by Tom Clancy
Now they lay side by side, her head on his shoulder, tears dripping slowly from her eyes in the silence. A fine woman, this one. Even dying young, her husband had been a lucky man to have a woman who knew that silence could be the greatest passion of all. He watched the clock on the end table. Ten minutes of silence before he spoke.
“Thank you, Moira ... I didn’t know ... it’s been.” He cleared his throat. “This is the first time since ... since ...” Actually it had been a week since the last one, which had cost him thirty thousand pesos. A young one, a skilled one. But—
The woman’s strength surprised him. He was barely able to take his next breath, so powerful was her embrace. Part of what had once been his conscience told him that he ought to be ashamed, but the greater part reported that he’d given more than he’d taken. This was better than purchased sex. There were feelings, after all, that money couldn’t buy; it was a thought both reassuring and annoying to Cortez, and one which amplified his sense of shame. Again he rationalized that there would be no shame without her powerful embrace, and the embrace would not have come unless he had pleased her greatly.
He reached behind himself to the other end table and got his cigarettes.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” Moira Wolfe told him.
He smiled. “I know. I must quit. But after what you have done to me,” he said with a twinkle in his eye, “I must gather myself.” Silence.
“Madre de Dios, ” he said after another minute.
“What’s the matter?”
Another mischievous smile. “Here I have given myself to you, and I hardly know who you are!”
“What do you want to know?”
A chuckle. A shrug. “Nothing important—I mean, what could be more important than what you have already done?” A kiss. A caress. More silence. He stubbed out the cigarette at the halfway point to show that her opinion was important to him. “I am not good at this.”
“Really?” It was her turn to chuckle, his turn to blush.
“It is different, Moira. I—when I was a young man, it was understood that when—it was understood that there was no importance, but ... now I am grown, and I cannot be so ...” Embarrassment. “If you permit it, I wish to know about you, Moira. I come to Washington frequently, and I wish ... I am tired of the loneliness. I am tired of ... I wish to know you,” he said with conviction. Then, tentatively, haltingly, hopeful but afraid, “If you permit it.”
She kissed his cheek gently. “I permit it.”
Instead of his own powerful hug, Cortez let his body go slack with relief not wholly feigned. More silence before he spoke again.
“You should know about me. I am wealthy. My business is machine tools and auto parts. I have two factories, one in Costa Rica, the other in Venezuela. The business is complicated and—not dangerous, but ... it is complicated dealing with the big assemblers. I have two younger brothers also in the business. So ... what work do you do?”
“Well, I’m an executive secretary. I’ve been doing that kind of work for twenty years.”
“Oh? I have one myself.”
“And you must chase her around the office ...”
“Consuela is old enough to be my mother. She worked for my father. Is that how it is in America? Does your boss chase you?” A hint of jealous outrage.
Another chuckle. “Not exactly. I work for Emil Jacobs. He’s the Director of the FBI.”
“I do not know the name.” A lie. “The FBI, that is your federales, this I know. And you are the chief secretary for them all, then?”
“Not exactly. Mainly my job is to keep Mr. Jacobs organized. You wouldn’t believe his schedule—all the meetings and conferences to keep straight. It’s like being a juggler.”
“Yes, it is that way with Consuela. Without her to watch over me ...” Cortez laughed. “If I had to choose between her and one of my brothers, I would choose her. I can always hire a factory manager. What sort of man is this—Jacobs, you say? You know, when I was a boy, I wanted to be a policeman, to carry the gun and drive the car. To be the chief police officer, that must be a grand thing.”
“Mainly his job is shuffling papers—I get to do a lot of the filing, and dictation. When you are the head, your job is mainly doing budgets and meetings.”
“But surely he gets to know the—the good things, yes? The best part of being a policeman—it must be the best thing, to know the things that other people do not. To know who are the criminals, and to hunt them.”
“And other things. It isn’t just police work. They also do counterespionage. Chasing spies,” she added.
“That is CIA, no?”
“No. I can’t talk about it, of course, but, no, that is a Bureau function. It’s all the same, really, and it’s not like television at all. Mainly it’s boring. I read the reports all the time.”
“Amazing,” Cortez observed comfortably. “All the talents of a woman, and also she educates me.” He smiled encouragement so that she would elaborate. That idiot who’d put him onto her, he remembered, suggested that he’d have to use money. Cortez thought that his KGB training officers would have been proud of his technique. The KGB was ever parsimonious with funds.
“Does he make you work so hard?” Cortez asked a minute later.
“Some of the days can go long, but really he’s pretty good about that.”
“If he makes you work too hard, we will speak, Mr. Jacobs and I. What if I come to Washington and I cannot see you because you are working?”
“You really want ... ?”
“Moira.” His voice changed its timbre. Cortez knew that he’d pressed too hard for a first time. It had gone too easily, and he’d asked too many questions. After all, lonely widow or not, this was a woman of substance and responsibility—therefore a woman of intellect. But she was also a woman of feelings, and of passion. He moved his hands and his head. He saw the question on her face: Again? He smiled his message: Again.
