IMPOSSIBLE TO REESTABLISH UPLINK TO SHOWBOAT TEAMS. TAKE WHATEVER ACTION YOU DEEM APPROPRIATE TO RETRIEVE ASSETS IN COUNTRY. TELL CLARK TO BE CAREFUL. THE ENCLOSED MIGHT BE OF HELP. C DOESN'T KNOW. GOOD LUCK. M/R.
"Nobody ever said they were stupid," Jack breathed as he handed the sheet to Clark. The heading was meant as a separate message in and of itself, one that had nothing to do with distribution or security. "But does this mean what I think it does?"
"One less REMF to worry about. Make that two," Clark observed. He started flipping through the faxes. "Holy shit!" He set the pile down on the desk and paced a bit, staring out of the windows at the aircraft sitting in the hangar. "Okay," he said to himself. Clark had never been one to dally over making plans. He spoke to Ryan for several minutes. Then, to Larson: "Let's move ass, kid. We got a job to do."
"Spare radios?" Colonel Johns asked him as he left.
"Two spares, new batteries in all of 'em, and extra batteries," Clark replied.
"Nice to work with somebody's been around the block," PJ said. "Check-six, Mr. Clark."
"Always, Colonel Johns," Clark said as he headed to the door. "See you in a few hours."
The hangar doors opened. A small cart pulled the Beechcraft out into the sun, and the hangar doors closed. Ryan listened to the engines start up, and the sound diminished as the aircraft taxied away.
"What about us?" he asked Colonel Johns.
Captain Frances Montaigne came in. She looked as French as her ancestry, short, with raven-black hair. Not especially pretty, but Ryan's first impression was that she was a handful in bed - which stopped his thought processes cold as he wondered why that had occurred to him. It seemed odder still that she was a command pilot in a special-ops outfit.
"Weather's going dogshit on us, Colonel," she announced at once. " Adele is heading west again, doing twenty-five knots."
"Can't help the weather. Getting down and doing the snatch oughtn't to be too bad."
"Getting back might be kinda exciting, PJ," Montaigne observed darkly.
"One thing at a time, Francie. And we do have that alternate place to land."
"Colonel, even you aren't that crazy."
PJ turned to Ryan and shook his head. "Junior officers aren't what they used to be."
They stayed over water for most of the way down. Larson was as steady and confident as ever at the controls, but his eyes kept turning northeast. There was no mistaking it, the high, thin clouds that were the perennial harbinger of an approaching hurricane. Behind them was Adele , and she had already made another chapter in history. Born off the Cape Verdes, she'd streaked across the Atlantic at an average speed of seventeen knots, then stopped as soon as she'd entered the eastern Caribbean, lost power, gained it back, jinked north, west, even east once. There hadn't been one this crazy since Joan , years before. Small as hurricanes went, and nowhere near the brutal power of a Camille , Adele was still a dangerous storm with seventy-five-knot winds. The only people who flew near tropical cyclones were dedicated hurricane-hunter aircraft flown by people for whom merely mortal danger was boring. It was not a place for a twin-engine Beechcraft, even with Chuck Yeager at the controls. Larson was already making plans. In case the mission didn't go right, or the storm changed course yet again, he started picking fields to put down on, to refuel and head southeast around the gray maelstrom that was marching toward them. The air was smooth and still, deceptively so. The pilot wondered how many hours until it changed to something very different. And that was only one of the dangers he'd face.
Clark sat quietly in the right seat, staring forward, his face composed and inhumanly serene while his mind turned over faster than the Beech's twin props. In front of the windshield he kept seeing faces, some living, some dead. He remembered past combat actions, past dangers, past fears, past escapes in which those faces had played their parts. Most of all he remembered the lessons, some learned in classrooms and lectures, but the important ones had come from his own experience. John Terence Clark was not a man who forgot things. Gradually he refreshed his memory on all the important lessons for this day, the ones about being alone in unfriendly territory. Then came the faces who'd play their part today. He looked at them, a few feet before his eyes, saw the expressions he expected them to wear, measuring the faces to understand the people who wore them. Finally came the plan of the day. He contemplated what he wanted to do and balanced that against the probable objectives of the opposition. He considered alternative plans and things that might go awry. When all that was done, he made himself stop. You could quickly get to the point that imagination became an enemy. Each segment of the operation was locked into its own little box which he'd open one at a time. He'd trust to his experience and instinct. But part of him wondered if - when - those qualities would fail him.
Sooner or later , Clark admitted to himself. But not today .
He always told himself that.
PJ's mission briefing took two hours. He, Captain Willis, and Captain Montaigne worked out every detail - where they'd refuel, where the aircraft would orbit if something went wrong. Which routes to take if things went badly. Each crew member got full information. It was more than necessary; it was a moral obligation to the crew. They were risking their lives tonight. They had to know why. As always, Sergeant Zimmer had a few questions, and one important suggestion that was immediately incorporated in the plan. Then it was time to preflight the aircraft. Every system aboard each aircraft was fully checked out in a procedure that would last hours. Part of that was training for the new crewmen.
"What do you know about guns?" Zimmer asked Ryan.
"Never fired one of these babies." Ryan's hand stroked the handles of the minigun. A scaled-down version of the 20mm Vulcan cannon, it had a gang of six.30-caliber barrels that rotated clockwise under the power of an electrical motor, drawing shells from an enormous hopper to the left of the mount. It had two speed settings, 4,000 and 6,000 rounds per minute - 66 or 100 rounds per second. The bullets were almost half tracers. The reason for that was psychological. The fire from the weapon looked like a laser beam from a science-fiction movie, the very embodiment of death. It also made a fine way to aim the weapon, since Zimmer assured him that the muzzle blast would be the most blinding thing short of staring into a noon sun. He checked Ryan out on the whole system: where the switches were, how to stand, how to aim.
"What do you know about combat, sir?"
"Depends on what you mean," Ryan replied.
"Combat is when people with guns are trying to kill you," Zimmer explained patiently. "It's dangerous."
"I know. I've been there a few times. Let's not dwell on that, okay? I'm already scared." Ryan looked over his gun, out the door of the aircraft, wondering why he'd been such a damned fool to volunteer for this. But what choice did he have? Could he just send these men off to danger? If he did, how did that make him different from Cutter? Jack looked around the interior of the aircraft. It seemed so large and strong and safe, sitting here on the concrete floor of the hangar. But it was an aircraft designed for life in the troubled air of an unfriendly sky. It was a helicopter: Ryan especially hated helicopters.
"The funny thing is, probably no sweat on the mission," Zimmer said after a moment. "Sir, we do our job right, it's just a flight in and a flight back out."
"That's what I'm scared of, Sarge," Ryan said, laughing mostly at himself.
They landed at Santagueda. Larson knew the man who ran the local flying service and talked him out of his Volkswagen Microvan. The two CIA officers drove north, and an hour later passed through the village of Anserma. They dallied here for half an hour, driving around until they found what they wanted to find: a few trucks heading in and out of a private dirt road and one expensive-looking car. CAPER had called it right, Clark saw, and it was the place he thought it was from the flight in. Having confirmed that, they moved out, heading north again for another hour and taking a side road into the mountains just outside of Vegas del Rio. Clark had his nose buried in a map, and Larson found a hilltop switchback at which to stop. That's where the radio came out.
"KNIFE, this is VARIABLE, over." Nothing, despite five minutes of trying. Larson drove farther west, horsing the Microvan around cow paths as he struggled to find another high spot for Clark to try again. It was three in the afternoon, and their fifth attempt until they got a reply.
"KNIFE here. Over."
"Chavez, this is Clark. Where the hell are you?" Clark asked, in Spanish, of course.
"Let's talk awhile first."
"You're good, kid. We really could have used you in 3rd SOG."
"Why should I trust you? Somebody cut us off, man. Somebody decided to leave us here."
"It wasn't me."
"Glad to hear it," came the skeptical, bitter reply.
"Chavez, you're talking over a radio net that might be compromised. If you got a map, we're at the following set of coordinates," Clark told him. "There's two of us in a blue Volkswagen van. Check us out, take all the time you want."
"I already have!" the radio told him.
Clark's head spun around to see a man with an AK-47 twenty feet away.
"Let's be real cool, people," Sergeant Vega said. Three more men emerged from the treeline. One of them had a bloody bandage on his thigh. Chavez, too, had an AK slung over his shoulder, but he had held on to his silenced MP-5. He walked straight up to the van.
"Not bad, kid," Clark told him. "How'd you know?"
"UHF radio. You had to transmit from a high spot, right? The map says there's six of them. I heard you one other time, too, and I spotted you heading this way half an hour ago. Now what the fuck is going on?"
"First thing, let's get that casualty treated." Clark stepped out and handed Chavez his pistol, butt first. "I got a first-aid kit in the back."
The wounded man was Sergeant Juardo, a rifleman from the 10th Mountain at Fort Drum. Clark opened the back of the van and helped load him aboard, then uncovered the wound.
"You know what you're doing?" Vega asked.
"I used to be a SEAL," Clark replied, holding up his arm so that they could see the tattoo. "Third Special Operations Group. Spent a lot of time in 'Nam, doing stuff that never made the TV news."
"What were you?"
"Came out a chief bosun's mate, E-7 to you." Clark examined the wound. It was bad to look at, but not life-threatening as long as the man didn't bleed out, which he'd managed not to do yet. So far it seemed that the infantrymen had done most of the right things. Clark ripped open an envelope and redusted the wound with sulfa. "You have any blood-expanders?"
"Here." Sergeant Le n passed over an IV bag. "None of us knows how to start one."
"It's not hard. Watch how I do it." Clark grabbed Juardo's upper arm hard and told him to make a fist. Then he stabbed the IV needle into the big vein inside the elbow. "See? Okay, I cheat. My wife's a nurse, and sometimes I get to practice at her hospital," Clark admitted. "How's it feel, kid?" he asked the patient.
"Nice to be sitting down," Juardo admitted.
"I don't want to give you a pain shot. We might need you awake. Think you can hack it?"
"You say so, man. Hey, Ding, you got any candy?"
Chavez tossed over his Tylenol bottle. "Last ones, Pablo. Make 'em last, man."
"Thanks, Ding."
"We have some sandwiches in the front," Larson said.
"Food!" Vega darted that way at once. A minute later the four soldiers were wolfing it down, along with a six-pack of Cokes that Larson had picked up on the way.
"Where'd you pick up the weapons?"
"Bad guys. We were just about out of ammo for our -16s, and I figured we might as well try to fit in, like."
"You're thinking good, kid," Clark told him.
"Okay, what's the plan?" Chavez asked.
"It's your call," Clark replied. "One of two things. We can drive you back to the airport and fly you out, take about three hours to get there, another three hours in the airplane, and it's over, you're back on U.S. territory."
"What else?"
"Chavez, how'd you like to get the fucker who did this to you?" Clark knew the answer before he'd asked the question.
Admiral Cutter was leaning back in his chair when the phone buzzed. He knew who it was from the line that was blinking. "Yes, Mr. President?"
"Come in here."
"On the way, sir."
Summer is as slow a season for the White House as for most government agencies. The President's calendar was fuller than usual with the ceremonial stuff that the politician in him loved and the executive in him abhorred. Shaking hands with "Miss Whole Milk," as he referred to the steady stream of visitors - though, he occasionally wondered to himself if he'd ever meet a Miss Condom, what with the way sexual mores were changing of late. The burden was larger than most imagine. For each such visitor there was a sheet of paper, a few paragraphs of information so that the person would leave thinking that, gee, the President really knows what I'm all about. He's really interested! Pressing flesh and talking to ordinary people was an important and usually pleasurable part of the job, but not now, a week short of the convention, still behind in the goddamned polls, as every news network announced at least twice a week.
"What about Colombia?" the President asked as soon as the door was closed.
"Sir, you told me to shut it down. It's being shut down."
"Any problems with the Agency?"
"No, Mr. President."
"How exactly -"
"Sir, you told me you didn't want to know that."
"You're telling me it's something I shouldn't know?"
"I'm telling you, sir, that I am carrying out your instructions. The orders were given, and the orders are being complied with. I don't think you will object to the consequences."
"Really?"
Cutter relaxed a bit. "Sir, in a very real sense, the operation was a success. Drug shipments are down and will drop further in the next few months. I would suggest, sir, that you let the press talk about that for the moment. You can always point to it later. We've hurt them. With Operation TARPON we have something we can point to all we wish. With CAPER we have a way of continuing to gather intelligence information. We will have some dramatic arrests in a few months as well."
"And how do you know that?"
"I've made those arrangements myself, sir."
"And just how did you do that?" the President asked, and stopped. "Something else I don't want to know?"
Cutter nodded.
"I assume that everything you've done is within the law," the President said for the benefit of the tape recorder he had running.
"You may make that assumption, sir." It was an artful reply in that it could mean anything, or nothing, depending on one's point of view. Cutter also knew about the tape recorder.
"And you're sure that your instructions are being carried out?"
"Of course, Mr. President."
"Make sure again."
It had taken far longer than the bearded consultant expected. Inspector O'Day held the printout in his hands, and it might as well have been Kurdish. The sheet was half covered with paragraphs entirely composed of ones and zeroes.
"Machine language," the consultant explained. "Whoever programmed this baby was a real pro. I recovered about forty percent of it. It's a transposition algorithm, just like I thought."
"You told me that last night."
"It ain't Russian. It takes in a message and enciphers it. No big deal, anybody can do that. What's really clever is that the system is based on an independent input signal that's unique to the individual transmission-over and above the encipherment algorithm that's already built into the system."
"You want to explain that?"
