Soldier D: The Colombian Cocaine War

by David Monnery

  Wynwood set to work cutting a flap in the de-electrified fence, while Eddie kept watch. Several bursts of gunfire reverberated in the distance, then all was silent again.

  No more than five seconds after the first mortar had landed, the Dame took out the farther of the two guards on the roof with the silenced sniper rifle. The guard had been standing right on the edge, and the bullet through his brain knocked him off the roof and out of sight behind the building. His partner must have heard him hit the ground because he turned, saw no one there, and looked wildly round before the Dame’s second shot brought his life to a sudden, anticlimactic end.

  Having removed these four eyes from the roof, the Dame started scanning the outer compound, ready to take out anyone who threatened to interrupt Wynwood and Eddie’s forced entry.

  A guard was walking their way, more to get a view of what had caused the explosions by the gate than because he had seen any intruders. The Dame aligned the cross-hairs in the scope and squeezed the trigger.

  In Victoria Amarales’s bedroom the light of the explosions flashed across the sky just as she and Chirlo were blissfully skirting round the edges of a mutual orgasm.

  ‘What the fuck?’ he asked breathlessly, as the booms rattled the window panes.

  ‘Oh no,’ she groaned, as he slid himself out of her and scrambled naked to the window in time to see the second mortar round land close to the guardpost by the outer gate. ‘We’re being attacked,’ he said, as much to himself as to her. He grabbed his trousers and pulled them on, snatched the automatic from the bedside table and started for the door. As he went through it he shouted ‘Stay there!’ over his shoulder.

  * * *

  ‘Enemy on your left down,’ the Dame’s calm voice said in their helmets as Wynwood and Eddie raced across open ground towards the stone wall which enclosed the inner compound.

  Wynwood made a stirrup for Eddie, boosted him up onto the top of the wall, and then waited while the younger man assessed the situation. It was not easy to assess. Since they were behind the main building, Eddie’s only view of the inner compound was through a narrow gap between it and one of the barracks-like buildings on his right. The only certainty was that the place was in a slowly growing uproar. Lights were going on, people shouting, feet running.

  Of more immediate import, he could see no one in a position to stop them penetrating the main house.

  At the other end of the corridor from his lover’s bedroom, Chirlo found the faces of the hostages’ guards brimming with questions.

  ‘I don’t know what’s happening,’ Chirlo snapped. ‘Just stay at your posts. And keep alert if you want to see the morning.’ He headed for the stairs, descended them three at a time and turned left into the security centre.

  Fernández was at the microphone, with two other sicarios standing behind him on either side of his chair, like courtiers behind a throne. They all looked up with relief when Chirlo appeared.

  ‘Are we being attacked?’ one of the men asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Chirlo said curtly, biting back the more sarcastic reply that came to mind. ‘What the fuck’s happening?’ he calmly asked Fernández.

  ‘I don’t know, chief. Pérez came on, but then he disappeared again …’

  ‘Try the gatehouse.’

  Fernández did so. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Chief?’ a voice came in. Chirlo recognized Pérez’s voice.

  ‘What’s happening, Manuel?’ he asked, leaning across Fernández.

  ‘Christ knows. Mario is dead, and Cayano is wounded. Not seriously. Some sort of bomb, mortar maybe? There were two of them.’

  ‘What’s happening now?’

  ‘Nothing, that’s what crazy. We can’t see anything or anybody. If there’s anyone out there they’re not moving … It could have been dropped from a plane, I suppose, but I didn’t hear one …’

  Was that possible, Chirlo asked himself. Could the British be dropping bombs on them? Or some other cartel? What for? No, it was a crazy idea.

  Another thought crossed his mind. ‘Start calling round,’ he told Fernández. ‘You,’ he told one of the others, ‘wake up the sleeping shift. No,’ he corrected himself, ‘first get the Army guys up and in their armoured car – that’s what they’re supposed to be here for. Then wake the others. Move!’

  Eddie was just reaching an arm down to Wynwood when a guard came running round the corner of the building. Eddie twisted onto his side, bringing up the MP5, but it was not necessary. Before the man had even seen the figure on the wall a bullet took half of his head away.

