Jack Ryan 6 - Clear and Present Danger (17 page)

“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.

Deployment

T
HE 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.