“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.”