Later that evening, El Alemán’s girlfriend and other guests arrived. The drones watched their arrival. They watched the dancing and the eating and the drinking. They watched the ceremony of the bear, the untying of one pink ribbon after the next. They watched as the party moved into the early hours of morning, and they watched as El Alemán’s girlfriend danced with the bear for El Alemán’s amusement, grinding into the fuzzy white heart. They watched as the party wound down, and people went to sleep, and people left the party. One of the drones peeled off to follow a partygoer, an unknown figure who seemed to be, alongside El Alemán, a locus of attention. And then they watched as El Alemán retired with his girlfriend to a room in the northern corner of the finca.
During this, Juan Pablo sat in the back corner of the operations center at Tolemaida, observing but letting his principals run their op, not interfering. The mark of a good officer, Mason thought. The only times Mason had seen him on a radio or phone was when he was talking to higher, running interference on whatever pressures or demands were coming from the full colonels and generals. Juan Pablo trusted his men and trusted their training.
“Wait until the sniper team is ready,” a Colombian major said into a headset, his eyes fixed on the screens. “Wait.”
Three squads of eight soldiers were deployed, one that would breach the finca, another held in reserve, and the remaining squad split into teams of four, positioned on the northwest and southeast corners of the finca to block and isolate.
“When you’re ready.”
On the feed, Mason saw small figures racing to a side wall of the compound, the images oddly endearing, a child’s action toys brought to life. They were lifting a lightweight ladder to the side of the eastern exterior wall of the finca, and then one sped up the ladder, dropped down inside, and placed an explosive charge on the side door.
A voice came on the net: “Movement.”
On “Kill TV,” Mason saw two figures moving along the wall, probably guards who’d heard the assault team moving into position.
“Three, two, one.”
The explosive charges went off as the sniper team opened fire. One large flash and a cluster of smaller ones. The two figures fell down. The assault squad streamed into the finca.
On screen, it wasn’t so different from a U.S. raid, the choreography of men trained over and over to not simply execute a task, but to rapidly adapt to the changes and surprises an enemy compound can throw at you. Speed and violence of execution were key. Mason figured that, with a compound this size, forty-five seconds was a fair estimate of how long a group of U.S. special operators might take, and he began counting to himself.
One-one-hundred. Two-one-hundred. Three-one-hundred.
A machine gun opened up on the roof, a terrified urabeño with limited weapons training firing ineffectual bullets into the night, his burst serving no other purpose than to alert the snipers. They adjusted fire. The machine gun stopped. Three figures squirted out a side door, muzzle flashes lit up from the blocking squad’s position, and the three fell scattered across the ground, doll limbs all akimbo.
Eleven-one-hundred. Twelve-one-hundred.
The assault team rolled out of the first structure and into the building where El Alemán had retired with his girlfriend. Flashes of gunfire appeared on the feed, but the eye-in-the-sky couldn’t tell who was firing inside the building, and at whom.
Nineteen-one-hundred. Twenty-one-hundred.
The team rolled out into the final building, laying down heavy fire as they crossed quickly out into the open.
Twenty-six-one-hundred. Twenty-seven-one-hundred.
Inside the final building, the squad leader turned into a bedroom, a younger soldier with a light machine gun following behind. There were two figures under sheets in a bed, both sitting up, holding each other.
The squad leader ordered them to put their hands up. Neither did. The squad leader repeated the order, and the man’s hands moved down into the folds of the sheet across his lap. The squad leader’s finger had been straight and off his trigger, but now it hovered above his trigger, now it barely touched his trigger, now it exerted the slightest pressure as he decided what to do.
Thirty-five-one-hundred. Thirty-six-one-hundred.
The squad leader squeezed the trigger, punching a line of bullet holes in the man’s chest like the buttons on a dress shirt, and then the woman threw herself on the man, and the young soldier with the light machine gun opened fire as well, the bullets splitting the woman’s head open. They rolled out and into the hallway.
Forty-two-one-hundred. Forty-three-one-hundred.
A voice came on the net stating that the objective had been cleared. Mason stopped his counting and revised his earlier estimate. A U.S. team could have done it in thirty seconds. Juan Pablo, at a far corner of the room, turned from the drone feed to the other officers and warrant officers and enlisted manning the operations center and permitted himself a smile. Then his eyes briefly met Mason’s, allowing him to share in the victory before he turned back to the screens.
At the time, Mason had no sense of the significance of the raid, or the events that would result from it. In fact, he consciously tried not to overestimate the meaning of the affair. In ungoverned spaces, killing drug dealers tended to lead not to more law and order but to violent power grabs among the criminals lower down in the food chain. Intellectually, he knew this killing wouldn’t change much in Norte de Santander. But still, in that room, it
