. The Polynesian navigator died, and the others fought over his body. They battled for the “food.” The haole faction gave you the penis and testicles as an offering; the pure Hawaiians gave you the liver as theirs. The death of the single member of the Rarotongan faction meant that they had lost the only person with any experience navigating the open ocean, even if he had wildly exaggerated his abilities, but the other two factions didn’t mind. The wealthy researcher died the next day, as if he couldn’t stand to have been beaten by the navigator. You took your time gnawing on the usual parts. Now the canoe had no leader.
Still you remained at the prow, and the humans at the stern.
Two factions became one. Only three humans remained, all pure Hawaiians.
You had passed through the doldrums. But where were you? No one manned the rudder. You had drifted off course, yes, but in which direction? East? West? North? South?
Who knew?
November 11. You were starving.
The double canoe was still adrift.
Still being swept this way and that on the endless sea.
You sat at the prow, gazing, not up at the sky, but at the level horizon.
The Hawaiians caught a few fish every day. They gave you the innards. Tossed the offering to you at the prow.
You didn’t attack the humans. Why would you? You weren’t a wild, ferocious beast—you never had been. You would never have gone for them the way you did if they hadn’t tried to kill you, to turn you into food. So you sat there at the prow, starving.
Starving.
You were still starving on November 12, and on the thirteenth, and on the fourteenth. Your body felt oddly light. You couldn’t feel your weight. You were becoming invisible, you thought.
I’M INVISIBLE.
I’M AN INVISIBLE BITCH.
The fifteenth. You were almost dead. Dehydrated. You faded in and out of consciousness. But your eyes were open. The horizon. More horizon. More horizon. Finally, you became delirious. You thought of your family on Oahu. Back on that island on the twenty-first parallel north, the beagles. Four puppies. SO ADORABLE! SO CUTE! You hadn’t given birth to them yourself, true. But at that moment, in that muddled mental state, you floundered in the fantasy of being their mother. You were suckling them. Giving your teats to those four tiny pups to suck. MY DARLING CHILDREN! you shouted. FRUIT OF MY WOMB! You were growling. Uuuuurrr. And the mistaken memory was burning itself into your mind.
The sixteenth.
The seventeenth.
You felt the ocean. Yes, you could feel it. Surging beneath you. The canoe was your cradle. The Pacific Ocean occupies fully one third of the earth’s surface. You sensed its enormity. The double canoe had now drifted way off to the west of the planned route. It had passed south of the equator, but if it kept going in this direction, it would never reach Tahiti. If it kept going in this direction…it wouldn’t reach Tahiti or any of the Society Islands. It was heading for another island group. As it happened, another boat traveled regularly along more or less the same course. A cargo ship. You noticed it, way off on the horizon. AM I INVISIBLE? you asked yourself. You watched the silhouette as it grew progressively larger. AM I AN INVISIBLE BITCH?
NO, you told yourself. I’M NOT.
NO, I’M A MOTHER, you told yourself. Mistakenly.
The mistaken memory that had burned itself into your mind was what brought you to your feet, your teats aching with a mother’s love.
You stood up.
You sent out an SOS. Woof! Woof! Woof!
At three o’clock on November 17, 1975, local time, having crossed to the east of the international date line, the cargo ship picked you up. When you started barking at the prow, the sound brought the Hawaiians at the stern back to their senses—they, too, had been driven by extreme hunger into a state of delirium. For a moment they had simply gaped at the sight of hope moving across the ocean, there, right in front of them, and then they had started whistling, waving their arms. You didn’t wave, but you did wag your tail. The ship’s crew noticed you, and your thirty-eight-day nightmare voyage came to an end.
It was over. And where, Goodnight, were you now?
The cargo ship was on its way from the American mainland to a point on the fourteenth parallel south that was itself one of the United State’s unincorporated territories. The ship was headed for American Samoa. It would be taking on a large shipment of canned tuna on Tutuila, the main island in the archipelago. Approximately thirty percent of the American Samoan labor force worked in the canneries, packing and sending can after can of South Pacific tuna to the mainland. Shortly before the date changed from November 17 to November 18, the three men, now identified in the ship records as “survivors,” were taken ashore at Tutuila, after the ship docked in Pago Pago Harbor. The records noted, too, the presence of one dog, also a “survivor.” She was a German shepherd. You, Goodnight. You looked like a bag of bones. You were exhausted, both physically and spiritually. You were a dog of the fourteenth parallel south now, though it would take a few weeks for you to realize this. For the time being, you still had the illusion that you were adrift in that canoe on the wide, wide sea, exiled from Oahu island, exiled from your home on the twenty-first parallel north. But you weren’t. You had become a Tutuilan dog. A dog of the fourteenth parallel south. From the American state of Hawaii to the central island in the American territory of Samoa. The two islands were separated by a distance of 2,610 miles, and even so you had simply moved from one place to another within “America.”
Even after thirty-eight days adrift on the ocean.
The three survivors didn’t discuss the details of what they had endured. Those three pure Hawaiians would not divulge the inside story of their thirty-eight days at sea. They had violated various taboos. They had hallucinated. What were they supposed to say? And so, in the end…they said very little. It was a hellish trip, they said, and fell silent. One man added that he’d never get in a canoe again. Then they boarded a plane at Pago Pago International Airport and flew back to Hawaii.
They did. But not you.
They intentionally left you behind. The Hawaiians were terrified of you and insisted there was no need to take you back. They looked at you with horror in their eyes, as if you yourself were the embodiment of a taboo, and they abandoned you. You made no effort to follow them. Those three men who had lived until the end, gathered at the stern of the canoe, were not your masters. If anything, they had been serving you, because that was the ritual. Because the livers, the penises, the testicles had become the custom. And then, later, the innards of the fish they caught. You had no master, no new master appeared, and all you had to show for the horror you had endured was a mistaken memory. MY PUPPIES! FRUIT OF MY WOMB! And now here you were, and here you stayed, from November to December 1975.
The fourteenth parallel south. Tutuila Island.
No one took you in as a pet, and yet you were fed. Days passed. At first they kept you on the grounds of the government office. You still resembled a bag of bones. “Hey, dog! You’re alive! Eat!” the Samoans who worked for the local government called to you, tossing you scraps of taro and fish. More offerings…the same custom, you thought. You began to put on weight, but you were still living in a daze. You stood out on this island, a single pure German shepherd among a Tutuilan population made up entirely of mongrels. You had style. The local dogs felt it. And so they avoided you. You went out on the beach. You gazed at the ocean. At the horizon. The horizon, the horizon, more horizon. I’M ADRIFT, I’M LOST, THIS IS A CANOE IN THE FORM OF AN ISLAND. You felt it. Coconut crabs scuttled on the shore. Slowly you grew accustomed to the stench of rotting coconut. An island. You felt it. From the second week of December, you began to understand that the island was an island. THIS PLACE IS…AN ISLAND? You were incapable of understanding that this island lay on the fourteenth parallel south. The island had been home to an American naval base until 1951, and as a dog who had served as a sentry until just ten months earlier, you could sense that history, sense the lingering base-ness of the place like a scent buried just under the surface of the earth, and it confused you. There was too much rain here for it to be that other island on the twenty-first parallel north.
You took shelter from the rain in the shade of a banyan tree.
You were facing the road.
You watched the road.
You stared at it as you had stared at the horizon. Your eyes were blank. You weren’t looking at anything in particular.
The road had two sides: a far side and a near side. Your empty gaze lingered on three dogs standing on the far side. A father and his children. You were new to the island; so were they.
The three dogs were about to cross the road, from that side to this side. To cut across it at an angle. The road was narrow. It wasn’t a highway. But still it had two sides, a near side and a far side, and to get from one to the other one had to cross it, like a river.
Seconds before your listless gaze took in the car, your ears had picked up the roaring of its engine. Then the car itself entered your field of vision. It was an expensive car: a Jaguar. The first sports car on the island. The driver, and owner, was a thirty-seven-year-old man who had made it big in the United Arab Emirates. He had paid for the car in US dollars and brought it ashore the day before, and now he was driving it in as flamboyant a manner as possible, showing off. Right now, he was pushing seventy miles per hour. Driving like a nut. You saw what was coming. Those three dogs were about to be run over. The father and his children. Three dogs, just like you.
