by Tom Clancy
“Let’s see the roll next.”
“Right here, man.” Lamarck was starting to lose it. That was both good and bad, Kelly thought. Good because it was pleasing to see. Bad because a panicked man might do something foolish. Instead of relaxing, Kelly actually became more tense.
“Thank you, Mr. Lamarck,” Kelly said politely, to calm the man.
Just then he wavered, and his head turned a few inches or so, as his consciousness asserted itself through the six drinks he’d had this evening. “Wait a minute—you said you knew Pam.”
“I did,” Kelly said.
“But why—” He turned farther to see a face that was bathed in darkness, only eyes showing with light glistening off their moisture, and the rest of the face a shadow white.
“You’re one of the guys who ruined her life.”
Outrage: “Hey, man, she came to me! ”
“And you got her on pills so she could party real good, right?” the disembodied voice asked. Lamarck could hardly remember what the man looked like now.
“That was business, so you met her, so she was a good fuck, right?”
“She certainly was.”
“I shoulda trained her better an’ you coulda had her again insteada—was, you say?”
“She’s dead,” Kelly told him, reaching in his pocket. “Somebody killed her.”
“So? I didn’t do it!” It seemed to Lamarck that he was facing a final exam, a test he didn’t understand, based on rules he didn’t know.
“Yes, I know that,” Kelly said, screwing the silencer onto the pistol. Lamarck saw that somehow, his eyes making the adjustment to the darkness. His voice became a shrill rasp.
“Then what are you doing this for?” the man said, too puzzled even to scream, too paralyzed by the incongruity of the past few minutes, by the passage of his life from the normality of his hangout bar to its end only forty feet away in front of a windowless brick wall, and he had to have an answer. Somehow it was more important than the escape, whose attempt he knew to be futile.
Kelly thought about that for a second or two. He could have said many things, but it was only fair, he decided, to tell the man the truth as the gun came up quickly and finally.
“Practice.”
14
Lessons Learned
The early flight back from New Orleans to Washington National was too short for a movie, and Kelly had already eaten breakfast. He settled on a glass of juice at his window seat and was thankful that the flight was only about a third full as, after every combat action of his life, he went over every detail. It was a habit that had begun in the SEALs. Following every training exercise there had been an event called various things by his various commanders. “Performance Critique” seemed most appropriate at the moment.
His first mistake had been the product of something desired and something forgotten. In wanting to see Lamarck die in the darkness, he’d stood too close, simultaneously forgetting that head wounds often bleed explosively. He’d jumped out of the way of the spouting blood like a child avoiding a wasp in his backyard, but had still not escaped it entirely. The good news was that he’d made only that one mistake; and his selection of dark clothing had mitigated the danger there. Lamarck’s wounds had been immediately and definitively fatal. The pimp had fallen to the ground as limp as a rag doll. The two screws that Kelly had drilled in the top of his pistol held a small cloth bag he’d sewn himself, and the bag had caught the two ejected cartridge cases, leaving the police who’d investigate the scene without that valuable bit of evidence. His stalk had been effectively carried out, just one more anonymous face in a large and anonymous bar.
His hastily selected site for the elimination had also worked well enough. He remembered walking down the alley and blending back into the sidewalk traffic, walking the distance to his car and driving back to the motel. There, he’d changed clothes, bundling the blood-splattered slacks, shirt, and, just to be sure, the underwear as well, into a plastic cleaner bag, which he’d walked across the street and deposited in a supermarket Dumpster. If the clothing was discovered, it might well be taken as something soiled by a sloppy meatcutter. He hadn’t met with Lamarck in the open. The only lighted place in which they’d spoken was the bar’s men’s room, and there fortune-and planning-had smiled on him. The sidewalk they’d walked on was too dark and too anonymous. Perhaps a casual observer who might have known Lamarck could give an investigator a rough idea of Kelly’s size, but little else, and that was a reasonable gamble to have taken, Kelly judged, looking down at the wooded hills of northern Alabama. It had been an apparent robbery, the pimp’s one thousand, four hundred seventy dollars of flash money tucked away in his bag. Cash was cash, after all, and not to have taken it would have shown the police that there had been a real motive in the elimination aside from something easily understandable and agreeably random. The physical side of the event—he could not think of it as a crime—was, he thought, as clean as he could have done it.
