"But it's your goddamned operation!"
"No, it isn't, but I won't bore you with the details," Jack said. "We need your help. Without it, those soldiers aren't going to make it home. It's that simple."
"So you're sending us back to clean up your mess. That's the way it always is with you people, you send us out -"
"Actually," Murray said, "we were planning to go with you. Part of the way anyway. How soon can you be in the air?"
"Tell me exactly what you want." Murray did just that. Colonel Johns nodded and checked his watch.
"Ninety minutes."
The MH- 53J was far larger than the CH-46 that had nearly ended Ryan's life at twenty-three, but no less frightening to him. He looked at the single rotor and remembered that they were making a long, over-water flight. The flight crew was businesslike and professional, hooking both civilians up to the intercom and telling them where to sit and what to do. Ryan was especially attentive to the ditching instructions. Murray kept looking at the miniguns, the impressive six-barrel gatlings set next to enormous hoppers of live shells. There were three for this flight. The helicopter lifted off just after four and headed southwest. As soon as they were airborne, Murray had a crewman attach him to the floor with a twenty-foot safety line so that he could walk around. The hatch at the rear of the aircraft was half open, and he walked back to watch the ocean pass beneath them. Ryan stayed put. The ride was better than the Marine Corps helicopters he remembered, but it still felt like sitting on a chandelier during an earthquake as the aircraft vibrated and oscillated beneath its enormous six-bladed rotor. He could look forward and see one of the pilots, just sitting there as comfortably as though at the wheel of a car. But, Ryan told himself, it wasn't a car.
What he hadn't anticipated was the midair refueling. He felt the aircraft increase power and take a slightly nose-up attitude. Then through the front window he saw the wing of another aircraft. Murray hastened forward to watch, standing behind the crew chief, Sergeant Zimmer. He and Ryan were both hooked into the intercom.
"What happens if you tangle with the hose?" Murray asked as they neared the drogue.
"I don't know," Colonel Johns answered coolly. "It's never happened to me yet. You want to keep it quiet now, sir?"
Ryan looked around for "facilities." He saw what looked like a camper's John, but getting to it meant taking his seat belt off. Jack decided against it. The refueling ended without incident, entirely due, Jack was sure, to his prayers.
Panache was cruising on her station in the Yucatan Channel, between Cuba and the Mexican Coast, following a racetrack pattern. There hadn't been much in the way of activity since the cutter had gotten here, but the crew took comfort from the fact that they were back at sea. The great adventure at the moment was observing the new female crewmen. They had a new female ensign fresh from the Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut, and a half dozen others, mainly unrated seamen, but two petty officers, both electronics types, who, their peers grudgingly admitted, knew their jobs. Captain Wegener was watching the new ensign stand watch as junior officer of the deck. Like all new ensigns she was nervous and eager and a little scared, especially with the skipper on the bridge. She was also cute as a button, and that was something Wegener had never thought of an ensign before.
"Commanding officer, commanding officer," the bulkhead speaker called. Wegener picked up the phone next to his bridge chair.
"Captain here. What is it?"
"Need you in the radio room, sir."
"On the way." Red Wegener rose from his chair. "Carry on," he said on his way aft.
"Sir," the petty officer told him in the radio shack, "we just got a transmission from an Air Force helo, says he's got a person he has to drop off here. Says it's secret, sir. I don't have anything on my board about it, and... well, sir, I didn't know what to do, sir. So I called you."
"Oh?" The woman handed him the microphone. Wegener depressed the transmit button. "This is Panache . Commanding officer speaking. Who am I talking to?"
" Panache , this is CAESAR. Helicopter inbound your position on a Sierra-Oscar. I have a drop-off for you, over."
Sierra- Oscar meant some sort of special operation. Wegener thought for a moment, then decided that there wasn't all that much to think about.
"Roger, CAESAR, say your ETA."
"ETA one- zero minutes."
"Roger, one-zero minutes. We'll be waiting. Out." Wegener handed the microphone back and returned to the bridge.
"Flight quarters," he told the OOD. "Miss Walters, bring us to Hotel Corpin."
"Aye aye, sir."
Things started happening quickly and smoothly. The bosun's mate of the watch keyed the 1-MC: "Flight quarters, flight quarters, all hands man your flight-quarter stations. Smoking lamp is out topside." Cigarettes sailed into the water and hands removed their caps, lest they be sucked into somebody's engines. Ensign Walters looked to see where the wind was, and altered course accordingly, also increasing the cutter's speed to fifteen knots, thus bringing the ship to Hotel Corpin, the proper course for flight operations. And all, she told herself proudly, without having to be told. Wegener turned away and grinned. It was one of many first steps in the career of a new officer. She'd actually known what to do and done it without help. For the captain it was like watching his child take a first step. Eager and smart.
"Christ, it's a big one," Riley said on the bridge wing. Wegener went out to watch.
The helicopter, he saw, was an Air Force -53, far larger than anything the Coast Guard had. The pilot brought it in from aft, then pivoted to fly sideways. Someone was attached to the rescue cable and lowered down to the waiting arms of four deck crewmen. The instant he was detached from the harness, the helicopter lowered its nose and moved off to the south. Quick and smooth, Red noted.
"Didn't know we were getting company, sir," Riley observed as he pulled out a cigar.
"We're still at flight quarters, Chief!" Ensign Walters snapped from the wheelhouse.
"Yes, ma'am, beg pardon, I forgot," the bosun responded with a crafty look at Wegener. Another test passed. She wasn't afraid to yell at the master chief, even if he was older than her father.
"You can secure from flight quarters," the CO told her. "I didn't know either," Wegener told Riley. "I'm going aft to see who it is." He heard Ensign Walters give her orders, under the supervision of a lieutenant and a couple of chiefs.
The visitor, he saw as he approached the helo deck door, was stripping off a green flight suit, but didn't appear to be carrying anything, which seemed odd. Then the man turned around, and it just got stranger.
"Howdy, Captain," Murray said.
"What gives?"
"You got a nice quiet place to talk?"
"Come along." They were in Wegener's cabin shortly thereafter.
"I figure I owe you for a couple of favors," he said. "You could have given me a bad time over that dumb stunt we pulled. Thanks for the tip on the lawyer, too. What he told me was pretty scary - but it turns out that I didn't talk to him until after the two bastards were killed. Last time I ever do something that dumb," Wegener promised. "You're here to collect, right?"
"Good guess."
"So what's going on? You don't just borrow one of those special-ops helos for a personal favor."
"I need you to be someplace tomorrow night."
"Where?"
Murray pulled an envelope from his pocket. "These coordinates. I have the radio plan, too." Murray gave him a few more details.
"You did this yourself, didn't you?" the captain said.
"Yeah, why?"
"Because you ought to have checked the weather."