"It means a very good computer lash-up - somewhere - governs how this baby operates. It can't be Russian. They don't have the hardware yet, unless they stole a really sexy one from us. Also, the input that adds the variable into the system probably comes from the NAVSTAR satellites. I'm guessing here, but I think it uses a very precise time mark to set the encryption key, one that's unique to each up-and-down transmission. Clever shit. That means NSA. The NAVSTAR satellites use atomic clocks to measure time with great precision, and the really sexy part of the system is also encrypted. Anyway, what we have here is a clever way of scrambling a signal in a way that you can't break or duplicate even if you know how it was done. Whoever set this baby up has access to everything we got. I used to consult with NSA, and never even heard of this puppy."
"Okay, and when the disk is destroyed...?"
"The link is gone, man. I mean, gone . If this is what it seems to be, you have an uplink facility that controls the algorithm, and ground stations that copy it down. You wipe this algorithm off, like somebody did, and the guys you used to be talking to can't communicate with you anymore, and nobody else can communicate with them either. Systems don't get any more secure than that."
"You can tell all that? What else?"
"Half of what I just told you is informed speculation. I can't rebuild the algorithm. I can just tell you how it probably worked. The bit on the NAVSTAR is supposition, but good supposition. The transposition processing is partly recovered, and it has NSA written all over it. Whoever did it really knows how to write computer code. It's definitely ours. It's probably the most sophisticated machine code we have. Whoever got to use it must have some serious juice. And whoever it is, he scrubbed it. It can never be used again. Whatever operation it was used for must be over."
"Yeah," O'Day said, chilled by what he had just learned. "Good work."
"Now all you have to do is write a note to my prof and tell him why I missed an exam this morning."
"I'll have somebody do that," O'Day promised him on the way out the door. He headed for Dan Murray's office, and was surprised to see that he was out. The next stop was with Bill Shaw.
Half an hour later it was clear that a crime had probably been committed. The next question was what to do about it.
The helicopter took off light. Mission requirements were fairly complex - more so than in the previous insertions - and speed was important this time. As soon as the Pave Low got to cruising altitude, it tanked from the MC-130E. There was no banter this time.
Ryan sat in back, strapped into his place while the MH-53J bounced and buffeted in the wash of the tanker. He wore a green flight suit and a similarly green helmet. There was also a flak jacket. Zimmer had explained to him that it would stop a pistol round, probably, secondary fragments almost certainly, but that he shouldn't depend on it to stop a rifle bullet. One more thing to worry about. Once clear of the tanker for the first time - they'd have to tank again before making landfall - Jack turned around to look out the door. The clouds were nearly overhead now, the outlying reaches from Adele .
Juardo's wound complicated matters and changed plans somewhat. They loaded him into Clark's seat on the Beech, leaving him with a radio and spare batteries. Then Clark and the rest drove back toward Anserma. Larson was still checking the weather, which was changing on an hour-to-hour basis. He was due to take off in ninety minutes for his part of the mission.
"How you fixed for rounds?" Clark asked in the Microvan.
"All we need for the AKs," Chavez replied. "About sixty each for the subs. I never knew how useful a silenced gun was."
"They are nice. Grenades?"
"All of us?" Vega asked. "Five frags and two CS."
"What are we going into?" Ding asked next.
"It's a farmhouse outside Anserma."
"What's the security there like?"
"I don't know squat yet."
"Hey, wait a minute, what are you getting us into?" Vega demanded.
"Relax, Sarge. If it's too heavy to handle, we back off and leave. All I know is we're going in for a close look. Chavez and I can handle that. By the way, there's spare batteries in the bag down there. Need 'em?"
"Fuckin' A!" Chavez pulled out his night scope and replaced the batteries at once. "Who's in the house?"
"Two people we especially want. Number One is F lix Cortez," Clark said, giving some background. "He's the guy running the operation against the SHOWBOAT teams - that's the code name for this operation, in case nobody bothered to tell you. He also had a hand in the murder of the ambassador. I want his ass and I want it alive. Number Two is one Se or Escobedo. He's one of the big shots in the Cartel. A lot of people want his ass."
"Yeah," Le n said. "We ain't got no big shots yet."
"So far we've gotten five or six of the bastards. That was my end of the operation." Clark turned to look at Chavez. He had to say that to establish his credibility.
"But how, when -"
"We're not supposed to talk all that much, children," Clark told them. "You don't go around advertising about killing folks no matter who told you it was okay."
"Are you really that good?"
Clark just shook his head. "Sometimes. Sometimes not. If you guys weren't damned good, you wouldn't be here. And there are times when it's just pure dumb luck."
"We just walked into one," Le n said. "I don't even know what went wrong, but Captain Rojas just -"
"I know. I saw some pricks load his body into the back of a truck -"
Le n went rigid. "And what -"
"Did I do?" Clark asked. "There were three of them. I put them in the truck, too. Then I torched the truck. I'm not real proud of that, but I think I took some of the heat off you BANNER guys when I did. Wasn't much, but it was all I could do at the time."
"So who pulled the chopper back on us?"
"Same guy who chopped off the radio. I know who it is. After this is all over, I want his ass, too. You don't send people out in the field and then pull this crap on 'em."
"So what are you going to do?" Vega wanted to know.
"I'll slap him firmly on both wrists. Now listen, people, you worry about tonight. One job at a time. You're soldiers, not a bunch of teenage broads. Less talkin' and more thinkin'."
Chavez, Vega, and Le n took the cue. They started checking their gear. There was enough room in the van to strip and clean weapons. Clark pulled into Anserma at sundown. He found a quiet spot about a mile from the house and left the van. Clark took Vega's night goggles, and then he and Chavez went out to take a walk.
There had been farming here recently. Clark wondered what it had been, but that and the fact that it was close to the village meant that the trees had been thinned out for cooking fires. They were able to move fast. Half an hour later they could see the house, separated from the woods by two hundred meters of open ground.
"Not good," Clark observed from his place on the ground.
"I count six, all with AKs."
"Company," the CIA officer said, turning to see where the noise was coming from. It was a Mercedes, and therefore could have belonged to anyone in the Cartel. Two more cars came with it, one ahead and one behind. A total of six guards got out to check the area.
"Escobedo and LaTorre," Clark said from behind the binoculars. "Two big shots to see Colonel Cortez. I wonder why..."
"Too many, man," Chavez said.
"You notice there wasn't any password or anything?"
"So?"
"It's possible, if we play it right."
"But how..."
"Think creatively," Clark told him. "Back to the car." That took another twenty minutes. When they got there, Clark adjusted one of his radios.
"CAESAR, this is SNAKE, over."
The second refueling was accomplished within sight of the beach. They'd have to tank at least once more before heading back to Panama. The other alternative didn't seem especially likely at the moment. The good news was that Francie Montaigne was driving her Combat Talon with her usual aplomb, its four big propellers turning in a steady rhythm. Its radio operators were already talking to the surviving ground teams, taking that strain off the helicopter crew. For the first time in the mission, the air team was allowed to function as it had been trained. The MC-130E would coordinate the various pieces, coaching the Pave Low into the proper areas and away from possible threats in addition to keeping PJ's chopper filled up with gas.
In back, the ride had settled down. Ryan was up and walking around. Fear became boring after a while, and he even managed to use the Port-A-Pot without missing. The flight crew had accepted him at least as an approved interloper, and for some reason that meant a lot to him.
"Ryan, you hear me?" Johns asked.
Jack reached down to the mike button. "Yeah, Colonel."
"Your guy on the ground wants us to do something different."
"Like what?"
PJ told him. "It means another tanking, but otherwise we can hack it. Your call."
"You sure?"
"Special ops is what they pay us for."
"Okay, then. We want that bastard."
"Roger. Sergeant Zimmer, we'll be feet-dry in one minute. Systems check."
The flight engineer looked down his panel. "Roger that, PJ. Everything looks pretty solid to me, sir. Everything's green."
"Okay. First stop is Team OMEN. ETA is two-zero minutes. Ryan, you'd better grab hold of something. We're going to start nap-of-the-earth. I have to talk to our backup."
Jack didn't know what that meant. He found out as soon as they crossed the first range of coastal mountains. The Pave Low leapt up like a mad elevator, then the bottom dropped out as it cleared the summit. The helicopter was on computer-assisted-flight mode, taking a six-degree slope-it felt much worse than that-up and down the terrain features, and skimmed over the ground with bare feet of clearance. The aircraft was made to be safe, not comfortable. Ryan didn't feel much of either.
"First LZ in three minutes," Colonel Johns announced half an eternity later. "Let's go hot, Buck."
"Roger." Zimmer reached down on his console and flipped a toggle switch. "Switches hot. Guns are hot."
"Gunners, stand to. That means you, Ryan," PJ added.
"Thanks." Jack gasped without toggling his mike. He took position on the left side of the aircraft and hit the activation switch for the minigun, which started turning at once.
"ETA one minute," the copilot said. "I got a good strobe at eleven o'clock. Okay. OMEN, this is CAESAR, do you copy, over?"
Jack heard only one side of the conversation, but mentally thanked the flight crew for letting the guys in back know something.
"Roger, OMEN, say again your situation... Roger that, we're coming in. Good strobe light. Thirty seconds. Get ready in back," Captain Willis told Ryan and the rest. "Safe guns, safe guns."
Jack held his thumbs clear of the switch and elevated the minigun at the sky. The helicopter took a big nose-up attitude as it came down. It stopped and hovered a foot off the ground, not quite touching.
"Buck, tell the captain to come forward immediately."
"Roger, PJ." Behind him, Ryan heard Zimmer run aft, then, through the soles of his feet, felt the troops race aboard. He kept his eyes outboard, looking over the rotating barrels of his gun until the helicopter took off, and even then he trained the mini down at the ground.
"Well, that wasn't so bad, was it?" Colonel Johns observed as he brought the aircraft back to a southerly heading. "Hell, I don't even know why they pay us for this. Where's that ground-pounder?"
"Hooking him up now, sir," Zimmer replied. "Got 'em all aboard. All clean, no casualties."
"Captain...?"
"Yes, Colonel?"
"We got a job for your team if you think you're up to it."
"Let's hear it, sir."
The MC- 130E Combat Talon was orbiting over Colombian territory, which made the crew a little nervous, since they didn't have permission. The main job now was to relay communications, and even with the sophisticated gear aboard the four-engine support aircraft, they couldn't handle it from over the ocean.
What they really needed was a good radar. The Pave Low/Combat Talon team was supposed to operate under supervision of an AW ACS which, however, they hadn't brought along. Instead a lieutenant and a few NCOs were writing on maps and talking over secure radio circuits at the same time.
"CAESAR, say your fuel state," Captain Montaigne called.
"Looking good, CLAW. We're staying down in the valleys. Estimate we'll tank again in eight-zero minutes."
"Roger eight-zero minutes. Be advised negative hostile radio traffic at this time."
"Acknowledged." That was one possible problem. What if the Cartel had somebody in the Colombian Air Force? Sophisticated as both American aircraft were, a P-51 left over from the Second World War could easily kill both of them.
Clark was waiting for them. With two vehicles. Vega had stolen a farm truck big enough for their needs. It turned out that he was quite adept at rewiring ignition systems, a skill about whose acquisition he was vague. The helicopter touched down and the men ran out toward the strobe light that Chavez still had. Clark got their officer and briefed him quickly. The helicopter took off and headed north, helped by the twenty-knot wind blowing down the valley. Then it looped west, heading for the MC-130 and another midair refueling.
The Microvan and the truck drove back toward the farmhouse. Clark's mind was still racing. A really smart guy would have run the operation from inside the village, which would have been far tougher to approach. Cortez wanted to be far from anyone's view, but failed to consider his physical security requirements in military terms. Cortez was thinking like a spy, for whom security was secrecy, and not a line-animal, for whom security was a lot of guns and a clear field of fire. Everyone, he figured, had his limitations. Clark rode the back of the farm truck with the OMEN team group around him and his hand-drawn diagram of the objective. It was just like the old days, Clark thought, running missions on zero-minute notice. He hoped that these young light-fighters were as good as the animals in 3rd SOG. Even Clark, however, had limitations. The animals of 3rd SOG had been young then, too.
"Ten minutes, then," he concluded.
"All right," the captain agreed. "We haven't had much contact. We have all the weapons and ammo we need."
"So?" Escobedo asked.
"So we killed ten norteamericanos last night and we will kill ten more tonight."
"But the losses!" LaTorre objected.
"We are fighting highly skilled professional soldiers. Our men wiped them out, but the enemy fought bravely and well. Only one survived," Cortez said. "I have his body in the next room. He died here soon after they brought him in."
"How do you know that they are not close by?" Escobedo demanded. The idea of physical danger was something he'd allowed himself to forget.
"I know the location of every enemy group. They are waiting to be extracted by their helicopter support. They do not know that their helicopter has been withdrawn."
"How did you manage that?" LaTorre wondered aloud.
"Please permit me my methods. You hired me for my expertise. You should not be surprised when I demonstrate it."
"And now?"
"Our assault group - nearly two hundred men this time - should now be approaching the second American group. This one's code name is Team FEATURE," F lix added. "Our next question, of course, is which elements of the Cartel leadership are taking advantage of this - or perhaps I should say, which members are working with the Americans, using them for their own ends. As is often the case in such operations, both sides appear to be using the other."
"Oh?" It was Escobedo this time.
" S , jefe . And it should not surprise either of you that I have been able to identify those who have betrayed their comrades." He looked at both men, a thin smile on his lips.
There were only two road guards. Clark was back in the VW Microvan while OMEN raced through the woods to get to the objective. Vega and Le n had removed a side window, and now Vega, also in back, held it in place with his hand.
