"Chicago. Come on." Vega rose. "One good thing about this place, you got all the hot water you want, and no Mickey Mouse on the housekeeping. Now, if they could just turn the fucking heat on at night -"
"Where the hell are we?"
"Colorado. I know that much. Not much else, though." The two sergeants joined a loose trail of men heading for the showers.
Chavez looked around. Nobody was wearing glasses. Everybody looked pretty fit, even accounting for the fact that they were soldiers. A few were obvious iron-pumpers, but most, like Chavez, had the lean, wiry look of distance runners. One other thing that was so obvious it took him half a minute to notice it. They were all Latinos.
The shower helped. There was a nice, tall pile of new towels, and enough sinks that everyone had room to shave. And the toilet stalls even had doors. Except for the thin air, Chavez decided, this place had real possibilities. Whoever ran the place gave them twenty-five minutes to get it together. It was almost civilized.
Civilization ended promptly at 0630. The men got into their uniforms, which included stout boots, and moved outside. Here Chavez saw four men standing in a line. They had to be officers. You could tell from the posture and the expressions. Behind the four was another, older man, who also looked and acted like an officer, but... not quite, Chavez told himself.
"Where do I go?" Ding asked Vega.
"You're supposed to stick with me. Third squad, Captain Ramirez. Tough mother, but a good guy. Hope you like to run, ' mano ."
"I'll try not to crap out on ya'," Chavez replied.
Vega turned with a grin. "That's what I said."
"Good morning, people!" boomed the voice of the older one. "For those of you who don't know me, I am Colonel Brown. You newcomers, welcome to our little mountain hideaway. You've already gotten to your proper squads, and for everyone's information, our TO and E is now complete. This is the whole team."
It didn't surprise Chavez that Brown was the only obvious non-Latino to be seen. But he didn't know why he wasn't surprised. Four others were walking toward the assembly. They were PT instructors. You can always tell from the clean, white T-shirts and the confidence that they could work anyone into the ground.
"I hope everyone got a good night's sleep," Brown went on. "We will start our day with a little exercise -"
"Sure," Vega muttered, "might as well die before breakfast."
"How long you been here?" Ding asked quietly.
"Second day. Jesus, I hope it gets easier. The officers musta been here a week at least - they don't barf after the run."
"- and a nice little three-mile jog through the hills," Brown ended.
"That's no big deal," Chavez observed.
"That's what I said yesterday," Vega replied. "Thank God I quit smokin'."
Ding didn't know how to react to that. Vega was another light infantryman from the 10th Mountain, and like himself was supposed to be able to move around all day with fifty pounds of gear on his back. But the air was pretty thin, thin enough that Chavez wondered just how high they were.
They started off with the usual daily dozen, and the number of repeats wasn't all that bad, though Chavez found himself breaking a slight sweat. It was the run that told him how tough things would get. As the sun rose above the mountains, he got a feel for what sort of country it was. The camp was nestled in the bottom of a valley, and comprised perhaps fifty acres of almost flat ground. Everything else looked vertical, but on inspection proved to be slopes of less than forty-five degrees, dotted with scruffy-looking little pine trees that would never outgrow the height for Christmas decorations. The four squads, each led by an instructor and a captain, moved in different directions, up horse trails worn into the mountainside. In the first mile, Chavez reckoned, they had climbed over five hundred feet, snaking their way along numerous switchbacks toward a rocky knoll. The instructor didn't bother with the usual singing that accompanied formation running. There wasn't much of a formation anyway, just a single-file of men struggling to keep pace with a faceless robot whose white shirt beckoned them on toward destruction. Chavez, who hadn't run a distance less than three miles, every day for the last two years of his life, was gasping for breath after the first. He wanted to say something, like, "There isn't any fuckin' air!" But he didn't want to waste the oxygen. He needed every little molecule for his bloodstream. The instructor stopped at the knoll to make sure everyone was there, and Chavez, jogging doggedly in place, had the chance to see a vista worthy of an Ansel Adams photograph - all the better in the full light of a morning sun. But his only thought on being able to see over forty miles was terror that he'd have to run it all.
God, I thought I was in shape!
Hell, I am in shape!
The next mile traced a ridgeline to the east, and the sun punished eyes that had to stay alert. This was a narrow trail, and going off it could involve a painful fall. The instructor gradually picked up the pace, or so it seemed, until he stopped again at another knoll.
"Keep those legs pumpin'!" he snarled at those who'd kept up. There were two stragglers, both new men, Chavez thought, and they were only twenty yards back. You could see the shame on their faces, and the determination to catch up. "Okay, people, it's downhill from here."
And it was, mostly, but that only made it more dangerous. Legs rubbery from the fatigue that comes from oxygen deprivation had to negotiate a downward slope that alternated from gradual to perilously steep, with plenty of loose rocks for the unwary. Here the instructor eased off on the pace, for safety as everyone guessed. The captain let his men pass, and took up the rear to keep an eye on things. They could see the camp now. Five buildings. Smoke rose from a chimney to promise breakfast. Chavez saw a helipad, half a dozen vehicles - all four-wheel-drives - and what could only be a rifle range. There was no other sign of human habitation in sight, and the sergeant realized that even the wide view he'd had earlier hadn't shown any buildings closer than five or six miles. It wasn't hard to figure out why the area was sparsely settled. But he didn't have time or energy for deep thoughts at the moment. His eyes locked on the trail, Ding Chavez concentrated on his footing and the pace. He took up a position alongside one of the erstwhile stragglers and kept an eye on him. Already Chavez was thinking of this as his squad, and soldiers are supposed to look out for one another. But the man had firmed up. His head was high now, his hands balled into tight, determined fists, and his powerfully exhaled breaths had purpose in them as the trail finally flattened out and they approached the camp. Another group was coming in from the far side.
"Form up, people!" Captain Ramirez called out for the first time. He passed his men and took the place of the instructor, who peeled off to let them by. Chavez noted that the bastard wasn't even sweating. Third Squad formed into a double line behind their officer.
"Squad! Quick-time, march!" Everyone slowed to a regular marching pace. This took the strain off lungs and legs, told them that they were now the custody of their captain, and reminded them that they were still part of the Army. Ramirez delivered them in front of their barracks. The captain didn't order anyone to sing a cadence, though. That made him smart, Chavez thought, smart enough to know that nobody had enough breath to do so. Julio was right, probably. Ramirez might be a good boss.
"Squad, halt!" Ramirez turned. "At ease, people. Now, that wasn't so bad, was it?"
" Madre de Dios! " a voice noted quietly. From the back rank, a man tried to vomit but couldn't find anything to bring up.
"Okay." Ramirez grinned at his men. "The altitude is a real bitch. But I've been here two weeks. You get used to it right quick. Two weeks from now, we'll be running five miles a day with packs, and you'll feel just fine."
Bullshit . Chavez shared the thought with Julio Vega, knowing that the captain was right, of course. The first day at boot camp had been harder than this... hadn't it?
"We're taking it easy on you. You have an hour to unwind and get some breakfast. Go easy on the chow: we'll have another little run this afternoon. At 0800 we assemble here for training. Dismissed."
"Well?" Ritter asked.
They sat on the shaded veranda of an old planter's house on the island of St. Kitts. Clark wondered what they'd planted here once. Probably sugarcane, though there was nothing now. What had once been a plantation manor was obviously supposed to look like the island retreat of a top-drawer capitalist and his collection of mistresses. In fact it belonged to CIA, which used it as an informal conference center, a particularly nice safe house for the debriefing of VIP defectors, and other, more mundane uses - like a vacation spot for senior executives.
"The background info was fairly accurate, but it underestimated the physical difficulties. I'm not criticizing the people who put the package together. You just have to see it to believe it. It's very tough country." Clark stretched in the wicker chair and reached for his drink. His personal seniority at the Agency was many levels below Ritter's, but Clark was one of a handful of CIA employees whose position was unique. That, plus the fact that he often worked personally for the Deputy Director (Operations), gave him the right to relax in the DDO's presence. Ritter's attitude toward the younger man was not one of deference, but he did show Clark considerable respect. "How's Admiral Greer doing?" Clark asked. It was James Greer who'd actually recruited him, many years before.
"Doesn't look very good. Couple of months at most," Ritter replied.
"Damn." Clark stared into his drink, then looked up. "I owe that man a lot. Like my whole life. They can't do anything?"
"No, it's spread too much for that. They can keep him comfortable, that's about all. Sorry. He's my friend, too."
"Yes, sir, I know." Clark finished off his drink and went back to work. "I still don't know exactly what you have in mind, but you can forget about going after them in their houses."
"That tough?"
Clark nodded. "That tough. It's a job for real infantry with real support, and even then you're going to take real casualties. From what Larson tells me, the security troops these characters have are pretty good. I suppose you might try to buy a few off, but they're probably well paid already, so that might just backfire." The field officer didn't ask what the real mission was, but he assumed it was to snatch some warm bodies and whisk them off stateside, where they'd arrive gift-wrapped in front of some FBI office, or maybe a U.S. courthouse. Like everyone else, he was making an incorrect guess. "Same thing with bagging one on the move. They take the usual precautions - irregular schedules, irregular routes, and they have armed escorts everywhere they go. So bagging one on the fly means having good intel, which means having somebody on the inside. Larson is as close to being inside as anybody we've ever run, and he's not close enough. Trying to get him in closer will get him killed. He's gotten us some good data - Larson's a pretty good kid - and the risks of trying that are just too great. I presume the local people have tried to -"
"They have. Six of them ended up dead or missing. Same thing with informers. They disappear a lot. The locals are thoroughly penetrated. They can't run any sort of op for long without risking their own. You do that long enough and people stop volunteering."
Clark shrugged and looked out to seaward. There was a white-hulled cruise ship inbound on the horizon. "I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised at how tough these bastards are. Larson was right, what brains they don't already have they can buy. Where do they hire their consultants?"
"Open market, mainly Europe, and -"
"I mean the intel pros. They must have some real spooks."
"Well, there's F lix Cortez. That's only a rumor, but the name's come up half a dozen times in the past few months."
"The DGI colonel who disappeared," Clark observed. The DGI was Cuba's intelligence service, modeled on the Soviet KGB. Cortez had been reported working with the Macheteros, a Puerto Rican terrorist group that the FBI had largely run to ground in the past few years. Another DGI colonel named Filiberto Ojeda had been arrested by the Bureau, after which Cortez had disappeared. So he'd decided to remain outside his country's borders. Next question: had Cortez decided to opt for this most vigorous branch of the free-enterprise system or was he still working under Cuban control? Either way, DGI was Russian-trained. Its senior people were graduates of the KGB's own academy. They were, therefore, opponents worthy of respect. Certainly Cortez was. His file at the Agency spoke of a genius for compromising people to get information.
"Larson know about this?"
"Yeah. He caught the name at a party. Of course, it would help if we knew what the hell Cortez looks like, but all we have is a description that fits half the people south of the Rio Grande. Don't worry. Larson knows how to be careful, and if anything goes wrong, he's got his own airplane to get out of Dodge with. His orders are fairly specific on that score. I don't want to lose a trained field officer doing police work." Ritter added, "I sent you down for a fresh appraisal. You know what the overall objective is. Tell me what you think is possible."
"Okay. You're probably right to go after the airfields and to keep it an intelligence-gathering operation. Given the necessary surveillance assets, we could finger processing sites fairly easily, but there's a lot of them and their mobility demands a rapid reaction time to get there. I figure that'll work maybe a half-dozen times, max, before the other side wises up. Then we'll take casualties, and if the bad guys get lucky, we might lose a whole assault force - if you've got people thinking in those terms. Tracking the finished product from the processing sites is probably impossible without a whole lot of people on the ground - too many to keep it a covert op for very long - and it wouldn't buy us very much anyway. There are a lot of little airfields on the northern part of the country to keep an eye on, but Larson thinks that they may be victims of their own success. They've been so successful buying off the military and police in that district that they might be falling into a regular pattern of airfield use. If the insertion teams keep a low profile, they could conceivably operate for two months - that may be a little generous - before we have to yank them out. I need to see the teams, see how good they are."
"I can arrange that," Ritter said. He'd already decided to send Clark to Colorado. Clark was the best man to evaluate their capabilities. "Go on."
"What we're setting up will go all right for a month or two. We can watch their aircraft lift off and call it ahead to whoever else is wrapped up in this." This was the only part of the op that Clark knew about. "We can inconvenience them for that long, but I wouldn't hope for much more."
"You're painting a fairly bleak picture, Clark."
Clark leaned forward. "Sir, if you want to run a covert operation to gather usable tactical intelligence against an adversary who's this decentralized in his own operations - yes, it's possible, but only for a limited period of time and only for a limited return. If you increase the assets to try and make it more effective, you're going to get blown sure as hell. You can run an operation like that, but it can't be for long. I don't know why we're even bothering." That wasn't quite true. Clark figured, correctly, that the reason was that it was an election year, but that wasn't the sort of observation a field officer was allowed to make - especially when it was a correct one.
"Why we're bothering isn't strictly your concern," Ritter pointed out. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to, and Clark was not a man to be intimidated.
"Fine, but this is not a serious undertaking. It's an old story, sir. Give us a mission we can do, not one we can't. Are we serious about this or aren't we?"
"What do you have in mind?" Ritter asked.
Clark told him. Ritter's face showed little in the way of emotion at the answer to his question. One of the nice things about Clark, Ritter thought to himself, was that he was the only man in the Agency who could discuss these topics calmly and dispassionately - and really mean it. There were quite a few for whom such talk was an interesting intellectual exercise, unprofessional speculation, really, gotten consciously or subconsciously from reading spy fiction. Gee, wouldn't it be nice if we could ... It was widely believed in the general public that the Central Intelligence Agency employed a goodly number of expert professionals in this particular field. It didn't. Even the KGB had gotten away from such things, farming this kind of work out to the Bulgarians - regarded by their own associates as uncouth barbarians - or genuine third-parties like terrorist groups in Europe and the Middle East. The political cost of such operations was too high, and despite the mania for secrecy cultivated by every intelligence service in the world, such things always got out eventually. The world had gotten far more civilized since Ritter had graduated from The Farm on the York River, and while he thought that a genuinely good thing, there were times when a return to the good old days beckoned with solutions to problems that hadn't quite gone away.
"How hard would it be?" Ritter asked, interested.
"With the proper backup and some additional assets - it's a snap." Clark explained what special assets were needed. "Everything they've done plays into our hands. That's the one mistake they've made. They're conventional in their defensive outlook. Same old thing, really. It's a matter of who determines the rules of the game. As things now stand, we both play by the same rules, and those rules, as applied here, give the advantage to the opposition. We never seem to learn that. We always let the other side set the rules. We can annoy them, inconvenience them, take away some of their profit margin, but, hell, given what they already make, it's a minor business loss. I only see one thing changing that."
"Which is?"
"How'd you like to live in a house like that one?" Clark asked, handing over one of his photographs.
"Frank Lloyd Wright meets Ludwig the Mad," Ritter observed with a chuckle.
"The man who commissioned that house is growing quite an ego, sir. They have manipulated whole governments. Everyone says that they are a government for all practical purposes. They said the same thing in Chicago during Prohibition, that Capone really ran the town - just one city, right? Well, these people are on their way to running their own country , and renting out others. So let's say that they do have the de facto power of a government. Factor ego into that. Sooner or later they're going to start acting like one. I know we won't break the rules. But it wouldn't surprise me if they stepped outside them once or twice, just to see what they might get away with. You see what I mean? They keep expanding their own limits, and they haven't found the brick wall yet, the one that tells them where to stop."
"John, you're turning into a psychologist," Ritter noted with a thin smile.
"Maybe so. These guys peddle addictive drugs, right? Mostly they do not use the stuff themselves, but I think they're getting themselves hooked on the most powerful narcotic there is."
"Power."
Clark nodded. "Sooner or later, they're going to OD. At that point, sir, somebody's going to think seriously about what I just proposed. When you get into the majors, the rules change some. That's a political decision, of course."
He was master of all he surveyed. At least that was the phrase that came to mind, and with all such aphorisms it could be both true and false at the same time. The valley into which he looked did not all belong to him; the parcel of land on which he stood was less than a thousand hectares, and his vista included a million. But not one person who lived within his view could continue to live were he to decide otherwise. That was the only sort of power that mattered, and it was a form of power that he had exercised on occasions too numerous to count. A flick of the wrist, a casual remark to an associate, and it was done. It wasn't that he had ever been casual about it - death was a serious business - but he knew that he could be. It was the sort of power that might make a man mad, he knew. He'd seen it happen among his own business associates, to their sorrow on several occasions. But he was a student of the world, and a student of history. Unusually, for someone in his chosen trade, he was the beneficiary of a good education, something forced on him by his late father, one of the pioneers. One of the greatest regrets of his life was that he'd never expressed his gratitude for it. Because of it he understood economics as well as any university professor. He understood market forces and trends. And he understood the historical forces that brought them about. He was a student of Marxism; though he rejected the Marxist outlook for a multiplicity of reasons, he knew that it contained more than one grain of truth intermixed with all the political gibberish. The rest of his professional education had been what Americans called "on-the-job training." While his father had helped invent a whole new way of doing business, he had watched and advised, and taken action. He'd explored new markets, under his father's direction, and formed the reputation of a careful, thorough planner, often sought after but never apprehended. He'd been arrested only once, but after two of the witnesses had died, the others had grown forgetful, ending his direct experience with police and courts.
He deemed himself a carry-over from another age - a classic robber-baron capitalist. A hundred years before, they'd driven railroads across the United States - he was a genuine expert on that country - and crushed anything in their path. Indian tribes - treated like a two-legged version of the plains buffalo and swatted aside. Unions - neutralized with hired thugs. Governments - bribed and subverted. The press - allowed to bray on... until too many people listened. He'd learned from that example. The local press was no longer terribly outspoken, not after learning that its members were mortal. The railroad barons had built themselves palatial homes - winter ones in New York, and summer "cottages" at Newport. Of course, he had problems that they'd not faced, but any historical model broke down if you took it too far. He also chose to ignore the fact that the Goulds and the Harrimans had built something that was useful, not destructive, to their societies. One other lesson he had learned from the previous century was that cutthroat competition was wasteful. He had persuaded his father to seek out his competitors. Even then his powers of persuasion had been impressive. Cleverly, it had been done at a time when danger from outside forces made cooperation attractive. Better to cooperate, the argument had gone, than to waste time, money, energy, and blood - and increase their own personal vulnerabilities. And it had worked.
His name was Ernesto Escobedo. He was one of many within the Cartel, but most of his peers would acknowledge that his was a voice to which all listened. They might not all agree, not all bend to his will, but his ideas were always given the attention they deserved because they had proven to be effective ones. The Cartel had no head as such, since the Cartel was not a single enterprise, but rather a collection of leaders who operated in close confederation - almost a committee, but not quite; almost friends, but not that either. The comparison to the American Mafia suggested itself, but the Cartel was both more civilized and more savage than that. Escobedo would have chosen to say that the Cartel was more effectively organized, and more vigorous, both attributes of a young and vital organization, as opposed to one that was older and feudal.
He knew that the sons of the robber barons had used the wealth accumulated by their antecedents to form a power elite, coming to rule their nation with their "service." He was unwilling to leave such a legacy to his sons, however. Besides, he himself was technically one of the second generation. Things moved more quickly now. The accumulation of great wealth no longer demanded a lifetime, and, therefore, Ernesto told himself, he didn't have to leave that to his sons. He could have it all. The first step in accomplishing any goal was deciding that it was possible. He had long since come to that decision.
It was his goal to see it done. Escobedo was forty, a man of uncommon vigor and confidence. He had never used the product which he provided for others, instead altering his consciousness with wine - and that rarely, now. A glass or two with dinner; perhaps some hard liquor at business meetings with his peers, but more often Perrier. This trait earned him more respect among his associates. Escobedo was a sober, serious man, they all knew. He exercised regularly, and paid attention to his appearance. A smoker in his youth, he'd broken the habit young. He watched his diet. His mother was still alive and vigorous at seventy-three; her mother was the same at ninety-one. His father would have been seventy-five last week, he knew, except for... but the people who'd ended his father's life had paid a savage price for their crime, along with all of their families, mostly at Escobedo's own hand. It was something he remembered with filial pride, taking the last one's wife while her dying husband watched, killing her and the two little ones before his eyes closed for the last time. He took no pleasure in killing women and children, of course, but such things were necessary. He'd shown that one who was the better man, and as word of the feat spread, it had become unlikely that his family would ever be troubled again. He took no pleasure from it, but history taught that harsh lessons made for long memories. It also taught that those who failed to teach such lessons would not be respected. Escobedo demanded respect above all things. His personal involvement in settling that particular account, instead of leaving it to hirelings, had earned him considerable prestige within the organization. Ernesto was a thinker, his associates said, but he knew how to get things done.
His wealth was so great that counting it had no point. He had the godlike power of life and death. He had a beautiful wife and three fine sons. When the marriage bed palled, he had a choice of mistresses. Every luxury that money could purchase, he had.
He had homes in the city below him, this hilltop fortress, and ranches near the sea - both seas, in fact, since Colombia borders on two great oceans. At the ranches were stables full of Arabian horses. Some of his associates had private bull rings, but that sport had never interested him. A crack shot, he had hunted everything that his country offered - including men, of course. He told himself that he ought to be satisfied. But he was not.
The American robber barons had traveled the world, had been invited to the courts of Europe, had married off their progeny to that of noble houses - a cynical exercise, he knew, but somehow a worthy one that he fully understood. The freedoms were denied him, and though the reason for it was plain enough, he was nevertheless offended that a man of his power and wealth could be denied anything. Despite everything that he had accomplished, there were still limits on his life - worse still, the limits were placed there by others of lesser power. Twenty years earlier he had chosen his path to greatness, and despite his obvious success, the fact that he'd chosen that particular path denied him the fruits that he wanted, because lesser men did not approve of it.
It had not always been so. "Law?" one of the great railroad men had said once. "What do I care about law?" And he had gotten away with it, had traveled about at will, had been recognized as a great man.
So why not me? Escobedo asked himself. Part of him knew the answer, but a more powerful part rejected it. He was not a stupid man, far less a foolish one, but he had not come so far to have others set rules upon his life. Ernesto had, in fact, violated every rule he wished, and prospered from it. He had gotten here by making his own rules, the businessman decided. He would have to learn to make some new ones. They would learn to deal with him, on terms of his own choosing. He was tired of having to accommodate the terms of others. Having made the decision, he began to explore methods.
What had worked for others?
The most obvious answer was success. That which one could not defeat, one had to acknowledge. International politics had as few rules as any other major enterprise, except for the only one that mattered - success. There was not a country in the world that failed to make deals with murderers, after all; it was just that the murderers in question had to be effective ones. Kill a few million people and one was a statesman. Did not every nation in the world kowtow to the Chinese - and had they not killed millions of their own? Didn't America seek to accommodate the Russians - and had they not killed millions of their own? Under Carter, the Americans had supported the regime of Pol Pot, which had killed millions of its own. Under Reagan, America had sought to reach a modus vivendi with the same Iranians who had killed so many of their own, including most of those who thought of America as a friend - and been abandoned. America befriended dictators with bloody hands - some on the right and some on the left - in the name of realpolitik , while refusing to support moderates - left or right - because they might not be quite moderate enough. Any country so lacking in principle could come to recognize him and his associates, couldn't it? That was the central truth about America in Ernesto's view. While he had principles from which he would not deviate, America did not.
The corruption of America was manifest to Ernesto. He, after all, fed it. For years now, forces in his largest and most important market had lobbied to legalize his business there. Fortunately they had all failed. That would have been disaster for the Cartel, and was yet another example of how a government lacked the wit to act in its own self-interest. The American government could have made billions from the business - as he and his associates did - but lacked the vision and the good sense to do so. And they called themselves a great power. For all their supposed strength, the yanquis had no will, no manhood. He could regulate the goings-on where he lived, but they could not. They could range over oceans, fill the air with warplanes - but use them to protect their own interests? He shook his head with amusement.
No, the Americans were not to be respected.
6. Deterrence
FELIX CORTEZ TRAVELED with a Costa Rican passport. If someone noted his Cuban accent, he'd explain that his family had left that country when he was a boy, but by carefully selecting his port of entry, he avoided that notice. Besides, he was working on the accent. Cortez was fluent in three languages - English and Russian in addition to his native Spanish. A raffishly handsome man, his tropical complexion was barely different from a vacationer's tan. The neat mustache and custom-tailored suit proclaimed him a successful businessman, and the gleaming white teeth made him a pleasant one at that. He waited in the immigration line at Dulles International Airport, chatting with the lady behind him until he got to the INS inspector, as resignedly unhurried as any frequent traveler.
"Good afternoon, sir," the inspector said, barely looking up from the passport. "What brings you to America?"
"Business," Cortez replied.
"Uh- huh," the inspector grunted. He flipped through the passport and saw numerous entry stamps. The man traveled a lot, and about half his trips in the previous... four years were to the States. The stamps were evenly split between Miami, Washington, and Los Angeles. "How long will you be staying?"
"Five days."
"Anything to declare?"
"Just my clothes, and my business notes." Cortez held up his briefcase.
"Welcome to America, Mr. D az." The inspector stamped the passport and handed it back.
"Thank you." He moved off to collect his bag, a large and well-used two-suiter. He tried to come through American airports at slack hours. This was less for convenience than because it was unusual for someone who had something to hide. At slack times the inspectors had all the time they needed to annoy people, and the sniffer dogs weren't rushed along the rows of luggage. It was also easier to spot surveillance when the airport concourses were uncrowded, of course, and Cortez/D az was an expert at countersurveillance.
His next stop was the Hertz counter, where he rented a full-size Chevy. Cortez had no love for Americans, but he did like their big cars. The routine was down pat. He used a Visa card. The young lady at the counter asked the usual question about joining the Hertz Number One Club, and he took the proffered brochure with feigned interest. The only reason he used a rental car company more than once was that there weren't enough to avoid repetition. Similarly, he never used the same passport twice, nor the same credit cards. At a place near his home he had an ample supply of both. He had come to Washington to see one of the people who made that possible.
His legs were still stiff as he walked out to get his car - he could have taken the courtesy van, but he'd been sitting for too long. The damp heat of a late spring day reminded him of home. Not that he remembered Cuba all that fondly, but his former government had, after all, given him the training that he needed for his current job. All the school classes on Marxism-Leninism, telling people who scarcely had food to eat that they lived in paradise. In Cortez's case, they'd had the effect of telling him what he wanted out of life. His training in the DGI had given him the first taste of privilege, and the unending political instruction had only made his government look all the more grotesque in its claims and its goals. But he'd played the game, and learned what he'd needed to learn, exchanging his time for training and field work, learning how capitalist societies work, learning how to penetrate and subvert them, learning their strong points and weak ones. The contrast between the two was entertaining to the former colonel. The relative poverty in Puerto Rico had looked like paradise to him, even while working along with fellow Colonel Ojeda and the Machetero savages to overthrow it - and replace it with Cuba's version of socialist realism. Cortez shook his head in amusement as he walked toward the parking lot.
Twenty feet over the Cuban's head, Liz Murray dropped her husband off behind a vanload of travelers. There was barely time for a kiss. She had errands to run, and they'd call Dan's flight in another ten minutes.
"I ought to be back tomorrow afternoon," he said as he got out.
"Good," Liz replied. "Remember the movers."
"I won't." Dan closed the door and took three steps. "I mean, I won't forget, honey..." He turned in time to see his wife laughing as she drove off; she'd done it to him again. "It's not fair," he grumbled to himself. "Bring you back from London, big promotion, and second day on the job they drop you in the soup." He walked through the self-opening doors into the terminal and found a TV monitor with his flight information. He had only one bag, and that was small enough to carry on. He'd already reviewed the paperwork - it had all been faxed to Washington by the Mobile Field Office and was the subject of considerable talk in the Hoover Building.
The next step was getting through the metal detector. Actually he bypassed it. The attendant gave out the usual, "Excuse me, sir," and Murray held up his ID folder, identifying himself as Daniel E. Murray, Deputy Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There was no way he could have passed through the magnetometer, not with the Smith Wesson automatic clipped to his belt, and people in airports tended to get nervous if he showed what he was carrying. Not that he shot that well with it. He hadn't even requalified yet. That was scheduled for the next week. They weren't so strict about that with top-level FBI management - his main workplace hazard now came from staple pullers - but though Murray was a man with few vanities, shooting skill was one of them. For no particular reason, Murray was worried about that. After four years in London as the legal attach , he knew that he needed some serious practice before he would shoot "expert" with either hand again, especially with a new gun. His beloved stainless-steel Colt Python.357 was in retirement. The Bureau was switching over to automatics, and on his arrival in his new office he'd found the engraved SW gift-wrapped on his desk, a present arranged by his friend Bill Shaw, the newly appointed executive assistant director (Investigations). Bill always had been a class act. Murray switched the bag to his left hand and surreptitiously checked to see that the gun was in place, much as an ordinary citizen might check for his wallet. The only bad thing about his London duty was being unarmed. Like any American cop, Murray felt slightly naked without a gun, even though he'd never had cause to use one in anger. If nothing else, he could make sure that this flight didn't go to Cuba. He wouldn't have much chance to do hands-on law enforcement anymore, of course. Now he was part of management, another way of saying that he was too old to be useful, Murray told himself as he selected a seat close to the departure gate. The problem at hand was about as close as he was going to get to handling a real case, and it was happening only because the Director had got hold of the file and called in Bill Shaw who, in turn, had decided that he wanted someone he knew to take a look at it. It promised to be ticklish. They were really starting him off with a cute one.
The flight took just over two hours of routine boredom and a dry meal. Murray was met at the gate by Supervisory Special Agent Mark Bright, assistant special-agent-in-charge of the Mobile Field Office.
"Any other bags, Mr. Murray?"
"Just this one - and the name's Dan," Murray replied. "Has anybody talked to them yet?"
"Not in yet - that is, I don't think so." Bright checked his watch. "They were due in about ten, but they got called in on a rescue last night. Some fishing boat blew up and the cutter had to get the crew off. It made the morning TV news. Nice job, evidently."
"Super," Murray observed. "We're going in to grill a friggin' hero, and he's gone and done it again."
"You know this guy's background?" Bright asked. "I haven't had much chance to -"
"I've been briefed. Hero's the right word. This Wegener's a legend. Red Wegener's called the King of SAR - that means search-and-rescue. Half the people who've ever been to sea, he's saved at one time or another. At least that's the word on the guy. He's got some big-time friends on The Hill, too."
"Like?"
"Senator Billings of Oregon." Murray explained why briefly.
"Chairman of Judiciary. Why couldn't he just have stayed with Transportation?" Bright asked the ceiling. The Senate Judiciary Committee had oversight duties for the FBI.
"How new are you on this case?"
"I'm here because DEA liaison is my job. I didn't see the file until just before lunch. Been out of the office for a couple of days," Bright said as he walked through the door. "We just had a baby."
"Oh," Murray noted. You couldn't blame a man for that. "Congratulations. Everyone all right?"
"Brought Marianne home this morning, and Sandra is the cutest thing I ever saw. Noisy, though."
Murray laughed. It had been quite a while since he'd had to handle an infant. Blight's car turned out to be a Ford whose engine purred like a well-fed tiger. Some paperwork on Captain Wegener lay on the front seat. Murray leafed through it while Bright picked his way out of the airport parking lot. It fleshed out what he'd heard in Washington.
"This is some story."
"How 'bout that." Bright nodded. "You don't suppose this is all true, do you?"
"I've heard some crazy ones before, but this one would be the all-time champ." Murray paused. "The funny thing is -"
"Yeah," the younger agent agreed. "Me, too. Our DEA colleagues believe it, but what broke loose out of this - I mean, even if the evidence is all tossed, what we got out of this is so -"
"Right." Which was the other reason Murray was involved in the case. "How important was the victim?"
"Big- time political connections, directorships of banks, the University of Alabama, the usual collection of civic groups -you name it. This guy wasn't just a solid member of the community, he was goddamned Stone Mountain." Both men knew that was in Georgia, but the point was made. "Old family, back to a Civil War general. His grandfather was a governor."
"Money?"
Bright grunted. "More than I'd ever need. Big place north of town, still a working farm-plantation, I guess you'd call it, but that's not where it comes from. He put all the family money into real-estate development. Very successfully as far as we can tell. The development stuff is a maze of small corporations - the usual stuff. We've got a team working, but it'll take awhile to sort through it. Some of the corporate veils are overseas, though, and we may never get it all. You know how that goes. We've barely begun to check things out."
" 'Prominent local businessman tied to drug kingpins.' Christ, he hid things real well. Never had a sniff?"
"Nary a one," Bright admitted. "Not us, not DEA, not the local cops. Nothing at all."
Murray closed the file and nodded at the traffic. This was only the opening crack in a case that could develop into man-years of investigative work. Hell, we don't even know exactly what we're looking for yet , the deputy assistant director told himself. All we do know is that there was a cold million dollars in used twenties and fifties aboard the good ship Empire Builder. So much cash could only mean one thing - but that wasn't true. It could mean lots of things, Murray thought,
"Here we are."
Getting onto the base was easy enough, and Bright knew the way to the pier. Panache looked pretty big from the car, a towering white cliff with a bright-orange stripe and some dark smudgemarks near midships. Murray knew that she was a small ship, but one needed a big ocean to tell. By the time he and Bright got out of the car, someone got on the phone at the head of the gangway, and another man appeared there within seconds. Murray recognized him from the file. It was Wegener.
The man had the muddy remains of what had once been red hair, but was now sprinkled with enough gray to defy an accurate description. He looked fit enough, the FBI agent thought as he came up the aluminum brow, a slight roll at the waist, but little else. A tattoo on his forearm marked him for a sailorman, and the impassive eyes marked the face of a man unaccustomed to questioning of any kind.
"Welcome aboard. I'm Red Wegener," the man said with enough of a smile to be polite.
"Thank you, Captain. I'm Dan Murray and this is Mark Bright."
"They told me you were FBI," the captain observed.
"I'm a deputy assistant director, down from Washington. Mark's the assistant special-agent-in-charge of the Mobile Office." Wegener's face changed a bit, Murray saw.
"Well, I know why you're here. Let's go to my cabin to discuss things."
"What's with all the scorching?" Dan asked as the captain led off. There was something about the way he'd said that. Something... odd.
"Shrimp boat had an engine fire. Happened five miles away from us last night while we were on the way in. The fuel tanks blew just as we came alongside. Got lucky. Nobody killed, but the mate was burned some."
"How about the boat?" Bright asked.
"Couldn't save her. Getting the crew off was pretty tricky." Wegener held open the door for his visitors. "Sometimes that's the best you can do. You gentlemen want any coffee?"
Murray declined. His eyes really bored in on the captain now. More than anything else, Dan thought, he looked embarrassed. Wrong emotion. Wegener got his guests seated, then took his chair behind the desk.
"I know why you're here," Red announced. "It's all my fault."
"Uh, Captain, before you go any further -" Bright tried to say.
"I've pulled some dumb ones in my time, but this time I really fucked up," Wegener went on as he lit his pipe. "You don't mind if I smoke, do you?"
"No, not at all," Murray lied. He didn't know what was coming, but he knew that it wasn't what Bright thought. He knew several other things that Bright didn't know, also. "Why don't you tell us about it?"
Wegener reached into his desk drawer and pulled something out. He tossed it to Murray. It was a pack of cigarettes.
"One of our friends dropped this on the deck and I had one of my people give this back to them. I figured - well, look at it. I mean, it looks like a pack of cigarettes, right? And when we have people in custody, we're supposed to treat 'em decent, right? So, I let 'em have their smokes. They're joints, of course. So, when we questioned them - especially the one who talked - well, he was high as a kite. That screws it all up, doesn't it?"
"That's not all, Captain, is it?" Murray asked innocently.
"Chief Riley roughed one of 'em up. My responsibility. I talked to the chief about it. The, uh, I forget his name - the obnoxious one - well, he spit on me, and Riley was there, and Riley got a little pissed and roughed him up some. He should not have done it, but this is a military organization, and when you spit on the boss, well, the troops might not like it. So Riley got a little out of hand - but it happened on my ship and it's my responsibility."
Murray and Bright exchanged a look. The suspects hadn't talked about that at all.
"Captain, that's not why we're here exactly," Murray said after a moment.
"Oh?" Wegener said. "Then why?"
"They say that you executed one of them," Bright replied. The stateroom was quiet for a moment. Murray could hear someone hammering on something, but the loudest noise came from the air-conditioning vent.
"They're both alive, aren't they? There were only two of them, and they're both alive. I sent that tape on the helicopter when we searched the yacht. I mean, if they're both alive, which one did we shoot?"
"Hanged," Murray said. "They say you hanged one."
"Wait a minute." He lifted the phone and punched a button. "Bridge, captain speaking. Send the XO to my stateroom. Thank you." The phone went back into place, and Wegener looked up. "If it's all right with you, I want my executive officer to hear this also."
Murray managed to keep his face impassive. You should have known, Danny , he told himself. They've had plenty of time to work out the little details, and Mr. Wegener is nobody's fool. He's got a U.S. senator to hide behind, and he handed us two coldblooded killers. Even without the confession, there's enough evidence for a capital murder case, and if you trash Wegener, you run the risk of losing that. The prominence of the victim - well, the U.S. Attorney won't go for it. No chance ... There wasn't a United States Attorney in all of America who lacked political ambition, and putting these two in the electric chair was worth half a million votes. Murray couldn't run the risk of screwing this case up. FBI Director Jacobs had been a federal prosecutor, and he'd understand. Murray decided that it might make things a lot easier.
The XO appeared a moment later, and after introductions were exchanged, Bright went on with his version of what the subjects had told the local FBI office. It took about five minutes during which Wegener puffed on his pipe and let his eyes go slightly wide.
"Sir," the XO told Bright when he was finished. "I've heard a couple of good sea stories, but that one's the all-time champ."
"It's my fault," Wegener grumbled with a shake of the head. "Lettin' 'em have their pot back."
"How come nobody noticed what they were smoking?" Murray asked, less with curiosity for the answer than for the skill with which it was delivered. He was surprised when the XO replied.
"There's an A/C return right outside the brig. We don't keep a constant watch on prisoners - these were our first, by the way - because that's supposed to be unduly intimidating or something. Anyway, it's in our procedure book that we don't. Besides, we don't have all that many people aboard that we can spare 'em. What with the smoke getting sucked out, nobody noticed the smell until that night. Then it was too late. When we brought them into the wardroom for questioning - one at a time; that's in the book, too - they were both kinda glassy-eyed. The first one didn't talk. The second one did. You have the tape, don't you?"
"Yes, I've seen it," Bright answered.
"Then you saw that we read them their rights, right off the card we carry, just like it says. But - hung 'em? Damn. That's crazy. I mean, that's really crazy. We don't - I mean, we can't. I don't even know when it was legal to do it."
"The last time I know about was 1843," the captain said. "The reason there's a Naval Academy at Annapolis is because some people got strung up on USS Somers . One of them was the son of the Secretary of War. Supposedly it, was an attempted mutiny, but there was quite a stink about it. We don't hang people anymore," Wegener concluded wryly. "I've been in the service a long time, but I don't go that far back."
"We can't even have a general court-martial," the XO added. "Not by ourselves, I mean. The manual for that weighs about ten pounds. Gawd, you need a judge, and real lawyers, all that stuff. I've been in the service for almost nine years, and I've never even seen a real one - just the practice things in law classes at the Academy. All we ever do aboard is Captain's Mast, and not much of that."
"Not a bad idea, though. I wouldn't have minded hanging those sons of bitches," Wegener observed. It struck Murray as a very strange, and very clever, thing to say. He felt a little sorry for Bright, who'd probably never had a case go this way. In that sense Murray was grateful for his time as legal attach in London. He understood politics better than most agents.
"Oh?"
"When I was a little kid, they used to hang murderers. I grew up in Kansas. And you know, there weren't many murders back then. Course, we're too civilized to do that now, and so we got murders every damned day. Civilized," Wegener snorted. "XO, did they ever hang pirates like this?"
"I don't think so. Blackbeard's crew was tried at Williamsburg - ever been there? - the old courthouse in the tourist part of the place. I remember hearing that they were actually hung where one of the Holiday Inns is. And Captain Kidd was taken home to England for hanging, wasn't he? Yeah, they had a place called Execution Dock or something like that. So - no, I don't think they really did it aboard ship, even in the old days. Damn sure we didn't do it. Christ, what a story."
"So it never happened," Murray said, not in the form of a question.
"No, sir, it did not," Wegener replied. The XO nodded to support his captain.
"And you're willing to say that under oath."
"Sure. Why not?"
"If it's all right with you, I also need to speak to one of your chiefs. It's the one who 'assaulted' the -"
"Is Riley aboard?" Wegener asked the XO.
"Yeah. Him and Portagee were working on something or other down in the goat locker."
"Okay, let's go see 'em." Wegener rose and waved for his visitors to follow.
"You need me, sir? I have some work to do."
"Sure thing, XO. Thanks."
