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Final Bearing

He would also trek to this high clearing just before the harvest. He could see for himself the bounty God had sent him to help him free his people. He could proudly watch some of those people as they worked below. Then, he would go down and join the peons, walk among them, honor them with his presence, embrace each of them, thank them for their sacrifice and loyalty.

He now watched instead as a half dozen Black Hawk helicopters reloaded the Colombian troops and their American advisors. Their morning’s work was completed. There was no mistaking where the choppers came from. The U. S. flag unashamedly marked each of them, just as it did the four Apache ‘copters that still buzzed overhead, guarding the men below, scouting about in the surrounding jungle for any rebel troops that might still be lurking there.

Most of de Santiago’s men had fled at the first thumping of the approaching helicopters. Their loyalty to the Marxist cause and to their leader gave way to self-preservation as they took to the thick underbrush. Now, their leader could do no more than angrily kick dirt with his perfectly polished boots and spout a continuous litany of deep-throated oaths. His swarthy face grew even darker with rage as a tic contorted his right cheek and eye.

That was not merely a cash crop going up in smoke down there. The fields represented the financing he needed to continue the revolution, a war that he was convinced would eventually return this beautiful land to him, to his people.

The Americans and their “war on drugs” had taken on a ferocious new intensity in the last year. Suddenly, it seemed El Presidente had unlimited resources. And, with the help of the yanqui military and their fancy machines, he seemed to finally have the strength to break both of de Santiago’s backbones, his revolution and the coca fields that financed it.

He had received the reports from Cartagena, had heard the breathless reports from the mouths of those who had seen it for themselves. How the Americans filled every wharf with their heavily laden ships, unloading more troops, more weapons and more supplies every day. In only a few months, their advisors had transformed El Presidente’s ragtag troops into an effective fighting force, putting the rebels on the run as they torched the coca fields. Even more disheartening was the word of the surveillance satellites overhead that were now trained on de Santiago’s precious jungle mountains, never blinking, never missing anything.

De Santiago would build a processing factory, even in the most remote jungle clearing, and the government troops would be there before the first shipment of silvery powder was prepared. Try to move a truckload of ammunition and the government troops and their American advisors would meet them at the rendezvous as if they had been sent an invitation. Or sow a field in some remote mountain valley and carefully nurture it, only to see the fine coca devoured by flames when it was so tantalizingly close to harvest.

His people in Bogota whispered of some new organization he had never heard of. Something called the Joint Drug Interdiction Agency, a seamless coalition of the imperialists who had finally come together to fight those who would use the coca to win the righteous war of the people. Beyond the name, there was little else known about this alliance. If it wasn’t so very painfully obvious that the Americans and their allies were doing something radically different, de Santiago would have dismissed this JDIA as simply a myth. If one could not see it, feel it, smell it, it likely did not exist.

This morning, Juan de Santiago could see the choppers, feel the heat of the flames they had set loose, smell the stench of the smoldering revolution this new threat seemed hell-sent to destroy. This JDIA must be stopped! But how? They had no idea where its headquarters might be, its communications facilities, or its leadership. It was hard to kill a snake if its head could not be severed.

De Santiago had been certain this series of fields, high in the Colombian Andes and down a narrow mountain valley, was safely hidden. No roads approached here, only this steep path over the mountains that he and his bodyguard and a small cadre of his men had just hiked. Even the damned satellites should not have been able to find these fields. They were almost always shrouded in clouds.

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