Clear and Present Danger

by Tom Clancy

  But what would the Admiral say about that?

  Jack didn’t have that answer. He pulled a paperback out of his desk drawer and started reading. A few hundred pages later it was seven o’clock.

  Time. Ryan lifted his phone and called the floor security desk. When the secretaries were gone home, it was the security guys who ran errands.

  “This is Dr. Ryan. I need some documents from central files.” He read off three numbers. “They’re big ones,” he warned the desk man. “Better take somebody else to help.”

  “Yes, sir. We’ll head down in a minute.”

  “Not that much of a hurry,” Ryan said as he hung up. He already had a reputation as an easygoing boss. As soon as the phone was back in its cradle, he jumped to his feet and switched on his personal Xerox machine. Then he walked out his door to Nancy’s outer office space, listening for the diminishing sound of the two security officers walking out to the main corridor.

  They didn’t lock office doors up here. There was no point. You had to pass through about ten security zones to get here, each guarded by armed officers, each supervised by a separate central security office on the first floor. There were also roving patrols. Security at CIA was tighter than at a federal prison, and about as oppressive. But it didn’t really apply to the senior executives, and all Jack had to do was walk across the corridor and open the door to Bob Ritter’s office.

  The DDO’s office safe—vault was a better term—was set up the same way as Ryan’s, behind a false panel in the wall. It was less for secrecy—any competent burglar would find it in under a minute—than for aesthetics. Jack opened the panel and dialed the combination for the safe. He wondered if Ritter knew that Greer had the combination. Perhaps he did, but certainly he didn’t know that the Admiral had written it down. It was so odd a thing for the Agency, so odd that no one had ever considered the possibility. The smartest people in the world still had blind spots.

  The safe doors were all alarmed, of course. The alarm systems were foolproof, and worked the same way as the safety locks on nuclear weapons—and they were the best kind available, weren’t they? You dialed in the right combination or the alarm went off. If you goofed doing it the first time, a light would go on above the dial, indicating that you had ten seconds to get it right or another light would go on at two separate security desks. A second goof would set off more alarms. A third would put the safe in lock-down for two hours. Several CIA executives had learned to curse the system and become the subject of jokes in the security department. But not Ryan, who was not intimidated by combination locks. The computer that kept track of such things decided that, well, it must be Mr. Ritter, and that was that.

  Jack’s heart beat faster now. There were over twenty files in here, and his time was measured in minutes. But again Agency procedures came to his rescue. Inside the front cover of each file was a summary sheet telling what “Operation WHATEVER” was all about. He didn’t really pay attention to what they said, but used the summary sheets only to identify items of interest. In less than two minutes, Jack had files labeled EAGLE EYE, SHOWBOAT-I and SHOWBOAT-II, CAPER, and RECIPROCITY. The total stack was nearly eighteen inches high. Jack made careful note of where the folders went, then closed the safe door without locking it. Next he returned to his office, setting the papers on the floor behind his desk. He started reading EAGLE EYE first of all.

  “Holy Christ!” “Detection and interdiction of incoming drug flight,” he saw, meant ... shooting them down. Someone knocked on his door.

  “Come on in.” It was the security guys with the files he’d requested. Ryan had them set the files on a chair and dismissed them.

  Jack figured he had an hour, two at most, to do what he had to do. That meant he had time to scan, not to read. Each operation had a more detailed summary of objectives and methods plus an event log and daily progress report. Jack’s personal Xerox machine was a big, sophisticated one that organized and collated sheets, and most importantly, zipped them through very rapidly. He started feeding sheets into the hopper. The automatic feed allowed him to read and copy at the same time. Ninety minutes later he had copied over six hundred sheets, maybe a quarter of what he’d taken. It wasn’t enough, but it would have to do. He summoned the security guards to return the files they’d brought up—he took the time to ruffle them up first. As soon as they were gone, he assembled the files he’d... ... stolen? Jack asked himself. It suddenly dawned on him that he’d just violated the law. He hadn’t thought of that. He really hadn’t. As he loaded the files back in the safe, Ryan told himself that really he hadn’t violated anything. As a senior executive, he was entitled to know these things, and the rules didn’t really apply to him ... but that, he remembered, was a dangerous way to think. He was serving a higher cause. He was doing What Was Right. He was—

  “Shit!” Ryan said aloud when he closed the safe door. “You don’t know what the hell you’re doing.” He was back in his office a minute later.

