"Rising Phoenix is an addictive, action-packed spy thriller ..." - BestThrillers.com

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CHAPTER 2
Ankoko Island, Venezuela

A dark green Mil Mi-17 helicopter lumbered overhead, flying just above the treetops as it crisscrossed the length of the disputed island.
John Phoenix noted the time and date of the helicopter’s movements in his waterproof notebook as he swatted a mosquito buzzing his ear. Despite the heavy application of insect repellent, it didn’t seem to keep the flying pests away.
“Fuck me,” Phoenix muttered as he lay in the jungle near the end of the airstrip that the Venezuelan military had cleared in 1966, right after Guyana had received independence from the United Kingdom. Despite the many protests of the Guyanese government, the Venezuelans hadn’t relinquished their new outpost. In fact, Venezuela claimed that over half of Guyana belonged to them in a long-standing territorial dispute that harkened back to colonial days.
Over the years, Venezuela had done little but lodge protests in international courts. Once ExxonMobil discovered major oil deposits off the coast of Guyana in 2015, dictator Michel Zarate had upped his rhetoric against his neighbor.
First, there were detainments of Guyanese fishing vessels by Venezuelan navy ships in Guyana’s Economic Exclusive Zone, and then Zarate had issued a decree creating a “Strategic Zone for the Development of the Atlantic Facade” in an area that Guyana claimed encompassed its territorial waters. The most recent aggression by Venezuela was the flight of Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jets over the village of Eteringbang on the Cuyuní River just downstream from Ankoko Island.
And hence the reason John Phoenix was lying in the dirt, sweating his ass off in the jungle. He’d been to worse places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where the sand got into everything, including the crack of one’s ass. Phoenix didn’t mind the jungle, maybe because his mother was Colombian, and even in the brutal heat of Texas summers, he’d never seen her break a sweat.
The Mi-17 made another pass over the airstrip and then came in for a landing, spreading dust and debris across the barren airstrip. Usually, when the military helicopters set down, soldiers burst forth, fleeing the eggbeater like their lives were in jeopardy, but no one exited this bird. Phoenix suspected the occupants were conducting an aerial survey of the airstrip.
Phoenix fitted a pair of binoculars to his eyes and gazed down the length of the runway at the helicopter. Through the helos’s front windows, Phoenix could see the pilots wore military green flight suits and white helmets, their dark visors down. The binoculars also contained a laser rangefinder, displaying the distance to the bird in the right lens, while the left lens housed a digital camera. Resting his finger on the shutter button, Phoenix documented the visitors.
Once the rotors had stopped turning on the Russian-made helicopter and the pilots had shut the turbine engines down, the door to the rear compartment slid open. Four men stepped out wearing khaki cargo pants and matching bush shirts with rolled-down sleeves. Phoenix pegged them for Russians based on their fair skin, rounded noses, and dirty blond hair. They had the ramrod posture of men who’d served in the military, and if Phoenix had to guess, they were probably on Ankoko to act as military advisors to the Venezuelan Army.
Driving out of the trees, a Tiuna UR-53AR50, a Venezuelan-made light utility vehicle similar to an American Humvee, pulled to a stop by the knot of newcomers. A man wearing the uniform of a general stepped out. He shook hands with the civilians, who were already appraising the airstrip and the surrounding environs. Phoenix wished he had a parabolic mic to eavesdrop on their conversation.
Eventually, the men all got into the Tiuana and drove away, leaving the pilots to walk, helmets in hand, to the small cluster of buildings that comprised the outpost.
Phoenix would have dearly loved to learn exactly who the newcomers were and what they were doing at the base, but he couldn’t stick around. At least he had pictures of the entire entourage to send back to Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. And he’d have to write a report. One thing he’d learned at The Farm while undertaking the Clandestine Service Training program to become a case officer was that he would spend more time drafting reports than actually conducting field exercises, which was another reason he enjoyed being in Guyana. There was little oversight of his activities, and he only wrote reports once a week. Most of the time, he was in his hide, watching, waiting, and gathering intelligence.
He had to leave tonight, though. His supplies were running low, and he had a scheduled rendezvous with a fishing boat that would take him downstream to the town of Eteringbang. While it was still light enough to see, Phoenix checked his hide to ensure he hadn’t left any trash or other litter behind that would warn others that he’d been spying on the base.
As Phoenix backed out of his hide, the suspected Russians reappeared and began unloading equipment from the helicopter. Their big yellow cases contained survey equipment, which they quickly set up.