"Aye aye. See you gentlemen later," the lieutenant said, and disappeared around a corner.
The walk took longer than Murray expected. They had to detour around two work parties who were repainting bulkheads. The chiefs' quarters - called the goat locker for reasons ancient and obscure - was located aft. Riley and Oreza, the two most senior chiefs aboard, shared the cabin nearest the small compartment where they and their peers ate in relative privacy. Wegener got to the open door and found a cloud of smoke. The bosun had a cigar clamped in his teeth while his oversized hands were trying to manipulate a ridiculously small screwdriver. Both men came to their feet when the captain appeared.
"Relax. What the hell you got there?"
"Portagee found it." Riley handed it over. "It's a real old one and we've been trying to fix it."
"How does 1778 grab you, sir?" Oreza asked. "A sextant made by Henry Edgworth. Found it in an old junk shop. It might be worth a few bucks if we can get it cleaned up."
Wegener gave it a close look. "1778, you said?"
"Yes, sir. That makes it one of the oldest-model sextants. The glass is all broke, but that's easy to fix. I know a museum that pays top dollar for these - but then I might just keep it myself, of course."
"We got some company," Wegener said, getting back to business. "They want to talk about the two people we picked up."
Murray and Bright held up their ID cards. Dan noticed a phone in the compartment. The XO, he realized, might have called to warn them what was coming. Riley's cigar hadn't dropped an ash yet.
"No problem," Oreza said. "What are you guys going to do with the bastards?"
"That's up to the U.S. Attorney," Bright said. "We're supposed to help put the case together, and that means we have to establish what you people did when you apprehended them."
"Well, you want to talk to Mr. Wilcox, sir. He was in command of the boarding party," Riley said. "We just did what he told us."
"Lieutenant Wilcox is on leave," the captain pointed out.
"What about after you brought them aboard?" Bright asked.
"Oh, that," Riley admitted. "Okay, I was wrong, but that little cocksucker - I mean, he spit on the captain, sir, and you just don't do that kinda shit, y'know? So I roughed him up some. Maybe I shouldn't have done it, but maybe that little prick oughta have manners, too."
"That's not what we're here about," Murray said after a moment. "He says you hanged him."
"Hung him? What from?" Oreza asked.
"I think you call it the yardarm."
"You mean - hang, like in, well, hang ? Around the neck, I mean?" Riley asked.
"That's right."
The bosun's laugh rumbled like an earthquake. "Sir, if I ever hung somebody, he wouldn't go around bitchin' about it the next day."
Murray repeated the story as he'd heard it, almost word for word. Riley shook his head.
"That's not the way it's done, sir."
"What do you mean?"
"You say that the little one said that the last thing he saw was his friend swinging back and forth, right? That ain't the way it's done."
"I still don't understand."
"When you hang somebody aboard ship, you tie his feet together and run a downhaul line - you tie that off to the rail or a stanchion so he don't swing around. You gotta do that, sir. You have something that weight - well, over a hundred pounds-swinging around like that, it'll break things. So what you do is, you two-block him - that means you run him right up to the block - that's the pulley, okay? - and you got the downhaul to keep him in place real snug like. Otherwise it just ain't shipshape. Hell, everybody knows that."
"How do you know that?" Bright asked, trying to hide his exasperation.
"Sir, you lower boats into the water, or you rig stuff on this ship, and that's my job. We call it seamanship. I mean, say you had some piece of gear that weighs as much as a man, okay? You want it swinging around loose like a friggin' chandelier on a long chain? Christ, it'd eventually hit the radar, tear it right off the mast. We had a storm that night, too. Nah, the way they did it in the old days was just like a signal hoist-line on top of the hoist and a line on the bottom, tie it off nice and tight so it don't go noplace. Hey, somebody in the deck division leaves stuff flapping around like that, I tear him a new asshole. Gear is expensive. We don't go around breaking it for kicks, sir. What do you think, Portagee?"
"He's right. That was a pretty good blow we had that night - didn't the captain tell you? - the only reason we still had the punks aboard was that we waved off the helo pickup 'cause of the weather. We didn't have any work parties out on deck that night, did we?"
"No chance," Riley said. "We buttoned up tight that night. What I mean, sir, is we can go out and work even in a damned hurricane if we have to, but unless you gotta, you don't go screwin' around on the weather decks during a gale. It's dangerous. You lose people that way."
"How bad was it that night?" Murray asked.
"Some of the new kids spent the night with their heads in the thunderjugs. The cook decided to serve chops that night, too." Oreza laughed. "That's how we learned, ain't it, Bob?"
"Only way," Riley agreed.
"So there wasn't a court-martial that night either?"
"Huh?" Riley appeared genuinely puzzled for a moment, then his face brightened. "Oh, you mean we gave 'em a fair trial, then hung 'em, like in the old beer commercial?"
"Just one of them," Murray said helpfully.
"Why not both? They're both fuckin' murderers, ain't they? Hey, sir, I was aboard that yacht, all right? I seen what they did - have you? It's a real mess. You see something like that all the time, maybe. I never have, and - well, I don't mind tellin' you, sir, it shook me up some. You want 'em hung, yeah, I'll do it and they won't bitch about it the next day, either. Okay, maybe I shouldn't 'a snapped the one over the rail - lost my cool, and I shouldn't have - okay, I'm sorry about that. But those two little fucks took out a whole family, probably did some rapin', too. I got a family, too, y'know? I got daughters. So does Portagee. You want us to shed tears over those two fuckers, you come to the wrong place, sir. You sit 'em in the electric chair and I'll throw the switch for you."
"So you didn't hang him?" Murray asked.
"Sir, I wish I'd'a thought of it," Riley announced. It was, after all, Oreza who'd thought of it.
Murray looked at Bright, whose face was slightly pink by this time. It had gone even more smoothly than he'd expected. Well, he'd been told that the captain was a clever sort. You didn't give command of a ship to a jerk - at least you weren't supposed to.
"Okay, gentlemen, I guess that answers all the questions we have for the moment. Thank you for your cooperation." A moment later, Wegener was leading them away.
The three men stopped at the gangway for a moment. Murray motioned for Bright to head for the car, then turned to the captain.
"You actually operate helicopters off that deck up there?"
"All the time. I just wish we had one of our own."
"Could I see it before I leave? I've never been aboard a cutter before."
"Follow me." In less than a minute, Murray was standing in the center of the deck, directly on the crossed yellow lines painted on the black no-skid deck coating. Wegener was explaining how the lights at the control station worked, but Murray was looking at the mast, drawing an imaginary line from the yardarm to the deck. Yeah , he decided, you could do it easy enough .
"Captain, for your sake I hope you never do anything this crazy again."
Wegener turned in surprise. "What do you mean?"
"We both know what I mean."
"You believe what those two -"
"Yes, I do. A jury wouldn't - at least I don't think one would, though you can never really tell what a jury will believe. But you did it. I know - you can't say anything..."
"What makes you think -"
"Captain, I've been in the Bureau for twenty-six years. I've heard lots of crazy stories, some real, some made up. You gradually get a feel for what's real and what isn't. The way it looks to me, you could run a piece of rope from that pulley up there, down to here pretty easy, and if you're taking the seas right, having a man swing wouldn't matter much. It sure wouldn't hurt the radar antenna that Riley was so worried about. Like I said, don't do it again. This one's a freebie because we can prosecute the case without the evidence you got for us. Don't push it. Well, I'm sure you won't. You found out that there was more to this one than you thought, didn't you?"
"I was surprised that the victim was -"
"Right. You opened a great big can of worms without getting your hands too dirty. You were lucky. Don't push it," Murray said again.
"Thank you, sir."
One minute after that, Murray was back in the car. Agent Bright was still unhappy.
"Once upon a time, when I was a brand-new agent fresh out of the Academy, I was assigned to Mississippi," Murray said. "Three civil-rights workers disappeared, and I was a very junior member of the team that cleared the case. I didn't do much of anything other than hold Inspector Fitzgerald's coat. Ever hear about Big Joe?"
"My dad worked with him," Bright answered.
"Then you know that Joe was a character, a real old-time cop. Anyway, the word got to us that the local Klukkers were mouthing off about how they were gonna kill a few agents - you know the stories, how they were harassing some families and stuff like that. Joe got a little pissed. Anyway, I drove him out to see - forget the mutt's name, but he was the Grand Kleagle of the local Klavern and he was the one with the biggest mouth. He was sitting under a shady tree in his front lawn when we pulled up. He had a shotgun next to the chair, and he was half in the bag from booze already. Joe walks up to him. The mutt starts to pick up the shotgun, but Joe just stared him down. Fitzgerald could do that; he put three guys in the ground and you could see in his face that he'd done it. I got a little worried, had my hand on my revolver, but Joe just stared him down and told him if there was any more talk about offing an agent, or any more shitty phone calls to wives and kids, Big Joe was going to come back and kill him, right there in his front yard. Didn't shout or anything, just said it like he was ordering breakfast. The Kleagle believed him. So did I. Anyway, all that loose talk ended.
"What Joe did was illegal as hell," Murray went on. "Sometimes the rules get bent. I've done it. So have you."
"I've never -"
"Don't get your tits in a flutter, Mark. I said 'bent,' not broken. The rules do not anticipate all situations. That's why we expect agents to exercise judgment. That's how society works. In this case, those Coasties broke loose some valuable information, and the only way we can use it is if we ignore how they got it. No real harm was done, because the subjects will be handled as murderers, and all the evidence we need is physical. Either they fry or they cop to the murders and cooperate by again giving us all the information that the good Captain Wegener scared out of 'em. Anyway, that's what they decided in D.C. It's too embarrassing to everyone to make an issue of what we discussed aboard the cutter. Do you really think a local jury would -"
"No," Bright admitted at once. "It wouldn't take much of a lawyer to blow it apart, and even if he didn't -"
"Exactly. We'd just be spinning our wheels. We live in an imperfect world, but I don't think that Wegener will ever make that mistake again."
"Okay." Bright didn't like it, but that was beside the point.
"So what we do now is figure out exactly why this poor bastard and his family got themselves murdered by a sicario and his spear-carrier. You know, when I was chasing wise guys up in New York, nobody messed with families. You didn't even kill a guy in front of his family except to make a special kind of point."
"Not much in the way of rules for the druggies," Bright pointed out.
"Yeah - and I used to think terrorists were bad."
It was so much easier than his work with the Macheteros, Cortez thought. Here he was, sitting in the corner booth of a fine, expensive restaurant with a ten-page wine list in his hands - Cortez thought himself an authority on wines - instead of a rat-infested barrio shack eating beans and mouthing revolutionary slogans with people whose idea of Marxism was robbing banks and making heroic taped pronouncements that the local radio stations played between the rock songs and commercials. America had to be the only place in the world, he thought, where poor people drove their own cars to demonstrations and the longest lines they stood in were at the supermarket check-out.
He selected an obscure estate label from the Loire Valley for dinner. The wine steward clicked his ballpoint in approval as he retrieved the list.
Cortez had grown up in a place where the poor people - which category included nearly everyone - scrounged for shoes and bread. In America, the poor areas were the ones where people indulged drug habits that required hundreds of cash dollars per week. It was more than bizarre to the former colonel. In America drugs spread from the slums to the suburbs, bringing prosperity to those who had what others wanted.
Which was essentially what happened on the international scale also, of course. The yanquis , ever niggardly in their official aid to their less prosperous neighbors, now flooded them with money, but on what the Americans liked to call a people-to-people basis. That was good for a laugh. He didn't know or care how much the yanqui government gave to its friends, but he was sure that ordinary citizens - so bored with their comfortable lives that they needed chemical stimulation - gave far more, and did so without strings on "human rights." He'd spent so many years as a professional intelligence officer, trying to find a way to demean America, to damage its stature, lessen its influence. But he'd gone about it in the wrong way, F lix had come to realize. He'd tried to use Marxism to fight capitalism despite all the evidence that showed what worked and what did not. He could, however, use capitalism against itself, and fulfill his original mission while enjoying all the benefits of the very system that he was hurting. And the oddest part of all: his former employers thought him a traitor because he had found a way that worked...
The man opposite him was a fairly typical American, Cortez thought. Overweight from too much good food, careless about cleaning his expensive clothing. Probably didn't polish his shoes either. Cortez remembered going barefoot for much of his youth, and thinking himself fortunate to have three shirts to call his own. This man drove an expensive car, lived in a comfortable flat, had a job that paid enough for ten DGI colonels - and it wasn't enough. That was America right there - whatever one had, it was never enough.
"So what do you have for me?"
"Four possible prospects. All the information is in my briefcase."
"How good are they?" Cortez asked.
"They all meet your guidelines," the man answered. "Haven't I always -"
"Yes, you are most reliable. That is why we pay you so much."
"Nice to be appreciated, Sam," the man said with a trace of smugness.
F lix - Sam to his dinner partner - had always appreciated the people with whom he worked. He appreciated what they could do. He appreciated the information they provided. But he despised them for the weaklings they were. Still, an intelligence officer - and that remained the way he thought of himself - couldn't be too picky. America abounded with people like this one. Cortez did not reflect on the fact that he, too, had been bought. He deemed himself a skilled professional, perhaps something of a mercenary, but that was in keeping with an honored tradition, wasn't it? Besides, he was doing what his former masters had always wanted him to do, more effectively than had ever been possible with the DGI, and someone else was doing the paying. In fact, ultimately the Americans themselves paid his salary.
Dinner passed without incident. The wine was every bit as excellent as he'd expected, but the meat was overdone and the vegetables disappointing. Washington, he thought, was overrated as a city of restaurants. On his way out he simply picked up his companion's briefcase and walked to his car. The drive back to his hotel took twenty leisurely minutes. After that, he spent several hours going over the documents. The man was reliable, Cortez reflected, and earned his appreciation. Each of the four was a solid prospect.
His recruiting effort would begin tomorrow.
7. Knowns and Unknowns
IT HAD TAKEN a week to get accustomed to the altitude, as Julio had promised. Chavez eased out of the suspenders pack. It wasn't a fully loaded one yet, only twenty-five pounds, but they were taking their time, almost easing people into the conditioning program instead of using a more violent approach. That suited the sergeant, still breathing a little hard after the eight-mile run. His shoulders hurt some, and his legs ached in the usual way, but around him there was no sound of retching, and there hadn't been any dropouts this time around. Just the usual grumbles and curses.
"That wasn't so bad," Julio said without gasping. "But I still say that getting laid is the best workout there is."
"You got that one right," Chavez agreed with a laugh. "All those unused muscle groups, as the free-weight guys say."
The best thing about the training camp was the food. For lunch in the field they had to eat MRE packs - "Meal Ready to Eat," which was three lies for the price of one - but breakfast and supper selections were always well prepared in the camp's oversized kitchen. Chavez invariably selected as large a bowl of fresh fruits as he could get away with, heavily laced with white sugar for energy, along with the usual Army coffee whose caffeine content always seemed augmented to give you that extra wake-up punch. He laid into his bowl of diced grapefruit, oranges, and damned near everything else with gusto while his tablemates attacked their greasy eggs and bacon. Chavez went back to the line for some hash-browns. He'd heard that carbohydrates were also good for energy, and now that he was almost accustomed to the altitude, the thought of grease for breakfast didn't bother him that much.
Things were going well. Work here was hard, but there was nothing in the way of Mickey Mouse bullshit. Everyone here was an experienced pro, and they were being treated as such. No energy was being wasted on bed-making; the sergeants all knew how, and if a blanket corner wasn't quite tucked in, peer pressure set things right without the need for shouting from a superior officer. They were all young men, as serious about their work as they knew how to be, but there was a spirit of fun and adventure. They still didn't know exactly what they were training for. There was the inevitable speculation, whispering between bunks that gradually transformed to a symphony of snoring at night after agreement on some wildly speculative idea.
Though an uneducated man, Chavez was not a stupid one. Somehow he knew that all of the theories were wrong. Afghanistan was all over; they couldn't be going there. Besides, everyone here spoke fluent Spanish. He mulled over it again while chewing a mouthful of kiwi fruit - a treat he hadn't known to exist a week before. High altitude - they weren't training them here for the fun of it. That eliminated Cuba and Panama. Nicaragua, perhaps. How high were the mountains there? Mexico and the other Central American nations had mountains, too. Everyone here was a sergeant. Everyone here had led a squad, and had done training at one level or other. Everyone here was a light infantryman. Probably they'd be dispatched on some special training mission, therefore, training other light-fighters. That made it counterinsurgency. Of course, every country south of the Rio Grande had one sort of guerrilla problem or other. They resulted from the inequities of the individual governments and economies, but to Chavez the explanation was simpler and to the point - those countries were all fucked up. He'd seen enough of that in his trips with his battalion to Honduras and Panama. The local towns were dirty - they'd made his home barrio seem paradise on earth. The police - well, he'd never thought that he would come to admire the LAPD. But it was the local armies that had earned his especial contempt. Bunch of lazy, incompetent bullies. Not much different from street gangs, as a matter of fact, except that they all carried the same sort of guns (the L.A. gangs tended toward individualism). Weapons skills were about the same. It didn't require very much for a soldier to butt-stroke some poor bastard with his rifle. The officers - well, he hadn't seen anyone to compare with Lieutenant Jackson, who loved to run with his men and didn't mind getting all dirty and smelly like a real soldier. But inevitably it was the sergeants down there who earned his fullest contempt. It had been that paddy Sergeant McDevitt in Korea who'd shown Ding Chavez the light - skill and professionalism equaled pride. And, when you got down to it, pride truly earned was all there was to a man. Pride was what kept you going, what kept you from caving in on those goddamned mountainside runs. You couldn't let down your friends. You couldn't let your friends see you for something less than you wanted to be. That was the short version of everything he had learned in the Army, and he knew that the same could be said of all the men in this room. What they were preparing for, therefore, was to train others to do the same. So their mission was a fairly conventional Army mission. For some reason or other - probably political, but Chavez didn't worry about political stuff; never made much sense anyway - it was a secret mission. He was smart enough to know that this kind of hush-hush preparation meant CIA. He was correct on that judgment. It was the mission he was wrong on.
Breakfast ended at the normal time. The men rose from their tables, taking their trays and dishes to the stacking table before proceeding outside. Most made pit stops and many, including Chavez, changed into clean, dry T-shirts. The sergeant wasn't overly fastidious, but he did prefer the crisp, clean smell of a newly washed shirt. There was an honest-to-God laundry service here. Chavez decided that he'd miss the camp, altitude and all. The air, if thin, was clean and dry. Each day they'd hear the lonely wail of diesel horns from the trains that entered the Moffat Tunnel, whose entrance they'd see on their twice-daily runs. Often in the evening they'd catch the distant sight of the double-deck cars of an Amtrak train heading east to Denver. He wondered what hunting was like here. What did they hunt? Deer, maybe? They'd seen a bunch of them, big mule deer, but also the curious white shapes of mountain goats racing up sheer rock walls as the soldiers approached. Now, those fuckers were really in shape, Julio had noted the previous day. But Chavez dismissed the thought after a moment. The animals he hunted had only two legs. And shot back if you weren't careful.
The four squads formed up on time. Captain Ramirez called them to attention and marched them off to their separate area, about half a mile east of the main camp at the far end of the flat bottom of the high valley. Waiting for them was a black man dressed in T-shirt and dark shorts, both of which struggled to contain bulging muscles.
"Good morning, people," the man said. "I am Mr. Johnson. Today we will begin some real mission-oriented training. All of you have had training in hand-to-hand combat. My job is to see how good you are, and to teach you some new tricks that your earlier training may have left out. Killing somebody silently isn't all that hard. The tricky part is getting close enough to do it. We all know that." Johnson's hands slipped behind his back as he talked on for a moment. "This is another way to kill silently."
His hands came into view holding a pistol with a large, canlike device affixed to the front. Before Chavez had told himself that it was a silencer, Johnson brought it around in both hands and fired it three times. It was a very good silencer, Ding noted immediately. You could barely hear the metallic clack of the automatic's slide-quieter, in fact, than the tinkle of glass from the three bottles that disintegrated twenty feet away - and you couldn't hear the sound of the shot at all. Impressive.
Johnson gave them all a mischievous grin. "You don't get your hands all bruised, either. Like I said, you all know hand-to-hand, and we're going to work on that. But I've been around the block a few times, just like you people, and let's not dick around the issue. Armed combat beats unarmed any day of the week. So today we're going to learn a whole new kind of fighting: silent armed combat." He bent down and flipped the blanket off a submachine gun. It, too, appeared to have a silencer on the muzzle. Chavez reproached himself for his earlier speculation. Whatever the mission was, it wasn't about training.
Vice Admiral James Cutter, USN, was a patrician. At least he looked like one, Ryan thought - tall and spare, his hair going a regal silver, and a confident smile forever fixed on his pink-scrubbed face. Certainly he acted like one - or thought he did, Jack corrected himself. It was Ryan's view that truly important people didn't go out of their way to act like it. It wasn't as though being the President's Special Assistant for National Security Affairs was the same as a peerage. Ryan knew a few people who actually had them. Cutter came from one of those old swamp-Yankee families which had grown rocks on their New England farmsteads for generations, then turned to the mercantile trade, and, in Cutter's case, sent its surplus sons to sea. But Cutter was the sort of sailor for whom the sea was a means to an end. More than half of his career had been spent in the Pentagon, and that, Ryan thought, was no place for a proper sailor. He'd had all the necessary commands, Jack knew. First a destroyer, then a cruiser. Each time he'd done his job well - well enough to be noticed, which must have been the important part. Plenty of outstanding officers' careers stopped cold at captain's rank because they'd failed to be noticed by a high-enough patron. What had Cutter done to make him stick out from the crowd...?
Polished up the knocker faithfully, perhaps? Jack wondered as he finished his briefing.
Not that it mattered now. The President had noticed him on Jeff Pelt's staff, and on Pelt's return to academia - the International Relations chair at the University of Virginia - Cutter had slipped into the job as neatly as a destroyer coming alongside the pier. He sat behind his desk in a neatly tailored suit, sipping his coffee from a mug with USS BELKNAP engraved on it, the better to remind people that he'd commanded that cruiser once. In case the casual visitor missed that one - there were few casual visitors to the National Security Adviser's office - the wall on the left was liberally covered with plaques of the ships he'd served on, and enough signed photographs for a Hollywood agent's office. Naval officers call this phenomenon the I LOVE ME! wall, and while most of them have one, they usually keep it at home.
Ryan didn't like Cutter very much. He hadn't liked Pelt either, but the difference was that Pelt was almost as smart as he thought he was. Cutter was not even close. The three-star Admiral was in over his head, but had not the sense to know it. The bad news was that while Ryan was also a Special Assistant To, it was not To the President. That meant he had to report to Cutter whether he liked it or not. With his boss in the hospital, that task would be a frequent occurrence.
"How's Greer?" the man asked. He spoke with a nasal New England accent that ought to have died a natural death long before, though it was one thing that Ryan didn't mind. It reminded him of his undergraduate days at Boston College.
"They're not through with the tests yet." Ryan's voice betrayed his worries. It looked like pancreatic cancer, the survival rate for which was just about zero. He'd checked with Cathy about that, and had tried to get his boss to Johns Hopkins, but Greer was Navy, which meant going to Bethesda. Though Bethesda Naval Medical Center was the Navy's number-one hospital, it wasn't Johns Hopkins.
"And you're going to take over for him?" Cutter asked.
"That is in rather poor taste, Admiral," Bob Ritter answered for his companion. "In Admiral Greer's absence, Dr. Ryan will represent him from time to time."
"If you handle that as well as you've handled this briefing, we ought to get along just fine. Shame about Greer. Hope things work out." There was about as much emotion in his voice as one needed to ask directions.
You're a warm person, aren't you? Ryan thought to himself as he closed his briefcase. I bet the crew of the Belknap just loved you . But Cutter wasn't paid to be warm. He was paid to advise the President. And Ryan was paid to brief him, not to love him.
Cutter wasn't a fool. Ryan had to admit that also. He was not an expert in the area of Ryan's own expertise, nor did he have Pelt's cardsharp's instinct for political wheeling and dealing behind the scene - and, unlike Pelt, Cutter liked to operate without consulting the State Department. He sure as hell didn't understand how the Soviet Union worked. The reason he was sitting in that high-back chair, behind that dark-oak desk, was that he was a reputed expert in other areas, and evidently those were the areas in which the President had most of his current interest. Here Ryan's intellect failed him. He came back to his brief on what KGB was up to in Central Europe instead of following that idea to its logical conclusion. Jack's other mistake was more basic. Cutter knew that he wasn't the man Jeff Pelt had been, and Cutter wanted to change all that.
"Nice to see you again, Dr. Ryan. Good brief. I'll bring that matter to the President's attention. Now if you'll excuse us, the DDO and I have something to discuss."
"See you back at Langley, Jack," Ritter said. Ryan nodded and left. The other two waited for the door to close behind him. Then the DDO presented his own brief on Operation SHOWBOAT. It lasted twenty minutes.
"So how do we coordinate this?" the Admiral asked Ritter.
"The usual. About the only good thing that came out of the Desert One fiasco was that it proved how secure satellite communications were. Ever see the portable kind?" the DDO asked. "It's standard equipment for the light forces."
"No, just the ones aboard ship. They're not real portable."
"Well, it has a couple of pieces, an X-shaped antenna and a little wire stand that looks like it's made out of a couple of used coat hangers. There's a new backpack only weighs fifteen pounds, including the handset, and it even has a Morse key in case the sender doesn't want to talk too loud. Single sideband, super-encrypted UHF. That's as secure as communications get."
"But what about keeping them covert?" Cutter was worried about that.
"If the region was heavily populated," Ritter explained tiredly, "the opposition wouldn't be using it. Moreover, they operate mainly at night for the obvious reason. So our people will belly-up during the day and only move around at night. They are trained and equipped for that. Look, we've been thinking about this for some time. These people are very well trained already, and we're -"
"Resupply?"
"Helicopter," Ritter said. "Special-ops people down in Florida."
"I still think we should use Marines."
"The Marines have a different mission. We've been over this, Admiral. These kids are better trained, they're better equipped, most of them have been into areas like this one, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get them into the program without anybody noticing," Ritter explained for what must have been the twentieth time. Cutter wasn't one to listen to the words of others. His own opinions were evidently too loud. The DDO wondered how the President fared, but that question needed no answer. A presidential whisper carried more weight than a scream from anyone else. The problem was, the President so often depended on idiots to make his wishes a reality. Ritter would not have been surprised to learn that his opinion of the National Security Adviser matched that of Jack Ryan; it was just that Ryan could not know why.
"Well, it's your operation," Cutter said after a moment. "When does it start?"
"Three weeks. Just had a report last night. Things are going along just fine. They already had all the basic skills we needed. It's only a matter of honing a few special ones and adding a few refinements. We've been lucky so far. Haven't even had anybody hurt up there."
"How long have you had that place, anyway?"
"Thirty years. It was supposed to have been an air-defense radar installation, but the funding got cut off for some reason or other. The Air Force turned it over to us, and we've been using it to train agents ever since. It doesn't show up on any of the OMB site lists. It belongs to an offshore corporation that we use for various things. During the fall we occasionally lease it out as a hunting camp, would you believe? It even shows a profit for us, which is another reason why it doesn't show on the OMB list. Is that covert enough? Came in real useful during Afghanistan, though, doing the same thing we're doing now, and nobody ever found out about it..."
"Three weeks."
Ritter nodded. "Maybe a touch longer. We're still working on coordinating the satellite intelligence, and our assets on the ground."
"Will it all work?" Cutter asked rhetorically.
"Look, Admiral, I've told you about that. If you want some magical solution to give to the President, we don't have it. What we can do is sting them some. The results will look good in the papers, and, hell, maybe we'll end up saving a life or two. Personally, I think it's worth doing even if we don't get much of a return."
The nice thing about Ritter, Cutter thought, was that he didn't state the obvious. There would be a return. Everyone knew what that was all about. The mission was not an exercise in cynicism, though some might see it as such.
"What about the radar coverage?"
"There are only two aircraft coming on line. They're testing a new system called LPI - Low Probability of Intercept - radar. I don't know all the details, but because of a combination of frequency agility, reduced side-lobes, and relatively low power output, it's damned hard to detect the emissions from the set. That will invalidate the ESM equipment that the opposition has started using. So we can use our assets on the ground to stake out between four and six of the covert airfields, and let us know when a shipment is en route. The modified E-2s will establish contact with them south of Cuba and pace them all the way in till they're intercepted by the F-15 driver I told you about. He's a black kid - hell of a fighter jock, they say. Comes from New York. His mother got mugged by a druggie up there. It was a bad one. She got all torn up, and eventually died. She was one of those ghetto success stories that you never hear about. Three kids, all of them turned out pretty well. The fighter pilot is a very angry kid at the moment. He'll work for us, and he won't talk."
"Right," Cutter said skeptically. "What about if he develops a conscience later on and -"
"The boy told me that he'd shoot all the bastards down if we wanted him to. A druggie killed his mother . He wants to get even, and he sees this as a good way. There are a lot of sensitive projects underway at Eglin. His fighter is cut loose from the rest as part of the LPI Radar project. It's two Navy airplanes carrying the radar, and we've picked the flight crews - pretty much the same story on them. And remember - after we have lock-on from the F-15, the radar aircraft shuts down and leaves. So if Bronco - that's the kid's name - does have to splash the inbound druggie, nobody'll know about it. Once we get them on the ground, the flight crews will have the living shit scared out of them. I worked out the details on that part myself. If some people have to disappear - I don't expect it - that can be arranged, too. The Marines there are all special-ops types. One of my people will pretend he's a fed, and the judge we take them to is the one the President -"
"I know that part." It was odd, Cutter thought, how ideas grow. First the President had made an intemperate remark after learning that the cousin of a close friend had died of a drug overdose. He'd talked about it with Ritter, gotten an idea, and mentioned it to the President. A month after that, a plan had started to grow. Two months more and it was finalized. A secret Presidential Finding was written and in the files - there were only four copies of it, each of which was locked up tight. Now things were starting to move. It was past the time for second thoughts, Cutter told himself weakly. He'd been involved in all the planning discussions, and still the operation had somehow leaped unexpectedly to full flower...
"What can go wrong?" he asked Ritter.
"Look, in field operations anything can go wrong. Just a few months ago a crash operation went bad because of an illegal turn -"
"That was KGB," Cutter said. "Jeff Pelt told me about that one."
"We are not immune. Shit happens, as they say. What we can do, we've done. Every aspect of the operation is compartmentalized. On the air part, for example, the fighter pilot doesn't know the radar aircraft or its people - for both sides it's just call signs and voices. The people on the ground don't know what aircraft are involved. The people we're putting in-country will get instructions from satellite radios - they won't even know where from. The people who insert them won't know why they're going or where the orders come from. Only a handful of people will know everything. The total number of people who know anything at all is less than a hundred, and only ten know the whole story. I can't make it any tighter than that. Now, either it's a Go-Mission or it's not. That's your call, Admiral Cutter. I presume," Ritter added for effect, "that you've fully briefed the President."
Cutter had to smile. It was not often, even in Washington, that a man could speak the truth and lie at the same time: "Of course, Mr. Ritter."
"In writing," Ritter said next.
"No."
"Then I call the operation off," the DDO said quietly. "I won't be left hanging on this one."
"But I will?" Cutter observed. He didn't allow anger to creep into his voice, but his face conveyed the message clearly enough. Ritter made the obvious maneuver.
"Judge Moore requires it. Would you prefer that he ask the President himself?"
Cutter was caught short. His job, after all, was to insulate the President. He'd tried to pass that onus to Ritter and/or Judge Moore, but found himself outmaneuvered in his own office. Someone had to be responsible for everything; bureaucracy or not, it always came down to one person. It was rather like a game of musical chairs. Someone was always left standing. That person was called the loser. For all his skills, Vice Admiral Cutter had found himself without a seat on that last chair. His naval training, of course, had taught him to take responsibilities, but though Cutter called himself a naval officer, and thought of himself as one - without wearing the uniform, of course - responsibility was something he'd managed to avoid for years. Pentagon duty was good for that, and White House duty was better still. Now responsibility was his again. He hadn't been this vulnerable since his cruiser had nearly rammed a tanker during replenishment operations - his executive officer had saved him with a timely command to the helmsman, Cutter remembered. A pity that his career had ended at captain's rank, but Ed just hadn't had the right stuff to make Flag...
Cutter opened a drawer to his desk and pulled out a sheet of paper whose letterhead proclaimed "The White House." He took a gold Cross pen from his pocket and wrote a clear authorization for Ritter in his best Palmer Method penmanship. You are authorized by the President ... The Admiral folded the sheet, tucked it into an envelope, and handed it across.
"Thank you, Admiral." Ritter tucked the envelope into his coat pocket. "I'll keep you posted."
"You be careful who sees that," Cutter said coldly.
"I do know how to keep secrets, sir. It's my job, remember?" Ritter rose and left the room, finally with a warm feeling around his backside. His ass was covered. It was a feeling craved by many people in Washington. It was one he didn't share with the President's National Security Adviser, but Ritter figured it wasn't his fault that Cutter hadn't thought this one through.
Five miles away, the DDI's office seemed a cold and lonely place to Ryan. There was the credenza and the coffee machine where James Greer made his Navy brew, there the high-backed judge's chair in which the old man leaned back before making his professorial statements of fact and theory, and his jokes, Jack remembered. His boss had one hell of a sense of humor. What a fine teacher he might have made - but then he really was a teacher to Jack. What was it? Only six years since he'd started with the Agency. He'd known Greer for less than seven, and the Admiral had in large part become the father he'd lost in that airplane crash at Chicago. It was here he had come for advice, for guidance. How many times?
The trees outside the seventh-floor windows were green with the leaves of summer, blocking the view of the Potomac Valley. The really crazy things had all happened when there were no leaves, Ryan thought. He remembered pacing around on the lush carpet, looking down at the piles of snow left by the plows while trying to find answers to hard questions, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not.
Vice Admiral James Greer would not live to see another winter. He'd seen his last snow, his last Christmas. Ryan's boss lay in a VIP suite at Bethesda Naval Medical Center, still alert, still thinking, still telling jokes. But his weight was down by fifteen pounds in the last three weeks, and the chemotherapy denied him any sort of food other than what came through tubes stuck in his arms. And the pain. There was nothing worse, Ryan knew, than to watch the pain of others. He'd seen his wife and daughter in pain, and it had been far worse than his own hospital stays. It was hard to go and see the Admiral, to see the tightness around the face, the occasional stiffening of limbs as the spasms came and went, some from the cancer, some from the medications. But Greer was as much a part of his family as - God, Ryan thought, I am thinking of him like my father. And so he would, until the end.
"Shit," Jack said quietly, without knowing it.
"I know what you mean, Dr. Ryan."
"Hmph?" Jack turned. The Admiral's driver (and security guard) stood quietly by the door while Jack retrieved some documents. Even though Ryan was the DDI's special assistant and de facto deputy, he had to be watched when going over documents cleared DDI-eyes-only. CIA's security rules were tough, logical, and inviolable.
"I know what you mean, sir. I've been with him eleven years. He's as much a friend as a boss. Every Christmas he has something for the kids. Never forgets a birthday, either. You think there's any hope at all?"
"Cathy had one of her friends come down. Professor Goldman. Russ is as good as they come, professor of oncology at Hopkins, consultant to NIH, and a bunch of other things. He says one chance in thirty. It's spread too far, too fast, Mickey. Two months, tops. Anything else would be a miracle." Ryan almost smiled. "I got a priest working on that."
Murdock nodded. "I know he's tight with Father Tim over at Georgetown. He was just at the hospital for some chess last night. The Admiral took him in forty-eight moves. You ever play chess with him?"
"I'm not in his class. Probably never will be."
"Yes, sir, you are," Murdock said after a moment or two. "Leastways, that's what he says."
"He would." Ryan shook his head. Damn it, Greer wouldn't want either of them to talk like this. There was work to be done. Jack took the key and unlocked the file drawer in the desk. He set the key chain on the desk blotter for Mickey to retrieve and reached down to pull the drawer, but goofed. Instead he pulled out the sliding board you could use as a writing surface, though this one was marked with brown rings from the DDI's coffee mug. Near the inside end of it, Ryan saw, was a file card, taped in place. Written on the card, in Greer's distinctive hand, were two safe combinations. Greer had a special office safe and so did Bob Ritter. Jack remembered that his boss had always been clumsy with combination locks, and he probably needed the combination written down so he wouldn't forget it. He found it odd that the Admiral should have combinations for both his and Ritter's, but decided after a moment that it made sense. If somebody had to get into the DDO's safe in a hurry - for example, if Ritter were kidnapped, and someone had to see what really classified material was in the current file - it had to be someone very senior, like the DDL Probably Ritter had the combination to the DDI's personal safe, as well. Jack wondered who else did. Shrugging off the thought, he slid the board back into place and opened the drawer. There were six files there. All related to long-term intelligence evaluations that the Admiral wanted to see. None were especially critical. In fact, they weren't all that sensitive, but it would give the Admiral something to occupy his mind. A rotating team of CIA security personnel guarded his room, with two on duty at all times, and he could still do work in the time he had left.
Damn! Jack snarled at himself. Get your mind off of it. Hell, he does have a chance. Some chance is better than none at all .
Chavez had never handled a submachine gun. His personal weapon had always been the M-16 rifle, often with an M-203 grenade launcher slung under the barrel. He also knew how to use the SAW-the Belgian-made squad automatic weapon that had recently been added to the Army's inventory-and had shot expert with pistol once. But submachine guns had long since gone out of favor in the Army. They just weren't serious weapons of the sort a soldier would need.
Which was not to say that he didn't like it. It was a German gun, the MP-5 SD2 made by Heckler Koch. It was decidedly unattractive. The matte-black finish was slightly rough to the touch, and it lacked the sexy compactness of the Israeli Uzi. On the other hand, it wasn't made to look good, he thought, it was made to shoot good. It was made to be reliable. It was made to be accurate. Whoever had designed this baby, Chavez decided as he brought it up for the first time, knew what shooting was all about. Unusually for a German-made weapon, it didn't have a huge number of small parts. It broke down easily and quickly for cleaning, and reassembly took less than a minute. The weapon nestled snugly against his shoulder, and his head dropped automatically into the right place to peer through the ring-aperture sight.
"Commence firing," Mr. Johnson commanded.
Chavez had the weapon on single-shot. He squeezed off the first round, just to get a feel for the trigger. It broke cleanly at about eleven pounds, the recoil was straight back and gentle, and the gun didn't jump off the target the way some weapons did. The shot, of course, went straight through the center of the target's silhouetted head. He squeezed off another, and the same thing happened, then five in rapid fire. The repeated shots rocked him back an inch or two, but the recoil spring ate up most of the kick. He looked up to see seven holes in a nice, tight group, like the nose carved into a jack-o'-lantern. Okay. Next he flipped the selector switch to the burst position - it was time for a little rock and roll. He put three rounds at the target's chest. This group was larger, but any of the three would have been fatal. After another one Chavez decided that he could hold a three-round burst dead on target. He didn't need full-automatic fire. Anything more than three rounds just wasted ammunition. His attitude might have seemed strange for a soldier, but as a light infantryman he understood that ammunition was something that had to be carried. To finish off his thirty-round magazine he aimed bursts at unmarked portions of the target card, and was rewarded with hits exactly where he'd wanted them.
"Baby, where have you been all my life?" Best of all, it wasn't much noisier than the rustle of dry leaves. It wasn't that it had a silencer; the barrel was a silencer. You heard the muted clack of the action, and the swish of the bullet. They were using a subsonic round, the instructor told them. Chavez picked one out of the box. The bullet was a hollow-point design; it looked like you could mix a drink in it, and on striking a man it probably spread out to the diameter of a dime. Instant death from a head shot, nearly as quick in the chest - but if they were training him to use a silencer, he'd be expected to go for the head. He figured that he could take head shots reliably from fifty or sixty feet - maybe farther under ideal circumstances, but soldiers don't expect ideal circumstances. On the face of it, he'd be expected to creep within fifteen or twenty yards of his target and drop him without a sound.
Whatever they were preparing for, he thought again, it sure as hell wasn't a training mission.
"Nice groups, Chavez," the instructor observed. Only three other men were on the firing line. There would be two submachine gunners per squad. Two SAWs - Julio had one of those - and the rest had M-16s, two of them with grenade launchers attached. Everyone had pistols, too. That seemed strange, but despite the weight Chavez didn't mind.
"This baby really shoots, sir."
"It's yours. How good are you with a pistol?"
"Just fair. I don't usually -"
"Yeah, I know. Well, you'll all get practice. Pistol ain't really good for much, but there's times when it comes in right handy." Johnson turned to address the whole squad. "All right, you four come on up. We want everyone to know how all these here weapons work. Everybody's gotta be an expert."
