Clear and Present Danger

by Tom Clancy

  He was barely a hundred pounds now, a scarecrow that had once been a man, a professional naval officer who’d commanded ships and led men in the service of their country. Fifty years of government service lay wasting away on the hospital bed. It was more than the death of a man. It was the death of an age, of a standard of behavior. Fifty years of experience and wisdom and judgment were slipping away. Jack took his seat next to the bed and waved the security officer out of the room.

  “Hey, boss.”

  His eyes opened.

  Now what do I say? How are you feeling? There’s something to say to a dying man!

  “How was the trip, Jack?” The voice was weak.

  “Belgium was okay. Everybody sends regards. Friday I got to brief Fowler, like you did the last time.”

  “What do you think of him?”

  “I think he needs some help on foreign policy.”

  A smile: “So do I. Gives a nice speech, though.”

  “I didn’t exactly hit it off with one of his aides, Elliot, the gal from Bennington. Obnoxious as hell. If her man wins, she says, I retire.” That was really the wrong thing to say. Greer tried to move but couldn’t.

  “Then you find her, and kiss and make up. If you have to kiss her ass at noon on the Bennington quad, you do that. When are you going to learn to bend that stiff Irish neck of yours? Ask Basil sometime how much he likes the people he has to work for. Your duty is to serve the country, Jack, not just the people you happen to like.” A blow from a professional boxer could not have stung worse.

  “Yes, sir. You’re right. I still have a lot to learn.”

  “Learn fast, boy. I haven’t got many lessons left.”

  “Don’t say that, Admiral.” The line was delivered like the plea of a child.

  “It’s my time, Jack. Some men I served with died off Savo Island fifty years ago, or at Leyte, or lots of other parts of ocean. I’ve been a lot luckier than they were, but it’s my time. And it’s your turn to take over for me. I want you to take my place, Jack.”

  “I do need some advice, Admiral.”

  “Colombia?”

  “I could ask how you know, but I won’t.”

  “When a man like Arthur Moore won’t look you in the eye, you know that something is wrong. He was in here Saturday and he wouldn’t look me in the eye.”

  “He lied to me today.” Ryan explained on for five minutes, outlining what he knew, what he suspected, and what he feared.

  “And you want to know what to do?” Greer asked.

  “I could sure use a little guidance, Admiral.”

  “You don’t need guidance, Jack. You’re smart enough. You have all the contacts you need. And you know what’s right.”

  “But what about—”

  “Politics? All that shit?” Greer almost laughed. “Jack, you know, when you lay here like this, you know what you think about? You think about all the things you’d like another chance at, all the mistakes, all the people you might have treated better, and you thank God that it wasn’t worse. Jack, you will never regret honesty, even if it hurts people. When they made you a Marine lieutenant you swore an oath before God. I understand why we do that now. It’s a help, not a threat. It’s something to remind you how important words are. Ideas are important. Principles are important. Words are important. Your word is the most important of all. Your word is who you are. That’s the last lesson, Jack. You have to carry on from here.” He paused, and Jack could see the pain coming through the heavy medications. “You have a family, Jack. Go home to them. Give ’em my love and tell them that I think their daddy is a pretty good guy, and they ought to be proud of him. Good night, Jack.” Greer drifted off to sleep.

  Jack didn’t get up for several minutes. It took that long for him to regain control of himself. He dried his eyes and walked out of the room. The doctor was on his way in. Jack stopped him and identified himself.

  “Not much longer. Less than a week. I’m sorry, but there never was much hope.”

  “Keep him comfortable,” Ryan said quietly. Another plea.

  “We are,” the oncologist replied. “That’s why he’s out most of the time. He’s still quite lucid when he’s awake. I’ve had some nice talks with him. I like him, too.” The doctor was used to losing patients, but had never grown to enjoy it. “In a few years, we might have saved him. Progress isn’t fast enough.”

