Editor’s Note: This is the fifth 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 later this spring.

So far in the story, our narrator Mike Holman, an independent media man and podcaster, has just 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.

Holman is having a journalistic look at Polk’s Shangri-La settlement, called Liberty Point, when he meets a British photojournalist named Sarah Givens, the sister of Polk’s famous professional tennis player girlfriend, and finds himself intrigued with her despite a distinct difference in worldview…

May 10, 2024, Miami, Florida

I’ll bet you expected that Sarah and I were going to become an item. I’m sorry to disappoint you.

Which is not to say that my time with her was uneventful. Oh, it was eventful, all right.

She joined us for dinner at the Liberty Lodge; the restaurant there had Guyanese food that was amazingly good, and Melissa swore she was “moving down here so I can eat this every day.”

“Oh my God, girl, you’re gonna get so fat,” said Kaylee.

“Shut up, Kaylee! Damn!”

“They’ve been griping at each other like this all afternoon,” Craig groused.

But he said they got some amazing B-roll footage all around the town, and even managed to shoot the inside of one of the condos. It belonged to a retired Delta Force guy and his new wife; he’d just signed a contract as a security consultant for an oilfield services company working that offshore block of rigs and said he was going to be seven days on, seven days off starting in a week.

“There’s more civilization here than anywhere else this part of South America,” Kaylee had him on camera saying.

Sarah largely kept her mouth shut during dinner, at least until Melissa decided to interrogate her.

“So are you a tennis player, too?”

“Not since I was a girl. Brienna was the tennis prodigy in the family, not me.”

“And when did you get into photography?”

“At university. And then I was on the job for the Guardian for a while, then a bit of fashion work…”

“You’re a fashion photographer?” I said.

“It’s not really my calling, but … yeah.”

“That’s so awesome,” said Kaylee. “Must be really cool to get to meet all the celebrities and…”

“You don’t really socialize with them,” Sarah said curtly. “You’re just there to do the work.”

“Yeah, but afterward? I dunno, wrap parties or whatever?”

Sarah gave her a blank look and a slow shake of her head.

“Anyway,” Sarah said, “I really do more non-profit work now.”

Nobody in our crew cared about that, so the conversation petered out and then moved on to current events. The US Attorney in San Francisco had just announced a round of indictments against Trumbull, alleging that he’d defrauded a bunch of banks with “procedural deficiencies” in loan applications his real estate company had submitted. The banks underwrote the loans and the loans were paid off, but somehow somebody had been defrauded.

Melissa said the whole thing made her nervous. “It feels like there’s no law anymore,” she said. “Can we do a podcast on this when we get home?”

“We should,” I said. “What we should do is get Trumbull.”

“Oh, no,” said Sarah. “You can’t. He’s horrid.”

“He’s about 80 million page views, easy,” said Kaylee. “Horrid or not, that’s a great idea.”

I could tell that neither Melissa nor Kaylee were too impressed with Sarah. It seemed like that was the only thing they could agree on so far during this trip.

But after dinner, Sarah pigeonholed me.

“Care for a nightcap?” she asked.

“I maybe could,” I said. “We’re in Pierce’s suite upstairs, so you’re welcome to…”

She was shaking her head.

“I was thinking something more private.”

“Oh, I see.”

I knew it was a bad idea, but I went with Sarah back to the Grand Waica and spent the night in her room.

And everybody knew what I’d done when I made it back to the suite at the lodge early the next morning.

“I can NOT believe what you did,” said Melissa, who was in her PJ’s drinking coffee on the big couch when I attempted to sneak in. “How could you hook up with her? She’s…”

“An adult,” I said. “And so am I.”

“Yeah, but come on, Mike. Nothing about her and you works.”

“I’m not marrying the girl, Mel. Relax, will you?”

“But really,” Kaylee, who had padded into the kitchen for coffee, said. “You’re not down here to hook up. You’re here to do a job. And she’s a distraction.”

“Exactly,” said Melissa. “Exactly right. We’re not distracted. But you are.”

