by Ross Sidor
Avery trained his scope on the commandant’s shack, shifting occasionally to any movement that caught his attention. In the event that Reyes made an abrupt departure, Avery’s job was to send the transmission back to the ops room that would abort the operation, and the helicopters would turn back. He didn’t anticipate this happening. Reyes came here to meet with a senior SEBIN officer, and as far as Avery knew, this person had not yet arrived at the camp. That was good. It ensured that Reyes wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while.
The next six hours were the slowest. That’s the length of time that passed before Avery finally heard the rotors of the helicopters interrupt the silence of the night.
The camp’s inhabitants heard it, too. Avery spotted some of them looking up into the sky and stepping out of their tents or shacks.
The helicopters swarmed on the camp. They’d flown in the whole way at low altitude, just barely skimming over the top of the rainforest canopy at a hundred thirty miles per hour to avoid detection by Venezuelan radar, and followed a course to avoid any villages where natives could spot or hear the aircraft. In the dead of night, the pilots relied on their night vision, terrain following radar, and FLIR pods.
There was no clear landing space for the Russian-manufactured, twin-turbine Mi-17 Hips to set down and deploy their squads, so the AH-60L Arpia gunships came in first. These are essentially an attack helicopter conversion of the American Blackhawk, developed jointly by Colombia and Israel, armed with .50 caliber machine guns, anti-tank missiles, and 70mm rockets.
The AH-60s strafed the camp with heavy machine gun fire, shredding any FARC militants in sight. A barrage of 70mm rockets blasted the barracks compound, armory, communications hut, and guard posts. Militants with RPGs appeared across the killing ground but were quickly torn apart and taken down by the unyielding onslaught. Only one FARC soldier was able to get off a shot, but the rocket propelled grenade went wide, missing its target, and the man who fired it was instantly pulverized by a stream of .50 caliber bullets and scattered messily across the ground.
The Mi-17 Hip transports hovered fifty feet over the camp, one on the south end, another on the east, while the Aprias covered them. Strands of thick and heavy black braided rope, two inches thick in diameter, dropped from the open cabin doors of each Hip. The Colombian special ops troops—clad in jungle camouflage, web harnesses, and balaclavas, and armed with M16s or Israeli-made Galil rifles—began to free fall the length of the ropes at thirty miles per hour. They dropped without the use of descenders attached to the rope, using only their gloved hands and feet to control their descent, slowing as they neared the ground. They maintained a ten foot gap between each man on the ropes.
Felix Aguilar was the first man on the ground, as was his custom to lead from the front. He sprinted several yards away from the rope and dropped to a crouch. He immediately sighted a FARC militant and took him down with a three-round burst, dropping his target.
As soon as each soldier hit the ground, they ran forward to make room for the next man down and to take up firing positions, scanning for targets through their night optics. FARC troops soon appeared, rushing the assaulters as they landed. A brief firefight ensued in which Aguilar’s troops quickly overwhelmed and gunned down the FARC fighters. Two FARC soldiers took cover behind the remnants of a blown-out cabin. A shot from a grenade launcher took them out. Then the Colombian soldiers walked amongst the FARC bodies and swiftly and coldly dispatched any survivors with headshots. Next, Aguilar’s squads split up and took off in different directions across the camp.
A third Hip deployed a squad into the forest, to set up position around the camp, secure the outer perimeter, and pick off any roaming patrols or fleeing insurgents.
It took twenty seconds for the two ten-man squads to dismount from the hovering Hips. With the last men on the ground, the helicopters immediately veered off, so as not to become targets for more RPG gunners.
The soldiers swept across the camp on foot, shooting anything that moved. Throwing in stun grenades first, entry teams systematically breeched and took down the huts and remaining structures, and gunned down militants as they appeared.
