by Tom Clancy
They weren’t. Each of the sixteen Arabs lifted a weapon and hefted it, as though to say hello to a new friend. Then one lifted a magazine pair—
“Stop! Halto!” Juan snapped at once. “You will not load these weapons inside. If you wish to test-fire them, we have targets outside.”
“Will this not be too noisy?” Mustafa asked.
“The nearest house is four kilometers away,” Juan answered dismissively. The bullets could not travel that far, and he assumed the noise could not either. In this, he was mistaken.
But his guests assumed he knew everything about the area, and they were always willing to shoot guns off, especially the rock-and-roll kind. Twenty meters from the house was a sand berm with some crates and cardboard boxes scattered about. One by one, they inserted the magazines into their SMGs and pulled back the bolts. There was no official command to fire. Instead, they took their lead from Mustafa, who grasped the strap dangling from the muzzle and pulled his trigger back.
The immediate results were agreeable. The MAC-10 made the appropriate noise, jumping up and right as all such weapons did, but since this was his first time and this was just range shooting, he managed to walk his rounds into a cardboard box about six meters to his left front. In seemingly no time at all, the bolt slammed shut on an empty chamber, having fired and ejected thirty Remington 9mm pistol cartridges. He thought of extracting the magazine and reversing it to enjoy another two or three seconds of blazing bliss, but he managed to control himself. There would be another time for that, in the not-too-distant future.
“The silencers?” he asked Juan.
“Inside. They screw on the muzzle, and it’s better to screw them on—easier to control how they spray their bullets, you see.” Juan spoke with some authority. He’d used the MAC-10 to eliminate business competitors and other unpleasant people in Dallas and Santa Fe over the years. Despite that, he looked on his guests with a certain unease. They grinned too much. They were not as he was, Juan Sandoval told himself, and the sooner they went on their way, the better. It would not be so for the people at their destinations, but that was not his concern. His orders came from on high. Very on high, his immediate superior had made clear to him the week before. And the money had been commensurate. Juan had no particular complaint, but, as a good reader of people, he had a red light flashing behind his eyes.
Mustafa followed him back in and picked up the suppressor. It was perhaps ten centimeters in diameter, and half a meter or so long. As promised, it screwed onto the thread on the gun’s muzzle, and on the whole, it did improve the weapon’s balance. He hefted it briefly and decided that he’d prefer to use it this way. Better to reduce muzzle climb, and make for more accurate shooting. The reduction in noise had little bearing on his mission, but accuracy did. But the suppressor made an easily concealed weapon unacceptably bulky. So, he unscrewed it for now, and replaced the silencer in its carry-bag. Then he went outside to gather his people. Juan followed him back out.
“Some things you need to know,” he told the team leaders. Juan went on in a slow, measured voice: “The American police are efficient, but they are not all-powerful. If, during your driving, one pulls you over, all you need to do is to speak politely. If he asks you to get out of the car, then get out as he says. He is allowed by American laws to see if you have a weapon on your person—to search you with his hands—but if he asks you to search your car, simply say no, I do not wish you to do that—and by their laws he may not search your car. I will say this again: If an American policeman asks to search your car, you need only say no, and then he may not do it. Then drive away. When you drive, do not go faster than the number on the highway signs. If you do that, you will probably not be disturbed in any way. If you go faster than the speed limit, all you do is to give the police a reason to pull you over. So, do not do that. Exercise patience at all times. Do you have any questions?”
“What if a policeman is too aggressive, can we—”
Juan knew that question was coming. “Kill one? Yes, it is possible to do so, but then you will have many more police chasing you. When a police officer pulls you over, the very first thing he will do is radio his location, and the license number of your car, and a description, to his headquarters. So, even if you kill him, his comrades will look for you in a matter of minutes—and in large numbers. It is not worth the satisfaction of killing the policeman. You will only invite more trouble on yourselves. American police forces have many cars, and even aircraft. Once they start looking for you, they will find you. So, your only defense against that is to escape notice. Do not speed. Do not break their traffic laws. Do that and you will be safe. Violate those laws, and you will be caught, guns or not. Do you understand this?”
“We understand,” Mustafa assured him. “Thank you for your assistance.”
“We have maps for all of you. They are good maps, from the American Automobile Association. You all have cover stories, yes?” Juan asked, hoping to get this over as quickly as he could.
Mustafa looked at his friends for additional inquiries, but they were too eager to get on with their business to be sidetracked now. Satisfied, he turned to Juan. “Thank you for your help, my friend.”
Friend be damned, Juan thought, but he took the man’s hand and walked them around to the front of the building. Bags were quickly transferred from the SUVs to the sedans, and then he watched them pull off, heading back to State Route 185. It was only a few miles to Radium Springs, and the entrance onto I-25 North. The foreigners gathered one last time, to shake hands—and even share a few kisses, Juan was surprised to see. Then they split up into four teams of four men each and entered their rental cars.
