Clear and Present Danger (1989)

by Tom - Jack Ryan 02 Clancy

  "And?" Larson asked.

  "And what do you think? The bastard was part of a plot to kill one of our ambassadors, the Director of the FBI, and the Administrator of DEA, plus a driver and assorted bodyguards. He's a terrorist."

  "Take him back?"

  "Do I look like a cop?" Clark responded.

  "Look, man, we don't--"

  "I do. By the way, have you forgotten those two bombs? I believe you were there."

  "That was--"

  "Different?" Clark chuckled. "That's what they always say, 'But that's different.' Larson, I didn't go to Dartmouth like you did, and maybe the difference is lost on me."

  "This isn't the fucking movies!" Larson said angrily.

  "Carlos, if this was the movies, you'd be a blond with big tits and a loose blouse. You know, I've been in this business since you were driving cars made by Matchbox, and I've never got laid on the job. Never. Not once. Hardly seems fair." He might have added that he was married and took it seriously, but why confuse the lad? He had accomplished what he'd intended. Larson smiled. The tension was broken.

  "I guess maybe I got you there, Mr. Clark."

  "Where is she?"

  "Gone till the end of the week--European run. I left a message in three places--I mean, the message for her to bug out. Soon as she gets back, she hops the next bird for Miami."

  "Good. This one is complicated enough. When it's all over, marry the girl, settle down, raise a family."

  "I've thought about that. What about--I mean, is it fair to--"

  "The job you're in is less dangerous statistically than running a liquor store in a big city. They all raise families. What holds you together on a big job in a faraway place is the knowledge that there is somebody to come back to. You can trust me on that one, son."

  "But for the moment we're in the area you want to look at. Now what do we do?"

  "Start prowling the side roads. Don't go too fast." Clark cranked down his window and started smelling the air. Next he opened his briefcase and pulled out a topographical map. He grew quiet for several minutes, getting his brain in synch with the situation. There were soldiers up there, trained men in Indian country, being hunted and trying to evade contact. He had to get himself in the proper frame of mind, alternately looking at the terrain and the map. "God, I'd kill for the right kind of radio right now." Your fault, Johnny, Clark told himself. You should have demanded it. You should have told Ritter that there had to be someone on the ground to liaise with the soldiers instead of trying to run it through a satellite link like it was a goddamned staff study.

  "Just to talk to them?"

  "Look, kid, how much security you seen so far?"

  "Why, none."

  "Right. With a radio I could call them down out of the hills and we could pick them up, clean them up, and drive 'em to the fucking airport for the flight home," Clark said, the frustration manifest in his voice.

  "That's craz--Jesus, you're right. This situation really is crazy." The realization dawned on Larson, and he was amazed that he'd misinterpreted the situation so completely.

  "Make a note--this is what happens when you run an op out of D.C. instead of running it from the field. Remember that. You might be a supervisor someday. Ritter thinks like a spymaster instead of a line-animal like me, and he's been out of the field too long. That's the biggest problem at Langley: the guys who run the show have forgotten what it's like out here, and the rules have changed a lot since they serviced all their dead-drops in Budapest. Moreover, this is a very different situation from what they think it is. This isn't intelligence-gathering. It's low-intensity warfare. You gotta know when not to be covert, too. This sort of thing is a whole new ball game."

  "They didn't cover this sort of thing at The Farm."

  "That's no surprise. Most of the instructors there are a bunch of old--" Clark stopped. "Slow down some."

  "What is it?"

  "Stop the car."

  Larson did as he was told, pulling off the gravel surface. Clark jumped out with his briefcase, which seemed very strange indeed, and took the ignition keys as he did so. His next move was open the back, then to toss the keys back to Larson. Clark dug into one of the boxes, past the samples of gold-bearing rock, and came out with his Beretta and silencer. He was wearing a bush jacket, and the gun disappeared nicely in the small of his back, silencer and all. Then he waved to Larson to stay put and follow him slowly in the car. Clark started walking with his map and a photograph in his hands. There was a bend in the road; just around it was a truck. Near the truck were some armed men. He was looking at his map when they shouted, and his head came up in obvious surprise. A man jerked his AK in a way that required no words: Come here at once or be shot.