  ‘You’re clear,’ the Dame was saying in his helmet. Eddie gave him a wry wave of the hand and turned once more to help Wynwood up onto the wall.

  ‘You’re still clear,’ the Dame’s voice said.

  They both dropped down to the ground, waited a few seconds, and headed out across the inner yard to the side wall of the main building’s north wing.

  ‘Good luck, lads,’ the Dame said.

  They had some immediately. The side door opened, admitting them into a long dimly lit corridor. Doors stood open on either side with darkened rooms behind them. They each took a doorway and waited for any sound nearby. There was none. The corridor was still empty. About forty metres down there was a pool of brighter light surrounding what looked like the bottom of a staircase. As Wynwood examined it a figure appeared and disappeared. Now they could hear the low buzz of conversation.

  Wynwood gave Eddie the hand signal to advance, and the two of them inched their way forward along the corridor.

  On the edge of the trees to the south Mike Bannister checked his watch and spoke into the radio mike: ‘Jaguar to Puma: your turn.’ Ten seconds later a mortar bomb landed twenty metres away from the inner gate. Another twenty seconds and the second bomb straddled it.

  ‘Someone tell me where that landed,’ Chirlo said into the mike. Why the fuck had Ramón insisted on putting the security centre in the bowels of the house?

  Two voices began answering him together.

  ‘Pérez,’ Chirlo insisted.

  ‘A bomb on the inner gate. It is a mortar – somewhere in the trees, I think.’

  ‘Are the armoured cars moving?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Chirlo stood there for a moment, thinking furiously.

  The sicario returned with four soldiers, the two armoured car teams. Chirlo grabbed the front one and almost pulled him towards the front door. ‘There’s a mortar up on that hillside,’ he said. ‘Go and get it.’ The officer seemed about to argue, but the Walther PPK in Chirlo’s hand seemed to convince him. The four men hurried across the yard towards their vehicles.

  The Dame had been waiting for them. The problem was they only had fifty metres to run, and once the first of the four went down they ran extremely fast. Two made it into the shelter of their car, engaged the engine, and started rolling it down the drive towards the inner gate.

  Ramón’s wife always said he slept the sleep of the dead, and it was true that the combination of wine and barbiturates did not make him the lightest sleeper in the world. That was the idea. There was not much point in hiring an army to defend yourself if you were going to be woken up by any little problem.

  The four bombs which landed on and around the inner and outer gates were neatly absorbed into a recurring dream he had of arriving with the conquistadors five hundreds years earlier, with Hereford’s 81mm mortars standing in for Balboa’s cannon. It was only his sister shaking him violently by the shoulders which brought him back to the twentieth century.

  * * *

  Where the hell was Ramón? Chirlo thought.

  There’s no answer from Ruiz, or either of the Romales brothers,’ Fernández said.

  ‘Where were they on duty?’

  ‘The Romales brothers were on the roof.’

  Chirlo had another thought. ‘Get me Pérez again.’

  ‘Yes, chief.’ Fernández made the connection.

  ‘Is the fence still switched on?’ Chirl
o asked Pérez.

  ‘No, the first bomb blew a hole in it – the power’s down.’

  ‘Shit.’ Chirlo brought his fist down towards the table, then aborted the motion in mid-air. At least it was beginning to make sense. ‘Fall back to the inner gate,’ he told Pérez. ‘You,’ he told the remaining sicario, ‘come with me.’

  He moved cautiously out of the security centre and towards the bottom of the stairs. If he knew anything at all about military tactics they would be somewhere in the house by now.

  Eddie and Wynwood had passed within five metres of the security centre’s open door two minutes earlier. Now upstairs, Eddie placed a single eye round the corner of the corridor, saw the two guards and was seen by them. He stepped out and fired the silenced MP5 from the hip, cutting them both down. ‘OK, boss,’ he said softly.

  The pair of them moved down the corridor, checking each room was empty of possible opposition, until they stood over the two dead guards. Each had a pair of keys in his pocket. Eddie opened the first door, and the two of them went in commando-style.

  Muñoz was sitting beneath the window, looking none too happy. Seeing Wynwood’s familiar figure, he sighed.

