28.

Accounting

CORTEZ SAT AT the table, doing his sums. The Americans had done marvelously well. Nearly two hundred Cartel men had gone up the mountain. Ninety-six had returned alive, sixteen of those wounded. They’d even brought a live American down with them. He was badly hurt, still bleeding from four wounds, and he hadn’t been well handled by the Colombian gunmen. The man was young and brave, biting off his screams, shaking with the effort to control himself. Such a courageous young man, this Green Beret. Cortez would not insult his bravery with questions. Besides, he was incoherent, and Cortez had other things to do.

There was a medical team here to treat “friendly” casualties. Cortez walked out to it and picked up a disposable syringe, filling it with morphine. He returned and stabbed the needle into a vein on the soldier’s uninjured arm, pushing down on the plunger after it was in. The soldier relaxed at once, his pain extinguished by a wonderful, brief sensation of well-being. Then his breathing just stopped, and his life, too, was extinguished. Most unfortunate. Cortez could really have used men like this one, but they rarely worked for anything other than a flag. He walked over to his phone and called the proper number.

“Jefe, we eliminated one of the enemy forces last night.... Yes, jefe, there were ten of them as I suspected, and we got them all. We go after another team tonight.... There is one problem, jefe. The enemy fought well, and we took many casualties. I need more men for tonight’s mission. Sí, thank you, jefe. That will do nicely. Send the men to Riosucio, and have the leaders report to me this afternoon. I will brief them here. Oh? Yes, that will be excellent. We’ll be waiting for you.”

With luck, Cortez thought, the next American team would fight equally as well. With luck he could eliminate two-thirds of the Cartel’s stable of gunmen in a single week. Along with their bosses, also tonight. He was on the downslope now, Cortez thought. He’d gambled dangerously and hard, but the tricky ones were behind him.

 

It was an early funeral. Greer had been a widower, and estranged from his wife long before that. The reason for the estrangement was next to the rectangular hole in Arlington, the simple white headstone of First Lieutenant Robert White Greer, USMC, his only son, who’d graduated from the Naval Academy and gone to Vietnam to die. Neither Moore nor Ritter had ever met the young man, and James had never kept a photo of him around the office. The former DDI had been a sentimental man but never a maudlin one. Yet he had long ago requested burial next to the grave of his son, and because of his rank and station an exception had been made and the place kept available for an event that for all men was as inevitable as it was untimely. He’d indeed been a sentimental man, but only in ways that mattered. Ritter thought that there were many explanations before his eyes. The way James had adopted several bright young people and brought them into the Agency, the interest he’d taken in their careers, the training and consideration he’d given them.

It was a small, quiet ceremony. James’ few close friends were there, along with a much larger number of people from the government. Among the latter were the President—and, much to Bob Ritter’s rage, Vice Admiral James A. Cutter, Jr. The President himself had spoken at the chapel service, noting the death of a man who had served his country continuously for more than fifty years, having enlisted in the U.S. Navy at seventeen, then entered the Academy, then reached two-star rank, achieving a third star for his flag after assuming his position at CIA. “A standard of professionalism, integrity, and devotion to his country that few have equaled and none have excelled” was how the President summarized the career Vice Admiral James Greer.

And that bastard Cutter sat right there in the front row as he said it, too, Ritter told himself. He found it especially sickening as he watched the honor guard from the 3rd Infantry Regiment fold the flag that had been draped over the casket. There was no one to hand it to. Ritter had expected it to go to—

But where was Ryan? He moved his head, trying to look around. He hadn’t noticed before because Jack hadn’t come from Langley with the rest of the CIA delegation. The flag went to Judge Moore by default. Hands were shaken, words exchanged. Yes, it really was a mercy that he’d gone so rapidly at the end. Yes, men like this didn’t appear every day. Yes, this was the end of the Greer line, and that was too bad, wasn’t it? No, I never met his son, but I heard.... Ritter and Moore were in the Agency Cadillac ten minutes later, heading back up the George Washington Parkway.

“Where the hell was Ryan?” the DCI asked.

“I don’t know. I figured he’d drive himself in.”

Moore was not so much angered as upset by the impropriety. He still had the flag in his lap, holding it as gently as a newborn baby without knowing why—until he realized that if there really was a God, as the Baptist preachers of his youth had assured him, and if James had really had a soul, he held its best legacy in his hands. It felt warm to the touch, and though he knew that it was merely his imagination or at most the residual heat absorbed from the morning sun, the energy radiating from the flag that James had served from his teens seemed to accuse him of treachery. They had just watched a funeral this morning, but two thousand miles away there were other people whom the Agency had sent to do a job and who would not receive even the empty reward of a grave amidst others of their kind.

“Bob, what the hell have we done?” Moore asked. “How did we ever get into this?”

“I don’t know, Arthur. I just don’t know.”

“James really was lucky,” the Director of Central Intelligence murmured. “At least he went out—”

“With a clear conscience?” Ritter looked out the window, unable to bring himself to face his boss. “Look, Arthur—” He stopped, not knowing what to say next. Ritter had been with the Agency since the fifties, had worked as a case officer, a supervisor, station chief, then head of section at Langley. He had lost case officers, had lost agents, but he’d never betrayed them. There was a first time for everything, he told himself. It had just come home to him in a very immediate way, however, that for every man there was also a first time for death, and that to meet that final accounting improperly was the ultimate cowardice, the ultimate failure of life. But what else could they do?

It was a short drive to Langley, and the car stopped before that question could be answered. They rode the elevator up. Moore walked to his office. Ritter walked to his. The secretaries hadn’t returned yet. They were in a van. Ritter paced around his office until they arrived, then walked over to see Mrs. Cummings.

“Did Ryan call in or anything?”

“No, and I didn’t see him at all. Do you know where he is?” Nancy asked.

“Sorry, I don’t.” Ritter walked back and on impulse called Ryan’s home, where all he got was an answering machine. He checked his card file for Cathy’s work number and got past the secretary to her.

“This is Bob Ritter. I need to know where Jack is.”

“I don’t know,” Dr. Caroline Ryan replied guardedly. “He told me yesterday that he had to go out of town. He didn’t say where.”

