by Tom Clancy
UPSTAIRS, Hendley had his senior people together in front of his TV set.
“Thoughts?”
“Pete called up from Charlottesville. Care to guess where our two trainees were?” Jerry Rounds asked.
“You’re kidding,” Tom Davis responded.
“No, I’m not. They whacked the bad guys for fair, without outside assistance, and they’re back at the house now. Bonus: Brian—the Marine—had been having second thoughts about his function. That, Pete reports, is a thing of the past. He can’t wait to go out on some real missions. Pete thinks they’re just about ready, too.”
“So, we just need some solid targets?” Hendley asked.
“My people will be checking the feed from NSA. You gotta assume that the bad guys will be talking back and forth now. Their downtime in chatting back and forth should be coming to an end even now,” Rick Bell thought aloud. “If we’re ready to go active, then we can go active, and soon.”
That was Sam Granger’s department. He’d kept quiet to this point, but now it was time to speak.
“Well, guys, we have two kids ready to go out and service some targets,” he said, using a phrase the Army had invented twenty years before. “They are good kids, Pete tells me, and from what happened today I think they will be properly motivated.”
“What is the opposition thinking?” Hendley asked. It wasn’t hard to figure out, but he wanted additional opinions.
“They wanted to sting us cleverly. The objective here manifestly is to strike at Middle America,” Rounds led off. “They think they can strike fear in our hearts by showing us they can attack us anywhere, not just at obvious targets like New York. That was the element of cleverness in this operation. Probably fifteen to twenty total terrorists, plus some support personnel, maybe. That’s a fairly large number, but not unprecedented—they maintained good operational security. Their people were well motivated. I would not say that they were particularly well trained, though, they just decided to toss a mad dog in the backyard to bite some of the kids, as it were. They’ve demonstrated their political willingness to do some very bad things, but that’s not a surprise; also to throw dedicated personnel away, but that’s not a surprise either. The attack was low-tech in nature, just some bad guys with light automatic weapons. They have demonstrated viciousness, but not real professionalism. In less than two days, the FBI will have them tracked down to their point of origin, probably, and maybe their routes of entry. They did not learn to fly or anything like that, so they probably have not been in-country all that long. I’d be interested in learning who scouted out their objectives. The element of timing suggests some preplanning, but not much, I’d guess—it’s not hard to read the time off a wristwatch. They didn’t plan on getting away after doing their shooting. They probably came in with their objectives already identified. At this point, I’d bet a few bucks that they’ve only been inside our borders for a week or two—even less, depending on their method of ingress. The Bureau will have that one nailed down pretty soon.”
“Pete reports the weapons were Ingram submachine guns. They look pretty—that’s why they show up in TV and the movies,” Granger explained. “But they are not really efficient weapons.”
“How did they get them?” Tom Davis asked.
“Good question. Figure the FBI already has the ones from Virginia, and is busy tracking them down by serial number. They’re good at it. We should have the information by tonight. That will give them leads on how the weapons got into the terrorists’ hands, and then the investigation will get going.”
“WHAT’S THE Bureau going to do, Enzo?” Brian asked.
“It’s a major case. It’ll have a code word assigned, and every agent in the country can be called in to work on it. Right now, first thing they’re looking for is the car the bad guys used. Maybe it’s stolen. More likely it’s rented. You have to sign for those, leave a copy of your driver’s license, credit card, all the normal stuff you do in order to exist in America. It can all be followed. It all leads somewhere, bro. That’s why you chase them all down.”
“How are you guys doing?” Pete asked, entering the room.
“A drink helps,” Brian answered. He’d already cleaned his Beretta, as Dominic had done with his Smith & Wesson. “It wasn’t fun, Pete.”
“It isn’t supposed to be. Okay, I just talked with the home office. They want to see you guys in a day or so. Brian, you had some qualms before, and you say that’s changed. That still true?”
“You’ve trained us to identify, close on, and kill people, Pete. And I can live with that—just so’s we’re not doing something completely off the reservation.”
