Jack Ryan 6 - Clear and Present Danger (48 page)

Murray
nodded thoughtfully.  That added something to their knowledge.  So they'd wanted to make sure that the victim hadn't left any records behind before they'd taken him and his family out, but their guy wasn't good enough, and they killed him for it.  It was also part of the murder of Director Jacobs, additional fallout from Operation T
ARPON
.  Those bastards are really flexing their muscles, aren't they? “Anything else?”

“The local cops are in a pretty nasty mood about this.  First time somebody's put a hit on a cop that way.  It was a 'public' hit, and his wife got taken out by a stray round.  Local cops are pretty pissed.  A drug dealer got taken all the way out last night.  It'll come out as a righteous shoot, but I don't think it was a coincidence.  That's it for now.”

“Thanks, Mark.”
Murray
hung up. “The bastards have declared war on us, all right,” he murmured.

“What's that, sir?”

“Nothing.  Have you back-checked on the earlier trips Cortez made—hotels, car rentals?”

“We have twenty people out there on it.  Ought to have some preliminary information in two hours.”

“Keep me posted.”

Stuart was the first morning appointment for the U.S. Attorney, and he looked unusually chipper this morning, the secretary thought.  She couldn't see the hangover.

“Morning, Ed,” Davidoff said without rising.  His desk was a mass of papers. “What can I do for you?”

“No death penalty,” Stuart said as he sat down. “I'll trade a guilty plea for twenty years, and that's the best deal you're going to get.”

“See ya' in court, Ed,” Davidoff replied, looking back down at his papers.

“You want to know what I've got?”

“If it's good, I'm sure you'll let me know at the proper time.”

“May be enough to get my people off completely.  You want 'em to walk on this?”

“Believe that when I see it,” Davidoff said, but he was looking up now.  Stuart was an overly zealous defense lawyer, the United States Attorney thought, but an honest one.  He didn't lie, at least not in chambers.

Stuart habitually carried an old-fashioned briefcase, the wedge-shaped kind made of semi-stiff leather instead of the newer and trimmer attach‚ case that most lawyers toted now.  From it he extracted a tape recorder.  Davidoff watched in silence.  Both men were trial lawyers and both were experts at concealing their feelings, able to say what they had to say, regardless of what they felt.  But since both had this ability, like professional poker players they knew the more subtle signs that others couldn't spot.  Stuart knew that he had his adversary worried when he punched the play button.  The tape lasted several minutes.  The sound quality was miserable, but it was audible, and with a little cleaning up in a sound laboratory—the defendants could afford it—it would be as clear as it needed to be.

Davidoff's ploy was the obvious one: “That has no relevance to the case we're trying.  All of the information in the confession is excluded from the proceedings.  We agreed on that.”

Stuart eased his tone now that he had the upper hand.  It was time for magnanimity. “You agreed.  I didn't say anything.  The government committed a gross violation of my clients' constitutional rights.  A simulated execution constitutes mental torture at the very least.  It's sure as hell illegal.  You have to put these two guys on the stand to make your case, and I'll crucify those Coast Guard sailors when you do.  It might be enough to impeach everything they say.  You never know what a jury's going to think, do you?”

“They might just stand up and cheer, too,” Davidoff answered warily.

“That's the chance, isn't it?  One way to find out.  We try the case.” Stuart replaced the player in his briefcase. “Still want an early trial date?  With this as background information I can attack your chain of evidence—after all, if they were crazy enough to pull this number, what if my clients claim that they were forced to masturbate to give you the semen samples that you told the papers about, or were forced to hold the murder weapons to make prints—I haven't yet discussed any of those details with them, by the way—and I link all that in with what I know about the victim?  I think I have a fighting chance to send them home alive and free.” Stuart leaned forward, resting his arms on Davidoff's desk. “On the other hand, as you say, it's hard to predict how a jury'll react.  So what I'm offering you is, they plead guilty to twenty years' worth of whatever charge you want, with no unseemly recommendation from the judge about how they have to serve all twenty—so they're out in, say, eight years.  You tell the press that there's problems with the evidence, and you're pretty mad about that, but there's nothing you can do.  My clients are out of circulation for a fairly long time.  You get your conviction but nobody else dies.  Anyway, that's my deal.  I'll give you a couple of days to think it over.” Stuart rose to his feet, picked up his briefcase, and left without another word.  Once outside, he looked for the men's room.  He felt an urgent need to wash his hands, but he wasn't sure why.  He was certain that he'd done the right thing.  The criminals—they really were criminals—would be found guilty, but they wouldn't die in the electric chair—and who knows, he thought, maybe they'll straighten out.  That was the sort of lie that lawyers tell themselves.  He wouldn't have to destroy the careers of some Coast Guard types who had probably stepped over the line only once and would never do so again.  That was something he was prepared to do, but didn't relish.  This way, he thought, everybody won something, and for a lawyer that was as successful an exercise as you generally got.  But he still felt a need to wash his hands.

