junkies like Franco and Emilio, who had never known a day of peace and never would, jumping from war zone to war zone until their luck ran out. Then there were the true believers, the Venezuelan Chavistas like the two guys on loan from MBR-200, Alejandro and Iván, who always sat together at meals and still wore their berets and bandanas even though they were five hundred miles from anyone who gave a shit.
Mercer looked at a skinny young guy named David who was in animated conversation. David lived in one of the barrios of Petare, and had been a janitor at an office building in downtown Caracas before losing his job like so many of the service workers who inhabited the slums. He got involved with the black market trade, linked up with a gang, and eventually found his way to the Hen House once word got out that Mercer was looking for young men seeking work that was high-risk and well-paying. Guys like David reminded him of the best kind of Army privates, the ones who were eager to please and grateful for the opportunity. The ideologues and the conflict vets came with their own baggage and arrogance. But the Davids, the former janitors and trash collectors whose livelihoods had been destroyed along with the Venezuelan economy, and who would do anything to earn and send money back to their starving families, they made good soldiers. About a third of Mercer’s men were like David, in various stages of training to become professional fighters.
A lanky guy with dark hair and fair skin sat at the table nearest Mercer, chewing on a piece of flatbread. This was Nico, the only true technician in this crew. He looked like a criollo—a Venezuelan of mostly Spanish ancestry—and he had been a specialist in the National Guard’s bomb squad in Caracas before he got laid off. He was an expert in detecting and defusing explosive devices, and he now used those skills to build them.
Earlier in the day, Nico had told him, “Está listo.” It’s ready.
He and Nico had gone over the logistics of transporting the bomb to Caracas, where it would be wired onto the car of a former Venezuelan Army colonel who’d been dismissed and was now working for the Americans. The official government line was that the colonel had been fired for corruption, but probably the opposite was true. In a broken country like this, the regime wanted everyone on the government dole to ensure their loyalty. It was the men—and women—with principles who were the problem.
Nico had wanted to do his work closer to the site of the attack, but Mercer had insisted that all operations originate at Camp Tombstone. The run from here to Caracas—or wherever an operation needed to happen—was relatively low-risk, while the population centers themselves were a hive of backstabbing government officials, dirty cops, and violent criminals. This whole country was teetering on the edge, and the safest place to be was far away from the chaos until it was time to strike. That’s what he’d learned from the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Mercer stared at the bony remnants of the catfish—alive this morning, a pile of shit tomorrow. It was good to be at the top of the food chain. And he intended to stay there.
He stood, left the mess hall and took a path through the trees that led to the river and a view of the sky.
Kyle Mercer took in the world around him: the river’s trembling waters, the dark leaves of the forest, cast silver in the moonlight. And looming above it all, Chimatá Tepui, that great ancient monolith rising into the black, starry night.
He thought back to his years of imprisonment in that filthy stone hut somewhere in Afghanistan’s mountainous borderlands. He remembered the small window, a one-foot-by-six-inch rectangle. In the daytime it was a patch of bright blue, and at night it was starlit sky. The infinite universe reduced to a sliver by the confines of his prison.
Most nights he was chained to a wooden yoke, enveloped in darkness except for his view of the stars. He would stare up at them as he heard his captors outside perform the final prayer ritual of the night as they bowed to Mecca.
One day he asked for a Quran. They gave him one, in Arabic with a side-by-side Pashto translation he could read. He began performing the prayer rituals inside his hut, five times a day. One of the Talibs who had