by Phil Klay
The assault team rolled out of the first structure and into the building where El Alemán had retired with his girlfriend. Flashes of gunfire appeared on the feed, but the eye-in-the-sky couldn’t tell who was firing inside the building, and at whom.
Nineteen-one-hundred. Twenty-one-hundred.
The team rolled out into the final building, laying down heavy fire as they crossed quickly out into the open.
Twenty-six-one-hundred. Twenty-seven-one-hundred.
Inside the final building, the squad leader turned into a bedroom, a younger soldier with a light machine gun following behind. There were two figures under sheets in a bed, both sitting up, holding each other.
The squad leader ordered them to put their hands up. Neither did. The squad leader repeated the order, and the man’s hands moved down into the folds of the sheet across his lap. The squad leader’s finger had been straight and off his trigger, but now it hovered above his trigger, now it barely touched his trigger, now it exerted the slightest pressure as he decided what to do.
Thirty-five-one-hundred. Thirty-six-one-hundred.
The squad leader squeezed the trigger, punching a line of bullet holes in the man’s chest like the buttons on a dress shirt, and then the woman threw herself on the man, and the young soldier with the light machine gun opened fire as well, the bullets splitting the woman’s head open. They rolled out and into the hallway.
Forty-two-one-hundred. Forty-three-one-hundred.
A voice came on the net stating that the objective had been cleared. Mason stopped his counting and revised his earlier estimate. A U.S. team could have done it in thirty seconds. Juan Pablo, at a far corner of the room, turned from the drone feed to the other officers and warrant officers and enlisted manning the operations center and permitted himself a smile. Then his eyes briefly met Mason’s, allowing him to share in the victory before he turned back to the screens.
At the time, Mason had no sense of the significance of the raid, or the events that would result from it. In fact, he consciously tried not to overestimate the meaning of the affair. In ungoverned spaces, killing drug dealers tended to lead not to more law and order but to violent power grabs among the criminals lower down in the food chain. Intellectually, he knew this killing wouldn’t change much in Norte de Santander. But still, in that room, it was hard to resist the feeling of a momentous victory. A cleanly executed raid is always deeply satisfying to watch. There is something beautiful about the operation of a perfectly engineered machine.
* * *
• • •
The first doctor knew who Jefferson was and delivered the news fearfully, uncertainly. The manner of delivery was, at first, more irritating to Jefferson than the news itself, and he took a certain pleasure in letting the doctor know.
“If you’re going to tell a man he will die,” Jefferson said, “have some balls while you do it.” He decided he needed a second opinion.
The second doctor was more professional, and spoke in rapid, clipped words about the necessity of “palliative care.”
“What’s important now is quality of life,” the doctor said.
“I have never given any importance to quality of life,” Jefferson told him. “I’m not going to start now.”
The doctor paused. “I’m talking about managing what could be, without significant intervention, a significant amount of pain,” he said.
Jefferson, who had never shied from pain, found that funny. “I don’t give a damn for any man who can’t handle pain. The more pain, the better. That’s life.”
“Yes . . . but . . .” the now somewhat flustered doctor said, before pausing and collecting himself. Then he proceeded to explain how the tumors would grow and expand and begin to press on the organs, how Jefferson would feel it, and how it would begin to inhibit every aspect of his life unless interventions were made to limit their size. And then, delicately, he began to discuss psychological care. Jefferson silenced that talk with a look.
As the man left, Jefferson told him, “If you mention my condition to anyone, I’ll cut your dick off and fuck you with it.” The doctor nodded gravely, as if this were a normal way of speaking.
Over the next couple of days, Jefferson made no significant changes. The possibility of death was always a part of the business he had spent his entire life engaged in. What did it matter if it was a disease or a bullet, a tumor or a bomb? Natural causes are, of course, crueler. Slower than even the worst tortures he’d inflicted on men over the years. But Jefferson felt no particular fear. He’d never been able to excite himself in that way, with that strange emotion he’d observed so often in other people. It could, he knew, reduce men to paralysis in the face of coming death. Loose their bowels, make them cry out, betray themselves and all they imagined they were. It was a curious thing, and he didn’t have it.
