Disintegration: King of the Jungle, Episode 9

The ninth installment of a serialized novel exclusive to The American Spectator.

Editor’s Note: This is the ninth installment of Scott McKay’s new novel, King of the Jungle, which is being released exclusively at The American Spectator in 10 episodes each weekend in February, March, and early April, before its full publication on Amazon on April 12.

So far in the story, our narrator Mike Holman, an independent media man and podcaster, has agreed to write a biography and work as a public-relations consultant with his friend and old college roommate, the billionaire industrialist Pierce Polk — only to find that Polk has built a small city in the jungles of Guyana as a redoubt away from the corrupt Joe Deadhorse administration back home in America.

But Guyana has been invaded by Venezuela, as the corrupt Madiera regime in Caracas, doing the bidding of its foreign partners, seeks the vast mineral wealth of its jungles and the ocean off its coast, and Polk’s jungle paradise is now on the front lines of a hot war.

The Venezuelans are pressing hard against the minuscule Guyanese military, but they’re finding that Polk and his men are a far more ferocious adversary than they expected. The situation is escalating, and the danger in the jungle — and elsewhere — is palpable…

June 14, 2024, Mahdia, Guyana

“Pop! Pop!” rang out the shots, and Cabrillo could see his men scrambling near the barbed-wire enclosure where the adult villagers were held from of the window of the police station.

He figured this was the work of a sniper, and Cabrillo could see that the tall trees and medium-sized rise to the west of the little town center of Mahdia held a fertile habitat for enemy shooters to pick off his occupying force.

He needed to make his forward headquarters here, because in the Potaro valley this was the biggest objective of them all.

Except for Liberty Point, which they were to take as intact as possible.

Cabrillo saw that to do that would be a nearly impossible mission, so his best option was to clear the rest of his objectives, try to isolate the Americans at Liberty Point and then pressure them into a surrender. And if that didn’t work, then build up enough of a concentrated force here, with reinforcements and colectivos relieving his troopers at the other small villages, mines and other objectives so that he could have virtually his entire brigade available to overwhelm the enemy in what would surely be a bloody massacre of a fight.

He didn’t want to chew up his brigade. But at the end of the day, most of its men were Venezuelans, and Cabrillo was not. If Division Command was willing to sacrifice their lives for Liberty Point, which they were already calling Ciudad Chavismo, after the former Venezuelan president, then who was he to protest?

Of course, his adjutant Carvajal was apoplectic.

Cabrillo could tell Carvajal was near to the point of desertion after the first day. He was a sensitive little man, over prone to emotion. Cabrillo was near to the point of wanting to relieve him, but he was too deep into the fight to attempt to break in a new adjutant. So he tolerated Carvajal’s womanly protests.

Xing was a different matter.

He’d showed up after the initial assault on Mahdia, flying in on a little Cessna turboprop plane with crates full of Puerto Rican rum for the men in order that they might celebrate their great victory. And then he left again, after picking one of the women out of the barbed-wire camp in the soccer field across the street from the police station and having his way with her in the bed of an old Toyota pickup truck. The men saw it, and they were inspired.

Cabrillo didn’t want to see him again. He’d told Xing abuse of civilians was off-limits. Xing asked him just who he thought he was to give orders.

He thought about shooting the bastard, but he knew doing so would be his end. Perhaps that was Xing’s grand finale as the 53rd’s procurement specialist and liaison with the Chinese.

And shooting Xing would certainly dampen the victory for his brigade.

Some victory. What they’d done was land about a hundred men in 10 helicopters in the middle of the night while their jets were keeping the enemy’s fighter pilots and SAM operators busy, and then go house to house kidnapping the civilians and bringing them to the soccer field across the street from the police station where they had set up a small, crowded concentration camp. Cabrillo didn’t like it, and he especially didn’t like it when, inspired by Xing, some of the men had taken certain liberties with their female captives — liberties which had led to some suicidal attempts by the men to fight back. Several dozen dead residents of Mahdia were the result.

There were few amenities in the fenced-in camp at the soccer field. On the second day they’d managed to string together a few canvas tents, so the angry civilians were at least somewhat out of the rain.

But Cabrillo’s men needed billeting, so the Venezuelans would be occupying the houses of Mahdia. And there would be a whole lot more of them as he staged for the attack on Liberty Point.

At least, that had been the plan. It was now coming apart to a substantial extent. The C-130 Hercules plane that was supposed to ferry the rest of the 53rd Jungle Infantry Brigade from the airfield at Tumeremo, where they had relocated for the follow-on deployments, to Mahida had crashed and blown up on the now-unusable runway at the airfield.

Cabrillo figured it was a drone strike which had destroyed the runway just before the C-130 landed; 71 men and four pilots had been killed, with six troopers seriously injured and flown back to Tumeremo by helicopter and three, amazingly, walking away from the crash shaken but otherwise unhurt.

They’d have to bring the rest in by helicopter, and resupply was going to be a problem without the use of that runway. And reinforcing the garrison at Mahdia in advance of going on offense was going to take a long time.

At least, Cabrillo expected, they’d have air superiority. The enemy’s fighter pilots were vastly superior. Their intelligence had it the American Polk had recruited three aces, two from the U.S. Navy and one from their Air Force, who were retired and had been flying private jets. He’d also recruited three or four others with experience as fighter pilots. Interestingly enough, they were British and Argentinian, which marked a strange mix since those two nations had been at war some 42 years earlier.

But in one of the few strokes of luck he’d had, the Americans hadn’t been able to get missiles for those planes. They were limited to using their guns. And while the pilots were good, they had to get in close against the Venezuelan jets to fight. So far Polk’s force had lost three of the 10 planes from their airfield on the other side of the Essequibo where his troops were not allowed to go, while the Venezuelans had lost four of what looked like it would be at least 14 jets able to fly. They would likely win the battle of attrition in the air.