Aguilar personally led the takedown of the commandant’s cabin. It was assumed that this would be where Reyes was staying. The cabin itself was already half-demolished and peppered with holes through which there was only darkness inside and no signs of life. Nonetheless, Aguilar kicked the door in and let his Galil rifle lead him into the hut. The commandant himself lay sprawled messily across the floor, with big, red holes punched through his body from a helicopter’s .50 caliber machine guns. Blood and ruptured internal organs oozed out of his carcass, and one of his legs lay nearby.
A quick search of the cabin produced a hidden trapdoor in the floor.
Aguilar hand signaled his men what he planned to do. The three soldiers backed out of the hut to a safe distance, leaving Aguilar alone in the cabin. He then removed a fragmentation grenade from his vest and pulled the pin, keeping his thumb pressed over the spoon. He lifted the trapdoor just wide enough to throw the grenade into the hidden bunker below and shut the door and cleared out of the hut before the grenade exploded. Pieces of shrapnel tore through the wooden floor of the cabin, and smoke filtered out.
When his squad went back inside, Aguilar re-opened the trapdoor, with two soldiers covering him, aiming their rifles down into the open space, tactical lights mounted to the barrels shining into the bunker. A FARC insurgent lay face down in the corner of the bunker, bleeding from shrapnel wounds to his gut and legs. There was another body beside him, missing an arm and parts of its head.
Aguilar fastened his rifle to his vest, switched to his Beretta, and dropped the five feet into the underground bunker. He scanned around him, three hundred sixty degrees, but there was no resistance and the bunker’s only two occupants were quite dead. Aguilar squatted near the body laying facedown and turned it over. He didn’t need to pull the photograph of Emilio Reyes out of his pocket to identify of the body.
___
From his observation post, Avery surveyed the battleground below, watching the muzzle flashes and explosions light up against the darkness. Rotor wash blotted out all other sound as the helicopters whipped quickly by overhead, wildly blowing hanging branches and leaves in all directions. Avery was unaccustomed to being a spectator on the sidelines and not a participant, but it was a refreshing change of pace for the bullets not to be directed at him.
Three minutes into the assault, Avery was squinting through his night optic scope. Following his line of sight through the trees and down the slight slope onto the camp, he watched Aguilar emerge from the commandant’s hut. From Aguilar’s confident expression and body language, and the way he addressed his men, Avery was sure they’d nailed Reyes. Next, they’d quell the remaining resistance and then perform site exploitation.
When Avery took his head away from the scope, the slightest movement in his peripheral commanded his attention. He flicked his eyes in that direction in time to catch a dark blur disturb the stillness of the jungle, so quick that he nearly missed it, and an untrained eye would have likely not caught it at all.
Avery focused on the thick layers of jungle understory, studying the smallest details. He heard leaves rustling and twigs snapping, but his eyes couldn’t find the source of the sound. Finally, several seconds later, fifty feet away, he saw hanging branches shudder, and this time, through his night optic, he clearly caught a glimmer of a man hurtling through the foliage, arms raised high with his rifle in front of him to clear and push his way through the tangled growth.
Avery’s eyes followed the trail of shuddering brush and shrubs to a clear space, where the man turned around to check his six, facing Avery without seeing him.
It was Aarón Moreno.
How the hell did he manage to slip away?
More importantly, why the hell did he have to make his escape right near Avery’s hide?
Moreno stopped until a second man caught up with him, an
d then they continued forward, swallowed by the understory growth.
Avery waited a couple seconds, expecting gunshots to follow, or Colombian troops in pursuit, but there was nothing. Instinctively, he started to get up, but then he stopped himself. It wasn’t like he could go after them. The last thing he needed was to be spotted and mistakenly dropped by a Colombian soldier.
As he nestled back into his hide, content to wait out the assault, Avery recalled the pre-mission briefing with the Colombian squad leaders. Moreno had personally killed a number of undercover operatives, including Americans, and friends and former teammates of Aguilar’s men. Reyes might be the man the politicians in Bogotá and Washington wanted, but Moreno was the man that the Colombian cops, intel operators, and special ops troops, plus the DEA agents, wanted to see taken down.
