Without Honor

by David Hagberg

20

  Warren Nicols crossed the Texas border at Big Bend National Park and entered Mexico a few minutes after ten in the evening. He had no problem fording the shallow Rio Grande, which here barely came up to his chest. Pushing the dirt bike on its inflated raft was a snap. On the far side he deflated the bag, buried it in the sand, shouldered his MAC-10 machine pistol and kit bag—containing a Handie-Talkie capable of transmitting and receiving via the CIA’s communications satellite, his night-vision spotting binoculars and high-speed camera, and his provisions—and headed away from the river.

  There were no roads here. The nearest paved highway was more than twenty miles to the east, across the low Sierra de la Encantada mountains. Overhead the stars shone as brilliant, hard points in the crystal clear desert air. Nicols concentrated on driving without lights. To have a serious spill here on the open desert would almost certainly mean death. He would not be listed as missing for a full seventy-two hours, though his first transmission via satellite to Langley was scheduled in barely six hours.

  He had spent the past four days camped in the park with a Boy Scout troop from Joliet, Illinois. They were background noise. No one would officially miss him for the next three days. Nor would anyone from the campsite miss him until breakfast in the morning. By then, however, if everything went as planned, he would be back.

  The 75-cc dirt bike with long-range tanks, a specially designed engine shroud and hi-tech muffler to minimize noise, and a highly sophisticated satellite-navigation system by which he could pinpoint his location anywhere on earth within ten meters, was capable of open-road speeds in excess of seventy miles per hour and nearly the same across open country provided the track was reasonably smooth and the driver had the guts and stamina to hang on. Nicols had both.

  He followed a general line along the base of the mountains, which according to the analysts and planners would make him hard to spot either from direct surveillance or from the ground scatter radar the Russians probably employed in the region. If he painted at all, he might look like a wind devil, a fast-moving desert hare or perhaps even a low-flying bird.

  Nicols was a large man, over six feet tall without boots and two hundred pounds. He had returned three months ago from Afghanistan, where he had distinguished himself in the field not only because of his strength, stamina, and courage, but because of his intelligence and understanding. At forty he wasn’t a spring chicken, but what he might lack in youthful zeal he more than made up for in experience and reliability. He was married and had three children who all adored him because he was a kind and gentle man.

  He had spent the past two weeks at the Farm outside Williamsburg preparing for this assignment. Nothing the instructors or planners had come up with, they had finally decided, could work effectively for him as a cover story. Americans armed with equipment such as he had simply had no business in the Mexican desert—except to spy. At the last they had allowed him to pick whatever weapon he wanted. The MAC-10 seemed correct. It was light, reliable, and deadly. In addition, he carried a World War II bayonet in a sheath taped to his chest beneath his shirt. It had been his father’s. He was an expert with it.

  For the first few miles he ran on underinflated tires because of the loose sand and sand dunes which rose and fell like swells on the open ocean. Farther away, however, the desert smoothed out to a hardpan. He stopped long enough to inflate the dirt bike’s tires and then continued, pushing harder, driving at times at an almost reckless forty miles per hour, yet in the next instant having to slow to a bare crawl because of rocks, in a few places ancient lava flows, and in eight places in one mile washouts from desert flash floods.

  In one long stretch of at least five miles, the going was comparatively easy and Nicols was able to engage in the luxury of thinking. As had been the case over the past few weeks, his thoughts automatically went to the briefing he had been given by the DCI himself.

  “The Soviets have armed Siberia to threaten our northernmost borders. They tried in the south to arm Cuba with offensive weapons and failed, and now we think they are trying again in northern Mexico.”

  Nicols had been stunned. It wasn’t possible. Mexico was our friend. He was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. In addition to being fluent in Russian and Chinese (from college), he was also fluent in the romance languages (from his boyhood chums)—Spanish, French, and Italian. It was a facility of his, languages.

