Early in the morning, 5 a.m.
Near Camp K1, in the swamp area.
Song Heping had been crouching behind a rotting log for a full two hours already.
It was an annoying position.
But it was also the best launching point for an attack on Camp K1.
Selecting an attack position was a real science.
You had to consider the terrain and the enemy camp's patrol patterns and defensive placements.
Generally, one needed to enter the position in advance and then wait for the attack to commence.
This place was on the edge of a swamp just outside Camp K1.
As it was the rainy season, the area was all wet, with some parts deep enough to reach one's waist.
Last night, Song Heping had crawled here from two hundred meters away.
Crawling was always better than walking.
For one, it was less likely to be detected; for another, it was not easy to get stuck in the quagmire.
Currently, lying next to Song Heping was Grey Wolf, covered in mud, and he himself was plastered in mud too, all over his head and face, with only a pair of eyes rolling white.
But this was good; it blended them completely into the environment.
Mud, when you're waging war, is quite useful, though it does have a somewhat unfriendly odor, carrying a whiff of decaying animal carcasses.
Song Heping glanced at his watch.
It was about time.
He then looked at the sky, which was now a dim gray light, the right time to launch an attack.
The distant Camp K1 was still quiet, except for a few sentries dozing beside trees and a lookout in a simple watchtower, there was no sign of any living person.
When he arrived here at past one in the night, Song Heping had been observing ever since he entered the attack position, trying to identify the house where the hostage was hidden.
There were eight buildings in Camp K1, all wooden huts, very rudimentary.
After a long observation, he couldn't tell which house held the hostage.
It was a very helpless situation.
Actually, locating where the hostage was hidden wasn't too difficult.
The hostage would have to eat, and someone must bring food; at mealtime, there would certainly be custodial staff delivering food, and that would be the best time to judge.
Unfortunately, there was no time to wait for mealtime.
The difficulty of the operation would increase exponentially once everyone in the camp was awake at daylight.
So they had to estimate based on the location and where the guards were.
Unexpectedly, after a long watch, all the houses' defenses were the same.
No custodial staff in sight.
This left Song Heping puzzled.
He could hardly determine which house was the place where the hostage was held.
Such a situation was very fatal.
On his side, the assault team effectively had only four people — himself, Cook, Grey Wolf, Hunter.
If you talked about forming combat teams, at most they could split into two pairs.
This was already the minimum configuration for an attack; it was impossible to simultaneously strike multiple buildings, and the limit was to attack two at the same time.
If both choices were wrong, the entire operation could almost be declared a failure.
The custodial staff might either kill the hostage or use the hostage as a human shield; either scenario would put the operation in a desperate situation.
Luckily, Song Heping was fortunate.
Just when he was frustrated that he couldn't determine the hostage's location, a crying voice suddenly came from the camp, piercingly loud in the quiet night, like the wail of a ghost.
Then Song Heping and his team saw an armed combatant walk out of one of the huts, coming to the open space in the center of the camp and shouting at the ground, cursing something.
After cursing, he even took out his tool and urinated on the ground.
Only then did Song Heping realize that there were structures on the ground like wooden fences; at first sight, he had thought they were excess fences thrown there unwanted.
Not until this moment did he discover they were not discarded fences; they were the exits to dungeons!
With that, everything clicked into place.
Dungeons.
These were perfect places to hold hostages.
Sometimes it was safer to keep someone in a dungeon than in a house. No wonder there were no guards around the buildings; the nearby sentries were the actual guards. The area around the dungeon was flat pavement, clearly visible, where sentries could see, and the watchtower's lookout could also glimpse. Any noise, even if the people in the dungeon managed to break through the fence to escape, they would be killed by lookouts from the tower or the patrolling sentries on the ground.
"Shh-shh—"
Song Heping pressed the communication button twice.
Everyone heard the short bursts of communication static through their earpieces.
This was the signal for the operation to start.
In the distance, Queen adjusted her lying position, targeting the lookout on the watchtower through her scope.
Disaster Star and White Bear, who were acting as machine gunners in this operation, aimed their machine guns at the doors of the two largest huts.
Song Heping began to crawl slowly forward.
After he crawled out more than ten meters to a clump of weeds and stopped, Grey Wolf was the second to crawl out.
This was a tactical movement involving alternating cover and approaching the target.
