by Tom Clancy
“Spent most of my time indoors,” Clark replied honestly. Stuck with a couple of clowns in a damned commo van on a hilltop surrounded by jungle. Just like the bad old days. Almost. For
all her intelligence, she almost never guessed where he’d been. But then, she wasn’t supposed to.
“How long ... ?”
“Only a couple of days, then I have to go out again. It’s important.”
“Anything to do with—” Her head jerked toward the kitchen TV.
Clark just smiled and shook his head.
“What do you think happened?”
“From what I see, the druggies got real lucky,” he said lightly.
Sandy knew what her husband thought of druggies, and why. Everyone had a pet hate. That was his—and hers; she’d been a nurse too long, had too often seen the results of substance abuse, to think otherwise. It was the one thing he’d lectured the girls on, and though they were as rebellious as any pair of healthy adolescents, it was one line they didn’t approach, much less cross.
“The President sounds angry.”
“How would you feel? The FBI Director was his friend—as far as a politician has friends.” Clark felt the need to qualify the statement. He was wary of political figures, even the ones he’d voted for.
“What is he going to do about it?”
“I don’t know, Sandy.” I haven’t quite figured it out yet. “Where are the kids?”
“They went to Busch Gardens with their friends. There’s a new coaster, and they’re probably screaming their brains out.”
“Do I have time to shower? I’ve been traveling all day.”
“Dinner in thirty minutes.”
“Fine.” He kissed her again and headed for the bedroom with his bag. Before entering the bathroom, he emptied his dirty laundry into the hamper. Clark would give himself one restful day with the family before starting on his mission planning. There wasn’t that much of a hurry. For missions of this sort, haste made death. He hoped the politicians would understand that.
Of course, they wouldn’t, he told himself on the way to the shower. They never did.
“Don’t feel bad,” Moira told him. “You’re tired. I’m sorry I’ve worn you out.” She cradled his face to her chest. A man was not a machine, after all, and five times in just over one day’s time ... what could she fairly expect of her lover? He had to sleep, had to rest. As did she, Moira realized, drifting off herself.
Within minutes, Cortez gently disengaged himself, watching her slow, steady breathing, a dreamy smile on her placid face while he wondered what the hell he could do. If anything. Place a phone call—risk everything for a brief conversation on a nonsecure line? The Colombian police or the Americans, or somebody had to have taps on all those phones. No, that was more dangerous than doing nothing at all.
His professionalism told him that the safest course of action was to do nothing. Cortez looked down at himself. Nothing was precisely what he had just accomplished. It was the first time that had happened in a very long time.
Team KNIFE, of course, was completely—if not blissfully—unaware of what had transpired the previous day. The jungle had no news service, and their radio was for official use only. That made the new message all the more surprising. Chavez and Vega were again on duty at the observation post, enduring the muggy heat that followed a violent thunderstorm. There had been two inches of rain in the previous hour, and their observation point was now a shallow puddle, and there would be more rain in the afternoon before things cleared off.
Captain Ramirez appeared, without much in the way of warning this time, even to Chavez, whose woodcraft skills were a matter of considerable pride. He rationalized to himself that the captain had learned from watching him.
“Hey, Cap’n,” Vega greeted their officer.
“Anything going on?” Ramirez asked.
Chavez answered from behind his binoculars. “Well, our two friends are enjoying their morning siesta.” There would be another in the afternoon, of course. He was pulled away from the lenses by the captain’s next statement.
“I hope they like it. It’s their last one.”
“Say again, Cap’n?” Vega asked.
“The chopper’s coming in to pick us up tonight. That’s the LZ right there, troops.” Ramirez pointed to the airstrip. “We waste this place before we leave.”
Chavez evaluated that statement briefly. He’d never liked druggies. Having to sit here and watch the lazy bastards go about their business as matter-of-factly as a man on a golf course hadn’t mitigated his feelings a dot.
Ding nodded. “Okay, Cap’n. How we gonna do it, sir?”
“Soon as it’s dark, you and me circle around the north side. Rest of the squad forms up in two fire teams to provide fire support in case we need it. Vega, you and your SAW stay here. The other one goes down about four hundred meters. After we do the two guards, we booby-trap the fuel drums in the shack, just as a farewell present. The chopper’ll pick us up at the far end at twenty-three hundred. We bring the bodies out with us, probably dump ’em at sea.”
Well, how about that, Chavez thought. “We’ll need like thirty-forty minutes to get around to them, just to play it safe and all, but the way those two fuckers been actin’, no sweat, sir.” The sergeant knew that the killing would be his job. He had the silenced weapon.
“You’re supposed to ask me if this is for-real,” Captain Ramirez pointed out. He had done just that over the satellite radio.
“Sir, you say do it, I figure it’s for-real. It don’t bother me none,” Staff Sergeant Domingo Chavez assured his commander.
“Okay—we’ll move out as soon as it’s dark.”
“Yes, sir.”
The captain patted both men on the shoulder and withdrew to the rally point. Chavez watched him leave, then pulled out his canteen. He unscrewed the plastic top and took a long pull before looking over at Vega.
