Noise. A whisper from a branch swishing through the ak. But there was no wind blowing at the moment. Maybe an animal. Maybe not.
Chavez stopped. He held his hand straight up. Vega, walking slack fifty meters back, relayed the signal. Ding moved along side a tree and stayed standing for the best possible visibili He started to lean against it and found himself drifting. The sergeant shook his head to clear it. Fatigue was really getting to him now.
There. Movement. It was a man. Just a spectral green shape, barely more than a stick figure on the goggle display, nearly two hundred meters to Ding's right front. He was moving uphill and--another one, about twenty meters behind. They were moving like ... soldiers, with the elaborate footwork that looked so damned crazy when somebody else was doing it....
There was one way to check. On the bottom side of his PVS- 7 goggles was a small infrared light for use in reading maps. Invisible to the human eye, it would show up like a beacon to anyone wearing another PVS-7. He didn't even have to make a noise. They'd be looking around constantly.
It was still a risk, of course.
Chavez stepped away from the tree. It was too far to see if they were wearing their headsets, if they were....
Yes. The lead figure was turning his head left and right. It stopped dead on where Chavez was standing. Ding tipped his goggles up to expose the IR light and blinked it three times. He dropped his night scope back into place just in time to see the other one do the same.
"I think they're our guys," Chavez whispered into his radio mike.
"Then they're pretty lost," Ramirez replied through his earpiece. "Be careful, Sergeant."
Click-Click. Okay.
Chavez waited for Oso to set his SAW up in a convenient place, then walked toward the other man, careful to keep where Vega could cover him. It seemed an awfully long way to walk, farther still without being able to put his weapon on the target, but he couldn't exactly do that, could he? He spotted one more, and there would be others out there also, watching him over the sights of their weapons. If that wasn't a friendly, his chances of seeing the sunrise were somewhere between zero and not much.
"Ding, is that you?" a whisper called the remaining ten meters. "It's Leon."
Chavez nodded. Both men took very deep breaths as they walked together and hugged. Somehow a handshake just wasn't enough under the circumstances.
"You're lost, 'Berto."
"No shit, man. I know where the fuck we are, but we're fucking lost all right."
"Where's Cap'n Rojas?"
"Dead. Esteves, Delgado, half the team."
"Okay. Hold it." Ding punched his radio button. "Six, this is Point. We just made contact with BANNER. They've had a little trouble, sir. You better get up here."
Click-click.
Leon waved for his men to come in. Chavez didn't even think to count. It was enough to see that half weren't there. Both men sat on a fallen tree.
"What happened?"
"We walked right into it, man. Thought it was a processing site. It wasn't. Musta been thirty-forty guys there. I think Esteves fucked up and it all came apart. Like a bar fight with guns, man. Then Captain Rojas went down, and--it was pretty bad, 'mano. Been on the run ever since."
"We got people chasing us, too."
"What's the good news?" Leon asked.
"I ain't heard any lately, 'Berto," Ding said. "I think it's time for us to get our asses outa this place."
"Roge-o," Sergeant Leon said just as Ramirez appeared. He made his report to the captain.
"Cap'n," Chavez said when he was finished, "we're all pretty beat. We need a place to belly up."
"The man's right," Guerra agreed.
"What about behind us?"
"They ain't heard nothin' in two hours, sir," Guerra reminded him. "That knoll over there looks like a good spot to me." That was about as hard as he could press his officer, but finally it was enough.
"Take the men up. Set up the perimeter and two outposts. We'll try to rest up till sundown, and maybe I can call in and get us some help."
"Sounds good to me, Cap'n." Guerra took off to get things organized. Chavez left at once to sweep the area while the rest of the squad moved to its new RON site--except, Chavez thought, this was an ROD--remain-over-day--site. It was a bleak attempt at humor, but it was all he could manage under the circumstances.
