Viper: A Thriller

by Ross Sidor

  A spokeswoman from the American embassy announced that the embassy was offering full assistance to the Panamanian authorities in identifying and locating the American suspect. Avery imagined that COS Panama was smugly pleased with the turn of events, and Culler would likely be placed in the hot seat at Langley. American diplomats had enough on their plates following the raid in Venezuela. They weren’t going to cover the ass of an American spy caught in a shootout in Panama City.

  Culler would later learn that CIA’s Panama station had provided to local authorities Avery’s description, the name under which he’d entered the country, and a description of his vehicle, thereby ensuring that he never returned to Panama again, and possibly compromising his ability to operate in neighboring countries, too.

  From the hotel, Aguilar and Avery then immediately gathered their things and fled in the rented Explorer. Aguilar drove with Avery stuffed in the back, concealed beneath a blanket between their duffel bags and suitcases. The police officers who stopped them at two different vehicle checkpoints never went further than asking for Aguilar’s ID and shining their flashlights through the Explorer’s windows as they walked around and looked inside. Fortunately Aguilar’s Bolivian ID and passport were quality forgeries.

  Once clear of Panama City and the surrounding metropolitan area, the remainder of the ninety mile drive to the rendezvous point, north of Darien National Park, near the Colombian border, was quiet and uneventful.

  There, they ditched the Explorer, leaving behind nothing that could be used to identify them or be traced back to them, walked across the border through the rainforest, remote territory populated only by indigenous tribal people, and were picked up by the stealth Blackhawk.

  Culler and Slayton had watched the news reports that night coming out of Panama about gunshots, explosions, and bodies at the Trump Ocean Club Hotel. Then, when Avery’s team reached the pick-up point, they’d heard the radio transmission that not only did the team not have Agent Canastilla in tow, but they were also short one of their own team members.

  It had been a tense twelve hours for Culler and Slayton, and they were both relieved when the Blackhawk finally returned to Palanquero.

  With the Canastilla extraction a failure, Daniel aborted the mission to bring out Pablo Muňoz’s family. It was a cold decision, but there simply was no need for them, and they weren’t worth the risk. It wasn’t difficult to surmise what their eventual fate would be. Left behind families of sapos could expect to receive a visit from a FARC security unit, followed by an unmarked grave, and NSA intercepts would soon confirm that Muňoz’s wife and children were picked up.

  Listening to Avery and Aguilar’s version of events, Daniel was torn between guilt for sending them into this situation and irritation for their failure to bring his man out. He also felt no small measure of guilt over Muňoz’s family. He was already craving the bottle of aguardiente in his quarters. It required a conscious effort for him to control the tremor in his hands, and he caught Avery looking at him with knowing eyes.

  “Seven civilians are dead, along with a valuable intelligence asset and another man who I pray the Panamanian authorities will never identify as an active duty member of National Army Special Forces.” Daniel shook his head. “This is a complete disaster.”

  “Hey,” Avery said, his nose bandaged and stuffed with gauze, “I wish I could have walked away with Canastilla too, but the enemy were in total control the entire time. The whole thing was a setup, and for some reason they specifically wanted me. Felix and I were lucky to make it out alive.”

  “I can tell you now there is no way I can keep this from my superiors,” Daniel said. “Many people will not accept the standard cover story that Sergeant Castillo was killed during a training exercise. They will demand an investigation into what happened to him.”

  “Who gives a fuck?” Avery said. “Let them. He was dirty.”

  “There are many people who will find that difficult to accept, especially taking into consideration the reputation of the Central Intelligence Agency’s so-called scorpions,” Daniel said, using the nickname for CIA contractors.

  “Wait a minute,” Culler said. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “This isn’t the first scorpion operation to result in a gun battle and civilian casualties.”

  “Daniel,” Aguilar cut in impatiently. “I was there. I can vouch that Carnivore made all of the right calls. He saved both our lives.”

