by Ross Sidor
The driver made no effort to engage the Viper in conversation, appearing noticeably uneasy around her. She was grateful for the silence, but the man’s apprehension aroused her suspicions. As time passed, she noticed the driver’s breathing become heavier. His shoulders tensed up, and his knuckles whitened around the wheel, while his eyes wavered, constantly flickering in her direction. The change in behavior was sufficient to activate her internal threat receptors.
Arianna yawned, raising her left hand to her mouth for distraction, and stretched, repositioning herself so that her right leg extended, and she rested her right hand over the Desert Eagle strapped to her thigh. The VSS Vintorez rested between her legs, the butt sitting on the floor, barrel pointing up toward the roof of the cab.
She caught the driver’s gaze on her. Beads of sweat began to form and trickle from his face. When his left hand fell to his side, the Viper snapped and instructed him to keep both hands on the wheel. The man obeyed.
“Stop here, and put your hands over the dashboard.”
The driver took his foot off the gas, gradually cutting speed. He took his time coming to a complete stop, hoping the troops in the back would notice and catch on that something was wrong.
As his right hand shifted the gear selector, his left made a move to the Beretta holstered at his side. He never got the gun clear of the holster before the Viper drew the big Desert Eagle and fired a single round of .50 Action Express through his right temple from a distance of three feet. The contents of his skull exploded against the window.
The Viper flung her door open and jumped down from the high cab of the truck. She turned right, holding the Desert Eagle level in front of her in both hands just as one of the soldiers who was riding in the bed came around the back of the truck with his AK-47 raised. The Viper aligned her sights over him and fired twice, two explosive cracks of thunder, catching the soldier through the chest, blasting his ribs through his lungs and taking him clean off his feet.
Off to her right, on the opposite side of the truck, the Viper heard footsteps sloshing through the puddles in the mud. She turned, stepped around the truck’s right fender, and stopped in front of the grill. Two seconds later, the barrel of an AK poked around the driver side of the truck, and she fired once on the FARC soldier as he entered her sight picture, wiping the surprised expression off his face.
The Viper holstered the Desert Eagle and retrieved the AK-47 and a spare magazine from the FARC corpse. Like the driver, he didn’t wear a uniform, had no unit patches or insignia. These men weren’t regulars; they were from FARC’s military intelligence branch; Flores’s men.
When she opened the truck’s driver side door, the driver’s body slumped over, falling halfway out of its seat. Gravity pushed a fresh stream of blood from the gaping hole in the head. The Viper grabbed onto the body, pulled it out, took his place behind the wheel, and lowered the blood-covered window before putting the truck into gear, accelerating over the dead body of the last man she shot, and continuing down the road.
She had the missiles in back, more than she sought, probably more than she could realistically use or transport, and her logistics contact waited for her in Bogotá, and the Iranian’s warning about Flores lingered in her mind. Still, she had no choice but to go forward to the FARC base. Her agents were waiting for her there, and without them the operation would be seriously hindered. Plus, with the Iranians now involved, she wanted reliable backup she could trust. More important, she wanted answers. Someone had the audacity to cross her, and had failed. That could not be forgotten.
She drove aggressively during the hour to the military camp belonging to the FARC 34th Front in Colombia’s Antioquia Department. Night came fast in the jungle, where sunlight barely filtered through the heavy canopy even during the day, and the sun was already setting by the time she was coming up to the camp. She saw the orange glow of a couple kerosene lanterns through the dark shade cast by the overhead layers of forest canopy.
The Viper knew if Flores sought to betray her, then now would be the time to do it, when he had her contained by a small army on FARC territory.
But the Viper was on good terms with the commander of the 34th Front, man who often acted unilaterally, becoming an intransigent thorn in the side of both the government and the Central High Command, like when he abducted a Colombian National Army general, putting the Havana peace talks on hold. The 34th Front commander, who went by the nom de guerre Commander Dios, didn’t play politics, and Arianna did not believe that he’d turn on her. She supposed that she would soon find out, though.