The Chinese who were taking over jet maintenance and repair at El Libertador were hard at work replacing the landing gear on the planes not too badly damaged in the sabotage attack which ruined the invasion’s first day, and in the coming days the word was that they’d be adding planes.

And the Chinese were supplying their J-16 fighters as well, which were essentially the same thing as the Su-30’s they were using now. They had two; there were three more coming, was the word.

With time, he felt like he had the advantage. If he could cut the enemy’s ability to resupply Liberty Point, he could starve them out. It would just take time.

But those gunshots in the street were a reminder that Cabrillo’s plans had every possibility of going awry. He peered out of the corner of the window of the little office of the Chief of Police on the second floor, the only room upstairs not occupied by the captive children of the village, and he saw three of his men dead in the street and the rest running for cover as the shots rang out.

And then he saw something which both amazed him and frightened him at the same time.

It was, he would call it, a robot. It looked almost like a toy car, but with treads instead of wheels, and it had a stem on which was mounted a small fisheye camera and, as he stared at it through binoculars, a pair of pistols.

Someone was remotely piloting this thing, and it was rolling along the street pot-shotting his men.

“Ernesto!” he yelled at the private he was using as a messenger.

“Si, coronel?” said the young man as he came running.

“Go out there and tell the men to shoot that thing! It’s just a toy!”

Ernesto nodded and thundered down the stairs. He could see him running from the front door in an effort to flag down the sergeant who was in charge of the camp. But almost as soon as he came into view Ernesto’s head exploded.

That was not from the toy. Cabrillo knew the enemy now had at least one sniper as well.

The toy car was quite agile, he saw. It would move quickly in the open, and then it would hide under a car or truck. A bullet would glance off it; it seemed to have a steel outer casing tough enough to protect its motor.

Cabrillo knew someone would have to hit its camera to render it unusable. But that was a shot which would need to be taken up close.

He figured he could perhaps do it himself, so he slid the window open just a bit to poke his rifle out, and…

A loud crash ensued as the window exploded. Cabrillo could hear, or more accurately he could feel, a bullet whizzing past his head barely three inches away.

Whoever was out there, the man was good. Damned good.

The drone was continuing to pop off shots, this time from underneath a truck, and the men were firing back to no avail. Someone managed to throw a grenade in an attempt to blow it up; but the damned thing hit the truck’s fender and bounced away before exploding in front of the police station and blowing out the front window.

“This is bullshit,” Cabrillo seethed.

He found the stairs and bounded down them, crooking his finger at Carvajal who had been hiding behind the station’s reception desk.

“I want you to kill that thing,” he said, pointing outside.

“Senor, it is…”

“No excuses, damn you. Lead. Take eight men and kill it. Tackle it if you have to. It doesn’t have an unlimited supply of ammunition.”

Carvajal knew he couldn’t disobey a direct order, Cabrillo could tell, but he wanted to.

“Go, dammit!” he screamed at the stubby little major.

Carvajal nodded, the fear on his face rendering him utterly pathetic in Cabrillo’s eyes, and he picked a squad of men to run out to the street and attempt to defeat the drone.

Through the window, Cabrillo saw the muzzle flash from a distance, and he saw the impact of the bullet as it hit Carvajal center mass. He was dead before he hit the ground.

There was a sniper in a tree on the hillside to the west of the soccer field. He had to be a thousand yards away, but his accuracy was nightmarish.

Carvajal’s men were now pinned down behind a police car parked on the street. One by one they attempted to re-enter the safety of the police station; only half survived.

And now the drone was moving again. It rolled to the sidewalk in front of the police station and began shooting through the blown-out window. Cabrillo retreated to the back of the station where seven of his men had taken refuge.

“We have to get that thing!” he yelled. “Who is with me?”

Silence and stone faces were his unexpected response.

Just then he could hear a loud bang, and then a cheer from his men across the street in the soccer field. One of them had scored a hit on the drone with a grenade, though a big chunk of the building’s façade had been taken out in the process. The station might no longer be functional as a headquarters. Cabrillo figured that Mahdia General Hospital a block away could be a suitable replacement.

The shots continued ringing out, and his men kept dying in the street.

Cabrillo could see that at least one of the shooters was to the west or southwest. He got on his walkie-talkie and gave orders to the 531st battalion to charge that position.

A few moments later, they were. Two ragged columns of men were hustling around the soccer field, a few of them dropping as they were hit, and making their way toward the hillside.

But as they went, Cabrillo could hear a familiar sound.

Motorcycles. Two, or was it three?

He caught a glimpse of them zooming through the trees to the south of his vantage.

The enemy had three snipers, and they were escaping.

“Get them!” he barked into the walkie-talkie. “They’re getting away!”

There was a lot of radio chatter after that, and the men were boarding requisitioned trucks to follow the motorcycles as they made their way east through the trees that sectioned the main part of town off from the ruined Mahdia airfield. Others were in a dead run attempting to cut off the enemy’s escape.

A few minutes later, Cabrillo could hear what sounded like a stuttering detonation to the east. Boomboomboomboomboomboom.

He knew what it was, and he cursed himself.

He’d sent his men right into a jackpot the snipers had laid in for them. They must have run into a massive mine field in that jungle.

Cabrillo could see smoke rising from the trees. A lot of smoke. It sickened him.

And, as if on cue, the rain came with a vengeance.

June 21 2024, Linden, Guyana

I managed to get PJ out of Liberty Point. It practically took an act of Congress to get her out. And it’s a good thing, too.

Not that she’s ever going to give me credit for that. As far as she’s concerned, letting me talk her out of that place was the worst example of me manipulating her there is.

And honestly, I’m OK with that.

When Roman, Charlie and Kurt, not to mention the mini army of deadly drones Kurt carried in his rucksack as they headed off to Mahdia, stitched up the Vinnies as they did, the effect was not what Hal and Pierce were going for.

