by Ross Sidor
He was an orphaned child, a loner, raised in a peasant family. Although his adoptive parents had connections with the communist party, Muňoz himself remained apolitical, never interested in politics or social issues.
Daniel orchestrated the cover story for Muňoz’s departure from the army. As far as FARC was concerned, as well as official army records—which also documented Muňoz’s very real trouble with authority and run-ins with superior officers, as evidenced by numerous disciplinary demerits—Muňoz deserted shortly after his patrol came across the remains of a tiny village slaughtered by government-supported right-wing death squads.
He travelled alone across the country on foot, hitchhiking, stealing vehicles, and traversing the jungles and mountains, into the deep FARC controlled-territory of the southwest Popayàn, where, wanted by the army and police, he presented himself to the camp commandant as a defector.
The FARC intelligence officers who interrogated him were at first skeptical, but Daniel provided Muňoz with just enough enticing details on troop movements and army operations to capture the Central High Command’s interest and gain their trust.
Muňoz played his part well, and over the next ten years, he rose through the ranks, by far exceeding Daniel’s expectations.
He’d proven his worth and commitment to the Central High Command early on, when he passed the ultimate test by executing a captured army captain, a man he’d once served under. It had been a difficult choice, one which still haunted him to this day, but it was either him or Muňoz, and FARC would have still killed the captain anyway.
Presently, Pablo Muňoz was assigned to the operations staff of the FARC Central High Command. From this position, feeding inside intelligence to ANIC, he was instrumental in the Colombian government’s recent string of victories against FARC, including its campaign of precision air strikes against the FARC leadership. In addition to leading the army to Emilio Reyes, he’d given ANIC the location of Alfonso Cano, commander-in-chief of FARC, who was killed in Operation Odysseus in 2011, still to this day the single biggest blow Bogotá has delivered to FARC.
But Canastilla’s efforts hadn’t resulted only in death. He’d saved lives too by helping the police to disrupt terrorist attacks in Colombian cities. Information Canastilla fed to ANIC also allowed the army to conduct Operation Jaque, where Special Forces, posing as members of the Central High Command, entered a FARC camp and took custody of fifteen hostages—the last bargaining chip FARC had left in its negotiations with the government—without firing a single shot.
Avery patiently listened to the story.
The details didn’t matter much as far it concerned his mission, and he wasn’t sure why Slayton bothered to relay all of this to him. Avery knew he could never go through with what Canastilla did, living a lie for that long, deeply embedded with the enemy, becoming one of them and wondering which side you were really on, all the while knowing that they could find you out at any moment and skin you alive. He thought Slayton told him the story of Pablo Muňoz to garner some sense of sympathy or solidarity, but Avery didn’t do sentimentality. He’d take the mission, but he didn’t give a shit about Pablo Muňoz.
“How do you feel about making the extraction?” Culler asked Avery.
They both knew he wouldn’t say no. Avery’s 201 file included words like “reliable” and “dependable,” traits that had gotten him into trouble more than once.
“If your agent’s at risk, I’ll bring him out.”
THREE
It rained on Arianna Moreno as she strode across the camp grounds. The coastal downpour seeped through the layered jungle canopy, drenching her, and she seemed to neither notice nor care. She passed two men on guard duty wearing ponchos with the hoods pulled up around their heads. Their eyes lingered long over the wet tank top clinging to the contours of Arianna’s breasts, betraying her choice to not wear a brassiere. She set her gaze forward, didn’t acknowledge the men, and they held their silence, knowing it would take a bold or foolish man to provoke her with crude sexual overtures.
Despite the social justice and equality FARC espoused, female recruits were often second class. The weaker ones became sex slaves, used to service the men to boost morale, receiving forced abortions if impregnated in the process, and performed demeaning tasks, like preparing meals and keeping the camps clean. Arianna Moreno was one of the rare exceptions, and most FARC men who set eyes on her recognized this immediately and made no passes toward her. Those who did, like the sergeant who had cornered her and groped her when she was a new recruit, quickly and painfully realized their mistake and became an example for others. That sergeant who assaulted Arianna had his scrotum ripped from his body when he’d dropped his pants.
She barged into the general’s hut without knocking, without caring whether she interrupted something of importance or a private moment. She thought she knew why the FARC chief of intelligence, who was a major general and a deputy of the Central High Command, the military leadership of FARC, had summoned her. Usually, it was because someone needed to be killed or something needed to be destroyed, but she sensed that this time would be different.
Of course by now she had heard of Operation Phoenix and of the government oppressors’ jubilation over slaughtering Emilio Reyes barely two days ago. The last she heard, there wasn’t yet a complete roll call of the dead, but she hadn’t heard from Aarón since before the raid—he never failed to check in with her—and she doubted the government would have left survivors after an illegal military operation in a foreign country.
Normally, a Central High Command deputy would not deal directly with a captain, the rank Arianna nominally held. In FARC, captains command columns—two companies, numbering forty-eight troops—but Arianna was assigned to a special section of the military intelligence network that performed sensitive tasks, a euphemism for assassination and terrorism, directly for the Central High Command. She answered directly and only to Flores. Informally, within the Central High Command, Andrés Flores’s colleagues referred to him as the snake charmer, because Arianna Moreno was the Viper.
