Mercer picked at his food. It was good, but he wasn’t particularly hungry. And that wasn’t because he’d just killed Ted Haggerty, or because General Gomez annoyed him; it was because he had a lot to think about. Specifically about the gringos poking around the barrio, who at this very moment might either be staking out or attempting to enter the Hen House. He had no doubt that the colectivo and the management at the Hen House could handle them, and get whatever information they possessed before disposing of them.
If the two Americans were Intel officers or otherwise working with Brendan Worley, then that meant the little shit was getting more proactive about locating him, which was a development that Kyle Mercer welcomed. The two men had been playing a distant and psychological game of cat and mouse ever since Worley became aware that Kyle Mercer was in Venezuela. But it was well past time to engage the enemy.
Most men would flee from a person who wanted to kill them. But Brendan Worley was a soldier, and he knew that his job was to kill Kyle Mercer. In any case, sooner or later the men were fated to meet, and it might as well be sooner—though Mercer enjoyed the game, and took pleasure in undoing the work that Worley had been sent here to do. For every anti-regime person that Kyle Mercer killed, Brendan Worley’s reputation in Washington as a man who could clean up the shit and advance American interests was diminished. And that was Kyle Mercer’s mission—to diminish the man, to destroy his mystique, and to kill his spirit before killing the man himself. In fact, a simple killing was too good for Brendan Worley—it would be better if Mercer put him in the Chapel, and watched him die slowly.
Mercer was aware that several of his men were stealing glances at him in the dimly lit mess hall, so he resumed eating. If it wasn’t Worley who’d sentthe two Americans to Petare, then who was it? He had to assume that Simpson had reported his Kyle Mercer sighting in the Hen House. Therefore the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division would have sent agents to Caracas to investigate and make an arrest. Mercer was sure that the CID would have made contact with the American Embassy as a matter of protocol, and for logistics and backup—it was the only way they could operate in a hostile country. And if that was the case, the CID agents would by now have made the acquaintance of Colonel Brendan Worley, an Army man working for Defense Intelligence, and also the resident expert on Captain Mercer. But would the CID or its agents know that? Maybe not. And maybe Worley would not tell them. But Brendan Worley would make it his business to host the CID agents who’d arrived in Caracas, and he would definitely want to be looking over their shoulders, because Brendan Worley was as guilty as Kyle Mercer. Actually, more guilty. As was the late Ted Haggerty. Like the people on the SEBIN kill list, if you worked with or for Brendan Worley, you paid with your life. And that would include any CID agents who were looking for him.
His thoughts turned back to Ted Haggerty. If Haggerty had gotten a message to Worley about his Kavak trip, why hadn’t Worley acted on it? Two possibilities: Haggerty hadnotgotten a message to Worley, and had impulsively chartered a flight to Kavak, intending to report when he got there. Had SEBIN found a sat phone on Haggerty and taken it before turning him over to the Pemón? Mercer should have pressed Haggerty on this, but as he’d learned in Afghanistan, information gotten under duress was unreliable and often led you astray. It was best to just assume the worst, which in this case was that Haggertyhadreported to Worley—or to his own CIA station chief at the U.S. Embassy—and that the Intel people at the embassy were waiting for another report—and still waiting. Or maybe Worley was taking his time planning his mission to Kavak. Or… the mission was now underway, and Worley was close. Mercer thought about what kind of mission it would be. An air strike from a carrier in the Caribbean? A Predator drone strike? Or maybe a ground operation launched by U.S. forces in Colombia? Maybe they’d send a Delta Force team to kill him. That was the only thing Kyle Mercer really worried about, because there was no one else on the face of the earth who could kill or capture Kyle Mercer.
Mercer drank from his water bottle and stared out through the mosquito netting at the dense rain forest. He felt safe here, though he could move his camp easily enough. That’s what soldiers did. Don’t get too comfortable. Home moves around, and you move with it. On the other hand… if you stay put, the enemy you’re trying to find will save you the trouble by finding you.
