Watch for the Jaguar

Using sweaty, machine-gun prose, this no-frills blood and bullets action thriller by a much-decorated former army lieutenant colonel imagines an unholy alliance between the CIA and the Colombian Medell n drug cartel. John Henry Clay is a troubled veteran pilot, scraping along trying to find civilian jobs, who winds up in South America as a bodyguard for a wealthy woman. But he loses his gig and is broke in Chile until he runs into his old Vietnam flying buddy, ""the chief,"" whom Clay is shocked to discover is working the CIA's ""Big Hand"" operation, smuggling cocaine into the States using agency aircraft. Clay is offered a job with the chief, but he refuses, even through he realizes he will be marked for death for knowing too much. The chief gives him a pistol with a silencer and tells him that if he survives the night he can hop a ride on an embassy flight back to Panama the next morning. After killing two hired assassins, Clay makes his way to the airport only to learn that the chief has been killed. He strong-arms a CIA station chief in La Paz into confessing that a Panama-based agency man called Striker killed the chief because ""He blabbed to you and we can't have blabber-mouths in the agency."" Enraged, Clay kills the man and sets out to avenge his buddy's murder. Leaving a trail of dead Contra, Sandinista, CIA and Medell n thugs, he tracks Striker across the jungles of Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama. With his pliant girlfriend, Mary Beth, providing emotional support, Clay goes ""eye-for-an-eye"" with the bad guys on both sides of the border. Though Oglesby's prose is unmistakably, almost humorously, blunt and amateur, his tale flourishes a bloody but satisfying end. (Mar.)