Clear and Present Danger

by Tom Clancy

  So, he told himself, now you have probable American covert-action teams working in the hills. Who and what are they? Probably soldiers, or very high-quality mercenaries. More likely the former. The international mercenary community wasn’t what it had once been—and truthfully had never been especially effective. Cortez had been to Angola and seen what African troops were like. Mercenaries hadn’t had to be all that effective to defeat them, though that was now changing along with everything else in the world.

  Whoever they were, they’d be far away—far enough that he didn’t feel uncomfortable at the moment, though he’d leave the hunting to others. Cortez was an intelligence officer, and had no illusions about being a soldier. For now, he gathered his evidence almost like a policeman. The rifle and machine-gun cartridges, he saw, came from a single manufacturer. He didn’t have such information committed to memory, but he noted that the 9mm cases had the same lot codes—stamped on the case heads—as those he’d gotten from one of the airfields on Colombia’s northern coast. The odds against that being a coincidence were pretty high, he thought. So whoever had been watching the airfields had moved here ... ? How would that have been done? The simple way would be by truck or bus, but that was a little too simple; that’s how M-19 would have done it. Too great a risk for Americans, however. The yanquis would use helicopters. Staging from where? A ship, perhaps, or more likely one of their bases in Panama. He knew of no American naval exercises within helicopter range of the coast. Therefore a large aircraft capable of midair refueling. Only the Americans did that. And it would have to be based in Panama. And he had assets in Panama. Cortez pocketed the cartridges and started walking down the hill. Now he had a starting place, and that was all someone with his training needed.

  Ryan’s VC-20A—thinking of it as his airplane still required a stretch of the imagination—lifted off from the airfield outside Mons in the early afternoon. His first official foray into the big leagues of the international intelligence business had gone well. His paper on the Soviets and their activities in Eastern Europe had met with general approval and agreement, and he’d been gratified to learn that the analysis chiefs of all the NATO intelligence agencies held exactly the same opinion of the changes in their enemy’s policies as he did: nobody knew what the hell was going on. There were theories ranging all the way from the peace-is-breaking-out-and-now-what-do-we-do? view to the equally unlikely it’s-all-a-trick opinion, but when it came down to doing a formal intelligence estimate, people who’d been in the business since before Jack was born just shook their heads and muttered into their beer—exactly what Ryan did some of the time. The really good news for the year, of course, was the signal success that the counterintelligence groups had had turning KGB operations throughout Europe, and while CIA had not told anyone (except Sir Basil, who’d been there when the plan had been hatched) exactly how that had come about, the Agency enjoyed considerable prestige for its work in that area. The bottom line that Jack had often cited in the investment business was fairly clear: militarily NATO was in its best-ever condition, its security services were riding higher than anyone thought possible—it was just that the alliance’s overall mission was now in doubt politically. To Ryan that looked like success, so long as politicians didn’t let things go to their heads, which was enough of a caveat for anyone.

  So there was a lot to smile about as the Belgian countryside fell farther and farther below him until it looked like a particularly attractive quilt from Pennsylvania Dutch country. At least on the actual NATO side.

  Possibly the truest testimony to NATO’s present happy condition, however, was that talk around the banquet tables and over coffee in the break periods between the plenary sessions was not on “business” as most of the conference attendees normally viewed it. Intelligence analysts from Germany and Italy, Britain and Norway, Denmark and Portugal, all of them expressed their concern at the growing problems of drugs in their countries. The Cartel’s activities were expanding eastward, no longer content with marketing their wares to America alone. The intelligence professionals had noted the assassination of Emil Jacobs and the rest and wondered aloud if international narcoterrorism had taken a wholly new and dangerous turn—and what had to be done about it. The French, with their history of vigorous action to protect their land, were especially approving of the bomb blast outside Medellín, and nonplussed by Ryan’s puzzled and somewhat exasperating response: No comment. I don’t know anything. Their reaction to that was predictable, of course. Had an equivalent French official been so publicly murdered, DGSE would have mounted an immediate operation. It was something the French were especially good at. It was something that the French media and, more to the point, the French people understood and approved. And so the DGSE representatives had expected Ryan to respond with a knowing smile to accompany his lack of comment, not blank embarrassment. That wasn’t part of the game as it was played in Europe, and just another odd thing about the Americans for their Old World allies to ponder. Must they be so unpredictable? they would ask themselves. Being that way to the Russians had strategic value, but not to one’s allies.

  And not to its own government officials, Ryan thought. What the hell is going on?

  Being three thousand miles from home had given Jack a properly detached perspective to the affair. In the absence of a viable legal mechanism to deal with such crimes, maybe direct action was the right thing to do. Challenge directly the power of a nation-state and you risked a direct response from that nation-state. If we could bomb a foreign country for sponsoring action against American soldiers in a Berlin disco, then why not—

  —kill people on the territory of a fellow American democracy?

  What about that political dimension?