And finally, how did Haggerty know to begin his search for Kyle Mercer at Tomás de Heres, and then fly to Kavak? Probably it was just as Haggerty said—good Intel work coupled with the usual sobornos, bribes. This was how Captain Mercer himself had accomplished his missions in Afghanistan. Intuition helped, and so did a little luck. It was both of these things that had saved his life in the ’Stan—saved him from being killed by the Taliban, and at the last minute, saved him from being killed by his friends.
Mercer finished his water and looked at his men through the haze of cigarette smoke. They were what the Army called a motley crew. Men from different cultures and countries and different walks of life who had taken different paths to Camp Tombstone.
There were, first, the conflict junkies like Franco and Emilio, who had never known a day of peace and never would, jumping from war zone to war zone until their luck ran out. Then there were the true believers, the Venezuelan Chavistas like the two guys on loan from MBR-200, Alejandro and Iván, who always sat together at meals and still wore their berets and bandanas even though they were five hundred miles from anyone who gave a shit.
Mercer looked at a skinny young guy named David who was in animated conversation. David lived in one of the barrios of Petare, and had been a janitor at an office building in downtown Caracas before losing his job like so many of the service workers who inhabited the slums. He got involved with the black market trade, linked up with a gang, and eventually found his way to the Hen House once word got out that Mercer was looking for young men seeking work that was high-risk and well-paying. Guys like David reminded him of the best kind of Army privates, the ones who were eager to please and grateful for the opportunity. The ideologues and the conflict vets came with their own baggage and arrogance. But the Davids, the former janitors and trash collectors whose livelihoods had been destroyed alongwith the Venezuelan economy, and who would do anything to earn and send money back to their starving families, they made good soldiers. About a third of Mercer’s men were like David, in various stages of training to become professional fighters.
A lanky guy with dark hair and fair skin sat at the table nearest Mercer, chewing on a piece of flatbread. This was Nico, the only true technician in this crew. He looked like a criollo—a Venezuelan of mostly Spanish ancestry—and he had been a specialist in the National Guard’s bomb squad in Caracas before he got laid off. He was an expert in detecting and defusing explosive devices, and he now used those skills to build them.
Earlier in the day, Nico had told him, “Está listo.” It’s ready.
He and Nico had gone over the logistics of transporting the bomb to Caracas, where it would be wired onto the car of a former Venezuelan Army colonel who’d been dismissed and was now working for the Americans. The official government line was that the colonel had been fired for corruption, but probably the opposite was true. In a broken country like this, the regime wanted everyone on the government dole to ensure their loyalty. It was the men—and women—with principles who were the problem.
Nico had wanted to do his work closer to the site of the attack, but Mercer had insisted that all operations originate at Camp Tombstone. The run from here to Caracas—or wherever an operation needed to happen—was relatively low-risk, while the population centers themselves were a hive of backstabbing government officials, dirty cops, and violent criminals. This whole country was teetering on the edge, and the safest place to be was far away from the chaos until it was time to strike. That’s what he’d learned from the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Mercer stared at the bony remnants of the catfish—alive this morning, a pile of shit tomorrow. It was good to be at the top of the food chain. And he intended to stay there.
He stood, left the mess hall and took a path through the trees that led to the river and a view of the sky.
Kyle Mercer took in the world around him: the river’s trembling waters, the dark leaves of the forest, cast silver in the moonlight. And looming above it all, Chimatá Tepui, that great ancient monolith rising into the black, starry night.
He thought back to his years of imprisonment in that filthy stone hut somewhere in Afghanistan’s mountainous borderlands. He remembered the small window, a one-foot-by-six-inch rectangle. In the daytime it was a patch of bright blue, and at night it was starlit sky. The infinite universe reduced to a sliver by the confines of his prison.
Most nights he was chained to a wooden yoke, enveloped in darkness except for his view of the stars. He would stare up at them as he heard his captors outside perform the final prayer ritual of the night as they bowed to Mecca.
One day he asked for a Quran. They gave him one, in Arabic with a side-by-side Pashto translation he could read. He began performing the prayer rituals inside his hut, five times a day. One of the Talibs who had come in to empty his latrine bucket saw him praying, and laughed at him. He was doing it wrong by praying in Pashto instead of Arabic. “Teach me,” said Mercer. The man refused.