For Edwin Davidoff, it was harder.  It wasn't just a criminal case, was it?  The same electric chair that would deliver those two pirates to hell would deliver him to a suite in the
Dirksen
Senate
Office
Building
.  Since he had read Advise and Consent as a freshman in high school, Davidoff had lusted for a place in the United States Senate.  And he'd worked very hard to earn it: top of his class at
Duke
Law
School
, long hours for which he was grossly underpaid by the Department of Justice, speaking engagements all over the state that had nearly wrecked his family life.  He had sacrificed his own life on the altar of justice . . . and ambition, he admitted to himself.  And now when it was all within his grasp, when he could rightfully take the lives of two criminals who had forfeited their rights to them . . . this could blow it all, couldn't it?  If he wimped out on the prosecution, plea-bargaining down to a trifling twenty years, all his work, all his speeches about Justice would be forgotten.  Just like that.

On the other hand, what if he disregarded what Stuart had just told him and took the case to trial—and risked being remembered as the man who lost the case entirely.  He might blame the Coast Guardsmen for what they had done—but then he would be sacrificing their careers and possibly their freedom on what altar?  Justice?  Ambition?  How about revenge? he asked himself.  Whether he won or lost the Pirates Case, those men would suffer even though what they had done had also given the government its strongest blow yet against the Cartel.

Drugs.  It all came down to that.  Their capacity to corrupt was like nothing he'd ever known.  Drugs corrupted people, clouded their thoughts at the individual level, and ultimately ended their lives.  Drugs generated the kinds of money to corrupt those who didn't partake.  Drugs corrupted institutions at every level and in every way imaginable.  Drugs corrupted whole governments.  So what was the answer?  Davidoff didn't have that answer, though he knew that if he ever ran for that Senate seat he'd prance about in front of the TV cameras and announce that he did—or at least part of it, if only the people of Alabama would trust him to represent them . . .

Christ
, he thought.  So now what do I do?

Those two pirates deserve to die for what they have done.  What about my duty to the victims?
  It wasn't all a lie—in fact none of it was.  Davidoff did believe in Justice, did believe that law was what men had built to protect themselves from the predators, did believe that his mission in life was to be an instrument of that justice.  Why else had he worked so hard for so little?  It wasn't entirely ambition, after all, was it?

No.

One of the victims had been dirty, but what of the other three?  What did the military call that? “Collateral damage.” That was the term when an act against an individual target incidentally destroyed the other things that happened to be close by.  Collateral damage.  It was one thing when the State did it in time of war.  In this case it was simply murder.

No, it wasn't simple murder, was it?  Those bastards took their time.  They enjoyed themselves.  Is eight years of time enough to pay for them?

But what if you lose the case entirely?  Even if you win, can you sacrifice those Coasties to get justice?  Is that “collateral damage,” too?

There had to be a way out.  There usually was, anyway, and he had a couple of days to figure that one out.

They'd slept well, and the thin mountain air didn't affect them as badly as they'd expected.  By sundown the squad was up and eager.  Chavez drank his instant coffee as he went over the map, wondering which of the marked targets they'd stake out tonight.  Throughout the day, squad members had kept a close eye on the road below, knowing more or less what they were looking for.  A truck with containers of acid.  Some cheap local labor would offload the jars and head into the hills, followed by people with backpacks of coca leaves and some other light equipment.  Around sundown a truck stopped.  Light failed before they could see all of what happened, and their low-light goggles had no telescopic features, but the truck moved off rather soon, and it was within three kilometers of H
OTEL
, one of the locations on the target list, four miles away.