Chavez relinquished his weapon to another squad member and walked back from the firing line. He was still trying to figure things out. Infantry combat is the business of death, at the personal level, where you could usually see what you were doing and to whom you were doing it. The fact that Chavez had not actually done it yet was irrelevant; it was still his business, and the organization of his unit told him what form the mission would take. Special ops. It had to be special ops. He knew a guy who'd been in the Delta Force at Bragg. Special operations were merely a refinement of straight infantry stuff. You had to get in real close, usually you had to chop down the sentries, and then you hit hard and fast, like a bolt of lightning. If it wasn't over in ten seconds or less - well, then things got a little too exciting. The funny part to Chavez was the similarity with street-gang tactics. There was no fair play in soldiering. You sneaked in and did people in the back without warning. You didn't give them a chance to protect themselves - none at all. But what was called cowardly in a gang kid was simply good tactics to a soldier. Chavez smiled to himself. It hardly seemed fair, when you looked at it like that. The Army was just better organized than a gang. And, of course, its targets were selected by others. The whole point to an Army, probably, was that what it did made sense to someone. That was true of gangs, too, but Army activity was supposed to make sense to someone important, someone who knew what he was really doing. Even if what he was doing didn't make much sense to him - a frequent occurrence for soldiers - it did make sense to somebody.
Chavez wasn't old enough to remember Vietnam.
Seduction was the saddest part of the job.
With this, as with all parts of his profession, Cortez had been trained to be coldly objective and businesslike, but there wasn't a way to be coldly intimate - at least not if you wanted to accomplish anything. Even the KGB Academy had recognized that. There had been hours of lectures on the pitfalls, he remembered with an ironic smile - Russians trying to tell a Latin about romantic entanglements. Probably the climate worked against them. You adapted your approach to the individual peculiarities of your target subject, in this case a widow who at forty-six retained surprising good looks, who had enough remaining of her youth to need companionship after the children retired for the evening or went out on their own dates, whose bed was a lonely place of memories grown cold. It wasn't his first such subject, and there was always something brave about them, as well as something pathetic. He was supposed to think - as his training had taught him - that their problems were their business and his opportunity. But how does a man become intimate with such a woman without feeling her pain? The KGB instructors hadn't had an answer to that one, though they did give him the proper technique. He, too, had to have suffered a recent loss.
His "wife" had also died of cancer, he'd told her. He'd married late in life, the story went, after getting the family business back on track - all that time working, flying around to secure the business his father had spent his life founding - and then married his Maria only three years before. She'd become pregnant, but when she'd visited the doctor to confirm the joyous news, the routine tests... only six months. The baby hadn't had a chance, and Cortez had nothing left of Maria. Perhaps, he'd told his wineglass, it was God's punishment on him for marrying so young a girl, or for his many dalliances as a footloose playboy.
At that point Moira's hand had come across the table to touch his. Of course it wasn't his fault, the woman told him. And he looked up to see the sympathy in the eyes of someone who'd asked herself questions not so different from those he'd just ostensibly addressed to himself. People were so predictable. All you had to do was press the right buttons - and have the proper feelings. When her hand had come to his, the seduction was accomplished. There had been a flush of warmth from the touch, the feeling of simple humanity. But if he thought of her as a simple target, how could he return the emotions - and how could he accomplish the mission? He felt her pain, her loneliness. He would be good to her.
And so he was, now two days later. It would have been comical except for how touching it was, how she'd prepared herself like a teenage girl on a date - something she hadn't done for over twenty years; certainly her children had found it entertaining, but there had been enough time since the death of their father that they didn't resent their mother's needs and had smiled bemused encouragement at her as she walked out to her car. A quick, nervous dinner, then the short ride to his hotel. Some more wine to get over the nerves that were real for both of them, if more so for her. But it had certainly been worth the wait. She was out of practice, but her responses were far more genuine than those he got from his usual bedmates. Cortez was very good at sex. He was proud of his abilities and gave her an above-average performance: an hour's work, building her up slowly, then letting her back down as gently as he knew how.
Now they lay side by side, her head on his shoulder, tears dripping slowly from her eyes in the silence. A fine woman, this one. Even dying young, her husband had been a lucky man to have a woman who knew that silence could be the greatest passion of all. He watched the clock on the end table. Ten minutes of silence before he spoke.
"Thank you, Moira... I didn't know... it's been." He cleared his throat. "This is the first time since... since..." Actually it had been a week since the last one, which had cost him thirty thousand pesos. A young one, a skilled one. But -
The woman's strength surprised him. He was barely able to take his next breath, so powerful was her embrace. Part of what had once been his conscience told him that he ought to be ashamed, but the greater part reported that he'd given more than he'd taken. This was better than purchased sex. There were feelings, after all, that money couldn't buy; it was a thought both reassuring and annoying to Cortez, and one which amplified his sense of shame. Again he rationalized that there would be no shame without her powerful embrace, and the embrace would not have come unless he had pleased her greatly.
He reached behind himself to the other end table and got his cigarettes.
"You shouldn't smoke," Moira Wolfe told him.
He smiled. "I know. I must quit. But after what you have done to me," he said with a twinkle in his eye, "I must gather myself." Silence.
" Madre de Dios ," he said after another minute.
"What's the matter?"
Another mischievous smile. "Here I have given myself to you, and I hardly know who you are!"
"What do you want to know?"
A chuckle. A shrug. "Nothing important - I mean, what could be more important than what you have already done?" A kiss. A caress. More silence. He stubbed out the cigarette at the halfway point to show that her opinion was important to him. "I am not good at this."
"Really?" It was her turn to chuckle, his turn to blush.
"It is different, Moira. I - when I was a young man, it was understood that when - it was understood that there was no importance, but... now I am grown, and I cannot be so..." Embarrassment. "If you permit it, I wish to know about you, Moira. I come to Washington frequently, and I wish... I am tired of the loneliness. I am tired of... I wish to know you," he said with conviction. Then, tentatively, haltingly, hopeful but afraid, "If you permit it."
She kissed his cheek gently. "I permit it."
Instead of his own powerful hug, Cortez let his body go slack with relief not wholly feigned. More silence before he spoke again.
"You should know about me. I am wealthy. My business is machine tools and auto parts. I have two factories, one in Costa Rica, the other in Venezuela. The business is complicated and - not dangerous, but... it is complicated dealing with the big assemblers. I have two younger brothers also in the business. So... what work do you do?"
"Well, I'm an executive secretary. I've been doing that kind of work for twenty years."
"Oh? I have one myself."
"And you must chase her around the office..."
"Consuela is old enough to be my mother. She worked for my father. Is that how it is in America? Does your boss chase you?" A hint of jealous outrage.
Another chuckle. "Not exactly. I work for Emil Jacobs. He's the Director of the FBI."
"I do not know the name." A lie. "The FBI, that is your federales , this I know. And you are the chief secretary for them all, then?"
"Not exactly. Mainly my job is to keep Mr. Jacobs organized. You wouldn't believe his schedule - all the meetings and conferences to keep straight. It's like being a juggler."
"Yes, it is that way with Consuela. Without her to watch over me..." Cortez laughed. "If I had to choose between her and one of my brothers, I would choose her. I can always hire a factory manager. What sort of man is this - Jacobs, you say? You know, when I was a boy, I wanted to be a policeman, to carry the gun and drive the car. To be the chief police officer, that must be a grand thing."
"Mainly his job is shuffling papers - I get to do a lot of the filing, and dictation. When you are the head, your job is mainly doing budgets and meetings."
"But surely he gets to know the - the good things, yes? The best part of being a policeman - it must be the best thing, to know the things that other people do not. To know who are the criminals, and to hunt them."
"And other things. It isn't just police work. They also do counterespionage. Chasing spies," she added.
"That is CIA, no?"
"No. I can't talk about it, of course, but, no, that is a Bureau function. It's all the same, really, and it's not like television at all. Mainly it's boring. I read the reports all the time."
"Amazing," Cortez observed comfortably. "All the talents of a woman, and also she educates me." He smiled encouragement so that she would elaborate. That idiot who'd put him onto her, he remembered, suggested that he'd have to use money. Cortez thought that his KGB training officers would have been proud of his technique. The KGB was ever parsimonious with funds.
"Does he make you work so hard?" Cortez asked a minute later.
"Some of the days can go long, but really he's pretty good about that."
"If he makes you work too hard, we will speak, Mr. Jacobs and I. What if I come to Washington and I cannot see you because you are working?"
"You really want...?"
"Moira." His voice changed its timbre. Cortez knew that he'd pressed too hard for a first time. It had gone too easily, and he'd asked too many questions. After all, lonely widow or not, this was a woman of substance and responsibility - therefore a woman of intellect. But she was also a woman of feelings, and of passion. He moved his hands and his head. He saw the question on her face: Again? He smiled his message: Again.
This time he was less patient, no longer a man exploring the unknown. There was familiarity now. Having established what she liked, his ministrations had direction. Within ten minutes she'd forgotten all of his questions. She would remember the smell and the feel of him. She would bask in the return of youth. She would ask herself where things might lead, but not how they had started.
Assignations are conspiratorial by their nature. Just after midnight he returned her to where her car was parked. Yet again she amazed him with her silence. She held his hand like a schoolgirl, yet her touch was in no way so simple. One last kiss before she left the car - she wouldn't let him get out.
"Thank you, Juan," she said quietly.
Cortez spoke from the heart. "Moira, because of you I am again a man. You have done more for me. When next I come to Washington, we must -"
"We will."
He followed her most of the way home, to let her know that he wished to protect her, breaking off before getting so close to her home that her children - surely they were waiting up - would notice. Cortez drove back to the apartment with a smile on his face, only partly because of his mission.
Her co- workers knew at once. With little more than six hours' sleep, Moira bounced into the office wearing a suit she hadn't touched in a year. There was a sparkle in her eye that could not be hidden. Even Director Jacobs noticed, but no one said anything. Jacobs understood. He'd buried his wife only a few months after Moira's loss, and learned that such voids in one's life could never quite be filled with work. Good for her , he thought. She still had children at home. He'd have to go easier on her schedule. She deserved another chance at a real life.
8. Deployment
THE AMAZING THING was how smoothly things had gone, Chavez thought. After all, they were all sergeants, but whoever had set this thing up had been a clever man because there had been no groping around for which man got which function. There was an operations sergeant in his squad to assist Captain Ramirez with planning. There was a medical corpsman, a good one from the Special Forces who already had his weapons training. Julio Vega and Juan Piscador had once been machine-gunners, and they got the SAWs. The same story applied to their radioman. Each member of the team fit neatly into a preselected slot, all were sufficiently trained that they respected the expertise of one another, and further cross-training enhanced that respect even more. The rugged regime of exercises had extended the pride with which each had arrived, and within two weeks the team had meshed together like a finely made machine. Chavez, a Ranger School graduate, was point man and scout. His job was to probe ahead, to move silently from one place of concealment to another, to watch and listen, then report his observations to Captain Ramirez.
"Okay, where are they?" the captain asked.
"Two hundred meters, just around that corner," Chavez whispered in reply. "Five of them. Three asleep, two awake. One's sitting by the fire. The other one's got an SMG, walking around some."
It was cool in the mountains at night, even in summer. A distant coyote howled at the moon. There was the occasional whisper from a deer moving through the trees, and the only sound associated with man was the distant noise of jets. The clear night made for surprisingly good visibility, even without the low-light goggles with which they were normally equipped. In the thin mountain air, the stars overhead didn't sparkle, but shone as constant, discrete points of light. Ordinarily Chavez would have noticed the beauty, but this was a work night.
Ramirez and the rest of the squad were wearing four-color camouflage fatigues of Belgian manufacture. Their faces were painted with matching tones from sticks of makeup (understandably the Army didn't call it that) so that they blended into the shadows as perfectly as Wells' invisible man. Most importantly, they were totally at home in the darkness. Night was their best and most powerful friend. Man was a day-hunter. All of his senses, all of his instincts, and all of his inventions worked best in the light. Primordial rhythms made him less efficient at night - unless he worked very hard to overcome them, as these soldiers had. Even American Indian tribes living in close partnership with nature had feared the night, had almost never fought at night, had not even guarded their encampments at night - thus giving the U.S. Army its first useful doctrine for operations in darkness. At night man built fires as much for vision as for warmth, but in doing so reduced that vision to mere feet, whereas the human eye, properly conditioned, can see quite well in the darkness.
"Only five?"
"That's all I counted, sir."
Ramirez nodded and gestured for two more men to come forward. A few quiet orders were given. He went with the other two, moving to the right to get above the encampment. Chavez went back forward. His job was to take the sentry down, along with the one dozing at the fire. Moving quietly in the dark is harder than seeing. The human eye is better at spotting movement in the dark than in identifying stationary objects. He put each foot down carefully, feeling for something that might slide or break, thus making noise - the human ear is much underestimated. In daylight his method of moving would have appeared comical, but stealth has its price. Worst of all, he moved slowly, and Ding was no more patient than any man still in his twenties. It was a weakness against which he'd trained himself. He walked in a tight crouch. His weapon was up and ready to guard against surprise, and as the moment approached, his senses were fully alerted, as though an electric current ran across his skin. His head swiveled slowly left and right, his eyes never quite locking on anything, because when one stares at an object in the darkness, it tends to disappear after a few seconds.
Something bothered Chavez, but he didn't know what it was. He stopped for a moment, looking around, searching with all his senses over to his left for about thirty seconds. Nothing. For the first time tonight he found himself wishing for his night goggles. Ding shook it off. Maybe a squirrel or some other night forager. Not a man, certainly. No one could move in the dark as well as a Ninja, he smiled to himself, and got back to the business at hand. He reached his position several minutes later, just behind a scrawny pine tree, and eased down to a kneeling position. Chavez slid the cover off the green face of his digital watch, watching the numbers march slowly toward the appointed moment. There was the sentry, moving in a circle around the fire, never more than thirty feet from it, trying to keep his eyes turned away from it to protect his night vision. But the light reflected off the rocks and the pines would damage his perceptions badly enough - he looked straight at Chavez twice, but saw nothing.
Time.
Chavez brought up his MP-5 and loosed a single round into the target's chest. The man flinched with the impact, grasped the spot where he'd been hit, and dropped to the ground with a surprised gasp. The MP-5 made only a slight metallic clack, like a small stone rolling against another, but in the still mountain night, it was something out of the ordinary. The drowsy one by the fire turned around, but only made it halfway when he too was struck. Chavez figured himself to be on a roll and was taking aim on one of the sleeping men when the distinctive ripping sound of Julio's squad automatic weapon jolted them from their slumber. All three leapt to their feet, and were dead before they got there.
"Where the hell did you come from?" the dead sentry demanded. The place on his chest where the wax bullet had struck was very sore, all the more so from surprise. By the time he was standing again, Ramirez and the others were in the camp.
"Kid, you are very good," a voice said behind Chavez, and a hand thumped down on his shoulder. The sergeant nearly jumped out of his skin as the man walked past him into the encampment. "Come on."
A rattled Chavez followed the man to the fire. He cleared his weapon on the way - the wax bullets could do real harm to a man's face.
"We'll score that one a success," the man said. "Five kills, no reaction from the bad guys. Captain, your machine-gunner got a little carried away. I'd go easier on the rock and roll; the sound of an automatic weapon carries an awful long way. I'd also try to move in a little closer, but - I guess that rock there was about the best you could do. Okay, forget that one. My mistake. We can't always pick the terrain. I liked your discipline on the approach march, and your movement into the objective was excellent. This point man you have is terrific. He almost picked me up." The last struck Chavez as faint praise indeed.
"Who the fuck are you!" Ding asked quietly.
"Kid, I was doing this sort of thing for real when you were playing with guns made by Mattel. Besides, I cheated." Clark held up his night goggles. "I picked my route carefully, and I froze every time you turned your head. What you heard was my breathing. You almost had me. I thought I blew the exercise. Sorry. My name's Clark, by the way." A hand appeared.
"Chavez." The sergeant took it.
"You're pretty good, Chavez. Best I've seen in a while. I especially like the footwork. Not many have the patience you do. We could have used you in the 3rd SOG." It was Clark's highest praise, and rarely given.
"What's that?"
A grunt and a chuckle. "Something that never existed - don't worry about it."
Clark walked over to examine the two men Chavez had shot. Both were rubbing identical places on their flak jackets, right over their hearts.
"You know how to shoot, too."
"Anybody can hit with this."
Clark turned to look at the young man. "Remember, when it's for real, it's not quite the same."
Chavez recognized genuine meaning in that statement. "What should I do different, sir?"
"That's the hard part," Clark admitted as the rest of the squad approached the fire. He spoke as a teacher to a gifted pupil. "Part of you has to pretend it's the same as training. Another part has to remember that you don't get many mistakes anymore. You have to know which part to listen to, 'cause it changes from one minute to the next. You got good instincts, kid. Trust 'em. They'll keep you alive. If things don't feel right, they probably aren't. Don't confuse that with fear."
"Huh?"
"You're going to be afraid out there, Chavez. I always was. Get used to the idea, and it can work for you 'stead of against you. For Christ's sake, don't be ashamed of it. Half the problem out in Indian Country is people afraid of being afraid."
"Sir, what the hell are we training for?"
"I don't know yet. Not my department." Clark managed to conceal his feelings on that score. The training wasn't exactly in accord with what he thought the mission was supposed to be. Ritter might be having another case of the clevers. There was nothing more worrisome to Clark than a clever superior.
"You're going to be working with us, though."
It was an exceedingly shrewd observation, Clark thought. He'd asked to come out here, of course, but realized that Ritter had maneuvered him into asking. Clark was the best man the Agency had for this sort of thing. There weren't many men with similar experience anywhere in government service, and most of those, like Clark, were getting a little old for the real thing. Was that all? Clark didn't know. He knew that Ritter liked to keep things under his hat, especially when he thought he was being clever. Clever men outsmart themselves, Clark thought, and Ritter wasn't immune from that.
"Maybe," he admitted reluctantly. It wasn't that he minded associating with these men, but Clark worried about the circumstances that might make it necessary, later on. Can you still cut it, Johnny boy?
"So?" Director Jacobs asked. Bill Shaw was there, too.
"So he did it, sure as hell," Murray replied as he reached for his coffee. "But taking it to trial would be nasty. He's a clever guy, and his crew backed him up. If you read up on his file, you'll see why. He's some officer. The day I went down, he rescued the crew of a burning fishing boat - talk about perfect timing. There were scorch marks on the hull, he went in so close. Oh, sure, we could get them all apart and interview them, but just figuring out who was involved would be tricky. I hate to say this, but it probably isn't worth the hassle, especially with the senator looking over our shoulder, and the local U.S. Attorney probably won't spring for it either. Bright wasn't all that crazy about it, but I calmed him down. He's a good kid, by the way."
"What about the defense for the two subjects?" Jacobs asked.
"Slim. On the face of it the case against them is pretty damned solid. Ballistics has matched the bullet Mobile pulled out of the deck to the gun recovered on the boat, with both men's fingerprints on it - that was a real stroke of luck. The blood type around where the bullet was found was AB-positive, which matches the wife. A carpet stain three feet away from that confirms that she was having her period, which along with a couple of semen stains suggests rape rather strongly. Right now they're doing the DNA match downstairs on semen samples recovered from the rug - anybody here want to bet against a positive match? We have a half-dozen bloody fingerprints that match the subjects ten points' worth or more. There's a lot of good physical evidence. It's more than enough to convict already," Murray said confidently, "and the lab boys haven't got halfway through their material yet. The U.S. Attorney is going to press for capital punishment. I'll think he'll get it. The only question is whether or not we allow them to trade information for a lighter sentence. But it's not exactly my case." That earned Murray a smile from the Director.
"Pretend it is," Jacobs ordered.
"We'll know in a week or so if we need anything they can tell us. My instincts say no. We ought to be able to figure out who the victim was working for, and that'll be the one who ordered the hit - we just don't know why yet. But it's unlikely that the subjects know why either. I think we have a couple of sicarios who hoped to parlay their hit into an entree to the marketing side of the business. I think they're throwaways. If that's correct, they don't know anything that we can't figure out for ourselves. I suppose we have to give them a chance, but I would recommend against mitigation of sentence. Four murders - bad ones at that. We have a death-penalty statute, and to this brick-agent, I think the chair would fit them just fine."
"Getting nasty in your old age?" Shaw asked. It was another inside joke. Bill Shaw was one of the Bureau's leading intellectuals. He had won his spurs cracking down on domestic terrorist groups, and had accomplished that mission by carefully rebuilding the FBI's intelligence-gathering and analysis procedures. A quintessential chess player with a quiet, organized demeanor, this tall, spare man was also a former field agent who advocated capital punishment in a quiet, organized, and well-reasoned way. It was a point on which police opinion was almost universal. All you had to do to understand capital punishment was to see a crime scene in all its vile spectacle.
"The U.S. Attorney agrees, Dan," Director Jacobs said. "These two druggies are out of the business for keeps."
As if it matters , Murray thought to himself. What mattered to him was that two murderers would pay the price. Because a sufficiently large stash of drugs had been found aboard the yacht, the government could invoke the statute that allowed the death penalty in drug-related murders. The relationship was probably a loose one in this case, but that didn't matter to the three men in the room. The fact of murder - brutal and premeditated - was enough. But to say, as both they and the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama would tell the TV cameras, that this was a fight against the drug trade, was a cynical lie.
Murray's education had been a classical one at Boston College, thirty years before. He could still recite passages in Latin from Virgil's Aeneid , or Cicero's opening salvo against Catiline. His study of Greek had been only in translation - foreign languages were one thing to Murray; different alphabets were something else - but he remembered the legend of the Hydra, the mythical beast that had seven or more heads. Each time you cut one off, two would grow to take its place. So it was with the drug trade. There was just too much money involved. Money beyond the horizon of greed. Money to purchase anything a simple man - most of them were - could desire. A single deal could make a man wealthy for life, and there were many who would willingly and consciously risk their lives for that one deal. Having decided to wager their lives on a toss of the dice - what value might they attach to the lives of others? The answer was the obvious one. And so they killed as casually and as brutally as a child might stamp down his foot on an anthill. They killed their competitors because they didn't wish to have competition. They killed their competitors' families whole because they didn't want a wrathful son to appear five, ten, twenty years later with vendetta on his mind; and also because, like nation-states armed with nuclear weapons, the principle of deterrence came into play. Even a man willing to wager his own life might quail before the prospect of wagering those of his children.
So in this case they'd cut off two heads from the Hydra. In three months or so the government would present its case in Federal District Court. The trial would probably last a week.
The defense would do its best, but as long as the feds were careful with their evidence, they'd win. The defense would try to discredit the Coast Guard, but it wasn't hard to see what the prosecutor had already decided: the jury would look at Captain Wegener and see a hero, then look at the defendants and see scum. The only likely tactic of the defense would almost certainly be counterproductive. Next, the judge had to make the proper rulings, but this was the South, where even federal judges were expected to have simple, clear ideas about justice. Once the defendants had been found guilty, the penalty phase of the trial would proceed, and again, this was the South, where people read their Bibles. The jury would listen to the aggravating circumstances: mass murder of a family, probability of rape, murder of children, and drugs. But there was a million dollars aboard, the defense would counter. The principal victim was involved in the drug trade. What proof of that is there? the prosecutor would inquire piously - and what of the wife and children? The jury would listen quietly, soberly, almost reverently, would get their instructions from the same judge who had told them how to find the defendants guilty in the first place. They'd deliberate a reasonable period of time, going through the motions of thorough consideration for a decision made days earlier, and report back: death. The criminals, no longer defendants, would be remanded to federal custody. The case would automatically be appealed, but a reversal was unlikely so long as the judge hadn't made any serious procedural errors, which the physical evidence made unlikely. It would take years of appeals. People would object to the sentence on philosophical grounds - Murray disagreed but respected them for their views. The Supreme Court would have to rule sooner or later, but the Supremes, as the police called them, knew that, despite earlier rulings to the contrary, the Constitution clearly contemplated capital punishment, and the will of the People, expressed through Congress, had directly mandated death in certain drug-related cases, as the majority opinion would make clear in its precise, dry use of the language. So, in about five years, after all the appeals had been heard and rejected, both men would be strapped into a wooden chair and a switch would be thrown.
That would be enough for Murray. For all his experience and sophistication, he was before all things a cop. He was an adulthood beyond his graduation from the FBI Academy, when he'd thought that he and his classmates - mostly retired now - would really change the world. The statistics said that they had in many ways, but statistics were too dry, too remote, too inhuman. To Murray the war on crime was an endless series of small battles. Victims were robbed alone, kidnapped alone, or killed alone, and were individuals to be saved or avenged by the warrior-priests of the FBI. Here, too, his outlook was shaped by the values of his Catholic education, and the Bureau remained a bastion of Irish-Catholic America. Perhaps he hadn't changed the world, but he had saved lives, and he had avenged deaths. New criminals would arise as they always did, but his battles had all ended in victories, and ultimately, he had to believe, there would be a net difference for his society, and the difference would be a positive one. He believed as truly as he believed in God that every felon caught was probably a life saved, somewhere down the line.
In this case he had helped to do so again.
But it wouldn't matter a damn to the drug business. His new post forced him to assume a longer view that ordinary agents contemplated only over drinks after their offices closed. With these two out of circulation, the Hydra had already grown two new heads, Murray knew, perhaps more. His mistake was in not pursuing the myth to its conclusion, something others were already doing. Heracles had slain the Hydra by changing tactics. One of the people who had remembered that fact was in this room. What Murray had not yet learned was that at the policy-making level, one's perspective gradually changed one's views.
Cortez liked the view also, despite the somewhat thinner air of this eyrie. His newly acquired boss knew the superficial ways to communicate his power. His desk faced away from the wide window, making it hard for those opposite the massive desk to read the expression on his face. He spoke with the calm, quiet voice of great power. His gestures were economical, his words generally mild. In fact he was a brutal man, Cortez knew, and despite his education a less sophisticated man than he deemed himself to be, but that, F lix knew, was why he'd been hired. So the former colonel trained in Moscow Center adjusted the focus of his eyes to examine the green vista of the valley. He allowed Escobedo to play his eye-power games. He'd played them with far more dangerous men than this one.
"So?"
"I have recruited two people," Cortez replied. "One will feed us information for monetary considerations. The other will do so for other reasons. I also examined two other potential prospects, but discarded them as unsuitable."
"Who are they - who are the ones you will use?"
"No." Cortez shook his head. "I have told you that the identity of my agents must remain secret. This is a principle of intelligence operations. You have informers within your organization, and loose talk would compromise our ability to gather the information which you require. Jefe ," he said fawningly. This one needed that sort of thing. " Jefe , you have hired me for my expertise and experience. You must allow me to do my work properly. You will know the quality of my sources from the information which I give you. I understand how you feel. It is normal. Castro himself has asked me that question, and I gave him the same answer. It must be so."
That earned Cortez a grunt. Escobedo liked to be compared with a chief of state, better still one who had defied the yanquis so successfully for a generation. There would be a satisfied smile now on the handsome face, F lix knew without bothering to check for it. His answer was a lie for two reasons: Castro had never asked the question, and neither F lix nor anyone else on that island would ever have dared to deny him the information.
"So what have you learned?"
"Something is afoot," he said in a matter-of-fact voice that was almost taunting. After all, he had to justify his salary. "The American government is putting together a new program designed to enhance their interdiction efforts. My sources have no specifics as yet, though what they have heard has come from multiple sources and is probably true. My other source will be able to confirm what information I receive from the first." The lesson was lost on Escobedo, F lix knew. Recruiting two complementary sources on a single mission would have earned him a flowery commendation letter from any real intelligence service.
"What will the information cost us?"
Money. It is always money with him , Cortez told himself with a stifled sigh. No wonder he needed a professional with his security operations. Only a fool thinks that he can buy everything. On the other hand, there were times when money was helpful, and though he didn't know it, Escobedo paid more money to his American hirelings and traitors than the entire Communist intelligence network.
"It is better to spend a great deal of money on one person at a high level than to squander it on a large number of minor functionaries. A quarter of a million dollars will do nicely to get the information which we require." Cortez would be keeping most of that, of course. He had expenses of his own.
"That is all?" Escobedo asked incredulously. "I pay more than that to -"
"Because your people have never used the proper approach, jefe . Because you pay people on the basis of where they are, not what they know. You have never adopted a systematic approach to dealing with your enemies. With the proper information, you can utilize your funds much more efficiently. You can act strategically instead of tactically," Cortez concluded by pushing the proper button.
"Yes! They must learn that we are a force to be reckoned with!"
Not for the first time, F lix thought that his main objective was to take the money and run... perhaps a house in Spain... or, perhaps, to supplant this egomaniacal buffoon. That was a thought... But not for now. Escobedo was an egomaniac, but he was also a shrewd one, capable of rapid action. One difference between this man and those who ran his former agency was that Escobedo wasn't afraid to make a decision, and do it quickly. No bureaucracy here, no multiplicity of desks for messages to pass. For that he respected El Jefe . At least he knew how to make a decision. KGB had probably been that way once, maybe even the American intelligence organs. But no longer.
"One more week," Ritter told the National Security Adviser.
"Nice to hear that things are moving," the Admiral observed. "Then what?"
"Why don't you tell me? Just to keep things clear," the DDO suggested. He followed it with a reminder. "After all, the operation was your idea in the first place."
"Well, I sold Director Jacobs on the idea," Cutter replied with a smile at his own cleverness. "When we're ready to proceed - and I mean ready to push the button - Jacobs will fly down there to meet with their Attorney General. The ambassador says that the Colombians will go along with almost anything. They're even more desperate than we are and -"
"You didn't -"
"No, Bob, the ambassador doesn't know. Okay?" I'm not the idiot you take me for , his eyes told the CIA executive. "If Jacobs can sell the idea to them, we insert the teams ASAP. One change I want to make."
"What's that?"
"The air side of it. Your report says that practice tracking missions are already turning up targets."
"Some," Ritter admitted. "Two or three per week."
"The wherewithal to handle them is already in place. Why not activate that part of the operation? I mean, it might actually help to identify the areas we want to send the insertion teams to, develop operational intelligence, that sort of thing."
"I'd prefer to wait," Ritter said cautiously.
"Why? If we can identify the most frequently used areas, it cuts down on the amount of moving around they'll have to do. That's your greatest operational risk, isn't it? This is a way to develop information that enhances the entire operational concept."
The problem with Cutter, Ritter told himself, was that the bastard knew just enough about operations to be dangerous. Worse, he had the power to enforce his will - and a memory of the Operations Directorate's recent history. What was it he'd said a few months back? Your best operations in the last couple of years actually came out of Greer's department ... By which he meant Jack Ryan, James's bright rising star - possibly the new DDI the way things looked. That was too bad. Ritter was genuinely fond of his counterpart at the head of the Intelligence Directorate, but less so of Greer's ingratiating prot g . But it was nevertheless true that the Agency's two best coups in recent years had begun in the "wrong" department, and it was time for Operations to reassert its primacy. Ritter wondered if Cutter was consciously using that as a prod to move him to action. Probably not, he decided. Cutter didn't know enough about infighting yet. Not that he wouldn't learn, of course.
"Going too early is a classic error in field operations," the DDO offered lamely.
"But we're not. Essentially we have two separate operations, don't we?" Cutter asked. "The air part can operate independently of the in-country part. I admit it'll be less effective, but it can still operate. Doesn't this give us a chance to check out the less tricky side of the plan before we commit to the dangerous part? Doesn't it give us something to take to the Colombians to show that we're really serious?"
Too soon , the voice in Ritter's head said urgently, but his face showed indecision.
"Look, do you want me to take it to the President?" Cutter asked.
"Where is he today - California?"
"Political trip. I would prefer not to bother him with this sort of thing, but -"
It was a curious situation, the DDO thought. He had underestimated Cutter, while the National Security Adviser seemed quite able to overestimate himself. "Okay, you win. EAGLE EYE starts day after tomorrow. It'll take that long to get everyone up and running."
"And SHOWBOAT?"
"One more week to prep the teams. Four days to get them to Panama and meet up with the air assets, check communications systems and all that."
Cutter grinned as he reached for his coffee. It was time to smooth some ruffled feathers, he thought. "God, it's nice to work with a real pro. Look on the bright side, Bob. We'll have two full weeks to interrogate whatever turns up in the air net, and the insertion teams will have a much better idea of where they're needed."
You've already won, you son of a bitch. Do you have to rub it in? Ritter wanted to ask. He wondered what would have happened if he'd called Cutter's cards. What would the President have said? Ritter's position was a vulnerable one. He'd grumbled long and loud within the intelligence community that CIA hadn't run a serious field operation in... fifteen years? It depended on what you meant by "serious," didn't it? Now he was being given the chance, and what had been a nice line to be spoken at the coffee sessions during high-level government conferences was now a gray chicken come home to roost. Field operations like this were dangerous. Dangerous to the participants. Dangerous to those who gave the orders. Dangerous to the governments that sponsored them. He'd told Cutter that often enough, but like many, the National Security Adviser was mesmerized by the glamour of field ops. It was known in the trade as the Mission: Impossible Syndrome . Even professionals could confuse a TV drama with reality, and, throughout government, people tended to hear only that which they wished to hear, and to ignore the unpleasant parts. But it was somewhat late for Ritter to give out his warnings. After all, he'd complained for years that such a mission was possible, and occasionally a desirable adjunct to international policy. And he'd said often enough that his directorate still knew how to do it. The fact that he'd had to recruit field operatives from the Army and Air Force had escaped notice. Time had been when the Agency had been able to use its own private air force and its own private army... and if this worked out, perhaps those times would come again. It was a capability the Agency and the country needed, Ritter thought. Here, perhaps, was his chance to make it all happen. If putting up with amateur power-vendors like Cutter was the price of getting it, then that was the price he'd have to pay.
"Okay, I'll get things moving."
"I'll tell the boss. How soon do you expect we'll have results...?"
"Impossible to say."
"But before November," Cutter suggested lightly.
"Yeah, probably by then." Politics, too, of course. Well, that was what kept traffic circling around the beltway.
The 1st Special Operations Wing was based at Hurlburt Field, at the west end of the Eglin Air Force Base complex in Florida. It was a unique unit, but any military unit with "Special" in its name was unique by its very nature. The adjective was used for any number of meanings. "Special weapons" most often meant nuclear weapons, and here the word was used to avoid offending the sensibilities of those for whom "nuclear" connoted mushroom clouds and megadeaths; it was as though a change of wording could effect a change of substance, yet another characteristic of governments all over the world. "Special Operations," on the other hand, meant something else. Generally it denoted covert business, getting people into places where they ought not to be, supporting them while they were there, and getting them out after concluding business that they ought not to have done in the first place. That, among other things, was the business of the 1st.
Colonel Paul Johns - "PJ" - didn't know everything the wing did. The 1st was rather an odd grouping where authority didn't always coincide with rank, where the troops provided support for the aircraft and crews without always knowing why they did so, where aircraft came and went on irregular schedules, and where people weren't encouraged to speculate or ask questions. The wing was divided into individual fiefdoms that interacted with others on an ad hoc basis. PJ's fiefdom included half a dozen MH-53J "Pave Low III" helicopters. Johns had been around for quite a while, and somehow had managed to spend nearly all of his Air Force career in the air. It was a career path that guaranteed him both a fulfilling, exciting career, and precisely zero chance at ever wearing general's stars. But on that score he didn't give much of a damn. He'd joined the Air Force to fly; something generals don't get to do very much. He'd kept his part of the bargain, and the service had kept its, which wasn't quite as common an arrangement as some would imagine. Johns had early on eschewed fixed-wing aircraft, the fast-movers that dropped bombs or shot down other aircraft. A people-person all of his life, Johns had started off in the Jolly Green Giants, the HH-3 rescue helicopters of Vietnam fame, then graduated to the Super Jolly HH-53, part of the Air Rescue Service. As a brash young captain he'd flown in the Song Tay Raid, copilot of the aircraft that had deliberately crashed into the prison camp twenty miles west of Hanoi as part of the effort to rescue people who, it turned out, had been moved just a short time before. That had been one of the few failures in his life. Colonel Johns was not a man accustomed to such things. If you went down, PJ would come get you. He was the third-ranking all-time rescue specialist in the Air Force. The current Chief of Staff and two other general officers had been excused a stay in the Hanoi Hilton because of him and his crews. PJ was a man who only rarely had to buy himself a drink. He was also a man whom general officers saluted first. It was a tradition that went along with the Medal of Honor.
Like most heroes, he was grossly ordinary. Only five-six and a hundred thirty pounds, he looked like any other middle-aged man picking up a loaf of bread in the base exchange. The reading glasses he now had to wear made him look rather like a friendly suburban banker, and he did not often raise his voice. He cut his own grass when he had the time, and his wife did it when he didn't. His car was a fuel-efficient Plymouth Horizon. His son was studying engineering at Georgia Tech, and his daughter had won a scholarship to Princeton, leaving him and his wife an overly quiet house on post in which to contemplate the retirement that lay a few years in the future.
But not now. He sat in the left seat of the Pave Low helicopter checking out a bright young captain who, everyone thought, was ready to be a command pilot himself. The multimillion-dollar helicopter was skimming treetops at a hair under two hundred knots. It was a dark, cloudy night over the Florida panhandle, and this part of the Eglin complex wasn't brightly lit, but that didn't matter. Both he and the captain wore special helmets with built-in low-light goggles, not terribly unlike what Darth Vader wore in Star Wars. But these worked, converting the vague darkness ahead into a green and gray display. PJ kept his head moving around, and made sure that the captain did the same. One danger with the night-vision gear was that your depth perception - a matter of life and death to a low-level flyer - was degraded by the artificial picture generated by the masks. Perhaps a third of the squadron's operational losses, Johns thought, could be traced to that particular hazard, and the technical wizards hadn't come up with a decent fix yet. One problem with the Pave Lows was that operational and training losses were relatively high. It was a price of the mission for which they trained, and there was no answer to that but more training.
The six- bladed rotor spun overhead, driven by the two turboshaft engines. Pave Low was about as big as helicopters got, with a full combat crew of six and room for over forty combat-equipped passengers. The nose bulged at various places with radar, infrared, and other instruments -the general effect was of an insect from another planet. At doors on each side of the airframe were mounts for rotary miniguns, plus another at the tail cargo door, because their primary mission, covert insertion and support of special-operations forces, was a dangerous business - as was the secondary role they practiced tonight, combat search-and-rescue. During his time in Southeast Asia, PJ had worked with A-l Skyraider attack bombers, the Air Force's last piston-engine attack aircraft, called SPADs or Sandys. Exactly who would support them today was still something of an open question. To protect herself, in addition to the guns the aircraft carried flare and chaff pods, IR jamming and suppression gear... and her crew of madmen.
Johns smiled within his helmet. This was real flying, and there wasn't much of that left. They had the option of flying with the aid of an autopilot-radar-computer system that hedgehopped automatically, but tonight they were simulating a system failure. Autopilot or not, the pilot was responsible for flying the airplane, and Willis was doing his best to keep the helicopter down on the treetops. Every so often Johns would have to stop himself from flinching as an errant tree branch seemed certain to slap against the chopper's underside, but Captain Willis was a competent young man, keeping the aircraft low, but not too low. Besides, as PJ knew from long experience, the top branches on trees were thin, fragile things that did nothing more than mar the paint. More than once he'd brought home a helicopter whose underside bore green stains like those on a child's jeans.
"Distance?" Willis asked.
Colonel Johns checked the navigation display. He had a choice of Doppler, satellite, or inertial, plus the old-fashioned plotting board that he still used, and still insisted that all his people learn.
"Two miles, zero-four-eight."
"Roger." Willis eased off on the throttle.
For this training mission, an honest-to-God fighter pilot had "volunteered" to be trucked out to the boonies, where another helicopter had draped a parachute over a tree to simulate a genuinely shot-down airman, who had in turn activated a genuine rescue-beacon radio. One of the new tricks was that the chute was coated with a chemical that fluoresced on ultraviolet light. Johns did the copilot's job of activating a low-power UV laser that scanned ahead, looking for the return signal. Whoever had come up with this idea deserved a medal, PJ thought. The worst, scariest, and always seemingly the longest part of any rescue mission was actually getting eyeballs on the victim. That was when the gomers on the ground, who were also out hunting, would hear the sound of the rotor and decide that they might as well bag two aircraft on the same day... His Medal of Honor had come on such a mission over eastern Laos, when the crew of an F-105 Wild Weasel had attracted a platoon of NVA. Despite aggressive support from the Sandy team, the downed airmen hadn't dared to reveal their position. But Johns had coldly decided not to go home empty, and his Jolly had absorbed two hundred rounds in a furious gunfight before getting both men out. Johns often wondered if he'd ever have the courage - lunacy - to try that again.
"I got a chute at two o'clock."
"X- Ray Two-Six, this is Papa Lima; we have your chute. Can you mark your position?"
"Affirmative, tossing smoke, tossing green smoke."
The rescuee was following proper procedure in telling the chopper crew what sort of smoke grenade he was using, but you couldn't tell in the dark. On the other hand, the heat of the pyrotechnic device blazed like a beacon on the infrared display, and they could see their man.
"Got him?"
"Yep," Willis answered, and spoke next to the crew chief. "Get ready, we have our victim."
