Editor’s Note: This is the seventh 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.
While things have begun to spiral downward back home in America, Holman and Polk find themselves feverishly working to stop a threatened Venezuelan invasion of Guyana which could destroy everything Polk has built in the jungle…
May 30, 2024: Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe
A week later, Pierce had turned me into a diplomat, or something like it.
And I had turned Pauline into a cameraman — er, camerawoman.
She said she’d been a shutterbug as a kid and she was reading up on how the latest cameras — and in particular, the Canon EOS R6 — incorporated video.
“All I know is still photography,” she said. “I guess I have to learn.”
“Is this your next career?” I asked her. “You trying to break into the lucrative world of press photography?”
“I’m just trying not to be bored,” she said. “But I did think about maybe doing a blog or something, and photography could maybe be a part of that.”
So I bought her a Canon EOS R6. Believe it or not, Amazon delivered it to the package station Pierce set up in Georgetown in two days and she had it in three.
And then Pauline was emailing us — we gave her a Holman Media e-mail address, because why not? — still photos, video, you name it. And for an amateur she actually wasn’t bad. Colby even told her he wanted to use some of her stuff on the website, which was doing Guyana coverage every day now. A guy named Flip Hardison, who had been a correspondent for Army Times in Afghanistan and then went to work for Sentinel Security, ultimately answering the Liberty Point call earlier in the spring, had sought me out on my last trip down and talked his way onto our staff.
It turned out Hardison was pretty good. He was a ham radio enthusiast, and he brought all his gear down when he moved from San Diego. He also spoke Spanish, so he was talking with a bunch of the ham radio people in Venezuela — and you wouldn’t think folks in a repressive country like that would be very chatty, but it turned out they were. So Hardison was getting all kinds of interesting intel about the Vinnies. (READ Episode Six: Threats and Betrayals: King of the Jungle, Episode 6)
Most of it we were publishing at the website. Some we weren’t.
But Pauline — or PJ, as she was now calling herself (the J was for Joan, which was her middle name), was snapping away with her camera and within a couple of days we had a Liberty Point bureau up and running.
You wouldn’t think that would generate a lot of traffic for the site but, again, you’d be wrong. People were starting to become fascinated with Guyana, particularly on the Right, because of what Pierce was building down there and because the word was getting out about how that country was booming with oil wealth. Deadhorse kept going on TV and promising that America would be getting away from oil, and one blue state after another kept passing EV mandates even though sales of those things were dropping through the floor, and yet U.S. oil production kept setting record after record. Glenn Beck did a show from Georgetown on what he called the “economic miracle” going on in Guyana, and Ishgan couldn’t have put on a bigger smile for the Blaze TV cameras.
Everybody in the States seemed to think that (1) it was a bluff that the Vinnies were coming, and (2) if they did, we’d send the Fourth Fleet and some Marines down to wipe the floor with them. But when the Chinese sent a half-dozen attack ships through the Panama Canal and docked them at the naval base at Puerto Cabello, there was a palpable change.
Which led to a hastily-organized confab in Guadeloupe where all the players showed up.
The State Department sent the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, a woman named Fawn Bass-Weaver. She was Yale-educated and half-white, half-black, but wore flowing dashiki dresses everywhere she went.
There were representatives of all the CARICOM countries — that’s the multilateral organization all the Caribbean nations are part of, including Guyana. The British sent somebody, so did the Brazilians, the Colombians, the Argentines and, of course, the Chinese.
All to kick around what to do about the dispute over Essequibo.
And Pierce got Ishgan to include me in the Guyanese delegation.
My job was to cover the confab, but more than that I had a couple of contacts they wanted me to make.
The most important one was with Sergio Roffler-Esquivel, the Argentine deputy foreign minister. Serge, as he insisted I call him, was a friend and ally of Miguel Sandoval, the new president of Argentina who was shaking that place up in a major way. Sandoval had fired half the Argentinian government and shuttered a third of the agencies upon taking office, and he was deregulating and tax-cutting his way into legendary status just a few months on the job.
Serge said Sandoval was “keenly interested” in the success of Liberty Point. He also said “it is the position of my government that any Venezuelan encroachment on Guyanese territory should be seen as an attack on the free world by the forces of communist tyranny.”