Suddenly you were up and running.
Your premonition was confirmed by a noise. A shift in the sound of the engine. A sudden slamming of the brakes.
Something was moving you. CH…you were thinking. CH…CHILDREN!
The father was hit. So was one of the puppies. The two dogs were thrown together six feet into the air. The third dog was dangling by his neck from your mouth. You were on the far side of the road; you had run, and you had made it. You had…you had saved the puppy. You had been taught how to survive on a battlefield. You had almost been sent to the front lines in Southeast Asia, to fight the Vietcong. You had been awarded two medals for your outstanding service as a military dog: a Purple Heart and a Silver Star. The puppy you saved was smaller than his dad, but at six months old he was heavy enough. But you had saved him. An instant later, he would have been dead meat.
You shuddered. Somewhere inside, Goodnight, you were barking your pride.
There on the far side of the road, you set the puppy on the ground.
He was less a puppy, really, than a young dog. He was an odd-looking thing. His coat was brown, but he had six thin black stripes on one side and a black spot on his haunch. He looked a bit like a guitar. He was paralyzed with fear by the sudden catastrophe. But then he started walking. Gingerly, unsteadily. His father’s body, and his brother’s, lay sprawled on the asphalt. The Jaguar was long gone, of course. The driver didn’t hang around to pay his respects to the two dogs he had killed. He didn’t come to apologize to the child he had orphaned. Soon enough the dogs’ owner and his bodyguard would track him down and beat him half to death. But that was still several hours off. The time for that hadn’t yet arrived.
Right now, it was just the young dog who looked like a guitar peering down at two dead bodies. Tragedy. Trickling blood. It had happened so suddenly, this…death. The shock of it. The guitar dog had been through this once before. Only this time around, the number of dead had increased—doubled. This time it wasn’t just one dog stretched out on the ground, it was one plus one. It was two.
He backed away.
He sensed that he was losing them. He was scared. Terrified. He was being pushed back to his earliest memory, his first experience of fear.
He stepped back off the road. Onto the ground.
And there you were. You, Goodnight, were waiting. As the guitar dog backed away step by step from the bodies, he pushed slowly up against your warm body. Your fur was short, and under it was your skin. It was warm. Soft. The young dog was afraid of things that were cold and hard. And there you were.
He collapsed into you. Bam, just like that. He cuddled desperately against you. He needed to feel safe…truly safe. He nuzzled for your teats. He had responded in the same way to his mother’s body, but this time the infantile impulse was even stronger. You had teats. Five pairs of them, ten in all. They had never produced milk. But as he moved from the first to the second, the third, the fourth…each teat he tried exuded warmth. Living warmth.
So he pressed desperately against you and kept sucking.
And you understood.
I’M A MOTHER.
You felt it.
I’M SUCKLING HIM. HE IS MY CHILD.
Destiny was doing its work, and you were confused, you were reconstructing your memory. You had given birth to this child with the guitar-like stripes—he was yours. That was how you remembered it now. And so you told him: GO ON, SUCK. You gazed down at this mongrel who looked nothing like you, a purebred German shepherd, and you told him: GO ON, YES, DRINK MY MILK. In 1957, on the American mainland, another dog in the same situation had spoken those same words. At the edge of a highway in Wisconsin, another German shepherd had told seven mongrel puppies, monstrosity embodied, the same thing. You had no idea of this. No knowledge of that fact, no ability to grasp the connection.
You understood. MY CHILD HAS COME TO ME.
This scene took place in December 1975. Soon 1975 turned into 1976, which turned into 1977, which turned into 1978, which turned into 1979. And in December 1979, we come to the other big event. The second of the two strikingly similar wars that took place in the second half of the twentieth century. In April 1975, Saigon fell. That’s what had happened in Southeast Asia. The capital of South Vietnam was taken. The United States gave up supporting South Vietnam. And so, that same year, the first of the two limited wars, the one that has come to be known as the Vietnam War, came to an end. And so we move to Central Asia. December 1979: the USSR sent its army into Afghanistan. It decided to initiate “direct intervention” in a nation torn by civil war. The Soviet Union’s own ten-year quagmire had begun.
The Afghan War.
The fuse blew on December 25, 1979.
Another limited war, another offshoot of the Cold War. Obviously.
War number two.
And so, dogs—mother and child, as you had now become, incognizant incarnations of the circularity of time—where were you, four years later?
Woof, woof, woof!
A bright red, gaudily painted truck barreled along the highway that headed west out of Peshawar, the old capital of the North-West Frontier Province. It was a mile out of the city, then two, three, four, five miles. A gate appeared. A checkpoint. This was not a national border. Through this gate lay the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Administered by the Pashtuns, the Tribal Areas were home to two and a half million people belonging to a number of tribes, each of which lived in accordance with its own Pashtunwali, an ethical code prescribing notions of warfare, loyalty, bravery, revenge, hospitality, the isolation of women, and so on. The land was populated by men with beards and veiled women. It was a region of steep hills whose major industries were the manufacture of weapons, smuggling, and farming illegal drugs. The truck drove into a village. It stopped. A dog leapt down from the bed. A second followed.
The first dog was about twenty-six inches tall with sinewy muscles and a fierce glitter in his eyes. His thick, short coat was brown, and he had a striking guitar-like pattern of stripes on one side. He had inherited the texture of his hair from his mother, a purebred Labrador retriever. His father’s father had been a purebred boxer. He himself belonged to no one breed, however. His blood was so mixed that all one could really say about him was that he was a mutt. Still, he had an air of tough, masculine power. Of unity…the odd sense of balance one feels when confronted with a monstrosity. Indeed, this dog had more than one mother. There was the mother who had given birth to him, and the mother who raised him. The dog who had jumped down out of the truck after him was his second mother.
She was a purebred German shepherd. She was twenty-two inches tall and already thirteen years old. Not that you could tell it from looking at her. Her coat had lost its luster, but that was about it. She was steady on her legs. She looked at the world calmly. She had dignity. And, above all, she had love.
The first dog was Guitar.
The second was Goodnight.
Two men got out of the truck. One was the Hellhound. Another was a Samoan. This was not, however, that Samoan—not the Hellhound’s bodyguard and right-hand man. He was a towering giant, six foot two, but he wasn’t that towering giant. He had the same face, but the tattoos on his arms, torso, and thighs were a little different. This Samoan was a devout Muslim who prayed five times each day without fail and spoke English with a Samoan accent and Urdu and Pashto with an English-Samoan accent. He had never once stepped into the boxing ring, but he was American Samoa’s top wrestler. He had even been invited to join a sumo stable in Japan. This Samoan was the number two, as it were, of that Samoan. The other Samoan’s alter ego. His twin brother. He was here in Central Asia serving as the Hellhound’s bodyguard, just as his older brother had. His older brother had stayed in Mexico to run the business while the boss was away. The Hellhound had expanded his operations into Asia. The summit in Samoa had been a success, and four years earlier the Hellhound had teamed up with the organization over here. Then, without any warning, the Asian organization’s boss died. It had happened two years earlier: one day, he got into a rage about some disagreement with a Chinese-Malaysian organization and he suffered a heart attack, and that was that. The Hellhound had pretty much taken charge of the dead boss’s territory—he had mollified the Chinese-Malaysians by helping them make some very profitable connections in the Nuevo Mundo. It was inevitable that the Samoan—the younger brother, of course—would become his local representative. And so the Hellhound had two right-hand men, both more or less identical in appearance: one to the west and one to the east of the Pacific Ocean. Two men. Two places. The past four years had seen other additions to the two theme as well. When the Hellhound succeeded in expanding his operations, La Familia’s Don sent him a second beautiful wife. A slim woman with very large breasts.
And there was more.
The Hellhound had a new dog as his alter ego. The second generation.