This time he was less patient, no longer a man exploring the unknown. There was familiarity now. Having established what she liked, his ministrations had direction. Within ten minutes she’d forgotten all of his questions. She would remember the smell and the feel of him. She would bask in the return of youth. She would ask herself where things might lead, but not how they had started.
Assignations are conspiratorial by their nature. Just after midnight he returned her to where her car was parked. Yet again she amazed him with her silence. She held his hand like a school-girl, yet her touch was in no way so simple. One last kiss before she left the car—she wouldn’t let him get out.
“Thank you, Juan,” she said quietly.
Cortez spoke from the heart. “Moira, because of you I am again a man. You have done more for me. When next I come to Washington, we must—”
“We will.”
He followed her most of the way home, to let her know that he wished to protect her, breaking off before getting so close to her home that her children—surely they were waiting up—would notice. Cortez drove back to the apartment with a smile on his face, only partly because of his mission.
Her co-workers knew at once. With little more than six hours’ sleep, Moira bounced into the office wearing a suit she hadn’t touched in a year. There was a sparkle in her eye that could not be hidden. Even Director Jacobs noticed, but no one said anything. Jacobs understood. He’d buried his wife only a few months after Moira’s loss, and learned that such voids in one’s life could never quite be filled with work. Good for her, he thought. She still had children at home. He’d have to go easier on her schedule. She deserved another chance at a real life.
8.
Deployment
THE AMAZING THING was how smoothly things had gone, Chavez thought. After all, they were all sergeants, but whoever had set this thing up had been a clever man because there had been no groping around for which man got which function. There was an operations sergeant in his squad to assist Captain Ramirez with planning. There was a medical corpsman, a good one
from the Special Forces who already had his weapons training. Julio Vega and Juan Piscador had once been machine-gunners, and they got the SAWs. The same story applied to their radioman. Each member of the team fit neatly into a preselected slot, all were sufficiently trained that they respected the expertise of one another, and further cross-training enhanced that respect even more. The rugged regime of exercises had extended the pride with which each had arrived, and within two weeks the team had meshed together like a finely made machine. Chavez, a Ranger School graduate, was point man and scout. His job was to probe ahead, to move silently from one place of concealment to another, to watch and listen, then report his observations to Captain Ramirez.
“Okay, where are they?” the captain asked.
“Two hundred meters, just around that corner,” Chavez whispered in reply. “Five of them. Three asleep, two awake. One’s sitting by the fire. The other one’s got an SMG, walking around some.”
It was cool in the mountains at night, even in summer. A distant coyote howled at the moon. There was the occasional whisper from a deer moving through the trees, and the only sound associated with man was the distant noise of jets. The clear night made for surprisingly good visibility, even without the low-light goggles with which they were normally equipped. In the thin mountain air, the stars overhead didn’t sparkle, but shone as constant, discrete points of light. Ordinarily Chavez would have noticed the beauty, but this was a work night.
Ramirez and the rest of the squad were wearing four-color camouflage fatigues of Belgian manufacture. Their faces were painted with matching tones from sticks of makeup (understandably the Army didn’t call it that) so that they blended into the shadows as perfectly as Wells’ invisible man. Most importantly, they were totally at home in the darkness. Night was their best and most powerful friend. Man was a day-hunter. All of his senses, all of his instincts, and all of his inventions worked best in the light. Primordial rhythms made him less efficient at night—unless he worked very hard to overcome them, as these soldiers had. Even American Indian tribes living in close partnership with nature had feared the night, had almost never fought at night, had not even guarded their encampments at night—thus giving the U.S. Army its first useful doctrine for operations in darkness. At night man built fires as much for vision as for warmth, but in doing so reduced that vision to mere feet, whereas the human eye, properly conditioned, can see quite well in the darkness.
“Only five?”
“That’s all I counted, sir.”
Ramirez nodded and gestured for two more men to come forward. A few quiet orders were given. He went with the other two, moving to the right to get above the encampment. Chavez went back forward. His job was to take the sentry down, along with the one dozing at the fire. Moving quietly in the dark is harder than seeing. The human eye is better at spotting movement in the dark than in identifying stationary objects. He put each foot down carefully, feeling for something that might slide or break, thus making noise—the human ear is much underestimated. In daylight his method of moving would have appeared comical, but stealth has its price. Worst of all, he moved slowly, and Ding was no more patient than any man still in his twenties. It was a weakness against which he’d trained himself. He walked in a tight crouch. His weapon was up and ready to guard against surprise, and as the moment approached, his senses were fully alerted, as though an electric current ran across his skin. His head swiveled slowly left and right, his eyes never quite locking on anything, because when one stares at an object in the dark ness, it tends to disappear after a few seconds.
