Clear and Present Danger

by Tom Clancy

  “Good evening, boss,” Ryan said as he took his seat.

  “Hi, Jack.” Admiral Greer smiled as much as he could. “How do you like the new job?”

  “Well, I’m keeping your chair warm.”

  “It’s your chair now, son,” the DDI pointed out. “Even if I do get out of here, I think it’s time to retire.”

  Jack didn’t like the way he pronounced the word if.

  “I don’t think I’m ready yet, sir.”

  “Nobody’s ever ready. Hell, when I was still a naval officer, about the time I actually learned how to do the job, it was time to leave. That’s the way life is, Jack.”

  Ryan thought that one over as he surveyed the room. Admiral Greer was getting his nourishment through clear plastic tubes. A blue-green gadget that looked like a splint kept the needles in his arm, but he could see where previous IV lines had “infiltrated” and left ugly bruises. That was always a bad sign. Next to the IV bottle was a smaller one, piggybacked with the D5W. That was the medication he was being given, the chemotherapy. It was a fancy name for poison, and poison was exactly what it was, a biocide that was supposed to kill the cancer a little faster than it killed the patient. He didn’t know what this one was, some acronym or other that designated a compound developed at the National Institutes of Health instead of the Army’s Chemical Warfare Center. Or maybe, Jack thought, they cooperated on such concoctions. Certainly Greer looked as though he were the victim of some dreadful, vicious experiment.

  But that wasn’t true. The best people in the field were doing everything they knew to keep him alive. And failing. Ryan had never seen his boss so thin. It seemed that every time he came—never less than three times per week—he’d lost additional weight. His eyes burned with defiant energy, but the light at the end of this painful tunnel was not recovery. He knew it. So did Jack. There was only one thing he could do to ease the pain. And this he did. Jack opened his briefcase and took out some documents.

  “You want to look these over.” Ryan handed them over.

  They nearly tangled on the IV lines, and Greer grumbled his annoyance at the plastic spaghetti.

  “You’re leaving for Belgium tomorrow night, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Give my regards to Rudi and Franz from the BND. And watch the local beer, son.”

  Ryan laughed. “Yes, sir.”

  Admiral Greer scanned through the first folder. “The Hungarians are still at it, I see.”

  “They got the word to cool it down, and they have, but the underlying problem isn’t going to go away. I think it’s in the interests of everyone concerned that they should cool it. Our friend Gerasimov has given us some tips on how to get word to a few people ourselves.”

  Greer nearly laughed at that. “It figures. How is the former KGB Director adapting to life in America?”

  “Not as well as his daughter is. Turns out that she always wanted a nose job. Well, she got her wish.” Jack grinned. “Last time I saw her she was working on a tan. She restarts college next fall. The wife is still a little antsy, and Gerasimov is still cooperating. We haven’t figured out what to do with him when we’re finished, though.”

  “Tell Arthur to show him my old place up in Maine. He’ll like the climate, and it ought to be easy to guard.”

  “I’ll pass that along.”

  “How do you like being let in on all the Operations stuff?” James Greer asked.

  “Well, what I’ve seen is interesting enough, but there’s still ‘need-to-know’ to worry about.”

  “Says who?” the DDI asked in surprise.

  “Says the Judge,” Jack replied. “They have a couple of things poppin’ that they don’t want me in on.”

  “Oh, really?” Greer was quiet for a moment. “Jack, in case nobody ever told you, the Director, the Deputy Director—they still haven’t refilled that slot, have they?—and the directorate chiefs are cleared for everything. You are now a chief of directorate. There isn’t anything you aren’t supposed to know. You have to know. You brief Congress.”