Avery pictured the debriefing sessions, having to explaining how he sat back and watched Aarón Moreno make a clean getaway.
Shit. He hated when his conscience kicked in.
Avery sprung up from his hide, coming up onto one knee while shouldering his M4, then rising onto his feet, letting the camouflage netting fall behind him. His legs felt stiff and sore from the lack of circulation, and the small of his back was briefly uncomfortable suddenly supporting his full weight in an upright position.
He scanned his surroundings. Turning his head slowly left, he gave a startled jump when he came suddenly face to face with a boa wrapped around a drooping limb from a kapok tree. The massive snake hissed and began to stir. Avery jumped back and stepped clear of the boa. Then something scurried quickly by on the forest floor, brushing against his leg, and he gave another jump, but didn’t bother to look. He also didn’t want to think about the spiders and bugs that he knew were crawling along his back.
Visualizing his movements in advance, Avery carefully covered four yards through the understory foliage, maneuvering around trees, over deadwood, through the understory curtains, and over the mud and decaying plants on the jungle floor, ducking and weaving around low-laying branches, following Moreno’s path. He stopped when he caught the blur of movement somewhere far ahead—strands of branches parting.
Avery was immediately reminded of another aspect of the jungle he detested. It was damned near impossible, especially at night, to track and subsequently hit a target through the endless trees, hanging branches, and vegetation. Absolutely no light from the moon or stars penetrated the canopy top.
To make matters worse, the rain began to pick up again, muting out all surrounding sound as water poured steadily through the treetops and pooled into puddles in depressions in the ground. Fortunately, Moreno was desperate to get far away, which made him easy to track. In the jungle, you had to sacrifice stealth for speed.
A couple yards deeper into the forest, Avery couldn’t even see the flame and lights from the FARC camp off to his right anymore. There was only darkness transformed through his night optics into a wild, cluttered green alien landscape.
He stopped briefly alongside a wide tree trunk for cover, and carefully studied the environment for movement. Finally, he saw a dark, man-shaped target pass along a copse of diseased trees that were nearly bare. The head whirred once round, panning left to right, oblivious to Avery’s presence.
Anticipating his target’s path now, Avery aimed ahead through a space between two trees offering him clear line of sight. This time he caught sight of the fleeing figure—the FARC soldier accompanying Moreno—aligned his crosshairs over the target’s back, and broke the trigger with a firm three pounds of pressure. He felt the M4’s stock buck against his shoulder and saw his target drop, as if the forest floor had opened up and swallowed him.
Less than a second later, Moreno sprung out from behind the same copse of dead trees. He jumped over the body of the FARC soldier, sprinting now, frantically maneuvering around trees and shrubs with natural ease. He turned and fired off a blind burst from his M16 before leaping over and throwing his weight behind the thick, sturdy trunk of a fallen kapok tree overturned on its side.
Avery lost sight of him. He studied the thick and high carpet of shrubs and decaying plants directly behind the driftwood, looking for motion or shapes that did not belong, but the forest floor remained completely still.
Although Moreno was an assassin, Avery remembered that he was also a trained jungle warfare fighter, having been brought up through the ranks of FARC as a foot soldier over two decades before. Moreno definitely held the advantage if it came to a duel in the jungle, which Avery sought to avoid at all costs, knowing that he wouldn’t stand a chance. He needed to end this quickly, before Moreno gained the upper hand.
Avery held his rifle in the ready position with his finger indexed over the trigger. Leaning into the stock, he ventured forward, staying behind trees, careful not to disturb branches or bushes, while simultaneously searching for a vantage point offering suitable line of sight. He took high steps to avoid kicking loose twigs or leaves, and with each step, he gently lowered his foot onto the leaf litter and saturated mud to reduce the risk of audibly signaling his approach.
The problem with jungle warfare was the poor visibility. You could be completely oblivious to the enemy’s presence until you came within a couple meters of him, especially if the enemy had good discipline, knew how to blend in, and didn’t so much as move a muscle. Meanwhile the same enemy was tracking you the whole time, waiting to get a clear shot. Operating solo, Avery was at a further disadvantage. Ideally, he’d have someone staying stationary, putting down fire, while he moved in on the enemy’s position.
