Tom Clancy's Power Plays 5 - 8

by Tom Clancy

  Lathrop ejected his subgun’s half-empty magazine, got a fresh forty-round clip from a pouch on his trousers, and jammed it into the weapon with the heel of his palm. Then he reached under his jacket and produced one of three cylindrical flashbangs he’d brought with him in a nylon web belt rig. About a minute had gone by since Armand emerged from his office, too long, giving him more than enough time to rabbit. But the guy who’d driven the Caddy into position had drawn a nine-mil from inside his jumpsuit and was taking shots at him out his lowered window—no mechanic, that ace, it didn’t matter how he was dressed—and there was gunfire coming from underneath the Caddy, a shooter in the pit. Lathrop saw him poking his head out of it like an infantryman in a foxhole, his weapon in one hand, no way he could grip it with both of them. The pit had to be eight or nine feet deep and he’d need to cling to the rail with his other hand to fire over its top.

  Staying low behind the Nav, Lathrop shuffled left around its rear fender and then forward along its flank, past the still-open driver’s door where the body of Raul was thrown back against the steering column. His MP7 on its sling at his side, he leaned around the front of the vehicle and pulled the arming pin from the steel grenade canister with his fist clenched around its flyoff lever. Then he tossed the canister across the garage floor with an easy underhand lob and saw the released lever twirl away as it rolled under the Caddy and into the pit.

  The grenade detonated before he could count out two full seconds, the walls of the pit muffling its blast of light and sound in the garage above. Lathrop sprang to his feet and darted toward the Caddy, his gun spitting as thin white smoke came up from the pit to ribbon out between its wheels. He could see the guy in the mech suit through the driver’s side window, sprawled back in the front seat with the nine slipped from his fingers, looking disoriented from the concussion.

  Lathrop pressed the snout of his MP7 between his dazed eyes, shot him, and pushed his corpse toward the passenger door. Then he leaned in and put the Caddy into reverse to get it rolling backward. As it moved off the service pit, he tossed a second flashbang down inside.

  He gave the smoke a moment to clear, rushed to the edge of the pit, thumbed on the slimline tac light mounted to his weapon. Almost directly below him at its bottom the shooter had fallen in a heap and was struggling up onto his hands and knees. Lathrop ripped into him with a volley and sprayed more fire through what was left of the smoke to take out the other men sprawled around him. Grabbing the rail’s handhold, he swung a leg over the side of the pit and dropped into it.

  There was plenty of light from glowing tube fixtures on the walls of the little space, rendering the flashlight inessential. Lathrop looked around, took a quick count of the bloodied men on the floor. He’d killed most of them. A couple of them stirred, trying to gather themselves. One was slouched back against the wall spitting up blood and mucous.

  Lathrop finished off the survivors and cut his eyes over to a door on his left. It was plain steel with a push bar and had been shoved wide open. On the other side was a lighted, cement-walled underground passage that ran out of the pit. There was a man kneeling in the doorway, blinking and groaning, his stooped form blocking the narrow passage. Armand Quiros was moving unsteadily forward just beyond him.

  Lathrop plunged toward the entrance, triggering his weapon at the back of the kneeling man’s head as he ran through. Armand staggered on a few feet before he caught up, grabbed him by the back of his shirt, and drove him face-first against the wall.

  “Que desa?” Armand said. “What you fucking want from me?”

  Lathrop shoved his gun barrel between Armand’s ear and the hinge of his jaw, pressing his face into the wall.

  “One good woman,” he said.

  THREE

  VARIOUS LOCALES APRIL 2006

  BOCA DEL SIERPE, TERRITORIAL TRINIDAD

  “CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT AIRPORT DOWN there?” Annie said from her window seat.

  Belted in for landing, Nimec hadn’t noticed the view. A stickler for punctuality, he was checking the time on his WristLink.