  Ryan waved it off. It wasn’t important, really. “Well, maybe the Judge doesn’t see things that way and—”

  The DDI tried to sit up in bed. “Listen up, son. What you just said is bullshit! You have to know, and you tell Arthur I said so. That ‘need-to-know’ crap stops at the door to my office.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll take care of that.” Ryan didn’t want his boss to get upset. He was only an acting chief of directorate, after all, and he was accustomed to being cut out of operational matters which, for the past six years, he’d been quite content to leave to others. Jack wasn’t ready to challenge the DCI on something like this. His responsibility for the Intelligence Directorate’s output to Congress, of course, was something he would make noise over.

  “I’m not kidding, Jack.”

  “Yes, sir.” Ryan pointed to another folder. He’d fight that battle after he got back from Europe. “Now, this development in South Africa is especially interesting and I want your opinion....”

  15.

  Deliverymen

  CLARK WALKED OFF the United flight in San Diego and rented a car for the drive to the nearby naval base. It didn’t take very long. He felt the usual pang of nostalgia when he saw the towering gray-blue hulls. He’d once been a part of this team, and though he’d been young and foolish then, he remembered it fondly as a time in which things were simpler.

  USS Ranger was a busy place. Clark parked his car at the far end of the area used by the enlisted crewmen and walked toward the quay, dodging around the trucks, cranes, and other items of mobile hardware that cycled in and out from their numerous tasks. The carrier was preparing to sail in another eight hours, and her thousands of sailors were on-loading all manner of supplies. Her flight deck was empty save for a single old F-4 Phantom fighter which no longer had any engines and was used for training new members of the flight-deck crew. The carrier’s air wing was scattered among three different naval air stations and would fly out after the carrier sailed. That fact spared the pilots of the wing from the tumult normal to a carrier’s departure. Except for one.

  Clark walked up to the officer’s brow, guarded by a Marine corporal who had his name written down on his clipboard list of official visitors. The Marine checked off the line on his list and lifted the dock phone to make the call that was mandated by his instructions. Clark just kept going up the steps, entering the carrier at the hangar-deck level, then looking around for a way topside. Finding one’s way around a carrier is not easy for the uninitiated, but if you kept going up you generally found the flight deck soon enough. This he did, heading for the forward starboard-side elevator. Standing there was an officer whose khaki collar bore the silver leaf of a Commander, USN. There was also a gold star over one shirt pocket that denoted command at sea. Clark was looking for the CO of a squadron of Grumman A-6E Intruder medium attack bombers.

  “Your name Jensen?” he asked. He’d flown down early to make this appointment.

  “That’s right, sir. Roy Jensen. And you are Mr. Carlson?”

  Clark smiled. “Something like that.” He motioned to the officer to follow him forward. The flight deck here was idle. Most of the loading activity was aft. They walked toward the bow across the black no-skid decking material, little different from the blacktop on any country road. Both men had to talk loudly to be heard. There was plenty of noise from the dock, plus a fifteen-knot onshore wind. Several people could see the two men talking, but with all the activity on the carrier’s flight deck, there was little likelihood that anyone would notice. And you couldn’t bug a flight deck. Clark handed over an envelope and let Jensen read its contents before taking it back. By this time they were nearly at the bow, standing between the two catapult tracks.

  “This for-real?”

  “That’s right. Can you handle it?”

  Jensen thought for a moment, staring off into the naval base.

  “Sure. Who’s going to be on the ground?”


  “Not supposed to tell you—but it’s going to be me.”

  “The battle group’s not supposed to be going down there, you know—”

  “That’s already been changed.”

  “What about the weapons?”

  “They’re being loaded aboard Shasta tomorrow. They’ll be painted blue, and they’re light for—”

  “I know. I did one of the drops a few weeks ago over at China Lake.”

  “Your CAG will get the orders three days from now. But he won’t know what’s happening. Neither will anybody else. We’ll have a ‘tech-rep’ flown aboard with the weapons. He’ll baby-sit the mission from this side. Your BDA cassettes go to him. Nobody else sees them. He’s bringing his own set, and they’re color-coded with orange-and-purple tape so they don’t get mixed up with anything else. You got a B/N you can trust to keep his mouth shut?”

