by Tom Clancy
Two hundred yards . . . two-fifty . . .
He squeezed off the round. There was a big whoosh! as the rocket’s exhaust blew out behind him. The rocket sped away. Top speed was only a couple hundred meters per second, and it would take a little while to get there, keep the sights on the target, keep them lined up. . . .
The rocket hit the back of the Hummer. The rocket and the Hummer went up together, a terrible flash, and the noise washed over him a second later. . . .
It seemed like a long time before the truck came back to collect him, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute or two. They drove past the burning remains of the Hummer, and the soldiers who had manned it.
“Sorry,” Carruth said as they went by.
“Stark’s dead,” somebody said.
Carruth nodded. “We’ll have to ditch the truck, fast. Get to the exchange point.”
The exchange point was behind an old gas station; there were two pickup trucks waiting. They piled out of the bigger truck, loaded the Dragons into them, covered them with tarps.
Carruth siphoned a couple gallons of gas out of the big truck’s tank and soaked Stark’s body and the inside of the vehicle pretty good. He climbed into one of the pickups, leaned out, and lit a flare. As they drove past the big truck he tossed the flare. There was no ID in the vehicle, nothing to tie Stark to them, and by the time anybody got there, he’d be a crispy critter.
“Go!”
The two smaller trucks peeled out.
The big truck erupted into an orange fireball as the gasoline caught.
“Adios, amigo,” Carruth said. He saluted the outside rearview mirror. At least they gave Stark a Viking funeral, sort of.
The light from the burning truck was visible for a long way behind them as they drove off.
It was a night to burn stuff up, for sure.
Lewis wasn’t gonna be happy about this.
The Pentagon
Washington, D.C.
This time, General Hadden had Thorn come to his office. And he wasn’t a man to beat around the bush.
“I’m not happy with your unit’s progress on this, Thorn. Last night, somebody stole four surplus rocket launchers from one of my bases and killed some of my soldiers—we lost six men when they cooked a vehicle full of MPs!”
“I’m sorry. We’ve got the best people in the world working on it as fast as they can go. It doesn’t get any better than that.”
“So you say, but I’m not seeing results and I’ve got a body count!”
“With all due respect, sir, we’re not making burgers and fries here. Sometimes you don’t get it your way. We’re dealing with a bad guy who is clever and who doesn’t want to get caught. Our people are on his trail, they are making progress, that’s how it works.”
Hadden said, “There is always something that can make things go faster—the trick is to figure out what. Maybe your computer geeks need some more motivation. Some . . . direct supervision. From what I’m able to tell, you give them something and turn them loose—you aren’t there keeping their noses to the grindstone.”
Thorn shook his head. “Sir, I came to this job by way of the computer industry. I worked with ‘computer geeks’ all the time. Hell, sir, I was one myself. They deal well with time pressure, most of them, but standing over them and micromanaging their actions is worse than trying to herd cats. The best players here are like artists; you lean on them, they will stop what they are doing and cross their arms. This isn’t paint-by-numbers.”
“I’m not talking about a guy with a bullwhip, Thorn, I’m talking about maybe giving you an . . . assistant. An efficiency expert, office manager, somebody who might be able to make things run a little smoother.”
Thorn laughed.
“I’m not used to people laughing at my ideas, son.”
“You aren’t used to dealing with this kind of civilian, General. You can’t fool my people into thinking I’m still running things if you send some hard-ass in to whip them into shape. They are smart enough to know I wouldn’t hire somebody like that. If one shows up, they’ll know who sent him, and they will know why. Any of our top operatives could quit this afternoon and have a better job lined up by supper time—more money, more perks, no direct supervision at all, and they could work from home if they wanted. You might be able to draft them and keep them, but without their fullest cooperation, you won’t ever get what you want from them.”
He paused, maintaining eye contact with Hadden. Then he added, “And if you want to fire me, sir, that’s fine, too. I’ll have my desk cleared out this afternoon.”
“Nobody is firing you.” Thorn heard the unspoken “yet.”