The exchange would be taking place at the village meeting place. A group of Pashtuns, none of them Pakistani citizens, was waiting there for the Hellhound and his associates. And for the dog. They were holding automatic rifles and a sample of the product. The latter wasn’t out in plain view, it was inside a metal briefcase. The dog would be able to evaluate the quality of the drugs through the metal. The Pashtuns hadn’t believed the rumors until they actually saw the dog do its stuff. They had lived all their lives in the hills, and the only dogs they were familiar with were strays and half-pets that they treated like strays. As far as they were concerned, dogs were unclean. It was as simple as that. But not this one. This dog had huge power over their livelihoods. When he growled, he might as well have been speaking in dog language: THIS IS INFERIOR, WE CAN’T BUY SHIT LIKE THIS. He had never once made a mistake. He noted the slightest decline in purity, whether it was an intentional effort to play fast and loose with the Hellhound and his group or not. He noted it and pointed it out.
In dog language.
They had learned their lesson. You couldn’t fool this dog’s nose.
The Hellhound greeted the Pashtuns. The Samoan greeted the Pashtuns. He was interpreting for the Hellhound. The men sat down in a circle in the meeting place, and the Samoan conveyed his boss’s words to the Pashtuns. An old Pashtun whose beard was going white nodded.
Guitar padded over to the briefcase and sniffed it.
Four years earlier, on Tutuila Island, the Hellhound had lost his first alter ego. Cabron, the mongrel the Don had given him as proof of his status as a member of La Familia. He had lost the dog, but not his mongrel seed. Cabron’s six-month-old son had survived. He had emerged unscathed from the accident that instantly killed both his father and his brother. The Hellhound hadn’t been on the scene of the accident. He had sent the dogs out on their own to get a bit of fresh air after the successful conclusion of the summit. “Go on, boys,” he said. “You were the stars of the show. Take a break.” He thought they might like to go to the beach and horse around, a father and his two sons doing the “dog family taking it easy in the South Seas” thing—what a scene, just like a postcard. But it had ended in tragedy. Fortunately, there had been a witness, so he was able to learn in detail what had happened. The Hellhound rushed to the scene and burst out wailing. At least one dog had been saved, though—that moved him profoundly. It was a miracle: according to the witness, a German shepherd that had been wandering around in the area had sprinted over and saved Cabron’s son in a manner that was all but suicidal. The German shepherd had recently been rescued. She’d come from Oahu, up in the North Pacific, and ended up adrift on the ocean…The puppy and the dog who saved him were still there at the scene of the accident—or rather just beside it, at the side of the road. The puppy, the son of now-dead Cabron, was pressed against his savior’s stomach, and the German shepherd was letting him suck on her teats. Oooaaoo, aaoooooh, the Hellhound moaned. The scene tugged almost violently at his heartstrings. It was a miracle, a true miracle. He was convinced of it. A dog who had drifted across the sea from Hawaii had saved the child of his alter ego, here in Samoa? Without realizing what he was doing, he was kneeling on the ground before the German shepherd, crossing himself. “I swear to you I’ll never forget this!” he cried. “So long as I live!” And he kept his promise.
On December 21, 1975, the German shepherd entered Mexico. She arrived in Mexico City and became a dog of the twentieth parallel north. Yes, her: Goodnight.
Finally she had left that enormous space called “America.”
Two months and ten days had passed since she had stopped being a dog of the twenty-first parallel north.
And then there was the other dog, Cabron’s child, who had also returned alive to Mexico City. Yes, Guitar.
Guitar knew. He understood that Goodnight was his second mother.
And the Hellhound knew. He understood that he should keep the two dogs together, treat them as mother and son.
Guitar had lost his true mother, lost his father, and acquired a second mother. There on a roadside on Tutuila Island he had regressed into an infantile state, lost all memory of his first six months. He believed his second mother had suckled him, and she, too, believed that he was her true child, the true fruit of her womb. It had seemed unlikely, given the shocks Guitar had endured—two sudden deaths in just six months—that the profound psychological wounds he had suffered would ever heal, but they did. The love of mother number two, pure and overflowing, enabled him to forget those two traumas. Two minus two equals zero. At the same time, Guitar never did forget the special ability he had learned. That ability, that power, had been pounded into him, and he clung to it. It was his father who taught him that, his father Cabron—no longer of this world, no longer present even in Guitar’s memory—who had himself acquired the ability as a sort of trick only because of his fixation on a certain bitch. The bitch, a Labrador retriever who belonged to the Mexican Federal Police, and whose talents as a drug-sniffing dog were without peer. How sad to think of that poor bitch, her life snuffed out on the first Sabbath of August 1975, then erased as well from Guitar’s memory. And yet that power of hers lived on.
Guitar didn’t just keep this power, he honed it. There was no surprise in that. All sorts of drugs—marijuana, heroine, cocaine, speed, and various new products—were constantly being carted into the estate and then whisked back out. Guitar smelled them all as a matter of course. And identified them. Because the custom was the same at home: Guitar would smell the drugs, tell the pure from the impure, and when he was right his master would praise him.
His master. The Hellhound.
So Guitar became two. The Hellhound’s second alter ego. Cabron’s son, a drug-sniffing dog like his father. His talent in this department was an undeniable sign of his twoness. And as it happened, two was better than one—in very little time, he had surpassed his father. Indeed, he even surpassed his true mother. 1976. Guitar was the Hellhound’s alter ego, and the Hellhound was Guitar’s alter ego.
The Hellhound’s business was growing. First, things started happening with his associates. The Asian organization, whose boss the younger of the Samoan twins was still serving as a “secretary,” was active across Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan. Its operations were based in the so-called “Islamic world.” But of course not all Islamic countries were brothers. Far from it. Take Pakistan, for instance. Pakistan’s western border ran up against Afghanistan. The line had been drawn by the British in 1893, splitting the traditional homeland of the Pashtuns in two. The British had completely ignored the history and distribution of local ethnic groups. So Afghanistan insisted that the rest of the Pashtun area, in Pakistan, was really Afghan territory as well, and this led to all kinds of disputes. Pakistan was first established—after its independence from Britain—in 1947, and within two years the countries had broken off diplomatic relations. The fact that both nations were Islamic didn’t help anything. Something else thawed the ice, though: in 1973, Afghanistan ended its monarchy and emerged as the Republic of Afghanistan.
Early on, the new republic’s foreign policy aligned closely with the USS.R, but within two years it began drifting away. At the time the international situation was very complex. The Cold War, between the USSR and the US, was playing itself out. At the same time, relations had grown tense between the USSR and China. In 1969, these two states engaged in armed conflict. China and India were enemies. They fought in the Himalayas in 1962. India and Pakistan were in a state of constant tension, and in 1971 the third Indo-Pakistani War broke out, leading to Pakistan’s defeat—for the third time. Having India as a common enemy brought China and Pakistan together. Since Afghanistan had been moving toward the USSR, the US decided it would be good strategy to get in with Pakistan. Pakistan, which was now friendly with both China and the US, necessarily came to view the USSR as an enemy. Then, in 1976, as the Republic of Afghanistan distanced itself from the USSR, the president reached out to the prime minister of Pakistan to explore the possibility of improving relations. He ended the border dispute—the argument over the line dividing the Pashtuns’ lands, that is. From that point on, Afghanistan and Pakistan began having all sorts of interactions. The most visible were those between the president and the prime minister; the least visible were those related to the drug trade. Poppy fields and purification plants across Afghanistan were “opened” to the population east of the national border. All at once. Huge quantities of high-quality hashish started flooding across as well. Previously the largest drug-producing region in Asia had been the so-called Golden Triangle on the border of Burma, Thailand, and Laos. The situation was different now. The criminal center, as it were, had shifted from Southeast Asia to Central Asia. And the organization the Hellhound had become tied up with was getting in on the game. In 1976 alone, the traffic didn’t merely double—and even that would have been incredible—it quadrupled. Bam, just like that. And so, again, in 1976, Guitar was the Hellhound’s alter ego, and the Hellhound was Guitar’s alter ego.
Guitar checked twice as much drugs, four times as much drugs. He took all the experience he’d accumulated so far and multiplied it by two, then multiplied it by two again. He became the best drug-sniffing dog the world had ever known.
