Against All Enemies mm-1

by Tom Clancy

  “Done. And you know what I want.”

  “Of course.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Oh, Corrales, you know that’s impossible. Tell me where you are, and I’ll send a car.”

  “This will take time. Twenty-four hours, at least.”

  “I’m sorry, Corrales, but I am supposed to trust you now, after what you did? So no, I don’t have twenty-four hours. I have until midnight. Okay?”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Sure, you can. We can take care of this electronically. I have all the information you need.”

  But that was not how Corrales wanted to pay off the man. He wanted to get cash so he could bury the money, hide it from Castillo. That kind of money would require him to draw from one of the cartel’s operations accounts, and Castillo would be tipped off by such a withdrawal.

  “I will come with the cash,” Corrales said. “By midnight.”

  “No, like I said, we’ll send a man for you when you’re ready. No more games, Corrales.”

  “I understand.”

  “I hope you do. This is your last chance. I know that you are very sorry for your mistake, and I am willing to help you one last time, because I will profit from it. Otherwise, God help you …God help you …”

  Corrales hung up and looked to Pablo. “We need a lot of cash here as fast as you can. Contact Héctor and tell La Familia that we need a loan.”

  “Now we’re borrowing money from another cartel?” asked Pablo.

  “Don’t question me! Just do it!” Corrales winced as the throbbing in his shoulder became a knifing pain.

  Jorge Rojas Medical Institute

  Mexico City

  A crowd of about two hundred people had gathered in the parking lot of a brand-new five-story office complex. Jorge Rojas straightened his shoulders at the lectern and smiled once more at the board of directors, the senior-level administrators, and at the dozens and dozens of office workers who’d been hired to help spearhead this ambitious endeavor. A handful of local media had also arrived to cover the historic ribbon-cutting ceremony.

  Rojas had made a surprise visit to the ceremony (he’d originally bowed out of an appearance because of travel plans), but he’d returned early from Colombia and had decided at the last moment to accept the security risk and speak at the event.

  He’d arrived in a convoy of six bulletproof SUVs, and his team of twenty men, dressed discreetly in Somoza’s suits and well armed, had secured the perimeter. He was just finishing up his remarks: “And as I’ve said, the current medical model is flawed. It’s our hope to focus on preventative medicine through promotion and greater access to services. This is a patient-centered approach rather than a health-care-system-centered approach. We hope to encourage all citizens of Mexico — and everyone in Latin America, for that matter — to take a more proactive role in their health care. We’ll do this by helping other nonprofit organizations and by providing grants for students, professors, researchers, and other health-care professionals. I founded this institute with one purpose in mind: to help people live better and longer. Now, then, can we cut this ribbon? Because over there, I think they have churros and coffee for us all!”

  The audience laughed as Rojas stepped off the podium, accepted the oversized pair of scissors, and did the honors, to great applause. He wished he could have turned to stare into the glistening eyes of his wife, but instead there was Alexsi, always stunning in her designer dresses and jewelry but a mannequin and hardly the conversationalist his wife had been. Beside her stood Castillo, putting a hand to his Bluetooth receiver and speaking softly to the rest of their security team.

  Before Rojas could turn away so that they could hear a few words from the new institute’s director, a reporter from XEWTV, Inés Ortega, a middle-aged woman who had interviewed Rojas several times before and whose questions repeatedly annoyed him, pushed herself to the front of the group and thrust a microphone in his face.

  “Señor Rojas, you are one of the richest men in the world, and your influence is seen everywhere. I can talk over my Rojas-operated cell phone while shopping at a supermarket you own with money I keep in one of your banks. When I’m finished, I can go buy a cup of coffee at a restaurant you own. You’re hard to escape.”