Psychological? Kelly asked himself. More than anything else Kelly had tested his nerve, the elimination of Pierre Lamarck having been a kind of field experiment, and in that he’d surprised himself. It had been some years since Kelly had entered combat, and he’d halfway expected a case of the shakes after the event. Such things had happened to him more than once before, but though his stride away from Lamarck’s body had been slightly uneasy, he’d handled the escape with the sort of tense aplomb that had marked many of his operations in Vietnam. So much had come back to him. He could catalog the familiar sensations that had returned as though he’d been watching a training film of his own production: the increased sensory awareness, as though his skin had been sandblasted, exposing every nerve; hearing, sight, smell all amplified. I was so fucking alive at that moment, he thought. It was vaguely sad that such a thing had happened due to the ending of a human life, but Lamarck had long since forfeited his right to life. In any just universe, a person-Kelly simply could not think of him as a man-who exploited helpless girls simply did not deserve the privilege of breathing the same air used by other human beings. Perhaps he’d taken the wrong turn, been unloved by his mother or beaten by his father. Perhaps he’d been socially deprived, raised in poverty, or exposed to inadequate schooling. But those were matters for psychiatrists or social workers. Lamarck had acted normally enough to function as a person in his community, and the only question that mattered to Kelly was whether or not he had lived his life in accordance with his own free will. That had clearly been the case, and those who took improper actions, he had long since decided, ought to have considered the possible consequences of those actions. Every girl they exploited might have had a father or mother or sister or brother or lover to be outraged at her victimization. In knowing that and in taking the risk, Lamarck had knowingly gambled his life to some greater or lesser degree. And gambling means that sometimes you lose, Kelly told himself. If he hadn’t weighed the hazards accurately enough, that was not Kelly’s problem, was it?
No, he told the ground, thirty-seven thousand feet below.
And what did Kelly feel about it? He pondered that question for a while, leaning back and closing his eyes as though napping. A quiet voice, perhaps conscience, told him that he ought to feel something, and he searched for a genuine emotion. After several minutes of consideration, he could find none. There was no loss, no grief, no remorse. Lamarck had meant nothing to him and probably would be no loss to anyone else. Perhaps his girls-Kelly had counted five of them in the bar—would be without a pimp, but then maybe one of them would seize the opportunity to correct her life. Unlikely, perhaps, but possible. It was realism that told Kelly he couldn’t fix all the problems of the world; it was idealism that told him his inability to do so did not preclude him from addressing individual imperfections.
But all that took him away from the initial question: What did he feel about the elimination of Pierre Lamarck? The only answer he could find was, Nothing. The professional elation of having done something diffic
ult was different from satisfaction, from the nature of the task. In ending the life of Pierre Lamarck he had removed something harmful from the surface of the planet. It had enriched him not at all—taking the money had been a tactic, a camouflage measure, certainly not an objective. It had not avenged Pam’s life. It had not changed very much. It had been like stepping on an offensive insect—you did it and moved on. He would not try to tell himself different, but neither would his conscience trouble him, and that was sufficient to the moment. His little experiment had been a success. After all the mental and physical preparation, he had proven himself worthy of the task before him. Kelly’s mind focused behind closed eyes on the mission before him. Having killed many men better than Pierre Lamarck, he could now think with confidence about killing men worse than the New Orleans pimp.
This time they visited him, Greer saw with satisfaction. On the whole, CIA’s hospitality was better. James Greer had arranged parking in the VIP Visitors’ area—the equivalent at the Pentagon was always haphazard and difficult to use—and a secure conference room. Cas Podulski thoughtfully selected a seat at the far end, close to the air-conditioning vent, where his smoking wouldn’t bother anyone.
“Dutch, you were right about this kid,” Greer said, handing out typed copies of the handwritten notes which had arrived two days earlier.
