Tom Clancy Presents: Act of Valor

by Dick Couch

  Ross smiled and lowered his voice. “We became interested when a 707 leased by him and filled with Soviet weapons was intercepted in Lagos.”

  Morales and Ross continued to walk, passing through the plaza and down a sheltered path.

  “Langley says the boys over at NSA have picked up some interesting intercepts connecting Christo to a jihadist network out of Southeast Asia,” Ross continued. “It seems that Christo and one of the guys running the network were childhood friends.”

  “So what’s going to happen to this animal? We know he deals drugs, and now you say he’s an arms dealer as well. Can he be arrested or somehow be made accountable?”

  “Sorry, Doctor. For now, Langley just wants us to watch him and report back on his activities.”

  “He needs to be stopped,” Morales murmured. “He may give a lot of money to worthy causes, but the misery of his kind of business that spreads to the region is unconscionable.”

  As she spoke, a camera shutter clicked and captured Ross and Morales in a frame.

  THREE

  The home of Dr. Lisa Morales was an average size apartment in a nondescript complex near the small town of Barranca. Very middle class. It was far from the luxury of Costa Rican resorts that catered to foreign tourists, primarily American tourists, on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The structure was concrete and glass set in sterile architecture—a building that attracted no attention. Perfect for someone who wanted to avoid notice and therefore perfect from the CIA’s standpoint for one of their informants.

  Lisa Morales had been the resident physician for Doctors Without Borders in Barranca for almost a year. She had made her small, one-bedroom apartment as homey as she could. She was reasonably well paid for her work, including a stipend from the CIA, but her life was designed to look like that of a young, idealistic physician on a modest salary. A rattan sofa and loveseat set, along with a bamboo-and-glass coffee table, took up most of the space in the small living room. The secondhand furniture was underlaid by a worn light-brown carpet. Cheap curtains adorned the two street-facing windows in the room. The adjacent kitchen sported only basic cookware and an ancient refrigerator. There was nothing high-end in the apartment. A small card table with four folding chairs served as the kitchen table. The only thing special about her furnishings was the secret compartment in the back of a battered end table. She seldom kept anything of a confidential intelligence nature, but it was there if she needed it. To even a critical eye, all was average and uninteresting.

  “Okay, Lisa, you’ve got eighteen points with a double-word score. But watch this,” Ross said.

  “Go for it, Mr. Wordsmith,” she replied as Ross laid down his tiles.

  “There it is, ‘seizure,’ that’s twenty-nine points, triple-word score.”

  “You don’t like to lose, do you, Walter?”

  “After twenty-five years with the Company, if I could stand losing I’d probably be dead by now,” Ross replied.

  It was always this way with them whenever Ross visited. They took a simple game of Scrabble and made it a highly competitive exercise. It fed both of their type-A personalities and took their minds off the deadly serious business they worked at—gathering intelligence on drug traffickers so that others in the CIA bureaucracy could take action.

  “You getting hungry yet?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I am,” he replied. “What did you have in mind?”

  “How about Chinese?”

  “Here? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “No, Chinese is universal, you know that. You can get Chinese anywhere. Where have you ever been that you can’t get Chinese? And besides, I order from them all the time. How about chow mein?”

  “Works for me,” Ross replied as he continued to fiddle with his Scrabble tiles, rearranging them on his tile holder and plotting his next move.

  Morales got up and walked to the phone hanging from the kitchen wall to put in their order. “Si . . . si . . . A que tiempo? . . . si . . . Gracias.” As she returned to join Ross, she passed in front of one of the windows. From across the street and unseen, a camera clicked. As she passed in front of the second window, a camera clicked again.

  “So how long?” Ross asked as Morales sat down again on the loveseat in front of the Scrabble board.

  “A half hour. I know, I know, you get it much faster in the States.”

  Ross grinned. “What would I know about ordering Chinese in the States? Listen,” he continued, lowering his voice, “we got a response from our last cable to the embassy.” He was referring obliquely to his reporting senior in Mexico City. “We’re still waiting for the Chief of Mission to finalize an updated list of requirements for you. Apparently one of the operations types had some additional questions. We should have it for you in a couple of days.”

