Jack Ryan 8 - Debt of Honor (4 page)

“We're gonna get you, motherfucker,” Ding breathed, back to business and wearing his mission face again. It wasn't just the dead American soldiers. People like Corp destroyed everything they touched, and this part of the world needed a chance at a future. That chance might have come two years earlier, if the President had listened to his field commanders instead of the U.N. Well, at least he seemed to be learning, which wasn't bad for a President.

The sun was lower, almost gone now, and the temperature was abating. More trucks. Not too many more, they both hoped. Chavez shifted his eyes to the four men a hundred yards away. They were talking back and forth with a little animation, mellow from the caq. Ordinarily it would be dangerous to be around drug-sotted men carrying military weapons, but tonight danger was inverting itself, as it sometimes did. The second truck was clearly visible now, and it came up close. Both CIA officers got out of their vehicle to stretch, then to greet the new visitors, cautiously, of course.

     The General's personal guard force of elite “policemen” was no better than the ones who had arrived before, though some of this group did wear unbuttoned shirts. The first one to come up to them smelled of whiskey, probably pilfered from the General's private stock. That was an affront to Islam, but then so was trafficking in drugs. One of the things
Clark
admired about the Saudis was their direct and peremptory method for processing that category of criminal.

“Hi.”
Clark
smiled at the man. “I'm John Clark. This is Mr. Chavez. We've been waiting for the General, like you told us.”

“What you carry?” the “policeman” asked, surprising
Clark
with his knowledge of English. John held up his bag of rock samples, while Ding showed his pair of electronic instruments. Alter a cursory inspection of the vehicle, they were spared even a serious frisking—a pleasant surprise.

Corp arrived next, with his most reliable security force, if you could call it that. They rode in a Russian ZIL-type jeep. The “General” was actually in a Mercedes that had once belonged to a government bureaucrat, before the government of this country had disintegrated. It had seen better times, but was still the best automobile in the country, probably. Corp wore his Sunday best, a khaki shirt outside the whipcord trousers, with something supposed to be rank insignia on the epaulets, and boots that had been polished sometime in the last week. The sun was just under the horizon now. Darkness would fall quickly, and the thin atmosphere of the high desert made for lots of visible stars even now.

The General was a gracious man, at least by his own lights. He walked over briskly, extending his hand. As he took it,
Clark
wondered what had become of the owner of the Mercedes. Most likely murdered along with the other members of the government. They'd died partly of incompetence, but mostly of barbarism, probably at the hands of the man whose firm and friendly hand he was now shaking.

“Have you completed your survey?” Corp asked, surprising
Clark
again with his grammar.

“Yes, sir, we have. May I show you?”

“Certainly.” Corp followed him to the back of the Rover. Chavez pulled out a survey map and some satellite photos obtained from commercial sources.

“This may be the biggest deposit since the one in
Colorado
, and the purity is surprising. Right here.”
Clark
extended a steel pointer and tapped it on the map.

“Thirty kilometers from where we are sitting…”

Clark
smiled. “You know, as long as I've been in this business, it still surprises me how this happens. A couple of billion years ago, a huge bubble of the stuff must have just perked up from the center of the earth.” His lecture was lyrical. He'd had lots of practice, and it helped that
Clark
read books on geology for recreation, borrowing the nicer phrases for his “pitch.”

“Anyway,” Ding, said, taking his cue a few minutes later, “the overburden is no problem at all, and we have the location fixed perfectly.”

“How can you do that?” Corp asked. His country's maps were products of another and far more casual age.

“With this, sir.” Ding handed it over.

“What is it?” the General asked.

“A GPS locator,” Chavez explained. “It's how we find our way around, sir. You just push that button there, the rubber one.”

Corp did just that, then held the large, thin green-plastic box up and watched the readout. First it gave him the exact time, then started to make its fix, showing that it had lock with one, then three, and finally four orbiting Global Positioning System satellites. “Such an amazing device,” he said, though that wasn't the half of it. By pushing the button he had also sent out a radio signal. It was so easy to forget that they were scarcely a hundred miles from the
Indian Ocean
, and that beyond the visible horizon might be a ship with a flat deck. A largely empty deck at the moment, because the helicopters that lived there had lifted off an hour earlier and were now sitting at a secure site thirty-five miles to the south.