  “I’m happy to help people,” he said, waving his hand at her. “If you don’t have any questions—”

  “Actually, I do. How do you respond to people who call you greedy? Much of the nation starves, and you become richer because your businesses never seem to fail …”

  “I respond like this,” he said, gesturing back to the medical complex. “We’re doing everything we can to give back to the community. There will always be critics, but the facts speak for themselves. If you want to talk about wealth, then I believe it must be protected to benefit future generations — that’s why it’s important for my businesses to do well. I’m not here to make myself rich anymore. I’m here to help our people and our president address this country’s needs — and if people want to call that greedy, then that is a misinterpretation of what’s in my heart.”

  A crack — not much louder than a firecracker — resounded from the back of the group, and almost immediately a thud like a punch struck Rojas’s chest and knocked him off balance. He reached out toward the staircase railing behind him, missed, and collapsed onto the steps, his elbow crashing hard onto the concrete.

  Pandemonium swept through the crowd, the screams coming in waves as some fled toward the parked cars while others simply hit the ground, all of them seeking cover except Fernando Castillo, who spotted the lone gunman at the back of the crowd and gave chase as the rest of the security team began to swarm around their prey.

  From the corner of his eye, Rojas watched as Castillo ran but twenty steps before opening fire and hitting the man, who dropped before he could reach a pickup truck parked at the back of the lot, beneath two large oak trees. Castillo sprinted to the fallen shooter and put two more bullets in the man’s head, much to Rojas’s chagrin. It might’ve been useful to question the man, but then again, a public figure as prominent as himself had many enemies. This could have been a troubled citizen who just snapped one day and decided to kill someone he’d read about or seen on TV.

  Both Alexsi and the reporter, Inés, were at Rojas’s side as he dug into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and wriggled out the round that had lodged in the flexible plate. He lifted it up and showed it to the two women. “Thank God for protection,” he said.

  “You will have to call Felipe in Colombia and tell him,” said Alexsi.

  They helped him back to his feet as more people, including his board of directors, approached and asked if he was all right.

  He returned to the lectern as the sirens grew in the distance. “I’m not dead,” he cried. “And neither is the dream we’ve built here!”

  With that, the crowd began to cheer.

  Afterward, in the backseat of his armored Mercedes, Rojas watched the TV footage captured by the news crew. The story was being picked up by all the major news networks and newswires: the Associated Press, BBC News World, Reuters, and United Press International. Every major network in Mexico and the United States was either covering the story or about to cover the story, Rojas knew.

  He tried once more to call Miguel. No answer. Voice mail.

  “Nothing from my son. Nothing from Sonia,” he told Castillo.

  “Nothing from Dante, either, but give them some time,” said Castillo. “Maybe there’s trouble with the towers — that would explain why none of them are answering us.”

  “You’re right. I shouldn’t be worried, but if Miguel sees the news of what happened, he’ll be worried, I know.”

  “He’ll call you,” Castillo assured him. “Now, sir, are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?”

  “Just take us home.”

  Alexsi put her hand on his and said, “Everything is fine, my love. Thank God you are so careful. I won’t complain about you going to C
olombia again.”

  He grinned faintly and tried to calm himself.

  She frowned. “Why do you think that madman wanted to kill you? Just jealousy? After all you do for the country? I just can’t believe there is so much hate in the world.”

  “Believe it,” he said, turning his attention to the darkly tinted window. They were merging back onto the highway, heading toward Cuernavaca and his mansion in the suburbs. He suddenly yelled, “I want to know who that guy was!”

  “Of course,” said Castillo. “I’m already working on that. The detectives will call me as soon as they know.”

  “Okay, excellent,” he said, catching his breath. And then a deep sigh of relief: a text message from Miguel.

  He thumbed on the message, which had no text, only a video attached. He double-tapped the video icon, turned his phone horizontally, and watched in widescreen as the camera panned, revealing Sonia …and then Miguel …

  Rojas began to lose his breath. “Fernando! Pull over! Pull over!”

  A man came into view carrying an ax.

  “Don’t look,” Sonia said. “Just don’t look.”