Once the leading person reached the cover point and set up their rifle for support, the others followed.
Then Song Heping and Grey Wolf formed one group, the Cook and Hunter the other; the two groups alternated, slowly closing in.
The nearest sentry was sitting under a tree, dozing off there.
They were very confident about their camp's security.
The location was remote,
hidden in the jungle,
near the border with Ecuador.
Hardly anyone came this way.
Westward, the closest to their AUC territory was the government army, with an understanding between them not to attack each other.
Toward the northeast was the territory of ELN armed forces, but there was a substantial deployment of AUC armed forces there. The ELN couldn't penetrate the defense line to get here, and even if they broke through, Camp K1 would be notified in advance to evacuate personnel in the shortest time possible.
So in Colombia, whether it was the anti-government armed forces, the government army, or even the drug cartels, no one could easily affect others. The mutual hostility wasn't just a matter of a day or two.
This seemingly chaotic country actually seemed to operate by rules, just that the rules in play were entirely different from those of normal countries.
Smack—
The sentry under the tree suddenly slapped his neck hard.
Spreading his hand to look, it was a mosquito, leaving a hand smeared with blood.
"Damn mosquitoes!"
He wearily opened his eyes, saw the fresh blood in his hand, and couldn't help but curse.
Then he yawned, stretched, and subconsciously looked ahead.
The early morning mist clung to the jungle, and the treetops a few dozen meters away were still enshrouded in white mist; beyond, the distant mountains were a vast expanse of white.
Everything seemed very normal.
Suddenly, he thought he saw something lying on the low scrubland about thirty meters away.
Dark and indistinct, like a log.
No.
It seemed more like a crocodile.
In the nearby swamps, crocodiles could occasionally be seen.
Local people usually didn't eat crocodiles much because the region's produce was actually abundant, with various types of fish from the rivers more than enough. Crocodiles weren't inedible, but slaughtering them was simply too troublesome.
However, for crocodiles that dared to come near their camp, the sentries generally showed no mercy.
Camp K1 had neither walls nor barbed wire, so animals could easily intrude.
Upon sighting them, sentries would shoot them dead, then use the meat for a barbecue feast in the evening.
"Heh heh, bad luck for you..."
He rubbed his bleary eyes, stood up, picked up the AKM assault rifle hanging in front of him, switched off the safety and chambered a round…
When he was about twenty meters away, the sight before him grew clearer.
Just as he was about to raise his rifle's muzzle, the crocodile suddenly squatted up…
"It" actually had a pair of human-like eyes.
The sentry saw the other blink at him.
"Eh?"
Before the sentry could react, the "crocodile" with something resembling a poker in his hand spewed out a string of fire.
Pop pop—
The sentry fell to the ground, limbs spread, head shot twice, his life dispatched to the Netherworld.
As soon as Song Heping fired, the Cook also opened fire on another sentry.
With that, the massacre had begun.
Pop pop—
Pop pop—
Pop pop—
The homemade silencer's quality was average, and so was its silencing effect, but it didn't sound as harsh to the ears.
All of them were top-notch experts; aiming and pulling the trigger were done in one fluid motion, let alone when they were attacking the unsuspecting.
Several sentries in the camp didn't even know what was happening, while some who had an inkling of what was happening had just thought to resist when they were immediately slaughtered.
After shooting a few people, the observation post on the watchtower seemed to have realized what was going on and turned the gun toward Song Heping below.
Crack—
This time it wasn't the sound of a silencer; it was Queen who had acted.
She had been watching this sentry, who posed the biggest threat to the assault team. While the four-man group continuously attacked the ground personnel, she was prepared to provide fire support for the sentry at the high vantage point because there were many sentries in the camp and the ground team couldn't cover them all. She had to ensure that the four-man team wasn't attacked.
The bullet pierced the man's chest; although the caliber of the SVD sniper rifle was only 7.62mm, at a distance of 400 meters, tearing through an entire heart with a single shot was not a difficult task.
Blood sprayed out like a fountain, and the watchtower's floor soon couldn't hold all that blood, gradually dripping down through the cracks, as if raining blood.
Queen's gunshot completely shattered the silence,
The guards inside the buildings immediately exploded into action, and the entire Camp K1 came alive in an instant.
Shouts, alarm calls, and curses broke the tranquility of the jungle.