  “Never is. Thanks for trying, doc. Thanks for caring.” Ryan took the elevator back down to ground level and told the driver to take him home. On the way they passed the Mormon temple again, the marble lit with floodlights. Jack still didn’t know exactly what he’d do, but now he was certain of what he had to accomplish. He’d made his silent promise to a dying man, and no promise could be more important than that.

  The clouds were breaking up and there would be moonlight soon. It was time. The enemy had sentries out. They paced around the same as the ones who’d guarded the processing sites. The fires were still burning, but conversation had died off as weary men fell asleep.

  “Just walk out together,” Chavez said. “They see us creep or crawl, they know we’re bad guys. They see us walkin’, we’re some of them.”

  “Makes sense,” Guerra agreed.

  Both men slung their weapons across their chests. The profile of each would be distinctively wrong to the enemy, but close up against their bodies the outlines would be obscured and the weapons could still be ready for immediate use. Ding could depend on his MP5 SD2 to kill quietly if the necessity arose. Guerra took out his machete. The metal blade was black-anodized, of course, and the only shiny part was the razor-sharp edge itself. Guerra was especially good with edged weapons, and was ever sharpening his steel. He was also ambidextrous, and held it loosely in his left hand while his right was on the pistol grip of his M-16.

  The squad had already moved to a line roughly a hundred meters from the camp past which they’d be walking, ready to provide support if it were needed. It would be a tricky exercise at best, and everyone hoped that it wouldn’t be necessary.

  “ ’kay, Ding, you lead off.” Guerra actually ranked Chavez, but this was a situation where expertise counted for more than seniority.

  Chavez headed down the hill, keeping to cover as long as he could, then angling left and north toward safety. His low-light goggles were in his rucksack, back at the squad’s hideout because he was supposed to have been relieved before nightfall. Ding missed the night scope. A lot.

  The two men moved as quietly as they could, and the soaked ground helped, but the cover got very thick along the path they took. It was only three or four hundred meters to safety, but this time it was too far.

  They didn’t use paths, of course, but they couldn’t entirely avoid them, and one of the paths twisted around. Just as Chavez and Guerra crossed it, two men appeared a mere ten feet away.

  “What are you doing out?” one asked. Chavez just waved in a friendly sort of way, hoping that the gesture would stop him, but he approached, trying to see who it was, his companion at his side. About the time he noticed that Ding was carrying the wrong sort of weapon it was too late for everyone.

  Chavez had both hands back on his submachine gun, and swiveled it around on the double-looped sling, delivering a single round under the man’s chin that exploded out the top of his head. Guerra turned and brought his machete around, and just like in the movies, the whole head came off. Both he and Chavez leaped to catch both victims before they made too much noise.

  Shit! Ding thought. Now they’d know that somebody was here. There wasn’t time to remove the bodies to a hiding place—they might bump into someone else. If that was true, he reasoned, better to get full value from the kills. He found the loose head and set it on the chest of Guerra’s victim, held in both lifeless hands. The message was a clear one: Don’t fuck with us!

  Guerra nodded approval and Ding led off again. It took ten more minutes before they heard a spitting sound just to the right.

  “I been watchin’ ya’ half
of forever,” Oso said.

  “You okay?” Ramirez whispered.

  “Met two guys. They’re dead,” Guerra said.

  “Let’s get moving before they find ’em.”

  That was not to be. A moment later they heard the thud of a falling body, followed by a shout, followed by a scream, followed by a wild burst of AK-47 fire. It went in the wrong direction, but it sufficed to awaken any sleeping soul within a couple of klicks. The squad members activated their low-light gear, the better to pick their way through the cover as quickly as possible while the camp behind them exploded with noise and shouts and curses aimed in all directions. They didn’t stop for two hours. It was as official as orders off their satellite net: they were now the hunted.

