Tom Clancy Oath of Office

by Marc Cameron

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She groaned. “I will be when you get off my ribs.”

  “Give me the gun!” Dovzhenko barked from the backseat. He’d slid the van door open above him, revealing a bright patch of dusty sky.

  Jack passed the Uzi without argument. He wasn’t using it at the moment.

  “Dom!” he shouted. “You good?”

  Dust and smoke poured into the van.

  “Dom!” Jack said again.

  Nothing.

  Dovzhenko had climbed out and now looked down through the open door, the Uzi slung around his neck. “Pass the girl to me! The engine is burning. You need to get out now.”

  Jack braced himself against the seats and helped Ysabel up. She looked at him in horror.

  “You are bleeding,” she said.

  “I’m fine,” Jack said. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  She looked back at him, terror in her eyes.

  “No,” she said. “You are not.”

  Ryan pressed up with his legs, pushing on her buttocks while Dovzhenko pulled her up and out.

  “We have to hurry,” the Russian yelled. “The motorcycles are returning.”

  “I’m right behind you,” Ryan said.

  Caruso was only half conscious. He moaned, looked at Jack as if he understood, and then closed his eyes.

  “Come on, buddy,” Jack said through clenched teeth. He squatted low and looped Caruso’s arm around his shoulder, pressing with his legs to drag Caruso up toward the door. “Dovzhenko!” he hissed. “A little help here!”

  Nothing.

  “Dovzhenko!”

  Caruso stirred, his head lolling sideways to look directly at Jack. His eyes were dazed, unfocused. “You’re bleeding.”

  “I’m fine,” Jack said.

  “No,” Caruso said. “I don’t think so, buddy. You should see yourself . . .”

  “I said I’m fine.” Ryan called for the Russian again, then Ysabel, to no avail.

  “I can’t lift you out of here by myself,” he said. “You still got that pistol?”

  Caruso shook his head. “Nope.”

  The sound of approaching motorcycle engines growled above the wind outside.

  Jack lowered Caruso gently to the seat. This wasn’t working. He cast his eyes around the interior of the van, searching for another way out. He could crawl over the backseat and maybe kick open the rear doors, but Caruso was little better than deadweight.

  The clack-clack cyclic of the Uzi ripped outside, followed by the distinctive crack of AKs. Acrid smoke began to pour in from the dash as the magnesium engine caught fire. Ryan knew they had maybe a minute before the van would become fully engulfed, less if the heat reached the fuel tank.

  “Dom,” Jack said, heart racing now in near-panic mode. “We have to get you out of here.”

  Caruso pointed at the ground. “Here.”

  “I’m telling you we can’t stay here.”

  Caruso shook his head, squinting now as the initial surge of adrenaline gave way to pain from his injuries. “Here!” He stomped on the window. “We’re on a ditch. Crawl out.”

  Jack saw the butt of the Beretta now, jammed between the side of the seat and the passenger doorframe. He leaned Caruso against the backrest and traded places with him so he was on the bottom. It would be much easier if he went first and dragged his cousin out. The alternative would be like pushing cooked spaghetti. Jack grabbed the pistol and, bracing his feet on the metal frame, put a single round through the window. Fortunately, the van had shatterproof glass and it broke into a thousand tiny squares rather than deadly shards.

  They’d come to rest with the wheels on the edge of the road and the roofline resting on the far bank, straddling the ditch. Gun in hand, Jack scrambled through the broken window, feetfirst, sinking immediately to his chest in muddy water. Caruso came behind him, gasping and becoming more animated from the surprise of hitting the muck.

  “Can you keep your head up?” Jack asked.

  “I’m good,” Caruso groaned. “My head feels like shit, though.”

  “Looks it, too,” Ryan said, relieved that Dom seemed coherent enough to assist in his own rescue.

  “Oh, yeah,” Caruso said. “Just wait until you look in the mirror . . .”

