A Day Capturing Maduro, 2026

"No one wants to go through what we went through"

Based upon a post by Mike Netter.

January 3, 2026, Fuerte Tiuna Main Gate Radar Station, Caracas

Sergeant Eduardo Vega was halfway through his third cup of coffee when every screen in the radar station flickered to black. He slapped the console. Nothing. The backup systems—offline. The hardwired landlines—dead static. In the seventeen years he’d served at this post, he had never witnessed a simultaneous failure of all systems. He stepped outside to smoke, to clear his head, and that’s when he saw them: small dark shapes against the stars, dozens of them, moving in perfect formation toward the interior. They made no sound. By the time he ran back inside to find the emergency radio, the drones had already passed beyond visual range, their electronic warfare payloads having silently lobotomized every detection system within 200 kilometers.

Safe House Compound, Fuerte Tiuna

Private First Class Ramon Gutierrez stood at the sandbagged checkpoint 200 meters from the safe house, watching the access road. The compound within the larger base was a fortress within a fortress—triple razor wire, overlapping fields of fire, armored vehicles at every corner. His radio had gone silent four minutes ago, but radios failed sometimes. It was the drones that made him understand. They materialized overhead without warning: hundreds of small angular shapes forming a grid that blotted out the stars above the military base. Then the helicopters emerged from behind the vehicle depot—matte-black phantoms, impossibly quiet. Ropes dropped. Men descended. Ramon had trained his whole career for an attack that would come from outside the base. No one had prepared him for enemies that could simply appear inside it.

Guard Barracks, Safe House Compound, Fuerte Tiuna

Sergeant Major Carlos Espinoza commanded 200 men specifically assigned to protect the safe house—the most loyal soldiers in Venezuela, handpicked by Maduro himself. They were billeted in the barracks adjacent to the converted officers’ quarters, ready to respond to any threat. When the acoustic weapon discharged, it hit like a physical wall—a subsonic frequency that bypassed ears and went straight to the nervous system. Espinoza watched his elite guards crumple as if their strings had been cut: some vomiting blood, others clutching their skulls, their specialized training meaningless against technology they couldn’t comprehend. He himself was on his knees, blood streaming from both nostrils, when he saw the operators advance past the sandbag walls. They moved in pairs, their rifles making soft spitting sounds. In ninety seconds, the elite barracks became a morgue.

Safe House Interior, Ground Floor Corridor

Colonel Marcus Webb led the entry team through the reinforced service door—three shaped charges had been required to breach the steel frame. The safe house’s interior was military utilitarian: concrete walls, exposed conduit, harsh fluorescent lighting now flickering on backup power. The targeting AI in Webb’s visor highlighted threats in red—guards stumbling through corridors, disoriented from the acoustic barrage. Webb’s rifle practically aimed itself: the smart-optic tracked eye movement, and the weapon discharged when his gaze settled on center mass. Two guards at the communications room. Three more at the stairwell. The concrete corridors amplified each suppressed shot into a flat, final slap. Webb’s helmet display showed the target’s location: second floor, northwest corner bedroom, 15 meters up and 20 meters ahead.

Safe House Interior, Second Floor Hallway

Maduro was awake now, his bulk wedged against the heavy steel bedroom door, pistol in one trembling hand. The gunfire below had stopped—too quickly, far too quickly for his 200-man guard force. Through the reinforced door, he could hear boots on the concrete stairwell, methodical and unhurried. He keyed his radio: static. The landline: dead. His satellite phone: no signal. The generals had promised him this bunker was impervious, that the base’s 10,000 troops would respond to any incursion. But no alarm had sounded. No reinforcements were coming. He looked at his pistol—seven rounds in the magazine. Against whatever was climbing those stairs, it might as well be empty. He thought about the families of dissidents he had ordered disappeared. He wondered if this was what they felt in their final moments.

Safe House Rooftop, Communications Mast

Torres and Honecker had a critical mission: disable the safe house’s hardened communications array before any distress signal could reach the broader base. The rooftop was cluttered with military equipment—satellite dishes, encrypted radio masts, backup generators—all designed to keep Maduro connected to his loyalists across the country. Torres found the drone swarm already holding position overhead, eighteen units hovering in a protective perimeter. He approached the primary antenna cluster and placed shaped charges with surgical precision. Through the reinforced skylights below, he could see muzzle flashes as Webb’s team cleared the upper floor. Honecker checked his tablet: 11 minutes since insertion, 247 hostiles neutralized, zero friendly casualties. The charges detonated in sequence, and the safe house’s last electronic lifeline severed.

Safe House Compound Courtyard, Extraction Point

They marched Maduro through the compound he had believed impregnable—past the bodies of his elite guards, past the sandbag walls that had offered no protection, past the razor wire that had kept nothing out. His bare feet slapped against the gravel. In the courtyard between the barracks and the safe house, two Ghost Hawks waited with rotors turning, their downdraft stirring dust and spent shell casings. Sanchez saw the full scope of the destruction: his handpicked protectors scattered like broken dolls across the military grounds, the communications mast twisted and smoking, armored vehicles he’d positioned for defense sitting useless and unmanned. Beyond the compound perimeter, the larger Fuerte Tiuna base remained dark and silent—10,000 troops who would wake to find their supreme commander simply gone.

Airborne, Venezuelan Airspace, Heading North

Inside the Ghost Hawk, Maduro sat between two operators, his hands bound in front of him. Through the open door, he watched Fuerte Tiuna—the military stronghold where he had felt invincible—shrink to a dark rectangle punctuated by emergency lights finally beginning to flash. The base was waking up, far too late. Alarms he couldn’t hear were surely sounding. Troops were scrambling to checkpoints that no longer mattered. Colonel Webb removed his helmet and let the humid Venezuelan air hit his face. Twenty-one minutes. Start to finish. They had penetrated the country’s largest military installation, eliminated a 400-man guard force, and extracted the most wanted man in South America—all without a single casualty. The sun broke the horizon as they crossed the coast, and Webb allowed himself one small thought: mission complete.

Based upon a post by Mike Netter.

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