Phoenix speculated on the rumors he’d heard on his way to Eteringbang. After Guyana had dispatched advisors to investigate whether Venezuela was about to broaden and lengthen the Ankoko Island airstrip, they claimed the rumors weren’t true, but the CIA had suspected otherwise, and now surveyors were actively working the area.
After snapping off more photos, Phoenix wiggled backward from his hide and brushed leaves over the spot where he’d lain. Then, he quietly made his way to the river.
Squatting by the bank, Phoenix gritted his teeth. His idea of a fun time wasn’t swimming through caiman-infested waters to wait for the boat to reach his pickup point, but he didn’t want to hang around the water’s edge either. He checked his watch, then cinched his waterproof rucksack tighter on his shoulders. With the survey crew working the runway, he had little choice but to exit the area lest they beat through the bush and find him.
Slipping on a pair of diving fins designed to go over his combat boots, Phoenix waded into the water and began kicking toward a distant island in the center of the river. It was more like a sandbar that trees had sprouted on, but it was better than treading water. The Cuyuní River was plagued with things that could kill a man in a heartbeat—caimans, giant snakes, swarms of piranhas, the occasional bull shark that had snuck in from the ocean, and of course the deadliest of all predators: man, and the many diseases infesting the shits they frequently took in the river.
The sound of an outboard reached Phoenix’s ears as he swam. Before long, a nineteen-foot wooden boat appeared, being pushed by a seventy-five-horsepower outboard. The boat’s owner had festively painted it with hues of bright green, blue, and orange. A lone man sat at the tiller and angled the bow toward Phoenix’s position in the water.
Seconds later, the boat coasted to a stop, and Axel, the owner, reached out a hand to the CIA case officer. Phoenix recognized his contact, Axel, and swam toward the boat. Axel helped Phoenix clamor aboard and then returned to the tiller, swinging the boat in a wide arc before heading back downstream.
“Slow down as we pass the ferry,” Phoenix ordered.
Axel dropped their speed to a mere idle as they approached the town of Ancón on the northern bank of the Cuyuní. The town was just a collection of huts in a long row, but at the eastern end, there was a ferry to ship people and supplies across the river to the military base on Ankoko.
The Venezuelans had a major advantage over the Guyanese. They had cut a network of roads through the dense jungle to bring in gear and supplies. A single dirt track led from San Martin just downstream out to join Route 10, a major paved road that stretched from the Brazilian border in the south to the Caribbean Sea in the north.
As the boat drifted with the current, Phoenix swatted at another mosquito that buzzed his ear. Despite the arrival of the helicopter at the airstrip, there was no enhanced guard presence at the ferry terminal. Axel cast a line, pretending to be fishing as the Venezuelan troops would quickly run off anyone who stopped along the river near their crossing.
Phoenix motioned for Axel to head out before someone took notice of them. The Guyanese quickly reeled in his line and restarted the outboard. He increased their speed, cutting through the silt-stained water, leaving a wide, creamy wake behind them.
Three miles downstream, the Cuyuní joined the Wenamu River, and another couple of miles through the twisting confluence, they came to Eteringbang. The tiny village wasn’t much more than a single street beside the river, lined with brothels, nightclubs, and restaurants, with several convenience stores and a hardware supply. Most of the buildings and homes sat on stilts, but in the not-too-distant past, a flood had ravaged the city and destroyed many of the properties. However, the hearty settlers and natives had rebuilt, using whatever scraps of wood and tin they could find.
Living in the tiny outpost in what the Guyanese government called the “Hinterland” wasn’t easy. With Georgetown an hour’s flight away and no roads through the Essequibo Region, supplies were limited to what the ferries brought upriver. The primary occupation of the outpost was illegal mining in the mineral-rich jungle, and with no bank in town, the currency of Eteringbang had shifted to gold.
Axel steered his boat up to the concrete quay beside a long row of other such boats that contained plastic oil barrels, improvising a fleet of floating oil trucks that served the miners and the surrounding community.
Phoenix shouldered his pack, having tucked everything neatly away, and bumped fists with his native friend who knew Phoenix was a CIA officer, as Axel had worked with the CIA to keep tabs on the Venezuelan base on Ankoko for years.
“Not a blade of grass,” Axel said.
