by Tom Clancy
“Roger, El Dorado,” Commander Jensen replied at once. “This is Four-Three Kilo. We are Inter-America Cargo Flight Six out of Quito, bound for LAX. Altitude three-zero-zero, course three-five-zero, speed four-nine-five. Over.”
The controller verified the track with his radar data and replied in English, which is the language of international air travel. “Four-Three Kilo, roger, copy. Be advised no traffic in your area. Weather CAVU. Maintain course and altitude. Over.”
“Roger, thank you, and good night, sir.” Jensen killed the radio and spoke over his intercom to his bombardier-navigator. “That was easy enough, wasn’t it? Let’s get to work.”
In the right seat, set slightly below and behind the pilot’s, the naval flight officer got on his own radio after he activated the TRAM pod that hung on the Intruder’s center-line hardpoint.
At T minus fifteen minutes, Larson lifted his cellular phone and dialed the proper number. “Señor Wagner, por favor.”
“Momento,” the voice replied. Larson wondered who it was.
“Wagner,” another voice replied a moment later. “Who is this?”
Larson took the cellophane from off a pack of cigarettes and crumpled it over the receiver while he spoke garbled fragments of words, then finally: “I can’t hear you, Carlos. I will call back in a few minutes.” Larson pressed the kill button on the phone. This location was at the far edge of the cellular system anyway.
“Nice touch,” Clark said approvingly. “Wagner?”
“His dad was a sergeant in the Allgemeine-SS—worked at Sobibor—came over in forty-six, married a local girl and went into the smuggling business, died before anyone caught up with him. Breeding tells,” Larson said. “Carlos is a real prick, likes his women with bruises on them. His colleagues aren’t all that wild about him, but he’s good at what he does.”
“Christmas,” Mr. Clark observed. The radio made the next sound, five minutes later.
“Bravo Whiskey, this is Zulu X-Ray, over.”
“Zulu X-Ray, this is Bravo Whiskey. I read you five-by-five. Over,” Larson answered at once. His radio was the sort used by forward air controllers, encrypted UHF.
“Status report, over.”
“We are in place. Mission is go. Say again, mission is go.”
“Roger, copy, we are go-mission. We are ten minutes out. Start the music.”
Larson turned to Clark. “Light her up.”
The GLD was already powered up. Mr. Clark flipped the switch from standby to active. The GLD was more fully known as the Ground Laser Designator. Designed for use by soldiers on the battlefield, it projected a focused infrared (hence invisible) laser beam through a complex but rugged series of lenses. Boresighted with the laser system was a separate infrared sensor that told the operator where he was aiming—essentially a telescopic sight. “Great Feet” had a fiberglass cargo box over its load area, and Clark trained the crosshairs on one of its small windows, using the fine-adjustment knobs on the tripod with some delicacy. The laser spot appeared as desired, but then he rethought his aiming point and took advantage of the fact that they were slightly higher than their target, respotting his aim on the center of the vehicle’s roof. Finally he turned on the videotape recorder that took its feed from the GLD. The big boys in D.C. wanted to count coup on this one.
“Okay,” he said quietly. “The target is lit.”
“The music is playing, and it sounds just fine,” Larson said over the radio.
Cortez was driving up the hill, having already passed a security checkpoint manned by two people drinking beer, he noted disgustedly. The road was about on a par with what he’d grown up with in Cuba, and the going was slow. They’d still blame him for being late, of course.
It was too easy, Jensen thought as he heard the reply. Tooling along at thirty thousand feet, clear night, no flak or missiles to evade. Even a contractor’s validation test wasn’t this easy.
“I got it,” the B/N noted, staring down at his own scope. You can see a very, very long way at thirty thousand feet on a clear night, especially with a multimillion-dollar system doing the looking. Underneath the Intruder, the Target Recognition and Attack Multisensor pod noted the laser dot that was still sixty miles away. It was a modulated beam, of course, and its carrier signal was known to the TRAM. They now had positive identification of the target.
“Zulu X-Ray confirms music sounds just fine,” Jensen said over the radio. Over intercom: “Next step.”
On the port inboard weapon station, the bomb’s seeker head was powered up. It immediately noted the laser dot as well. Inside the aircraft, a computer was keeping track of the aircraft’s position, altitude, course, and speed, and the bombardier-navigator programmed in the position of the target to an accuracy of two hundred meters. He could have dialed it in even closer, of course, but didn’t need to. The bomb release would be completely automatic, and at this altitude the laser “basket” into which the bomb had to be dropped was miles wide. The computer took note of all these facts and decided to make an optimum drop, right in the most favorable portion of the basket.
Clark’s eyes were now fixed to the GLD. He was perched on his elbows, and no part of his body was touching the instrument except for his eyebrow on the rubber cup that protected the eyepiece.
“Any second now,” the B/N said.
Jensen kept the Intruder straight and level, heading straight down the electronic path defined by various computer systems aboard. The entire exercise was now out of human hands. On the ejector rack, a signal was received from the computer. Several shotgun shells—that’s precisely what was used—fired, driving down the “ejector feet” onto small steel plates on the upper side of the bombcase. The bomb separated cleanly from the aircraft.