She found Flores seated at an old, decrepit wooden desk, consulting a notebook computer under the glow of a burning oil lamp. Raindrops drummed against the wooden rooftop. His hut smelled of tobacco, and a bottle of aged Chivas Regal sat on his desk, next to a short glass filled with half a measure of the liquor, but his eyes remained clear and focused. He looked up over a pair of smudged, crooked glasses at Arianna Moreno’s entrance.
“Please come in and sit down.” Flores indicated the chair in front of his desk. “Make yourself comfortable.”
“I prefer to stand.”
“As you please,” Flores said, annoyed that she always seemed to feel the need to be disagreeable simply as a matter of course. “This is an informal visit. It’s a personal matter. There is no easy way to say this, I’m afraid. Your brother’s body was found in the jungle outside the Venezuelan camp.”
Arianna provided no reaction. Flores simply confirmed what she already knew, and she’d already unleashed her grief. She spent the previous night alone, crying and screaming, wanting to tear her guts out. There were fresh cuts in the exposed flesh of her arms, where she’d pressed the blade of the straight razor deep and sliced, out of the need for some outlet through which to unleash the rage surging inside her. She’d finally exhausted herself and fell asleep covered in blood and tears. The worst was waking up, the couple of seconds of peace and normalcy in the morning, followed by the realization that it hadn’t been a nightmare, and then the agony seized her again.
Aware of Flores’ eyes on the fresh wounds, she self-consciously covered her arms in front of her, internally reprimanded herself for doing so, seeing the move as a sign of weakness, and asked, “Where is the body now?”
“I have arranged for the return of your brother’s remains to Jasminia.”
This was a small hamlet in the north, the closest thing to a home Arianna ever had to return to the over past fifteen years. Now, without
Aarón, the place was nothing. She didn’t she think she had any reason to return now.
“He will be given a proper military burial with full honors.”
That meant little to Arianna. Symbolic gestures were without value, and no one would care, anyway. She needed to think ahead, to the future.
“What will happen next?”
“Members of the Secretariat are in discussions with Caracas to formulate a political as well as tactical response to this provocation,” Flores said. “As far as the latter, I imagine that you would care to extract some measure of retribution on behalf of your brother. It is apparent that Emilio Reyes was betrayed. Finding the spy is our top priority.”
“You have suspicions as to the identity of the spy?”
“As far as I can tell, there are only two men who had advance knowledge of Emilio Reyes’ visit to Venezuela. One of those men is a member of the Secretariat, which means there is little I can do. But we will bait a trap for the other man. When we find the traitor, an example will be made of him, whoever he is.”
Arianna gave it thought and shook her head. “It is not enough.”
“Excuse me?”
“Aarón is dead, along with thirty of our soldiers massacred in their sleep. One spy is not enough, not for Aarón, not for the fascists’ cowardly assault in another nation. A message needs to be sent to Bogotá, and their American masters. I want more than one life, and so should the Secretariat. We’re capable of inflicting so much destruction upon them.”
“With all due respect to your brother, and the others who died, the Secretariat is dealing with the enormous political and security ramifications that will follow Reyes’ death. We have never lost someone as important as Reyes.”
“I think I understand,” Arianna said. “They care only about Reyes. They probably do not even know Aarón’s name. But I’ve done more for the FARC than any of them ever will, and by rights I should have earned their support. I should at least have your support.”
Flores sighed. He’d wanted to keep this to himself, but he realized he had to give Arianna something to placate her. “Very well. Through our intelligence sources, we have identified the man who killed your brother.”
Her eyes widened and she leaned in closer to Flores. “And you intended to withhold this from me?”
“I intended to keep you from doing something…imprudent, at least until you had time to compose yourself and distance yourself from recent events.”
“He’s mine.”
“He will not be an easy target.”
“I will put my team together. They are the best.”
And Flores knew it, too. Four months ago, he’d tasked the Viper’s team with ambushing and destroying a convoy of oil tankers on the highway, spilling their contents to cause millions of dollars of financial and environmental devastation. The following week, they killed the president of the same company with a car bomb.
“The Secretariat cannot authorize personal missions for revenge, you know that. The risk is too great for little reward.”
“Look at me, Andrés. My judgment is not impaired. Give me a name, and I will find him, quick and professional, like any other mission. I’ll do it myself, and there will be no risk involved to anyone but myself.”
Flores knew she possessed the skills and the capabilities. Despite her arrogance and zealousness, she was one of the Central High Command’s most lethal weapons.
Arianna Moreno started out at the FARC training camps at a young age, but her intelligence, sharp reflexes, natural marksmanship abilities, and quick grasp of hand-to-hand fighting skills quickly set her apart from the other recruits. She was selected for advanced special warfare and terrorism training, and that’s when the Viper came into being.
Credit for the creation of the Viper was owed to FARC’s toughest, most unforgiving IRA and Israeli mercenary trainers, and to the DGI, Castro’s Directorate of General Intelligence, at Camp Matanzas, near Havana, where Carlos the Jackal was trained.