The headman, Farzaad, thought the American was trying either to trick them or to mock them. In response, they made his conditions worse. His midday meal was cut, his thin blanket taken away. Once in the middle of the night one of them came in and beat him with a wooden rod, breaking his rib.
He kept praying. He began listening to his jailors’ Arabic prayers through the walls and memorizing them. A week later, a different Talib, Mateen, saw him trying to recite the Arabic prayer, and showed him the proper way, when to stand and when to bow. Mateen brought him a bucket of water and a cloth so he could wash himself before prayer. He performed the Fajr at dawn, the Zuhr and Asr during the day, the Maghrib at sunset and the Isha after nightfall.
His conditions did not improve, but he kept up the prayers, five times a day, every day for months. One day Mateen gave him a prayer mat. Weeks later they began giving him regular meals again. They stopped beating him. Months after that, they invited him to perform the Isha outside along with them. It was one of the few times he’d been out of the hut in almost twenty months. He joined his jailors under the stars, bowing to the west. And every night thereafter he did the same. He made sure not to look around too much, to focus on the prayer and on the act of prostrating himself before God.
Each night, he gave himself one small thing to observe. He noted therewere always five men, though not always the same five. There was a pickup truck parked in the camp, and he noticed the tire marks in the dirt that told him the direction of their village. There were two torches staked into the ground, one near his hut and one where the pickup truck was parked. One night he focused on counting the weapons—five AK-47s, piled in the flatbed of the pickup truck during prayers, and two knives, which their wearers removed and set beside them as they prayed. One night he observed the physicality of the men—who seemed the strongest, who the weakest. Who carried himself with assurance, who averted his eyes when Mercer looked at him.
He sometimes asked them questions about their faith after the completion of the prayer. They were, not surprisingly, somewhat ignorant of their own religion. But he listened to their stupid ramblings. He didn’t flatter them personally—that would be too obvious. It was always about their faith. About growing closer to God and saving his infidel soul.
One night, he decided it was time. He had built up enough strength, gone enough weeks without beatings, without being denied a meal. They led him outside for the Isha. This time he laid his prayer mat down next to Akram, one of the men who wore a knife. Akram removed the knife and sheath, and made sure to set them down on the opposite side from where Mercer had placed his mat. They, of course, still didn’t trust him. But the months of his charade had bred something else in them—an indifference to him. He had bowed and bowed until they had forgotten who—and what—he was.
The six men—five Afghans and one American—began the prayer, standing under the stars, turning their palms to the heavens. They dropped to their knees and bowed down—and closed their eyes. Mercer bowed too, then rose back to his knees as they continued to recite the prayer. He reached over the back of Akram, unsheathed his knife, then grabbed him by his hair and drew the blade across his throat. Blood spurted onto the man’s prayer mat.
It happened so quickly and so silently that the other men did not notice for a moment. Mercer turned to the man on his other side and cut his throat. The man cried out before his windpipe was severed, and the other three sprang to their feet.
Farzaad drew a pistol from beneath his tunic. It was a weapon Mercer had not counted on and had never seen. Mercer dropped his knife, grabbed the pistol with both hands as he’d been trained to do, twisted it free, and pressed the muzzle under the headman’s chin and blew his brains out. He shot the two other Talibs in the back as they ran for the AKs.
It was all over in a matter of seconds. Mercer stood over the bodies, under the stars, his heart pounding. Two years in chains and then suddenly he was free. And freedom meant making choices—something he had not been able to do for almost two years, but something he’d thought about for most of those years. Virtually every soldier would now do what they were trained to do and sworn to do under the Code of Conduct—escape and evasion, making every effort to link up with friendly forces. And this was something that Captain Mercer, Delta Force, would do. The difficult part would come when he had to explain to the American Army why he’d left his post—why he’d deserted—but even that wasn’t so difficult, and if they believed him, he, Captain Kyle Mercer, would be truly free: free to go home, free to remain in the Army, and free to testify about Operation Flagstaff. The deserter would become a hero. And he would get his revenge in a court of law.