"Everybody ready?" Clark asked.
"Go!" Chavez replied.
"Here we go." Clark took the last turn in the road and slowed, taking the car right up to the two guards. They took their weapons off sling and assumed a more aggressive stance as he slowed the vehicle. "Excuse me, I am lost."
That was Vega's cue to let go of the glass. As it dropped, Chavez and Le n came up to their knees and aimed their MP-5s at the guards. Both took bursts in the head without warning, and both fell without a sound. Strangely, the submachine guns sounded awfully loud within the confines of the vehicle.
"Nicely done," Clark said. Before proceeding, he lifted his radio.
"This is SNAKE. OMEN, report in."
"SNAKE, this is OMEN Six. In position. Say again, we are in position."
"Roger, stand by. CAESAR, this is SNAKE."
"SNAKE, this is CAESAR, ready to copy."
"Position check."
"We are holding at five miles out."
"Roger that, CAESAR, continue to hold at five miles. Be advised we are moving in."
Clark killed the lights and drove the van a hundred yards down the driveway. He selected a spot where the road twisted. Here he stopped the van and maneuvered it to block the road.
"Give me one of your frags," he said, stepping out and leaving the keys in the ignition. First he loosened the cotter pin on the grenade. Next he wired the body of the grenade to the door handle and ran another wire from the pin to the accelerator pedal. It took under a minute. The next person who opened that door was in for a nasty surprise. "Okay, come on."
"Tricky, Mr. Clark," Chavez observed.
"Kid, I was a Ninja before it became fashionable. Now shut up and do your jobs." No smile now, no time for banter. It was like the return of his youth, but while that feeling was a welcome one, it would have been more so if his youth had not been spent doing things best unremembered. The pure exhilaration of leading men into battle, however, was something that his memory had not lied about. It was terrible. It was dangerous. It was also something at which he excelled, and knew it. For the moment he was not Mr. Clark. He was, again, The Snake, the man whose footsteps no one had ever heard. It took five minutes to get to their jump-off point.
The NVA were smarter opponents than these. All the security troops were near the house. He took Vega's night scope and counted them, sweeping the grounds to check for strays, but there were none.
"OMEN Six, this is SNAKE. Say your position."
"We are in the treeline north of the objective."
"Toss your strobe to mark your position."
"Okay, done."
Clark turned his head and the goggles showed the infrared strobe blinking on the open ground, thirty feet from the treeline. Chavez, listening on the same radio circuit, did the same.
"Okay, stand by. CAESAR, this is SNAKE. We are in position on the east side of the objective where the driveway comes through the trees. OMEN is on the north side. We have two good strobes to mark friendly positions. Acknowledge."
"Roger, copy, you are in the treeline at the road, east side of the objective. Say again, east of the objective, with OMEN to the north. Copy strobes to mark friendly positions. We are standing by at five miles," PJ replied in his best computer voice.
"Roger, come on in. It's show time. I repeat, come on in."
"Roger, copy, CAESAR is turning in with hot guns."
"OMEN, this is SNAKE. Commence firing, commence firing."
Cortez had them both at a disadvantage, though neither knew the whole reason for it. LaTorre, after all, had talked to F lix the previous day and been told that Escobedo was the traitor in their midst. Because of that, he had his pistol out first.
"What is this?" Escobedo demanded.
"The ambush was very clever, jefe , but I saw through your ploy," Cortez said.
"What are you talking about?"
Before Cortez could give his preplanned answer, several rifles started firing north of the house. F lix wasn't a total fool. His first reaction was to extinguish the lights in the house. LaTorre still had his gun aimed at Escobedo, and Cortez dashed to the window, a pistol in his hand, to see what was happening. Just as he got there, he realized that he was being foolish, and dropped to his knees, peering around the frame. The house was of block construction and should stop a bullet, he told himself, though the windows certainly would not.
The fire was light and sporadic, just a few people, just an annoyance, and he had people to deal with that. Cortez's own men, assisted by the bodyguards for Escobedo and LaTorre, returned fire at once. F lix watched his men move like soldiers, spreading out into two fire teams, dropping at once into the usual infantry drill of fire and movement. Whatever annoyance this was, they'd soon take care of things. The Cartel bodyguards, as usual, were brave but oafish. Two of them were already down.
Yes, he saw, it was already working. The gunfire from the trees was diminishing. Some bandits, perhaps, who'd been late realizing that they'd bitten off more than -
The sound was like nothing he'd ever heard.
"Target in sight," Jack heard over the intercom phones. Ryan was looking the wrong way, of course. Though he was standing at a gun, Colonel Johns had not mistaken him for a gunner, not a real one. Sergeant Zimmer was on the right-side gun, the one that corresponded to the pilot's seat. They'd come skimming in so low that Ryan felt - knew that he could reach out and touch some treetops. Then the aircraft pivoted. The sound and vibration assaulted Jack through all the protective gear, and the flash that accompanied the sound cast a shadow of the aircraft before Jack's eyes as he looked for other targets.
It looked like a huge, curving tube of yellow neon, Cortez's mind told him. Wherever it touched the ground, dust rose in a great cloud. It swept up and down the field between the house and the trees. Then it stopped after what could have been only a few seconds. Cortez couldn't see anything in the dust, and it took a second to realize that he should have been able to see something, the flashes of his men's rifles at the very least. Then there were flashes, but those were from farther away, in the treeline, and there were more now.
"CAESAR: Check fire, check fire!"
"Roger," the radio replied. Overhead, the horrible noise stopped. Clark hadn't heard it in a very long time. Another sound from his youth, it was as fearful now as it had been then.
"Heads up, OMEN, we're moving now, SNAKE is moving. Acknowledge."
"OMEN, this is Six, cease fire, cease fire!" The shooting from the treeline stopped. "SNAKE: Go!"
"Come on!" It was stupid to lead them with only a silenced pistol in his hand, Clark knew, but he was in command, and the good commanders led from the front. They covered the two hundred yards to the house in thirty seconds.
"Door!" Clark said to Vega, who used his AK to blast off the hinges, then kicked it down. Clark dove through low, rolling when he hit, looking and seeing one man in the room. He had an AK, and fired it, but shot high. Clark dropped him with a silenced round in the face, then another as he fell. There was a doorway but no door to the next room. He gestured to Chavez, who tossed a CS grenade into it. They waited for it to go off, then both rushed the room, again diving in low.
There were three men. One, holding a pistol, took a step toward them. Clark and Chavez hit him in the chest and head. The other armed man, kneeling by the window, tried to turn about, but couldn't do it on his knees, and fell onto his side. Chavez was there in an instant, smashing his buttstock onto his forehead. Clark rushed the third man, slamming him against the block wall. Le n and Vega came in next, leapfrogging to the final door. That room was empty.
"Building is clear!" Vega shouted. "Hey, I -"
"Come on!" Clark dragged his man out the front. Chavez did the same, covered by Le n. Vega was slow in moving. They didn't know why until they were all outside.
Clark was already on his radio. "CAESAR, this is SNAKE. We got 'em. Let's get the fuck outa here."
"Le n," Vega said. "Look here."
"Tony," the sergeant said. The only other survivor from Ninja Hill had been a BANNER man. Le n walked over to Escobedo, who was still conscious. " Motherfucker! You're fuckin' dead! " Le n screamed, bringing his gun down.
"Stop!" Clark yelled at him. That almost didn't work, but Clark knocked him down, which did. "You're a soldier, goddammit, act like one! You and Vega - carry your friend on the chopper."
Team OMEN worked its way across the field. Several men, remarkably enough, weren't quite dead yet. That aberration was corrected with single rifle shots. The captain got his men together and counted them off with his finger.
"Good work," Clark told him. "You got everybody?"
"Yes!"
"Okay, here's comes our ride."
The Pave Low swept in from the west this time, and again didn't quite touch the ground. Just like the old days, Clark . A helicopter that touched the ground could set off a mine. Not likely here, but PJ hadn't gotten old enough to be a colonel by overlooking any chances at all. He grabbed Escobedo - he'd gotten a good enough look by now to identify him - by the arm and propelled him to the ramp. One of the chopper crew met them there, did his count, and before Clark was sitting down with his charge, the MH-53J was moving up and north. He assigned a soldier to look after Se or Escobedo and went forward.
Sweet Jesus , Ryan thought. He'd counted eight bodies, and they'd just been the ones close to the helicopter. Jack switched off his gun motor and relaxed - and really did this time. Relaxation was a relative thing, he'd just learned. Being shot at really was worse than flying in the back of a goddamned helicopter. Amazing, he thought. A hand grabbed his shoulder.
"We got Cortez and Escobedo alive!" Clark shouted at him.
"Escobedo? What the hell was he -"
"You complaining?"
"What the hell can we do with him?" Jack asked.
"Well, I sure as shit couldn't just leave him there, could I?"
"But what -"
"If you want, I can give the bastard a flying lesson." Clark gestured toward the stern ramp. If he learns to fly before he hits the ground, fine ...
"No, goddammit, that's fucking murder!"
Clark grinned at him. "That gun next to you is not a negotiating tool, doc."
"Okay, people," PJ's voice came over the intercom before that conversation went any further. "One more stop and we call this one a day."
29. Fill-ups
IT HAD STARTED with the President's warning. Admiral Cutter wasn't used to having to make sure his orders had been carried out. In his naval career orders were things that you gave and that other people did, or that you did after being told to do so by others. He placed a call to the Agency and got Ritter and asked the question, the one that had to be an unnecessarily insulting one. Cutter knew that he'd already humiliated the man, and that to do so further was not a smart move -but what if the President had been right? That risk called for further action. Ritter's reaction was a troubling one. The irritation that should have been in his voice, wasn't. Instead he'd spoken like any other government bureaucrat saying that yes, the orders were being carried out, of course. Ritter was a cold, effective son of a bitch, but even that sort had its limits, beyond which emotion comes to the fore; Cutter knew that he'd reached and passed that point with the DDO. The anger just hadn't been there, and it ought to have been.
Something is wrong . The National Security Adviser told himself to relax. Something might be wrong . Maybe Ritter was playing mind games. Maybe even he'd seen that his course of action was the only proper one, Cutter speculated, and resigned himself to the inevitable. After all, Ritter liked being Deputy Director (Operations). That was his rice bowl, as the government saying went. Even the most important government officials had those. Even they were often uncomfortable with the idea of leaving behind the office and the secretary and the driver and most of all the title that designated them as Important People despite their meager salaries. Like the line from some movie or other, leaving the government meant entering the real world, and in the real world, people expected results to back up position papers arid National Intelligence Estimates. How many people stayed in government service because of the security, the benefits, and the insulation from that "real" world? There were more of those, Cutter was sure, than of the ones who saw themselves as the honest servants of the people.
But even if that were likely, Cutter considered, it was not certain, and some further checking was in order. And so he placed his own call to Hurlburt Field and asked for Wing Operations.
"I need to talk to Colonel Johns."
"Colonel Johns is off post, sir, and cannot be reached."
"I need to know where he is."
"I do not have that information, sir."
"What do you mean, you don't have that information, Captain?" The real wing operations officer was off duty by now, and one of the helicopter pilots had drawn the duty for this evening.
"I mean I don't know, sir," the captain replied. He wanted to be a little more insolent in his answer to so stupid a question, but the call had come in on a secure line, and there was no telling who the hell was on the other end.
"Who does know?"
"I don't know that, sir, but I can try to find out."
Was this just some command fuck-up? Cutter asked himself. What if it wasn't?
"Are all your MC-130s in place, Captain?" Cutter asked.
"Three birds are off TDY somewhere or other, sir. Where they are is classified - I mean, sir, that where our aircraft happen to be is almost always classified. Besides, what with that hurricane chasing around south of here, we're getting ready to move a lot of our birds in case it heads this way."
Cutter could have demanded the information right then and there. But that would have meant identifying himself, and even then, he was talking to some twenty-something-year-old junior officer who might just say no because nobody had told him otherwise, and such a junior officer knew that he'd never be seriously punished for not taking initiative and doing something he'd been told not to do - at least not over a telephone line, secure or not. Such a demand would also have called attention to something in a way that he didn't want...
"Very well," Cutter said finally and hung up. Then he called Andrews.
The first hint of trouble came from Larson, whose Beech was circling the FEATURE LZ. Juardo, still fighting the pain of his leg wound, was scanning out the side of the aircraft with his low-light goggles.
"Hey, man, I got some trucks on the ground down there at three o'clock. Like fifteen of 'em."
"Oh, that's just great," the pilot observed, and keyed his microphone.
"CLAW, this is LITTLE EYES, over."
"LITTLE EYES, this is CLAW," the Combat Talon answered.
"Be advised we have possible activity on the ground six klicks southeast of FEATURE. Say again we have trucks on the ground. No personnel are visible at this time. Recommend you warn FEATURE and CAESAR of possible intruders."
"Roger, copy."
"Christ, I hope they're slow tonight," Larson said over the intercom. "We're going down to take a look."
"You say so, man."
Larson extended his flaps and reduced power as much as he dared. There was precious little light, and flying low over mountains at night was not his idea of fun. Juardo looked down with his goggles, but the tree canopy was too heavy.
"I don't see anything."
"I wonder how long those trucks have been there..."
There was a bright flash on the ground, perhaps five hundred meters below the summit. Then there were several more, small ones, like sparklers on the ground. Larson made another call:
"CLAW, this is LITTLE EYES. We have a possible firefight underway below FEATURE LZ."
"Roger."
"Roger, copy," PJ said to the MC-130. "Aircraft commander to crew: we have a possible firefight at the next LZ. We may have a hot pickup." At that moment something changed. The aircraft settled a touch and slowed. "Buck, what is that?"