“Fuck!” the machine-gunner observed quietly.
“Whoever’s runnin’ this party musta grown a pair o’ balls,” Ding agreed.
“Be nice to get back to a place with showers and air conditioning,” Vega said next. That two people would have to die to make that possible was, once it was decided, a matter of small consequence. It bemused both men somewhat that after years of uniformed service they were finally being told to do the very thing for which they’d trained endlessly. The moral issue never occurred to them. They were soldiers of their country. Their country had decided that those two dozing men a few hundred meters away were enemies worthy of death. That was that, though both men wondered what it would actually be like to do it.
“Let’s plan this one out,” Chavez said, getting back to his binoculars. “I want you to be careful with that SAW, Oso. ”
Vega considered the situation. “I won’t fire to the left of the shack unless you call in.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll come in from the direction of that big-ass tree. Shouldn’t be no big deal,” he thought aloud.
“Nah, shouldn’t be.”
Except that this time it was all real. Chavez stayed on the glasses, examining the men whom he would kill in a few hours.
Colonel Johns got his stand-to order at roughly the same time as all of the field teams, along with a whole new set of tactical maps that were for further study. He and Captain Willis went over the plan for this night in the privacy of their room. There was a snatch-and-grab tonight. The troops they’d inserted were coming back out far earlier than scheduled. PJ suspected that he knew why. Part of it, anyway.
“Right on the airfields?” the captain wondered.
“Yeah, well, either all four were dry holes, or our friends are going to have to secure them before we land for the snatch-and-grab.”
“Oh.” Captain Willis understood after a moment’s thought.
“Get ahold of Buck and have him check the miniguns out again. He’ll get the message from that. I want to take a look at the weather for tonight.”
“Pickup or
der reverse from the drop-off?”
“Yeah—we’ll tank fifty miles off the beach and then again after we make the pickup.”
“Right.” Willis walked out to find Sergeant Zimmer. PJ went in the opposite direction, heading for the base meteorological office. The weather for tonight was disappointing: light winds, clear skies, and a crescent moon. Perfect flying weather for everyone else, it was not what special-ops people hoped for. Well, there wasn’t much you could do about that.
They checked out of The Hideaway at noon. Cortez thanked whatever fortune smiled down on him that it had been her idea to cut the weekend short, claiming that she had to get back to her children, though he suspected that she had made a conscious decision to go easy on her weary lover. No woman had ever felt the need to take pity on him before, and the insult of it was balanced against his need to find out what the hell was going on.
They drove up Interstate 81, in silence as usual. He’d rented a car with an ordinary bench seat, and she sat in the center, leaning against him with his right arm wrapped warmly around her shoulder. Like teenagers, almost, except for the silence, and again he found himself appreciating her for it. But it wasn’t for the quiet passion now. His mind was racing far faster than the car, which he kept exactly at the posted limit. He could have turned on the car radio, but that would have been out of character. He couldn’t risk that, could he? If his employer had only exercised intelligence—and he had plenty of that, Cortez compelled himself to admit—then he still had his arm draped over a supremely valuable source of strategic intelligence. Escobedo took an appropriately long view of his business operations. He understood—but Cortez remembered the man’s arrogance, too. How easily he took offense—it wasn’t enough for him to win, Escobedo also felt the need to humiliate, crush, utterly destroy those who offended him in the slightest way. He had power, and the sort of money normally associated only with governments, but he lacked perspective. For all his intelligence, he was a man ruled by childish emotions, and that thought merely grew in Cortez’s mind as he turned onto I-66, heading east now, for Washington. It was so strange, he mused with a thin, bitter smile, that in a world replete with information, he was forced to speculate like a child when he could have all he needed merely from the twist of a radio knob, but he commanded himself to do without.
They reached the airport parking lot right on time. He pulled up to Moira’s car and got out to unload her bags.
“Juan ...”
“Yes?”
“Don’t feel badly about last night. It was my fault,” she said quietly.
He managed a grin. “I already told you that I am no longer a young man. I have proved it true. I will rest for the next time so that I will do better.”
“When—”
“I don’t know. I will call you.” He kissed her gently. She drove off a minute later, and he stood there in the parking lot watching her leave, as she would have expected. Then he got into his car. It was nearly four o’clock, and he flipped on the radio to get the hourly news broadcast. Two minutes after that he’d driven the car to the return lot, taken out his bags, and walked into the terminal, looking for the first plane anywhere. A United flight to Atlanta was the next available, and he knew that he could make the necessary connections at that busy terminal. He barely squeezed aboard at the last call.
Moira Wolfe drove home with a smile tinged with guilt. What had happened to Juan the previous night was one of the most humiliating things a man could experience, and it was all her fault. She’d demanded too much of him and he was, as he’d said himself, no longer young. She’d let her enthusiasm take charge of her own judgment, and hurt a man whom she—loved. She was certain now. Moira had thought she’d never know the emotion again, but there it was, with all the carefree splendor of her youth, and if Juan lacked the vigor of those years, he more than compensated with his patience and fantastic skill. She reached down and turned on her radio to an oldies FM channel, and for the remainder of her drive basked in the glow of the most pleasant of emotions, her memories of youthful happiness brought further to the fore by the sounds of the teenage ballads to which she’d danced thirty years before.