  ‘Your partner is next door,’ he said in Spanish.

  Wynwood edged back into the corridor, found it was still clear, and unlocked the final door.

  Anderson was behind it, holding a torn length of sheet. ‘I expected you to abseil in through the window,’ he said disappointedly.

  ‘There are bars across it.’

  ‘I know,’

  Wynwood handed the other man his Browning and smiled. ‘Just shut up and follow me,’ he said. ‘Condor to Jaguar,’ he told the helmet, ‘we’re on our way out with Tom and Jerry.’

  ‘All clear boss,’ Eddie’s voice came from outside. He fell in behind the two sergeants as they started back down the corridor.

  Chirlo hurled himself up the stairs, his bare feet making next to no noise on the carpeted stairs. The men in the corridor above did not hear him coming, but it was someone else who paid for their mistake. Chirlo’s brain took in the four men, the guns, reckoned the odds and crashed his body through the door opposite, all in a tenth of a second.

  The bursts from Eddie’s and Wynwood’s MP5s would have encountered only empty air if Victoria Amarales had not chosen that instant to emerge from her brother’s room further down the corridor. Wynwood’s took her in the upper torso, Eddie’s in the head. She was dead before she hit the door-frame.

  Ramón slammed the door shut on her lifeless body.

  The three SAS men and Muñoz were left in command of an empty corridor. Somewhere ahead of them was the enemy. It seemed sensible to find another way out.

  ‘You two, check in there,’ Wynwood told Eddie and Anderson, pointing out the room opposite the one in which Anderson had been held. ‘I’ll hold the fort.’

  The two men went in one after the other, slamming their backs against the wall. The room was empty save for an array of body-building equipment. French windows led out onto the verandah.

  Outside they could see an armoured car which was a dark shape in the outer compound, sending sparks into the night as it fired blindly at the southern slope. An essay in utter futility, Eddie thought.

  The inner compound, by contrast, seemed empty. He hand-signalled Wynwood the all-clear.

  The Welshman fired one last burst at a door down the corridor which was inching open, then walked swiftly through to the verandah, and headed down towards its far end behind the others. No one seemed to be looking their way. The plan was working perfectly, Wynwood thought. They know there are soldiers out there, but they can’t see them, and they can’t stop trying to see them.

  Eddie clambered down to the ground and Muñoz was lowered to join him. Wynwood and Anderson followed with rather more agility. In spaced single file they rounded the building where Anderson had been tied to the chair. The inner wall was twenty metres away.

  ‘All clear,’ the Dame told them.

  For Bonnie and Blackie down on the road it had all seemed a bit of a doddle. Once their patrol had fired its planned mortar rounds they had been reduced to keeping watch for any sign of unexpected arrivals on the valley road.

  The news of the prisoners’ release had come over the radio helmets a few minutes earlier. The next message would be the order for withdrawal to the pick-up zone. It looked all over bar the drinking, Bonnie thought; he would have to fail to beat the clock some other time.

  And then he saw the lights, or rather their glow beyond the bend down the valley. ‘Incoming,’ he said.

  ‘Lights on the road to the north,’ Chris was telling Bannister. ‘No visual sighting as yet.’

  Blackie was recalibrating the mortar to the prearranged setting for the bridge across the river, some four hundred metres away to the north.

  One headlight, two headlights, appeared round the distant shoulder of the hill. A rumbling sound added confirmation that the lights were not tricks of the imagination.

  ‘Ocelot to Jaguar: these are not friendlies,’ Chris was telling Bannister, though how he could see anything through the nightscope against the brightness of the headlights Bonnie had no idea. Nor did he much care. ‘Prepare to fire,’ Chris told him and Blackie.

  The lead lorry was fifty metres from the bridge, twenty-five …

  ‘Fire.’

  The mortar went off with a whoosh, the bomb landing almost under the front wheels of the truck, filling the cab with flames.

  Bonnie dropped another bomb into the tube. Another whoosh, and he thought he could see shadowy figures breaking out in both directions from behind the burning truck.

  ‘Jaguar to Ocelot: what strength?’ Bannister was asking.

