Editor’s Note: This is the eighth 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 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.

And Holman finds himself in the middle of the fray…

June 12, 2024, Tumeremo, Bolivar, Venezuela

“I should point out, General, that there were certainly elements missing which were not under my control.”

“We are aware, Coronel. Nevertheless…”

“Sir, if I may. We had no air defense capability at Las Claritas. This had been discussed for weeks prior to the invasion date but Division Command judged the enemy would have no air power and as such it was not provided.”

“The intelligence failure was not yours, that much is true…”

“And I should also point out that I voiced misgivings about launching our adventure without our attack jets from El Libertador.”

“But Coronel Cabrillo, when ordered to continue the launch, you disobeyed. That is why you are here at this tribunal. Orders must be followed.”

“I still have a brigade because I shut down the invasion and sent our helicopters away. General Velez and the 52nd Jungle Infantry Brigade have lost half their strength attempting to launch amid the Yanquis firing on their helicopters.”

“But they have nonetheless taken more than a dozen of their objectives in the south. And Coronel Fernandez and the 51st Brigade have achieved seven of their objectives in the northern sector. It is your failure to execute your orders which has cost us the tactical initiative.”

“Tactical initiative? The enemy knew not only that we were coming but when we were coming and how. I have lost only four of 24 helicopters and 44 of more than 5,000 men. Mine is the only combat-effective brigade in the division. Sirs, I should point out that the Yanqui Pierce Polk and his hired men are the only effective opposition we have and they are billeted in my sector. This was discussed in the briefings prior to the action.”

Cabrillo was torn between the strain of keeping his cool amid the struggle session Division Command was putting him through and not really caring if he was relieved of duty. What he knew was that he had done the right thing in shutting down the attack as soon as the enemy’s jets zoomed in and riddled four of his helicopters with 20-millimeter shells upon takeoff. It was clear that the enemy had them under surveillance, almost certainly with a drone, and the A-4AR jets were patrolling along the border with the ability to turn and blaze a path to their position as soon as the choppers were spotted taking off.

He’d had to act quickly. The four helicopters crashed to the earth in giant fireballs, which sent the men into a panic. Many who had boarded other helicopters for the short rides into Guyana jumped out and ran, creating a scene of utter chaos in the 53rd’s staging area, and Cabrillo knew that what would come next was the enemy jets strafing their position with those 20-millimeter cannons to take out all of their helicopters.

He made a split-second decision, ordering the chopper pilots to disgorge their troops and fly away to the west, and the enemy had not engaged them. Which saved his brigade to fight another day.

Cabrillo knew that it was a mistake for the Americans to show such mercy, but here, in Tumeremo, he was enduring the fat Venezuelan generals in charge of the Jungle Infantry Division attempting to make a bigger one.

Namely, firing him.

He’d reported the enemy action and notified Tumeremo that he was unable to fulfill his mission with neither air support nor air defense while his men were busy attempting to douse the fire from a crashed helicopter as the wind blew it dangerously close to the command trailer from which he was communicating via cell phone. And when he was ordered to fight anyway, he had simply said no.

“I will not meaninglessly sacrifice my men,” he said. “I will spend every one of them on a mission with a chance of success. This is no such mission. We will go when circumstances indicate it is possible to achieve our objectives.”

Carvajal was looking at him with a mixture of admiration and amazement, which he later explained by saying he had never seen an officer disobey an order openly and on principle before.

“Don’t get any ideas,” he told Carvajal. “You aren’t capable of what I’ve just done. You do as you’re told.”

Xing had disappeared, which Cabrillo figured was a blessing, but then he worried that their Chinese military liaison might have perished in one of the chopper crashes. But no, he turned up just before Cabrillo was summoned to Tumeremo to answer for his disobedience.

“It’s been nice knowing you,” he said. “For the record, you were correct. No air defense, no air support, no invasion.”

“Thanks for all your help,” Cabrillo snarked in response.

“You’re welcome. I’ll have you know I’ve gotten you a lot more supplies and equipment than the other brigades have. You should be grateful. And let them know about it in Tumeremo.”

But when Cabrillo made it to the 5th Jungle Infantry Division’s forward headquarters in that dingy little town an hour and a half away by jeep, he didn’t feel very grateful. He felt what he imagined his grandfather had felt when the Castros stashed him in those prisons.

Trouble.

In the northern and southern sectors, it was true, the Venezuelans had managed to land troops at their objectives. But losses — both from air attacks from the A-4AR’s and also from enemy surface-to-air missiles fired by villagers and others on the ground — had been catastrophic.

