by Tom Clancy
Virginia Charles gasped when the knife sliced her arm, and yanked away, or tried to, dropping the five-dollar bill. The boy’s other hand grabbed her throat to control her, and she could see in his eyes that he was deciding the next place for the knife to go. Then she saw movement, a man perhaps fifteen feet away, and in her pain and panic she tried to call for help. It wasn’t much of a sound, but enough for the mugger to notice. Her eyes were fixed on something—what?
The youth turned to see a street wino ten feet away. What had been an instant and automatic alarm changed to a lazy smile.
Shit. This was not going well at all. Kelly’s head was lowered, his eyes up and looking at the boy, sensing that the event was not really in his control.
“Maybe you got some money, too, pop?” he asked, intoxicated with power, and on a whim he took a step towards the man who had to have more money than this nursey bitch.
Kelly hadn’t expected it, and it threw his timing off. He reached for his gun, but the silencer caught on his waistband, and the incoming mugger instinctively took his movement for the threatening act it had to be. He took another step, more quickly, extending his knife hand. There was no time now to bring the gun out. Kelly stopped, backing off a half step and coming up to an erect stance.
For all his aggressiveness, the mugger wasn’t very skillful. His first lunge with the knife was clumsy, and he was surprised at how easily the wino batted it aside, then stepped inside its arc. A stiff, straight right to the solar plexus deflated his lungs, winding him but not stopping his movements entirely. The knife hand came back wildly as the mugger started folding up. Kelly grabbed the hand, twisting and extending the arm, then stepping over the body already headed to the pavement. An extended ripping/cracking sound announced the dislocation of the youth’s shoulder, and Kelly continued the move, rendering the arm useless.
“Why don’t you go home, Ma’am,” he told Virginia Charles quietly, turning his face away and hoping she hadn’t seen it very well. She ought not to have done so, Kelly told himself; he’d moved with lightning speed.
The nurse’s aide stooped down to recover the five-dollar bill from the sidewalk and left without a word. Kelly watched sideways, seeing her hold her right hand on the bleeding left arm as she tried not to stagger, probably in shock. He was grateful that she didn’t need any help. She would call someone, sure as hell, at least an ambulance, and he really ought to have helped her deal with her wound, but the risks were piling up faster than his ability to deal with them. The would-be mugger was starting to moan now, the pain from his destroyed shoulder penetrating the protective fog of narcotics. And this one had definitely seen his face, close up.
Shit, Kelly told himself. Well, he’d attempted to hurt a woman, and he’d attacked Kelly with a knife, both of them, arguably, failed attempts at murder. Surely this wasn’t his first such attempt. He’d picked the wrong game and, tonight, the wrong playground, and mistakes like that had a price. Kelly took the knife from his limp hand and shoved it hard into the base of his skull, leaving it there. Within a minute his Volkswagen was half a block away.
Seven, he told himself, turning east.
Shit.
19
Quantity of Mercy
It was becoming more routine than the morning coffee and Danish at his desk, Lieutenant Ryan told himself. Two pushers down, both with a pair of .22s in the head, but not robbed this time. No loose cartridge cases around, no evident sign of a struggle. One with his hand on his pistol grip, but the gun hadn’t cleared his hip pocket. For all that, it was unusual. He’d at least seen danger and reacted to it, however ineffectively. Then had come the call from only a few blocks away, and he and Douglas had rolled to that one, leaving junior detectives to deal with this crime scene. The call had identified the new one as interesting.
“Whoa,” Douglas said, getting out first. One did not often see a knife sticking in the back of a head, up in the air like a fence post. “They weren’t kidding.”
The average murder in this part of the city, or any part of any city for that matter, was some sort of domestic argument. People killed other family members, or close friends, over the most trivial disputes. The previous Thanksgiving a father had killed his son over a turkey leg. Ryan’s personal “favorite” was a homicide over a crab cake—not so much a matter of amusement as hyperbole. In all such cases the contributing factors were usually alcohol and a bleak life that transformed ordinarily petty disputes into matters of great import. I didn’t mean it was the phrase most often heard afterwards, followed by some variation of why didn’t he just back off a little? The sadness of such events was like a slow-acting acid on Ryan’s soul. The sameness of those murders was the worst part of all. Human life ought not to end like variations of a single theme. It was too precious for that, a lesson learned in the bocage country of Normandy and the snowy forests around Bastogne when he’d been a young paratrooper in the 101st Airborne. The typical murderer claimed not to have meant it, and frequently copped to the crime immediately, as remorseful as he or she could be over the loss of a friend or loved one by his or her own hand, and so two lives were often destroyed by the crime. Those were crimes of passion and poor judgment, and that’s what murder was, for the most part. But not this one.
“What the hell’s the matter with the arm?” he asked the medical examiner. Aside from the needle tracks the arm was twisted around so much that he realized he was looking at the wrong side of it.
“The victim’s shoulder appears to be dislocated. Make that wrecked,” the ME added after a second’s consideration. “We have bruising around the wrist from the force of the grip. Somebody held the arm with two hands and damned near tore the arm off, like taking a branch off a tree.”
“Karate move?” Douglas asked.