Dominic just nodded agreement, but his eyes didn’t leave Alexander.
“Okay, good. There’s an old joke in Texas about why the lawyers are so good down there. The answer is, there’s more men who need killin’ than horses that need stealin’. Well, those who need killing, maybe you two can help them along some.”
“Are you finally going to tell us who we’re working for, exactly?” Brian asked.
“You will find that out in due course—just a day or so.”
“Okay, I can wait that long,” Brian said. He was doing some quick analysis of his own. General Terry Broughton might know something. For damned sure that Werner guy in FBI did, but this former tobacco plantation they’d been training on didn’t belong to any part of the government he knew about. CIA had “The Farm” near Yorktown, Virginia, but that was about a hundred fifty miles away. This place didn’t feel like “Agency,” at least not in accordance with his assumptions, wrong though they could be. In fact, this place didn’t smell “government” at all, not to his nose. But one way or another, in a couple of days he’d know something substantive, and he could wait that long.
“What do we know about the guys we whacked today?”
“Nothing much. That’ll have to wait awhile. Dominic, how long before they start finding stuff out?”
“By noon tomorrow they’ll have a lot of information, but we don’t have a pipeline into the Bureau, unless you want me to—”
“No, I don’t. We might have to let them know that you and Brian aren’t the new version of the Lone Ranger, but it ought not to go very far.”
“You mean I’ll have to talk to Gus Werner?”
“Probably. He has enough juice in the Bureau to say you’re on ‘special assignment’ and make it stick. I imagine he’ll be patting himself on the back for talent-scouting you for us. You two did pretty damned well, by the way.”
“All we did,” the Marine said, “was what we’ve been trained to do. We had just enough time to get our shit together, and after that it was all automatic. They taught me at the Basic School that the difference between making it and not making it is usually just a few seconds’ worth of thinking. If we’d been in the Sam Goody when it all started instead of a few minutes later, it might have been different in the final outcome. One other thing—two men are about four times as effective as one man. There’s actually a study about it. ‘Non-Linear Tactical Factors In Small-Unit Engagements, ’ I think the title is. It’s part of the syllabus at Recon School.”
“Marines really do know how to read, eh?” Dominic asked, reaching for a bottle of bourbon. He poured two stiff ones, handing one to his brother and taking a pull on his own.
“The guy in the Sam Goody—he smiled at me,” Brian said in reflective amazement. “I didn’t think about it at the time. I guess he wasn’t afraid to die.”
“It’s called martyrdom, and some people really do think that way,” Pete told them both. “So, what did you do?”
“I shot him, close range, maybe six or seven times—”
“Far side of ten times, bro,” Dominic corrected him. “Plus the last one in the back of his head.”
“He was still moving,” Brian explained. “And I didn’t have any cuffs to slap on him. And, you know, I’m not really all that worried about it.” And besides, he would have bled out anyway. The way thin
gs had worked out, his trip into the next dimension had just happened sooner.
“B-3 AND bingo! We have a bingo,” Jack announced from his workstation. “Sali is a player, Tony. Look here,” he said, pointing to his computer screen.
Wills punched up his “take” from NSA, and there it was. “You know, chickens are supposed to cackle after they lay an egg, just to let the world know how good they are. Works with these birds, too. Okay, Jack, it’s official. Uda bin Sali is a player. Who is this addressed to?”
“It’s a guy he chats on the ’Net with. He mainly talks to him about money moves.”
“Finally!” Wills observed, checking the document on his own workstation. “They want photos of the guy, a whole spread. Maybe Langley is finally going to put some coverage on him. Praise the Lord!” He paused. “Got a list of the people he e-mails to?”
“Yep. Want it?” Jack keyed it up and hit the PRINT command. In just fifteen seconds, he handed the sheet over to his roomie. “Numbers and dates of e-mails. I can print up all the interesting ones, and the reasons I find them interesting, if you want.”
“We’ll let that sit for the moment. I’ll get this up to Rick Bell.”
