"We'll make the most of it," he promises.

If we live long enough.

Matamoros Tamaulipas, Mexico November 2004 Heriberto Ochoa watches from a pew in the third row of the church as Salvador Herrera holds the baby girl over the baptismal and the priest says the words. As is tradition, both infant and godfather wear white, and Herrera's squat form reminds Ochoa of an old refrigerator.

The church is packed, as befits the bautizo of a powerful narco's daughter. Osiel Contreras stands to the side of the font and beams in paternal pride.

Ochoa remembers the first time he met Osiel Contreras, over a year ago now. A soldier then, Ochoa was a lieutenant in Mexico's elite Airborne Special Forces Group, and Contreras had just risen to the leadership of the Gulf cartel after Garza's arrest and extradition.

They met at a barbecue on a ranch south of the city, and Contreras mentioned that he needed protection.

"What kind of men do you need?" Ochoa asked. He sipped his beer. It was cold and crisp.

"The best," Contreras answered. "Only the best."

"The best men," Ochoa said, "are only in the army."

It wasn't bragging, it was a simple matter of fact. If you want gangbangers, drug addicts, thugs, and malandros-useless layabouts-on your payroll, you can pick them up on any corner. If you want elite men, you have to go to an elite force. Ochoa was elite-he'd taken counterinsurgency training from the American special forces and the Israelis.

The best of the best.

"What do you make a year?" Contreras asked. When Ochoa told him, Contreras shook his head and said, "I feed my chickens better."

"And do they protect you?"

Contreras laughed.

Ochoa deserted the army and went to work for the Gulf cartel. His first task was to recruit others like him.

The Mexican army was rife with desertion anyway. Armed with caonazos de dlares-cannonballs of money-Ochoa easily seduced thirty of his comrades away from their long hours, shabby barracks, and lousy pay. Within weeks he'd brought over four other lieutenants, five sergeants, five corporals, and twenty privates. They brought with them valuable merchandise-AR-15 rifles, grenade launchers, and state-of-the-art surveillance equipment.

Contreras's terms were generous.

In addition to a salary, he gave each recruit a bonus of $3,000 U.S. to put in the bank, invest el norte, or buy drugs.

Ochoa bought eighteen kilos of cocaine.

Now he was well on his way to becoming a rich man.

The work itself was relatively easy-guard Contreras and enforce the piso. Most paid willingly, the recalcitrant were taken to the Hotel Nieto in Matamoros and persuaded, often with a pistol barrel shoved down their throats.

Just a few months into the job, Contreras ordered him to eliminate a rival trafficker. Ochoa took twenty 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 can't blame him-Herrera had always been high-handed, all the more so since assuming the head chair, and he's started to treat Contreras more as a subordinate than a partner, interrupting him at meetings, dismissing his opinions.

Still, the two men are friends.

They washed dishes together, served time together, came up the hard way under Garza, a hard man.

The three of them get into Contreras's new troca del ao, a Dodge Durango. "You can take the boy out of the country," Ochoa muses as he squeezes his long legs into the pickup's narrow rear compartment. Contreras gets behind the wheel-he loves to drive a truck.

In the rural shitholes they grew up in, you were lucky to have a pair of shoes. Even a baica was a dream. You'd stand there in the dust and watch the grandes speed by in their new pickups and think, one day that's going to be me.

So Contreras has fleets of trucks and SUVs, he has drivers, he even has a private plane with a pilot-but when he gets the chance to get behind the wheel of a pickup truck, he's going to do it.

As they head out of town toward Contreras's ranch, Herrera wants to talk. "Did you hear the news? Someone tried to kill Adn Barrera."

"It wasn't me," Contreras says. "His people pay the piso. If Adn increases volume, it's more money for us."

"What if he wants the throne back?" Herrera asks.

"He doesn't."

"How do you know?"

"He sent Diego Tapia personally," Contreras answers.

"He didn't come to see me," Herrera says. "You should have told me."