  That was the rub, wasn’t it? Colombia had its own laws. It wasn’t Libya, ruled by a comic-opera figure of dubious stability. It wasn’t Iran, a vicious theocracy ruled by a bitter testimonial to the skill of gerontologists. Colombia was a country with real democratic traditions, one that had put its own institutions at risk, fighting to protect the citizens of another land from—themselves.

  What the hell are we doing?

  Right and wrong assumed different values at this level of statecraft, didn’t they? Or did they? What were the rules? What was the law? Were there any of either? Before he could answer those questions, Ryan knew that he’d have to learn the facts. That would be hard enough. Jack settled back into his comfortable seat and looked down at the English Channel, widening out like a funnel as the aircraft headed west toward Land’s End. Beyond that lonely point of ship-killing rocks lay the North Atlantic, and beyond that lay home. He had seven hours to decide what he should do once he got there. Seven whole hours, Jack thought, wondering how many times he could ask himself the same questions, and how many times he’d only come up with new questions instead of answers.

  Law was a trap, Murray told himself. It was a goddess to worship, a lovely bronze lady who held up her lantern in the darkness to show one the way. But what if the way led nowhere? They now had a dead-bang case against the one “suspect” in the assassination of the Director. The Colombians had gotten the confession and its thirty single-spaced pages of text were lying on his desk. There was ample physical evidence, which had been duly processed through the Bureau’s legendary forensic laboratories. There was just one little problem. The extradition treaty the United States had with Colombia was not operative at the moment. Colombia’s Supreme Court—more precisely, those justices who remained alive after twelve of their colleagues had been murdered by M-19 raiders not so long ago; all of whom, coincidentally, had been supporters of the extradition treaty before their violent deaths—had decided that the treaty was somehow in opposition to their country’s constitution. No treaty. No extradition. The assassin would be tried locally and doubtless sent away for a lengthy prison term, but at the very least Murray and the Bureau wanted him caged in Marion, Illinois—the maximum-security federal prison for really troublesome offenders; Alcatraz without the amb
ience—and the Justice Department thought it could make a case for invoking the death statute that related to drug-related murders. But—the confession the Colombians had gotten hadn’t exactly followed with American rules of evidence, and, the lawyers admitted, might be thrown out by an American judge; which would eliminate the death penalty. And the guy who took out the Director of the FBI might actually become something of a celebrity at Marion, Illinois, most of whose prisoners did not regard the FBI with the same degree of affection accorded by most U.S. citizens. The same thing, he’d learned the day before, was true of the Pirates Case. Some tricky bastard of a defense lawyer had uncovered what the Coast Guard had pulled, blowing that death case away also. And the only good news around was that Murray was sure his government had struck back in a way that was highly satisfying, but fell under the general legal category of cold-blooded murder.

  It worried Dan Murray that he did view that development as good news. It wasn’t the sort of thing that they’d lectured him—and he had later lectured others—about during his stint as a student and later an instructor at the FBI Academy, was it? What happened when governments broke the law? The textbook answer was anarchy—at least that’s what happened when it became known that the government was breaking its own laws. But that was the really operative definition of a criminal, wasn’t it—one who got caught breaking the law.

  “No,” Murray told himself quietly. He’d spent his life following that light because on dark nights that one beacon of sanity was all society had. His mission and the Bureau’s was to enforce the laws of his country faithfully and honestly. There was leeway—there had to be, because the written words couldn’t anticipate everything—but when the letter of the law was insufficient one was guided by the principle upon which the law was based. Maybe the situation wasn’t always a satisfying one, but it beat the alternative, didn’t it? But what did you do when the law didn’t work? Was that just part of the game, too? Was it, after all was said and done, just a game?

  Clark held a somewhat different view. Law had never been his concern—at least not his immediate concern. To him “legal” meant that something was “okay,” not that some legislators had drafted a set of rules, and that some President or other had signed it. To him it meant that the sitting President had decided that the continued existence of someone or something was contrary to the best interests of his country. His government service had begun in the United States Navy as part of the SEALs, the Navy’s elite, secretive commandos. In that tight, quiet community he’d made himself a name that was still spoken with respect: Snake, they’d called him, because you couldn’t hear his footsteps. To the best of his knowledge, no enemy had ever seen him and lived to tell the tale. His name had been different then, of course, but only because after leaving the Navy he’d made the mistake—he truly thought of it as a mistake, but only in the technical sense—of applying his skills on a free-agent basis. And done quite well, of course, until the police had discovered his identity. The lesson from that adventure was that while people didn’t really investigate happenings on the battlefield, they did elsewhere, requiring far greater circumspection on his part. A foolish error in retrospect, one result of his almost-discovery by a local police force was that he’d come to the attention of CIA, which occasionally needed people with his unique skills. It was even something of a joke: “When there’s killing to be done, get someone who kills for a living.” At least it had been funny back then, almost twenty years earlier.