"Standing by, sir." In the back the flight engineer, Senior Master Sergeant Buck Zimmer - he and the colonel went way back together - activated his winch controls. At the end of the steel cable was a heavy steel device called a penetrator. Heavy enough to fall through the foliage of any forest, its bottom unfolded like the petals of a flower, providing a seat for the victim, who would then be pulled back up through the branches, an experience which remarkably enough had never quite killed anyone. In the event that the victim was injured, it was the job of Sergeant Zimmer or a rescue paramedic to ride it down, attach the victim to the penetrator, and take the elevator ride himself. That job sometimes entailed physically searching for the victim, often under fire. It was for this reason that the people who flew the rescue choppers treated their crewmen with considerable respect. Nothing so horrifies a pilot as the idea of being on the ground, with people shooting at you.
But not this time. Since it was peacetime and safety rules applied, training or not, the pickup was being made from a small clearing. Zimmer worked the winch controls. The victim unfolded the seat-petals and hooked himself securely aboard, knowing what was to follow. The flight engineer started hoisting the cable, made sure that the victim was firmly attached, and so notified the flight crew.
On the flight deck, forward, Captain Willis immediately twisted the throttle control to full power and moved upward. Within fifteen seconds, the "rescued" fighter pilot was three hundred feet over the ground, hanging by a quarter-inch steel cable and wondering why in the hell he'd been so fucking idiotic to volunteer for this. Five seconds later, the burly arm of Sergeant Zimmer yanked him into the aircraft.
"Recovery complete," Zimmer reported.
Captain Willis pushed his cyclic control forward, diving the helicopter at the ground. He'd climbed too much on the extraction, he knew, and tried to compensate by showing Colonel Johns that he could get back down to the safety of the treetops very quickly. He accomplished this, but he could feel the eyes of his commander on the side of his head. He'd made a mistake.
Johns did not tolerate mistakes. People died of mistakes, the colonel told them every goddamned day, and he was tired of having people die.
"Can you take it for a minute?" Willis asked.
"Copilot's airplane," Johns acknowledged, taking the stick and easing the Sikorsky down another foot or so. "You don't want to climb so much winching the guy in, not with possible SAMs out there."
"At night you'd expect more guns than SAMs." Willis was right, sort of. It was a hard call. And he knew the answer that would come.
"We're protected against small-caliber guns. The big ones are as dangerous as SAMs. You keep it closer to the ground next time, Captain."
"Yes, sir."
"Other than that, not bad. Arm a little stiff?"
"Yes, sir."
"It might be the gloves. Unless your fingers fit in just right, you end up gripping too hard, and that translates back into the wrist and upper arm after a while. You end up with a stiff arm, stiff movements on the stick, and sloppy handling. Get yourself a good set of gloves. My wife makes mine for me special. You might not always have a copilot to take the airplane, and this sort of thing is tough enough that you don't want any more distractions than you gotta have."
"Yes, sir."
"By the way, you passed."
It wouldn't do to thank the colonel, Captain Willis knew. He did the next best thing after flexing his hand for a minute.
"I got the airplane."
PJ took his hand off the stick. "Pilot's airplane," he acknowledged. "By the way..."
"Yes, sir?"
"I've got a special job coming up in a week or so. Interested?"
"Doing what?"
"You're not supposed to ask that," the colonel told him. "A little TDY. Not too far away. We'll be flying this bird down. Call it Spec-Ops."
"Okay," Willis said. "Count me in. Who's cleared to -"
"In simple terms, nobody is. We're taking Zimmer, Childs, and Bean, and a support team. Far as everybody knows, we're TDY for some practice missions out on the California coast. That's all you need to know for now."
Inside his helmet, Willis's eyebrow went up. Zimmer had worked with PJ all the way back to Thailand and the Jolly Green days, one of the few enlisted men left with real combat experience. Sergeant Bean was the squadron's best gunner. Childs was right behind him. Whatever this TDY - temporary detached duty - assignment was, it was for real. It also meant that Willis would remain a copilot for a little while longer, but he didn't mind. It was always a treat flying with the champion of Combat Search and Rescue. That was where the colonel got his call sign. C-SAR, in PJ's lexicon, it came out "Caesar."
Chavez traded a look with Julio Vega: Jesucristo!
"Any questions?" the briefer asked.
"Yes, sir," a radio operator said. "What happens after we call it in?"
"The aircraft will be intercepted."
"For- real, sir?"
"That's up to the flight crew. If they don't do what they're told, they're going swimming. That's all I can say. Gentlemen, everything you've heard is Top Secret. Nobody - I mean nobody! - ever hears what I just said. If the wrong folks ever learn about this, people will get hurt. The objective of this mission is to put a crimp in the way people move drugs into the United States. It may get a little rough."
"About fucking time," a quiet voice observed.
"Okay, now you know. I repeat, gentlemen, this mission is going to be dangerous. We are going to give each of you some time to think about it. If you want out, we'll understand. We're dealing with some pretty bad folks. Of course" - the man smiled and went on after a moment - "we got some pretty bad people here, too."
"Fuckin' A!" another voice said.
"Anyway, you have the rest of the night to think this one over. We move out at eighteen-hundred hours tomorrow. There is no turning back at that point. Everybody understand? Good. That is all for now."
"Ten- Hut!" Captain Ramirez snapped. Everyone in the room jumped to attention as the briefer left. Then it was the captain's turn: "Okay, you heard the man. Give this one a real good think, people. I want you to come along on this one -hell, I need every one of you - but if you're not comfortable with the idea, I don't want you. You got any questions for me?" There weren't. "Okay. Some of you know people who got fucked up because of drugs. Maybe friends, maybe family, I don't know. What we have here is a chance to get even. Those bastards are fucking up our country, and it's time we taught 'em a little lesson. Think it over. If anyone has any problems, let me know right away. If anybody wants out, that's okay." His face and tone said something else entirely. Anyone who opted out would be seen by his officer as something less than a man, and that would be doubly painful since Ramirez had led his men, shared every hardship, and sweated with them through every step of training. He turned and left.
"Damn," Chavez observed finally. "I figured this was going to be a strange one, but... damn."
"I had a friend died of an OD," Vega said. "He was just playing around, y'know, not a regular user like, but I guess it was bad stuff. Scared the shit outa me. I never touched it again. I was pissed when that happened. Tom s was a friend, ' mano . The fucker sold him the shit, man, I wouldn't mind introducin' him to my SAW."
Chavez nodded as thoughtfully as his age and education allowed. He remembered the gangs who had been vicious enough in his early childhood, but that activity seemed almost playful in retrospect. Now the turf fights were not the mere symbolism over who dwelt on what block. Now it was over marketing position. There was serious money involved, more than enough to kill for. That was what had transformed his old neighborhood from a zone of poverty to an area of open combat. Some people he knew were afraid to walk their own streets because of other people with drugs and guns. Wild rounds came through windows and killed people in front of televisions, and the cops were often afraid to visit the projects unless they came with the numbers and weapons of an invading army... all because of drugs. And the people who caused it all were living high and safe, fifteen hundred miles away...
Chavez didn't begin to grasp how skillfully he and his fellows - even Captain Ramirez - had been manipulated. They were all soldiers who trained constantly to protect their country against its enemies, products of a system that took their youth and enthusiasm and gave it direction; that rewarded hard work with achievement and pride; that most of all gave their boundless energy purpose; that asked only for allegiance in return. Since enlisted soldiers most often come from the poorer strata of society, they all had learned that minority status did not matter - the Army rewarded performance without consideration to one's color or accent. All of these men were intimately aware of the social problems caused by drugs, and were part of a subculture in which drugs were not tolerated - the military's effort to expunge its ranks of drug users had been painful, but it had succeeded. Those who stayed in were people for whom the use of drugs was beyond the pale. They were the achievers from their neighborhoods. They were the success stories. They were the adventurous, the brave, the disciplined graduates of the mean streets for whom obstacles were things to be overcome, and for whom every instinct was to help others to do the same.
And that was the mission they all contemplated. Here was a chance to protect not only their country, but also the barrios from which they had all escaped. Already marked as achievers within the ranks of the Army's most demanding units, then given training to make them prouder still, they could no more decline participation in this mission than they could deny their manhood. There was not a man here who had not once in his life contemplated taking down a drug dealer. But the Army was letting them do something even better. Of course they'd do it.
"Blow the fuckers right out of the sky!" the squad's radio operator said. "Put a Sidewinder missile right up his ass! You got the right to remain dead , sucker!"
"Yeah," Vega agreed. "I wouldn't mind seeing that. Hell, I wouldn't mind it if we got to go after the big shots where they fucking live! Think we could get them, Ding?"
Chavez grinned. "You shittin' me, Julio? Who you suppose they got working for them, soldiers? Shit. Punks with machine guns, probably don't even keep 'em clean. Against us? Shit. Maybe against what they got down there, maybe, but against us? No chance, man. I'm talking dead meat. I just get in close, pop the sentries nice an' quiet with my H and K, an' let you turkeys do the easy stuff."
"More Ninja shit," a rifleman said lightly.
Ding pulled one of his throwing stars from his shirt pocket and flicked it into the doorframe fifteen feet away.
"Smile when you say that, boy." Chavez laughed.
"Hey, Ding, could you teach me to do that?" the rifleman asked. There was no further discussion of the mission's dangers, only of its opportunities.
They called him Bronco. His real name was Jeff Winters, and he was a newly promoted captain in the United States Air Force, but because his job was flying fighter aircraft he had to have a special name, known as a call sign. His resulted from a nearly forgotten party in Colorado - he'd graduated from the United States Air Force Academy - at which he'd fallen from a horse so gentle that the animal had nearly died of fright. The six-pack of Coors had contributed to the fall, along with the laughter that followed from his amused classmates, and one of them - the asshole was flying trash-haulers now, Winters told himself with a tight smile - assigned him the name on the spot. The classmate knew how to ride horses, Bronco told the night, but he hadn't made the grade to fly F-15-Charlies. The world wasn't exactly overrun with justice, but there was some to be found.
Which was the whole purpose of his special mission.
Winters was a small man, and a young one. Twenty-seven, to be exact, he already had seven hundred hours in the McDonnell-Douglas fighter. As some men were born to play baseball, or to act, or to drive race cars, Bronco Winters had entered the world for the single purpose of flying fighter planes. He had the sort of eyesight to make an ophthalmologist despair, coordination that combined the best of a concert pianist and the man on the flying trapeze, and a much rarer quality known in his tight community as SA - situational awareness. Winters always knew what was happening around him. His airplane was as natural a part of the young man as the muscles in his arm. He transmitted his wishes to the airplane and the F-15C complied at once, precisely mimicking the mental image in the pilot's mind. Where his mind went, the airplane followed.
At the moment he was orbiting two hundred miles off the Florida Gulf Coast. He'd taken off from Eglin Air Force Base forty minutes earlier, topped off his fuel from a KC-135 tanker, and now he had enough JP-5 aboard to fly for five hours if he took things easy, as he had every intention of doing. FAST-pack conformal fuel cells were attached along the sides of his aircraft. Ordinarily they were hung with missiles as well - the F-15 can carry as many as eight - but for this evening's mission the only ordnance aboard were the rounds for his 20mm rotary cannon, and these were always kept aboard the aircraft because their weight was a convenience in maintaining the Eagle's flying trim.
He flew in a racetrack pattern, his engines throttled down to loitering speed. Bronco's dark, sharp eyes swept continuously left and right, searching for the running lights of other aircraft but finding none among the stars. He wasn't the least bit bored. He was, rather, a man quietly delighted that the taxpayers of his country were actually foolish enough to give him over $30,000 per year to do something for which he would have been grateful to pay. Well, he told himself, I guess that's what I'm doing tonight.
"Two- Six Alpha, this is Eight-Three Quebec, do you read, over?" his radio crackled. Bronco squeezed the trigger on his stick.
"Eight- Three Quebec, this is Two-Six Alpha. I read you five by five, over." The radio channel was encrypted. Only the two aircraft were using the unique encoding algorithm for this evening; all that anyone trying to listen in would hear would be the warbling rasp of static.
"We have a target on profile, bearing one-nine-six, range two-one-zero your position. Angels two. Course zero-one-eight. Speed two-six-five. Over." There was no command to accompany this information. Despite the secure radios, chatter was kept to a minimum.
"Roger, copy. Out."
Captain Winters moved his stick left. The proper course and speed for his intercept sprang into his mind unbidden. The Eagle changed over to a southerly heading. Winters dropped the nose a touch as he brought the fighter to a course of one hundred eighty degrees and increased power a fraction to bring his speed up. It actually seemed that he was abusing the airplane to fly her this slow, but that was not actually the case.
It was a twin-engined Beech, Captain Winters saw, the most common aircraft used by the druggies. That meant cocaine rather than the bulkier marijuana, and that suited him, since it was probably a cokehead who'd mugged his mom. He pulled his F-15 level behind it, about half a mile back.
This was the eighth time he'd intercepted a drug runner, but it was the first time he'd be allowed to do something about it. On the previous occasions he'd not even been allowed to call the information in to the Customs boys. Bronco verified the course of the target - for fighter pilots anything other than a friendly was a target - and checked his systems. The directional radio transmitter hanging in the streamlined container under the fighter's centerline slaved itself to the radar tracking Beech. He made his first radio call, and flipped on his landing lights, transfixing the small executive aircraft in the night. Immediately the Beech dived for the wave tops, and the Eagle followed it down. He called again, giving his order and getting no response. He moved the button on the top of his stick to the "guns" position. The next call was accompanied by a burst from his cannon. This started the Beech in a series of radical evasive turns. Winters decided that the target was not going to do what it was told.
Okay.
An ordinary pilot might have been startled by the lights and turned to evade a collision, but an ordinary pilot would not do what the druggies did. The Beech dived for the wave tops, reduced power, and popped his flaps, slowing the aircraft down to approach speed, which was far slower than the F-15 could do without stalling out. This maneuver often forced the DEA and Coast Guard planes to break contact. But Bronco's job wasn't to follow the guy in. As the Beech turned west to run for the Mexican coast, Captain Winters killed his lights, added power, and zoomed up to five thousand feet. There he executed a smart hammerhead turn and took a nose-down attitude, the Eagle's radar sweeping the surface of the sea. There: heading due west, speed 85 knots, only a few feet over the water. A gutsy pilot, Bronco thought, holding that close to a stall and that low. Not that it mattered.
Winters extended his own speed brakes and flaps, taking the fighter down. He felt to make sure that the selector button was still in the "guns" position and watched the Head-Up Display, bringing the pipper right on the target and holding it there. It might have been harder if the Beech had kept speed up and tried to maneuver, but it wouldn't really have mattered. Bronco was just too good, and in his Eagle, he was nearly invincible. When he got within four hundred yards, his finger depressed the button for a fraction of a second.
A line of green tracers lanced through the sky.
Several rounds appeared to miss the Beech ahead, but the rest hit right in the cockpit area. He heard no sound from the kill. There was only a brief flash of light, followed by a phosphorescent splash of white foam when the aircraft hit.
Winters reflected briefly that he had just killed one man, maybe two. That was all right. They wouldn't be missed.
9. Meeting Engagement
"SO?" ESCOBEDO EYED Larson as coldly as a biology professor might look at a caged white rat. He had no special reason to suspect Larson of anything, but he was angry, and Larson was the nearest target for that anger.
But Larson was used to that. "So I don't know, jefe . Ernesto was a good pilot, a good student. So was the other one, Cruz. The engines in the aircraft were practically new - two hundred hours on each. The airframe was six years old, but that's nothing unusual; the aircraft was well maintained. Weather was okay all the way north, some scattered high clouds over the Yucatan Channel, nothing worse than that." The pilot shrugged. "Aircraft disappear, jefe . One cannot always know why."
"He is my cousin! What do I tell his mother?"
"Have you checked with any airfields in Mexico?"
"Yes! And Cuba, and Honduras, and Nicaragua!"
"No distress calls? No reports from ships or aircraft in the vicinity?"
"No, nothing." Escobedo moderated somewhat as Larson went through the possibilities, professional as ever.
"If it was some sort of electrical failure, he might be down somewhere, but... I would not be hopeful, jefe . If they had landed safely, they would have let us know by now. I am sorry, jefe . He is probably lost. It has happened before. It will happen again."
One other possibility was that Ernesto and Cruz had made their own arrangements, had landed somewhere other than their intended destination, had sold their cargo of forty kilograms, and had decided to disappear, but that was not seriously considered. The question of drugs had not even been mentioned, because Larson was not really part of the operation, merely a technical consultant who had asked to be cut out of that aspect of the business. Escobedo trusted Larson to be honest and objective because he had always been so in the past, taking his money and doing his job well, and also because Larson was no fool - he knew the consequences of lying and double-dealing.
They were in Escobedo's expensive condominium in Medell n. It occupied the entire top floor of the building. The floor immediately under this was occupied by Escobedo's vassals and retainers. The elevator was controlled by people who knew who could pass and who could not. The street outside the building was watched. Larson reflected that at least he didn't have to worry about somebody stealing the hubcaps off his car. He also wondered what the hell had happened to Ernesto. Was it simply an accident of some sort? Such things had happened often enough. One reason for his position as flying instructor was that past smuggling operations had lost quite a few airplanes, often through the most prosaic of causes. But Larson was not a fool. He was thinking about recent visitors and recent orders from Langley; training at The Farm didn't encourage people to believe in coincidences. Some sort of op was about to run. Might this have been the opening move?
Larson didn't think so. CIA was years past that sort of thing, which was too bad, he thought, but a fact nonetheless.
"He was a good pilot?" Escobedo asked again.
"I taught him myself, jefe . He had four hundred hours, good mechanical skills, and he was as good on instruments as a young pilot can be. The only thing that worried me about him was that he liked flying low."
"Yes?"
"Flying low over water is dangerous, especially at night. It is too easy to become disoriented. You forget where the horizon is, and if you keep looking out of the windows instead of checking your instruments... Experienced pilots have driven their airplanes right into the water that way. Unfortunately, flying very low is fun and many pilots, especially the young ones, think that it is also a test of manhood. That is foolish, as pilots learn with time."
" 'A good pilot is a cautious pilot'?" Escobedo asked.
"That is what I tell every student," Larson replied seriously. "Not all of them believe me. It is true everywhere. You can ask instructors in any air force in the world. Young pilots make foolish mistakes because they are young and inexperienced. Judgment comes with experience - most often through a frightening experience. Those who survive learn, but some do not survive."
Escobedo considered that for a few seconds.
"He was a proud one, Ernesto." To Larson it sounded like an epitaph.
"I will recheck the maintenance log of the aircraft," the pilot offered. "And I will also review the weather data."
"Thank you for coming in so quickly, Se or Larson."
"I am at your service, jefe . If I learn anything, I will let you know."
Escobedo saw him to the door, then returned to his desk. Cortez entered the room from a side door.
"Well?"
"I like Larson," Cortez said. "He speaks the truth. He has pride, but not too much."
Escobedo nodded agreement. "A hireling, but a good one."
... like you . Cortez didn't react to the implied message. "How many flights have been lost over the years?"
"We didn't even keep records until eighteen months ago. Since then, nine. That's one reason we took Larson on. I felt that the crashes were due to pilot error and poor maintenance. Carlos has proven to be a good instructor."
"But never wished to become involved himself?"
"No. A simple man. He has a comfortable life doing what he enjoys. There is much to be said for that," Escobedo observed lightly. "You have been over his background?"
" S . Everything checks out, but..."
"But?"
"But if he were something other than what he appears to be, things would also check out." This was the point at which an ordinary man would say something like, But you can't suspect everyone . Escobedo did not, and that was a measure of his sophistication, Cortez noted. His employer had ample experience with conspiracy and knew that you had to suspect everyone. He wasn't exactly a professional, but he wasn't exactly a fool either.
"Do you think -"
"No. He was nowhere near the place the flight left from, had no way of knowing that it was happening that night. I checked: he was in Bogot with his lady friend. They had dinner alone and retired early. Perhaps it was a flying accident, but coming so soon after we learn that the norteamericanos are planning something, I do not think we should call it such a thing. I think I should return to Washington."
"What will you find out?"
"I will attempt to discover something of what they are doing."
"Attempt?"
"Se or, gathering sensitive intelligence information is an art -"
"You can buy anything you need!"
"There you are incorrect," Cortez said with a level stare. "The best sources of information are never motivated by money. It is dangerous - foolish - to assume that allegiance can be purchased."
"And what of you?"
"That is a question you must consider, but I am sure you already have." The best way to earn trust with this man was always to say that trust did not exist. Escobedo thought that whatever allegiance money could not buy could be maintained with fear instead. In that sense, his employer was foolish. He assumed that his reputation for violence could cow anyone, and rarely considered that there were those who could give him lessons in applied violence. There was much to admire about this man, but so much also to merit disdain. Fundamentally he was an amateur - though a gifted one - who learned from his mistakes readily enough, but lacked the formal training that might have enabled him to learn from the mistakes of others - and what was intelligence training but the institutional memory of lessons from the mistakes of others? He didn't so much need an intelligence and security adviser as one in covert operations per se, but that was an area in which none of these men would solicit or accept advice. They came from generations of smugglers, and their expertise in corrupting and bribing was real enough. It was just that they'd never learned how to play the game against a truly organized and formidable adversary - the Colombians didn't count. That the yanquis had not yet discovered within themselves the courage to act in accordance with their power was nothing more than good fortune. If there was one thing the KGB had drilled into Cortez, it was that good fortune did not exist.
Captain Winters viewed his gunsight videotape with the men from Washington. They were in a corner office of one of the Special Ops buildings - Eglin had quite a few - and the other two wore Air Force uniforms, both bearing the rank of lieutenant colonel, a convenient middle grade of officer, many of whom came and went in total anonymity.
"Nice shooting, son," one observed.
"He could have made it harder," Bronco replied without much in the way of emotion. "But he didn't."
"How about traffic on the surface?"
"Nothing within thirty miles."
"Put up the Hawkeye tape," the senior man ordered. They were using three-quarter-inch tape, which was preferred by the military for its higher data capacity. The tape was already cued. It showed the inbound Beechcraft, marked as XXI on the alphanumeric display, one of many contacts, most of which were clearly marked as airliners, and had been high over the shoot-down. There were also numerous surface contacts, but all of them were a good distance away from the area of the attack, and this tape ended prior to the shoot-down. The Hawkeye crew, as planned, had no direct knowledge of what had transpired after handing over the contact to the fighter. The guidelines for the mission were clear, and the intercept area was calculated to avoid frequently used shipping channels. The low-altitude path taken by the drug smugglers helped, of course, insofar as it limited the distance at which someone might see a flash or an explosion, neither of which had happened here.
"Okay," said the senior one. "That was well within mission parameters." They switched tapes again.
"How many rounds expended?" the junior one asked Winters.
"A hundred 'n eight," the captain replied. "With a Vulcan it's kinda hard to keep it down, y'know? The critter shoots right quick."
"It did that plane like a chainsaw."
"That's the idea, sir. I could have been a little faster on the trigger, but you want me to try 'n avoid the fuel tanks, right?"
"That's correct." The cover story, in case anyone saw a flash, was that there was a Shoot-Ex out of Eglin - exercises killing target drones are not uncommon there - but so much the better if no one noticed at all.
Bronco didn't like the secrecy stuff. As far as he was concerned, shooting the bastards down made perfectly good sense. The point of the mission, they'd told him during the recruiting phase, was that drug trafficking was a threat to U.S. national security. That phrasing made everything legitimate. As an air-defense fighter pilot, he was trained to deal with threats to national security in this specific way - to shoot them out of the sky with as much emotion as a skeet-shooter dispatched clay birds thrown out from the traps. Besides, Bronco thought, if it's a real threat to national security, why shouldn't the people know about it? But that wasn't his department. He was only a captain, and captains are operators, not thinkers. Somebody up the line had decided that this was okay, and that was all he needed to know. Dispatching this Twin-Beech had been the next thing to murder, but that was as accurate a description of combat operations as any other. After all, giving people a fair chance was what happened at the Olympics, not where your life was on the line. If somebody was dumb enough to let his ass get killed, that wasn't Bronco's lookout, especially if he happened to be committing an act of war against Bronco's country. And that was what "threat to national security" meant, wasn't it?
Besides, he had given Juan - or whatever the bastard's name had been - a fair warning, hadn't he? If the asshole'd thought he could outfly the best fucking fighter plane in the whole world, well, he'd learned different. Tough.
"You got any problems to this point, Captain?" the senior one asked.
"Problems with what, sir?" What a dumbass question!
The airstrip at which they had arrived wasn't big enough for a proper military transport. The forty-four men of Operation SHOWBOAT traveled by bus to Peterson Air Force Base, a few miles east of the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs. It was dark, of course. The bus was driven by one of the "camp counselors," as the men had taken to calling them, and the ride was a quiet one, with many of the soldiers asleep after their last day's PT. The rest were alone with their own thoughts. Chavez watched the mountains slide by as the bus twisted its way down the last range. The men were ready.
"Pretty mountains, man," Julio Vega observed sleepily.
"Especially in a bus heading downhill."
"Fuckin' A!" Vega chuckled. "You know, someday I'm gonna come back here and do some skiing." The machine-gunner adjusted himself in the seat and faded out.
They were roused thirty-five minutes later after passing through the gate at Peterson. The bus pulled right up to the aft ramp of an Air Force C-141 Starlifter transport. The soldiers rose and assembled their gear in an orderly fashion, with each squad captain checking to make sure that everyone had everything he'd been issued as they filed off. A few looked around on the way to the aircraft. There was nothing unusual about the departure, no special security guards, merely the ground crew fueling and preflighting the aircraft for an immediate departure. In the distance a KC-135 aerial tanker was lifting off, and though no one thought much about it, they'd be meeting that bird in a little while. The Air Force sergeant who was load-master for this particular aircraft took them aboard and seated them as comfortably as the spartan appointments allowed - this mainly involved giving everyone ear protectors.
The flight crew went through the usual startup procedures, and presently the Starlifter began moving. The noise was grating despite the earmuffs, but the aircraft had an Air Force Reserve crew, all airline personnel, who gave them a decent ride. Except for the midair refueling, that is. As soon as the C-141 had climbed to altitude, it rendezvoused with the KC-135 to replace the fuel burned off during the climb-out. For the passengers this involved the usual roller-coaster buffet which, amplified by the near total absence of windows, made a few stomachs decidedly queasy, though all looked quietly inured to it. Half an hour after lifting off, the C-141 settled down on a southerly course, and from a mixture of fatigue and sheer boredom, the soldiers drifted off to sleep for the remainder of the ride.
The MH- 53J left Eglin Air Force Base at about the same time, all of its fuel tanks topped off after engine warm-up. Colonel Johns took it to one thousand feet and a course of two-one-five for the Yucatan Channel. Three hours out, an MC-130E Combat Talon tanker/support aircraft caught up with the Pave Low, and Johns decided to let the captain handle the midair refueling. They'd have to tank thrice more, and the tanker would accompany them all the way down, bringing a maintenance and support crew and spare parts.
"Ready to plug," PJ told the tanker commander.
"Roger," answered Captain Montaigne in the MC-130E, holding the aircraft straight and level.
Johns watched Willis ease the nose probe into the drogue. "Okay, we got plug."
In the cockpit of the -130E, Captain Montaigne took note of the indicator light and keyed the microphone. " Ohhh! " she said in her huskiest voice. "Nobody does it like you, Colonel!"
Johns laughed out loud and keyed his switch twice, generating a click-click signal, which meant Affirmative. He switched to intercom. "Why spoil it for her?" he asked Willis, who was regrettably straitlaced. The fuel transfer took six minutes.
"How long do you think we'll be down there?" Captain Willis wondered after it was done.
"They didn't tell me that, but if it goes too long, they say we'll get relief."
"That's nice," the captain observed. His eyes shifted back and forth from his flight instruments to the world outside the armored cockpit. The aircraft had more than its full load of combat gear aboard - Johns was a firm believer in firepower - and the electronic countermeasures racks were gone. Whatever they'd be doing, they wouldn't have to worry about unfriendly radar coverage, and that meant that the job, whatever it was, didn't involve Nicaragua or Cuba. It also made for more passenger room in the aircraft and deleted the second flight engineer from the crew. "You were right about the gloves. My wife made up a set and it does make a difference."
"Some guys just fly without 'em, but I don't like to have sweaty hands on the stick."
"Is it going to be that warm?"
"There's warm, and there's warm," Johns pointed out. "You don't get sweaty hands just from the outside temperature."
"Oh. Yes, sir." Gee, he gets scared, too - just like the rest of us?
"Like I keep telling people, the more thinking you do before things get exciting, the less exciting things will be. And they get plenty exciting enough."
Another voice came onto the intercom circuit: "You keep talking like that, sir, and we might get a little scared."
"Sergeant Zimmer, how are things in the back?" Johns asked. Zimmer's regular spot was just aft of the two pilots, hovering over an impressive array of instruments.
"Coffee, tea, or milk, sir? The meals for this flight are Chicken Kiev with rice, Roast Beef au Jus with baked potato, and for the weight-watchers among us, Orange Ruffy and stir-fried veggies - and if you believe that, sir, you've been staring at the instrument panel too long. Why the hell don't we have a stewardess along with us?"
" 'Cause you and I are both too old for that shit, Zimmer!" PJ laughed.
"It ain't bad in a chopper, sir. What with all the vibration and all..."
"I've been trying to reform him since Korat," Johns explained to Captain Willis. "How old are the kids now, Buck?"
"Seventeen, fifteen, twelve, nine, six, five, and three, sir."
"Christ," Willis noted. "Your wife must be some gal, Sarge."
"She's afraid I'll run around, so she robs me of my energy," Zimmer explained. "I fly to get away from her. It's the only thing that keeps me alive."
"Her cooking must be all right, judging by your uniform."
"Is the colonel picking on his sergeant again?" Zimmer asked.
"Not exactly. I just want you to look as good as Carol does."
"No chance, sir."
"Roger that. Some coffee would be nice."
"On the way, Colonel, sir." Zimmer was on the flight deck in less than a minute. The instrument console for the Pave Low helicopter was large and complex, but Zimmer had long since installed gimbaled cup holders suitable for the spillproof cups that Colonel Johns liked. PJ took a quick sip.
"She makes good coffee, too, Buck."
"Funny how things work out, isn't it?" Carol Zimmer knew that her husband would share it with his colonel. Carol wasn't her original given name. Born in Laos thirty-six years earlier, she was the daughter of a Hmong warlord who'd fought long and hard for a country that was no longer his. She was the only survivor of a family of ten. PJ and Buck had lifted her and a handful of others off a hilltop at the final stages of a North Vietnamese assault in 1972. America had failed that man's family, but at least it hadn't failed his daughter. Zimmer had fallen in love with her from the first moment, and it was generally agreed that they had the seven cutest kids in Florida.
"Yep."
It was late in Mobile, somewhere between the two southbound aircraft, and jails - especially Southern jails - are places where the rules are strictly applied. For lawyers, however, the rules are often rather lenient, and paradoxically they were very lenient indeed in the case of these two. These two had an as - yet - undetermined date with "Old Sparky," the electric chair at Admore Prison. The jailors at Mobile therefore didn't want to do anything to interfere with the prisoners' constitutional rights, access to counsel, or general comfort. The attorney, whose name was Edward Stuart, had been fully briefed going in, and was fully fluent in Spanish.
"How did they do it?"
"I don't know."
"You screamed and kicked, Ram n," Jes s said.
"I know. And you sang like a canary."
"It doesn't matter," the attorney told them. "They're not charging you with anything but drug-related murder and piracy. The information Jes s gave them is not being used at all in this case."
"So do your lawyer shit and get us off!"
The look on Stuart's face was all the response either man needed.
"You tell our friends that if we don't get off on this one, we start talking."
The jail guards had already told both men in loving detail what fate had in store for them. One had even shown Ram n a poster of the chair itself with the caption REGULAR OR EXTRA CRISPY. Though a hard man and a brutal one, the idea of being strapped into a hard-backed wooden chair, then having a copper band affixed to his left leg, and a small metal cap set on a bald spot that the prison barber would shave on his head the day before, and the small sponge soaked in a saline solution to facilitate electrical conductivity, the leather mask to keep his eyes from flying out of his head... Ram n was a brave man when he had the upper hand, and that hand held a gun or a knife directed at an unarmed or bound person. Then he was quite brave. It had never occurred to him that one day he might be the helpless one. Ram n had lost five pounds in the preceding week. His appetite was virtually nil and he took an inordinate interest in light bulbs and wall sockets. He was afraid, but more than that he was angry, at himself for his fear, at the guards and police for giving him that fear, and at his former associates for not getting him free of this mess.
"I know many things, many useful things."
"It does not matter. I have spoken with the federales , and they do not care what you know. The U.S. Attorney claims to have no interest in what you might tell him."
"That is ridiculous. They always trade for information, they always -"
"Not here. The rules have changed."
"What do you tell us?"
"I will do my best for you." I'm supposed to tell you to die like men , Stuart could not say. "There are many things that can happen in the next few weeks."
The attorney was rewarded with skeptical expressions not entirely devoid of hope. He himself had no hope at all. The U.S. Attorney was going to handle this one himself, the better to get his face on the 5:30 and 11:00 Eyewitness News broadcasts. This would be a very speedy trial, and a U.S. Senate seat would be available in just over two years. So much the better that the prosecutor could point to his law-and-order record. Frying some druggie-pirate-rapist-murderers would surely appeal to the citizens of the sovereign state of Alabama, Stuart knew. The defense attorney objected to capital punishment on principle, and had spent much of his time and money working against it. He'd successfully taken one case to the Supreme Court and on a five-to-four decision managed to get his client a new trial, where the death sentence had been bargained down to life plus ninety-nine years. Stuart regarded that as a victory even though his client had survived precisely four months in the prison's general population until someone who disliked child-murderers had put a shank into his lumbar spine. He didn't have to like his clients - and most often he didn't. He was occasionally afraid of them, especially the drug runners. They quite simply expected that in return for however much cash - it was generally cash - they paid for his services they would get their freedom in return. They did not understand that in law there are no guarantees, especially for the guilty. And these two were guilty as hell. But they did not deserve death. Stuart was convinced that society could not afford to debase itself to the level of... his clients. It was not a popular opinion in the South, but Stuart had no ambition to run for public office.
In any case, he was their lawyer, and his job was to provide them with the best possible defense. He'd already explored the chances of a plea-bargain; life imprisonment in exchange for information. He'd already examined the government's case. It was all circumstantial - there were no witnesses except his own clients, of course - but the physical evidence was formidable, and that Coast Guard crew had scrupulously left the crime scene intact except for removing some evidence, all of which had been carefully locked up for a proper chain-of-evidence. Whoever had briefed and trained those people had done it right. Not much hope there. His only real hope, therefore, was to impeach their credibility. It was a slim hope, but it was the best he had.
Supervisory Special Agent Mark Bright was also working late. The crew had been busy. For starters there had been an office and a home to search, a lengthy procedure that was just the opening move in a process to last months, probably, since all the documents found, all the phone numbers scribbled in any of eleven places, all the photographs on desks and walls, and everything else found would have to be investigated. Every business acquaintance of the deceased would be interviewed, along with neighbors, people whose offices adjoined his, members of his country club, and even parishioners at his church. For all that, the major break in the case had come in the second hour of the fourth home search, fully a month after the case had begun. Something had told them all that there had to be something else. In his den, the deceased had a floor safe - with no record of its purchase or installation - neatly hidden by an untacked segment of the wall-to-wall carpeting. Discovering it had required thirty-two days. Tickling it open took nearly ninety minutes, but an experienced agent had done it by first experimenting with the birthdays of the deceased's whole family, then playing variations on the theme. It turned out that the three-element combination came from taking the month of the man's birth and adding one, taking the day of his birth and adding two, then taking the year of his birth and adding three. The door of the expensive Mosler came open with a whisper as it rubbed against the rug flap.
No money, no jewels, no letter to his attorney. Inside the safe had been five computer disks of a type compatible with the businessman's IBM personal computer. That told the agents all they wanted. Bright had at once taken the disks and the deceased's computer to his office, which was also equipped with IBM-compatible machines. Mark Bright was a good investigator, which meant that he was a patient one. His first move had been to call a local computer expert who assisted the FBI from time to time. A freelance software consultant, he'd first protested that he was busy, but he'd only needed to hear that there was a major criminal investigation underway to settle that. Like many such people who informally assist the FBI, he found police work most exciting, though not quite exciting enough to take a full-time job for the FBI Laboratory. Government service didn't come close to paying what he earned on the outside. Bright had anticipated his first instruction: bring in the man's own computer and hard-disk.
After first making exact copies of the five disks using a program called CHASTITY BELT, he had Bright store the originals while he went to work on the copies. The disks were encrypted, of course. There were many ways of accomplishing that, and the consultant knew them all. As he and Bright had anticipated, the encrypting algorithm was permanently stored on the deceased's hard disk. From that point it was merely a question of what option and what personal encrypting key had been used to secure the data on the disks. That took nine nonstop hours, with Bright feeding coffee and sandwiches to his friend and wondering why he did it all for free.
"Gotcha!" A scruffy hand punched the PRINT command, and the office laser printer started humming and disgorging papers. All five disks were packed with data, totaling over seven hundred single-spaced pages of text. By the time the third one was printed, the consultant had left. Bright read it all, over a period of three days. Then he made six Xerox copies for the other senior agents in the case. They were now flipping through the pages around the conference table.
"Christ, Mark, this stuff is fantastic!"
"That's what I said."
"Three hundred million dollars!" another exclaimed. "Christ, I shop there myself..."
"What's the total involved?" a third asked more soberly.
"I just skimmed through this stuff," Bright answered, "but I got close to seven hundred million. Eight shopping malls spread from Fort Worth to Atlanta. The investments go through eleven different corporations, twenty-three banks, and -"
"My life insurance is with this company! They do my IRA, and -"
"The way he set it up, he was the only one who knew. Talk about an artist, this guy was like Leonardo..."
"Sucker got greedy, though. If I read this right, he skimmed off about thirty million... God almighty..."
The plan, as with all great plans, was an elegantly simple one. There were eight real-estate-development projects. In each case the deceased had set up himself as the general partner representing foreign money - invariably described as Persian Gulf oil money or Japanese industrial money, with the funds laundered through an incredible maze of non-American banks. The general partner had used the "Oil Money" - the term was almost generic in the venture capital field - to purchase land and set the project in motion, then solicited further development funds from limited partners who had no say in the executive management of the individual projects, but whose profits were almost guaranteed by the syndicate's previous performance. Even the one in Fort Worth had made money, despite the recent slowdown in the local oil industry. By the time ground was broken on every project, actual ownership was further disguised by majority investment from banks, insurance companies, and wealthy private investors, with much of the original overseas investment fully recovered and gone back to the Bank of Dubai and numerous others - but with a controlling interest remaining in the project itself. In this way, the overseas investors speedily recouped their initial investment with a tidy profit, and continued to get much of the profits from the project's actual operations, further looking forward to the eventual sale of the project to local interests for more profit still. For each hundred million dollars invested, Bright estimated, one hundred fifty million fully laundered dollars were extracted. And that was the important part. The hundred million put in, and the fifty million profit taken out were as clean as the marble on the Washington Monument,
Except for these computer disks.
"Every one of these projects, and every dime of investment and profits, went through IRS, SEC, and enough lawyers to fill the Pentagon, and nobody ever caught a sniff. He kept these records in case somebody ever burned him - but he must have expected to trade this information for a crack at the Witness Protection Program -"
"And he'd be the richest guy in Cody, Wyoming," Mike Schratz observed. "But the wrong people got a sniff. I wonder what tipped them off? What did our friends say?"
"They don't know. Just that they pulled the job of killing them all off and making it look like a disappearance. The bosses clearly anticipated losing them and compartmentalized the information. How hard is it to get one of these mutts to take a contract? It's like filling out a girl's dance card at the cotillion."
"Roger that. Headquarters know about this yet?"
"No, Mike, I wanted you guys to see it first," Bright said. "Opinions, gentlemen?"
"If we move fast... we could seize a whole shitload of money... unless they've moved the money on us," Schratz thought aloud. "I wonder if they have? As clever as this stuff is... I got a buck says they haven't. Takers?"
"Not from me," another agent announced. This one was a CPA and a lawyer. "Why should they bother? This is the closest thing I've ever seen to - hell, it is a perfect plan. I suppose we ought to show some appreciation, what with all the help they're giving our balance-of-payments problem. In any case, folks, this money is exposed. We can bag it all."
"There's the Bureau's budget for the next two years -"
"And a squadron of fighters for the Air Force. This is big enough to sting them pretty good. Mark, I think you ought to call the Director," Schratz concluded. There was general agreement. "Where's Pete today?" Pete Mariano was the special-agent-in-charge of the Mobile Field Office.
"Probably Venice," an agent said. "He's going to be pissed he was away for this one."
Bright closed the ring binder. He was already booked on an early-morning flight to Dulles International Airport.