The aircraft jerked upward a bit at the loss of just over eleven hundred pounds of weight.
“Breakaway, breakaway,” Jensen reported.
There, finally. Cortez saw the wall. His car—he’d have to buy a jeep if he were going to come here very often—was still losing its grip on the gravel, but he’d be through the gate in a moment, and if he remembered right, the road inside the perimeter was paved decently—probably leftover materials from the helipad, he thought.
“On the way,” Larson told Clark.
The bomb was still traveling at five hundred knots. Once clear of the aircraft, gravity took over, arcing it down toward the ground. It actually accelerated somewhat in the rarefied air as the seeker head moved fractionally to correct for wind drift. The seeker head was made of fiberglass and looked like a round-nose bullet with some small fins attached. When the laser dot on which it tracked moved out of the center of its field of view, the entire seeker body moved itself and the plastic tail fins in the appropriate direction to bring the dot back where it belonged. It had to fall exactly twenty-two thousand feet, and the microchip brain in the guidance package was trying to hit the target exactly. It had plenty of time to correct for mistakes.
Clark didn’t know what to expect, exactly. It had been too long a time since he’d called air strikes in, and he’d forgotten some of the details—when you had to call in air support, you generally didn’t have time to notice the small stuff. He found himself wondering if there’d be the whistle—something he never remembered from his war service. He kept his eye on the target, still careful not to touch the GLD lest he screw things up. There were several men standing close to the truck. One lit a cigarette, and it appeared that several were talking about something or other. On the whole, it seemed like this was taking an awfully long time. When it happened, there was not the least warning. Not a whistle, not anything at all.
Cortez felt his front wheels bump upward as they got on solid pavement.
The GBU-15 laser-guided bomb had a “guaranteed” accuracy of under three meters, but that was under combat conditions, and this was a far easier test of the system. It landed within inches of its target point, striking the top of the truck. Unlike the first test shot, this bomb was impact-fused. Two
detonators, one in the nose and one in the tail, were triggered by a computer chip within a microsecond of the instant when the seeker head struck the fiberglass top of the truck. There were mechanical backups to the electronic triggers. Neither proved necessary, but even explosives take time, and the bomb fell an additional thirty inches while the detonation process got underway. The bombcase had barely penetrated the cargo cover when the bomb filler was ignited by both detonators. Things happened more quickly now. The explosive filler was Octol, a very expensive chemical explosive also used to trigger nuclear weapons, with a detonation rate of over eight thousand meters per second. The combustible bombcase vaporized in a few microseconds. Then expanding gas from the explosion hurled fragments of the truck body in all directions—except up—immediately behind which was the rock-hard shock wave. Both the fragments and the shock wave struck the concrete-block walls of the house in well under a thousandth of a second. The effects were predictable. The wall disintegrated, transformed into millions of tiny fragments traveling at bullet speed, with the remainder of the shock wave still behind to attack other parts of the house. The human nervous system simply doesn’t work quickly enough for such events, and the people in the conference room never had the first hint that their deaths were underway.
The low-light sensor on the GLD went white (with a touch of green). Clark cringed on instinct and looked away from the eyepiece to see an even whiter flash in the target area. They were too far away to hear the noise at once. It wasn’t often that you could see sound, but large bombs make that possible. The compressed air of the shock wave was a ghostly white wall that expanded radially from where the truck had been, at a speed over a thousand feet per second. It took about twelve seconds for the noise to reach Clark and Larson. Everyone who had been in the conference room was dead by that time, of course, and the crump of the pressure wave sounded like the outraged cry of lost souls.
“Christ,” Larson said, awed by the event.
“Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?” Clark asked. It was all he could do not to laugh. That was a first. He’d killed his share of enemies, and never taken joy from it. But the nature of the target combined with the method of the attack made the whole thing seem like a glorious prank. Son of a BITCH! The sober pause followed a moment later. His “prank” had just ended the lives of over twenty people, only four of whom were listed targets, and that was no joke. The urge to laugh died. He was a professional, not a psychopath.
Cortez had been less than two hundred meters from the explosion, but being downhill from it saved his life since most of the fragments sailed well over his head. The blast wave was bad enough, hurling his windshield backward into his face, where it fractured but didn’t shatter, held together by the polymer filler of the safety-glass sandwich. His car was flipped on its back, but he managed to crawl free even before his mind had decided what his eyes had just witnessed. It was fully six seconds before the word “explosion” occurred to him. At that his reactions were far more rapid than that of the security guards, half of whom were dead or dying in any case. His first considered action was to draw his pistol and advance toward the house.
Except that there wasn’t a house there anymore. He was too deafened to hear the screams of the injured. Several guards wandered aimlessly about with their guns held ready—for what, they didn’t know. The ones from the far corner of the perimeter wall were the least affected. The body of the house had absorbed most of the blast, protecting them from everything but the projectiles, which had been quite lethal enough.
“Bravo Whiskey, this is Zulu X-Ray requesting BDA, over.” BDA was bomb-damage assessment. Larson keyed his microphone one last time.
“I evaluate CEP as zero, I repeat, zero, with high-order detonation. Score this one-four-point-oh. Over.”