A chill went across Ritter’s face. “Cathy, I have to know. This is very important—I can’t tell you how important. Please trust me. I have to know where he is.”

“I don’t know. You mean you don’t, either?” There was alarm in her voice.

Ryan knows, Ritter realized.

“Look, Cathy, I’ll track him down. Don’t worry or anything, okay?” The effort to calm her down was wasted, but Ritter hung up as soon as he could. The DDO walked to Judge Moore’s office. The flag was centered on the DCI’s desk, still folded into its triangular section, called a cocked-hat. Judge Arthur Moore, Director of Central Intelligence, was sitting quietly, staring at it.

“Jack’s gone. His wife says she doesn’t know where. He knows, Arthur. He knows and he’s off doing something.”

“How could he have found out?”

“How the hell should I know?” Ritter thought for a moment, then waved at his boss. “Come on.”

They walked into Ryan’s office. Ritter opened the panel for Jack’s wall safe and dialed in the proper combination, and nothing happened other than the fact that the warning light went on over the dial.

“Damn,” Ritter said. “I thought that was it.”

“James’s combination?”

“Yeah. You know how he was, never did like the damned things, and he probably ...” Ritter looked around. He got it on the third try, pulling out the writing panel from the desk, and there it was.

“I thought I did dial the right one.” He turned and tried again. This time the light was accompanied by the goddamned beeper. Ritter turned back and checked the number again. There was some more writing on the sheet. Ritter pulled the panel farther out.

“Oh, my God.”

Moore nodded and walked to the door. “Nancy, tell security that it’s us trying to work the safe. Looks like Jack changed the combination without telling us like he was supposed to.” The DCI closed the door and turned back.

“He knows, Arthur.”

“Maybe. How do we check it out?”

A minute later they were in Ritter’s office. He’d shredded all of his documents, but not his memory. You didn’t forget the name of someone with the Medal of Honor. Then it was just a matter of flipping open his AUTOVON phone directory and calling the 1st Special Operations Wing at Eglin AFB.

“I need to talk to Colonel Paul Johns,” Ritter told the sergeant who’d picked up the phone.

“Colonel Johns is off TDY somewhere, sir. I don’t know where.”

“Who does?”

“The wing operations officer might, sir. This is a nonsecure line, sir,” the sergeant reminded him.

“Give me his number.” The sergeant did so, and Ritter’s next call went out on, and to, a secure line.

“I need to find Colonel Johns,” Ritter said after identifying himself.

“Sir, I have orders not to give that information out to anybody. That means nobody, sir.”

“Major, if he’s down in Panama again, I need to know it. His life may depend on it. Something is happening that he needs to know about.”

“Sir, I have orders—”

“Stuff your orders, sonny. If you don’t tell me, and that flight crew dies, it will be your fault! Now you make the call, Major, yes or no?”

The officer had never seen combat, and life-death decisions were theoretical matters to him—or had been until now.

“Sir, they’re back where they were before. Same place, same crew. That’s as far as I go, sir.”

“Thank you, Major. You did the right thing. You really did. Now I suggest that you make written note of this call and its content.” Ritter hung up. The phone had been on speaker.

“Has to be Ryan,” the DCI agreed. “Now what do we do?”

“You tell me, Arthur.”

“How many more people are we going to kill, Bob?” Moore asked. His greatest fear now was of mirrors, looking into them and seeing something less than the image he wanted to be there.

“You do understand the consequences?”

“Fuck the consequences,” snorted the former chief judge of the Texas Court of Appeals.

Ritter nodded and punched a button on his phone. When he spoke, it was in his accustomed, decisive voice of command. “I need everything CAPER has developed in the last two days.” Another button. “I want chief of Station Panama to call me in thirty minutes. Tell him to clear decks for the day—he’s going to be busy.” Ritter replaced the phone receiver in its cradle. They’d have to wait for a few minutes, but it wasn’t the sort of occasion to wait in silence.

“Thank God,” Ritter said after a moment.

Moore smiled for the first time this day. “Me, too, Robert. Nice to be a man again, isn’t it?”

 

The security police brought him in at gunpoint, the man in the tan suit. He said his name was Luna, and the briefcase he carried had already been searched for weapons. Clark recognized him.

“What the hell are you doing here, Tony?”

“Who’s this?” Ryan asked.

“Station chief for Panama,” Clark answered. “Tony, I hope you have a very good reason.”

“I have a telex for Dr. Ryan from Judge Moore.”

“What?”

Clark took Luna’s arm and guided him into the office. He didn’t have much time. He and Larson were to take off within minutes.

“This better not be some fucking joke,” Clark announced.

“Hey, I’m delivering the mail, okay?” Luna said. “Now stop playing the macho game. I’m the spic here, remember?” He handed Jack the first sheet.

TOP SECRET—EYES ONLY DDI

IMPOSSIBLE TO REESTABLISH UPLINK TO SHOWBOAT TEAMS. TAKE WHATEVER ACTION YOU DEEM APPROPRIATE TO RETRIEVE ASSETS IN COUNTRY. TELL CLARK TO BE CAREFUL. THE ENCLOSED MIGHT BE OF HELP. C DOESN’T KNOW. GOOD LUCK. M/R.

 

“Nobody ever said they were stupid,” Jack breathed as he handed the sheet to Clark. The heading was meant as a separate message in and of itself, one that had nothing to do with distribution or security. “But does this mean what I think it does?”

“One less REMF to worry about. Make that two,” Clark observed. He started flipping through the faxes. “Holy shit!” He set the pile down on the desk and paced a bit, staring out of the windows at the aircraft sitting in the hangar. “Okay,” he said to himself. Clark had never been one to dally over making plans. He spoke to Ryan for several minutes. Then, to Larson: “Let’s move ass, kid. We got a job to do.”

“Spare radios?” Colonel Johns asked him as he left.

“Two spares, new batteries in all of ’em, and extra batteries,” Clark replied.

“Nice to work with somebody’s been around the block,” PJ said. “Check-six, Mr. Clark.”