“Fine. Then as long as my name is on the door, nobody is sending me an assistant I don’t want or need. My people will get this job done as soon as it is humanly possible. They won’t go any slower and they can’t go any faster—you standing on the sidelines yelling ‘Hurry, hurry!’ at guys running full out isn’t going to help.”
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was at the beck and call of a civilian, the President of the United States, but Thorn guessed he wasn’t used to hearing lip from anybody less than that. Thorn could see it didn’t set well.
“Sir, it’s like sifting a beach, looking for a particular grain of sand. Our guys will know it when they get to it, but they can’t just walk out into the dunes and pick that one grain up and say, ‘Aha!’ ”
Hadden didn’t say anything.
Thorn had dealt with people like him before—CEOs of major corporations tended to be control freaks; that was part of how they got to the top, by attending to all the details. And the United States military was as major as it got. Thorn said, “I understand you are the man in the hot seat, General, and that you are responsible for all kinds of things about which I don’t have a clue. But this is what we do. Once you set the dogs loose, you have to wait until they get the scent and run your game to ground.”
“I don’t like waiting.”
“No, sir, I understand, I don’t either. You don’t have to like it, but you need to understand it. This is how it is done.”
Hadden chewed on that for a moment. “All right. But you put a bug in your man’s ear and make damn sure he is making all due speed.”
“Yes, sir.”
But Thorn wouldn’t say anything to Jay. The general believed that a little bit of time pressure would help keep people on their toes; feeling as if somebody was looking over your shoulder. The general was wrong. With these people, at any rate, that would just make things worse.
As Thorn was leaving the Pentagon, walking to where his car and driver waited, he saw Marissa angling across the walk toward him.
“Why, hey, Tommy, fancy meeting you here.”
He didn’t think for a second that it was a coincidence. “Are you following me?”
“Of course. You didn’t think this was a coincidence, did you?”
He smiled. “Why?”
“Well, sometimes you are pretty dense, so you might have thought I just happened to be in the area—”
“No, Marissa. Why are you following me?”
“Just concerned about you. Worried you might have been in there telling the Chairman of the JCOS to go play with himself.”
“Close. But he didn’t fire me and I didn’t quit.”
“That’s good. You’re learning patience, I like that. Truth is, I have something for you, in my capacity as CIA liaison to Net Force—for whatever that is worth these days.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“That break-in, the one where they got the M-47 Dragon launcher and rockets?”
“The one they used to wipe out the MPs chasing them?”
“Yeah, that one. Well, it turns out we got one of their guys. He was killed by an M-16 round. They tried to burn the body in the truck they used, but it was recovered, and an ID made; dental records confirmed it.”
“That’s great.”
“For you, maybe. Turns out he was one of ours—a CIA
asset.”
“No shit?”
“Plenty of that, but, yeah. A contract man, not a direct employee. Name was Stark. Ex-military—he was a Ranger—then he got into mercenary work in Congo, eventually wound up knocking around in Iraq, working private security. Apparently the local station used him for gathering intel—he spoke some Arabic and a little Kurdish. We lost track of him a couple years back. According to his passport, he’s still in the Middle East.”
“If you found his body in the back of a truck in Kentucky, then I’m guessing maybe he was using a different passport,” Thorn said.
“Give the man a cigar. Anyway, I’m having the information couriered to your people—known associates, relatives, his old unit, like that. Maybe Gridley can find something that State missed.”
“I hope so. Those rocket launchers they stole—how easy would it be to take down a passenger jet with one?”
“Well, they are outdated, there are better ones now, but—as easy as pointing your finger and going ‘bang!’ If they can get within half a mile of a target like, say, the White House? They might be able to put a rocket through the President’s window.”
“That’s what Hadden is really afraid of,” Thorn said.
“Sure. And he’s right to be. Bulletproof glass won’t stop an armor-piercing antitank rocket. It’ll go through the wall of a brick building like a hot knife through butter.”
Thorn nodded. “You need a ride?”