  Larson was overcome with the urge to wet his pants, but Clark waved for him to follow and walked confidently to the truck. Its loadbed was covered with a tarp, but Clark already knew what was under it. He'd smelled it. That was why he'd stopped around the bend.

  "Good day," he said to the nearest one with a rifle.

  "You have picked a bad day to be on the road, my friend."

  "He told me you would be out here. I have permission," Clark replied.

  "What? Permission? Whose permission?"

  "Senor Escobedo, of course," Larson heard him say.

  Jesus, this isn't happening, please tell me this isn't happening!

  "Who are you?" the man said with a mixture of anger and wariness.

  "I am a prospector. I am looking for gold. Here," Clark said, turning his photo around. "This area I have marked, I think there is gold here. Of course I would not come here without permission of Senor Escobedo, and he told me to tell those I met that I am here under his protection."

  "Gold--you look for gold?" another man said as he came up. The first one deferred to him, and Clark figured he was talking to the boss now.

  "Si. Come, I will show you." Clark led them to the back of the Subaru and pulled two rocks from the cardboard box. "My driver there is Senor Larson. He introduced me to Senor Escobedo. If you know Senor Escobedo--you must know him, no?"

  The man clearly didn't know what to do or think. Clark was speaking in good Spanish, with a trace of accent, and talking as normally as though he were asking directions from a policeman.

  "Here, you see this?" Clark said, pointing to the rock. "That is gold. This may be the biggest find since Pizarro. I think Senor Escobedo and his friends will buy all of this land."

  "They did not tell me of this," the man temporized.

  "Of course. It is a secret. And I must warn you, senor, not to speak of it to anyone or you will surely speak to Senor Escobedo!"

  Bladder control was a major problem for Larson now.

  "When are we leaving?" someone called from the truck.

  Clark looked around while the two gunmen tried to decide what to do. A driver and perhaps one other in the truck. He didn't hear or see anyone else. He started walking toward it. Two more steps and he saw what he'd needed and feared to see. Sticking out from under the edge of the tarp was the front sight assembly of an M-16A2 rifle. What he had to do was decided in less than a second. Even to Clark it was amazing how the old habits kept coming back.

  "Stop!" the leader said.

  "Can I load my samples on your truck?" Clark asked without turning. "To take to Senor Escobedo? He will be very pleased to see what I have found, I promise you," Clark added.

  The two men ran to catch up with him, their rifles dangling from their hands as they did so. They'd gotten within ten feet when he turned. As he did so, his right hand remained fixed in space, and took the Beretta from his waistband while his left hand fluttered the map and photo. Neither one saw it coming, Larson realized. He was so smooth....

  "Not this truck, senor, I--"

  It was just one more thing to surprise him, but it would be the last. Clark's hand came up and fired into the man's forehead at a range of five feet. Before the leader had even started to fall, the second was also dead from the same cause. W
ithout pause he moved around the right side of the truck. He hopped up on the running board and saw that there was just a driver. He, too, took a silenced round in the head. By this time Larson was out of the car. Approaching Clark from the rear, he came close to getting a round for his trouble.

  "Don't do that!" Clark said as he safed his pistol.

  "Christ, I just--"

  "You announce your presence in a situation like this. You almost died 'cause you didn't. Remember that. Come on." Clark hopped onto the back of the truck and pulled back the tarp.

  Most of the dead were locals, judging by their clothes, but there were two faces that Clark vaguely recognized. It took a moment for him to remember....

  "Captain Rojas. Sorry, kid," he said quietly to the body.

  "Who?"

  "He had command of Team BANNER. One of ours. These fuckers killed some of our people." His voice seemed quite tired.

  "Looks like our guys did all right, too--"

  "Let me explain something to you about combat, kid. There are two kinds of people in the field: your people and other people. The second category can include noncombatants, and you try to avoid hurting them if you have the time, but the only ones who really matter are your own people. You got a handkerchief?"

  "Two."

  "Give 'em to me, then load those two in the truck."

