by Tom Clancy
Braden rationalized the damage done to society simply by continuing to investigate his burglaries, and even catching a real hood from time to time, though that was rare enough. Burglary was a pretty safe crime to commit. It never got the attention it deserved. Neither did the people whose job it was to track them down—probably the most unrewarded segment of the law-enforcement profession. He’d been taking the lieutenant’s exam for nine years, and never quite made it. Braden needed or at least wanted the money that the promotion would bring, only to see the promotions go to the hotshots in Narcotics and Homicide while he slaved away ... and why not take the goddamned money? More than anything else, Ernie Braden was tired of it all. Tired of the long hours. Tired of the crime victims who took their frustration out on him when he was just trying to do his job. Tired of being unappreciated within his own community of police officers. Tired of being sent out to local schools for the pro forma anticrime lectures that nobody ever listened to. He was even tired of coaching little-league baseball, though that had once been the single joy of his life. Tired of just about everything. But he couldn’t afford to retire, either. Not yet, anyway.
The noise from the Sears riding mower crackled through the hot, humid air of the quiet street on which he and his family lived. He wiped a handkerchief across his sweaty brow and contemplated the cold beer he’d have as soon as he was finished. It could have been worse. Until three years ago he’d pushed a goddamned Lawn-Boy across the grass. At least now he could sit down as he did his weekly chore, cutting the goddamned grass. His wife had a real thing about the lawn and garden. As if it mattered, Braden grumbled.
He concentrated on the job at hand, making sure that the spinning blades had at least two sweeps over every square inch of the green crap that, this early in the season, grew almost as fast as you cut it. He didn’t notice the Plymouth minivan coming down the street. Nor did he know that the people who paid him his supplementary income were most unhappy with a recent clandestine effort he’d made on their behalf.
Braden had several eccentricities, as do many men and most police officers. In his case, he never went anywhere unarmed. Not even to cut the grass. Under the back of his greasy shirt was a Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special, a five-shot stainless steel revolver that was as close as he’d ever get to something with “chief” written on it. When he finally noticed the minivan pull up behind his Chevy Citation, he took little note of it, except that there were two men in it, and they seemed to be looking at him.
His cop’s instinct didn’t entirely fail him, however. They were looking real hard at him. That made him look back, mainly in curiosity. Who’d be interested in him on a Saturday afternoon? When the passenger-side door opened and he saw the gun, that question faded away.
When Braden rolled off the mower, his foot came off the brake pedal, which had the opposite effect as in a car. The mower stopped in two feet, its blades still churning away on the bluegrass-and-fescue mix of the policeman’s front yard. Braden came off just at the ejection port of the mower assembly, and felt tiny bits of grit and sand peppering his knees, but that, too, was not a matter of importance at the moment. His revolver was already out when the man from the van fired his first round.
He was using an Ingram Mac-10, probably a 9-millimeter, and the man didn’t know how to use it well. His first round was roughly on target, but the next eight merely decorated the sky as the notoriously unstable weapon jerked out of control, not even hitting the mower. Sergeant Braden fired two rounds back, but the range was over ten yards, and the Chiefs Special had only a two-inch barrel, which gave it an effective combat range measured in feet, not yards. With the instant and unexpected stress added to his poorly selected weapon, he managed to hit the van behind his target with only one round.
But machine-gun fire is a highly distinctive sound—not the least mistakable for firecrackers or any other normal noise—and the neighborhood immediately realized that something very unusual was happening. At a house across the street a fifteen-year-old boy was cleaning his rifle. It was an old Marlin .22 lever-action that had once belonged to his grandfather, and its proud owner had learned to play third base from Sergeant Braden, whom he thought to be a really neat guy. The young man in question, Erik Sanderson, set down his cleaning gear and walked to the window just in time to see his former coach shooting from behind his mower at somebody. In the clarity that comes in such moments, Erik Sanderson realized that people were trying to kill his coach, a police officer, that he had a rifle and cartridges ten feet away, and that it Would Be All Right for him to use the rifle to come to the aid of the policeman. The fact that he’d spent the morning plinking away at tin cans merely meant that he was ready. Erik Sanderson’s main ambition in life was to become a U.S. Marine, and he seized the chance to get an early feel for what it was all about.
While the sound of gunfire continued to crackle around the wooded street, he grabbed the rifle and a handful of the small copper-colored rimfire cartridges and ran out to the front porch. First he twisted the spring-loaded rod that pushed rounds down the magazine tube which hung under the barrel. He pulled it out too far, dropping it, but the young man had the good sense to ignore that for the moment. He fed the .22 rounds into the loading slot one at a time, surprised that his hands were already sweaty. When he had fourteen rounds in, he bent down to get the rod, and two rounds fell out the front of the tube. He took the time to reload them, reinserted the rod, twisting it shut, then slammed his hand down and up on the lever, loading the gun and cocking the exposed hammer.