This was at dinner the night before the confab got started. We didn’t go anywhere fancy; we were at a seafood place on the water in Pointe-a-Pitre; I had on jeans and a Hawaiian shirt and PJ was wearing a beach dress she’d found at a funky little boutique in town. Plus her Tretorns; at that point I wasn’t sure the woman was ever going to wear actual women’s shoes again.
I had given Serge a letter from Pierce at the beginning of our meeting. I knew what was in it. It was a letter of intent to invest $10 billion into modernization of the ports of Buenos Aires, Quequen and Santa Fe, plus a commitment to provide satellite internet in Argentina over the next five years at cost plus five percent.
And Serge gave me a letter in return. In it — Pierce told me to read it to make sure what they’d talked about was in writing — was a commitment to deliver eight Lockheed Martin A-4AR Fightinghawk jets from the nation’s inventory, with a minimum of two in working order, and a model TR-1700 submarine, the Santa Cruz, to the Republic of Guyana.
“We will deliver the items in that letter within 10 days,” Serge said. “The work of fitting them for what action may be needed, that is for your friend and his friends.”
“Understood,” I said, “and I believe there is much reason for happy friendship between Argentina and Guyana.”
“And the United States as well,” Serge said, “once you have done as we are doing and chased the zurdos de mierda from your government.”
That was a reference to Sandoval’s term for communists. The best translation for it, I guess, is shitlibs.
The Argentines were serious. And PJ couldn’t stop laughing later when I translated for her what Serge had said.
The other backchannel thing they had me do was to meet with Samantha Peale, the British foreign ministry rep at the confab, and deliver her the same kind of letter. Pierce was committing to make investments in ports and aerospace things, and in return the Brits were dumping, for a reasonable price, a nice little cache of weaponry on the Guyanese, including a whole bunch of small arms, a pair of Harrier GR.9 fighter jets which had been sitting in a hangar in Somerset and a half-dozen Alvis Stormer mobile surface-to-air missile platforms equipped with Starstreak high velocity missiles.
On the sly, Pierce was doing a hell of a job cobbling together a well-provisioned little military. In the open, Sentinel was recruiting like crazy — putting ads on national TV for military and law enforcement veterans to become contractors for the company in Guyana and paying $50,000 signing bonuses, plus ten grand a month for a six-month hitch. They were flying people into Georgetown by the hundreds, and they were getting, from what Hal Gibson had told me, some really skilled operators across a number of needed disciplines.
Of course, the hope was that none of this was needed and all these guys would end up either going home or else they’d stick around Guyana and be butchers, bakers, candlestick makers and whatever else, because even with the threat the Vinnies would come the economy was blowing up in that country. I read a story about a kid still in college at the University of Guyana who was making a fortune launching a homefinder app, sort of a Guyanese Zillow-slash-AirBnB, and supplementing that by getting places turned around for move-in. And when the kid was interviewed about his business, he said his inspiration was…
I don’t even need to tell you who. You already know.
Everybody hoped that something could be worked out at that confab. But it was a disaster.
All that needed to happen was for the State Department to commit to the defense of Guyana. But Bass-Weaver wouldn’t do it. She mouthed a bunch of platitudes but otherwise said exactly nothing. And the Chinese and Venezuelans took over that summit and put the Americans, Brits, Guyanese and everyone else on the defensive by trashing the treaty of 1899 as a rigged farce and an injustice done to the Venezuelan people.
On the last day of the confab, of course, the Guyanese announced the results of the referendum they’d held in Essequibo the day before. It turned out that 88 percent of the people there voted to remain in Guyana, and there was something like 85 percent turnout. That Chinese bribe money of those villagers didn’t mean a damn thing. They wanted no part of Venezuela.
Andujar challenged the results, saying that because Liberty Point was included and those people weren’t Guyanese (despite the fact most of them had been granted citizenship by the government), the results were skewed. Ishgan responded by noting that 83 percent of everybody else had voted to remain in Guyana.
Guyana asked for a UN resolution condemning a Venezuelan invasion. That went nowhere.
It was crazy. It was like America barely existed, and nobody cared if we did. The center-right media was screaming that if we were going to spend a hundred billion on Ukraine all the way across the world the least we could do was show some interest in something in our backyard.
But asked about the situation, Deadhorse said that Guyana was already part of Venezuela. His press people went into turbodrive walking that one back. Then Pamela Farris, the vice president, went on TV and gave a speech about how Guyana was a country next door to Venezuela, which was also a country, and across the country the American people threw up their hands.