“Somebody ought to have put a gun to his head and walked him into OCS. He would have been the kind of junior officer we used to be.”
Podulski chuckled at his end of the table. “No wonder he got out,” he said with lighthearted bitterness.
“I’d be careful putting a gun to his head,” Greer observed with a chuckle of his own. “I spent a whole night last week going through his package. This guy’s a wild one in the field.”
“Wild?” Maxwell asked with a hint of disapproval in his voice. “Spirited, you mean, James?”
Perhaps a compromise, Greer thought: “A self-starter. He had three commanders and they backed him on every play he made except one.”
“PLASTIC FLOWER? The political-action major he killed?”
“Correct. His lieutenant was furious about that, but if it’s true about what he had to watch, the only thing you can fault was his judgment, rushing in the way he did.”
“I read through that, James. I doubt I could have held back,” Cas said, looking up from the notes. Once a fighter pilot, always a fighter pilot. “Look at this, even his grammar is good!” Despite his accent, Podulski had been assiduous in learning his adopted language.
“Jesuit high school,” Greer pointed out. “I’ve gone over our in-house assessment of KINGPIN. Kelly’s analysis tracks on every major point except where he calls a few spades.”
“Who did the CIA assessment?” Maxwell asked.
“Robert Ritter. He’s a European specialist they brought in. Good man, a little terse, knows how to work the field, though.”
“Operations guy?” Maxwell asked.
“Right.” Greer nodded. “Did some very nice work working Station Budapest.”
“And why,” Podulski asked, “did they bring in a guy from that side of the house to look over the KINGPIN operation?”
“I think you know the answer, Cas,” Maxwell pointed out.
“If BOXWOOD GREEN goes, we need an Operations guy from this house. We have to have it. I don’t have the juice to do everything. Are we agreed on that?” Greer looked around the table, seeing the reluctant nods. Podulski looked back down at his documents before saying what they all thought.
“Can we trust him?”
“He’s not the one who burned KINGPIN. Cas, we have Jim Angleton looking at that. It was his idea to bring Ritter onboard. I’m new here, people. Ritter knows the bureaucracy here better than I do. He’s an operator; I’m just an analyst-type. And his heart’s in the right place. He damned near lost his job protecting a guy—he had an agent working inside GRU, and it was time to get him out. The decision-weenies upstairs didn’t like the timing, with the arms talks going on, and they told him no. Ritter brought the guy out anyway. It turned out his man had something State needed, and that saved Ritter’s career.” It hadn’t done much for the martini-mixer upstairs, Greer didn’t add, but that was a person CIA was doing rather well without.
“Swashbuckler?” Maxwell asked.
“He was loyal to his agent. Sometimes people here forget about that,” Greer said.
Admiral Podulski looked up the table. “Sounds like our kind of guy.”
“Brief him in,” Maxwell ordered. “But you tell him that if I ever find out some civilian in the building fucked up our chance to get these men out, I will personally drive down to Pax River, personally check out an A-4, and personally napalm his house.”
“You should let me do that, Dutch,” Cas added with a smile. “I’ve always had a better hand for dropping things. Besides, I have six hundred hours in the Scooter.”
Greer wondered how much of that was humor.
“What about Kelly?” Maxwell asked.
“His CIA identity is ‘Clark’ now. If we want him in, we can utilize him better as a civilian. He’d never get over being a chief, but a civilian doesn’t have to worry about rank.”
“Make it so,” Maxwell said. It was convenient, he thought, to have a naval officer seconded to CIA, wearing civilian clothes but still subject to military discipline.
“Aye aye, sir. If we get to training, where will it be done?”
“Quantico Marine Base,” Maxwell replied. “General Young is a pal from the old days. Aviator. He understands.”
“Marty and I went through test-pilot school together,” Podulski explained. “From what Kelly says, we don’t need that many troops. I always figured KINGPIN was over manned. You know, if we bring this off, we have to get Kelly his Medal.”
“One thing at a time, Cas.” Maxwell set that aside, looking back to Greer as he stood. “You will let us know if Angleton finds out anything?”