The front gates and the guard station appeared ahead in the Viper’s headlights.
A figure clad in jungle-camouflage stepped in her path in front of the open gates. He raised a hand, signaling her to stop. With the AK-47 laying across the dash, in easy reach, the selector switch on automatic, Arianna pressed the gas. The diesel engine gave a roar, and the truck picked up speed. The guard hesitated for a second, and then jumped off the side of the path as the FAP truck whipped past.
In the center of the campground, a clearing amidst the wooden cabins and barracks, Andrés Flores, accompanied by four FARC soldiers with shouldered rifles, awaited the Viper’s arrival. There were two others, familiar faces to Arianna, and she was surprised to see them standing alongside Flores and his thugs.
The Viper stopped the truck thirty feet in front of Flores. She grabbed the AK-47, slung the VSS over her shoulder, threw the door open, and jumped out of the cab. Her eyes set on Flores, but she kept the AK in the low ready position, muzzle angled toward the ground, and made no threatening moves.
She returned the looks of her own men, read their faces, and knew at once she was in no danger. Flores was an even bigger fool than she’d thought.
“I didn’t expect you to personally greet me, Andrés,” she called out.
“I assure you, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important. I require you to stand down now, Captain Moreno. I am acting on orders from Timoshenko.”
“Ah, I see, so that’s why your men tried and failed to kill me, Andrés.”
“They were under strict orders not to harm you unless they came under threat.”
“Then why do you wait for me here with six armed men? Why even send me to Venezuela if you never intended on following through with our arrangement?”
“I had every intention of honoring our agreement, but unfortunately that is no longer possible.”
Flores did not mention that Timoshenko was also irate over what happened in Panama City. The FARC commander-in-chief believed that Flores was controlling the Viper and deliberately using her to sabotage the peace talks and escalate the conflict. Timoshenko told him that if the peace talks came apart, there would be no safety for Flores in Cuba and he would be viewed by everyone, including the Secretariat and Havana, as a war criminal and a terrorist. Timoshenko threatened to hunt Flores down himself if the Viper used a single missile against a civilian target.
Flores said, “If you do not stand down now, I will give the order for these men to shoot you down where you stand.”
“You know I will not do that.”
“Have you not taken a look around? You have no choice. Even your own men are unwilling to go along with this madness. Please, Arianna. You do not want to die here like this.”
The Viper shifted her gaze to the short, scruffy Peruvian standing on the outer flank of Flores’s agents, then to the taller, older Spaniard. Their fingers had already taken up first pressure on their triggers, just waiting for the order to fire. Their eyes never left Arianna.
“So you’ve picked your sides then?” the Viper asked her men.
The Spaniard nodded once.
The Peruvian shifted his head and spat a wad of chew tobacco into the tall grass.
“You should never have placed your trust in mercenaries,” Flores answered for them. “Set your weapons down, Arianna. Please. This will be your last chance.”
“I do not believe so, Andrés.”
“Very well,” Flores said, and before he could get his next word out, the order for his men to open fire, the Peruvian and the Spaniard shifted their stances, taking a couple steps back, and brought their weapons to bear on Flores’s troops.
As the FARC soldiers reacted, the Viper snapped up her AK and locked onto the most immediate threat to her personal safety, a soldier with his rifle trained on her. She got off the first shot, dropping a FARC soldier, and then the Peruvian and the Spaniard opened fire.
There was shouting and a tangle of confusion, during which eleven more whip-like shots broke out, one after the other, a couple simultaneously, thundering across the camp. In the nearby trees, monkeys screeched and scattered, and birds squawked and took to the sky.
When the blue-gray smoke cleared, Flores’s troops were strewn across the ground, perforated, dead, and bleeding, and Flores, still standing, surprised to find himself alive, was quickly relieved of his sidearm by the Spaniard, who poked his FAL rifle into Flores’s back, while the Spaniard executed a surviving FARC soldier with a single shot to the head.