And discipline had broken down, as the men of the 51st and 52nd brigades who had landed at their objectives had engaged in horrific, barbaric abuse of those villagers. Which caused an even larger set of problems.

Especially in the ill-fated village of Port Kaituma in the north, ironically enough near to the site of the People’s Temple at Jonestown, where the locals had attempted to resist the 55 men who landed there. Someone on the roof of a restaurant had set up a South African Vektor SS-77 machine gun and unloaded some fairly accurate fire on a pair of the choppers which set down at the site, killing eight men before they’d even had a chance to set foot on land. But a rocket-propelled grenade fired from one of the other choppers had scattered the defenders on that roof, and when the Venezuelans hit the ground they killed every last man, woman and child in Port Kaituma, and even chased many of its 1,200-odd inhabitants into the jungle to murder them.

Making the Venezuelans more guilty of murder in that place than even the psychotic Jim Jones, who had murdered or induced to suicide some 909 of his followers at Jonestown seven miles away in 1978.

Similar massacres took place in Towakaima, Monkey Mountain, Isherton, and several other places. Worse, the enemy had installed cameras in most of the villages, so that when the Venezuelans had taken their revenge they shortly found the images of the slaughter broadcast to the entire world.

And that had created an international incident which led to countries all over the world cutting off trade and diplomatic ties to Venezuela. The only major countries sticking with normal relations with Venezuela were Russia and China, and Cabrillo, who as a Cuban didn’t particularly care but as an observer of geopolitics couldn’t help but notice, recognized this only cemented his employer’s country as a Chinese economic colony.

Plus Canada, which Cabrillo found entertaining, if not at all surprising.

He wondered if those massacres were a breakdown in discipline at all, or whether they were purposeful and strategic.

But things got even worse for the 51st and 52nd, because the Guyanese wasted no time in exacting their revenge by air against those responsible. The A-4AR’s returned with a vengeance to strafe the places the Venezuelans occupied, though conspicuously they did not have bombs.

Which was a saving grace. None of the places the 51st and 52nd captured were retaken, though both brigades were down to a collection of skeleton crews. The plans were to replenish their strength by bringing in colectivos and reinforcements from other infantry divisions, but both brigades themselves were now collections of understrength platoons strewn across parts of their assigned territories.

But Cabrillo knew that his objectives were largely far better defended. And without air support or air defense, it would be impossible to take any but the most tertiary of their objectives.

The division command was attempting to make him the scapegoat for the disaster that was the invasion to date. He was lucky, however; General Luis Montoya de Loyola, a fellow Cuban who had been his mentor and who served at Army General Command, had flown to his rescue.

Montoya de Loyola took over the meeting and proceeded to browbeat the division’s generals for their own incompetence. The shouting match that ensued resulted in Cabrillo getting a new lease on life in Las Claritas, if just barely.

“You are down to your last life, Manuel,” said his benefactor. “Reacquire your helicopters and go tonight with your men.”

“General, with no air support it is suicide.”

“Things are better than they seem, Manuel. Be of good cheer! And do not make a fool of me again.”

June 14, 2024, Liberty Point, Guyana

I guess I made it to Liberty Point at the best, and worst, possible time.

I did my interview with Ishgan, which was basically a forum for him to directly plead with the Deadhorse administration to send in the Marines before things started getting ugly, and then the next morning I hopped on a chopper that was headed down to Liberty Point from Sentinel Port Management’s facility. With me was a guy whom I’ll call Kurt. He had the look and sound of somebody who’d done some wet work for some agency or other.

“Are you heading down to get involved?” I asked him.

“I’ll do what I can,” he said. “Price is right, and so’s the cause.”

He didn’t have much more to say than that. I felt it would be rude to pry, and Kurt didn’t seem like a guy I should be rude to.

We touched down at the airfield close to one of the hangars and the chopper immediately took off again, heading quickly to the east. My old buddy Earl was waiting for me in a Cherokee. He was beckoning me from the driver’s seat.

“Hop in, quick!” he said.

“Hey,” I said, as I hustled my bags into the back and myself into the passenger seat. “What’s with all the rushing around?”

“Worried about an air strike,” he said as he gunned the engine. “And we expect they’re going to hit CPX any minute. I can’t believe they let you fly down here on a chopper.”

“I think the guy I came down with is a somebody.”

