With some effort and a little electricity—and this had eventually caused one of the prisoners to die of cardiac arrest—Mahamda had been able to pinpoint the exact location of the FNLS headquarters for drug shipments.
It had all been rather tricky, really. Unlike most pairs Mahamda had dealt with in his long career as an interrogator, the two captive guerrillas had had a prepared story. Almost they'd succeeded in fooling the Sumeri émigré. Ultimately, it was the completeness of that story that had aroused Mahamda's further suspicions. He'd continued the torture, asking a series of seemingly innocuous but detailed questions, things unrelated to either the bombing or the FNLS that the captives were unlikely to have agreed on before hand. Mahamda had asked things like, "What is your partner's place of birth?" or "His preferred brand of rum?" or "Are both of Juan's parents still alive?" Anguish had followed all non-matching answers until the men had been trained to tell the truth for terror of the consequences of being caught in a lie.
The information gained having been brought to Carrera, he had duly entered an FNLS headquarters on his target list. As with every other target on the list, the headquarters was reconnoitered in advance, both by air and by a four man team from 14th Cazador Tercio. The latter had penetrated the general area only with great difficulty, but had still managed to return with photos and detailed sketches. Another overflight, only a few days prior, had reported no obvious changes.
* * *
Continuing to scan with his goggles, Carrera confirmed the scouts' report. The local FNLS headquarters was in an expansive villa, a complex rather than a single house, surrounded by a low wall, reinforced with earthen bunkers. It stood some five miles southeast of the town of Florencia, up a tortuous mountain road. The wall was itself protected by a broad barbed wire fence. Nearby, less than a kilometer away, in fact, a fourteen hundred meter dirt airstrip had been laboriously carved out of the mountainside. There was a refueling station on the strip. Usually only a few guards were present. A dirt road led from the strip through jungle and wire, to the villa's gate. Per instructions, the recon team had not attempted to get past the wall.
* * *
Mahamda had managed to extract an estimate of the number of guerillas in the camp and their weaponry. Those admissions by the captives had been confirmed by both aerial and ground recon. The latter had also confirmed that these were not mere bandits but well armed men with something like real training. East of the villa, and further up the slope, was a rifle range, reported as being frequently used. The ground recon team had also reported explosions, some single, some double, which they were reasonably certain were both demolitions' and heavy weapons' training in progress. The comings and goings of groups of armed men suggested to both air and ground recon that there were other units in the general area, but neither recon element had been able to pinpoint the precise location of any of them. They were able to confirm that none were within three or four miles of the villa.
* * *
The tactical problem was a difficult one. Other powers might have been content to drop a number of guided bombs. The Legion had those, and could have delivered them easily enough. The difficulty there was that bombs, even precision guided ones, were not all that effective; not effective enough, in any case, when the objective isn't mere punishment, but massacre. That meant troops had to be landed, and landing troops in the face of one's own aerial bombardment was . . . somewhat dangerous.
It had been a close question and neither Carrera nor Samsonov were entirely confident they'd picked the right answer.
Faced with a more serious fight than generally expected, Carrera had asked Samsonov which was his best rifle company. Samsonov had answered, without hesitation "Number 15. I put all men that transferred from Division Recon Battalion into 15th company. Good boys. Company commander, Chapayev, is young, but talented officer. You met him once."
When, in planning, the question had arisen as to the wisdom of jumping from the C-47s to assault the villa, Samsonov had objected. "In mountains? No. Too high, air too thin, men will fall too fast. Besides, most of us are not trained for parachuting into trees."
Those were sound objections. "Assault landing?" Carrera had asked.
"Think best," Samsonov had answered. "One plane to secure strip, then others follow."
"Hmmm," Carrera had wondered aloud, "how do we keep the local guards from shooting up the plane as it lands?"
"That is only question of deciding which Kosmo humanitarian activist organization works most closely with Santandern guerillas," Samsonov had answered. "Maybe Red Cross."
Thus, instead of jumping, one plane would go in first, marked with the insignia of the Red Cross, to secure the landing strip and fuel facilities.
* * *
That first, falsely-marked plane landed with only the airfield guards to witness. The guards hadn't been expecting a flight but in any guerilla movement coordination and information sharing tends to be problematic. Still, the guards began to walk over to enquire as soon as the plane rolled to a stop.
A side door flow open. From it emerged four Balboans from the 14th Tercio, all dressed in mufti. Two of the Balboans called out greetings in Spanish and walked toward the three guards running to meet them. The two others, doing a fair imitation of the universal "pee pee dance," trotted to the far side of the airfield as if to relieve themselves. Half disappearing below the lip of the airstrip, the latter two made motions as if loosening their clothes. Instead of penises, however, silenced Pound sub-machineguns were pulled out. The eyes of those two followed their comrades closely as those comrades neared the FNLS guards.
"What the fuck are you guys doing here now?" the chief of the Santandern guards asked. "I've got no word of any flight coming in and I know for a fact we don't have enough leaf or paste on hand to justify using one of these to take out what we do have.
The Balboan shook his head. "Ain't that just like the fucking Committee?" he asked. "Nobody tells nobody nothin'. We're carrying shit in, not bringing it out."
"Shit?" the Santandern asked.
"Serious shit," the Balboan said. "Ammunition, some guns—some heavy guns—mortar shells, explosives, and a couple of crates worth of uniforms and field gear." All of which was, technically, true. So what if the uniforms weren't actually in crates? They would have filled a couple of crates easily enough.
"No shit?"
"No shit. Estevez, over in Belalcázar, made a deal with the Committee. He provides the shit; you guys smash the Balboan Embassy."
"Ohhh. That makes some sense then." The FNLS guard leader agreed. "Need help unloading it?"
The entire time the two parties, Cazadors and airfield guards, had been walking closer to each other. At a range of under six feet the two Balboans drew silenced, large caliber, pistols, with cartridges loaded down to be subsonic. The Santanderns barely had time to register shock and surprise before the muzzles flashed and their heads and chests were ruined by bullets that broke up upon hitting flesh or bone to create great swaths of destruction inside human bodies.
The senior of the pistoleros spoke a code word into a small radio masquerading as an earpiece. At the word, the second pair of Balboans ran to the little shack that housed the rest of the guards. Civilized men, they tried the door to the shack first and found it open. Gripping their silenced Pound submachine guns, the Balboans walked in and began methodically spraying the reclining men inside. They killed them all, quickly and silently, then went from body to body, shooting each one in the head, once, to make sure.