According to the boy’s account, at around six in the evening three SUVs came around the curve and into the hollow to cross the Ullucos River. The bodyguards were riding in the first and third vehicles, two Land Rover Discoverys, both silvery gray, or at least that’s what it looked like with the last rays of sunlight smacking him right in the eyes. The one in the middle, the biggest one, was an unmistakable black Hummer with level-six armor—a fact that would be established later—and windows tinted so dark that it seemed impossible for anyone inside to actually see out. The attackers were waiting in three different spots, arranged in a triangle. They’d planned to dynamite the little bridge, but something changed and they decided against it. Instead, they blocked the convoy’s path by laying the desiccated trunk of an old eucalyptus across the road, which proved effective, since when the SUVs found themselves in the middle of the hail of bullets, they were unable to retreat.
The drivers had good military training. When the first shots rang out and they realized they weren’t going to be able to escape around the next curve, they spread out in a V shape, protecting the Hummer and illuminating the area with their headlights, which worked for a while, since the tracer bullets just hit the chassis, shattered the lights, and pierced the tires. Even hemmed in, the men organized to repel the attack. Their first move was to get out of the vehicles and figure out where the enemy was located, but they soon realized they were surrounded. The heaviest fire seemed to be coming from the road itself, as if a nest of machine gunners were lurking a few meters ahead.
And the worst was still to come.
The boy watched two attackers pass close by the tree (a mango) he was perched in and felt a mix of fear and vertigo. They climbed up from the stream bank and positioned themselves on the rise, less than a hundred meters from the armored Hummer. They had a bazooka. They lay down in the grass, gesticulated, and moved their arms, as if they were using complicated calculations to work out the shot, but without making a sound. At last they decided. One of them got on his knees and rested the barrel on his shoulder. The other one, behind him, calculated the trajectory, paused a few seconds that the boy thought would never end, and fired. The Hummer flew backward, wiping out one of the men. It crashed back to earth and burst into flames. The artillerymen had time to calmly reload the bazooka and retake their position. The second shot blew up the righthand Landrover, proving its armor to be inferior. A second bodyguard was crushed, and flames took over part of his body.
The gunfire intensified.
From where the boy was hiding, the air was a fabric woven of sparks and flashes.
One bullet sailed through the night and entered the base of the skull of another of the men, possibly the youngest and most aggressive, who had grabbed a fire extinguisher. It was later learned that his name was Enciso Yepes. He was of average height with a powerful build, and he had close-cropped hair with a longer patch on top like a soccer player. On the left side of his chest was a tattoo that said, “God is my buddy, my homie, my key,” and on his right arm was one that said, “Estéphanny is Love and she is God and IHer.” The bullet pierced his brain and, from within, shattered the frontal bone at the level of his right eye. After killing him, it reemerged into the open air, which was saturated with smoke and gunfire, grazed a mudflap, and, changing trajectory, plunged into the trunk of a cedar tree fifty meters from the road.
If he had survived, Enciso Yepes would have been an invalid and unable to talk. He was thirty-five years old and had three young children with two different women. His bank account contained 1,087,000 pesos, but he had debts totaling 7,923,460. Life had not been stingy with him, but it was tremendously lopsided, since at the same moment that his soul was heading toward (we assume) purgatory, his beloved second wife, Estéphanny Gómez, thirty-one years old, born in the village of Dosquebradas, Risaralda, was sprawled naked on a heart-shaped bed at the Panorama Motel in Pereira, in the position known as doggy-style, with her hips hoisted up in a pyramid and her face buried in a flowery pillowcase, suffocating in rapturous grunts of pleasure. It would soon be discovered that Estéphanny was the shouty type, and among the things the people in the room next door heard that afternoon, the most memorable were phrases of the sort “Pound me, honey, whip me good!” or “Harder, Papi, give it to me!” or “It’s so good to fuck stoned, baby.” All of this in the company of a man who, to the best of my knowledge, was her brother-in-law, Anselmo Yepes.
Far from there, by the Ullucos River, the fighting grew even fiercer, and the men, sweaty and firelit, no longer looked like heroes. But they were holding out. From that keep of fuel and twisted metal, an intrepid group was still defending, and it appeared they had a lot of ammunition. They were well trained. They barely needed to look at each other to implement a strategy. The Hummer was on its side, but as the flames abated it was clear that the chassis remained intact. It was impossible to imagine that the occupants were alive, given the impact and the heat.
But alive they were.
A helicopter’s sudden arrival caught everyone off guard. It was a Hurricane 9.2, but that was learned afterward. From the air, via radar, the aircraft identified the origin points of the attack and destroyed them with its .52 caliber machine guns. The attackers, who’d been on the verge of victory, were stunned, unable to process what was happening. Then all hell broke loose. The guys with the bazooka raced toward the slope, heading down to the riverbank, but then realized that they could attack the helicopter and maybe bring it down. Those seconds of indecision were fatal. The one carrying the bazooka hoisted it to his shoulder and kneeled down, but as the helicopter’s spotlight swept toward him, he leaped to one side and almost ended up shooting in the opposite direction. Then the machine guns took the men down from above. First one, then two. The crisscrossing bullets, like in the third secret of Fátima, came out of the darkest night. One man dove into the water and hit his head on a rock. The machine guns must have found all the nests of attackers, because the gunfire suddenly ceased. Any survivors managed to flee; everything happened really fast.
Then the helicopter alighted next to the SUVs. The doors of the battered Hummer opened and the boy, from the tree, saw a man dressed all in black climb out along with two young women, one of them wearing just a swimsuit and inadequately covered with a towel. The three boarded the helicopter, which immediately lifted back into the air and disappeared into the night.
Then the bodyguards loaded the bodies into the ruined vehicles, collected the weapons, and headed toward San Andrés de Pisimbalá. A little while later a second group arrived in two huge utility trucks. They cleared away the eucalyptus trunk and meticulously gathered up the remnants of the battle until there was no sign remaining on the hillsides or roadway.
The boy waited another hour. He climbed down from the tree and walked along the shoulder, searching the ground, but they’d taken everything, from the ruined SUV chassis to every last shotgun cartridge. He didn’t find a single spent casing.