  “But we are not sure, Warren. Not one hundred percent certain,” Powers had admitted. They were alone, seated across a coffee table from each other in the DCI’s office.

  “What can I do, Mr. Director?” he’d asked.

  “Someone has to go across the border and see them firsthand. Take some photographs from the ground.”

  “Of the installation?” Nicols said naively.

  “Of the installation, yes, that too. Ideally we’d like to have photographs of the missiles themselves. Their serial numbers.”

  Nicols had smiled. He suddenly saw the entire operation and beyond, like a long, clear highway out to the horizon. “We can invent a satellite-surveillance photograph, but not a serial number, sir.”

  Powers laughed out loud, but then he suddenly sat forward, an intense look in his eyes. “I don’t want you to get yourself shot up or captured, Warren. If someone—I don’t care who—should happen to get in your way, it’ll be too bad for them. Whatever happens, whatever you do, you will have my personal backing. Is that perfectly clear?”

  It had been perfectly clear then, and it was clear now. The situation was not the fault of the Mexicans. They’d been taken in just as so many other poor nations had been. Soviet influence was like quicksand he’d been told over and over again by the Afghan rebel leaders. Get your leg caught in it and you have troubles. Jump in or slip in with both feet—no matter which—and you’re dead.

  As he drove he began to think about what would happen within the next few hours. He began to hope that he would run into someone. A guard. An engineer. An officer. His fingers tightened on the handle grips.

  He slowly picked his way across a dry riverbed and on the other side maneuvered the bike to the top of a rise, where he stopped a moment to check his position. Far to the south he thought he caught a glimpse of a light, but then he wasn’t sure. It had to be over the horizon from him, at least fifteen miles away. The SatNav gave his position in grid coordinates. He opened the panel, flipped a couple of switches, then compared the readings with a plasticized chart he carried in a leg pocket of his black coveralls. The suspected Soviet-built missile installation was directly south of him, about eighteen miles away.

  The land flattened out on the other side of the rise, and as far as he could tell no one had come this way for a very long time. There were no tracks anywhere. He had studied the satellite surveillance photographs that had been overlaid onto a topographical map of the region. The missile installation, which was still under construction but apparently nearing completion, was nestled between parallel ridges in the mountains, the rises about three miles apart. The land in between was perfectly flat, forming a natural amphitheater with good protection on three sides, open only to the southwest toward the open desert. The construction was meant to look as if a large oil exploration project was underway. It had not fooled the agency’s analysts, nor would it fool anyone who came for a closer look, except perhaps for the farmers in the area. But they would be of no bother. They were very poor. A few pesos would guarantee their complete cooperation.

  He covered two-thirds of the distance in less than twenty minutes before he stopped again. This time he shut off the bike’s engine, took out his night-vision binoculars, and trained them on the hills rising to the east, beyond which lay the construction site. At first he saw nothing. He looked specifically for lights, any kind of lights, as well as for fences, movements such as patrols might make in jeeps, on horseback, or on foot, or any kind of a track in the sand.

  A thin white light flashed in the sky just above a cut in the hills, probably an arroyo. For a secon
d he thought it might have been a spotlight of some kind, but then the light bounced into the sky again, and he realized what he was seeing. The light had moved from right to left. A couple of seconds later he saw a much smaller red light wink on, then off, and then there was a pair of them. Taillights, he thought. A patrol vehicle was working its way along the ridge, which offered views down the one side into the valley where the missile base lay, and down the other across the open desert to where Nicols crouched beside his dirt bike.

  They were obviously expecting intruders, or at the very least they were prepared for such a possibility. Let them be Russians, Nicols told himself mounting his bike and starting it. Not Mexicans. Let them be Russians, please God. After Afghanistan he had a few old scores to settle.

  He cut straight across the desert now, directly for the northern edge of the arroyo, the last place he had seen the lights of the patrol vehicle. Whatever their schedule might be, he did not think they would be making a pass by any one spot more than once or twice each night. He would be relatively safe up to that point for the next few hours, he figured. From there he would descend into the valley on the other side, make his way onto the base, take his photographs, and then get the hell out. God help the man who got in his way. Especially if he was Russian. Here on this continent! Christ, it made his blood boil.

