“The source. Was he one of Daniel’s?”
“Yeah,” Aguilar said. “Another of the Deep Sting agents.”
“Muňoz wasn’t the only one?”
“There were several. But Muňoz lasted the longest.”
“You think Moreno is as dangerous as Daniel makes her out to be?”
“I think you wouldn’t ask that question if you didn’t already think that she was,” Aguilar replied. “Her track record speaks for itself. You saw her in action in Panama. She has you worried, doesn’t she?”
Avery didn’t answer.
“ Look at the enormous risks she took in Panama just to get a shot at you, and no offense, but you’re nothing special. You’re not a politically or strategically important target as far as the Central High Command is concerned. She’s confident, skilled, completely fanatical, and not afraid to take risks.”
Avery agreed with Aguilar’s reasoning, but he thought that his assessment also indicated how unbalanced Arianna Moreno was. Terrorists weren’t known to make things personal. It simply wasn’t worth the risk of potentially compromising the entire cell or organization to settle a personal grudge, and Aguilar was right about Avery’s lack of value as a target for assassination. If Moreno was successful in killing him, nobody in Washington or Langley would give a shit, but knocking a couple civilian airliners out of the sky over American cities would sure get a reaction and have an impact on government policy and American life for decades to come.
Germany’s GSG-9 instructed their operators, and lectured foreign counterparts, to always shoot female terrorists first in a combat situation. After over a decade taking down Red Army Faction and PLO terror cells, the Germans found the women to be far more aggressive, colder, equipped with faster reflexes, and far more eager to kill civilian hostages or bystanders than were their male peers, and this was largely the experience of the Colombian military, too, in regards to FARC. Women needed to be cold and ruthless to survive in violent male-dominated extremist organizations.
And Avery thought that certainly explained how Arianna Moreno became the Viper.
“Yeah,” he said, “so let’s get to work and find her before she reaches the States.”
ELEVEN
Seven hours later, the German-made Do 228 twin-turboprop, needle-nosed utility plane’s wheels hit the dirt-paved runway at a remote military outpost in southwestern Venezuela. It was a hard landing, given the required steepness of the ascent due to the forest of seventy-foot tall kapok trees surrounding the outpost.
The military outpost was fifty miles from FARC-controlled land in eastern Colombia. From here weapons were flown in and delivered past the border, and cocaine came in from Colombia or Bolivia. Normally Venezuela merely acted as the middleman in arming FARC. The Central High Command purchased the weapons and paid a fee to the right officials in Caracas to facilitate delivery through Venezuelan territory and the rainforest, where the American spy satellites’ coverage was obscured by the layers of jungle canopy.
Furthermore, for a cost, the Russians provided tracking and telemetry data of American reconnaissance satellites to Caracas, who then relayed it to the Central High Command’s intelligence staff, allowing FARC to transport weapons and equipment along its supply lines when they knew there’d be no satellites overhead.
Hydraulics whined as the Do 228’s cargo lamp lowered.
The Viper climbed out the back of the plane’s small, stifling cabin with Durante on her heels. His orders were to keep her in sight until she’d left the Bolivarian Republic for the final time.
It felt good to see the jungle again, swathed in the familiar tropical heat and humidity, breathing in the dense, musky scent of dirt and plants, and feeling the occasional warm mist spray against her face.
In a heavily populated urban area, the Viper’s training kicked in and her mind went into overdrive, assessing possible targets, monitoring police activity, looking for potential sniper hides, where to place a bomb to cause the most damage, and preparing escape routes.
In the jungle she felt at home, far removed from the revolting sights and sounds of humanity, and the animosity those things invited. She’d understood from an early age, at the peasant village in which she grew up, that she didn’t belong in society. Even when she’d enlisted in the people’s army, following Aarón so that she would not be left behind, she never really belonged, but she’d at least found a sense of purpose and an outlet for her anger and hatred.
Arianna Moreno could recall the precise moment the Viper was born, when she accepted that by nature and design she was something inherently different from other people. At the training camps, one instructor, a veteran of Guatemala’s internationally condemned Kaibil Battalion, provided each of his trainees with a puppy to take care of. After three weeks passed, time enough for even the most hardened guerilla fighter to form some attachment to their dog, the Guatemalan ordered the recruits to slice the throats of their puppies. The sole female in the group, Arianna was the only one to follow the order without hesitation or question. She found the puppy pathetic as it helplessly whimpered and squirmed in its death throes, and it made her understand the weakness that attachments and empathy instilled in men.
The sudden recollection surprised Arianna, and she wondered why she thought about that now. She had little place for reflection or memories. She’d barely given thought to Aarón over the past week. There was no point in clouding her mind with memories and feelings. He was simply gone and no more. She’d never hear his voice again or feel the comfort of his embrace or the warmth of his flesh inside her. He was reduced to memories, which, like dreams, were simply abstract products of the mind and became less clear over time. Like dreams, memories were useless things, left for the sentimental and the weak, and Arianna Moreno thought that there was nothing weak about the Viper.
The backfire of an engine snapped her out of her reverie. Standing beside her, Durante said something, but she didn’t hear him as a Russian-made UAZ-469 open-top jeep pulled up alongside the airstrip, kicking up a cloud of dust and belching dark exhaust fumes into the air. A man jumped down from the back of the jeep and approached Durante and the Viper.
He was in his fifties with an olive complexion, short graying hair, a salt-and-pepper beard, and a long, angular face with narrow, deep set eyes and a sharp nose. He wore fading blue jeans and a white shirt with the top four buttons undone and the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. His shirt was damp with sweat, and he dabbed a handkerchief at his face; a man not acclimated to the tropical climate.
Colonel Vahid Kashani served in the Quds Force of the Seppah e-Pasdaran, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. He was a veteran of conflicts and covert actions in Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, having spent his entire adult life in service of the ayatollahs.
The Revolutionary Guard is the military branch tasked with protecting Iran’s revolutionary Shiite clerical government. The Quds Force, or Jerusalem Force, is the special operations unit of the Revolutionary Guards, responsible for covert operations in foreign countries. This included coordinating, training, and supplying terrorist and insurgent groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Mahdi Army in Iraq. Quds Force introduced explosively formed projectiles into the Iraq Theater, a weapon whose molten copper slug proved brutally effective against American tanks and armored personnel carriers, and Quds Force continued to augment Assad’s forces in Syria’s civil war.