  “Mhmm,” he said. He’d taken an aisle seat aboard their Continental Airbus flight out of San Francisco, which, according to the analog watch display he’d selected, was right on the mark for its scheduled noon arrival.

  Annie turned to him.

  “Dear me, such enthusiasm,” she said. “How will I ever manage to keep up?”

  Nimec felt like a killjoy. He supposed Annie would agree that he ought to.

  “It’s nice,” he said a touch guiltily, looking past her out the window. “I think it’s a very nice airport.”

  “Pete, when you told me Los Rayos was a bona fide destination for international passenger flights, I wasn’t sure what to expect,” she said. “But this just knocks me out . . . I’ve been to cities back home with fields that aren’t anywhere close to its size.”

  Nimec scanned the rows of interconnected terminal buildings and warehouses, the sometimes parallel, sometimes converging bands of service roads and runways below. An airport, and a largish one, yup. Nice, nice, very impressive, and yet he couldn’t muster too much excitement. Still, he should have figured it was the sort of thing Annie would be keen on. Between her dad having been a pilot, and all those years she’d spent with the Air Force and NASA, she’d been around planes and runways forever. Earned a license to fly when she was, what, seventeen or eighteen? Whatever the minimum legal age might have been in Kansas. Hard to fathom, but she was a special case. He’d been different. The opposite, really—a slow starter. The highest Nimec had gotten off the ground before leaving South Philly to enlist in the service was a tenement rooftop, and he supposed the pigeons he’d flown out of the coop up above Boylston Street might have had a broader outlook on the world than he could have formed at the time.

  Now he felt the thump of the Airbus’s deploying wheels, quietly sat back for its descent, and five minutes afterward was on the taxiway waiting for the call to disembark, along with the handful of other passengers bound for Los Rayos. The rest would presumably fly on to Piarco in the Trinididian capital, the plane’s final destination.

  Annie leaned down and slid her carry-on from under her seat. It was an old—she proudly called it vintage—Samsonite leather train case her mother had brought to San Jose with her, passing it on to Annie as a functional keepsake.

  She snapped open its lid.

  “Here,” she said, reaching inside. “You might want to stuff this into your computer bag.”

  Nimec glanced over at her, happily saw that she’d fished out his Seattle Mariners baseball cap.

  “Hey, thanks.” He snatched the cap from her hand. “Guess I forgot to pack it.”

  Annie nodded.

  “That’s how come I remembered,” she said, and shut her case with authority.

  The cabin intercom crackled out a pleasant thank-you-and-enjoy-your-stay, and then they were shuffling past the air crew and flight attendants into the jetway.

  Nimec had expected to be met at the arrivals lounge by Henri Beauchart, the director of resort security, but they were instead received by his subordinate while looking for someone that matched the ex–GIGN chief’s description. A slight, dark-haired, olive-complected man who spoke with a faint British accent, he introduced himself as Kalidas Murthy (“Please feel free to call me Kal.”), and explained that his boss had gotten unavoidably detained at the last minute.

  Nimec found this annoyed him, and got the sense Murthy had picked up on it.

  “I offer a sincere apology on Mr. Beauchart’s behalf, madam and sir, and convey his desire that you might be his personal guests at dinner tonight,” he said, looking straight at Nimec as he addressed them. “Meanwhile, you must be eager to settle into your villa after what I hope was a good trip.”

  He waved over a skycap to take their suitcases and then guided them through the terminal’s entrance, where a driver stood waiting by a gray stretch limo. As he opened the trunk for their bags, Nimec paused in the hot sun to admire
the car’s gleaming body.

  “A Jankel Rolls-Royce,” he said. “Pre ninety-eight.”

  Murthy smiled.

  “You know your automobiles.”

  “Some,” Nimec said. “This one’s a classic.”

  “It’s been refitted with the latest modifications and vehicle technology,” Murthy said with a nod. “You should enjoy chatting with Mr. Beauchart, who is quite an afficionado, and can better discuss its features . . . but come, I see your luggage is in the boot.”

