Jack Ryan 6 - Clear and Present Danger (45 page)

“What is it?”

Murray
handed over the sheet he pulled off the aircraft's facsimile printer a few hours earlier.

“Oh, shit!” Shaw swore quietly. “Not Moira.  Not her.”

Target List

“I
'
M OPEN TO
suggestions,”
Murray
said.  He regretted his tone at once.

“Christ's sake, Dan!” Shaw's face had gone gray for a moment, and his expression was now angry.

“Sorry, but—damn it, Bill, do we handle it straight or do we candy-ass our way around the issue?”

“Straight.”

“One of the kids from WFO asked her the usual battery of questions, and she said that she didn't tell anybody . . . well, maybe so, but who the hell did she call in
Venezuela
?  They re-checked going back a year, no such calls ever before.  The boy I left behind to run things did some further checking—the number she called is an apartment, and the phone there rang someplace in Colombia within a few minutes of Moira's call.”

“Oh, God.” Shaw shook his head.  From anyone else he would merely have felt anger, but Moira had worked with the Director since before he'd returned to D.C., from his command of the New York Field Division.

“Maybe it's an innocent thing.  Maybe even a coincidence,”
Murray
allowed, but that didn't improve Bill's demeanor very much.

“Care to do a probability assessment of that statement, Danny?”

“No.”

“Well, we're all going back to the office after we land.  I'll have her into my place an hour after we get back.  You be there, too.”

“Right.” It was time for
Murray
to shake his head.  She'd shed as many tears at the graveside as anyone else.  He'd seen a lifetime's worth of duplicity in his law-enforcement career, but to think that of Moira was more than he could stomach.  It has to be a coincidence.  Maybe one of her kids has a pen pal down there.  Or something like that, Dan told himself.

The detectives searching Sergeant Braden's home found what they were looking for.  It wasn't much, just a camera case.  But the case had a Nikon F-3 body and enough lenses that the entire package had to be worth eight or nine thousand dollars.  More than a
Mobile
detective sergeant could afford.  While the rest of the officers continued the search, the senior detective called Nikon's home office and checked the number on the camera to see if the owner had registered it for warranty purposes.  He had.  And with the name that was read off to him, the officer knew that he had to call the FBI office as well.  It was part of a federal case, and he hoped that somehow they could protect the name of a man who had certainly been a dirty cop.  Dirty or not, he did leave kids behind.  Perhaps the FBI would understand that.

He was committing a federal crime to do this, but the attorney considered that he had a higher duty to his clients.  It was one of those gray areas which decorate not so much legal textbooks, but rather the volumes of written court decisions.  He was sure a crime had been committed, was sure that nothing was being done to investigate it, and was sure that its disclosure was important to the defense of his clients on a case of capital murder.  He didn't expect to be caught, but if he were, he'd have something to take to the professional ethics panel of the state bar association.  Edward Stuart's professional duty to his clients, added to his personal distaste for capital punishment, made the decision an inevitable one.

They didn't call it Happy Hour at the base NCO club anymore, but nothing had really changed.  Stuart had served his time in the U.S. Navy as a legal officer aboard an aircraft carrier—even in the Navy, a mobile city of six thousand people needed a lawyer or two—and knew about sailors and suds.  So he'd visited a uniform store and gotten the proper outfit of a Coast Guard chief yeoman complete with the appropriate ribbons and just walked onto the base, heading for the NCO club where, as long as he paid for his drinks in cash, nobody would take great note of his presence.  He'd been a yeoman himself while aboard USS Eisenhower, and knew the lingo well enough to pass any casual test of authenticity.  The next trick, of course, was finding a crewman from the cutter Panache.

The cutter was finishing up the maintenance period that always followed a deployment, preparatory to yet another cruise, and her crewmen would be hitting the club after working hours to enjoy their afternoon beers while they could.  It was just a matter of finding the right ones.  He knew the names, and had checked tape archives at the local TV stations to get a look at the faces.  It was nothing more than good luck that the one he found was Bob Riley.  He knew more about that man's career than the other chiefs.

The master chief boatswain's mate strolled in at
4:30
after ten hot hours supervising work on various topside gear.  He'd had a light lunch and sweated off all of that and more, and now figured that a few mugs of beer would replace all the fluids and electrolytes that he'd lost under the hot
Alabama
sun.  The barmaid saw him coming and had a tall one of Samuel Adams all ready by the time he selected a stool.  Edward Stuart got there a minute and half a mug later.

