Jack Ryan 6 - Clear and Present Danger (39 page)

He was surprised to see that he didn't have a shot, and ran down the sidewalk to the street, taking a position across the hood of his father's pickup truck.  From this point he could see two men, each firing a submachine gun from the hip.  He looked just in time to see Sergeant Braden fire off his last round, which missed as badly as the first four had.  The police officer turned to run for the safety of his house, but tripped over his own feet and had trouble getting up.  Both gunmen advanced on Braden, loading new magazines into their weapons.  Erik Sanderson's hands were trembling as he shouldered his rifle.  It had old-fashioned iron sights, and he had to stop and remind himself how to line them up as he'd been taught in Boy Scouts, with the front-sight post centered in the notch of the rear-sight leaf, the top of the post even with the top of the leaf as he maneuvered it on a target.

He was horrified to be too late.  Both men blew his little-league coach to shreds with extended bursts at point-blank range.  Something snapped inside Erik's head at that moment.  He sighted on the head of the nearer gunman and jerked off his round.

Like most young and inexperienced shooters, he immediately looked up to see what had happened.  Nothing.  He'd missed—with a rifle at a range of only thirty yards, he'd missed.  Amazed, he sighted again and squeezed the trigger, but nothing happened.  The hammer was down.  He'd forgotten to cock the rifle.  Swearing something his mother would have slapped him to hear, he reloaded the Marlin .22 and took exquisitely careful aim, squeezing off his next shot.

The murderers hadn't heard his first shot, and with their ears still ringing from their own shots, they didn't hear the second, but one man's head jerked to the side with the wasp's-sting impact of the round.  The man knew what had happened, turned to his left, and fired off a long burst despite the crushing pain that seized his head in an instant.  The other one saw Erik and fired as well.

But the young man was now jacking rounds into the breech of his rifle as fast as he could fire them.  He watched in rage as he kept missing, unconsciously flinching as bullets came his way, trying to kill both men before they could get back into their car.  He had the satisfaction of seeing them duck behind cover, and wasted his last three rounds trying to shoot through the car body to get them.  But a .22 can't accomplish that, and the minivan pulled away.

Erik watched it pull away, wishing he'd loaded more rounds into his rifle, wishing that he could try a shot through the back window before the car turned right and disappeared.

The young man didn't have the courage to go over and see what had happened to Sergeant Braden.  He just stayed there, leaning across the truck, cursing himself for letting them get away.  He didn't know, and would never believe, that he had, in fact, done better than many trained police officers could have done.

In the minivan, one of the gunmen took more note of the bullet in his chest than the one in his head.  But it was the head shot that would kill him.  As the man bent down, a lacerated artery let go completely and showered the inside of the car with blood, much to the surprise of the dying man, who had but a few seconds to realize what had happ—

Another Air Force flight, as luck had it, also a C-141B, took Mr. Clark out of
Panama
, heading for Andrews, where rapid preparations were being made for the arrival ceremony.  Before the funeral flight arrived,
Clark
was in
Langley
talking to his boss, Bob Ritter.  For the first time in a generation, the Operations Directorate had been granted a presidential hunting license.  John Clark, carried on the personnel rolls as a case-officer instructor, was the CIA chief hunter.  He hadn't been asked to exercise that particular talent in a very long time, but he still knew how.

Ritter and Clark didn't watch the TV coverage of the arrival.  All that was part of history now, and while both men had an interest in history, it was mainly in the sort that is never written down.

“We're going to take another look at the idea you handed me at St. Kitts,” the Deputy Director (Operations) said.

“What's the objective?”
Clark
asked carefully.  It wasn't hard to guess why this was happening, or the originator of the directive.  That was the reason for his caution.

“The short version is revenge,” Ritter answered.

“Retribution is a more acceptable word,”
Clark
pointed out.  Lacking in formal education though he was, he did read a good deal.

“The targets represent a clear and present danger to the security of the
United States
.”

“The President said that?”

“His words,” Ritter affirmed.

“Fine.  That makes it all legal.  Not any less dangerous, but legal.”

“Can you do it?”

Clark
smiled in a distant, smoky way. “I run my side of the op my way.  Otherwise, forget it.  I don't want to die from oversight.  No interference from this end.  You give me the target list and the assets I need.  I do the rest, my way, my schedule.”

“Agreed,” Ritter nodded.

Clark
was more than surprised by that. “Then I can do it.  What about the kids we have running around in the jungle?”

“We're pulling them out tonight.”

“To be reinserted where?”
Clark
asked.

Ritter told him.

“That's really dangerous,” the case officer observed, though he was not surprised by the answer.  It had probably been planned all along.  But, if it had . . .

“We know that.”

“I don't like it,”
Clark
said after a moment's thought. “It complicates things.”