27. The Battle of Ninja Hill
ARMIES HAVE HABITS. These often appear strange or even downright crazy to outsiders, but for all of them there is an underlying purpose, learned over the four millennia in which men have fought one another in an organized fashion. Mainly the lessons learned are negative ones. Whenever men are killed for no good purpose, it is the business of armies to learn from the mistake and ensure that it will never happen again. Of course, such mistakes are repeated as often in the profession of arms as in any other, but also as in all professions, the really good practitioners are those who never forget fundamentals. Captain Ramirez was one of these. Though the captain had learned that he had too much sentiment, that the loss of life which was part and parcel of his chosen way of life was too difficult a burden to bear, he still remembered the other lessons, one of which was reinforced by the most recent and unpleasant discovery. He still expected to be picked up tonight by the Air Force helicopter, and felt reasonably sure that he had evaded the teams set out to hunt Team KNIFE, but he remembered all the lessons of the past when soldiers died because the unexpected happened, because they took things for granted, because they forgot the fundamentals.
The fundamental rule here was that a unit in a fixed location was always vulnerable, and to reduce that vulnerability, the intelligent commander prepared a defense plan. Ramirez remembered that, and hadn't lost a keen eye for terrain. He didn't think that anyone would come to trouble his men that night, but he had already prepared for that eventuality.
His deployments reflected the threat, which he evaluated as a very large but relatively untrained force, and his two special advantages: first, that all of his men had radios, and second, that there were three silenced weapons at his disposal. Ramirez hoped that they wouldn't come calling, but if they did, he planned to give them a whole series of nasty surprises.
Each of his men was part of a two-man team for mutual support - there is nothing so fearful as to be alone in a combat action, and the effectiveness of any soldier is multiplied many times over merely by having a single comrade at his side. Each pair had dug three holes - called Primary, Alternate, and Supplementary - as part of three separate defensive networks, all of them camouflaged and carefully sited to be mutually supporting. Where possible, fire lanes were cleared, but always on oblique lines so that the fire would take the attacker from the side, not the front, and part of the plan was to force the attacker to move in a direction anticipated by the Team. Finally, if everything broke down, there were three preplanned escape routes and corresponding rally points. His men kept busy all day, digging their holes, preparing their positions, siting their remaining claymore mines, until their rest periods were occupied only with sleep and not conversation. But he couldn't keep himself quite that busy, and couldn't keep himself from thinking.
Through the day things kept getting worse. The radio link was never reestablished, and every time Ramirez came up at a scheduled time and heard nothing, the thinner became his explanations for it. He could no longer wave it off as an equipment or power failure at the downlink. Throughout the afternoon he told himself that it was impossible they were cut off, and he never even considered the possibility that they had been cut off, but the nagging thought grew louder in the back of his mind that he and his men were alone, far from home, facing a potential threat with only what they had carried in on their own backs.
The helicopter landed back at the same facility it had only left two days before, taxiing into the hangar whose door was immediately closed. The MC-130 that had accompanied them down was similarly hidden. Ryan was exhausted by the flight and walked off with wobbly legs to find Clark waiting. The one really good piece of news was that Cutter had neglected to take the simple expedient of meeting with the base commander, never thinking that his orders would be disregarded. As a result, the reappearance of the special-operations aircraft was just another odd occurrence, and one green helicopter - in shadows they looked black - was pretty much the same as another.
Jack returned to the aircraft after making a trip to the rest room and drinking about a quart of water from the cooler. Introductions had already been explained, and he saw that Colonel Johns had hit it off with Mr. Clark.
"Third SOG, eh?"
"That's right, Colonel," Clark said. "I never made it into Laos myself, but you guys saved a few of our asses. I've been with the Agency ever since - well, almost," Clark corrected himself.
"I don't even know where to go. That Navy prick had us destroy all our maps. Zimmer remembers some of the radio freqs, but -"
"I got the freqs," Clark said.
"Fine, but we still have to find 'em. Even with tanker support, I don't have the legs to do a real search. There's a lot of country down there, and the altitude murders our fuel consumption. What's the opposition like?"
"Lots of people with AKs. Oughta sound familiar."
PJ grimaced. "It does. I got three minis. Without any air support..."
"You guessed right: you are the air support. I'd hold on to the miniguns. Okay, the exfiltration sites were agreed upon beforehand?" Clark asked.
"Yeah - a primary and two backups for each team, total of twelve."
"We have to assume that they are known to the enemy. The job for tonight is finding 'em and getting them somewhere else that we know about and they don't. Then tomorrow night you can fly in for the pickup."
"And from there out... The FBI guy wants us to land on that little boat. I'm worried about Adele . The last weather report I saw at noon had it heading north toward Cuba. I want to update that."
"I just did," Larson said as he rejoined the group. " Adele is heading west again, and she made hurricane an hour ago. Core winds are now seventy-five."
"Oh, shit," Colonel Johns observed. "How fast is she moving?"
"It's going to be close for tomorrow night, but no problem for our flight this evening."
"What flight is that, now?"
"Larson and I are going to hop down to locate the teams." Clark pulled a radio out of what had been Murray's bag. "We fly up and down the valley, talking on these. With luck we'll get contact."
"You must really believe in luck, son," Johns said.
O'Day reflected that the life of an FBI agent wasn't always as glamorous as people thought. There was also the little problem that with less than twenty agents on the case he couldn't assign this distasteful task to a junior agent. But the case had enough of those problems. They hadn't even considered getting a search warrant yet, and sneaking into Cutter's quarters without legal authorization - something that the Bureau seldom did anymore - was impossible. Cutter's wife had just gotten back and was bossing her staff of stewards around like a woman to the manor born. On the other hand, the Supreme Court had ruled a few years before that trash-searching didn't require the sanction of a court. That fact enabled Pat O'Day to get the best upper-body workout he'd had in years. Now he could barely raise his arms after having loaded a few tons of malodorous garbage bags into the back of a white-painted trash truck. It might have been one of several cans. The VIP section of Fort Myer was still a military post; even the trash cans had to be set up just so, and in this case, two homes shared each stopping place for the equally well-organized trash contractor. O'Day had marked the bags before loading them into the back of the truck, and as a result, fifteen garbage bags were now sitting in one of the Bureau's many laboratories, though not one that was part of the tourist route, since the FBI shows only its best face to those who tour the Hoover Building, the nice, clean, antiseptic labs. The only good news was that the ventilation system was good, and there were several cans of air freshener around to disguise the smells that got past the technicians' surgical masks. O'Day himself felt as though a squadron of bluebottle flies would follow him for the rest of his life. The search took an hour as the garbage was processed across a white tabletop of imitation marble, about four days' worth of coffee grinds and half-eaten croissants, decomposing meringue, and several diapers - those were from the wrong house: the officer next door to the Cutters had his new granddaughter visiting.
"Bingo," a technician said. His gloved hand held up a computer disk. Even with the gloves, he held it on opposite corners and dropped it into an extended plastic baggie. O'Day took the bag and walked upstairs to latent prints.
Two senior technicians were working overtime tonight. They'd cheated somewhat, of course. They already had a copy of Admiral Cutter's fingerprints from the central print index - all military personnel are printed as a matter of course upon their enlistment - along with their entire bag of tricks, which included a laser.
"What was it in?" one of them asked.
