Fernandez stared at the TV, finally absorbed in something other than himself.
“They backed Imberbe? Impossible,” he said. “I can’t believe he would work with them. Never.”
“Will that have an impact on the election?”
Fernandez shrugged. A new set of talking heads came on, noting the gravity of the situation. A spokesman for Imberbe was interviewed saying that the candidate denounced the rebel movement; he was immediately followed by a statement by a longtime political correspondent who said Imberbe could not be believed.
Lia sipped her beer slowly as she watched the program. The show was entertaining in a bizarre way, as guest after guest speculated endlessly on something they knew almost nothing about. The medium is the same the world over, Lia decided.
Fernandez ordered another drink and then a third. Un-prompted, he began telling Lia his life story, which amounted to an epic struggle against academic demons as he went to five different schools before earning a master’s degree in international law. Fernandez seemed to feel that he had struggled mightily in his years as a student, which made him appreciate the realities of poverty and hardship even though his family regularly sent him checks from Madrid.
Lia nodded every so often, one eye on the TV. Finally, bored and tired, she got up to go. Fernandez accompanied her shakily back to the hotel; as they walked up the stairs to their rooms she wasn’t sure whether he would get sick or make a pass at her when they reached their floor.
He did neither, which was something of a relief as she eased into her room.
The door had no lock. Lia pushed the bureau in front of it; the bureau was too light to keep anyone from entering, but it would at least slow them down. Though it seemed ludicrous, she took out her PDA and scanned the room for bugs. When she saw it was clean, she checked in with the Art Room.
“Same old, same old on your end,” said Rockman, telling her nothing was new. Dean and Karr were on their way to check out the warhead; she was to proceed as planned.
Kicking off her shoes, Lia climbed under the covers still fully dressed. She’d no sooner shut her eyes than she heard a scratching sound. Jerking up in bed, Lia pulled out the pistol she had left under the covers next to her. Her first thought was that Fernandez was scraping at the door in some sort of drunken plea, but she quickly realized that the sound was coming from above her.
Lia took her gun and got out of bed. She reached into her pocket and took out her small penlight, shining it around the ceiling. There were several patches where the plaster had fallen out, exposing the lath.
As she shone her light upward, the sound turned into a scampering drumbeat, then stopped. Lia climbed up onto the bed and shone the light into one of the lath-filled holes. The light made shadows through the blackness, but it was impossible to see beyond them.
She flicked off the light for a moment. The scratching resumed. When she flicked it back on, a pair of red beads glowed down at her from above.
The ceiling space was filled with rats.
“Oh, just peachy,” Lia said to herself, shivering involuntarily as she climbed back beneath the covers.
57
When he was a corporal, Charlie Dean had learned to parachute on the advice of a top sergeant, who said the skill would help him advance. The sergeant, a short, ugly man with a large heart and a very soft voice, was the smartest noncom Dean had ever had, and so he followed the advice even though he knew he would hate every minute of it. For a man who had served as a sniper in the waning days of the Vietnam War and witnessed the evacuation of Saigon, the training could not be honestly described as difficult duty. But Dean would have gladly swapped his weeks there for a year anywhere else, including Vietnam.
His three night training jumps — all successful, all utterly routine, all scary as all get-out — came back to him as he waited for Fashona’s signal to go. The aircraft had a specially rigged door on the right side that allowed it to slide out of the way, making egress easier for parachutists. Wind kicked through the cockpit like a hurricane, and Fashona groused about how hard it was to keep the plane on its circular course over the patio-sized field they had targeted for the drop. All three men had donned oxygen masks because of the thin air.
The area they were jumping into sat in the foothills between the Andes and the thickest parts of the tropical forest. Not as wet as the jungle to the east, nor as high as the peaks to the west, it mixed qualities of both — wide rivers divided green valleys; dusty plateaus were shaded by craggy rocks. Their targeted landing zone was a grassy field a mile and a half from a river; bounded on one side by a sharp drop and on the other by a dozen or so trees, they had about two and a half acres of clear landing zone.
It might just as well have been a square foot as far as Dean was concerned, looking out at the darkness.
“Five seconds,” said Fashona.
Karr stood next to a large equipment pack that contained most of their gear as well as an inflatable boat. Rather than using a static line to open the parachute, an altimeter trigger would open the chute at nine thousand feet above sea level, which was fifteen hundred feet above the ground, if, of course, the altimeter setting they had chosen was somewhere close to the true barometric pressure. The nylon canopy was designed so that the gear would fall in as straight a line as possible; Fashona had to fly the plane along a very precise line and the gear had to be ejected at the right moment for it to hit the landing zone.
Dean couldn’t recall the name of the top sergeant who had told him to learn to jump — Jones or Jacobs — but heard his voice in his head as if he were right behind him.
Well-rounded Marine is a good Marine. The way of the future, kid. Educate yourself.
What did jumping out of an airplane have to do with education, anyway?
“Now,” said Fashona.
Karr pushed the pack out. Dean leaned forward, hands still gripping the sides of the doorway.
“Geronimo!” yelled Karr, pulling Dean from the plane with him.