The C- 141 landed ten minutes early at Howard Field. After the clean, dry air of the Colorado Rockies, and the cleaner, thinner, and drier air of the flight, the damp oven of the Isthmus of Panama was like walking into a door. The soldiers assembled their gear and allowed themselves to be herded off by the loadmaster. They were quiet and serious. The change in climate was a physical sign that playtime was over. The mission had begun. They immediately boarded yet another green bus which took them to some dilapidated barracks on the grounds of Fort Kobbe.
The MH- 53J helicopter landed several hours later at the same field, and was rolled unceremoniously into a hangar, which was surrounded with armed guards. Colonel Johns and the flight crew were taken to nearby quarters and told to stay put.
Another helicopter, this one a Marine CH-53E Super Stallion, lifted off the deck of USS Guadalcanal just before dawn. It flew west over the Bay of Panama to Corezal, a small military site near the Gaillard Cut, the most difficult segment of the original Panama Canal construction project. The helicopter - carrier's flight-deck crew attached a bulky item to a sling dangling from the helicopter's underside, and the CH-53E headed awkwardly toward shore. After a twenty-minute flight, the helicopter hovered over its predetermined destination. The pilot killed his forward speed and gently eased toward the ground, coached by instructions from the crew chief, until the communications van touched down on a concrete pad. The sling was detached and the helicopter flew off at once to make room for a second aircraft, a smaller CH-46 troop carrier which deposited four men before returning to its ship. The men went immediately to work setting up the van.
The van was quite ordinary, looking most of all like a cargo container with wheels, though it was painted in the mottled green camouflage scheme of most military vehicles. That changed rapidly as the communications technicians began erecting various radio antennas, including one four-foot satellite dish. Power cables were run in from a generator vehicle already in place, and the van's air-conditioning systems were turned on to protect the communications gear, rather than the technicians. They wore military-style dress, though none of them were soldiers. All the pieces were now in place.
Or almost all. At Cape Canaveral, a Titan-IIID rocket began its final countdown. Three senior Air Force officers and half a dozen civilians watched the hundred or so technicians go through the procedure. They were unhappy. Their cargo had been bumped at the last minute for this less important one (they thought). The explanation for the change was not to their collective satisfaction, and there weren't enough launch rockets to play this sort of game. But nobody had bothered telling them what the game actually was.
"Tallyho, tallyho. I have eyeballs on target," Bronco reported. The Eagle bottomed out half a mile astern and slightly below the target. It seemed to be a four-engined Douglas. A DC-4, -6, or -7, a big one-the biggest he'd yet intercepted. Four piston engines and a single rudder made it a Douglas product, certainly older than the man who was now chasing it. Winters saw the blue flames from the exhaust ports on the big radial engines, along with the moonlight shimmering from the propellers. The rest was mainly guesswork.
The flying became harder now. He was closing on the target and had to slough off his airspeed lest he overtake it. Bronco throttled his Pratt Whitney engines back and put on some flaps to increase both lift and drag as he watched his airspeed drop to a scant two-hundred forty knots.
He matched speed when he was a hundred yards aft of the target. The heavy fighter rocked slightly - only the pilot would have noticed - from the larger plane's wake turbulence. Time. He took a deep breath and flexed his fingers once around the stick. Captain Winters switched on his powerful landing lights. They were alert, he saw. The wingtips rocked a second after his lights transfixed the former airliner in the sky.
"Aircraft in view, please identify, over," he called over the guard frequency.
It started turning - it was a DC-7B, he thought now, the last of the great piston-engine liners, so quickly brushed aside by the advent of the jetliners in the late fifties. The exhaust flames grew brighter as the pilot added power.
"Aircraft in view, you are in restricted airspace. Identify immediately, over," Bronco called next. Immediately is a word that carries a special meaning for flyers.
The DC- 7B was diving now, heading for the wave tops. The Eagle followed almost of its own accord.
"Aircraft in view, I repeat - you are in restricted airspace. Identify at once!
Turning away now, heading east for the Florida peninsula. Captain Winters eased back on the stick and armed his gun system. He checked the surface of the ocean to make sure that there were no ships or boats about.
"Aircraft in view, if you do not identify I will open fire, over." No reaction.
The hard part now was that the Eagle's gun system, once armed, did everything possible to facilitate the pilot's task of hitting the target. But they wanted him to bring one in alive, and Bronco had to concentrate to make sure he'd miss, then squeezed the trigger for a fraction of a second.
Half the rounds in the magazine were tracers, and the six-barrel cannon spat them out at a rate of almost a hundred per second. What resulted was a streak of green-yellow light that looked like one of the laser beams in a science-fiction movie, and hung for a sizable portion of infinity a bare ten yards from the DC-7B's cockpit window.
"Aircraft in view: level out and identify or you'll eat the next burst. Over."
"Who is this? What the hell are you doing?" The DC-7B leveled out.
"Identify!" Winters commanded tersely.
"Carib Cargo - we're a special flight, inbound from Honduras."
"You are in restricted airspace. Come left to new course three-four-seven."
"Look, we didn't know about the restriction. Tell us where to go and we're out of here, okay? Over."
"Come left to three-four-seven. I will be following you in. You got some big-league explaining to do, Carib. You picked a bad place to be flying without lights. I hope you got a good story, 'cause the colonel is not pleased with you. Bring that fat-assed bird left - now!"
Nothing happened for a moment. Bronco was a little bit peeved that they were not taking him seriously enough. He eased his fighter over to the right and triggered off another burst to encourage the target.
And it came left to a heading of three-four-seven. And the anticollision lights came on.
"Okay, Carib, maintain course and altitude. Stay off your radio. I repeat, maintain radio silence until instructed otherwise. Don't make it any worse than it already is. I'll be back here to keep an eye on you. Out."
It took nearly an hour - each second like driving a Ferrari in Manhattan rush-hour traffic. Clouds were rolling in from the north, he saw as they approached the coast, and there was lightning in them. They'd land first, Winters thought. On cue, a set of runway lights came on.
"Carib, I want you to land on that strip right in front of you. You do exactly what they tell you. Out." Bronco checked his fuel state. Enough for several more hours. He indulged himself by throttling up and rocketing to twenty thousand as he watched the DC-7's strobe lights enter the blue rectangle of the old airstrip.
"Okay, he's ours," the radio told the fighter pilot.
Bronco did not acknowledge. He brought the Eagle around for Eglin AFB, and figured that he'd beat the weather in. Another night's work.
The DC- 7B rolled to a stop at the end of the runway. As it halted, a number of lights came on. A jeep rolled to within fifty yards of the aircraft's nose. On the back of the jeep was an M-2.50-caliber machine gun, on the left side of which hung a large box of ammunition. The gun was pointed right at the cockpit.
"Out of the fuckin" airplane, amigo! " an angry voice commanded over some loudspeakers.
The forward door opened on the left side of the aircraft. The man who looked down was white and in his forties. Blinded by the lights that were aimed at his face, he was still disoriented. Which was part of the plan, of course.
"Down on the pavement, amigo ," a voice said from behind a light.
"What's gives? I -"
" Down on the fuckin' pavement - right the fuck now! "
There were no stairs. The pilot was joined by another man, and one at a time they sat down on the doorsill, and stretched down to hang from their hands, then dropped the four feet or so to the cracked concrete. They were met by strong arms in rolled-up camouflage fatigues.
" Face on the cement, you fuckin' commie spy! " a young voice screamed at them.
"Hot diggity damn, we finally bagged one!" another voice called. "We got us a fuckin' Cuban spy plane!"
"What the hell -" one of the men on the cement started to say. He stopped talking when the three-pronged flash suppressor on an M-16 rifle came to rest on the back of his neck. Then he felt a hot breath on the side of his face.
"I want any shit out of you, amigo , I'll fuckin' blow it outa ya!" said the other voice. It sounded older than the first one. "Anybody else on the airplane, amigo ?"
"No. Look, we're -"
"Check it out! And watch your ass!" the gunnery sergeant added.
"Aye aye, Gunny," answered the Marine corporal. "Give me some cover on the door."
"You got a name?" the gunnery sergeant asked. He punctuated the question by pressing his muzzle into the pilot's neck.
"Bert Russo. I'm -"
"You picked a bad time to spy on the exercise, Ro berto . We was ready for y'all this time, boy! I wonder if Fidel'll want your ass back...?"
"He don't look Cuban to me, Gunny," a young voice observed. "You s'pose he's a Russian?"
"Hey, I don't know what you're talking about," Russo objected.
"Sure, Ro berto . I - over here, Cap'n!" Footsteps approached. And a new voice started talking.
"Sorry I'm late, Gunny Black."
"We got it under control, sir. Putting people into the plane now. Finally bagged that Cuban snooper, we did. This here's Ro berto . Ain't talked to the other one yet."
"Roll him over."
A rough hand flipped the pilot faceup like a rag doll, and he saw what the hot breath came from. The biggest German Shepherd dog he'd ever seen in his life was staring at him from a distance of three inches. When he looked at it, it started growling.
"Don't you go scarin' my dog, Roberto," Gunnery Sergeant Black warned him unnecessarily.
"You have a name?"
Bert Russo couldn't see any faces. Everyone was backlit by the perimeter lights. He could see the guns, and the dogs, one of which stood next to his copilot. When he started to speak, the dog over his face moved, and that froze the breath in his throat.
"You Cubans ought to know better. We warned you not to come snooping into our exercise last time, but you had to come bother us again, didn't you?" the captain observed.
"I'm not a Cuban - I'm an American. And I don't know what you're talking about," the pilot finally managed to say.
"You got some ID?" the captain asked.
Bert Russo started moving his hand toward his wallet, but then the dog really let loose a snarl.
"Don't scare the dog," the captain warned. "They're a little high-strung, y'know?"
"Fuckin' Cuban spies," Gunny Black observed. "We could just waste them, sir. I mean, who really gives a damn?"
"Hey, Gunny!" a voice called from the airplane. "This ain't no spy-bird. It's full of drugs! We got us a drug runner!"
"Son of a bitch!" The gunny sounded disappointed for a moment. "Fuckin' druggie is all? Shit!"
The captain just laughed. "Mister, you really picked the wrong place to drive that airplane tonight. How much, Corp?"
"A whole goddamned pisspot full, sir. Grass and coke both. Plane's like full of it, sir."
"Fuckin' druggie," the gunny observed. He was quiet for a moment. "Cap'n?"
"Yeah?"
"Sir, all the time, sir, these planes land, and the crew just bugs the hell out, and nobody ever finds 'em, sir."
As though on cue, they all heard a guttural sound from the swamp that surrounded the old airstrip. Albert Russo came from Florida and knew what the sound was.
"I mean, sir, who'd ever know the difference? Plane landed, and the crew ran off 'fore we could catch up, and they got into the swamp over yonder, and like we heard some screams, y'know...?" A pause. "I mean, they're just druggies. Who's really gonna care, sir? Make the world a better place, y'know? Hell, it even feeds them 'gators. They sound right hungry to me, sir."
"No evidence..." the captain mused.
"Ain't nobody gonna give a good goddamn, sir," the sergeant persisted. "Just us be out here, sir."
" No! " the copilot screamed, speaking for the first time and startling the dog at the back of his neck.
"Y'all be quiet now, we be talking business here," the gunny observed.
"Gentlemen, I find that the sergeant makes a pretty good case," the captain said after a moment's contemplation. "And the 'gators do sound hungry. Kill 'em first, Sergeant. No sense being cruel about it, and the 'gators don't care one way or the other. Be sure you take all their IDs, though."
"Aye aye, skipper," the gunnery sergeant replied. He and the remainder of the duty section - there were only eight of them - came from the Special Operations Center at MacDill. They were Recon Marines, for whom unusual activities were the rule rather than the exception. Their helicopter was half a mile away.
"Okay, sport," Black said as he bent down. He hoisted Russo to his feet with one brutal jerk. "You sure did pick the wrong time to run drugs, boy."
"Wait a minute!" the other one screamed. "We didn't - I mean, we can tell you -"
"You talk all you want, boy. I got my orders. Come on, now. Y'all want to pray or something, now be the time."
"We came in from Colombia -"
"That's a real surprise, ain't it?" Black observed as he frogmarched the man toward the trees. "You best be doing your talking to the Lord, boy. He might listen. Then again, He might not..."
"I can tell you everything," Russo said.
"I ain't int'rested! "
"But you can't -"
"Sure I can. What do you think I do for a livin', boy?" Black said with amusement. "Don't worry. It'll be quick and clean. I don't make people suffer like your kind does with drugs. I just do it."
"I have a family..." Russo was whimpering now.
"Most people do," Black agreed. "They'll get along. You got insurance, I 'spect. Lookie there!"
Another Marine pointed his flashlight into the bushes. It was as large an alligator as Russo had ever seen, over twelve feet long. The large eyes blazed yellow in the darkness, while the rest of the reptile's body looked like a green log. With a mouth.
"This is far enough," Black judged. "Keep them dogs back, goddammit!"
The alligator - they called him Nicodemus - opened his mouth and hissed. It was a thoroughly evil sound.
"Please..." Russo said.
"I can tell you everything!" the copilot offered again.
"Like what?" the captain asked disgustedly. Why can't you just die like a man? he seemed to ask instead .
"Where we came from. Who gave us the load. Where we're going. Radio codes. Who's supposed to meet us. Everything!"
"Sure," the captain noted. "Get their IDs. Pocket change, car keys, everything. As a matter of fact, just strip 'em naked before you shoot 'em. Let's try to be neat."
"I know everything!" Russo screamed.
"He knows everything," Gunny Black said. "Isn't that nice? Take off your clothes, boy."
"Hold it a minute, Gunny." The captain came forward and shined his light right in Russo's face.
"What do you know that would interest us?" It was a voice they hadn't heard before. Though dressed in fatigues, he was not a Marine.
Ten minutes later it was all on tape. They already knew most of the names, of course. The location of the airstrip was new information, however, as were the radio codes.
"Do you waive the right to counsel?" the civilian asked.
"Yes!"
"You willing to cooperate?"
"Yes!"
"Good." Russo and the copilot, whose name was Bennett, were blindfolded and led to a helicopter. By noon the next day they'd be taken before a U.S. Magistrate, then a judge of the Federal District Court; by sundown to a remote part of Eglin Air Force Base, a newly built structure with a high fence. It was guarded by serious-looking men in uniform.
They didn't know that they were the lucky ones. Five downed planes qualified a pilot as an ace. Bronco was well on his way there.
10. Dry Feet
MARK BRIGHT CHECKED in with Deputy Assistant Director Murray, just as a matter of courtesy, before going in to see the Director.
"You must have caught the first bird out. How's the case coming?"
"The Pirates Case - that's how the papers are treating it - is just fine. I'm up here because of what spun off of it. The victim was dirtier than we thought." Bright explained on for several minutes, pulling one of the ring binders from his briefcase.
"How much?"
"We're not sure. This one's going to take some careful analysis by people with expertise in the world of high finance, but... well, probably on the order of seven hundred million dollars."
Murray managed to set down his coffee without spilling any. "Say that again?"
"You heard right. I didn't know that until day before yesterday, and I didn't finish reading this until about twenty-four hours ago. Christ, Dan, I just skimmed it. If I'm wrong, I'm off on the low side. Anyway, I figured the Director needed to see this PDQ."
"Not to mention the AG and the President. What time you going in to see Emil?"
"Half an hour. Want to tag along? You know this international shuffle better than I do."
The Bureau had a lot of deputy assistant directors, and Murray's post had a vague definition that he jokingly called "utility outfielder." The Bureau's leading authority on terrorism, Murray was also the agency's in-house expert on how various international groups moved people, arms, and money from point to point. That, added to his wide experience as a street agent, gave him the brief of overseeing certain important cases for the Director or for Bill Shaw, the executive assistant director (Investigations). Bright hadn't walked into this office entirely by accident.
"How solid is your information?"
"Like I said, it's not all collated yet, but I got a bunch of account numbers, transaction dates, amounts, and a solid trail all the way back to the point of origin."
"And all of this because that Coast Guard -"
"No, sir." Bright hesitated. "Well, maybe. Knowing the victim was dirty made us search his background a little more thoroughly. We probably would have gotten this stuff eventually anyway. As it was, I kept going back to the house. You know how it is."
"Yeah." Murray nodded. One mark of a good agent was tenacity. Another was instinct. Bright had returned to the home of the victims for as long as his mind kept telling him that something else had to be there. "How'd you find the safe?"
"The guy had one of those Rubbermaid sheets for his swivel chair to ride on. You know how they tend to drift away when you move your chair back and forth? I must have sat at that desk for an hour, all told, and I noticed that it had moved. I rolled the chair away, so I could slide the mat back, and then it hit me - what a perfect hiding place. I was right." Bright grinned. He had every right to do so.
"You should write that one up for The Investigator " - that was the Justice Department's in-house newsletter - "so everybody'll know to look for it."
"We have a good safe-man in the office. After that, it was just a matter of cracking the code on the disks. We have a guy in Mobile who helps us out on that - and, no, he doesn't know what's on the disks. He knows not to pay close attention, and he's not all that interested anyway. I figure we'll want to keep this one pretty tight until we move to seize the funds."
"You know, I don't think we've ever owned a shopping mall. I remember when we seized that topless bar, though." Murray laughed as he lifted his phone and tapped in the number for the Director's office. "Morning, Moira, this is Dan Murray. Tell the boss that we have something really hot for him. Bill Shaw will want to come in for this, too. Be there in two minutes." Murray hung up. "Come on, Agent Bright. It's not often that you hit a grand slam on your first major-league at-bat. You ever meet the Director?"
"Just to say hi to him twice at receptions."
"He's good people," Murray assured him on the way out the door. It was a short walk down the carpeted corridor. Bill Shaw met them on the way.
"Hi, Mark. How's your dad?"
"Catching a lot of fish."
"Living down in the Keys now, isn't he?"
"Yes, sir."
"You're going to love this one, Bill," Murray observed as he opened the door. He led them in and stopped cold when he saw the Director's secretary. "My God, Moira, you're beautiful!"
"You watch that, Mr. Murray, or I'll tell your wife!" But there was no denying it. Her suit was lovely, her makeup was perfect, and her face positively glowed with what could only be new love.
"I most humbly beg your pardon, ma'am," Murray said gallantly. "This handsome young man is Mark Bright."
"You're five minutes early, Agent Bright," Mrs. Wolfe noted without checking the appointment calendar. "Coffee?"
"No, thank you, ma'am."
"Very well." She checked to see that the Director wasn't on the phone. "You can go right in."
The Director's office was large enough for conferences. Emil Jacobs had come to the Bureau after a distinguished career as a United States Attorney in Chicago, and to take this job he'd declined a seat on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals there. It went without saying that he could have held a partner's chair in any criminal-law firm in America, but from the day he'd passed the bar exam, Emil Jacobs had dedicated his life to putting criminals in jail. Part of that resulted from the fact that his father had suffered during the beer wars of Prohibition. Jacobs never forgot the scars his father bore for once having talked back to a South Side Gang enforcer. A small man, like his father, Emil Jacobs viewed his mission in life as protecting the weak from the evil. He pursued that mission with a religious fervor that hid behind a brilliant analytical mind. A rare Jew in a largely Irish-Catholic agency, he'd been made an honorary member of seventeen Hibernian lodges. While J. Edgar Hoover had been known in the field as "Director Hoover," to the current crop of agents, Director Jacobs was "Emil."
"Your dad worked for me once," Jacobs said as he extended his hand to Agent Bright. "He's down on Marathon Key, isn't he? Still fishing for tarpon?"
"Yes, sir. How'd you know?"
"Every year he sends me a Chanukah card." Jacobs laughed. "It's a long story. I'm surprised he hasn't told you that one. So what's the story?"
Bright sat down and opened his briefcase, handing out the bound copies of his documents. He started talking, awkwardly at first, but in ten minutes he was fully warmed to the subject. Jacobs was flipping rapidly through the binder, but didn't miss a spoken word.
"We're talking over half a billion dollars," Bright concluded.
"More than that from what I see here, son."
"I haven't had time to give it a detailed analysis, sir. I figured you'd want to see this right quick."
"You figured right," Jacobs replied without looking up. "Bill, who's the best guy at Justice to get in on this?"
"Remember the guy who headed the savings-and-loan thing? He's a whiz for following money from place to place. Marty something," Shaw said. "Young guy. He has a real nose for it. I think Dan ought to be involved also."
Jacobs looked up. "Well?"
"Fine with me. Shame we can't get a commission on what we seize. We're going to want to move fast on this. The first inkling they have..."
"That might not matter," Jacobs mused. "But there's no reason to drag our feet. This sort of loss will sting them pretty good. And with the other things we're... excuse me. Right, Dan, let's set this up to move fast. Any complications on the piracy case?"
"No, sir. The physical evidence is enough for a conviction. The U.S. Attorney tossed the confession entirely when the defense lawyer started grumbling about how it had been obtained. Says he smiled when he did it. Told the other guy no deals of any kind, that he had enough evidence to fry them, which is exactly what he plans to do. He's pressing for an early trial date, going to try the case himself. The whole thing."
"Sounds like we have a budding political career on our hands," Jacobs observed. "How much show and how much substance?"
"He's been pretty good to us down in Mobile, sir," Bright said.
"You can never have too many friends on The Hill," Jacobs agreed. "You're fully satisfied with the case?"
"Yes, sir. It's solid. What's spun off of it can stand pretty much on its own."
"Why was there so much money on the boat if they just planned to kill him?" Murray asked.
"Bait," Agent Bright answered. "According to the confession that we trashed, they were actually supposed to deliver it to a contact in the Bahamas. As you can see from this document, the victim occasionally handled large cash transactions himself. That's probably the reason he bought the yacht in the first place."
Jacobs nodded. "Fair enough. Dan, you did tell that captain -"
"Yes, sir. He learned his lesson."
"Fine. Back to the money. Dan, you coordinate with Justice and keep me informed through Bill. I want a target date to start the seizures - give you three days for that. Agent Bright and the Mobile Field Office are to get full credit for turning this one - but, this one is code-word until we're ready to move." Codeword meant that the case would be classified right up with CIA operations. It wasn't all that unusual for the Bureau, which ran most of America's counterintelligence operations. "Mark, pick a code-word."
" Tarpon . Dad always has been crazy about chasing after them, and they're good fighters."
"I'm going to have to go down there and see. I've never caught anything bigger than a pike." Jacobs was quiet for a moment. He was thinking about something, Murray thought, wondering what it was. Whatever it was, it gave Emil a very crafty look. "The timing couldn't be better. Shame I can't tell you why. Mark, say hi to your dad for me." The Director stood, ending the meeting.
Mrs. Wolfe noted that everyone was smiling when they came out of the room. Shaw even gave her a wink. Ten minutes later she'd opened a new file in the secure cabinet, an empty folder with the name TARPON typed on the paper label. It went in the drug section, and Jacobs told her that further documentation would follow in a few days.
Murray and Shaw walked Agent Bright down to his car and saw him off.
"What's with Moira?" Dan asked as the car pulled out. "They think she's got a boyfriend." "About time."
At 4:45, Moira Wolfe placed the plastic cover over her computer keyboard and another over her typewriter. Before leaving the office, she checked her makeup one last time and then walked out with a spring in her step. The oddest thing was that she didn't realize that everyone else in the office was rooting for her. The other secretaries and executive assistants, even the Director's security detail, had avoided comment for fear of making her self-conscious. But tonight had to be a date. The signs were clear, even though Moira thought that she was concealing it all.
As a senior executive secretary, Mrs. Wolfe rated a reserved parking space, one of many things that made her life easier. She drove out a few minutes later onto 10th Street, Northwest, then turned right onto Constitution Avenue. Instead of her normal southward course toward Alexandria and home, she headed west across the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge into Arlington. It seemed as though the rush-hour traffic was parting before her, and twenty-five minutes later she pulled up to a small Italian restaurant in Seven Corners. Before going in she checked her makeup again in the rearview mirror. Her children would be getting dinner from McDonald's tonight, but they understood. She told them that she'd be working very late, and she was sure that they believed her, though she ought to have known that they saw through her lies as easily as she had once seen through theirs.
"Excuse me," she said to the hostess upon entering.
"You must be Mrs. Wolfe," the young lady replied at once. "Please come with me. Mr. D az is waiting for you."
F lix Cortez - Juan D az - was sitting in a corner booth at the rear of the restaurant. Moira was sure that he'd picked the dark place for privacy, and that he had his back to the wall so that he could see her coming. She was partially correct on both counts. Cortez was wary of being in this area. CIA headquarters was less than five miles away, thousands of FBI personnel lived in this area, and who could say whether a senior counterintelligence officer might also like this restaurant? He didn't think that anyone there knew what he looked like, but intelligence officers do not live to collect their pensions by assuming anything. His nervousness was not entirely feigned. On the other hand, he was unarmed. Cortez was in a business where firearms caused far more problems than they solved, public perceptions to the contrary.
F lix rose as she approached. The hostess departed as soon as she realized the nature of this "business dinner," leaving the two lovers - she thought it was kind of cute - to grab each other's hands and exchange kisses that were oddly passionate despite their being restrained for so public a place. Cortez seated his lady, pouring her a glass of white wine before resuming his place opposite her. His first words were delivered with sheepish embarrassment.
"I was afraid you wouldn't come."
"How long have you been waiting?" Moira asked. There were a half-dozen stubbed-out cigarettes in the ashtray.
"Almost an hour," he answered with a funny look. Clearly he was amused at himself, she thought.
"But I'm early."
"I know." This time he laughed. "You make me a fool, Moira. I do not act in such a way at home."
She misread what he was trying to say. "I'm sorry, Juan, I didn't mean-"
A perfect response , Cortez's mind reported. Exactly right . He took her hand across the table and his eyes sparkled. "Do not trouble yourself. Sometimes it is good for a man to be a fool. Forgive me for calling you so abruptly. A small business problem. I had to fly to Detroit on short notice, and since I was in the neighborhood, as you say, I wanted to see you before I went home."
"Problem...?"
"A change in the design for a carburetor. Something to do with fuel economy, and I must change some tools in my factories." He waved his hand. "The problem is solved. These things are not uncommon - and, it gave me an excuse to make an extra trip here. Perhaps I should thank your EPA, or whatever government office complains about air pollution."
"I will write the letter myself, if you wish."
His voice changed. "It is so good to see you again, Moira."
"I was afraid that -"
The emotion on his face was manifest. "No, Moira, it was I who was afraid. I am a foreigner. I come here so seldom, and surely there must be many men who -"
"Juan, where are you staying?" Mrs. Wolfe asked.
"At the Sheraton."
"Do they have room service?"
"Yes, but why -"
"I won't be hungry for about two hours," she told him, and finished off her wine. "Can we leave now?"
F lix dropped a pair of twenties on the table and led her out. The hostess was reminded of a song from The King and I . They were in the lobby of the Sheraton in less than six minutes. Both walked quickly to the elevators, and both looked warily about, both hoping that they wouldn't be spotted, but for different reasons. His tenth-floor room was actually an expensive suite. Moira scarcely noticed on entering, and for the next hour knew of nothing but a man whose name she mistakenly thought was Juan D az.
"So wonderful a thing," he said at last.
"What's that?"
"So wonderful a thing that there was a problem with the new carburetor."
"Juan!"
"I must now create quality-control problems so that they call me every week to Detroit," he suggested lightly, stroking her arm as he did so.
"Why not build a factory here?"
"The labor costs are too high," he said seriously. "Of course, drugs would be less of a problem."
"There, too?"
"Yes. They call it basuco , filthy stuff, not good enough for export, and too many of my workers indulge." He stopped talking for a moment. "Moira, I try to make a joke, and you force me to speak of business. Have you lost interest in me?"
"What do you think?"
"I think I need to return to Venezuela while I can still walk."
Her fingers did some exploring. "I think you will recover soon."
"That is good to know." He turned his head to kiss her, and let his eyes linger, examining her body in the rays of the setting sun that spilled through the windows. She noticed his stares and reached for the sheet. He stopped her.
"I am no longer young," she said.
"Every child in all the world looks upon his mother and sees the most beautiful woman in the world, even though many mothers are not beautiful. Do you know why this is so? The child looks with love, and sees love returned. Love is what makes beauty, Moira. And, truly, you are beautiful to me."
And there it was. The word was finally out in the open. He watched her eyes go somewhat wider, her mouth move, and her breaths deepen for a moment. For the second time, Cortez felt shame. He shrugged it off. Or tried to. He'd done this sort of thing before, of course. But always with young women, young, single ones with an eye for adventure and a taste for excitement. This one was different in so many ways. Different or not, he reminded himself, there was work to be done.
"Forgive me. Do I embarrass you?"
"No," she answered softly. "Not now."
He smiled down at her. "And now, are you ready for dinner?"
"Yes."
"That is good."
Cortez rose and got the bathrobes from the back of the bathroom door. Service was good. Half an hour later, Moira stayed in the bedroom while the dinner cart was rolled into the sitting room. He opened the connecting door as soon as the waiter left.
"You make of me a dishonest man. The look he gave me!"
She laughed. "Do you know how long it's been since. I had to hide in the other room?"
"And you didn't order enough. How can you live on this tiny salad?"
"If I grow fat, you will not come back to me."
"Where I come from, we do not count a woman's ribs," Cortez said. "When I see someone who grows too thin, I think it is the basuco again. Where I live, they are the ones who forget even to eat."
"Is it that bad?"
"Do you know what basuco is?"
"Cocaine, according to the reports I see."
"Poor quality, not good enough for the criminals to send to the norteamericanos , and mixed with chemicals that poison the brain. It is becoming the curse of my homeland."
"It's pretty bad here," Moira said. She could see that it was something that really worried her lover. Just like it was with the Director, she thought.
"I have spoken to the police at home. How can my workers do their jobs if their minds are poisoned by this thing? And what do the police do? They shrug and mumble excuses - and people die. They die from the basuco . They die from the guns of the dealers. And no one does anything to stop it." Cortez made a frustrated gesture. "You know, Moira, I am not merely a capitalist. My factories, they give jobs, they bring money into my country, money for the people to build houses and educate their children. I am rich, yes, but I help to build my country - with these hands, I do it. My workers, they come to me and tell me that their children - ah! I can do nothing. Someday, the dealers, they will come to me and try to take my factory," he went on. "I will go to the police, and the police will do nothing. I will go to the army, and the army will do nothing. You work for your federales , yes? Is there nothing anyone can do?" Cortez nearly held his breath, wondering what the answer would be.
"You should see the reports I have to type for the Director."
"Reports," he snorted. "Anyone can write reports. At home, the police write many reports, and the judges do their investigations - and nothing happens. If I ran my factory in this way, soon I would be living in a hillside shack and begging for money in the street! Do your federales do anything?"
"More than you might think. There are things going on right now that I cannot speak about. What they're saying around the office is that the rules are changing. But I don't know what that means. The Director is flying down to Colombia soon to meet with the Attorney General, and - oh! I'm not supposed to tell anybody that. It's supposed to be a secret."
"I will tell no one," Cortez assured her.
"I really don't know that much anyway," she went on carefully. "Something new is about to start. I don't know what. The Director doesn't like it very much, whatever it is."
"If it hurts the criminals, why should he not like it?" Cortez asked in a puzzled voice. "You could shoot them all dead in the street, and I would buy your federales dinner afterwards!"
Moira just smiled. "I'll pass that along. That's what all the letters say - we get letters from all sorts of people."
"Your director should listen to them."
"So does the President."
"Perhaps he will listen," Cortez suggested. This is an election year ...
"Maybe he already is. Whatever just changed, it started there."
"But your director doesn't like it?" He shook his head. "I do not understand the government in my country. I should not try to understand yours."
"It is funny, though. This is the first time that I don't know - well, I couldn't tell you anyway." Moira finished her salad. She looked at her empty wineglass. F lix/Juan filled it for her.
"Can you tell me one thing?"
"What?"
"Call me when your director leaves for Colombia," he said.
"Why?" She was too taken aback to say no.
"For state visits one spends several days, no?"
"Yes, I suppose. I don't really know."
"And if your director is away, and you are his secretary, you will have little work to do, no?"
"No, not much."
"Then I will fly to Washington, of course." Cortez rose from his chair and took three steps around the table. Moira's bathrobe hung loosely around her. He took advantage of that. "I must fly home early tomorrow morning. One day with you is no longer enough, my love. Hmm, you are ready, I think."
"Are you?"
"We will see. There is one thing I will never understand," he said as he helped her from the chair.
"What is that?"
"Why would any fool use powder for pleasure when he can have a woman?" It was, in fact, something that Cortez never would understand. But it wasn't his job to understand it.
"Any woman?" she said, heading for the door.
Cortez pulled the robe from her. "No, not any woman."
"My God," Moira said, half an hour later. Her chest glistened with perspiration, hers and his.
"I was mistaken," he gasped facedown at her side.
"What?"
"When your director of federales flies to Colombia, do not call me!" He laughed to show that he was kidding. "Moira, I do not know that I can do this for more than one day a month."
A giggle. "Perhaps you should not work so hard, Juan."
"How can I not?" He turned to look at her. "I have not felt like this since I was a boy. But I am no longer a boy. How can women stay young when men cannot?" She smiled with amusement at the obvious lie. He had pleased her greatly.
"I cannot call you."
"What?"
"I do not have your number." She laughed. Cortez leaped from the bed and pulled the wallet from his coat pocket, then muttered something that sounded profane.
"I have no cards - ah!" He took the pad from the night table and wrote the number. "This is for my office. Usually I am not there - I spend my days on the shop floor." A grunt. "I spend my nights in the factory. I spend weekends in the factory. Sometimes I sleep in the factory. But Consuela will reach me, wherever I might be."
"And I must leave," Moira said.
"Tell your director that he must make it a weekend trip. We will spend two days in the country. I know of a small, quiet place in the mountains, just a few hours from here."
"Do you think you can survive it?" she asked with a hug.
"I will eat sensibly and exercise," he promised her. A final kiss, and she left.
Cortez closed the door and walked into the bathroom. He hadn't learned all that much, but what he had found out might be crucial. "The rules are changing." Whatever they were changing to, Director Jacobs didn't like it, but was evidently going along. He was going to Colombia to discuss it with the Attorney General. Jacobs, he remembered, knew the Attorney General quite well. They had been classmates together in college, over thirty years before. The Attorney General had flown to America for the funeral of Mrs. Jacobs. Something with a presidential seal on it, also. Well. Two of Cortez's associates were in New Orleans to meet with the attorney for the two fools who'd botched the killing on the yacht. The FBI had certainly played a part in that, and whatever had happened there would give him a clue.
Cortez looked up from washing his hands to see the man who had obtained those intelligence tidbits and decided that he didn't like the man who had done it. He shrugged off the feeling. It wasn't the first time. Certainly it wouldn't be the last.
The shot went off at 23:41 hours. The Titan-IIID's two massive solid-rocket boosters ignited at the appointed time, over a million pounds of thrust was generated, and the entire assembly leapt off the pad amid a glow that would be seen from Savannah to Miami. The solid boosters burned for 120 seconds before being discarded. At this point the liquid-fuel engines on the booster's center section ignited, hurling the remaining package higher, faster, and farther downrange. All the while onboard instruments relayed data from the booster to ground station at the Cape. In fact, they were also radioing their data to a Soviet listening post located on the northern tip of Cuba, and to a "fishing trawler" which kept station off Cape Canaveral, and also flew a red flag. The Titan-IIID was a bird used exclusively for military launches, and Soviet interest in this launch resulted from an unconfirmed GRU report that the satellite atop the launcher had been specially modified to intercept very weak electronic signals - exactly what kind the report didn't specify.
Faster and higher. Half of the remaining rocket dropped off now, the second-stage fuel expended, and the third stage lit off about a thousand miles downrange. In the control bunkers at the Cape, the engineers and technicians noted that everything was still going as planned, as befitted a launch vehicle whose ancestry dated back to the late 1950s. The third stage burned out on time and on profile. The payload, along with the fourth, or transstage, now awaited the proper time to ignite, kicking the payload to its intended geosynchronous height, from which it would hover over a specific piece of the earth's equator. The hiatus allowed the control-room crew to top off their coffee, make necessary pit stops, and review the data from the launch, which, they all agreed, had been about as perfect as an engineer had any right to expect.
The trouble came half an hour later. The transstage ignited early, seemingly on its own, boosting the payload to the required height, but not in the expected place; also, instead of being perfectly placed in a stationary position, the payload was left in an eccentric path, meandering in a lopsided figure-eight that straddled the equator. Even if it had been over the right longitude, the path would negate its coverage of the higher latitudes for brief but annoying periods of time. Despite everything that had gone right, all the thousands of parts that had functioned exactly as designed, the launch was a failure. The engineering crew who managed the lower stages shook their heads in sympathy with those whose responsibility had been the transstage, and who now surveyed launch control in evident dejection. The launch was a failure.
The payload didn't know that. At the appointed time, it separated itself from the transstage and began to perform as it had been programmed. Weighted arms ten meters in length extended themselves. Gravity from an earth over twenty thousand miles away would act on them through tidal forces, keeping the satellite forever pointed downward. Next the solar panels deployed to convert sunlight into electricity, charging the onboard batteries. Finally, an enormous dish antenna began to form. Made of a special metal-ceramic-plastic material, its frame "remembered" its proper configuration, and on being heated by sunlight unfolded itself over a three-hour period until it formed a nearly perfect parabolic dish fully thirty meters in diameter. Anyone close enough to view the event would have noticed the builder's plate on the side of the satellite. Why this was done was itself an anachronism, since there would never be anyone close enough to notice, but it was the custom. The plate, made of gold foil, designated the prime contractor as TRW, and the name of the satellite as Rhyolite-J. The last of an obsolete series of such satellites, it had been built in 1981 and sat in storage - at the cost of over $100,000 per year - awaiting a launch that had never actually been expected, since CIA and NSA had developed newer, less cumbersome electronic-reconnaissance birds that used advanced signal-gathering equipment. In fact, some of the new equipment had been attached to this obsolete bird, made even more effective by the massive receiving dish. Rhyolite had been originally designed to eavesdrop on Soviet electronic emissions, telemetry from missile tests, side-lobes from air-defense radars, scatterings from microwave towers, even for signals from spy devices dropped off by CIA officers and agents at sensitive locations.
That didn't matter to the people at the Cape. An Air Force public affairs officer released a statement to the general effect that the (classified) launch had not achieved proper orbit. This was verified by the Soviets, who had fully expected the satellite to take a place over the Indian Ocean when, in fact, it was now oscillating over the Brazilian-Peruvian border, from which it couldn't even see the Soviet Union. Curious, they thought, that the Americans had even allowed it to switch itself on, but from yet another "fishing trawler" off the California coast, they monitored intermittent scatterings of encrypted transmissions from the satellite down to some earth station or other. Whatever it was sending down, however, was of little concern to the Soviet Union.
Those signals were received at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where technicians in yet another nondescript communications van, with a satellite dish set outside, began calibrating their instruments. They didn't know that the launch was supposedly a failure. They just knew that everything about it was secret.
The jungle , Chavez thought. It smelled, but he didn't mind the smell so much as the snakes. Chavez had never told anyone about it, but he hated and feared snakes. All kinds of snakes. He didn't know why - and it troubled him that fear of snakes was associated with women, not men - but even the thought of the slithering, slimy things made his skin crawl, those legless lizards with flicking tongues and lidless eyes. They hung from branches and hid under fallen trees, waiting for him to pass so that they could strike at whatever part of his anatomy offered itself. He knew that they would if they got the chance. He was sure that he would die if they did. So he kept alert. No snake would get him, not so long as he stayed alert. At least he had a silenced weapon. That way he could kill them without making noise. Fuckin' snakes .
He finally made the road, and he really ought to have stayed in the mud, but he wanted to lie down on a dry, clear place, which he first scanned with his AN/PVS-7 night scope. No snakes. He took a deep breath, then removed the plastic canteen from its holder. They'd been on the move for six hours, covering nearly five miles - which was really pushing it - but they were supposed to get to this road before dawn, and get there unseen by the OPFOR - the opposing force - who were warned of their presence. Chavez had spotted them twice, each time, he thought, a pair of American MPs, who weren't really soldiers, not to his way of thinking. Chavez had led his squad around them, moving through the swamp as quietly as... as a snake, he told himself wryly. He could have double-tapped all four of them easily enough, but that wasn't the mission.
"Nice job, Ding." Captain Ramirez came down beside him. They spoke in whispers.
"Hell, they were asleep."
The captain grinned in the darkness. "I hate the fuckin' jungle. All these bugs."
"Bugs ain't so bad, sir. It's the snakes I don't like."
Both men scanned the road in both directions. Nothing. Ramirez clapped the sergeant on the shoulder and went to check on the rest of the squad. He'd scarcely left when a figure emerged from the treeline three hundred yards away. He was moving directly toward Chavez. Uh-oh .