Another national poll came out with Deadhorse’s approval notching down to 25 percent. And Trumbull was beating him by six points in a head-to-head race, including a nine-point lead in Pennsylvania and a 12-point lead in Georgia.
But illegal immigration, crime, and corruption were the big-mover issues. Not our crisis in South America.
I expected the neocons to jump aboard the Save Guyana train. Not really. It was like the political class in America was simply out of gas. They went from not taking it seriously to being scared of getting into a war with China on our side of the world.
Or something like that.
While I was in Guadeloupe, ANN booked me to do a prime-time debate segment with Will Shue-Geldfarb, the publisher of the neoconservative webzine The Weekly Tureen and a chronic cable news talking head, especially on channels like MSNBC where he was trotted out as a pet conservative.
I hated doing it, because I hated being on the air with Shue-Geldfarb.
A couple of years back I’d interviewed him on the podcast about some of the insane things he was saying on Twitter, demanding that we send troops to invade Russia in retaliation for Putin’s attacks on Ukraine, and when I challenged him on that topic he blew up like the Hindenburg. That segment got a ton of traffic, but it was an embarrassment. It felt like mudwrestling. But naturally, the cable news clowns had to get in on some of that action, and I got booked for another debate with him on Newsmax which was similarly a shitshow.
This was the third time, and it was no better.
Shue-Geldfarb — the story goes that he got his name because his mom was married to Geldfarb but was openly having an affair with Shue when he was conceived, and so the meme went that he’d been a cuck since birth — started the segment off by accusing me of being a shill for Pierce Polk, and the fact that we were doing all that coverage of the Essequibo crisis was checkbook journalism on my part.
I knew that was coming, and I was ready for it.
“Will, it’s interesting that you’re calling somebody else a shill. I expect we’ll circle back to that question a little later, but I’d like to keep this discussion on topic. It’s really strange, because based on your long history of demanding that America send troops to faraway places where there is zero evidence that our interests were well-served by fighting and dying there I would think you’d have a little Guyanese flag on those social media accounts you spend your whole day on. After all, Guyana isn’t a failed state but instead a friendly, free country that we have some very big, and very rapidly growing, economic ties to. Not to mention there are tens of thousands of Americans living down there who aren’t Pierce Polk. Why would you not be interested in preserving our sphere of influence?”
“Because there have to be limits. We aren’t the world’s policeman!”
“Why would Guyana be outside those limits and Iraq and Ukraine would be inside? Didn’t you demand an invasion of Sri Lanka last year? I’m struggling to understand how that would be a place our interests involve but a place where Exoil and Enveron and Sentinel are employing thousands of our countrymen who could be in grave danger wouldn’t be. You can call me a shill all you want, but that doesn’t answer the question.”
“There’s no question to answer, because first of all Venezuela is not going to invade Guyana. And second, if they do invade they won’t succeed. Third, they…”
“Wait, why won’t they succeed?”
“Because Venezuela’s armed forces aren’t capable of invading another country.”
“If that’s the case, then all our administration needs to do is state that a Venezuelan invasion of Guyana isn’t acceptable and will be dealt with rudely and decisively. What’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong with it is it’s bullying, and if we’ve learned anything it’s that the world is tired of the United States throwing our weight around. But of course, this whole thing is a perfect example of the latent racism of Mike Holman coming to the forefront. You’re assuming that the brown Venezuelans are going to rape and pillage their neighbors, and…”
“OK, here you go again. You tried to call me a racist on my podcast a couple of years ago, and Colby Igboizwe, who runs our website and is a hell of a lot better American than you are, wrote a piece that absolutely demolished you on that subject. I don’t think you have any black people working with you, and certainly not anybody as sharp or prominent as Colby is. So that’s a pretty big fail right there. And…”
“You’re dancing around the topic, Holman.”
“No, I’m coming around to it. What I was about to say was that you’re so ignorant about this subject that you don’t realize Guyana’s population is mostly Indian, as in South Asian Indian, and most of the rest of their people are black. And we’re down here because the Guyanese face the prospect of being invaded by a country in Venezuela which is mostly white people. They’re descendants of Spaniards, who are Europeans, don’t you know. So the race angle here is beyond idiotic and I don’t even know how you came up with that.”