  Morales merely shrugged on hearing this and laid down her tiles. “ ‘Broken’ . . . that’s twenty-one points.”

  “Y’know,” Ross said almost to himself, “I’ll never understand why good old boys from Princeton, who haven’t been in the field since Nixon was in the White House, are the ones who control our playbook.” He stared at the board and put down three of his tiles. “Double-word score. Eighteen points.”

  “ ‘Dumb,’ ” Morales replied, shaking her head. “Easy word, good score.”

  “Read it and weep.”

  “I’m trying not to,” Morales replied.

  The game and their banter continued, mixing Scrabble challenges with quiet shoptalk. It was familiar and comfortable. They were intelligence operatives, even though Morales was more informant than agent. They were both, as Robert Heinlein would say, strangers in a strange land. The game progressed, and as the board became a tiled mosaic, they continued to discuss ways their seniors could act more quickly on the information they were providing. Ross, the senior spook, easily shared his experience and his ideas with Morales. And while there was no sexual tension between them, he couldn’t help but embellish on his espionage exploits. For her, it was a cause; for him, it was a way of life.

  Morales looked up at Ross and smiled as she put all her tiles on the board. “Thirty-four points!”

  “ ‘Adumbrating’? That’s not a word!” Ross exclaimed.

  They both paused a moment as the doorbell rang.

  “Finally!” Ross said. “I’ll get it.”

  “Here,” Morales replied as she threw a dictionary at him. “It’s pronounced ADAM-brating. It means ‘portending’ or ‘foreshadowing.’ You’re buying dinner.”

  Ross fumbled with the dictionary, looking for Morales’s word as he ambled toward the front door. “Nice,” he said. “Most case officers get tactical partners. Langley sets me up with some kind of Scrabble hustler.”

  “Scrabble Yoda,” Morales replied, leaning back on the loveseat and kicking off her shoes.

  Ross looked through the peephole and saw the delivery boy holding their Chinese takeout. He undid the security chain, opened the double bolt, and turned the doorknob to the right. As he swung the door open, he reached into his back pocket for his wallet.

  “How much do I owe . . .”

  PSSST! PSST! There was only the metallic clatter that followed the muted explosions as the suppressed automatic chambered new rounds. The silencer and the downloaded rounds did their work as two 9mm hollow points slammed into Ross’s forehead.

  Morales looked up just in time to see the back of Ross’s head expel a curtain of red mist that dusted the entryway walls.

  Tommy and two of his men charged through the door, stepping over Ross’s lifeless body. Morales froze for just an instant, then rolled off the loveseat and dived for her weapon. Tommy and the two men charged directly at her.

  The Agency firearms training Morales received at the Farm served her well. She moved instinctively and managed to double-tap the man closest to her. The explosion inside the small apartment was deafening. He went down hard, but she stayed with her first target a fraction of a second too long. As she pivoted to take aim, T
ommy elbowed her square in the face, knocking her gun away.

  Momentarily stunned, Morales was helpless as Tommy picked her up and slammed her through the coffee table, shattering the glass. Snarling, the enforcer picked her up and again threw her to the floor, knocking the wind out of her. Gasping, she came to her knees when the third man kicked her in the ribs. Fighting back and on an adrenaline high, she somehow struggled off the floor and was almost standing when Tommy took a sap from his back pocket and neatly clipped her on the back of the head. This time, she melted to the floor like a wet towel and did not move.

  Tommy and his man quickly duct-taped her arms and legs, and shoved a cloth into her mouth. Then, as Tommy knelt over Morales’s hog-tied body, his man used a razor-sharp carpet knife to cut a section of the dung-colored carpet from around Morales’s bound body. The two men rolled Morales up like a tortilla in the section of carpet. The two hoisted her onto their shoulders and, half stumbling over the inert form of Ross, quickly left the apartment. They dashed down the single flight of stairs to the back alley and threw the carpet holding Morales into the back of a battered pickup truck.