They figured they’d waste a nice percentage of the Vinnies’ main invasion force at Mahdia as it was gearing up to come after them at Liberty Point. That’s exactly what they did. And by all reasonable recognition it should have brought cooler heads to the table for a parlay about how this thing was going to be resolved.

Clearly, Pierce and Hal had lots of Romans, Charlies and Kurts. They also had lots of high-tech weaponry that would make for colossal casualty counts the more the Vinnies wanted to press their occupation of Essequibo.

But the analysis failed from there, because this wasn’t about Venezuela. It wasn’t about Madiera and his government. And the forces controlling them.

After the first couple of days, when the Vinnies had absorbed such massive losses in occupying all those little villages and other assets in Essequibo, it was time to start negotiating. After all, it was clear that to hold them would be to commit the kinds of abuses the world is unlikely to tolerate for long. Even then, they would be getting an ever-increasing amount of trouble from the indigenous opposition rapidly building thanks to guys like my friend Earl. I’ll get to that in a minute.

What I’m saying is that if you’re Madiera, you’d do this not because you wanted to occupy Essequibo. The expense associated with that alone made it a bad idea. Throw in the cost of governing a whole shitload of little bitty villages where everybody hates your guts, plus the international sanctions from being where you’re not supposed to be, and it just looks bad and worse.

I think this is where that Latin mindset kicks in. The Venezuelans didn’t want to admit they’d bitten off more than they could chew. If they were able to recognize that, they’d have bluffed their way into a deal that would have gotten them what they were looking for, or at least some of it, with their Essequibo adventure.

Especially when somebody — I think it was Pierce and Hal, but they wouldn’t admit it, and there were other sources saying it was the CIA, though it’s been a while since I saw those guys do anything effective outside of our borders — started a pretty well-organized amount of domestic trouble for Madiera.

Remember General de la Vega? You thought he’d gone away when Madiera kidnapped his wife and kids and traded them for his exile to Miami. Well, de la Vega showed up on Univision trashing the invasion as a disaster, claiming that the Chinese were in charge of everything and calling for Madiera’s resignation.

Asked what changed given that he’d tabbed Madiera as the rightful ruler, he said that he’d been under duress when he’d relented, and that the war changed everything.

While de la Vega’s first emergence as a dissident leader had fizzled before it ever got going, this one was different. The Venezuelan expat community in South Florida got behind him and raised a bunch of money practically overnight, there were rumors of a couple of camps in El Salvador that sprang up to train guerillas to fight the government — and it was easy to get recruits given the flood of refugees who’d left Venezuela for Central America on their way north — and the streets of Venezuela’s cities turned bloody.

Madiera couldn’t reinforce his gains in Essequibo. Not the way he wanted to. He all of a sudden needed every boot he could get on the ground back home. His recognition of that fact was … well, let me tell that part a little bit later.

De la Vega reiterated that he would take power only as an interim president through the election in December. He said he would negotiate an honorable end to the war in Guyana and he would restore both market economics and human rights.

“Venezuela must be a prosperous democracy again,” he said. “That starts with peace, the rule of law and then elections. I can accomplish those between now and the end of the year.”

All of those things sounded good. They were the reason I talked PJ into coming with me to interview the pilots at the air base in Linden and then back to Georgetown. I’d had an email from her dad saying she wouldn’t talk to him; he’d said something immediately after Terre Haute that had really, really hacked her off. He said that if I could get her to come home, he’d fix everything.

“I don’t know what you’ve convinced her of,” he said, “but she has a future back in California. I’m begging you to let me make that happen.”

“Mr. Chang,” I said, “your daughter is a very smart, very strong woman. I’m making no decisions for her. She’s quite capable of handling herself. I think you should be proud of her.”

I didn’t get a response back, but the exchange was unnerving enough — Peter Chang had the kind of influence with the Deadhorse administration which could result in a whole lot of trouble for yours truly. And with the FBI already nosing around back in Atlanta — Karen messaged me that the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia had a grand jury going about my dissemination of “classified information” about the Secret Service and Terre Haute, and that I was likely to catch a subpoena.

It occurred to me that I would need to come home soon or else I might not be able to.

Anyway, the effect of the war on PJ was fascinating. It turned her on. She was glowing. The night Roman, Charlie and Kurt made it back to Liberty Point, and there was a big celebration at the Grand Waica about their huge win, she cornered me behind a big fern not far from the concierge desk and just about choked me with her tongue.

“I think we’ve passed that point we talked about,” she said.

“Oh, you mean…”

“We don’t need to stop at second base anymore.”

“Are you sure?”

“I feel so alive right now I can’t stand it. Don’t you?”

“Well, I’m older. I’ve been in a war zone a couple of times. It’s not as new. But yeah, this thing between you and me has some legs on it.”

She gave me a big smile. We caught a ride back to the suite at Liberty Lodge and that was that.

PJ was a very early riser, and she insisted I become one too.

“OK, Mike,” she said, nudging me awake just before the crack of dawn, “if we’re going to become a, you know, I’m going to have to train you. Get up.”

I did, bitching about it, but PJ made it worthwhile. She was a clean freak, it turned out, and the best shower-helper I’ve ever seen.

After breakfast, we made it down to Pierce’s bunker and control room. The joy of the previous evening had settled into what seemed like a satisfied calm.

“Good day yesterday,” said Hal, as he sipped his coffee and surveyed the wall of surveillance screens.

“Yeah, sounds like it,” I said. “What comes next?”

“We’re going to keep harassing the enemy, force him onto the defensive.”

“How does this end, do you think?”

“Either badly, or maybe we do a deal, or, best hope, either Deadhorse wakes up and sends in the Marines or there’s a coup in Venezuela and this melts away.”

“So you don’t think there’s a winning scenario here.”

“Not from a military standpoint, no. Not if the Vinnies are willing to escalate this.”

“So you’re about making Liberty Point as hard a target as you can, and hope for the best.”

