by Tom Clancy
Kelly. We tried calling him. We had the Coast Guard look at that island he lives on. The boat wasn’t there. The boat wasn’t anywhere. Where was he? He was back now, though, if the little old lady was right. What if he was away? But now he’s back. The killings just plain stopped after the Farmer-Grayson-Brown incident. The marina had remembered seeing the boat about that time, but he’d left in the middle of the night—that night—and just vanished. Connection. Where had the boat been? Where was it now? What falls out of the sky? Trouble. That’s exactly what had happened before. It just dropped out of the sky. Started and stopped.
His wife and son saw it again. Chewing on his food, his eyes focused on infinity, unable to turn his mind off as it churned his information over and over. Kelly’s not really all that different from what I used to be, Ryan thought. One-Oh-One, the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Infantry Division (Airborne), who still swaggered in their baggy pants. Emmet had started off as a buck private, ended up with a late-war battlefield commission to the rank he still held, lieutenant. He remembered the pride of being something very special, the sense of invincibility that strangely came arm in arm with the terror of jumping out of an aircraft, being the first on enemy territory, in the dark, carrying light weapons only. The hardest men with the hardest mission. Mission. He’d been like that once. But no one had ever killed his lady . . . what might have happened, back in 1946, perhaps, if someone had done that to Catherine?
Nothing good.
He’d saved Doris Brown. He’d given her over to people he trusted. He’d seen one of them last night. He knows she’s dead. He saved Pamela Madden, she died, and he was in the hospital, and a few weeks after he got out people started dying in a very expert way. A few weeks . . . to get in shape. Then the killings just stopped and Kelly was nowhere to be found.
What if he’s just been away?
He’s back now.
Something’s going to happen.
It wasn’t a thing he could take to court. The only physical evidence they had was the imprint of a shoe sole—a common brand of sneaker, of course, hundreds sold every day. Zilch. They had motive. But how many murders happened every year, and how many people followed up on it? They had opportunity. Could he account for his time in front of a jury? No one could. How, the detective thought, do you explain this to a judge—no, some judges would understand, but no jury would, not after a brand-new law-school graduate had explained a few things to them.
The case was solved, Ryan thought. He knew. But he had nothing for it but the knowledge that something was going to happen.
“Who’s that, you suppose?” Mike asked.
“Some fisherman, looks like,” Burt observed from the driver’s seat. He kept Henry’s Eighth well clear of the white cabin cruiser. Sunset was close. They were almost too late to navigate the tangled waters into their laboratory, which looked very different at night. Burt gave the white boat a look. The guy with the fishing rod waved, a gesture he returned as he turned to port—left, as he thought of it. There was a big night ahead. Xantha wouldn’t be much help. Well, maybe a little, when they broke for meals. A shame, really. Not really a bad girl, just dumb, badly spaced out. Maybe that’s how they’d do it, just give her a nice taste of real good stuff before they broke out the netting and the cement blocks. They were sitting right in the open, right in the boat, and she didn’t have a clue what they were for. Well, that wasn’t his lookout.
Burt shook his head. There were more important things to consider. How would Mike and Phil feel about working under him? He’d have to be polite about it, of course. They’d understand. With the money involved, they ought to. He relaxed in his chair, sipping his beer and looking for the red marker buoy.
“Lookee, lookee,” Kelly breathed. It wasn’t hard, really. Billy had told him all he needed to know. They had a place in there. They came in the Bay side, by boat, usually at night, and usually left the following morning. Turned in at the red lighted buoy. Hard as hell to find, almost impossible in the dark. Well, probably was if you didn’t know the water. Kelly did. He reeled in the unbaited hook and lifted his binoculars. Size and color were right. Henry’s Eighth was the name. Check. He settled back, watching it move south, then turn east at the red buoy. Kelly marked his chart. Twelve hours at least. That should be plenty of time. The problem with so secure a place was that it depended absolutely on secrecy which, once blown, became a fatal liability. People never learned. One way in, one way out. Another clever way to commit suicide. He’d wait for sunset. While waiting, Kelly got out a can of spray paint and put green stripes on his dinghy. The inside he painted black.