“Hey, I’m here. It’s early. And we’re working. We’re leaving out of here for Micobie in an hour, and then we’re going to Mahdia, and then this afternoon we’ve got interviews set with Bill Abbott and Ted Kournis, who built this place, and with Mahandas Ishgan, the president. Does that sound like I’m distracted?”

Kaylee and Melissa both frowned at me.

“What’s the problem here?”

“Ashley broke up with you and you’re lonely,” Kaylee said.

“You guys didn’t like Ashley either. And why are you all playing Dating Nazi with my love life, anyway?”

“Because somebody has to,” Melissa said. “You’re a disaster.”

“Dis-aster,” Kaylee agreed.

I wanted to argue. I would have. I had nothing.

“Well, try not to be bitchy to Sarah. She’s coming with us today.”

“Great,” groaned Melissa.

“Let’s remember that we’re also doing PR for Pierce, so having her along and being nice to her while she sees she’s completely wrong about this place, and maybe changing her mind, is us earning some of the fat swag we’re pulling down from Sentinel Holdings.”

“Yeah, OK,” said Kaylee, “but can you keep it professional?”

“Uhhh, yeah,” I said, a little insulted. “Can you?”

A little later Sarah arrived, and just after that was when the whole project blew up.

We went down to Micobie and we interviewed no less than eight people, most of them women who were holding down the village while the men were working — at Liberty Point.

Universally, they loved Pierce Polk.

“He’s absolutely the best thing that’s ever happened here,” said a charmingly pudgy middle-aged lady who gave her name as Betty. “The whole village is making money, we’re getting a new road into Mahdia, and we’re all fixing up our houses. He hired a guy who set up a learning pod for our kids and hooked us up to a bunch of online learning programs from the States. He’s done so much for us.”

“But why?” asked Sarah. “What is he gaining from it?”

“Probably friendship. He’s a good neighbor and he takes care of people.”

Sarah didn’t like that at all. It didn’t fit her narrative. And the more people we talked to, the bitchier she got.

Finally, she said she wanted to investigate the area around the village.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the village chief, an old guy named Patrick, told her.

“Oh, I know my way around a rain forest,” Sarah said.

“Sarah, why don’t you listen to him?” I said. “Besides, we need to get on the road to Mahdia. I don’t want to make those people wait for us.”

But she wasn’t listening, and she fished a bunch of camera equipment out of the SUV and headed for the woods.

“Let her go,” Kaylee said.

“I can’t,” I said. “Let me try to get her back.”

So I chased after her, trying to cajole her back to the truck.

“Look,” I said, “you don’t know the jungle here…”

“Rain forest,” she said. “No one calls it a jungle anymore.”

“Whatever. It’s full of critters, many of them not at all friendly to humans. If you’re going to go exploring in the wilderness you should do it with a local guide, don’t you think?”

“I know what I’m doing,” she said. “I’ve been in Africa, southeast Asia…”

“But you haven’t been here. Do you know about which snakes are poisonous? Which plants cause a rash?”

“Do you?”

“No, which is why I’m saying let’s get back in the truck and head to our next place.”

She had her camera out and she was taking pictures. I was attempting to note, with less confidence than I was comfortable with, which way through the dense jungle led back to Micobie.

“Oh, here’s something,” Sarah said, snapping away with her camera.

I turned to look, and immediately yelled at her to back away.

She had turned over a log and found a nest full of snake eggs. And while she was clicking away, I could see a snake quickly slithering toward her.

“Sarah! Move!”

“What?” she asked, irritably, just before the snake — which I later found out was a brown labaria, or otherwise known as a fer-de-lance — struck at her leg and bit her two or three times.

“Ahhh!” she screamed as she went down.

I then did one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done, but I guess instinct kicked in. The snake had wrapped around her ankle and had pulled its head back to strike again, and I reached out and caught it just below the head.

Then I whipped out the retractable knife Megan had bought me with my credit card before my first trip down to Guyana, and I chopped the head off that snake.

Sarah was wincing. “Oh my God,” she said.