Ding moved backward under a bush and set down his submachine gun. It wasn't loaded anyway, not even with the wax practice bullets. A second one came out, but he walked the other way. Bad tactics, Chavez thought. Pairs are supposed to support each other. Well, that was too bad. The last sliver of moon was dropping below the top level of the triple-canopy forest, and Chavez still had the advantage of his night scope as the figure walked toward him. The man walked quietly - at least he knew how to do that - and slowly, keeping his eyes on the edge of the road and listening as much as looking. Chavez waited, switching off the scope and removing it from his head. Then he removed his fighting knife from its sheath. Closer, only about fifty yards now, and the sergeant coiled up, drawing his legs under his chest. At thirty feet, he stopped breathing. If he could have willed his heart to stop, he'd have done that to reduce the noise. This was for fun. If this had been for-real, a 9mm bullet would now reside in the man's head.
The sentry walked right past Ding's position, looking but not seeing the form under the bush. He made it another step before he heard a swishing sound, but then it was too late. By that time, he was facedown on the gravel, and he felt the hilt of a knife at the back of his neck.
"Ninja owns the night, boy! You're history."
"You got me, sure as hell," the man whispered in reply.
Chavez rolled him over. It was a major, and his headgear was a beret. Maybe the OPFOR wasn't MPs after all.
"Who are you?" the victim asked.
"Staff Sergeant Domingo Chavez, sir."
"Well, you just killed a jungle-warfare instructor, Chavez. Good job. Mind if I get a drink? It's been a long night." Chavez allowed the man to roll into the bushes, where he, too, took a pull off his canteen. "What outfit you from - wait a minute, 3rd of the 17th, right?"
"We own the night, sir," Chavez agreed. "You been there?"
"Going there, for a battalion staffjob." The major wiped some blood from his face. He'd hit the road a little hard.
"Sorry about that, sir."
"My fault, Sergeant, not yours. We have twenty guys out there. I never thought you'd make it this far without being spotted."
The sound of a vehicle came down the road. A minute later the wide-set lights of a Hummer - the new and larger incarnation of the venerable jeep-appeared, announcing that the exercise was over. The "dead" major marched off to collect his men, while Captain Ramirez did the same.
"That was the final exam, people," he told the squad. "Get a good day's sleep. We go in tonight."
"I don't believe it," Cortez said. He'd hopped the first flight from Dulles to Atlanta. There he met an associate in a rented car, and now they discussed their information in the total anonymity of an automobile driving at the posted limit on the Atlanta beltway.
"Call it psychological warfare," the man answered. "No plea-bargain, no nothing. It's being handled as a straight murder trial. Ram n and Jes s will not get any consideration."
Cortez looked at the passing traffic. He didn't give a damn about the two sicarios , who were as expendable as any other terrorists and who didn't know the reason for the killings. What he was considering now was a series of seemingly disjointed and unconnected bits of information on American interdiction operations. An unusual number of courier aircraft were disappearing. The Americans were treating this legal case in an unusual way. The Director of the FBI was doing something that he didn't like, and that his personal secretary didn't know about yet. "The rules are changing." That could mean anything at all.
Something fundamental. It had to be. But what?
There were a number of well-paid and highly reliable informants throughout the American government, in Customs, DEA, the Coast Guard, none of whom had reported a single thing. The law-enforcement community was in the dark - except for the FBI Director, who didn't like it, but would soon go to Colombia...
Some sort of intelligence operation was - no. Active Measures? The phrase came from KGB, and could mean any of several things, from feeding disinformation to reporters to "wet" work. Would the Americans do anything like that? They never had. He glowered at the passing scenery. He was an experienced intelligence officer, and his profession was to determine what people were doing from bits and pieces of random data. That he was working for someone he detested was beside the point. This was a matter of pride and besides, he detested the Americans even more.
What were they doing now?
Cortez had to admit to himself that he didn't know, but in one hour he'd board a plane, and in six hours he'd have to tell his employer that he didn't know. That did not appeal to him.
Something fundamental. The rules are changing. The FBI Director didn't like it. His secretary didn't know. The trip to Colombia was clandestine.
Cortez relaxed. Whatever it was, it was not an immediate threat. The Cartel was too secure. There would be time to analyze and respond. There were many people in the smuggling chain who could be sacrificed, who would fight for the chance, in fact. And after a time, the Cartel would adapt its operations to the changing conditions as it always had. All he had to do was convince his employer of that simple fact. What did el jefe really care about Ram n and Jes s or any of the underlings who ran the drugs and did the killings that became necessary? It was continuing the supply of drugs to the consumers that mattered.
His mind came back to the vanishing airplanes. Historically, the Americans had managed to intercept one or two per month, that small a number despite all their radars and aircraft. But recently - four in the last two weeks, wasn't it? - had disappeared. What did that mean? Unknown to the Americans, there had always been "operational" losses, a military term that meant nothing more mysterious than flying accidents. One of the reasons that his boss had taken Carlos Larson on was to mitigate that wastage of resources, and it had, initially, shown promise - until very recently. Why the sudden jump in losses? If the Americans had somehow intercepted them, the air crews would have shown up in courtrooms and jails, wouldn't they? Cortez had to dismiss that thought.
Sabotage, perhaps? What if someone were placing explosives in the aircraft, like the Arab terrorists did...? Unlikely... or was it? Did anyone check for that? It wouldn't take much. Even minor damage to a low-flying aircraft could face the pilot with a problem whose solution required more time than he had in altitude. Even a single blasting cap could do it, not even a cubic centimeter... he'd have to check that out. But, then, who would be doing it? The Americans? But what if it became known that the Americans were placing bombs on aircraft? Would they take that political risk? Probably not. Who else, then? The Colombians might. Some senior Colombian military officer, operating entirely on his own... or in the pay of the yanquis ? That was possible. It couldn't be a government operation, Cortez was sure. There were too many informants there, too.
Would it have to be a bomb? Why not contaminated gasoline? Why not minor tampering with an engine, a frayed control cable... or a flight instrument. What was it that Larson had said about having to watch instruments at low level? What if some mechanic had altered the setting on the artificial horizon...? Or merely arranged for it to stop working... something in the electrical system, perhaps? How hard was it to make a small airplane stop flying? Whom to ask? Larson?
Cortez grumbled to himself. This was undirected speculation, decidedly unprofessional. There were countless possibilities. He knew that something was probably happening, but not what it was. And only probably, he admitted to himself. The unusually large number of missing aircraft could merely be a statistical anomaly - he didn't believe that, but forced himself to consider the possibility. A series of coincidences - there was not an intelligence academy in the world that encouraged its students to believe in coincidences, and yet how many strange coincidences had he encountered in his professional career?
"The rules are changing," he muttered to himself.
"What?" the driver asked.
"Back to the airport. My Caracas flight leaves in less than an hour."
" S , jefe ."
Cortez lifted off on time. He had to travel to Venezuela first for the obvious reasons. Moira might get curious, might want to see his ticket, might ask his flight number, and besides, American agents would be less interested in people who flew there than those who flew directly to Bogot . Four hours later he made his Avianca connection to El Dorado International Airport, where he met a private plane for the last hop over the mountains.
Equipment was issued as always, with a single exception. Chavez noted that nobody was signing for anything. That was a real break from routine. The Army always had people sign for their gear. If you broke it or lost it, well, though they might not make you pay for it, you had to account for it in one way or another. But not now.
The load- cuts differed slightly from one man to the next. Chavez, the squad scout, got the lightest load, while Julio Vega, one of the machine-gunners, got the heaviest. Ding got eleven magazines for his MP-5 submachine gun, a total of 330 rounds. The M-203 grenade launchers that two squad members had attached to their rifles were the only heavy firepower they'd be carrying in.
His uniform was not the usual stripe-and-splotch Army fatigue pattern, but rather rip-stop khaki because they weren't supposed to look like Americans to the casual observer, if any. Khaki clothing was not the least unusual in Colombia. Jungle fatigues were. A floppy green hat instead of a helmet, and a scarf to tie over his hair. A small can of green spray paint and two sticks of facial camouflage "makeup." A waterproof map case with several maps; Captain Ramirez got one also. Twelve feet of rope and a snaplink, issued to everyone. A short-range FM radio of an expensive commercial type that was nonetheless better and cheaper than the one the Army used. Seven-power compact binoculars, Japanese. American-style web gear of the type used by every Army in the world, actually made in Spain. Two one-quart canteens to hang on the web belt, and a third two-quart water bottle for his rucksack, American, commercial. A large supply of water-purification tablets - they'd resupply their own water, which wasn't a surprise.
Ding got a strobe light with an infrared cover lens because one of his jobs would be to select and mark helicopter landing zones, plus a VS-17 panel for the same purpose. A signaling mirror for times when a radio might not be appropriate (steel mirrors, moreover, do not break). A small flashlight; and a butane cigarette lighter, which was far better than carrying matches. A large bottle of extra-strength Tylenol, also known as "light-fighter candy." A bottle of prescription cough medicine, heavily laced with codeine. A small bottle of Vaseline petroleum jelly. A small squeeze bottle of concentrated CS tear gas. A weapons-cleaning kit, which included a toothbrush. Spare batteries for everything. A gas mask.
Chavez would travel light with but four hand grenades - Dutch NR-20 C1 type - and two smokes, also of Dutch manufacture. The rest of the squad got the Dutch frags, and some CS tear-gas grenades, also Dutch. In fact, all of the weapons carried by the squad and all of their ammunition had been purchased at Colon, Panama, in what was fast becoming the hemisphere's most convenient arms market. For anyone with cash there were weapons to be had.
Rations were the normal MREs. Water was the main hygienic concern, but they'd already been fully briefed about using their water-purification tablets. Whoever forgot had a supply of antidiarrhea pills that would follow a serious chewing from Captain Ramirez. Every man had gotten a new series of booster shots while still in Colorado against the spectrum of tropical diseases endemic to the area, and all carried an odorless insect repellent made for the military by the same company that produced the commercial product called "Off." The squad medic carried a full medical kit, and each rifleman had his own morphine Syrette and a plastic bottle of IV fluids for use as a blood-expander.
Chavez had a razor-sharp machete, a four-inch folding knife, and, of course, his three nonregulation throwing stars that Captain Ramirez didn't know about. With other sundry items, Chavez would be carrying a load of exactly fifty-eight pounds. That made his load the lightest in the squad. Vega and the other SAW gunner had the heaviest, with seventy-one pounds. Ding jostled the load around on his shoulders to get a feel for it, then adjusted the straps on his rucksack to make it as comfortable as possible. It was a futile exercise. He was packing a third of his body weight, which is about as much as a man can carry for any length of time without risking a physical breakdown. His boots were well broken-in, and he had extra pairs of dry socks.
"Ding, could you give me a hand with this?" Vega asked.
"Sure, Julio." Chavez took some slack in on one of the machine gunner's shoulder straps. "How's that?"
"Just right, ' mano . Jeez, carrying the biggest gun do have a price."
"Roger that, Oso ." Julio, who'd demonstrated the ability to pack more than anyone in the squad, had a new nickname, Oso : Bear.
Captain Ramirez came down the line, walking around each man to check the loads. He adjusted a few straps, bounced a few rucksacks, and generally made sure that every man was properly loaded, and that all weapons were clean. When he was finished, Ding checked the captain's load, and Ramirez took his place in front of the squad.
"Okay - anybody got aches, pains, or blisters?"
"No, sir!" the squad replied.
"We ready to go do it?" Ramirez asked with a wide grin that belied the fact that he was as nervous as everyone else in the squad bay.
"Yes, sir!"
One more thing left to do. Ramirez walked down the line and collected dog tags from each man. Each set went into a clear plastic bag along with wallets and all other forms of identification. Finished, he removed his own, counted the bags a last time, and left them on the table in the squad bay. Outside, each squad boarded a separate five-ton truck. Few waves were exchanged. Though friendships had sprouted up in training, they were mainly limited within the structure of the squads. Each eleven-man unit was a self-contained community. Every member knew every other, knew all there was to know, from stories of sexual performance to marksmanship skills. Some solid friendships had blossomed, and some even more valuable rivalries. They were, in fact, already closer than friends could ever be. Each man knew that his life would depend on the skill of his fellows, and none of them wished to appear weak before his comrades. Argue as they might among themselves, they were now a team; though they might trade barbed comments, over the past weeks they had been forged into a single complex organism with Ramirez as their brain, Chavez as their eyes, Julio Vega and the other machine-gunner as their fists, and all the others as equally vital components. They were as ready for their mission as any soldiers had ever been.
The trucks arrived together behind the helicopter and the troops boarded by squads. The first thing Chavez noticed was the 7.62mm minigun on the right side of the aircraft. There was an Air Force sergeant standing next to it, his green coveralls topped by a camouflage-painted flight helmet, and a massive feed line of shells leading to an even larger hopper. Ding had no particular love for the Air Force - a bunch of pansy truck drivers, he'd thought until now - but the man on that gun looked serious and competent as hell. Another such gun was unmanned on the opposite side of the aircraft, and there was a spot for another at the rear. The flight engineer - his name tag said ZIMMER - moved them all into their places and made sure that each soldier was properly strapped down to his particular piece of floor. Chavez didn't trade words with him, but sensed that this man had been around the block a few times. It was, he belatedly realized, the biggest goddamned helicopter he'd ever seen.
The flight engineer made one final check before going forward and plugging his helmet into the intercom system. A moment later came the whine from the helicopter's twin turbine engines.
"Looking good," PJ observed over the headset. The engines had been pre-warmed and the fuel tanks topped off. Zimmer had repaired a minor hydraulic problem, and the Pave Low III was as ready as his skilled men could make it. Colonel Johns keyed his radio.
"Tower, this is Night Hawk Two-Five requesting permission to taxi. Over."
"Two- Five, tower, permission granted. Winds are one-zero-niner at six knots."
"Roger. Two-Five is rolling. Out."
Johns twisted the throttle grip on his collective control and eased the cyclic stick forward. Due to the size and engine power of the big Sikorsky, it was customary to taxi the aircraft toward the runway apron before actually lifting off. Captain Willis swiveled his neck around, checking for other ground traffic, but there was none this late at night. One ground crewman walked backward in front of them as a further safety measure, waving for them to follow with lighted wands. Five minutes later they were at the apron. The wands came together and pointed to the right. Johns gave the man a last look, returning the ceremonial salute.
"Okay, let's get this show on the road." PJ brought the throttle to full power, making a last check of his engine instruments as he did so. Everything looked fine. The helicopter lifted at the nose a few feet, then dipped forward as it began to move forward. Next it started to climb, leaving behind a small tornado of dust, visible only in the blue runway perimeter lights.
Captain Willis put the navigations systems on line, adjusting the electronic terrain display. There was a moving map display not unlike that used by James Bond in Goldfinger . Pave Low could navigate from a Doppler-radar system that interrogated the ground, from an inertial system using laser-gyroscopes, or from navigational satellites. The helicopter initially flew straight down the Canal's length, simulating the regular security patrol. They unknowingly flew within a mile of the SHOWBOAT's communications nexus at Corezal.
"Lot of pick-and-shovel work down there," Willis observed.
"Ever been here before?"
"No, sir, first time. Quite a job for eighty-ninety years ago," he said as they flew over a large container ship. They caught a little buffet from the hot stack-gas of the ship. PJ came to the right to get out of it. It would be a two-hour flight, and there was no sense in jostling the passengers any more than necessary. In an hour their MC-130E tanker would lift off to refuel them for the return leg.
"Lot of dirt to move," Colonel Johns agreed after a moment. He moved a little in his seat. Twenty minutes later they went "feet wet," passing over the Caribbean Sea for the longest portion of the flight on a course of zero-nine-zero, due east.
"Look at that," Willis said half an hour later. On their night-vision sets, they spotted a twin-engine aircraft on a northerly heading, perhaps six miles away. They spotted it from the infrared glow of the two piston engines.
"No lights," PJ agreed.
"I wonder what he's carrying?"
"Sure as hell isn't Federal Express." More to the point, he can't see us unless he's wearing the same goggles we got .
"We could pull up alongside and take the miniguns -"
"Not tonight." Too bad. I wouldn't especially mind ...
"What do you suppose our passengers -"
"If we were supposed to know, Captain, they would have told us," Johns replied. He was wondering, too, of course. Christ, but they're loaded for bear , the colonel thought. Not wearing standard-issue uniforms... obviously a covert insertion - hell, I've known that part of the mission for weeks - but they were clearly planning to stay awhile. Johns hadn't heard that the government had ever done that. He wondered if the Colombians were playing ball... probably not. And we're staying down here for at least a month, so they're planning for us to support them, maybe extract them if things get a little hot... Christ, it's Laos all over again, he concluded. Good thing I brought Buck along. We're the only real vets left . Colonel Johns shook his head. Where had his youth gone?
You spent it with a helicopter strapped to your back, doing all sorts of screwy things .
"I got a ship target on the horizon at about eleven o'clock," the captain said, and altered course a few degrees to the right. The mission brief had been clear on that. Nobody was supposed to see or hear them. That meant avoiding ships, fishing boats, and inquisitive dolphins, staying well off the coast, no more than a thousand feet up, and keeping their anticollision lights off. The mission profile was precisely what they'd fly in wartime, with some flight-safety rules set aside. Even in the special-operations business, that last fact was somewhat out of the ordinary, Johns reminded himself. Hot guns and all.
They made the Colombian coast without further incident. As soon as it was in view, Johns alerted his crew. Sergeants Zimmer and Bean powered up their electrically driven miniguns and slid open the doors next to them.
"Well, we just invaded a friendly foreign country," Willis noted as they went "feet dry" north of Tolu. They used their low-light instruments to search for vehicular traffic, which they were also supposed to avoid. Their course track was plotted to avoid areas of habitation. The six-bladed rotor didn't make the fluttering whops associated with smaller helicopters. Its sound, at a distance, wasn't terribly different from turbopowered aircraft; it was also directionally deceptive - even if you heard the noise, it was hard to figure where it came from. Once past the Pan American Highway, they curved north, passing east of Plato.
"Zimmer, LZ One in five minutes."
"Right, PJ," the flight engineer replied. It had been decided to leave Bean and Childs on the guns, while Zimmer handled the dropoff.
It must be a combat mission . Johns smiled to himself. Buck only calls me that when he expects to get shot at .
Aft, Sergeant Zimmer walked down the center of the aircraft, telling the first two squads to unbuckle their safety belts and holding up his hand to show how many more minutes there were. Both captains nodded.
"LZ One in sight," Willis said soon thereafter.
"I'll take her."
"Pilot's airplane."
Colonel Johns orbited the area, spiraling into the clearing selected from satellite photos. Willis scanned the ground for the least sign of life, but there was none.
"Looks clear to me, Colonel."
"Going in now," Johns said into the intercom.
"Get ready!" Zimmer shouted as the helicopter's nose came up.
Chavez stood up with the rest of his squad, facing aft to the opening cargo door. His knees buckled slightly as the Sikorsky touched down.
" Go! " Zimmer waved them out, patting each man on the shoulder to keep a proper count.
Chavez went out behind his captain, turning left to avoid the tail rotor as soon as his feet were on the dirt. He went ten steps and dropped to his face. Above his head, the rotor was still turning at full power, holding the lethal blades a safe fifteen feet off the ground.
"Clear, clear, clear!" Zimmer said when he'd seen them all off.
"Roger," Johns replied, twisting the throttle again to lift off.
Chavez turned his head as the whine of the engines increased. The blacked-out helicopter was barely visible, but he saw the spectral outline lift off and felt the dirt stinging his face as the hundred-knot downwash from the rotor subsided, and stopped. It was gone.
He ought to have expected it, but the feeling came to Chavez as a surprise. He was in enemy territory. It was real, not an exercise. The only way he had out - had just flown away, already invisible. Despite the fact that there were ten men around him, he was momentarily awash in a sense of loneliness. But he was a trained man, a professional soldier. Chavez grasped his loaded weapon and took strength from it. He wasn't quite alone.
"Move out," Captain Ramirez told him quietly.
Chavez moved toward the treeline in the knowledge that behind him the squad would follow.
11. In- Country
THREE HUNDRED MILES away from SSG Ding Chavez, Colonel F lix Cortez, formerly of the Cuban DGI, sat dozing in el jefe's office. El jefe , he'd been told on his arrival several hours before, was occupied at present - probably entertaining a mistress. Maybe even his wife , Cortez thought; unlikely but possible. He'd drunk two cups of the fine local coffee - previously Colombia's most valuable export crop - but it hadn't helped. He was tired from the previous night's exertions, from the travel, and now from readjusting yet again to the high altitude of the region. Cortez was ready for sleep, but had to stay awake to debrief his boss. Inconsiderate bastard. At least in the DGI he could have submitted a hastily written report and taken a few hours to freshen up before normal office hours began. But the DGI was composed of professionals, and he'd chosen to work for an amateur.
Just after 1:30 in the morning he heard feet coming down the corridor. Cortez stood and shook off the sleep. The door opened, and there was el jefe , his visage placid and happy. One of his mistresses.
"What have you learned?" Escobedo asked without preamble.
"Nothing specific as of yet," Cortez replied with a yawn. He proceeded to speak for about five minutes, going over what things he had discovered.
"I pay you for results, Colonel," Escobedo pointed out.
"That is true, but at high levels such results require time. Under the methods for gathering information which you had in place before I arrived, you would still know nothing other than the fact that some aircraft are missing, and that two of your couriers have been apprehended by the yanquis ."
"Their story about the interrogation aboard the ship?"
"Most unusual, perhaps all a fabrication on their part." Cortez settled into his chair, wishing for another cup of coffee. "Or perhaps true, though I doubt it. I do not know either man and cannot evaluate the reliability of their claims."
"Two men from Medell n. Ram n's older brother served me well. He was killed in the battles with M-19. He died bravely. Ram n has also served me. I had to give him a chance," Escobedo said. "It was a matter of honor. He is not very intelligent, but he is faithful."
"And his death is not overly troublesome?"
Escobedo shook his head without a moment's pause. "No. He knew what the chances were. He did not know why it was necessary to kill the American. He can tell them nothing about that. As for the American - he was a thief, and a foolish thief. He thought that we would not discover his thievery. He was mistaken. So we eliminated him."
And his family , Cortez noted. Killing people was one thing. Raping children... that was something else. But such things were not his concern.
"You are sure that they cannot tell the Americans -"
"They were told to get aboard the yacht, using the money as their bona fides and concealing their cache of drugs. Once the killings were accomplished, they were instructed to go to the Bahamas, turn the money over to one of my bankers, destroy the yacht discreetly, and then smuggle the drugs in normally, into Philadelphia. They knew that the American had displeased me, but not how he had done so."
"They must know that he was laundering money, and they must have told the Americans this," Cortez pointed out patiently.
" S . Fortunately, however, the American was very clever in how he did this. We were careful, Colonel. Beforehand we made sure that no one could learn exactly what the thief had done." Escobedo smiled, still in the afterglow of Pinta's services. "He was so very clever, that American."
"What if he left behind a record?"
"He did not. A police officer in that city searched his office and home for us - so carefully that the American federales never noticed that he had been there - before I authorized the killings."
Cortez took a deep breath before speaking. " Jefe , do you not understand that you must tell me about such things as this beforehand! Why do you employ me if you have no wish to make use of my knowledge?"
"We have been doing things such as this for years. We can manage our affairs without -"
"The Russians would send you to Siberia for such idiocy!"
"You forget your place, Se or Cortez!" Escobedo snarled back. *
F lix bit off his own reply and managed to speak reasonably. "You think the norteamericanos are fools because they are unable to stop your smuggling. Their weakness is a political failing, not one of professional expertise. You do not understand that, and so I will explain it to you. Their borders are easy to violate because the Americans have a tradition of open borders. You confuse that with inefficiency. It is not. They have highly efficient police with the best scientific methods in the world - do you know that the Russian KGB reads American police textbooks? And copies their techniques? The American police are hamstrung because their political leadership does not allow them to act as they wish to act - and as they could act, in a moment, if those restrictions were ever eased. The American FBI - the federales - have resources beyond your comprehension. I know - they hunted me in Puerto Rico and came within a hair of capturing me along with Ojgda - and I am a trained intelligence officer."
"Yes, yes," Escobedo said patiently. "So what are you telling me?"
"Exactly what did this dead American do for you?"
"He laundered vast sums of money for us, and it continues to generate clean income for us. He set up a laundering scheme that we continue to use and -"
"Get your money out at once. If this yanqui was as efficient as you say, it is very likely that he left evidence behind. If he did so, then it is likely that those records were found."
"If so, then why have the federales not acted? They've had over a month now." Escobedo turned around to grab a bottle of brandy. He rarely indulged, but this was a time for it. Pinta had been especially fine tonight, and he enjoyed telling Cortez that his expertise, while useful, was not entirely crucial.
" Jefe , perhaps it will not happen this time, but someday you will learn that chances such as you took in this case are foolish."
Escobedo waved the snifter under his nose. "As you say, Colonel. Now, what about these new rules you speak of?"
Chavez was already fully briefed, of course. They'd had a "walkthrough/talk-through" on a sand table as part of their mission brief, and every man in the unit had the terrain and their way through it committed to memory. The objective was an airfield designated RENO. He'd seen satellite and low-oblique photos of the site. He didn't know that it had been fingered by someone named Bert Russo, confirming an earlier intelligence report. It was a gravel strip about five thousand feet long, easy enough for a twin-engine aircraft, and marginally safe for a larger one, if it were lightly loaded-with grass, for instance, which was bulky but not especially heavy. The sergeant navigated by the compass strapped to his wrist. Every fifty yards he'd check the compass, sight on a tree or other object on the proper line of bearing, and head for it, at which time the procedure would begin again. He moved slowly and quietly, listening for any vaguely human noise and looking around with the night-vision scope that he wore on his head. His weapon was loaded and locked, but the selector switch was on "safe." Vega, the second or "slack" man in the line, was the buffer between Chavez's point position and the main body of the unit, fifty meters behind Vega. His machine gun made for a formidable buffer. If contact were made, their first thought would be evasion, but if evasion proved impossible, then they were to eliminate whatever stood in their path as quickly and violently as possible.
After two hours and two kilometers, Ding picked a spot to rest, a preselected rally point. He raised his hand and twirled it around in a lasso-motion to communicate what he was doing. They could have pushed a little harder, but the flight, as all lengthy helicopter flights, had been tiring, and the captain hadn't wanted to press too hard. They were not in fact expected to reach the objective until the following night. Every other word in the mission brief had been "Caution!" He remembered smirking every time he'd heard that. Now the amusement had left him. That guy Clark had been right. It was different in Indian Country. The price of failure here would not be the embarrassment of having your "MILES" beeper go off.
Chavez shook his head to clear away the thought. He had a job. It was a job for which he was fully trained and equipped, and it was a job which he wanted to do.
His rest spot was a small, dry knoll, which he scanned for snakes before sitting down. He made one last scan of the area before switching off his goggles to save battery time, and pulled out his canteen for a drink. It was hot, but not terribly so. High eighties, he thought, and the humidity was well up there also. If it was this hot at night, he didn't want to think about the daytime heat. At least they'd be bellied up during daylight. And Chavez was accustomed to heat. At Hunter-Liggett he'd marched over hills through temperatures over a hundred-ten degrees. He didn't much like it, but he could do it easily enough.
"How we doin', Chavez?"
" Muy bien, Capit n ," Chavez replied. "I figure we've made two miles, maybe two and a half-three klicks. That's Checkpoint WRENCH right over there, sir."
"Seen anything?"
"Negative. Just birds and bugs. Not even a wild pig or anything... you suppose people hunt here?"
"Good bet," Ramirez said after a moment's thought. "That's something we'll want to keep in mind, Ding."
Chavez looked around. He could see one man, but the rest blended in with the ground. He'd worried about the khaki clothing - not as effective camouflage as what he was accustomed to - but in the field it seemed to disappear just fine. Ding took another drink, then shook his canteen to see how noisy it was. That was a nice thing about the plastic canteens. Water sloshing around wasn't as noisy as with the old aluminum ones. It was still something to worry about. Any kind of noise was, in the bush. He popped a cough drop to keep his mouth moist and made ready to head out.
"Next stop, Checkpoint CHAINSAW. Captain, who thinks those dumbass names up?"
Ramirez chuckled quietly. "Why, I do, Sergeant. Don't feel bad. My ex didn't much like my taste either, so she went and married a real-estate hustler."
"Ain't broads a bitch?"
"Mine sure was."
Even the captain , Chavez thought. Christ, nobody has a girl or a family behind ... The thought was distantly troubling, but the issue at hand was getting past WRENCH to CHAINSAW in less than two hours.
The next hop involved crossing a road - what they called a road. It was a straight dirt-gravel track that stretched off to infinity in both directions. Chavez took his time approaching and crossing it. The rest of the squad halted fifty meters from the roadway, allowing the point man to move left and right of the crossing point to make sure it was secure. That done, he made a brief radio transmission to Captain Ramirez, in Spanish:
"The crossing is clear." His answer was a double click of static as the captain keyed the transmit key on his radio, but without saying anything. Chavez answered in kind and waited for the squad to cross.
The terrain here was agreeably flat, enough so that he was wondering why their training had been in towering, airless mountains. Probably because it was well hidden, he decided. The forest, or jungle, was thick, but not quite as bad as it had been in Panama. There was ample evidence that people occasionally farmed here, probably slash-and-burn operations, judging from the numerous small clearings. He'd seen half a dozen crumbling shacks where some poor bastard had tried to raise a family, or farm for beans, or something that hadn't worked out. The poverty that such evidence spoke of was depressing to Chavez. The people who lived in this region had names not unlike his, spoke a language differing only in accent from that spoken in his childhood home. Had his great-grandfather not decided to come to California and pick lettuce, might he have grown up in such a place? If so, how might he have turned out? Might Ding Chavez have ended up running drugs or being a shooter for the Cartel bigshots? That was a truly disturbing thought. His personal pride was too great to consider the possibility seriously, but its basic truth hovered at the edges of his conscious thoughts. There was poverty here, and poor people seized at whatever opportunity presented itself. How could you face your children and say that you could not feed them without doing something illegal? You could not, of course. What would a child understand other than an empty belly? Poor people had poor options. Chavez had found the Army almost by accident, and had found in it a true home of security and opportunity and fellowship and respect. But down here...?
Poor bastards . But what about the people from his own barrio? Their lives poisoned, their neighborhoods corrupted. Who was to blame for it all?
Less thinkin' and more workin ', 'mano, he told himself. Chavez switched on his night scope for the next part of the trek.
He moved standing straight up, not crouched as one would expect. His feet caressed the ground carefully, making sure that there wasn't a twig to snap, and he avoided bushes that might have leaves or thorns to grasp at his clothing and make their own rustling noise. Wherever possible he cut across clearings, skirting the treelines to keep from being silhouetted against the cloudy sky. But the main enemy at night was noise, not sight. It was amazing how acute your hearing got in the bush. He thought he could hear every bug, every birdcall, each puff of breeze in the leaves far over his head. But there were no human sounds. No coughs or mutters, none of the distinctive metallic noises that only men make. While he didn't exactly relax, he moved with confidence, just like on field-training exercises, he realized. Every fifty meters he'd stop and listen for those behind him. Not a whisper, not even Oso with his machine gun and heavy load. In their quiet was safety.
How good was the opposition? he wondered. Well equipped, probably. With the sort of money they had, you could buy any sort of weapons - in America or anyplace else. But trained soldiers? No way.
So how good are they? Ding asked himself. Like the members of his old gang, perhaps. They'd cultivate physical toughness, but not in a structured way. They'd be bullies, tough when they had the edge in weapons or numbers. Because of that they wouldn't be skilled in weapons use or fieldcraft; they'd rely on intimidation, and they'd be surprised when people failed to be intimidated. Some might be good hunters, but they wouldn't know how to move as a team. They wouldn't know about over-watch, mutual support, and grazing fire. They might know ambushes, but the finer points of reconnaissance would be lost on them. They would not have proper discipline. Chavez was sure that when they got to their objective, he'd find men smoking on guard. The arts of soldiering took time to acquire - time and discipline and desire. No, he was up against bullies. And bullies were cowards. These were mercenaries who acted for money. Chavez, on the other hand, took great pride that he performed his duties for love of country and, though he didn't quite think of it in those terms, for love of his fellow soldiers. His earlier uneasiness at the departure of the helicopter faded away. Though his mission was reconnaissance-intelligence-gathering - he found himself hoping that he'd have his chance to use the MP-5 SD2.
He reached CHAINSAW right on schedule. There the squad rested again, and Chavez led off to the final objective for the night's march, Checkpoint RASP. It was a small wooded knoll, five kilometers from their objective. Ding took his time checking RASP out. He looked especially for evidence of animals that might be hunted, and the tracks of men Who might be doing the hunting. He found nothing. The squad arrived twenty minutes after he called them in by radio, having "hooked" and reversed their path to make sure that there were no trailers. Captain Ramirez examined the site as carefully as Chavez had done and came to the same positive conclusion. The squad members paired off to find places to eat and sleep. Ding teamed with Sergeant Vega, taking a security position along the most likely threat axis - northeast - to site one of the squad's two SAW machine guns. The squad medic - Sergeant Olivero - took a man to a nearby stream to replenish canteens, taking special care that everyone used his water-purification tablets. A latrine site was agreed upon, and men used that as well to dump the trash left over from their daily rations. But cleaning weapons came first, even though they hadn't been used. Each pair of soldiers cleaned their weapons one at a time, then worried about food.
"That wasn't so bad," Vega said as the sun climbed over the trees.
"Nice and flat," Chavez agreed with a yawn. "Gonna be a hot fucker down here, though."
"Have one o' these, ' mano ." Vega passed over an envelope of Gatorade concentrate.
"All right!" Chavez loved the stuff. He tore open the envelope and dumped the contents into his canteen, swishing it around to get the powder mixed in properly. "Captain know about this?"
"Nah - why worry him?"
"Right." Chavez pocketed the empty envelope. "Shame they don't make instant beer, isn't it?" They traded a chuckle. Neither man would do something so foolish, but both agreed that a cold beer wasn't all that bad an idea in the abstract.
"Flip you for first sleep," Vega said next. It turned out that he had a single U.S. quarter for the task. They'd each been issued five hundred dollars' equivalent in local currency, but all in paper, since coins make noise. It came up heads. Chavez got to stand watch on the gun while Vega curled up for sleep.
Ding settled down in the position. Julio had selected a good one. It was behind a spreading bush of one kind or another, with a shallow berm of dirt in front of him that could stop bullets but didn't obstruct his view, and the SAW had a good field of fire out to nearly three hundred meters. Ding checked that the weapon had a round chambered, but that the selector switch was also on "safe." He took out his binoculars to survey the area.
"How do things look, Sergeant?" Captain Ramirez asked quietly.
"Nothing moving at all, sir. Why don't you catch some Zs? We'll keep watch for ya'." Officers, Ding knew, have to be looked after. And if sergeants didn't do it, who would?
Ramirez surveyed the position. It had been well selected. Both men had eaten and refreshed themselves as good soldiers do, and would be well rested by sundown - over ten hours away. The captain patted Chavez on the shoulder before returning to his own position.
"All ready, sir," the communications sergeant - Ingeles - reported. The satellite-radio antenna was set up. It was only two bits of steel, about the size and shape of grade-school rulers, linked together in a cross, with a bit of wire for a stand. Ramirez checked his watch. It was time to transmit.
"VARIABLE, this is KNIFE, over." The signal went twenty-two thousand miles to a geosynchronous communications satellite, which relayed it back down toward Panama. It took about one-third of a second, and two more seconds passed before the reply came down. The circuit was agreeably free of static.
"KNIFE, this is VARIABLE. Your signal is five by five. Over."
"We are in position, Checkpoint RASP. All is quiet, nothing to report, over."
"Roger, copy. Out."
In the hilltop communications van, Mr. Clark occupied a seat in the corner by the door. He wasn't running the operation - far from it - but Ritter wanted his tactical expertise available in case it was needed. On the wall opposite the racks of communications gear was a large tactical map which showed the squads and their various checkpoints. All had made them on schedule. At least whoever had set this operation up had known - or listened to people who did - what men in the bush could and could not do. The expectations for time and distance were reasonable.
That's nice for a change , Clark thought. He looked around the van. Aside from the two communicators, there were two senior people from the Directorate of Operations, neither of whom had what Clark would call expertise in this particular sort of operation - though they were close to Ritter and dependable. Well , he admitted, people with my sort of experience are mostly retired now .
Clark's heart was out there in the field. He'd never operated in the Americas, at least not in the jungles of the Americas, but for all that he'd "been there" - out in the boonies, alone as a man could be, your only lifeline back to friendly forces a helicopter that might or might not show, tethered by an invisible thread of radio energy. The radios were far more reliable now; that was one positive change. For what it was worth. If something went wrong, these radios would not, however, bring in a flight of "fast-movers" whose afterburning engines rattled the sky and whose bombloads shook the ground fifteen minutes after you called for help. No, not this time.
Christ, do they know that? Do they really know what that fact means?
No, they don't. They can't. They're all too young. Kids. They're all little kids. That they were older, bigger, and tougher than his own children was for the moment beside the point. Clark was a man who'd operated in Cambodia and Vietnam - North and South. Always with small teams of men with guns and radios, almost always trying to stay hidden, looking for information and trying to get the hell away without being noticed. Mostly succeeding, but some of them had been very, very close.
"So far, so good," the senior Operations guy observed as he reached for a coffee mug. His companion nodded agreement.
Clark merely raised an eyebrow. And what the hell do you two know about this?
The Director, Moira saw, was excited about TARPON. As well he might be, she thought as she made her notes. It would take about a week, but already the seizure notices were being scratched in. Four Justice Department specialists had spent more than a day going through the report Mark Bright had delivered. Electronic banking, she realized, had made the job much easier. Somewhere in the Department of Justice there was someone who could access the computerized records of every bank in the world. Or maybe not in Justice. Maybe one of the intelligence agencies, or maybe a private contractor, because the legality of the matter was slightly vague. In any case, comparing records of the Securities and Exchange Commission with the numerous bank transactions, they had already identified the drug money used to finance the projects in which the "victim" - at least his family had been real victims, Moira told herself - had sought to launder it. She'd never known the wheels of justice to turn so quickly.
What arrogant people they must be, thinking they can invest and launder their dirty money right here! Juan was right about them and their arrogance, Moira thought. Well, this would wipe the smiles off their faces. There was at least six hundred million dollars of equity that the government could seize, and that didn't count the profits that they expected to make when the properties were rolled over. Six hundred million dollars! The amount was astounding. Sure, she'd heard about how "billions" in drug money poured out of the country, but the actual estimates were about as reliable as weather reports. It was plain, the Director said in dictation, that the Cartel was unhappy with its previous laundering arrangements and/or found that bringing the cash directly back to their own country created as many problems as it solved. Therefore, it appeared that after laundering the primary funds - plus making a significant profit on their money - they were setting up their accounts in such a way as to establish an enormous investment trust fund which could legitimately begin to take over all commercial businesses in their home country or any other country in which they wished to establish a political or economic position. What made this interesting, Emil went on, was that it might presage an attempt to launder themselves - the old American criminal phraseology: "to go legit" - to a degree that would be fully acceptable in the local, Latin American political context.
"How soon do you need this, sir?" Mrs. Wolfe asked.
"I'm seeing the President tomorrow morning."
"Copies?"
"Five, all numbered. Moira, this is code-word material," he reminded her.
"Soon as I finish, I'll eat the computer disk," she promised. "You have Assistant Director Grady coming in for lunch, and the AG canceled on dinner tomorrow night. He has to go out to San Francisco."
"What does the Attorney General want in San Francisco?"
"His son decided to get married on short notice."
"That's short, all right," Jacobs agreed. "How far away are you from that?"
"Not very. Your trip to Colombia - do you know when yet, so I can rework your appointments?"
"Sorry, still don't know. It shouldn't hurt the schedule too much, though. It'll be a weekend trip. I'll get out early Friday, and I ought to be back by lunch on the following Monday. So it shouldn't hurt anything important."
"Oh, okay." Moira left the room with a smile.
"Good morning." The United States Attorney was a thirty-seven-year-old man named Edwin Davidoff. He, planned to be the first Jewish United States senator from Alabama in living memory. A tall, fit, two hundred pounds of former varsity wrestler, he'd parlayed a Presidential appointment into a reputation as a tough, effective, and scrupulously honest champion of the people. When handling civil-rights cases, his public statement always referred to the Law Of The Land, and all the things that America Stands For. When handling a major criminal case, he talked about Law And Order, and the Protection That The People Expect. He spoke a lot, as a matter of fact. There was scarcely a Rotary or Optimists group in Alabama to which he had not spoken in the past three years, and he hadn't missed any police departments at all. His post as the chief government lawyer for this part of Alabama was mainly administrative, but he did take the odd case, which always seemed to be a high-profile one. He'd been especially keen on political corruption, as three state legislators had discovered to their sorrow. They were now raking the sand traps at the Officers' Club Golf Course at Eglin Air Force Base.
Edward Stuart took his seat opposite the desk. Davidoff was a polite man, standing when Stuart arrived. Polite prosecutors worried Stuart.
"We finally got confirmation on your clients' identity," Davidoff said in a voice that might have feigned surprise, but instead was fully businesslike. "It turns out that they're both Colombian citizens with nearly a dozen arrests between them. I thought you said that they came from Costa Rica."
Stuart temporized: "Why did identification take so long?"