33
Poisoned Charm
It usually took all night, Billy had told him. That gave Kelly time to eat, relax, and prepare. He moved Springer in close to the cluttered ground he would be hunting tonight and set his anchors. The meal he prepared was only sandwiches, but it was better than he’d had atop “his” hill less than a week before. God, a week ago I was on Ogden, getting ready, he thought with a rueful shake of the head. How could life be so mad as this?
His small dinghy, now camouflaged, went into the water after midnight. He’d attached a small electric trolling motor to the transom, and hoped he had enough battery power to get in and out. It couldn’t be too far. The chart showed that the area was not a large one, and the place they used had to be in the middle for maximum isolation. With darkened face and hands he moved into the maze of derelicts, steering the dinghy with his left hand while his eyes and ears searched for something that didn’t belong. The sky helped. There was no moon, and the starlight was just enough to show him the grass and reeds that had grown in this tidal wetland that had been created when the hulks had been left there, silting up this part of the Bay and making a place that birds loved in the fall season.
It was like before. The low hum of the trolling motor was so much like that of the sled he’d used, moving him along at perhaps two knots, conserving power, guided this time by stars. The marsh grass grew to perhaps six or seven feet above the water, and it wasn’t hard to see why they didn’t navigate their way in by night. It truly was a maze if you didn’t know how. But Kelly did. He watched the stars, knowing which to follow and which to ignore as their position rotated in the arching sky. It was a matter of comfort, really. They were from the city, were not seamen as he was, and as secure as they felt in their chosen place to prepare their illicit product, they weren’t at ease here in this place of wild things and uncertain paths. Won’t you come into my parlor, Kelly told himself. He was more listening than looking now. A gentle breeze rustled through the tall grass, following the widest channel here among the silted bars; twisty as it was, it had to be the one they’d followed. The fifty-year-old hulks around him looked like ghosts of another age, as indeed they were, relics of a war that had been won, cast-offs of a much simpler time, some of them sitting at odd angles, forgotten toys of the huge child their country had been, a child now grown into a troubled adult.
A voice. Kelly stopped his motor, drifting for a few seconds, pivoting his head around to get a fix on it. He’d guessed right on the channel. It looped around to the right just ahead there, and the noise had come from the right as well. Carefully now, slowly, he came around the bend. There were three of the derelicts. Perhaps they’d been towed in together. The tugboat skippers had probably tried to leave them in a perfect line as a personal conceit. The westernmost one was sitting at a slight angle, and listed seven or eight degrees to port, resting on a shifting bottom. The profile was an old one, with a low superstructure whose tall steel funnel had long since rusted away. But there was a light where the bridge ought to be. Music, he thought, some contemporary rock from a station that tried to keep truckers awake at night.
Kelly waited a few minutes, letting his eyes gather a fuller picture in the darkness, selecting his route of approach. He’d come in fine on the bow so that the body of the ship would screen him from view. He could hear more than one voice now. A sudden rolling laugh from
a joke, perhaps. He paused again, searching the ship’s outline for a bump, something that didn’t belong, a sentry. Nothing.
They’d been clever selecting this place. It was as unlikely a spot as one might imagine, ignored even by local fishermen, but you had to have a lookout because no place was ever quite that secure . . . there was the boat. Okay. Kelly crept up at half a knot now, sticking close to the side of the old ship until he got to their boat. He tied his painter off to the nearest cleat. A rope ladder led up to the derelict’s weather deck. Kelly took a deep breath and started climbing.