“I need to keep the head of this thing,” I said, “because it’ll matter what kind of snake this is.”

I made her get up, though I noticed she was bleeding a good bit from those bites on her leg, and helped her in the direction of Micobie.

We were a good 15 minutes before we were in sight of the village. The patient was clearly not holding up well.

Finally, I flagged down Patrick, who was walking his dog (a springer spaniel, if it matters), showed him the snake head and told him what happened. He wasn’t pleased.

“Put her in that truck and take her to Liberty Point right now,” he said, waving at the driver, who was sprinting to the Cherokee. “They don’t have the hospital up yet, but the clinic is good. They can stabilize her and then you can get her out in time.”

“In time for what?”

“To save her life. That’s a brown labaria. It’s one of the deadliest snakes there are. How’d you manage this, lady? Those snakes avoid people.”

“We stumbled on a nest,” I said.

“That was stupid,” said Patrick. “You might have killed this poor girl.”

Sarah was still somewhat lucid, and I expected her to defend me since this dumb escapade was her idea, but instead there was silence.

I gave her a shitty look, but I noticed she was in pain and I just felt guilty. Then I saw Patrick glaring at me and I got angry all over again.

We piled her in the back of the Cherokee and lit out as fast as the muddy dirt track would allow. Sarah was groaning. I was holding her hand and making her drink water. Patrick, while he was calling the clinic at Liberty Point and warning them we were coming in, had told me to keep her leg bent down so that the venom couldn’t circulate as quickly to the rest of her system.

Melissa, Kaylee and Craig didn’t say a word. They just looked at me. None of them gave off the vibe that I was a hero for helping to try to save Sarah.

We made it back to Liberty Point, and the Cherokee dropped us off at the medical clinic they’d set up next door to the Landing. There was a Guyanese doc there, whose name was Singh, and he grabbed a pair of scissors and cut the leg of her pants up to the knee as she had her lower leg hanging off the examination table. Sarah was wincing and muttering something about “man invading their habitat, and this is what happens.”

Sarah’s leg had swelled up like a tree trunk. She was bleeding profusely.

Singh looked at me and frowned. He grabbed a walkie-talkie and called the airfield.

“Give her water,” he said, thrusting a bottle at me. I poured a little down Sarah’s throat. She was shaking.

Then she threw up.

Singh was talking with the tower at the airfield, and there was a Cessna Citation owned by one of Pierce’s friends that was headed back to Miami in a few minutes.

“Miami will work,” he said, and demanded that they hold the plane.

“You must go with her,” he said. “I would go, but I am the only doctor here. Someone must be on call. But I will tell you what to do for her.”

“Well, the thing is…” I began.

Singh’s look stopped me in my tracks.

A few minutes later, I was carrying Sarah from the Cherokee onto the Cessna, with the passengers — an aging hotel magnate and three very fetching young women who were quite certainly not his daughters — scrambling to get out of my way. I dumped her into a reclining seat in the front of the plane.

“Did she break her leg?” one of the girls asked.

“No,” I said. “They put it in a splint when you get a snake-bite.”

“What’s in that IV?”

“Antivenom. Hey, is there a bucket or something we can use?”

“What for?” asked the old man. The flight attendant closed the door and I could feel the jet begin to roll out of the hangar.

“Well, she might get sick. I don’t want it to, you know.”

I heard him sigh, and the next thing I knew there was a newly-empty ice bucket handed to me. I wedged it between Sarah’s body and the edge of the seat.

“This bucket would have been more fun with what was in it before, I’ll bet,” I said.

“It’s champagne,” said one of the girls. “You want some?”

“Shit, yeah,” I said. “Thanks!”

Sarah was mumbling nonsense and I could tell she was going into shock. Singh had given me an epi pen; I had no idea whether I should use it. He told me that if she was having trouble breathing or if she couldn’t move, that I should give her a stick with it. But I had no clue.

And that was how it went for the next four hours until we landed at Miami Executive Airport. An ambulance was waiting for us on the tarmac, and off we went to Jackson South Medical Center.

