by Marc Cameron
“Nope,” he said. “Those are U.S. Navy birds.”
* * *
—
The Seahawks arrived first, circling to approach from the west, then hovering close to the surface of the ocean as they dropped two rescue swimmers. Backlit by a low sun, the clouds of mist driven up by the churning rotors threw dazzling rainbows of color into the air below each gunmetal-gray bird.
Adara gave Chavez a good-natured punch in the shoulder with a shaky hand. “Bet you Army boys are happy to see the Navy now . . .”
The Navy swimmer broke the surface a few feet from the raft. He wore a black neoprene shorty and red helmet outfitted with a flashing strobe so the pilots could keep an eye on him. A black dive mask covered his youthful face.
“Petty Officer Third Class Aaron Ward,” the swimmer said, as if he’d just sidled up to the bar instead of hanging on to the side of a raft with hurricane-force prop wash battering the ocean a few dozen yards away. “United States Navy. How you folks holding up?”
Petty Officer Ward’s demeanor was relaxed—because calm was contagious—but he worked fast to triage the injured in the raft while the choppers scoured the surface for other survivors.
The helicopter pilot had it the worst, and Petty Officer Ward saw to him first, radioing his chopper with a situation report that would be passed on to his ship. It wasn’t long before everyone on the rafts was wrapped in foil space blankets like so many shivering baked potatoes.
Inflatable runabouts deployed from Makin Island’s well-deck as she drew nearer, allowing the monstrous ship to stand off, protecting it from possible danger, and those in the water from its massive bulk. The runabouts made for an easier rescue than the helicopter hoist, letting the rescue swimmers get back in their respective birds and continue the search for survivors.
Chavez was last off the raft. He stayed out of the way as the coxswain ran the inflatable up the ramp of the Makin Island’s well-deck. Sailors and Marines were on hand to assist survivors as they climbed onto the ship. Ears half clogged with water and still shivering, Chavez was vaguely aware of a murmur among a small group of Marines.
One of them stepped away from the others.
Pausing mid-step as he climbed out, Chavez looked to his left. What he saw nearly sent him tumbling back into the runabout.
A slender lance corporal with green eyes administered an on-the-spot correction to a Marine PFC who he must have thought was being too rough bringing the Vietnamese roustabouts aboard. The correction was direct, colorful in its language, and over quickly.
Chavez, still dizzy and near hypothermia, squinted, turning his head slightly to be certain he wasn’t seeing things. Satisfied, he chuckled to himself, suddenly much warmer than he had been.
“You kiss your mama with that mouth, Marine?”
The green-eyed lance corporal braced, wheeling to look directly at Chavez. His jaw dropped and his eyes flew wide.
“Dad?”
10
John Clark was almost finished with a call from Mary Pat Foley when his phone buzzed. He’d been expecting to hear from Ding, but this was an unknown number, so he let it go to voicemail. The same number called back twice more in rapid succession, prompting him to put the director of national intelligence on hold—something he was certain few people ever got to do.
It was Ding, calling on a borrowed phone.
* * *
—
Clark’s helicopter touched down on the USS Makin Island an hour and a half later. By then, rescue operations had turned into body recovery and Lance Corporal Chavez had received permission to break away from his platoon. Captain Jackson cleared the wardroom so the boy could meet privately with his father and grandfather.
Clark had time to brief Chavez of the basics of Foley’s call, but little else. The urgency of the situation in China drove him to want to return to the hotel immediately and formulate a plan, but the idea of spending a minute or two with his grandson made him step back and take a breath. Jack and Lisanne were already working logistics for a quick move and they were all waiting on direction from Adam Yao, anyway. He could spare a couple minutes.
Captain Jackson made certain everyone was comfortable in the wardroom and then, grinning, said, “Looks like the Marine has a question or two.”
“That I do, sir,” JP said. His nose was crooked now. Telltale scars above his right eyebrow and his lower lip had taken the brunt of what looked to have been a serious fight. Shoulder blades pinned, he stood so straight Clark thought his back might snap. Clark suppressed a smile, remembering the hundreds of times as a grandfather that he’d told the boy to stand up straight. As much of a Navy man as he was, he had to admit there wasn’t any straight back like a Marine straight back.
Captain Jackson gave JP a soft nod. “Stand at ease, son. In fact, have a seat. Not sure how much your dad is going to tell you, but it’d probably be best if you were sitting down for whatever it is.”
The younger Chavez moved mechanically, looking warily back and forth from his father to his grandfather and the captain as he sidled in on a chair at the long table.
Clark took a seat beside him, resting a hand on his grandson’s shoulder. “What do you want to know?”