  But Avery knew that didn’t matter. He understood what was really going on here. With Colombian presidential elections coming up, this might become a political issue, as invariably did any failed operation of the security services. The last political scandal borne from the intelligence services resulted in the elimination of ANIC’s predecessor agency and a total re-organization of the Colombian intelligence and security establishment, plus the termination of numerous careers.

  “We can place blame later,” Special Agent Mark Slayton said. Addressing Avery and Aguilar, he asked, “Did you guys see or hear anything that might help us? Was there anything that caught your attention? Anything at all?”

  “Yeah,” said Avery. “I was getting to that before Daniel started threatening us with bureaucratic political bullshit. Canastilla did tell me something before he died. Actually, he wanted me to pass it on to Daniel.”

  “What is it?” Slayton asked.

  “Canastilla said that the Viper has hijacked Plan…Estragos, that’s it, and is bringing Estragos to the United States.”

  Culler didn’t react, clearly as out of the loop as Avery, but Slayton exchanged worried looks with Daniel.

  “Obviously that means something to you guys,” Avery said. “Estragos means, what, havoc?”

  “Right,” Slayton answered. “Plan Estragos refers to FARC’s battle plan following its acquisition of an unknown quantity of MANPADs, specifically SA-24. FARC intends to distribute the missiles amongst their military blocs for air defense against the helicopters and attack planes that have been so instrumental in giving the Colombian government the upper-hand and finally forcing FARC to the negotiating table.”

  “Quite simply,” Daniel said, “our military will have no defense against a SAM threat of this magnitude. SA-24 will deny the military air superiority. These missiles can completely alter the balance of power in Colombia, buy FARC the time to re-organize itself, and potentially undo everything we’ve achieved over the last eight years. Our top priority the past year has been to deny FARC access to MANPADS.”

  After WMD, MANPADS—man portable air defense systems, aka shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles (SAMs)—were the most sought after weapon by terrorists. American-supplied Stingers played a pivotal part in the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan in the 1980s. If FARC had SA-24 at Táchira, then Operation Phoenix would have turned out very differently, with burning Colombian helicopters, and troops stranded in Venezuela. If MANPADS were used against defenseless civilian airliners, it would be a total slaughter.

  SA-24 Grinch is the latest model of the Russian-made 9K38 Igla (“needle”) infra-red homing shoulder-fired SAM, and one of the most sophisticated in the world. It is faster than previous Russian models, with an extended range of 3.2 miles, and possesses upgraded defenses against known NATO countermeasures while packing a larger warhead. SA-24 can also target an aircraft from any direction, unlike older Russian MANPADS, which went for the heat of the engines’ exhaust.

  “What about Viper?” Avery asked. “What’s that?”

  “The Viper is Arianna Moreno,” Daniel replied.

  It took a second before the last name clicked with Avery. “That sounds familiar.”

  “She is Aarón Moreno’s sister, and she is a dozen times more lethal than her brother. Aarón Moreno was a brutal thug. This woman is a skilled, professionally trained, and capable assassin.”

  “In short, she’s the most dangerous terrorist in Latin America,” Culler replied. “She came up a couple times back when I ran CIA’s Countert
errorism Center. This was well after 9/11. Frankly, the Seventh Floor didn’t give a shit about one Colombian terrorist at the time. I had a feeling I’d hear that name again at some point.”

  “She might have little political value, but she’s one of our most wanted and most elusive high value targets,” Daniel said. “For the past six years, she’s been the target of a special Search Bloc task force.”

  When the National Police’s Search Bloc unit, often working in tandem with the US Army’s top secret Intelligence Support Activity, set its sights on someone, that person invariably ended up dead or in jail, often sooner rather than later. They’d hunted and took down Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellin cartel and once the most wanted man in the world. The fact that the Viper could elude Search Bloc so long spoke volumes about her skills and tradecraft.

  “I never heard of her,” Avery admitted.

  “Most people haven’t,” Culler said. “Like I said, she’s never been a focus for us. Not when we have lunatics from the Taliban buying weapons grade material on the black market and the Islamic State seeking to weaponize the bubonic plague. Despite the connotations of her cute nickname, which is simply a codename FARC informally gave her, she doesn’t seek fame and attention, or media adoration. She maintains a low-profile and stays in the shadows.”