Corp took one more look at the GPS locator before handing it back. “What is the rattle?” he asked as Ding took it.

“
Battery
pack is loose, sir,” Chavez explained with a smile. It was their only handgun, and not a large one. The General ignored the irrelevancy and turned back to
Clark
.

“How much?” he asked simply.

“Well, determining the exact size of the deposit will require—”

“Money, Mr. Clark.”

“Anaconda is prepared to offer you fifty million dollars, sir. We'll pay that in four payments of twelve and a half million dollars, plus ten percent of the gross profit from the mining operations. The advance fee and the continuing income will be paid in U.S. dollars.”

“More than that. I know what molybdenum is worth.” He'd checked a copy of The Financial Times on the way in.

“But it will take two years, closer to three, probably, to commence operations. Then we have to determine the best way to get the ore to the coast. Probably truck, maybe a rail line if the deposit is as big as I think it is. Our up-front costs to develop the operation will be on the order of three hundred million.” Even with the labor costs here,
Clark
didn't have to add.

“I need more money to keep my people happy. You must understand that,” Corp said reasonably. Had he been an honorable man,
Clark
thought, this could have been an interesting negotiation. Corp wanted the additional up-front money to buy arms in order to reconquer the country that he had once almost owned. The U.N. had displaced him, but not quite thoroughly enough. Relegated to dangerous obscurity in the bush, he had survived the last year by running caq into the cities, such as they were, and he'd made enough from the trade that some thought him to be a danger to the state again, such as it was. With new arms, of course, and control over the country, he would then renegotiate the continuing royalty for the molybdenum. It was a clever ploy,
Clark
thought, but obvious, having dreamed it up himself to draw the bastard out of his hole.

“Well, yes, we are concerned with the political stability of the region,” John allowed, with an insider's smile to show that he knew the score. Americans were known for doing business all over the world, after all, or so Corp and others believed.

Chavez was fiddling with the GPS device, watching the LCD display. At the upper-right corner, a block went from clear to black. Ding coughed from the dust in the air and scratched his nose.

“Okay,”
Clark
said. “You're a serious man, and we understand that. The fifty million can be paid up-front. Swiss account?”

“That is somewhat better,” Corp allowed, taking his time. He walked around to the back of the Rover and pointed into the open cargo area. “These are your rock samples?”

“Yes, sir,”
Clark
replied with a nod. He handed over a three-pound piece of stone with very high-grade Molly-be-damned ore, though it was from
Colorado
, not
Africa
. “Want to show it to your people?”

“What is this?” Corp pointed at two objects in the Rover.

“Our lights, sir.”
Clark
smiled as he took one out. Ding did the same.

“You have a gun in there,” Corp saw with amusement, pointing to a bolt-action rifle. Two of his bodyguards drew closer.

“This is
Africa
, sir. I was worried about—”

“Lions?” Corp thought that one pretty good. He turned and spoke to his “policemen,” who started laughing amiably at the stupidity of the Americans. “We kill the lions,” Corp told them after the laughter settled down. “Nothing lives out here.”

Clark
, the General thought, took it like a man, standing there, holding his light. It seemed a big light. “What is that for?”

“Well, I don't like the dark very much, and when we camp out, I like to take pictures at night.”

“Yeah,” Ding confirmed. “These things are really great.” He turned and scanned the positions of the General's security detail. There were two groups, one of four, the other of six, plus the two nearby and Corp himself.

“Want me to take pictures of your people for you?”
Clark
asked without reaching for his camera.

On cue, Chavez flipped his light on and played it toward the larger of the two distant groups.
Clark
handled the three men close to the Rover. The “lights” worked like a charm. It took only about three seconds before both CIA officers could turn them off and go to work securing the men's hands.