“Gentlemen,” Kristina Walker, the host, chimed in, “we only have another couple of minutes left. Mr. Holman, what do you have to say to the accusation that this is simply about your relationship with Pierce Polk and not about America’s interests?” (READ Episode Five: An Attack of Snakes: King of the Jungle, Episode 5)
“I’m glad you asked that, Kristina, because what I can say is that the folks I’ve met in Guyana are some of the nicest people anywhere in the world, and they don’t deserve to get run over by a communist dictatorship. It used to be that America was the country who would stand up for folks like them. I might not have gotten involved but for my relationship with Pierce, whom I’ve known since college, but now it’s about the folks. Pierce could lose ten billion dollars down there in Guyana and still get on a private jet and go anywhere in the world without hurting at all, but they don’t have such resources.”
“He doesn’t care about the Guyanians,” said Shue-Geldfarb.
“Yeah? Well, Will, I managed to do a little research about what you care about, and it seems like you need to offer up a little disclosure of your own. Like for example, how much does that fat consulting contract you’ve got with Dragon Harvest, Limited, which is a Chinese Communist Party front company buying up farmland all over America, put in your wallet? Seems like that’s a hell of a good explanation for why the neocon warmonger who wants our troops everywhere but on our southern border is all of a sudden willing to throw the Guyanese people under the bus. Your Chinese pals must be paying top dollar for that change of heart, I bet.”
“There he is again,” Shue-Geldfarb was screeching. “Racist!”
Walker was cutting in, trying to close the segment before the hard break. She didn’t quite manage it.
The whole thing was depressing. What made it bearable was the nights back at the Maison Victoire, the decent little hotel where we were staying, with PJ.
And that was fun and torture at the same time, because we’d made a deal that we wouldn’t fool around. “Nothing past second base until we know we mean it,” she’d said, and I’d agreed. But by the second night there both of us had agreed we completely regretted that decision.
And yet we stuck to it.
PJ was laughing her ass off at Shue-Geldfarb after that debate, by the way. “Oh my God, what a tool,” she said. “How did he get on TV?”
“Because he says whatever shit he’s told to,” I responded. “You don’t think the people who actually know things are the ones they put on TV over and over again, do you?”
“Not really,” she said. “But you were awesome, honey. I almost think that performance was worth a trip to third base.”
“Yeah? That’s encouraging.”
“I said almost, Mike.”
“Right. OK.”
I was doing podcasts every day from Guadeloupe, interviewing some of the people at that confab, plus I did a Zoom call interview with Paul Vallely who caused a stir when he wondered if we were even a country anymore, and then suggested that Ron DeSantis ought to deploy the Florida State Guard down to Guyana.
I had a constitutional lawyer on the podcast the next day who said he was pretty sure that wasn’t legal.
PJ was behind that camera the whole time, and when she wasn’t, she was fussing over how my hair looked, straightening the tie she was making me wear, and so on. I told her it was hard to imagine her as a Secret Service agent now; she said she was having more fun doing this than she ever had with a gun on her hip.
I couldn’t tell, and didn’t want to ask, whether it was the de-stressing of not having somebody’s life in her hands, or if it was just me. I was hoping it wasn’t the former.
But when the confab ended, I had to fly back to Atlanta. I asked her to come back with me.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m not ready to face all that.”
So she went back to Liberty Point.
And when I got home, I read Hardison’s story on the website that was blowing up about the Chinese People’s Liberation Army general who’d flown in to hold talks with Madiera and the Venezuelan military brass in Caracas.
June 10, 2024: Georgetown, Guyana
After all of the work that had been done in an attempt to stop it, the invasion happened anyway.
Which is not to say that it went smoothly for the Vinnies. It didn’t.
I found out all of this either after the fact, or from the dispatches that my guy Flip Hardison was sending back from Liberty Point. Let me tell you something; if the Pulitzer Prize meant anything anymore, if it was for actual journalism, then Hardison was as hands-down a winner as you could get for what he was putting together every day once this thing got going.
The thing that was obvious from the very beginning was that the Vinnies weren’t going to be able to stage the invasion the way, say, the Russians went into Ukraine, or the way the U.S. Army went into Iraq. In other words, going in with armored vehicles and troops in trucks was, simply, out.
There were no roads through that jungle, remember? The only road went south into Brazil and then back north into Guyana. And the Brazilians hadn’t just said no to the Vinnies passing troops through their country, they’d deployed a sizable force of their own army to enforce that preference.
So the Vinnies had to drop guys from airplanes and helicopters into Essequibo, and they had to do amphibious landings from the Essequibo River after running a naval flotilla east along the Atlantic coast and then up the mouth of the river.
