Clear and Present Danger

by Tom Clancy

  He met with the peasants in another room on another floor after washing his hands and changing his clothes. They were frightened, but not of Cortez, which surprised Félix greatly. It took several minutes to understand why. They told their stories in an overly rapid and disjointed manner, which he allowed, memorizing the details—some of them conflicting, but that was not unexpected since there were two of them—before he began asking his own, directed questions.

  “The rifles were not AK-47s,” one said positively. “I know the sound. It was not that one.” The other shrugged. He didn’t know one weapon from another.

  “Did you see anyone?”

  “No, señor. We heard the noise and the shouting, and we ran.”

  Very sensible of you, Cortez noted. “Shouting, you say? In what language?”

  “Why, in our language. We heard them chasing after us, but we ran. They didn’t catch us. We know the mountains,” the weapons expert explained.

  “You saw and heard nothing else?”

  “The shooting, the explosions, lights—flashes from the guns, that is all.”

  “The place where it happened—how many times had you been there?”

  “Many times, señor, it is where we make the paste.”

  “Many times,” the other confirmed. “For over a year we have gone there.”

  “You will tell no one that you came here. You will tell no one anything that you know,” Félix told them.

  “But the families of—”

  “You will tell no one,” Cortez repeated in a quiet, serious voice. Both men knew danger when they saw it. “You will be well rewarded for what you have done, and the families of the others will be compensated.”

  Cortez deemed himself a fair man. These two mountain folk had served his purposes well, and they would be properly rewarded. He still didn’t know where the leak was, but if he could get ahold of one of those—what? M-19 bands? Somehow he didn’t think so.

  Then who?

  Americans?

  If anything, the death of Rocha had only increased their resolve, Chavez knew. Captain Ramirez had taken it pretty hard, but that was to be expected from a good officer. Their new patrol base was only two miles from one of the many coffee plantations in the area, and two miles in a different direction from yet another processing site. The men were in their normal daytime routine. Half asleep, half standing guard.

  Ramirez sat alone. Chavez was correct. He had taken it hard. In an intellectual sense, the captain knew that he should accept the death of one of his men as a simple cost of doing business. But emotions are not the same as intellect. It was also true, though Ramirez didn’t think along these precise lines, that historically there is no way to predict which officers are suited for combat operations and which are not. Ramirez had committed a typical mistake for combat leaders. He had grown too close to his men. He was unable to think of them as expendable assets. His failure had nothing to do with courage. The captain had enough of that; risking his own life was a part of the job he readily accepted. Where he failed was in understanding that risking the lives of his men—which he also knew to be part of the job—inevitably meant that some would die. Somehow he’d forgotten that. As a company commander he’d led his men on countless field exercises, training them, showing them how to do their jobs, chiding them when their laser-sensing Miles gear went off to denote a simulated casualty. But Rocha hadn’t been a simulation, had he? And it wasn’t as though Rocha had been a slick-sleeved new kid. He’d been a skilled pro. That meant that he’d somehow failed his men, Ramirez told himself, knowing that it was wrong even as he thought it. If he’d deployed better, if he’d paid more attention, if, if, if. The young captain tried to shake it off but couldn’t. But he couldn’t quit either. So he’d be more careful next time.

  The tape cassettes arrived together just after lunch. The COD flight from Ranger, unbeknownst to anyone involved, had been coordinated with a courier flight from Bogotá. Larson had handled part of it, flying the tape from the GLD to El Dorado where he handed it off to another CIA officer. Both cassettes were tucked in the satchel of an Agency courier who rode in the front cabin of the Air Force C-5A transport, catching a few hours’ sleep in one of the cramped bunks on the right side of the aircraft, a few feet behind the flight deck. The flight came directly into Andrews, and, after its landing, the forty-foot ladder was let down into the cavernous cargo area and the courier walked out the opened cargo door to a waiting Agency car which sped directly to Langley.

  Ritter had a pair of television sets in his office, each with its own VCR. He watched them alone, cueing the tapes until they were roughly synchronized. The one from the aircraft didn’t show very much. You could see the laser dot and the rough outline of the house, but little else until the flash of the detonation. Clark’s tape was far better. There was the house, its lighted windows flaring in the light-amplified picture, and the guards wandering about—those with cigarettes looked like lightning bugs; each time they took a drag their faces were lit brightly by the glow. Then the bomb. It was very much like watching a Hitch-cock movie, Ritter thought. He knew what was happening, but those on the screen did not. They wandered around aimlessly, unaware of the part they played in a drama written in the office of the Deputy Director (Operations) of the Central Intelligence Agency. But—

  “That’s funny ...” Ritter said to himself. He used his remote control to back up the tape. Seconds before the bomb went off, a new car appeared at the gate. “Who might you be?” he asked the screen. Then he fast-forwarded the tape past the explosion. The car he’d seen driving up—a BMW—had been flipped over by the shock wave, but seconds later the driver got out and pulled a pistol.