  “Well, I guess we know who set the trap for me in Panama.”

  “You’re a very lucky man,” Daniel said. “The Viper is not known to miss. Admittedly, we have precious little insight into her psychological makeup, but by all accounts she shared an extremely close relationship with her brother and is a generally disturbed personality. Her brother’s death must have left quite an impression on her.”

  “Yeah,” Avery grunted. “I gathered that.”

  “It’s my fault,” Culler told Avery. “We knew something wasn’t right from the beginning. I shouldn’t have let you go.”

  “Fuck that, Matt. It was my choice, not yours. If I didn’t go, we’d have no idea about the SA-24 threat until planes started dropping out of the sky. Speaking of which, you really think FARC would hit us on American soil? Do they even have the capability? They never operated in the States before.”

  “FARC will surely retaliate for Operation Phoenix,” Daniel said, “but it is difficult to believe that the Secretariat would ever authorize terrorist attacks inside the United States. On the other hand, I doubt there is little that can deter the Viper once she has made up her mind, and, since the peace talks began, there are plenty of factions within FARC that essentially act independently of the Secretariat and Central High Command.”

  “So you’re saying the threat should be taken seriously?” asked Avery.

  “Coming from a source like Canastilla, yes.”

  “Who’s supplying missiles to FARC?” Avery asked. “The SA-24 shoulder-fired variant is modern, top of the line gear. You don’t just go to any arms dealer and place an order.”

  Slayton fielded this question. “We can’t say for sure, but we have our suspicions. We know that for the past month Emilio Reyes has been meeting with a mid-level trade official from the Iranian embassy in Venezuela named Farhad Mahmoudieh. The CIA station in Caracas has verified that Mahmoudieh is in actuality one Colonel Vahid Kashani.”

  “Kashani, that fuck!” Culler blurted out.

  Avery shared the sentiment. He was just as surprised to hear that name come up here. The faces of dead friends and teammates appeared clear in his mind.

  “Someone you know?” Slayton asked.

  “Yeah,” Avery said. “You could say that.”

  Avery exchanged looks with Culler, who knew exactly what Avery was thinking.

  Two years ago Avery ran security for a CIA unit assigned to recover loose missiles in Libya. Gaddafi had accumulated vast stockpiles of weapons, including 20,000 SAMs, over half of which were unaccounted after the NATO-backed Libyan National Transitional Council took power.

  During the chaos that followed the fall of Gaddafi’s regime, Libya became an ungoverned free-for-all. Arms depots were looted by the various terrorist groups, intelligence services, and arms merchants flocking to the country in droves. In addition to becoming a new insurgent battleground rivaling Iraq during the American occupation, Libya also became a giant arms bazaar with everything from AK-47s and RPGs to tanks, mines, artillery, chemical weapons shells, and enriched uranium for sale.

  On top of Libyan arms, plenty of American weapons flooded the market too, including thousands of American-made Stinger missiles and AT-4 anti-tank rockets that the US secretary of state had convinced the president to send to Libyan rebel groups, at least one of which was a designated terrorist organization and affiliated with al-Qaeda.

  And al-Qaeda, Hamas, Boko Haram, ISIS, al-Shabaab, Chechen rebels, Syrian rebels, Iraqi insurgents, Egyptian spies, Sudanese generals, and Iranian Revolutionary Guard all lined up to buy everything they could get their hands on.

  While NATO forces immediately locked down Libyan nuclear and chemical weapons sites, the White House tasked CIA with locating and buying or destroying the MANPADS.

  So Avery’s team of shooters escorted Arabic fluent case officers through the war ravaged streets of Tripoli, the harbors of Sirte, and abandoned desert army bases turned terrorist shopping centers, following tip-offs from Arab agents recruited amongst the rebel forces and leads generated from interrogating Libyan military officers. Avery’s job was to keep the case officers alive and conduct direct action to secure any missiles they found.