"Uh- oh," the flight engineer said. "I think we have a P3 leak here. Possible pressure bleed leak, maybe a bad valve, number-two engine. I'm losing some Nf speed and some Ng, sir. T5 is coming up a little." Ten feet over the flight engineer's head, a spring had broken, opening a valve wider than it was supposed to be. It released bleed air supposed to recirculate within the turboshaft engine. That reduced combustion in the engine, and was manifested in reduced Nf or free-power turbine speed, also in Ng power from the gas-producer turbine, and finally the loss of air volume resulted in increased tailpipe temperature, called T5. Johns and Willis could see all this from their instruments, but they really depended on Sergeant Zimmer to tell them what the problem was. The engines belonged to him.
"Talk to me, Buck," Johns ordered.
"We just lost twenty-six-percent power in Number Two, sir. Can't fix it. Bad valve, shouldn't get much worse, though. Tailpipe temp ought to stabilize short of max-sustainable... maybe. Ain't an emergency yet, PJ. I'll keep an eye on it."
"Fine," the pilot growled. At the valve, not at Zimmer. This was not good news. Things had gone well tonight, too well. Like most combat veterans, Paul Johns was a suspicious man. What his mind went over now were power and weight considerations. He had to climb over those goddamned mountains in order to tank and fly back to Panama...
But first he had a pickup to make.
"Give me a time."
"Four minutes," Captain Willis answered. "We'll be able to see it over that next ridge. Starting to mush on us, sir."
"Yeah, I can tell." Johns looked at his instruments. Number One was at 104 percent rated power. Number Two was just over 73 percent. Since they could accomplish their next segment of the mission despite the problem, it went onto the back burner for now. PJ dialed some more altitude into his autopilot. Climbing ridges would be getting harder now with greater weight on the airframe and less power to drag it around.
"It's a real fight, all right," Johns said a minute later. His night-vision systems showed lots of activity on the ground. Johns keyed his radio. "FEATURE, this is CAESAR, over." No answer.
"FEATURE, this is CAESAR, over." It took two more tries.
"CAESAR this is FEATURE, we are under attack."
"Roger, FEATURE, I can see that, son. I make your position about three hundred meters down from the LZ. Get up the hill, we can cover. Say again, we can cover."
"We have close contact, CAESAR."
"Run for it. I repeat, run for it, we can cover you," PJ told him calmly. Come on, kid. I've been here before. I know the drill ... "Break contact now!"
"Roger. FEATURE, this is Six, head for the LZ. I repeat, head for the LZ now!" they heard him say. PJ keyed his intercom.
"Buck, let's go hot. Gunners to stations, we have a hot LZ here. There are friendlies on the ground. I say again: there are friendlies on the ground, people . So let's be goddamned careful with those fucking guns!"
Johns had wished a hundred times that he'd had one of these over Laos. The Pave Low carried over a thousand pounds of titanium armor which went, of course, over the engines, fuel cells, and transmission. The flight crew was protected by less effective Kevlar. The rest of the aircraft was less fortunate-a child could push a screwdriver through the aluminum skin - but those were the breaks. He orbited the LZ, a thousand feet higher and two thousand yards out, traveling in a clockwise circle to get a feel for things. Things didn't feel good.
"I don't like this, PJ," Zimmer told him over intercom. Sergeant Bean on the ramp gun felt the same way but didn't say anything. Ryan, who hadn't seen anything at any of the landing zones, also kept his mouth shut.
"They're moving, Buck."
"Looks like it."
"Okay, I'm spiraling in. AC to crew, we're heading in for a closer look. You may return fire directed at us, but nothing else until I say otherwise. I want to hear acknowledgments."
"Zimmer, acknowledge."
"Bean, acknowledge."
"Ryan, okay." I can't see anything to shoot at anyway .
It was worse than it looked. The attackers from the Cartel had chosen to approach the primary LZ from an unexpected direction. This took them right through the alternate extraction site selected by FEATURE, and the team had not had the time needed to prepare a full defensive network. Worst of all, some of the attackers were those who had survived the fight against KNIFE, and had learned a few things, like the way in which caution was sometimes improved by a speedy advance, not diminished by it. They also knew of the helicopter, but not enough. Had they known of its armament, the battle might have ended then and there, but they expected the rescue chopper to be unarmed because they had never really encountered any other sort. As usual in battle, the contest was defined by purpose and error, knowledge and ignorance. FEATURE was pulling back rapidly, leaving behind hastily arranged booby traps and claymores, but, as before, the casualties were less a warning to the attackers than a goad, and the Cartel's veterans of Ninja Hill were learning. Now they split into three distinct groups and began to envelop the hilltop LZ.
"I got a strobe," Willis said.
"FEATURE, this is CAESAR, confirm your LZ."
"CAESAR, FEATURE, do you have our strobe?"
"That's affirm. Coming in now. Get all your people in the open. I say again, get all your people where we can see them."
"We have three down we're bringing in. We're doing our best."
"Thirty seconds out," PJ told him.
"We'll be ready."
As before, the gunners heard half of the conversation, followed by their instructions: "AC to crew, I've ordered all friendlies into the open. Once we get a good count, I want you to hose down the area. Anything you can see is probably friendly. I want everything else suppressed hard. Ryan, that means beat the shit out of it."
"Roger," Jack replied.
"Fifteen seconds. Let's look sharp, people."
It came without warning. No one saw where it originated. The Pave Low was spiraling in steeply, but it could not wholly avoid flying over enemy troops. Six of them heard it approach and saw the black mass moving against the background of clouds. Simultaneously they aimed at the sky and let loose. The 7.62mm rounds lanced right through the floor of the helicopter. The sound was distinctive, like hail on a tin roof, and everyone who heard it knew immediately what it was. A scream confirmed it for the slow. Someone had been hit.
"PJ, we're taking fire," Zimmer said over the intercom circuit. As he said so, he trained his gun down and loosed a brief burst.
Again the airframe vibrated. The line of tracers told the whole world what and where the Pave Low was, and more fire came in.
"Jesus!" Rounds hit the armored windshield. They didn't penetrate, but they left nicks, and their impacts sparked like fireflies. On instinct, Johns jinked to the right, away from the fire. That unmasked the left side of the aircraft.
Ryan was as scared as he had ever been. It seemed that there were a hundred, two hundred, a thousand muzzle flashes down there, all aimed straight at him. He wanted to cringe, but knew that his safest place was behind the thousand-plus-pound gun mount. The gun didn't really have much of a sight. He looked down the rotating barrels toward a particularly tight knot of flashes and depressed the trigger switch.
It felt like he was holding a jackhammer in his hands and sounded like a giant was ripping a canvas sail to bits. A gout of flame six feet long and three across erupted before his eyes, so bright that he could barely see through it, but the tight cylinder of tracers was impossible to miss, and it walked right into the flashes that were still sparkling on the ground. But not for long. He waved the gun around, assisted in the effort by the gyrations of the helicopter and the incredible vibration of the gun. The line of tracers wiggled and wavered over the target area for several seconds. By the time his thumbs came up, the sparkling of muzzle flashes had stopped.
"Son of a bitch," he said to himself, so surprised that he momentarily forgot about the danger. That wasn't the only incoming fire. Ryan selected another area and went to work, this time holding to short bursts, only a few hundred rounds each. Then the chopper turned fully away and he had no more targets.
On the flight deck, Willis and Johns scanned their instruments. They'd allowed themselves to be surprised. There was no critical damage to the aircraft. The flight controls, also protected by armor, engines, transmission, and fuel cells were impervious to rifle fire. Or supposed to be.
"We got some people hurt back here," Zimmer reported. "Let's get it over with, PJ."
"Okay, Buck, I hear you." PJ brought the chopper back around, looping to the left now. "FEATURE, this is CAESAR, we're going to try that again." Even his voice had lost its icy calm. Combat hadn't changed very much, but he'd grown older.
"They're closing in. Move your ass, mister! We're all here, we're all here."
"Twenty seconds, son. AC to crew, we're going back in. Twenty seconds."
The helicopter stopped and pivoted in the air, not continuing its majestic sweep, and Johns hoped that those who were watching would be unprepared for that. He twisted the throttle control to max power and lowered his nose to dive in hard on the LZ. Two hundred meters out he brought the nose up and yanked the collective to slow down. It was his usual perfect maneuver. The Pave Low lost forward airspeed exactly at the right place - and dropped hard on the ground because of the reduced power from Number Two. Johns cringed when he felt it, half expecting it to set off a booby trap, but that didn't happen and he left it there.
It seemed to take forever. Minds and bodies pumped up with adrenaline have their own time, the sort that stops the ticking of watches. Ryan thought that he could see the rotor blades spinning individually at the top of his peripheral vision. He wanted to look aft, wanted to see if the team had gotten aboard yet, but his area of responsibility was out the left-side gunner's door. He realized at once that he wasn't being paid to bring ammunition home. As soon as he was sure that there were no friendlies in front of him, he punched the gun switch and hosed down the treeline, sweeping his fire about a foot off the ground in a wide arc. On the other side, Zimmer was doing the same.
Aft, Clark was looking out the back door. Bean was on his minigun, and he couldn't shoot. This was where the friendlies were, and they moved toward the chopper, their legs pumping in what had to be a run, but seeming to be slow-motion. That was when the fire started from the trees.
Forward, Ryan was amazed that anyone could be alive in the area that he'd just hosed, but there it was. He saw a spark on the doorframe and knew it had to have been a bullet aimed right at him. Jack didn't cringe. There was no place to hide, and he knew that the side of the aircraft was getting hit far worse. He took an instant to look and see where the shooting was coming from, then trained on it and fired again. It seemed that the blast from the gun must push the aircraft sideways. The exhaust flames from the gun bored a hole through the dust kicked up by the spinning rotor, but still there were flashes of fire from the treeline.
Clark heard the screams inside and out over the low howl of the miniguns. He could feel the rounds hitting the side of the aircraft, and then saw two men fall just at the tail rotor of the helicopter while others were racing aboard.
"Shit!" He leapt to his feet and ran out the door, joined by Chavez and Vega. Clark lifted one of the fallen soldiers and dragged him toward the ramp. Chavez and Vega got the other. There was dust kicking up at their feet from the fire. Vega fell five feet from the ramp, taking his burden down with him. Clark tossed his soldier into the waiting hands of his team members and turned to assist. First he took the team member. When he turned, Chavez was struggling with Vega. Clark grabbed the man's shoulders and pushed backward, landing on the edge of the ramp. Ding grabbed Oso 's feet and swung them around, leaping over them to grab the base of the minigun as the helicopter started lifting off. Fire came straight through the door, but Bean now had a clear field for his weapon and swept it across the area.
It was slow getting off. The helicopter had several tons of new weight, was at over five thousand feet of altitude, and trying to fly with reduced power. Forward, PJ cursed the balky machine. The Pave Low struggled up a few feet, still taking fire.
On the ground around them the attackers were enraged that the men whom they wanted to kill were escaping, and ran for one last attempt to prevent it. They saw the helicopter as a trophy, some horrible apparition that had robbed them of success and their comrades of their lives, and each of them determined that this should not be. Over a hundred rifles were trained on the aircraft as it wavered, halfway between ground and flight.
Ryan felt the passage of several rounds - they were coming right through his door, going he knew not where, aiming for him and his gun. He was past fear. The flashes of rifle fire were places to aim, and that he did. One at a time he selected a target and touched his trigger, shifting rapidly from one to another. Safety, what there was of it, lay in eliminating the danger. There was no place to run, and he knew that the ability to respond was a luxury that everyone aboard the aircraft wanted, but only three of them had. He couldn't let them down. He moved the gun left to right and back again in a series of seconds that stretched out into hours, and he thought that he could hear each individual round the minigun spat out. His head jerked back when something hit his helmet, but he yanked it back and held the trigger down, spraying the area in one continuous blast of fire that changed as he realized that he had to bring his hands up and the muzzles down because the targets were dropping away. For one brief contradictory instant it seemed as if they and not he were getting away. Then it was over. For a moment, his hands wouldn't come off the gun. He tried to take a step back, but his hands wouldn't let go until he willed them to. Then they dropped to his side. Ryan shook his head to clear it. He was deafened by the noise from the minigun, and it took a few seconds before he started hearing the higher-frequency screams of wounded men. He looked around to see that the body of the aircraft was filled with the acidic smoke of the guns, but the rapidly increasing slipstream from forward flight was clearing it out. His eyes were still suffering from the gun flashes, and his legs were wobbly from the sudden fatigue that comes after violent action. He wanted to sit down, to go to sleep, to wake up in another place.
One of the screams was close by. It was Zimmer, only a few feet away, lying on his back and rolling around with his arms across his chest. Ryan went to see what the problem was.
Zimmer had taken three rounds in the chest. He was aspirating blood. It sprayed in a pink cloud from his mouth and nose. One round had shattered his right shoulder, but the serious ones were through the lungs. The man was bleeding to death before his eyes, Ryan knew at once. Was there a medic here? Might he do something?
"This is Ryan," he said over the intercom line. "Sergeant Zimmer is down. He's hit pretty bad."
"Buck!" PJ responded at once. "Buck, are you all right?"
Zimmer tried to answer but couldn't. His intercom line had been shot away. He shouted something Ryan couldn't understand, and Jack turned and screamed as loudly as he could at the rest of them, the others who didn't seem to care or know what the problem here was.
" Medic! Corpsman! " he added, not knowing what it was that Army troops said. Clark heard him and started heading that way.