Then in 1977, the boss of the Asian organization suddenly passed away, and the Hellhound took over the organization’s territory. The younger of the two Samoan twins became his local representative—in essence, he had been promoted, becoming the organization’s next Muslim boss. And so the Hellhound had two Samoan right-hand men: one to the west and one to the east of the Pacific Ocean. Two places, two men. The Hellhound supervised the two regions with equal care. In that one year, he made more than ten trips among Mexico City, Karachi, and Islamabad.
As did his alter ego.
Guitar, that is, flying with his master.
You, Guitar.
ME?
That’s right—you turned one, and then two, and in 1978 you turned three, and in 1979 you turned four. Isn’t that right?
THAT’S RIGHT.
Your mother accompanied you on those trips across the Pacific, from that side to this side and back again. Your alter ego, the Hellhound, was a true dogman. He understood how your mother felt (he understood her feelings as a dog, as a dog who was also a mother), so he never separated you. The Hellhound, who was your alter ego and also your master, all but worshipped your mother, Goodnight. She was his Madonna. And so there you were. You and your mother, flying over the Pacific, from this side to that side and back again—and again, and again. Your mother told you, didn’t she? I KNOW THE SIZE OF THIS OCEAN, she said. I HAVE FELT THE TRUE IMMENSITY OF THIS OCEAN. She spoke the truth. In the entire history of the twentieth century, there was only one dog who, having survived an inconceivably hellish period adrift on its waters, ever grasped the vast reality of the Pacific Ocean itself.
Listen, Guitar, in all humility.
OF COURSE.
Do you promise?
Woof! you bark.
And so you and your mother became dogs of both sides of the Pacific. Your sense of smell, Guitar, and your ability to use it to sniff out and appraise drugs, grew more sensitive with every day you spent on the front lines, where deals were struck and where the drugs were produced, and more sensitive with every year. In 1978, a coup d’état toppled the anti-Soviet Republic of Afghanistan and a new communist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was created in its place. This political change did surprisingly little damage to your alter ego’s affairs. Why? Because the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan went overboard. For example, the previous flag had been heavy on green, the color of Islam, but now, all of a sudden, it was changed to a solid field of red, the symbol of communism. It was a bit too much. This “democratic republic” started oppressing antigovernment elements. Anticommunist members of the previous government, intellectuals, religious leaders—huge numbers were thrown in jail, executed. This was way too much. Armed rebellion broke out all over Afghanistan. The rebels declared that they were engaged in an Islamic jihad. They referred to themselves as mujahideen. Often these antigovernment organizations established their bases in neighboring countries…in Pakistan, say. And often they funded their activities with drug production and smuggling. As a result, from 1978 to 1979 your master doubled the quantity he trafficked once again. The mujahideen organizations began using him to funnel drugs from all over Afghanistan out of the country.
You gained twice as much experience as the year before. Two times two times two.
Day by day, month by month, the front lines, the territory where you worked, shifted further to the west, toward Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.
And at last, Guitar, we come to the fourth year. Exactly four years had passed. December 1979. Four years since you and Goodnight had become mother and child. You and your mother, and of course your alter ego, the Hellhound, and the alter ego of the Hellhound’s right-hand man in Mexico, the younger of the two Samoan twins, left the North-West Frontier Province to come even further west, to the FATA. To the region the Pashtuns administered themselves. You would never forget this land. You would never forget the FATA’s hilly terrain.
Because this was where your mother would die.
Goodnight.
Listen. Looking back, you can see how fickle your mother’s fate had been. In 1967, she had been denied the chance to go and fight on the battlefields of the Indochina peninsula with her brother DED. She played no role in the Vietnam War. Southeast Asia had nothing to do with her life. Now, in 1979, here you both were in Central Asia. You and your mother were standing in the Pashtuns’ traditional homeland. A line just like the one that had split Vietnam into North and South had divided the Pashtuns. You and your mother were on the front lines. Your mother was about to be swept up in the Afghan Wars.
To die in the Afghan Wars.
A little more Afghan political history. The few months leading up to December 1979. All of Afghanistan had plunged into civil war. The confusion the mujahideen had bred was exacerbated by power struggles within the communist government itself. The president placed great faith in the Soviet Union, but the second in command—the deputy prime minister—was more of a nationalist. A nationalist communist. He was focused on the potential negative effects of reforms carried out too suddenly and decided it would be advisable to loosen restrictions on religious freedom—restrictions, that is, that had been placed on Afghanistan’s traditional, local forms of Islam. Hoping to establish Afghanistan’s independence from the Soviet Union, he secretly initiated communications with the United States Embassy in Kabul. The president, working with members of the Soviet intelligence team, plotted to assassinate him. The plot was put in action on September 14, but the deputy prime minister struck back with help from the Afghan army and intelligence agency. The president was taken prisoner. On September 16, his resignation was announced, and the deputy prime minister became the president. A few days later, the former president was “taken care of.” And so the elimination of the pro-Soviet faction within the government began.
A purge.
Yet another purge.
And once again, adrift from the USSR.
Far from ending the civil war, this actually worsened it. December 1979. You, Guitar, were on the Pakistan side of the Pashtun homeland. You had come with your mother and your alter ego and your alter ego’s bodyguard’s alter ego. A first transaction took place, then a second. On December 25, the Soviet army moved south at a number of different points over the twelve-hundred-mile border with Afghanistan. It invaded Afghanistan’s territory. This was actually the start of the Afghan War, although it took some time for that information to radiate around the country. That same day, you participated in a third transaction. In the days leading up to the war, a few different mujahideen organizations had hosted your master. On December 27, Soviet special forces attacked the Tajbeg Presidential Palace in Kabul. The Afghan president was killed. The USSR immediately established a puppet government. It installed a new leader to replace the old one. On the afternoon of December 29, Kabul fell. Antigovernment forces had been laying their own plans since before the USSR began its “direct intervention,” and the Soviet occupation gave them, in effect, the go sign. At the same time, Guitar, you watched as your master entered into negotiations with a powerful commandant from a mujahideen group, a member of the Ghilzai tribe—also part of the Pashtun confederacy. That was a very busy day. The commandant kept getting calls on his radio. In the end, he and your master decided to arrange another meeting in a remote region even further west in the FATA, almost on the border with Afghanistan. There were four opium purification factories there, disguised as ordinary brick houses, belonging to the commandant. And so the next evening, that’s where you were. Your mother too. And your master—your alter ego. The Samoan had some business to take care of and hadn’t come. He had gone to a smuggling base near Peshawar the day before and would be joining up with you again the next day.
So the Hellhound, your master and alter ego, had no bodyguard.
And so it happened.
Go on, you tell it.
ME?
Sure.
I SAW IT.
You saw it?
I SAW IT. I SAW MY MOTHER DIE. SAW THAT VILLAGE ON THE BORDER BECOME THE PLACE WHERE MY MOTHER DIED. I SAW IT.
What did you see first?
A…CAR.
That’s right. It was a truck, actually, with a canvas tarp. It arrived that evening in the village near the western border of the FATA. That evening—the evening of December 30, 1979. The word TOYOTA was printed on the back. Not that you could read it.
I COULDN’T READ IT. BUT I HATED IT.
You hated the Toyota?
YES.
As well you should have. Because, Guitar, the man who would shoot your mother was soon to emerge from it. At first, everyone assumed it was just another transport truck. They thought it was one of theirs. As a matter of fact, the truck itself was being used by the commandant of the mujahideen organization your master was currently negotiating with. It was supposed to be full of freshly harvested poppy fruit and hashish. The commandant wanted to show your master, the Hellhound, what they could produce. You were going to be part of that scene too. You would smell the raw materials, then accompany them to the factory, where you would smell the finished products…
I NEVER GOT TO DO ANYTHING.
No, you didn’t.
PEOPLE JUMPED OUT OF THE TRUCK. THEY HAD GUNS.