  “Cortez ...” He froze the frame. The picture didn’t tell him much. It was a man of medium dimensions. While everyone else around the wrecked house raced about without much in the way of purpose, this man just stood there for a little while, then revived himself at the fountain—wasn’t it odd that it still worked! Ritter thought—and next went to where the bomb had gone off. He couldn’t have been a retainer of one of the Cartel members. They were all plowing through the rubble by this time. No, this one was already trying to figure out what had happened. It was right before the tape changed over to blank noise that he got the best picture. That had to be Félix Cortez. Looking around, already thinking, already trying to figure things out. That was a real pro.

  “Damn, that was close,” Ritter breathed. “One more minute and you would have parked your car over with the others. One more damned minute!” Ritter pulled both tapes and tucked them in his office safe along with all of the EAGLE EYE, SHOWBOAT, and RECIPROCITY material. Next time, he promised the tape cassette. Then he started thinking. Was Cortez really involved in the assassination?

  “Gawd,” Ritter said aloud in his office. He’d assumed that, but ... Would he have set up the crime and then come to America ... ? Why do such a thing? According to the statement that secretary had made, he’d not even pumped her very hard for information. Instead it had been a basic get-away-with-your-lover weekend. The technique was a classic one. First, seduce the target. Second, determine if you can get information from her (usually him the way Western intelligence services handled sexual recruitments, but the other way around for the Eastern bloc). Third, firm up the relationship—and then use it. If Ritter understood the evidence properly, Cortez hadn’t yet gotten to the point ...

  It wasn’t Cortez at all, was it? He’d probably forwarded what information he had as a matter of course, not knowing about the FBI operation against the Cartel’s money operations. He hadn’t been there when the decision to whack the Director had been made. And he would have recommended against it. Why lash out when you have just developed a good intel source? No, that wasn’t professional at all.

  So, Félix, how do you feel about all this? Ritter would have traded much for the ability to ask that question, though the answer was plain enough. Intelligence officers were regularly betrayed by their political superiors. It
wouldn’t be the first time for him, but he’d be angry just the same. Just as angry as Ritter was with Admiral Cutter.

  For the first time, Ritter found himself wondering what Cortez was really doing. Probably he had simply defected away from Cuba and made a mercenary of himself. The Cartel had hired him on for his training and experience, thinking that they were buying just another mercenary—a very good one to be sure, but a mercenary nonetheless. Just like they bought local cops—hell, American cops—and politicians. But a police officer wasn’t the same thing as a professional spook educated at Moscow Center. He was giving them his advice, and he’d think they had betrayed him—well, acted very stupidly, because killing Emil Jacobs had been an act of emotion, not of reason.

  Why didn’t I see that before! Ritter growled at himself. The answer: because not seeing had given him an excuse to do something he’d always wanted to do. He hadn’t thought because somehow he’d known that thinking would have prevented him from taking action.

  Cortez wasn’t a terrorist, was he? He was an intelligence officer. He’d worked with the Macheteros because he’d been assigned to the job. Before that his experience had been straight espionage, and merely because he’d worked with that loony Puerto Rican group, they’d just assumed ... That was probably one reason why he’d defected.

  It was clearer now. The Cartel had hired Cortez for his expertise and experience. But in doing so they had adopted a pet wolf. And wolves made for dangerous pets, didn’t they?

  For the moment there was one thing he could do. Ritter summoned an aide and instructed him to take the best frame they had of Cortez, run it through the photo-enhancing computer, and forward it to the FBI. That was something worth doing, so long as they isolated the figure from the background, but that was just another task for the imaging computer.

  Admiral Cutter remained at his White House office while the President was away in the western Maryland hills. He’d fly up every day for his usual morning briefing—delivered at a somewhat later hour while the President was on his “vacation” regime—but for the most part he’d stay here. He had his own duties, one of which was being “a senior administration official.” ASAO, as he thought of the title, was his name when he gave off-the-record press briefings. Such information was a vital part of presidential policymaking, all part of an elaborate game played by the government and the press: Official Leaking. Cutter would send up “trial balloons,” what people in the consumer-products business called test-marketing. When the President had a new idea that he was not too sure about, Cutter—or the appropriate cabinet secretary, each of whom was also an ASAO—would speak on background, and a story would be written in the major papers, allowing Congress and others to react to the idea before it was given an official presidential imprimatur. It was a way for elected officials and other players in the Washington scene to dance and posture without the need for anyone to lose face—an Oriental concept that translated well inside the confines of the Capital Beltway.

  Bob Holtzman, the senior White House correspondent for one of the Washington papers, settled into his chair opposite Cutter for the deep-background revelations. The rules were fully understood by both sides. Cutter could say anything he wished without fear that his name, title, or the location of his office would be used. Holtzman would feel free to write the story any way he wished, within reason, so long as he did not compromise his source to anyone except his editor. Neither man especially liked the other. Cutter’s distaste for journalists was about the only thing he still had in common with his fellow military officers, though he was certain that he concealed it. He thought them all, especially the one before him now, to be lazy, stupid people who couldn’t write and didn’t think. Holtzman felt that Cutter was the wrong man in the wrong place—the reporter didn’t like the idea of having a military officer giving such intimate advice to the President; more importantly, he thought Cutter was a shallow, self-serving apple-polisher with delusions of grandeur, not to mention an arrogant son of a bitch who looked upon reporters as a semiuseful form of domesticated vulture. As a result of such thoughts, they got along rather well.