"Come on, Zimmer, you're going to be all right," Jack told him. He remembered that much from his brief few months in the Marine Corps. Give them a reason to live. "We're going to fix this up and you're going to be all right. Hang in there, Sarge - it hurts, but you're going to be all right."
Clark was there a moment later. He stripped off the flight engineer's flak jacket, oblivious to the screech of pain that it caused from the wrecked shoulder. For Clark, too, it was too much a return to years past and things half-remembered. Somehow he'd forgotten just how scary, how awful this sort of thing was, and while he was recovering his senses more rapidly than most, the horror of having been helpless under fire and helpless with its aftermath had nearly overpowered him. And he was helpless now. He could see that from the placement of the wounds. Clark looked up at Ryan and shook his head.
"My kids!" Zimmer screamed. The sergeant had a reason to live, but the reason wasn't enough.
"Tell me about your kids," Ryan said. "Talk to me about your kids."
"Seven - I got seven kids - I gotta, I can't die! My kids - my kids need me."
"Hang in there, Sarge, we're going to get you out of here. You're going to make it," Ryan told him, tears clouding in his eyes at the shame of lying to a dying man.
"They need me!" His voice was weaker now as the blood was filling his throat and lungs.
Ryan looked up at Clark, hoping that there was something to be said. Some hope. Something. Clark just stared into Jack's face. He looked back down at Zimmer and took his hand, the uninjured one.
"Seven kids?" Jack asked.
"They need me," Zimmer whimpered, knowing now that he wouldn't be there, wouldn't see them grow and marry and have their own children, wouldn't be there to guide them, to protect them. He had failed to do what a father must do.
"I'll tell you something about your kids that you don't know, Zimmer," Ryan said to the dying man.
"Huh? What?" He looked confused, looked to Ryan for the answer to the great question of life. Jack didn't have that one, but told him what he could.
"They're all going to college, man." Ryan squeezed the hand as hard as he could. "You got my word, Zimmer, all your kids'll go to college. I will take care of that for you. Swear to God, man, I'll do it."
The sergeant's face changed a bit at that, but before Ryan could decide what emotion he beheld, the face changed again, and there was no emotion left. Ryan hit the intercom switch. "Zimmer's dead, Colonel."
"Roger." Ryan was offended by the coldness of the acknowledgment. He didn't hear what Johns was thinking: God, oh God, what do I tell Carol and the kids?
Ryan had Zimmer's head cradled on his lap. He disengaged himself slowly, resting the head down on the metal floor of the helicopter. Clark wrapped his burly arms around the younger man.
"I'm going to do it," Jack told him in a choking voice. "That wasn't a fucking lie. I am going to do it!"
"I know. He knew it too. He really did."
"You sure?" The tears had started, and it was hard for Jack to repeat the most important question of his life. "Are you really sure?"
"He knew what you said, Jack, and he believed you. What you did, doc, that was pretty good." Clark embraced Ryan in the way that men do only with their wives, their children, and those with whom they had faced death.
In the right-front seat, Colonel Johns put his grief away into a locked compartment that he would later open and experience to the full. But for now he had a mission to fly. Buck would surely understand that.
Cutter's jet arrived at Hurlburt Field well after dark. He was met by a car which took him to Wing Operations. He'd arrived entirely without warning, and strode into the Operations office like an evil spirit.
"Who the hell's in charge here?"
The sergeant at the desk recognized the President's National Security Adviser immediately from seeing him on television. "Right through that door, sir."
Cutter found a young captain dozing in his swivel chair. His eyes had cracked open just as the door did, and the twenty-nine-year-old officer jumped to his feet quite unsteadily.
"I want to know where Colonel Johns is," Vice Admiral Cutter told him quietly.
"Sir, that is information which I am not able to -"
"You know who the hell I am?"
"Yes, sir."
"Are you trying to say no to me, Captain?"
"Sir, I have my orders."
"Captain, I am countermanding all of your orders. Now, you answer my question and you do it right now." Cutter's voice was a few decibels higher now.
"Sir, I don't know where the -"
"Then you find somebody who does, and you get him here."
The captain was frightened enough that he took the route of least resistance. He called a major, who lived on post and was in the office in under eight minutes.
"What the hell is this?" the major said on the way through the door.
"Major, I am what's going on here," Cutter told him. "I want to know where Colonel Johns is. He's the goddamned CO of this outfit, isn't he?"
"Yessir!" What the hell is this ...?
"Are you telling me that the people of this unit don't know where their CO is?" Cutter was sufficiently amazed that his authority hadn't generated immediate compliance with his orders that he allowed himself to bluster off on a tangent.
"Sir, in Special Operations, we -"
"Is this a fucking Boy Scout camp or a military organization?" the Admiral shouted.
"Sir, this is a military organization," the major replied. "Colonel Johns is off TDY. I am under orders, sir, not to discuss his mission or his location with anyone without proper authority, and you are not on the list, sir. Those are my orders, Admiral."
Cutter was amazed and only got angrier. "Do you know what my job is and who I work for?" He hadn't had a junior officer talk to him like this in over a decade. And he'd broken that one's career like a matchstick.
"Sir, I have written orders on this matter. The President ain't on the list either, sir," the major said from the position of attention. Fucking squid, calling the United States Air Force a Boy Scout camp! Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on - Admiral, sir , his face managed to communicate quite clearly.
Cutter had to soften his voice, had to regain control of his emotions. He could take care of this insolent punk at leisure. But for now he needed that information. He started, therefore, with an apology, man to man, as it were. "Major, you'll have to excuse me. This is a most important matter, and I can't explain to you why it is important or the issues involved here. I can say that this is a real life-or-death situation. Your Colonel Johns may be in a place where he needs help. The operation may be coming apart around him, and I really need to know. Your loyalty to your commander is laudable, and your devotion to duty is exemplary, but officers are supposed to exercise judgment. You have to do that now, Major. I am telling you that I need that information - and I need it now."
Reason succeeded where bluster had failed. "Admiral, the colonel went back down to Panama along with one of our MC-130s. I do not know why, and I don't know what they're doing. That is normal in a special-ops wing, sir. Practically everything we do is compartmented, and this one is tighter than most. What I just told you is everything I know, sir."
"Exactly where?"
"Howard, sir."
"Very well. How can I get in touch with them?"
"Sir, they're out of the net. I do not have that information. They can contact us but we can't contact them."
"That's crazy," Cutter objected.
"Not so, Admiral. We do that sort of thing all the time. With the MC-130 along, they're a self-contained unit. The Herky-bird takes maintenance and support personnel to sustain the operation, and unless they call us for something, they're completely independent of this base. In the event of a family emergency or something like that, we can try to contact them through Howard's base ops office, but we haven't had to do so in this case. I can try to open that channel now for you, if you wish, sir, but it might take a few hours."
"Thanks, but I can be there in a few hours."
"Weather's breaking down around that area, sir," the major warned him.
"That's okay." Cutter left the room and walked back to his car. His plane had already been refueled, and ten minutes later it was lifting off for Panama.
Johns was on an easier flight profile now, heading northeast down the great Andean valley that forms the spine of Colombia.
The flight was smooth, but he had three concerns. First, he didn't have the necessary power to climb over the mountains to his west at his present aircraft weight. Second, he'd have to refuel in less than an hour. Third, the weather ahead was getting worse by the minute.
"CAESAR, this is CLAW, over."
"Roger, CLAW."
"When are we going to tank, sir?" Captain Montaigne asked.
"I want to get closer to the coast first, and maybe if we burn some more off I can head west some more to do it."
"Roger, but be advised that we're starting to get radar emissions, and somebody might just detect us. They're air-traffic radars, but this Herky-bird is big enough to give one a skin-paint, sir."
Damn! Somehow Johns had allowed himself to forget that.
"We got a problem here," PJ told Willis.
"Yeah. There's a pass about twenty minutes ahead that we might be able to climb over."
"How much?"
"Says eighty-one hundred on the charts. Drops down a lot lower farther up, but with the detection problem... and the weather. I don't know, Colonel."
"Let's find out how high we can take her," Johns said. He'd tried to go easy on the engines for the last half hour. Not now. He had to find out what he could do. PJ twisted the throttle control on the collective arm to full power, watching the gauge for Number Two as he did so. The needle didn't even reach 70 percent this time.
"The P3 leak is getting worse, boss," Willis told him.
"I see it." They worked to get maximum lift off the rotor, but though they didn't know it, that, too, had taken damage and was not delivering as much lift as it was supposed to. The Pave Low labored upward, reaching seventy-seven hundred feet, but that was where it stopped, and then it started descending, fighting every foot but gradually losing altitude.
"As we burn off more gas..." Willis said hopefully.
"Don't bet on it." PJ keyed his radio. "CLAW, CAESAR, we can't make it over the hills."
"Then we'll come to you."
"Negative, too soon. We have to tank closer to the coast."
"CAESAR, this is LITTLE EYES. I copy your problem. What sort of fuel you need for that monster?" Larson asked. He'd been pacing the helicopter since the pickup, in accordance with the plan.
"Son, right now I'd burn piss if I had enough."
"Can you make the coast?"
"That's affirmative. Close, but we ought to be able to make it."
"I can pick you an airfield one-zero-zero miles short of the coast that has all the avgas you need. I am also carrying a casualty who's bleeding and needs some medical help."
Johns and Willis looked at each other. "Where is it?"
"At current speed, about forty minutes. El Pindo. It's a little place for private birds. Ought to be deserted this time of night. They have ten-kay gallons of underground storage. It's a Shell concession and I've been in and out of there a bunch of times."
"Altitude?"
"Under five hundred. Nice, thick air for that rotor, Colonel."
"Let's do it," Willis said.
"CLAW, did you copy that?" Johns asked.
"That's affirm."
"That's what we're going to try. Break west. Stay close enough to maintain radio contact, but you are free to evade radar coverage."
"Roger, heading west," Montaigne replied.
In back, Ryan was sitting by his gun. There were eight wounded men in the helicopter, but two medics were working on them and Ryan was unable to offer any help better than that. Clark rejoined him.
"Okay, what are we going to do with Cortez and Escobedo?"
"Cortez we want, the other one, hell, I don't know. How do we explain kidnapping him?"
"What do you think we're going to do, put him on trial?" Clark asked over the din of the engines and the wind.
"Anything else is cold-blooded murder. He's a prisoner now, and killing prisoners is murder, remember?"
You're getting legal on me , Clark thought, but he knew that Ryan was right. Killing prisoners was contrary to the code.
"So we take him back?"
"That blows the operation," Ryan said. He knew he was talking too loudly for the subject. He was supposed to be quiet and thoughtful now, but the environment and the events of the evening defeated that. "Christ, I don't know what to do."
"Where are we going - I mean, where's this chopper going?"
"I don't know." Ryan keyed his intercom to ask. He was surprised by the answer and communicated it to Clark.
"Look, let me handle it. I got an idea. I'll take him out of here when we land. Larson and I will tidy that part of it up. I think I know what'll work."
"But - "
"You don't really want to know, do you?"
"You can't murder him!" Jack insisted.
"I won't," Clark said. Ryan didn't know how to read that answer. But it did offer a way out, and he took it.
Larson got there first. The airfield was poorly lit, only a few glow lights showing under the low ceiling, but he managed to get his aircraft down, and with his anticollision lights blinking, he guided the way to the fuel-service area. He'd barely stopped when the helicopter landed fifty yards away.
Larson was amazed. In the dim blue lights he could see numerous holes in the aircraft. A man in a flight suit ran out toward him. Larson met him and led him to the fuel hose. It was a long one, about an inch in diameter, used to fuel private aircraft. The power to the pumps was off, but Larson knew where the switch was, and he shot the door lock. He'd never done that before, but just like in the movies, five rounds removed the brass mechanism from the wooden frame of the door. A minute later, Sergeant Bean had the nozzle into one of the outrigger tanks. That was when Clark and Escobedo appeared. A soldier held a rifle to the latter's head while the CIA officers conferred.
"We're going back," Clark told the pilot.
"What?" Larson turned to see two soldiers taking Juardo out of the Beech and toward the helicopter.
"We're taking our friend here back home to Medell n. Couple of things we have to do first, though..."
"Oh, great." Larson walked back to his aircraft and climbed up on the wing to open his fuel caps. He had to wait fifteen minutes. The helicopter usually drank fuel through a far larger hose. When the crewman took the hose back, the chopper's rotor started turning again. Soon after that, it lifted off into the night. There was lightning ahead to the north, and Larson was just as happy that he wasn't flying there. He let Clark handle the fueling while he went inside to make a telephone call. The funny part was that he'd even make money off the deal. Except that there was nothing funny about anything that had happened during the preceding month.
"Okay," PJ said into the intercom. "That's the last pit stop, and we're heading for home."
"Engine temps aren't all that great," Willis said. The T-64-GE-7 engines were designed to burn aviation kerosene, not the more volatile and dangerous high-octane gas used by private planes. The manufacturer's warranty said that you could use that fuel for thirty hours before the burner cans were crisped down to ashes, but the warranty didn't say anything about bad valve springs and P3 loss.
"Looks like we're going to cool 'em down just fine," the colonel said, nodding at the weather ahead.
"Thinking positive again, are we, Colonel?" Willis said as coolly as he could manage. It wasn't just a thunderstorm there, it was a hurricane that stood between them and Panama. On the whole, it was something scarier than being shot at. You couldn't shoot back at a storm.
"CLAW, this is CAESAR, over," Johns called on his radio.
"I read you, CAESAR."
"How's the weather ahead look?"
"Bad, sir. Recommend that you head west, find a spot to climb over, and try to approach from the Pacific side."