“Roger that. Out.” Jensen switched his radio off again. “You know,” he said over the intercom, “I can remember back when I was a lieutenant I made a Med cruise on Kennedy and us officers were afraid to go into some spaces because the troops were fuckin’ around with drugs.”
“Yeah,” the bombardier/navigator answered. “Fuckin’ drugs. Don’t worry, skipper. I ain’t likely to have a conscience attack. Hey, the White House says it’s okay, that means that it’s really okay.”
“Yep.” Jensen lapsed back into silence. He’d proceed on his current heading until he was out of El Dorado’s radar coverage, then turn southwest for the Ranger. It really was a pretty night. He wondered how the air-defense exercise was going....
Cortez had little experience with explosions, and the vagaries of such events were new to him. For example, the fountain in front of the house was still running. The electrical power cables to the casa were buried and unharmed, and the breaker box inside hadn’t been totally destroyed. He lowered his face into the water to clear it. When he came back up, he felt almost normal except for the ache in his head.
There had been a dozen or so vehicles inside the wall when the explosion happened. About half of them were shredded, and their gas tanks had ruptured, illuminating the area with isolated fires. Untiveros’ new helicopter was a smashed wreck against the fractured wall. There were other people rushing about. Cortez stood still and started thinking.
He remembered seeing a truck, one with huge wheels, parked right next to ... He walked over that way. Though the entire three-hectare area around the house was littered with rubble, here it was clear, he saw as he approached. Then he saw the crater, fully two meters deep and six meters wide.
Car bomb.
A big one. Perhaps a thousand kilos, he thought, looking away from the hole while his brain went to work.
“I think that’s all we really need to see,” Clark observed. He made a last look through the eyepiece of the GLD and switched it off. Repacking took less than three minutes.
“Who do you suppose that is?” Larson asked while he put his backpack on. He handed the Noctron over to Clark.
“Must be the guy who showed up late in the BMW. Suppose he’s important or something?”
“Don’t know. Maybe next time.”
“Right.” Clark led the way down the hill.
It was the Americans, of course. CIA, without doubt. They’d made some financial arrangements and somehow managed to place a ton of explosives in the back of that monstrous truck. Cortez admired the touch. It was Fernández’s truck-he’d heard about it but never seen it. Now I never will, he thought. Fernández had loved his new truck and had kept it parked right in front of ... That had to be it. The Americans had gotten lucky. Okay, he thought, how did they do it? They wouldn’t have gotten their own hands involved, of course. So they must have arranged for someone else ... who? Somebody—no, more than one, at least four or five from M-19 or FARC ... ? Again, that made sense. Might it have been indirect? Have the Cubans or KGB arrange it. With all the changes between East and West, might CIA have managed to get such cooperation? Unlikely, Félix thought, but possible. A direct attack on high government officials such as the Cartel had executed was the sort of thing to generate the most unlikely of bedfellows.
Was the bomb placement here an accident? Might the Americans have learned of the meeting?
There were voices from inside the rubble pile that had once been a castle. Security people were nosing around, and Cortez joined them. Untiveros’ family had been here. His wife and two children, and a staff of eight or more people. Probably treated them like serfs, Cortez thought. The Cartel chieftains all did. Perhaps he’d offended one greatly—gone after a daughter, maybe. They all did that. Droit du seigneur. A French term, but one which the chieftains understood. The fools, Cortez told himself. Was there no perversion beneath them?
Security guards were already scrambling through the rubble. It was amazing that anyone could be alive in there. His hearing was coming back now. He caught the shrill screams of some poor bastard. He wondered what the body count would be. Perhaps. Yes. He turned and walked back to his overturned BMW. It was leaking gasoline out the filler cap, b
ut Cortez reached in and got his cellular phone. He walked twenty meters from the car before switching it on.
“Jefe, this is Cortez. There has been an explosion here.”
It was ironic, Ritter thought, that his first notification of the mission’s success should come from another CAPER intercept. The really good news, the NSA guys reported, was that they now had a voiceprint on Cortez. That greatly improved their chances of locating him. It was better than nothing, the DDO thought as his visitor arrived for the second time today.
“We missed Cortez,” he told Admiral Cutter. “But we got d’Alejandro, Fernández, Wagner, and Untiveros, plus the usual collateral damage.”
“What do you mean?”
Ritter looked again at the satellite photo of the house. He’d have to get a new one to quantify the damage. “I mean there were a bunch of security guards around, and we probably got a bunch of them. Unfortunately there was also Untiveros’s family—wife, a couple of kids, and various domestic servants.”
Cutter snapped erect in his chair. “You didn’t tell me anything about that! This was supposed to be a surgical strike.”
Ritter looked up in considerable annoyance. “Well, for Christ’s sake, Jimmy! What the hell do you expect? You are still a naval officer, aren’t you? Didn’t anybody ever tell you that there are always extraneous people standing around? We used a bomb, remember? You don’t do surgery with bombs, despite what all the ‘experts’ say. Grow up!” Ritter himself took no pleasure from the extraneous deaths, but it was a cost of doing business—as the Cartel’s own members well understood.
