by Tom Clancy
“Bloody good,” Al Stanley breathed. “Not a bloody sound.”
“He is as good as he says,” Clark observed.
As though hearing the remarks, Malloy brought the helicopter around, flashing a thumbs-up out the window to the men on the ground as he headed off to orbit the area for the remainder of the simulation. In a real situation, the orbit would be in case he was needed to do an emergency evacuation—and even more so, to get the people on the ground used to having a helicopter overhead, to make his presence as much a part of the landscape as the trees, so he’d disappear into the normal background of the night, no more remarkable than the song of nightingales despite the danger inherent from his presence. It surprised everyone in the business that you could get away with this, but it was just an application of human nature to the world of special operations. If a tank had driven into the parking lot, after a day or two it would be just another car. Covington’s trio of shooters circulated about the roof for a few minutes, then disappeared down ladders into the interior and emerged a few seconds later from the front door.
“Okay, Bear, this is Six, exercise concluded. Back to the bird farm, Colonel, over.”
“Roger, Six, Bear is RTB. Out” was the terse reply, and the Night Hawk broke off from the orbit and headed down to the helo pad.
“What do you think?” Stanley asked Major Covington.
“Bloody good. Like stepping off the train to the platform. Malloy knows what he’s about. Master Chief?”
“Put him on the payroll, sir,” Master Chief Chin confirmed. “That’s a guy we can work with.”
“The aircraft is nicely set up,” Malloy said twenty minutes later, in the club. He was wearing his green Nomex flight suit, with a yellow scarf around his neck, like a good aviator, though it struck Clark as odd.
“What’s with the necktie?”
“Oh, this? It’s the A-10 scarf. One of the guys I rescued in Kuwait gave it to me. I figure it’s lucky, and I’ve always kinda liked the Warthog as an airplane. So, I wear it on missions.”
“How hard is it to do that transition maneuver?” Covington asked.
“Your timing has to be pretty good, and you have to read the wind. You know what helps me prepare for it?”
“Tell me,” Clark said.
“Piano playing.” Malloy sipped at his pint of bitter and grinned. “Don’t ask me why, but I always fly better after I’ve played some. Maybe something to do with getting the fingers loose. Anyway, that chopper they lent us is set up just right. Control cables have the right tension, throttles are just so. That Air Force ground crew—well, I have to meet ’em and buy ’em all a round. They really know how to prepare a chopper. Good team of mechanics.”
“They are that,” First Lieutenant Harrison agreed. He belonged to 1st Special Operations Wing, and technically, therefore, he was responsible for the helicopter, though now he was very pleased to have so fine a teacher as Malloy.
“That’s half the battle of flying helos, getting the bird dialed in just so,” Malloy went on. “That one, you can just sweet talk to her, and she listens real nice.”
“Like a good rifle,” Chin observed.
“Roger that, Master Chief,” Malloy said, saluting with his beer. “So, what can you guys tell me about your first two missions?”
“Christians 10, Lions 1,” Stanley replied.
“Who’d you lose?”
“That was the Bern job. The hostage was killed before we were on the scene.”
“Eager beavers?”
“Something like that.” Clark nodded. “They weren’t real swift, crossing the line like that. I sorta thought they were just bank robbers, but later investigation turned up the terrorist connection. Of course, maybe they just wanted some cash. Dr. Bellow never really decided what they were all about.”
“Any way you look at it, they’re just hoods, murderers, whatever you want to call ’em,” Malloy said. “I helped train the FBI chopper pilots, spent a few weeks at Quantico with the Hostage Rescue Team. They kinda indoctrinated me on the psychological side. It can be pretty interesting. This Dr. Bellow, is it Paul Bellow, the guy who wrote the three books?”
“Same guy.”
“He’s pretty smart.”
“That’s the idea, Colonel Malloy,” Stanley said, waving for another round.
“But the thing is, you know, there’s only one thing you really need to know about them,” Malloy said, reverting back to identity as a colonel of the United States Marine Corps.
“How to whack them,” Master Chief Chin agreed.
The Turtle Inn Bar and Lounge was something of a fixture on Columbus Avenue, between Sixty-eighth and Sixty-ninth, well known and well patronized by locals and tourists. The music was loud, but not too loud, and the area was lighted, but not very well. The booze was a little more expensive than the norm, but the added price was for the atmosphere, which, the owner would have said, was priceless.
“So.” The man sipped at his rum and coke. “You live around here?”
“Just moving in,” she answered, sipping her own drink. “Looking for a job.”
“What d’ya do?”
“Legal secretary.”
A laugh. “Lots of room for that here. We got more lawyers ’n we got taxi drivers. Where’d you say you were from?”
“Des Moines, Iowa. Ever been there?”
“No, local boy,” the man replied, lying. He’d been born in Los Angeles thirty years before. “I’m an accountant with Peat Marwick.” That was a lie, too.
But a singles bar was a place for lies, as everyone knew. The woman was twenty-three or so, just out of secretarial school, brown hair and eyes, and needed to lose about fifteen pounds, though she was attractive enough if you liked them short. The three drinks she’d already consumed to show that she was a burgeoning Big Apple sophisticate had her pretty mellow.