“Always, Colonel Johns,” Clark said as he headed to the door. “See you in a few hours.”

The hangar doors opened. A small cart pulled the Beechcraft out into the sun, and the hangar doors closed. Ryan listened to the engines start up, and the sound diminished as the aircraft taxied away.

“What about us?” he asked Colonel Johns.

Captain Frances Montaigne came in. She looked as French as her ancestry, short, with raven-black hair. Not especially pretty, but Ryan’s first impression was that she was a handful in bed—which stopped his thought processes cold as he wondered why that had occurred to him. It seemed odder still that she was a command pilot in a special-ops outfit.

“Weather’s going dogshit on us, Colonel,” she announced at once. “Adele is heading west again, doing twenty-five knots.”

“Can’t help the weather. Getting down and doing the snatch oughtn’t to be too bad.”

“Getting back might be kinda exciting, PJ,” Montaigne observed darkly.

“One thing at a time, Francie. And we do have that alternate place to land.”

“Colonel, even you aren’t that crazy.”

PJ turned to Ryan and shook his head. “Junior officers aren’t what they used to be.”

 

They stayed over water for most of the way down. Larson was as steady and confident as ever at the controls, but his eyes kept turning northeast. There was no mistaking it, the high, thin clouds that were the perennial harbinger of an approaching hurricane. Behind them was Adele, and she had already made another chapter in history. Born off the Cape Verdes, she’d streaked across the Atlantic at an average speed of seventeen knots, then stopped as soon as she’d entered the eastern Caribbean, lost power, gained it back, jinked north, west, even east once. There hadn’t been one this crazy since Joan, years before. Small as hurricanes went, and nowhere near the brutal power of a Camille, Adele was still a dangerous storm with seventy-five-knot winds. The only people who flew near tropical cyclones were dedicated hurricane-hunter aircraft flown by people for whom merely mortal danger was boring. It was not a place for a twin-engine Beechcraft, even with Chuck Yeager at the controls. Larson was already making plans. In case the mission didn’t go right, or the storm changed course yet again, he started picking fields to put down on, to refuel and head southeast around the gray maelstrom that was marching toward them. The air was smooth and still, deceptively so. The pilot wondered how many hours until it changed to something very different. And that was only one of the dangers he’d face.

Clark sat quietly in the right seat, staring forward, his face composed and inhumanly serene while his mind turned over faster than the Beech’s twin props. In front of the windshield he kept seeing faces, some living, some dead. He remembered past combat actions, past dangers, past fears, past escapes in which those faces had played their parts. Most of all he remembered the lessons, some learned in classrooms and lectures, but the important ones had come from his own experience. John Terence Clark was not a man who forgot things. Gradually he refreshed his memory on all the important lessons for this day, the ones about being alone in unfriendly territory. Then came the faces who’d play their part today. He looked at them, a few feet before his eyes, saw the expressions he expected them to wear, measuring the faces to understand the people who wore them. Finally came the plan of the day. He contemplated what he wanted to do and balanced that against the probable objectives of the opposition. He considered alternative plans and things that might go awry. When all that was done, he made himself stop. You could quickly get to the point that imagination became an enemy. Each segment of the operation was locked into its own little box which he’d open one at a time. He’d trust to his experience and instinct. But part of him wondered if—when—those qualities would fail him.

Sooner or later, Clark admitted to himself. But not today.

He always told himself that.

 

PJ’s mission briefing took two hours. He, Captain Willis, and Captain Montaigne worked out every detail—where they’d refuel, where the aircraft would orbit if something went wrong. Which routes to take if things went badly. Each crew member got full information. It was more than necessary; it was a moral obligation to the crew. They were risking their lives tonight. They had to know why. As always, Sergeant Zimmer had a few questions, and one important suggestion that was immediately incorporated in the plan. Then it was time to preflight the aircraft. Every system aboard each aircraft was fully checked out in a procedure that would last hours. Part of that was training for the new crewmen.

“What do you know about guns?” Zimmer asked Ryan.

“Never fired one of these babies.” Ryan’s hand stroked the handles of the minigun. A scaled-down version of the 20mm Vulcan cannon, it had a gang of six .30-caliber barrels that rotated clockwise under the power of an electrical motor, drawing shells from an enormous hopper to the left of the mount. It had two speed settings, 4,000 and 6,000 rounds per minute—66 or 100 rounds per second. The bullets were almost half tracers. The reason for that was psychological. The fire from the weapon looked like a laser beam from a science-fiction movie, the very embodiment of death. It also made a fine way to aim the weapon, since Zimmer assured him that the muzzle blast would be the most blinding thing short of staring into a noon sun. He checked Ryan out on the whole system: where the switches were, how to stand, how to aim.

“What do you know about combat, sir?”

“Depends on what you mean,” Ryan replied.

“Combat is when people with guns are trying to kill you,” Zimmer explained patiently. “It’s dangerous.”

“I know. I’ve been there a few times. Let’s not dwell on that, okay? I’m already scared.” Ryan looked over his gun, out the door of the aircraft, wondering why he’d been such a damned fool to volunteer for this. But what choice did he have? Could he just send these men off to danger? If he did, how did that make him different from Cutter? Jack looked around the interior of the aircraft. It seemed so large and strong and safe, sitting here on the concrete floor of the hangar. But it was an aircraft designed for life in the troubled air of an unfriendly sky. It was a helicopter: Ryan especially hated helicopters.

“The funny thing is, probably no sweat on the mission,” Zimmer said after a moment. “Sir, we do our job right, it’s just a flight in and a flight back out.”

“That’s what I’m scared of, Sarge,” Ryan said, laughing mostly at himself.

 

They landed at Santagueda. Larson knew the man who ran the local flying service and talked him out of his Volkswagen Microvan. The two CIA officers drove north, and an hour later passed through the village of Anserma. They dallied here for half an hour, driving around until they found what they wanted to find: a few trucks heading in and out of a private dirt road and one expensive-looking car. CAPER had called it right, Clark saw, and it was the place he thought it was from the flight in. Having confirmed that, they moved out, heading north again for another hour and taking a side road into the mountains just outside of Vegas del Rio. Clark had his nose buried in a map, and Larson found a hilltop switchback at which to stop. That’s where the radio came out.