“I think later today we might have a development. We’ll see.”

That was cryptic enough, so I took out my laptop and checked emails and messages.

Which was when I had my interaction with Peter Chang. That I didn’t tell PJ about.

Back home nobody was paying any attention to the war in Guyana, and it was starting to become awfully clear overt American help wasn’t coming our way.

There was an incident in Washington that morning which made it obvious any hope of robust U.S. involvement down in the jungle was a fantasy.

Dr. Diego Cardoza, a geopolitics expert who’d spent time on Trumbull’s National Security Council, was giving a speech on the threat China posed to America’s interests worldwide and, more specifically, to the homeland.

Cardoza had written an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal warning that there were more than 35,000 military-age Chinese males who had come across the U.S. border in the previous 10 months, and he said he was in possession of proof that some or most of those illegals were not migrants but invaders — they were saboteurs, guerillas, hackers, terrorists and spies. And Cardoza had mentioned, in a follow-up interview on Fox News, that the war in Guyana was all about the Chinese getting their hands on the mines and oilfields of Essequibo.

All of which generated some calls for Congressional investigations, and it was awfully splashy on the radio talk show circuit. A few days later, Cardoza was at the National Press Club to show the proof he claimed he had about Chinese infiltration.

But he didn’t get to show it. As soon as Cardozo took the stage, he was rushed by three dozen Chinese men from the crowd who were calling him a racist. “Stop Asian Hate!” they screamed, as they rushed the podium and proceeded to beat him bloody.

No one in the audience did much of anything. Not even the D.C. Metro Police officer who was there to provide security; he called the incident in, but of course it was streaming live on CSPAN, and everybody knew in real time what was happening. The Chinese left Cardozo with half his teeth knocked out, a detached retina, seven broken ribs, a fractured skull and a severe concussion.

And the legacy media were covering the case as outraged citizens taking their frustrations out on a deranged racist. Even though it was by no means in evidence that any of these guys were citizens.

The Chinese ambassador said that while he “abhorred violence,” the claims Cardozo had made were inflammatory and could not be allowed to poison Sino-American relations.

And then around noon, a satellite image on the control-room wall showed a flotilla of vessels — dozens of fishing trawlers, houseboats, small freighters, and pleasure craft — leaving the harbor at Puerto Cabello escorted by that Chinese naval task force, heading east along the coast.

If you weren’t allowed to talk about the Chinese infiltrators in America in Washington, D.C., then you certainly weren’t going to get any American help in stopping a Chinese-protected invasion fleet in Guyana. That was obvious.

Hal was watching the Cardozo event on one of the monitors on the wall. Pierce had joined in, having been off doing something else in the morning.

I could see from the expressions on both of their faces that the implications of that event were disturbing — and devastating.

Pierce found me and whispered quietly, “I think you’ve done what you can in Liberty Point for now. Take your girl and get the hell out of here, quick.”

“I was thinking the same,” I said.

So we caught a chopper to Linden. I told PJ that I needed a photojournalist to document the goings-on at the air base.

But when we landed at Linden, the relative calm of Liberty Point had become something else.

There were pilots and ground crews scrambling around, and a huge hustle to get the four working A-4AR’s and two old Harriers in the air. They managed it, and everybody seemed to be jumping in cars and trucks to get the hell out of there. A few minutes later we found out why.

The guy in command of the air base in Linden was a retired Air Force bomber wing commander named Bob Arness. When we landed, he and his assistant, a heavyset black lady whose name was Lucille, drove up in an old Jeep and he demanded we get in.

“Now!” he said. “Hustle up unless you have a death wish!”

We got in the Jeep and Lucille hit the gas.

“What’s going on?” I asked, as we shot west along the runway toward the Linden-Kwakwani Road and the Demerara River.

“Missile…” said Arness, just as we could hear a very loud ripping sound and a series of huge booms behind us. Almost immediately thereafter, the Jeep was shaken — hard — by a series of shock waves.

When I looked behind, there was a fiery smoke cloud which reminded me of the pyroclastic cloud from Mount St. Helen’s eruption in that old Pierce Brosnan movie. Perhaps not quite that dramatic, but more than enough for me to let loose a string of expletives.

And that earned me a nudge from PJ, who had her camera out and was filming the entire thing.

“We got all the good planes out,” said Lucille. “And the guys should…”

“Yeah, I hope so,” Arness muttered.

“How’d you know the missiles were coming?” I asked.

“Early warning radar,” he said. “And real-time satellite imagery. They fired from the central part of Venezuela, which was their mistake; they should have had those missiles in Tumeremo. Gave us an eight-minute head start.”

“I’m shocked you got your jets in the air that quickly,” said PJ.

“Well, we got lucky there. We were launching anyway. The enemy is usually patrolling in the late afternoon, and with the boats they have coming it’s almost certain they’re going to be out to provide air cover.”

“You’re attacking those boats?”

“We’re attacking their planes.”

“Seems like it’s a suicide mission.”

“It is what it is. Our tactics are better. But we’ve got to be perfect, because they have air-to-air missiles and we just have guns. And now we’re not going to have anything since it’s a pretty sure thing they just took out our weapons stores along with our fuel.”

“And your runway, I imagine,” said PJ.

“I’d say that’s correct,” said Arness. “We have a last-ditch mission today and then it’s bug-out time.”

“How come you don’t have missiles?”

“Because the A-4AR uses Sidewinders, and those are damned hard to find. Deadhorse raided all the stocks he could, all over the world, to send to Ukraine. They’ve been using them as surface-to-air missiles against the Russians. So we’ve really been up shit creek getting the weapons we need. We were lucky enough that I had a contact who could get us the M-61 Vulcan cannons to replace what those planes came with.”

It struck me how desperate this situation really was.