Mustafa settled in his car. He set his cigarette packs on the seat next to him, made sure that the mirrors were properly aligned for his eyes, and buckled his seat belt—he’d been told that not buckling was as likely as speeding to get himself pulled over. Above all things, he didn’t want to be pulled over by a policeman. Despite the briefing instructions he’d received from Juan, it was a risk he felt no desire to run. Passing by, a cop might not recognize them for what they were, but face-to-face was something else again, and he had no illusions about how Americans thought of Arabs. For that reason, all copies of the Holy Koran were tucked away in the trunk.
It would be a long time, Abdullah would spell him at the wheel, but the first stint would be his. North on I-25 to Albuquerque, then east on I-40 almost all the way to their target. Over three thousand kilometers. He’d have to start thinking in miles now, Mustafa told himself. One point six kilometers to a mile. He’d have to multiply every number by that constant, or just disregard metric altogether as far as his car was concerned. Whatever, he drove north on Route 185 until he saw the leaf-green sign and the arrow for I-25 North. He settled back in his seat, checked traffic as he merged, and increased speed to sixty-five miles per hour, setting the Ford’s cruise control right on that number. After that, it was just a matter of steering, and watching all of the anonymous traffic which, like him and his friends, was headed north to Albuquerque . . .
JACK DIDN’T know why it was hard to go to sleep. It was past eleven in the evening, he’d seen his nightly take of TV, and had his two or three—tonight it had been three—drinks. He should have been sleepy. He was sleepy, as a matter of fact, but sleep wasn’t coming. And he didn’t know why. Just close your eyes and think happy thoughts, his mom had told him as a little boy. But thinking happy thoughts was the hard part now that he wasn’t a kid anymore. He’d entered into a new world that had few enough of those in it. His job was to examine the known and suspected facts concerning people he’d probably never meet, try to decide if they wanted to kill other people he’d never meet, then pass the information on to other people who might or might not try to do something about it. Exactly what they would try to do he did not know, though he had his suspicions . . . and ugly suspicions they were. Roll over, refluff the pillow, try to find a cool spot in the pillowcase, head back down, get some sleep
. . .
. . . it wasn’t happening. It would, eventually. It always did, seemingly half a second before the clock radio went off.
God damn it! he raged at the ceiling.
He was hunting terrorists. Most of them believed something good—no, something heroic—about themselves as they went about their crimes. To them it wasn’t a crime at all. For Muslim terrorists, it was the illusion that they were doing God’s work. Except the Holy Koran didn’t really say that. It particularly disapproved of killing innocent people, noncombatants. How did that really work? Did Allah greet suicide bombers with a smile, or something else? In Catholicism, personal conscience was sovereign. If you truly believed you were doing the right thing, then God couldn’t slam you for it. Was Islam the same in its rules? Besides, since there was only one God, maybe the rules were the same for everybody. Problem was, which set of religious rules came closest to what God really thought? And how the hell did you tell which was which? The Crusades had done some pretty vile things. But that was a classic case of someone giving a religious title for a war that was really about economics and simple ambition. A nobleman just didn’t want to appear to be fighting for money— and with God on your side, there was nothing you couldn’t do. Swing the sword, and whatever neck you severed was okay. The bishop said so.
Right. The real problem was that religion and political power made a shitty mix, though one easily adopted by the young and enthusiastic, for whom adventure was something that just pulled at your sleeve. His father had talked about that, sometimes, over dinner on the Residence Level of the White House, explaining that one of the things you had to tell young soldier and Marine recruits was that even war had rules, and that breaking them carried stiff penalties. American soldiers learned that pretty easily, Jack Sr. had told his son, because they came from a society in which undisciplined violence was harshly punished, which was better than abstract principle for teaching right and wrong. After a smack or two, you kinda picked up the message.
He sighed, and rolled over again. He was really too young to think about such Great Questions of Life, even though his degree from Georgetown suggested otherwise. Colleges typically did not tell you that ninety percent of your education came after you hung the parchment on the wall. People might ask for a rebate.
IT WAS past closing time at The Campus. Gerry Hendley was in his top-floor office, going over data that he hadn’t been able to fit into the normal working day. It was the same for Tom Davis, who had reports from Pete Alexander.
“Trouble?” Hendley asked.
“The twins are still thinking a little too much, Gerry. We should have anticipated it. They’re both smart, and they’re both people who play within the rules, for the most part, so when they see themselves being trained to violate those rules it worries them. The funny part, Pete says, is that the Marine’s the one who’s worrying so much. The FBI one is playing along much better.”
“I would have expected it to go the other way.”
“So did I. And Pete.” Davis reached for his ice water. He never drank coffee this late at night. “Anyway, Pete says he’s unsure how it’s going to play out, but he has no choice other than to continue the training. Gerry, I should have warned you more about this. I figured we’d have this problem. Hell, it’s our first time. The sort of people we want—like I said, they’re not psychopaths. They will ask questions. They will want to know why. They will have second thoughts. We can’t recruit robots, can we?”
