by Ross Sidor
Fifteen minutes later, the deputy interior minister left the embassy in his official car for the ten minute drive to the Palace of Conventions, the massive, square-shaped glass and concrete building one mile south of the Straits of Florida where the National Assembly of People’s Power, the Cuban legislative branch, convenes. The building’s modern look was a stark contrast to the fifty year old cars driving past on Calle 145, belching black and gray exhaust into the air.
Although only members of the Colombian and FARC delegations would be allowed inside the locked, climate-controlled conference room, the hallways and reception floors of the Palace of Conventions was filled with representatives from other countries with a stake in Colombian politics.
There were many players with an interest in the outcome of the Colombian peace talks. Colombia has massive reserves of oil and natural gas, production of which has been stymied by the ongoing conflict, allowing Venezuela’s and Ecuador’s own petroleum industries to prosper in the past decade. There was further concern over the integrity of shared borders and the future of certain FARC factions, like Commander Dios’s intransigent 34th Front, that were expected to oppose any ceasefire or reconciliation.
As a result, amongst the diplomats and reporters from Ecuador, Venezuela, Spain, the United States, and elsewhere, there were also intelligence officers, as there invariably were at any diplomatic function. This in turn drew the attention of Cuba’s Directorate of General Intelligence, which was also responsible for providing security for the Colombian peace talks.
Modeled after the Soviet-era KGB, DGI is one of the most professional and active intelligence agencies in Latin America. Throughout the eighties, DGI was heavily involved in communist revolutionary and insurgent movements in Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Puerto Rico, while taking part in Soviet interventions in Yemen, Angola, Zaire, and Mozambique. DGI remains active in the US, where it had compromised or bribed a number of reporters, government employees, and congressman, resulting in the pro-Castro American news reports, legislation, and policies.
As security officers escorted him to the conference room, the Colombian minister ignored the questions reporters threw at him. Questions concerning the army raid into Venezuela and how he expected that to affect the peace talks. He gave reporters little attention and, when he did, his words were often derisive, accounting for the less than favorable portrayal of him in Latin American media.
The DGI men closed and locked the doors behind the deputy interior minister after he entered the conference room.
Today’s session began with the usual formal handshakes exchanged amongst the members of the opposing delegations. Then everyone took their seats, one delegation seated across from the other at the table positioned in the center of the vast hall.
The Colombians thought the Secretariat members looked out of place, clean shaven, in ties and business suits, exchanging their jungle fatigues and rugged guerilla fighter look for the façade of respectability and political legitimacy.
Seated at the ends of the table were the Cuban mediators, one of whom was in actuality an intelligence officer reporting directly to Raul Castro after each session.
The air conditioning kept the room’s temperature at just below seventy, to allow the negotiators to keep cool and maintain composure during the often heated discussions. A table against the far wall had water coolers, plastic cups, muffins, and fruit, plus notepads and pens.
These talks have long since grown tiresome for the Colombian diplomats in attendance, having dragged on for over three years. The Colombian government accused FARC of intentionally dragging out the talks to protect senior FARC commanders, who were guaranteed safety from Colombian security forces while in Havana and in transit to and from the conferences. Meanwhile, as the talks took place, government troops continued to engage FARC forces across Colombia.
There are six main topics on the peace talk’s agenda: land reform of rural territory controlled by FARC, political participation and rights of disarmed insurgents, total FARC disarmament, repatriation for victims’ families, and cocaine production and trafficking, as well as the implementation of these items. Once the terms and conditions in all of these areas are agreed upon, the plan would go to Colombian voters for ratification.
The tedium that morning was offset by the excitement that came with carrying out a task, however small, on behalf of the intelligence service, a first for the deputy interior minister. He could hardly wait to tell his wife when he returned to Bogotá.
After spending too long over thinking and planning how to pass the note, the deputy interior minister finally slipped the sealed envelope across the table to Antonio Lascarro.
The FARC negotiator accepted the note with a befuddled expression and examined the envelope in his hand. When he looked up at the deputy interior minister across from him, the Colombian official’s focus was set on his copy of the morning’s agenda, his face bored and impassive as if nothing had happened.
Lascarro tore the envelope open, withdrew the folded piece of paper, and read the text printed on it.
“Inform Rodrigo Echeverri that we are fully aware of Plan Estragos and the intended use of SA-24. We will hold Senor Echeverri personally responsible for any action taken by the Viper against the Republic of Colombia or her allies. Order the Viper to stand down at once and have her delivered into the custody of government authorities or the negotiations are over and there will exist a state of total war. There will be no quarter granted to anyone wearing the FARC banner. We will hunt down every last member of the Secretariat and the Central High Command and execute them where our soldiers find them.”
The color drained from Lascarro’s face.
Rodrigo Echeverri is the commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. He is more commonly known by the nom de guerre Timoshenko, taken after the famous Red Army general who commanded Soviet forces during World War II. In 2011, Echeverri/Timoshenko replaced Alfonso Cano, who was killed by the Colombian army, as the man at the very top of the FARC chain of command. Because of his involvement in the production and trafficking of cocaine to the United States, the US State Department continued to offer a $5 million reward for his capture.