  They climbed into the limousine’s rear, Annie first, then Nimec, Murthy following to take the jump seat opposite them.

  “I hope you won’t mind my pointing out a scenic highlight or two as we go along,” he said, another smile flashing across his dark Asiatic face.

  Nimec leaned back without response. Although his irritation at being stood up by Beauchart had faded under the bright tropical sun, he wasn’t really in the mood for sightseeing. But what could he say? He was going to be here awhile and wanted to be courteous.

  “Above all else, our planners have made it simple to orient oneself on the island,” Murthy was explaining. “This road leads north from the airport, as the signs generally indicate, and will take us beyond our commercial shipping facilities into the resort areas. The area to our south, over a third of the island, is an environmental preserve and wildlife refuge . . . forty miles of mangrove forest, coastal plain, and tidal waterways explicitly prohibited from development by the national government’s land use charter.”

  “Does that mean no guests allowed?” Annie said. She smiled. “I like to explore.”

  “Their safety requires that access be restricted . . . a decision that ownership left to our security team. But we understand its appeal to nature lovers, and have worked with the recreational staff so that they can conduct guided boat and walking tours,” Murthy said. “It may interest you to know there are active sugarcane fields and fruit groves at the jungle’s fringes. These belong to local growers descended from freed African slaves who have an economic reliance on the crops. Their claims to the land are also protected by law.” He paused a moment. “The villagers of Umbria tend to be reserved and mistrustful of outsiders, but in recent years a significant number have come to Los Rayos seeking employment opportunities, and their initial opposition to sharing the island with us has eased.”

  Listening to him, Annie seemed intensely fascinated.

  Nimec, meanwhile, had studied the interior of the Rolls with a more measured sort of interest before he turned to look out at what clearly had to be the island’s main harbor—a bustling complement to the airport. As they drove by, he could see four long quays and a great many smaller docks reaching out over the water. There were ramps, bridges, floating cranes, storage and handling areas with enormous freight containers stacked like building blocks, a lighthouse tower at the channel entrance, and all kinds of barges and ferries coming and going, or in the process of being loaded or offloaded by dock personnel.

  The heavy activity surprised Nimec a little at first, although after a moment’s consideration he guessed it shouldn’t have. A resort the size of Los Rayos would have supplies flowing in continuously, and generate a high volume of waste that he assumed accounted for much of what was hauled off on the ships. Some of the produce grown by those local villagers Murthy had brought up might also leave the island by way of the harbor. Seemed pretty likely, in fact.

  Though tempted to ask him about it, Nimec decided the timing wasn’t right. He’d been thinking about Megan’s mysterious e-mail informant, and felt it would be best to sit on his questions about the harbor traffic for a while.

  He watched in silence as they left the docks behind and began driving past some of the island’s far more attractive visitor spots.

  As threatened, Murthy called attention to them like an enthusiastic tour bus operator.

  He pointed out a golf course that came up on the left side of the road, elaborating that it was one of two eighteen-hole championship greens available to guests. He pointed out tennis courts and horseback riding paths, casinos and nightclubs, cabanas and oceanside swimming pools. And he pointed out beach after sweeping beach as the road striped up along the ocean shore.

  Nimec gazed out at the shiny white sand and emerald water, quietly succumbing to the serene beauty of the place . . . and the funny thing was that the deeper this almost hypnotic calm settled in, the more he realized how hard he’d been trying to resist it.

  “Look, Pete.” Annie tapped his arm to get his attention, then motioned to her right. “That’s fantastic!”

  Out beyond the shore, a tanned, toned couple attached to colorful kiteboard sails was riding the wind with happy abandon.

  “I thought about giving that a shot once,” Nimec said. “Had to be fifteen years ago, before I got too busy.” He shrugged. “The job, you know.”

  Annie had kept her hand on him.

  “We should do it together,” she said, rubbing his shoulder. “It’s really a kick . . . a lesson or two should be enough for you to get your wings.”