“I’ll hold the fort.”
DID YOU SEE THE NEWS ON TV, Sali had written to a semiregular correspondent. THIS OUGHT TO GIVE THE AMERICANS A STOMACHACHE!
“Yeah, it sure will,” Jack told the screen. “But you just tipped your hand, Uda. Oops.”
SIXTEEN MORE martyrs, Mohammed thought, watching a TV in Vienna’s Bristol Hotel. It was only painful in the abstract. Such people were, really, expendable assets. They were less important than he, and that was the truth, because of his value to the organization. He had the looks and the language skills to travel anywhere, and the brainpower to plan his missions well.
The Bristol was an especially fine hotel, just across the street from the even more ornate Imperial, and the minibar had some good cognac, and he liked good cognac. The mission had not gone all that well ... he’d hoped for hundreds of dead Americans, instead of several dozen, but with all the armed police and even some armed citizens, the high end of his expectations had been overly optimistic. But the strategic objective had been achieved. All Americans now knew that they were not safe. No matter where they might live, they could be struck by his Holy Warriors, who were willing to trade their lives for the Americans’ sense of security. Mustafa, Saeed, Sabawi, and Mehdi were now in Paradise—if that place really existed. He sometimes thought it was a tale told to impressionable children, or to the simpleminded who actually listened to the preaching of the imams. You had to choose your preachers carefully, since not all the imams saw Islam the way Mohammed did. But they did not want to rule all of it. He did—or maybe just a piece of it, just so long as it included the Holy Places.
He couldn’t talk aloud about matters like this. Some senior members of the organization really did believe, they were more to the conservative—reactionary—side of the Faith than were those such as the Wahabis of Saudi Arabia. To his eyes the latter were just the corrupt rich of that hideously corrupt country, people who mouthed the words while indulging their vices at home and abroad, spending their money. And money was easily spent. You could not take it to the afterlife, after all. Paradise, if it truly existed, had no need of money. And if it did not exist, then there was no use for money, either. What he wanted, what he hoped to—no, what he would have in his lifetime—was power, the ability to direct people, to bend others to his will. For him, religion was the matrix that set the shape of the world that he would be controlling. He even prayed on occasion, lest he forget that shape—more so when he met with his “superiors.” But as the chief of operations, it was he and not they who determined their organization’s course through the obstacles placed in their path by the idolaters of the West. And in choosing the path, he also chose the nature of their strategy, which came from their religious beliefs, which were easily guided by the political world in which they operated. Your enemy shaped your strategy, after all, since his strategy was that which had to be thwarted.
So, now, the Americans would know fear as they’d not known it before. It was not their political capital or their financial capital that was at risk. It was all of their lives. The mission had been designed from the beginning mainly to kill women and children, the most precious and most vulnerable parts of any society.
And with that done, he twisted the top off another small bottle of cognac.
Later, he’d light up his laptop and get reports from his underlings in the field. He’d have to tell one of his bankers to put some more currency into his Liechtenstein account. It wouldn’t do to tap that account dry. Then the Visa accounts would be eliminated, and vanish forever into the ether-world. Otherwise, the police would come after him, with a name and perhaps with photos. That would not do. He’d be in Vienna another few days, then back home for a week to meet with his seniors and plan future operations. With such a success under his belt, they’d listen more closely now. His alliance with the Colombians had paid off, despite their misgivings, and he was riding the crest of the wave. A few nights more of celebration and he’d be ready to return to the rather less lively nightlife of his home, which was mostly coffee or tea—and talk, endless talk. Not action. Only through action could he achieve the goals set for him . . . by his seniors . . . and himself.
“MY GOD, Pablo,” Ernesto said, turning his own TV off.
“Come now, it’s not that much of a surprise,” Pablo responded. “You didn’t expect them to set up a table to sell Girl Scout cookies.”
“No, but this?”