The Guyanese had taken the statement from the song of the same name written by Dave Martins, an iconic Guyanese composer and comedian. Martins maintained that the song was purely about the Guyanese people’s deep affection for Guyana and everything Guyanese, but others argued he had written it with the border threat in mind. Despite the disagreements over the song’s origins, the Guyanese people sang the song as passionately as they did their national anthem.
Axel’s statement meant that Venezuela couldn’t take any more of Guyana’s land beyond what they already possessed, but Phoenix knew that if Michel Zarate desired to conquer his neighbor, the forty-six-hundred-member strong Guyana Defence Force would be powerless to stop him.
On his way to his hotel, Phoenix waved to one of the police officers who occasionally patrolled the town. The officer had dressed casually in flip-flops and shorts with a machine gun slung over his bare chest. A large gold chain glistened around his neck, and Phoenix thought it was probably the result of a bribe someone had paid the cop.
Phoenix’s hotel, another ramshackle building along the river that had been divided into sleeping rooms, also operated as a brothel. Many of the young women were Venezuelans tricked into believing they were signing up for a better life, but in reality, they had what they called “survival sex,” earning half a gram of gold for each male they serviced—barely enough for room and board for a single woman, yet most sex workers had at least one child to provide for. It sickened and saddened Phoenix to see the levels of depravity these women had to stoop to in order to provide for themselves.
As he climbed the stairs to the upper deck, he tried not to think about the impoverished people he met or the plight of those around him. He yawned, wondering if sleeping in the bush was more comfortable than sleeping on the thin mattress in his room. But it didn’t matter. The Army had taught him how to sleep just about anywhere.
A hooker named Bambi called out to him, propositioning Phoenix just like she did every time she saw him.
Waving her off, Phoenix continued to his room. As a precaution for this mission, he’d brought only what he could fit into his rucksack to Eteringbang and had carried everything with him into the bush. He was thankful he’d left nothing behind as he saw the door to his room was standing wide open. Phoenix entered, half expecting a hooker and her John to be doing it on his bed, but thankfully, he found no one inside.
Not me, Phoenix mused, another John.
Phoenix had learned early in his life that his first name often had negative connotations, and he’d usually dealt with those situations with flying fists. People often referred to a person who could be easily taken advantage of as a “John,” but John Phoenix was no dummy, and he was not a man many could take advantage of unless he allowed it. And there were few people in the world he would allow to use him. His employer was usually the one who bent him over the table and made him their plaything. He was the CIA’s “John.”
After closing the door to his room, Phoenix tossed his pack onto the bed and pulled out his satellite phone. Having turned it off several days ago, Phoenix figured he’d better check if his handler, Leslie Connelly—assistant chief of the Latin American Division and the only person with the number to his phone—had left him any messages.
Moving back outside, Phoenix let the phone connect to the satellites orbiting high overhead. He walked along the street, checking the phone as he stepped up to a counter attached to the side of a house that acted as a tavern. Through the open window, he ordered a beer. By the time he had his cold Banks DIH Caribbean Lager in hand, the phone was pinging irritatingly with text and voicemail messages.
Phoenix sipped his beer and opened the messaging app. He wished he’d left the phone off. A crisis had developed in Caracas, and Connelly wanted him to get off his ass and get moving.
Walking down the street toward a quiet corner, Phoenix sipped his beer and listened to the escalating voicemails, starting from “Where are you, Bowie?” to “If you don’t answer the fucking phone, I’m going to kill you.”
Being from Texas, Phoenix had picked up the codename Bowie after the knife maker and frontiersman who had perished so infamously at the Alamo. When his old boss at Ground Branch, Chris Miller, had bestowed it on Phoenix, the operator hadn’t liked it at first, but the name had stuck, and he even used the first name of Jim as a cover alias.
Phoenix dialed the number for Connelly, then lifted the phone to his ear. He took another swallow of beer as the phone rang on the other end.
Connelly answered with, “This is Nightingale. Say ident.”
Phoenix gave his credentials to verify his identity to his handler and then asked. “What’s so important that I’m not watching a team of Russians survey the Ankoko airport?”
Unfazed by his revelation, Connelly said, “Get to the Eteringbang airport. I have a plane waiting to fly you to Georgetown, and I have a team locked and loaded.”
“A team of Ground Branch shooters?” he asked.
“No. They’re contractors. I’ll explain everything when you get here.”
“What’s the mission?” he asked, wanting to have at least some idea of what Connelly was throwing him into.
Without hesitation, his handler said, “Bowie, you’re going into VZ to retrieve our asset.”