  And Rojas’s hands began to tremble. “No!”

  Private Airstrip

  Approx. 1,000 Miles South of Mexicali, Mexico

  It was nearly dusk by the time they finished transferring their gear and all of their personnel onto the trucks, both of which were step vans, one belonging to a plumber whose logo was emblazoned across the side of the vehicle. The other was a seafood-delivery vehicle whose bay reeked of fish and crabs. Samad and his men could only grimace and climb aboard. These trucks were all they had, and he was, despite their confines, grateful to Allah for them.

  Samad estimated it would take them about eighteen hours of drive time, averaging fifty-five miles per hour, and so he’d warned his men that the next two days on the road would be long and arduous. Talwar and Niazi, who were in the other van, said they would do their best to keep the men calm and remind them that refueling points were their only chance to use the bathroom facilities. With a group as large as theirs, that would become a serious consideration.

  They were but twenty miles into their journey when the other truck pulled to the side of the road with a flat tire, and this made Samad throw his hands up in frustration. Yes, they had a spare; yes, they could fix it; but many, many others already in the United States were waiting for them, and the delay caused his stomach to knot and his hands to ball into fists. The drivers, both Mexicans, were yelling at each other in Spanish as they fixed the flat, and Samad was beginning to realize that the driver of his truck might be having second thoughts. He shifted up to the man, hunkered down, and said in Spanish, “We trust you to deliver us to our destination. That’s all you need to do. To get paid. To stay alive. Do you understand me?”

  The man swallowed and nodded.

  A commercial airliner cut across the sky in the distance. Samad turned up toward the plane and watched it vanish into a raft of pink clouds.

  27 AL RESCATE

  San Juan Chamula

  Chiapas, Mexico

  Deep shadows had fallen across the graveyard, and the rows of crosses now stood in silhouette against the moldy walls of the abandoned church. Down below, past the church and the marketplace, Moore, who was lying on his belly, scanned the large crowds of locals and tourists gathering around and lining the streets of the main road, where the parade and fireworks show of Carnival would soon commence. Troupes of dancers were already shifting and whirling across beds of burning embers whose sparks rose around them.

  Moore panned to the right with his night-vision scope and back to the house where the small blue car and van were still parked. Torres had fetched their rental car and had moved it up behind the pair of smaller houses at the bottom of the road. He’d left the car there with the keys under the mat.

  After another long breath, Moore adjusted his grip on the weapon in his hands, one of the Mark 11 Model 0’s, which had earned the nickname “Pirate Killer,” based on their use by Navy SEALs to rescue captured sailors from Somali pirates. Fitzpatrick had feigned surprise over Moore toting them, and Torres had grilled Moore about how he’d acquired such powerful military-issue weapons. “Like I told you,” Moore had said, “the people I work for are very well connected.”

  Indeed.

  The Mark 11 was a twenty-round semiautomatic rifle equipped with a biped. The rifle’s magazine held twenty 7.62x5-millimeter NATO rounds, and Moore liked to joke that if you needed twenty bullets to hit your target, then you’d best get into politics and out of soldiering. When Moore fired the Mark 11, the round would streak off faster than the speed of sound, creating a small sonic boom that would dissipate as the round slowed to subsonic speeds. At about six hundred meters out in places such as the mountains of Afghanistan, a sniper could shoot and remain silent to his target; however, in more urban environments such as San Juan Chamula, Moore and Fitzpatrick, who also lay on his belly on the other side of the hill, needed the KAC suppressors that would help conceal and confuse the source of their ordnance. If Moore were to take his shot beyond eight hundred meters, he could fire at will without the enemy ever detecting his location. Of course, as Murphy’s Law would have it, the math was not in their favor.