"On top of some newspapers," O'Day replied.
"Aha! No extraneous grease, and good insulation against the heat. There may be a chance." The technician removed the disk from the clear bag and went to work. It took ten minutes, while O'Day paced the room.
"I got a thumbprint with eight points on the front side, and what is probably a smudged ring finger on the back side with one good point and one very marginal one. There is one completely different set, but it's too smudged to identify. It's a different pattern, though, has to be a different person."
O'Day figured that that was more than he'd had the right to expect under the circumstances. A fingerprint identification ordinarily required ten individual points - the irregularities that constituted the art of fingerprint identification - but that number had always been arbitrary. The inspector was certain that Cutter had handled this computer disk, even if a jury might not be completely sure, if that time ever came. Now it was time to see what was on it, and for that he headed to a different lab.
Since personal computers had entered the marketplace, it was only a matter of time until they were used in criminal enterprises. To investigate such use, the Bureau had its own department, but the most useful people of all were private consultants whose real business was "hacking," and for whom computers were marvelous toys and their use the most entertaining of games. To have an important government agency pay them for playing the game was their equivalent of a pro-football career. The one O'Day found waiting for him was one of the champs. He was twenty-five, and still a student at a local community college despite over two hundred hours of credits, the lowest grade for which had been a B +. He had longish red hair and a beard, both of which needed washing. O'Day handed it over.
"This is a code-word case," he said.
"That's nice," the consultant said. "This is a Sony MFD-2DD microfloppy, double-sided, double-density, 135TPI, probably formatted for 800K. What's supposed to be on it?"
"We're not sure, but probably an encipherment algorithm."
"Ah! Russian communications systems? The Sovs getting sophisticated on us?"
"You don't need to know that," O'Day pointed out.
"You guys are no fun at all," the man said as he slid the disk into the drive. The computer to which it was attached was a new Apple Macintosh IIx, each of whose expander slots was occupied by a special circuit board, two of which the technician had personally designed. O'Day had heard that he'd work on an IBM only if someone put a gun to his head.
The programs he used for this task had been designed by other hackers to recover data from damaged disks. The first one was called Rescuedata. The operation was a delicate one. First the read heads mapped each magnetic zone on the disk, copying the data over to the eight-megabyte memory of the IIx and making a permanent copy on the hard drive, plus a floppy-disk copy. That allowed him to eject the original, which O'Day immediately reinserted in the baggie.
"It's been wiped," the man said next.
"What?"
"It's been wiped, not erased or initialized, but wiped. Probably with a little toy magnet."
"Shit," O'Day observed. He knew enough about computers to realize that the magnetically stored data was destroyed by magnetic interference.
"Don't get excited."
"Huh?"
"If this guy had initialized the disk, we'd be screwed, but he just swiped a magnet around. Some of the data is gone, but some probably isn't. Give me a couple of hours and maybe I can get some of this data back for you - there's a smidge right there. It's in machine language, but I don't recognize the format... looks like a transposition algorithm. I don't know any of that cryppie stuff, sir. Looks fairly complex." He looked around. "This is going to take some time."
"How long?"
"How long to paint the Mona Lisa? How long to build a cathedral, How long..." O'Day was out of the room before he heard the third one. He dropped the disk off in the secure file in his office, then headed for the gym for a shower and a half hour in the whirlpool. The shower removed the stink, and while the whirlpool went to work on the aches, O'Day reflected that the case against the son of a bitch was shaping up rather nicely.
"Sir, they just ain't there."
Ramirez handed the headset back and nodded. There was no denying it now. He looked over to Guerra, his operations sergeant.
"I think somebody forgot about us."
"Well, that's good news, Cap'n. What are we gonna do about it?"
"Our next check-in time is zero-one-hundred. We give 'em one more chance. If nothing by then, I guess we move out."
"Where to, sir?"
"Head down off the mountain, see if we can borrow some transport and - Christ, I don't know. We probably have enough cash we can use to fly out of here -"
"No passports, no ID."
"Yeah. Make it to the Embassy in Bogot ?"
"That violates about a dozen different orders, sir," Guerra pointed out.
"First time for everything," Captain Ramirez observed. "Have everybody eat their last rations, rest up as best they can. We stand-to in two hours, and stay alert all night. I want Chavez and Le n to patrol down the hill, say two klicks' worth." Ramirez didn't have to say what he was worried about. As unlikely as intellect told them it had to be, he and Guerra were on the same wavelength.
"It's cool, Cap'n," the sergeant assured him. "We're going to be all right, just as soon as those REMFs get their shit together."
The mission briefing took fifteen minutes. The men were angry and restive at the losses they had taken, not fully appreciative of the danger that lay ahead, only of their rage at what had already happened to their numbers. Such bravado, Cortez thought, such machismo. The fools .
The first target was only thirty kilometers away - for the obvious reasons he wanted to deal with the nearest one first - and twenty-two of them could be covered by truck. They had to wait for darkness, of course, but sixteen trucks rolled out, each with fifteen or so men aboard. Cortez watched them depart, muttering to one another as they pulled out of sight. His own people stayed behind, of course. He had so far recruited ten men, and their loyalty was to him alone. He'd recruited well, of course. No nonsense about who their parents were or how faithfully they had killed. He'd selected them for their skills. Most were dropouts from M-19 and PARC, men for whom five years of playing at guerrilla warfare had been enough. Some had received training in Cuba or Nicaragua and had basic soldier skills - actually terrorist skills, but that put them ahead of the "soldiers" of the Cartel, most of whom had never received formal training at all. They were mercenaries. Their only interest in Cortez was in the money he'd paid them, but he'd also promised them more. More to the point, there was nowhere else for them to go. The Colombian government had no use for them. The Cartel would not have trusted them. And they had forsworn their loyalty to the two Marxist groups which were so politically bankrupt that they allowed themselves to be hired out by the Cartel. That left Cortez. He was the man they would kill for. He hadn't confided in them, since he didn't yet trust them to do any more than that, but all great movements began with small groups of people whose methods were as murky as their objectives, who knew only loyalty to a single man. At least that's what Cortez had been taught. He didn't fully believe that himself, but it was enough for the moment. He had no illusions about leading a revolution. He was merely executing - what was it called? A hostile takeover. Yes, that was right. Cortez chuckled to himself as he walked back inside and started looking at his maps.
"Good thing neither one of us is a smoker," Larson said as the wheels came up. In the cabin behind them was an auxiliary fuel tank. They had a two-hour flight down to their patrol area, and two hours back, with three hours of loiter time on station. "You suppose this is going to work?"
"If it doesn't, somebody's going to pay," Clark replied. "What about the weather?"
"We'll sneak back in ahead of it. Don't make any bets on tomorrow, though."
Chavez and Le n were two kilometers away from the team's farthest listening post. Both carried silenced weapons. Le n hadn't been the point scout for BANNER, but had woodcraft skills that Chavez liked. The best news of all was that they found nothing. Captain Ramirez had briefed them on what he was worried about. So far they hadn't detected it, which was fine with the two sergeants. They'd gone down to the north initially, then gradually come south while covering an arc of several kilometers, looking for signs, listening for noise. They were just turning for the climb back to the LZ when Chavez stopped and turned.
