The technicals at the front of the column were starting to pull away, bodies piled into the beds. One still had a gunner up, and he tried to spray bullets down the road at the Blackhearts, but a half dozen rounds knocked him off his feet and on top of another Green Shirt, who shoved him off to fall out of the bed and flop onto the road.
Then there was no one left to shoot. The echoes of gunfire died away, replaced with the moans of the wounded as a thin, misty rain began to fall.
Chapter 24
Galán’s farm was in ruins. His crop was smashed, burned, and shredded by gunfire, stalks flattened under corpses leaking blood and other bodily fluids into the soil. His house was shattered, the walls holed in several hundred places by bullets, every window smashed. The interior looked like a hurricane had hit it, the floor and the furniture strewn with plaster dust, broken glass, and bits of pulverized concrete.
Of the six policemen that Quintana and Brannigan had gathered, four were still alive. By some miracle—and most likely because of the sheer speed and ferocity of their counterattack—none of the Blackhearts had been killed. A few minor shrapnel wounds were overshadowed by the pain of exhaustion, dehydration, and numerous cuts, scrapes, gouges, and battered joints from negotiating the terrain and the jungle itself.
Brannigan, Lara, and Pacheco stood on the top terrace, just outside the house, surveying the bodies strewn across the cornfield and the road.
“How many men did the Green Shirts ever have in total?” Brannigan turned to Lara and Quintana. The former policeman was covered in blood, having been clipped by a bullet through his right trapezius as well as having his scalp torn by flying glass as a burst of rifle fire had shattered the window he’d been peering out of. “Did you ever get a rough count?”
Quintana winced as he squinted against the misting rain. “I don’t think anyone ever got a complete count. And they weren’t exactly posting how many men they had. But our best estimates were less than two hundred.”
Brannigan squinted as he scanned the carnage below, adding in his head. “Joe, how many do you think you guys killed at Ballesteros’s house?”
Flanagan thought about it for a second. “Maybe a dozen? Twenty at the outside?”
Brannigan nodded as he kept adding up the last several engagements they’d had with the Green Shirts. “Were they actively recruiting at all?”
“Yes. Successfully, too. Mostly among the street gangs in the city.”
“So, even on an optimistic assessment, with as many as we killed here, we might have cut their numbers by… what? A third?”
“Maybe half.” Quintana sounded a little hopeful, but there was still a note of doubt in his voice.
“Don’t underestimate the effect that word of this will have on the rest.” Pacheco sounded a little more sure of himself than Quintana. “Even if the thugs flocked to them—and there is never any shortage of such people—and if Galvez goes to great lengths to frighten his surviving men out of talking about it—and he will—word will get around, and many of even the most vicious will start to look for an escape plan. You rarely have to kill all of them. Kill just enough, and the rest will scatter.”
“The question is, how many is enough?” Brannigan had fought insurgents all around the world over the past thirty years. He’d seen many hard lessons driven home in blood and fire. And seen just as many of them ignored.
One of the hardest was the fact that no two insurgencies are ever exactly the same, and by definition, they’re hard as hell to eradicate.
“How dependent are they on the leadership?” He was still thinking through contingencies and courses of action. They’d dealt the Green Shirts a severe blow here, but as long as Clemente, Galvez, and possibly others were still at large—and still in control of San Tabal, even if only through terror—then this wasn’t over.
“More than FARC or ELN.” Pacheco had clearly done some study, even as a relative outsider. “Clemente isn’t the type to plan for a legacy. He’s a creature of appetite and pride. He’d probably sooner see San Tabal burned to the ground at his death than plan for a successor. Galvez is more cunning. He’ll have contingency plans, though once again, they probably don’t allow for his own capture or death. He’s the outlaw hero, the great revolutionary. He wants to see himself on top of the revolution, not a martyr for it.”
“So, if we take them out, then at least we can throw the Green Shirts into enough chaos that we might be able to secure the city and the surrounding farms, drive them back into the jungle, and maybe even get the situation shifted to a state where we can get Bogota to intervene.”
Pacheco nodded. “It seems like the most workable plan at the moment. We should continue to recruit police and concerned citizens as we go, of course.” He gestured to the bloody mess below and around them. “We have more weapons and ammunition to go around, now.”
Brannigan cracked his knuckles. “Let’s get them divvied up and get moving. They’re off balance for now. We need to move quickly, before they can regroup.”
***
Galvez hadn’t told Clemente about his fallback camp. He’d found the cavern back during his days working with the FARC. An operation had gone bad, and he had fled into the jungle, pursued by the Colombian National Army. He’d almost fallen into the tiny hole that had led into the cavern, and as the helicopters had come closer, he’d wormed his way into the dark. He’d marked where it was, and over time, as he’d come in and out of Colombia in the service of The Revolution, he’d turned it into a fallback position, one that he could even get