Soviet-made guns. Kalashnikovs. About a dozen men leapt out of the canvas-covered back of the truck, each one carrying a Kalashnikov. They were Pashtuns, but they weren’t from this area. Neither were they part of the organization the commandant ran, with this village as one of his bases. They were Pashtuns in the Afghan army, obeying top-secret orders from the new government—a government that was, of course, no more than a Soviet puppet. The USSR believed it was essential to maintain stability in Afghanistan, now that it had taken control, and that meant thoroughly clamping down on the movements of all antigovernment forces. It meant crushing the mujahideen. Crushing the jihad. They had a list. Twenty-three leading figures in four organizations were named. The third from the top was the commandant. The list included his true name and seven aliases.
SO THAT WAS IT?
That was it.
THAT’S WHY THEY CAME?
That’s why they came. And they came quickly. They had been ordered to execute their man before the new year. Ordered by the new government—by those who stood behind the new government. These Pashtuns, members of the Afghan government’s army, had formed an assassination squad, and then, on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, they had seized that Toyota you hated. And now here they were, in the village.
I SAW THEM. THEY HAD GUNS.
That’s right. And whom were they aiming them at? The commandant, standing dumbstruck, taken completely by surprise…yes, the commandant of the mujahideen organization. But not only him. Also your master.
AND ME.
And your mother.
YES! MY MOTHER! MY MOTHER!
And who protected the Hellhound at that crucial instant, in the absence of his bodyguard? Your mother. Who, if you could split that first second into a hundred fleeting snippets of time, was the first to respond to the eruption from the truck of that group armed with Kalashnikovs? Your mother. Goodnight. A bitch with an eight-year career as a military dog behind her, and actual battle experience. A dog who had successfully seen missions to a successful conclusion even as shells rained down around her. Yes, your mother—the German shepherd who was your mother—was quicker to see what was happening, moved faster than anyone into combat mode. Just as you could instantly distinguish all sorts of drugs by smelling them, so your mother instantaneously recognized the scent of war. No sooner had she detected it in the air than she was acting, reacting, pure reflex. Your mother gave no thought to her age. She threw herself courageously at those men, went on the attack. She leapt at the Kalashnikov group, one man after the other, to take them down. There were no rules. She made it up as she went along.
ONE MAN DOWN!
You saw it.
ANOTHER MAN DOWN!
You saw it.
BUT…BUT…BUT!
You barked. And then your alter ego barked. The Hellhound was shouting. He realized what was happening, saw it unfolding in slow motion before him. Saw who had stepped up to protect him. He understood. He understood her bravery as she flew in the face of all those guns. He was watching it happen. She flew at the Afghan government’s troop of assassins, she threw herself at them, she leapt at them, she was shot. A lurid spray of red blood burst from one of her shoulders, she was thrown almost two feet, she crumpled to the ground. She got up. Once again, she leapt. Once again, she was shot. But she didn’t stop. And then one of the assassins shot another of the assassins. And then…and then.
The Hellhound was shouting.
And you were shouting.
Aaaaah! you both shouted.
Your mother died, and the commandant of the mujahideen organization didn’t die, and neither did the Hellhound. The Kalashnikov attackers’ surprise attack had failed. Because there was a dog, and the dog had confused them, gotten the better of them—they had missed their chance at carrying out the assassination. Finally, the commandant’s men responded. Seven minutes later the men with the Kalashnikovs had been killed. Every last one. But…but your mother was gone and wouldn’t be coming back.
She had died.
Even her corpse had dignity.
This, Guitar, was the second to last turning point in your destiny. Yes, because things were changing. Even before you realized it, Guitar, your alter ego—your second self—was switching from one track to another, changing the course of destiny. The Hellhound was kneeling before Goodnight’s corpse. Kneeling low, almost bowing, crossing himself. You’d seen him do this once before. The Hellhound was moaning. Oooaaoo, aaoooooh. I swear…I swear I’ll never forget this…the second time you’ve risked your life…I’ll never forget! he cried. I swear on my life, I’ll get them for this!
A bolt of spiritual lightning slammed through the Hellhound’s body.
1980. The Hellhound would get his revenge. What did that mean? It meant he had declared war on the Afghan government’s army and on the new Afghan government that supported the army, and on the Soviet Union that stood behind them both. The Hellhound was himself a mujahideen now. He abandoned his Catholic faith and recited the Shahada before witnesses, thereby officially converting to Islam. The choice came naturally. He had been given a sign. My dog lay down her life to protect me—how could I not honor her by…how could I…how could I! So he pressed the switch, changed course. He gave up being a luchador. He was too old now anyway. It was too much of a drain now, getting up there in the ring. But he still needed a second face, needed to serve the people somehow, or he couldn’t deal with the moral dilemma that faced him. And so, with absolutely perfect timing, ever so easily, the Hellhound converted. He was reborn. Devoting himself to jihad as a member of the mujahideen was good. That was it: for the benefit of the Afghan people, he would “Destroy the Soviet Union!” as he cried in his Mexican Spanish–accented Pashto, and this would make up for the negative effect of his immoral activities. This would balance out the evil of his work as a criminal. An outer face and an inner face. And so, even as he managed the cartel, he trafficked drugs from Afghanistan on a global scale and used the profits to support mujahideen organizations and often went out onto the battlefields himself.
As did you, Guitar.
Just as your alter ego’s destiny had changed, so had yours. Naturally, you accompanied the Hellhound onto the battlefields. You yourself desired this. You had seen it—seen your mother, Goodnight, doing her stuff as a military dog, putting up a fight. Fighting to the death. The sight of her valiance was seared into your mind: how she had hurled herself at the attackers without flinching and struggled against them, bitten them, killed them. The image was there, indelible. SHE SHOWED ME WHAT TO DO! you thought. MY MOTHER DIED TO SHOW ME!
I’LL FIGHT!
And so, in 1980, you lived a new life, acted out a new role, as a mujahideen military dog. You went into battle in Afghanistan. Like your alter ego, you possessed two faces. An outer face and an inner face. You were a drug-sniffing dog and a military dog.
It was a huge transformation.
But this was still only the second to the last.
You, dogs, dogs whose bloodlines were channeled by the twentieth century, by a century of war, a century of military dogs, you who were scattered over the face of the earth, increasing your numbers, where, in the end, would the branches of your great family tree converge?
What was your destiny?
The Afghan War devolved into a quagmire. For the USSR. All sorts of miscalculations were made, right from the start. Kabul had immediately been brought under control, and yet people refused to recognize the Soviet-backed puppet government. Any number of rebellions and riots broke out. The situation remained grave. Far from being worn down, the mujahideen organizations grew stronger by the day, month after month, year after year. New anti-Soviet factions kept popping up, and by spring 1981 the USSR had surpassed what was supposed to be the upper limit of one hundred thousand soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. This was all a miscalculation, of course. They still couldn’t crush the rebellions. They had bungled it.
In 1981, efforts to suppress the jihad made no headway.
No headway was made in 1982, either.
Afghanistan could not be kept stable. The country was being destroyed. The miscalculations continued.
Clearly this war (this “conflict,” from the Soviet perspective) was going to be long. Clearly it was going to be a quagmire.
As the Afghan War continued, the Soviet Union itself began undergoing changes. The most obvious was the drama that surrounded the change in leadership. It wasn’t a coup. On November 10, 1982, Leonid Brezhnev (General Secretary of the Communist Party, Marshal of the Soviet Union, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet) died. He was seventy-six and died of illness. He was succeeded as general secretary by Yuri Andropov, who had previously served for fifteen years as the director of the KGB. Andropov was sixty-eight. He called on the resources of his old haunt in order to solidify his grasp on power. He named the chairman of the KGB, a confidant, as interior minister and named the Azerbaijan KGB chief as deputy premier. He tried, in other words, to remove everyone in the Brezhnev faction from government. And his reliance on the KGB didn’t stop with personnel matters of this sort—he realized its potential usefulness in bringing all sorts of problems under control. If General Secretary Andropov said “Do it!” every bureau in the KGB snapped into action. For instance, it was occasionally possible to dilute the criticisms that were being leveled against the USSR and that had been growing shrill in the wake of its invasion of Afghanistan, by spreading information about arms reductions and the abolition of nuclear weapons, and it was the job of the KGB First Chief Directorate, which handled everything relating to foreign operations and intelligence, to spread (quietly) this information (or misinformation). The First Chief Directorate was made up of ten departments that handled espionage operations in various geographical regions. The third department, for instance, was in charge of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia; the sixth department was in charge of China, Vietnam, and North Korea; and so on. Andropov fully exploited the potential of these ten departments and did so by granting himself vast authority of a sort that would never have been permitted when Brezhnev was general secretary. Naturally, he also decided to use the KGB to improve—from the Soviet perspective—the situation in Afghanistan. And so it came about that they were sent in. It happened in summer 1983: the most highly classified unit under the administration of KGB Border Guard Headquarters set foot on Afghan soil. It was known by the code name “S,” or sometimes “Department S.” On June 16, Andropov had been chosen as the new Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, so he now had control over everything—the party, the KBG, and the army. He had climbed his way to the top both in name and in fact, and was both the leader of and the most powerful person in the entire Soviet Union. This was how “S” got permission to carry out independent operations, free from army supervision—an unprecedented level of authority. “S” had no need to be in contact with the Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, despite the fact that the GRU oversaw all the special forces in the USSR.