It was a metallic sound. He waved for Le n to freeze and pivoted his head around, hoping - what? he asked himself. Hoping that he'd really heard something? Hoping that he'd imagined it? He switched his goggles and scanned downhill. There was a road down there somewhere. If somebody came calling, it would be from that direction.
It was hard to tell at first. There was thick overhead cover here, and the relative absence of light forced him to turn the brightness control to the maximum. That made the picture fuzzy, like a pre-cable TV signal from a distant city, and what he was looking for was far off-at least five hundred meters, which was as far as he could see down a thinned-out area of the forest. The tension only made him more alert, but that made his imagination work all the harder, and he had to guard against seeing things that weren't there.
But something was there. He could feel it even before the noise returned. There were no more metallic sounds, but there was... there was the over-loud whisper of leaves, and then it was a calm night again in the lee of the mountain. Chavez looked over to Le n, who also had his goggles on, was also looking that way, a green image on the tube. The goggled face turned toward Chavez and nodded. There was no emotion in the gesture, just the professional communication of an unpleasant thought. Chavez knelt to activate his radio.
"Six, this is Point," Ding called.
"Six here."
"We're at the turn-back point. We got movement down here, about half a klick below us. We're gonna wait to see what it is."
"Roger. Be careful, Sergeant," Ramirez said.
"Will do. Out." Le n came over to join him.
"How d'you want to play this?" 'Berto asked.
"Let's stay close, try not to move too much till we see what they're up to."
"You got it. Better cover about fifty meters uphill."
"Go ahead, I'll be right behind you." Chavez took one more look downhill before following his comrade up to a stand of thick trees. Still nothing he could really identify on the speckled screen. Two minutes later he was at the new perch.
'Berto saw it first and pointed down a trail. The moving specks were larger than the noise generated by the viewing system. Heads. Four or five hundred meters off. Coming straight up the hill.
Okay , Chavez said to himself. Let's get a count . He felt himself relaxing. This was business. He'd done it all before. The great unknown was now behind him. There would be a fight. He knew how to do that.
"Six, this is Point, estimate company strength, heading right up to you."
"Anything else?"
"They're moving kinda slow. Careful, like."
"How long can you stay there?"
"Maybe a couple minutes."
"Stay as long as it's safe, then move. Try to pace them for another klick or so. We want to get as many as possible into the sack."
"Roger."
"These numbers suck, man," Le n whispered.
"We sure as hell want to whittle 'em down some 'fore we run, don't we?" Chavez returned his eyes to the advancing enemy. He saw no obvious organization. They were taking their time, moving slowly up the hill, though he could easily hear them now. They moved in little bands of three or four, probably groups of friends, he thought, like street gangs did. You wanted a friend at your back.
Street gang , he thought. They didn't bother with colors down here like in his barrio, just those damned AK-47s. No real plan, no fire and maneuver teams. He wondered if they had radios to coordinate with. Probably not. He realized, a little late, that they did know where they were going. He didn't understand how they knew, but it only meant that they were heading into one hell of an ambush. But there were still a lot of 'em. An awful lot.
"Time to move," Ding told 'Berto.
They raced uphill, or went as fast as their training allowed, choosing one good observation point after another and keeping their command posted on their position and the enemy's. Ahead of them, up the hill, the squad had nearly two hours to reorient itself and prepare its ambush. Chavez and Le n copied his radio message on their own sets. The squad was moving forward to meet the attackers well in front of the primary defensive line. It was set between two particularly steep sections, anchored at those points with the SAWs, covering an approach route less than three hundred meters wide. If the enemy was dumb enough to come through there, well, that was their problem, wasn't it? So far they had taken a direct route to the LZ. Maybe they'd been told that KNIFE probably was there, not certainly, Chavez thought, as he and Le n picked their spot, just below one of the SAWs.
"Six, this is Point, we are in position. Enemy is three hundred meters below us."
Click- click
"I see 'em," another voice called over the radio net. "Grenade One sees 'em."
"Medic has 'em."
"SAW One has 'em."
"Grenade Two. We got 'em."
"KNIFE, this is Six. Let's everybody be cool," Ramirez said calmly. "Looks like they're coming right in the front door. Remember the signal, people..."
It took another ten minutes. Chavez switched off his scope both to save batteries and to get his eyes back to normal. His mind played and replayed the squad fire-plan. He and Le n had specific areas of responsibility. Each soldier was supposed to limit his fire to an individual arc. All the arcs interlocked and overlapped somewhat, but they were supposed to hunt in their own little patch and not hose down the entire area. Even the two SAWs on line were so limited. The third was well behind the firing line with the small reserve force, ready to support the squad as it pulled back or to react to something unexpected.
They were within a hundred meters of the line now. The front rank of the advancing enemy was perhaps eighteen or twenty men, with others struggling behind to keep up. They moved slowly, careful of their footing, weapons held at port across their chests. Chavez counted three in his area of responsibility. Le n kept watch downhill as he brought his weapon up.
In the old days it was done with volley fire. Napoleonic infantry formed up shoulder-to-shoulder in ranks of two or four, leveling their muskets on command and firing on one another in one dreadful blast of power and ball. The purpose was shock. The purpose still is. Shock to unsettle those enemies fortunate enough to escape instant death, shock to tell them that this was not a place they wanted to be, shock to interfere with their performance, to stop them, to confuse them. It is no longer done with massed columns of muskets. Today it is done by letting them get very, very close, but the impact remains as much psychological as physical.
Click- click-click . Get ready, Ramirez ordered. Across the line, the riflemen snugged their weapons into their shoulders. The machine guns came up on their bipods. Safeties went off. In the center of the line, the captain wrapped his hand around a length of communications wire. It was fifty yards long, and attached to its other end was a tin can containing a few pebbles. Slowly, carefully, he pulled the wire taut. Then he yanked it hard.
The sudden sound froze the moment in time. It was as if everything stopped for an instant that seemed to last for hours. The men in front of the light-fighters turned instinctively toward the sound in their midst, away from the unknown threat that lay to their front and their flanks, away from the fingers that had just begun to press down.
The moment ended with the white muzzle flashes of the squad. The leading fifteen attackers dropped in an instant. Behind them five more died or were wounded before fire was returned. Then the firing from above stopped. The attackers responded late. Many of them emptied whole magazines in the general direction of uphill, but the soldiers were down in their holes, denying the attackers targets.
"Who fired? Who fired? What is going on here?" It was the voice of Sergeant Olivero, whose accent was perfect.
Confusion is the ally of the prepared. More men rushed forward into the killing zone to see what was happening, wondering who had shot at whom. Chavez and all the others counted to ten before coming back up. Ding had two men within thirty meters of his position. On "Ten!" he dropped one with a three-round burst and wounded the other. Maybe a dozen more enemies were down now.
Click- click-click-click-click . "Everybody move out," Ramirez called over the radios.