The Viper approached Flores, raised her rifle in the air and smashed the wooden butt against the side of his head, breaking his glasses. Dazed, Flores collapsed onto his knees, and the Viper struck him again, this time in the back of the head, toppling him.
“You should never have trusted these mercenaries either, Andrés.”
The Viper stepped past Flores and embraced her men.
Flores sat up in the wet grass, thinking that she was right. He should have had the Spaniard and the Peruvian killed immediately when they’d arrived here, instead of offering them a choice.
The Viper’s men were Carlo Ibarra and Benito Trujillo. Like the Viper, each was a trained, seasoned killer, but Flores had underestimated their relationship with Arianna and misjudged the extent of her lone wolf independence. He watched Ibarra take Arianna into his arms and kiss her on each cheek, unusual to see the Viper to display affection for a human being.
And it was all the more curious because Flores knew the histories of these men. They’d served FARC well over the years, but he realized too late they’d always truly belonged to the Viper.
The Viper first met Carlo Ibarra when she was assigned to assist his ETA cell in Madrid for the aborted assassination of President Aznar. In 2010, when ETA declared a ceasefire, disarmed, and entered into negotiations with the Spanish government, Carlo Ibarra, forty-six years old, was one of the top terrorists wanted by the Spanish government. There were absolutely no conditions under which Madrid would ever grant Ibarra amnesty or a lighter sentence, and the Spanish security services would never give up the hunt for him.
With ETA’s leadership shaking hands with Spanish council ministers and selling out the Basque separatist fighters, Ibarra fled to Colombia. He served as an adviser to FARC’s intelligence and terrorist commanders, and opened up channels to European financial supporters, arms dealers, and cocaine buyers. If Arianna Moreno hadn’t convinced General Flores to take him in, then Ibarra would be rotting in a Spanish prison for the rest of his life, where the vengeful death squads sponsored by the Spanish government could easily reach him.
Benito Trujillo once served in the 6th Jungle Brigade of the Peruvian army, trained at the US Army’s School of the Americas in Georgia. He fought in Peru’s internal conflict, and its brief border war with Ecuador, before deserting to join the Shining Path insurgency. Later, after the Peruvian government’s hardline tactics all but defeated the Shining Path, Trujillo found work as a mercenary in Mexico working for the cartels; in Colombia with FARC; in Thailand training the communist insurgency; and in Iraq working for a private military corporation doing work for the CIA.
Small, wry, and rat-like, Trujillo was absolutely vicious and a total sociopath with no compunction about killing anyone or anything. More often than not, he enjoyed it. In Thailand, he was rumored to have skinned alive a spy caught amongst his troops, and then cooked the man’s meat on an open grill.
“Get ready to move,” the Viper told her men.
“Where are we going?” Trujillo asked. “We’re going to have the whole fucking FARC after us now, in addition to everyone else.”
“Bogotá,” the Viper answered. “There’s someone else we need to see.”
“What about the weapons?”
“Arrangements will be made in Cali for their delivery north.”
Trujillo rolled his eyes. “Nolan?”
The Viper caught the disdain in Trujillo’s tone. He’d never cared for the Irishman, but then, he’d never cared for any white man.
“He has the resources and connections, and I can trust him,” the Viper replied, and Trujillo left it at that, knowing better than to question her.
Carlo Ibarra’s gaze fell onto Flores, who was listening intently to the exchange.
“What about him?”
Trujillo drew his sidearm and pointed it at Flores, who flinched. “We waste him.”
“No,” the Viper said. Flores was surprised, but relieved, to see Trujillo comply so easily with the Viper’s command and lower his weapon. Trujillo never took orders well from anyone. His relief didn’t last, though.
“He’s mine.”
The Viper handed Ibarra her AK.
She circled Flores and stopped behind him.