  Clark pulled the cap of the gas tank that hung under the cab. He tied the handkerchiefs together and fed them in. The tank was full and the cloth was immediately saturated with gasoline.

  "Come on, back to the car." Clark disassembled his pistol and put it back in the rock box, then closed the back hatch and got back into the front seat. He punched the cigarette lighter. "Pull up close."

  Larson did so, getting there about the time the lighter popped out. Clark took it out and touched it to the soaked handkerchiefs. They ignited at once. Larson didn't have to be told to take off. They were around the next bend before the fire started in earnest.

  "Back to the city, fast as you can," Clark ordered next. "What's the fastest way to get to Panama?"

  "I can have you there in a couple of hours, but it means--"

  "Do you have the radio codes to get onto an Air Force base?"

  "Yes, but--"

  "You are now out of country. Your cover is completely blown," Mr. Clark said. "Get a message to your girl before she gets back. Have her desert, or jump ship, or whatever you call it with an airline so that she doesn't have to come back here. She's blown, too. Both your lives are in danger-no-shit danger. There might have been somebody watching us. Somebody might have noticed that you drove me down here. Somebody might have noticed that you borrowed this car twice. Probably not, but you don't get old in this business by taking unnecessary chances. You have nothing more to contribute to this operation, so get your asses clear."

  "Yes, sir." They reached the highway before Larson spoke again. "What you did ..."

  "What about it?"

  "You were right. We can't let people do that and--"

  "You're wrong. You don't know why I did that, do you?"

  Clark asked. He spoke like a man teaching a class, but gave only one of the reasons. "You're thinking like a spy, and this is no longer an intelligence operation. We have people, soldiers, running and hiding up in those hills. What I did was to create a diversion. If they think our guys came down to avenge their dead, it may pull some of the bad guys down off the mountain, get them to look in the wrong place, take some of the heat off our guys. Not much, but it's the best I could do." He paused for a moment. "I won't say it didn't feel good. I don't like seeing our people killed, and I fucking well don't like not being allowed to do anything about it. That's been happening for too many years--Middle East, everywhere--we lose people and don't do a goddamned thing about it. This time I just had an excuse. It's been a long time. And you know something--it did feel good," Clark admitted coldly. "Now shut up and drive. I have some thinking to do."

  Ryan was in his office, still quiet, still thinking. Judge Moore was finding all sorts of excuses to be away. Ritter was spending a lot of time out of the office. Jack couldn't ask questions and demand answers if they weren't here. That also made Ryan the senior executive present, and gave him all sorts of extraneous paper to shuffle and telephone calls to return. Maybe he could make that work for him. Of one thing he was certain. He had to find out what the hell was happening. It was also plain that Moore and Ritter had made two mistakes of their own. First, they thought that Ryan didn't know anything. They ought to have known better. He'd only gotten this far in the Agency because he was good at figuring things out. Their second mistake was in their likely assumption that his inexperience would prevent him from pressing too hard even if he did start figuring things out. Fundamentally they were both thinking like bureaucrats. People who spent their lives in bureaucracies were typically afraid of breaking rules. That was a sure way to get fired, and it cowed people to think of tossing their careers away. But that was an issue Jack had decided on long before. He didn't know what his profession was. He'd been a Marine, a stockbroker, an assistant professor of history, and then joined CIA. He could always go back to teaching. The University of Virginia had already talked to Cathy about becoming a full professor at their medical school, and even Jeff Pelt wanted Ryan to come and liven up the history department as a visiting lecturer. It would be nice to teach again, Jack thought. It would certainly be easier than what he was doing here. Whatever he saw in his future, he didn't feel trapped by his job. And James Greer had given him all the guidance he needed: Do what you think is right.

  "Nancy." Jack keyed his intercom. "When is Mr. Ritter going to be back?"

  "Tomorrow morning. He had to meet with somebody down at The Farm."

  "Okay, thanks. Could you call my wife and leave a message that I'm going to be pretty late tonight?"

  "Surely, Doctor."

  "Thanks. I need the file on INF verification, the OSWR preliminary report."

  "Dr. Molina is out at Sunnyvale with the Judge," Nancy said. Tom Molina was the head of the Office of Strategic Weapons Research, which was back-checking two other departments on the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty verification procedures.