And Sarah had a lucid moment as we hurtled east on 152^nd Street.

“Mike,” she said.

“Yeah, honey. Hang in there for me.”

“You’re very sweet. But it seems we’re quite different people.”

“Y’know,” I said, “I think you’re exactly right.”

Sarah went straight into the ICU, and they deposited me in the waiting room. And my phone rang. It was Brienna.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Your sister started a fight with a snake and she lost,” I said. “They just brought her into intensive care and it sounds like they think she’s going to make it.”

“Oh my God,” came the response.

“I did the best that I could, but Brienna — that leg looks really bad. I don’t know.”

“She’s always doing things like this, the stupid cow.”

“I don’t know what to say. She wanted to take a bunch of nature pics, and she wouldn’t listen when the village chief told her she should take a guide…”

“No, it’s not your fault, Michael.”

“I should have tried to find you, but there wasn’t time.”

“I was at the waterfall with Pierce. But I’ll come to you. Sarah isn’t your problem.”

“OK.”

“I’m on the next plane out, which is in an hour. I’ll be there tonight.”

It struck me that it was after dark. I hadn’t hardly noticed. Then I looked at the TV.

“Brienna, I’ve got to go,” I said. And I hung up.

The chyron across the bottom of the screen said “TRUMBULL SHOT; WOULD-BE ASSASSIN TAKES OWN LIFE.”

May 12, 2024, Atlanta, Georgia

Kaylee, Melissa and Craig managed to salvage the podcast episode by doing the interviews with the folks in Mahdia and Liberty Point that we needed. They actually did a terrific job, I thought, and what we put together for that episode was great.

But as viewership went it was a dud, because of what happened with Trumbull.

The shooter who almost took him out was a 22-year-old male whose name was James Alfred Sterling, but he had demanded that people call him Shirley.

And yes, Billy Ray memed the shit out of that.

Sterling left a manifesto which held that killing Trumbull was a heroic attempt to save “Our Democracy,” and a blow against “American fascism.” It talked about how he had traveled back in time in a vision and killed Hitler before he took power in Germany, and that vision proved to him that he — well, they — was destined to take out “the modern Hitler which is so much worse.”

Katrina Duvalier, Joe Deadhorse’s press secretary, was caught on a hot mic saying Shirley Sterling was the greatest American patriot since the Rosenbergs. You’d think that would have been the absolute end of her career, but it only made a minor ripple when Dieter Poocey, the White House correspondent for Fox, asked her if she understood what a patriot was and then expressed doubt when she insisted she did.

When he got shot, Trumbull was at a rally in Terre Haute, having just won the Indiana primary and thereby sewing up the Republican nomination. At the time Sterling popped him he was talking about firing everybody at the EPA and letting the states take over environmental regulation. Such is the reduced state of American fascism, I guess.

The bullet broke his clavicle, missing his heart by six inches. Christy Hazel earned himself a two-day suspension from MSNBC by quipping that Trumbull had no heart to miss.

But the real problem was when the Secretary of the Treasury, under whom the Secret Service operates, called a press conference to decry a lack of cooperation and “shoddy practices” from Trumbull’s private security contractors.

Guess who those were. Yep. Sentinel.

It was a huge PR problem, and we ended up pulling a couple of all-nighters to get on top of the situation. But when we dug down into the facts of the case, what we found was explosive as hell.

They’d changed out the head of Trumbull’s Secret Service detail. DeAndre Taylor, who had been with Trumbull going back to his time in the White House, had been forced out because of some bogus sexual harassment claim filed against him. And his replacement, a lady named Pauline Chang, was the daughter of a San Francisco import-export guy who’d been a huge donor to both Omobba and Deadhorse.

It was a really bad look. And when we broke all this at the website, the shit hit the fan. Trumbull even called me from the hospital.

“Mike, Mike, Mike,” he said, “you’re gonna kill me. I can’t use Sentinel for security, and now I can’t get much from the Secret Service. I got crazies everywhere who want to take my head off and they’re cheerin’ ‘em on at all the papers and networks. How’m I gonna run a campaign if I can’t go anywhere?”