He was surprised to see that he didn’t have a shot, and ran down the sidewalk to the street, taking a position across the hood of his father’s pickup truck. From this point he could see two men, each firing a submachine gun from the hip. He looked just in time to see Sergeant Braden fire off his last round, which missed as badly as the first four had. The police officer turned to run for the safety of his house, but tripped over his own feet and had trouble getting up. Both gunmen advanced on Braden, loading new magazines into their weapons. Erik Sanderson’s hands were trembling as he shouldered his rifle. It had old-fashioned iron sights, and he had to stop and remind himself how to line them up as he’d been taught in Boy Scouts, with the front-sight post centered in the notch of the rear-sight leaf, the top of the post even with the top of the leaf as he maneuvered it on a target.
He was horrified to be too late. Both men blew his little-league coach to shreds with extended bursts at point-blank range. Something snapped inside Erik’s head at that moment. He sighted on the head of the nearer gunman and jerked off his round.
Like most young and inexperienced shooters, he immediately looked up to see what had happened. Nothing. He’d missed—with a rifle at a range of only thirty yards, he’d missed. Amazed, he sighted again and squeezed the trigger, but nothing happened. The hammer was down. He’d forgotten to cock the rifle. Swearing something his mother would have slapped him to hear, he reloaded the Marlin .22 and took exquisitely careful aim, squeezing off his next shot.
The murderers hadn’t heard his first shot, and with their ears still ringing from their own shots, they didn’t hear the second, but one man’s head jerked to the side with the wasp’s-sting impact of the round. The man knew what had happened, turned to his left, and fired off a long burst despite the crushing pain that seized his head in an instant. The other one saw Erik and fired as well.
But the young man was now jacking rounds into the breech of his rifle as fast as he could fire them. He watched in rage as he kept missing, unconsciously flinching as bullets came his way, trying to kill both men before they could get back into their car. He had the satisfaction of seeing them duck behind cover, and wasted his last three rounds trying to shoot through the car body to get them. But a .22 can’t accomplish that, and the minivan pulled away.
Erik watched it pull away, wishing he’d loaded more rounds into his rifle, wishing that he could try a shot through the back window before the car turned right and disappeared.
In the minivan, one of the gunmen took more note of the bullet in his chest than the one in his head. But it was the head shot that would kill him. As the man bent down, a lacerated artery let go completely and showered the inside of the car with blood, much to the surprise of the dying man, who had but a few seconds to realize what had happ—
Another Air Force flight, as luck had it, also a C-141B, took Mr. Clark out of Panama, heading for Andrews, where rapid preparations were being made for the arrival ceremony. Before the funeral flight arrived, Clark was in Langley talking to his boss, Bob Ritter. For the first time in a generation, the Operations Directorate had been granted a presidential hunting license. John Clark, carried on the personnel rolls as a case-officer instructor, was the CIA chief hunter. He hadn’t been asked to exercise that particular talent in a very long time, but he still knew how.
Ritter and Clark didn’t watch the TV coverage of the arrival. All that was part of history now, and while both men had an interest in history, it was mainly in the sort that is never written down.
“We’re going to take another look at the idea you handed me at St. Kitts,” the Deputy Director (Operations) said.
“What’s the objective?” Clark asked carefully. It wasn’t hard to guess why this was happening, or the originator of the directive. That was the reason for his caution.
“The short version is revenge,” Ritter answered.
“Retribution is a more acceptable word,” Clark pointed out. Lacking in formal education though he was, he did read a good deal.
“The targets represent a clear and present danger to the security of the United States.”
“The President said that?”
“His words,” Ritter affirmed.
“Fine. That makes it all legal. Not any less dangerous, but legal.”
“Can you do it?”
Clark smiled in a distant, smoky way. “I run my side of the op my way. Otherwise, forget it. I don’t want to die from oversight. No interference from this end. You give me the target list and the assets I need. I do the rest, my way, my schedule.”
“Agreed,” Ritter nodded.
Clark was more than surprised by that. “Then I can do it. What about the kids we have running around in the jungle?”
“We’re pulling them out tonight.”
“To be reinserted where?” Clark asked.
Ritter told him.
“That’s really dangerous,” the case officer observed, though he was not surprised by the answer. It had probably been planned all along. But, if it had ...
“We know that.”
“I don’t like it,” Clark said after a moment’s thought. “It complicates things.”
“We don’t pay you to like it.”
Clark had to agree to that. He was honest enough with himself, though, to admit that part of it he did like. A job such as this, after all, had gotten him into the protective embrace of the Central Intelligence Agency in the first place, so many years before. But that job had been on a free-agent basis. This one was legal, but arguably. Once that would not have mattered to Mr. Clark, but with a wife and kids, it did now.
