Viper: A Thriller (15 page)

“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 34
^th
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.”

“What else did
Flores say?”

“He said you
were a threat to any chance our nation has of ever achieving true political
reconciliation and a peaceful settlement after all these decades, but that’s
okay with me. My heart is with the revolution. Whatever the Secretariat
decides, the 34
^th
Front is not going to sell out.”

“In the coming
weeks, you’ll hear word of what I’ve done, Dios. Expect a strong military
response from the Americans and their whores in Bogotá, probably unlike
anything we’ve seen before. Be prepared and stay strong. It may be best for you
to save the missiles until then.”

“My men are
prepared to fight,” Commander Dios assured her. “And what will you do?”

“I will kill as
many of them as I can until they find me.”

___

The Viper linked up with the Iranian’s
operative four days later in Bogotá. During that time span, she and her men
acquired civilian vehicles and made a stop in Cali, where, for a sizeable
amount of cash, nine of the missiles were to begin their journey north. She
retained the tenth missile.

She arrived
early to first run a countersurveillance sweep through Simón Bolívar Park, the
arranged meet site, located in the center of the city with a lake, children’s
museum, waterpark, and a stadium capable of holding over a 100,000 people.

It was late
afternoon, the weather pleasant, and people were everywhere, playing soccer on
the open fields, picnicking near the lake, and filling the trails. The single
woman wearing jeans and a long-sleeve shirt with her hair tied back didn’t
garner a second glance from anyone. Trujillo and Ibarra shadowed her from a
distance, and nobody would have made a connection between the three disparate
individuals taking a leisurely stroll.

The sight of
Flores struggling on the ground, like a fish out of water, was permanently
branded into Arianna’s mind, having been one of the rare instances where she
derived genuine pleasure from the suffering of her victim. She didn’t think of
herself as a sadist, but she thought she would enjoy the same sensation when
and if she plied her blade to the throat of the man codenamed Carnivore. Imagining
the feel of his warm blood on her flesh sent quivers of anticipatory pleasure
throughout her body.  

The Viper looked
out for her contact.

Very little was
capable of surprising her, but she definitely did not expect the fit European-looking
man sitting at the park where Kashani had said to find him. She’d anticipated a
Middle Easterner or one of the Latino converts to Islam Iran recruited in South
America. After first spotting the man, she walked past him and then doubled
back, thinking that this was not possibly the Iranian agent. But it was. The
rolled-up copy of the
City Paper Bogotá
in the man’s left hand and the
backpack resting on the ground near his left foot provided confirmation.

Despite the
recognition signals, it was his eyes that gave him away. They were light blue
and focused, highly aware, and attuned to his surroundings. He was dressed
casually in tan pants and a blue polo shirt that was just loose enough to
conceal his well-built shoulders and chest.

He remained
seated where he was and made no move until she approached him and initiated contact
by stating the pass number, seven. A pass number is the same as confirmation
statements, which most people knew from bad spy movies, but numbers were simpler,
easier to remember, and less idiotic.

On cue, the man provided
the appropriate response, “thirteen,” and their identities were established to
their mutual satisfaction.

He grabbed his
backpack and accompanied the Viper down the path leading out of the park.
Trujillo stayed with them, and Ibarra went ahead to start the car.

“What should I
call you?” the Viper asked, knowing she would never know his real name, but it
was easier to have something to call him.

“David.”

This was the
name on his forged Canadian passport, Social Insurance card, and driver’s
license, but his birth name, known only to a select few, was Mirsad Sidran. It had
been several years since he’d heard anyone use that name, and the last had been
his mother, who died shortly before he left his native Bosnia for the last
time.

He was one of
Quds Force’s most highly valued assets and one of the West’s greatest fears, an
invisible. Sidran was a Muslim veteran of the war against the Serbs and had subsequently
assisted Iranian intelligence operations in Western Europe. Not once in his
life had he ever stepped foot within the Islamic Republic of Iran or entered
any of its embassies. American security agencies would never be able to
establish any ties between him and Iran or its terrorist affiliates.

Presently
assigned to Quds Force’s North American branch, Mirsad Sidran had been
dispatched to the United States and Canada for intelligence collection and to
perform security assessments of potential targets in American cities for
retaliation against American or Israeli first strikes against Iran’s nuclear
facilities. One of his proposals to his superiors was a series of coordinated
strikes against American airliners with shoulder-fired missiles.