  It was time to leave. First he made a notation on the Xerox count sheet. You didn’t make Xerox copies anywhere in this building without signing off for them, but he’d thought ahead on that. Roughly the right number of sheets were assembled in a pile and placed in his safe, ostensibly a copy of the OSWR report that Nancy had retrieved. Making such copies was something that directorate chiefs were allowed to do fairly freely. Inside his safe, he found, was the manual for its operation. The copies he’d made went into his briefcase. The last thing Ryan did before leaving was to change his combination to something nobody would ever guess. He nodded to the security officer at the desk next to the elevator on his way out. The Agency Buick was waiting when he got to the basement garage.

  “Sorry to make you stay in so late, Fred,” Jack said as he got in. Fred was his evening driver.

  “No problem, sir. Home?”

  “Right.” It required all of his discipline not to start reading on the way. Instead he leaned back and commanded himself to take a nap. It would be the only sleep he would get tonight, he was sure.

  Clark got into Andrews just after eight. His first call was to Ritter’s office, but it was shortstopped elsewhere and he learned that the DDO was unavailable until morning. With nothing better to do, Clark and Larson checked into a motel near the Pentagon. After picking up shaving gear and a toothbrush from the Marriott’s gift shop, Clark again went to sleep, again surprising the younger officer, who was far too keyed up to do so.

  “How bad is it?” the President asked.

  “We’ve lost nine people,” Cutter replied. “It was inevitable, sir. We knew going in that this was a dangerous operation. So did they. What we can do—”

  “What we can do is shut this operation down, and do it at once. And keep a nice tight lid on it forever. This one never happened. I didn’t bargain for any of this, not for the civilian casualties, and sure as hell not for losing nine of our own people. Damn it, Admiral, you told me that these kids were so good—”

  “Mr. President, I never—”

  “The hell you didn’t!” the President said loudly enough to startle the Secret Service agent outside his upstairs office. “How the hell did you get me into this mess?”

  Cutter’s patrician face went pale as a corpse. Everything he’d worked for, the action he’d been proposing for three years.... Ritter was proclaiming success. That was the maddest part of all.

  “Sir, our objective was to hurt the Cartel. We have accomplished that. The CIA officer who’s running RECIPROCITY, in Colombia, right now, said that he could start a gang war within the Cartel—and we have done just that! They just tried to assassinate one of their own people—Escobedo. Drug shipments coming in are down. We haven’t announced it yet, but the papers are already talking about how prices are going up on the street. We’re winning.”

  “Fine. You tell Fowler that!” The President slammed a file folder down on his desk. His own private polls showed Fowler ahead by fourteen points.

  “Sir, after the convention, the opposit
ion candidate always—”

  “Now you’re giving me political advice? Mister, you haven’t shown me a hell of a lot of competence in your supposed area of expertise.”

  “Mr. President, I—”

  “I want this whole thing shut down. I want it kept quiet. I want you to do it, and I want you to do it fast. This is your mess and you will clean it up.”

  Cutter hesitated. “Sir, how do you want me to go about it?”

  “I don’t want to know. I just want to know when it’s done.”

  “Sir, that may mean that I’ll have to disappear for a while.”

  “Then disappear!”

  “People might notice.”

  “Then you are on a special, classified mission for the President. Admiral, I want this thing closed out. I don’t care what you have to do. Just do it!”

  Cutter came to attention. He still remembered how to do that. “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “Reverse your rudder,” Wegener said. USCGC Panache pivoted with the change of rudder and engine settings, pointing herself down the channel.

  “Midships.”

  “Rudder amidships, aye. Sir, my rudder is amidships,” the young helmsman announced under the watchful eye of Master Chief Quartermaster Oreza.

  “Very well. All ahead one-third, steady up on course one-nine-five.” Wegener looked at the junior officer of the deck. “You have the conn. Take her out.”