  Range to the house and the four guards positioned there was only 527 meters. Current wind was NNE at nine miles per hour. Elevation was 7,410 feet, and they were approximately 29 feet higher than their target with a grade of nine percent heading up into the hills. Between the wind, the calculations for bullet drop, and their current positions, the shots would be difficult but not impossible. They would certainly be heard, and the only thing to help mask them would be the fireworks echoing from town. As Moore had earlier remarked, that was their only stroke of luck, and they’d need a lot more than luck, because the real test would occur after they brought down the guards …

  Moore called Towers, who was monitoring the Avenging Vultures’ radio channel. “Anything?”

  “Still running through the cell-phone calls. That’ll take a while. Just the usual small talk on the radio. They’re calling one guy Captain Salou, and I pulled up what we have on him: Guatemalan Special Forces, twenty-year veteran before he retired and turned mercenary. In technical terms, he’s a mean-ass motherfucker.”

  “And handy with an ax,” Moore added darkly.

  “Something else is going on, though, down in Cristóbal. Local police are on high alert, and from what we can tell, they’re searching for missing persons.”

  “No surprise. Maybe Daddy found out that his little boy’s been kidnapped and put in some calls.”

  “Well, if he did, then you need to extract them and get the hell out of there before Rojas’s team arrives.”

  “I hear that. I’m just waiting for the party to begin …”

  Moore closed his eyes, trying to purge all the extraneous thoughts and simply focus on the shots, on the moment. But his conscience wasn’t cooperating because of how similar this moment was to the past. He unwillingly took himself back to the beach at Coronado and stood there, watching the tide roll in, watching as out there in the dark sea, a hand rose above the waves …and a voice that was really his own came in a bellow, “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!”

  “We have to go back!”

  “He’s taking off! We can’t!”

  “Don’t do this, Max! Don’t do it!”

  “No choice! Shut the fuck up! We’re leaving!”

  Moore shuddered violently over those voices.

  And then another one: “You are class 198. You are the warriors who’ve survived because of your teamwork.”

  Not anymore. He’d tricked the Navy into thinking he was worth it, but he should have never become a SEAL. He had broken the most basic rule, and should have been punished for his actions, and because he wasn’t, he thought he should take on that job himself. He didn’t deserve a real life after what he’d done. No, he didn’t.

  During a time when he was feeling most depress
ed, he’d tried to lift his spirits by literally launching himself into the air, but not parachuting, no. He’d talked to a few buddies and found something much more exotic in the Romsdal Valley of Norway. Within two days of his arrival, he was wearing a wingsuit and jetting through the air at 150 miles per hour. He dove down into the valley, taking advantage of the favorable winds during the summer solstice. The wingsuit allowed him to soar like a bird, with the fabric fanning out beneath his arms and legs like webbing. This was not free fall but a very fast, very dangerous form of gliding. All Moore had to do was lean to the left or to the right to steer himself within a meter of the cliff walls beside which he raced.

  He came whipping around one corner, close enough to reach out and grab the rock face, then he rolled to the left and plummeted at a forty-five-degree angle, the wind now roaring across him. Death was very close, whispering in his ear, and he began to find peace with himself, with the wind, the valley, and for a few seconds, he just closed his eyes, knowing he should pull his rip cord but waiting to see how long he would wait, how long, just a few more seconds, the euphoria mounting as he imagined the mottled rock face below.

  He pulled the cord. Boom. The chute blossomed; the cords tugged. It was over.

  The group roared from somewhere behind him.

  Of the fifteen people in his extreme-sports posse who’d come from all over the world to do this, Moore’s flight had been the fastest, the longest, without question the most dangerous of all, like something out of an action film and not a tourist’s joyride. He hadn’t realized what he’d done until the others gazed on him in awe, as though his temples had gone gray and he’d seen the maker.

  Afterward, their Norwegian guide, Bjoernolf, took them all out for lunch, and over smørrebrød topped with smoked salmon and cups of dark-roast coffee, he pulled Moore aside and, in his heavily accented English, simply asked, “Why do you want to die?”

  “Excuse me?” Moore replied, lowering his mug.