“S” was in charge of all special operations within the KGB. The KGB Border Guards as a whole had more combat experience than any of the Soviet Union’s other military organizations, having been active since the Great Patriotic War (World War II). And within the Border Guards, “S” was special. It specialized in unconventional warfare.
“S” rapidly adapted itself to the battle against the mujahideen.
Its fighters made use of the difficult, hilly terrain. They learned how to counter the special tactics of the Afghan jihadists.
Even then “S” hadn’t realized its full potential. The Soviet Union itself was still changing. The drama surrounding its leadership continued. On February 9, 1984, General Secretary Andropov suddenly passed away after fifteen months in office. His successor was Konstantin Chernenko, a man who had been born, astonishingly enough, in 1911. He was way too old to be doing this. The only reason he could take over from Andropov was that he had been a loyal follower and right-hand man to Brezhnev. The old faction Andropov had struggled to crush was back. General Secretary Chernenko died on March 10, 1985, however, also of sickness.
Too old.
“S” found its fortunes changing, then changing again. If Andropov had remained general secretary, “S” might have managed to turn the quagmire of the Afghan War into something closer to a pond, at least, with relatively clear waters. “S” probably could have calmed the situation. But that wasn’t what happened. Because the Soviet leaders kept popping in and out so fast, one after the other. General Secretary Brezhnev was replaced by General Secretary Andropov, General Secretary Andropov was replaced by General Secretary Chernenko. Three deaths from sickness, one sudden. But these three men weren’t the only ones to have an effect on the fortunes of “S.” The unit—the most highly guarded secret at KGB Border Guard Headquarters—had been created by the man who preceded General Secretary Brezhnev. The previous general secretary…except that he wasn’t general secretary. Until April 1966, the party had put a moratorium on the use of this title, going instead with “first secretary”—a title that Brezhnev had used for his first year and a half in the position. First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Why had “general secretary” been abandoned? Because that was the title Stalin had used. And who had decided to abandon the title? Which forces? Forces critical of Stalin, obviously. Who was first secretary before First Secretary Brezhnev? The man who had declared that Stalin was a despot. The man who had delivered a searing critique of Stalin in 1956 in a closed session at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party. Nikita Khrushchev.
The man Red China’s leader, Mao Zedong, hated.
Khrushchev had had a dream. He dreamed of a day—sometime, somewhere—when the Cold War would turn hot. Perhaps the magma would come spurting up in the form of a proxy war somewhere in the Third World. And just imagine how cool it would be if, when that day came, the USSR could dispatch to the front lines of that regional conflict a unit so unlike any other that it would take people’s breath away—imagine the value that would have as propaganda! Incomparable! He had that dream. And so he gave the order, almost as a joke. And when it reached the end of the long chain of command, having made its way through that rigid bureaucratic system, the order was rigorously enacted. All the romance of the dream died, and it was turned into something utterly pragmatic and real. Two former communist space dogs were the raw material from which the new reality was fashioned. Two Soviet heroes. A male dog named Belka and a bitch named Strelka.
It had all started with them.
And it was continuing with them.
In 1982. A dog and a bitch, heirs to the same names.
And in 1983.
And in 1984.
And in 1985.
Their line continued, unbroken.
A unit of killers who would fight the anticapitalist war, training in the very real Arctic.
In short, “S” had its origins in Khrushchev’s dream. Years later, reality had chipped its way through the shell of that dream, picked at the edges of the hole, and then shaken the last pieces off so that it stood fully revealed, a monstrous “unit” with a life of its own. But Brezhnev had a memory. He had been part of the group that brought Khrushchev down. He himself had pushed Khrushchev out in October 1964 and taken his place as first secretary. He wanted to expunge all trace of Khrushchev’s administration. And so he offered a reappraisal of Stalin’s legacy and changed his title from “first secretary” to “general secretary.” And so, in April 1966, General Secretary Brezhnev was born. And so, years later, when the situation in Afghanistan became impossible, Brezhnev chose not to call on “S” to make things right. The KGB suggested bringing “S” in, but Brezhnev refused. The whole idea…it sort of had that Khrushchev smell to it.
Then Andropov became general secretary, and he used “S.”
But he died.
Then Chernenko became general secretary, and as an old geezer who had once been the late Brezhnev’s right-hand man, he thought this whole “S” thing stank of Khrushchev. He couldn’t pinpoint the source of the effluvium because he was so old, his sense of smell going. But he intuited it. Brezhnev had always made a point of that, back when he’d been boss. Don’t give Khrushchev anything. Not a thimbleful of cat food.
Chernenko steered clear of “S.”
In the end, “S” only had seven months to show what it could do. It never had a chance to play a significant role in the first half of the Afghan War.
Only a little more than seven months. A very short time.
And yet, even so, something happened.
An epoch-making event. For dogs.
In the second week of December 1983, “S” was in a valley amidst the hills of northeastern Afghanistan, having been led there by a general known as the Director—the Director of Department S. In this area the main road to the capital was subject to frequent targeted attacks from a mujahideen organization hoping to steal Soviet supplies. “S” launched a targeted attack of its own against the mujahideen organization, which excelled in guerrilla techniques. “S” used the same sort of guerrilla techniques. But while the jihadists really were guerrilla fighters—in the sense that they were “irregulars”—“S” was a regular army unit. The difference between the two was enormous in terms of their structures for communicating orders, their discipline, and the refinement of their land war tactics. “S” was a regular guerrilla unit, so to speak. Its fighters were consummate professionals, but they conducted only surprise and sneak attacks. The mujahideen had no idea the Soviet army had units like this, so “S” had no trouble penetrating their defenses. “S” didn’t rely on MiG fighters, after all, and didn’t ride in on T-64 tanks, and didn’t even send in attack helicopters. It had some auto-cannons to intimidate the enemy, but heavy firearms were not its main weapons. It used another kind of weapon.
Military dogs.
The unit’s special nature allowed it to catch the mujahideen off guard.
Ever so easily. From behind.
And then it happened.
The scene was set. Ninety-one men lying on the ground. Ninety-one bodies, that is. Dead. Eighty-eight were mujahideen. Former jihadists. Their weapons had not been particularly up-to-date. They had a rocket launcher, but that was their only heavy firearm. Other than that it was all automatic rifles and pistols for self-protection. A few of the men had even had matchlocks. Most of the mujahideen were Pashtuns. Farther north there were armed groups made up largely of Tajiks, but in this more rugged region the bands tended to be composed of Pashtuns, and of Pashtuns known for their Islamic fundamentalism. There was one casualty among the mujahideen who was not a Pashtun, however. One among eighty-eight. He was a Mexican. He had a beard, and his blondish mestizo hair had been dyed black. His once-brawny physique had no strength in it now, all his life having flowed out onto the sand around him.
The wind sighed pointlessly over the desolate valley.
Apart from that, it was quiet.
And then you growled.
You, Guitar. The Mexican lay at your feet, two cartridge belts slung across his chest, dressed in the manner of the Muslims of this particular region. He was your master. He was dead. Your master, your alter ego, your second self, the Hellhound. He was dead.
