“And what has that deal accomplished? Has the violence stopped?” Pacheco stabbed a finger in the direction of San Tabal. “No, it hasn’t. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that a lot of those bastards squatting in San Tabal were FARC before.”
“What do you want from me?” It was almost a scream.
Pacheco stared at him grimly. “You are an important man among the farmers around San Tabal, Señor Fuentes. If you stand up, others will follow.”
“I’m a farmer. Only a farmer.”
“You were in the Army once. I seem to remember your name being connected with that fight outside of Ocaña.” Pacheco was relentless.
“That was a long time ago,” Fuentes protested. “I only want to feed my family, give them a better life. I haven’t even shot a gun in years.”
Pacheco waved to indicate the Blackhearts. “That’s why they’re here. They know how to fight. They can lead the fight. But the others won’t fight without someone like you to rally around.”
“Diego.”
Fuentes turned to look at his wife, who had stepped out of the kitchen, facing him with her face composed and calm, though she pointedly didn’t look at the corpses sprawled in her living room. She was a small, slightly plump woman, her hair still dark.
Neither of them said anything. Fuentes was older than his wife, but not by that much. The crow’s feet around his wife’s eyes belied her age. The two of them had clearly been married long enough that they didn’t need to speak to communicate. She held his gaze, her expression frightened and yet defiant, her face pale yet her back straight and her head held high. And after a moment, he cast his eyes down at the floor, then turned back to Pacheco.
“What is the plan?”
***
The roads were narrow and treacherous, as they twisted back and forth through the mountains. The clouds lowered over the peaks, and a faint drizzle had started to make it even harder to see, even with the headlights on.
Galvez fumed in the passenger seat of the lead Nissan Frontier. This was taking too long. It had already taken him far too long to realize that a former Search Bloc operator lived entirely too close to San Tabal for comfort. Then gathering up enough Green Shirts who hadn’t already drunk or smoked themselves into uselessness as the evening got older had taken even more time. Now it was past midnight, and they still had over ten miles to go to get to Pacheco’s farm.
He didn’t know that Alejandro Pacheco had been behind the loss of his patrol. Finding out that the man had been in the Search Bloc had meant calling in favors with certain people in Bogota. It wasn’t something that was widely advertised or recorded. Families were always targets in Colombia, going back to the days of La Violencia.
The convoy struggled up toward the bend around the next finger. Only when they rounded the tight, hairpin turn and started up the other side of the ridge did Galvez’s radio start squawking.
“…alvez, come in!”
He lifted the radio to his lips. “This is Commander Galvez.”
The incoming transmission was scratchy and broken. “Some…attacked the Fuentes farm. Only a… survivors. They have control of…farm now.”
He cursed. “Stop the vehicles!” He searched the dark ahead of the headlights as the driver stomped on the brake, bringing them to a halt with a lurch, but the slope of the ridge was sheer to either side. He punched the dashboard. “Keep going. Find us a place to turn around.” They were several miles past the Fuentes farm. It would take well over an hour to reach it, and something told him that they did not have that much time. If Pacheco—or whoever was moving against the Green Shirt revolution—had struck that quickly, they would be moving while he tried to get turned around.
He was behind, he knew it, and someone was going to pay in blood.
Chapter 15
“We don’t have enough time to harden this place.” Brannigan stood by Fuentes’s kitchen table, his arms folded and his Galil hanging by its sling around his neck. Flanagan, Wade, and Pacheco stood with him and Fuentes, as the rest of the Blackhearts helped Fuentes’s hands haul the bodies out of the living room.
Brannigan suspected that the family wasn’t going to be able to live in that house for a little while.
“We don’t have the time, and we don’t have the manpower,” he continued. “We’ll have to move you and your family somewhere safer—I should say, we’ll have to have Pacheco and his network get you moved somewhere safer. We need to move before the Green Shirts can get their act together.” He stroked his mustache as he looked down at the map he’d spread over the table. “Since we can’t turn this place into the Alamo, we’ll have to move fast and hit them hard, keep them off balance.” He glanced over at Pacheco. “Any suggestions?”
Pacheco, for his part, looked at Fuentes. “You know the people here better than I do. What do you think?”
Fuentes still looked a little green around the gills. While Pacheco had assured Brannigan that the farmer had done a stint in the National Army, and had even fought the ELN once or twice, he was hardly a seasoned veteran, and he was still working through his shock at the bloodshed in his own living room. But he’d had a little time to adjust, and his mind was working through things. Brannigan could see him start to harden as he thought.
“A lot of the farmers are not happy, and I’m sure that if we can give them some kind of substantial plan—and a way to make it work without charging machineguns with machetes and bare hands—more of them will be willing to rise up. Especially some of those