“Been here before?” he asked.
“No, first time, what about you?”
“Last few months, nice place to meet people.” Another lie, but they came easily in a place like this.
“Music’s a little loud,” she said.
“Well, other places it’s a lot worse. You live close?”
“Three blocks north. Got a little studio apartment, subleasing it. Rent control in the building. My stuff gets here in another week.”
“So, you’re not really moved in yet?”
“Right.”
“Well, welcome to New York . . . ?”
“Anne Pretloe.”
“Kirk Maclean.” They shook hands, and he held hers a little longer than necessary so that she’d get a feel for his skin, a necessary precondition to casual affection, which he needed to generate. In another few minutes, they were dancing, which mainly meant bumping into people in the dark. He was turning on the charm, and she was smiling up at his six-foot height. Under other circumstances, this could have developed into something, Kirk thought. But not tonight.
The bar closed after two in the morning, and he walked her out. She was quite drunk now from a total of seven drinks barely diluted by bar peanuts and pretzel nuggets. He’d carefully nursed his three, and eaten a lot of peanuts. “So,” he asked out on the sidewalk, “let me drive you, okay?”
“It’s only three blocks.”
“Annie, it’s late, and this is New York; okay? You need to learn where you can go and where you can’t. Come on,” he concluded, pulling her hand and leading her around the corner. His BMW was parked halfway to Broadway. He gallantly held the door open, shut it behind her, then walked around to get in himself.
“You must do okay,” Anne Pretloe noted, surveying the car.
“Yeah, well, lots of people like to dodge taxes, y’know?” He started the car and moved out onto the cross street, actually in the wrong direction, though she was a little too much in her cups to appreciate that. He turned left on Broadway and spotted the blue van, parked in a quiet spot. Half a block away, he flashed his lights, whereupon he slowed the car, and pushed t
he button to lower both the driver-side and passenger windows.
“Hey,” he said, “I know this guy.”
“Huh?” Pretloe replied, somewhat confused about where they were and where they were going. It was too late for her to do much in any case.
“Yo, Kirk,” the man in coveralls said, leaning down to the open passenger window.
“Hey, buddy,” Maclean replied, giving a thumbs-up.
The man in coveralls leaned in and produced a small aerosol can from his sleeve. Then he depressed the red plastic button and gave Anne Pretloe a blast of ether right in the face. Her eyes popped open for a second of shock and surprise. She turned to look at Kirk for a long lingering second or so, and then her body went slack.
“Be careful with the drugs, man, she’s got a lot of booze in her.”
“No problem.” The man banged the side of the truck and another man appeared. This one looked up and down the street for a police car, then helped open the passenger door, lifted Anne Pretloe, and carried her limp form through the rear door of the van, where she joined another young woman picked up by another company employee earlier that night. With that, Maclean drove off, letting the night air blow the stink of the ether out of the car as he headed right, onto the West Side Highway and north to the George Washington Bridge. Okay, that made two he’d bagged, and the others should have gotten a total of six more by now. Another three, and they could end this most dangerous part of the operation.
CHAPTER 11
INFRASTRUCTURE
The lawyer made the call, and unsurprisingly found that it developed into a luncheon in a restaurant where a man of forty or so asked a few simple questions, then left before the dessert cart was wheeled up to the table. That ended his involvement with whatever would happen. He paid the check with cash and walked back to his office haunted by the question—what had he done, what might he have started? The answer for both, he told himself forcefully, was that he didn’t know. It was the intellectual equivalent of a shower after a sweaty day’s work, and though ultimately not as satisfying, he was a lawyer, and accustomed to the vicissitudes of life.
His interlocutor left the restaurant and caught the Métro, changing trains three times before settling on the one that ran near his home, close to a park known for the prostitutes who stood about, peddling their multivalued wares for passersby in automobiles. If there were anywhere an indictment of the capitalist system, it was here, he thought, though the tradition went further back than the onset of the current economic system. The women had all the gaiety of serial killers, as they stood there in their abbreviated clothing made to be removed as rapidly as possible, so as to save time. He turned away, and headed to his flat, where, with luck, others would be waiting for him. And luck, it turned out, was with him. One of his guests had even made coffee.
“This is where it has to stop,” Carol Brightling said, even though she knew it wouldn’t.
“Sure, doc,” her guest said, sipping OEOB coffee. “But how the hell do you sell it to him?”
The map was spread on her coffee table: East of Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay was a piece of tundra, over a thousand square miles of it, and geologists for British Petroleum and Atlantic Richfield—the two companies that had largely exploited the Alaskan North Slope, built the pipeline, and therefore helped cause the Exxon Valdez disaster—had made their public pronouncement. This oil-field, called AARM, was at least double the size of the North Slope. The report, still semiclassified in the industrial sense, had come to the White House a week earlier, with confirming data from the United States Geological Survey, a federal agency tasked to the same sort of work, along with the opinion of the geologists that the field extended farther east, across the Canadian border—and exactly how far it extended they could only guess, because the Canadians had not yet begun their survey. The conclusion of the executive summary posited the possibility that the entire field could rival the one in Saudi Arabia, although it was far harder to transport oil from it—except for the fact, the report went on, that the Trans-Alaska pipeline had already been built, and the new fields would only need a few hundred miles of extension on the existing pipeline, which, the summary concluded arrogantly, had produced a negligible environmental impact.