  It had happened with unaccustomed rapidity, one hundred miles from the Cape Verde Islands. The satellite cameras had been watching for some days now, scanning the storm on several different light frequencies. The photos were downlinked to anyone with the right equipment, and already ships were altering course to get clear of it. Very hot, dry air had spilled off the West African desert in what was already a near-record summer and, driven by the easterly trade winds, combined with moist ocean air to form towering thunderheads, hundreds of them that had begun to merge. The clouds reached down into the warm surface water, drawing additional heat upward into the air to add that energy to what the clouds already contained. When some critical mass of heat and rain and cloud was reached, the storm began to organize itself. The people at the National Hurricane Center still didn’t understand why it happened—or why, given the circumstances, it happened so seldom—but it was happening now. The chief scientist manipulated his computer controls to fast-forward the satellite photos, rewind, and fast-forward again. He could see it clearly. The clouds had begun their counterclockwise orbit around a single point in space. It was becoming an organized storm, using its circular motion to increase its own coherence and power as though it knew that such activity would give it life. It wasn’t the earliest that such a storm had begun, but conditions were unusually “good” this year for their formation. How lovely they appeared on the satellite photographs, like some kind of modern art, feathery pinwheels of gossamer cloud. Or, the chief scientist thought, that’s how they would look if they didn’t kill so many people. When you got down to it, the reason they gave the storms names was that it was unseemly for hundreds or thousands of human lives to be ended by a number. This one would be such a storm, the meteorologist thought. For the moment they’d call it a tropical depression, but if it kept growing in size and power, it would change to a tropical storm. At that point they’d start calling it Adele.

  About the only thing that the movies got right, Clark thought, was that they often had spies meeting in bars. Bars were useful things in civilized countries. They were places for men to go and have a few, and meet other men, and strike up casual conversations in dimly lit, anonymous rooms, usually with the din of bad music to mute out their words beyond a certain, small radius. Larson arrived a minute late, sliding up to Clark’s spot. This cantina didn’t have stools, just a real brass bar on which to rest one’s foot. Larson ordered a beer, a local one, which was something the Colombians were good at. They were good at a lot of things, Clark thought. Except for the drug problem this country could really be going places. This country was suffering—as much as? No, more than his own. Colombia’s government was having to face the fact that it had fought a war against the druggies and was losing ... unlike America? the CIA officer wondered. Unlike America, the Colombian government was threatened? Yeah, sure, he told himself, we’re so much better off than this place.

  “Well?” he asked when the owner moved to the other end of the bar.

  Larson spoke quietly, in Spanish. “It’s definite. The number of troops the big shots have out on the street has dropped way the hell off.”

  “Gone where?”

  “A guy told me southwest. They were talking about a hunting expedition in the hills.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Clark muttered in English.

  “What gives?”

  “Well, there’s about forty light-infantry soldiers ...” he explained on for several minutes.

  “We’ve invaded?” Larson looked down at the bar. “Jesus Christ, what lunatic came up with that idea?”

  “We both work for him—for them, I suppose.”

  “Goddammit, there is one thing we cannot do to these people, and that’s fucking it!”

  “Fine. You fly back to D.C. and tell the DDO. If Ritter still has a brain, he’ll pull them out quick, before anybody really gets hurt.” Clark turned. He was thinking very hard at the moment, and didn’t like some of the ideas he was getting. He remembered a mission in “Eye” Corps, when ... “How about you and me take a look down that way tomorrow?”

  “You really want me to blow my cover, don’t you?” Larson observed.

  “You got a bolt-hole?” Clark meant what every field officer sets up when he goes covert, a safe place to run to and hide in if it becomes necessary.

  Larson snorted. “Is the Pope Polish?”

  “What about your lady friend?”

  “We don’t take care of her, too, and I’m history with this outfit.” The Agency encouraged loyalty to one’s agents, even when one didn’t sleep with them, and Larson was a man with the normal affection for his year-long lovers.

  “We’ll try to cover it like a prospecting trip, but after this one, on my authorization, your cover is officially blown, and you will return to D.C. for reassignment. Her, too. That’s an official order.”

  “I didn’t know you had—”

  Clark smiled. “Officially I don’t, but you’ll soon discover that Mr. Ritter and I have an understanding. I do the field work and he doesn’t second-guess me.”