  Jack shrimped backward, his back scraping the van, his body submerged up to his neck in the soupy muck. Dom’s brother, Brian, had been killed doing this job. Jack wasn’t about to lose another cousin. Caruso faced him, crawling along as well as he could, coughing and sputtering from smoke and muddy water.

  Jack was vaguely aware of more shots outside, but they were in front of the van. He had a vague plan of staying as deep in the water as he could as he worked his way out feetfirst while making certain Caruso didn’t drown or burn to death.

  “Stay with me, D—”

  Strong hands grabbed Jack around both ankles. He kicked and twisted to try and get away, but, caught on the tunnel-like space between the ditch and the body of the van, he was robbed of any real power. He heard muffled voices and then felt more hands grabbing him, one person on each leg now, dragging him out through the mud. The image of his cousin seared into his brain. His dazed eyes, the crooked jaw, flames licking the van above him.

  46

  Ding Chavez pressed his spine against the trunk of a gnarled olive tree. He held his short shotgun at low ready. Grasshoppers flew up each time he took a step, wings clicking on the hazy evening air. Birds chirped in the branches. A dead man lay in the shrubs fifteen feet away. It was probably a sentry and whoever had killed him was somewhere uphill, between Chavez and the house.

  Ding was not, by nature, a whiner, but just once he’d like to come to some beautiful corner of the world and take a little look around—bring his bride instead of an armed-up team of operatives. She deserved to get out a little, especially since she hardly even knew what he did, let alone where he did it. Growing up with a father like John Clark imbued you with a certain understanding of the way of life. She and Ding had come to an agreement early in their marriage that he’d tell her what he could, and she wouldn’t ask questions. It made a conversational dance around the dinner table when JP was younger, but Patsy became adept at jumping in front of any topic that would turn Ding into a liar.

  It would be most cool if he could bring them both to this little Portuguese village, but first he had to see to a certain murderous couple—and whoever happened to be trying to whack them at this moment on one of the low hills east of town. Chavez’s money was on the Russians, most likely GRU. They’d done a deal with da Rocha and, for some reason, now wanted to back out.

  Clark’s plan had been to watch and learn, gleaning whatever they could over the course of a few days from watching the activity on da Rocha’s computer. Now that they knew where he was, they would get a couple of rooms, act the part of tourists, and see what they could see.

  It had been a good plan until ten minutes ago—when they’d seen the body.

  Gavin tweaked the malware running in the background of da Rocha’s computer so it “phoned home” to him and Midas now that Jack was gallivanting around Afghanistan. The software allowed them to search e-mails, documents, and bank accounts—and to do things to them so long as da Rocha wasn’t looking at the screen when they did it. The keystroke-logging feature gave them real-time observation of what da Rocha was doing—which appeared to have a great deal to do with weapons. Most important, though, the hidden program told them where he was.

  It was midafternoon by the time the team reached the crossroads village of Alpalhão in central Portugal. Surrounded by fertile fields of wheat and olive groves, the village had fewer than fifteen hundred full-time residents.

  Clark had decided they should do a little recon of the location as soon as they got to town, to get a feel for it before finding rooms for the night. The GPS on
da Rocha’s computer indicated he was located at the end of a tree-lined dirt lane. A copse of pines hid all but the roofline and a few glimpses of white from the road. Adara was the first to see the pair of legs jutting out from the pine trees as she and Midas passed the entrance to the villa lane from the south.

  “This changes everything,” Clark said over the net. “I’d really like to talk to this guy, but if that happens to be Russians paying him a visit, I’m not hopeful.”

  “Want me to launch the drone?” Midas said.

  “Let’s gear up first,” Clark said.

