That Night in Cartagena

I'd been watching the small compound below me for the last four days and I wasn't holding out much hope that I was going to see anything. The compound was just a relatively large house in the foothills of the Cordillera de Melida in southwestern Venezuela and didn't have the typical several acres of clearing surrounded by a fence or wall of some sort. There didn't appear to be a regular guard detail either. All I'd seen were three men dressed in jeans and shirts walking around once in a while.

I was hoping for something to happen. If it didn't, I'd been sent on a wild goose chase that put my life in danger for nothing. The compound was supposedly a staging point for the cartel drug traffic between Venezuela and the Caribbean. Drugs would go from Venezuela to the other islands or to Mexico, usually via small plane or boat. This compound would be a place where shipments were consolidated and then transported to the airport in San Christóbal or possibly to a speedboat that pulled into shore at Punlo Cabello on the north coast.

It was late in the day when I saw an OD green truck coming up the road that led to the compound. When it got close enough, I could see it was a Pinzgauer 4X4 hardtop. The markings and the radio antenna on the back told me it was a Venezuelan Army vehicle. I'd been expecting a Toyota Landcruiser since there were thousands of them in Venezuela. They were a favorite of the cartels because they blended in, but the Venezuelan Army Pinzgauer wasn't a big surprise. The only people in Venezuela who have money are either in the government or are involved in drugs and sex trafficking, usually both.

Evidently the truck was expected. Two of the men I'd seen over the past four days casually strolled out of the house to meet the truck with their H&K MP5's slung across their chests. When the truck stopped, the driver, in the uniform of the Bolivarian National Guard, got out and said something to the two men while his shotgun rider in the same uniform got out, jacked the bolt on his FN-FNC rifle and then opened the side door. A few seconds later, three women stepped out of the truck followed by a third man, also in uniform and with his FNC at the ready.

The women were a surprise, but not because they were women instead of drugs. Sex trafficking is a big part of the cartel's business in Venezuela. The surprise was the difference in their ages. I guessed two of them late teens or early twenties, and the third at probably early forties. Sex traffickers like their women young, and the younger the better. Young women are pretty easy to dupe into thinking they're going to go to the US and make more money in a day they they've had in their entire lives.

The two younger women fit that pattern. It was the older woman who didn't fit. By the time a woman has passed thirty and especially in a country like Venezuela, she's seen and lived enough that she's a lot harder to convince. This woman had left thirty behind her years ago.

The two girls wore jeans that fit tight enough it was pretty easy to guess their age. Both had slender hips, a sure sign that the girl is young. Another clue to their young age was the T-shirts they wore. One had "Los Angeles" printed across the front. The other wore a shirt with a picture of a guy on it. I didn't know the name of the guy but I recognized him as of one of those teenage American singers the girls in El Paso were always gaga over.

The older woman was a different story. She had the full figure of a mature woman, with larger breasts and wide hips that are a lot more appealing to me. She also had a lot of cleavage to show and she was showing a lot of it because her knit top was cut pretty low. At that distance, I couldn't see much other than their bodies, but all three had long, black hair.

I figured something else was going on with the women. They were dressed pretty casually but in better clothes than most of the locals, and all three were barefoot. That told me they were probably not there because they wanted to be. They weren't handcuffed though, so they'd probably gone along with whatever was happening without much of a fight.

I was trying to think of a reasonable explanation when the two men with rifles said something and then waved their rifles at the women. The women started walking toward the main building, followed by the two men from the compound. As soon as they started walking, the uniformed men got back into the Pinzgauer and headed back down the road.

The group was about halfway to the main building when the three women stopped and turned to face the two men from the compound. The two men kept walking until they were less than a meter from the women, and they started to bring their carbines up. I saw the older woman's mouth move and then all hell broke loose for about thirty seconds.

The older woman kicked the man closest to her in the crotch. When he doubled over, she kicked him in the gut and he went down. She kicked him in the gut again, and when he rolled over on his back, she stomped him in the crotch three times. The other two women both wrestled the other man to the ground and one of them jabbed him in the eyes over and over while the third kept stomping his crotch with the heel of her bare foot.

The two men were virtually helpless then. No man can take a hard kick to the balls and still function, let alone a repeated pounding like these two had received. They were probably barely conscious. There was no resistance at all when the older woman grabbed the pistol one of the men carried holstered on his side. She shot him in the head, then turned to the second man. The other two women let him go, and once they were clear, the older woman shot him too. After that, they stripped both men of the rifles and pistols they carried and then started out of the compound at a run -- right in my direction.

It was good that they were running. They'd made it half way to the cover of some trees when the third man from the compound walked out of the main building, took one look at the two on the ground and at the women running away, and then leveled his MP5 at them and started chasing them.

The guy got off about a five round burst, but the MP5 is more of a spray and pray weapon on full auto unless the user knows how to handle the recoil. His first shot wasn't even close to the three women because the guy was running. The rest of his shots kept getting higher and higher because he wasn't controlling the muzzle climb. The last bullet shredded the trees about six meters off the ground.