The Viper once used the promise of her sex to lure an undercover DEA informant from a bar in Bogotá to his hotel, where she castrated him and slit his throat. She assassinated a senior, well-protected Cali cartel member who had ceased paying the tax required of those trafficking cocaine through FARC-controlled territory. In Quito, she assassinated a right wing Ecuadoran presidential candidate who sought closer ties to Colombia and military cooperation with the US. In the Bolivian city La Paz, outside the US Embassy, she held the American deputy chief of mission in the crosshairs of the VSS sniper rifle and broke the trigger on her. She’d even been sent to America once, for the early stages of a mission, later aborted, to bomb the FBI’s Hoover Building in Washington, DC.
But…
“It won’t be quite that simple,” Flores said. “We only have a codename for this man—Carnivore. This is the first time my intelligence people have heard this name before. From our source, we believe he is a former American soldier, probably from an elite unit, and now works for the US intelligence agencies. Other than that, we have only a vague physical description.”
“So the chances of your intelligence networks identifying and locating this man are small,” Arianna said, the disappoint clear in her voice.
“When I said that he would not be an easy target, it was not because I questioned your capabilities. We may simply never know who he is.”
“And if you can identify him?”
“Then he is yours.”
As usual Flores did not divulge the details. The Viper didn’t need to know that one of Flores’s informants in the Colombian army, an NCO who occasionally bought and smuggled cocaine, put Flores’ agents into contact with an army sergeant at Tolemaida, where the Colombian Special Forces were based. From this man, Flores’s agents were given a name and a full account of the army raid and the shooting death of Aarón Moreno. Flores’s agents offered $30,000 for the American, but their source wasn’t confident he could deliver.
In the meantime, Arianna Moreno’s vitriolic anger and need for bloodshed would fester and become her obsession, demanding an outlet. She wondered if killing one man would really satisfy her. Americans as a whole disgusted her, and she’d long been a proponent at striking at the American electorate, the ignorant, pampered people who put into power those subjugating the Colombian people. Whether her brother was killed or not, the Colombian operation into Venezuela demanded a strong response to show that FARC was still a powerful military force.
“What about Plan Estragos?” the Viper asked, catching Flores by surprise. The name was supposed to be known only to the highest ranking FARC commanders. Plan Estragos—Havoc—was a new military endeavor intended to shift the war in FARC’s strategic favor. “Reyes was close to finalizing the acquisition of weapons. That’s why he travelled to Táchira, to see the man from Caracas.”
“Plan Estragos will proceed according to the original timetable,” Flores said, “but I do not see how our measures for enhanced air defense are relevant to this discussion.”
“I can bring the weapons into the US, just as the Americans arrogantly violate the borders and sovereignty of other nations with impunity. With just a couple strikes, I can devastate their entire country.”
Flores shook his head, and the Viper cut him off when he started to respond.
“It would be a far better use of my abilities than using me to catch one worthless sapo, and you know it,” she said.
Sapo was the derogatory slang term used within FARC for spies who collaborated with the Colombian federal government.
“We both know it will never happen. The Secretariat must take into consideration the politics, current negotiations with the Bogotá government, and our long term strategy. As satisfying as it may be, the Secretariat will most definitely not authorize military action against American civilian targets, certainly not within the borders of the United States. There is no way.”
“You misunderstand me. I am not asking the Secretariat to sanction anything.” Arianna realized that
she now crossed a line from which there could be no going back. “I will use my own agents. All I require from you are the weapons and financing. I think I’ve earned that much.”
“You forget your place, Captain. I understand you must be very emotional at the moment, but if you do not let this topic rest, I will need to inform the Sec-”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Andrés. In fact, it would be best for both of us if you didn’t repeat a word of this conversation to anyone. How do you think the Secretariat would react to learning that you and Emilio Reyes skimmed from FARC’s cocaine revenue and sold drugs to the Mexicans for your personal profit? I imagine they’d execute you.”
Flores blinked, understanding where this conversation was headed and at once regretting his decision to not have his personal bodyguards standing outside of his hut for the duration of his meeting with Moreno, a precaution he normally took. As valuable as she was, the Viper wasn’t easily controlled, and Flores never fully felt at ease alone with her.
He didn’t deny her statement or defend himself. There was no point. It wouldn’t change anything now and would only make him appear even weaker in the Viper’s eyes. Besides, what she said was true, and he knew she wouldn’t have made the threat without evidence. It stood to reason that she’d collected her own intelligence over the years, to use as security, because she’d never fully trusted her political masters.
With the peace talks underway in Havana, and government forces decimating FARC, Flores had decided it was prudent to look into securing his own future. He had over two million dollars that he’d accumulated over the past couple years held in numbered Cayman Island bank accounts and he’d privately negotiated with the Cubans for future asylum in Havana.
Flores wasn’t going to allow Arianna Moreno to interfere with that future. He felt no animosity toward her. He reserved his anger for himself, for recognizing the Viper as a liability years ago and never dealing with it.