The work was every bit as menial and boring as Burt had told them it would be, Phil thought. Mixing the milk sugar in was the easy part, sifting it into large stainless-steel bowls like flour for a cake, making sure it was all evenly distributed. He remembered helping his mother with baking when he’d been a small child, watching her and learning things that a kid forgot as soon as he discovered baseball. They came back now, the rattling sound of the sifter, the way the powders came together. It was actually rather a pleasant excursion back to a time when he hadn’t even had to wake up and go to school. But that was the easy part. Then came the tedious job of doling out precisely measured portions into the little plastic envelopes which had to be stapled shut, and piled, and counted, and bagged. He shared an exasperated look with Mike, who felt the same way he did. Burt probably felt the same way, but didn’t let it show, and he had been nice enough to bring entertainment along. They had a radio playing, and for breaks they had this Xantha girl, half-blasted on pills, but . . . compliant, they’d all found out at their midnight break. They’d gotten her nice and tired, anyway. She was sleeping in the corner. There would be another break at four, allowing each of them enough time to recover. It was hard staying awake, and Phil was worried about all this powder, some of it dust in the air. Was he breathing it in? Might he get high on the stuff? If he had to do this again, he promised himself some sort of mask. He might like the idea of making money off selling the shit, but he had no desire at all to use it. Well, Tony and Henry were setting up a proper lab. Travel wouldn’t be such a pain in the ass. That was something.
Another batch done. Phil was a little faster than the others, wanting to get it done. He walked over to the cooler and lifted the next one-kilo bag. He smelled it, as he had the others. Foul, chemical smell, like the chemicals used in the biology lab at his high school, formaldehyde, something like that. He slit open the bag with a penknife, dumping the contents into the first mixing bowl at arm’s length, then adding a premeasured quantity of sugar and stirring with a spoon by the light of one of the Coleman lamps.
“Hello.”
There had been no warning at all. Suddenly there was someone else there at the door, holding a pistol. He was dressed in military clothes, striped fatigues, and his face was painted green and black.
There wasn’t any need for silence. His prey had seen to that. Kelly had reconverted his Colt back to .45 caliber, and he knew that the hole in the front of the automatic would seem large enough to park a car to the others in the room. He pointed with his left hand. “That way. On the deck, facedown, hands at the back of the neck, one at a time, you first,” he said to the one at the mixing bowl.
“Who the hell are you?” the black one asked.
“You must be Burt. Don’t do anything dumb.”
“How you know my name?” Burt demanded as Phil took his place on the deck.
Kelly pointed at the other white one, directing him next to his friend.
“I know lots of things,” Kelly said, moving towards Burt now. Then he saw the sleeping girl in the corner. “Who’s she?”
“Look, asshole!” The .45 went level with his face, an arm’s length away.
“What was that?” Kelly asked in a conversational voice. “Down on the deck, now.” Burt complied at once. The girl, he saw, was sleeping. He’d let that continue for the moment. His first task was to search them for weapons. Two had small handguns. One had a useless little knife.
“Hey, who are you? Maybe we can talk,” Burt suggested.
“We’re going to do that. Tell me about the drugs,” Kelly started off.
It was ten in the morning in Moscow when Voloshin’s dispatch emerged from the decoding department. A senior member of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, he had a pipeline into any number of senior officers, one of whom was an academician in Service I, an American specialist who was advising the senior KGB leadership and the Foreign Ministry on this new development that the American media called détente. This man, who didn’t hold a paramilitary rank within the KGB hierarchy, was probably the best person to get fast action, though an information copy of the dispatch had also gone to the Deputy Chairman with oversight duties for Voloshin’s Directorate. Typically, the message was short and to the point. The Academician was appalled. The reduction of tension between the two superpowers, in the midst of a shooting war for one of them, was little short of miraculous, and coming as it did in parallel with the American approach to China, it could well signal a new era in relations. So he had said to the Politburo in a lengthy briefing only two weeks earlier. The public revelation that a Soviet officer had been involved in something like this—it was madness. What cretin at GRU had thought this one up? Assuming it really was true, which was something he had to check. For that he called the Deputy Chairman.
“Yevgeniy Leonidovich? I have an urgent dispatch from Washington.”
“As do I, Vanya. Your recommendations?”
