by Tom Clancy
No witnesses, no fuss, no muss.
There were, however, some major differences between the past and present scenarios. The Israeli agents had shadowed their target for months without interference from Argentinian officials, who had a decent political relationship with their government, were aware of their activities in the country, and had lent them a sort of passive endorsement. By contrast, Ricci’s team had no such temperate climate in which to carry out a mission that had necessarily been planned on short notice. They were undermanned and underresourced. They were in a nation that was on the shakiest diplomatic terms with America and just recently had been taken off the State Department’s list of designated terrorist sponsors. The capital’s top cop was a crooked, venal son of a bitch who exercised his power in shameless cahoots with bands of khat-chewing thieves and looters. And, most significantly, the Wildcat was in the city at his direct invitation, enjoying the protective graces of the police and criminal militias that Obeng commanded with equal impunity.
It was a difficult and potentially ugly situation for Ricci and his men. If they got into a pinch, there would be no U.S. liaison — no one at all — to provide a bailout. They were entirely on their own string.
You asked for it, he thought, you got it.
Thompson had turned to him from the multiplex transmitter.
“What’s next?” he said.
Ricci leaned back in his chair. The answer to that question depended on his assessment of what the Wildcat had or had not come to suspect and, moreover, what his degree of suspicion might be — which meant Ricci needed to slip into the skin of a mercenary killer and international fugitive. The scary part was that it came easily to him. So easily it had made him close to dysfunctional when he was working undercover with the Boston P.D. So easily he’d eventually requested a transfer out of the Special Investigations Unit on psychological grounds.
And here he was again. Back where he didn’t want to be. He could know his enemy, see the world through his eyes, walk in his shoes. Sure he could. It was a natural inclination that he distrusted for the lines it blurred, an effortless reach into the darkness within him.
If he were the Wildcat, what would he do?
Had the topic of conversation in the locker room been the weather or hotel food, had the two men inside been exchanging war stories about fatherhood, home repairs, deadlines, simple stuff, chances were that the Wildcat would have hardly paid attention to them, and they’d have been able to make their intended move on him as he got ready for his swim. But instead, they chose to gripe about the local taxi service, and that had seemed unconvincing even to Ricci. An American traveling to this country for a business conference, staying at an expensive, first-class hotel, was no small potato with whatever firm he represented. It was far more likely than not that a courtesy car would be waiting for him at the airline terminal. And that the driver engaged by his corporate hosts would treat him like royalty.
Okay, then. The two men’s small talk had struck a false note, and their quarry had been sensitive to it. But not all hosts were equally hospitable. It wasn’t inconceivable that they’d have taken cabs from the airport, and it wasn’t as if they’d done anything that was a tangible and conclusive tip-off — revealing their firearms too soon, for instance. Would their clumsiness have been enough to make the Wildcat drop out of sight, abandon an immensely profitable deal that was well on the way toward finalization? Or would he instead opt to take extra precautions and accelerate the pace of his talks, clinch things before leaving the country?
Ricci stared at the ceiling and thought in silence a while longer. He imagined the tactile sensation of holding the illicit diamonds in hand, their weight and smoothness, his fingers clenched tightly around the forbidden gems.
Then he sat forward, looked at Thompson and Gallagher.
“We’re shifting to our fallback options,” he said. “Let’s have the intercept teams keep close tabs on the airport and other departure routes just in case. But five gets you ten our guy isn’t going anywhere before he pays Obeng another visit.”
* * *
Ricci’s bet was on the money.
It was late afternoon when Le Chaut Sauvage appeared. Two of his bodyguards had preceded him out of the hotel, looking up and down the street, scouting for any indication of a threat. Then one of them made a discreet all-clear gesture with his hand, and the Wildcat emerged onto the sidewalk, another couple of guards trailing a few steps behind.
Minutes earlier, a line of five police vehicles had arrived at the entrance, two standard patrol cars followed by a diesel-fueled South African Lion 1, reinforced from frame to engine block with ballistic-and-blast-resistant carbon fiber monocoque. After pulling the big, armored four-by-four up to the curb, several of its uniformed occupants had exited and leaned against its heavy flank with their arms folded imposingly across their chests.
The group from the hotel moved straight toward the Lion 1. One of the uniforms standing beside it opened the rear door, and the Wildcat climbed in back between the original pair of bodyguards to have left the hotel. The second two hovered beside the vehicle until his door shut and then went to the lead police car and got into it.
Behind drawn shades in the office across the street, Ricci and his techs watched on an LCD panel as the motorcade pulled into the two-way avenue bisecting the downtown area and then rolled eastward, the pictures feeding from 180-degree trackable spy eyes suctioned to the windowpane.
Ricci glanced at the city map on the wall above the monitoring station. East was toward police headquarters, Obeng’s official seat of corruption, its location circled on the map with a red highlighter. His unofficial cradle lay west of the downtown area. Ricci had penned the words “Gang Central Station” above the blue circle that marked its coordinates.
A vertical crease etched itself in the middle of his forehead. Something wasn’t kosher about what he’d just observed. A few somethings. If the Wildcat believed he might be under surveillance, why stroll out the front of the hotel, head so openly to the cop station, make the trip there surrounded by a goddamned cortege?
