Authors: Ross Sidor
The voices grew
farther apart as the patrol dispersed, and Avery soon saw two FARC soldiers
spread apart and descend the hill, returning to the camp. They moved slowly.
Their eyes scanned the jungle for irregularities, any shape or color that
didn’t belong. One of them turned around, twenty feet away. He panned from left
to right, and for a split second was looking directly at Avery without seeing
him, then his eyes looked elsewhere and he continued walking.
A new party of travelers
arrived on foot later at 15:37.
They emerged
from the jungle, dressed in camouflage fatigues and carrying rucksacks bulging
at the seams. Two guerillas toting M16 rifles led the group, with another pair
bringing up the rear. In the middle of the pack, there were two more men. One
of them was taller than the others, slender and older. The man beside him was
shorter, but heavier, with significantly more muscle packed around his frame.
Avery, looking through his scope, wasn’t offered a good view of their faces.
Without stopping
the newcomers, the guards opened the gates and allowed them into the camp.
Before entering, the tall and lanky man turned his head around to speak to the
gunmen in back, finally offering Avery a clear view of his long and angular
face. He recognized the face immediately, having studied dozens of pictures of Emilio
Reyes during pre-mission preparation.
Avery shifted
his scope onto the younger man and identified him as Aarón Moreno, Reyes’
lethal and personal killer. Reyes had ordered the killings of numerous people,
but he never got his hands dirty. That was Moreno’s job, and, by all accounts, Moreno
enjoyed his work.
The camp
commandant greeted Reyes and Moreno, and ushered them into his hut.
Making imperceptibly
slow, deliberate movements, Avery unpacked the miniature satellite radio and a
collapsible antenna sixteen inches in diameter. He switched on the satellite
radio, then unfolded the antenna, plugged it into the radio, and carefully
positioned it in the proper direction and angle. He pressed a button on the
radio’s panel, and softly but clearly said “Hide One for Eagle Control. Echo
Romeo on-site. Repeat Echo Romeo on-site. You are clear to launch.” He hit
another button, and, in less than half a minute, the encrypted message was
compressed and, in the form of a one second long burst transmission that was undetectable
and impossible to intercept, was bounced off an orbiting satellite and relayed to
the Phoenix op center at Palanquero Air Base.
To limit
transmissions, he’d sent only one previous message earlier that afternoon. This
had been a detailed verbal description of the camp, using an alpha-numeric
system to provide distance between and dimensions of each structure. The US
Army Special Forces advisers at Palanquero then used this information to
produce a diagram of the camp for Captain Aguilar’s team.
Avery waited for
the acknowledgement from the ops center. It came several seconds later:
“Avalanche.” The one word response meant that Operation Phoenix was given the
green light.
Avery
disassembled the SATCOM unit, shutting off the radio, unplugging and collapsing
the antenna. It was now time to bid his time, since Operation Phoenix was to be
conducted at night, and make sure that Reyes didn’t leave the camp in the
meantime.
Avery trained his
scope on the commandant’s shack, shifting occasionally to any movement that
caught his attention. In the event that Reyes made an abrupt departure, Avery’s
job was to send the transmission back to the ops room that would abort the
operation, and the helicopters would turn back. He didn’t anticipate this
happening. Reyes came here to meet with a senior SEBIN officer, and as far as
Avery knew, this person had not yet arrived at the camp. That was good. It ensured
that Reyes wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while.
The next six
hours were the slowest. That’s the length of time that passed before Avery
finally heard the rotors of the helicopters interrupt the silence of the night.
The camp’s
inhabitants heard it, too. Avery spotted some of them looking up into the sky
and stepping out of their tents or shacks.
The helicopters
swarmed on the camp. They’d flown in the whole way at low altitude, just barely
skimming over the top of the rainforest canopy at a hundred thirty miles per
hour to avoid detection by Venezuelan radar, and followed a course to avoid any
villages where natives could spot or hear the aircraft. In the dead of night,
the pilots relied on their night vision, terrain following radar, and FLIR pods.