A helicopter whipped by low overhead, one of the Mi-17s, its bright white searchlights cutting through the overhead canopy. Taking his eye away from the night optic, Avery used the noise of the helicopter’s rotors and engines to mask his approach, covering an ambitious five meters in one go. He kept his unblinking gaze locked on the driftwood, to make sure Moreno didn’t have the same idea and tried to slip away.
Once the helicopter passed, Avery became aware of silence in the surrounding jungle. No longer were there the sounds of combat coming from the camp some thirty meters away.
Then he heard twigs snap from behind the fallen tree, and something splashed against the mud. Before Avery’s mind could process the sounds, a muzzle flash lit up over the side of the driftwood, and there was the familiar report of an M16 with a selector switch at three-round burst. The barrel shifted several degrees to the right and lit up again, releasing another burst. Avery ducked into a half crouch and reeled back behind the nearest tree for cover. The incoming rounds chewed through the leaves of hanging branches three feet to his left, near where he’d just been standing.
Avery swung his rifle around his tree and fired multiple shots back at the muzzle flash when it lit up again, forcing Moreno to ease off the trigger and drop back. Then Avery covered another meter, taking wide steps, unconcerned with concealing his approach now, and he swiftly sidestepped to the left behind another tree, this one covered with termites, as Moreno popped up once more and returned fire. Avery heard the shots bore into the tree trunk he used for cover, and then he came around left and fired another burst.
Tree bark exploded in Moreno’s face, and he took cover once more.
Avery took a few more steps with his eyes locked onto another tree and quickly took cover behind this one. Here, he dropped onto one knee and looked ahead, but he still wasn’t able to see directly behind the driftwood. There was a slight gap between the bottom of the overturned tree and the jungle floor, but the space was too dark and shallow to see Moreno through it.
So Avery concentrated his eyes on the forest floor, concealed beneath shrubs and plants, further behind the tree. About four feet beyond the overturned tree, the brush shuddered.
Avery’s eyes shifted to the movement in time to see the sole of a boot slip between the bushes and the low hanging branches. He raised his aim and fired four quick shots through the flora. At least one made contact. Avery saw a leg kick out of the plants, and then it was drag
ged forward through the forest floor.
Avery sprung ahead, keeping his rifle trained on the growth. When he came within two meters, Moreno rolled out of the brush onto his back, with his M16 pointed up and angled toward the American now towering above him. Moreno grimaced, but he was oblivious to the blood pouring into the mud from the back of his left thigh where Avery’s 5.56mm had punctured the meat of his quadriceps, and he was oblivious to the millipedes and army ants on him. He was intent on nothing but acquiring Avery in his sights.
But Avery, anticipating the attack, and not physically impeded, moved faster. Without aiming, he triggered three shots into Moreno’s chest and throat. Moreno’s body convulsed, then his head fell back and his arms went limp and his hands dropped the M16. He wheezed and gasped and withered on the ground for a couple seconds, then became completely still. His eyes stared up at the treetops without seeing.
Keeping his M4 on Moreno, Avery took five more steps forward, slipping one leg and then the other over the top of the overturned tree. He kicked the rifle out of the dead man’s hands and did a full three-sixty sweep around him.
“Suelta el arma, y se identifique!”
The voice called out somewhere behind Avery.
Drop your weapon and identify yourself.
Avery stood completely still and held hands held out to the side. He identified himself by his call sign, Carnivore, the name the Colombian troops would know him by.
It had to be Aguilar’s men—FARC would have just shot him—but Avery’s body still tensed, would stay that way until he was sure someone wasn’t thinking about killing him.
He heard the approach of the troops from behind. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder, and another hand relieved him of the M4, and he was instructed to turn around. When he did so, he came face-to-face with First Sergeant Jon Castillo.