“Ain't you Bob Riley?”

“That's right,” the bosun said before turning. “Who're you?”

“Didn't think you'd remember me.  Matt Stevens.  You near tore my head off on the Mellon awhile back—said I'd never get my shit together.”

“Looks like I was wrong,” Riley noted, searching his memory for the face.

“No, you were right.  I was a real punk back then, but you—well, I owe you one, Master Chief.  I did get my shit together.  Mainly 'causa what you said.” Stuart stuck out his hand. “I figure I owe you a beer at least.”

It wasn't all that unusual a thing for Riley to hear. “Hell, we all need straigthenin' out.  I got bounced off a coupla bulkheads when I was a kid, too, y'know?”

“Done a little of it myself.” Stuart grinned. “You make chief an' you gotta be respectable and responsible, right?  Otherwise who keeps the officers straightened out?”

Riley grunted agreement. “Who you workin' for?”

“Admiral Hally.  He's at Buzzard's Point.  Had to fly down with him to meet with the base commander.  I think he's off playing golf right now.  Never did get the hang of that game.  You're on Panache, right?”

“You bet.”

“Captain Wegener?”

“Yep.” Riley finished off his beer and Stuart waved to the barmaid for refills.

“Is he as good as they say?”

“Red's a better seaman 'n I am,” Riley replied honestly.

“Nobody's that good, Master Chief.  Hey, I was there when you took the boat across—what was the name of that container boat that snapped in half . . . ?”

“Arctic Star.” Riley smiled, remembering. “Jesus, if we didn't earn our pay that afternoon.”

“I remember watching.  Thought you were crazy.  Well, shit.  All I do now is drive a word processor for the Admiral, but I did a little stuff in a forty-one boat before I made chief, working outa
Norfolk
.  Nothing like Arctic Star, of course.”

“Don't knock it, Matt.  One of those jobs's enough for a couple years of sea stories.  I'll take an easy one any day.  I'm gettin' a little old for that dramatic stuff.”

“How's the food here?”

“Fair.”

“Buy you dinner?”

“Matt, I don't even remember what I said to you.”

“I remember,” Stuart assured him. “God knows how I woulda turned out if you hadn't turned me around.  No shit, man.  I owe you one.  Come on.” He waved Riley over to a booth against the wall.  They were quickly going through their third beer when Chief Quartermaster Oreza arrived.

“Hey, Portagee,” Riley called to his fellow master chief.

“I see the beer's cold, Bob.”

Riley waved to his companion. “This here's Matt Stevens.  We were on the Mellon together.  Did I ever tell you about the Arctic Star job?”

“Only about thirty times,” Oreza noted.

“You wanna tell the story, Matt?” Riley asked.

“Hey, I didn't even see it all, you know—”

“Yeah, half the crew was puking their guts out.  I'm talking a real gale blowing.  No way the helo could take off, and this container boat—the after half of her, that is; the fo'ard part was already gone—look like she was gonna roll right there an' then . . .”

Within an hour, two more rounds had been consumed, and the three men were chomping their way through a disk of knockwurst and sauerkraut, which went well with beer.  Stuart stuck with stories about his new Admiral, the Chief Counsel of the Coast Guard, in which legal officers are also line officers, expected to know how to drive ships and command men.

“Hey, what's with these stories I been hearing about you an' those two drug pukes?” the attorney finally asked.

“What d'ya mean?” Oreza asked.  Portagee still had some remaining shreds of sobriety.

“Hey, the FBI guys went in to see Hally, right?  I had, to type up his reports on my Zenith, y'know?”

“What did them FBI guys say?”

“I'm not supposed—oh, fuck it!  Look, you're all in the clear.  The Bureau isn't doing a fuckin' thing.  They told your skipper 'go forth and sin no more,' okay?  The shit you got outa those pukes—didn't you hear?  Operation T
ARPON
.  That whole sting operation came from you guys.  Didn't you know that?”

“What?” Riley hadn't seen a paper or turned on a TV in days.  Though he did know about the death of the FBI Director, he had no idea of the connection with his Hang-Ex, as he had taken to calling it in the goat locker.

Stuart explained what he knew, which was quite a lot.

“Half a billion dollars?” Oreza observed quietly. “That oughta build us a few new hulls.”

“Christ knows we need 'em,” Stuart agreed.