Show time.  Each man sprayed a goodly bit of insect repellent onto his hands, then rubbed it on face, neck, and ears.  In addition to keeping the bugs off, it also softened the camouflage paint that went on next like some ghastly form of lipstick.  The members of each pair assisted one another in putting it on.  The darker shades went on forehead, nose, and cheekbones, while the lighter ones went to the normal shadow areas under the eyes and in the hollow of cheeks.  It wasn't war paint, as one might think from watching movie representations of soldiers.  The purpose was invisibility, not intimidation.  With the naturally bright spots dulled, and the normally dark ones brightened, their faces no longer looked like faces at all.

It was time to earn their pay for real.  Approach routes and rally points were preselected and made known to every member of the squad.  Questions were asked and answered, contingencies examined, alternate plans made, and Ramirez had them up and moving while there was still light on the eastern wall of the valley, heading downhill toward their objective.

Execution

T
HE STANDARD ARMY
field order for a combat mission follows an acronym known as SMESSCS:  Situation;
Mission
; Execution; Service and Support; Command and Signal.

Situation
is the background information for the mission, what is going on that the soldiers need to know about.

Mission
is a one-sentence description of the task at hand.

Execution
is the methodology for how the mission is to be accomplished.

Service and Support
covers the support functions that might aid the men in the performance of their job.

Command
defines who gives the orders through every step of the chain, theoretically all the way back up to the Pentagon, and all the way down to the most junior member of the unit who in the final exigency would be commanding himself alone.

Signal
is the general term for communications procedures to be followed.

The soldiers had already been briefed on the overall situation, which had hardly been necessary.  Both that and their current mission had changed somewhat, but they already knew that, too.  Captain Ramirez had briefed them on the execution of their current mission, also giving his men the other information they needed for this evening.  There was no outside support; they were on their own.  Ramirez was in tactical command, with subordinate leaders identified in case of his disablement, and he'd already issued radio codes.  His last act before leading his men down from their perch was to radio his intentions to V
ARIABLE
, whose location he didn't know, but whose approval he receipted.

As always Staff Sergeant Domingo Chavez had the point, now one hundred meters ahead of Julio Vega, again “walking slack” fifty meters ahead of the main body, whose men were spread out at ten-meter intervals for the approach.  Going downhill made it tougher on the legs, but the men hardly noticed.  They were too pumped up.  Every few hundred meters Chavez angled for a clear spot from which they could look down at the objective—the place they were going to hit—and through his binoculars he could see the vague glow of gasoline lanterns.  With the sun behind him he didn't have to worry about a reflection off the glasses.  The spot was right where the map said it was—he wondered how that information had been developed—and they were following exactly the procedure that he'd been briefed about.  Somebody, he thought, had really done his homework on this job.  They expected ten to fifteen people at H
OTEL
.  He hoped they had that right, too.

The going wasn't so bad.  The cover was not as dense as it had been in the lowlands, and there were fewer bugs.  Maybe, he thought, the air was too thin for them, too.  There were birds calling to one another, the usual forest chatter to mask the sounds of his unit's approach—but there was damned little of that.  Chavez had heard one guy slip and fall a hundred meters back, but only a Ninja would have noticed.  He was able to cover half the distance in under an hour, stopping at a preplanned rally point for the rest of the squad to catch up.

“So far, so good, jefe,” he told Ramirez. “I ain't seen nothing, not even a llama,” he added to show that he was at ease. “Little over three thousand more meters to go.”

“Okay.  Stop at the next checkpoint.  Remember there might be folks out taking a stroll.”

“Roger that, Cap'n.” Chavez took off at once.  The rest started moving two minutes later.

Ding moved more slowly now.  The probability of contact increased with every step he took toward H
OTEL
.  The druggies couldn't be all that dumb, he warned himself.  They had to have a little brains, and the people they used would be locals, people who'd grown up in this valley and knew its ways.  And lots of them would have weapons.  He was surprised how different it felt from the last time, but then he'd watched and evaluated his targets over a period of days.  He didn't even have a proper count on them, didn't know how they were armed, didn't know how good they were.

Christ, this is real combat.  We don't know shit.

But that's what Ninja are for!
he told himself, taking small comfort in his bravado.