“Got one. Call me when you get off work.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
As he headed to his car, Thorn considered the new intelligence. He could understand how General Hadden was worried. These people seemed to be able to penetrate the Army’s bases at will, and this last episode gave them weapons that could do a lot of damage.
What might they try and collect next time?
Maybe he did need to at least mention this to Jay Gridley. . . .
19
The Jungle
Deepest, Darkest Africa
1940 C.E.
Jay Gridley, dressed only in a loincloth with a sheath knife strapped to his waist, swung through the trees on a thick and flexible vine. As the hot jungle air rushed past him, he did the yell:
“Uhhh-ahhh-uhhh-ahhh-uhhh-ahhh-uhhh!”
He grinned. He had gotten pretty good at the ape-man’s attention-getting cry. He had watched a lot of Tarzan movies growing up, and he had practiced the yell made famous by Johnny Weissmuller. Yeah, there had been other Tarzan actors, before and after, some good, some terrible, but as far as Jay was concerned, there was only one Tarzan—just as there was only one James Bond, Sean Connery. . . .
He reached a fat tree limb at the end of his swing and let go of the vine. He thought about doing the yell again, but decided that wasn’t necessary. The denizens of the jungle knew that Jay of the Apes was here, no question about that.
As he did for most his scenarios, Jay had blended fact with fiction into what he thought was a seamless whole. The yell, for instance. There were several stories on the genesis of it. Weissmuller’s version had it that he had come up with the cry based on being able to yodel as a boy. Pure fiction, that. Johnny Sheffield, who played “Boy” starting in 1939, remembered that a guy from the sound department hit a note on a piano and taped his voice, then fiddled with it. The truth was, the cry—the original MGM version—had been put together by Douglas Shearer, a technician who taped a shout, probably Weissmuller’s, though the verified identity was forever lost to anonymity, enhanced it using the crude electronics of the day—this was, after all, in the 1940s—spliced it, and then ran it backward. Since the second half of the yell was the reverse of the first part—like a wordless palindrome—it sounded the same from either direction.
Later, when the movies moved from MGM to RKO, Weissmuller did develop his own yell and actually did it on-screen. It didn’t sound the same, and although some preferred it to the original, Jay had always liked the MGM version. He got pretty good at, well, aping it—if you were going to swing through the trees, you had to sound right. . . .
But enough about that, Jay. There were evil hunters in the bush, and he needed to track them down and find out exactly where they were headed. He grabbed another vine, conveniently hanging there, and leaped into the air.
He wondered who had put all those vines in exactly the right spot. Did Cheetah get up every morning and go rig them? It would sure be bad if the ape-man landed on a branch and leaped into space and somebody had forgotten to leave a vine there for him. . . .
Oh, why not, he could do the yell one more time:
“Uhhh-ahhh-uhhh-ahhh-uhhh-ahhh-uhhh . . . !”
He was having way too much fun here. . . .
In due course, Jay achieved the jungle floor again. The spongy humus felt good under his bare feet. The evil hunters’ camp was not far, and he slipped through the trees with a practiced stealth.
One of the elements of his scenario was a lack of mosquitoes.
He’d always wondered about that—either feral jungle-men generally had a great natural chemical resistance to the things, or they would have looked like they had some kind of pox all the time, being bitten constantly. Jay also allowed some large, constrictor-type snakes, but didn’t populate the bush with itty-bitty poisonous ones. Stepping on an asp barefooted while slinking through the woods seemed like a good way to guarantee a bad afternoon:
“Uhhh-ahhh-uhhh—oh, crap, I’m snakebit—!”
Still, it was at least an approximation of the movie version of the jungle.
There was a huge boablike tree near the hunters’ camp, and Jay shinnied up it easily, perching on a broad branch that was three times his height above the ground. It was dusk and getting dark fast—night fell quickly in the tropics—and the hunters were gathered around a large fire, their native bearers hunched around a couple of smaller fires, roasting critters of some kind. In the gathering evening, Simba roared, and Jay was pleased to see the hunters and bearers tense against the lion’s cry. Although it was the female lion who did most of the hunting, the big-maned male was most impressive-looking and he did like to talk loudly.