  Others decided who needed to die. Those others were the properly selected representatives of the American people, whom he’d served in one way or another for most of his adult life. The law, as he’d once bothered to find out, was that there was no law. If the President said “kill,” then Clark was merely the instrument of properly defined government policy, all the more so now, since selected members of Congress had to agree with the executive branch. The rules which from time to time prohibited such acts were Executive Orders from the President’s office, which orders the President could freely violate—or more precisely, redefine to suit the situation. Of course, Clark did very little of that. Mainly his jobs for the Agency involved his other skills—getting in and out of places without being detected, for example, at which he was the best guy around. But killing was the reason he’d been hired in the first place, and for Clark, who’d been baptized John Terrence Kelly at St. Ignatius Parish in Indianapolis, Indiana, it was simply an act of war sanctioned both by his country and also by his religion, about which he was moderately serious. Vietnam had never been granted the legal sanction of a declared war, after all, and if killing his country’s enemies back then had been all right, why not now? Murder to the renamed John T. Clark was killing people without just cause. Law he left to lawyers, in the knowledge that his definition of just cause was far more practical, and far more effective.

  His immediate concern was his next target. He had two more days of availability on the carrier battle group, and he wanted to stage another stealth-bombing if he could.

  Clark was domiciled in a frame house in the outskirts of Bogotá, a safe house the CIA had set up a decade earlier, officially owned by a corporate front and generally rented out commercially to visiting American businessmen. It had no obvious special features. The telephone was ordinary until he attached a portable encrypting device—a simple one that wouldn’t have passed muster in Eastern Europe, but sufficient for the relatively low-intercept threat down here—and he also had a satellite dish that operated just fine through a not very obvious hole in the roof and also ran through an encrypting system that looked much the same as a portable cassette player.

  So what to do next? he asked himself. The Untiveros bombing had been carefully executed to look like a car bomb. Why not another, a real one? The trick was setting it up to scare hell out of the intended targets, flushing them into a better target area. To accomplish that it had to appear an earnest attempt, but at the same time it couldn’t be earnest enough to injure innocent people. That was the problem with car bombs.

  Low-order detonation? he thought. That was an idea. Make the bomb look like an earnest attempt that fizzled. Too hard to do, he decided.

  Best of all would be a simple assassination with a rifle, but that was too hard to set up. Just getting a perch overlooking the proper place would be difficult and dangerous. The Cartel overlords kept tabs on every window with a line of sight to their own domiciles. If an American rented one, and soon thereafter a shot was fired from it—well, that wouldn’t exactly be covert, would it? The whole point was for them not to know exactly what was happening.

  Clark’s operational concept was an elegantly simple one. So elegant and so simple that it hadn’t occurred to the supposed experts in “black” operations at Langley. What Clark wanted to do, simply, was to kill enough of the people on his list to increase the paranoia within his targeted community. Killing them all, desirable though it might be, was a practical impossibility. What he wanted to do was merely to kill enough of them, and to do so in such a way as to spark another reaction entirely.

  The Cartel was composed of a number of very ruthless people whose intelligence was manifested in the sort of cunning most often associated with a skilled enemy on the battlefield. Like good soldiers they were always alert to danger, but unlike soldiers they looked for danger from within in addition to from without. Despite the success of their collaborative enterprise, these men were rivals. Flushed with money and power, they didn’t and would never have enough. There was never enough of either for men like this, but power most of all. It seemed to Clark and others that their ultimate goal was to assume political control of their country, but countries are not run by committees, at least not by large ones. All Clark needed to accomplish was to make the Cartel chieftains think that there was a power grab underway within their own hierarchy, at which point they would merrily start killing one another off in a new version of the Mafia wars of the 1930s.

  Maybe, he admitted to himself. He gave the plan about
a 30 percent chance of total success. But even if it failed, some major players would be removed from the field, and that, too, counted as a tactical success if not a strategic one. Weakening the Cartel might increase Colombia’s chances of dealing with it, which was another possible strategic outcome, but not the only one. There was also the chance that the war he was hoping to start could have the same result as the final act of the Castellammare Wars, remembered as the Night of the Italian Vespers, in which scores of mafiosi had been killed by their own colleagues. What had grown out of that bloody night was a stronger, better-organized, and more dangerous organized-crime network under the far more sophisticated leadership of Carlo Luchiano and Vito Genovese. That was a real danger, Clark thought. But things couldn’t get much worse than they already were. Or so Washington had decided. It was a gamble worth the taking.

  Larson arrived at the house. He’d come here only once before, and while it was in keeping with Clark’s cover as a visiting prospector of sorts—there were several boxes of rocks lying around the house—it was one aspect of the mission that bothered him.

  “Catch the news?”

  “Everyone says car bomb,” Larson replied with a sly smile. “We won’t be that lucky next time.”

  “Probably not. The next one has to be really spectacular.”

  “Don’t look at me! You don’t expect that I’m going to find out when the next meet is, do you?”

  It would be nice, Clark told himself, but he didn’t expect it, and would have disapproved any order requiring it. “No, we have to pray for another intercept. They have to meet. They have to get together and discuss what’s happened.”