was that he’d once been trained by the U.S. Army, which was the only reason Mercer would work with him. In an odd way, they spoke the same language, and had once worn the same uniform. Mercer had no idea why Gomez had developed an animosity toward the U.S.—maybe his U.S. Army trainers had made fun of him, or the chow in the officers’ mess gave him diarrhoea—but Gomez was now a full-fledged anti-American Chavista, dedicated to wiping out the last vestiges of protest and democracy in Venezuela. Kyle Mercer’s goal was more complex, more personal, and far less ideological. But, as often happens in life and in war, you make alliances with people whose motivations are different than yours but whose goals are the same. It works until it doesn’t.
The American government knew that lesson well, from decades of ratfucking elections and sponsoring insurgencies and counterinsurgencies in almost every country south of the Rio Grande. Now Uncle Sam had turned his eyes toward Venezuela, a country with an incompetent and corrupt socialist government, a weak military, and more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia. A target too tempting to resist.
And oil wasn’t the United States’ only motivation. According to a briefing Mercer had received from General Gomez in the Hen House, China and Russia were loaning the bankrupt Maduro government billions of dollars, and when the bill came due and the Venezuelans didn’t have the cash or oil to repay it, they would give away political influence instead. Russian mercenaries were already in country to protect Maduro, and more were on the way. Venezuela, like Cuba before it, was becoming a toehold in the Western Hemisphere for America’s enemies, and the U.S. was determined to change the equation. Kyle Mercer had learned in grade school that the Cold War was over, but as he’d learned firsthand in Afghanistan, one war just morphs into another.
And now Kyle Mercer was here, doing some ratfucking of his own. He was working with the Chavistas, but not for them. An important distinction.
So far Mercer and his men had killed a pro-American Air Force colonel in Caracas, an anti-Chavista National Police captain in Ciudad Bolívar, and an outspoken pro-democracy mayor in a nearby small town. But that was all warm-up for the big show—a counterinsurgency operation against armed groups currently being trained by the Americans across the border in Colombia.
Kyle Mercer had arrived here suspecting the Americans were up to something, but it was General Gomez who gave him the Intel on Operation Boyacá, an ambitious American plot to destabilize and ultimately overthrow the Maduro government. Mercer had assumed Boyacá was something along the lines of a traditional Latin American coup—recruit some disgruntled officers, have a plan to seize the Presidential Palace and maybe a media outlet, make some high-profile arrests. The kind of plan whose success relied on a swift, psychological blow. But, as Gomez had explained to him, coups had not been working in Venezuela for some time. Not for Chávez’ two coup attempts in 1992, or in 2002 for the people who tried to depose him—or just this past May, when a group of military officers were hatching a plot to arrest Maduro in the run-up to the presidential elections. The plot was exposed by SEBIN, and the conspirators were jailed and awaiting punishment.
So now there was Operation Boyacá—named after the victorious battle waged by Simón Bolívar that marked the beginning of the end of Spain’s rule in the north of their New World empire. Like Bolívar’s army, these U.S.-trained insurgents would sweep down out of the Andes to liberate Venezuela in the name of the people. No more top-down coups. This would look like a genuine people’s revolution, and the illusion needed to last just long enough for a group of pro-American Venezuelan Army officers to take command, promise elections at a future date, and kick out the Russians.
General Gomez had seemed particularly offended by the Americans co-opting the name of his beloved Bolívar’s military victory over the Spanish Empire for their own imperial project. But Kyle Mercer thought it was smart branding. Besides, whether you’re promising freedom or vengeance, revolution or restoration, the only constants in war are that a lot of people will die and nothing will turn out how you planned.
He looked again at Gomez’ list—a grab bag of assassinations to soften up the opposition on the home front before the battles to come. Maybe Gomez and his fellow Chavistas believed that if they killed enough collaborators now,