“Mr. President,” I said, “we’re just making sure the public knows the truth. But while I have you on the phone, I’d really like to do a podcast episode with you when you’re back on your feet.”

“Sure,” he said. “Have your people call my people.”

I asked him if he’d talked to Pierce.

“He’s supposed to call later,” he said, “but how’s he gonna help? He’s down in the jungle with that project of his. His business is falling apart and the FBI is taking all his houses.”

Which was true. They’d raided Pierce’s place in Jupiter, Florida that day. It was also cleared out, save for a house full of Walmart frog figurines set up in funny alignments. He’d texted me photos of those, and we put them up at the website and got a ton of traffic out of it.

That earned me a message from Karen, our new lawyer, asking me if I had a death wish. I responded saying maybe I did, but mostly I was just having too much fun to quit.

Pierce had stuff moving around everywhere, and the rumor had it he was stashing all of his gear at warehouses his friends owned to keep the feds from seizing it.

Pierce was now essentially a man without a country. The funny thing was, his businesses were very much still operational. For example, after what happened to New York State with the cyberattack, nobody dared put Sentinel Security out of business, and if Sentinel Port Management ceased operations half the country’s supply chain would disintegrate.

And of course, his companies all had international operations. Pierce could have all of his stateside business go away and he’d still be one of the richest people in the world.

I wasn’t sure Trumbull knew that. I also wasn’t sure he cared that much, either. Donny Trumbull had a reputation for being hostile toward people richer than he was, though generally his experience had been that those people were hostile toward him. And while Pierce had been friendly, and publicly supportive, I got the impression Trumbull felt threatened by him.

Pierce had CC’ed me on an email he sent to Trumbull suggesting that his campaign hire Thurston Contingency Management as the new contractor, the upshot being that Thurston would retain the Sentinel team as a subcontractor, and that way everybody could save face a little. He also sent along a 14-page report from Sentinel Security’s diagnostic team noting that there was a hole in his coverage at the Hulman Center at Indiana State University, where his rally was, and that where the shooter came in was a Secret Service responsibility.

And the details of that were really bad. Really, really bad. Which we’ll get to a little later in the story.

Had the Secret Service deliberately botched the job and let a maniac in to assassinate a presidential candidate? And what would happen if that came out?

It had been a while since I’d been afraid to publish the truth. But on this, I definitely had to take a pause. Something Trumbull said stuck with me: because of what we’d reported about Pauline Chang, he was concerned the Secret Service was useless to him going forward. If I put this out? It would get a whole lot worse.

And social media, not to mention legacy corporate media, was full of people openly wishing that Shirley Sterling had done Trumbull in.

Things were getting exceptionally weird out there.

Then I got a death threat. It was just a stupid rant from an anonymous email, but I forwarded it to Agent Muhammad and asked if he wouldn’t mind putting it through the proper channels.

“Not my department,” came the response. I wasn’t very surprised. So I sent it to Casey Crane, our contact at Sentinel Network Security. He said he’d find out the source and “then we’ll take care of it.”

Then I called Pierce.

“I have a suggestion,” I said. “I think you ought to get political. Like very political.”

“More than I’ve been?”

“Yeah. If I were you, I’d go and set up a PAC and I’d buy up every ad impression and 30-second commercial spot you could get, and I would bombard the public with all the political dirt you have on Omobba and Deadhorse.”

“It’s a thought. What am I trying to accomplish?”

“For one thing, it gives you an opportunity to push back against these people calling you a crook. Especially when it’s projection on their part. You’ve already uncovered enough on these people that in a sane country they’d be coming for them with pitchforks and torches.”

“I would have thought we’d see more of an impact from what we’ve already put out there. Honestly, I would have thought they’d have backed off by now. It’s getting worse, though.”

“I don’t think you can back these guys down. They don’t back down. All they do is attack. Anybody who gets in their way, they wipe the poor bastard out. And that includes you, too, it seems.”