“We don't pay you to like it.”

Clark
had to agree to that.  He was honest enough with himself, though, to admit that part of it he did like.  A job such as this, after all, had gotten him into the protective embrace of the Central Intelligence Agency in the first place, so many years before.  But that job had been on a free-agent basis.  This one was legal, but arguably.  Once that would not have mattered to Mr. Clark, but with a wife and kids, it did now.

“Do I get to see the family for a couple of days?”

“Sure.  It'll take awhile to get things in place.  I'll have all the information you need messengered down to The Farm.”

“What do we call this one?”

“R
ECIPROCITY
.”

“I guess that about covers it.”
Clark
's face broke into a grin.  He walked out of the room toward the elevator.  The new DDI was there, Dr. Ryan, heading to Judge Moore's office.  They'd never quite met, Clark and Ryan, and this wasn't the time, though their lives had already touched on two occasions.

Snatch and Grab

I
MUST THANK
your Director Jacobs,“ Juan said. ”Perhaps we will meet someday." He'd taken his time with this one.  Soon, he judged, he'd be able to extract any information he wanted from her with the same intimate confidence that might be expected of husband and wife—after all, true love did not allow for secrets, did it?

“Perhaps,” Moira replied after a moment.  Already part of her was thinking that the Director would come to her wedding.  It wasn't too much to hope for, was it?

“What did he travel to
Colombia
for, anyway?” he asked while his fingertips did some more exploring over what was now very familiar ground.

“Well, it's public information now.  They called it Operation T
ARPON
.” Moira explained on for several minutes during which Juan's caresses didn't miss a beat.

Which was only due to his experience as an intelligence officer.  He actually found himself smiling lazily at the ceiling.  The fool.  I warned him.  I warned him more than once in his own office, but no—he was too smart, too confident in his own cleverness to take my advice.  Well, maybe the stupid bastard will heed my advice now . . .  It took another few moments before he found himself asking how his employer would react.  That was when the smiling and the caresses stopped.

“Something wrong, Juan?”

“Your director picked a dangerous time to visit Bogotá .  They will be very angry.  If they discover that he is there—”

“The trip is a secret.  Their attorney general is an old friend—I think they went to school together, and they've known each other for forty years.”

The trip was a secret.
  Cortez told himself that they couldn't be so foolish as to—but they could.  He was amazed that Moira didn't feel the chill that swept over his body.  But what could he do?

As was true of the families of military people and sales executives,
Clark
's family was accustomed to having him away at short notice and for irregular intervals.  They were also used to having him reappear without much in the way of warning.  It was almost a game, and one, strangely enough, to which his wife didn't object.  In this case he took a car from the CIA pool and made the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Yorktown, Virginia, by himself to think over the operation he was about to undertake.  By the time he turned off Interstate 64, he'd answered most of the procedural questions, though the exact details would wait until he'd had a chance to go over the intelligence package that Ritter had promised to send down.

Clark
's house was that of a middle-level executive, a four-bedroom split-foyer brick dwelling set in an acre of the long-needled pines common to the American South.  It was a ten-minute drive from The Farm, the CIA's training establishment whose post-office address is
Williamsburg
,
Virginia
, but which is actually closer to
Yorktown
, adjacent to an installation in which the Navy keeps both submarine-launched ballistic missiles and their nuclear warheads.  The development in which he lived was mainly occupied by other CIA instructors, obviating the need for elaborate stories for the neighbors' benefit.  His family, of course, had a pretty good idea what he did for a living.  His two daughters, Maggie, seventeen, and Patricia, fourteen, occasionally called him “Secret Agent Man,” which they'd picked up from the revival of the Patrick McGoohan TV series on one of the cable channels, but they knew not to discuss it with their schoolmates—though they would occasionally warn their boyfriends to behave as responsibly as possible around their father.  It was an unnecessary warning.  On instinct, most men watched their behavior around Mr. Clark.  John Clark did not have horns and hooves, but it seldom took more than a single glance to know that he was not to be trifled with, either.  His wife,
Sandy
, knew even more, including what he had done before joining the Agency. 
Sandy
was a registered nurse who taught student nurses in the operating rooms of the local teaching hospital.  As such she was accustomed to dealing with issues of life and death, and she took comfort from the fact that her husband was one of the few “laymen” who understood what that was all about, albeit from a reversed perspective.  To his wife and children, John Terence Clark was a devoted husband and father, if somewhat overly protective at times.  Maggie had once complained that he'd scared off one prospective “steady” with nothing more than a look.  That the boy in question had later been arrested for drunken driving had only proved her father correct, rather to her chagrin.  He was also a far easier touch than their mother on issues like privileges and had a ready shoulder to cry on, when he was home.  At home, his counsel was invariably quiet and reasoned, his language mild, and his demeanor relaxed, but his family knew that away from home he was something else entirely.  They didn't care about that.