"My God," Ryan breathed. It was four in the morning, and he was awake only because of coffee and apprehension. Ryan had uncovered his share of things with the Agency. But never anything like this. The first thing he had to do was ... what?
Get some sleep, even a few hours, he told himself. Jack lifted the phone and called the office. There was always a watch officer on duty.
"This is Dr. Ryan. I'm going to be late. Something I ate. I've been throwing up all night ... no, I think it's over now, but I need a few hours of sleep. I'll drive myself in tomorr--today," he corrected himself. "Yeah, that's right. Thanks. 'Bye."
He left a note on the refrigerator door for his wife and crawled into a spare bed to avoid disturbing her.
Passing the message was the easiest part for Cortez. It would have been hard for anyone else, but one of the first things he'd done after joining the Cartel was to get a list of certain telephone numbers in the Washington, D.C., area. It hadn't been hard. As with any task, it was just a matter of finding someone who knew what you needed to know. That was something Cortez excelled at. Once he had the list of numbers--it had cost him $10,000, the best sort of money well spent, that is to say, someone's else's well-spent money--it was merely a matter of knowing schedules. That was tricky, of course. The person might not be there, which risked disclosure, but the right sort of eyes-only prefix would probably serve to warn off the casual viewer. The secretaries of such people typically were disciplined people who risked their jobs when they showed too much curiosity.
But what really made it easy was a new bit of technology, the facsimile printer. It was a brand-new status symbol. Everyone had to have one, just as everyone, especially the important, had to have a direct private telephone line that bypassed his secretary. That and the fax went together. Cortez had driven to Medellin to his private office and typed the message himself. He knew what official U.S. government messages looked like, of course, and did his best to reproduce it here. EYES-ONLY NIMBUS was the header, and the name in the FROM slot was bogus, but that in the To place was quite genuine, which ought to have been sufficient to get the attention of the addressee. The body of the message was brief and to the point, and indicated a coded reply-address. How would the addressee react? Well, there was no telling, was there? But this, too, Cortez felt was a good gamble. He inserted the single sheet in his fax, dialed the proper number, and waited. The machine did the rest. As soon as it heard the warbling electronic love-call of another fax machine, it transmitted the message form. Cortez removed the original and folded it away into his wallet.
The addressee turned in surprise when he heard the whir of his fax printing out a message. It had to be official, because only half a dozen people knew that private line. (It never occurred to him that the telephone company's computer knew about it, too.) He finished what he was doing before reaching over for the message.
What the hell is NIMBUS? he wondered. Whatever it was, it was eyes-only to him, and therefore he started to read the message. He was sipping his third cup of morning coffee while he did so, and was fortunate that his cough deposited some of it onto his desk and not his trousers.
Cathy Ryan was nothing if not punctual. The phone in the guest room rang at precisely 8:30. Jack's head jerked off the pillow as though from an electric shock, and his hand reached out to grab the offensive instrument.
"Hello?"
"Good morning, Jack," his wife said brightly. "What's the problem with you?"
"I had to stay up late with some work. Did you take the other thing with you?"
"Yes, what's the--"
Jack cut her off. "I know what it says, babe. Could you just mak
e the call? It's important." Dr. Caroline Ryan was also bright enough to catch the meaning of what he said.
"Okay, Jack. How do you feel?"
"Awful. But I have work to do."
"So do I, honey. 'Bye."
"Yeah." Jack hung up and commanded himself to get out of the bed. First a shower, he told himself.
Cathy was on her way to Surgery, and had to hurry. She lifted her office phone and called the proper number on the hospital's D.C. line. It rang only once.
"Dan Murray."
"Dan, this is Cathy Ryan."
"Morning! What can I do for you this fine day, Doctor?" "Jack said to tell you that he'd be in to see you just after ten. He wants you to let him park in the drive-through, and he said to tell you that the folks down the hall aren't supposed to know. I don't know what that means, but that's what he told me to say." Cathy didn't know whether to be amused or not. Jack did like to play funny little games--she thought they were pretty dumb little games--with people who shared his clearances, and wondered if this was some sort of joke or not. Jack especially liked to play games with his FBI friend.