I didn't really think about what I was doing except to remember that old adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The guy got off one more burst that also went wild before I put a bullet in his chest with the FNC I was carrying on that mission. The three women didn't stop to look. They just kept running and they were getting closer to me.

They were less than ten meters away by then, so there wasn't really time for me to pack up and leave. My only hope was they wouldn't see me when they passed. Just in case, I pulled the Sig from my holster and eased back the slide to make sure I had a round in the chamber. I had no idea who they were or why they were there, but if there was going to be a firefight, the Sig would be faster to point and shoot than the FNC.

I was wondering for about the hundredth time in my life if I'd chosen the right career path when the three women ran into the small clearing where I'd set up and stopped running when they saw me. A second later, the older woman of the three pointed her MP5 at me and the other two did the same, one with the other MP5 and one with a pistol that looked a lot like a Glock 17.

I'd been in tight situations before, but never in a situation where I might have to shoot a woman. In fact, in my entire military career, I'd killed only twenty-three men, twenty-four if I counted the man I'd just shot.

It all started when I was still a teenager back in Chicago.

My dad turned eighteen in 1970 and was promptly drafted into the US Army where he trained as an infantryman and then served a tour in Vietnam. I was his only child and was born in 1975.

Dad didn't talk about Vietnam with me until I was fifteen. At that time in my life, I was in the process of deciding what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I didn't think I'd be satisfied working in a factory like Dad did. He did talk about work sometimes, but it was always about how he couldn't get a better job because he didn't have more than a high school education. He'd been telling me I had to go to college since I could remember.

I knew I wasn't cut out for college. When I learned something, I wanted to learn two things -- how I should do it and what would happen when I did. I didn't need or want to know why three times two equals six. I could memorize that and get along just fine. I saw college as more of the same thing as high school, just endless explanations of why without many chances to do the how.

The local Army recruiter had dropped off some brochures at the school for the seniors, but I picked up one and the Army seemed to be something I could handle. I'd have eight weeks of basic training, then eight or ten more weeks of training in something, and then I'd have an Army job and be working. The brochure was full of pictures of Army guys walking down the streets of Germany or Japan, or a beach in Hawaii with a few half-naked girls. Since I'd never been out of Chicago, the idea that I would see the world was also really appealing.

When I told that to Dad, he shook his head.

"Well, that's what you think now, but you don't know how it really is. They'll train you to fight, but then they'll send you someplace where you have to fight. I saw a lot of friends get killed in 'Nam, and a lot more got hurt bad. You don't want to put yourself through that."

He then started trying to talk me out of enlisting by telling me stories about what he'd seen in Vietnam. When you're fifteen, you understand death but dying was something old people did. It could never happen to me. I listened and nodded my head, but inside, I was amazed at the bravery of the men he talked about.

One story he told me was about what he called "LURPs". He said he had been friends with a couple of LURPs and always envied them.

"They went on some really dangerous missions, but they usually came back in one piece. What they did was go out in the bush and spy on the 'Cong. Those boys had some really big balls to do what they did, and they were damned good at it too. They'd go out with almost no gear except a rifle, a knife, and some balls of cooked rice for food, stay out for a week and watch the 'Cong, and then come back and report. They made their own decisions about what to do, and they took care of each other.

What I did was ride a Huey out to the jungle with a hundred other guys and then run like hell for cover while the 'Cong shot at us. They could hear us coming a mile away and could set up an ambush before we even got there. It was pretty much every man for himself until we got to enough cover we could get organized. By that time, we'd have several men down and we'd have to stay put and keep the 'Cong's heads down until the medivacs could come in and pick them up."

I hadn't been much of a reader before that, but the next day, I found a book in the school library written by a man who had been a LURP in Vietnam. The more I read, the more the idea appealed to me. Call it a lust for glory or whatever you want, but I started seeing myself in jungle camo with a rifle and a light pack with everything taped down so it wouldn't make any noise. I'd go out with five other guys, sneak up on a known trail way behind enemy lines, and then spend a week watching who went down that trail and what they were carrying.

The spring I was going to graduate, I took the bus to the Army Recruiting Center and talked to the Sergeant about what I had to do to become a LURP. He smiled like a kid getting a candy bar.

"Well, we don't call them LURP's anymore. They're called Long Range Surveillance teams now, LRS for short. You gotta be tough to be in LRS, but you look big enough and strong enough you could handle it. Once you're in, you'll be in one of the most elite units in the world. You'll work in small teams behind enemy lines gathering intelligence. Most never fire a shot on a mission. They just go in, do their thing, and are then picked up at some designated location. Nobody ever knows they were there. A lot of times, they go in by parachute, so if you want to be on an LRS team, you should probably go airborne infantry."

Three years later, Andres Sandoval, civilian and high school graduate, was Corporal Andres Sandoval. I had qualified as "Expert" with both a rifle and a pistol, was jump qualified, had served a two-year stint in Germany, and was at Fort Campbell, Kentucky assigned to the 101st Airborne and thinking about my future again.

I'd learned the way to get what you want from the Army is to make a school or duty station part of your re-enlistment contract. Toward my goal of joining an LRS team, I kept re-enlisting with special schools as part of my contract. When I re-enlisted in 2005, I specified that I'd be assigned to Special Forces, the section to which LRS teams were now assigned. I already had most of the required qualifications. I'd been through Ranger school, Pathfinder school, and Sniper school, and I'd done well in all.