What did develop, slowly, was nostalgia. He found himself thinking of the great days in Cesar, where he had risen through the ranks. Of the trust they’d conferred on him when they sent him to Norte de Santander. Of the network he’d built across the border in Venezuela.
He was made for great things, it was clear. And if he had less time left on this earth than expected, that was no problem. It was merely a spur to action.
And it was in the midst of these thoughts that he heard about the death of El Alemán.
* * *
• • •
When she bought the plane tickets, it had made sense. Bob had told her, just between the two of them, that there’d be an opening in Bogotá soon. It wasn’t for five months, but, she told him over Skype, that was perfect. “I want time to write something a bit more long-form.”
Just looking at Bob’s face, she could tell, even through the grainy, stuttering video feed, that he did not think that was perfect.
“Long-form? Oh, fuck me. Et tu, Liz?”
Lisette shrugged, tried to play it off. “I just want to—”
“I know what you want,” he said. “You want eight thousand words in The New Yorker. Fuck you. I hope you get a listicle in BuzzFeed.”
“What’s wrong with—”
“Eighteen Totally Empowering Ways to Brew Coffee, by Lisette Marigny. I can’t wait.”
Lisette sighed. She’d known he wouldn’t approve. And she didn’t need his approval. But still.
“BuzzFeed does great reporting. And what the fuck would be so wrong with eight thousand words in The New Yorker?”
The video stalled, jerked forward, like cheap animation with too few frames to connect the movement of the characters, making Bob’s voice disembodied, and, oddly, more authoritative.
“You don’t know anything about Colombia. I let you stretch a bit here because you’d put the work in. What, you think just because you can write a good sentence you deserve an opinion? You haven’t earned opinions yet.”
Then he went off on a rant she’s heard before, one of Bob’s old-man, oh-the-kids-these-days rants, about how too many young journalists thought the work they did was just a stepping-stone. How they think just because they’re smart they deserve to talk, but a real journalist doesn’t need smarts and definitely doesn’t need even a college degree but needs only the ability to get people to tell you things. And that’s it. The spade work of the wire services, before the color commentary, before the spin and polish. It’s the only thing that actually matters.
Lisette, sitting in her sublet in Brooklyn, wanted to believe him. Go out, find what happened, report it as straight and as succinctly as possible—that’s the real work. His voice floated in over his frozen face. “All the hot takes in the world shrivel up and die in the presence of one well-reported fact.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “You’ve said that before.”
She considered laughing it off, gently conceding his point but then telling him, “It’s my four-month vacation, I can do with it what I’d like. Why not let me fuc
k around with a vanity project?” Or she could have told him what she’d been telling herself. That she did know Colombia, because she knew Iraq and Afghanistan. That this was an extension of the same war, not the endless war on “terror” but something vaguer, harder to pin down and related to the demands of America’s not-quite-empire which was always projecting military power across the globe and just shifting the rationale of why. That Cold War communist guerrillas became War on Drugs narcoguerrillas became War on Terror narcoterrorists. That you keep seeing the same policies or strategies or even people bouncing around the globe. Two U.S. ambassadors to Colombia going on to be ambassador to Afghanistan. Another going on to be ambassador to Pakistan. In 2004, SOCOM had told Colombian troops to focus on counterinsurgency. In 2007, the new counterinsurgency strategy gets rolled out in Iraq. In 2004, a revolution in targeted killing starts in JSOC in Iraq. Mid-2000s, we start applying the same methods to Colombia, the only difference being that we let the Colombians do the actual killing. Then we give them drones. And if the rumors Diego had told her are true, that the targeting apparatus was about to get applied to domestic drug groups, and that the State Department was carefully eyeing the coming success or failure of insurgents in Colombia as they worked to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table in Afghanistan, then she may have had precisely the right kind of knowledge and context to describe the theoretical end of this theoretically successful war.