He pulled into the driveway just before dinnertime, taking his soft two-suiter in through the kitchen to find the smells of a decent dinner. 
Sandy
had been surprised too many times to overreact on the matter of how much food she'd prepared.

“Where have you been?”
Sandy
asked rhetorically, then went into her usual guessing game. “Not much work done on the tan.  Someplace cold or cloudy?”

“Spent most of my time indoors,”
Clark
replied honestly.  Stuck with a couple of clowns in a damned comma van on a hilltop surrounded by jungle.  Just like the bad old days.  Almost.  For all her intelligence, she almost never guessed where he'd been.  But then, she wasn't supposed to.

“How long . . . ?”

“Only a couple of days, then I have to go out again.  It's important.”

“Anything to do with—” Her head jerked toward the kitchen TV.

Clark
just smiled and shook his head.

“What do you think happened?”

“From what I see, the druggies got real lucky,” he said lightly.

Sandy
knew what her husband thought of druggies, and why.  Everyone had a pet hate.  That was his—and hers; she'd been a nurse too long, had too often seen the results of substance abuse, to think otherwise.  It was the one thing he'd lectured the girls on, and though they were as rebellious as any pair of healthy adolescents, it was one line they didn't approach, much less cross.

“The President sounds angry.”

“How would you feel?  The FBI Director was his friend—as far as a politician has friends.”
Clark
felt the need to qualify the statement.  He was wary of political figures, even the ones he'd voted for.

“What is he going to do about it?”

“I don't know,
Sandy
.” I haven't quite figured it out yet. “Where are the kids?”

“They went to
Busch
Gardens
with their friends.  There's a new coaster, and they're probably screaming their brains out.”

“Do I have time to shower?  I've been traveling all day.”

“Dinner in thirty minutes.”

“Fine.” He kissed her again and headed for the bedroom with his bag.  Before entering the bathroom, he emptied his dirty laundry into the hamper. 
Clark
would give himself one restful day with the family before starting on his mission planning.  There wasn't that much of a hurry.  For missions of this sort, haste made death.  He hoped the politicians would understand that.

Of course, they wouldn't, he told himself on the way to the shower.  They never did.

“Don't feel bad,” Moira told him. “You're tired.  I'm sorry I've worn you out.” She cradled his face to her chest.  A man was not a machine, after all, and five times in just over one day's time . . . what could she fairly expect of her lover?  He had to sleep, had to rest.  As did she, Moira realized, drifting off herself.

Within minutes, Cortez gently disengaged himself, watching her slow, steady breathing, a dreamy smile on her placid face while he wondered what the hell he could do.  If anything.  Place a phone call—risk everything for a brief conversation on a non-secure line?  The Colombian police or the Americans, or somebody had to have taps on all those phones.  No, that was more dangerous than doing nothing at all.

His professionalism told him that the safest course of action was to do nothing.  Cortez looked down at himself.  Nothing was precisely what he had just accomplished.  It was the first time that had happened in a very long time.

Team K
NIFE
, of course, was completely—if not blissfully—unaware of what had transpired the previous day.  The jungle had no news service, and their radio was for official use only.  That made the new message all the more surprising.  Chavez and Vega were again on duty at the observation post, enduring the muggy heat that followed a violent thunderstorm.  There had been two inches of rain in the previous hour, and their observation point was now a shallow puddle, and there would be more rain in the afternoon before things cleared off.

Captain Ramirez appeared, without much in the way of warning this time, even to Chavez, whose woodcraft skills were a matter of considerable pride.  He rationalized to himself that the captain had learned from watching him.

“Hey, Cap'n,” Vega greeted their officer.

“Anything going on?” Ramirez asked.

Chavez answered from behind his binoculars. “Well, our two friends are enjoying their morning siesta.” There would be another in the afternoon, of course.  He was pulled away from the lenses by the captain's next statement.

“I hope they like it.  It's their last one.”

“Say again, Cap'n?” Vega asked.

“The chopper's coming in to pick us up tonight.  That's the LZ right there, troops.” Ramirez pointed to the airstrip. “We waste this place before we leave.”

Chavez evaluated that statement briefly.  He'd never liked druggies.  Having to sit here and watch the lazy bastards go about their business as matter-of-factly as a man on a golf course hadn't mitigated his feelings a dot.

Ding nodded. “Okay, Cap'n.  How we gonna do it, sir?”

“Soon as it's dark, you and me circle around the north side.  Rest of the squad forms up in two fire teams to provide fire support in case we need it.  Vega, you and your SAW stay here.  The other one goes down about four hundred meters.  After we do the two guards, we booby-trap the fuel drums in the shack, just as a farewell present.  The chopper'll pick us up at the far end at twenty-three hundred.  We bring the bodies out with us, probably dump 'em at sea.”