  The entire operation had taken less than two minutes. Only the two shots from Morales’s pistol and the roar of the speeding pickup disturbed the still evening. When the police finally arrived, they asked few questions. And if any of the neighboring residents saw anything, they were not talking, nor did the Barranca police expect them to.

  * * *

  They began to arrive at Gator Beach just after 5:00 P.M., and by 5:30 there were kids racing between the picnic shelters and the water, often with mothers chasing close behind. Two of the younger platoon SEALs had arrived earlier and had three of the beach fire pits burning gently with a nice bed of coals. A platoon family outing was a logistically intensive affair, and there were coolers, beach bags, food containers, diaper bags, and paper dinnerware stacked on the picnic tables. The beach toys, including boogie boards, soccer balls, paddle balls, and a Nerf football, were soon fully deployed. The platoon was at full strength with sixteen SEAL operators—two platoon officers and fourteen enlisted SEALs. A few single men had their girlfriends in tow, but most of the men were married with kids. The average age of the Bandito Platoon SEALs was just under thirty. When Roark and Jackie Engel arrived, the gathering had swelled close to fifty. The surf was low and the water chilly, about 62 degrees, but that did not deter the kids or the dads—the former too excited at the prospect of playing in the water and the latter professionally immune to cold water. So the women organized and talked, while the kids and SEALs splashed about. The kids outlasted the SEALs in the water.

  Jackie Engel moved easily among the other SEAL wives. She came from a prominent family in Indianapolis, and her father was a senior executive at Eli Lilly. She had met Roark during his junior year at Notre Dame while she was a freshman. They dated for two years and became engaged when he graduated. It was a long-distance engagement while she finished college and he completed SEAL training. She would have left school to be with him, but he insisted she stay and graduate. “We’ll have a lifetime together,” he told her, “so stay and get your degree.” They’d talked about her finishing at San Diego State or USD, but neither offered a degree in her field—microbiology. When she offered to switch majors to be near him, he again rejected it. “I plan to be in a dangerous line of work for quite some time,” the ever-practical Roark had told her. “You have to be prepared to step up and be the breadwinner.” He also knew that a SEAL officer in training was seldom home. So they were together for part of the summers and during Christmas and Easter breaks, and they were on Skype nearly every night. It was good training for marriage to a deploying Navy SEAL.

  Jackie was tall, blond, and thin. As a young girl she had been awkward and angular, and since she was clumsy, she hated sports. Her ears back then had been too big, and she had always felt disproportionate. But as a teenager she caught up with herself and began to move with a newfound ease and grace. She grew into her features, and although not quite beautiful, she was attractive—striking even. Her parents had sent Jacquelyn, their only child, to the private Park Tudor School, where she excelled academically and dated very little. As she matured, she acquired a soft, ethereal presence that made her appear aloof and often made boys reluctant to approach her. Her grades and College Board scores were such that if her family had not had the means, she would have attended college on an academic scholarship. When she came home for Thanksgiving her freshman year at Notre Dame, she told her parents she had met the man she would marry. They brushed it off as infatuation and inexperience. Still, they were concerned that this attachment would distract her from her studies—or, worse, cause her to drop out of school. Yet her first-semester grades reflected no such problem. Still, they were wary of this first boy in her life. Jackie’s parents did not meet him until later that spring.

  They met Roark during a parent’s weekend at South Bend and quickly realized that this boy was a man, that he was courteous and polite to a fault, and that he was as much in love with their daughter as she was with him. While Jackie completed school and he completed SEAL training, her parents found themselves worrying that the separation might cause the relationship to end. The wedding took place a week after her graduation, followed by a reception at the Meridian Hills Country Club. Jackie was radiant, and the Navy groomsmen were just as handsome and polite as their new son-in-law. And they all wore the same shiny gold pin on their starched, white uniforms—the one they called the Trident.

  When Engel returned to their small Coronado efficiency after his lunch with Nolan, he was worried about having broken the news of Jackie’s pregnancy to his chief. He was still trying to figure out how to tell her when she saw him and smiled.

  “You told Dave, didn’t you?”

  “Well, you see, he just sort of found out. I didn’t actually tell him.”