This was a logistical operation that would have been challenging for a first-rate military. And no, that’s not what the Venezuelans had.
Of course, a third-rate military is better than no military. What the Guyanese had was essentially enough to defend their capital and not much more. And that meant that Hal Gibson was, for all practical purposes, the Supreme Commander of the military defense of Essequibo.
Hal had maybe five thousand people, which was not what you’d think would be close to enough. The Venezuelan Army’s Fifth Jungle Infantry Division, augmented by Bolivian, Cuban, Ecuadoran, Nicaraguan and, we were later told, Iranian troops, plus some Chinese military advisors, had close to twenty thousand.
And Hal knew the Vinnies’ plan was to supplement the Jungle Infantry with other regular army troops, plus thousands of colectivos — thugs on motorcycles from the barrios of the Venezuelan cities whose ordinary jobs were to ride around and terrorize regular folks.
But to get the Jungle Infantry in to take down all of these villages and other installations — the mines, quarries, road junctions and whatever else they needed to occupy — they’d have to do it with helicopters or maybe transport planes they’d parachute out of.
And that meant doing a good bit of softening up their targets with airstrikes. The Vinnies knew that Pierce had invested pretty heavily in surface-to-air missiles, and the way you’d typically go about suppressing SAMs is to roll in with fighter-bombers and take those out, at least, if you didn’t have a big arsenal of surface-to-surface missiles, which nobody expected the Vinnies would have. Establish complete air superiority and then your choppers can ferry troops to all of your targets of opportunity, and now your invasion is going to proceed in an orderly fashion.
And a defenseless little country like Guyana is then going to sue for the best peace deal they can get.
But Hal had ideas which differed from the Vinnies having air superiority.
And it didn’t take him long to have a pretty good plan to insure his ideas, rather than those of Madiera’s thugs, were the ones which became reality.
You wouldn’t believe this, but the entire offensive capability of the Venezuelan Air Force came out of one place. El Libertador Air Base is located a little south of the city of Maracay, about 50 miles west of Caracas. At El Libertador, all of the Vinnies’ attack jets — on paper, 18 F-16’s and 21 Su-30MKV Flankers, but in reality a lot less than that — and their pilots and ground crew were housed.
And El Libertador was, frankly, not the most secure place. It certainly wasn’t up to the standard it needed to be to hold up to the machinations of Hal Gibson and the Sentinel Security guys, who were some of the most devious, cruel bad-asses I’ve ever met.
They noticed that El Libertador had a grand total of one runway. They noticed that the base’s fuel supply was set up in four very large, and very above-ground, fuel tanks. They also noticed that of the 17 attack jets that were in working order, 15 of them were parked on the tarmac under a row of canvas canopies, something like what the rednecks in the Atlanta suburbs would call a Carolina carport.
Gibson had told me in a private conversation during one of my sitdowns with him in May that the Vinnies weren’t going to enjoy the early stages of their invasion. He didn’t say how, but I was convinced he was right anyway. Hal didn’t strike me as a bullshit artist, and his military record was a good indication that he knew what he was talking about when it came to killing people and breaking things.
What he didn’t tell me, but I found out later, was that he’d already put a man on the inside at El Libertador.
Chris Rodrigue wasn’t Venezuelan. He was actually a Cajun from St. Martinville, Louisiana. Rodrigue was one of those little guys who had boundless energy and would talk your ear off. He’d been a military policeman in Kuwait during the Iraq War; never saw action, and then he ended up transferring out of the MP’s and landing in the maintenance crew fixing Black Hawk helicopters.
Then after he got out of the service, Rodrigue became an aviation mechanic. He’d worked on all kinds of airframes. Including some time he spent down in Chile as a civilian contractor for the Chilean air force.
So he knew Spanish. And he knew the F-16.
On top of all that Rodrigue even looked Hispanic. And what’s more, he looked an awful lot like Jose Javier Jimenez, who had been a mechanic at El Libertador six years before who’d picked up and left for Miami and a job with a civilian aviation service company.
So thanks to a full briefing from Senor Jimenez, who was happy to tell stories of his time at El Libertador to the Sentinel Security guys who dropped him a nice check for the effort, Chris Rodrigue showed up at El Libertador with a cock-and-bull story about how he’d missed the old country and wanted to do his patriotic duty for the Bolivarian Republic and wouldn’t he like his old job back.