There was no
clear landing space for the Russian-manufactured, twin-turbine Mi-17 Hips to
set down and deploy their squads, so the AH-60L Arpia gunships came in first. These
are essentially an attack helicopter conversion of the American Blackhawk, developed
jointly by Colombia and Israel, armed with .50 caliber machine guns, anti-tank
missiles, and 70mm rockets.
The AH-60s
strafed the camp with heavy machine gun fire, shredding any FARC militants in
sight. A barrage of 70mm rockets blasted the barracks compound, armory,
communications hut, and guard posts. Militants with RPGs appeared across the
killing ground but were quickly torn apart and taken down by the unyielding onslaught.
Only one FARC soldier was able to get off a shot, but the rocket propelled
grenade went wide, missing its target, and the man who fired it was instantly
pulverized by a stream of .50 caliber bullets and scattered messily across the
ground.
The Mi-17 Hip
transports hovered fifty feet over the camp, one on the south end, another on
the east, while the Aprias covered them. Strands of thick and heavy black
braided rope, two inches thick in diameter, dropped from the open cabin doors
of each Hip. The Colombian special ops troops—clad in jungle camouflage, web
harnesses, and balaclavas, and armed with M16s or Israeli-made Galil rifles—began
to free fall the length of the ropes at thirty miles per hour. They dropped
without the use of descenders attached to the rope, using only their gloved
hands and feet to control their descent, slowing as they neared the ground. They
maintained a ten foot gap between each man on the ropes.
Felix Aguilar
was the first man on the ground, as was his custom to lead from the front. He
sprinted several yards away from the rope and dropped to a crouch. He
immediately sighted a FARC militant and took him down with a three-round burst,
dropping his target.
As soon as each
soldier hit the ground, they ran forward to make room for the next man down and
to take up firing positions, scanning for targets through their night optics. FARC
troops soon appeared, rushing the assaulters as they landed. A brief firefight
ensued in which Aguilar’s troops quickly overwhelmed and gunned down the FARC
fighters. Two FARC soldiers took cover behind the remnants of a blown-out cabin.
A shot from a grenade launcher took them out. Then the Colombian soldiers
walked amongst the FARC bodies and swiftly and coldly dispatched any survivors
with headshots. Next, Aguilar’s squads split up and took off in different
directions across the camp.
A third Hip
deployed a squad into the forest, to set up position around the camp, secure
the outer perimeter, and pick off any roaming patrols or fleeing insurgents.
It took twenty
seconds for the two ten-man squads to dismount from the hovering Hips. With the
last men on the ground, the helicopters immediately veered off, so as not to
become targets for more RPG gunners.
The soldiers
swept across the camp on foot, shooting anything that moved. Throwing in stun
grenades first, entry teams systematically breeched and took down the huts and
remaining structures, and gunned down militants as they appeared.
Aguilar
personally led the takedown of the commandant’s cabin. It was assumed that this
would be where Reyes was staying. The cabin itself was already half-demolished
and peppered with holes through which there was only darkness inside and no
signs of life. Nonetheless, Aguilar kicked the door in and let his Galil rifle
lead him into the hut. The commandant himself lay sprawled messily across the
floor, with big, red holes punched through his body from a helicopter’s .50
caliber machine guns. Blood and ruptured internal organs oozed out of his
carcass, and one of his legs lay nearby.
A quick search
of the cabin produced a hidden trapdoor in the floor.
Aguilar hand
signaled his men what he planned to do. The three soldiers backed out of the
hut to a safe distance, leaving Aguilar alone in the cabin. He then removed a
fragmentation grenade from his vest and pulled the pin, keeping his thumb
pressed over the spoon. He lifted the trapdoor just wide enough to throw the
grenade into the hidden bunker below and shut the door and cleared out of the
hut before the grenade exploded. Pieces of shrapnel tore through the wooden
floor of the cabin, and smoke filtered out.