“Something like that. That sure slowed him down some. You can see the cause of death.”
“Lieutenant, over here,” a uniformed sergeant called. “This is Virginia Charles, she lives a block over. She reported the crime.”
“Are you okay, Miss Charles?” Ryan asked. A fireman-paramedic was checking the bandage she’d placed on her own arm, and her son, a senior at Dunbar High School, stood by her side, looking down at the murder victim without a trace of sympathy. Within four minutes Ryan had a goodly quantity of information.
“A bum, you say?”
“Wino—that’s the bottle he dropped.” She pointed. Douglas picked it up with the greatest care.
“Can you describe him?” Lieutenant Ryan asked.
The routine was so exactingly normal that they might have been at any Marine base from Lejeune to Okinawa. The daily-dozen exercises followed by a run, everyone in step, the senior NCO calling cadence. They took particular pleasure in passing formations of new second lieutenants in the Basic Officers Course, or even more wimpy examples of officer-wannabes doing their summer school at Quantico. Five miles, passing the five-hundred-yard KD range and various other teaching facilities, all of them named for dead Marines, approaching the FBI Academy, but turning back off the main road then, into the woods towards their training site. The morning routine merely reminded them that they were Marines, and the length of the run made them Recon Marines, for whom Olympic-class fitness was the norm. They were surprised to see a general officer waiting for them. Not to mention a sandbox and a swing set.
“Welcome to Quantico, Marines,” Marty Young told them after they’d had a chance to cool down and been told to stand at ease. Off to the side, they saw two naval officers in sparkling undress whites, and a pair of civilians, watching and listening. Eyes narrowed collectively, and the mission was suddenly very interesting indeed.
“Just like looking at the photos,” Cas observed quietly, looking around the training site; they knew what the lecture was about. “Why the playground stuff?”
“My idea,” Greer said. “Ivan has satellites. The overhead schedules for the next six weeks are posted inside Building A. We don’t know how good the cameras are, and so I’m going to as
sume that they’re as good as ours, okay? You show the other guy what he wants to see or you make it easy for him to figure out. Any really harmless place has a parking lot.” The drill was already determined. Every day the new arrivals would move the cars around randomly. Around ten every day they would take the mannequins from the cars and distribute them around the playground equipment. At two or three the cars would be moved again and the mannequins rearranged. They suspected correctly that the ritual would acquire a great deal of institutional humor.
“And after it’s all over, it becomes a real playground?” Ritter asked, then answered his own question. “Hell, why not? Nice job, James.”
“Thank you, Bob.”
“It looks small this way,” Admiral Maxwell said.
“The dimensions are accurate to within three inches. We cheated,” Ritter said. “We have the Soviet manual for building places like this. Your General Young did a nice job.”
“No glass in the windows on Building C,” Casimir noted.
“Check the photos. Cas,” Greer suggested. “There’s a shortage of window glass over there. That building just has shutters, here and there. The callback”—he pointed to Building B—“has the bars. Just wood so that they can be removed later. We’ve just guessed at the inside arrangements, but we’ve had a few people released from the other side and we’ve modeled this place on the debriefs. It’s not totally made up from thin air.”
The Marines were already looking around, having learned a little of the mission. Much of the plan they already knew, and they were thinking about how to apply their lessons of real combat operations to this perverted playground, complete with child mannequins who would watch them train with blue doll eyes. M-79 grenades to blast the guard towers. Willie-pete through the barracks windows. Gunships to hose things down after that . . . the “wives” and “kids” would watch the rehearsal and tell no one.
The site had been carefully selected for its similarity with another place—the Marines hadn’t needed to be told that; it had to be so—and a few eyes lingered on a hill half a mile from the site. You could see everything from there. After the welcoming speech, the men divided into predetermined units to draw their weapons. Instead of M16A1 rifles, they had the shorter CAR-15 carbines, shorter, handier, preferred for close work. Grenadiers had standard M-79 grenade launchers, whose sights had been painted with radioactive tritium to glow in the dark, and their bandoleers were heavy with practice rounds because weapons training would start immediately. They’d start in daylight for feel and proficiency, but almost immediately their training would switch exclusively to night work, which the General had left out. It was obvious in any case. This sort of job only happened at night. The men marched to the nearest weapons-firing range to familiarize themselves. Already set up were window frames, six of them. The grenadiers exchanged looks and fired off their first volley. One, to his shame, missed. The other five razzed him at once, after making sure that the white puffs from their training rounds had appeared behind the frames.
“All right, all right, I just have to warm up,” the corporal said defensively, then placed five shots through the target in forty seconds. He was slow—it had been a mainly sleepless night.
“How strong do you have to be to do that, I wonder?” Ryan asked.
“Sure as hell isn’t Wally Cox,” the ME observed. “The knife severed the spinal cord just where it enters the medulla. Death was instantaneous.”
“He already had the guy crippled. The shoulder as bad as it looks?” Douglas asked, stepping aside for the photographer to finish up.
“Worse, probably. We’ll look at it, but I’ll bet you the whole structure is destroyed. You don’t repair an injury like this, not all the way. His pitching career was over even before the knife.”