  Midas and Adara continued north, while Chavez and Clark hung back in the shadow of a large cork oak. They were all traveling heavy now, having brought their weapons aboard the Hendley Gulfstream when they’d first come to Portugal to watch Hugo Gaspard. Clark carried his venerable Wilson Combat .45, the single action being easier for him to operate with the previously damaged tendons in his dominant hand. Everyone else carried Smith & Wesson M&P Shields in nine-millimeter. With a capacity of only nine rounds including the one in the chamber, the little pistols weren’t exactly optimum sidearms for a frontal assault. But as Ding had learned from hard experience, when it came to hunting men, no pistol was an ideal weapon. When given a choice, long guns were always primary when there was offensive work to be done.

  Both Clark and Adara carried short-barreled Colt M4s on single-point slings around their necks. The 5.56 caliber NATO ammo allowed them to accurately reach out well past four hundred meters. Midas carried an H&K MP7 with three 40-round magazines of 4.6x30, a small but zippy little round meant to rip through body armor that the nine-millimeter MP5 could not. Chavez carried the street howitzer, a Remington Tac-14 twelve-gauge with a ball-like bird’s-head grip and a fourteen-inch barrel. The gun was highly maneuverable and devastating at close range.

  In addition to their weapons loadout, each carried a Cordura wallet containing a personal trauma kit of clotting gauze, an Israeli bandage, a SWAT-T tourniquet, and a fourteen-gauge needle.

  Midas launched the Snipe Nano six minutes after they arrived, taking it up three hundred feet above ground level so it was less likely to be heard.

  Adara kept her eyes peeled outbound while the rest of the team watched on the screen as four guys in dark clothing moved slowly toward a buttressed white stucco villa. A man and a woman, probably da Rocha and Fournier, lounged outside by a pool. There looked to be at least two sentries posted near the rear of the house on either end of the pool deck.

  “Let’s move,” Clark said. “I’d like to get da Rocha before they quiet him for good.”

  Midas recalled the drone, and two minutes later the team spread out in the trees, far enough to get a wider field of view but close enough that they could still see one another in the long shadows. The Russians, if that’s who it was, made the classic mistake of forgetting about their six o’clock. Not wanting to make the same error, Clark, Adara, and Ding focused their attention forward with intersecting fields of fire. Midas kept an eye downhill with the MP7.

  They found three dead sentries by the time they reached the tree line at the top of the hill—but they’d yet to hear a single shot.

  * * *

  —

  Da Rocha pounded the arm of his lounge chair hard enough to spill his beer. “This cannot be right. The product is where it is supposed to be.”

  Lucile lounged at the edge of the pool. “What? Have they forgotten to pay you?”

  “They paid me yesterday.” He ran a hand through his hair and then checked a different account. Perhaps he’d checked the wrong one. “Half of it, anyway. I should have gotten the balance today, but now even the first payment has disappeared.”

  “Odd,” Lucile said. “How did they access your accounts?”

  Da Rocha heard a muffled grunt and looked over his shoulder to find that Ramirez was no longer at his post. His stomach sank and he found himself overwhelmed with a feeling he’d not had since working the docks. Someone was out in the trees. Someone dangerous.

  Lucile felt it, too, and hopped out of the pool, streaming a trail of water as she padded quickly to her folded towel, where she’d left her Beretta. Pistol in hand, she pointed to the far end of the house without speaking and melted into the evening air to see what had happened to Ramirez.

  Da Rocha had no weapon. That’s what he hired guards for. Feigning disinterest but half expecting a bullet to scream in and blow his head off, he walked nonchalantly until he was five or six feet from the patio door. A single bullet thwacked off the wall in front of him, chipping a perfect half-moon from the white stucco. Another zinged off the pavement, narrowly missing his heel. He heard the staccato cracks of supersonic bullets but no boom from the ignition. They must have been using suppressors.

  He didn’t wait around to figure it out but ducked his head and ran.