“Depend on it,” Greer promised. “If there’s a bad guy inside, we’ll get his ass. I’ve fished with the guy. He can pull a brook trout out of thin air.” After they left he set an afternoon meeting with Robert Ritter. It meant putting Kelly off, but Ritter was more important now, and while there was a rush on the mission, it wasn’t all that great a rush.
Airports were useful places, with their bustling anonymity and telephones. Kelly placed his call, as he waited for his baggage to appear—he hoped—in the proper place.
“Greer,” the voice said.
“Clark,” Kelly replied, smiling at himself. It seemed so James Bond to have a cover name. “I’m at the airport, sir. Do you still want me in this afternoon?”
“No. I’m tied up.” Greer flipped through his daybook. “Tuesday. . . three-thirty. You can drive in. Give me your car type and license number.”
Kelly did that, surprised that he’d been bumped. “You get my notes, sir?”
“Yes, and you did a fine job, Mr. Clark. We’ll be going over them Tuesday. We are very pleased with your work.”
“Thank you, sir,” Kelly said into the phone.
“See you Tuesday.” The line clicked off.
“And thanks for that, too,” Kelly said after he hung up. Twenty minutes later he had his bags and was walking off to his car. About an hour after that he was in his Baltimore apartment. It was lunchtime, and he fixed a couple of sandwiches, chasing both down with Coca-Cola. He hadn’t shaved today, and his heavy beard made a shadow on his face, he saw in the mirror. He’d leave it. Kelly headed into the bedroom for a lengthy nap.
The civilian contractors didn’t really understand what they were up to, but they were being paid. That was all they really required, since they had families to feed and house payments to make. The buildings they had just erected were well to the right of spartan: bare concrete block, nothing in the way of utilities, built to odd proportions, not like American construction at all except for the building materials. It was as though their size and shape had been taken from some foreig
n construction manual. All the dimensions were metric, one worker noted, though the actual plans were noted in odd numbers of inches and feet, as American building plans had to be. The job itself had been simple enough, the site already cleared when they’d first arrived. A number of the construction workers were former servicemen, most ex-Army, but a few Marines as well, and they were at turns pleased and uncomfortable to be at this sprawling Marine base in the wooded hills of northern Virginia. On the drive into the construction site they could see the morning formations of officer candidates jogging along the roads. All those bright young kids with shaved heads, one former corporal of the 1st Marines had thought this very morning. How many would get their commissions? How many would deploy there? How many would come home early, shipped in steel boxes? It was nothing he could foresee or control, of course. He’d served his time in hell and returned unscratched, which was still remarkable to the former grunt who’d heard all too often the supersonic crack of rifle bullets. To have survived at all was amazing enough.
The roofs were finished. Soon it would be time to leave the site for good, after a mere three weeks of well-paid work. Seven-day weeks. Plenty of overtime on every working day he’d been here. Somebody had wanted this place built in a hurry. Some very odd things about it, too. The parking lot, for one. A hundred-slot blacktopped lot. Someone was even painting the lines. For buildings with no utilities? But strangest of all was the current job that he’d drawn because the site foreman liked him. Playground equipment. A large swing set. A huge jungle gym. A sandbox, complete with half a dump truck’s load of sand. All the things that his two-year-old son would someday cavort on when he was old enough for kindergarten in the Fairfax County Schools. But it was structural work, and it required assembly, and the former Marine and two others fumbled through the plans like fathers in a backyard, figuring which bolts went where. Theirs was not to reason why, not as union construction workers on a government contract. Besides, he thought, there was no understanding the Green Machine. The Corps operated according to a plan that no man really figured out, and if they wanted to pay him overtime for this, then that was another monthly house payment earned for every three days he came here. Jobs like this might be crazy, but he sure liked the money. About the only thing he didn’t like was the length of the commute. Maybe they’d have to do something equally crazy at Fort Belvoir, he hoped, finishing the last item on the jungle gym. He could drive from his house to that place in twenty minutes or so. But the Army was a little more rational than the Corps. It had to be.
