Clancy, Tom - Op Center 04 - Acts Of War

by Acts Of War [lit]

  "I don't believe that about the climate," Coffey said. "At least, not entirely." He removed a can of Tab from the melting ice in the cooler and popped it. As he poured the soda into his mouth, he squinted back at the long, gleaming van. For a moment, the despair left him. That seemingly nondescript vehicle was beautiful and sexy. He was proud to be associated with it, at least. The attorney stopped drinking and caught his breath. "I mean," he said, panting after the long, unbroken swallow, "look at cities or prisons where there are riots. Or compounds like Jonestown and Waco where people turn into cult-kooks. It never happens during a cold spell or a blizzard. It's always when it's hot. Look at the Biblical scholars who went out into the desert. Went out men, stayed in the heat, came back prophets. Heat lights our fuses."

  "You don't think that God could have had anything to do with Moses and Jesus?" Katzen asked solemnly.

  Coffey raised the canto his lips. "Touché," he said before he drank again.

  Katzen turned to the young black woman standing to his right. She was dressed in khaki shorts, a sweat-stained khaki blouse, and a white headband. The uniform was "sterile." Nowhere did she display the winged-lightning shield of the rapid-deployment Striker force to which she belonged. Nor was there any other sign of military affiliation. Like the van itself, whose side-mounted mirror looked just like a mirror and not a parabolic dish, whose walls were intentionally dented and artificially rusted and didn't show a hint of the reinforced steel underneath, the woman looked like she was a seasoned archaeological field worker.

  "What do you think, Sondra?" Katzen asked.

  "With all due respect," said the young black woman, "I think you're both wrong. I think peace and war and sanity are all questions of leadership. Look at that old city out there." She spoke with quiet reverence. "Thirty centuries ago the prophet Abraham was born---right there. That was where he lived when God told him to move his family to Canaan. That man was touched by the Holy Spirit. He founded a people, a nation, a morality. I'm sure he was as warm as we are, especially when God told him to put a dagger into the bosom of his son. I'm sure his sweat as well as his tears fell onto the frightened face of Isaac." She looked from Katzen to Coffey. "His leadership was based on faith and love, and he is revered by Jews and Muslims alike."

  "Nicely put, Private DeVonne," Katzen said.

  "Very nicely put," Coffey agreed, "but it doesn't contradict my point. We're not all made of the same obedient, determined stuff as Abraham. And for some of us, the heat makes our natural irritability worse." He took another long drink from his sweating can of Tab. "There's another thing too. After twenty-seven hours and fifteen minutes of camping here, I hate the living hell out of this place. I like air conditioning and cold water from a glass instead of hot water from a plastic bottle. And bathrooms. Those are good too."

  Katzen smiled. "Maybe you'll appreciate them a whole lot more when you get back."

  "I appreciated them before I left. Frankly, I still don't understand why we couldn't have tested this prototype in the U.S. We have enemies at home. I could have gotten clearance from any number of judges to spy on suspected terrorists, paramilitary camps, Mafiosi, you-name-it."

  "You know the answer as well as I do," Katzen said.

  "Sure," Coffey said. He drained the can of soda, dropped it in the plastic trash bag, and walked back to the van. "If we don't help the moderate True Path Party, the Islamic fundamentalists and their Welfare Party will continue to make gains here. And then you've got the Social Democratic Populist Party, the Democratic Left Party, the Democratic Center Party, the Reform Democratic Party, the Prosperity Party, the Refah Party, the Socialist Unity Party, the Correct Way Party, and the Great Anatolia Party, all of which have to be dealt with and all of whom want their piece of the very small Turkish pie. Not to mention the Kurds, who want freedom from the Turks, Iraqis, and Syrians." Coffey used his index fingers to wipe sweat from his eyes. "If the Welfare Party does happen to take control of Turkey and its military, Greece will be threatened. Disputes in the Aegean Sea will come to a head and NATO will be torn apart. Europe and the Middle East will be endangered and everyone will turn to the U.S. for help. We'll gladly provide it, of course, but only in the form of shuttle diplomacy. We can't afford to take sides in a war like that."

  "Excellent summation, counselor."

  "Except for one thing," Coffey continued. "For my money, they can all take a flying leap. This isn't like when you took a leave of absence to save the spotted owl from loggers."

  "Stop," Katzen said. "You're embarrassing me. I'm not all that virtuous."

  "I'm not talking about virtue," Coffey said. "I'm talking about being committed to something worthwhile. You went to Oregon, did your on-site protest, testified at the state legislature, and got the problem solved. This situation is fifty centuries years old. Ethnic factions have always fought one another here and they always will. We can't stop them, and it's a waste of valuable resources even trying."

  "I disagree," Katzen replied. "We can mitigate the situation. And who knows? Maybe the next five thousand years will be better."

  "Or maybe the U.S. will get sucked into a religious war that'll tear us apart," Coffey replied. "I'm an isolationist at heart, Phil. That's one thing Senator Fox and I have in common. We've got the best country in the history of the world, and those who don't want to join us in the democratic melting pot can shoot, bomb, gas, nuke, and martyr each other until they're all in Paradise. I really don't care."