The drill was the same across the line. One man from each pair took off at once, racing fifty meters uphill before stopping at a preselected spot. The SAWs, which had thus far fired only short bursts as though they were mere rifles, now fired long ones to cover the disengagement. Within a minute, KNIFE had moved away from the area now being beaten with late and inaccurate fire. One man was grazed by a stray round, but ignored it. As usual, Chavez was the last to leave and the slowest to move, picking his way from one thick tree to another as the returning fire became heavier. He reactivated his goggles to get a view of things. Perhaps thirty men were down in the kill zone, only half of them moving. Too late, the enemy was looping around the south side, trying to envelop a position already deserted. He watched them come into the position he and Le n had occupied only minutes before, and they just stood there in confusion, still wondering what had happened. There were screams from the wounded now, and then the curses started, obscene, powerful curses of enraged men who were accustomed to inflicting death, not receiving it. New voices became clear over the din of sporadic rifle fire and curses and screams. Those would be the leaders, giving orders loudly and in a language all of the soldiers understood. Chavez had just started believing that this battle would be easily won when he took his final look.
"Oh, shit." He keyed his radio. "Six, this is Point. This is greater than company strength, sir. Say again, more than company strength. I estimate three-zero enemy casualties at this time. They just started moving up again. I got thirty or so moving south. Somebody's telling 'em to try 'n surround us."
"Roger, Ding. Get moving uphill."
"On the way." Chavez ran hard, leapfrogging past Le n's position.
"Mr. Clark, you've got me believing in miracles," Larson said at the wheel of his Beechcraft. They'd made contact with Team OMEN on the third try, and ordered them to move five klicks to a clearing barely large enough for the Pave Low. The next attempt took longer, nearly forty minutes. Now they were looking for BANNER. What was left of it, Clark reminded himself. He didn't know that its survivors had linked up with KNIFE, which was the last team on his list.
The second defense position was of necessity more dispersed than the first, and Ramirez was starting to worry. His men had handled the first ambush so perfectly that someone at the Infantry School might one day write a paper about it, but one immutable law of military operations was that successful tricks can rarely be repeated. There was nothing like death to teach someone a lesson. The enemy would maneuver now, would spread out, trying to coordinate or at least to make better use of his larger numbers. And the enemy was doing something smart. He was moving faster. Now that they knew that they had a real enemy with real teeth, they knew on instinct that the best thing to do was to push, to take the initiative and force the pace of the combat action. That was the one thing that Ramirez could not really prevent. But he, too, had cards to play.
His flank scouts kept him posted on enemy movements. There were now three groups of about forty men each. Ramirez couldn't deal with all three, but he could hurt them one at a time. He also had three fire teams of five men each. One - the remains of BANNER - he left in the center, with a scout on the left to keep track of the third enemy group while he slid the bulk of his force south and deployed on an oblique uphill-downhill line, almost an L-shaped ambush line anchored at the uphill side with both SAWs.
They didn't have to wait very long. The enemy was moving faster than Ramirez hoped, and there was barely time for his men to select good firing positions, but the attackers were still moving predictably over the terrain, which was again to be their misfortune. Chavez was at the bottom end and gave warning as they approached. Again, they allowed the enemy to close to fifty meters' distance. Chavez and Le n were several meters apart, looking for leaders. Their job was to fire first, silently, to remove anyone who might try to coordinate and lead the attackers. There was one, Ding thought, someone gesturing to others. He leveled his MP-5 and squeezed off a burst which missed. Despite the silenced weapon, its cycling made enough noise to draw a shot, and the whole squad opened up. Five more attackers fell. The rest returned fire accurately this time and formed up to assault the defenders' position, but when their muzzle flashes revealed their position, both SAW machine guns raked up and down their line.
The theater of combat was horrible and fascinating to watch. As soon as people started firing, night vision fell away. Chavez tried to protect his by keeping one eye shut as he'd been drilled, but found that it didn't work. The forest was alive with bright cylindrical tongues of flame, some of which became small globes of light that illuminated the moving men like a series of strobe lights. Tracers from the machine guns walked fire into living men. Tracers from the riflemen meant something else. The last three rounds in every magazine were lit to tell them that it was time to load new magazines. The noise was unlike anything Chavez had ever heard, the chatter of the M-16s, and the lower, slower rattle of the AK-47s. The shouted orders, the screams of rage and pain and despairing death.
"Run!" It was Captain Ramirez's voice, shouting in Spanish. Again they disengaged by pairs. Or tried to. Two squad members had been hit in this exchange. Chavez tripped on one, who was trying to crawl away. He lifted the man on his shoulders and ran up the hill while he tried to ignore the pain in his legs. The man - it was Ingeles - died at the rally point. There was no time for grief; his unused magazines were passed out among the other riflemen. While Captain Ramirez tried to get things organized again, all of them heard the mixed notes of gunfire down the hill, more shouts, more curses. Only one more man made it to the rally point. Team KNIFE now had two more dead and one seriously wounded. Olivero took charge of that, leading the injured man up the hill to the casualty collection point near the LZ. It had taken fifteen minutes to inflict a further twenty casualties on the enemy, at the cost of 30 percent of their strength. If Captain Ramirez had had time to think, he would have realized that for all his cleverness he was in a losing game. But there wasn't time for thinking.
The BANNER men discouraged another group of the enemy with a few bursts of fire, but lost one of their number withdrawing up the hill. The next defense line was four hundred meters away. Tighter than the second, it was disagreeably close to their final defensive position. It was time to play their last card.
The enemy again closed in on empty terrain, and still didn't know what casualties they had inflicted on the evil spirits that appeared and killed and disappeared like something from a nightmare. Two of the men who occupied something akin to leadership positions were gone, one dead, the other gravely wounded, and now they stopped to regroup while the surviving leaders conferred.
For the soldiers, the situation was much the same. As soon as the casualties were identified, Ramirez rearranged his deployment to compensate, distantly thankful that he didn't have time to mourn his dead, that his training really did force him to focus on the problem at hand. The helicopter wasn't going to come in time. Or was it? Or did it matter? What did matter?
What he had to do was further reduce the enemy numbers so that an escape attempt had a decent chance at success. They had to run away, but they had to do some more killing first. Ramirez had been keeping his explosives in reserve. None of his men had yet fired or thrown a grenade, and this position was the one protected by their remaining claymore mines, each of them set to protect a rifleman's hole.
"Why are you waiting, eh?" Ramirez called downhill. "Come on, we are not finished with you yet! First we kill you, then we fuck your women!"
"They don't have women," Vega shouted. "They do it to each other. Come, fairies, it is time to die!"
And so they came. Like a puncher remorselessly closing on a boxer, cutting off the ring, still driven by anger, scarcely noting their losses, drawn to the voices and cursing them as they did so. But more carefully now, the enemy troops had learned. Moving from tree to tree, covering one another as they did so. Firing ahead to keep heads down.
"Something's happening down to the south, there. See the flashes?" Larson said. "Over at two o'clock on the mountainside."