None of the folks there really remembered him, but he was in the files and he was rated as an A-plus mechanic, and his story seemed to check out, so he got hired.
That was back in April. In May, Senor Jimenez’ boss got himself laid up in the hospital after some unknown SOB t-boned him on a busy street. And that meant Jose Javier Jimenez found himself promoted as the guy who would be under those Carolina carports inspecting all the planes.
And the day before the balloon was supposed to go up, Senor Jimenez made a point of inspecting all of the landing gear of those 15 attack jets under the canopies, plus the two in the hangars with the rest of the planes which weren’t service-ready thanks to various missing parts they’d had to cannibal off them to keep the others running. Jimenez blew a gasket while he was in the hangars, because El Libertador was supposed to take delivery of several truckloads of parts that were to have been shipped in from China; it turned out that there was a Chinese part supplier that didn’t just handle parts for the Su-30’s — after all, the Chinese were now making Su-30’s after the Russians had licensed the design to them — but also was knocking off parts for F-16’s as well.
There’s what free trade with China, the world’s greatest practitioner of industrial espionage, can do for you.
Anyway, those parts had been on a ship which had docked at the port of Puerto Cabello, about an hour down Highway 1 from the base, and somehow they’d gone missing. It was a source of consternation for the brass at El Libertador that their parts should be desaparecido, and a frantic investigation had turned up the explanation that somehow there had been a mixup in the computer routing software. The trucks that were supposed to be carrying those aviation parts which would have made the other 22 jets airworthy arrived at the base with pallets full of diapers, ping pong balls and ceramic iguanas, and as best anybody could tell the containers carrying the base’s intended cargo were put on trucks headed for Cumana.
Before anybody could figure any of this out, of course, those trucks had offloaded at the container port in Maiquetia, just a few miles north of the capital, and the containers were put on a ship bound for Spain which made a stop in Georgetown and just happened to offload them there.
But the Venezuelans at the base never found out about that. All they knew was that Jose Javier Jimenez was red hot about not getting his malditas piezas de avión, especially so close to the action.
So they all stayed far, far away from the en fuego head mechanic, and nobody said a thing when he attached thick rings bearing inspection badges around the front landing gear of all 17 of those attack jets. If anyone had said anything, he would have told them those rings, made out of what looked like bungee cords with a small plastic tag on them, were standard practice.
They didn’t ask, and that answer would have satisfied them if they had. After all, Senor Jimenez had been a miracle-maker in getting the 17 planes airworthy which did have the parts, and that was thought to be more than enough to fulfill the mission over Guayana Esequiba.
What nobody knew was that those inspection badges were actually blasting caps and the bungee cords on those rings were made of Primacord, and when somebody sent a signal by cell phone all 15 of the attack jets still on the tarmac had their front landing gear blown off.
The two that were on air patrol over the Atlantic didn’t. Not until they tried to land at the airport in Maiquetia, which is the main airport servicing Caracas, and somebody managed to get that cell signal to those two blasting caps and blew off the landing gear of both of those jets just as they were about to touch the ground. The twin little explosions led to a pair of larger ones as the Su-30’s crashed on the runway, and that knocked out air service to the Venezuelan capital for a couple of hours.
Not only was there chaos on the tarmac in El Liberatador, just a few minutes later those four above-ground fuel tanks at the base went up in a giant ball of flame. It seems somebody managed to shoot an AGM-114 Hellfire missile from an MQ-1 Predator drone into one of the tanks and crashed the Predator into another, and the explosions set half the base ablaze.
You’d think that an air base would be more than capable of detecting a relative slow-mover like a Predator. But there were some reversals. Specifically, the power to the air traffic control tower had gone out, which was a product of a truck bomb that had been delivered to the only power substation servicing the base, located right off the main road in. Nobody ever found remains of a driver picking through the wreckage of the Class 8 truck that had barreled into the substation and then lit off the fertilizer bomb in the back of the cab, and it was soon clear why; the truck was a drone in its own right, a prototype of a driverless vehicle manufactured by a company called Aurora in Texas.
And that was the end of the air cover for the first day of the Venezuelan invasion of Guyana.
Chris Rodrigue had slipped away from the base just before the carnage began and made his way to the airport in Maracay, where there was a little Cessna plane waiting to take him to Port of Spain. From there he caught a puddle-jumper to Georgetown and then hopped in a Land Rover for a ride to Linden, about 60 miles to the south, where Pierce had turned the little airstrip for whatever rickety old planes would land there into an air base.