Timoshenko had perhaps more at stake in the peace talks than anyone else. Without a reconciliation offering amnesty to FARC leaders, his options for the future were limited to death by Colombian government troops or life imprisonment in an American maximum security penitentiary, whichever came first.
Four hours later, after the session adjourned for the day, Lascarro and the other members of his delegation left the Palace of Conventions without stopping to make a statement and espouse the standard political rhetoric to the waiting reporters. Escorted by a uniformed police security detail, they walked the short distance to the Palco Hotel.
Lascarro called his DGI contact and said he needed to speak to him in person right away.
An hour later the Cuban intelligence officer and the FARC delegates gathered in Lascarro’s suite. He showed them the ominous note from the deputy interior minister.
The other FARC delegates knew the Viper was General Andrés Flores’s top assassin, but the DGI officer was perhaps most familiar with her. After all, his service helped create the Viper. The Cubans were likewise already aware of Iranian arms sales to FARC brokered through Caracas. But no one present in Lascarro’s suite was able to make sense of the context of the note and the Colombian government’s threats.
As Timoshenko’s personal emissary at the peace talks, Antonio Lascarro was a prime target of the American, British, and Colombian intelligence services in Havana.
Two weeks ago, during a security sweep in Lascarro’s suite, the DGI discovered covert audio surveillance gear manufactured by an American firm known to do business with the CIA.
The previous month, another member of the FARC delegation bedded an attractive young Spanish reporter, who he later caught inserting a specially modified USB drive into his laptop to spike his hard
drive. The DGI quietly picked the reporter up and detained her for a couple days before declaring her persona non grata and expelling her from the country. The incident was kept quiet, but there was no doubt the woman was from Spain’s National Intelligence Center.
Consequently, Lascarro turned to the Cubans to securely transmit messages to Timoshenko, who did not use computers or cell phones. Far too often he’d seen how electronic fingerprints became the undoing of the revolutionaries in the Middle East, and it had also led to the downfall of more than one FARC commander.
Lascarro composed the text of a message to relay to Timoshenko. He coded the message using an old school method known as a book cipher. The correspondents simply substitute the plaintext of the message with the words from a book each party owns (in this case it was The Power of Blood by Miguel de Cervantes; 2005 Whitaker House expanded edition) in a pre-determined pattern known only to the correspondents. It was an additional security measure Lascarro took to prevent the Cubans from reading his communications with Timoshenko, as well as a precaution in case the courier on the ground was intercepted by Colombian agents.
Later at DGI headquarters, which houses a modern array of secure signals and electronic gear, thanks to FAPSI, Russia’s SIGINT agency, he cabled the message to the DGI station at the Cuban embassy in Bogotá.
There, the message was decrypted, leaving the actual substance of Lascarro’s message coded by book cipher and unintelligible to anyone in the world other than Timoshenko. Immediately after receiving the message, the Bogotá-based DGI officer texted his FARC contact with the code word for requesting a meeting. Upon leaving the Cuban embassy, he conducted an expertly crafted surveillance detection run, to find and then lose his separate Colombian and American tails, before completing the drive to Zipaquira, thirty miles north of Bogotá, where he transferred the coded message to the FARC courier. The message was handed off three more times before finally reaching Timoshenko at his jungle hideout on the Colombian-Venezuelan border the following night. Outraged and confused, Timoshenko immediately summoned General Andrés Flores.
TEN
Avery turned and snapped the Glock up in front of him after clearing the holster at his right hip. He leveled the sights, broke the trigger with 5.5lbs of pressure from the pad of his right index finger, and sent a searing hot round of .40 caliber S&W ammunition coring thirty-five feet through the air at 1,230 feet per second into the human shaped silhouette target hanging from the winch. The discharged brass arced through the air, to the right, and clattered against the floor, joining over two dozen more spent shell casings.
Recovering from the recoil, Avery reacquired aim and hit the trigger again. He continued firing until he’d emptied the Glock’s magazine. Within the close confines of the bay’s reinforced baffles, the concussion of the shots exploded through the plugs in his ears. He felt traces of the corrosive smoke in his nose and throat, despite the range’s ventilation system.
But he was most conscious of the dull aching sensation in his right shoulder, deep within the mass of his deltoid, from holding his extended arm up, and the discomfort was sufficient to hinder his fast draw by a second and inhibit his aim. The slightest, imperceptible movement of the barrel was enough to completely divert the bullet’s path.
Avery pressed the automatic target retrieval system’s recall button, and the rail-mounted target travelled down the length of the lane and stopped in front of him. He examined his groupings. His last three shots were slightly left off-center of the circle in the silhouette’s torso, but he was doing better, after learning how he’d need to adjust his stance and aim, and he’d already improved over two days ago.
Contrary to movies and TV shows, you can’t take hits to the shoulder, and suck it up and brush it off. The shoulder was filled with nerve endings, blood vessels, and a complex and vulnerable ball-in-socket joint, and it took a long time to heal.