“KIFE, this is VARIABLE, over.” Nothing, despite five minutes of trying. Larson drove farther west, horsing the Microvan around cow paths as he struggled to find another high spot for Clark to try again. It was three in the afternoon, and their fifth attempt until they got a reply.

“KNIFE here. Over.”

“Chavez, this is Clark. Where the hell are you?” Clark asked, in Spanish, of course.

“Let’s talk awhile first.”

“You’re good, kid. We really could have used you in 3rd SOG.”

“Why should I trust you? Somebody cut us off, man. Somebody decided to leave us here.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“Glad to hear it,” came the skeptical, bitter reply.

“Chavez, you’re talking over a radio net that might be compromised. If you got a map, we’re at the following set of coordinates,” Clark told him. “There’s two of us in a blue Volkswagen van. Check us out, take all the time you want.”

“I already have!” the radio told him.

Clark’s head spun around to see a man with an AK-47 twenty feet away.

“Let’s be real cool, people,” Sergeant Vega said. Three more men emerged from the treeline. One of them had a bloody bandage on his thigh. Chavez, too, had an AK slung over his shoulder, but he had held on to his silenced MP-5. He walked straight up to the van.

“Not bad, kid,” Clark told him. “How’d you know?”

“UHF radio. You had to transmit from a high spot, right? The map says there’s six of them. I heard you one other time, too, and I spotted you heading this way half an hour ago. Now what the fuck is going on?”

“First thing, let’s get that casualty treated.” Clark stepped out and handed Chavez his pistol, butt first. “I got a first-aid kit in the back.”

The wounded man was Sergeant Juardo, a rifleman from the 10th Mountain at Fort Drum. Clark opened the back of the van and helped load him aboard, then uncovered the wound.

“You know what you’re doing?” Vega asked.

“I used to be a SEAL,” Clark replied, holding up his arm so that they could see the tattoo. “Third Special Operations Group. Spent a lot of time in ’Nam, doing stuff that never made the TV news.”

“What were you?”

“Came out a chief bosun’s mate, E-7 to you.” Clark examined the wound. It was bad to look at, but not life-threatening as long as the man didn’t bleed out, which he’d managed not to do yet. So far it seemed that the infantrymen had done most of the right things. Clark ripped open an envelope and redusted the wound with sulfa. “You have any blood-expanders?”

“Here.” Sergeant León passed over an IV bag. “None of us knows how to start one.”

“It’s not hard. Watch how I do it.” Clark grabbed Juardo’s upper arm hard and told him to make a fist. Then he stabbed the IV needle into the big vein inside the elbow. “See? Okay, I cheat. My wife’s a nurse, and sometimes I get to practice at her hospital,” Clark admitted. “How’s it feel, kid?” he asked the patient.

“Nice to be sitting down,” Juardo admitted.

“I don’t want to give you a pain shot. We might need you awake. Think you can hack it?”

“You say so, man. Hey, Ding, you got any candy?”

Chavez tossed over his Tylenol bottle. “Last ones, Pablo. Make ’em last, man.”

“Thanks, Ding.”

“We have some sandwiches in the front,” Larson said.

“Food!” Vega darted that way at once. A minute later the four soldiers were wolfing it down, along with a six-pack of Cokes that Larson had picked up on the way.

“Where’d you pick up the weapons?”

“Bad guys. We were just about out of ammo for our -16s, and I figured we might as well try to fit in, like.”

“You’re thinking good, kid,” Clark told him.

“Okay, what’s the plan?” Chavez asked.

“It’s your call,” Clark replied. “One of two things. We can drive you back to the airport and fly you out, take about three hours to get there, another three hours in the airplane, and it’s over, you’re back on U.S. territory.”

“What else?”

“Chavez, how’d you like to get the fucker who did this to you?” Clark knew the answer before he’d asked the question.

 

Admiral Cutter was leaning back in his chair when the phone buzzed. He knew who it was from the line that was blinking. “Yes, Mr. President?”

“Come in here.”

“On the way, sir.”

Summer is as slow a season for the White House as for most government agencies. The President’s calendar was fuller than usual with the ceremonial stuff that the politician in him loved and the executive in him abhorred. Shaking hands with “Miss Whole Milk,” as he referred to the steady stream of visitors—though, he occasionally wondered to himself if he’d ever meet a Miss Condom, what with the way sexual mores were changing of late. The burden was larger than most imagine. For each such visitor there was a sheet of paper, a few paragraphs of information so that the person would leave thinking that, gee, the President really knows what I’m all about. He’s really interested! Pressing flesh and talking to ordinary people was an important and usually pleasurable part of the job, but not now, a week short of the convention, still behind in the goddamned polls, as every news network announced at least twice a week.

“What about Colombia?” the President asked as soon as the door was closed.

“Sir, you told me to shut it down. It’s being shut down.”

“Any problems with the Agency?”

“No, Mr. President.”

“How exactly—”

“Sir, you told me you didn’t want to know that.”

“You’re telling me it’s something I shouldn’t know?”

“I’m telling you, sir, that I am carrying out your instructions. The orders were given, and the orders are being complied with. I don’t think you will object to the consequences.”

“Really?”

Cutter relaxed a bit. “Sir, in a very real sense, the operation was a success. Drug shipments are down and will drop further in the next few months. I would suggest, sir, that you let the press talk about that for the moment. You can always point to it later. We’ve hurt them. With Operation TARPON we have something we can point to all we wish. With CAPER we have a way of continuing to gather intelligence information. We will have some dramatic arrests in a few months as well.”

“And how do you know that?”

“I’ve made those arrangements myself, sir.”

“And just how did you do that?” the President asked, and stopped. “Something else I don’t want to know?”

Cutter nodded.

“I assume that everything you’ve done is within the law,” the President said for the benefit of the tape recorder he had running.

“You may make that assumption, sir.” It was an artful reply in that it could mean anything, or nothing, depending on one’s point of view. Cutter also knew about the tape recorder.

“And you’re sure that your instructions are being carried out?”