She was surprised to see what looked like a Bureau car parked across the street from her house, but it might just as easily have been a cheap rental or something else—except for the radio antenna, she realized. It was a Bureau car. That was odd, she thought. She parked against the curb and got out her bags, walking up the sidewalk, but when the door was opened, she saw Frank Weber, one of the Director’s security detail.
“Hi, Frank.” Special Agent Weber helped her with the bags, but his expression was serious. “Something wrong?”
There wasn’t any easy way of telling her, though Weber felt guilty for spoiling what must have been a very special weekend for her.
“Emil was killed Friday evening. We’ve been trying to reach you since then.”
“What?”
“They got him on the way to the embassy. The whole detail—everybody. Emil’s funeral’s tomorrow. The rest of’em are Tuesday.”
“Oh, my God.” Moira sat on the nearest chair. “Eddie—Leo?” She thought of the young agents on Emil’s protection detail as her own kids.
“All of them,” Weber repeated.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “I haven’t seen a paper or turned on a TV in—since Friday night. Where—?”
“Your kids went out to the movies. We need you to come down to help us out with a few things. We’ll have somebody here to look after them for you.”
It was several minutes before she was able to go anywhere. The tears started as soon as the reality of Weber’s words got past her newly made storehouse of other feelings.
Captain Ramirez didn’t like the idea of accompanying Chavez. It wasn’t cowardice, of course, but a question of what his part of the job actually was. His command responsibilities were muddled in some ways. As a captain who had recently commanded a company, he had learned that “commanding” isn’t quite the same thing as “leading.” A company commander is supposed to stay a short distance back from the front line and manage—the Army doesn’t like that word—the combat action, maneuvering his units and keeping an overview of the battle underway so that he could control matters while his platoon leaders handled the actual fighting. Having learned to “lead from the front” as a lieutenant, he was supposed to apply his lessons at the next higher level, though there would be times when the captain was expected to take the lead. In this case he was commanding only a squad, and though the mission demanded circumspection and command judgment, the size of his unit demanded personal leadership. Besides, he could not very well send two men out on their first killing mission without being there himself, even though Chavez had far superior movement skills than Captain Ramirez ever expected to attain. The contradiction between his command and leadership responsibilities troubled the young officer, but he came down, as he had to, on the side of leading. He could not exercise command, after all, if his men didn’t have confidence in his ability to lead. Somehow he knew that if this one went right, he’d never have the same problem again. Maybe that’s how it always worked, he told himself.
After setting up his two fire teams, he and Chavez moved out, heading around the northern side of the airstrip with the sergeant in the lead. It went smoothly. The two targets were still lolling around, smoking their joints—or whatever they were—and talking loudly enough to be heard through a hundred meters of trees. Chavez had planned their approach carefully, drawing on previous nights’ perimeter patrolling which Captain Ramirez had ordered. There were no surprises, and after twenty minutes they curved back in and again saw where the airstrip was. Now they moved more slowly.
Chavez kept the lead. The narrow trail that the trucks followed to get in here was a convenient guide. They stayed on the north side of it, which would keep them out of the fire lanes established for the squad’s machine guns. Right on time, they sighted the shack. As planned, Chavez waited for his officer t
o close up from his approach interval of ten meters. They communicated with hand signals. Chavez would move straight in with the captain to his right front. The sergeant would do the shooting, but if anything went wrong, Ramirez would be in position to support him at once. The captain tapped out four dashes on the transmit key of his radio and got two signals back. The squad was in place on the far side of the strip, aware of what was about to happen and ready to play its part in the action if needed.
Ramirez waved Ding forward.
Chavez took a deep breath, surprised at how rapidly his heart was beating. After all, he’d done this a hundred times before. He jerked his arms around just to get loose, then adjusted the fit of his weapon’s sling. His thumb went down on the selector switch, putting the MP-5 on the three-round-burst setting. The sights were painted with small amounts of tritium, and glowed just enough to be visible in the near-total darkness of the equatorial forest. His night-vision goggles were stowed in a pocket. They’d just get in the way if he tried to use them.
He moved very slowly now, moving around trees and bushes, finding firm, uncluttered places for his feet or pushing the leaves out of his way with his toe before setting his boot down for the next step. It was all business. The obvious tension in his body disappeared, though there was something like a buzz in his ear that told him that this was not an exercise.
There.
They were standing in the open, perhaps two meters apart, twenty meters from the tree against which Chavez leaned. They were still talking, and though he could understand their words easily enough, for some reason it was as foreign to him as the barking of dogs. Ding could have gotten closer, but didn’t want to take the chance, and twenty meters was close enough—sixty-six feet. It was a clear shot past another tree to both of them.
Okay.
He brought the gun up slowly, centering the ringed forward sight in the aperture rear sight, making sure that he could see the white circle all around, and putting the center post right on the black, circular mass that represented the back of a human head that was no longer part of a human being—it was just a target, just a thing. His finger squeezed gently on the trigger.