  His forehead creased with surprise. “You’ve done it before?”

  “Sure,” she said. “In Florida. When we’d have downtime at Canaveral, I’d try to find ways for my training groups to unwind.”

  Nimec grunted, still looking out at the airborne couple. Then he saw something else against the blue sky, much higher and further off, a sleek flying object that reflected bright sparkles of sunlight as it needled south toward the harbor and airport.

  “That an Augusta one-oh-nine?” he asked, turning to Murthy.

  For a moment the security man’s expression almost seemed startled. “You have an eye for both air and ground vehicles.”

  “I’ve seen a few of those choppers . . . UpLink’s designed avionics for some of the custom Stingray versions,” Nimec said. “The body’s pretty recognizable. With how its nose is so sharp, and that frame kind of flaring out between the doors and tail boom.”

  Murthy produced another smile.

  “We have a fleet of four in constant operational readiness,” he said. “At least one patrols our airspace round the clock and, your alert eye aside, their fly patterns are charted out to be inconspicuous.” He paused. “The goal at Los Rayos is to make our guests feel secure without their being conscious of security, if my meaning is clear. These are men and women who run nations, global business empires. They come here to escape and relax. To temporarily step free of the lifestyle constraints that go hand-in-hand with their positions, and at the same time have confidence they and their families are well protected. To create this environment requires a delicate balance. Our vigilance must be constant and multilayered. It also must be unobtrusive or the island will seem to them like an armed camp.”

  Nimec tugged his ear. He’d noticed that the chopper had sped out of sight.

  “I can see how it’d be a challenge,” he said. “The Augs . . . how’ve you got them configured?”

  “Variously.” Murthy said. “Here again, I’m not one for technical specifications. I know they are fast and mobile, but will defer to Mr. Beauchart’s thorough expertise for the rest.” He looked at Nimec, his smile grown bigger than ever. “I’m increasingly certain you and he will find no lack of conversation at dinner tonight.”

  Nimec guessed that was Murthy’s politely professional way of suggesting they move on to other subjects, and couldn’t blame him. It would be up to his boss to decide which of their trade secrets to share, the details of how their choppers were loaded among them.

  Whatever Murthy’s reason or reasons, Nimec didn’t want to be pushy.

  He fell silent, and after a minute or two realized Annie had taken easy hold of his hand on the seat between them, her fingertips so light against his palm it kind of tickled. She really seemed to be enjoying herself as they viewed the passing sights, and that made him glad.

  Then the Rolls turned onto a drive branching off from the seaside road, and slowed, and Murthy pointed ahead at wha
t he announced was the villa that had been reserved for them.

  Annie’s fingers squeezed Nimec’s hand more tightly. There beyond a courtyard lined with palmettos was an expansive, Spanish-looking structure—all railed balconies, wide columns, arched windows, and sunwashed adobe under a red tile roof. Nimec saw a swimming pool at the end of a fieldstone path on one side of the place, and spread across the grounds, spacious gardens with bright exotic flowers and thick green hedges.

  “This location is rather secluded, as we thought you might prefer,” Murthy was saying. “We hope you won’t hesitate to let us know if anything fails to meet your satisfaction.”

  Nimec looked over at Annie, saw the barely contained excitement on her face, and then turned back to Murthy.

  “I think it’ll be perfect,” he said.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Andrew Reed Baxter had dreaded checking his morning voice mail. Three days in Palm Springs had notched the term long weekend into a depressing context for him and he’d known there would be a carryover before leaving for the office . . . shit, one stiff hand after another, how much cash had he lost? He didn’t need a certified accountant to tell him it was a whole fucking lot—no wonder his reflux was giving him a terrible time this morning. It was doubling down on those soft counts that had killed him, screw those variations; he should have just played his usual game. Next time he’d remember that before deciding to take anybody’s so-called expert advice about systems and strategies, stick to what he knew and watch the dealer go bust.