“Your wife wants the peace deal to deliver justice,” he says.
“Yes.”
“How about you?”
“I think justice is a lot to ask for.”
He laughs at that. “Somebody told me you were on the Raúl Reyes mission.”
I nod. Reyes had been the number three man in the FARC. Also, he’d been a clown and a killer, with rodent facial hair and endless crimes from cocaine trafficking to murder. Formally sentenced for eighteen kidnappings, for the murders of thirteen policemen, eighteen soldiers, the thirty-six youths killed in the bombing of Club El Nogal. And he had the obnoxious habit of dressing his murders up in the most trite clichés about the people, and the revolution, and socialism, and justice.
“Did that feel like justice?” Mason asks.
I wonder what he’s driving at. The Reyes mission was done in collaboration with the Americans, the type of collaboration we’d like to employ in the Agamemnon mission.
“It was”—I’m not sure how to describe it—“an impressive display.”
Basically I’d sat on a base, bored, while the planes flew overhead toward his camp just across the Ecuadorian border, first a group of Cessna A-37 Dragonflys, light attack aircraft carrying 500-pound Mark-82 gravity bombs with a Paveway guidance system strapped on the nose, behind them our Super Tucanos, flying at much lower altitude, carrying conventional gravity bombs, and behind them an AC-47 gunship. The Dragonflys dropped their smart bombs, killing Reyes and those around him. The Super Tucanos dropped their bombs, flattening the surrounding jungle, killing insurgents while simultaneously providing plausible deniability that we were using American technology. Then the AC-47 strafed the area, shot survivors. And it was only then, after all that firepower, that we came in on our U.S.-provided Black Hawks. There weren’t many guerrilleros left. We walked through bodies torn by shrapnel. One corpse lay peacefully, as if for a wake, the only sign of damage, pools of blood where eyes should be. And we found a huge amount of intelligence, probably the biggest haul on the FARC ever. And, of course, Raúl Reyes’s corpse. Mostly intact.
Hearing that story, you might be tempted to think it was a bomb that killed Reyes. You might focus on the technology, the guidance system given to us by the CIA, or the plane, a light attack aircraft specially designed during the Vietnam War for counterinsurgency. Or perhaps you’d think about the pilot, or the commander who oversaw the operation. But that wasn’t what killed him at all. Or, at least, it wasn’t the important thing.
“You know what it felt like,” I tell him. “It felt like doing the laundry, or taking out the trash. Like something that needed to be done.”
Mason takes another awkward pull on his cigar. The only other American soldiers who don’t know how to smoke are the Mormons, who have an excuse.
Nonchalantly, not trying to offend him, I turn in profile to show him how to treat a lancero, holding the cigar just to the mouth, drawing in the smoke gently, bringing down the cigar with the smoke held in the mouth, feeling the tobacco hit, savoring the richness, slowly letting it out, then rotating the cigar, exaggerating the movement, and repeating the process. I don’t think he notices.
“Take Agamemnon,” I say. “Currently it’s the police who are leading the fight against the Urabeños. It’s logical. They’re a drug gang. Let the police handle them. And so they’re trying. And when they catch Urabeños, they arrest them and bring them to trial. Would you say that counts as justice?”
“Sure,” he says.
“But if the army takes over Agamemnon, well . . .”
“You’ll stop putting Urabeños in jail and start putting them in body bags.”
“Exactly.” I smile. I suspect this is what makes him nervous about the whole thing. Might as well confront it. “Is that justice? Who knows? But last week the Úsaga dragged a sixty-year-old man from his truck, they shot him in the middle of the road, waited for the police to come. Then they killed four police, they killed one army captain . . .” I let out a sigh. “So I don’t think now is a time to worry about justice. There are things that need to be done, one way or another.”
He says nothing. I know he gets my point, but he won’t agree to it, even for politeness’s sake. Which is frustrating. What we want is not simply a new front in a war, but access to that thing the Americans, and only the Americans, can provide. The same thing that killed Raúl Reyes, and which the Americans have been using to hunt people in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Philippines and Somalia and Niger and Colombia and Ecuador and who knows where else. And it is something we deserve access to. After all, it started here, in Colombia, thirty years ago.
This was during the war against Pablo Escobar, who had been the herald of a new type of criminal. A drug lord of such scale and wealth that he was able to wage an asymmetric war against the foundations of the state itself, focusing as much on murdering police officers, judges, and politicians as on holding territory. When ISIS started murdering every state worker in Iraq they could find, including garbagemen, as part of their war, they were acting as Escobar’s children. Break down all order, all civilization, so the cockroaches can breed in the ruins.
In response, we formed a special unit, the Search Bloc, about whom much has been written. Behind the scenes, men like my father worked with the Americans to create an integrated network of differing agencies designed to tighten the loop of finding targets, fixing them in place, finishing them, exploiting and analyzing the intelligence collected, and then disseminating that intelligence to the agencies and commands able to act on it most rapidly. It created a model in which the operations of special forces, military intelligence, police intelligence, signals and human and image intelligence services were reorganized and integrated to reduce stovepiping, maximize information sharing, and tighten the circle of analysis