“So you’re saying play over the top of these assholes.”

“I think that’s all you can do. The thing you have, more than they have, is money. You’ve got an unlimited supply of that. You need to use it to bury them before they bury you.”

“How’s the podcast doing?”

“The one about Liberty Point?”

“Yeah.”

“It got covered up a bit with the Trumbull shooting. But the numbers aren’t terrible. And we’ve gotten some press inquiries. By the way, you talk to Brienna? How’s her sister?”

“She’s still in the hospital. She’s all messed up, but they think they can save the leg. You saved her life, I think.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“Mike did you sex up that girl?”

“It was a one-time thing. I was lonely, she was friendly. I don’t think it’ll be repeated.”

“Brienna’s pissed about that, but she won’t tell me why.”

“Do you care, Pierce?”

He laughed.

“Not really. I don’t think my new existence as a hermit king is her style.”

“It’s not. You need somebody who’s a wife, not a supermodel.”

“Buddy, I’ve had two wives. I’ve had my last wife. They’re expensive and they get mean. No thanks to all that. But you? You’re the one who needs a wife. You’re not like me. You actually would benefit from a normal life and a family. And let me tell you, Sarah Givens is not that girl.”

“So I gather.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Pretty much.”

I told him what happened that day in Micobie, including the part I didn’t tell Brienna about how she didn’t back me in front of the village chief and how she essentially broke up with me on the way to the ICU.

Pierce laughed.

“That’s Sarah,” he said. “Wait until she makes a fresh PR nightmare going public about the trip.”

“What are you talking about, Pierce?”

“She told Brienna that snake-bite was all my fault. That between climate change and the loss of the snake’s habitat, it’s no surprise the wildlife are more aggressive.”

“I’m thinking Sarah is the proximate cause of that snake-bite and not the climate.”

“I don’t think it matters a whole lot what the reality is. Not to her.”

“Well, don’t take that hit. Tell Brienna that she needs to let Sarah know that if she opens her mouth to trash you, after everything that was done to keep her from dying out there, that it’s the end of that NGO of hers.”

“That’s not a bad idea. Brienna will probably end it with me if I do that, though.”

“Again, do you care?”

“Not really. It’s good advice. So is the political stuff. You know a guy I should use for that?”

“All the money you give to campaigns and you don’t have a guy?”

“I don’t care about that shit, Mike. Come on.”

“Yeah, well, you’re learning the most important rule, Pierce.”

“What’s that?”

“You might not care about politics, but politics definitely cares about you.”

“Ain’t that the truth. OK, so I’m going to go all mad bomber and essentially rig the election for Trumbull, and when I do I’ll have a president in my pocket, and all of this bullshit will go away.”

“I’m thinking that’s your best call, yeah.”

“OK. That’ll work, I guess. But, dammit, I never wanted to be political. Why do I have to be political?”

“Because you do, Pierce. Modern America isn’t interested in prominent people with no politics. It’s bullshit, but that’s how it is.”

“That isn’t a good look for modern America, Mike.”

“I don’t disagree. What about your situation down there?”

“We got a couple LM-100 Hercules planes makin’ trips into the airfield regularly with pallets full of stuff, like military stuff, and we got shooters coming in from all over.”

“Building a mercenary army, are you?”

“I’m tempted to go public about that. See if it scares off the Vinnies. But I’m apparently not as scary as I thought I was.”

“The thing is, to impress them you’d have to let them know what kind of hardware your guys are packing. Small arms won’t do it. And I’m no military strategist, but it’s better, if you get in a fight, that the enemy doesn’t know your order of battle.”

“The point is to prevent the fight.”

“The only way you fix that is to get Uncle Sam involved.”

“Which won’t happen if I keep up my war against Deadhorse and Omobba.”

“That’s about the size of it, yeah.”

“Shit, Holman.”

“Unless there’s something else I don’t know about, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s a rotten situation all around.”

“Well, maybe there is something else. We’ll see.”

“That must be the something I don’t know about. What is it?”