"I see it." They'd spent over an hour trying to raise BANNER by flying and transmitting over all three exfiltration sites, and gotten nothing. Clark didn't like leaving the area, but had little choice. If that was what it might be, they had to get closer. Even with a clear line of sight, these little radios were good for less than ten miles.
" Buster ," he told the pilot. Get there as fast as you can .
Larson retracted his flaps and pushed the throttles forward.
It was called a fire-sack, a term borrowed from the Soviet Army, and perfectly descriptive of its function. The squad was spread out in a wide arc, every man in his hole, though four of the holes were occupied by one instead of two, and another was not occupied at all. In front of each hole were one or two claymores, faced convex side toward the enemy. The position was just inside a stand of trees and faced down across what must have been a rockfall or small landslide, an open space perhaps seventy meters wide, looking down on some fallen trees, and a few new ones. The noise and muzzle flashes of the enemy approached that line and stopped moving, though the firing did not abate at all.
"Okay, people," Ramirez said. "On command we get the hell out of here, back to the LZ, and from there down X-route two. But we gotta thin them down some more first."
The other side was talking, too, and finally doing so intelligently. They used names instead of places, just enough encoding to mask what they wanted to do, though they had again allowed themselves to follow terrain features instead of crossing them. Certainly they had courage, Ramirez thought; whatever sort of men they were, they didn't shrink from danger. If they'd had just a little training and one or two competent leaders, the fight would already have been over.
Chavez had other things on his mind. His weapon was flash-less in addition to being noiseless, and the Ninja was using his goggles to pick out individual targets and then dropping them without a shred of remorse. He got one possible leader. It was almost too easy. The rattle of fire from the enemy line masked the sound of his own weapon. But he checked his ammo bag and realized that he had only two magazines and sixty rounds beyond what were in his weapon already. Captain Ramirez was playing it smart, but he was also playing it close.
Another head appeared from behind a tree, then an arm gesturing to someone else. Ding tracked in on it and loosed a single round. It caught the man in the throat, but didn't prevent a gurgling scream. Though Chavez didn't know it, that was the main leader of the enemy, and his scream galvanized them to action. All across the treeline fire lanced out at the light-fighters, and with a shout, the enemy attacked.
Ramirez let them get halfway across, then fired a grenade from his launcher. It was a phosphorus round, which created an intense, spidery white fountain of light. Instantly, every man triggered his claymore mines.
- "Oh, shit, there's KNIFE. Willie Pete and claymores." Clark shoved his antenna out the aircraft's window.
"KNIFE, this is VARIABLE; KNIFE, this is VARIABLE. Come in, over!" His attempt at help could not have come at a worse moment.
Thirty more men fell dead, and ten wounded under the scything fragments from the mines. Next, grenades were launched into the treeline, including all of the WP rounds, to start fires. Far enough away to avoid instant death, but too close to be untouched by the showering bits of burning phosphorus, some men caught fire, adding their screams to the cacophony of the night. Hand-thrown grenades were added to the field, killing yet more of the attackers. Then Ramirez keyed his radio again.
"Move out, move out now!" But he'd done the right thing once too often.
When the KNIFE team moved out from their positions, they were swept with automatic-weapons fire from men shooting on reflex. Those soldiers who had them tossed smoke and CS tear-gas grenades to conceal their departure, but the sparkling of the pyrotechnics merely gave the other side a point of aim, and each drew the fire from a dozen weapons. Two were killed, and another two wounded as a direct result of doing what they'd been taught to do. Ramirez had done a stellar job of maintaining control of his unit to this point, but it was here that he lost it. The radio earpiece started crackling with an unfamiliar voice.
"This is KNIFE," he said, standing erect. "VARIABLE, where the hell are you?"
"Overhead, we are overhead. What is your situation, over?"
"We're in deep shit, falling back to the LZ now, get down here, get down here right now! " Ramirez shouted for his men. "Get to the LZ, they're coming to get us!"
"Negative, negative. KNIFE, we cannot come in now. You must get clear, you must get clear. Acknowledge!" Clark told the radio. No reply. He repeated the instructions and again there was nothing.
And now there were only eight left of what had once been twenty-two men. Ramirez was carrying a wounded man, and his earpiece had fallen out as he ran for the LZ, two hundred meters up the hill, through one last stand of trees into the clearing where the helicopter would come.
But it didn't. Ramirez set his burden down, looking up at the sky with his eyes, then with his goggles, but there was no helicopter, no flash of strobe lights, no heat from turboshaft engines to light up the night sky. The captain yanked the earpiece out of the radio and screamed into it.
"VARIABLE, where the hell are you?"
"KNIFE, this is VARIABLE. We are orbiting your position in a fixed-wing aircraft. We cannot execute a pickup until tomorrow night. You must get clear, you must get clear. Acknowledge!"
"There's only eight of us left, there's only -" Ramirez stopped, and his humanity returned one last, lethal time. "Oh, my God." He hesitated, realizing that most of his men were gone, and he had been their commander, and he was responsible. That he wasn't, really, was something he would never learn.
The enemy was approaching now, approaching from three sides. There was only one way to escape. It was a preplanned route, but Ramirez looked down at the man he'd carried to the LZ and watched him die. He looked up again, looked round at his men, and didn't know what to do next. There wasn't time for training to work. A hundred meters away, the first of the enemy force emerged from the last line of trees and fired. His men returned it, but there were too many and the infantrymen were down to their last magazines.
Chavez saw it happening. He'd linked back up with Vega and Le n, to help a man whose leg was badly wounded. As he watched, a line of men swept across the LZ. He saw Ramirez drop prone, firing his weapon at the oncoming enemy, but there was nothing Ding and his friends could do, and they headed west, down the escape route. They didn't look back. They didn't need to. The sound told them enough. The chattering of the M-16s was answered by the louder fire of the AKs. A few more grenades went off. Men screamed and cursed, all of them in Spanish. And then all the fire was from AKs. The battle for this hill had ended.
"Does that mean what I think it means?" Larson asked.
"It means that some stateside REMF is going to die," Clark said quietly. There were tears in his eyes. He'd seen this happen once before, when his helicopter had gotten off in time and the other hadn't, and he'd been ashamed at the time and long thereafter that he had survived while others had not. " Shit! " He shook his head and got control of himself.
"KNIFE, this is VARIABLE. Do you read me, over? Reply by name. Say again, reply by name."
"Wait a minute," Chavez said. "This is Chavez. Who's on this net?"
"Listen fast, kid, 'cause your net is compromised. This is Clark. We met awhile back. Head in the same direction you did on the practice night. Do you remember that?"
"Roger. I remember the way we headed then. We can do that."
"I'll be back for you tomorrow. Hang in there, kid. It ain't over yet. Repeat: I will be back for you. Now haul your ass out of there. Out."
"What was that all about?" Vega asked.
"We loop around east, down the hill to the north, then around east."
"And then what?" Oso demanded.
"How the fuck should I know?"
"Head back north," Clark ordered.
"What's an REMF?" Larson asked as he started the turn.
