by Tom Clancy
“Yes, sir,” the chief of the detail answered. He wasn’t looking forward to this one either. Especially now. The druggies were going to be pissed. But this visit would catch them unawares. The news stories would say that Jacobs was remaining in D.C. to work on the case, and they wouldn’t expect him to show up in Colombia. Even so, the security for this one would be tight. He and his fellow agents would be spending some extra time in the Hoover Building’s own weapons range, honing their skills with their automatic pistols and submachine guns. They couldn’t let anything happen to Emil.
Moira found out Tuesday morning. By this time she, too, knew all about TARPON, of course. She knew that the trip was supposed to be secret, and she had no doubt that it would also be dangerous. She wouldn’t tell Juan until Thursday night. After all, she had to be careful. She spent the rest of the week wondering what special place he had in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
It no longer mattered that the uniform clothing was khaki instead of woodland pattern Battle Dress Uniform. Between the sweat stains and the dirt, the squad members were now exactly the same color as the ground on which they hid. They had all washed once in the stream from which they took their water, but no one had used soap for fear that suds or smell or something might alert someone downstream. Under the circumstances, washing without soap wasn’t even as good as kissing your sister. It had cooled them off, however, and that for Chavez was a most pleasant memory. For—what was it?—ten glorious minutes he’d been comfortable. Ten minutes after which, he’d sweated again. The climate was beastly, with temperatures reaching to one hundred twenty degrees on one cloudless afternoon. If this was a goddamned jungle, Chavez asked himself, why the hell doesn’t it rain? The good news was that they didn’t have to move around a great deal. The two jerks who guarded this airstrip spent most of their time sleeping, smoking—probably grass, Chavez thought—and generally jerking off. They had, once, startled him by firing their weapons at tin cans that they’d set up on the runway. That might have been dangerous, but the direction of fire hadn’t been toward the observation post, and Chavez had used the opportunity to evaluate the weapons skills of the opposition. Shitty, he’d told Vega at once. Now they were up to it again. They set up three bean cans—big ones—perhaps a hundred meters from the shack, and just blazed away, shooting from the hip like movie actors.
“Christ, what fuck-ups,” he observed, watching through his binoculars.
“Lemme see.” Vega got to watch just as one of them knocked a can down on his third try. “Hell, I could hit the damned things from here....”
“Point, this is Six, what the fuck is going on!” the radio squawked a moment later. Vega answered the call.
“Six, this is Point. Our friends are doing some plinkin’ again. Their axis of fire is away from us, sir. They’re punchin’ holes in some tin cans. They can’t shoot for shit, Cap’n.”
“I’m coming over.”
“Roger.” Ding set down the radio. “The Cap’n’s coming. I think the noise made him nervous.”
“He sure does worry a lot,” Vega noted.
“That’s what they pay officers for, ain’t it?”
Ramirez appeared three minutes later. Chavez made to hand over his binoculars, but the captain had brought his own pair this time. He fell to a prone position and got his glasses up just in time to watch another can go down.
“Oh.”
“Two cans, two full magazines,” Chavez explained. “They like to go rock-and-roll. I guess ammo’s cheap down here.”
Both of the guards were still smoking. The captain and the sergeant watched them laugh and joke as they shot. Probably, Ramirez thought, they’re as bored as we are. After the first aircraft, there had been no activity at all here at RENO, and soldiers like boredom even less than ordinary citizens. One of them—it was hard to tell them apart since they were roughly the same size and wore the same sort of clothing—inserted another magazine into his AK-47 and blazed off a ten-round burst. The little fountains of dirt walked up to the remaining can, but didn’t quite hit it.
“I didn’t know it would be this easy, sir,” Vega observed from behind the sights of his machine gun. “What a bunch of fuck-ups!”
“You think that way, Oso, you turn into one yourself,” Ramirez said seriously.
“Roger that, Cap‘n, but I can’t help seein’ what I’m seein’.”
Ramirez softened his rebuke with a smile. “I suppose you’re right.”