“Did you think we forgot?” the CIA field officer asked Corp as the roar of rotary-wing aircraft became audible fifteen minutes later. By this time all twelve of Corp's security people were facedown in the dust, their hands bound behind them with the sort of plastic ties policemen use when they run out of cuffs. All the General could do was moan and writhe on the ground in pain. Ding cracked a handful of chemical lights and tossed them around in a circle downwind of the Rover. The first UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter circled carefully, illuminating the ground with lights.

“B
IRD
-D
OG
O
NE
, this is
B
AG
M
AN
.
”

“Good evening, B
AG
M
AN
, B
IRD
-D
OG
O
NE
has the situation under control. Come on down!”
Clark
chuckled into the radio.

The first chopper down was well outside the lighted area. The Rangers appeared out of the shadows like ghosts, spaced out five meters apart, weapons low and ready.

“
Clark
?” a loud, very tense voice called.

“Yo!” John called back with a wave. “We got 'im.”

A captain of Rangers came in. A young Latino face, smeared with camouflage paint and dressed in desert cammies. He'd been a lieutenant the last time he'd been on the African mainland, and remembered the memorial service for those he'd lost from his platoon. Bringing the Rangers back had been
Clark
's idea, and it had been easy to arrange. Four more men came in behind Captain Diego Checa. The rest of the squad dispersed to check out the “policemen.”

“What about these two?” one asked, pointing to Corp's two personal bodyguards.

“Leave 'em,” Ding replied.

“You got it, sir,” a spec-4 replied, taking out steel cuffs and securing both pairs of wrists in addition to the plastic ties. Captain Checa cuffed Corp himself. He and a sergeant lifted the man off the ground while Clark and Chavez retrieved their personal gear from the Rover and followed the soldiers to the Blackhawk. One of the Rangers handed Chavez a canteen.

“Oso sends his regards,” the staff sergeant said. Ding's head came around.

“What's he doing now?”

“First Sergeants' school. He's pissed that he missed this one. I'm Gomez, Foxtrot, Second of the One-Seventy-Fifth. I was here back then, too.”

“You made that look pretty easy,” Checa was telling
Clark
, a few feet away.

     “Six weeks,” the senior field officer replied in a studiously casual voice. The rules required such a demeanor. “Four weeks to bum around in the boonies, two weeks to set the meet up, six hours waiting for it to happen, and about ten seconds to take him down.”

“Just the way it's supposed to be,” Checa observed. He handed over a canteen filled with Gatorade. The Captain's eyes locked on the senior man. Whoever he was, Checa thought at first, he was far too old to play games in the boonies with the gomers. Then he gave
Clark
's eyes a closer look.

“How the fuck you do this, man?” Gomez demanded of Chavez at the door to the chopper. The other Rangers leaned in close to get the reply.

Ding glanced over at his gear and laughed. “ Magic!”

Gomez was annoyed that his question hadn't been answered. “Leaving all these guys out here?”

“Yeah, they're just gomers.” Chavez turned to look one last time. Sooner or later one would get his hands free—probably—retrieve a knife, and cut his fellow “policemen” free; then they could worry about the two with steel bracelets. “It's the boss we were after.”

Gomez turned to scan the horizon. “Any lions or hyenas out here?”   Ding shook his head. Too bad, the sergeant thought.

The Rangers were shaking their heads as they strapped into their seats on the helicopter. As soon as they were airborne,
Clark
donned a headset and waited for the crew chief to set up the radio patch.

“C
APSTONE
, this is B
IRD
-D
OG
,” he began.

The eight-hour time difference made it early afternoon in
Washington
. The UHF radio from the helicopter went to USS Tripoli, and then it was uplinked to a satellite. The Signals Office routed the call right into Ryan's desk phone.

“Yes, B
IRD
-D
OG
, this is C
APSTONE
.”

Ryan couldn't quite recognize
Clark
's voice, but the words were readable through the static:  “In the bag, no friendlies hurt. Repeat, the duck is in the bag and there are zero friendly casualties.”

“I understand, B
IRD
-D
OG
. Make your delivery as planned.”

It was an outrage, really, Jack told himself as he set the phone back. Such operations were better left in the field, but the President had insisted this time. He rose from his desk and headed toward the Oval Office.