  “Aye aye, sir, I have the conn,” the ensign acknowledged in some surprise. “Take her out” generally means that you start from the dock, but the skipper was unusually cautious today. The kid on the wheel could handle it from here. Wegener lit his pipe and headed out for the bridge wing. Portagee followed him there.

  “That’s about as happy as I’ve ever been to head out to sea,” Wegener said.

  “I know what you mean, Cap’n.”

  It had been one scary day. Only one, but that had been enough. The FBI agent’s warning had come as quite a shock. Wegener had grilled his people one by one—something that he’d found as distasteful as it had been unfruitful—to find out who had spilled the beans. Oreza thought he knew but wasn’t sure. He was thankful that he’d never have to be. That danger had died with the pirates in Mobile jail. But both men had learned their lesson. From now on they’d abide by the rules.

  “Skipper, why d’ya suppose that FBI guy warned us?”

  “That’s a good question, Portagee. It figures that what we choked out of the bastards turned that money seizure they pulled off. I guess they figured they owed us some. Besides, the local guy says that it was his boss in Washington who ordered him to warn us.”

  “I think we owe him one,” Oreza said.

  “I think you’re right.” Both men stayed out to savor yet another sunset at sea, and Panache took a heading of one-eight-one, heading for her patrol station in the Yucatan Channel.

  Chavez was down to his last set of batteries. The situation, if anything, had gotten worse. There was a group somewhere be hind them, necessitating a rear guard. It was something that he on point, couldn’t concern himself about, but it was there a nagging concern as real as the sore muscles that had him popping Tylenol every few hours. Maybe they were being folowed Maybe it was just accidental—or maybe Ramirez had gotter predictable in his evasion tactics. Chavez didn’t think so but he was becoming too tired to think coherently, and knew it. Maybe the captain had the same problem, he realized. That was especially worrisome. Sergeants were paid to fight Cantains were paid to think. But if Ramirez was too tired to do that then they might as well not have him.

  Noise. A whisper from a branch swishing through the ak. But there was no wind blowing at the moment. Maybe an animal. Maybe not.

  Chavez stopped. He held his hand straight up. Vega, walking slack fifty meters back, relayed the signal. Ding moved along side a tree and stayed standing for the best possible visibili He started to lean against it and found himself drifting. The sergeant shook his head to clear it. Fatigue was really getting to him now.

  There. Movement. It was a man. Just a spectral green shape, barely more than a stick figure on the goggle display, nearly two hundred meters to Ding’s right front. He was moving uphill and—another one, about twenty meters behind. They were moving like ... soldiers, with the elaborate footwork that looked so damned crazy when somebody else was doing it....

  There was one way to check. On the bottom side of his PVS- 7 goggles was a small infrared light for use in reading maps. Invisible to the human eye, it would show up like a beacon to anyone wearing another PVS-7. He didn’t even have to make a noise. They’d be looking around constantly.

  It was still a risk, of course.

  Chavez stepped away from the tree. It was too far to see if they were wearing their headsets, if they were....

  Yes. The lead figure was turning his head left and right. It stopped dead on where Chavez was standing. Ding tipped his goggles up to expose the IR light and blinked it three times. He dropped his night scope back into place just in time to see the other one do the same.

  “I think they’re our guys,” Chavez whispered into his radio mike.

  “Then they’re pretty lost,” Ramirez replied through his earpiece. “Be careful, Sergeant.”

  Click-Click. Okay.

  Chavez waited for Oso to set his SAW up in a convenient place, then walked toward the other man, careful to keep where Vega could cover him. It seemed an awfully long way to walk, farther still without being able to put his weapon on the target, but he couldn’t exactly do that, could he? He spotted one more, and there would be others out there also, watching him over the sights of their weapons. If that wasn’t a friendly, his chances of seeing the sunrise were somewhere between zero and not much.

  “Ding, is that you?” a whisper called the remaining ten meters. “It’s León.”

  Chavez nodded. Both men took very deep breaths as they walked together and hugged. Somehow a handshake just wasn’t enough under the circumstances.

  “You’re lost, ’Berto.”