  Chris examined the scene through his PNGs. ‘Ocelot to Jaguar. As far as I can tell, just two truckloads of men. They’re carrying automatic weapons, but I can’t see anything heavier.’

  ‘Jaguar to Ocelot: disengage,’ Bannister said. ‘Start making your way home.’

  ‘Roger. Let’s move,’ Chris told the others.

  They collapsed the mortar, and started working their way back along the river bank. Behind them the new arrivals were still lying low, waiting for more incoming fire, oblivious of their retreat up the river bank. Somewhere further up the valley a heavy machine-gun was firing.

  They recrossed the river, which seemed even colder the second time round, and slipping across the empty road, moved up the slope into the dark and welcoming embrace of the forest.

  Chirlo looked down at the bloody, broken body. ‘What is happening?’ Ramón was asking him, but Chirlo ignored him.

  ‘She is dead,’ Ramón said. ‘We cannot help her now. We must help ourselves.’

  Chirlo went down on one knee, swept her up in his arms, and carried her off down the corridor, back to her room. There he lay her on the bed, careless of the robe falling open to reveal the bullet-raddled body to which he had been making love only an hour before. He leaned down and placed his cheek against the stomach, his tears coursing down to mingle with the still-slippery blood.

  After a few minutes he slowly raised his head, pulled the robe closed and stared down at the ruined face. The men who did this will die, he said to himself. If he had to travel the length and breadth of the earth they would die. And not easily.

  Familiarity with the ground ensured that Wynwood, Eddie, the Dame and the two exprisoners arrived at the landing zone well ahead of the others. Bannister’s last contact with the incoming helicopters suggested they were on schedule, and confirmation of their 0400 hours Estimated Time of Arrival came through as the three of them set out the four infrared landing lights.

  A couple of minutes later they could hear the faint scraping rhythms of the blades. Another minute and first one, then a second dark shape appeared round the shoulder of the mountain slope, dim silhouettes against the night sky.

  ‘Condor to Jaguar,’ Wynwood asked. ‘Our transport is in sight. Where are you?’

  Chris’s voic
e replied. ‘Ten minutes away. Tell them to wait.’

  Wynwood was halfway into a smile when the leading helicopter exploded in a ball of flame.

  Chapter 10

  The second Blackhawk seemed to fly straight through the destruction of the first, but touched down apparently unscathed just a few seconds later. Everyone in the valley was aware of the explosion. Even inside the main house at Totoro they were aware of a momentary flash, like distant sheet lightning or the flicker of a fluorescent bulb. Chirlo looked up, sudden hope in his eyes.

  The units still climbing towards the landing zone had a closer view – one moment the hills above them were dark against the stars, the next a blaze of orange fire.

  ‘What was it?’ Bannister asked, more calmly than he felt.

  ‘One of the choppers has gone,’ Wynwood answered in the same tone.

  ‘Crashed?’

  ‘Exploded.’

  ‘What about the other one?’

  ‘We’re checking it out now.’

  Or rather the Dame was. As the patrol’s explosives specialist he had not even bothered to volunteer, but just shouted to the others to stay back and got on with it. He was underneath it now, inching along on his back examining its belly with his torch.

  He did not know how long he had, but it could not be that long. While his eyes scanned every likely hiding place and the sweat gathered on his chest, his mind seemed to stand apart, utterly detached. He had the strange feeling that the men he had killed that evening were there rooting for him.

  Maybe the fear of death made brothers of everyone, he thought.

  And there was the bomb, taped almost directly beneath the cockpit. It seemed to be ticking up a storm – just like Captain Hook’s crocodile, the Dame thought. Probably a cheap alarm clock.

  It looked like a parcel wrapped tightly in plastic sheeting, with nothing other than the noise to indicate that it was a bomb, let alone what type. There was no sense in trying to unwrap it. The light was too poor, and time was doubtless on the bomb’s side.

  He gingerly pulled at the tape holding it to the helicopter’s skin, which came off with more ease than he had expected. He let the bomb down onto his stomach, then wriggled his way out from under the helicopter, clutching it with one hand, and slowly got to his feet.