Clark's reply was so low as to be inaudible. "An REMF is a rear-echelon motherfucker, one of those useless, order-generating bastards who gets us line-animals killed. And one of them is going to pay for this, Larson. Now shut up and fly."
For another hour they continued their futile search for Team BANNER, then they headed back to Panama. That flight took two hours and fifteen minutes, during which Clark didn't say word and Larson was afraid to. The pilot taxied the aircraft right into the hangar with the Pave Low, and the doors closed behind him. Ryan and Johns were waiting for them.
"Well?" Jack asked.
"We made contact with OMEN and FEATURE," Clark said. "Come on." He led them into an office with a table. There he spread out his map.
"What about the others?" Jack asked. Colonel Johns didn't have to. He already knew part of it from the look on Clark's face.
"OMEN will be right here tomorrow night. FEATURE will be here," Clark said, indicating two places marked on the map.
"Okay, we can handle that," Johns said.
"Goddammit!" Ryan growled. "What about the others?"
"We never made contact with BANNER. We watched the bad guys overrun KNIFE. Most of it," Clark corrected himself. "At least one man got away. I'm going in after him, on the ground." Clark turned to the pilot. "Larson, you'd better get a few hours. I need you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in six hours."
"What about the weather?" he asked PJ.
"That fucking storm's jinking around like a Weasel on a SAM hunt. Nobody knows where the hell it's going, but it ain't there yet, and I've flown in weather before," Colonel Johns replied.
"Okay." The pilot walked off. There were some cots set in the next room. He landed on one and was asleep in a minute.
"Going in on the ground?" Ryan asked.
"What do you expect me to do - leave them there? Ain't we done enough of that?" Clark looked away. His eyes were red, and only PJ knew that it wasn't from strain and lack of sleep. "Sorry, Jack. There's some of our people there. I have to try. They'd try for me. It's cool, man. I know how to do it."
"How?" PJ asked.
"Larson and I'll fly in around noon, get a car and drive down. I told Chavez - that's the kid I talked to - to get around them and head east, down the mountain. We'll try to pick them up, drive 'em to the airport, and just fly them out."
"Just like that?" Ryan asked incredulously.
"Sure. Why not?"
"There's a difference between being brave and being an idiot," Ryan said.
"Who gives a fuck about being brave? It's my job." Clark walked off to get some sleep.
"You know what you're really afraid of?" Johns said when he'd left. "You're afraid of remembering the times that you could have done it and didn't. I can give you a play-by-play of every failure I've had in twenty-some years." The colonel was wearing his blue shirt with command wings and all the ribbons. He had quite a few.
Jack's eyes fixed on one, pale blue with five white stars. "But you..."
"It's a nice thing to wear, and it's nice to have four-stars salute me first and treat me like I'm something special. But you know what matters? Those two guys I got out. One's a general now. The other one flies for Delta. They're both alive. They both have families. That's what matters, Mr. Ryan. The ones I didn't get out, they matter, too. Some of them are still there, because I wasn't good enough or fast enough or lucky enough. Or they weren't. Or something. I should have gotten them out. That's the job," Johns said quietly. "That's what I do."
We sent them in there , Jack told himself. My agency sent them in there. And some of them are dead now, and we let somebody tell us not to do anything about it. And I'm supposed to be ...
"Might be dangerous going in tonight."
"Possible. Looks that way."
"You have three minis aboard your chopper," Ryan said after a moment. "You only have two gunners."
"I couldn't whistle another one up this fast and -"
"I'm a pretty fair shot," Jack told him.
28. Accounting
CORTEZ SAT AT the table, doing his sums. The Americans had done marvelously well. Nearly two hundred Cartel men had gone up the mountain. Ninety-six had returned alive, sixteen of those wounded. They'd even brought a live American down with them. He was badly hurt, still bleeding from four wounds, and he hadn't been well handled by the Colombian gunmen. The man was young and brave, biting off his screams, shaking with the effort to control himself. Such a courageous young man, this Green Beret. Cortez would not insult his bravery with questions. Besides, he was incoherent, and Cortez had other things to do.
There was a medical team here to treat "friendly" casualties. Cortez walked out to it and picked up a disposable syringe, filling it with morphine. He returned and stabbed the needle into a vein on the soldier's uninjured arm, pushing down on the plunger after it was in. The soldier relaxed at once, his pain extinguished by a wonderful, brief sensation of well-being. Then his breathing just stopped, and his life, too, was extinguished. Most unfortunate. Cortez could really have used men like this one, but they rarely worked for anything other than a flag. He walked over to his phone and called the proper number.
" Jefe , we eliminated one of the enemy forces last night... Yes, jefe , there were ten of them as I suspected, and we got them all. We go after another team tonight... There is one problem, jefe . The enemy fought well, and we took many casualties. I need more men for tonight's mission. S , thank you, jefe . That will do nicely. Send the men to Riosucio, and have the leaders report to me this afternoon. I will brief them here. Oh? Yes, that will be excellent. We'll be waiting for you."
With luck, Cortez thought, the next American team would fight equally as well. With luck he could eliminate two-thirds of the Cartel's stable of gunmen in a single week. Along with their bosses, also tonight. He was on the downslope now, Cortez thought. He'd gambled dangerously and hard, but the tricky ones were behind him.
It was an early funeral. Greer had been a widower, and estranged from his wife long before that. The reason for the estrangement was next to the rectangular hole in Arlington, the simple white headstone of First Lieutenant Robert White Greer, USMC, his only son, who'd graduated from the Naval Academy and gone to Vietnam to die. Neither Moore nor Ritter had ever met the young man, and James had never kept a photo of him around the office. The former DDI had been a sentimental man but never a maudlin one. Yet he had long ago requested burial next to the grave of his son, and because of his rank and station an exception had been made and the place kept available for an event that for all men was as inevitable as it was untimely. He'd indeed been a sentimental man, but only in ways that mattered. Ritter thought that there were many explanations before his eyes. The way James had adopted several bright young people and brought them into the Agency, the interest he'd taken in their careers, the training and consideration he'd given them.
It was a small, quiet ceremony. James' few close friends were there, along with a much larger number of people from the government. Among the latter were the President - and, much to Bob Ritter's rage, Vice Admiral James A. Cutter, Jr. The President himself had spoken at the chapel service, noting the death of a man who had served his country continuously for more than fifty years, having enlisted in the U.S. Navy at seventeen, then entered the Academy, then reached two-star rank, achieving a third star for his flag after assuming his position at CIA. "A standard of professionalism, integrity, and devotion to his country that few have equaled and none have excelled" was how the President summarized the career Vice Admiral James Greer.
And that bastard Cutter sat right there in the front row as he said it, too , Ritter told himself. He found it especially sickening as he watched the honor guard from the 3rd Infantry Regiment fold the flag that had been draped over the casket. There was no one to hand it to. Ritter had expected it to go to -
But where was Ryan? He moved his head, trying to look around. He hadn't noticed before because Jack hadn't come from Langley with the rest of the CIA delegation. The flag went to Judge Moore by default. Hands were shaken, words exchanged. Yes, it really was a mercy that he'd gone so rapidly at the end. Yes, men like this didn't appear every day. Yes, this was the end of the Greer line, and that was too bad, wasn't it? No, I never met his son, but I heard... Ritter and Moore were in the Agency Cadillac ten minutes later, heading back up the George Washington Parkway.