“Do I get to see the family for a couple of days?”
“Sure. It’ll take awhile to get things in place. I’ll have all the information you need messengered down to The Farm.”
“What do we call this one?”
“RECIPROCITY.”
“I guess that about covers it.” Clark’s face broke into a grin. He walked out of the room toward the elevator. The new DDI was there, Dr. Ryan, heading to Judge Moore’s office. They’d never quite met, Clark and Ryan, and this wasn’t the time, though their lives had already touched on two occasions.
14.
Snatch and Grab
“I MUST THANK your Director Jacobs,” Juan said.
“Perhaps we will meet someday.” He’d taken his time with this one. Soon, he judged, he’d be able to extract any information he wanted from her with the same intimate confidence that might be expected of husband and wife—after all, true love did not allow for secrets, did it?
“Perhaps,” Moira replied after a moment. Already part of her was thinking that the Director would come to her wedding. It wasn’t too much to hope for, was it?
“What did he travel to Colombia for, anyway?” he asked while his fingertips did some more exploring over what was now very familiar ground.
“Well, it’s public information now. They called it Operation TARPON.” Moira explained on for several minutes during which Juan’s caresses didn’t miss a beat.
Which was only due to his experience as an intelligence officer. He actually found himself smiling lazily at the ceiling. The fool. I warned him. I warned him more than once in his own office, but no—he was too smart, too confident in his own cleverness to take my advice. Well, maybe the stupid bastard will heed my advice now.... It took another few moments before he found himself asking how his employer would react. That was when the smiling and the caresses stopped.
“Something wrong, Juan?”
“Your director picked a dangerous time to visit Bogotá. They will be very angry. If they discover that he is there—”
“The trip is a secret. Their attorney general is an old friend— I think they went to school together, and they’ve known each other for forty years.”
The trip was a secret. Cortez told himself that they couldn’t be so foolish as to—but they could. He was amazed that Moira didn’t feel the chill that swept over his body. But what could he do?
As was true of the families of military people and sales executives, Clark’s family was accustomed to having him away at short notice and for irregular intervals. They were also used to having him reappear without much in the way of warning. It was almost a game, and one, strangely enough, to which his wife didn’t object. In this case he took a car from the CIA pool and made the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Yorktown, Virginia, by himself to think over the operation he was about to undertake. By the time he turned off Interstate 64, he’d answered most of the procedural questions, though the exact details would wait until he’d had a chance to go over the intelligence package that Ritter had promised to send down.
Clark’s house was that of a middle-level executive, a four-bedroom split-foyer brick dwelling set in an acre of the long-needled pines common to the American South. It was a ten-minute drive from The Farm, the CIA’s training establishment whose post-office address is Williamsburg, Virginia, but which is actually closer to Yorktown, adjacent to an installation in which the Navy keeps both submarine-launched ballistic missiles and their nuclear warheads. The development in which he lived was mainly occupied by other CIA instructors, obviating the need for elaborate stories for the neighbors’ benefit. His family, of course, had a pretty good idea what he did for a living. His two daughters, Maggie, seventeen, and Patricia, fourteen, occasionally called him “Secret Agent Man,” which they’d picked up from the revival of the Patrick McGoohan TV series on one of the cable channels, but they knew not to discuss it with their schoolmates—though they would occasionally warn their boyfriends to behave as responsibly as possible around their father. It was an unnecessary warning. On instinct, most men watched their behavior around Mr. Clark. John Clark did not have horns and hooves, but it seldom took more than a single glance to know that he was not to be trifled with, either. His wife, Sandy, knew even more, including what he had done before joining the Agency. Sandy was a registered nurse who taught student nurses in the operating rooms of the local teaching hospital. As such she was accustomed to dealing with issues of life and death, and she took comfort from the fact that her husband was one of the few “laymen” who understood what that was all ab
out, albeit from a reversed perspective. To his wife and children, John Terence Clark was a devoted husband and father, if somewhat overly protective at times. Maggie had once complained that he’d scared off one prospective “steady” with nothing more than a look. That the boy in question had later been arrested for drunken driving had only proved her father correct, rather to her chagrin. He was also a far easier touch than their mother on issues like privileges and had a ready shoulder to cry on, when he was home. At home, his counsel was invariably quiet and reasoned, his language mild, and his demeanor relaxed, but his family knew that away from home he was something else entirely. They didn’t care about that.
He pulled into the driveway just before dinnertime, taking his soft two-suiter in through the kitchen to find the smells of a decent dinner. Sandy had been surprised too many times to overreact on the matter of how much food she’d prepared.
“Where have you been?” Sandy asked rhetorically, then went into her usual guessing game. “Not much work done on the tan. Someplace cold or cloudy?”