Lucille was taking us over the Wismar/Mackenzie bridge into the town of Linden, which wasn’t all that happening a burg. Arness was on his cell, though I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

Finally, he hung up, turned back to look at us and said “You’re in luck. Your chopper turned back around and he’s going to pick you up at the ballfield.”

I could see that he was telling the truth, because as we traveled that road toward a sports park only a couple miles away there was a helicopter vectoring in and landing.

“What’s next for you guys?” I asked Arness.

“Suriname,” he said. “Our secondary base is at the Kabalebo Nature Resort in Suriname, about 130 miles southeast of here. They’ve got a decent little airstrip there and the government is willing to get out of our way for a nice fee Pierce negotiated.”

“Man,” I said. “This is some wildcat operation, isn’t it?”

“Never seen anything like it.”

I shook his hand, Lucille wished us well and we hopped on the chopper.

“Back to Liberty Point?” I asked when I put the headset on.

“Nah, you don’t want to do that,” said the pilot. “They got hit with a missile strike at the airfield and a few other places. I’m taking you to Georgetown.”

“Oh, no,” said PJ.

“How bad are the casualties?” I asked.

“They don’t know yet. It’s pretty chaotic down there.”

“We should go and help,” PJ said.

I shook my head. “No. We need to get to Georgetown. We’ve got to get the word out about what’s happening down here.”

Things weren’t better in the capital. We were supposed to land at the helipad at Sentinel Port Management’s facility on the Demerara. That wasn’t possible, because the whole place was a blown-out wreck.

So were a whole host of other targets in the capital, including the Parliament building.

And the Guyana Police Force headquarters. And Camp Ayanganna, which was the military base in the capital.

And the airport.

And Exoil’s office complex next to the airport.

There were pillars of smoke rising from close to a dozen large fires around Georgetown.

So instead, he set us down in the parking lot in front of the Marriott.

The place was heavily guarded, but it seems like I was known. The two big black guys in berets and what looked like Guyanese military uniforms guarding the front door waved us to the concierge, where we were directed to one of the little ballrooms. There, we were given ID badges on lanyards and directed to the grand ballroom.

Because the Marriott had become the seat of government now that most of the government buildings had been hit by missiles.

I remembered Ravi Darke, the head of the Guyanese military. He was there, surrounded by a host of minions and it looked like they were keeping awfully busy. People were sitting at banquet tables with their faces inches away from laptop screens, and it looked a little like a war room.

But of course, these guys were helpless. Missiles were raining down on every security asset in Guyana at this point, and they had no defense for it.

There was a flotilla headed from Venezuela that was almost surely going up the Essequibo, and they had no defense for that, either. Hell, they wouldn’t have much defense if that flotilla was coming for Georgetown.

The only defense they had was Pierce and his operation, and for all we knew that was out of commission, too.

We hung off to the side, but then Jaganoo, the Prime Minister, saw me and collected us. Jaganoo led PJ and me to a second-floor suite, and then sat us down.

“Beer?” he asked. It seemed like a bizarre offer, but I couldn’t turn it down. Neither could PJ.

“Been a long day,” I said, tipping my bottle to Jaganoo. “I’m sure yours has been the same.”

“I am glad that you are safe,” said Jaganoo, “and I thought you should hear it from me first. We are in contact with the Madiera government about a cease-fire.”

“You’re surrendering?”

“There is no choice. Earlier today the Venezuelans took Bartica. Because of that, they now control the mouth of the Essequibo. They’ve killed half our parliament and they have cut off the capital from the rest of the country by destroying the airport.”

“They can’t hold what they’ve taken,” said PJ. “They’re going to fall apart. The whole Venezuelan government is going to topple.”

“We must save as many lives as we can.”

“You mean like at Port Kaituma?”

“OK, PJ, take it easy,” I said.

“How can he just give his country away?” she said, her face screwed up in a rage.

“It’s been decided,” said Jaganoo. “No one wants this, but we are without options.”

Just then my cell rang. It was Pierce.

“I have to take this call,” I said. Jaganoo pointed me to a bedroom.

“Are you all right?” I asked him.

“We’re good,” he said. “Airfield is shot up pretty bad and they whacked the hydro plant, but we still have some juice. And what pisses me off more than anything, they hit the Torch.”

“How chickenshit. You guys were almost finished with that.”

“Tell me about it. Mostly we’re just shaken up. About a dozen wounded, nobody too seriously, nobody dead which is a miracle thanks to our early-warning radar and real-time sat imagery. But it’s not all bad news here. We have the Cuban.”

“You what?”

“Cabrillo. We nabbed him.”

“How in the hell did you do that?”

“Ol’ boy made the mistake of going out to check on the progress of his airfield getting rebuilt. Somebody hit his ride with an RPG, and then he got dragged off into the woods.”

“Well, that sucks to be him. Roman and his guys are good, right?”

“This wasn’t Roman.”

“No? Who was it?”

“Believe it or not, Earl and the IM’s pulled it off. They also shot up the guards at that soccer field in Mahdia and got the civilians out. Or at least the adults — the kids we’ll go get next.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. So right now Cabrillo is making a little hostage confession speech we’ll send back to Caracas, and maybe that’ll put a stop to these damned Iranian missiles they’re shooting at us.”

“Pierce, we’re with Jaganoo. They’re surrendering.”

“They’re what? The hell they are.”

“The Vinnies hit Parliament. They took out the airport, the army base, the police headquarters, a bunch of other stuff. They hit your port facility, too. Plus they took Linden out, but you already know that.”

“Yeah. I know about the port. They didn’t hit it in time.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Probably find that out later today.”

“Jaganoo says they took Bartica, too.”

“Yeah, that was the Black Wasps.”

“The what?”

“Avispas Negras. Cuban special forces. They shot up the Guyanese army guys who were guarding the town with an airstrike, and they gave up almost immediately when the Black Wasps showed up in choppers. They had plenty of MANPADs; nobody bothered firing one.”

“Not great.”