"I don't know. That factor doesn't really matter anyway. I've asked for an early trial date."
"What about the consideration the Coast Guard offered my client?"
"That statement was made after his confession - and in any case, we are not using the confession because we don't need it."
"Because it was obtained through flagrantly -"
"That's crap and you know it. Regardless, it will not play in this case. Far as I'm concerned, the confession does not exist, okay? Ed, your clients committed mass murder and they're going to pay for that. They're going to pay in full."
Stuart leaned forward. "I can give you information -"
"I don't care what information they have," Davidoff said. "This is a murder case."
"This isn't the way things are done," Stuart objected.
"Maybe that's part of the problem. We're sending a message with this case."
"You're going to try to execute my clients just to send a message." It was not a question.
"I know we disagree on the deterrent value of capital punishment."
"I'm willing to trade a confession to murder and all their information for life."
"No deal."
"Are you really that sure you'll win the case?"
"You know what our evidence is," Davidoff replied. Disclosure laws required the prosecution to allow the defense team to examine everything they had. The same rule was not applied in reverse. It was a structural means of ensuring a fair trial to the defendants, though it was not universally approved of by police and prosecutors. It was, however, a rule, and Davidoff always played by the rules. That, Stuart knew, was one of the things that made him so dangerous. He had never once lost a case or an appeal on procedural grounds. Davidoff was a brilliant legal technician.
"If we kill these two people, we've sunk to the same level that we say they live at."
"Ed, we live in a democracy. The people ultimately decide what the laws should be, and the people approve of capital punishment."
"I will do everything I can to prevent that."
"I would be disappointed in you if you didn't."
Christ, but you'll be a great senator. So evenhanded, so tolerant of those who disagree with you on principle. No wonder the papers love you .
"So that's the story on Eastern Europe for this week," Judge Moore observed. "Sounds to me like things are quieting down."
"Yes, sir," Ryan replied. "It does look that way for the present."
The Director of Central Intelligence nodded and changed subjects. "You were in to see James last night?"
"Yes, sir. His spirits are still pretty good, but he knows." Ryan hated giving these progress reports. It wasn't as though he were a physician.
"I'm going over tonight," Ritter said. "Anything he needs, anything I can take over?"
"Just work. He still wants to work."
"Anything he wants, he gets," Moore said. Ritter stirred slightly at that, Ryan saw. "Dr. Ryan, you are doing quite well. If I were to suggest to the President that you might be ready to become the next DDI - look, I know how you feel about James; remember that I've worked with him longer than you have, all right? - and -"
"Sir, Admiral Greer isn't dead," Jack objected. He'd almost said yet , and cursed himself for even having thought that word.
"He's not going to make it, Jack," Moore said gently. "I'm sorry about that. He's my friend, too. But our business here is to serve our country. That is more important than personalities, even James. What's more, James is a pro, and he would be disappointed in your attitude."
Ryan managed not to flinch at the rebuke. But it wounded him, all the more so because the Judge was correct. Jack took a deep breath and nodded agreement.
"James told me last week that he wants you to succeed him. I think you might be ready. What do you think?"
"Judge, I think I am fitted technically, but I lack the political sophistication needed for the office."
"There's only one way to learn that part of the job - and, hell, politics aren't supposed to have much place in the Intelligence Directorate." Moore smiled to punctuate the irony of that statement. "The President likes you, and The Hill likes you. As of now you're acting Deputy Director (Intelligence). The slot won't be officially filled until after the election, but as of now the job is yours on a provisional basis. If James recovers, well and good. The additional seasoning you get from working under him won't hurt. But even if he recovers, it will soon be time for him to leave. We are all replaceable, and James thinks you're ready. So do I."
Ryan didn't know what to say. Still short of forty, he now had one of the premiere intelligence posts in the world. As a practical matter, he'd had it for several months - even for several years, some might say - but now it was official, and somehow that made it different. People would now come to him for opinions and judgments. That had been going on for a long time, but he'd always had someone to fall back on. Now he would not. He'd present his information to Judge Moore and await final judgment, but from this moment the responsibility for being right was his. Before, he'd presented opinions and options to his superiors. Beginning now, he'd present policy decisions directly to the ultimate decision-makers. The increase in responsibility, though subtle, was vast.
"Need- to-know still applies," Ritter pointed out.
"Of course," Ryan said.
"I'll tell Nancy and your department heads," Moore said. "James ginned up a letter I'll read. Here's your copy."
Ryan stood to take it.
"I believe you have work to do, Dr. Ryan," Moore said.
"Yes, sir." Jack turned and left the room. He knew that he should have felt elated, but instead felt trapped. He thought he knew why.
"Too soon, Arthur," Ritter said after Jack had left.
"I know what you're saying, Bob, but we can't have Intelligence go adrift just because you don't want him in on SHOWBOAT. We'll keep him out of that, at least isolated from what Operations is doing. He'll have to get in on the information that we're developing. For Christ's sake, his knowledge of finance will be useful to us. He just doesn't have to know how the information gets to us. Besides, if the President says 'go' on this, and he gets approval from The Hill, we're home free."
"So when do you go to The Hill?"
"I have four of them coming here tomorrow afternoon. We're invoking the special- and hazardous-operations rule."
SAHO was an informal codicil of the oversight rules. While Congress had the right under law to oversee all intelligence operations, in a case two years earlier, a leak from one of the select committees had caused the death of a CIA station chief and a high-ranking defector. Instead of going public, Judge Moore had approached the members of both committees and gotten written agreement that in special cases the chairman and co-chairman of each committee would alone be given access to the necessary information. It was then their responsibility to decide if it should be shared with the committees as a whole. Since members of both political parties were present, it had been hoped that political posturing could be avoided. In fact, Judge Moore had created a subtle trap for all of them. Whoever tried to decide that information had to be disseminated ran the risk of being labeled as having a political agenda. Moreover, the higher selectivity of the four SAHO-cleared members had already created an atmosphere of privilege that mitigated directly against spreading the information out. So long as the operation was not politically sensitive, it was a virtual guarantee that Congress would not interfere. The remarkable thing was that Moore had managed to get the committees to agree to this. But bringing the widow and children of the dead station chief to the executive hearings hadn't hurt one bit. It was one thing to carp abstractly about the majesty of law, quite another to have to face the results of a mistake - the more so if one of them was a ten-year-old girl without a father. Political theater was not solely the domain of elected officials.
"And the Presidential Finding?" Ritter asked.
"Already done. 'It is determined that drug-smuggling operations are a clear and present danger to U.S. national security. The President authorizes the judicious use of military force in accord with established operational guidelines to protect our citizens,' et cetera ."
"The political angle is the one I don't like."
Moore chuckled. "Neither will the people from The Hill. So we have to keep it all secret, don't we? If the President goes public to show that he's 'really doing something,' the opposition will scream that he's playing politics. If the opposition burns the operation, then the President can do the same thing. So both sides have a political interest in keeping this one under wraps. The election-year politics work in our favor. Clever fellow, that Admiral Cutter."
"Not as clever as he thinks," Ritter snorted. "But who is?"
"Yeah. Who is? You know, it's a shame that James never got in on this."
"Gonna miss him," Ritter agreed. "God, I wish there was something I could take him, something to make it a little easier."
"I know what you mean," Judge Moore agreed. "Sooner or later, Ryan has to get in on this."
"I don't like it."
"What you don't like, Bob, is the fact that Ryan's been involved in two highly successful field operations in addition to all the work he's done at his desk. Maybe he did poach on your territory, but in both cases he had your support when he did so. Would you like him better if he'd failed? Robert, I don't have Directorate chiefs so that they can get into pissing contests like Cutter and those folks on The Hill."
Ritter blinked at the rebuke. "I've been saying for a long time that we brought him along too fast - which we have. I'll grant you that he's been very effective. But it's also true that he doesn't have the necessary political savvy for this sort of thing. He's yet to establish the capacity needed for executive oversight. He has to fly over to Europe to represent us at the NATO intel conference. No sense dropping SHOWBOAT on him before he leaves, is there?"
Moore almost replied that Admiral Greer was out of the loop because of his physical condition, which was mainly, but only partly, true. The presidential directive mandated an extremely tight group of people who really knew what the counter-drug operations were all about. It was an old story in the intelligence game: sometimes security was so tight that people who might have had something important to offer were left out of the picture. It was not unknown, in fact, for those left out to have had knowledge crucial to the operation's successful conclusion. But it was equally true that history was replete with examples of the disasters that resulted from making an operation so broadly based as to paralyze the decision-making process and compromise its secrecy. Drawing the line between operational security and operational efficiency was historically the most difficult task of an intelligence executive. There were no rules, Judge Moore knew, merely the requirement that such operations must succeed. One of the most persistent elements of spy fiction was the supposition that intelligence chiefs had an uncanny, infallible sixth sense of how to run their ops. But if the world's finest surgeons could make mistakes, if the world's best test pilots most often died in crashes - for that matter, if a pro-bowl quarterback could throw interceptions - why should a spymaster be any different? The only real difference between a wise man and a fool, Moore knew, was that the wise man tended to make more serious mistakes - and only because no one trusted a fool with really crucial decisions; only the wise had the opportunity to lose battles, or nations.
"You're right about the NATO conference. You win, Bob. For now." Judge Moore frowned at his desk. "How are things going?"
"All four teams are within a few hours' march of their surveillance points. If everything goes according to plan, they'll be in position by dawn tomorrow, and the following day they'll begin feeding us information. The flight crew we bagged the other day coughed up all the preliminary information we need. At least two of the airfields we staked out are 'hot.' Probably at least one of the others is also."
"The President wants me over tomorrow. It seems that the Bureau has tumbled to something important. Emil's really hot about it. Seems that they've identified a major money-laundering operation."
"Something we can exploit?"
"It would seem so. Emil's treating it as code-word material."
"Sauce for the goose," Ritter observed with a smile. "Maybe we can put a real crimp in their operations."
Chavez awoke from his second sleep period an hour before sundown. Sleep had come hard. Daytime temperatures were well over a hundred, and the high humidity made the jungle seem an oven despite being in shade. His first considered act was to drink over a pint of water - Gatorade - from his canteen to replace what he'd sweated off while asleep. Next came a couple of Tylenol. Light-fighters lived off the things to moderate the aches and pains that came with their normal physical regimen of exertion. In this case, it was a heat-induced headache that felt like a low-grade hangover.
"Why don't we let 'em keep this fucking place?" he muttered to Julio.
"Roger that, ' mano ." Vega chuckled in return.
Sergeant Chavez wrenched himself to a sitting position, shaking off the cobwebs as he did so. He rubbed a hand over his face. The heavy beard he'd had since puberty was growing with its accustomed rapidity, but he wouldn't shave today. That merited a grunt. Normal Army routine was heavy on personal hygiene, and light infantrymen, as elite soldiers, were supposed to be "pretty" troops. Already he stank like a basketball team after double overtime, but he wouldn't wash, either. Nor would he don a clean uniform. But he would, of course, clean his weapon again. After making sure that Julio had already serviced his SAW, Chavez stripped his MP-5 down to six pieces and inspected them all visually. The matte-black finish resisted rust quite well. Regardless, he wiped everything down with oil, ran a toothbrush along all operation parts, checked to see that all springs were taut and magazines were not fouled with dirt or grit. Satisfied, he reassembled the weapon and worked the action quietly to make certain that it functioned smoothly. Finally, he inserted the magazine, chambered a round, and set the safety. Next he checked that his knives were clean and sharp. This included his throwing stars, of course.
"The captain's gonna be pissed if he sees them," Vega observed quietly.
"They're good luck," Chavez replied as he put them back in his pocket. " 'Sides, you never know..." He checked the rest of his gear. Everything was as it should be. He was ready for the day's work. Next the maps came out.
"That where we're goin'?"
"RENO." Chavez pointed to the spot on the tactical map. "Just under five klicks." He examined the map carefully, making several mental notes and again committing the details to memory. The map had no marks on it, of course. If lost or captured, such marks would tell the wrong people things that they ought not to know.
"Here." Captain Ramirez joined the two, handing over a satellite photograph.
"These maps must be new, sir."
"They are. DMA" - he referred to the Defense Mapping Agency - "didn't have good maps of this area until recently. They were drawn up from the satellite photos. See any problems?"
"No, sir." Chavez looked up with a smile. "Nice and flat, lots of thinned-out trees-looks easier than last night, Cap'n."
"When we get in close, I want you to approach from this angle here into the objective rally point." Ramirez traced his hand across the photo. "I'll make the final approach with you for the 'leader's recon.'"
"You the boss, sir," Ding agreed.
"Plan the first break point right here, Checkpoint SPIKE."
"Right."
Ramirez stuck his head up, surveying the area. "Remember the briefing. These guys may have very good security, and be especially careful for booby traps. You see something, let me know immediately - as long as it's safe to do so. When in doubt, remember the mission is covert."
"I'll get us there, sir."
"Sorry, Ding," Ramirez apologized. "I must sound like a nervous woman."
"You ain't got the legs for it, sir," Chavez pointed out with a grin.
"You up to carrying that SAW another night, Oso ?" Ramirez asked Vega.
"I carried heavier toothpicks, jefe ."
Ramirez laughed and made off to check the next pair.
"I've known worse captains than that one," Vega observed when he was gone.
"Hard worker," Chavez allowed. Sergeant Olivero appeared next.
"How's your water?" the medic asked.
"Both a quart low," Vega replied.
"Both of you, drink a quart down right now."
"Come on, doc," Chavez protested.
"No dickin' around, people. Somebody gets heatstroke and it's my ass. If you ain't gotta piss, you ain't been drinking enough. Pretend it's a Corona," he suggested as both men took out their canteens. "Remember that: if you don't have to piss, you need a drink. Damn it, Ding, you oughta know that, you spent time at Hunter-Liggett. This fucking climate'll dry your ass out in a heartbeat, and I ain't carrying your ass, dried-out or not."
Olivero was right, of course. Chavez emptied a canteen in three long pulls. Vega followed the medic off to the nearby stream to replenish the empty containers. He reappeared several minutes later. Oso surprised his friend with a couple more envelopes of Gatorade concentrate. The medic, he explained, had his own supply. About the only bad news was that the waterpurification pills did not mix well with the Gatorade, but that was for electrolytes, not taste.
Ramirez assembled his men just at sundown, repeating the night's brief already delivered to the individual guard posts. Repetition was the foundation of clarity - some manual said that, Chavez knew. The squad members were all dirty. The generally heavy beards and scraggly hair would enhance their camouflage, almost obviating the need for paint. There were a few aches and pains, mainly from the rough sleeping conditions, but everyone was fit and rested. And eager. Garbage was assembled and buried. Olivero sprinkled CS tear-gas powder before the dirt was smoothed over the hole. That would keep animals from scratching it up for a few weeks. Captain Ramirez made a final check of the area while there was still light. By the time Chavez moved out at point, there was no evidence that they'd ever been here.
Ding crossed the clearing as quickly as safety allowed, scanning ahead with his low-light goggles. Again using compass and landmarks, he was able to travel rapidly, now that he had a feel for the country. As before, there was no sound other than what nature provided, and better still, the forest wasn't quite as dense. He made better than a kilometer per hour. Best of all, he had yet to spot a snake.
He made Checkpoint SPIKE in under two hours, feeling relaxed and confident. The walk through the jungle had merely served to loosen up his muscles. He stopped twice along the way for water breaks, more often to listen, and still heard nothing unexpected. Every thirty minutes he checked in by radio with Captain Ramirez.
After Chavez picked a place to belly-up, it took ten minutes for the rest of the squad to catch up. Ten more minutes and he was off again for the final checkpoint, MALLET. Chavez found himself hoping that they'd run out of tool names.
He was more careful now. He had the map committed to memory, and the closer he got to the objective, the more likely that he'd encounter somebody. He slowed down almost without thinking about it. Half a klick out of SPIKE he heard something moving off to his right. Something quiet, but a land creature. He waved the squad to halt while he checked it out - Vega did the same, aiming his SAW in that direction - but whatever it was, it moved off heading southwest. Some animal or other, he was sure, though Ding waited another few minutes before he felt totally safe moving off. He checked the wind, which was blowing from his left rear, and wondered if his pungent odor was detectable to men - probably not, he decided. The rank smells of the jungle were pretty overpowering. On the other hand, maybe washing once in a while was worth the effort...
He arrived at MALLET without further incident. He was now one kilometer off the objective. Again the squad assembled. There was a creek less than fifty meters from the checkpoint, and water was again replenished. The next stop was the objective rally point, picked for its easy identifiability. Ding got them there in just under an hour. The squad formed yet another defensive perimeter while the point man and commander got together.
Ramirez took out his map again. Chavez and his captain turned on the infrared lights that were part of the goggle-sets and traced ideas on the map and the accompanying photos. Also present was the operations sergeant, appropriately named Guerra. The road to the airfield came in from the opposite direction, looping around a stream that the squad had followed into the rally point. The only building visible on the photo was also on the far side of the objective.
"I like this way in, sir," Chavez observed.
"I think you're right," Ramirez replied. "Sergeant Guerra?"
"Looks pretty good to me, sir."
"Okay, people, if there's going to be contact, it'll be in this here neighborhood. It is now post time. Chavez, I'm going in with you. Guerra, you bring the rest of the squad in behind us if there's any trouble."
"Yes, sir," both sergeants replied.
Out of habit, Ding pulled out his camouflage stick and applied some green and black to his face. Next he put on his gloves. Though sweaty hands were a nuisance, the dark leather shells would darken his hands. He moved out, with Captain Ramirez close behind. Both men had their goggles on, and both moved very slowly now.
The stream they'd followed in for the last half a klick made for good drainage in the area, and that made for dry, solid footing - the same reason that someone had decided to bulldoze a landing strip here, of course. Chavez was especially wary for booby traps. With every step he checked the ground for wires, then up at waist and eye level. He also checked for any disturbance of ground. Again he wondered about game in the area. If there were some, it, too, would set off the booby traps, wouldn't it? So how would the bad guys react if one got set off? Probably they'd send somebody out to look... that would be bad news regardless of what he expected to find, wouldn't it?
Let's be cool , 'mano, Chavez told himself.
Finally: noise. It carried against the breeze. The low, far-off murmuring of talking men. Though too sporadic and confused even to guess the language, it was human speech.
Contact.
Chavez turned to look at his captain, pointing to the direction from which it seemed to come and tapping his ear with a finger. Ramirez nodded and motioned for the sergeant to press on.
Not real smart, people , Chavez thought at his quarry. Not real smart talking so's a guy can hear you a couple hundred meters away. You are making my job easier . Not that the sergeant minded. Just being here was hard enough.
Next, a trail.
Chavez knelt down and looked for human footprints. They were here, all right, coming out and going back. He took a very long step to pass over the narrow dirt path, and stopped. Ramirez and Chavez were now a tight two-man formation, far enough apart that the same burst wouldn't get both, close enough that they could provide mutual support. Captain Ramirez was an experienced officer, just off his eighteen-month tour in command of a light-infantry company, but even he was in awe of Chavez's woodcraft skills. It was now post time, as he'd told them a few minutes earlier, and his were the greatest worries of the unit. He was in command. That meant that the mission's success was his sole responsibility. He was similarly responsible for the lives of his men. He'd brought ten men in-country, and he was supposed to bring all ten men out. As the single officer, moreover, he was supposed to be at least as good as any of his men - preferably better - in every specialty. Even though that was not realistic, it was expected by everyone. Including Captain Ramirez, who was old enough to know better. But watching Chavez, ten meters ahead, in the gray-green image of his night goggles, moving like a ghost, as quietly as a puff of breeze, Ramirez had to shake off a feeling of inadequacy. It was replaced a moment later with one of elation. This was better than command of a company. Ten elite specialists, each one of them among the best the Army had, and they were his to command... Ramirez distantly realized that he was experiencing the emotional roller-coaster common to combat operations. A bright young man, he was now learning another lesson that history talked about but never quite conveyed: it was one thing to talk and think and read about this sort of thing, but there would never be a substitute for doing it. Training could attenuate the stress of combat operations, but never remove it. It amazed the young captain that everything seemed so clear to him. His senses were as fully alert as they had ever been, and his mind was working with speed and clarity. He recognized the stress and danger, but he was ready for it. In that recognition came elation as the roller coaster rolled on. A far-off part of his intellect watched and evaluated his performance, noting that as in a contact sport, every member of the squad needed the shock of real contact before settling down fully to work. The problem was simply that they were supposed to avoid that contact.
Chavez's hand went up, Ramirez saw, and then the scout crouched down behind a tree. The captain passed around a thicket of bushes and saw why the sergeant had stopped.
There was the airfield.
Better yet, there was an aircraft, several hundred yards away, its engines off but glowing on the infrared image generated by the goggles.
"Looks like we be in business, Cap'n," Ding noted in a whisper.
Ramirez and Chavez moved left and right, well inside the treeline, to search for security forces. But there were none. The objective, RENO, was agreeably identical to what they'd been told to expect. They took their time making sure, of course, then Ramirez went back to the rally point, leaving Chavez to keep an eye on things. Twenty minutes later the squad was in place on a small hill just northwest of the airfield, covering a front of two hundred yards. This had probably once been some peasant's farm, with the burned-off fields merely extended into the strip. They all had a clear view of the airstrip. Chavez was on the extreme right with Vega, Guerra on the far left with the other SAW gunner, and Ramirez stayed in the center, with his radio operator, Sergeant Ingeles.
12. The Curtain on SHOWBOAT
"VARIABLE, THIS is KNIFE. Stand by to copy, over.'
The signal off the satellite channel was as clear as a commercial FM station. The communications technician stubbed out his cigarette and keyed his headset.
"KNIFE, this is VARIABLE, your signal is five by five. We are ready to copy, over." Behind him, Clark turned in his swivel chair to look at the map.
"We are at Objective RENO, and guess what - there's a twin-engine aircraft in view with some people loading cardboard boxes into it. Over."
Clark turned to look in surprise at the radio rack. Was their operational intel that good?
"Can you read the tail number, over."
"Negative, the angle's wrong. But he's going to take off right past us. We are right in the planned position. No security assets are evident at this time."
"Damn," observed one of the Operations people. He lifted a handset. "This is VARIABLE. RENO reports bird in the nest, time zero-three-one-six Zulu... Roger. Will advise. Out." He turned to his companion. "The stateside assets are at plus-one hour."
"That'll do just fine," the other man thought.
As Ramirez and Chavez watched through their binoculars, two men finished loading their boxes into the aircraft. It was a Piper Cheyenne, both men determined, a midsize corporate aircraft with reasonably long range, depending on load weights and flight profile. Local shops could fit it with ferry tanks, extending the range designed into the aircraft. The cargo flown into America by drug smugglers had little to do with weight or - except in the case of marijuana - bulk. The limiting factor was money. A single aircraft could carry enough refined cocaine, even at wholesale value, to wipe out the cash holdings of most federal reserve banks.
The pilots boarded the aircraft after shaking hands with the ground crews - that part seemed to their covert observers just as routine as any aircraft departure. The engines began turning, and their roar swept across the open land toward the light-fighters.
"Jesus," Sergeant Vega noted with bemusement. "I could smoke the bird right here and now. Damn." His gun was on "safe," of course.
"Might make our life a little too exciting," Chavez noted. "Yeah, that makes sense, Oso . The security guys were all around the airplane. They're spreading out now." He grabbed his radio. "Captain -"
"I see it. Heads up in case we have to move out."
The Piper taxied to the end of the runway, moving like a crippled bird, bouncing and bobbing on the landing-gear shocks. The airstrip was illuminated by a mere handful of small flares, far fewer lights than were normally used to outline a real runway. It struck all who looked as dangerous, and suddenly Chavez realized that if the aircraft crashed on takeoff, some squad members would end up eating the thing...
The aircraft's nose dropped as the pilot pushed the engines to full throttle preparatory to takeoff, then reduced power to make sure the motors wouldn't quit when he did so. Satisfied, they ran up again, and the aircraft slipped its brakes and started moving. Chavez set his binoculars down to watch. Heavily loaded with fuel, it cleared the trees to his right by a mere twenty yards. Whoever the pilot was, he was a daredevil. The term that sprang into the sergeant's mind seemed appropriate enough.
"Just took off now. It's a Piper Cheyenne," Ramirez's voice read off the tail number. It had American registration. "Course about three-three-zero." Which headed for the Yucatan Channel, between Cuba and Mexico. The communicator took the proper notes. "What can you tell me about RENO?"
"I count six people. Four carry rifles, can't tell about the rest. One pickup truck and a shack, like on the satellite overheads. Truck's moving now, and I think - yeah, they're putting out the runway lights. They're using flares, just putting dirt over on top of them. Stand by, we have a truck heading this way."
Off to Ramirez's left, Vega had his machine gun up on its bipod, the sight tracking the pickup as it moved down the east side of the runway. Every few hundred meters, it stopped, and the passenger jumped out and shoveled dirt on one of the sputtering flares.
"Reach out, reach out and touch someone..." Julio murmured.
"Be cool, Oso ," Ding cautioned.
"No problem." Vega's thumb was on the selector switch - still set on "safe" - and his finger was on the trigger guard, not the trigger itself.
The flares went out one by one. The truck was briefly within one hundred fifty meters of the two soldiers, but never approached them directly. They merely happened to be in a place the truck had to pass by. Vega's gun stayed on the truck until well after it turned away. As he set the buttstock back down on the dirt, he turned to his comrade.
"Aw, shit!" he whispered in feigned disappointment.
Chavez had to stifle a giggle. Wasn't this odd, he thought. Here they were in enemy territory, loaded for fucking bear, and they were playing a game no different from what children did on Christmas Eve, peeking around corners. The game was serious as hell, they all knew, but the form it took was almost laughable. They also knew that could change in an instant. There wasn't anything funny about training a machine gun on two men in a truck. Was there?
Chavez reactivated his night goggles. At the far end of the runway, people were lighting cigarettes. The faint images on his display flared white with the heat energy. That would kill their night vision, Ding knew. He could tell from the way they moved that they were just bullshitting around now. Their day's - night's - work was complete. The truck drove off, leaving two men behind. These, it would seem, were the security troops for this airstrip. Only two, and they smoked at night. Armed or not - they seemed to be carrying AK-47s or a close copy thereof - they were not serious opposition.
"What do you suppose they're smoking?" Vega asked.
"I didn't think about that," Chavez admitted with a grunt. "You don't suppose they're that dumb, do you?"
"We ain't dealing with soldiers, man. We coulda moved in and snuffed those fuckers no sweat. Maybe ten seconds' worth of firefight."
"Still gotta be careful," Chavez whispered in reply.
"Roge- o," Vega agreed. "That's where you get the edge."
"KNIFE, this is Six," Ramirez called on the radio net. "Fall back to the rally point."
"Move, I'll cover," Chavez told Vega.
Julio stood and shouldered his weapon. There was a slight but annoying tinkle from the metal parts as he did so - the ammo belt, Ding thought. Have to keep that in mind . He waited in place for several minutes before moving out.
The rally point was a particularly tall tree close to the stream. Again, people replenished their canteens at Olivero's persistent urging. It turned out that one man had had his face slashed by a low branch, requiring attention from the medic, but otherwise the squad was fully intact. They'd camp five hundred meters from the airfield, leaving two men at an observation point - the one Chavez had staked out for himself - around the clock. Ding took the first watch, again with Vega, and would be relieved at dawn by Guerra and another man armed with a silenced MP-5. Either a SAW or a soldier armed with a grenade launcher would always be at the OP in case the opposition got rambunctious. If there was to be a firefight, the idea was to end it as quickly as possible. Light-fighters weren't especially big on tanks and heavy guns, but American soldiers think in terms of firepower, which, after all, had been largely an American invention in the first place.
It amazed Chavez how easily one could slip into a routine. An hour before dawn, he and Vega surveyed the landing strip from their little knoll. Of the two men in the permanent security team, only one was moving around. The other was sitting with his back against the shack, still smoking something or other. The one up and moving didn't stray far.
"What's happening, Ding?" the captain asked.
"I heard you coming, sir," Chavez said.
"I tripped. Sorry."
Chavez ran down the situation briefly. Ramirez put his binoculars on the enemy to check things for himself.
"Supposedly they aren't being bothered by the local police and army," the captain observed.
"Bought off?" Vega asked.
"No, just they got discouraged, mainly. So the druggies have settled down to a half-dozen or so regular airfields. Like this one. We're gonna be here awhile." A pause. "Anything happens -"
"We'll call you right off, sir," Vega promised.
"See any snakes?" Ramirez asked.
"No, thank God." The captain's teeth flared in the darkness. He clapped Chavez on the shoulder and disappeared back into the bushes.
"What's wrong with snakes?" Vega asked.
Captain Winters felt the pangs of disappointment as he watched the Piper touch down. It was two in a row now. The big one from the other night was gone already. Exactly where they flew them off to, he didn't know. Maybe the big boneyard in the desert. One more old piston bird would hardly be noticed. On the other hand, you could sell one of these Pipers easily enough.
The.50- caliber machine gun looked even more impressive at eye level, though with dawn coming up, the spotlights were less overpowering. They didn't use the spy-plane ploy this time. The Marines treated the smugglers just as roughly as before, however, and their actions again had the desired effect. The CIA officer running the operation had formerly been with DEA, and he enjoyed the difference in interrogation methods. Both pilots were Colombians, the aircraft's registration to the contrary. Despite their machismo, it took only one look at Nicodemus. To be brave in the face of a bullet, or even an attack dog, was one thing. To be brave before a living carnosaur was something else entirely. It took less than an hour for them to be processed, then taken off to the tame federal district judge.
"How many planes don't make it here?" Gunnery Sergeant Black asked as they were driven away.
"What d'you mean, Gunny?"
"I seen the fighter, sir. It figures that he told the dude, 'Fly this way or else!' An' we been called here more times 'n airplanes have showed up, right? What I'm saying, sir, is it stands to reason, like, that some folks didn't take the hint, and the boy driving the fighter showed them the 'or else.' "
"You don't need to know that, Gunny Black," the CIA officer pointed out.
"Fair enough. Either way, it's cool with me, sir. My first tour in 'Nam, I seen a squad get wiped because some of 'em were doped up. I caught a punk selling drugs in my squad, back in '74-75, and I damned near beat the little fuck to death. Almost got in trouble over it, too."
The CIA officer nodded as though that statement surprised him. It didn't.
" 'Need- to-know,' Gunny," he repeated.
"Aye aye, sir." Gunnery Sergeant Black assembled his men and walked off toward the waiting helicopter.
That was the problem with "black" operations, the CIA officer thought as he watched the Marines leave. You want good people, reliable people, smart people, to be part of the op. But the good, reliable, and smart people all had brains and imagination. And it really wasn't all that hard for them to figure things out. After enough of that happened, "black" operations tended to become gray ones. Like the dawn that had just risen. Except that light wasn't always a good thing, was it?
Admiral Cutter met Directors Moore and Jacobs in the lobby of the office wing, and took them straight to the Oval Office. Agents Connor and D'Agostino were on duty in the secretarial office and gave all three the usual once-over out of habit. Unusually, for the White House, they walked straight in to see WRANGLER.
"Good afternoon, Mr. President," all three said in turn.
The President rose from his desk and took his place in an antique chair by the fireplace. This was where he usually sat for "intimate" conversations. The President regretted this. The chair he sat in was nowhere near as comfortable as the custom-designed one behind his desk, and his back was acting up, but even presidents have to play by the rules of others' expectations.
"I take it that this is to be a progress report. You want to start off, Judge?"
"SHOWBOAT is fully underway. We've had a major stroke of luck, in fact. Just as we got a surveillance team in place, they spotted an aircraft taking off." Moore favored everyone with a smile. "Everything worked exactly as planned. The two smugglers are in federal custody. That was luck, pure and simple, of course. We can't expect that to happen too often, but we intercepted ninety kilos of cocaine, and that's a fair night's work. All four covert teams are on the ground and in place. None have been spotted."
"How's the satellite working out?"
"Still getting parts of it calibrated. That's mainly a computer problem, of course. The thing we're planning to use the Rhyolite for will take another week or so. As you know, that element of the plan was set up rather late, and we're playing it by ear at the moment. The problem, if I can call it that, is setting up the computer software, and they need another couple of days."
"What about The Hill?"
"This afternoon," Judge Moore answered. "I don't expect that to be a problem."
"You've said that before," Cutter pointed out.
Moore turned and examined him with a tired eye. "We've laid quite a bit of groundwork. I don't invoke SAHO very often, and I've never had any problems from them when I did."
"I don't expect any active opposition there, Jim," the President agreed. "I've laid some groundwork, too. Emil, you're quiet this morning."
"We've been over that aspect of the operation, Mr. President. I have no special legal qualms, because there really is no law on this issue. The Constitution grants you plenipotentiary powers to use military force to protect our national security once it is determined - by you, of course - that our security is, in fact, threatened. The legal precedents go all the way back to the Jefferson presidency. The political issues are something else, but that's not really my department. In any case, the Bureau has broken what appears to be a major money-laundering operation, and we're just about ready to move on it."
"How major?" Admiral Cutter asked, annoying the President, who wanted to ask the same question.
"We can identify a total of five hundred eighty-eight million dollars of drug money, spread through twenty-two different banks all the way from Liechtenstein to California, invested in a number of real-estate ventures, all of which are here in the United States. We've had a team working 'round the clock all week on this."
"How much?" the President asked, getting in first this time. He wasn't the only person in the room who wanted that number repeated.
"Almost six hundred million," the FBI Director repeated. "It was just over that figure two days ago, but a sizable block of funds was transferred on Wednesday - it looks like it was a routine transfer, but we are keeping an eye on the accounts in question."
"And what will you be doing?"
"By this evening we'll have complete documentation on all the accounts. Starting tomorrow, the legal attach s in all our embassies overseas, and the field divisions covering the domestic banks, will move to freeze the accounts and -"
"Will the Swiss and the Europeans cooperate?" Cutter interrupted.
"Yes, they will. The mystique about numbered accounts is overrated, as President Marcos found out a few years ago. If we can prove that the deposits result from criminal operations, the governments in question will freeze the funds. In Switzerland, for example, the money goes to the state - 'canton' - government for domestic applications. Aside from the moral issue, it's simple self-interest, and we have treaties to cover this. It hardly hurts the Swiss economy, for example, to keep that money in Switzerland, does it? If we're successful, as I have every right to expect, the total net loss to the Cartel will be on the order of one billion dollars. That figure is just an estimate on our part which includes loss of equity in the investments and the expected profits from rollover. The five eighty-eight, on the other hand, is a hard number. We're calling this Operation TARPON. Domestically, the law is entirely on our side, and on close inspection, it's going to be very hard for anyone to liberate the funds, ever. Overseas the legal issues are more muddied, but I think we can expect fairly good cooperation. The European governments are starting to notice drug problems of their own, and they have a way of handling the legal issues more... oh, I guess the word is pragmatically," Jacobs concluded with a smile. "I presume you'll want the Attorney General to make the announcement."
You could see the sparkle in the President's eyes. The press release would be made in the White House Press Room. He'd let the Justice Department handle it, of course, but it would be done in the White House so that journalists could get the right spin. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I have just informed the President that we have made a major break in the continuing war against ...
"How badly will this hurt them?" the President asked.
"Sir, exactly how much money they have has always been a matter of speculation on our part. What's really interesting about this whole scheme is that the laundering operation may actually be designed to legitimize the money once it gets into Colombia. That's hard to read, but it would seem that the Cartel is trying to find a less overtly criminal way in which to infiltrate their own national economy. Since that is not strictly necessary in economic terms, the presumptive goal of the operation would seem to be political. To answer your question, the monetary loss will sting them rather badly, but will not cripple them in any way. The political ramifications, however, may be an extra bonus whose scope we cannot as yet evaluate."
"A billion dollars..." the President said. "That really gives you something to tell the Colombians about, doesn't it?"
"I do not think they'll be displeased. The political rumblings they've been getting from the Cartel are very troubling to them."
"Not troubling enough to take action," Cutter observed.
Jacobs didn't like that at all. "Admiral, their Attorney General is a friend of mine. He travels with a security detail that's double the size of the President's, and he has to deal with a security threat that'd make most people duck for cover every time a car backfired. Colombia is trying damned hard to run a real democracy in a region where democracies are pretty rare - which historically happens to be our fault, in case you've forgotten - and you expect them to do - what? Trash what institutions they do have, do what Argentina did? For Christ's sake, the Bureau and DEA combined don't have the manpower to go after the drug rings that we already know about, and we have a thousand times their resources. So what the hell do you expect, that they'll go fascist again to hunt down the druggies just because it suits us? We did expect that and we got that, for over a hundred years, and look where it's gotten us!" This clown is supposed to be an expert on Latin America , Jacobs didn't say out loud. Says who? I bet you couldn't even drive boats worth a damn!
The bottom line , Judge Moore noted, is that Emil doesn't like this whole operation, does he? On the other hand, it did rock Cutter back in his chair. A small man, Jacobs had dignity and moral authority measured in megaton quantities.
"You're trying to tell us something, Emil," the President said lightly. "Spit it out."
"Terminate this whole operation," the FBI Director said. "Stop it before it goes too far. Give me the manpower I need, and I can accomplish more right here at home, entirely within the law, than we'll ever accomplish with all this covert-operations nonsense. TARPON is the proof of that. Straight police work, and it's the biggest success we've ever had."
"Which happened only because some Coast Guard skipper got a little off the reservation," Judge Moore noted. "If that Coastie hadn't broken the rules himself, your case would have looked like simple piracy and murder. You left that part out, Emil."
"Not the first time something like that has happened, and the difference, Arthur, is that that wasn't planned by anyone in Washington."
"That captain isn't going to be hurt, is he?" the President asked.
"No, sir. That's already been taken care of," Jacobs assured him.
"Good. Keep it that way. Emil, I respect your point of view," the President said, "but we have to try something different. I can't sell Congress on the funding to double the size of the FBI, or DEA. You know that."
You haven't tried , Jacobs wanted to say. Instead he nodded submission.
"And I thought we had your agreement on this operation."
"You do, Mr. President." How did I ever rope myself into this? Jacobs asked himself. This road, like so many others, was paved with good intentions. What they were doing wasn't quite illegal; in the same sense that skydiving wasn't quite dangerous - so long as everything went according to plan.
"And when are you heading down to Bogot ?"
"Next week, sir. I've messengered a letter to the legal attach , and he'll deliver it by hand to the AG. We'll have good security for the meeting."
"Good. I want you to be careful, Emil. I need you. I especially need your advice," the President said kindly. "Even if I don't always take it."
The President has to be the world's champ at setting people down easy , Moore told himself. But part of that was Emil Jacobs. He'd been a team player since he joined the U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago, lo, those thirty years ago.
"Anything else?"
"I've made Jack Ryan the acting DDI," Moore said. "James recommended him, and I think he's ready."
"Will he be cleared for SHOWBOAT?" Cutter asked immediately.
"He's not that ready, is he, Arthur?" the President opined.
"No, sir, your orders were to keep this one tight."
"Any change with Greer?"
"It does not look good, Mr. President," Moore replied.
"Damned shame. I have to go into Bethesda to have my blood pressure looked at next week. I'll stop in to see him."
"That would be very kind of you, sir."
Everyone was supportive as hell, Ryan noted. He felt like a trespasser in this office, but Nancy Cummings - secretary to the DDI from long before the time Greer arrived here - did not treat him as an interloper, and the security detail that he now rated called him "sir" even though two of them were older than Jack was. The really good news, he didn't realize until someone told him, was that he now rated a driver also. The purpose of this was simply that the driver was a security officer with a Beretta Model 92-F automatic pistol under his left armpit (there was something even more impressive under the dash), but for Ryan it meant that he'd no longer have to make the fifty-eight-minute drive himself. From now on he'd be one of those Important People who sat in the back of the speeding car talking on a secure mobile phone, or reading over Important Documents, or, more likely, reading the paper on the way into work. The official car would be parked in GIA's underground garage, in a reserved space near the executive elevator, which would whisk him directly to the seventh floor without having to pass through the customary security-gate routine, which was such a damned nuisance. He'd eat in the executive dining room with its mahogany furniture and discreetly elegant silverware.
The increase in salary was also impressive, or would have been if it had matched what his wife, Cathy, was making from the surgical practice that supplemented her associate professorship at Johns Hopkins. But there was not a single government salary - not even the President's - that matched what a good surgeon made. Ryan also had the equivalent rank of a three-star general or admiral, even though his capacity in the job was merely "acting."
His first task of the day, after closing the office door, had been to open the DDI safe. There was nothing in it. Ryan memorized the combination, again noting that the DDO's combination was scribbled on the same sheet of paper. His office had that most precious of government perks: a private bathroom; a high-definition TV monitor on which he could watch satellite imagery come in without going to the viewing room in the building's new north wing; a secure computer terminal over which he could communicate to other offices if he so wished - there was dust on the keys; Greer had almost never used it. Most of all, there was room . He could get up and pace if he wanted. His job gave him unlimited access to the Director. When the Director was away - and even if he were not - Ryan could call the White House for an immediate meeting with the President. He'd have to go through the Chief of Staff - bypassing Cutter, if he felt the need - but if Ryan now said, "I have to see the President, right now!" he'd get in, right now. Of course he'd have to have a very good reason for doing so.