"Where the hell was Ryan?" the DCI asked.
"I don't know. I figured he'd drive himself in."
Moore was not so much angered as upset by the impropriety. He still had the flag in his lap, holding it as gently as a newborn baby without knowing why - until he realized that if there really was a God, as the Baptist preachers of his youth had assured him, and if James had really had a soul, he held its best legacy in his hands. It felt warm to the touch, and though he knew that it was merely his imagination or at most the residual heat absorbed from the morning sun, the energy radiating from the flag that James had served from his teens seemed to accuse him of treachery. They had just watched a funeral this morning, but two thousand miles away there were other people whom the Agency had sent to do a job and who would not receive even the empty reward of a grave amidst others of their kind.
"Bob, what the hell have we done?" Moore asked. "How did we ever get into this?"
"I don't know, Arthur. I just don't know."
"James really was lucky," the Director of Central Intelligence murmured. "At least he went out -"
"With a clear conscience?" Ritter looked out the window, unable to bring himself to face his boss. "Look, Arthur -" He stopped, not knowing what to say next. Ritter had been with the Agency since the fifties, had worked as a case officer, a supervisor, station chief, then head of section at Langley. He had lost case officers, had lost agents, but he'd never betrayed them. There was a first time for everything, he told himself. It had just come home to him in a very immediate way, however, that for every man there was also a first time for death, and that to meet that final accounting improperly was the ultimate cowardice, the ultimate failure of life. But what else could they do?
It was a short drive to Langley, and the car stopped before that question could be answered. They rode the elevator up. Moore walked to his office. Ritter walked to his. The secretaries hadn't returned yet. They were in a van. Ritter paced around his office until they arrived, then walked over to see Mrs. Cummings.
"Did Ryan call in or anything?"
"No, and I didn't see him at all. Do you know where he is?" Nancy asked.
"Sorry, I don't." Ritter walked back and on impulse called Ryan's home, where all he got was an answering machine. He checked his card file for Cathy's work number and got past the secretary to her.
"This is Bob Ritter. I need to know where Jack is."
"I don't know," Dr. Caroline Ryan replied guardedly. "He told me yesterday that he had to go out of town. He didn't say where."
A chill went across Ritter's face. "Cathy, I have to know. This is very important - I can't tell you how important. Please trust me. I have to know where he is."
"I don't know. You mean you don't, either?" There was alarm in her voice.
Ryan knows , Ritter realized.
"Look, Cathy, I'll track him down. Don't worry or anything, okay?" The effort to calm her down was wasted, but Ritter hung up as soon as he could. The DDO walked to Judge Moore's office. The flag was centered on the DCI's desk, still folded into its triangular section, called a cocked-hat. Judge Arthur Moore, Director of Central Intelligence, was sitting quietly, staring at it.
"Jack's gone. His wife says she doesn't know where. He knows, Arthur. He knows and he's off doing something."
"How could he have found out?"
"How the hell should I know?" Ritter thought for a moment, then waved at his boss. "Come on."
They walked into Ryan's office. Ritter opened the panel for Jack's wall safe and dialed in the proper combination, and nothing happened other than the fact that the warning light went on over the dial.
"Damn," Ritter said. "I thought that was it."
"James's combination?"
"Yeah. You know how he was, never did like the damned things, and he probably..." Ritter looked around. He got it on the third try, pulling out the writing panel from the desk, and there it was.
"I thought I did dial the right one." He turned and tried again. This time the light was accompanied by the goddamned beeper. Ritter turned back and checked the number again. There was some more writing on the sheet. Ritter pulled the panel farther out.
"Oh, my God."
Moore nodded and walked to the door. "Nancy, tell security that it's us trying to work the safe. Looks like Jack changed the combination without telling us like he was supposed to." The DCI closed the door and turned back.
"He knows, Arthur."
"Maybe. How do we check it out?"
A minute later they were in Ritter's office. He'd shredded all of his documents, but not his memory. You didn't forget the name of someone with the Medal of Honor. Then it was just a matter of flipping open his AUTOVON phone directory and calling the 1st Special Operations Wing at Eglin AFB.
"I need to talk to Colonel Paul Johns," Ritter told the sergeant who'd picked up the phone.
"Colonel Johns is off TDY somewhere, sir. I don't know where."
"Who does?"
"The wing operations officer might, sir. This is a nonsecure line, sir," the sergeant reminded him.
"Give me his number." The sergeant did so, and Ritter's next call went out on, and to, a secure line.
"I need to find Colonel Johns," Ritter said after identifying himself.
"Sir, I have orders not to give that information out to anybody. That means nobody, sir."
"Major, if he's down in Panama again, I need to know it. His life may depend on it. Something is happening that he needs to know about."
"Sir, I have orders -"
"Stuff your orders, sonny. If you don't tell me, and that flight crew dies, it will be your fault! Now you make the call, Major, yes or no?"
The officer had never seen combat, and life-death decisions were theoretical matters to him - or had been until now.
"Sir, they're back where they were before. Same place, same crew. That's as far as I go, sir."
"Thank you, Major. You did the right thing. You really did. Now I suggest that you make written note of this call and its content." Ritter hung up. The phone had been on speaker.
"Has to be Ryan," the DCI agreed. "Now what do we do?"
"You tell me, Arthur."
"How many more people are we going to kill, Bob?" Moore asked. His greatest fear now was of mirrors, looking into them and seeing something less than the image he wanted to be there.
"You do understand the consequences?"
"Fuck the consequences," snorted the former chief judge of the Texas Court of Appeals.
Ritter nodded and punched a button on his phone. When he spoke, it was in his accustomed, decisive voice of command. "I need everything CAPER has developed in the last two days." Another button. "I want chief of Station Panama to call me in thirty minutes. Tell him to clear decks for the day - he's going to be busy." Ritter replaced the phone receiver in its cradle. They'd have to wait for a few minutes, but it wasn't the sort of occasion to wait in silence.
"Thank God," Ritter said after a moment.
Moore smiled for the first time this day. "Me, too, Robert. Nice to be a man again, isn't it?"
The security police brought him in at gunpoint, the man in the tan suit. He said his name was Luna, and the briefcase he carried had already been searched for weapons. Clark recognized him.
"What the hell are you doing here, Tony?"
"Who's this?" Ryan asked.
"Station chief for Panama," Clark answered. "Tony, I hope you have a very good reason."
"I have a telex for Dr. Ryan from Judge Moore."
"What?"
Clark took Luna's arm and guided him into the office. He didn't have much time. He and Larson were to take off within minutes.
"This better not be some fucking joke," Clark announced.
"Hey, I'm delivering the mail, okay?" Luna said. "Now stop playing the macho game. I'm the spic here, remember?" He handed Jack the first sheet.