“Of course, Mr. President.”

“Make sure again.”

 

It had taken far longer than the bearded consultant expected. Inspector O’Day held the printout in his hands, and it might as well have been Kurdish. The sheet was half covered with paragraphs entirely composed of ones and zeroes.

“Machine language,” the consultant explained. “Whoever programmed this baby was a real pro. I recovered about forty percent of it. It’s a transposition algorithm, just like I thought.”

“You told me that last night.”

“It ain’t Russian. It takes in a message and enciphers it. No big deal, anybody can do that. What’s really clever is that the system is based on an independent input signal that’s unique to the individual transmission—over and above the encipherment algorithm that’s already built into the system.”

“You want to explain that?”

“It means a very good computer lash-up—somewhere—governs how this baby operates. It can’t be Russian. They don’t have the hardware yet, unless they stole a really sexy one from us. Also, the input that adds the variable into the system probably comes from the NAVSTAR satellites. I’m guessing here, but I think it uses a very precise time mark to set the encryption key, one that’s unique to each up-and-down transmission. Clever shit. That means NSA. The NAVSTAR satellites use atomic clocks to measure time with great precision, and the really sexy part of the system is also encrypted. Anyway, what we have here is a clever way of scrambling a signal in a way that you can’t break or duplicate even if you know how it was done. Whoever set this baby up has access to everything we got. I used to consult with NSA, and never even heard of this puppy.”

“Okay, and when the disk is destroyed ... ?”

“The link is gone, man. I mean, gone. If this is what it seems to be, you have an uplink facility that controls the algorithm, and ground stations that copy it down. You wipe this algorithm off, like somebody did, and the guys you used to be talking to can’t communicate with you anymore, and nobody else can communicate with them either. Systems don’t get any more secure than that.”

“You can tell all that? What else?”

“Half of what I just told you is informed speculation. I can’t rebuild the algorithm. I can just tell you how it probably worked. The bit on the NAVSTAR is supposition, but good supposition. The transposition processing is partly recovered, and it has NSA written all over it. Whoever did it really knows how to write computer code. It’s definitely ours. It’s probably the most sophisticated machine code we have. Whoever got to use it must have some serious juice. And whoever it is, he scrubbed it. It can never be used again. Whatever operation it was used for must be over.”

“Yeah,” O’Day said, chilled by what he had just learned. “Good work.”

“Now all you have to do is write a note to my prof and tell him why I missed an exam this morning.”

“I’ll have somebody do that,” O’Day promised him on the way out the door. He headed for Dan Murray’s office, and was surprised to see that he was out. The next stop was with Bill Shaw.

Half an hour later it was clear that a crime had probably been committed. The next question was what to do about it.

 

The helicopter took off light. Mission requirements were fairly complex—more so than in the previous insertions—and speed was important this time. As soon as the Pave Low got to cruising altitude, it tanked from the MC-130E. There was no banter this time.

Ryan sat in back, strapped into his place while the MH-53J bounced and buffeted in the wash of the tanker. He wore a green flight suit and a similarly green helmet. There was also a flak jacket. Zimmer had explained to him that it would stop a pistol round, probably, secondary fragments almost certainly, but that he shouldn’t depend on it to stop a rifle bullet. One more thing to worry about. Once clear of the tanker for the first time—they’d have to tank again before making landfall—Jack turned around to look out the door. The clouds were nearly overhead now, the outlying reaches from Adele.

 

Juardo’s wound complicated matters and changed plans somewhat. They loaded him into Clark’s seat on the Beech, leaving him with a radio and spare batteries. Then Clark and the rest drove back toward Anserma. Larson was still checking the weather, which was changing on an hour-to-hour basis. He was due to take off in ninety minutes for his part of the mission.

“How you fixed for rounds?” Clark asked in the Microvan.

“All we need for the AKs,” Chavez replied. “About sixty each for the subs. I never knew how useful a silenced gun was.”

“They are nice. Grenades?”

“All of us?” Vega asked. “Five frags and two CS.”

“What are we going into?” Ding asked next.

“It’s a farmhouse outside Anserma.”

“What’s the security there like?”

“I don’t know squat yet.”

“Hey, wait a minute, what are you getting us into?” Vega demanded.

“Relax, Sarge. If it’s too heavy to handle, we back off and leave. All I know is we’re going in for a close look. Chavez and I can handle that. By the way, there’s spare batteries in the bag down there. Need ’em?”

“Fuckin’ A!” Chavez pulled out his night scope and replaced the batteries at once. “Who’s in the house?”

“Two people we especially want. Number One is Félix Cortez,” Clark said, giving some background. “He’s the guy running the operation against the SHOWBOAT teams—that’s the code name for this operation, in case nobody bothered to tell you. He also had a hand in the murder of the ambassador. I want his ass and I want it alive. Number Two is one Señor Escobedo. He’s one of the big shots in the Cartel. A lot of people want his ass.”

“Yeah,” León said. “We ain’t got no big shots yet.”

“So far we’ve gotten five or six of the bastards. That was my end of the operation.” Clark turned to look at Chavez. He had to say that to establish his credibility.

“But how, when—”

“We’re not supposed to talk all that much, children,” Clark told them. “You don’t go around advertising about killing folks no matter who told you it was okay.”

“Are you really that good?”

Clark just shook his head. “Sometimes. Sometimes not. If you guys weren’t damned good, you wouldn’t be here. And there are times when it’s just pure dumb luck.”

“We just walked into one,” León said. “I don’t even know what went wrong, but Captain Rojas just—”

“I know. I saw some pricks load his body into the back of a truck—”

León went rigid. “And what—”

“Did I do?” Clark asked. “There were three of them. I put them in the truck, too. Then I torched the truck. I’m not real proud of that, but I think I took some of the heat off you BANNER guys when I did. Wasn’t much, but it was all I could do at the time.”

“So who pulled the chopper back on us?”

“Same guy who chopped off the radio. I know who it is. After this is all over, I want his ass, too. You don’t send people out in the field and then pull this crap on ’em.”

“So what are you going to do?” Vega wanted to know.