  The desert dipped down toward the base of the first hills, then rose on an alluvial fan that spread out beneath the broad cut above. Leaning into the pitch of the hill, Nicols gunned the little bike, rocks and sand spitting out behind him and clattering down the hill as he spurted up. He was making too much noise, and he knew it. But he wanted to gain the first rise in the series of hills below the main crest. He figured he would find a spot to conceal the bike somewhere there and then make it the rest of the way on foot. If he was lucky the patrol vehicle he had seen earlier would be a long distance off by now. He did not think they would have installed any other kind of short-range surveillance equipment out here; heat sensors, motion detectors, pressure grids buried just beneath the surface. At least he hoped they hadn’t.

  His luck ran out just at the top of the lower ridge. The headlights of at least half a dozen jeeps suddenly came on, catching him in a blinding glare. He tried to spin the bike around so that he could take off back down the hill the way he had come, but the rear wheel got away from him on the loose sand and gravel and he went down.

  Moving purely on instinct, Nicols rolled left, away from the still sliding bike as he grabbed his MAC-10, yanked the bolt back, thumbed off the safety, and came around on his belly into a shooting position.

  He fired one short burst at the nearest jeep to his left, and as the headlights suddenly were extinguished and a man cried out, he rolled left again.

  A split instant before a withering rain of automatic weapons fire slammed into Nicols’s body, he heard someone shouting “Left! He has gone left!” at the top of his lungs. In Russian. They were the last words he ever heard.

  It was two in the morning, a time that Donald Suthland Powers had always found the most enchanting, the most mysterious, a time when things always seemed to go bad. If you could somehow get past three A.M., the rest would naturally fall into place. Or at least anything that might happen afterward would be manageable. Like many of his predecessors, Powers had developed the habit of staying at his office during crucial operations when lives were on the line; lives of men and women he had personally sent out into the field. It was a part of the business that he had never become accustomed to. Here in his office on the seventh floor of the headquarters building at Langley, he felt more secure than he did at home, more in control, as if he were a direct part of whatever operation was in progress. As if his mere presence here would lend strength to the battles on distant fields. There was no one at his home in any event. Sissy was away at school, the housekeeper had taken the week off, and how many years had it been since Janet? More than he cared to count. It was at times like these he missed her the most. The nest was empty. This was home.

  Danielle, his DDO, felt the same way although for different reasons. He sat across the desk from Powers, and they both looked up as they heard someone running up the corridor outside the open door. Stuart Flagler, Powers’s bodyguard, was sitting in the anteroom. He jumped up, his hand automatically reaching for his weapon.

  Powers stiffened. He had had a premonition of disaster since this afternoon. Was this it, then? he wondered. “Stuart, see who that is,” he called.

  “Yes, sir,” Flagler answered over his shoulder as he stepped to the outer door.

  Danielle got to his feet as Tom Josten, one of his young staffers out of operations, appeared, out of breath.

  “Mr. Danielle,” he called past Flagler.

  “It’s all right, Stuart,” Powers said.

  The big bodyguard stepped aside and the young man rushed in. He brought with him a half a dozen computer-enhanced and printed photographs from their surveillance satellite. They were infrared tracings. “There’s trouble with Banyan Tree, sir,” Josten said, spreading the photos on Powers’s desk. Banyan Tree was the code name of Warren Nicols’s operation.

  “What have we got here, son?” Powers asked, bending over the stark photographs.

  “These were sent down from Big Bird Four at 0517 Zulu—that would have been 1117 central time last night. I have the grid coordinates here … .”

  “Banyan Base?” Danielle asked.