  “With these orders?” Commander Jensen asked. “No sweat.”

  “Fair enough. The ‘tech-rep’ will have the details when he gets aboard. He reports to the CAG first, but he’ll ask to see you. From there on it’s eyes-only. The CAG’ll know that it’s a quiet project. If he asks about it, just tell him it’s a Drop-Ex to evaluate a new weapon.” Clark raised an eyebrow. “It really is a Drop-Ex, isn’t it?”

  “The people we’re—”

  “What people? You do not need to know. You do not want to know,” Clark said. “If you have a problem with that, I want you to tell me right now.”

  “Hey, I told you we could do it. I was just curious.”

  “You’re old enough to know better.” Clark delivered the line gently. He didn’t want to insult the man, though he did have to get the message across.

  “Okay.”

  USS Ranger was about to deploy for an extended battle-group exercise whose objective was work-ups: battle practice to prepare the group for a deployment to the Indian Ocean. They were scheduled for three weeks of intensive operations that involved everything from carrier landing practice to underway-replenishment drills, with a mock attack from another carrier battle group returning from WestPac. The operations would be carried out, Commander Jensen had just learned, about three hundred miles from Panama instead of farther west. The squadron commander wondered who had the juice to reroute a total of thirty-one ships, some of them outrageous fuelhogs. That confirmed the source of the orders he’d just been given. Jensen was a careful man; though he’d gotten a very official telephone call, and the orders hand-delivered by Mr. Carlson said everything they needed to say, it was nice to have outside confirmation.

  “That’s it. You’ll get notice when you need it. Figure eight hours or so of warning time. That enough?”

  “No sweat. I’ll make sure the ordies put the weapons in a convenient place. You be careful on the ground, Mr. Carlson.”

  “I’ll try.” Clark shook hands with the pilot and walked aft to find his way off the ship. He’d be catching another plane in two hours.

  The Mobile cops were in a particularly foul mood. Bad enough that one of their own had been murdered in such an obvious, brutal way, Mrs. Braden had made the mistake of coming to the door to see what was wrong and caught two rounds herself. The surgeons had almost saved her, but after thirty-six hours that too was over, and all the police had to show for it was a kid not yet old enough to drive who claimed to have hit one of the killers with his granddad’s Marlin ’39, and some bloodstains that might or might not have supported the story. The police preferred to believe that Braden had scored for the points, of course, but the experienced homicide investigators knew that a two-inch belly gun was the next thing to useless unless the shoot-out were held inside a crowded elevator. Every cop in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana was looking for a blue Plymouth Voyager minivan with two male Caucs, black hair, medium, medium, armed and dangerous, suspected cop-killers.

  The van was found Monday afternoon by a concerned citizen—there really were some in Alabama—who called the local county sheriff’s office, who in turned called the Mobile force.

  “The kid was right,” the lieutenant in charge of the case observed. The body on the back of the van was about as distasteful to behold as any cadaver would be after two days locked inside a car, in Alabama, in June, but for all that the hole near the base of the skull, just at the hairline, was definitely a .22. It was also clear that the killer had died in the right-front seat, hemorrhaging explosively from the head wound. There was one more thing.

  “I’ve seen this guy. He’s a druggie,” another detective observed.

  “So what was Ernie wrapped up with?”

  “Christ knows. What about his kids?” the detective asked. “They lose their mom and dad—we gonna tell the whole fucking world that their dad was a dirty cop? Do that to a couple of orphaned kids?”

  It merely required a single look for both men to agree that, no, you couldn’t do something like that. They’d find a way to make Ernie a hero, and damned sure somebody’d give the Sanderson kid a pat on the head.

  “Do you realize what you have done?” Cortez asked. He’d steeled himself going in to restrain his temper. In an organization of Latins, his would be—had to be—the only voice of reason. They would respect that in the same sense that the Romans valued chastity: a rare and admirable commodity best found in others.