Time started doing strange things.  Each single step seemed to take forever, but when he got to the final rally point, it hadn't been all that long at all, had it?  He could see the glow of the objective now, a vague green semicircle on the goggle display, but still there was no movement to be seen or heard in the woods.  When he got to the last checkpoint, Chavez picked a tree and stood beside it, keeping his head up, swiveling left and right to gather as much information as possible.  He thought he could hear things now.  It came and went, but occasionally there was an odd, not natural sound from the direction of the objective.  It worried him that he didn't really see anything as yet.  Just that glow, but nothing else.

“Anything?” Captain Ramirez asked in a whisper.

“Listen.”

“Yeah,” the captain said after a moment.

The squad members dropped off their rucksacks and divided according to plan.  Chavez, Vega, and Ingeles would advance directly toward H
OTEL
while the rest circled around to the left.  Ingeles, the communications sergeant, had an M-203 grenade launcher slung under his rifle, Vega had the machine gun, and Chavez still had his silenced MP-5.  Their job was overwatch.  They would get in as close as possible to provide fire support for the actual assault.  If anyone was in the way, it was Chavez's job to drop him quietly.  Ding led his group off first, while Captain Ramirez moved off a minute later.  In the case of both groups, the interval between the men was tightened up to five meters.  Another real danger now was confusion.  If any of the soldiers lost contact with his comrades, or if an enemy sentry somehow got mixed up with their group, the results could be lethal to the mission and the men.

The last five hundred meters took over half an hour.  Ding's overwatch position was clear on the map, but not so clear in the woods at night.  Things always looked different at night, and even with the low-light goggles, things were just . . . different.  In a distant sort of way, Chavez knew that he was having an attack of the jitters.  It wasn't so much that he was afraid, just that he felt much less certain now.  He told himself every two or three minutes that he knew exactly what he was doing, and each time it worked—but only for a few minutes before the uncertainty hit him again.  Logic told him that he was having what the manuals called a normal anxiety reaction.  Chavez didn't like it, but found that he could live with it.  Just like the manuals said.

He saw movement and froze.  His left hand swung around his back, palm perpendicular to warn the two behind him to stop also.  Again he kept his head up, trusting to his training.  The human eye sees only movement at night, the manuals and his experience told him.  Unless the opposition had goggles . . .

And this one didn't.  The man-shape was almost a hundred meters away, moving slowly and casually through the trees between Chavez and the place where Chavez wanted to be.  So simple a thing as that gave the man an early death sentence.  Ding waved for Ingeles and Vega to stay put while he moved right, opposite his target's current path to get behind him.  Perversely, he moved quickly now.  He had to be in place in another fifteen minutes.  Using his goggles to select clear places, he set his feet as lightly as he could, moving almost at a normal walking speed.  Pride surged past the anxiety now that he could see what he had to do.  He made no sound at all, moving alone, crouched down, swiveling his head from his path to his target and back again.  Within a minute he was in a good place.  There was a worn path there.  This was a path for the guard.  The idiot stuck to a path, Chavez recognized.  You didn't do things like that and expect to live.

He was coming back now, moving with slow, almost childish steps, his legs snapping out from the knees—but he moved quietly enough by walking on the worn path, Ding noticed belatedly.  Maybe he wasn't a total fool.  His head was looking uphill.  But his rifle was slung over his shoulder.  Chavez let him approach, taking off his goggles when the man was looking away.  The sudden loss of the display made him lose his target for a few seconds, and the edges of panic appeared in his consciousness, but Ding commanded them to be still.  The man would reappear presently as he walked back to the south.

He did, first as a spectral outline, then as a black mass walking down the worn corridor in the jungle.  Ding crouched at the base of a tree, his weapon aimed at the man's head, and let him come closer.  Better to wait and get a sure kill.  His selector switch was on the single-shot position.  The man was ten meters away.  Chavez wasn't even breathing now.  He aimed for the center of the man's head and squeezed off a single round.

The metallic sound of the H&K's action cycling back and forth seemed incredibly loud, but the target dropped at once, just a muted clack from his own rifle as it hit the ground alongside the body.  Chavez leaped forward, his submachine gun fixed on the target, but the man—it had been a man, after all—didn't move.  With his goggles back on, he could see the single hole right in the center of the nose, and the bullet had angled upward, ripping through the bottom of the brain for an instant, noiseless kill.