The third can finally went down. They were averaging thirty rounds per target. Next the guards used their weapons to push the cans around the runway.
“You know,” Vega said after a moment, “I ain’t seen ’em clean their weapons yet.” For the squad members, cleaning their weapons was as regular a routine as morning and evening prayers were for clergymen.
“The AK’ll take a lot of abuse. It’s good for that,” Ramirez pointed out.
“Yes, sir.”
Finally the guards, too, grew bored. One of them retrieved the cans. As he was doing so, a truck appeared. With little in the way of warning, Chavez was surprised to note. The wind was wrong, but even so it hadn’t occurred to him that he wouldn’t have at least a minute or two worth of warning. Something to remember. There were three people in the truck, one of whom was riding in the back. The driver dismounted and walked out to the two guards. In a moment he was pointing at the ground and yelling—they could hear it from five hundred yards away even though they hadn’t heard the truck, which really seemed strange.
“What’s that all about?” Vega asked.
Captain Ramirez laughed quietly. “FOD. He’s pissed off at the FOD.”
“Huh?” Vega asked.
“Foreign Object Damage. You suck one of those cartridge cases into an aircraft engine, like a turbine engine, and it’ll beat the hell out of it. Yeah—look, they’re picking up their brass.”
Chavez turned his binoculars back to the truck. “I see some boxes there, sir. Maybe we got a pickup tonight. How come no fuel cans—yeah! Captain, last time we were here, they didn’t fuel the airplane, did they?”
“The flight originates from a regular airstrip twenty miles off,” Ramirez explained. “Maybe they don’t have to top off ... Does seem odd, though.”
“Maybe they got fuel drums in the shack ... ?” Vega wondered.
Captain Ramirez grunted. He wanted to send a couple of men in close to check the area out, but his orders didn’t permit that. Their only patrolling was to check the airfield perimeter for additional security troops. They never got closer than four hundred meters to the cleared area, and it was always done with an eye on the two guards. His operational orders were not to take the slightest risk of making contact with the opposition. So they weren’t supposed to patrol the area even though it would have told them more about the opposition than they knew—would tell them things that they might need to know. That was just good basic soldiering, he thought, and the order not to do it was a dumb order, since it ran as many—or more—risks than it was supposed to avoid. But orders were still orders. Whoever had generated them didn’t know much about soldiering. It was Ramirez’s first experience with that phenomenon, since he, too, was not old enough to remember Vietnam.
“They’re gonna be out there all day,” Chavez said. It appeared that the truck driver was making them count their brass, and you never could find all of the damned things. Vega checked his watch.
“Sundown in two hours. Anybody wanna bet we’ll have business tonight? I got a hundred pesos says we get a plane before twenty-two hundred.”
“No bet,” Ramirez said. “The tall one by the truck just opened a box of flares.” The captain left. He had a radio call to make.
It had been a quiet couple of days at Corezal. Clark had just returned from a late lunch at the Fort Amador Officers’ Club—curiously, the head of the Panamanian Army had an office in the same building; most curious, since he was not overly popular with the U.S. military at the moment—followed by a brief siesta. Local cu
stoms, he decided, made sense. Especially sleeping through the hottest part of the day. The cold air of the van—the air conditioning was to protect the electronics gear, mainly from the oppressive humidity here—gave him the wakeup shock he needed.
Team KNIFE had scored on their first night with a single aircraft. Two of the other squads had also had hits, but one of the aircraft had made it all the way to its destination when the F-15 had lost its radar ten minutes after takeoff, much to everyone’s chagrin. But that was the sort of problem you had to expect with an operation this short of assets. Two for three wasn’t bad at all, especially when you considered what the odds had been like a bare month before, when the Customs people were lucky to bag a single aircraft in a month. One of the squads, moreover, had drawn a complete blank. Their airfield seemed totally inactive, contradicting intelligence data that had looked very promising only a week before. That also was a hazard of real-world operations.