“I thought you and Dad were forensic investigators. I mean, I’m smart enough to figure out there was some security work involved, considering your backgrounds. I know you guys travel . . . but last I heard, Mom told me Dad was supposed to be on some business trip to Singapore. Now I run into him on his way out to an oil rig that gets bombed, and you’re able to commandeer a helicopter on a moment’s notice to my ship from Ho Chi Minh City . . . That’s just . . .”
Clark laid his hands flat on the table and studied them for a moment, deciding whether or not to speak, then said, “The family business. That’s what it is.”
JP looked at his father. “Seriously? Are you guys mercs?”
“Hell, no,” Ding said. “Far from it.”
“We’re more what you’d call contractors,” Clark said.
Captain Jackson turned to leave. “I’ll see myself out so you can read him in to whatever this is.”
Clark gave a dry chuckle. “You’re involved, Skipper. At least your family is.”
Jackson nodded. “I thought as much. Jack Ryan was my uncle Robby’s dearest friend. Ryan tapped him to be his vice president.”
“That’s true,” Clark said. “But I was thinking of your other uncle. Tim.”
Jackson cocked his head. “How’s that?”
“Years ago—I hate to admit how many—I recruited our young Marine’s daddy for a special mission. It remains classified, but what we were doing isn’t important. Your uncle Tim was a platoon leader at Fort Ord and I sort of snatched Staff Sergeant Chavez out from under his nose. He got a pretty good ass-chewing for trying to find out what was going on, if I remember correctly.”
Jackson laughed. “I remember hearing him talk about spooks invading his turf.”
“Spooks . . .” JP Chavez stared into space, then turned to look directly at his father. “Does Mom know?”
“She does,” Ding said.
JP’s gaze shifted to Clark, who answered before he could ask. “Your grandma has known what I do since before I even really started doing it.”
“I guess there’s a lot you can’t tell me.”
Ding chuckled. “Quite a bit. But we’re the good guys. That’s the main thing you need to know.”
“CIA?”
“For a while,” Clark said. “Since we’re getting it all out in the open.”
JP looked down at his hands, folded on the wardroom table, and for just a moment Clark saw a bit of himself. “This is a lot to take in.” He locked eyes with his dad. “You’ve been doing whatever this is since you were in the Army?”
“In one way or another,” Ding said.
“Since you were abo
ut my age? Grandpa came to your unit and recruited you? So that could happen to me if it’s the family business. Right?”
“First of all,” Ding said, “I was a staff sergeant, not an E3.” He looked imploringly at Clark. “Help me out here, Grandpa.”
Clark put a hand on JP’s shoulder again. “Let’s just see where your career takes you. This kind of work has a way of finding the right person for the job. Let things happen in time.”
“I thought you were going to help,” Ding said. “That’s not helping.”
Clark gave his grandson a wink. “Like I said, it is the family business.” He put both hands on the table, and gave Ding a warning side-eye. “As much as it kills me to cut this reunion short, we need to talk more about that call from the boss’s boss.”
JP got to his feet. Both Ding and Clark drew him in for back-slapping hugs.
“I always thought you guys were pretty cool,” JP said. “But this is—”
“Between us,” Clark said. “That’s what it is. Secrecy is a burden, but it’s a big part of that family business we talked about.”
“Understood, sir,” JP said. “I should get back to my platoon.”
Clark gave him one more hug for the road, and then tousled what little hair there was on top of his regulation cut.
“Care to tell me how you got that broken nose?”
“Long story, sir,” JP said. “For another time.”
“But I should see the other guy. Right?”
JP laughed out loud. “You probably already have. He’s my best friend in the platoon.”
“Hmmm,” Ding said. “I guess that is a long story . . .”
Captain Jackson followed him out the wardroom door. “Lance Corporal Chavez and I will leave you two to discuss your secret phone call. Can you stay for dinner?”
“Wish we could,” Clark said. “But we’ll have to take a rain check.”
JP was shaking his head as he went out the door. “This is the most kickass thing I’ve ever even heard of . . .”
* * *
—
The Mi-17 pilot and Dom Caruso, who’d been sitting directly behind him, suffered burns from spilled fuel during the crash. The pilot went directly from the Makin Island to a hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. Caruso got some Silvadene ointment for his burns—and a splint for the severely damaged cartilage in his knee. The ship’s doc agreed with Adara’s assessment that he was going to need surgery—which would sideline him for the next several weeks at the very least. They gave him enough pain meds to get him back to the States and sent him on his way with Clark, Chavez, and Adara in one of the Seahawks. Everyone in the city knew the U.S. Navy had assisted in the rescue after the oil rig explosion, so one of the matte-gray choppers dropping off some Americans didn’t raise any eyebrows.