Willis scanned the navigational display. "Uh-uh."
"CLAW, we just gained about five-kay pounds in weight. We, uh, looks like we need another way."
"Sir, the storm is moving west at fifteen knots, and your course to Panama takes you into the lower-right quadrant."
Headwinds all the way , PJ told himself.
"Give me a number."
"Estimated peak winds on your course home are seven-zero knots."
"Great!" Willis observed. "That makes us marginal for Panama, sir. Very damned marginal."
Johns nodded. The winds were bad enough. The rain that came with them would greatly reduce engine efficiency. His flight range might be less than half of what it should be... no way he could tank in the storm... the smart move would be to find a place to land and stay there, but he couldn't do that either... Johns keyed his radio yet again.
"CLAW, this is CAESAR. We are heading for Alternate One."
"Are you out of your skull?" Francie Montaigne replied.
"I don't like it, sir," Willis said.
"Fine. You can testify to that effect someday. It's only a hundred miles off the coast, and if it doesn't work, we'll use the winds to slingshot us around. CLAW, I need a position check on Alternate One."
"You crazy fucker," Montaigne breathed. To her communications people: "Call up Alternate One. I need a position check and I need it now."
Murray was not having any fun at all. Though Adele wasn't really a major hurricane, Wegener had told him, it was more than he had ever expected to see. The seas had been forty feet, and though once Panache had looked like a white steel cliff alongside the dock, she now rode like a child's toy in a bathtub. The FBI agent had a scopolamine patch stuck to his head below and behind his ear to combat motion-sickness, but it wasn't fighting hard enough at the moment. But Wegener was just sitting in his bridge chair, smoking his pipe like the Old Man of the Sea while Murray held on to the grab-bar over his head, feeling like the man on the flying trapeze.
They were not in their programmed position. Wegener had explained to his visitor that there was only one place they could be. It moved, but that's where they had to be, and Murray was distantly thankful that the seas weren't quite as bad as they had been. He worked his way over to the door and looked out at the towering cylinder of cloud.
" Panache , this is CLAW, over," the speaker said. Wegener rose to take the mike.
"CLAW, this is Panache . Your signal is weak but readable, over."
"Position check, over."
Wegener gave it to the pilot, who sounded like a girl, he thought. Christ, they were everywhere now.
"CAESAR is inbound yours."
"Roger. Please advise CAESAR that conditions are below margins. I say again, it is not good down here at the moment.":
"Roger, copy. Stand by." The voice came back two minutes later. " Panache , this is CLAW. CAESAR says he wants to try it. If he can't do it, he plans to HIFR. Can you handle that, over."
"That's affirmative, we can sure as hell try. Give me an ETA, over."
"Estimate six-zero minutes."
"Roger, we'll be ready. Keep us posted. Out." Wegener looked across his bridge. "Miss Walters, I have the conn. I want chiefs Oreza and Riley on the bridge, now."
"Captain has the conn," Ensign Walters said. She was disappointed. Here she was in the middle of a goddamned tropical storm and having the time of her young life. She wasn't even ill from it, though many of the crew were. So why couldn't the skipper let her keep the goddamned conn?
"Left standard rudder," Wegener ordered. "Come to new course three-three-five. All ahead two-thirds."
"Left standard rudder, aye, coming to new course three-three-five." The helmsman turned the wheel, then reached for the throttle controls. "Two thirds, sir."
"Very well. How you feel, Obrecki?" the skipper asked.
"Hell of a coaster, but I'm wondering when the ride is going to stop, sir." The youngster grinned, but didn't take his eyes off the compass.
"You're doing just fine. Let me know if you get tired, though."
"Aye aye, sir."
Oreza and Riley appeared a minute later. "What gives?" the former asked.
"We go to flight quarters in thirty minutes," the captain told them.
"Oh, fuck!" Riley observed. "Excuse me, Red, but... shit!"
"Okay, Master Chief, now that we've gotten that behind us, I'm depending on you to get it done," Wegener said sternly. Riley accepted the rebuke like the pro he was.
"Beg pardon, Cap'n, you'll get my best shot. Put the XO in the tower?"
Wegener nodded. The executive officer was the best man to command the evolution from the flight-control station. "Go get him." Riley left and Wegener turned to his quartermaster.
"Portagee, I want you on the wheel when we go Hotel Corpin. I'll have the conn."
"Sir, there ain't no Hotel Corpin."
"That's why you're on the wheel. Relieve Obrecki in half an hour and get a feel for her. We gotta give him the best target we can."
"Jesus." Oreza looked out the windows. "You got it, Red."
Johns held the aircraft down, staying a scant five hundred feet above ground level. He disengaged the automatic flight controls, trusting more to his skill and instinct now, leaving the throttle to Willis and concentrating on his instruments as much as he could. It started in an instant. One moment they were flying in clear air, the next there was rain pelting the aircraft.
"This isn't so bad," Johns lied outrageously over the intercom.
"They even pay us to do it," Willis agreed with no small irony.
PJ checked the navigation display. The winds were from the northwest at the moment, slowing the helicopter somewhat, but that would change. His eyes flickered from the airspeed indicator to another one that worked off a Doppler-radar aimed at the ground. Satellite and inertial navigation systems told a computer display where he was and where he wanted to go, a red dot. Another screen held the display of a radar system that interrogated the storm ahead, showing the worst sections in red. He'd try to avoid those, but the yellow areas he had to fly through were bad enough.
"Shit!" Willis shouted. Both pilots yanked up on the collective and twisted to maximum power. They'd caught a downdraft. Both pairs of eyes locked onto the dial that gave them vertical velocity in feet per minute. For an instant they were headed down at over a thousand, less than thirty seconds of life for an aircraft at five hundred feet. But microbursts like that are localized phenomena. The helicopter bottomed out at two hundred and clawed its way back up. PJ decided that seven hundred feet was a safer cruise altitude at the moment. He said one word:
"Close."
Willis grunted by way of reply.
In back, men were strapped down to the floor. Ryan had already done that, and was holding onto his minigun mount as though it would make a difference. He could see out the open door - at nothing, really. Just a mass of gray darkness occasionally lit by lightning. The helicopter was jolting up and down, tossed like a child's kite by the moving masses of air, except that the helicopter weighed forty thousand pounds. But there was nothing he could do. His fate was in the hands of others, and nothing he knew or did mattered now. Even vomiting didn't make him feel any better, though he and others were doing that. He just wanted it to be over, and only intellect told him that he really did care how it ended - didn't he?
The buffeting continued, but the winds shifted as the helicopter penetrated the storm. They had started off from the northeast, but shifted with measurable speed counterclockwise, and were soon on the port quarter of the aircraft. That increased their ground speed. With an airspeed of one-fifty, they now had a ground speed of one-ninety and increasing.
"This is doing wonders for our fuel economy," Johns noted.
"Fifty miles," Willis replied.
"CAESAR, this is CLAW, over."
"Roger, CLAW, we are five-zero miles from Alternate One, and it's a little bumpy -" A little bumpy, my ass , Captain Montaigne thought, roller-coastering through lighter weather a hundred miles away "- otherwise okay," Johns reported. "If we cannot make the landing, I think we can try to slingshot out the other side and make for the Panamanian coast." Johns frowned as more water struck the windshield. Some was ingested into the engines at the same time.
"Flameout! We've lost Number Two."
"Restart it," Johns said, still trying to be cool. He lowered the nose and traded altitude for speed to get out of the heavy rain. That, too, was supposed to be a local phenomenon. Supposed to be.
"Working on it," Willis rasped.
"Losing power in Number One," Johns said. He twisted the throttle all the way and managed to get some of it back. His two-engine aircraft was now operating on one of its engines at 80 percent power. "Let's get Two back, Captain. We have a hundred foot per minute of 'down' right now."
"Working," Willis repeated. The rain eased a little, and Number Two started turning and burning again, but delivered only 40 percent. "I think the P3 loss just got worse. We got a shit sandwich here, Colonel. Forty miles. We're committed to Alternate One now."
"At least we have an option. I never could swim worth a damn." PJ's hands were sweaty now. He could feel them loose inside the handmade gloves. Intercom time: "AC to crew, we're about fifteen minutes out," he told them. "One-five minutes out."
Riley had assembled a group of ten, all experienced crewmen. Each had a safety line around his waist, and Riley checked every knot and buckle personally. Though all had life preservers on, finding a man overboard in these conditions would require a miracle from an especially loving God who had lots of things to keep Him busy tonight, Riley thought. Tie-down chains and more two-inch line was assembled and set in place, already secured to the deck wherever possible. He took the deck crew forward, standing them against the aft-facing wall of the superstructure. "All ready here," he said over the phone to the XO in flight control. To his people: "If any of you fuck up and go over the side, I'll fucking jump overboard an' strangle you myself!"
They were in a whirlpool of wind. According to the navigational display, they were now north of their target, traveling at nearly two hundred fifty knots. The buffet now was the worst it had been. One downburst hurled them down at the black waves until Johns stopped at a bare hundred feet. It was now to the point that the pilot wanted to throw up. He'd never flown in conditions like this, and it was worse than the manuals said it was. "How far?"
"We should be there right now, sir!" Willis said. "Dead south."
"Okay." Johns pushed the stick to the left. The sudden change of direction relative to the wind threatened to snap the helicopter over, but he held it and crabbed onto the new course. Two minutes later, they were in the clear.
" Panache , this is CAESAR, where the hell are you?"
"Lights on, everything, now!" Wegener shouted when he heard the call. In a moment Panache was lit up like a Christmas tree.
"Goddamn if you don't look pretty down there!" the voice said a few seconds later.
Adele was a small, weak, disorganized hurricane, now turning back into a tropical storm due to confused local weather conditions. That made her winds weaker than everyone had feared, but the eye was also small and disorganized, and the eye was what they needed now.
It is a common misconception that the eye of a hurricane is calm. It is not, though after experiencing the powerful winds in the innermost wall of clouds, the fifteen knots of breeze there seem like less than nothing to an observer. But the wind is unsteady and shifting, and the seas in the eye, though not as tall as those in the storm proper, are confused. Wegener had stationed his ship within a mile of the northwest edge of the eye, which was barely four miles across. The storm was moving at about fifteen knots. They had fifteen minutes to recover the helicopter. About the only good news was that the air was clear. No rain was falling, and the crew in the pilothouse could see the waves and allow for them.
Aft at flight control, the executive officer donned his headset and started talking.
"CAESAR, this is Panache . I am the flight-operations officer, and I will guide your approach. We have fifteen knots of wind, and the direction is variable. The ship is pitching and rolling in what looks like about fifteen-foot seas. We have about ten or fifteen minutes to do this, so there's not that much of a rush." That last sentence was merely aimed at making the helicopter's crew feel better. He wondered if anyone could bring this off.
"Skipper, a few more knots and I can hold her a little steadier," Portagee reported at the wheel.
"We can't run out of the eye."
"I know that, sir, but I need a little more way on."
Wegener went outside to look. The helicopter was visible now, its strobes blinking in the darkness as it circled the ship to allow the pilot to size things up. If anything screws this up, it's going to be the roll , Wegener realized. Portagee was right about the speed. 'Two-thirds," he called back inside.
"Christ, that's a little boat," Johns heard Willis breathe.
"Just so the oars ain't in the way." PJ took the helicopter down, circling one last tune and coming to a straight course dead aft of the cutter. He leveled out at one hundred feet and found that he couldn't hover very well. He lacked the power, and the aircraft wavered left and right when he tried.
"Hold that damned boat steady!" he said over the radio circuit.
"We are trying, sir," the XO replied. "We have the wind off the port bow at the moment. I recommend you come in from the portside and stay at an angle to the deck all the way in."
"Roger, I can see why." Johns adjusted power one more time and moved in.
"Okay, let's move!" Riley told his men. They divided into three teams, one for each of the helicopter's wheel assemblies.
The deck, Johns saw, was not quite large enough for a fore-and-aft landing, but by angling his approach he could plant all six wheels on the black surface. He came in slowly, fifteen knots faster than the ship to start, and sloughing that off as he closed, but the wind shifted and turned the helicopter. Johns swore and turned fully away to try again.
"Sorry about that," he said. "I have some power problems here."
"Roger, take your time, sir," the XO replied.
PJ started again, a thousand yards out. The approach this time went well. He flared the aircraft a hundred yards aft to drop off excess speed, then flattened out and eased forward. His main gear touched just where he wanted, but the ship rolled hard and threw the aircraft to starboard. Instinctively PJ hit power and collective to lift free of the deck. He shouldn't have, and knew it even as he did so.
"This is hard," he said over the radio, managing not to curse as he brought the chopper back around.
"Shame we don't have more time to practice," the Coast Guard officer agreed. "That was a good, smooth approach. The ship just took a bad roll on us. Do that one more time, you'll be just fine."
"Okay, one more time." PJ came in again.
The ship was rolling twenty degrees left and right despite her stabilizers and bilge keels, but Johns fixed his eyes on the center of the target area, which wasn't rolling at all, just a fixed point in space. That had to be the trick, he told himself, pick the spot that isn't moving. Again he flared out to kill off speed and inched forward. Just as he approached the deck, his eyes shifted to where the nosewheels had to hit, and slammed the collective down. It felt almost as bad as a crash, but the collective held the chopper in place.
Riley was first up and rolled under the aircraft at the nose-wheels. Another boatswain's mate followed with the tie-down chains. The master chief found a likely spot and hooked them in place, then shot his arm out and made a fist. Two men on the other end of the chains pulled them taut, and the chief rolled free and went down the portside to get to work on the main gear. It took several minutes. The Pave Low shifted twice before they had it secured, but soon they had two-inch line to back up the chains. By the time Riley was finished, it would have taken explosives to lift it from the deck. The deck crew entered the helicopter at the stern ramp and guided the passengers out. Riley counted fifteen people. He'd been told to expect more than that. Then he saw the bodies, and the men who were struggling with them.