“That is why they are called terrorists, Ernesto. They kill without warning and attack people unable to defend themselves.” There had been a lot of TV coverage from Colorado Springs, where the presence of National Guard trucks made such a dramatic backdrop. There the uniformed civilians had even dragged the two terrorist bodies out—ostensibly to clear the area where the smoke grenades had started some fires, but really to display the bodies, of course. The local military in Colombia liked to do similar things. Soldiers showing off. Well, the Cartel’s own sicarios often did the same, didn’t they? But it wasn’t something he’d point out in this setting. It was important to Ernesto that his identity be that of a “businessman,” and not a drug dealer or terrorist. In his mirror, he saw a man who provided a valuable product and service to the public, for which he was paid, and to protect which he had to deal with his competitors.
“But how will the norteamericanos react?” Ernesto asked the air.
“They will bluster and investigate it like any street murder, and some things they will find out, but most things they will not—and we have a new distribution network in Europe, which,” he reminded his boss, “is our objective.”
“I did not expect so spectacular a crime, Pablo.”
“But we discussed all this,” Pablo said in the calmest of voices. “Their hope was to commit some spectacular demonstration”—he did not say crime, of course—“which would strike fear into their hearts. Such rubbish is important to them, as we all knew beforehand. The important thing to us is that it will direct their troublesome activities away from our interests.
Sometimes he had to be patient explaining things to his boss. The important thing was the money. With money, you could buy power. With money, you could buy people and protection, and not only safeguard your own life and the life of your family, but also control your country. Sooner or later, they would arrange the election of someone who would say the words the norteamericanos wanted to hear, but who would do little, except maybe deal with the Cali group, which suited them fine. Their only real concern was that they might buy the protection of a turncoat, one who would take their money and then turn on them like a disloyal dog. Politicians were all made of the same cloth, after all. But he’d have informers inside the camp of such people, backup security of his own. They would “avenge” the assassination of the false friend whose life he’d have to take in such circumstance
s. All in all, it was a complex game, but a playable one. And he knew how to maneuver the people and the government—even the North American one, if it came to that. His hands reached far, even into the minds and souls of those who had no idea whose hand was pulling their strings. This was especially true of those who spoke against legalizing his product. Should that happen, then his profit margin would evaporate, and, along with it, his power. He couldn’t have that. No. For him and his organization, the status quo was a perfectly fine modus vivendi with the world as a whole. It was not perfection—but perfection was something he could not hope to achieve in the real world.
THE FBI had worked fast. Picking out the Ford with New Mexico tags had not been taxing, though every single tag number in the parking lot had been “run” and tracked down to its owner, and in many cases the owner had been interviewed by a sworn, gun-toting agent. In New Mexico, it had been discovered that the National car rental agency had security cameras, and the tape for the day in question was available, and, remarkably, it showed another rental that was of direct interest to the Des Moines, Iowa, field office. Less than an hour later, the FBI had the same agents back to check out the Hertz office just half a mile away, and that, too, had TV cameras inside. Between printed records and the TV tapes, they had false names (Tomas Salazar, Hector Santos, Antonio Quinones, and Carlos Oliva) to play with, images of their equally false driver’s licenses, and cover names for four subjects. The documentation was also important. The international driver’s licenses had been obtained in Mexico City, and telexes were fired off to the Mexican Federal Police, where cooperation was immediate and efficient.
In Richmond, Des Moines, Salt Lake City, and Denver, Visa card numbers were queried. The chief of security at Visa was a former senior FBI agent, and here computers not only identified the bank of origin for the credit accounts, but also tracked four cards through a total of sixteen gas stations, showing the paths taken and the speed of advance for all four terrorist vehicles. Serial numbers off the Ingram machine guns were processed through the FBI’s sister agency, the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. There it was determined that all sixteen weapons had been part of a shipment hijacked eleven years earlier in Texas. Some of their sisters had turned up in drug-related shootings all across the country, and that piece of information opened a whole new line of investigation for the Bureau to run down. At the four major crime scenes, fingerprints were taken of the dead terrorists, plus blood for DNA identification.