  “No shit, man. I know where the fuck we are, but we’re fucking lost all right.”

  “Where’s Cap’n Rojas?”

  “Dead. Esteves, Delgado, half the team.”

  “Okay. Hold it.” Ding punched his radio button. “Six, this is Point. We just made contact with BANNER. They’ve had a little trouble, sir. You better get up here.”

  Click-click.

  León waved for his men to come in. Chavez didn’t even think to count. It was enough to see that half weren’t there. Both men sat on a fallen tree.

  “What happened?”

  “We walked right into it, man. Thought it was a processing site. It wasn’t. Musta been thirty-forty guys there. I think Esteves fucked up and it all came apart. Like a bar fight with guns, man. Then Captain Rojas went down, and—it was pretty bad, ’mano. Been on the run ever since.”

  “We got people chasing us, too.”

  “What’s the good news?” León asked.

  “I ain’t heard any lately, ’Berto,” Ding said. “I think it’s time for us to get our asses outa this place.”

  “Roge-o,” Sergeant León said just as Ramirez appeared. He made his report to the captain.

  “Cap’n,” Chavez said when he was finished, “we’re all pretty beat. We need a place to belly up.”

  “The man’s right,” Guerra agreed.

  “What about behind us?”

  “They ain’t heard nothin’ in two hours, sir,” Guerra reminded him. “That knoll over there looks like a good spot to me.” That was about as hard as he could press his officer, but finally it was enough.

  “Take the men up. Set up the perimeter and two outposts. We’ll try to rest up till sundown, and maybe I can call in and get us some help.”

  “Sounds good to me, Cap’n.” Guerra took off to get things organized. Chavez left at once to sweep the area while the rest of the squad moved to its new RON site—except, Chavez thought, this was an ROD—remain-over-day—site. It wa
s a bleak attempt at humor, but it was all he could manage under the circumstances.

  “My God,” Ryan breathed. It was four in the morning, and he was awake only because of coffee and apprehension. Ryan had uncovered his share of things with the Agency. But never anything like this. The first thing he had to do was ... what?

  Get some sleep, even a few hours, he told himself. Jack lifted the phone and called the office. There was always a watch officer on duty.

  “This is Dr. Ryan. I’m going to be late. Something I ate. I’ve been throwing up all night ... no, I think it’s over now, but I need a few hours of sleep. I’ll drive myself in tomorr—today,” he corrected himself. “Yeah, that’s right. Thanks. ’Bye.”

  He left a note on the refrigerator door for his wife and crawled into a spare bed to avoid disturbing her.

  Passing the message was the easiest part for Cortez. It would have been hard for anyone else, but one of the first things he’d done after joining the Cartel was to get a list of certain telephone numbers in the Washington, D.C., area. It hadn’t been hard. As with any task, it was just a matter of finding someone who knew what you needed to know. That was something Cortez excelled at. Once he had the list of numbers—it had cost him $10,000, the best sort of money well spent, that is to say, someone’s else’s well-spent money—it was merely a matter of knowing schedules. That was tricky, of course. The person might not be there, which risked disclosure, but the right sort of eyes-only prefix would probably serve to warn off the casual viewer. The secretaries of such people typically were disciplined people who risked their jobs when they showed too much curiosity.

  But what really made it easy was a new bit of technology, the facsimile printer. It was a brand-new status symbol. Everyone had to have one, just as everyone, especially the important, had to have a direct private telephone line that bypassed his secretary. That and the fax went together. Cortez had driven to Medellin to his private office and typed the message himself. He knew what official U.S. government messages looked like, of course, and did his best to reproduce it here. EYES-ONLY NIMBUS was the header, and the name in the FROM slot was bogus, but that in the To place was quite genuine, which ought to have been sufficient to get the attention of the addressee. The body of the message was brief and to the point, and indicated a coded reply-address. How would the addressee react? Well, there was no telling, was there? But this, too, Cortez felt was a good gamble. He inserted the single sheet in his fax, dialed the proper number, and waited. The machine did the rest. As soon as it heard the warbling electronic love-call of another fax machine, it transmitted the message form. Cortez removed the original and folded it away into his wallet.