When his squad
went back inside, Aguilar re-opened the trapdoor, with two soldiers covering
him, aiming their rifles down into the open space, tactical lights mounted to
the barrels shining into the bunker. A FARC insurgent lay face down in the
corner of the bunker, bleeding from shrapnel wounds to his gut and legs. There
was another body beside him, missing an arm and parts of its head.
Aguilar fastened
his rifle to his vest, switched to his Beretta, and dropped the five feet into the
underground bunker. He scanned around him, three hundred sixty degrees, but
there was no resistance and the bunker’s only two occupants were quite dead.
Aguilar squatted near the body laying facedown and turned it over. He didn’t
need to pull the photograph of Emilio Reyes out of his pocket to identify of
the body.
___
From his observation post, Avery surveyed
the battleground below, watching the muzzle flashes and explosions light up
against the darkness. Rotor wash blotted out all other sound as the helicopters
whipped quickly by overhead, wildly blowing hanging branches and leaves in all
directions. Avery was unaccustomed to being a spectator on the sidelines and
not a participant, but it was a refreshing change of pace for the bullets not
to be directed at him.
Three minutes
into the assault, Avery was squinting through his night optic scope. Following
his line of sight through the trees and down the slight slope onto the camp, he
watched Aguilar emerge from the commandant’s hut. From Aguilar’s confident expression
and body language, and the way he addressed his men, Avery was sure they’d
nailed Reyes. Next, they’d quell the remaining resistance and then perform site
exploitation.
When Avery took
his head away from the scope, the slightest movement in his peripheral commanded
his attention. He flicked his eyes in that direction in time to catch a dark
blur disturb the stillness of the jungle, so quick that he nearly missed it,
and an untrained eye would have likely not caught it at all.
Avery focused on
the thick layers of jungle understory, studying the smallest details. He heard
leaves rustling and twigs snapping, but his eyes couldn’t find the source of
the sound. Finally, several seconds later, fifty feet away, he saw hanging
branches shudder, and this time, through his night optic, he clearly caught a
glimmer of a man hurtling through the foliage, arms raised high with his rifle
in front of him to clear and push his way through the tangled growth.
Avery’s eyes
followed the trail of shuddering brush and shrubs to a clear space, where the
man turned around to check his six, facing Avery without seeing him.
It was Aarón
Moreno.
How the hell did
he manage to slip away?
More
importantly, why the hell did he have to make his escape right near Avery’s
hide?
Moreno stopped
until a second man caught up with him, and then they continued forward,
swallowed by the understory growth.
Avery waited a
couple seconds, expecting gunshots to follow, or Colombian troops in pursuit,
but there was nothing. Instinctively, he started to get up, but then he stopped
himself. It wasn’t like he could go after them. The last thing he needed was to
be spotted and mistakenly dropped by a Colombian soldier.
As he nestled
back into his hide, content to wait out the assault, Avery recalled the pre-mission
briefing with the Colombian squad leaders. Moreno had personally killed a
number of undercover operatives, including Americans, and friends and former
teammates of Aguilar’s men. Reyes might be the man the politicians in Bogotá
and Washington wanted, but Moreno was the man that the Colombian cops, intel
operators, and special ops troops, plus the DEA agents, wanted to see taken
down.
Avery pictured
the debriefing sessions, having to explaining how he sat back and watched Aarón
Moreno make a clean getaway.
Shit. He hated when
his conscience kicked in.
Avery sprung up
from his hide, coming up onto one knee while shouldering his M4, then rising
onto his feet, letting the camouflage netting fall behind him. His legs felt
stiff and sore from the lack of circulation, and the small of his back was
briefly uncomfortable suddenly supporting his full weight in an upright
position.
He scanned his
surroundings. Turning his head slowly left, he gave a startled jump when he came
suddenly face to face with a boa wrapped around a drooping limb from a kapok
tree. The massive snake hissed and began to stir
.
Avery jumped back and
stepped clear of the boa. Then something scurried quickly by on the forest
floor, brushing against his leg, and he gave another jump, but didn’t bother to
look. He also didn’t want to think about the spiders and bugs that he knew were
crawling along his back.