  “You going to be watching the convention next week?” Holtzman asked.

  “I try not to concern myself with politics,” Cutter replied. “Coffee?”

  Right! the reporter told himself. “No, thanks. What the hell’s going on down in coca land?”

  “Your guess is as good as—well, that’s not true. We’ve had the bastards under surveillance for some time. My guess is that Emil was killed by one faction of the Cartel—no surprise—but without their having made a really official decision. The bombing last night might be indicative of a faction fight inside the organization.”

  “Well, somebody’s pretty pissed,” Holtzman observed, scribbling notes on his pad under his personal heading for Cutter. “A Senior Administration Official” was transcribed as ASO‘l. “The word is that the Cartel contracted M-19 to do the assassination, and that the Colombians really worked over the one they caught.”

  “Maybe they did.”

  “How’d they know that Director Jacobs was going down?”

  “I don’t know,” Cutter replied.

  “Really? You know that his secretary tried to commit suicide. The Bureau isn’t talking at all, but I find that a remarkable coincidence.”

  “Who’s running the case over there? Believe it or not, I don’t know.”

  “Dan Murray, a deputy assistant director. He’s not actually doing the field work, but he’s the guy reporting to Shaw.”

  “Well, that’s not my turf. I’m looking at the overseas aspects of the case, but the domestic stuff is in another office,” Cutter pointed out, erecting a stone wall that Holtzman couldn’t breach.

  “So the Cartel was pretty worked up about Operation TARPON, and some senior people acted without the approval of the whole outfit to take Jacobs out. Other members, you say, think that their action was precipitous and decided to eliminate those who put out the contract?”

  “That’s the way it looks now. You have to understand, our intel on this is pretty thin.”

  “Our intel is always pretty thin,” Holtzman pointed out.

  “You can talk to Bob Ritter about that.” Cutter set his coffee mug down.

  “Right.” Holtzman smiled. If there were two people in Washington whom you could trust never to leak anything, it was Bob Ritter and Arthur Moore. “What about Jack Ryan?”

  “He’s just settling in. He’s been in Belgium all week anyway, at the NATO intel conference.”

  “There are rumbles on The Hill that somebody ought to do something about the Cartel, that the attack on Jacobs was a direct attack on—”

  “I watch C-SPAN, too, Bob. Talk is cheap.”

  “And what Governor Fowler said this morning ... ?”

  “I’ll leave politics to the politicians.”

  “You know that the price of coke is up on the street?”

  “Oh? I’m not in that market. Is it?” Cutter hadn’t heard that yet. Already ...

  “Not much, but some. There’s word on the street that incoming shipments are off a little.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “But no comment?” Holtzman asked. “You’re the one who’s been saying that this is a for-real war and we ought to treat it as such.”

  Cutter’s smile froze on his face for a moment. “The President decides about things like war.”

  “What about Congress?”

  “Well, that, too, but since I’ve been in government service there hasn’t been a congressional declaration along those lines.”

  “How would you feel personally if we were involved in that bombing?”

  “I don’t know. We weren’t involved.” The interview wasn’t going as planned. What did Holtzman know?

  “That was a hypothetical,” the reporter pointed out.

  “Okay. We go off the record—completely—at this point. Hypothetically, we could kill all the bastards and I wouldn’t shed many tears. How a
bout you?”

  Holtzman snorted. “Off the record, I agree with you. I grew up here. I can remember when it was safe to walk the streets. Now I look at the body count every morning and wonder if I’m in D.C. or Beirut. So it wasn’t us, then?”

  “Nope. Looks more like the Cartel is shaking itself out. That’s speculation, but it’s the best we have at the moment.”

  “Fair enough. I suppose I can make a story out of that.”

  20.

  Discoveries

  IT WAS AMAZING. But it was also true. Cortez had been there for over an hour. There were six armed men with him, and a dog that sniffed around for signs of the people who had assaulted this processing site. The empty cartridge cases were mostly of the 5.56mm round now used by most of the NATO countries and their surrogates all over the world, but which had begun as the .223 Remington sporting cartridge. In America. There were also a number of 9mm cases, and a single empty hull from a 40mm grenade launcher. One of the attackers had been wounded, perhaps severely. The method of the attack was classic, a fire unit uphill and an assault group on the same level, to the north. They’d left hastily, not booby-trapping the bodies as had happened in two other cases. Probably because of the injured man, Cortez judged. Also because they knew—suspected? No, they probably knew—that two men had gotten away to summon help.

  Definitely more than one team was roaming the mountains. Maybe three or four, judging by the number and location of sites that had so far been attacked. That eliminated M-19. There weren’t enough trained men in that organization to do something like this—not without his hearing of it, he corrected himself. The Cartel had done more than suborn the local guerrilla factions. It also had paid informants in each unit, something the Colombian government had signally failed to do.