In the twenty-first century, sitting on a big tree branch in the gathering night wouldn’t be much protection: There were infrared glasses, starlight scopes, heat detectors, FLIR, all kinds of ways to see a mostly naked man in a tree even in pitch darkness. But in the generic 1940s such toys weren’t available—and nobody thought to look up. That seemed fair to Jay, given that all he had were his wits and a knife, whereas the hunters had pistols, rifles, shotguns, and bearers to haul the hardware around.
The voices of the party—there were five of them—drifted up to Jay’s hiding place:
“And I’m telling you, I don’t believe in native curses.” That was from Stone, the leader. He was the most venal of them—just as soon shoot you as look at you, and he would do anything to get to the treasure. He had a pencil-thin moustache, and would be considered devilishly handsome in certain low circles.
“Yeah, but our bearers do.” That was Mackey, and his voice came out as a whine. He was mostly a coward, but he’d shoot you in the back if he had a chance. “Who is going to help us carry out all the treasure if the bearers melt away into the jungle?”
“We can all haul our own shares,” Stone said. “Or you can turn around and head back to Boombahbah now, if you are so worried.”
“Gentlemen, this isn’t getting us anywhere.” That was the Professor. He was the oldest, and most educated, of the lot. Gray-haired and -bearded, he was here for science, but he had allowed himself to be co-opted by the others. Not wise in the ways of the world, when it all came down the Professor would be stunned to find out how evil the men he traveled with actually were.
“The Professor is right.” That was Armstrong, the semi-good egg. A decent chap, as the Brits would say, and here primarily because of Josephine, the Professor’s daughter, who was beautiful and a bit on the wimpy side to be running around in the jungle in her khaki skirt and blouse.
“I keep thinking about that poor boy who was eaten by the crocodile.” And that was Jo, who really should be at home sewing or baking cookies or some such. The jungle was no place for a woman such as she. . . .
There was a shrug-it-off walla: “Yeah, too bad. Croc. Uh huh.”
In those old movies, the white men’s attitude toward the native bearers was something approximating who-gives-a-damn.
In the course of these things, only Jo was destined to make it out of the jungle alive, and then only with Jay’s help. They had seen lions and rhinos and crocs and gorillas and elephants, and would soon be meeting some pointy-teethed cannibals whose sole reason for existing seemed to be to guard the fabled Jewels of Alabara and to gobble up would-be thieves.
The native bearers, actually much smarter than the white hunters about such matters, had already figured out which way the wind was blowing out there in the dangerous woods, and would indeed scamper as soon as the hunters went to sleep.
Once they reached the cave, Mackey would get greedy trying to fill his pockets with treasure, and wind up sinking in quicksand. Armstrong would step in front of Jo and catch a thrown spear in the liver for his trouble. The Professor would go next, courtesy of a blowgun dart. Stone would empty his revolver into the charging cannibals, and last be seen quaking in a closing circle of the lean and hungry locals moving in for dinner. And Jo would be rescued by Jay of the Jungle, as the roof of the cave collapsed, burying the hidden treasure forever.
Jo would learn to like tree houses, chimpanzees, and swimming in the pool naked with Jay, only it would never get that far.
Jay smiled. It was all so . . . simple. Ah, those were the days, when nobody asked the hard questions, and the bad guys got their just deserts. . . .
What Jay was looking for was a link from the dead terrorist to his live friends. A hoard of jewels was as good a metaphor as any.
How had such a king’s ransom of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and assorted gold chalices and the like come to be in a mountain cave in the middle of the unnamed African country’s deepest, darkest jungle? Bother that. There never had been any civilization here higher than daub-and-wattle huts and subsistence natives—the Aztecs and Mayans had been in South America. The gems were all polished and set, requiring expert jewelers and gold workers, none of which had ever existed here. And why would people capable of producing such a hoard of priceless baubles haul it fifty miles through the deepest, darkest, animal-infested, malarial jungle to stash it in a cave anyhow?
