Free The Cartel by Don Winslow

men and besieged the man’s compound. The occupants of the fortified house, maybe a dozen of them, returned fire and held Ochoa’s men off until he dashed to the back of the compound, found the propane tank, and blew it up, immolating everyone inside.
    Mission accomplished.
    The resultant bonus from a grateful Contreras bought more cocaine, and the story gained them useful notoriety.
    And now they have become far more than just bodyguards. The original thirty are now over four hundred, and Ochoa has begun to worry a little bit about the dilution of quality. To counter that, he’s set up three training bases on cartel-owned ranches out in the countryside, where the new recruits sharpen their skills on tactics, weapons, and intelligence gathering, and are indoctrinated into the group culture.
    The culture is that of an elite force.
    On missions, they blacken their faces and wear black clothing and hoods. Military protocol is strictly observed, with ranks, salutes, and chain of command. So is loyalty and camaraderie—the ethic of “no man left behind.” A comrade is to be brought off the field of battle, dead or alive. If wounded, he gets the best treatment by the best doctors; if killed, his family is taken care of and his death avenged.

    Without exception.
    As their numbers grew, their role expanded. While mission one is and always will be the protection of Osiel Contreras and his narco-turf, Ochoa’s force has gotten into lucrative side markets. With the boss’s approval—and why not, he gets thick envelopes of cash—the men have moved into kidnapping and extortion.
    Shopkeepers, bar owners, and club proprietors in Matamoros and other towns now pay Ochoa’s men for “protection,” otherwise their businesses might be robbed or burned to the ground, their customers beaten up. Gambling dens, brothels, tienditas —the little stores that sell small amounts of dope to junkies—pay off.
    They’re scared not to.
    Ochoa’s men have a well-earned reputation for brutality. People whisper about la paleta, said to be a favored technique of Ochoa, in which the victim in stripped naked and then beaten to death with a two-by-four.
    But to be truly famous, a group needs a name.
    In the army, Ochoa’s radio call signal was “Zeta One,” so they went with that and called themselves the Zetas.
    As the original Zeta, Ochoa became known as “Z-1.”
    The original other thirty took their nicknames from the order in which they came over—Z-2, Z-3, and so on. It became a hierarchy of seniority.
    Z-1 is tall, handsome, with a thick head of black hair, a hawklike face, and a muscular build. Today he wears a khaki suit with a deep blue shirt—his army-issued FN Five-seven pistol tucked into a shoulder holster under his left arm. He sits in the crowded church and tries to stay awake as the priest drones on.
    But that’s what priests do—they drone.
    Finally, the service comes to an end and the participants start to file out of the church.
    “Let’s go for a ride,” Contreras says.
    A fiend for intelligence, Ochoa knows his boss’s history. Born dirt poor and fatherless on a shitty ranch in rural Tamaulipas, Osiel Contreras was raised by an uncle who resented the additional mouth to feed. The young Osiel worked as a dishwasher before running off to Arizona to deal marijuana, only to end up in a yanqui prison. When NAFTA came along, Contreras, with scores of others, was transferred to a prison back in Mexico. The legend goes that he had an affair with the warden’s wife, and when the warden found out and beat her, Contreras had him killed.
    When he got out of jail, Herrera ostensibly got him a job in an auto body shop but really as a trafficker for Garza. The two men earned their way to the top. It was often said that they sat at the feet of God—Herrera on the right, Contreras on the left.

    “Herrera is coming with us,” Contreras says now.
    Lately, Contreras has become more and more annoyed with his old friend. Ochoa