“If the American claims are true, I urge immediate action. Public knowledge of such idiocy could be ruinous. Could you confirm that this is indeed under way?”
“Da. And then . . . Foreign Ministry?”
“I agree. The military would take too long. Will they listen?”
“Our fraternal socialist allies? They’ll listen to a shipment of rockets. They’ve been screaming for them for weeks,” the Deputy Chairman replied.
How typical, the Academician thought, in order to save American lives we will send weapons to take more of them, and the Americans will understand. Such madness. If there was ever an illustration as to why détente was necessary, this was it. How could two great countries manage their affairs when both were involved, directly or not, in the affairs of minor countries? Such a worthless distraction from important matters.
“I urge speed. Yevgeniy Leonidovich,” the Academician repeated. Though far outranked by the Deputy Chairman, they’d been classmates, years earlier, and their careers had crossed many times.
“I agree completely, Vanya. I’ll be back to you this afternoon.”
It was a miracle, Zacharias thought, looking around. He hadn’t seen the outside of his cell in months, and just to smell the air, warm and humid as it was. seemed a gift from God, but that wasn’t it. He counted the others, eighteen other men in the single line, men like himself, all within the same five-year age bracket, and in the fading light of dusk he saw faces. There was the one he’d seen so long before, a Navy guy by the look of him. They exchanged a look and thin smiles as all the men did what Robin was doing. If only the guards would let them talk, but the first attempt had earned one of their number a slap. Even so, for the moment just seeing their faces was enough. To not be alone any longer, to know that there were others here, just that was enough. Such a small thing. Such a large one. Robin stood as tall as his injured back allowed, squaring his shoulders while that little officer was saying something to his people, who were also lined up. He hadn’t picked up enough Vietnamese to understand the rapid speech.
“This is the enemy,” the Captain was telling his men. He’d be taking his unit south soon, and after all the lectures and battle practice, here was an unexpected opportunity for them to get a real look. They weren’t so tough, these Americans, he told them. See, they’re not so tall and forbidding, are they? They bend and break and bleed—very easily, too! And these are the elite of them, the ones who drop bombs on our country and kill our people. These are the men you’ll be figh
ting. Do you fear them now? And if the Americans are foolish enough to try to rescue these dogs, we’ll get early practice in the art of killing them. With those rousing words, he dismissed his troops, sending them off to their night guard posts.
He could do this, the Captain thought. It wouldn’t matter soon. He’d heard a rumor through his regimental commander that as soon as the political leadership got their thumbs out, this camp would be closed down in a very final way, and his men would indeed get a little practice before they had to walk down Uncle Ho’s trail, where they would have the chance to kill armed Americans next. Until then he had them as trophies to show his men, to lessen their dread of the great unknown of combat, and to focus their rage, for these were the men who’d bombed their beautiful country into a wasteland. He’d select recruits who had trained especially hard and well . . . nineteen of them, so as to give them a taste of killing. They’d need it. The captain of infantry wondered how many of them he’d be bringing home.
Kelly stopped off for fuel at the Cambridge town dock before heading back north. He had it all now—weft, he had enough now, Kelly told himself. Full bunkers, and a mind full of useful data. and for the first time he’d hurt the bastards. Two weeks, maybe three weeks of their product. That would shake things loose. He might have collected it himself and perhaps used it as bait, but no, he couldn’t do that. He wouldn’t have it around him, especially now that he suspected he knew how it might come in. Somewhere on the East Coast, was all that Burt actually knew. Whoever this Henry Tucker was, he was on the clever side of paranoid, and compartmentalized his operation in a way that Kelly might have admired under other circumstances. But it was Asian heroin, and the bags it arrived in smelled of death, and they came in on the East Coast. How many things from Asia that smelled of death came to the Eastern United States? Kelly could think of only one, and the fact that he’d known men whose bodies had been processed at Pope Air Force Base only fueled his anger and his determination to see this one thing through. He brought Springer north, past the brick tower of Sharp’s Island Light, heading back into a city that held danger from more than one direction.