Well, how about that
, Chavez thought. “We'll need like thirty-forty minutes to get around to them, just to play it safe and all, but the way those two fuckers been actin', no sweat, sir.” The sergeant knew that the killing would be his job.  He had the silenced weapon.

“You're supposed to ask me if this is for-real,” Captain Ramirez pointed out.  He had done just that over the satellite radio.

“Sir, you say do it, I figure it's for-real.  It don't bother me none,” Staff Sergeant Domingo Chavez assured his commander.

“Okay—we'll move out as soon as it's dark.”

“Yes, sir.”

The captain patted both men on the shoulder and withdrew to the rally point.  Chavez watched him leave, then pulled out his canteen.  He unscrewed the plastic top and took a long pull before looking over at Vega.

“Fuck!” the machine-gunner observed quietly.

“Whoever's runnin' this party musta grown a pair o' balls,” Ding agreed.

“Be nice to get back to a place with showers and air conditioning,” Vega said next.  That two people would have to die to make that possible was, once it was decided, a matter of small consequence.  It bemused both men somewhat that after years of uniformed service they were finally being told to do the very thing for which they'd trained endlessly.  The moral issue never occurred to them.  They were soldiers of their country.  Their country had decided that those two dozing men a few hundred meters away were enemies worthy of death.  That was that, though both men wondered what it would actually be like to do it.

“Let's plan this one out,” Chavez said, getting back to his binoculars. “I want you to be careful with that SAW, Oso.”

Vega considered the situation. “I won't fire to the left of the shack unless you call in.”

“Yeah, okay.  I'll come in from the direction of that big-ass tree.  Shouldn't be no big deal,” he thought aloud.

“Nah, shouldn't be.”

Except that this time it was all real.  Chavez stayed on the glasses, examining the men whom he would kill in a few hours.

Colonel Johns got his stand-to order at roughly the same time as all of the field teams, along with a whole new set of tactical maps that were for further study.  He and Captain Willis went over the plan for this night in the privacy of their room.  There was a snatch-and-grab tonight.  The troops they'd inserted were coming back out far earlier than scheduled.  PJ suspected that he knew why.  Part of it, anyway.

“Right on the airfields?” the captain wondered.

“Yeah, well, either all four were dry holes, or our friends are going to have to secure them before we land for the snatch-and-grab.”

“Oh.” Captain Willis understood after a moment's thought.

“Get ahold of Buck and have him check the miniguns out again.  He'll get the message from that.  I want to take a look at the weather for tonight.”

“Pickup order reverse from the drop-off?”

“Yeah—we'll tank fifty miles off the beach and then again after we make the pickup.”

“Right.” Willis walked out to find Sergeant Zimmer.  PJ went in the opposite direction, heading for the base meteorological office.  The weather for tonight was disappointing: light winds, clear skies, and a crescent moon.  Perfect flying weather for everyone else, it was not what special-ops people hoped for.  Well, there wasn't much you could do about that.

They checked out of The Hideaway at
noon
.  Cortez thanked whatever fortune smiled down on him that it had been her idea to cut the weekend short, claiming that she had to get back to her children, though he suspected that she had made a conscious decision to go easy on her weary lover.  No woman had ever felt the need to take pity on him before, and the insult of it was balanced against his need to find out what the hell was going on.  They drove up Interstate 81, in silence as usual.  He'd rented a car with an ordinary bench seat, and she sat in the center, leaning against him with his right arm wrapped warmly around her shoulder.  Like teenagers, almost, except for the silence, and again he found himself appreciating her for it.  But it wasn't for the quiet passion now.  His mind was racing far faster than the car, which he kept exactly at the posted limit.  He could have turned on the car radio, but that would have been out of character.  He couldn't risk that, could he?  If his employer had only exercised intelligence—and he had plenty of that, Cortez compelled himself to admit—then he still had his arm draped over a supremely valuable source of strategic intelligence.  Escobedo took an appropriately long view of his business operations.  He understood—but Cortez remembered the man's arrogance, too.  How easily he took offense—it wasn't enough for him to win, Escobedo also felt the need to humiliate, crush, utterly destroy those who offended him in the slightest way.  He had power, and the sort of money normally associated only with governments, but he lacked perspective.  For all his intelligence, he was a man ruled by childish emotions, and that thought merely grew in Cortez's mind as he turned onto 1-66, heading east now, for
Washington
.  It was so strange, he mused with a thin, bitter smile, that in a world replete with information, he was forced to speculate like a child when he could have all he needed merely from the twist of a radio knob, but he commanded himself to do without.