There was a short pause.

“Pierce?” I asked. “What’s the story?”

“Not over the phone, man.”

May 15, 2024, Las Claritas, Bolivar

The mood in the camp was, in Cabrillo’s estimation, less favorable than it had been since preparations had begun.

That had to do with the attempted coup d’etat, of course.

Things had deteriorated very quickly after the Madiera government announced that the second of the major opposition candidates in the elections set for December of 2024 had been disqualified. Jorge Rojas, who was the candidate of the new Primero Venezuela party and who in polling was holding a 15-point lead over the incumbent, was charged with collusion with America — a crime not specified in Venezuelan law — and stricken from the ballot.

Rojas was the second major candidate thus scratched; previously, Maria Lopez Morales of the Democracia Venezuela Party — who, like Rojas, had boasted a significant lead over Madiera at the time she was bounced off the ballot under dubious circumstances. And despite there being seven months until the election, it became painfully obvious to everyone involved in Venezuelan politics that Rojas would hardly be the last electoral threat Madiera and his government would block from running.

The people took to the streets. Violence ensued. The offices of the SENIAT, or Servicio Nacional Integrado de Administración Aduanera y Tributaria, Venezuela’s national tax collection agency, were firebombed, and the mob refused to let the Caracas fire department put out the blaze. The building burned to the ground.

And then Pedro Ulloa de la Vega, the commander of the Army’s First Infantry Division, stepped forward to offer himself as the interim president. De la Vega ordered that Madiera be arrested and tried for human rights abuses and vowed to restore Rojas and Morales to the ballot.

For three days no one knew who was running Venezuela. Then de la Vega turned up in Miami, conceding defeat and proclaiming Madiera the rightful president.

And hundreds of military and civilian supporters of the general were rounded up and shot as traitors.

That occasioned a fresh round of emigrations, including, interestingly enough, thousands of Venezuelans heading for Guyana. Not to mention a fresh round of condemnations from governments across the globe not to include China, Russia, South Africa, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, North Korea, Iran and Canada.

But more to the point, it occasioned problems in discipline for the 53^rd Jungle Infantry Brigade which Cabrillo dealt with very harshly. Six of his men attempted to desert the brigade, but were found hiding in the woods a mile from their makeshift base. Cabrillo ordered that they be fired on by the helicopters sent to find them; the six tried to surrender and were cut down.

He knew that the men, who hadn’t particularly liked or trusted him in the first place, were ready for an all-out mutiny; what saved him was that most of the brigade’s leadership was Cuban and the only Venezuelan in the command structure was Carvajal, who was nobody’s idea of a commander.

That, and Madiera paying the 53^rd a visit and promising the men a loyalty bonus to be paid to their families.

That crisis resolved, things got much better.

The 53^rd took delivery of four shipping containers full of food and water rations, dozens of crates full of new rifles, mortar systems, GPS locators, and even motorcycles.

And then there were the reinforcements.

The 53^rd was to be supplemented by 500 additional troops, none of whom were Venezuelan.

Half of the additions were Cubans, a company of special-forces infantrymen from the Avispas Negras, or Black Wasps; these were the best jungle fighters the Cuban Revolutionary Army could offer, and Cabrillo had been asking for them for months. The rest were from elsewhere in Latin America: Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua.

Cabrillo didn’t think much of those.

He asked Xing whether China would be adding manpower to their effort, and the response he received was typical Xing.

“You have me,” he said. “I’m your military advisor and procurement officer. And you don’t need anything else to achieve your objectives, so stop whining.”

That didn’t sit well with Carvajal, who lit into their Chinese benefactor.

“We have enough trouble knowing that this action, which will cost many of our men their lives, ultimately results in more mines and oil rigs and timber for China,” he said. “The least we should expect is that some Chinese might bleed alongside us before you earn your spoils.”

“There are no Chinese to spare,” Xing said.

“No Chinese to spare? There are more Chinese than anyone else! Why are you saying to me this mierda?”