“I’ll slap him firmly on both wrists. Now listen, people, you worry about tonight. One job at a time. You’re soldiers, not a bunch of teenage broads. Less talkin’ and more thinkin’.”

Chavez, Vega, and León took the cue. They started checking their gear. There was enough room in the van to strip and clean weapons. Clark pulled into Anserma at sundown. He found a quiet spot about a mile from the house and left the van. Clark took Vega’s night goggles, and then he and Chavez went out to take a walk.

There had been farming here recently. Clark wondered what it had been, but that and the fact that it was close to the village meant that the trees had been thinned out for cooking fires. They were able to move fast. Half an hour later they could see the house, separated from the woods by two hundred meters of open ground.

“Not good,” Clark observed from his place on the ground.

“I count six, all with AKs.”

“Company,” the CIA officer said, turning to see where the noise was coming from. It was a Mercedes, and therefore could have belonged to anyone in the Cartel. Two more cars came with it, one ahead and one behind. A total of six guards got out to check the area.

“Escobedo and LaTorre,” Clark said from behind the binoculars. “Two big shots to see Colonel Cortez. I wonder why ...”

“Too many, man,” Chavez said.

“You notice there wasn’t any password or anything?”

“So?”

“It’s possible, if we play it right.”

“But how ...”

“Think creatively,” Clark told him. “Back to the car.” That took another twenty minutes. When they got there, Clark adjusted one of his radios.

“CAESAR, this is SNAKE, over.”

 

The second refueling was accomplished within sight of the beach. They’d have to tank at least once more before heading back to Panama. The other alternative didn’t seem especially likely at the moment. The good news was that Francie Montaigne was driving her Combat Talon with her usual aplomb, its four big propellers turning in a steady rhythm. Its radio operators were already talking to the surviving ground teams, taking that strain off the helicopter crew. For the first time in the mission, the air team was allowed to function as it had been trained. The MC-130E would coordinate the various pieces, coaching the Pave Low into the proper areas and away from possible threats in addition to keeping PJ’s chopper filled up with gas.

In back, the ride had settled down. Ryan was up and walking around. Fear became boring after a while, and he even managed to use the Port-A-Pot without missing. The flight crew had accepted him at least as an approved interloper, and for some reason that meant a lot to him.

“Ryan, you hear me?” Johns asked.

Jack reached down to the mike button. “Yeah, Colonel.”

“Your guy on the ground wants us to do something different.”

“Like what?”

PJ told him. “It means another tanking, but otherwise we can hack it. Your call.”

“You sure?”

“Special ops is what they pay us for.”

“Okay, then. We want that bastard.”

“Roger. Sergeant Zimmer, we’ll be feet-dry in one minute. Systems check.”

The flight engineer looked down his panel. “Roger that, PJ. Everything looks pretty solid to me, sir. Everything’s green.”

“Okay. First stop is Team OMEN. ETA is two-zero minutes. Ryan, you’d better grab hold of something. We’re going to start nap-of-the-earth. I have to talk to our backup.”

Jack didn’t know what that meant. He found out as soon as they crossed the first range of coastal mountains. The Pave Low leapt up like a mad elevator, then the bottom dropped out as it cleared the summit. The helicopter was on computer-assisted-flight mode, taking a six-degree slope—it felt much worse than that—up and down the terrain features, and skimmed over the ground with bare feet of clearance. The aircraft was made to be safe, not comfortable. Ryan didn’t feel much of either.

“First LZ in three minutes,” Colonel Johns announced half an eternity later. “Let’s go hot, Buck.”

“Roger.” Zimmer reached down on his console and flipped a toggle switch. “Switches hot. Guns are hot.”

“Gunners, stand to. That means you, Ryan,” PJ added.

“Thanks.” Jack gasped without toggling his mike. He took position on the left side of the aircraft and hit the activation switch for the minigun, which started turning at once.

“ETA one minute,” the copilot said. “I got a good strobe at eleven o’clock. Okay. OMEN, this is CAESAR, do you copy, over?”

Jack heard only one side of the conversation, but mentally thanked the flight crew for letting the guys in back know something.

“Roger, OMEN, say again your situation.... Roger that, we’re coming in. Good strobe light. Thirty seconds. Get ready in back,” Captain Willis told Ryan and the rest. “Safe guns, safe guns.”

Jack held his thumbs clear of the switch and elevated the minigun at the sky. The helicopter took a big nose-up attitude as it came down. It stopped and hovered a foot off the ground, not quite touching.

“Buck, tell the captain to come forward immediately.”

“Roger, PJ.” Behind him, Ryan heard Zimmer run aft, then, through the soles of his feet, felt the troops race aboard. He kept his eyes outboard, looking over the rotating barrels of his gun until the helicopter took off, and even then he trained the mini down at the ground.

“Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Colonel Johns observed as he brought the aircraft back to a southerly heading. “Hell, I don’t even know why they pay us for this. Where’s that ground-pounder?”

“Hooking him up now, sir,” Zimmer replied. “Got ’em all aboard. All clean, no casualties.”

“Captain ... ?”

“Yes, Colonel?”

“We got a job for your team if you think you’re up to it.”

“Let’s hear it, sir.”

 

The MC-130E Combat Talon was orbiting over Colombian territory, which made the crew a little nervous, since they didn’t have permission. The main job now was to relay communications, and even with the sophisticated gear aboard the four-engine support aircraft, they couldn’t handle it from over the ocean.

 

What they really needed was a good radar. The Pave Low/Combat Talon team was supposed to operate under supervision of an AWACS which, however, they hadn’t brought along. Instead a lieutenant and a few NCOs were writing on maps and talking over secure radio circuits at the same time.

“CAESAR, say your fuel state,” Captain Montaigne called.

“Looking good, CLAW. We’re staying down in the valleys. Estimate we’ll tank again in eight-zero minutes.”

“Roger eight-zero minutes. Be advised negative hostile radio traffic at this time.”

“Acknowledged.” That was one possible problem. What if the Cartel had somebody in the Colombian Air Force? Sophisticated as both American aircraft were, a P-51 left over from the Second World War could easily kill both of them.