For all the focus Bob had on a depth of local knowledge, maybe he wasn’t seeing the forest for the trees, maybe she had something to say about Colombia that wasn’t about knowing the people or the culture but about knowing the systems applying violence across the globe. And maybe, because she “fucked a mercenary” once, and because that mercenary was in Colombia, she was uniquely positioned to get insider access into the next permutation on the massive, industrial-scale U.S. machine for generating, and executing, targets.
But then Bob finished with, “And I know there’s not a ton of validation covering a war nobody cares about, but Jesus Christ, Liz, that’s why we’ve got to do it. If you’re not going to tell this story, who is? I never thought you’d just give up.” Which stung. And she realized that perhaps she couldn’t afford to trust Bob with the dreams she’s been spinning for herself. Perhaps he’d tear them apart. And also, perhaps, Bob could go fuck himself.
So that’s what she said. “Go fuck yourself, Bob.” The video feed didn’t register his reaction but Bob was a big boy, he’d managed journalists in war zones a long time, she doubted that was enough to draw blood. So she went deeper. She told him he was a fool, because it wasn’t 1971, because people don’t read newspapers now, because there’s no page A26 to flip past, because people don’t accidentally get reported facts on the way to the opinion page anymore.
“All the reported facts in the world shrivel up and die in the presence of universal indifference,” she said. And then, going further, she added, “People don’t even read about Afghanistan, where they at least sort of know there’s a war on, and you think doing spade work in Colombia is going to make a difference to anyone? Excuse me for not wanting to shovel words into a hole until I die.”
At which point she realized the video feed from Afghanistan had stalled completely, and there was just Bob’s frozen face, the mouth slightly open, and a snippet of a word here or there until it failed, so Lisette sent an apology email and went to bed.
The sad thing was, she wanted to believe like Bob did, but he was only right in another world, a world with the kind of media ecosystem that supported his kind of work, and the kind of popular culture where one was expected to have a broad sense of the world, rather than an in-depth, ideologically inflected analysis of the latest Twitter moment. The question was not, Which style of reporting is best in an ideal world? It was, How do you reach people?
* * *
• • •
In a small town on the border with Venezuela, Jefferson Paúl López Quesada met with a former lieutenant of his, Tomás Henríquez Rúa. Javier had come a long way from the days when he used to chain-saw enemies of the paramilitaries in the middle of town squares. After the demobilization he’d stayed in the region around La Vigia, and when Jefferson ended up in prison in Venezuela had attached his little group to the Urabeños, running extortion as well as handling an increasing percentage of the cocaine trade moving across the border.
“I’m proud of you,” Jefferson told him at their meeting.
Javier ignored the praise. He knew the meeting was about the shake-up after the death of El Alemán. Javier told his former boss that he was mostly watching and waiting. “How close are you to the Urabeños?” he asked.
Jefferson told him, and Javier grinned. Javier liked his old boss, and had liked working for him. But more importantly, he knew his old boss had connections with the Cartel of the Suns, a drug trafficking ring run by the Venezuelan military. With the FARC about to sign a peace treaty with the government, the Cartel needed other clients with cocaine to transport. And so Jefferson was moving across the border to expand supply.
“You know,” Jefferson said, “in the Castaño days I used to work for El Alemán. That fat pig.”
Javier smiled. “I didn’t mind working for him,” he said. “But I think I will prefer working for you again.”
Jefferson would have smiled back but a stabbing pain in his gut seized him. It had been happening more and more. So the best he could work up was a grimace and a firm handshake, which was good enough.
* * *
• • •
When Diego learned that Lisette Marigny was coming to visit him in Colombia, he permitted himself a fifth beer, then a sixth. He read distractedly for an hour. He did fifty push-ups. Then he stripped naked in front of his bedroom mirror and surveyed what had become of his body. He decided he had become old.