  * * *

  —

  Lucille Fournier tasted blood, as she always did when she was about to spill some. The toe of a leather shoe protruded around the corner, revealing the presence of a man, hiding there to ambush her. She smiled, the pink tip of her tongue moistening her lips, tasting the air, serpentlike. She would have just shot through the wall, but da Rocha believed in solid, near-soundproof houses, and like many of the interior walls, this one was painted concrete. With the Beretta aimed in with both hands, she began to sidestep, cutting the pie, planning to shoot the first bit of the man that she saw and then take care of the rest of the bits as they presented themselves. She’d made it almost all the way around when she realized it was just an empty shoe. Clenching her teeth, she spun too late, catching a powerful fist that slammed her against the wall and sent a shower of lights exploding behind her eyes. She attempted to bring up the Beretta, but her attacker struck her in the forearm with some sort of truncheon. He kicked the gun away when it hit the floor.

  Two more rapid blows to the face left her staggered and dazed. She had to use the wall to keep her feet. Her vision was fogged, but she could just make out the Russian with the odd haircut standing in front of her, smirking.

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk, Ms. Fournier,” he said, a pained expression on his face. “You make things so complicated. Internal piston ammunition, sophisticated shellfish toxins . . . People are not so hard to kill.”

  As if to prove his point, the Russian raised his pistol and shot her just below the nose. If she’d had any thoughts of arguing, she left them on the concrete wall behind her, along with her teeth.

  * * *

  —

  Clark shot the first Russian twice as he turned the corner by the pool. “Splash one,” he said. He kicked the man’s suppressed Glock into the deep end of the pool and continued forward. A deafening boom to his right told him Chavez’s Tac-14 had spoken. Another Russian staggered backward from behind one of the villa’s winged buttresses. Clark and Adara both shot the third Russian as he came out of a bedroom, unaware that the previous gunfire had been at, not from, his comrades. Adara shot the fourth Russian as he was drawing a bead on da Rocha, who wore a bizarre-looking swimsuit that looked like he’d made it from matador pants. The arms dealer was now sprinting as fast as his legs could carry him down the gravel lane toward the main road.

  “Stay alert,” Clark said. He scanned across the top of his M4, pointing out while Ding covered the interior of the house behind him with the shotgun. “We saw four on the drone, but we might have missed one—and that doesn’t count Lucile Fournier. Midas, think you can get da Rocha so we can talk to him?”

  Rather than wasting breath on an answer, Midas, who was already running, just waved over his head with his left hand. Clark couldn’t help but smile as the retired Delta operator’s long strides chewed up the distance between him and da Rocha. He caught up quickly, falling in behind the arms dealer to give him a mighty shove between the shoulder blades. Midas grabbed his quarry by the hair as he went down, riding him to the ground like a sled. Da Rocha took
the brunt of the impact on his chest and nose, yowling as he skidded to a stop. Midas rolled him over and slapped him across the ear. Thirty seconds later he was flex-cuffed, on his feet, and trudging back up the gravel road in his ridiculous-looking shorts.

  Adrenaline ebbing, da Rocha’s shoulders trembled when he looked around his estate at all the carnage. He blinked several times and then settled in on Clark, whom he’d identified as the leader. “Who are you? What . . . what is the meaning of this?”

  Adara leaned out the sliding glass door and gave a grim shake of her head. “I found Fournier.”

  Clark sighed. “Mr. da Rocha. I’m the guy who just saved your life. That means you owe me some information.”

  Chavez leaned in. “We should go, boss.”

  “Right,” Clark said, his eyes never leaving da Rocha. “I know a place near the coast where we can talk in private.” He turned to Chavez. “No shit. The place I’m talking about is soundproof. There’s a lake out back that must be a hundred feet deep. We can do whatever we want and no one will ever know.”

  Completely overwhelmed, da Rocha’s face screwed up in a twisted grimace and he began to sob.

  47

  Dominic Caruso had wandered away from the rest of his family in Shenandoah National Forest when he was six years old. With darkness falling, every tree and bush looked like the other trees and bushes. In no time, he was so turned around he had no idea where he was. He’d sat down on a rock and cried as only a six-year-old boy can cry when he is hopelessly lost. But even then, he’d known that somewhere in the gathering darkness, there were people who loved him and wanted to make him safe.