Viper: A Thriller (14 page)

Arianna yawned,
raising her left hand to her mouth for distraction, and stretched,
repositioning herself so that her right leg extended, and she rested her right hand
over the Desert Eagle strapped to her thigh. The VSS Vintorez rested between
her legs, the butt sitting on the floor, barrel pointing up toward the roof of
the cab.

She caught the
driver’s gaze on her. Beads of sweat began to form and trickle from his face. When
his left hand fell to his side, the Viper snapped and instructed him to keep
both hands on the wheel. The man obeyed.

“Stop here, and
put your hands over the dashboard.”

The driver took
his foot off the gas, gradually cutting speed. He took his time coming to a
complete stop, hoping the troops in the back would notice and catch on that
something was wrong.         

 As his right
hand shifted the gear selector, his left made a move to the Beretta holstered at
his side. He never got the gun clear of the holster before the Viper drew the
big Desert Eagle and fired a single round of .50 Action Express through his
right temple from a distance of three feet. The contents of his skull exploded against
the window.

The Viper flung
her door open and jumped down from the high cab of the truck. She turned right,
holding the Desert Eagle level in front of her in both hands just as one of the
soldiers who was riding in the bed came around the back of the truck with his
AK-47 raised. The Viper aligned her sights over him and fired twice, two
explosive cracks of thunder, catching the soldier through the chest, blasting
his ribs through his lungs and taking him clean off his feet.

Off to her
right, on the opposite side of the truck, the Viper heard footsteps sloshing
through the puddles in the mud. She turned, stepped around the truck’s right fender,
and stopped in front of the grill. Two seconds later, the barrel of an AK poked
around the driver side of the truck, and she fired once on the FARC soldier as
he entered her sight picture, wiping the surprised expression off his face.

The Viper
holstered the Desert Eagle and retrieved the AK-47 and a spare magazine from the
FARC corpse. Like the driver, he didn’t wear a uniform, had no unit patches or
insignia. These men weren’t regulars; they were from FARC’s military
intelligence branch; Flores’s men.

When she opened
the truck’s driver side door, the driver’s body slumped over, falling halfway
out of its seat. Gravity pushed a fresh stream of blood from the gaping hole in
the head. The Viper grabbed onto the body, pulled it out, took his place behind
the wheel, and lowered the blood-covered window before putting the truck into
gear, accelerating over the dead body of the last man she shot, and continuing
down the road.

She had the
missiles in back, more than she sought, probably more than she could realistically
use or transport, and her logistics contact waited for her in Bogotá, and the
Iranian’s warning about Flores lingered in her mind. Still, she had no choice
but to go forward to the FARC base. Her agents were waiting for her there, and
without them the operation would be seriously hindered. Plus, with the Iranians
now involved, she wanted reliable backup she could trust. More important, she
wanted answers. Someone had the audacity to cross her, and had failed. That
could not be forgotten.

She drove
aggressively during the hour to the military camp belonging to the FARC 34
^th
Front in Colombia’s Antioquia Department. Night came fast in the jungle, where  sunlight
barely filtered through the heavy canopy even during the day,  and the sun was
already  setting by the time she was coming up to the camp. She saw the orange
glow of a couple kerosene lanterns through the dark shade cast by the overhead
layers of forest canopy.

The Viper knew
if Flores sought to betray her, then now would be the time to do it, when he
had her contained by a small army on FARC territory.

But the Viper
was on good terms with the commander of the 34
^th
Front, man who often
acted unilaterally, becoming an intransigent thorn in the side of both the
government and the Central High Command, like when he abducted a Colombian
National Army general, putting the Havana peace talks on hold. The 34
^th
Front commander, who went by the
nom de guerre
Commander Dios, didn’t
play politics, and Arianna did not believe that he’d turn on her. She supposed
that she would soon find out, though.

The front gates
and the guard station appeared ahead in the Viper’s headlights.

A figure clad in
jungle-camouflage stepped in her path in front of the open gates. He raised a
hand, signaling her to stop. With the AK-47 laying across the dash, in easy
reach, the selector switch on automatic, Arianna pressed the gas. The diesel
engine gave a roar, and the truck picked up speed. The guard hesitated for a
second, and then jumped off the side of the path as the FAP truck whipped past.

In the center of
the campground, a clearing amidst the wooden cabins and barracks,
Andrés Flores,
accompanied by four FARC soldiers with shouldered rifles, awaited the Viper’s
arrival. There were two others, familiar faces to Arianna, and she was
surprised to see them standing alongside Flores and his thugs.

The Viper
stopped the truck thirty feet in front of Flores. She grabbed the AK-47, slung
the VSS over her shoulder, threw the door open, and jumped out of the cab. Her
eyes set on Flores, but she kept the AK in the low ready position, muzzle
angled toward the ground, and made no threatening moves.

She returned the
looks of her own men, read their faces, and knew at once she was in no danger.
Flores was an even bigger fool than she’d thought.

 “I didn’t
expect you to personally greet me, Andrés,” she called out.

“I assure you, I
wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important. I require you to stand down now,
Captain Moreno. I am acting on orders from Timoshenko.”

“Ah, I see, so
that’s why your men tried and failed to kill me, Andrés.”

“They were under
strict orders not to harm you unless they came under threat.”

“Then why do you
wait for me here with six armed men? Why even send me to Venezuela if you never
intended on following through with our arrangement?”

“I had every
intention of honoring our agreement, but unfortunately that is no longer
possible.”

Flores did not
mention that Timoshenko was also irate over what happened in Panama City. The
FARC commander-in-chief believed that Flores was controlling the Viper and
deliberately using her to sabotage the peace talks and escalate the conflict.
Timoshenko told him that if the peace talks came apart, there would be no
safety for Flores in Cuba and he would be viewed by everyone, including the
Secretariat and Havana, as a war criminal and a terrorist. Timoshenko
threatened to hunt Flores down himself if the Viper used a single missile
against a civilian target.

Flores said, “If
you do not stand down now, I will give the order for these men to shoot you
down where you stand.”

“You know I will
not do that.”

“Have you not
taken a look around? You have no choice. Even your own men are unwilling to go
along with this madness. Please, Arianna. You do not want to die here like
this.”

The Viper
shifted her gaze to the short, scruffy Peruvian standing on the outer flank of
Flores’s agents, then to the taller, older Spaniard. Their fingers had already
taken up first pressure on their triggers, just waiting for the order to fire.
Their eyes never left Arianna.

“So you’ve picked
your sides then?” the Viper asked her men.

The Spaniard
nodded once.

The Peruvian
shifted his head and spat a wad of chew tobacco into the tall grass.

“You should
never have placed your trust in mercenaries,” Flores answered for them. “Set
your weapons down, Arianna. Please. This will be your last chance.”

“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 6
^th
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.”