You were alive.
The single survivor on the mujahideen side.
You were surrounded.
By countless dogs. Military dogs belonging to “S.” Four strategic divisions, subset of “S,” were operating together that day, in that place. Each one was composed of four humans and twelve dogs. So there were, in fact, forty-eight dogs in all. That was the exact number, though you couldn’t count them. There should have been sixteen people, but in fact there were only thirteen. The other three were bodies. Corpses. You had killed them.
You had taken them down, trying to protect your master.
You, a mongrel. You had watched your mother, Goodnight, and then…all on your own, you had learned, turned yourself into a military dog. You had guarded him as best you could.
But your master died.
Your second self died.
You were surrounded. Because you were the only survivor. The humans were standing on the outskirts of the circle, and all you could see were dogs.
You didn’t bark.
You growled.
The dogs watched you.
Then suddenly one barked. Woof!
Another barked. Woof!
And another. Woof!
Woof!
Woof!
Woof!
You stopped growling, though you didn’t realize it. You were overwhelmed. Swept up in the phenomenon that had suddenly blossomed around you. For a moment you felt as if you were listening to a chorus. You were enclosed, and the enclosure was singing. Not loudly—the melody was, if anything, tranquility itself. So it seemed to you. Unable to look your enemy in the eye, because the enemy was all around you, three hundred sixty degrees, you lowered your gaze, stared down at your feet. That, you felt, was all you could do. The Hellhound was dead. Yeah, I’m dead, he was saying to you. YOU…YOU’RE DEAD? YOU’RE MY ALTER EGO, AND YOU’RE DEAD? And you listened to the song. All around you, three hundred sixty degrees of singing.
Woof!
Woof!
Woof!
Woof!
Woof!
You raised your eyes again.
You didn’t growl. You barked. Woof!
Forty-eight dogs fell silent. Then one stepped toward you. A male. A fairly large dog. His stride was dignified, leisurely.
He stood in front of you.
This is it, Guitar. This is the moment. This is the place where your destiny changes course again, one last time. Your alter ego was gone, and now only one being in the entire world had the right to flip the switch, to turn your destiny from one track to the other, and that was you. You. Two had become one. You felt a bolt of spiritual lightning slam through your body. You felt a sign. But that sign wouldn’t turn you into a devout Christian or a devout Muslim. You…you would be a dog. That was all. The dog standing in front of you spoke to you, first with his eyes, and then by speaking to you.
ARE YOU A MONGREL? he asked. A DOG WHO MONGRELIZES?
I’M ME, you answered. I’M ONE.
YOU WANT TO LIVE?
TO LIVE…YES, I’LL LIVE! I’LL NEVER DIE!
COME, THEN.
AM I A PRISONER?
NO.
NO?
YOU’VE COME.
I HAVE?
YOU CAME TO US. SO WE CAME TO GET YOU.
You shuddered when you heard those words, and then you pressed the switch. You would make the great change.
The dogs spoke among themselves in dog language; the humans spoke Russian. A man in camouflage with no epaulettes was making a report over the radio. He was asking for a truck to come get them, and soon a six-wheel-drive vehicle arrived on the scene. The scene changed: now there were forty-eight dogs plus one, ninety-one bodies, thirteen people, and a six-wheel truck—an “S” rapid-deployment vehicle—carrying heavy machine guns and mortars. An officer dressed in an ordinary army uniform hopped out. The wind was still whipping wildly over the valley. The man who had spoken Russian over the radio had conveyed the dogs’ wishes, not his own, and the officer who had come was neither a company nor a battalion commander; he was a general. He was the man known as the Director.
The thirteen living men saluted the general crisply with one motion.
As he approached, the circle of dogs, the enclosure, broke.
“You’ve accepted him?” the general asked.
Two dogs stood before the general within the ring of “S” dogs: the mujahideen survivor and the male dog who had taken up a position opposite him. The general had addressed the latter. His gaze, however, was fixed on the survivor.
Woof! said the male dog.
“All right, then, Belka,” said the general. “He looks a bit rough around the edges, but you think it’d be a waste to kill him, huh? He’s got what it takes, I guess…he was born with it. Or maybe he’s got some amazing story too? I bet he does. You, boy, here in Afghanistan, serving the mujahideen.” The general was addressing the new dog now. “I believe it. Belka accepted you. You were chosen. Your blood is good enough, you can join the line. You are accepted. Come.”
That’s what happened on the battlefields of Afghanistan in the second week of December 1983.
An epoch-making event in dog history.
Woof, woof, woof, woof!
The Afghan War continued, but “S” pulled out. For the time being, that is. Because General Secretary Chernenko had stripped it of much of its authority, steered clear of it. Then, in March 1985, General Secretary Chernenko himself pulled out—of Soviet politics, of the world. And the fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen as the next general secretary. Gorbachev was much, much younger than his predecessor, Chernenko, and than Chernenko’s predecessor Andropov, and than Andropov’s predecessor Brezhnev. Party personnel at other levels began changing too, as one generation gave way to the next.
General Secretary Gorbachev insisted that reform was necessary.
Under General Secretary Gorbachev, the Communist Party leadership announced one new policy after the next.
He made perestroika his slogan. “Restructuring.”
The Afghan War continued. It wasn’t over yet. Of course not. It was a ten-year quagmire, after all.
In July 1986, Gorbachev declared in a speech that he “would equate the word perestroika with revolution.” He stated explicitly that he was aiming to reform the USSR fundamentally. But how could this be? Hadn’t the Soviet leadership always regarded as absolutes the bourgeois revolution of February 1917 and the socialist revolution in October the same year? So there were those who voiced their doubts. And there were others who had doubts but kept them to themselves, became confused. And there were those who declared, smiles playing on their faces, that only the revolutions of 1917 could ever have real meaning for the homeland.
Those, for instance, who belonged to “S.” The humans, of course, not the dogs.
The general of “S,” the Director, had pounded this into their heads.
The Director himself had taught them how to fight without weapons, how to kill without a sound, how to survive. And he had filled their minds with rigid, unyielding ideas. We will not allow the counter-revolutionaries to take control; we must defend the achievements of socialism at home and abroad; Marxism-Leninism alone is strong, legitimate. If you can’t be a true believer, you might as well be a priest. Indeed, when new members were inducted into “S” they were required to sign a document pledging their loyalty to the unit—any member who betrayed the unit would be killed. So even if they had wanted to, it would have been impossible for anyone to start having doubts about their ideology—to abandon their faith in the Revolution—and go back to the Russian Orthodox Church. If you changed your mind, if you had a change of heart, you would be executed. It was as simple as that. Though in actual practice, this was never a problem. Once a man entered “S,” no one from the general on down ever had the slightest doubt about the legitimacy of his work. The men were fervent in their belief. The unit’s insignia proved their legitimacy.
Their insignia featured a skull.
Not a human skull. An animal skull. A dog’s skull.
A dog’s skull with the earth in the background.
That was the badge “S” used.
The earth was angled so that the north of the Eurasian continent was visible. So that this part of the globe faced the viewer, so that it was the front.
Every member of the unit had seen the skull on which the insignia was modeled. Once or twice, maybe three times, they had been granted an audience. There, in the room known as the Director’s Office, they had trembled with emotion at the sight. The real thing was preserved in a sort of casket shaped like the earth. In a globe specially constructed for that purpose. It was burned, blackened, little scraps of flesh clinging to it, hanging from it, here and there. Those were the traces that had been left when it was immolated on its reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, when the man-made satellite began to burn, to disintegrate. This was the skull of the first living creature from Earth to look down at the planet from outer space. These were the remains, in other words, of the space dog, the Russian laika, that had extended the reach of Soviet territory, of the homeland, into outer space.
“We will wage war against the counter-revolutionary movement and fight with the power of heroes—and of this hero! We are the embodiment of legitimacy!” The words reverberated through the Director’s Office.