Is that a gray hair? he thought, looking not at his head but at his crotch. He plucked it. And then he laughed. Now it’s like I’m twenty again! In the mirror, a thickset, forty-two-year-old man with a hairy belly looked back at him. He’d once had abs. He’d once had that V of muscle moving up from the pelvis and contouring the lower edge of the stomach. Women liked that V, he’d been told.
He was still in good shape. The other day he’d run seven miles with a thirty-pound pack at almost an eight-minute pace. That was impressive. And if Lisette needed someone to run seven miles with a thirty-pound pack at an almost-but-not-quite eight-minute pace, it would come in handy.
Later that evening he texted her on WhatsApp to say that the hotel she booked for herself was popular with sex tourists. The owner brought in prostitutes to spend all day in the hotel’s gym, which was where the clients could observe them in their tight spandex. “Maybe there’s some journalisty reason you chose it,” he typed, hit send, then typed, “But if you want a nicer place, I’ve got an extra bedroom at my finca.” This didn’t seem sufficient, so he added, “close to airport, close to Medellín.” He stared at the messages, wondering what subtext she’d read into them, then added, “It’s got a private entrance so you don’t need to see me if you don’t want to.” That seemed too standoffish, but he’d already sent it, so he started typing, “And I’d love to spend some time with you,” but that was too much. He deleted it without sending, scrolled through his photos for a good shot of the view, and sent that. He texted, “Don’t waste money if you don’t have to.”
* * *
• • •
Traffic jams were good for Abel. The little store he’d constructed on the side of the road leading into La Vigia got decent business—he’d planned the placement well, with little competition beyond the men carrying wares on their back—and since the new construction had blocked off all but one lane and created backlogs of trucks and cars and motorcycles, it seemed like every third car would pull into the parking lot he’d shoveled flat and paved himself. His shop wasn’t like any other peasant shop, with dirty shelves and old goods. He’
d slowly built it up to look more and more like a real professional store. It had a sign with lights. It had a glass front door. It had a little section under a heat lamp with cooked goods he got from a bakery run by demobilized guerrillas—one of the projects of the Fundación de Justicia y Fe. One day, he thought, he would raise enough money to sell gasoline. That was expensive, and required tanks and machinery and construction he couldn’t do himself. But one day, he’d have a proper gas station. He was a business owner. He paid taxes. He paid the Urabeños. He paid the guerrilla. Some days, it seemed all he did was bleed money to parasites. But when there were traffic jams, and the cars poured in, drivers eager to kill some time, stretch their legs, and buy some chicharrónes or cool drinks or aguardiente, those parasites felt like nothing more than tiny little mosquitoes, young baby mosquitoes with skinny legs and long rifles but bellies so small they couldn’t ever dream of taking in enough of his blood to even weaken him. Let them feed off me, he’d think. They know no better way to live.
He wasn’t like them anymore. He was back in the land of the living. He had friends. Neighbors. It’d been hard, as an old paramilitary. But he’d kept his head down, and lived honestly, and slowly, over time, proved himself. He’d received help here and there, especially from the Fundación de Justicia y Fe, but mostly it’d been a hard, lonely struggle, building his business brick by brick, the way his father had built the home he’d grown up in. There were days when he could even imagine his father looking down from heaven, seeing his store, recognizing his son, and feeling proud.
So he was feeling good the day Jefferson walked back into his life. Construction about a mile south of him had backed up his road, and led to a steady stream of customers seeking a small break from the frustrations of driving. And then, as the sun dipped, a pack of motorcycles weaved through the cars and turned as one into his little lot. One man, short, blocky, with a helmet that obscured his face, got off his moto. The rest stayed put, staking out positions in a military manner Abel knew well. Indeed, everything about the group, down to the walk of their leader as he made his way toward Abel’s glass door, seemed familiar. These men were not customers, he knew that. But neither were they strangers.