“Yeah, he is,” Earl said as we shot past the open airfield gate and up the road heading for the town. The 3-D printer factory, I saw, was surrounded by sandbags and there was a…

“Is that a SAM site?” I asked, gawking.

“Starstreak,” said Earl. “They got one last night, I understand.”

“Got one what?”

“Attack jet. I think it was one of those Su-30’s. I can’t really tell ‘em apart, and definitely not at night.”

“Wait, I thought you guys knocked their air force out day before yesterday.”

“It sounds like they lifted parts off the destroyed planes and got the other ones running,” said Earl. “I think I heard ‘em say last night after we made it in that the Vinnies had nine jets in the air.”

“After you made it in?”

“Got the whole population of Campbelltown evacuated here. It was a hell of a good operation, let me tell you. Just in the nick of time, too.”

“I’m way behind here, Earl. Can you tell it to me like I’m stupid?”

He gave me a quick smile, which turned into a grimace.

“OK. Yesterday the Vinnies invaded to our north and our south. You know about that, right? And you heard about the massacres at Port Kaituma and those other places.”

“Right. Yes.”

“Well, here in, what’s I guess, the middle, our jets busted ‘em just as the helos were taking off and they broke up the attack. The enemy actually got their choppers away, and Hal was worried they’d lead our guys into a missile trap so they didn’t pursue.”

“Right. I heard about that, too.”

“Then what you don’t know is that last night, they got their act together and came back. Got air cover from those nine, or maybe it was ten, zoomers — I heard a couple were these J-16 jets which are actually Chinese-made — and while we did get three of their planes either with a missile or with one of our pilots shooting one of them down, we also lost three jets. And in the air-fight, they managed to land choppers at a bunch of places. So we’ve definitely been invaded.”

“Ahh, damn. I’m sorry, Earl.”

“Yeah, well, they managed to put 500 or so troops down at Mahdia last night. When the word hit that they were coming, I called an immediate evacuation of Campbelltown. Had to. They’d be not three miles away and we didn’t have the resources to hold out.”

“That’s right. I forgot that you were the mayor over there.”

“Yeah, well, anyway, I got every last one of us out and Pierce has us sorted with a place to stay. So I’m now the head of the IM. I guess that’s my reward for bein’ a hero.”

“What’s the IM?”

“Indigenous militia. Which is a shitty name. Pierce wanted to call me the Grand Waica. I told him not until I’ve earned it.”

“Damn, Earl. You ever serve in a military?”

“Hell, no. But I hunt, and I know this jungle. For what we’re gonna do that’s enough.”

“Which is what?”

Earl pulled under the arch. We were at the Liberty Lodge. He stopped and looked at me.

“We’re gonna be the bogeymen these bastards dream about. Come to my country like this, and I’ll make you pay.”

I’d met Earl a couple of times before. He’d always seemed so nice. He definitely didn’t seem that way now.

“I hear you,” I said.

“Stay safe, Mike. I think your girl is in your suite with that Flip guy.”

And she was.

When I went in the door, Flip and PJ essentially mobbed me, fighting to blurt out all the latest scoop they were going to post to the website. Flip was damned proud of the fact that Pierce was letting him get all the footage from the cameras they had virtually everywhere, though he had to run each clip by a guy named Rivers Sutton, who was Hal’s security officer, before posting it.

“They don’t want to give away any tactical advantage,” he said, “but we’ve got imagery — good imagery — from all over.”

“What we should do,” said PJ, “is make a documentary about the invasion.”

I could tell that this was what she wanted to do when she grew up. And it struck me that here I was hooking up with my second photojournalist in a row.

Though clearly this was a trade up from Sarah Givens.

I said I was good with that idea, though it was contingent on surviving what was coming.

“Are we sitting ducks here?” I asked.

“Be hard to get at us,” said Flip. “This place is absolutely covered with MANPADs and the four Starstreak pods. I don’t think they have enough jets to spare trying to hit Liberty Point.”

“But Hal thinks they’re going to try to take out the airfield next,” said PJ. “They’re going to try to starve us out.”

“Don’t like the sound of that.”

“We should get to the bunker,” Flip said. “The meeting’s gonna start in twenty minutes.”

He and PJ hurriedly gathered up their gear, which made me pick up my computer bag, and then Flip led the way to the elevator. He punched a button and soon we were down in the garage in front of a golf cart.

“You wanna ride shotgun?” PJ asked, and handed me … not a shotgun, but something a bit more interesting.