  After a month of snooping around, tipped off by sources belonging to Ghadaffi defectors to the National Transitional Council, Avery’s team soon caught wind of Iranians looking for Gaddafi’s brand new SA-24s.

  Why would the Iranians go through the trouble of slipping undercover operatives into a war zone to procure weapons when they could simply place an order with Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria, or Vietnam? Because this way there’d be no records and no way for Western agencies to track the sales and trace the missiles back from the end-user to the supplier. The missiles were a completely deniable, untraceable weapon Iran could supply to Hezbollah or Hamas.

  Within the week, Avery’s team picked up the trail of the Iranians, and learned they were planning to raid a secret storage facility belonging to Gaddafi’s elite 32nd Khamis Brigade hidden beneath a farm in Tripoli’s Salahadin neighborhood.

  A Libyan agent from one of the militia groups on the CIA payroll reported the Iranians had procured army transport trucks, paid off Islamists who had seized an abandoned Libyan air base, and were preparing to move the missiles out of the Salahadin facility that night. The shipment reportedly numbered in the hundreds.

  The head of the CIA task force shit a brick when he heard this. He gave Avery the green light to move in and use whatever force necessary to prevent the removal of the weapons.

  But Avery’s team was delayed negotiating passage through the territory of a local militia, and the team arrived too late. They searched the warehouse, finding plenty of anti-tank rockets and older Chinese-made missiles, but not a single SA-24 or SA-7. They did, however, recover SA-24 operating and maintenance manuals, spare battery-coolant units, and transit crates.

  While Avery’s team remained on site and waited for the arrival of British forces to lock the place down and take inventory, they came under attack by Ansar al-Sharia, an Islamist faction allied with Iran. The firefight lasted until British paratroopers arrived to even the odds, but not before Avery lost three of the men on his team.

  The next day, CIA learned through one of its Libyan agents that an Iranian cargo plane had taken off just two hours later from the abandoned airfield the Iranians secured fifty miles away. The plane landed in Sudan, and the missiles were diverted to covert Iranian bases in Shiite rebel territory in Yemen.

  Egyptian and Israeli intelligence sources in Sudan later identified Colonel Vahid Kashani, a man already known to CIA and Mossad, as the leader of the Iranian acquisition team.

  Six months later, the Israelis raid
ed a Hezbollah safe house in southern Lebanon and discovered a cache of five SA-24s. Since then, Libyan SAMs, both shoulder-launched and pedestal-mounted, have also turned up in the Gaza Strip, Mali, the Sinai Peninsula, Somalia, and Syria. American aircraft have already been shot down by the loose missiles, including a USAF spy plane taking off from Camp Lemonier in Djibouti and a Chinook carrying a SEAL Team Six contingent in Afghanistan.

  Ever since Libya, Vahid Kashani had been on Avery’s personal hit list. Avery pushed his contacts in JSOC and CIA’s Near East Division, waiting to catch that one bit of intel that would set him on Kashani’s path or steer him toward those missing SA-24s before they ended up in the hands of insurgents targeting American troops in Iraq or Afghanistan or, worse, in the hands of terrorists inside the United States.

  Avery usually had no problem keeping detached from his work, viewing it as just that, but this was different. He’d done plenty of time as a soldier, lugging around a backpack and a rifle in foreign countries, following orders. He’d also seen friends catch a bullet or an IED. Part of the reason he went to work for CIA was because he thought maybe he could stop more soldiers from getting killed in some God-awful place because one asshole or another in the White House was pressured to intervene in some conflict or another that often had little to do with the United States, more often than not in a short sighted, half ass manner.

  But other than one time in southern Yemen, where Avery had Kashani under surveillance and in his crosshairs, only to be ordered by the Seventh Floor to let him go, he’d had no luck. Ironically and frustrating, it had been one of the rare times he actually listened to Langley’s orders.

  Avery vowed that the next time he had Kashani in his sights, he’d pull the trigger. And it wouldn’t matter a damn to him whether he had official sanction or not.