“I mean that there are none to spare,” said Xing. “Our people are working to the west of here.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” asked Carvajal, angrily brushing off Cabrillo’s very mild attempts to shut him down. Cabrillo would lightly discipline his adjutant later, but frankly, he wanted to hear what Xing had to say. Mostly he was curious to see if the rumors he had heard were true.

“It means that our people have a far larger project to work on than some shitwater jungle wilderness,” said Xing, “and what we are doing will ensure you don’t have to contend with that which you fear most.”

“Dios mio!” Carvajal bellowed. “You speak in twisted riddles! What does that mean?”

“It means the Chinese are busy infiltrating up from Ecuador through to the Yanqui border,” said Cabrillo, testing his theory.

Xing looked at him and smiled, and he knew he was correct.

“Meaning what?” asked Carvajal.

“Meaning that if the Americans attempt to block our adventure here, they will shortly find themselves dealing with much, much larger problems than Guyana,” said Xing.

Carvajal cocked his head sideways. He clearly didn’t understand.

“Hector,” said Cabrillo, “our Chinese friends are playing the great game on a level much higher than ours. We need only focus on our mission, and all will be as it should.”

“Coronel,” said Carvajal, in perhaps the least subservient tone of his time under Cabrillo’s command, “for an atheist you certainly seem to have a remarkable amount of faith.”

“I have faith in power,” said Cabrillo. “And that is something you must learn if you are to advance.”

What Xing did provide, and Caracas then confirmed after Madiera re-established control of the government, was a much larger list of targets for the 53^rd to occupy once the invasion began. Cabrillo could see that he would be in charge of one of three separate zones of occupation; each included every settlement, mine, quarry and other facility of any sort of value along the three tributaries to the Essequibo that were in the 53^rd’s area of operation.

One was the Rupununi River to the south. Then there were the two forks of the Mazaruni to the north. And, of course, the Potaro in the middle. That last was to be Cabrillo’s zone of occupation.

They were going to have to drop in on and occupy well more than 300 different places in those three zones, though the vast majority of them wouldn’t be resisting.

Most of the mission was simply a matter of getting his people to their objectives and then having them convince the locals that they were now Venezuelans and not a whole lot else would change.

They wouldn’t like it much, but in Cabrillo’s experience that wasn’t particularly important. The Venezuelans didn’t seem to be very fond of Madiera, but even after the failed coup attempt of a few days earlier it didn’t appear they would do anything more dangerous than grumbling. All it took was for the regime to lay hands on de la Vega’s wife and children and explain to him they’d either join him in comfortable exile or in a shallow grave. That was enough to get the general to choose exile. And when de la Vega wilted, the whole popular revolt did as well.

And now it was in doubt whether there would even be an election.

Cabrillo had learned to disdain the whims and wishes of the public. Especially when those people didn’t have firearms. He knew Mao’s old maxim that power comes from the barrel of a gun.

The Guyanese did have guns, though. Guyana had the highest rate of gun ownership in the Caribbean. And the people they were set to conquering were hunters and farmers used to shooting their dinners.

That wasn’t the same as shooting people, though. Shooting people for the first time carried an injury to the soul profound enough to make many men hesitate, and that would give his troops an advantage.

He was training the 53^rd very roughly, and most of them were becoming hardened. At least to an extent. Cabrillo hadn’t adjusted upward his expectation that 60 percent of his men would perform in battle rather than melt away, but he did believe those 60 percent would acquit themselves quite well against what Guyanese resistance they would meet.

But at Liberty Point, it was different. Cabrillo watched the video of the American journalist Mike Holman who had done interviews of the capitalist exploiter Pierce Polk and his people there, and from those interviews it was clear that settlement would be well-defended by military veterans.

They’d have better troops than Cabrillo would. And maybe even more of them.

He didn’t agree with Xing that he had everything he needed to take the territory he was assigned. It might take a division to capture Liberty Point, not a brigade.

And further, the order from the 5^th Jungle Infantry Division headquarters in Tumeremo was to take the American town with as little structural damage as possible.