Caught off-balance, Dean’s left arm was grabbed and twisted by the wind. He focused on bringing it back, pushing his body into a flying wedge. The specially programmed goggles they were using worked with global positioning satellites as well as an altimeter reading to present visual cues as the parachutist fell. While the goggles weighed almost seven pounds, the weight was worth it — a green arrow appeared before him, telling him he was perfectly on course.
Good thing, thought Dean. At least if I splat I’ll do it in the right place.
58
Robert Gallo got up from his workstation in the Desk Three subbasement and began walking around the NSA computer lab. His eyes had started to water and blur from staring at the LCD computer screens. He’d run out of eyedrops earlier and struggled not to rub them — he knew from experience that would only make them worse. He had another bottle of the drops in the lounge, but that was a staircase and a security checkpoint away. Better to tough it out for a bit, if possible.
But not to itch! Gallo lay down in the middle of the floor and shut his eyes. The tears had just stopped streaming out when he heard someone come into the room.
“Ah,” said Johnny Bib above him. “There you are.”
“Hey,” said Gallo. “Did Angie find the source of the guerrillas’ communiqué?”
“No,” said Johnny Bib.
“They must not have used a landline to transmit the message. Otherwise Shark Siphon would have found it already, right?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” said Johnny.
Shark Siphon was an automated program that snagged communications on the Internet. It had taken all of the communications from Peru over the past twenty-four hours, examining them as possible sources of the communique by applying a variety of decrypting techniques. Unlike the smart viruses and worms that Gallo specialized in, it was a brute-force tool, made possible only by the agency’s massive computer capacity.
“Another possibility is Peru’s cell phone network,” said Johnny Bib.
Gallo sat up, eyes still closed. “We could hit the wireless companies’ databases, look for some transmission that would be long enough to send the message. I bet we could narrow it down to maybe a hundred phones or so. Even a thousand — we could check the names on the list against Peruvian intelligence files.”
“Yes,” said Johnny Bib in the singsongy way he used when someone had shared a good idea with him. “Ye-es. Very good thinking.”
“Want me to get in?”
“Ye-es. Ye-es.”
“On it.” Gallo opened his eyes gingerly. They felt a little better; once he launched the attack on the cell phone network, he’d run up and put the drops in.
“Are you having a vision?” asked Johnny Bib as he got up.
“Huh?”
“You were on the floor.”
“Oh.” Gallo laughed sheepishly. “My eyes just got teary with the screen.”
“Too bad,” said his supervisor, leaving the lab.
59
The green arrow in Dean’s goggles began to blink, indicating that he had three seconds before pulling the rip cord. He reached his hand to the ring, waiting. As the arrowhead changed to a plus sign and a tone sounded in his helmet’s headset, Dean pulled.
It was a good, solid tug, exactly as he had been taught as a Marine Corps “guest” at the Army’s Fort Benning airborne training center nearly three decades before. The parachute jerked him against his restraints — a very welcome jerk, given the alternative — and he reached for the control toggles. The green arrow was solid again and stayed there the whole way down, showing he was right on course.
Even so, his anxiety and adrenaline continued to build. Dean did everything right, braking the chute on cue and even managing to flex his legs as he hit the ground. But he tumbled over like a sack of potatoes and found he was hyperventilating so badly he had to rest a moment before getting up.
“Hey, Charlie, right on target,” yelled Karr, landing a few yards away. “Our gear and the boat are back about a quarter mile. Just missed landing in one of those funny-looking trees.”
Dean’s legs were so unsteady he thought he was going to collapse as he undid his harness.
“Hey, you OK?” said Karr, giving him a hand.
“I’ve been better.”
“Aw, come on. Don’t tell me it wasn’t fun.”
“Barrels,” said Dean. “I wish I could do it every damn day.”
* * *
The river was a half mile from where they landed. The large pack of equipment contained a small raft that inflated in a few seconds once Dean twisted the plastic lock on the air canister. As Dean loaded the backpacks into the raft, Karr assembled a small electric outboard motor. It looked like it had come from an oversize kids’ Erector set. The sturdiest part was the battery, which was about the size of a dictionary. But it proved not only quiet but relatively powerful, propelling them upriver against the current at about seven knots.
The village where the warhead had been found lay three and a half miles upriver, perched on the side of a cliff about two hundred feet above the water. Dean and Karr planned to stop at a bend about a half mile south of the village, hide their boat, and then sneak through the jungle. They had to get close enough to the warhead to get good pictures of it, take readings with a radiation meter Fashona had given them, and if at all possible plant a tracking device on the bomb or its transport.
Dean sat in the front of the boat, working as lookout as they made their way upriver. He tried warding off the memories of Vietnam, but they marshaled among the shadows along the riverbanks. He’d worked in terrain somewhat similar to this when he got the North Vietnamese sniper they called Fu Manchu. That had been in the highlands, too; drier on the whole, but there’d been a stream there as well.
As much as he tried to focus on the present dangers, the past ones clawed their way into his consciousness.
Fu Manchu had been hitting a South Vietnamese army outpost southeast of the demilitarized zone. The South Vietnamese were supposed to be interdicting the stream of North Vietnamese supplies, weapons, and men south, but what they were mostly doing was hunkering in an abandoned American bunker and trying to stay alive.