They had a couple of old Harrier jump-jets at Linden, plus eight A-4AR Fightinghawk attack planes, which were the same airframe as an F-16; the A-4AR’s were made by Lockheed Martin just like the F-16’s were. The makeshift base at Linden also had a whole shitload of newly-arrived Chinese-marked containers full of parts to make airworthy the six semi-junked A-4AR’s the Argentines had sent along.
Plus about three dozen Air Force and Navy veteran pilots and ground crew guys that Pierce’s people had recruited, living in a little village of double-wide trailers that had been hastily put up a couple of weeks earlier.
Linden wasn’t Miramar or Nellis. But it turned out that in this war it would be the center of air power. The Vinnies didn’t realize how badly they’d been had until they started launching helicopters full of Fifth Jungle Infantry Division troopers out of the bases they’d set up at Tumaremo, Las Claritas and Santa Elena de Uairen, only to find those choppers torn to shreds shortly after liftoff thanks to the M61 Vulcan 20-millimeter cannons the marauding Guyanese A-4AR jets had been newly refitted with.
It got very ugly, very fast, on that first day. No sooner had Madiera gone on national TV in Venezuela to declare that “efforts to recover the long-lost Guayana Esequiba have now begun,” that the power went down all over Caracas thanks to what appeared to be a cyberattack against the grid in the Capitol District.
As I said, this was all stuff I found out about either from what I was told later or from what Hardison was doing from Liberty Point. And what he was doing, as I said, was amazing.
Of course, Pierce helped him out a lot. Because there were cameras recording all of it, and Pierce made sure Hardison was getting the footage in real time. Dash-cam footage from the driverless truck, which caught the drone strike on those fuel tanks and then the explosion at the power substation, cockpit camera footage of those choppers getting torn to pieces by the A-4AR’s, footage from the El Libertador security cameras (that they’d hacked, of course) showing the explosions under those jets on the tarmac.
And footage of the runway wrecks at Maiquetia.
He had all of it.
What he didn’t publish, at least not then, was the fact that the Sentinel Security guys had set up cameras everywhere in the jungle along a double perimeter outside of Liberty Point and around Mahdia as well. Actually, the guy who did most of the camera setups was Earl Roberts, the tochao from Campbelltown, the village next door to Mahdia, who had been my driver that time. Earl told them “give me that bag of cameras. You guys have more important work to do.”
And he just tromped around in the jungle setting the cameras up perfectly on those trees, so that before long they had a full ground-level view of the entire jungle.
Then Hal’s guys went in and set up anti-personnel mines in strategic places that could be detonated with a smartphone app.
While all this was going on I was back in the States, suddenly dealing with all kinds of crap. Karen had demanded that I sit for an interview with the two FBI agents Smythe and Muhammad, who proceeded to pepper me with questions not about PJ and her story but Pierce.
They wanted me to turn informant on Pierce. Karen had to stop me from telling them to do something anatomically impossible. I got up and left the meeting, which was not what Karen was hoping for but she didn’t yell at me for it.
“They don’t have anything on you,” she told me. “I expect this will go away, but they’re squeezing the tube from the bottom for sure. They want him.”
“I’m not severing my ties with Pierce, Karen. I know that’s what’s coming next out of your mouth.”
“Nah. This is out of control. My politics and yours might be totally different, but the feds are crooked and somebody has to call them out for what they’re doing. Keep fighting.”
Then there was the domestic news, which just got weirder and weirder.
There had been a standoff on the border in Texas, the third one in the past four months, between the Border Patrol and the Texas National Guard over the former’s attempts to take down blockades the latter had set up to keep migrants from coming across.
This was the biggest issue in the country, and it had been all year. The Deadhorse administration had every big-city mayor in America screaming about the flood of migrants into their cities, and there had been the whiff of chaos in the air. In Chicago, the police had barely managed to squelch a race riot on the city’s south side after an illegal from Honduras had run over a black kid while driving drunk, and Illinois’ governor had brought in the Illinois National Guard to help to keep the peace.
And when the Albuquerque Police raided the warehouse of a local taco-stand chain and uncovered a large cache of weapons — we’re talking several thousand AK-47’s, hand grenades and RPG platforms — the issue of the border turned into a galvanizing one.