Forward, Johns and Willis shut down their engines.
"CLAW, CAESAR is down. Return to base." Johns took off his helmet too soon to catch the reply, though Willis caught it.
"Roger. Out."
Johns looked around. He didn't feel like a pilot now. His aircraft was down. He was safe. It was time to get out and do something else. He couldn't get out his door without risking a fall overboard and... he'd allowed himself to forget Buck Zimmer. That door in his mind opened itself now. Well, he told himself, Buck would understand. The colonel stepped over the flight-engineer console. Ryan was still there, his flight suit speckled from his nausea. Johns knelt by the side of his sergeant. They'd served together on and off for over twenty years.
"He told me he has seven kids," Ryan said.
Johns' voice was too tired for any overt emotions. He spoke like a man a thousand years old, tired of life, tired of flying, tired of everything. "Yeah, cute ones. His wife is from Laos. Carol, her name is. Oh, God, Buck - why now?"
"Let me help," Jack said. Johns took the arms. Ryan got the legs. They had to wait in line. There were other bodies to be carried out, some dead, some only wounded, and they got the understandable priority. The soldiers, Jack saw, carried their own, helped by Sergeant Bean. The Coasties offered help, but it was declined - not unkindly, and the sailors understood the reason. Ryan and Johns also declined the assistance, the colonel because of the years with his friend, and the CIA officer because of a duty self-imposed. Riley and his men stayed behind briefly to collect packs and weapons. Then they, too, went below.
The bodies were set in a passageway for the time being. The wounded went to the crew's mess. Ryan and the Air Force officers were guided to the wardroom. There they found the man who'd started it all, months before, though none of them would ever understand how it had all happened. There was one more face, one which Jack recognized.
"Hi, Dan."
"Bad?" the FBI agent asked.
Jack didn't respond to that. "We got Cortez. I think he was wounded. He's probably in sick bay with a couple of soldiers keeping an eye on him."
"What got you?" Murray asked. He pointed to Jack's helmet.
Ryan took it off and saw a gouge where a 7.62 bullet had scraped away a quarter inch or so of fiberglass. Jack knew that he should have reacted to it, but that part of his life was four hundred miles behind him. Instead he sat down and stared at the deck and didn't say anything for a while. Two minutes later, Murray moved him onto a cot and covered him with a blanket.
Captain Montaigne had to fight the last two miles through high winds, but she was a particularly fine pilot and the Lockheed Hercules was a particularly fine aircraft. She touched down a little hard, but not too badly, and followed the guide jeep to her hangar. A man in civilian clothes was waiting there, along with some officers. As soon as she'd shut down, she walked out to meet them. She made them wait while she headed for the rest room, smiling through her fatigue that there was not a man in America who'd deny a lady a trip to the john. Her flight suit smelled horrible and her hair was a wreck, she saw in the mirror before she returned. They were waiting for her right outside the door.
"Captain, I want to know what you did tonight," the civilian asked - but he wasn't a civilian, she realized after a moment, though the prick certainly didn't deserve to be anything else. Montaigne didn't know everything that was behind all this, but she did know that much.
"I just flew a very long mission, sir. My crew and I are beat to hell."
"I want to talk to all of you about what you did."
"Sir, that is my crew. If there's any talking to be done, you'll talk to me!" she snapped back.
"What did you do?" Cutter demanded. He tried pretending it wasn't a girl. He didn't know that she was not pretending that he wasn't a man.
"Colonel Johns went in to rescue some special-ops troopers." She rubbed both hands across the back of her neck. "We got 'em - he got 'em, most of 'em, I suppose."
"Then where is he?"
Montaigne looked him right in the eye. "Sir, he had engine trouble. He couldn't climb out to us - couldn't get over the mountains. He flew right into the storm. He didn't fly out of it, sir. Anything else you want to know? I want to get showered, get some coffee down, and start thinking about search and rescue."
"The field's closed," the base commander said. "Nobody gets out for another ten hours. I think you need some rest, Captain."
"I think you're right, sir. Excuse me, I have to see to my crew. I'll have you the SAR coordinates in a few minutes. Somebody's gotta try," she added.
"Look, General, I want -" Cutter started to say.
"Mister, you leave that crew alone," said an Air Force one-star who was retiring soon anyway.
Larson landed at Medell n's city airport about the same time the MC-130 approached Panama. It had been a profane flight, Clark in the back with Escobedo, the latter's hands tied behind his back and a gun in his ribs. There had been many promises of death in the flight. Death to Clark, death to Larson and his girlfriend who worked for Avianca, death to many people. Clark just smiled through it all.
"So what do you do with me, eh? You kill me now?" he asked as the wheels locked in the down position. Finally, Clark responded.
"I suggested that we could give you a flying lesson out the back of the helicopter, but they wouldn't let me. So looks like we're going to have to let you go."
Escobedo didn't know how to answer. His bluster wasn't able to cope with the fact that they might not want to kill him. They just didn't have the courage to, Clark decided.
"I had Larson call ahead," he said.
"Larson, you motherless traitor, you think you will survive?"
Clark dug the pistol in Escobedo's ribs. "You don't bother the guy who's flying the goddamned airplane. If I were you, se or, I'd be very pleased to be coming home. We're even having you met at the airport."
"Met by whom?"
"By some of your friends," Clark said as the wheel squeaked down on the tarmac. Larson reversed his props to brake the aircraft. "Some of your fellow board members."
That's when he saw the real danger coming. "What did you tell them?"
"The truth," Larson answered. "That you were taking a flight out of the country under very strange circumstances, what with the storm and all. And, gee, what with all the odd happenings of the past few weeks, I thought that it was kind of a coincidence..."
"But I will tell them -"
"What?" Clark asked. "That we put our own lives at risk by delivering you back home? That it's all a trick? Sure, you tell them that."
The aircraft stopped but the engines didn't. Clark gagged the chieftain. Then he unbuckled Escobedo's seat belt and pulled him toward the door. A car was already there. Clark stepped down, his silenced automatic in Escobedo's back.
"You are not Larson," the man with the submachine gun said.
"I am his friend. He is flying. Here is your man. You should have something for us."
"You do not need to leave," said the man with the briefcase.
"This one has too many friends. It is best, I think, that we should leave."
"As you wish," the second one said. "But you have nothing to fear from us." He handed over the briefcase.
" Gracias, jefe ," Clark said. They loved to be called that. He pushed Escobedo toward them.
"You should know better than to betray your friends," said the second one as Clark reentered the aircraft. The comment was aimed at the bound and gagged chieftain, whose eyes were very, very wide, staring back at Clark as he closed the door.
"Get us the hell out of here."
"Next stop, Venezuela," Larson said as he goosed the throttles.
"Then Gitmo. Think you can hack it?"
"I'll need some coffee, but they make it good down here." The aircraft lifted off and Larson thought, Jesus, it's good to have this one behind us . That was true for him, but not for everyone.
30. The Good of the Service
BY THE TIME Ryan awoke on his cot in the wardroom, they were out of the worst of it. The cutter managed to make a steady ten knots east, and with the storm heading northwest at fifteen, they were in moderate seas in six hours. Course was made northeast, and Panache increased to her best continuous speed of about twenty knots.
The soldiers were quartered with the cutter's enlisted crew, who treated them like visiting kings. By some miracle some liquor bottles were discovered - probably from the chiefs' quarters, but no one hazarded to ask - and swiftly emptied. Their uniforms were discarded and new clothing issued from ship's stores. The dead were placed in cold storage, which everyone understood was the only possible thing. There were five of them; two of them, including Zimmer, had died during the rescue. Eight men were wounded, one of them seriously, but the two Army medics, plus the cutter's independent-duty corpsman, were able to stabilize him. Mainly the soldiers slept and ate and slept some more during their brief cruise.
Cortez, who'd been wounded in the arm, was in the brig. Murray looked after him. After Ryan awoke, both men went below with a TV camera which was set up on a tripod, and the senior FBI executive started to ask some questions. It was soon apparent that Cortez had had nothing to do with the murder of Emil Jacobs, which was as surprising to Murray as it was reasonable on examination of the information. It was a complication that neither man had actually expected, but one that might work in their favor, Ryan thought. He was the one who started asking the questions about Cortex's experience with the DGI. Cortez was wholly cooperative throughout. He'd betrayed one allegiance, and doing so to another came easily, especially with Jack's promise that he wouldn't be prosecuted if he cooperated. It was a promise that would be kept to the letter.
Cutter remained in Panama for another day. The search-and-rescue operation aimed at locating the downed helicopter was delayed by weather, and it was hardly surprising to him that nothing was found. The storm kept heading northwest and blew itself out on the Yucatan Peninsula, ending as a series of line squalls that caused half a dozen tornados in Texas several days later. Cutter didn't stay long enough for that. As soon as the weather permitted, he flew straight back to D.C. just hours after Captain Montaigne returned to Eglin Air Force Base, her crew sworn to secrecy that their commander had every reason to enforce.
Panache arrived at Guantanamo Naval Base thirty-six hours after taking the helicopter aboard. Captain Wegener had radioed for permission, claiming a machinery problem and wanting to get out of Hurricane Adele 's path. Several miles off, Colonel Johns started up their helicopter and flew it onto the base, where it was immediately rolled into a hangar. The cutter came alongside an hour later, showing moderate storm damage, some of which was quite real.
Clark and Larson met the ship at the dock. Their aircraft was also hidden away. Ryan and Murray joined them, and a squad of Marines went aboard the cutter to retrieve F lix Cortez. Some telephone calls were placed, and then it was time to decide what had to be done. There were no easy solutions, nothing that would be entirely legal. The soldiers were treated at the base hospital and flown the next day to Fort MacDill in Florida. The same day, Clark and Larson returned the aircraft to Washington, having stopped to refuel in the Bahamas. In Washington it was turned over to a small corporation that belongs to CIA. Larson went on leave, wondering if he should really marry the girl and raise a family. Of one thing he was certain: he would leave the Agency.
Predictably, one of the things that happened was quite unexpected, and would forever be a mystery to all but one.
Admiral Cutter had returned two days earlier, and was back in his regular routine. The President was off on a political trip, trying to reestablish himself in the polls before the convention started two weeks hence. That made easier what had been a very hectic few weeks for his National Security Adviser. One way or another, he decided, he'd had enough of this. He'd served this President well, done things that needed to be done, and was entitled to a reward. He thought a fleet command would be appropriate, preferably Commander-in-Chief Atlantic Fleet. Vice Admiral Painter, the current Assistant Chief of Naval Operations (Air Warfare), had been told to expect it, but it was the President's call to make, after all, and Cutter figured that he could have just about anything he wanted. After that, if the President was re-elected, maybe Chairman of the Joint Chiefs... It was something to think about over breakfast, which was at a civilized hour for a change. He'd even have time for a jog after his morning briefing from CIA. The doorbell rang at 7:15. Cutter answered it himself.
"Who are you?"
"Your regular briefing officer was taken ill, sir. I have the duty today," the man said. Forties, looked like one tough old field officer.
"Okay, come on." Cutter waved him into the study. The man sat down, glad to see that the Admiral had a TV and VCR in here.
"Okay, where do we start today?" Cutter asked after the door was closed.
"Gitmo, sir," the man said.
"What's happening in Cuba?"
"Actually, I have it on videotape, sir." The field officer inserted it in the unit and punched "play."
"What is this...?" Jesus Christ! The tape played on for several minutes before the CIA officer stopped it.
"So what? That's the word of a traitor to his own country," Cutter said to answer the man's expectant smile.
"There's this, too." He held up a photograph of the two of them. "Personally, I'd love to see you in federal prison. That's what the FBI wants. They're going to arrest you later today. You can imagine the charges. Assistant Deputy Director Murray is running the case. He's probably meeting with a U.S. Magistrate right now - whatever the mechanics are. Personally I don't care about that."
"Then why -?"
"I'm a bit of a movie buff. Used to be in the Navy, too. In the movies at times like this, they always give a guy a chance to handle things himself - 'for the good of the service,' they usually say. I wouldn't try running away. There's a team of FBI agents watching you, in case you haven't noticed. Given the way things work in this town - how long things take to get done - I don't suppose you'll be meeting them until ten or eleven. If you do, Admiral, then God help you. You'll get life. I only wish they could do something worse, but you'll get life in a federal pen, with some career hood sticking it up that tight little ass of yours when the guards aren't around. I wouldn't mind seeing that either. Anyway." He retrieved the videotape, tucking it in the briefcase along with the photograph that the Bureau really shouldn't have given him - and they'd told Ryan that he'd only use it to identify Cortez. "Good day, sir."
"But you've -"
"Done what? Nobody swore me to secrecy over this. What secrets have I revealed, Admiral? You were there for all of them."
"You're Clark, aren't you?"
"Excuse me? Who?" he said on his way out. Then he was gone.
Half an hour later, Pat O'Day saw Cutter jogging down the hill toward the George Washington Parkway. One nice thing about having the President out of town, the inspector thought, was that he didn't have to shake out of the rack at 4:30 to meet the bastard. He'd been here only forty minutes, spending a lot of time with his stretching exercises, and there he was. O'Day let him pass, then moved out, keeping up easily since the man was quite a bit older. But that wasn't all...
O'Day followed him for a mile, then two, approaching the Pentagon. Cutter followed the jogging path between the road and the river. Perhaps he didn't feel well. He alternately jogged and walked. Maybe he's trying to see if he has a tail, O'Day thought, but... Then he started moving again.
