Ross Sidor
Viper: A Thriller
For my dad
11/29/52—3/3/15
ONE
For over five hours Avery lay still, prone in the mud and leaf litter. Damp grass and weeds clung to his face. His boots were soaked through to his socks. The tropical heat penetrated his fatigues. All around him, his ears were inundated with the sounds of the rainforest. Water streamed off leaves. Birds squawked. Monkeys chattered. Insects buzzed.
He couldn’t help but ask himself, not for the first time, why he’d taken this job. The truth was that he simply wasn’t able to say no when Matt Culler called with a job. Culler ran the independent contractors, sometimes called scorpions, who CIA’s Global Response Staff kept on retainer. Avery needed to make a living like anyone else, and this was quite simply the only thing for which he was any good. More important, if he declined, he didn’t want it going into his 201 file that he was unreliable, or stepped away from a challenge, and be subsequently passed over when the next job came along.
The previous day, a Blackhawk helicopter had taken off from the joint American-Colombian Palanquero military base, near Puerto Salgar, north of Bogotá, and deposited Avery near the Venezuelan border, where he made the six hour hike to the target in west-central Venezuela. The FARC camp was located just thirty miles south of San Cristóbal, capital of the Venezuelan state Táchira, and ten miles southwest of the Rio Apure River, near the foothills of the Andes Mountains.
Upon arrival, Avery carefully established his makeshift hide, and had remained there for the past eighteen hours. He lived off MREs, Meals Ready to Eat. He pissed into a bottle and shit into a plastic bag, both of which were then buried in the ground. His muscles already grew sore and stiff from the lack of circulation that came from remaining sedentary for so long.
From here, dug two feet into the ground in a coffin shaped space, Avery had a perfect view of the sprawling camp below, fifty yards downhill, and the narrow, muddy trail that led from the jungle to the campground. Cradled in front of him, his M4A1 rifle was equipped with a suppressor and infrared scope.
The temperature that afternoon peaked at 88°F, with eighty-one percent humidity. Avery almost immediately sweated any water he put into his body. But he hadn’t been sweating for the last four hours, and hadn’t pissed in even longer, so he figured he was pretty well dehydrated by this point, and he already felt a headache beginning. The bottled water he carried needed to be carefully rationed, since it wasn’t like he could drink from a stream, and he wasn’t due to chug the next half bottle of water for another three hours. His body craved that water, but it was important to stick to the timeframe, in case anything came up that might leave him here longer than he’d anticipated.
Well, at least that cup of water was something to look forward to.
Green and brown camouflage non-glare grease paint covered his face and every inch of exposed flesh. He was filthy and grimy. He hadn’t showered or cleaned for two days before flying out, because the unnatural scents of soap, shampoo, deodorant, and bug repellants carried in the air and would potentially betray his presence, either to the enemy or to the local wildlife.
Animals cautiously kept their distance from unfamiliar sounds and scents, and their silence and absence would in turn alert an experienced jungle fighter to the presence of an intruder. The only way to go unnoticed was to become a part of the surrounding environment and meld into the animals’ natural habitat.
Yesterday’s heavy downpour had given way to a light rain. After a day, Avery was soaked, even through the jungle camouflage netting blanketed over his hide, and the water pooled beneath him. Large beetles and fire ants crawled over him, some biting at the exposed flesh of his hands and wrists with tiny, razor sharp mandibles. Worms emerged from the saturated soil to become lost in the inch-deep puddle of water, and some found their way squiggling down his shirt and into his pockets and against his chin and lips. Tiny gnats flew into his ear canals and nostrils.
To make matters worse, there was a three hour old pile of rain soaked shit from a capybara, essentially a 145lb guinea pig, just six feet away from his face, and every breath he took carried the fetid, fecal smell to his nose, along with the jungle’s usual tepid, musty scent of plants and moss.
But worst of all, the occasional snake slithered past. The last one, long and black, came within just two feet of his face, with its little fork tongue flickering out of its mouth. It took everything Avery had to remain calm and completely motionless. He detested snakes, and South America was teeming with the legless reptiles. Here they came in a variety of shapes, sizes, colors, and temperaments. They dangled from branches, unseen until you were only feet away. They hid beneath the leaf litter, where they were easy to step on, which they didn’t react well to.
On the way in from Colombia, Avery had stopped in his tracks at the sight of a fifteen foot long green anaconda devouring an equally ferocious looking alligator on a riverbed. He’d spent time in many Third and Fourth World hellholes and had seen his share of oddities, but he couldn’t shake the twisted spectacle from his mind.
Everything in this environment, from the plants and terrain to the insects and animals, was biologically designed to poison, maim, kill, or eat a man, or even do all four. Even the frogs were poisonous, and the monkeys were cantankerous little thieves who had already tried to steal from his backpack when he’d stopped to rest during his hike.
To keep his mind off the discomfort, Avery focused on the task at hand.
The camp occupied about a half square mile clearing in the rainforest. Only the first layer of canopy growth had been cut down, leaving the top canopy layer in place for concealment against satellite and aerial surveillance. A fence composed of spiraling strands of razor wire spaced about a foot apart and attached to seven foot high wooden posts ran along the perimeter of the camp, with a guard shack at the front gates and a twelve foot high watch tower in the rear of the camp. Behind the security fence, there were several small, ramshackle wooden huts with tin roofs, two larger barracks style structures, a communications shack with a satellite dish mounted atop the roof, and an outside mess area comprised of rows of long picnic tables with bench seating beneath a wooden-framed, tarp-covered terrace. There were also three large, rectangular tents and an outdoor firing range. Wooden planks on the muddy ground formed a sidewalk throughout the camp. There were no vehicles. The camp was only accessible by foot. Camouflage netting and tarps were spread out over the huts and tents, to further help conceal the camp from the air.
The guerillas numbered about two dozen, Avery estimated from what he’d so far observed. They belonged to the 10th Front of FARC’s Eastern Bloc.
The fifty year old Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), was far better organized and disciplined than the typical al-Qaeda or Iraqi amateurs playing insurgents. These guys almost looked like a legitimate army by the manner in which they moved and carried themselves. They were lean, muscled, physically fit, and confident. Their uniforms even included ranks, badges, and unit patches, and they carried their M16 assault rifles like they knew how to use them.
Avery tried to keep track of the faces, but so far there’d been no sighting of his target.
Emilio Reyes was a senior ranking member of the FARC Secretariat with close ties to the North Coast drug cartel. He was born in the Colombian port city of Buenaventura forty-eight years ago to an uneducated docks worker and a maid. Before he was eighteen years old, he was already a member of the Colombian Communist Party and full of socialist idealism. He joined FARC in his early twenties and quickly rose to the political leadership in the Secretariat.