Texas, with the help of some 25 other states sending National Guard and State Guard personnel, had largely halted the flood of migrants at the Rio Grande. But all that did was turn New Mexico and Arizona into war zones. I flew to Tucson to interview the sheriff of Pima County, who was a Democrat but who together with his counterparts in Yuma, Cochise, and Santa Cruz Counties was openly defying both the governor and the Deadhorse administration by turning away people at the border with a huge army of volunteers funded by a nonprofit some grocery store magnate had set up.
Arizona’s governor was threatening to call out the National Guard against the sheriffs, but she wasn’t doing it because there was a whole lot of discussion about whether the state legislature had the votes to impeach and remove her.
None of that was happening in New Mexico, but the polls were increasingly ugly for Deadhorse there. Our Sentinel investigations partners had come up with a bunch of dirt on the governor, who had made an uncanny investment return with an off-Wall Street international hedge fund called Pan American Partners.
We had a couple of reporters digging on Pan American Partners and it turned out it had extensive real estate investments both stateside and throughout Latin America, including a significant amount of the huge skyscrapers going up in Monterrey.
But Pan American Partners wasn’t just collecting rent. It was a front for a pair of the cartels — specifically the Sinaloa cartel and Cartel del Noreste. And it had a stake in a whole host of other companies.
Among them was Plum Solar Industries, which operated a couple of large-scale solar plants in the New Mexico desert that delivered a disappointing amount of energy, and a network of dealerships in solar panels for residential housing.
Plum Solar was also delivering an uncanny investment return for lots of political figures who were disclosing their income on state and federal disclosure forms.
And that included Alexis Mallorca, the Secretary of Homeland Security. Mallorca had survived an impeachment attempt earlier in the year, and the House cranked up another on June 1 after our report on the Pan American Partners and Plum Solar Industries connections hit the internet.
You would have thought all of this would have had people in the streets. Not really. The mainstream legacy corporate press barely noticed, other than to run a few “Republicans Pounce” stories on how members of Congress and conservative media were making a big deal out of those reports.
They didn’t even flinch when Fox News broke the story quoting an unnamed cartel boss who said that the migrant invasion was a front for a Chinese infiltration of the southern border.
Just … nothing. There was a daily debate over whether Travis Kelce would pop the question to Taylor Swift before the Chiefs’ preseason camp began.
And there was a real conversation about Deadhorse, who was rapidly getting worse. In a speech to the SEIU convention in Las Vegas, he addressed the crowd by welcoming them to Miami, and then — because of a teleprompter malfunction — he proceeded to ad-lib a speech for eight minutes and forty-two seconds before the music went up and he was escorted, protesting “you can’t do this to me, I’m a United States Senator!” off the stage.
That eight minutes and forty-two seconds was probably the worst stretch of video in American politics since the Kennedy assassination. He set off no less than three international incidents and earned the condemnation of eleven different left-leaning advocacy groups in addition to every conservative organization in America by the end of the day. There was something to offend and alarm everyone in that eight minutes and forty-two seconds. His handlers didn’t know what to do.
Either that, or they were instructed, many thought by the Omobba machine, to let it happen.
A poll on June 4 actually had Deadhorse behind Paddy Moynihan, Jr., the longtime liberal gadfly who was running as an independent. And the media stories were full of nonstop speculation about how this was the end for him and he’d have to come off the ticket.
But at a Rose Garden press conference on June 7, Deadhorse issued an angry denial that he was leaving the ticket. “Why would I go anywhere?” he barked. “The other guy is going to jail. They’re all going to jail.”
Moynihan publicly blew a gasket and demanded to know by what charge he would be convicted and imprisoned, going so far as to set up a press avail outside the White House to demand answers.
And since he didn’t have a security clearance he actually did get arrested and was given a ticket, which was a piece of PR brilliance on his part.
The House voted on a non-binding resolution demanding the invocation of the 25th Amendment against Deadhorse. It fell three votes short, even with four Democrats voting “yes.” The Speaker announced he was throwing six Republicans off all their committee assignments in retaliation for not voting the way the leadership wanted.
Politics had turned into a circus. The American people were whipsawed back and forth over the advancing decline of the public sector. It was impossible to cover the mounting idiocy and instability.
I had a lot going on, but in the meantime I’d already made a commitment to head down to Georgetown to interview Ishgan, and to meet PJ, whom I’d convinced to make a trip up from Liberty Point to join me at the Grand Coastal Hotel.