Just opposite the beginning of the northern parking lot, Cutter got off the path, heading toward the road as though to cross it. The inspector had now closed to within fifty yards. Something was wrong. He didn't know what. It was...
... the way he was looking at the traffic. He wasn't looking for openings, O'Day realized too late. A bus was coming north, a B.C. transit bus, it had just come off the 14th Street Bridge and -
"Look out!" But the man wasn't listening for that sort of warning.
Brakes screeched. The bus tried to avoid the man, slamming into another car, then five more added their mass to the pileup. O'Day approached only because he was a cop, and cops are expected to do such things. Vice Admiral James A. Cutter, Jr., USN, was still in the road, thrown fifty feet by the collision.
He'd wanted it to look like an accident , O'Day thought, but it wasn't. The agent didn't notice a passerby in a cheap-bodied government car who came down the other side of the parkway, rubbernecking at the accident scene like many others, but with a look of satisfaction instead of horror at the sight.
Ryan was waiting at the White House. The President had flown home because of the death of his aide, but he was still President, and there was still work to be done, and if the DDI said that he needed to meet with the President, then it had to be important. The President was puzzled to see that along with Ryan were Al Trent and Sam Fellows, co-chairmen of the House Select Committee on Intelligence Oversight.
"Come on in," he said, guiding them regally into the Oval Office. "What's so important?"
"Mr. President, it has to do with some covert operations, especially one called SHOWBOAT."
"What's that?" the President asked, on guard. Ryan explained for a minute or so.
"Oh, that. Very well. SHOWBOAT was given to these two men personally by Judge Moore under his hazardous-operations rule."
"Dr. Ryan tells us that there are some other things we need to know about also. Other operations related to SHOWBOAT," Congressman Fellows said.
"I don't know about any of that."
"Yes, you do, Mr. President," Ryan said quietly. "You authorized it. It is my duty under the law to report on these matters - to Congress. Before I do so, I felt it necessary to notify you. I asked the two congressmen here to witness my doing so."
"Mr. Trent, Mr. Fellows, could you please excuse me for a moment? There are some things going on that I don't know about. Will you allow me to question Dr. Ryan in private for a moment?"
Say no! Ryan wished as hard as he could, but one does not deny such requests to the President, and in a moment he and Ryan were alone.
"What are you hiding, Ryan?" the President asked. "I know you're hiding some things."
"Yes, sir, I am and I will. The identities of some of our people, CIA and military, who acted on what they thought was proper authority." Ryan explained further, wondering what of it the President knew and what he didn't. It was something he was sure he'd never fully know. Most of the really important secrets Cutter had taken to his grave. Ryan suspected what had happened there, but... but had decided to let that sleeping dog lie, too. Was it possible to be connected with something like this , he asked himself, and not be corrupted by it?
"What Cutter did, what you say he did - I didn't know. I'm sorry. I'm especially sorry about those soldiers."
"We got about half of them out, sir. I was there. That's the part I cannot forgive. Cutter deliberately cut them off with the intention of giving you a political -"
" I never authorized that! " he almost screamed.
"You allowed it to happen, sir." Ryan tried to look him straight in the eye, and on the moment of wavering, it was the President who looked away. "My God, sir, how could you do it?"
"The people want us to stop the flow of drugs."
"Then do it, do just what you tried to do, but do it in accordance with the law."
"It won't work that way."
"Why not?" Ryan asked. "Have the American people ever objected when we used force to protect our interests?"
"But what we had to do here could never be public."
"In that case, sir, all you needed to do was make the appropriate notification of the Congress and do it covertly. You got partial approval for the operation, politics would not necessarily have come into play, but in breaking the rules, sir, you took a national-security issue and made it into a political one."
"Ryan, you're smart and clever and good at what you do, but you're naive."
Jack wasn't that naive: "What are you asking me to do, sir?"
"How much does the Congress really need to know?"
"Are you asking me to lie for you, sir? You called me naive, Mr. President. I had a man die in my arms two days ago, a sergeant in the Air Force who left seven children behind. Tell me, sir, am I naive to let that weigh upon my thinking?"
"You can't talk to me that way."
"I take no pleasure in it, sir. But I will not lie for you."
"But you are willing to conceal the identities of people who -"
"Who followed your orders in good faith. Yes, Mr. President, I am willing to do that."
"What happens to the country, Jack?"
"I agree with you that we do not need another scandal, but that is a political question. On that, sir, you have to talk to the men outside. My function is to provide information for the government, and to perform certain tasks for the government. I am an instrument of policy. So were those people who died for their country, sir, and they had a right to expect that their lives would be given greater value by the government they served. They were people, Mr. President, young kids for the most part who went off to do a job because their country - you, sir - thought it important that they do so. What they didn't know was that there were enemies in Washington. They never suspected that, and that's why most of them died. Sir, the oath our people take when they put the uniform on requires them to bear 'true faith and allegiance' to their country. Isn't it written down somewhere that the country owes them the same thing? It's not the first time this has happened, but I wasn't part of it before, and I will not lie about it, sir, not to protect you or anyone else."
"I didn't know that, Jack. Honestly, I didn't know."
"Mr. President, I choose to believe that you are an honorable man. What you just said, sir, is that really an excuse?" Jack paused, and was fully answered by silence.
"Do you wish to meet with the congressmen before I brief them, sir?"
"Yes. Why don't you wait outside for us."
"Thank you, Mr. President."
Jack waited for an hour of discomfort before Trent and Fellows reappeared. They drove with him to Langley in silence, and the three walked into the office of the Director of Central Intelligence.
"Judge," Trent said, "that may have been the greatest service you have ever done your country."
"Under the circumstances -" Moore paused. "What else could I have done?"
"You could have left them to die, you could have warned the opposition that we were coming in," Jack said. "In that case I wouldn't be here. And for that, Judge, I am in your debt. You could have stuck with the lie."
"And live with myself?" Moore smiled in a very strange way and shook his head.
"And the operations?" Ryan asked. Exactly what had been discussed in the Oval Office he didn't know, and he told himself not to make any guesses.
"Never happened," Fellows said. "Under the hazardous-operations rule, you have done what you needed to do - granted, a little late, but we have been notified. We don't need another scandal like this, and with the way things are going, the situation will settle itself. Politically it's shaky, but legally you can argue that it's all according to Hoyle."
"The craziest part of all is, it almost worked," Trent observed. "Your CAPER operation was brilliant, and I assume it'll be kept going."
"It will. The whole operation did work," Ritter said for the first time. "It really did. We did start a war within the Cartel, and Escobedo's killing was just the last act - or maybe not if it goes on further. With that many chieftains gone, maybe Colombia will be able to do a little better. We need that capability. We can't have it stripped away from us."
"I agree," Ryan said. "We need the capability, but you don't make public policy this way, damn it!"
"Jack, tell me what right and wrong is?" Moore asked. "You seem to be the expert today," he added without very much irony.
"This is supposed to be a democracy. We let the people know something, or at least we let them know." He waved at the congressmen. "When a government decides to kill people who threaten its interests or its citizens, it doesn't have to be murder. Not always. I'm just not sure where the line is. But I don't have to be sure. Other people are supposed to tell us that."
"Well, come January, it won't be us," Moore observed. "It's agreed, then? It stays here. No political footballs?"
Trent and Fellows could scarcely have been further apart politically, the gay New Englander and the tough-minded Mormon from Arizona. They nodded agreement.
"No games on this," Trent said.
"It would just hurt the country," Fellows concurred.
"And what we've just done..." Ryan murmured. Whatever the hell it was ...
"You didn't do it," Trent said. "The rest of us did."
"Right," Jack snorted. "Well, I'm gone soon, too."
"Think so?" Fellows asked.
"Not so, Dr. Ryan. We don't know who Fowler is going to appoint, probably some political lawyer he likes. I know the names on the list," Trent said.
"It sure as hell won't be me. He doesn't like me," Ryan said.
"He doesn't have to like you, and you're not going to be Director. But you will be here," Trent told him. Deputy Director, maybe , the congressman thought to himself.
"We'll see." Fellows said. "What if things turn out differently in November? Fowler may just screw it up yet."
"You have my word, Sam," Trent replied. "If that happens, it happens."
"There is one wild card, though," Ritter pointed out.
"I've already discussed that with Bill Shaw," Moore said. "It's funny. The only law he actually broke was illegal entry. None of the data he got out of her was technically classified. Amazing, isn't it?"
Ryan shook his head and left work early. He had an appointment with his attorney, who would soon be establishing an educational trust for seven kids living in Florida.
The infantrymen were cycled through Fort MacDill's special-operations center. Told that their operation had been a success, they were sworn to secrecy, given their promotions, and sent on to new postings. Except for one.
"Chavez?" a voice called.
"Yo, Mr. Clark."
"Buy you dinner?"
"There a good Mexican place around here?"
"Maybe I can find one."
"What's the occasion?"
"Let's talk jobs," Clark said. "There's an opening where I work. It pays better than what you do now. You'll have to go back to school for a couple of years, though."
"I've been thinkin' about that," Chavez replied. He'd been thinking that he was officer material. If he'd been in command instead of Ramirez, maybe - or maybe not. But he did want to find out.
"You're good, kid. I want you to work with me."
Chavez thought about that. At least he'd get a dinner out of the idea.
Captain Bronco Winters was dispatched to an F-15 squadron in Germany, where he distinguished himself and was soon a flight leader. He was a calmer young man now. He'd exorcised the demons of his mother's death. Winters would never look back. He'd had a job, and done it.
It was a cold, dismal fall after a hot, muggy summer in Washington. The political city emptied out for the presidential election, which shared that November with all of the House seats and a third of the Senate, plus hundreds of political-appointment slots in the executive branch. In the early fall, the FBI broke several Cuban-run spy rings, but strangely that was politically neutral. Although arresting a drug ring was a police success, arresting a spy ring was seen as a failure because of the existence of a spy ring in the first place. There was no political advantage except in the Cuban refugee community, whose votes might as well already have been cast anyway, since Fowler was talking about "opening a dialogue" with the Cuba they had left. The President regained the lead after his own convention, but ran a lackluster campaign and fired two key political advisers. But most of all, it was time for a change, and though it was close. Robert Fowler carried the election with a bare 2 percent advantage in the popular vote. Some called it a mandate; others called it a sloppy campaign on both sides. The latter was closer to the truth, Ryan thought after it was all over.
All over the city and its environs, displaced appointees made preparations to move home - wherever home was - or to move into law offices so that they could stay in the area. Congress hadn't changed very much, but Congress rarely did. Ryan remained in his office, wondering if he'd be confirmed as the next DDL It was too soon to tell. One thing he did know was that the President was still President, and still a man of honor, whatever mistakes he'd made. Before he left, pardons would be issued to those who needed them. They'd go on the books, but no one was expected to notice, and after things were explained to the Fowler people - Trent would handle that - it wasn't expected that anyone ever would.
On the Saturday after the election, Dan Murray drove Moira Wolfe to Andrews Air Force Base, where a jet was waiting for them. It took just over three hours before they landed at Guantanamo. A leftover from the Spanish-American War, Gitmo, as it's called, is the only American military installation on Communist soil, a thorn stuck in Castro's side that rankled him as much as he rankled his oversized neighbor across the Florida Strait.
Moira was doing well at the Department of Agriculture, executive secretary to one of the department's top career executives. She was thinner now, but Murray wasn't concerned about that. She'd taken up walking for exercise, and was doing well with her psychological counseling. She was the last of the victims, and he hoped that this trip would help.
So this was the day, Cortez thought. He was surprised and disappointed at his fate, but resigned to it. He'd gambled greatly and lost greatly. He feared his fate, but he wouldn't let that show, not to Americans. They loaded him into the back of a sedan and drove toward the gate. He saw another car ahead of his, but made no special note of it.
And there it was, the tall barbed-wire fence, manned on one side by American Marines in their multicolor fatigues - they called them "utilities," Cortez had learned - and on the other by Cubans in their battle dress. Perhaps, just perhaps, Cortez thought, he might talk his way out of this. The car halted fifty meters from the gate. The corporal to his left pulled him out of the car and unlocked his handcuffs, lest he take them across and so enrich a Communist country. Such trivial nonsense, F lix thought.
"Come on, Pancho," the black corporal said. "Time to go home."
Even without the cuffs, both Marines grabbed him by the arms to help him walk to his mother country. There at the gate he saw two officers waiting for him, impassively for now. They would probably embrace him when he came across, which wouldn't mean a thing. In either case, Cortez was determined to meet his fate like a man. He straightened his back and smiled at those waiting for him as though they were family members waiting at the airport gate.
"Cortez," a man's voice called.
They stepped out of the guard shack, just inside the gate. He didn't know the man, but the woman...
F lix stopped, and the motion of the two Marines nearly toppled him. She just stood there, staring at him. She didn't speak a word, and Cortez didn't know what to say. The smile vanished from his lips. The look in her eyes made him shrink within himself. He'd never meant to hurt her. To use her, yes, of course, but never really...
"Come on, Pancho," the corporal said, heaving the man forward. They were just at the gate.
"Oh, by the way, this here's yours, Pancho," the corporal said, tucking a videocassette in his belt. "Welcome home, asshole." A final push.
"Welcome home, Colonel ," the senior of the two Cubans said. He embraced his former comrade and whispered: "You have much to answer for!"
But before they dragged him off, F lix turned one last time, seeing Moira, just standing there with the man he didn't know, and his last thought as he turned away was that once again she'd understood: silence was the greatest passion of all.