Clark was waiting for them. With two vehicles. Vega had stolen a farm truck big enough for their needs. It turned out that he was quite adept at rewiring ignition systems, a skill about whose acquisition he was vague. The helicopter touched down and the men ran out toward the strobe light that Chavez still had. Clark got their officer and briefed him quickly. The helicopter took off and headed north, helped by the twenty-knot wind blowing down the valley. Then it looped west, heading for the MC-130 and another midair refueling.

 

The Microvan and the truck drove back toward the farmhouse. Clark’s mind was still racing. A really smart guy would have run the operation from inside the village, which would have been far tougher to approach. Cortez wanted to be far from anyone’s view, but failed to consider his physical security requirements in military terms. Cortez was thinking like a spy, for whom security was secrecy, and not a line-animal, for whom security was a lot of guns and a clear field of fire. Everyone, he figured, had his limitations. Clark rode the back of the farm truck with the OMEN team group around him and his hand-drawn diagram of the objective. It was just like the old days, Clark thought, running missions on zero-minute notice. He hoped that these young light-fighters were as good as the animals in 3rd SOG. Even Clark, however, had limitations. The animals of 3rd SOG had been young then, too.

“Ten minutes, then,” he concluded.

“All right,” the captain agreed. “We haven’t had much contact. We have all the weapons and ammo we need.”

 

“So?” Escobedo asked.

“So we killed ten norteamericanos last night and we will kill ten more tonight.”

“But the losses!” LaTorre objected.

“We are fighting highly skilled professional soldiers. Our men wiped them out, but the enemy fought bravely and well. Only one survived,” Cortez said. “I have his body in the next room. He died here soon after they brought him in.”

“How do you know that they are not close by?” Escobedo demanded. The idea of physical danger was something he’d allowed himself to forget.

“I know the location of every enemy group. They are waiting to be extracted by their helicopter support. They do not know that their helicopter has been withdrawn.”

“How did you manage that?” LaTorre wondered aloud.

“Please permit me my methods. You hired me for my expertise. You should not be surprised when I demonstrate it.”

“And now?”

“Our assault group—nearly two hundred men this time—should now be approaching the second American group. This one’s code name is Team FEATURE,” Félix added. “Our next question, of course, is which elements of the Cartel leadership are taking advantage of this—or perhaps I should say, which members are working with the Americans, using them for their own ends. As is often the case in such operations, both sides appear to be using the other.”

“Oh?” It was Escobedo this time.

“Sí, jefe. And it should not surprise either of you that I have been able to identify those who have betrayed their comrades.” He looked at both men, a thin smile on his lips.

 

There were only two road guards. Clark was back in the VW Microvan while OMEN raced through the woods to get to the objective. Vega and León had removed a side window, and now Vega, also in back, held it in place with his hand.

“Everybody ready?” Clark asked.

“Go!” Chavez replied.

“Here we go.” Clark took the last turn in the road and slowed, taking the car right up to the two guards. They took their weapons off sling and assumed a more aggressive stance as he slowed the vehicle. “Excuse me, I am lost.”

That was Vega’s cue to let go of the glass. As it dropped, Chavez and León came up to their knees and aimed their MP-5s at the guards. Both took bursts in the head without warning, and both fell without a sound. Strangely, the submachine guns sounded awfully loud within the confines of the vehicle.

“Nicely done,” Clark said. Before proceeding, he lifted his radio.

“This is SNAKE. OMEN, report in.”

“SNAKE, this is OMEN Six. In position. Say again, we are in position.”

“Roger, stand by. CAESAR, this is SNAKE.”

“SNAKE, this is CAESAR, ready to copy.”

“Position check.”

“We are holding at five miles out.”

“Roger that, CAESAR, continue to hold at five miles. Be advised we are moving in.”

Clark killed the lights and drove the van a hundred yards down the driveway. He selected a spot where the road twisted. Here he stopped the van and maneuvered it to block the road.

“Give me one of your frags,” he said, stepping out and leaving the keys in the ignition. First he loosened the cotter pin on the grenade. Next he wired the body of the grenade to the door handle and ran another wire from the pin to the accelerator pedal. It took under a minute. The next person who opened that door was in for a nasty surprise. “Okay, come on.”

“Tricky, Mr. Clark,” Chavez observed.

“Kid, I was a Ninja before it became fashionable. Now shut up and do your jobs.” No smile now, no time for banter. It was like the return of his youth, but while that feeling was a welcome one, it would have been more so if his youth had not been spent doing things best unremembered. The pure exhilaration of leading men into battle, however, was something that his memory had not lied about. It was terrible. It was dangerous. It was also something at which he excelled, and knew it. For the moment he was not Mr. Clark. He was, again, The Snake, the man whose footsteps no one had ever heard. It took five minutes to get to their jump-off point.

The NVA were smarter opponents than these. All the security troops were near the house. He took Vega’s night scope and counted them, sweeping the grounds to check for strays, but there were none.

“OMEN Six, this is SNAKE. Say your position.”

“We are in the treeline north of the objective.”

“Toss your strobe to mark your position.”

“Okay, done.”

Clark turned his head and the goggles showed the infrared strobe blinking on the open ground, thirty feet from the treeline. Chavez, listening on the same radio circuit, did the same.

“Okay, stand by. CAESAR, this is SNAKE. We are in position on the east side of the objective where the driveway comes through the trees. OMEN is on the north side. We have two good strobes to mark friendly positions. Acknowledge.”

“Roger, copy, you are in the treeline at the road, east side of the objective. Say again, east of the objective, with OMEN to the north. Copy strobes to mark friendly positions. We are standing by at five miles,” PJ replied in his best computer voice.

“Roger, come on in. It’s show time. I repeat, come on in.”

“Roger, copy, CAESAR is turning in with hot guns.”

“OMEN, this is SNAKE. Commence firing, commence firing.”

 

Cortez had them both at a disadvantage, though neither knew the whole reason for it. LaTorre, after all, had talked to Félix the previous day and been told that Escobedo was the traitor in their midst. Because of that, he had his pistol out first.

“What is this?” Escobedo demanded.