“These guys might be soldiers. They aren’t warriors. And there’s the question of leadership, too.”

“So what’s the play?”

“Well, we’re not done. We’re gonna hold out. And any Guyanese who want to keep fighting, we’ll get ‘em weapons and comms and whatever supplies they need. I still have procurement guys around the world and we’ve got lots more stuff coming.”

“Pierce, you don’t think it’s over? What if Ishgan calls on you to give up?”

“Ohhh, it is not over. Not by a long shot. In a few hours things are gonna look completely different on the ground.”

“Yeah, but if Georgetown sues for peace…”

“This is what I need from you,” he said. “Don’t let him. That’s the key. You’ve got to stall Ishgan — if it’s even Ishgan who’s still calling the shots, because we found a whole bunch of interesting things.”

“Anything on that you can tell me?”

“Check your email when you get off this call.”

“All right.”

“But do not let these guys throw in the towel. Not just yet. All right? Whatever it takes, I need another three or four hours.”

“OK. I’ll do what I can.”

June 22, 2024, Georgetown, Guyana

PJ and I didn’t have a place to stay in Georgetown. The Grand Coastal was out of rooms, and so were all the other hotels in town. We ended up crashing in the pool house at Tom Burnham’s place in Lusignan, which frankly was a sizable stroke of luck.

After I finished my call with Pierce, I went back to the main room of Jaganoo’s suite at the Marriott and saw that he was becoming more and more agitated with PJ. She was giving him what-for about the idea of giving up.

I was quickly scanning the email that Pierce had sent on my phone, so I didn’t say anything. I just listened.

I could tell that Moses Jaganoo was not in the custom of listening to lectures from women. And to be fair, from what I knew of PJ it wasn’t all that customary for her to talk to anybody like she was talking to Jaganoo. PJ was always very polite and friendly. But I think she had seen, heard and endured enough over the past few days and weeks, and she wasn’t very friendly anymore.

So finally, I turned on the “record” app on my phone. And I stepped in.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s turn the temperature down.”

“But Mike, he’s…”

“No, PJ, let’s calm it down. Please.”

“Thank you,” said Jaganoo, who was recovering his carefully practiced composure.

I took PJ’s hand and I smiled at her.

“The thing is, Mr. Prime Minister, she’s absolutely correct. It would be treason for you to surrender right now.”

That took him aback.

“And sir, you’re not really in a position to defend against accusations of treason.”

“Why, I am deeply offended at the statement, Mr. Holman…”

“Stabroek-Penitence Holdings. That ring a bell?”

“Yes, of course,” he said, stammering a little. “What of it?”

“You’ve been a fairly broke lawyer and politician all your life, Mr. Jaganoo. Three years ago you ended up in a partnership now worth more than $150 million with real estate property all over the Caribbean. How did you pull that off? Where’d you get the equity for that?”

“What are you accusing me of, sir?”

“I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just asking what about you made Mr. George Ling of Sino-Americas Harvest Limited, who in reality is the Chinese Communist Party’s number one espionage operative in Latin America, interested in cutting you in for a one-third share of his real estate company. You guys must be close, right?”

“He’s a business partner. I know nothing of espionage.”

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s right. I think you know plenty about espionage, and I think you’ve been waiting for this invasion from the very beginning. Where is the president?”

“He’s in the presidential suite.”

“I think it’s time we go and see him.”

“He’s indisposed.”

“Indisposed?”

“President Ishgan has had an emotional breakdown. He is resting comfortably under sedation.”

“I see. And are we free to leave?”

There was a very, very long pause.

“Of course,” he said, quite shakily. “But I should caution you that the capital is a dangerous city given the missile attacks. Be very careful out there.”

“Is that a threat?” PJ exploded. “Did you just fucking threaten us?”

“Easy, girl,” I said, squeezing her hand. “Easy. We’re going to take our chances. Mr. Jaganoo, what I’m here to ask you is that you do nothing until tomorrow morning.”

“As I said, it has already been decided. I’m sorry.”

“Decide what you want, sir, but the deal I will make with you is that if you do nothing publicly, if you announce no cease-fire or surrender, then your commercial history similarly will not go public. My team back in Atlanta has it all, and they await my instructions.”

“Now it is you making threats.”

“No, sir, I’m not making threats. I’m proposing a mutually beneficial arrangement which could work out very well for all involved. Give me and Pierce Polk twelve hours, and you might find yourself with very superior options to those you currently have, but if you act now it’ll be…”

“Messy,” said PJ, following my lead.

Jaganoo looked at me for what seemed like a long time. I could see sweat forming on his brow.

PJ started to say something. I squeezed her hand and she shut up.

“I require certain considerations,” he said.

“I think we can work something out. What are you looking for?”

“I want to be on the board of Polk’s stock exchange.”

“I’ll let him know.”

“And I want his endorsement of my candidacy for president in the snap elections we will call for next month.”

“Well, it would seem like if an arrangement were made it would be to Pierce’s benefit to do something like that.”

“And I want $100 million in cash.”

“A very reasonable number. I’ll relay that to Pierce.”

“I require a response in one hour’s time.”

“OK, then. Let me get to work.”

We grabbed our bags and left. I could tell PJ was ready to explode, but I managed to keep her quiet until we got outside of the hotel.

“Holy shit!” she said. “You just bribed the Prime Minister to keep him from treason! You’re a lot more interesting guy than I thought, Mike.”

“I haven’t done anything yet,” I said. “What I did do is make sure Mr. Jaganoo is done in politics, though.”

I pulled out my phone, selected the app and tapped the “play” button. When PJ heard the recording, her eyes lit up.

“Oh, that is sooo hot,” she said after a few seconds.

I stopped the playback and sent the recording out to Pierce, Flip Hardison, Colby, Tom Burnham and a bunch of other people, with a message asking them not to share it until further instructions.

Burnham immediately messaged me back.

“You in Georgetown?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“In front of the Marriott.”