"I'm telling you now," Contreras says. "You think I just like chauffeuring you around?"

Herrera pouts for a few moments and then changes the subject. "A beautiful ceremony, I thought. Although I prefer weddings-you get to fuck the bridesmaids."

"Or try, anyway," Contreras answers.

"'There is no try.'" Herrera chuckles. "'Just do.'"

"I hate those fucking movies," Osiel says.

Ochoa quietly pulls his pistol from the holster and lays it by his side.

"It's my big dick they like," Herrera says. "You should-"

Ochoa sticks the pistol into the back of Herrera's head and pulls the trigger twice.

Brains, blood, and hair splatter onto the windshield and the console.

Contreras pulls over and puts the truck in park. Ochoa climbs out of the cab and pulls Herrera's body in the bushes. When he comes back, Contreras is fussing about the mess. "Now I'll have to have it detailed again."

"I'll just dump it someplace."

"It's a good truck," Contreras says. "Have it steam-cleaned, replace the windshield."

Ochoa is amused. The chaca spent about thirty-seven minutes working in a body shop and thinks he's an expert on auto repair.

He's also cheap.

Ochoa understands that-he grew up poor, too.

He was born on Christmas Day to campesinos in Apan, where life promised little opportunity except to make pulque or go into the rodeo. Ochoa didn't see a future in either, or as a tenant farmer, so the day he turned seventeen he ran away and enlisted in the army, where at least he'd have clean sheets, and if the meals were bad, at least there were three of them a day.

A natural soldier, he liked the army, the discipline, the order, the cleanliness so different from the constant dust and filth of the impoverished casita he grew up in. He liked the uniforms, the clean clothes, the camaraderie. And if he had to take orders, it was from men he respected, men who'd earned their positions, not just fat grandes who'd inherited their estates and thought that made them little gods.

And a man could rise in the army, rise above his birth and his accent and make something of himself-not like in Apan, where you were stuck in your class, generation after generation. He watched his father work his life away, come home red-eyed and staggering from the pulque, whip out his belt, and take it out on his wife and his kids.

Not for me, Ochoa thought.

"There was only one man born in a stable on Christmas who ever made anything of himself," Ochoa liked to say, "and look what they did to him."

So the army was a refuge, an opportunity.

He was good at it.

His father had made him insensitive to pain; he could take anything the training sergeants could dish out. He liked the brutal training, the hand-to-hand combat, the survival ordeals in the desert. His superiors noticed him and plucked him out for special forces. There they gave him skills-counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, weapons, intelligence, interrogation.

He made his reputation putting down the armed rebellion in Chiapas. It was a dirty war in a jungle, like any guerrilla conflict it was hard to tell the combatants from the civilians, and then he found it didn't really matter-the response to terror is terror.

Ochoa did things, in clearings, in streambeds, in villages, that you don't talk about, that you don't trumpet on the evening news. But when his superiors needed information, he got them information, when they needed a guerrilla leader dead, he made it thus, when a village needed intimidation, he snuck in at night, and when the village awoke at dawn, it found its headman's body strung from a tree.

For all this, they made him an officer, and, when the rebellion had been put down, transferred him to Tamaulipas.

To a special antinarcotics task force.

That's when he met Contreras.

Now a white Jeep Cherokee comes down the road. Miguel Morales, aka "Z-40," gets out, tosses Ochoa a quick salute, and gets behind the wheel of the Durango. Ochoa and Contreras get into the Cherokee.

"I'll have someone come out and bury him," Ochoa says, jutting his chin toward Herrera's corpse.

"Let the coyotes enjoy his big dick," Contreras answers. "What about the others?"

"It's taken care of."

There will be two more killings-of Herrera loyalists-before the sun goes down. When it comes back up, Osiel Contreras will be the sole, undisputed boss of the Gulf cartel.

And he'll have a nickname-El Mata Amigos.

The Friend Killer.

Ochoa will gain a new aporto as well.

El Verdugo.

The Executioner.

2.

Christmas in Prison