  “I have taught the norteamericanos a lesson,” Escobedo replied with arrogant patience that nearly defeated Félix’s self-discipline.

  “And what did they do in reply?”

  Escobedo made a grand gesture with his hand, a gesture of power and satisfaction. “The sting of an insect.”

  “You also know, of course, that after all the effort I made to establish a valuable information source, you have pissed it away like—”

  “What source?”

  “The secretary of the FBI Director,” Cortez answered with his own self-satisfied smile.

  “And you cannot use her again?” Escobedo was puzzled.

  Fool! “Not unless you wish me to be arrested, jefe. Were that to happen, my services would cease to be useful to you. We could have used information from this woman, carefully, over years. We could have identified attempts to infiltrate the organization. We could have discovered what new ideas the norteamericanos have, and countered them, again carefully and thoughtfully, protecting our operations while allowing them enough successes to think that they were accomplishing something.” Cortez almost said that he’d just figured out why all those aircraft had disappeared, but didn’t. His anger wasn’t under that much control. Félix was just beginning to realize that he really could supplant the man who sat behind the desk. But first he would have to demonstrate his value to the organization and gradually prove to all of the criminals that he was more useful than this buffoon. Better to let them stew in their own juice for a while, the better to appreciate the difference between a trained intelligence professional and a pack of self-taught and over-rich smugglers.

  Ryan gazed down at the ocean, forty-two thousand feet below him. The VIP treatment wasn’t hard to get used to. As a directorate chief he also rated a special flight from Andrews direct to a military airfield outside of the NATO headquarters at Mons, Belgium. He was representing the Agency at a semiannual conference with his intelligence counterparts from the European Alliance. It would be a major performance. He had a speech to give, and favorable impressions to make. Though he knew many of the people who’d be there, he’d always been an upscale gofer for James Greer. Now he had to prove himself. But he’d succeed. Ryan was sure of that. He had three of his own department heads along, and a comfortable seat on a VC- 20A to remind him how important he was. He didn’t know that it was the same bird that had taken Emil Jacobs to Colombia. That was just as well. For all his education, Ryan remained superstitious.

  As Executive Assistant Director (Investigations), Bill Shaw was the Bureau’s senior official, and until a new Director was appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, he’d be acting Director. That might last fo
r a while. It was a presidential election year, and with the coming of summer, people were thinking about conventions, not appointments. Perversely, Shaw didn’t mind a bit. That meant that he’d be running things, and for a case of this magnitude, the Bureau needed an experienced cop at the helm. “Political realities” were not terribly important to William Shaw. Crime cases were something that agents solved, and to him the case was everything. His first act on learning of the death of Director Jacobs had been to recall his friend, Dan Murray. It would be Dan’s job to oversee the case from his deputy assistant director’s office, since there were at least two elements to it: the investigation in Colombia and the one in Washington. Murray’s experience as legal attaché in London gave him the necessary political sensitivity to understand that the overseas aspect of the case might not be handled to the Bureau’s satisfaction. Murray entered Shaw’s office at seven that morning. Neither had gotten much sleep in the previous two days, but they’d sleep on the plane. Director Jacobs would be buried in Chicago today, and they’d be flying out on the plane with the body to attend the funeral.

  “Well?”

  Dan flipped open his folder. “I just talked to Morales in Bogotá. The shooter they bagged is a stringer for M-19, and he doesn’t know shit. Name is Hector Buente, age twenty, college dropout from the University of the Andes—bad marks. Evidently the locals leaned on him a little bit—Morales says they’re pretty torqued about this—but the kid doesn’t know much. The shooters got a heads-up for an important job several days ago, but they didn’t know what or where until four hours before it actually took place. They didn’t know who was in the car aside from the ambassador. There was another team of shooters, by the way, staked out on a different route. They have some names, and the local cops’re taking the town apart looking for them. I think that’s a dead end. It was a contract job, and the people who know anything are long gone.”