“Like when they tried to whack Castro,” Hendley observed. He’d read into the classified files on that mad, failed adventure. Bobby Kennedy had ramrodded Operation MONGOOSE. They’d probably decided over drinks, or maybe after some touch football, to play that game. After all, Eisenhower had used CIA for similar purposes during his presidency, so why shouldn’t they? Except that a former lieutenant in the Navy who’d lost his command to ramming, and a lawyer who’d never practiced law, did not instinctively know all the things that a career soldier who’d gone to five stars fully understood from the very beginning. And besides, they’d had the power. The Constitution itself had made Jack Kennedy Commander in Chief, and with that sort of power invariably came the urge to make use of it, and so reshape the world into something more amenable to his personal outlook. And so, CIA had been ordered to make Castro go away. But CIA had never had an assassination department, and had never trained people to perform such missions. And so, the Agency had gone to the Mafia, whose commission members had little reason to admire Fidel Castro—who had shut down what had been about to become their most profitable venture ever. It’d been so sure a thing that some of the organized-crime big shots had invested their own, personal, money in the Havana casinos, only to have them closed down by the communist dictator.
And did not the Mafia know how to kill people?
Well, in fact, no, they had never been very efficient at it—especially at killing people able to fight back—Hollywood movies to the contrary. And even so, the government of the United States of America had tried to use them as contractors for the assassination of a foreign chief of state—because CIA didn’t know how to make such a thing happen. It was, in retrospect, somewhat ludicrous. Somewhat? Gerry Hendley asked himself. It had come within an inch of exposure as a government-engineered train wreck. Enough to force President Gerry Ford into drafting his executive order that made such action illegal, and that order had lasted until President Ryan had decided to take out the religious dictator of Iran with two smart bombs. Remarkably, the time and circumstances had disabled the news media from commenting on the killing. It had been done, after all, by the United States Air Force, with properly marked—albeit stealthy—bomber aircraft in a time of an undeclared but very real war in which weapons of mass destruction had been used against American citizens. Those factors had combined to make the entire operation not only legitimate but laudable, as ratified by the American people at the following election. Only George Washington had garnered a larger plurality at the polls, a fact which still made the senior Jack Ryan uneasy. But Jack had known the import of the killing of Mahmoud Haji Daryaei, and so, before leaving office, had talked Gerry into establishing The Campus.
But Jack didn’t tell me how hard this would be, Hendley reminded himself. That was how Jack Ryan had always operated: Pick good people, give them a mission and the tools to accomplish it, then let them do it with minimal guidance from on high. It was what had made him a good boss, and a pretty good president, Gerry thought. But it didn’t make life much easier on his subordinates. Why the hell had he taken the assignment? Hendley asked himself. But then came a smile. How would Jack react when he found out his own son was part of The Campus? Would he see the humor of it?
Probably not.
“So, Pete says just to play it out?”
“What else can he say?” Davis asked in reply.
“Tom, ever wish you were back on your dad’s farm in Nebraska?”
“It’s awful hard work, and kind of dull out there.” And there was no way you were going to keep Davis down on the farm after he’d been a CIA field officer. He might be a pretty good bond trader now in his “white” life, but Davis was no more white in his true avocation than he was in his skin color. He liked the action in the “black” world too much.
“What do you think of the Fort Meade stuff?”
“My gut tells me we’re due for something. We’ve stung them. They’ll want to sting us back.”
“You think they can recover? Haven’t our troops in Afghanistan bit into them pretty hard?”
“Gerry, some people are too dumb, or too dedicated, to notice being hurt. Religion is a powerful motivator. And even if their shooters are too dumb to know the import of what they’re doing—”
“—they’re smart enough to carry out missions,” Hendley agreed.
“And isn’t that why we’re here?” Davis asked.
CHAPTER 11
CROSSING THE RIVER
THE SUN rose promptly at dawn. Mustafa was startled awake by
the combination of bright light and a bump in the road. He shook his head clear and turned to see Abdullah smiling at the wheel.
“Where are we?” the team leader asked his principal subordinate.
“We are half an hour east of Amarillo. It has been a pleasant drive for the past three hundred and fifty miles, but I will soon need petrol.”
“Why didn’t you wake me hours ago?”
“Why? You were sleeping pleasantly, and the road has been almost completely clear all night, except for those damned big trucks. These Americans must all sleep at night. I do not think I have seen more than thirty real automobiles in the past several hours.”
Mustafa checked the speedometer. The car was only doing sixty-five. So, Abdullah was not speeding. They hadn’t been stopped by any policemen. There was nothing to be upset about—except that Abdullah had not followed his orders as precisely as Mustafa would have preferred.
“There.” The driver pointed at a blue service sign. “We can get petrol and some food. I was planning to wake you up here anyway, Mustafa. Be at ease, my friend.” The fuel gauge was almost on the “E,” Mustafa saw. Abdullah had been foolish to let it get that low, but there was no sense in berating him for it.
They pulled into a sizable travel plaza. The gas pumps were labeled Chevron and were automated. Mustafa took out his wallet and inserted his Visa card in the slot, then filled up the Ford with over twenty gallons of premium gasoline.
By that time, the other three had cycled through the plaza’s men’s room and were examining the food options. Looked like doughnuts again. Ten minutes after pulling the car off the interstate highway, they were back onto it, heading east for Oklahoma. In another twenty minutes, they’d entered it.