  “And he’s the only one who knows, right?” she asked, knowing the answer full well.

  He shifted from one foot to the other. “Well, it sort of went a little further than that.”

  She came to him and they hugged. “Yeah, I know. Brothers by different mothers and all that.” They had stood in the kitchen-dining-living area for some time and just held each other. That afternoon they went for a long, easy bike ride together, their last for a while. Then they loaded the cooler in the car and headed for the platoon beach party.

  The sun dropped behind the clouds before it dropped behind the ocean. No green flash tonight. The SEALs and the kids gradually played themselves out and began to straggle back to the food tables. It was a standard beach spread with chips, burgers, hotdogs, potato salad, and coleslaw. The other wives fussed over Jackie, and Roark moved from one table to another, taking a few moments with each extended family group. Dave Nolan was on the move as well. Their circuits converged when they reached a couple comfortably ensconced in two beach chairs on the edge of the group. Their kids were older and off doing what teenagers do on a Sunday night.

  “Evening, Senior Chief. Hello, Mary. Good to see you again.”

  “Evening, sir,” he replied. Then to Nolan, “How goes it with the Bandito, Jefe?”

  “It goes well, Senior—even better knowing that you’ll be with our detachment.”

  Mary, sensing they needed to talk, pushed herself to her feet. “Think I’ll go and see what the girls are doing.” She paused, then gave Engel a hug. “I just heard the news, Roark. I couldn’t be more tickled. Blessings to you and Jackie.”

  “Thanks, Mary. We won’t be long.”

  They watched as she made her way over to a group of wives. Engel sensed that the collective mood of their ladies was much lighter than it had been during previous pre-deployment parties. Those rotations had been to Afghanistan or Iraq, with the prospect of certain and continuous combat. This deployment, with the task unit away from the active theaters in a contingency posture, held the prospect of probable engagement, but not the daily combat operations nearly all of them had known since 9
/11. On this rotation, they would be looking for opportunities to get their guns in the fight. Currently in Afghanistan, as it had been in Iraq a few years before, the environment was target rich, and quite often, the fight found you.

  The SEAL wives were for the most part bright, attractive, outgoing women and, in many cases, much more than the home half of a marriage. SEALs tended to marry women like themselves—capable, self-reliant, and independent. Many, including Jackie, were professionals whose income exceeded that of their husbands. Most worked until the children arrived. Some then became stay-at-home moms while others retained nannies and continued their careers. Yet because many SEALs and their wives shared the type-A gene, divorce rates were high—not noticeably higher now than before 9/11 but still high.

  “Senior, I didn’t speak with you before I asked the skipper if you could detach in support of us. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No worries, sir. I’ve been to Southeast Asia many times, and before this deployment’s over, we’ll all probably be back out in WESTPAC with the rest of the task unit.” He grinned with some satisfaction. “It’s a chance to work a new area of operations. Other than that, I go where they tell me, just like you do. That much hasn’t changed.”

  At thirty-nine, Senior Chief Otto Miller was older than any of the platoon SEALs and one of the older hands at Team Seven. He was also a legend in the SEAL Teams. As a platoon leading petty officer at SEAL Team Five, he had been badly wounded in an urban firefight during the Battle of Ramadi in 2006. His squad had gone out to rescue an Army patrol that was pinned down by insurgents. Early in the fight, his face had been raked by shrapnel, and a bullet found its way under his body armor and lodged itself in his spine. Yet he kept his gun in the fight, and his actions saved many lives in the beleaguered patrol. The bullet left him with permanent nerve damage and only the partial use of his left leg. He could have taken his Navy Cross and a substantial disability pension and retired, but Otto Miller was not finished serving his country. While he was still in physical therapy, he asked to have his Navy rating changed from Special Operator First Class to Intelligence Specialist First Class. Intelligence Specialists are among the Navy’s smartest sailors, and their rating is known to be one that demands a great deal of ability. Miller got his rating change, but he also had to pass the IS1 exam to keep it—no easy task for someone new to the specialty. He passed the exam and then some, exceeding the scores of other more-seasoned sailors, specialists who had been working in military intelligence for years.