"Okay, Cath', I'll take care of that."
"I have to run off to fix somebody's eyeball. Say hi to Liz for me."
"Will do. Have a good one."
Murray hung up with a puzzled look on his face. Folks down the hall aren't supposed to know. "The folks down the hall" was a phrase Murray had used the first time they'd met, in St. Thomas's Hospital in London when Dan had been the legal attache at the U.S. Embassy on Grosvenor Square. The folks down the hall were CIA.
But Ryan was one of the top six people at Langley, arguably one of the top three.
What the hell did that mean?
"Hmph." He called his secretary and had her notify the security guards to allow Ryan into the driveway that passed under the main entrance to the Hoover Building. Whatever it meant, he could wait.
Clark arrived at Langley at nine that morning. He didn't have a security pass--not the sort of thing you carry into the field--and had to use a code-word to get through the main gate, which seemed very conspiratorial indeed. He parked in the visitors' lot--CIA has one of those--and walked in the main entrance, heading immediately to the left where he quickly got what looked like a visitor's badge which, however, worked just fine in the electronically controlled gates. Now he angled off to the right, past the wall murals that looked as though some enormous child had daubed mud all over the place. The decorator for this place, Clark was sure, had to have been a KGB plant. Or maybe they'd just picked the lowest bidder. An elevator took him to the seventh floor, and he walked around the corridor to the executive offices that have their own separate corridor on the face of the building. He ended up in front of the DDO's secretary.
"Mr. Clark to see Mr. Ritter," he said.
"Do you have an appointment?" the secretary asked.
"No, I don't, but I think he wants to see me," Clark said politely. There was no sense in abusing her. Besides, Clark had been raised to show deference to women. She lifted her phone and passed the message. "You can go right in, Mr. Clark."
"Thank you." He closed the door behind him. The door, of course, was heavy and soundproof. That was just as well.
"What the hell are you doing here?" the DDO demanded.
"You're going to have to shut SHOWBOAT down," Clark said without preamble. "It's coming apart. The bad guys are hunting those kids down and--"
"I know. I heard late last night. Look, I never figured this would be a no-loss operation. One of the teams got clobbered pretty good thirty-six hours ago, but based on intercepts, looks like they gave better than they took, and then they got even with some others who--"
"That was me," Clark said.
"What?" Ritter asked in surprise.
"Larson and I took a little drive about this time yesterday, and I found three of those--whatevers. They were just finished loading up the bodies into the back of a truck. I didn't see any point in letting them live," Mr. Clark said in a normal tone of voice. It had been a very long time since anyone at CIA had said something like that.
"Christ, John!" Ritter was even too surprised to blast Clark for violating his own security by stepping into a separate operation.
"I recognized one of the bodies," Clark went on. "Captain Emilio Rojas, United States Army. He was a hell of a nice kid, by the way."
"I'm sorry about that. Nobody ever said this was safe."
"I'm sure his family, if any, will appreciate that. This operation is blown. It's time to cut our losses. What are we doing to get them out?" Clark asked.
"I'm looking at that. I have to coordinate with somebody. I'm not sure that he'll agree."
"In that case, sir," Clark told his boss, "I suggest that you make your case rather forcefully."
"Are you threatening me?" Ritter asked quietly.
"No, sir, I would prefer not to have you read me that way. I am telling you, on the basis of my experience, that this operation must be terminated ASAP. It is your job to make that necessity plain to the people who authorized the operation. Failing to get such permission, I would advise you to terminate the operation anyway."
"I could lose my job for that," the DDO pointed out.