“Except for that damned tanker incident,” Dr. Brightling observed into her morning coffee. Which had killed thousands of innocent wild birds and hundreds of sea otters, and had sullied several hundred square miles of pristine seacoast.
“This will be a catastrophe if Congress lets it go forward. My God, Carol, the caribou, the birds, all the predators. There are polar bears there, and browns, and barren-ground grizzly, and this environment is as delicate as a newborn infant. We can’t allow the oil companies to go in there!”
“I know, Kevin,” the President’s Science Advisor responded, with an emphatic nod—
“The damage might never be repaired. The permafrost—there’s nothing more delicate on the face of the planet,” the president of the Sierra Club said, with further, repetitive emphasis. “We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our children—we owe it to the planet. This bill has to be killed! I don’t care what it takes, this bill must die! You must convince the President to withdraw any semblance of support for it. We cannot allow this environmental rape to take place.”
“Kevin, we have to be smart about how we do this. The President sees this as a balance-of-payments issue. Domestic oil doesn’t force us to spend our money buying oil from other countries. Worse, he believes the oil companies when they say they drill and transport the oil without doing great environmental damage, and that they can fix what damage they do accidentally.”
“That’s horseshit, and you know it, Carol.” Kevin Mayflower spat out his contempt for the oil companies. Their goddamned pipeline is a bleeding scar on the face of Alaska, an ugly, jagged steel line crossing the most beautiful land on the face of the earth, an affront to Nature Herself—and what for? So that people could drive motor vehicles, which further polluted the planet merely because lazy people didn’t want to walk to work or ride bicycles or horses. (Mayflower didn’t reflect on the fact that he’d flown to Washington to deliver his plea instead of riding one of his Appaloosa horses across the country, and that his rented car had been parked on West Executive Drive.) Everything the oil companies touched, they ruined, he thought. They made it dirty. They sullied the very earth itself, removing what they thought of as a precious resource here, there, and everywhere, whether it was oil or coal, gashing the earth, or poking holes into it, sometimes spilling their liquid treasure because they didn’t know and didn’t care about the sanctity of the planet, which belonged to everyone, and which needed proper stewardship. The stewardship, of course, required proper guidance, and that was the job of the Sierra Club and similar groups, to tell the people how important the earth was, and how they must respect and treat it. The good news was that the President’s Science Advisor did understand, and that she did work in the White House Compound, and did have access to the President.
“Carol, I want you to walk across the street, go into the Oval Office, and tell him what has to be done.”
“Kevin, it’s not that easy.”
“Why the hell not? He’s not that much of a dunce, is he?”
“He occasionally has a different point of view, and the oil companies are being very clever about this. Look at their proposal,” she said, tapping the report on the table. “They promise to indemnify the entire operation, to put up a billion-dollar bond in case something goes wrong—for God’s sake, Kevin, they even offer to let the Sierra Club be on the council to oversee their environmental protection programs!”
“And be outnumbered there by their own cronies! Be damned if they’ll co-opt us that way!” Mayflower snarled. “I won’t let anyone from my office be a part of this rape, and that’s final!”
“And if you say that out loud, the oil companies will call you an extremist, and marginalize the whole environmental movement—and you can’t afford to let that happen,
Kevin!”
“The hell I can’t. You have to stand and fight for something, Carol. Here is where we stand and fight. We let those polluting bastards drill oil in Prudhoe Bay, but that’s it!”
“What will the rest of your board say about this?” Dr. Brightling asked.
“They’ll goddamned well say what I goddamned tell them to say!”
“No, Kevin, they won’t.” Carol leaned back and rubbed her eyes. She’d read the entire report the previous night, and the sad truth was that the oil companies had gotten pretty damned smart about dealing with environmental issues. It was plain business sense. The Exxon Valdez had cost them a ton of money, in addition to the bad public relations. Three pages had been devoted to the changes in tanker safety procedures. Now, ships leaving the huge oil terminal at Valdez, Alaska, were escorted by tugs all the way to the open sea. A total of twenty pollution-control vessels were on constant standby, with a further number in reserve. The navigation systems on every tanker had been upgraded to beyond what nuclear submarines carried; the navigation officers were compelled to test their skills on simulators every six months. It was all hugely expensive, but far less so than another serious spill. A series of commercials proclaimed all of these facts on television—worst of all, the high-end intellectual cable/satellite channels, History, Learning, Discovery, and A&E, for whom the oil companies were also sponsoring new shows on wildlife in the Arctic, never touched upon what the companies did, but there were plenty of pictures of caribou and other animals traversing under the elevated portions of the pipeline. They were getting their message out very skillfully indeed, even to members of the Sierra Club’s board, Brightling thought.