“Wait five minutes.”

There was a Land Rover with an Exoil logo on the side door pulling up to us in three.

“Mr. Holman?” the driver, a black guy I could have sworn was Idi Amin’s cousin, said out of the window.

“Mr. Burnham sent you?”

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Please do hop in.”

So PJ and I did, and he took off to the east down the Seawall Public Road.

The guy’s name was Desmond. He was Jamaican. He was an engineer, or at least he was until around lunchtime.

“They struck our offices,” he said. “Seventy-four people dead. I will have my vengeance. You and your man must succeed.”

I could feel PJ shaking in the back seat next to me. She was trying to hold back her rage.

We turned onto Railway Embankment Road, still heading east. Desmond was talking about how the public was inflamed by the failure of the government to do anything to fight the Venezuelans and how citizens’ militias were springing up.

“Your man Polk had the right idea,” he was saying. “But the people don’t have the resources he has.”

“It’s a problem,” I said.

“Ultimately the people are what will solve this. The people are who pay the price for their poor leaders.”

“No doubt.”

“I have a Heckler & Koch 416 rifle,” he said. “I’ll be going home and getting it after I drop you off. I’ll stand with the militia in Lusignan, where I live.”

“What’s Lusignan?” asked PJ.

“It’s the ritzy neighborhood on the golf course where all the Exoil people hang out,” I said. “East of the city.”

“You know your Georgetown well,” said Desmond.

Burnham’s house had turned into a headquarters facility of its own, since they’d blown up Exoil’s offices with that missile.

“I leave you here,” said Desmond, “and then I join the militia. This isn’t even my country, but it seems we have to fight shit politicians everywhere. The enemy, the traitors among us…”

“Best of luck to you, Desmond,” I said.

He nodded and waved, and we made our way through the crowd in the front yard.

“A lot of angry folks here,” said PJ as we picked up shreds of conversations along the way to the front door.

“Yep,” I said.

There was a twenty-something kid who answered the door when I knocked on it. Unlike Desmond, I could immediately tell he was an engineer. The glasses gave it away.

“You’re Mr. Holman,” he said in a brogue-y East Coast accent. “I’ve seen your podcast! I’m Sal O’Reilly.”

“Nice to meet you, Sal. Irish-Italian mix, huh?”

“I’m a mutt, yep.”

“Classic white-privileged kid from…”

“South Philly.”

“Got it. This here is PJ.”

“I know you, too. You’re Pauline Chang. They did you wrong, ma’am.”

“Thanks,” said PJ. “But call me PJ.”

“Mr. Burnham wouldn’t be around, would he?” I asked.

“Yes! Sorry. He’s upstairs in the office with some people, but I know he needs to see you. Go right up.”

So we did.

“Do you think these are, like…” PJ was saying.

“This is who the Vinnies didn’t take out when they hit the Exoil Guyana headquarters,” I said, “and now there are two super-wealthy American companies at war with Venezuela.”

“I don’t understand. Why would they hit Exoil?”

“Because if there’s nobody left to run Exoil’s operations in Guyana, Exoil sells the thing to…”

“China,” she said. “Damn.”

“Sino-Petro is already a partner in those offshore oilfields. It’s nothing to just get a check over to them and bow out, and then nobody cares when the fields are licensed through the new conquering lackey government.”

“I hate everybody,” she said.

“Well, all these people standing around looking for a fight to get in might be an indication they’ve grossly, grossly miscalculated,” I said.

Finally, after dodging a host of people hanging around in the upstairs den we managed to get into Burnham’s office. He had a Zoom call going with his corporate people in Houston and, surprisingly enough, Ravi Darke, the head of the Guyanese military.

“Mike, glad you’re here,” Burnham said. “I heard you almost bought it at Linden.”

“I felt the shock wave,” I said. “It was pretty lucky stuff.”

“Well, there’s no time to fill you in, so I’ll try to do that later. But as we talk this through, feel free to jump in. You’ve talked to Pierce? I can’t get through.”

“Like 20 minutes ago, yeah.”

“OK, good,” he said and then pointed to the Zoom call screen on his wall. “First, Mike Holman, this is Brett Gilchrist, Exoil CEO. Rob Owens, head of field security, Tina Williams, VP of corporate external relations, Walt Zeiling, governmental affairs. And Brigadier Darke you already know. Also, everybody, this is PJ Chang; she’s with Mike. I understand she’s a hell of a photojournalist.”

They all nodded their greetings when PJ and I sat next to Burnham and entered the video frame.

“Sorry, guys. Brigadier, please continue.”

“The issue,” Darke said, “is that the surviving members of Parliament are with Jaganoo. And so the votes for surrender are there.”

“What’s the state of the GDF?” Gilchrist asked. He was talking about the Guyanese Defense Force.

“We lost a third of our men when Bartica surrendered,” Darke said. “The rest will have to hold the capital and the eastern coast in case the enemy attempts to swallow all of Guyana.”

“Will your men hold the capital?” asked Owens.

“We will certainly do our best,” Darke said.

“That’s not what I’m asking. Will your men hold the capital against this cabal trying to give away two thirds of your country?”

“You’re asking about a coup d’etat.”

“Brigadier,” said Gilchrist, “it sounds a hell of a lot like you’ve already had one. The question is, are you going to sanction it?”

I leaned to Burnham.

“Are we saying that Jaganoo had his allies in Parliament hang back and let the patriots get killed by that missile strike?” I asked him.

“We don’t know that,” said Burnham, “but it sure does come off that way.”

“What about Ishgan? Has anybody talked to him? They told me he had a breakdown and they had him sedated.”

“Out of pocket and out of the picture. I don’t think he’s the president anymore.”

“Then it’s definitely a coup d’etat.”

Burnham shrugged and nodded.