"After I identified the body of Captain Rojas, I set fire to the truck. Couple reasons. I wanted to divert the enemy somewhat, and, of course, I also wanted to render the bodies unrecognizable. I've never burned the body of a friendly before. I did not like doing that. Larson still doesn't know why I did it. He's too young to understand. You're not, sir. You sent those people into the field and you are responsible for them. If you are telling me that your job is more important than that, I am here to tell you that you are wrong, sir." Clark hadn't yet raised his voice above the level of a reasonable man discussing ordinary business, but for the first time in a very long time, Bob Ritter feared for his personal safety.
"Your diversion attempt was successful, by the way. The opposition has forty people looking in the wrong place now."
"Good. That will make the extraction effort all the easier to accomplish."
"John, you can't give me orders like this."
"Sir, I am not giving you orders. I am telling you what has to be done. You told me that the operation was mine to run."
"That was RECIPROCITY, not SHOWBOAT."
"This is not a time for semantics, sir. If you do not pull those people out, more--possibly all of them--will be killed. That, sir, is your responsibility. You can't put people in the field and not support them. You know that."
"You're right, of course," Ritter said after a moment. "I can't do it on my own. I have to inform--well, you know. I'll take care of that. We'll pull them out as quickly as we can."
"Good." Clark relaxed. Ritter was a sharp operator, often too sharp in his dealings with subordinates, but he was a man of his word. Besides, the DDO was too smart to cross him on a matter like this. Clark was sure of that. He had made his own position pretty damned clear, and Ritter had caught the signal five-by-five.
"What about Larson and his courier?"
"I've pulled them both out. His plane's at Panama, and he's at the Marriott down the road. He's pretty good, by the way, but he's probably blown as far as Colombia is concerned. I'd say they could both use a few weeks off."
"Fair enough. What about you?"
"I can head back tomorrow if you want. You might want me to help with the extraction."
"We may have a line on Cortez."
"Really?"
"And you're the guy who got the first picture of him."
"Oh. Where--the guy at the Untiveros house, the guy we just barely missed?"
"The same. Positive ID from the lady he seduced. He's running the people they have in the field from a little house near Anserma."
"I'd have to take Larson back for that."
"Think it's worth the risk?"
"Getting Cortez?" Clark thought for a moment. "Depends. It's worth a look. What do we know about his security?"
&
nbsp; "Nothing," Ritter admitted, "just a rough idea where the house is. We got that from an intercept. Be nice to get him alive. He knows a lot of things we want to find out. We bring him back here and we can hang a murder rap over his head. Death-penalty kind."
Clark nodded thoughtfully. Another element of spy fiction was the canard about how people in the intelligence business were willing to take their cyanide capsules or face a firing squad with a song in their hearts. The facts were to the contrary. Men faced certain death courageously only when there was no attractive alternative. The trick was to give them such an alternative, which didn't require the mind of a rocket scientist, as the current aphorism went. If they got Cortez, the normal form would be take him all the way through a trial, sentence him to death--just a matter of picking the right judge, and in national-security matters, there was always lots of leeway--and take it from there. Cortez would crack in due course, probably even before the trial started. Cortez was no fool, after all, and would know when and how to strike a bargain. He'd already sold out on his own country. Selling out on the Cartel was trivial beside that.
Clark nodded. "Give me a few hours to think about it."
Ryan turned left off 10th Street, Northwest, into the drive-through. There were uniformed and plainclothes guards, one of whom held a clipboard. He approached the car.
"Jack Ryan to see Dan Murray."
"Could I see some ID, please?"
Jack pulled out his CIA pass. The guard recognized it for what it was and waved to another guard. This one punched the button to lower the steel barrier that was supposed to prevent people with car bombs from driving under the headquarters of the FBI. He pulled over it and found a place to park the car. A young FBI agent met him in the lobby and handed him a pass that would work the Bureau's electronic gate. If someone invented the right sort of computer virus, Jack thought, half of the government would be prevented from going to work. And maybe the country would be safe until the problem was fixed.
Clear and Present Danger (1989) Page 65