“VARIABLE, this is KNIFE, over,” the speaker said without preamble.
“KNIFE, this is VARIABLE. We read you loud and clear. We are ready to copy, over.”
“We have activity at RENO. Possible pickup this evening. We will keep you advised. Over.”
“Roger, copy. We’ll be here. Out.”
One of the Operations people lifted the handset to another radio channel.
“EAGLE’S NEST, this is VARIABLE ... Stand to ... Roger. We’ll keep you posted. Out.” He set the instrument down and turned. “They’ll get everyone up. The fighter is back on line. Seems the radar was overdue for some part replacement or other. It’s up and running, and the Air Force offers its apology.”
“Damned well ought to,” the other Operations man grumbled.
“You guys ever think that maybe an operation can go too right?” Clark asked from his seat in the corner.
The senior one wanted to say something snotty, Clark saw, but knew better.
“They must know that something odd is happening. You don’t want to make it too obvious,” Clark explained for the other one. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes. Might as well get another piece of that siesta, he told himself. It might be a long night.
Chavez got his wish just after sundown. It started to rain lightly, and clouds moving in from the west promised an even heavier downpour. The airfield crew set out their flares—quite a few more than the last time, he saw—and the aircraft arrived soon after that.
Rain made visibility difficult. It seemed to Chavez that someone ran a fuel hose out from the shack. Maybe there were some fuel drums in there, and maybe a hand-crank pump, but his ability to see the five or six hundred yards came and went with the rain. Something else happened. The truck drove down the center of the strip, and the driver tossed out at least ten additional flares to mark the centerline. The aircraft took off twenty minutes after it arrived, and Ramirez was already on his satellite radio.
“Did you get the tail number?” VARIABLE asked.
“Negative,” the captain replied. “It’s raining pretty heavy now. Visibility is dogshit. But he got off at twenty-fifty-one Lima, heading north-northwest.”
“Roger, copy. Out.”
Ramirez didn’t like the effect that the reduced visibility might have on his unit. He took another pair of soldiers forward to the OP, but he just as well might not have bothered. The guards didn’t bother extinguishing the flares this time, letting the rain wet things down. The truck left soon after the aircraft took off, and the two chastised runway guards retired to the shack to keep dry. All in all, he thought, it couldn’t be much easier.
Bronco was bored, too. It wasn’t that he minded what he was doing, but there really wasn’t much challenge in it. And besides, he was stuck at four kills, and needed only one more to be an ace. The fighter pilot was sure that the mission was better accomplished with live prisoners—but, damn it, killing the sons of bitches was ... satisfying, even though there wasn’t much challenge to it. He was flying an aircraft designed to mix it up with the best fighters the Russians could make. Taking out a Twin-Beech was about as difficult as driving to the O-Club for a couple of brews. Maybe tonight he’d do something different ... but what?
That gave him something to think about as he orbited north of the Yucatan Channel, just behind the E-2C, and of course out of normal airliner tracks. The contact call came in at about the right time. He turned south to get on the target, which took just over ten minutes.
“Tallyho,” he told the Hawkeye. “I have eyeballs on target.”
Another two-engine, therefore another coke smuggler. Captain Winters was still angry about the other night. Someone had forgotten to check the maintenance schedule on his Eagle, and sure enough, that damned widget had failed right when the contractor said it would, at five hundred three hours. Amazing that they could figure it that close. Amazing that an umpty-million-dollar fighter plane went tits-up because of a five-dollar widget, or diode, or chip, or whatever the hell it was. It cost five bucks. He knew that because the sergeant had told him.
Well, there he was. Twin engines, looked like a Beech King Air. No lights, cruising a lot lower than his most efficient cruise altitude.
Okay, Bronco thought, slowing his fighter down, then lighting him up and making the first radio call.
It was a druggie, all right. He did the same dumbass thing they all did, reducing power, lowering flaps, and diving for the deck. Winters had never gotten past the fourth level of Donkey Kong, but popping a real airplane under these circumstances was a hell of a lot easier than that, and you didn’t even have to put in a quarter ... but he was bored.