It was never made clear how exactly the skull of this dog—once both a hero of the state and a popular idol—found its way into the Director’s hands. Because all information, even the most trivial, relating to the space dogs was classified as top secret. But the man who created “S” was closer than anyone else to those secrets. He had control of the space dogs’ bloodline. And he determined that nothing as insignificant as Khrushchev’s fall from power would derail the project, now that his posse at the breeding ground in South Siberia was unquestionably approaching the ideal. This project could not be allowed to die…this lineage could not be allowed to die. These dogs. This was where a master spy showed his true value as a master spy. And so, at the age of twenty-six and seven months, this young man who was expected to go far, who had been promoted within the KGB to the rank of lieutenant, responded to nonexistent expectations by contacting various branches of the KGB, trying this and that, working to realize a plan of his own. For the dogs…to guarantee their survival.
And one day a door opened, and out came the skull of the first space dog.
Someone told him Sputnik 2 wasn’t designed for recovery, so it had broken to pieces when it entered the atmosphere on May 14, 1958. Someone else insisted that the date had been April 4, not May 14, and the satellite burned up. One document, however, indicated that the wreckage of Sputnik 2 had in fact been recovered. The real thing, the secret document itself, remains in some KGB office. A copy is held, as well, in the secret vaults of the Council for the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics. They may have been there from the beginning, or perhaps they found their way in at some later date. Either way, the documents are there.
And the door opened. The same door that opened to admit the wrecked cockpit of the MiG fighter Yuri Gagarin—the first human to fly in outer space, on the Vostok 1 in April 1961, known for his famous comment “The earth is blue”—had been riding in when he was killed in a mysterious crash in 1968. It opened, and out came the skull.
It was a real laika skull, from a mid-sized dog.
Documents proved that this was her skull.
“S” came into existence toward the end of the 1960s. It was a code-named unit under the administration of the KGB Border Guard Headquarters, but with its own authority. “S” had been inspired by Khrushchev’s dreamy romanticism, but the cheesiness of its origins had been eliminated, and it now had a rational basis for its existence. The involvement of that dog, the bitch who demonstrated to the world the greatness of the Soviet homeland, proved that we, “S,” were not just some group of renegades.
We were born of that event, on November 3, 1957—Marxism-Leninism’s single greatest achievement. We are its progeny.
“We are a corps centered on dogs, and it is our job to support our dogs,” the creator of “S” told his men. “We ourselves are the progeny of the bitch named Laika.”
So their legitimacy could never be in doubt.
And so, he said, pledge allegiance to the “S” insignia!
The men pledged their allegiance. They saluted the skull in its globe.
And so, when Gorbachev declared that perestroika was revolution in July 1986, the members of “S” could deny this without batting an eye, smiles on their faces. The revolution had already happened, in 1917, and we were its progeny—we, the members of “S.” Gorbachev’s statement was a joke. They knew it. But sometimes even words mumbled in sleep can alter the course of history. It doesn’t matter who is legitimate, who is the renegade.
The Afghan War continued. The two sides were in a stalemate, to put it simply, and it was slowly becoming apparent how closely this Central Asian quagmire resembled those ten years of war that America had initiated…America’s Southeast Asian quagmire. First there was the massive scale of the two conflicts—endless wars of attrition fought against guerrillas. Then there were all the other, smaller similarities. Young Soviet conscripts were destroying themselves with drugs. They smoked hashish the way young American conscripts had used LSD, heroin, and marijuana during the Vietnam War. Indiscriminant massacres were committed because it was impossible to tell civilians from guerrillas. During the Vietnam War, unspeakable tragedies had unfolded in villages the Americans regarded as Vietcong strongholds—everyone in these villages was slaughtered, from infants to the elderly; even domestic animals were shot; and naturally the women were raped—and now, in the same manner, villages the Soviets regarded as mujahideen strongholds were completely wiped out. Everyone in these villages was slaughtered, from infants to the elderly, even domestic animals were shot, and naturally the women were raped, gang-raped. Limited use was made of chemical weapons, albeit in secret. In the Vietnam War, the American army had done the same thing, in secret.
The Soviets were confronted with the fact that the Afghan War was “our Vietnam.”
And there was Gorbachev. There was Gorbachev, singing his slogan: Perestroika! Perestroika! He initiated a completely new foreign policy. Relations with the West would now be aimed at fostering dialogue, guided by the notion of “new thinking” diplomacy. Gorbachev was trying to change the direction of the Soviet-American arms race. The Soviet economy was stagnating. It had been subsiding into stagnation for some time, but Gorbachev was the first to acknowledge this. In fact, the USSR was on the verge of bankruptcy. He admitted it. And their enormous military expenditures were putting the most pressure on the treasury. One aim of Gorbachev’s “new thinking” diplomacy was to make it possible to cut the military budget. He pushed ahead with negotiations concerning nuclear non-proliferation, and finally he was able to improve relations not only with America, Britain, and France, but even with China. Red China—the third player in the Cold War. The whole shift was described by the term détente.
Something was changing.
Something was speeding up.
And then Gorbachev made the announcement: “Withdrawing troops from Afghanistan is also perestroika.”
The United Nations had gotten involved in peace negotiations relating to the Afghanistan problem in 1982 but had failed to make any progress. In April 1988, with this statement by Gorbachev, everything happened in a flash: a peace accord was signed. Now it was settled. The Soviet army would withdraw from Afghanistan.
The withdrawal began officially in May 1988 and was completed in February 1989.
On February 25. But did the Afghan War really end on that day? No, it did not. Because the Afghan government was still communist, and it was still friendly with the USSR, and it was still at odds with the mujahideen. And to make matters worse, the mujahideen organizations were at odds with each other as well, divided by all sorts of factors: were they composed largely of Pashtuns or non-Pashtuns, were they Sunni or Shi’a, and so on. Obviously the country was bound to descend into civil war. The USSR decided, first of all, that it would be unprofitable to allow Kabul’s pro-Soviet communist government to collapse; second, that since the Soviet Union shared a twelve-hundred-mile border with Afghanistan, any exacerbation of the situation within Afghanistan would pose a threat to the safety of the border regions; and third, that if the current government were to fall and be replaced by an Islamic government, the ensuing confusion was bound to spread to the Central Asian members of the USSR, including Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and the other Islamic autonomous republics.
So the USSR continued to supply the communist, pro-Soviet Afghan government with vast quantities of aid, both financial and in the form of weapons.
And then something else happened.
This was just before the last of the one hundred thousand occupying soldiers withdrew.
On January 24, 1989, a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ratified a top-secret report that gave permission to the KGB Border Guards, then stationed in the north of Afghanistan, to carry out a certain strategic mission.
Needless to say, this was in violation of the peace accord.
The USSR’s quagmire, the Afghan War, wasn’t over yet. The Soviet Union itself refused to let it end. It kept going until the end of the year. But only in secret. The KGB took control, and only units that knew how to keep their activities secret were involved. Once again “S” was called in. Its fighters were special operations professionals, and they would keep quiet about their achievements in battle. Its fighters were the most powerful unconventional troops in the entire Border Guard. As for Gorbachev…Gorbachev was content to let this happen, as long as the Afghan “problem” was settled, as long as it didn’t cause any disruption domestically. He wasn’t concerned that the plan “stank of Khrushchev,” as Chernenko and Brezhnev had been. Indeed, as far as he was concerned “S” was just another useful organization—he wasn’t even aware that it had originated in Khrushchev’s time. And so once again “S” was granted authority to carry out illegal assignments in secret. It eliminated targets marked for elimination. In public, Gorbachev continued shouting his slogan as before: Perestroika! Perestroika! And in December 1989, he finally pushed his “new thinking” diplomacy to the limit. A Soviet-American summit was held off the shore of Malta, on a Soviet missile cruiser named Slava. Gorbachev welcomed American President George H. W. Bush with a smile. He announced that the Soviet Union and the United States were now friends. The Cold War was over. Lasting peace had been achieved between the two states. A press conference attended by reporters from all around the world was held on December 3. All across the globe, people stared at their television screens. This was a day that would go down in the history of the twentieth century. In human history. And as for dog history…dog history…
On that same day, December 3, a secret order was issued.
“Destroy all the evidence,” read the order, which had come by way of Moscow. “Leave no trace of the top-secret operations in Afghanistan. There is no Cold War. Kill the dogs.”