“You guys didn't really—I mean, you didn't really . . . hang one of the fuckers, did you?” Stuart extracted a Radio Shack mini-tape recorder from his pocket and thumbed the volume switch to the top.

“Actually it was Portagee's idea,” Riley said.

“Couldn't have done it without you, Bob,” Oreza said generously.

“Yeah, well, the trick was how to do the hangin',” Riley explained. “You see, we had to make it look real if we was gonna scare the piss outa the little one.  Wasn't really all that hard once I thought it over.  After we got him alone, the pharmacist mate gave him a shot of ether to knock him out for a few minutes, and I rigged a rope harness on his back.  When we took him topside, the noose had a hook on the back, so when I looped the noose around his neck, all I hadda do was attach the hook to an eye I put on the harness, so we was hoistin' him by the harness, not the neck.  We didn't really wanna kill the fucker—well, I did,” Riley said. “But Red didn't think it was a real good idea.” The bosun grinned at the quartermaster.

“The other trick was baggin' him,” Oreza said. “We put a black hood over his head.  Well, there was a gauze pad inside soaked in ether.  The bastard screamed bloody murder when he smelled it, but it had him knocked out as soon as we ran his ass up to the yardarm.”

“The little one believed the whole thing.  Fucker wet his pants, it was beautiful!  Sang like a canary when they got him back to the wardroom.  Soon as he was outa sight, of course, we lowered the other one and got him woke back up.  They were both half in the bag from smokin' grass all day.  I don't think they ever figured out what we did to them.”

No, they didn't.
“Grass?”

“That was Red's idea.  They had their own pot stash—looked like real cigarettes.  We just gave 'em back to 'em, and they got themselves looped.  Throw in the ether and everything, and I bet they never figured out what really happened.”

Almost right
, Stuart thought, hoping that his tape recorder was getting this.

“I wish we really could have hung 'em,” Riley said after a few seconds. “Matt, you ain't never seen anything like what that yacht looked like.  Four people, man—butchered 'em like cattle.  Ever smell blood?  I didn't know you could.  You can,” the bosun assured him. "They raped the wife and the little girl, then cut 'em up like they was—God!  You know, I been having nightmares from that?  Nightmares—me!  Jesus, that's one sea story I wish I could forget.  I got a little girl that age.  Those fuckers raped her an' killed her, and cut her up an' fed her to the fuckin' sharks.  Just a little girl, not even big enough to drive a car or go out on a date.

“We're supposed to be professional cops, right?  We're supposed to be cool about it, don't get personally involved.  All that shit?” Riley asked.

“That's what the book says,” Stuart agreed.

“The book wasn't written for stuff like this,” Portagee said. “People who do this sort of thing—they ain't really people.  I don't know what the hell they are, but people they ain't.  You can't do that kinda shit and be people, Matt.”

“Hey, what d'you want me to say?” Stuart asked, suddenly defensive, and not acting a part this time. “We got laws to deal with people like that.”

“Laws ain't doin' much good, are they?” Riley asked.

The difference between the people he was obliged to defend and the people he had to impeach, Stuart told himself through the fog of alcohol, was that the bad ones were his clients and the good ones were not.  And now, by impersonating a Coast Guard chief, he too had broken a law, just as these men had done, and like them, he was doing it for some greater good, some higher moral cause.  So he asked himself who was right.  Not that it mattered, of course.  Whatever was “right” was lost somewhere, not to be found in lawbooks or canons of ethics.  Yet if you couldn't find it there, then where the hell was it?  But Stuart was a lawyer, and his business was law, not right.  Right was the province of judges and juries.  Or something like that.  Stuart told himself that he shouldn't drink so much.  Drink made confused things clear, and the clear things confused.

The ride in was far rougher this time.  Westerly winds off the
Pacific Ocean
hit the slopes of the
Andes
and boiled upward, looking for passes to go through.  The resulting turbulence could be felt at thirty thousand feet, and here, only three hundred feet AGL—above ground level—the ride was a hard one, all the more so with the helicopter on its terrain-following autopilot.  Johns and Willis were strapped in tight to reduce the effects of the rough ride, and both knew that the people in back were having a bad time indeed as the big Sikorsky jolted up and down in twenty-foot bounds at least ten times per minute.  PJ's hand was on the stick, following the motions of the autopilot but ready to take instant command if the system showed the first sign of failure.  This was real flying, as he liked to say.  That generally meant the dangerous kind.