Okay, let’s try something different.
He let the aircraft go down, maintaining his own altitude and power setting to pass well ahead of it. He checked to make sure that all of his flying lights were off, then threw the Eagle into a tight left-hand turn. This brought his fire-control radar in on the target, and that allowed him to spot the King Air on his infrared scanner, which was wired in to a videotape recorder the same way his gun systems were.
You think you’ve lost me, don’t you....
Now for the fun part. It was a really dark one tonight. No stars, no moon, solid overcast at ten or twelve thousand feet. The Eagle was painted in a blue-gray motif that was supposed to blend in with the sky anyway, and at night it was even better than flat-matte black. He was invisible. The crew in the Beech must be looking all over creation for him, he knew. Looking everywhere but directly forward.
They were flying at fifty feet, and on his screen Captain Winters saw that their propwash was throwing up spray from the waves—five- or six-footers, he thought—just over a mile away. He came straight in at one hundred feet and five hundred knots. Exactly a mile from the target, he put on his lights again.
It was so predictable. The Beech pilot saw the incoming, sun-bright lights, seemingly dead-on, and instinctively did what any pilot would do. He banked hard right and dove—exactly fifty feet—cartwheeling spectacularly into the sea. Probably didn’t even have time to realize what he’d done wrong, Bronco thought, then he laughed out loud as he yanked back on the stick and rolled to give it a last look. Now that was a class kill, Captain Winters told himself as he turned for home. The Agency people would really love that one. And best of all, he was now an ace. You didn’t have to shoot them down for it to count. You just had to get the kill.
13.
The Bloody
Weekend
IT REALLY WASN’T fair to make him wait, was it? Moira thought on her drive home Wednesday afternoon. What if he couldn’t come? What if he needed notice in advance? What if he had something important scheduled in for the weekend? What if he couldn’t make it?
She had to call him.
Mrs. Wolfe reached into the purse at her side and felt for the scrap of hotel stationery—it was still there in the zipper pocket—and the numbers written on it seemed to burn into her skin. She had to call him.
Traffic was confused today. Somebody had blown a tire on the 14th Street Bridge,
and her hands sweated on the plastic steering wheel. What if he couldn’t make it?
What about the kids? They were old enough to look after themselves, that was the easy part—but how to explain to them that their mother was going off for a weekend to—what was the phrase they used? To “get laid.” Their mother. How would they react? It hadn’t occurred to her that her horrible secret was nothing of the kind, not to her children, not to her co-workers, not to her boss, and she would have been dumbfounded to know that all of them were rooting for her ... to get laid. Moira Wolfe had missed the sexual revolution by only a year or two. She’d taken her fearful-hopeful-passionate-frightened virginity to the marriage bed, and always thought that her husband had done the same. He must have, she’d told herself then and later, because they’d both botched things so badly the first time. But within three days they’d had the basics figured out—youthful vigor and love could handle almost anything—and over the next twenty-two years the two newlyweds had truly become one.
The void left in her life by the loss of her husband was like an open sore that would not heal. His picture was at her bedside, taken only a year before his death, working on his sailboat. No longer a young man when it had been taken, love handles at his waist, much of his hair gone, but the smile. What was it Juan said? You look with love, and see love returned. Such a fine way of putting it, Moira thought.
My God, What would Rich think? She’d asked herself that question more than once. Every time she looked at the photograph before sleep. Every time she looked at her children on the way in or out of the house, hoping that they didn’t suspect, knowing in a way conscious thought did not touch that they must know. But what choice did she have? Was she supposed to wear widow’s weeds—that was a custom best left in the distant past. She’d mourned for the appropriate time, hadn’t she? She’d wept alone in her bed when a phrase crossed her mind, on the anniversaries of all the special dates that acquire meaning in the twenty-two years that two lives merge into one, and, often enough, just from looking at that picture of Rich on the boat that they’d saved years for....