  Katzen scowled. "That's one point of view, I suppose."

  "Damn right," Coffey replied. "And I'm not apologizing for it. But there is one thing you can tell me."

  "What?" Katzen asked.

  Coffey's mouth twisted. "What is the difference between a porpoise and a dolphin?"

  Before he could answer, the door of the van opened and Mike Rodgers stepped out. Coffey savored the blast of air-conditioning before the ramrod-straight general shut the door. He was dressed in jeans and a tight gray Gettysburg Campaign souvenir T-shirt. His light brown eyes seemed almost golden in the bright sun.

  Mike Rodgers rarely smiled, but Coffey noticed the hint of a grin tugging at the side of his mouth.

  "So?" Coffey asked.

  "It's running," Rodgers said. "We were able to uplink to all five of the selected National Reconnaissance Office satellites. We have video, audio, and thermal views of the target region as well as complete electronic surveillance. Mary Rose is talking to Matt Stoll right now, making sure all of the data is getting through." Rodgers's reluctant smile bloomed. "The battery-powered son of a gun works."

  Katzen offered him his hand. "Congratulations, General. Matt must be ecstatic."

  "Yeah, he's a pretty happy fella," Rodgers said. "After everything we went through to put the ROC together, I'm pretty happy myself."

  Coffey toasted General Rodgers with a swig from the water bottle. "Forget everything I said, Phil. If Mike Rodgers is pleased, then we really must've batted one out of the park."

  "Grand slam," Rodgers said, "That's the good news. The bad news is that the chopper which is supposed to take you and Phil to Lake Van's been delayed."

  "For how long?" Katzen asked.

  "Permanently," said Rodgers. "Seems someone in the Motherland Party objects to the excursion. They don't buy our ecology cover story, that we're out here to study the rising alkaline levels of Turkish waterways and its percolation effect on the soil."

  "Aw, jeez," Katzen said. "What the hell do they think we want to do out there?"

  "You ready for this?" Rodgers asked. "They believe we've found Noah's Ark and that we plan to take it to the U.S. They want the Council of Ministers to cancel our permits."

  Katzen angrily jabbed the toe of his boot at the parched ground. "I really did want to have a look at that lake. It's got just one species of fish, the darek, which evolved to survive in the soda-rich water. We can learn a lot about adaptation from it."

  "Sorry," Rodgers said. "We're going to have to do some adapting of our own.
" He looked over at Coffey. "What do you know about this Motherland Party, Lowell? Do they have enough power to screw up our shakedown session?"

  Coffey dragged the kerchief along his strong jaw and then across the back of his neck. "Probably not," he said, "though you might want to check with Martha. They're pretty strong and considerably right-of-center. But any debate they start will go back and forth between the Prime Minister and the Motherlanders for two or three days before it's brought to the Grand National Assembly for a vote. I don't know about Phil's excursion, but I think that'll give us the time to do what we came here for."

  Rodgers nodded. He turned to Sondra. "Private DeVonne, the Deputy Prime Minister also told me that leaflets are being passed out in the streets, informing citizens about our plan to rob Turkey of its heritage. The government is sending an intelligence agent, Colonel Nejat Seden, to help us deal with any incidents. Until then, please inform Private Pupshaw that some of the people who'll be heading to the watermelon festival in Diyarbakir may be carrying a grudge as well as fruit. Tell him to stay cool."

  "Yes, sir."

  Sondra saluted and jogged toward the burly Pupshaw, who was stationed on the other side of the tents. He was watching the road where it disappeared behind a row of hills.

  Katzen frowned. "This is great. Not only could I miss out on the chance to study the darek, but we've got a hundred million dollars worth of sophisticated electronics in there. And until this Colonel Seden gets here, all we've got to protect it are two Strikers with radios on their hips and M21s, which, of they use 'em, we'll get clobbered for because we're supposed to be unarmed."

  "I thought you admired my diplomatic finesse," Coffey said.

  "I do."

  "Well, that was the best deal we could get," Coffey said. "You worked with Greenpeace. When the French secret service sunk your flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbor in 1985, you didn't go out and kill Parisians."

  "I wanted to," Katzen admitted. "Boy, how I wanted to."

  "But you didn't. We're employees of a foreign power conducting surveillance on behalf of a minority government so that their military can keep am eye on Islamic fanatics. We don't exactly have a moral imperative to gun down locals. If we're attacked, we lock the van door, get inside, and radio the local polisi. They rush out here in their swift Renaults and deal with the situation."

  "Unless they're Motherland sympathizers," Katzen said.

  "No," Coffey replied, "the police here are pretty fair. They may not like you, but they believe in the law and they'll uphold it."

  "Anyway," Rodgers said, "the DPM doesn't expect us to have that kind of trouble. At worst there'll be tossed watermelon, eggs, manure, that sort of thing."

  "Terrific," Katzen said. "At least in Washington they only sling mud."

  "If it ever rained here," Coffey said, "we'd get that too.