By 2017, I was an experienced LRS team leader with the rank of Staff Sergeant and two tours in Iraq and two tours in Afghanistan. I was an instructor for several Special Forces schools at Ft. Bragg, and was high on the promotion list for Master Sergeant. That's when the bottom fell out.

Some computer specialist who'd never seen a battlefield except in the movies put together a computer simulation about what the US Army was to become in the future. That simulation said the Army would no longer need actual boots on the ground LRS teams. They could gather all the intelligence they needed by drones and satellites.

That was just plain bullshit. I'd been on the ground when one of those fucking drones flew over. The Afghans could hear it coming and either shot it down or quickly stashed their weapons and started acting like civilians. It took eyeballs and ears on the ground over several days to find out what they were really doing.

All LRS teams were to be distributed to other units. I knew what that meant. My highly trained LRS teams were destined to become little more than regular infantry. That included me. I had my twenty years in and I wasn't about to take the drop in status. When my enlistment was up, I retired.

I was retired, but I was only forty-two at the time. I needed something to do for the next twenty years or so if only to keep myself busy. That problem was solved for me a week before I retired.

I got a phone call from a man who said his company needed someone with my qualifications and understood that I was retiring in a day or so. He wouldn't tell me how he got that information. I asked him what the job was but he wouldn't tell me that either. He also wouldn't tell me the name of his company. Instead, he asked if I could meet him at a certain restaurant the day after I retired so we could discuss my future.

I can't give the name of the company here because that might pose some national security problems. Let's just say it was a company that often gets contracts for security of US diplomatic personnel and certain other jobs the US Government agencies would rather not do themselves and leave it at that. Usually the US Government would just as soon nobody knows they hire contractors to do their dirty work.

Technically, I'm classified as a mercenary, but I haven't done any actual fighting since I accepted the guy's offer. I just do what I've been trained to do, that being slip into someplace some US Government department finds interesting, find out what they want to know, and then make a report. One of those jobs is what I was doing that day by watching the suspected cartel compound.

I never know who requested my services but I can usually guess. The DEA, DHS, and State don't have the authority to get more involved in the operations of any foreign country other than training and support of that countries own internal sections who do the same thing. The CIA does have agents at every US Embassy, but their job is mostly recruiting locals to gather information about the country and bring that information to the agent.

To get a picture of what's happening during the normal day to day activities of the government and citizens, those departments contract that job to a company like mine. Since both the DEA and the DHS are pretty interested in Central and South America because of drugs and sex trafficking, they want as much information as they can get, however they can get it.

For instance, the DEA may have intel from a CIA informant that such and such a place is being used to transfer drugs to the Mexico-US border, but they can't send a DEA agent to find out the details. Instead, they contract for that surveillance with my company who in turn sends me. That way, if I was ever caught, instead of creating an international incident, the DEA can simply deny any knowledge of what I was doing.

Now, nobody in either government really believes that, but politically, it works for both sides. The DEA can continue their programs of training local law enforcement and the country's military so it looks like they're doing something and can keep increasing their budget. Since the foreign country doesn't have to expel any US diplomats or advisors, they can keep getting the money the US Government sends them to improve their internal capabilities.

I'd been watching this compound for four days and my food was running out. I have to keep myself mobile, and that means food is two dozen emergency food bars that give me thirty-six hundred calories a day for six days and weigh a tad over three pounds. I don't carry much water unless I'm working in a desert area. I carry a small bottle of iodine tablets and get my water from natural sources.

The reason for not carrying something like MRE's is twofold and both are equally important. My limit for food and gear is twenty pounds. I can swim while carrying thirty pounds of gear, but I'm basically exhausted after thirty meters or so. With twenty pounds, I can swim that thirty meters and still have enough left to run. It's important to be able to run if you're being chased, and yes, I've been chased.

The other reason for the food bars instead of MRE's or other varieties of the same thing is the waste material. All the food items and heat pouches come in plastic packages that I'd have to do something with. Nothing says, "Somebody is out there watching" to an enemy like the wrapper of a food pouch or even a gum wrapper. The packages of the food bars are small, lightweight, and I can stuff them into a pocket of my pack and take them with me.

The other standard gear I carry includes the same rifle the country's military is currently using. If I have to shoot somebody, using the same rifle as that country's military makes it hard to know who really fired the shot. By carrying the same weapon as the country's military also means ammunition is pretty easy to come by.

My rifle ammunition, the same ammunition the country's government issues, amounts to a hundred or so rounds, depending upon magazine capacity. I also carry a Sig P320 pistol with four extra seventeen round magazines. Nine millimeter ammunition is used worldwide as is the Sig P320, so neither will give away the fact that I'm an American.

Less than two hundred rounds probably doesn't seem like much firepower to anyone who has served in combat, but the rifle and the Sig are just insurance. My intention is to never be in a situation where I have to use them. My intention is to be a ghost. I slip in, do my thing, and then slip out without anyone knowing I was ever there.