Avery cleared and holstered his weapon, and collected his things before exiting the range through the airlock. He worked his jaw, trying to push air through his Eustachian tubes to clear the clogged, stuffy feeling in his ears.
After eating a fast meal of protein bars, bananas, and bottled water, he changed into shorts and a t-shirt, threw on a backpack loaded with weight plates, and headed outside. He ran at a measured pace through the wet grass and the misting rain pouring from the gray gloom overhead, along the way passing the rows of mammoth airplane hangars and a USAF C-130 Hercules just in from Tampa Bay.
After the Panama debriefing, Avery had gone straight to his bunk, closed his eyes, and went instantly to sleep. When he woke up twelve hours later, he felt recovered from the post-combat fatigue and adrenaline hangover, but the pain had become even more prevalent in his shoulder and across his upper back.
Still too sore to work out in the gym, since nearly any exercise with weights put stress on the shoulders, Avery passed the time however he could over the next three days, while waiting to hear from Culler that they had a lead—something, anything—on the Viper’s trail.
But there was nothing.
So Avery passed the time the only way he knew how; training and preparing. He obsessively read everything the Colombians had on the Viper, even though the details and insight were sparse, and then he read it again. There were dry factual details dissecting past Viper operations, and analysis laced with speculation, nothing that offered any insight into her psychological makeup or provided clues on how or where to find her. Avery still had little idea of who he was really facing.
He grew restless quickly, his body craving some type of physical activity.
So he put in time on the firing range.
And he ran.
The thin air and humidity that came with the region’s 8,300 foot elevation made running all the more grueling, but it was already going better than yesterday’s run, so he pushed himself a little harder, enough to feel the burn in his lungs and the strain in his thighs. He’d always hated PT in Colombia’s tropical climate, even back then as a twenty-four year old soldier, and it hadn’t become any easier with age.
Maybe he possessed a sadomasochist streak, but Avery liked to push his body under less than optimal conditions. He thought forcing himself through a run while deprived of sleep or in the freezing rain was a good system of enforcing strict discipline. Habituated comfort quickly lent itself to laziness and complacency, which was to be avoided at all costs.
A squad of Colombian soldiers ran past him in formation, with full combat gear, making it look depressingly easy. The gap quickly expanded between the young troops and Avery. He tried picking up the pace to keep up, and failed miserably.
He soon experienced grinding aches behind his knees with each step, and he gasped and sucked air into his lungs like he couldn’t get enough, while sweat drenched his shirt. The humidity and high elevation made him feel twenty pounds heavier and slow. Even with his mind a thousand miles away, it was difficult to ignore the immense physical discomfort.
He was halfway through his third mile, pushing himself much harder than he normally needed to after only three miles. He began to wonder if he’d even make it to a fourth. Back home, five, six miles would be considered a light run with little exertion.
A shadow fell across the ground beside him. He turned his head and saw Aguilar coming up beside him in a relaxed jog.
“Fuck, you look like you’re about to drop dead.”
Avery looked at him and extended an upright middle finger.
“I don’t know what the docs told you, but I can’t imagine they okayed you for this kind of activity.”
“Maybe not, but sitting inside going over the same shit through my head all day isn’t going to do me any good either,” Avery replied between gasps for air. Finally, he stopped running and fell into a walk, panting for air as his heart pounded against his chest. He accepted the water bottle Aguilar tossed to him, guzzled its contents, and poured the rest over his face.
“You’re letting Moreno get to you?” Aguilar asked.
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br /> “Not really. I’ve dealt with her kind before.”
“Castillo?”
“Yeah,” Avery said. “I never had to worry about my teammates from 75th stabbing me in the back; never entered my head. I always could count on some guy in the next chalk I didn’t even know to lay his life down for me, because he knew I’d do the same for him, because we were both Rangers. It was the single absolute I could always count on. It’s what kept us sane in shitholes like Afghanistan.”
Aguilar shrugged. “I won’t lose sleep over Castillo. I would have taken a bullet for him any other time, but there in the stairwell he wasn’t going to hesitate to kill me. He made his own choices. Someone like that should have never made it this far in the army. The system failed him, and us, by letting him slip through.”
Aguilar had been close with Jon Castillo, and Avery knew it was hitting him harder than he let on. Aguilar had served in Afghanistan with Castillo, after all, and he’d been to his wedding five years ago, and held his newborn baby in his arms. Looking down the barrel of a gun in Castillo’s hand, and pulling his own trigger with his sights over Castillo, must have gone against every instinct in Aguilar’s body.
“What are you going to do?” Aguilar asked.
Avery didn’t need to stay around any longer, and he’d briefly entertained the thought of heading back home. Soon CIA’s regional stations, FBI, Homeland Security, and the National Security Council would be brought into the loop, and there’d be little room for Avery.
But Avery knew he wasn’t going to walk away from this. Kashani, an old enemy who had already killed three of his friends in Libya, was arming a terrorist with one of the world’s deadliest weapon systems. He cared little about Moreno, but he thought that maybe she could lead him to Kashani.
“You know I’m going with you,” Aguilar said.
“Huh?” Avery frowned. “And where the hell do you think I’m going?”