Something bothered Chavez, but he didn’t know what it was He stopped for a moment, looking around, searching with al his senses over to his left for about thirty seconds. Nothing. For the first time tonight he found himself wishing for his night goggles. Ding shook it off. Maybe a squirrel or some other night forager. Not a man, certainly. No one could move in the dark as well as a Ninja, he smiled to himself, and got back to the business at hand. He reached his position several minutes later, just behind a scrawny pine tree, and eased down to a kneeling position. Chavez slid the cover off the green face of his digital watch watching the numbers march slowly toward the appointed moment. There was the sentry, moving in a circle around the fire never more than thirty feet from it, trying to keep his eyes turnec away from it to protect his night vision. But the light reflected off the rocks and the pines would damage his perceptions badly enough—he looked straight at Chavez twice, but saw nothing
Time.
Chavez brought up his MP-5 and loosed a single round intc the target’s chest. The man flinched with the impact, graspec the spot where he’d been hit, and dropped to the ground with a surprised gasp. The MP-5 made only a slight metallic clack like a small stone rolling against another, but in the still mountain night, it was something out of the ordinary. The drowsy one by the fire turned around, but only made it halfway wher he too was struck. Chavez figured himself to be on a roll anc was taking aim on one of the sleeping men when the distinctive ripping sound of Julio’s squad automatic weapon jolted them from their slumber. All three leapt to their feet, and were deac before they got there.
“Where the hell did you come from?” the dead sentry demanded. The place on his chest where the wax bullet had struck was very sore, all the more so from surprise. By the time he was standing again, Ramirez and the others were in the camp.
“Kid, you are very good,” a voice said behind Chavez, and a hand thumped down on his shoulder. The sergeant nearly jumped out of his skin as the man walked past him into the encampment. “Come on.”
A rattled Chavez followed the man to the fire. He cleared his weapon on the way—the wax bullets could do real harm to a man’s face.
“We’ll score that one a success,” the man said. “Five kills, no reaction from the bad guys. Captain, your machine-gunner got a little carried away. I’d go easier on the rock and roll; the sound of an automatic weapon carries an awful long way. I’d also try to move in a little closer, but—I guess that rock there was about the best you could do. Okay, forget that one. My mistake. We can’t always pick the terrain. I liked your discipline on the approach march, and your movement into the objective was excellent. This point man you have is terrific. He almost picked me up.” The last struck Chavez as faint praise indeed.
“Who the fuck are you!” Ding asked quietly.
“Kid, I was doing this sort of thing for-real when you were playing with guns made by Mattel. Besides, I cheated.” Clark held up his night goggles. “I picked my route carefully, and I froze every time you turned your head. What you heard was my breathing. You almost had me. I thought I blew the exercise. Sorry. My name’s Clark, by the way.” A hand appeared.
“Chavez.” The sergeant took it.
“You’re pretty good, Chavez. Best I’ve seen in a while. I especially like the footwork. Not many have the patience you do. We could have used you in the 3rd SOG.” It was Clark’s highest praise, and rarely given.
“What’s that?”
A grunt and a chuckle. “Something that never existed—don’t worry about it.”
Clark walked over to examine the two men Chavez had shot. Both were rubbing identical places on their flak jackets, right over their hearts.
“You know how to shoot, too.”
“Anybody can hit with this.”
Clark turned to look at the young man. “Remember, when it’s for-real, it’s not quite the same.”
Chavez recognized genuine meaning in that statement. “What should I do different, sir?”
“That’s the hard part,” Clark admitted as the rest of the squad approached the fire. He spoke as a teacher to a gifted pupil. “Part of you has to pretend it’s the same as training. Another part has to remember that you don’t get many mistakes anymore. You have to know which part to listen to, ‘cause it changes from one minute to the next. You got good instincts, kid. Trust ’em. They’ll keep you alive. If things don’t feel right, they probably aren’t. Don’t confu
se that with fear.”
“Huh?”
“You’re going to be afraid out there, Chavez. I always was. Get used to the idea, and it can work for you ’stead of against you. For Christ’s sake, don’t be ashamed of it. Half the problem out in Indian Country is people afraid of being afraid.”
“Sir, what the hell are we training for?”
“I don’t know yet. Not my department.” Clark managed to conceal his feelings on that score. The training wasn’t exactly in accord with what he thought the mission was supposed to be. Ritter might be having another case of the clevers. There was nothing more worrisome to Clark than a clever superior.
“You’re going to be working with us, though.”
It was an exceedingly shrewd observation, Clark thought. He’d asked to come out here, of course, but realized that Ritter had maneuvered him into asking. Clark was the best man the Agency had for this sort of thing. There weren’t many men with similar experience anywhere in government service, and most of those, like Clark, were getting a little old for the real thing. Was that all? Clark didn’t know. He knew that Ritter liked to keep things under his hat, especially when he thought he was being clever. Clever men outsmart themselves, Clark thought, and Ritter wasn’t immune from that.