The ones who hadn’t deserted, that is.
A Marine unit was sent to stiffen their resolve. After they set up a post on the military crest of the hill near their ally’s bunker, the North Vietnamese sniper began taking shots at them as well. Dean and another Marine sniper called Turk ended up going after the man, volunteering one muggy afternoon and ending up on a cat-and-mouse chase that stretched nearly five days.
It was difficult to say who was the cat and who was the mouse. Turk was a gunnery sergeant, a veteran of two tours as a sniper in Vietnam, and as wily a hunter as Dean had ever met. Dean had only been in country a month and, though he’d seen quite a bit of action, was a novice at the trade.
Fu Manchu — Turk gave him the name for no particular reason — slipped through the jungles on both sides of a five-meter-wide stream so smoothly and silently that for much of the time they weren’t sure whether he was one person or three. They eventually discovered that he had several hides, where he prepositioned weapons and ammunition.
Something splashed in the water ahead. Dean jumped back to the present, raising not a sniper’s gun but the A2.
“Something?” whispered Karr.
Dean stared at the riverbank through his lightweight night goggles. A medium-sized cat hunkered down a few dozen yards away, eyes fixed on the strange craft as it sailed past them.
“Jaguar,” Dean said.
“I thought jaguars were extinct.”
“Then it’s a ghost,” said Dean.
Karr’s chuckle cracked the stillness.
They made landfall and stowed the boat under some foliage. A collection of small satellite-launched audio bugs had been dropped on the village, allowing the Art Room to scout the general layout of the troops there. Their runner, Sandy Chafetz, wanted Karr and Dean to launch a small unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, nicknamed a crow, so they’d have real-time visuals of the village. (It was called a crow because it was about the size of a large bird and looked like one, at least from afar and at night.)
“Not worth it with this foliage,” said Karr. “We won’t be able to see much, and it’ll be tough to recover. I think we just slide in and out. Plenty of gaps.”
“Your call,” said Chafetz.
“Thanks, sweets,” said Karr.
As they pulled on their rucksacks, Dean thought of the strange pack Turk had used in ’Nam. Taken from a North Vietnamese sapper, it was a big, sturdy bag with handy pockets and pouches. Turk had found a rigger or someone who could sew and added a few more of his own. At the time the Army was using very basic packs, and everyone who saw it was envious.
Fu Manchu had sent one of his bullets through the side of the pack. It was the sniper’s other bullet that had taken Turk, drilling through his temple.
Dean’s thought when he heard the second shot was that their quarry had failed — a second shot meant you had missed the first time.
And more important in this case, the second shot showed Dean where Fu Manchu was. He put his bullet there.
It took him several hours to get to the sniper’s body. Fu Manchu had crumpled into a pile of bones. He was so skinny he looked as if his flesh were made of paper.
He was a kid, younger even than Dean, who’d gotten into the Marine Corps the year before at sixteen, fudging on his age.
“Sentry, fifty yards,” said Karr, pointing to the left. He took point, moving through the trees toward the low-slung huts ahead. For a big man — and Karr was very big — he moved extremely quietly. He would have been a good sniper.
The village consisted of six small huts scattered around a clearing near the water. The woods on the south side were so thick that even with infrared night glasses, Dean and Karr had trouble seeing more than a few feet ahead. That helped them more than hindered them; the soldiers in the village had no night-vision
gear at all.
Several vehicles were parked at the edge of the clearing and on the rough trail of a road, which snaked off to the west. Two men walked back and forth in the center of the compound.
Dean and Karr observed the area carefully, comparing what the Art Room had told them with what they saw, making sure they knew where everyone was. Knots of soldiers were strung out along the roadway and shoreline, but they were all far enough away that they could be ignored. Several soldiers were sleeping in the huts; they, too, wouldn’t be a problem — as long as they remained sleeping.
The target was a large military truck parked behind an SUV on the dirt road that ran in front of the huts. Dean counted seven soldiers, each about thirty feet from the truck, strung out in a loose circle around it. When they were sure they knew where everyone was, Dean and Karr backtracked ten yards into the jungle, circling to the east, where the brush and the alignment of the guards left a narrow lane they could use to get close to the truck without being seen. The night was almost pitch-black, but they couldn’t entirely count on the darkness to hide them; at least one of the guards had a flashlight on his belt, and Dean suspected flares would be kept nearby.
When they were five yards from the road and about a dozen from the truck, Karr pulled off his pack, dropped it to the ground, and handed Dean his rifle. Then he removed a small device about the size of a TV remote control. This was a radiation detector “tuned” to find specific isotopes of plutonium — the common warhead material for Russian missiles — and a uranium by-product that often accompanied the material.
Just in case there was any shielding, Karr carried a device that would look for extremely dense material by sending X-rays through it. Nicknamed “the interrogator,” it was about the size and shape of two fat coffee thermoses put back-to-back together. The interrogator had two modes, one for simply detecting large mass elements and the other for estimating their size. The X-rays were extremely powerful; the beam could burn flesh and cause radiation damage if you stood too close.
Payback db-4 Page 17