Jack sat in the high-backed chair, facing away from the plate-glass windows, and realized that he had gotten there. This was as far as he had ever expected to rise in the Agency. Not even forty yet. He'd made his money in the brokerage business - and the money was still growing; he needed his CIA salary about as much as he needed a third shoe - gotten his doctor's degree, written his books, taught some history, made himself a new and interesting career, and worked his way to the top. Not even forty yet. He would have awarded himself a gentle, satisfied smile except for the fatherly gentleman who was now at Bethesda Naval Medical Center, dying the lingering and painful death that had put him in this chair, in this office, in this position.
It's not worth it. It sure as hell isn't worth that , Jack told himself. He'd lost his parents to an airliner crash at Chicago, and remembered the sudden, wrenching loss, the impact that had come like a thrown punch. For all that, it had come with merciful speed. He hadn't realized it at the time, but he did now. Ryan made a point of seeing Admiral Greer three times a week, watching his body shrink, draw in on itself like a drying plant, watching the pain lines deepen in his dignified face as the man fought valiantly in a battle he knew to be hopeless. He'd been spared the ordeal of watching his parents fade away, but Greer had become a new father to him, and Ryan was now observing his filial duty for his surrogate parent. Now he understood why his wife had chosen eye surgery. It was tough, technically demanding work in which a slip could cause blindness, but Cathy didn't have to watch people die. What could be harder than this - but Ryan knew that answer. He'd seen his daughter hover near death, saved by chance and some especially fine surgeons.
Where do they get the courage? Jack wondered. It was one thing to fight against people. Ryan had done that. But to fight against Death itself, knowing that they must ultimately lose, but still fighting. Such was the nature of the medical profession.
Jesus, you're a morbid son of a bitch this morning .
What would the Admiral say?
He'd say to get on with the goddamned job .
The point of life was to press on, to do the best you can, to make the world a better place. Of course, Jack admitted, CIA might seem to some a most peculiar place in which to do that, but not to Ryan, who had done some very odd but also very useful things here.
A smell got his attention. He turned to see that the coffee machine on the credenza was turned on. Nancy must have done it, he realized. But Admiral Greer's mugs were gone, and some "generic" CIA-logoed cups sat on the silver tray. Just then came a knock on the door. Nancy's head appeared.
"Your department-head meeting starts in two minutes, Dr. Ryan."
"Thanks, Mrs. Cummings. Who did the coffee?" Jack asked.
"The Admiral called in this morning. He said you would need some on your first day."
"Oh. I'll thank him when I go over tonight."
"He sounded a little better this morning," Nancy said hopefully.
"Hope you're right."
The department heads appeared right on schedule. He poured himself a cup of coffee, offering the same to his visitors, and in a minute was down to work. The first morning report, as always, concerned the Soviet Union, followed by the others as CIA's interests rotated around the globe. Jack had attended these meetings as a matter of routine for years, but now he was the man behind the desk. He knew how the meetings were supposed to be run, and he didn't break the pattern. Business was still business. The Admiral wouldn't have had it any other way.
With presidential approval, things moved along smartly. Overseas communications were handled, as always, by the National Security Agency, and only the time zones made things inconvenient. An earlier heads-up signal had been dispatched to the legal attaches in several European embassies, and at the appointed time, first in Bern, teletype machines operating off encrypted satellite channels began punching out paper. In the communications rooms in all the embassies, the commo-techs took note of the fact that the systems being used were the most secure lines available. The first, or register, sheet prepped the technicians for the proper one-time-pad sequence, which had to be retrieved from the safes which held the cipher keys.
For especially sensitive communications - the sort that might accompany notice that war was about to start, for example - conventional cipher machines simply were not secure enough. The Walker-Whitworth spy ring had seen to that. Those revelations had forced a rapid and radical change in American code policy. Each embassy had a special safe - actually a safe within yet another, larger safe - which contained a number of quite ordinary-looking tape cassettes. Each was encased in a transparent but color-coded plastic shrink-wrap. Each bore two numbers. One number - in this case 342 - was the master registration number for the cassette. The other - in the Bern embassy; it was 68 - designated the individual cassette within the 342 series. In the event that the plastic wrap on any of the cassettes, anywhere in the world, was determined to be split, scratched, or even distorted, all cassettes on that number series were immediately burned on the assumption that the cassette might have been compromised.
In this case, the communications technician removed the cassette from its storage case, examined its number, and had his watch supervisor verify that it had the proper number: "I read the number as three-four-two."
"Concur," the watch supervisor confirmed. "Three-four-two."
"I am opening the cassette," the technician said, shaking his head at the absurd solemnity of the event.
The shrink-wrap was discarded in the low-tech rectangular plastic waste can next to his desk, and the technician inserted the cassette in an ordinary-looking but expensive player that was linked electronically to another teletype machine ten feet away.
The technician set the original printout on the clipboard over his own machine and started typing.
The message, already encrypted on the master 342 cassette at NSA headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland, had been further encrypted for satellite transmission on the current maximum-security State Department cipher, called STRIPE, but even if someone had the proper keys to read STRIPE, all he would have gotten was a message that read DEERAMO WERAC KEWJRT, and so on, due to the super-encipherment imposed by the cassette system. That would at the least annoy anyone who thought that he'd broken the American communications systems. It certainly annoyed the communications technician, who had to concentrate as hard as he knew on how to type things like DEERAMO WERAC KEWJRT instead of real words that made some sort of sense.
Each letter passed through the cassette player, which took note of the incoming letter and treated it as a number from 1 (A) to 26 (Z), and then added the number on the tape cassette. Thus, if 1 (A) on the original text corresponded to another 1 (A) on the cassette, 1 was added to 1, making 2 (B) on the clear-text message. The transpositions on the cassette were completely random, having been generated from atmospheric radio noise by a computer at Fort Meade. It was a completely unbreakable code system, technically known as a One-Time Pad. There was, by definition, no way to order or predict random behavior. So long as the tape cassettes were uncompromised, no one could break this cipher system. The only reason that this system, called TAPDANCE, was not used for all communications was the inconvenience of making, shipping, securing, and keeping track of the thousands of cassettes that would be required, but that would soon be made easier when a laser-disc format replaced the tape cassettes. The code-breaking profession had been around since Elizabethan times, and this technical development threatened to render it as obsolete as the slide rule.
The technician pounded away on the keyboard, trying to concentrate as he grumbled to himself about the late hours. He ought to have been off work at six, and was looking forward to dinner in a nice little place a couple of blocks from the embassy. He could not, of course, see the clear-text message coming up ten feet away, but the truth was that he didn't give a good goddamn. He'd been doing this sort of thing for nine years, and the only reason he stuck with it was the travel opportunity. Bern was his third posting overseas. It wasn't as much fun as Bangkok had been, but it was far more interesting than his childhood home in Ithaca, New York.
The message had seventeen thousand characters, which probably corresponded to about twenty-five hundred words, the technician thought. He blazed through the message as quickly as he could.
"Okay?" he asked when he was finished. The last "word" had been ERYTPESM.
"Yep," the legal attach replied.
"Great." The technician took the telex printout he'd just typed from and fed it into the code room's own shredder. It came out as flat pasta. Next he removed the tape cassette from the player and, getting a nod from the watch supervisor, walked to the corner of the room. Here, tied to a cable fixed to the wall - actually it was just a spiraled telephone cord - was a large horseshoe magnet. He moved this back and forth over the cassette to destroy the magnetic information encoded on the tape inside. Then the cassette went into the burn-bag. At midnight, one of the Marine guards, supervised by someone else, would carry the bag to the embassy's incinerator, where both would watch a day's worth of paper and other important garbage burned to ashes by a natural-gas flame. Mr. Bernardi finished scanning the message and looked up.
"I wish my secretary could type that fast, Charlie. I count two - only two! - mistakes. Sorry we kept you late." The legal attach handed over a ten-franc note. "Have a couple of beers on me."
"Thank you, Mr. Bernardi."
Chuck Bernardi was a senior FBI agent, whose civil-service rank was equivalent to that of brigadier general in the United States Army, in which he had served as an infantry officer, long ago and far away. He had two more months to serve here, after which he'd rotate home to FBI Headquarters and maybe a job as special-agent-in-charge of a medium-sized field division. His specialty was in the Bureau's OC-Organized Crime-Directorate, which explained his posting to Switzerland. Chuck Bernardi was an expert on tracking mob money, and a lot of it worked its way through the Swiss banking system. His job, half police officer and half diplomat, put him in touch with all of the top Swiss police officials, with whom he had developed a close and friendly working relationship. The local cops were smart, professional, and damned effective, he thought. A little old lady could walk the streets of Bern with a shopping bag full of banknotes and feel perfectly secure. And some of them, he chuckled to himself on the walk to his office, probably did.
Once in his office, Bernardi flipped on his reading light and reached for a cigar. He hadn't shaken off the first ash when he leaned back in his chair to stare at the ceiling.
"Son of a bitch! " He reached for his telephone and called the most senior cop he knew.
"This is Chuck Bernardi. Could I speak to Dr. Lang, please? Thank you... Hi, Karl, Chuck here. I need to see you... right away if possible... it's pretty important, Karl, honest... In your office would be better... Not over the phone, Karl, if you don't mind... Okay, thanks, pal. It's worth it, believe me. I'll be there in fifteen minutes."
He hung up the phone. Next he walked out to the office Xerox machine and made a copy of the document, signing off that it was he who had used the machine and how many copies had been run off. Before leaving, he put the original in his personal safe and tucked the copy in his coat pocket. Karl might be pissed about missing dinner, he thought, but it wasn't every day that somebody enriched your national economy to the tune of two hundred million dollars. The Swiss would freeze the accounts. That meant that six of their banks would, by law, keep all the accrued interest - and maybe the principal also, as the identity of the government which was entitled to get the funds might never be clear, "forcing" the Swiss to keep the funds, which would ultimately be turned over to the canton governments. And people wondered why Switzerland was such a wealthy, peaceful, charming little country. It wasn't just the skiing and the chocolate.
Within an hour, six embassies had the word, and as the sun marched across the earth, special agents of the FBI also visited the executive suites of several American commercial - "full-service" - banks. They handed over the identifying numbers or names of several accounts, all of whose considerable funds would be immediately frozen by the simple expedient of putting a computer lock on them. In all cases, it was done quietly. No one had to know, and the importance of secrecy was conveyed in very positive terms - in America and elsewhere - by serious, senior government employees, to bank presidents who were fully cooperative in every instance. (After all, it wasn't their money, was it?) In nearly all cases, the police officials learned, the accounts were not terribly active, averaging two or three transactions per month; always large ones, of course. Deposits would still be accepted, and it was suggested by a Belgian official that if the FBI had the account information for other such accounts, transfers from one monitored account to another would be allowed - only within the same country, of course, the Belgian pointed out - to prevent tipping off the depositors. After all, he said, drugs were the common enemy of all civilized men, and most certainly of all police officers. That suggestion was immediately ratified by Director Jacobs, with the concurrence of the AG. Even the Dutch went along, despite the fact that the Netherlands government itself sold drugs in approved stores to its more jaded younger citizens. It was, all in all, a clear case of capitalism in action. There was dirty money around, money that had not been rightly earned, and governments did not approve of such money. Which was why they seized it for their own approved ends. In the case of the banks, the secrecy to which they were sworn was every bit as sacred as that by which they guarded the identity of their depositors.
By the close of business hours on Friday, all had been accomplished. The banks' computer systems stayed up and running. The law-enforcement people now had two full additional days to give the money trails further examination. If they found any more money related to the accounts already seized, those funds would also be frozen, and, in the case of the European banks, confiscated. The first hit here was in Luxembourg. Though Swiss banks are those known internationally for their confidentiality laws, the only real difference in security between their operation and those of banks in most other European countries was the fact that Belgium, for example, wasn't surrounded by the Alps, and that Switzerland hadn't been overrun by foreign armies quite as recently as her European neighbors. Otherwise, the integrity of the banks was identical, and accordingly the non-Swiss bankers actually resented the Alps for giving their Swiss brethren such an additional and accidental business advantage. But in this case, international cooperation was the rule. By Sunday evening, six new "dirty" accounts had been identified, and one hundred thirty-five million additional dollars were put under computer lock.
Back in Washington, Director Jacobs, Deputy Assistant Director Murray, the specialists from the organized-crime office, and the Justice Department left their offices for a well-deserved dinner at the Jockey Club Restaurant. While the Director's security detail watched, the ten men proceeded to have themselves a superb meal at government expense. Perhaps a passing reporter or Common Cause staffer might have objected, but this one had been well and truly earned. Operation TARPON was the greatest single success in the War on Drugs. It would go public, they agreed, by the end of the week.
"Gentlemen," Dan Murray said, rising with his - he didn't remember how many glasses of Chablis had accompanied this fish - of course - dinner. "I give you the United States Coast Guard!"
They all rose with a chorus of laughter that annoyed the other customers in the restaurant. "The United States Coast Guard!" It was a pity, one of the Justice Department attorneys noted, that they didn't know the words to "Semper Paratus."
The party broke up about ten o'clock. The Director's security men shared looks. Emil didn't hold his liquor all that well, and he'd be a gruff, hungover little bear tomorrow morning - though he'd apologize to them all before lunch.
"We'll be flying down to Bogot Friday afternoon," he told them in the sanctity of his official car, an Oldsmobile. "Make your plans but don't tell the Air Force until Wednesday. I don't want any leaks on this."
"Yes, sir," the chief of the detail answered. He wasn't looking forward to this one either. Especially now. The druggies were going to be pissed. But this visit would catch them unawares. The news stories would say that Jacobs was remaining in D.C. to work on the case, and they wouldn't expect him to show up in Colombia. Even so, the security for this one would be tight. He and his fellow agents would be spending some extra time in the Hoover Building's own weapons range, honing their skills with their automatic pistols and submachine guns. They couldn't let anything happen to Emil.
Moira found out Tuesday morning. By this time she, too, knew all about TARPON, of course. She knew that the trip was supposed to be secret, and she had no doubt that it would also be dangerous. She wouldn't tell Juan until Thursday night. After all, she had to be careful. She spent the rest of the week wondering what special place he had in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
It no longer mattered that the uniform clothing was khaki instead of woodland pattern Battle Dress Uniform. Between the sweat stains and the dirt, the squad members were now exactly the same color as the ground on which they hid. They had all washed once in the stream from which they took their water, but no one had used soap for fear that suds or smell or something might alert someone downstream. Under the circumstances, washing without soap wasn't even as good as kissing your sister. It had cooled them off, however, and that for Chavez was a most pleasant memory. For - what was it? - ten glorious minutes he'd been comfortable. Ten minutes after which, he'd sweated again. The climate was beastly, with temperatures reaching to one hundred twenty degrees on one cloudless afternoon. If this was a goddamned jungle, Chavez asked himself, why the hell doesn't it rain? The good news was that they didn't have to move around a great deal. The two jerks who guarded this airstrip spent most of their time sleeping, smoking - probably grass, Chavez thought - and generally jerking off. They had, once, startled him by firing their weapons at tin cans that they'd set up on the runway. That might have been dangerous, but the direction of fire hadn't been toward the observation post, and Chavez had used the opportunity to evaluate the weapons skills of the opposition. Shitty, he'd told Vega at once. Now they were up to it again. They set up three bean cans - big ones - perhaps a hundred meters from the shack, and just blazed away, shooting from the hip like movie actors.
"Christ, what fuck-ups," he observed, watching through his binoculars.
"Lemme see." Vega got to watch just as one of them knocked a can down on his third try. "Hell, I could hit the damned things from here..."
"Point, this is Six, what the fuck is going on!" the radio squawked a moment later. Vega answered the call.
"Six, this is Point. Our friends are doing some plinkin' again. Their axis of fire is away from us, sir. They're punchin' holes in some tin cans. They can't shoot for shit, Cap'n."
"I'm coming over."
"Roger." Ding set down the radio. "The Cap'n's coming. I think the noise made him nervous."
"He sure does worry a lot," Vega noted.
"That's what they pay officers for, ain't it?"
Ramirez appeared three minutes later. Chavez made to hand over his binoculars, but the captain had brought his own pair this time. He fell to a prone position and got his glasses up just in time to watch another can go down.
"Oh."
"Two cans, two full magazines," Chavez explained. "They like to go rock-and-roll. I guess ammo's cheap down here."
Both of the guards were still smoking. The captain and the sergeant watched them laugh and joke as they shot. Probably, Ramirez thought, they're as bored as we are. After the first aircraft, there had been no activity at all here at RENO, and soldiers like boredom even less than ordinary citizens. One of them - it was hard to tell them apart since they were roughly the same size and wore the same sort of clothing - inserted another magazine into his AK-47 and blazed off a ten-round burst. The little fountains of dirt walked up to the remaining can, but didn't quite hit it.
"I didn't know it would be this easy, sir," Vega observed from behind the sights of his machine gun. "What a bunch of fuck-ups!"
"You think that way, Oso , you turn into one yourself," Ramirez said seriously.
"Roger that, Cap'n, but I can't help seein' what I'm seein'."
Ramirez softened his rebuke with a smile. "I suppose you're right."
The third can finally went down. They were averaging thirty rounds per target. Next the guards used their weapons to push the cans around the runway.
"You know," Vega said after a moment, "I ain't seen 'em clean their weapons yet." For the squad members, cleaning their weapons was as regular a routine as morning and evening prayers were for clergymen.
"The AK'll take a lot of abuse. It's good for that," Ramirez pointed out.
"Yes, sir."
Finally the guards, too, grew bored. One of them retrieved the cans. As he was doing so, a truck appeared. With little in the way of warning, Chavez was surprised to note. The wind was wrong, but even so it hadn't occurred to him that he wouldn't have at least a minute or two worth of warning. Something to remember. There were three people in the truck, one of whom was riding in the back. The driver dismounted and walked out to the two guards. In a moment he was pointing at the ground and yelling - they could hear it from five hundred yards away even though they hadn't heard the truck, which really seemed strange.
"What's that all about?" Vega asked.
Captain Ramirez laughed quietly. "FOD. He's pissed off at the FOD."
"Huh?" Vega asked.
"Foreign Object Damage. You suck one of those cartridge cases into an aircraft engine, like a turbine engine, and it'll beat the hell out of it. Yeah - look, they're picking up their brass."
Chavez turned his binoculars back to the truck. "I see some boxes there, sir. Maybe we got a pickup tonight. How come no fuel cans - yeah! Captain, last time we were here, they didn't fuel the airplane, did they?"
"The flight originates from a regular airstrip twenty miles off," Ramirez explained. "Maybe they don't have to top off... Does seem odd, though."
"Maybe they got fuel drums in the shack...?" Vega wondered.
Captain Ramirez grunted. He wanted to send a couple of men in close to check the area out, but his orders didn't permit that. Their only patrolling was to check the airfield perimeter for additional security troops. They never got closer than four hundred meters to the cleared area, and it was always done with an eye on the two guards. His operational orders were not to take the slightest risk of making contact with the opposition. So they weren't supposed to patrol the area even though it would have told them more about the opposition than they knew - would tell them things that they might need to know. That was just good basic soldiering, he thought, and the order not to do it was a dumb order, since it ran as many - or more - risks than it was supposed to avoid. But orders were still orders. Whoever had generated them didn't know much about soldiering. It was Ramirez's first experience with that phenomenon, since he, too, was not old enough to remember Vietnam.
"They're gonna be out there all day," Chavez said. It appeared that the truck driver was making them count their brass, and you never could find all of the damned things. Vega checked his watch.
"Sundown in two hours. Anybody wanna bet we'll have business tonight? I got a hundred pesos says we get a plane before twenty-two hundred."
"No bet," Ramirez said. "The tall one by the truck just opened a box of flares." The captain left. He had a radio call to make.
It had been a quiet couple of days at Corezal. Clark had just returned from a late lunch at the Fort Amador Officers' Club - curiously, the head of the Panamanian Army had an office in the same building; most curious, since he was not overly popular with the U.S. military at the moment - followed by a brief siesta. Local customs, he decided, made sense. Especially sleeping through the hottest part of the day. The cold air of the van - the air conditioning was to protect the electronics gear, mainly from the oppressive humidity here - gave him the wakeup shock he needed.
Team KNIFE had scored on their first night with a single aircraft. Two of the other squads had also had hits, but one of the aircraft had made it all the way to its destination when the F-15 had lost its radar ten minutes after takeoff, much to everyone's chagrin. But that was the sort of problem you had to expect with an operation this short of assets. Two for three wasn't bad at all, especially when you considered what the odds had been like a bare month before, when the Customs people were lucky to bag a single aircraft in a month. One of the squads, moreover, had drawn a complete blank. Their airfield seemed totally inactive, contradicting intelligence data that had looked very promising only a week before. That also was a hazard of real-world operations.
"VARIABLE, this is KNIFE, over," the speaker said without preamble.
"KNIFE, this is VARIABLE. We read you loud and clear. We are ready to copy, over."
"We have activity at RENO. Possible pickup this evening. We will keep you advised. Over."
"Roger, copy. We'll be here. Out."
One of the Operations people lifted the handset to another radio channel.
"EAGLE'S NEST, this is VARIABLE... Stand to... Roger. We'll keep you posted. Out." He set the instrument down and turned. "They'll get everyone up. The fighter is back on line. Seems the radar was overdue for some part replacement or other. It's up and running, and the Air Force offers its apology."
"Damned well ought to," the other Operations man grumbled.
"You guys ever think that maybe an operation can go too right?" Clark asked from his seat in the corner.
The senior one wanted to say something snotty, Clark saw, but knew better.
"They must know that something odd is happening. You don't want to make it too obvious," Clark explained for the other one. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes. Might as well get another piece of that siesta, he told himself. It might be a long night.
Chavez got his wish just after sundown. It started to rain lightly, and clouds moving in from the west promised an even heavier downpour. The airfield crew set out their flares - quite a few more than the last time, he saw - and the aircraft arrived soon after that.
Rain made visibility difficult. It seemed to Chavez that someone ran a fuel hose out from the shack. Maybe there were some fuel drums in there, and maybe a hand-crank pump, but his ability to see the five or six hundred yards came and went with the rain. Something else happened. The truck drove down the center of the strip, and the driver tossed out at least ten additional flares to mark the centerline. The aircraft took off twenty minutes after it arrived, and Ramirez was already on his satellite radio.
"Did you get the tail number?" VARIABLE asked.
"Negative," the captain replied. "It's raining pretty heavy now. Visibility is dogshit. But he got off at twenty-fifty-one Lima, heading north-northwest."
"Roger, copy. Out."
Ramirez didn't like the effect that the reduced visibility might have on his unit. He took another pair of soldiers forward to the OP, but he just as well might not have bothered. The guards didn't bother extinguishing the flares this time, letting the rain wet things down. The truck left soon after the aircraft took off, and the two chastised runway guards retired to the shack to keep dry. All in all, he thought, it couldn't be much easier.
Bronco was bored, too. It wasn't that he minded what he was doing, but there really wasn't much challenge in it. And besides, he was stuck at four kills, and needed only one more to be an ace. The fighter pilot was sure that the mission was better accomplished with live prisoners - but, damn it, killing the sons of bitches was... satisfying, even though there wasn't much challenge to it. He was flying an aircraft designed to mix it up with the best fighters the Russians could make. Taking out a Twin-Beech was about as difficult as driving to the O-Club for a couple of brews. Maybe tonight he'd do something different... but what?
That gave him something to think about as he orbited north of the Yucatan Channel, just behind the E-2C, and of course out of normal airliner tracks. The contact call came in at about the right time. He turned south to get on the target, which took just over ten minutes.
"Tallyho," he told the Hawkeye. "I have eyeballs on target."
Another two-engine, therefore another coke smuggler. Captain Winters was still angry about the other night. Someone had forgotten to check the maintenance schedule on his Eagle, and sure enough, that damned widget had failed right when the contractor said it would, at five hundred three hours. Amazing that they could figure it that close. Amazing that an umpty-million-dollar fighter plane went tits-up because of a five-dollar widget, or diode, or chip, or whatever the hell it was. It cost five bucks. He knew that because the sergeant had told him.
Well, there he was. Twin engines, looked like a Beech King Air. No lights, cruising a lot lower than his most efficient cruise altitude.
Okay, Bronco thought, slowing his fighter down, then lighting him up and making the first radio call.
It was a druggie, all right. He did the same dumbass thing they all did, reducing power, lowering flaps, and diving for the deck. Winters had never gotten past the fourth level of Donkey Kong, but popping a real airplane under these circumstances was a hell of a lot easier than that, and you didn't even have to put in a quarter... but he was bored.
Okay, let's try something different .
He let the aircraft go down, maintaining his own altitude and power setting to pass well ahead of it. He checked to make sure that all of his flying lights were off, then threw the Eagle into a tight left-hand turn. This brought his fire-control radar in on the target, and that allowed him to spot the King Air on his infrared scanner, which was wired in to a videotape recorder the same way his gun systems were.
You think you've lost me, don't you ...
Now for the fun part. It was a really dark one tonight. No stars, no moon, solid overcast at ten or twelve thousand feet. The Eagle was painted in a blue-gray motif that was supposed to blend in with the sky anyway, and at night it was even better than flat-matte black. He was invisible. The crew in the Beech must be looking all over creation for him, he knew. Looking everywhere but directly forward.
They were flying at fifty feet, and on his screen Captain Winters saw that their propwash was throwing up spray from the waves-five- or six-footers, he thought - just over a mile away. He came straight in at one hundred feet and five hundred knots. Exactly a mile from the target, he put on his lights again.
It was so predictable. The Beech pilot saw the incoming, sun-bright lights, seemingly dead-on, and instinctively did what any pilot would do. He banked hard right and dove - exactly fifty feet - cartwheeling spectacularly into the sea. Probably didn't even have time to realize what he'd done wrong, Bronco thought, then he laughed out loud as he yanked back on the stick and rolled to give it a last look. Now that was a class kill , Captain Winters told himself as he turned for home. The Agency people would really love that one. And best of all, he was now an ace. You didn't have to shoot them down for it to count. You just had to get the kill.
13. The Bloody Weekend
IT REALLY WASN'T fair to make him wait, was it? Moira thought on her drive home Wednesday afternoon. What if he couldn't come? What if he needed notice in advance? What if he had something important scheduled in for the weekend? What if he couldn't make it?
She had to call him.
Mrs. Wolfe reached into the purse at her side and felt for the scrap of hotel stationery - it was still there in the zipper pocket - and the numbers written on it seemed to burn into her skin. She had to call him.
Traffic was confused today. Somebody had blown a tire on the 14th Street Bridge, and her hands sweated on the plastic steering wheel. What if he couldn't make it?
What about the kids? They were old enough to look after themselves, that was the easy part - but how to explain to them that their mother was going off for a weekend to - what was the phrase they used? To "get laid." Their mother . How would they react? It hadn't occurred to her that her horrible secret was nothing of the kind, not to her children, not to her co-workers, not to her boss, and she would have been dumbfounded to know that all of them were rooting for her... to get laid . Moira Wolfe had missed the sexual revolution by only a year or two. She'd taken her fearful-hopeful-passionate-frightened virginity to the marriage bed, and always thought that her husband had done the same. He must have, she'd told herself then and later, because they'd both botched things so badly the first time. But within three days they'd had the basics figured out - youthful vigor and love could handle almost anything - and over the next twenty-two years the two newlyweds had truly become one.
The void left in her life by the loss of her husband was like an open sore that would not heal. His picture was at her bedside, taken only a year before his death, working on his sailboat. No longer a young man when it had been taken, love handles at his waist, much of his hair gone, but the smile. What was it Juan said? You look with love, and see love returned. Such a fine way of putting it , Moira thought.
My God, What would Rich think? She'd asked herself that question more than once. Every time she looked at the photograph before sleep. Every time she looked at her children on the way in or out of the house, hoping that they didn't suspect, knowing in a way conscious thought did not touch that they must know. But what choice did she have? Was she supposed to wear widow's weeds - that was a custom best left in the distant past. She'd mourned for the appropriate time, hadn't she? She'd wept alone in her bed when a phrase crossed her mind, on the anniversaries of all the special dates that acquire meaning in the twenty-two years that two lives merge into one, and, often enough, just from looking at that picture of Rich on the boat that they'd saved years for...
What do people expect of me? she asked herself in sudden anguish. I still have a life. I still have needs .
What would Rich say?
He hadn't had time to say anything at all. He'd died on his way to work, two months after a routine physical that had told him that he should lose a few pounds, that his blood pressure was a touch high, but nothing to worry about really, that his cholesterol was pretty good for somebody in his forties, and that he should come back for the same thing next year. Then, at 7:39 in the morning, his car had just run off the road into a guardrail and stopped. A policeman only a block away had come and been puzzled to see the driver still in the car, and wondered whether or not someone might be driving drunk this early in the morning, then realized that there was no pulse. An ambulance had been summoned, its crew finding the officer pounding on Rich's chest, making the assumption of a heart attack that they'd made themselves, doing everything they'd been trained to do. But there had never been a chance. Aneurysm in the brain. A weakening in the wall of a blood vessel, the doctor had explained after the postmortem. Nothing that could have been done. Why did it happen...? Maybe hereditary, probably not. No, blood pressure had nothing to do with it. Almost impossible to diagnose under the best of circumstances. Did he complain of headaches? Not even that much warning? The doctor had walked away quietly, wishing he could have said more, not so much angry as saddened by the fact that medicine didn't have all the answers, and that there never was much you could say. ( Just one of those things , was what doctors said among themselves, but you couldn't say that to the family, could you?) There hadn't been much pain, the doctor had said - not knowing if it were a lie or not - but that hardly mattered now, so he'd said confidently that, no, she could take comfort in the fact that there would not have been much pain. Then the funeral. Emil Jacobs there, already anticipating the death of his wife; she'd come from the hospital herself to attend the event with the husband she'd soon leave. All the tears that were shed...
It wasn't fair. Not fair that he'd been forced to leave without saying goodbye. A kiss that tasted of coffee on the way to the door, something about stopping at the Safeway on the way home, and she'd turned away, hadn't even seen him enter the car that last time. She'd punished herself for months merely because of that.
What would Rich say?
But Rich was dead, and two years was long enough.
The kids already had dinner going when she got home. Moira walked upstairs to change her clothes, and found herself looking at the phone that sat on the night table. Right next to the picture of Rich. She sat down on the bed, looking at it, trying to face it. It took a minute or so. Moira took the paper from her purse, and with a deep breath began punching the number into the phone. There were the normal chirps associated with an international call.
"D az y D az," a voice answered.
"Could I speak to Juan D az, please?" Moira asked the female voice.
"Who is calling, please?" the voice asked, switching over to English.
"This is Moira Wolfe."
"Ah, Se ora Wolfe! I am Consuela. Please hold for a momento ." There followed a minute of static on the line. "Se ora Wolfe, he is somewhere in the factory. I cannot locate him. Can I tell him to call you?"
"Yes. I'm at home."
" S , I will tell him - Se ora?"
"Yes?"
"Please excuse me, but there is something I must say. Since the death of his Maria - Se or Juan, he is like my son. Since he has met you, Se ora, he is happy again. I was afraid he would never - please, you must not say I tell you this, but, thank you for what you have done. It is a good thing you have done for Se or Juan. We in the office pray for both of you, that you will find happiness."
It was exactly what she needed to hear. "Consuela, Juan has said so many wonderful things about you. Please call me Moira."
"I have already said too much. I will find Se or Juan, wherever he is."
"Thank you, Consuela. Goodbye."
Consuela, whose real name was Maria - from which F lix (Juan) had gotten the name for his dead wife - was twenty-five and a graduate of a local secretarial school who wanted to make better money than that, and who, as a consequence, had smuggled drugs into America, through Miami and Atlanta, on half a dozen occasions before a close call had decided her on a career change. Now she handled odd jobs for her former employers while she operated her own small business outside Caracas. For this task, merely waiting for the phone to ring, she was being paid five thousand dollars per week. Of course, that was only one half of the job. She proceeded to perform the other half, dialing another number. There was an unusual series of chirps as, she suspected, the call was skipped over from the number she'd dialed to another she didn't know about.
"Yes?"
"Se or D az? This is Consuela."
"Yes?"
"Moira called a moment ago. She wishes for you to call her at home."
"Thank you." And the connection broke.
Cortez looked at his desk clock. He'd let her wait... twenty-three minutes. His place was yet another luxury condominium in Medell n, two buildings down from that of his boss. Was this the call? he wondered. He remembered when patience had come hard to him, but it was a long time since he'd been a fledgling intelligence officer, and he went back to his papers.
Twenty minutes later he checked the time again and lit a cigarette, watching the hands move around the dial. He smiled, wondering what it was like for her to have to wait, two thousand miles away. What was she thinking? Halfway through the cigarette, it was time to find out. He lifted the phone and dialed in the number.
Dave got to the phone first. "Hello?" He frowned. "We have a bad connection. Could you repeat that? Oh, okay, hold on." Dave looked over to see his mother's eyes on him. "For you, Mom."
"I'll take it upstairs," she said at once, and moved toward the stairs as slowly as she could manage.
Dave put his hand over the receiver. "Guess who?" There were knowing looks around the dining room.
"Yes," Dave heard her say on the other phone. He discreetly hung up. Good luck, Mom .
"Moira, this is Juan."
"Are you free this weekend?" she asked.
"This weekend? Are you sure?"
"I'm free from lunch Friday to Monday morning."
"So... let me think..." Two thousand miles away, Cortez stared out the window at the building across the street. Might it be a trap? Might the FBI Intelligence Division... might the whole thing be a ...? Of course not. "Moira, I must talk to someone here. Please hold for another minute. Can you?"
"Yes!"
The enthusiasm in her voice was unmistakable as he punched the hold button. He let her wait two minutes by his clock before going back on the line.
"I will be in Washington Friday afternoon."
"You'll be getting in about the time - about the right time."
"Where can we meet? At the airport. Can you meet me at the airport?"
"Yes."
"I don't know what flight I'll be on. I'll meet you at... at the Hertz counter at three o'clock. You will be there, yes?"
"I will be there."
"As will I, Moira. Goodbye, my love."
Moira Wolfe looked again at the photograph. The smile was still there, but she decided it was not an accusing smile.
Cortez got up from his desk and walked out of the room. The guard in the hall stood when he came out of the door.
"I am going to see el jefe ," he said simply. The guard lifted his cellular phone to make the call.
The technical problems were very difficult. The most basic one was power. While the base stations cranked out about five hundred watts, the mobile stations were allowed less than seven, and the battery-powered hand-held sets that everyone likes to use were three hundred milliwatts, and even with a huge parabolic dish receiving antenna, the signals gathered were like whispers. But the Rhyolite-J was a highly sophisticated instrument, the result of uncounted billions of research-and-development dollars. Supercooled electronics solved part of the problem. Various computers worked on the rest. The incoming signals were broken down into digital code - ones and zeroes - by a relatively simple computer and downlinked to Fort Huachuca, where another computer of vastly greater power examined the bits of raw information and tried to make sense of them. Random static was eliminated by a mathematically simple but still massively repetitive procedure - an algorithm - that compared neighboring bits to one another and through a process of averaging numerical values filtered out over 90 percent of the noise. That enabled the computer to spit out a recognizable conversation from what it had downloaded from the satellite. But that was only the beginning.
The reason the Cartel used cellular phones for its day-to-day communications was security. There were roughly six hundred separate frequencies, all in the UHF band from 825 to 845 and 870 to 890 megahertz. A small computer at the base station would complete a call by selecting an available frequency at random, and in the case of a call from a mobile phone, changing that frequency to a better one when performance wavered. Finally, the same frequency could be used simultaneously for different calls on neighboring "cells" (hence the name of the system) of the same overall network. Because of this operating feature, there was not a police force in the world that could monitor phone calls made on cellular-phone equipment. Even without scrambling, the calls could be made in the clear, without even the need for code.
Or that's what everyone thought.
The United States government had been in the business of intercepting foreign radio communications since the days of Yardley's famous Black Chamber. Technically known as comint or sigint - for communications or signals intelligence - there was no better form of information possible than your enemy's own words to his own people. It was a field in which America had excelled for generations. Whole constellations of satellites were deployed to eavesdrop on foreign nations, catching snippets of radio calls, side-lobe signals from microwave relay towers. Often encoded in one way or another, the signals were most often processed at the headquarters of the National Security Agency, on the grounds of Fort Meade, Maryland, between Washington and Baltimore, whose acres of basement held most of the supercomputers in the world.
The task here was to keep constant track of the six hundred frequencies used by the cellular phone net in Medell n. What was impossible for any police agency in the world was less than a light workout for NSA, which monitored literally tens of thousands of radio and other electronic channels on a continuous basis. The National Security Agency was far larger than CIA, far more secretive, and much better funded. One of its stations was on the grounds of Fort Huachuca, Arizona. It even had its own supercomputer, a brand-new Cray connected by fiberoptic cable to one of many communications vans, each of which performed functions that those in the loop knew not to ask about.
The next problem was making the computer work. The names and identities of many Cartel figures were fully known to the U.S. government, of course. Their voices had been recorded, and the programmers had started there. Using voiceprints of the known voices, they established an algorithm to recognize those voices, whichever cellular frequency they used. Next, those who called them had their voices electronically identified. Soon the computer was automatically keying and recording over thirty known voices, and the number of known voice-targets was expanding on a daily basis. Source-power considerations made voice identification difficult on occasion, and some calls were inevitably missed, but the chief technician estimated that they were catching over 60 percent, and that as their identification database grew larger, that their performance would grow to 85 percent.
Those voices that did not have names attached were assigned numbers. Voice 23 had just called Voice 17. Twenty-three was a security guard. He had been identified because he had called 17, who was also known to be a security guard for Subject ECHO, as Escobedo was known to the comint team. "He's coming over to see him," was all the recorded signal told them. Exactly who "he" was they didn't know. It was a voice they had either not yet heard or, more likely, not yet identified. The intelligence specialists were patient. This case had gone a lot quicker than normal. For all their sophistication, the targets never dreamed that someone could tap in on them in this way and as a consequence had taken no precautions against it. Within a month the comint team would have enough experience with the targets to develop all sorts of usable tactical intelligence. It was just a matter of time. The technicians wondered when actual operations would begin. After all, setting up the sigint side was always the precursor to putting assets in the field.
"What is it?" Escobedo asked as Cortez entered the room.
"The American FBI Director will be flying to Bogot tomorrow. He leaves Washington sometime after noon. It is to be a covert visit. I would expect him to be using an official aircraft. The Americans have a squadron of such aircraft at Andrews Air Force Base. There will be a flight plan filed, probably covered as something else. Anything from four tomorrow afternoon to eight in the evening could be the flight. I expect it to be a twin-engine executive jet, the G-Three, although another type is possible. He will be meeting with the Attorney General, undoubtedly to discuss something of great importance. I will fly to Washington immediately to find out what I can. There is a flight to Mexico City in three hours. I'll be on it."
"Your source is a good one," Escobedo observed, impressed for once.
Cortez smiled. " S , jefe . Even if you are unable to determine what is being discussed here, I hope to find out over the weekend. I make no promises, but I will do my best."
"A woman," Escobedo observed. "Young and beautiful, I am sure."
"As you say. I must be off."
"Enjoy your weekend, Colonel. I will enjoy mine."
Cortez had been gone only an hour when a telex came in, informing him that last night's courier flight had failed to arrive at its destination in southwestern Georgia. The amusement that invariably accompanies receipt of top-secret information changed at once to anger. El jefe thought to call Cortez on his mobile phone, but remembered that his hireling refused to discuss substantive matters over what he called a "nonsecure" line. Escobedo shook his head. This colonel of the DGI - he was an old woman! El jefe's phone twittered its own signal.
"Bingo," a man said in a van, two thousand miles away, vox IDENT, his computer screen announced: SUBJECT BRAVO
INIT CALL TO SUBJECT ECHO FRQ 848.970MHZ CALL INIT 2349Z INTERCEPT IDENT 345.
"We may have our first big one here, Tony."
The senior technician, who'd been christened Antonio forty-seven years earlier, put on his headphones. The conversation was being taken down on high-speed tape - it was actually a three-quarter-inch videotape because of the nature of the system used to intercept the signal. Four separate machines recorded the signal. They were Sony commercial recorders, only slightly modified by the NSA technical staff.
"Ha! Se or Bravo is pissed!" Tony observed as he caught part of the conversation. "Tell Meade that we finally caught a frozen rope down the left-field line." A "frozen rope" was the current NSA nickname for a very important signal intercept. It was baseball season, and the Baltimore Orioles were coming back.
"How's the signal?"
"Clear as a church bell. Christ, why don't I ever buy TRW stock?" Antonio paused, struggling not to laugh. "God, is he pissed!"
The call ended a minute later. Tony switched his headphone input to one of the tape machines and crab-walked his swivel chair to a teleprinter, where he started typing.