“The ambush was very clever, jefe, but I saw through your ploy,” Cortez said.

“What are you talking about?”

Before Cortez could give his preplanned answer, several rifles started firing north of the house. Félix wasn’t a total fool. His first reaction was to extinguish the lights in the house. LaTorre still had his gun aimed at Escobedo, and Cortez dashed to the window, a pistol in his hand, to see what was happening. Just as he got there, he realized that he was being foolish, and dropped to his knees, peering around the frame. The house was of block construction and should stop a bullet, he told himself, though the windows certainly would not.

The fire was light and sporadic, just a few people, just an annoyance, and he had people to deal with that. Cortez’s own men, assisted by the bodyguards for Escobedo and LaTorre, returned fire at once. Félix watched his men move like soldiers, spreading out into two fire teams, dropping at once into the usual infantry drill of fire and movement. Whatever annoyance this was, they’d soon take care of things. The Cartel bodyguards, as usual, were brave but oafish. Two of them were already down.

Yes, he saw, it was already working. The gunfire from the trees was diminishing. Some bandits, perhaps, who’d been late realizing that they’d bitten off more than—

The sound was like nothing he’d ever heard.

 

“Target in sight,” Jack heard over the intercom phones. Ryan was looking the wrong way, of course. Though he was standing at a gun, Colonel Johns had not mistaken him for a gunner, not a real one. Sergeant Zimmer was on the right-side gun, the one that corresponded to the pilot’s seat. They’d come skimming in so low that Ryan felt—knew that he could reach out and touch some treetops. Then the aircraft pivoted. The sound and vibration assaulted Jack through all the protective gear, and the flash that accompanied the sound cast a shadow of the aircraft before Jack’s eyes as he looked for other targets.

 

It looked like a huge, curving tube of yellow neon, Cortez’s mind told him. Wherever it touched the ground, dust rose in a great cloud. It swept up and down the field between the house and the trees. Then it stopped after what could have been only a few seconds. Cortez couldn’t see anything in the dust, and it took a second to realize that he should have been able to see something, the flashes of his men’s rifles at the very least. Then there were flashes, but those were from farther away, in the treeline, and there were more now.

 

“CAESAR: Check fire, check fire!”

“Roger,” the radio replied. Overhead, the horrible noise stopped. Clark hadn’t heard it in a very long time. Another sound from his youth, it was as fearful now as it had been then.

“Heads up, OMEN, we’re moving now, SNAKE is moving. Acknowledge.”

“OMEN, this is Six, cease fire, cease fire!” The shooting from the treeline stopped. “SNAKE: Go!”

“Come on!” It was stupid to lead them with only a silenced pistol in his hand, Clark knew, but he was in command, and the good commanders led from the front. They covered the two hundred yards to the house in thirty seconds.

“Door!” Clark said to Vega, who used his AK to blast off the hinges, then kicked it down. Clark dove through low, rolling when he hit, looking and seeing one man in the room. He had an AK, and fired it, but shot high. Clark dropped him with a silenced round in the face, then another as he fell. There was a doorway but no door to the next room. He gestured to Chavez, who tossed a CS grenade into it. They waited for it to go off, then both rushed the room, again diving in low.

There were three men. One, holding a pistol, took a step toward them. Clark and Chavez hit him in the chest and head. The other armed man, kneeling by the window, tried to turn about, but couldn’t do it on his knees, and fell onto his side. Chavez was there in an instant, smashing his buttstock onto his forehead. Clark rushed the third man, slamming him against the block wall. León and Vega came in next, leapfrogging to the final door. That room was empty.

“Building is clear!” Vega shouted. “Hey, I—”

“Come on!” Clark dragged his man out the front. Chavez did the same, covered by León. Vega was slow in moving. They didn’t know why until they were all outside.

Clark was already on his radio. “CAESAR, this is SNAKE. We got ’em. Let’s get the fuck outa here.”

“León,” Vega said. “Look here.”

“Tony,” the sergeant said. The only other survivor from Ninja Hill had been a BANNER man. Leon walked over to Escobedo, who was still conscious. “Motherfucker! You’re fuckin’ dead!” León screamed, bringing his gun down.

“Stop!” Clark yelled at him. That almost didn’t work, but Clark knocked him down, which did. “You’re a soldier, goddammit, act like one! You and Vega—carry your friend on the chopper.”

Team OMEN worked its way across the field. Several men, remarkably enough, weren’t quite dead yet. That aberration was corrected with single rifle shots. The captain got his men together and counted them off with his finger.

“Good work,” Clark told him. “You got everybody?”

“Yes!”

“Okay, here’s comes our ride.”

The Pave Low swept in from the west this time, and again didn’t quite touch the ground. Just like the old days, Clark. A helicopter that touched the ground could set off a mine. Not likely here, but PJ hadn’t gotten old enough to be a colonel by overlooking any chances at all. He grabbed Escobedo—he’d gotten a good enough look by now to identify him—by the arm and propelled him to the ramp. One of the chopper crew met them there, did his count, and before Clark was sitting down with his charge, the MH-53J was moving up and north. He assigned a soldier to look after Señor Escobedo and went forward.

Sweet Jesus, Ryan thought. He’d counted eight bodies, and they’d just been the ones close to the helicopter. Jack switched off his gun motor and relaxed—and really did this time. Relaxation was a relative thing, he’d just learned. Being shot at really was worse than flying in the back of a goddamned helicopter. Amazing, he thought. A hand grabbed his shoulder.

“We got Cortez and Escobedo alive!” Clark shouted at him.

“Escobedo? What the hell was he—”

“You complaining?”

“What the hell can we do with him?” Jack asked.

“Well, I sure as shit couldn’t just leave him there, could I?”

“But what—”

“If you want, I can give the bastard a flying lesson.” Clark gestured toward the stern ramp. If he learns to fly before he hits the ground, fine....

“No, goddammit, that’s fucking murder!”

Clark grinned at him. “That gun next to you is not a negotiating tool, doc.”

“Okay, people,” PJ’s voice came over the intercom before that conversation went any further. “One more stop and we call this one a day.”