“Alert the strike team at Gang Central that company’s on its way,” he abruptly said to Thompson.
Thompson spun around in his chair and looked at him. “Will do,” he said, sounding confused. His eyes went to the wall map. “But—”
“I can read that as well as you,” Ricci said. “The whole scene in front of the hotel was a dupe. Like a game of three-card monte. Soon as Wildcat reaches police HQ, he’s out the back door and into a different vehicle.” He paused, his mind racing. “We’ll keep one of the tail cars on him. Let’s have the others sit outside the cop station, make themselves just conspicuous enough so our man feels comfortable he’s outsmarted us,” he said.
Comprehension dawned on Thompson’s face. He nodded briskly and turned to the multiplexer.
Ricci chewed the inside of his mouth, still thinking hard, making sure he’d covered all his bases. Then he rose from his chair and grabbed the shoulder-holstered FN Five-Seven pistol that was hung over the backrest.
“Have Simmons and Grillo bring around the tac van,” he said, and strapped on the holster. Basics first; he would finish gearing up en route. “I’m heading out to meet them.”
* * *
Since before the civil war, Antoine Obeng had presided over his rackets from a five-story commercial frame building set back from the street on a low hill in one of the city’s quieter outlying neighborhoods. A paved blacktop turnaround gave motor access to the main doors and led to the entrance and exit ramps of its sunken parking garage. Descending behind it were three or four yards of terraced slope and manicured shrubbery, below which the neat plants yielded to a snarl of wild, thorny growth that went down another thirty feet to the bottom of the hillside and then extended outward into a small, flat, muddy barrens.
On the ground floor were two businesses that Obeng owned and controlled through tamely obedient surrogates: the main offices of a shipping/mailin
g company and a travel agency. These afforded the warlord with useful fronts for laundering a portion of his criminal earnings, distributing forged documents, and orchestrating a multiplicity of smuggling operations, a partial index of which included the transport of stolen luxury cars and antiquities, bootlegged music and video recordings, illegal weapons and narcotics, and the meat, hides, horns, and hooves of exotic animals killed by poachers in wilderness preserves all across central and western Africa.
Like everyone else in the city, the thirty or so employees of Obeng’s front businesses were aware of his command of the militias and indeed could not have possibly failed to notice the regular comings and goings of his hoodlum lackeys. But only a few knowingly participated in his lawless undertakings or profited from them in any way. The majority of these men and women showed up each morning for an honest day’s work, went home to their families at quitting time, and brought home modest paychecks at the end of the week.
They were what Tom Ricci had called “solid citizens” back when he’d carried a detective’s tin.
They were also convenient human shields for Obeng.
From Ricci’s standpoint, this was not good.
* * *
As he sloshed through a foul-smelling drainage culvert in a near squat, his boots awash in brown sludge, his arms, legs, and ballistic helmet soiled with wet clots of grime that had peeled like fresh scabs off the curved, close-pressing top and sides of the channel, Ricci knew the worst things that could go wrong with his maneuver would be having innocent civilians taken hostage, injured, or, even more unthinkable to him, killed during its execution.
Morally wrong, operationally wrong, politically wrong. Rollie Thibodeau had correctly pointed out aboard the Pomona that the mere presence of his RDT on foreign soil shredded several chapters of international law. Without question, the course of action on which they were now embarked would trash the rest of the rule book.
But Ricci had come a long way to collar the Wildcat, stalked him with all the resources at his disposal, and he was not going to succeed by knocking on Obeng’s front door and politely asking that his guest step into the waiting arms of justice.
Neither would he do so by shrinking from a calculated risk.
Given the best opportunity for a nab that was liable to present itself, Ricci damn well intended to exploit it. If he screwed up, he was ready to take the heat. And his darling admirer Megan Breen could flash her razzle-dazzle smile as she watched him swing in the wind like a gallows bird.
Ricci dismissed that unpleasant image from his mind.
He’d been twice on the money today, after all.
As expected, the Wildcat’s ride to the police station had been a classic casino shuffle. Soon after arriving there, he left in different clothes than he’d worn out of the hotel — taking a side exit rather than the back door, the only detail not to meet Ricci’s prediction to the letter — and was then chauffeured off in the passenger seat of an unmarked sedan that pulled into the crosstown avenue’s westbound lanes and clanked along seemingly on two cylinders, an authentic touch that allowed it to blend nicely with the crumpled matchboxes driven by the average motorist in this land of plenty.
Thirty minutes later, that car swung into the parking garage at Gang Central.
Ricci and his strike team had been ready and waiting in the swampy, weed-clogged field out back.
Now he crawled toward the building by way of the subterranean overflow channel beneath the hill, his helmet-mounted torch beam lancing sharply into the dimness. Like the men slogging along at his rear, he was clad in a mottled woodland camouflage stealth suit with protective knee and elbow pads and an ultrathin Zylon bullet-resistant lining. Besides the Five-Seven in his side holster, he was toting a compact version of UpLink’s variable velocity rifle system — or VVRS — submachine gun, a second-generation variant that was half the size and weight of the original, that was manufactured with an integrated silencer, and that fired subsonic ammunition. The rotating hand guard, which manually adjusted the earlier model’s barrel pressure from lethal to less-than-lethal, had been replaced by MEMS circuitry that did the job at the fast and easy touch of a button.