“What is this, an M4A1?” I asked, noting the grenade launcher under the barrel.

“Yup,” said Flip. And I looked at PJ, who was settling into a back seat which faced behind the cart. She had an M4A1 rifle as well.

“Try not to shoot yourself,” she said.

“It’s really nice to see you, sweetie,” I said to PJ as Flip drove us out of the garage and into the street heading northwest toward the Potaro. She blew me a kiss and told me to watch the sky.

Just then I heard a whoosh, and I could see a contrail forming behind what looked like a fast-moving missile heading to the west.

“Oh, shit,” Flip said. “Here they come.”

And in the distance I could see three jets on the way in. Another whoosh, and then another. Then two more.

“Those are our missiles?”

“Yeah,” said Flip. He parked the golf cart. “We’re here.”

PJ had her camera out and she was filming the sky to the west. Two of the planes had, it appeared, begun to bug out. The other was banking, attempting to evade that first missile. It was flying low over the jungle.

A second missile exploded as it hit a wing on that plane. The Su-30 — I could see that it was a Su-30 — rolled and then dived into the trees, where it erupted into a large fireball.

“Splash you, motherfucker,” said Flip.

“OK, let’s get inside,” said PJ.

The building was sort of an all-purpose facility that was going to house the police and fire departments and administrative center of Liberty Point. In the basement was a bunker. We were passed through a phalanx of a dozen guys, all of whom looked like they’d just come from the battle of Fallujah, and into a war room filled with TV and computer screens. The full breadth of the security camera coverage that Pierce and his guys had laid on was glaringly apparent now.

“Jesus,” I said, gawking at the wall-to-wall imagery.

“Hey, Mike,” I could hear Pierce as he motioned for us to join him in a glass conference room to my right. “In here.”

He had Hal with him, plus a half-dozen other guys I didn’t know, plus my old travel buddy Roman Jefferson.

And Earl.

They were sitting around the table looking at a satellite image on the far wall.

“…and so they’re going to make the police station their headquarters and I bet that’s where the Cuban is,” one of the strangers was saying. “Should we take the chance at hitting that building?”

“I’m worried about this rumor,” said Earl.

“What’s the rumor, Earl?” Pierce asked.

“That they stashed the kids on the second floor.”

“It’s not worth the risk just to take out the Cuban,” said Hal.

Pierce motioned for me to grab a seat next to him. I did.

“Who’s the Cuban?” I asked him quietly.

“Cabrillo,” said Pierce. “He’s the colonel in charge of the 53^rd Jungle Infantry Brigade. He’s their Norman Schwarzkopf.”

“So you take him out, and, what?”

“That’s just it. They’ll send somebody else. Hal thinks this guy is better than the others they have, though.”

“…not a problem,” one of the guys I didn’t know was saying. “We get in close and we just do it.”

“They’ve got to have 500 troopers, though,” said Roman. “And now that they’ve established an airhead at the Mahdia airfield they’re going to just pour people in.”

“This is what we need to break out the Predator for,” Hal said to Pierce. “That airfield has to go.”

“Use it or lose it,” Pierce was saying.

“Yeah. Durandal.”

“I’ll make the call.”

A few seconds later, Pierce was hanging up his cell after barking a few cryptic words to someone.

“What’s going on?” I asked him.

“You remember the Durandal bombs from the first Gulf War?” he asked me.

“Not really.”

“They’re bombs for busting up runways so they can’t get fixed any time soon. We need to take out Mahdia so they can’t land planes on that runway. The Vinnies can carry in way, way more troops with planes than in those little Chinese helicopters of theirs, and we can’t have them landing a whole damn army just up the road.”

“Exactly how bad is this?” I asked.

Hal jumped in. “Mr. Holman, the enemy is in possession of Mahdia, with the bulk of its population currently hostage. Adults are penned into a collection camp surrounded with razor wire, children we believe are human shields in the police station. They’re now organizing in at least company strength and they’re going to build and build until they can make a ground assault on Liberty Point.”

“Shit,” I said. “Guess that’s better than them dropping in out of the sky here.”

“We’ve got too much air defense to try to take us from the air,” Pierce said. “They could come from upriver, though that won’t be easy, but the main problem is Mahdia. These guys are jungle infantry, meaning they train to fight in those woods.”

I suddenly felt like I really didn’t want to be here. I’d covered a couple of armed conflicts before; I’d been to Afghanistan, and I’d seen a little bit of the Colombians’ fight against the FARC rebels. But this seemed a whole lot more personal.