  Rodgers held out his hand and Coffey passed him the water. After taking a long swallow the general said, "Cheer up. As Tennessee Williams once said, 'Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.' "

  THREE

  Monday, 6:48 a.m.,

  Chevy Chase, Maryland

  Paul Hood sat sipping black coffee in the den of his comfortable suburban home. He'd opened the ivory-colored drapes, had cracked the sliding glass door an inch, and was looking across the backyard. Hood had traveled the world and was intimately familiar with many parts of it. But there was nothing that thrilled him as much as the dirty-white picket fence that marked his small part of it.

  The grass was glistening-green, and a warm breeze carried the smell of roses from his wife's tiny garden. Eastern bluebirds and yellow warblers were lively with song, and squirrels were acting like furry little Strikers as they moved, stopped, reconnoitered, then moved again. The rustic tranquility was broken now and then by what the jazz-loving Hood called the morning door jam: the slap of a screen door, the groan of a garage door, or the slam of a car door.

  To Hood's right was a dark oak bookcase filled with Sharon's well-used volumes on gardening and cooking. The shelves were also hacked with the encyclopedias, atlases, and dictionaries Harleigh and Alexander didn't consult anymore since all that material was on CDROM. Then there was a small corner section for Hood's own favorite novels. Ben-Hur. From Here to Eternity. The War of the Worlds. Tender Is the Night. Works by Ayn Rand, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Old Lone Ranger novels by Fran Striker that Hood had read as a kid and went back to every now and then. To Hood's left were shelves filled with mementoes of his tenure as the mayor of Los Angeles. Plaques, mugs, keys to other cities, and photographs with domestic and foreign dignitaries.

  The coffee and fresh air were equally invigorating. His lightly starched shirt was comfortable. And his new shoes felt rich, even though they weren't. He remembered when his father couldn't afford to buy him new shoes. It was thirty-five years ago, when Paul was nine and President Kennedy had been assassinated. His father, Frank "Battleship" Hood, a Navy man during the Second World War, had quit one accounting job to take another. The Hoods had sold their house and were about to move from Long Island to Los Angeles when the new firm put a sudden freeze on hiring. The firm was very, very sorry but they didn't know what was going to happen to the company, to the economy, to the country. His father didn't work for thirteen months after that, and they had to move into a small apartment. An apartment small enough so he could hear his mother consoling his father when he cried at night.

  Now here he was. Relatively affluent and the director of Op-Center. In less than a year, Hood and his core team had turned the agency, formally known as the National Crisis Management Center, from a liaison office between the CIA, the White House, and the other big boys to a crisis-management team in its own right. Hood had an often fractious relationship with some of his closest people, most notably Deputy Director Mike Rodgers, Intelligence Officer Bob Herbert, and Political and Economics Officer Martha Mackall. But he welcomed the differences of opinion. Besides, if he couldn't manage personality clashes in his office, he couldn't handle political and military clashes thousands of miles away. The desk-side skirmishes kept him alert and in shape for the bigger, more important battles.

  Hood drank his coffee slowly. Virtually every morning he sat comfortably alone on this sofa. He surveyed his life and invited contentment to lap him like an island. But it rarely did. Not on all sides, anyway. There was a hole, much larger in the month since he'd returned from Germany. A void which had been filled unexpectedly with passion. Passion for his one-time love Nancy, whom he'd met in Hamburg after twenty years. Passion that burned on the beach of his little island and disturbed his rest at night and fought for attention during the day.

  But it was passion that he had not and could not act upon. Not unless he wanted to destroy the people for whom this home and this life were contentment. The children to whom he was a constant and reliable source of strength and emotional security. The wife who respected and trusted him and said she loved him. Well, she probably did. She probably loved him in the same buddy-sisterly-shared-goals way that he loved her. Which wasn't bad, even though it wasn't what he felt for Nancy.

  Hood drained his mug, regretting that the last mouthful never tasted as glorious as the first. Not in coffee, not in life. He rose, put the mug in the dishwasher, grabbed his trench coat from the closet, and walked into the balmy morning.

  Hood drove southeast through Washington, D.C., to Op-Center's headquarters at Andrews Air Force Base. He negotiated traffic that was already thick with trucks, Mercedes, and fleets of overnight courier vans rushing to make morning deliveries. He wondered how many people were thinking like he was, how many were cursing the traffic, and how many were just enjoying the drive, the morning, and some upbeat music.

  He plugged in a tape of Spanish gypsy music, a love he'd acquired from his Cuban-born grandfather. The car filled with Romany lyrics whose words he didn't understand but whose passion he did. And as the music washed over him, Hood
tried once again to fill the gaps in his contentment.

  FOUR

  Monday, 7:18 a.m.,

  Washington, D. C.

  Matthew Stoll disdained the traditional labels for "his kind." He loathed them almost as much as he hated chronic optimists, unreasonably high prices for software, and curry. As he'd been telling all his friends and coworkers since his days as an MIT wunderkind---a term he didn't mind---he was not a computer nerd, a techno-weenie, or an egghead.

  "I think of myself as a techsplorer," he'd told Paul Hood and Mike Rodgers when he first interviewed for the job of Operations Support Officer.

  "Excuse me?" Hood had said.