In a lighting fast movement, she grabbed a handful of Flores’s hair with her right hand and pulled, jerking his head back and exposing his neck, while her opposite hand withdrew the black Russian-made Kizlyar tactical knife from the sheath strapped to her leg. Flores’s eyes caught a flash of movement in front of his face, and then he felt the blade against his throat.
It wasn’t the clean, smooth cut depicted in movies. The flesh around the throat is rough and sinewy. The Viper pressed the blade in deep, and jerked and pulled, hacking savagely at Flores’s throat, tearing through the muscles and cartilage of the larynx and trachea. She stood back, her legs taking a wide stance, arms outstretched. She kept her distance from her victim because this was also to be a messy affair. Blood gushed out in great spurts, splattering Flores’s face and the Viper’s hands and soaking the front of his shirt. She gave a couple more hard pulls on the knife, the blade scraping the esophagus now, and then she released her hold on Flores. He remained on his knees for a second, clutching at his neck with both hands, blood pouring through his fingers, before he fell over. He thrashed and kicked on the ground, hacking and wheezing as he choked on his own blood. Even after he became still, his eyes locked open in death, blood continued to stream from the gash in his throat.
The Viper watched, fascinated. Her heart beat rapidly and her breathing was heavy, as adrenaline coursed through her body at the almost orgasmic thrill of the kill. She brought the knife to her mouth and licked the blood from the blade before returning it to its sheath.
She heard movement behind her and turned around as Ibarra and Trujillo snapped their rifles up.
Someone approached from across the camp. He was tall, fit, wore jungle camouflage fatigues, and had his long, dirty hair tied back into a pony tail. The Viper recognized Commander Dios, the commander of the 34th Front, and told her men to stand down.
“Shortly after we received word you were coming,” Commander Dios said, “Flores arrived here with his thugs. He said you were a traitor and instructed us to provide back up for his men. Flores was always a lying shit. I ordered my troops to stay out of it, no matter what they heard or saw.”
The Viper nodded her thanks. “I’m leaving you with fourteen missiles in the truck. The other ten are mine.”
“So it true. Flores said you intend to attack the norte americanos in their homeland.”
“What else did Flores say?”
“He said you were a threat to any chance our nation has of ever achieving true political reconciliation and a peaceful settlement after all these decades, but that’s okay with me. My heart is with the revolution. Whatever the Secretariat decides, the 34th Front is not going to sell out.”
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“In the coming weeks, you’ll hear word of what I’ve done, Dios. Expect a strong military response from the Americans and their whores in Bogotá, probably unlike anything we’ve seen before. Be prepared and stay strong. It may be best for you to save the missiles until then.”
“My men are prepared to fight,” Commander Dios assured her. “And what will you do?”
“I will kill as many of them as I can until they find me.”
___
The Viper linked up with the Iranian’s operative four days later in Bogotá. During that time span, she and her men acquired civilian vehicles and made a stop in Cali, where, for a sizeable amount of cash, nine of the missiles were to begin their journey north. She retained the tenth missile.
She arrived early to first run a countersurveillance sweep through Simón Bolívar Park, the arranged meet site, located in the center of the city with a lake, children’s museum, waterpark, and a stadium capable of holding over a 100,000 people.
It was late afternoon, the weather pleasant, and people were everywhere, playing soccer on the open fields, picnicking near the lake, and filling the trails. The single woman wearing jeans and a long-sleeve shirt with her hair tied back didn’t garner a second glance from anyone. Trujillo and Ibarra shadowed her from a distance, and nobody would have made a connection between the three disparate individuals taking a leisurely stroll.
The sight of Flores struggling on the ground, like a fish out of water, was permanently branded into Arianna’s mind, having been one of the rare instances where she derived genuine pleasure from the suffering of her victim. She didn’t think of herself as a sadist, but she thought she would enjoy the same sensation when and if she plied her blade to the throat of the man codenamed Carnivore. Imagining the feel of his warm blood on her flesh sent quivers of anticipatory pleasure throughout her body.