A snap-on attachment under the barrel resembled and was technologically related to a laser targeter, though it served a very different function. While Ricci disliked the way the device threw off his weapon’s balance, its use by the entire team was crucial to their objective.
They had brought other equipment from the tac van as well, some of it defensive in nature.
Because he had taken point, Ricci held in his left hand a portable vapor detector that looked oddly similar to the super-eight movie cameras he remembered from distant childhood, and was presently scanning for environmental hazards that ranged from the toxic methane, nitrogen, and sulfurous gases of decaying sewage to chemical and biological weapons agents to the minutest airborne traces of the explosive ingredients of booby traps. In the event its beeper alarm sounded, a backlit LCD readout would specifically identify the threat, with the beep tones increasing in rapidity as the instrument was brought closer to it. Should that threat prove to be chem/bio or the products of organic decomposition, each member of the strike team was ready to convert the carry bag strapped over his shoulder into an air-powered, filtered-breathing system at the pull of a zipper, worn as if it were a masked and hooded vest. Should a bomb be detected, they would hopefully steer clear of its triggering mechanism.
And there was still more equipment, some of it suppressive, referred to as public order weapons by law enforcement personnel with a penchant for cooking up new euphemisms every fifteen seconds.
Call them what you wished, their fundamental purpose was to incapacitate their targets without causing serious injury.
Ricci’s absolute intent, second only to bagging the Wildcat, was that no harm come to the innocent civilian workers in the building. This was foremost out of bounds. But he was also determined to avoid using deadly force on any of Obeng’s rotten cops, and for that matter against Obeng himself, all of whom held nominal claim to being upstanding members of the population. Even the militiamen would not be permanently damaged, if possible, though Ricci was giving his ops some leeway in dealing with them, as it was unlikely their country’s heads of state, eager to improve relations with America, would raise a commotion over the loss of a few known malcontents whose looting and violent behavior threatened their own government’s stability, and who they were consequently better off living without.
Cramped from kneeling, Ricci led the way through the narrow drainage duct for another ten minutes. Then his torch disclosed its circular mouth a few yards up ahead. He moved forward and saw that it opened out some three or four feet above the bottom of a cementwalled tunnel with room enough for him and the others to stand upright.
He raised a clenched fist to signal a pause, then glanced over his shoulder at Grillo.
“Drop’s maybe a yard,” Ricci told him in a hushed voice. “Everybody be careful. Looks to me like the tunnel’s ankle deep in water. Not much of a flow, but it’s bound to be slippery.”
Grillo nodded and passed the word to Lou Rosander, the man behind him, who in turn relayed it to the next in line.
Ricci inched over to the opening and sprang down.
He landed with a splash. A layer of slime coated the floor under the stagnant water, but he had a good sense of balance and was aided by the corrugated rubber soles of his boots.
The rest of the team hopped from the pipe one at a time, all of them joining him in short order. They immediately formed up in single file.
Ricci looked around. The passage was almost chamberlike measured against the constricted tube from which he’d jumped. Other tunnels of nearly equal width and height branched off from it in various directions.
They had reached a major juncture of the system.
Ricci did not need to consult his underground street plan to know which of the diverging passages to take. He had committed the system layout to mem
ory before proceeding with his mission, just as he’d memorized the location of the drainage pipe’s outflow opening from the high-res GIS data provided by Sword’s satellite mapping unit.
With another crisp hand signal, Ricci turned toward the dark hole of the tunnel entrance to his immediate left and stepped into it, his feet squishing in the muck.
His men followed without hesitation.
* * *
“Okay,” Rosander whispered. “I see a single attendant. I don’t think he’s one of Obeng’s goons. Or that he’s gonna be a problem.”
“He in a booth?” Ricci asked.
Rosander kept peering through a thin fiber-optic periscope that he’d coiled upward through the metal drain cover above him. With maybe four feet of clearance between the floor of the sunken garage and the bottom of the sluice in which they were hunched, a six-year-old would have had difficulty standing erect, let alone the ten grown men of Ricci’s team.
“No,” he said. “The guy’s nodding off in a chair against the wall.”
Ricci nodded.
“There anybody else around we have to worry about?” he said.
“Give me a sec.”
Rosander rotated the fiberscope between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, his other hand making adjustments to the eyepiece barrel to focus its color video image.
“Not a soul,” he said.
“Number of vehicles?”
“I’d say about a dozen, including the rattletrap that brought the Wildcat.”
Ricci nodded again.
He reached into a gear pouch for a breaching charge, peeled the plastic strip from its adhesive backing, and pressed the thin patch of C2 explosive — a compound as powerful as C4, but more stable — against the ceiling surface until it was firmly secured. Then he took the “lipstick” detonator caps out of a separate pouch and inserted them. Before blowing their mouse hole into the sunken garage, his team would back through the runoff duct to keep a safe distance from the blast and falling masonry.