“Look,” Roman was saying, “the most important thing is to pin the enemy down where he is and deny him freedom of movement. This isn’t complicated. They’re still getting organized. I imagine they haven’t even started patrols yet. So let’s do this the smart way.”

Hal smiled at him.

“Whom shall I send?” he asked. “And who will go for us?”

Roman smiled back. “Here am I. Send me!”

The book of Isaiah had made it to the Guyanese war.

“Take two guys with you,” Hal said. “You’re there to disrupt and lay chaos, and after you’ve kicked over the anthill, you know which way to lead them.”

“Through Candyland,” said Roman.

“Candyland,” echoed one of the guys. Roman pointed to him.

“Where’s Kurt?” Roman asked.

“I think he’s still at the airfield,” I said. “The guy who flew in with me?”

“Yeah. Fine. Come on, Charlie, let’s gear up.”

Charlie, the guy Roman had pointed to, shot up from his seat and followed Roman out. Flip plopped down in Charlie’s vacant chair.

“So what’s next?” asked Pierce.

Hal scowled.

“Hit the runway this evening, pray the Predator comes back intact, pray your shipment of munitions gets in here, pray the river is protected, pray we get some international help.”

“That’s a lot of praying,” I said. “Are you concerned you can’t hold out here?”

“We’ll hold out,” said Hal. “My concern is that we’re Stalingrad. They’re landing their people in all of their other objectives, and they’re going to be in a position to hold the locals hostage.”

“What about Micobie?” I asked. That little village between Liberty Point and Mahdia had been the only other indigenous settlement I’d seen.

“Got them out, too,” said Earl. “Really, around here it’s Mahdia.”

“How many prisoners are we talking about?” I asked.

“About twenty-one hundred,” said Hal.

Most of the rest of the day was spent in that basement watching the security footage — which included camera shots of three men riding west on motorcycles through a barely-discernible trail through the jungle. There had been a road running parallel to the Potaro west to Mahdia, but when the enemy came, Pierce told me, they’d blown a few trees so they’d fall and block it.

He’d also told me that they’d ringed all of the areas around those fallen trees with Claymore mines, so if the Vinnies tried to clear them they’d take some heavy losses.

So Roman, Charlie and Kurt were on their way to Mahdia, or parts near it, where they were setting up as snipers. And at the airfield they were preparing the one Predator drone Liberty Point had available with an old French Durandal runway-buster bomb that the Argentinians had donated to the cause. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Liberty Point had been fully mobilized for its defense and were standing guard all along those high wooden walls and on rooftops watching the skies.

Hal told me they had more than 50 shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, not counting the four Starstreak missile emplacements. I’d already seen what those could do.

It seemed like Liberty Point was about as safe a place as you could be, considering it was on the front line of a war.

There was a monitor high on the wall to my left, and Pierce pointed it out to me.

“That’s our runway cam in Mahdia,” he said.

“You have a runway cam there.”

“Yeah.”

“Well done.”

“Thank old Earl over there. He’s the one who set it up.”

Earl just nodded and smiled.

“OK,” I said, “is this where we’re going to see a show?”

“Should be less than a minute now,” said Hal. “Can we get that image on the main screen?”

A freckly-faced kid sitting at one of the war room’s computer terminals nodded, moved his mouse, and the runway cam occupied the large screen in the middle of the display.

“Oh, would you look at that,” said one of the guys I didn’t know.

“Some kind of timing, isn’t it?” said Hal.

I could make out in the fading light from the runway camera that there was a plane on its way in from the west. It looked like a big C-130 Hercules plane. I didn’t think a big monster like that could land on a little runway like Mahdia had, but it looked like its pilot disagreed with me.

Except just as the Hercules dipped down over the trees on its final approach, the camera caught a flash of light and a fast-rising smoke cloud over the runway. It was too late for the Hercules pilot to pull up, and the plane touched down just in time to run into the sizable crater the bomb had made on the asphalt.

The Hercules bounced, and then skidded to its right. It crashed into a stand of trees and broke apart in a fiery mess. I felt a wave of nausea pass over me when I could see bodies being thrown from the ruined airframe; these guys might have been the enemy, but a worse death than this was hard to imagine.

“It’s good,” said Hal. “Mission accomplished.”

I looked at PJ, who was sitting next to me. She stared back.

“I need to get you out of here,” I said.

“No way,” came the response. “This is home. I’m defending it.”