Able to discard
his accent or adopt an American or German accent at will, and fluent in
American colloquiums, Mirsad Sidran could freely travel the United States and
live amongst Americans without drawing the scrutiny from law enforcement
agencies and the suspicions from civilians that inevitably faced Arabs,
Iranians, or Pakistanis. He understood American society—or at least he
understood how it functioned, as American social behavior and values still mystified
him—and he knew how to avoid catching the attention of an observant police
officer on routine patrol or a nosey neighbor. He could drink a beer at a local
bar and talk baseball, or he could talk to a stranger on a subway train about
what it was like growing up outside Toronto.

He’d entered Colombia
the previous day from a secret Iranian base in Venezuela, where he received his
briefing from Kashani, who carefully outlined Mirsad Sidran’s mission. He
wasn’t there so much to assist the Viper, as he was to ensure that she was not
taken alive by the Americans or their allies, as well as see to it that,
however events played out, she did not live past the end of Plan Estragos.

___

The Viper selected an Avianca flight as her
first target.
Aerovías Nacionales de Colombia
, or National Airways of
Colombia, is the country’s flag carrier, as well as the second largest airline
in South America. It was an impulsive decision on the Viper’s part, to hit a
target of opportunity, but she was well familiar with El Dorado International
Airport from previous target reconnaissance and assessments, and she had
contacts there that had helped her smuggle weapons out of the country in the
past.

So the first
thing she did upon arriving in Bogotá was leave a note in a shared airport
locker that was used as a dead drop to exchange messages with Martin Garcia, an
operating engineer. The note simply indicated the time and location for a
meeting. Later that afternoon, face to face, the Viper explained to Garcia what
she required.

Mirsad Sidran
objected to the deviation from plan and the impulsivity and lack of discipline
the Viper’s decision demonstrated. Before planting a bomb at an American army
barracks in Iraq or assassinating an Israeli diplomat, Hezbollah or Qods Force
spent
months
in the planning stages, learning everything they could
about the target and its environment, and leaving nothing to chance.

But Sidran kept
his concerns to himself, knowing the Viper was too insecure and defensive to
take anything he said into consideration. So he stayed out of the way and
observed. Besides, it was far better for the whole operation to unravel here rather
than later in the United States. 

At the safe
house, Sidran gave the Viper agents a primer on SA-24. The weapon was simple to
use and almost fired itself. The Viper once used an earlier Russian-model
missile to bring down an American drug eradication plane, and Benito Trujillo
had experience on similar weapons from his time in the Peruvian army.

The following
day, Martin Garcia procured for the Viper an official 4x4 service truck that
belonged to
Operadora Aeroportuaria Internacional,
or OPAIN, the
consortium of construction and engineering firms that managed the airport’s
operations in conjunction with Flughafen Zurich AG, a Swiss company.

El Dorado is
twenty minutes from Bogotá’s downtown area, which is itself an urban space the
size of New York or Mexico City. El Dorado is one of the largest airports on
the continent and one of the busiest in the world. This meant tight security,
including a US Air Force Combat Arms Training and Maintenance (CATM) contingent,
but the Viper knew that even the strictest security systems were still fallible
to human error

The main
passenger terminal area was presently undergoing extensive renovation, and
there was another construction project underway to expand the cargo terminal,
so the airport was even more hectic than usual, with all manner of construction
vehicles coming and going, and the Viper fully intended on using this to her
advantage.

The Viper
travelled with Benito Trujillo in the borrowed OPAIN truck. Trujillo drove.
Wearing worker’s overalls with her hair concealed beneath a cap, Arianna sat in
the passenger seat. The forty-two pound, five foot long launcher with a
twenty-six pound missile sat in the truck’s bed, wrapped in canvas and
concealed beneath rolled-up tarps and a ladder. The OPAIN staff badges clipped
to Arianna’s and Trujillo’s shirts allowed them to breeze past the Colombian
security officers and onto an access road leading onto the airfield.

If the security
officers could have been bothered to take half a minute to stop the truck and
give the IDs even the barest cursory examination, they would have seen that the
pictures on the badges did not at all resemble the occupants of the truck.
Instead the officers demonstrated the laziness and complacency common to those
doing a long shift of guard duty.

Trujillo slowed
but didn’t come to a complete stop as he approached the security checkpoint. He
lowered his window and held up his ID and security badge, and the guard waved
him through without a second thought.

The Viper
directed Trujillo where to go.