“I don’t know that I have the authority,” Darke was saying. “A majority of the remaining parliament voted earlier today to make Jaganoo acting president, and…”

“Hang on,” I said. “If I can jump in, I might be able to contribute a few things.”

Gilchrist and Darke both nodded, and I relayed what Pierce had said about the situation at Liberty Point, and I noted that they were going to relocate the little air force to the jungle resort airstrip in Suriname.

And then I noted that Jaganoo had told me his price for holding off on the surrender until morning. Burnham uploaded the recording to the Zoom call and everyone heard it.

“Jeez,” said Owens.

I could see in Darke’s face that we’d had him wrong. He wasn’t a traitor. He was just in over his head.

“I will do as you ask,” he said, “but if I am to assume power it will be for a very short time and then, when a new election is held, I will retire.”

“I have to talk to Mr. Polk,” I said, “but would anyone here object if we told Jaganoo his terms are acceptable? I want to stall him so there’s time to put whatever plan in place that we can.”

“I think it’s the only play,” said Burnham. “Rob?”

“Tell him whatever. We need to buy some time.”

“Mr. Zeiling, maybe you guys talked about this, but is there nothing the U.S. government is going to do?”

Before he could answer, Gilchrist stepped in.

“The Navy offered to evacuate our offshore platforms. And they recalled the ambassador in Caracas.”

“That’s it?”

“So far,” Zeiling said.

“But Trumbull is interested in doing a fly-in,” said Gilchrist. “We’re trying to figure out how to get him into Georgetown with the airport knocked out.”

“Boy, that would send a signal,” I said. “Pretty good politics, too.”

“Almost certain to get him indicted under the Logan Act,” Zeiling said, laughing.

I looked at Burnham. “I need to call Pierce,” I said.

He nodded, and he pointed to the balcony.

“Go out there. Cell reception in here is atrocious.”

Mine was a satellite phone, so it didn’t matter, but I went on the balcony and called Pierce. He answered immediately and I told him where I was.

“You’re on speaker,” he said, “and I’ve got Hal and a couple of his guys with me. By the way, the Vinnies just surrendered Mahdia 10 minutes ago.”

“They what?”

“Yeah. We’ve been using a swarm of these quad-copter drones that drop grenades on ‘em, and we’ve been picking them off all day. Finally they all came out and waved the white flag, and they brought the kids out of the police station. So that’s over and Earl and the IM’s are retaking the place. We have the Vinnies fenced in at the soccer field now, but there aren’t a lot of them left.”

“Hang on,” I said, and I leaned into Burnham’s office. “Tom, Pierce says the Venezuelans just gave up in Mahdia.”

“Oh,” said Pierce, “tell Burnham I just emailed him a link he’s going to want to see, in about four minutes.”

So I did, and Burnham put up the link in the “share screen” function on the Zoom call. I was looking at it through the window from the balcony.

It was footage from a drone, and you could see the flotilla of Venezuelan boats escorted by those three Chinese warships as they made their way eastward near the coast.

I then quickly filled Pierce in on the conversations with Jaganoo and Darke.

“OK, OK,” he said, “but wait up a minute.”

Pierce was telling me that the IM’s had set up a training camp at a little place in the far south called Yupukari, which was along the Rupunari River, and people were coming out of the woodwork to join up. He said the Venezuelans had sent two choppers down there to occupy the place on the first day of the invasion and both of them had been hit with MANPADs. Only six Vinnies managed to survive the crash landings and the locals had managed to dispose of them after about three days. There was a former British SAS lieutenant who was running a research station for the black caiman down there, and the guy turned out to be a pretty kick-ass military commander.

“Too bad he can’t train the caiman,” I said.

“Well, apparently one of the Vinnies ran and jumped in the river as the locals were chasing him down,” Pierce said with a laugh, “and the caiman got him. So maybe he did train ‘em.”

Just then his voice changed. “OK, here we go,” he said.

I looked at the drone footage, and it showed a couple of big explosions on two of those Chinese ships happening almost simultaneously.

“Biiiig badaboom!” said Pierce.

“What the hell?” I said.

“That would be the ARA Santa Cruz,” said Pierce, “newly equipped with an upgraded power plant and the Mark 48 Mod 7 Common Broadband Advanced Sonar System torpedo,” he said. “I’m not even going to tell you how much this cost. Worth every penny.”

Three more explosions hit the third Chinese ship and a couple of the bigger boats in the flotilla. The Chinese sailors were lowering their lifeboats as the warships began listing.

“You just declared war on China, Pierce,” I said. “Holy cow.”

“Nah,” he said. “They’ve been at war with me for a good while now. I just started fighting. Oh, by the way, tell Tom I have another link for him.”

I did, and another window popped up on Burnham’s wall.

This looked more like satellite imagery. Pierce said it was from a town called Tumeremo, which was where the Vinnies had been staging the bulk of their invasion from.

The satellite camera was zooming in on what looked like a fairly deserted road, and there were six trucks, or what looked like trucks, parked along it.

“Those would be our Iranian friends,” he said, and I realized he was talking about missile launchers.

“That’s what hit…”

“Linden. And Liberty Point. And Georgetown,” Pierce said.

Just then, there were two shadows moving quickly across the image, and shortly behind them were four large explosions.

And then several secondary explosions behind them.

“Fatteh you, you bastards,” said Pierce. I think he was talking about the Fatteh 11 missile, the Iranian-made weapon the Vinnies had used on us. “We’re settling all family business tonight. Keyser Soze!”

I laughed. “Good grief, Pierce. Could you butcher your movie references any worse? And why didn’t you tell me you had all this going on?”

“Operational security, I guess. In case they got you.”

“Well, I need to tell Jaganoo something. He’s the key to this, I guess. Tell me what you want to do.”

“Sure. Call him and tell him he gets everything he wants if he holds off. And then Ravi can go and arrest him and run his coup.”

“OK, will do.”

“Hey, Earl is here. Earl, how’d you like to be president of Guyana?”