White, forty or older, long black hair, short, dirty. Ryan looked at his notes. “Go home, Ma’am,” he’d told Virginia Charles.
Ma’am.
“Our victim was still alive when she walked away.” Douglas came over to his lieutenant. “Then he must have taken his knife away and gave it back. Em, in the past week we’ve seen four very expert murders and six very dead victims.”
“Four different MOs. Two guys tied up, robbed, and executed, .22 revolver, no sign of a struggle. One guy with a shotgun in the guts, also robbed, no chance to defend himself. Two last night just shot, probably a .22 again, but not robbed, not tied up, and they were alerted before they were shot. Those were all pushers. But this guy’s just a street hood. Not good enough, Tom.” But the Lieutenant had started thinking about it. “Have we ID’d this one yet?”
The uniformed sergeant answered. “Junkie. He’s got a rap sheet, six arrests for robbery, God knows what else.”
“It doesn’t fit,” Ryan said. “It doesn’t fit anything, and if you’re talking about a really clever guy, why let somebody see him. why let her leave. why talk to her—hell, why take this guy out at all? What pattern does that fit?” There was no pattern. Sure, the two pairs of drug dealers had been taken down with a .22, but the small-bore was the most commonly used weapon on the street, and while one pair had been robbed, the other had not; nor had the second pair been shot with the same deadly precision, though each did have two head wounds. The other murdered and robbed dealer had been done by a shotgun. “Look, we have the murder weapon, and we have the wine bottle, and from one or both we’ll get prints. Whoever this guy was, he sure as hell wasn’t real careful.”
“A wino with a sense of justice, Em?” Douglas prodded. “Whoever took this punk down—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. He wasn’t Wally Cox.” But who and what the hell was he?
Thank God for gloves, Kelly thought. looking at the bruises on his right hand. He’d let his anger get the better of him, and that wasn’t smart! Looking back, reliving the incident, he realized that he’d been faced with a difficult situation. If he’d let the woman get killed or seriously injured, and just gotten into his car and driven off. first, he’d never really have been able to forgive himself, and second, if anyone had seen the car, he’d be a murder suspect. That extended thought evoked a snort of disgust. He was a murder suspect now. Well, somebody would be. On coming home, he’d looked in the mirror, wig and all. Whatever that woman had seen, it had not been John Kelly, not with a face shadowed by his heavy beard, smeared with dirt, under a long and filthy wig. His hunched-over posture made him appear several inches shorter than he was. And the light on the street had not been good. And she’d been even more interested in getting away than anything else. Even so. He’d somehow left his wine bottle behind. He remembered dropping it to parry the knife thrust, and then in the heat of the moment he’d not recovered it. Dumb! Kelly raged at himself.
What would the police know? The physical description would not be a good one. He’d worn a pair of surgical gloves, and though they allowed him to bruise his hands, they hadn’t torn and he hadn’t bled. Most important of all, he had never touched the wine bottle with ungloved hands. Of that he was certain because he’d decided from the beginning to be careful about it. The police would know a street bum had killed that punk, but there were lots of street bums, and he only needed one more night. It meant that he’d have to alter his operational pattern even so, and that tonight’s mission was more dangerous than it ought to be, but his information on Billy was too good to pass up on, and the little bastard might be smart enough to change his own patterns. What if he used different houses to count his cash or only used one for a few nights? If that was true, any wait beyond a day or two might invalidate his whole reconnaissance effort, forcing him to start again with a new disguise—if he could select something equally effective, which was not immediately likely. Kelly told himself that he’d killed six people to get this far—the seventh was a mistake and didn’t count . . . except maybe to that lady, whoever she was. He took a deep breath. If he’d watched her get hurt worse, or killed, how would he be able to look in a mirror? He had to tell himself that he’d made the best of a bad situatio
n. Shit happens. It ran the risks up, but the only concern there was failure in the mission, not in danger to himself. It was time to set his thoughts aside. There were other responsibilities as well. Kelly lifted his phone and dialed.
“Greer.”
“Clark,” Kelly responded. At least that was still amusing.
“You’re late,” the Admiral told him. The call was supposed to have been before lunch, and Kelly’s stomach churned a little at the rebuke. “No harm done, I just got back. We’re going to need you soon. It’s started.”
That’s fast, Kelly thought. Damn. “Okay, sir.”
“I hope you’re in shape. Dutch says you are,” James Greer said more kindly.
“I think I can hold up, sir.”
“Ever been to Quantico?”
“No, Admiral.”
“Bring your boat. There’s a marina there and it’ll give us a place to chat. Sunday morning. Ten sharp. We’ll be waiting, Mr. Clark.”
“Aye aye.” Kelly heard the phone click off.
Sunday morning. He hadn’t expected that. It was going too fast, and it made his other mission all the more urgent. Since when had the government ever moved that quickly? Whatever the reason, it affected Kelly directly.
“I hate it, but it’s the way we work,” Grishanov said.
“You really are that tied to your ground radar?”
“Robin, there is even talk of having the missile firing done by the intercept-control officer from his booth on the ground.” The disgust in his voice was manifest.
“But then you’re just a driver!” Zacharias announced. “You have to trust your pilots.”