  “Just outside it, sir. About four miles to the west. We overlaid it on the topo. It would have put the action at the first ridge just below the west wall.” Josten pointed to the first two prints, which showed a ragged red streak about three inches long. “This would be the exhaust-heat trace from Nicols’s bike. He was going up the hill at a pretty good clip.” Josten pointed to the next several prints, which showed a U-shaped ring of lights, and a fifth and sixth print showing pinpoints of light that bloomed into long red streaks. “They were waiting for him. Looks like headlights to Scotty downstairs. I’d have to agree. We’ll know once spectral analysis is done.”

  “And these are gun bursts,” Danielle said.

  “Yes, sir. A lot of them.”

  Powers had picked up a magnifying glass, he bent low over one of the photos and looked at a series of pinpricks, and several streaks facing inward, toward the headlights. He looked up. “Nicols got off a few shots?”

  Josten smiled unhappily. “Yes, sir. It would appear so. But we don’t think it did him much good. We counted at least twenty-three separate weapons locations, every one of them trained on and just to the left of where Nicols had fired. He didn’t have a chance in hell, sir. Not a chance.”

  Powers put down his magnifying glass and exchanged glances with Danielle. “Nothing from him? No emergency signal?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I want his frequency monitored for the next seventy-two hours, no matter what this may look like.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’re not giving up on him. Not yet.”

  “Yes, sir,” Josten said.

  Powers sighed deeply. He was tired. He nodded. “Thanks for coming up here, but let’s not give in so easily. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Can we do that?”

  “Of course, sir,” Josten said glumly. He nodded, then turned and left the office. They watched him go. In the anteroom, Flagler settled back to his magazine.

  Powers came around his desk, crossed his huge office, and from a sideboard behind a bookcase, he poured two stiff shots of brandy.

  “A little water in mine, Mr. Director,” Danielle said.

  Powers poured water in both and brought them back to his desk. They looked at each other as they drank. Powers put down his glass and went back behind his desk.

  “I think we should call the president,” Danielle said softly.

  Powers nodded. He leaned his weight into his fists, which were bunched up on the desktop. “Nicols is scheduled to transmit his first status report in an hour or so.”

  “Give it
up. You can’t believe he survived that.” Danielle gestured at the infrared satellite photos.

  “We’ve been in this business long enough, Lawrence, to know not to jump at the obvious. This could have been a snoopy rancher straying someplace he didn’t belong. A drug runner looking for someplace to stash a future load. It would be a perfect place for a drug operation; close to our border, flat ground for a landing strip, the protection of the mountains, almost no population center anywhere nearby.”

  “You’re clutching at straws, if you permit me to say so.”

  . Powers thrust his hands into his pockets, as if the action would stay him from picking up the telephone. The pieces were beginning to fall into some kind of a pattern, though he still could not recognize it. This had the earmarks of a Baranov operation. That much he did recognize. It had begun last October with the hijacking of the Aeromexico flight out of Miami and the assassination of Jules and Asher on the taxiway at Havana. They had been on their way into place in Mexico, and it was very possible they would have uncovered the incoming Soviet construction equipment and missile-base supplies, which would have alerted us to the situation when there could have been time for a political solution. Baranov had known. He was smart. And he was back in Mexico. Powers could feel the man’s presence as a powerful, electromagnetic force that caused his hair to stand on end.

  “We’re not going to have time to send another man down there,” Danielle was saying. “And this time is different from Cuba. Back then we had time for a blockade. This time all six of their installations are nearly operational.”

  “I should have seen it,” Powers mumbled, his mind still on Baranov, the charmer, Baranov, the magic man, the Houdini.

  “You’re talking about Jules and Asher last year? We’ve gone over it before, but I just don’t see the connection. It’s too farfetched. He’d have to have someone here. Someone either within the agency or certainly here in Washington with top-level sources.” Danielle had said it all before. “Trotter found nothing in the hijacking to suggest a larger plan. And he’s a damned good man. One of the best. Something would have shown up. We would have gotten at least a glimmer in Mexico City.”