  "I know. I just want to look the report over so I can discuss it with him when he gets back."

  "Take about fifteen minutes to get it."

  "No rush," Jack replied and killed the intercom. That document could tie up King Solomon himself for three days, and it gave him a wholly plausible excuse for staying late. Congress had gotten antsy about some technical issues as both sides worked to destroy the last of their launchers. Ryan and Molina would have to testify there in the next week. Jack pulled the writing panel out from the side of his desk, knowing what he'd do after Nancy and the other clerical people left.

  Cortez was a very sophisticated political observer. That was one reason he'd made colonel so young in an organization as bureaucratized as the DGI. Based on the Soviet KGB model, it had already grown a collection of clerks and inspectors and security officers to make the American CIA look like a mom-and-pop operation--which made the relative efficiencies of the agencies all the more surprising. For all their advantages, the Americans lacked political will, always fighting over issues that ought to have been quite clear. At the KGB Academy, one instructor had compared them to the Polish parliament of old, a collection of over five hundred barons, all of whom had had to agree before anything happened--and because of which nothing ever happened, allowing Poland to be raped by anyone with the ability to make a simple decision.

  The Americans had acted in this case, however, acted decisively and well. What had changed?

  What had changed--what had to have changed in this case--was that the Americans were breaking their own laws. They had responded emotionally ... no, that wasn't fair, Felix told himself. They had responded forcefully to a direct and arrogant challenge, just as the Soviets would have reacted, though with minor tactical differences. The emotional aspect to the reaction was that they
had done the proper thing only by violating their incredible intelligence-oversight laws. And it was an election year in America....

  "Ah," Cortez said aloud. It really was that simple, wasn't it? The Americans, who had already helped him, would do so again. He just had to identify the proper target. That took only ten minutes more. So fitting, he thought, that his military rank had been that of colonel. For a century of Latin American history, it was always the colonels who did this sort of thing.

  What would Fidel say? Cortez nearly laughed out loud at the thought. For as long as that bearded ideologue had breathed, he'd hated the norteamericanos as an evangelist hated sin, enjoyed every small sting he'd been able to inflict on them, dumped his criminals and lunatics on the unsuspecting Carter--Anyone could have taken advantage of that fool, Cortez thought with amusement--played every possible gambit of guerrilla diplomacy against them. He really would have enjoyed this one. Now Felix just had to figure a way to pass the message along. It was a high-risk play on his part, but he'd won every toss to this point, and the dice were hot in his hand.

  Perhaps it had been a mistake, Chavez reflected. Perhaps leaving the head on the man's chest had merely enraged them. Whatever the cause, the Colombians were prowling the woods with gusto now. They hadn't caught Team KNIFE'S trail, and the soldiers were working very hard not to leave one, but one thing was clear to him: there would be a knock-down, drag-out firefight, and it wouldn't be long in coming.

  But that wasn't clear to Captain Ramirez. His orders were still to evade and avoid, and he was following them. Most of the men didn't question that, but Chavez did--or more precisely, wanted to. But sergeants don't question captains, at least not very often, and then only if you were a first sergeant and had the opportunity to take the man aside. If there was going to be a fight, and it sure as hell looked that way, why not set it up on favorable terms? Ten good men, armed with automatic weapons and grenades, plus two SAWs, made for one hell of an ambush. Give them a trail to follow, lead them right into the killzone. They were still carrying a couple of claymores. With luck, they'd drop ten or fifteen men in the first three seconds. Then the other side--those few who ran away fast enough--wouldn't be pissed. They'd be pissing in their pants. Nobody would be crazy about hot pursuit then. Why didn't Ramirez see that? Instead he was keeping everyone on the move, wearing them out, not looking for a good place to rest up, prepare a major ambush, duke it out, and then take off again. There was a time for caution. There was a time to fight. What that most favored word in any military lexicon, "initiative," meant was who did the deciding on which time was which. Chavez knew it on instinct. Ramirez, he suspected, was thinking too much. About what, Chavez didn't know, but the captain's thinking was starting to worry the sergeant.