Ninja!
his mind exulted.

He stood beside the body and looked uphill, holding his weapon high.  All clear.  A moment later the shapes of Vega and Ingeles appeared on the green image display, heading downhill.  He turned, found a spot from which to observe the objective, and waited for them.

There it was, seventy meters away.  The glow from the gasoline lanterns blazed on his goggles, and he realized that he could take them off once and for all.  There were more voices now.  He could even catch the odd word.  It was the bored, day-to-day talk of people doing a job.  There was a splashing sound, almost like . . . what?  Ding didn't know, and it didn't matter for the present.  Their fire-support position was in view.  There was just one little problem.

It was oriented the wrong way.  The trees that should have provided cover to their right flank instead prevented them from covering the objective.  They'd planned the overwatch position in the wrong place, he decided.  Chavez grimaced and made other plans, knowing that the captain would do the same.  They found a spot almost as good fifteen meters away and oriented in the proper direction.  He checked his watch.  Nearly time.  It was time to make his final, vital inspection of the objective.

He counted twelve men.  The center of the site was . . . what looked like a portable bathtub.  Two men were walking in it, crushing or stirring up or doing something to the curious-looking soup of coca leaves and . . . what was it they told us? he asked himself.  Water and sulfuric acid?  Something like that.  Christ, he thought.  Walking in fucking acid!  The men doing that distasteful task took turns.  He watched one change, and those who got out poured fresh water over their feet and calves.  It must have hurt or burned or something, Ding realized.  But their banter was good-natured enough, thirty meters away.  One was talking about his girlfriend in rather crude terms,—boasting of what she did for him and what he did to her.

There were six men with rifles, all AKs.  Christ, the whole world carries those goddamned things.
 They stood at the perimeter of the site, watching inward, however, rather than outward.  One was smoking.  There was a backpack by the lantern.  One of the walkers said something to one of the gunmen and pulled a beer bottle out of it for himself, and another for the one who'd given him permission.

Idiots!
  Ding told himself.  The radio earpiece made three rasping dashes of static.  Ramirez was in place and asking if Ding was ready.  He keyed his radio two times in reply, then looked left and right.  Vega had his SAW up on the bipod, and the canvas ammo pouch unzipped.  Two hundred rounds were all ready, and a second pouch lay next to the first.

Chavez again nestled himself as close to a thick tree as he could and selected the farthest target.  He figured the range to him at about eighty meters, a touch long for his weapon, too long for a head shot, he decided.  He thumbed the selector to the burst setting, tucked the weapon in tight, and took careful aim through the diopter sight.

Three rounds were ejected from the side of his weapon.  The man's face was surprised when two of them struck his chest.  His breath came out in a rasping scream that caused heads to turn in his direction.  Chavez shifted aim to another rifleman, whose gun was already coming off his shoulder.  This one also took two or three hits, but that didn't stop him from trying to get his weapon around.

As soon as it appeared that fire might be returned, Vega opened up, transfixing that man with tracers from his machine gun, then shifting fire to two more armed men.  One of them got a couple of rounds off, but they went high.  The other, unarmed men reacted more slowly than the guards.  Two started to run but were cut down by Vega's stream of fire.  The others fell to the ground and crawled.  Two more armed men appeared—or their weapons did.  The flaming signatures of automatic weapons appeared in the trees on the far side of the site, aimed up at the fire-support team.  Exactly as planned.

The assault element, led by Captain Ramirez, opened up from their right flank.  The distinctive chatter of M-16 fire tore through the trees as Chavez, Vega, and Ingeles continued to pour fire into the objective and away from the incoming assault element.  One of the people firing from the trees must have been hit.  The muzzle flash from his weapon changed direction, blazing straight up.  But two others turned and fired into the assault element before they went down.  The soldiers were shooting at anything that moved now.  One of the men who'd been walking in the tub tried to pick up a discarded rifle and didn't make it.  One stood and might have been trying to surrender, but his hands never got high enough before the squad's other SAW lanced a line of tracers through his chest.

Chavez and his team ceased fire to allow the assault element to enter the objective safely.  Two of them finished off people who were still moving despite their wounds.  Then everything stopped for a moment.  The lantern still hissed and illuminated the area, but there was no other sound but the echoes of the shooting and the calls of outraged birds.