  “Nobody has that much juice.” All Larson got for a reply was a raised eyebrow and a look into eyes that appeared far more dangerous than he had ever appreciated.

  Cortez sat in the one decent room in the house. It was the kitchen, a large one by local standards, and he had a table on which to set his radios and his maps, and a ledger sheet on which he kept a running tally. So far he had lost eleven men in short, violent, and for the most part noiseless encounters—and gotten nothing in return. The “soldiers” he had in the field were still too angry to be afraid, but that wholly suited his purpose. There was a clear acetate cover on the main tactical map, and he used a red grease pencil to mark areas of activity. He had made contact with two—maybe three—of the American teams. He determined contact, of course, by the fact that he had lost eleven men. He chose to believe that he’d lost eleven stupid ones. That was a relative measure, of course, since luck was always a factor on the battlefield, but by and large history taught that the dumb ones die off first, that there was a Darwinian selection process on the field of combat. He planned to lose another fifty or so men before doing anything different. At that point he’d call for reinforcements, further stripping the lords of their retainers. Then he would call his boss and say that he’d identified two or three fellow lords whose men were behaving rather oddly in the field—he already knew whom he would accuse, of course—and the next day he would warn one of those—also preselected—that his own boss was behaving rather oddly, and that his—Cortez’s —loyalty was to the organization as a whole which paid him, not to single personalities. His plan was for Escobedo to be killed off. It was necessary, and not especially regrettable. The Americans had already killed off two of the really smart members, and he would help to eliminate the remaining two intellects. The surviving lords would need Cortez, and would know that they needed him. His position as chief of security and intelligence would be upgraded to a seat around the table while the rest of the Cartel was restructured in accordance with his ideas for a streamlined and more secure organization. Within a year he’d be first among equals; another year and he’d merely be first. He wouldn’t even have to kill the rest off. Escobedo was one of the smart ones, and he’d proven so easy to manipul
ate. The rest would be as children, more interested in their money and their expensive toys than with what the organization could really accomplish. His ideas in that area were vague. Cortez was not one to think ten steps ahead. Four or five were enough.

  He reexamined the maps. Soon the Americans would become alert to the danger of his operation and would react. He opened his briefcase and compared aerial photographs with the maps. He now knew that the Americans had been brought in and were supported probably by a single helicopter. That was so daring as to be foolish. Hadn’t the Americans learned about helicopters on the plains of Iran? He had to identify likely landing zones ... or did he?

  Cortez closed his eyes and commanded himself to return to first principles. That was the real danger in operations like this. One got so caught up in what was going on that one lost sight of the overall situation. Perhaps there was another way. The Americans had already helped him. Perhaps they might help him again. How might he bring that about? What could he do to and for them? What might they do for him? It gave him something to ponder for the rest of the sleepless night.

  Bad weather had prevented them from testing out the new engine the previous night, and for the same reason they had to wait until 0300 local time to try this night. The Pave Low was not allowed to show itself by day under any circumstances, without a direct order from on high.

  A cart pulled the chopper out of the hangar, and the rotor was unfolded and locked into place before the engines were started. PJ and Captain Willis applied power, with Sergeant Zimmer at his engineer’s console. They taxied normally to the runway and started their takeoff in the way of helicopters, with an uneven lurch as the reluctant tons of metal and fuel climbed into the air like a child on his first ladder.

  It was hard to say what happened first. A terrible screech reached the pilot’s ears, coming through the protective foam of his Darth Vader helmet. At the same time, perhaps a millisecond earlier, Zimmer shouted a warning too loudly over the intercom circuit. Whatever happened first, Colonel Johns’ eyes flicked down to his instrument panel and saw that his Number One engine dials were all wrong. Willis and Zimmer both killed the engine while PJ slewed the chopper around, thankful that he was only fifty feet off the pavement. In less than three seconds, he was back on the ground, powering his single working engine down to idle.