“Patsy’s going to have my ass,” Chavez said.
“The boy looks sharp, though,” Clark said.
“I wonder about that fight,” Ding said. “He took some kind of beating . . . and the dude and he are friends now . . .”
“And he’s still standing,” Clark said.
“Still . . .” Ding said, his mouth set in a tight line.
Clark patted him on the back. “We all got our secrets, son.”
* * *
—
Clark got Foley back on the line as soon as he had the team convened in his hotel room.
Dom sat in a padded chair, his bad leg propped up on an ottoman under a bag of ice. Jack Junior barely contained his displeasure at having missed the action—even if that action was a helicopter crash. Frankly, Clark knew how he felt, but had seen enough action in his life that he didn’t feel cheated.
Vietnam had good relations with the United States at the moment, but Clark had still taken time to sweep the room for listening devices. They’d drawn the curtains and set up white-noise “chirpers” by the door and each window to defeat laser mics anyone might be bouncing off the glass. Even so, they spoke in vague terms and coded names.
“Thanks, Chief,” Clark said, when the DNI had finished her thumbnail brief. An enlisted sailor at heart, Clark used the title as a term of endearment, having generally reserved his top level of trust for the crusty old senior chiefs over most officers.
“So,” Ding said, once Clark disconnected the call. “Two targets. Mother and daughter. We’ll have to split up.”
Midas lay on his back on top of Clark’s bedspread, drawing imaginary circles in the air with the gimme hotel pen from the nightstand. “The kid should be a simple find. We’re going to need something else to go on to find her mama besides ‘hiding out with some terrorists somewhere in China.’”
“Yep,” Clark said. “We’ll get more from CROSSTIE anytime now.” Everyone in the room knew CROSSTIE was CIA operations officer Adam Yao. They’d worked with him before, built that kind of rare trust that comes from spilling a lot of sweat and a substantial amount of blood together in the field.
“And they have a mole,” Ding said, restating Mary Pat Foley’s larger concern. “Will CROSSTIE’s initial cables to his chain of command compromise him at all?”
“Remains to be seen,” Clark said. “The boss believes his identity has been compartmented enough to keep him in the black. But we have to be careful. Without knowing the mole’s identity and level of access, we can’t be certain what he or she knows.”
“Does it sound like she has any suspects?” Adara asked from her spot at Caruso’s side. She’d been coddling him from the moment they got back to the hotel.
Clark gave her a knowing nod. “At this point, I imagine they suspect everyone.”
11
Monica Hendricks stood barefoot on a padded office chair, her lips pursed around a mouthful of tenpenny nails. Like most of the bean counters in government buildings around the world, the powers that be at CIA paid an inordinate amount of attention to little things, like the tiny holes left by hanging framed plaques, certificates, and photographs on an employee’s I-love-me wall. A certain type of hanger was mandated, or . . . Monica didn’t exactly know the consequences, but she suspected it would entail either a firing squad or a flurry of e-mails from admin weenie bosses to operational bosses—who had, by virtue of their jobs, become admin weenies themselves. Hanging anything with something as large as a tenpenny nail was strictly verboten. Monica smiled, dabbing a bit of Colgate toothpaste into the tenpenny holes to cover her treachery. She was on her way out the door, anyway—the admin weenies would have to run fast if they wanted to catch her now.
Known for being a snappy dresser, Hendricks wore faded jeans and a Georgetown sweatshirt today. The Agency had a robust program to help see people through the transition to the private sector, help them understand that they are still relevant when they turn in their parking pass and building ID. It was a big step, leaving all this behind, and like most people who’d worked anywhere for as long as she had, she’d spent her last day reminiscing about her career, with colleagues and in her head. That reminiscing was doubly important now, because there was a lot she would never be able to talk about once she stepped out the door.
Fifty was young to be retiring from the CIA. Armed federal law enforcement agents had to pull the plug at fifty-seven. CIA officers didn’t hit their sell-by date until they were sixty. Even then, they could come back as contractors to teach. By fifty you’d paid your dues. You’d just begun to untie the Gordian knot that was the Central Intelligence Agency. The best promotions came around fifty, when they still had ten good years to wring out of your soul. Everyone on the Asia desk thought she was making the biggest mistake of her life. She’d served in leadership positions in the headquarters and the field, including chief of station, and was on the short list for several plum promotions to the seventh floor. For the last three years, virtually every iota of intelligence regarding China had crossed her desk or the desks of those who worked for her. Some even thought she h
ad a shot at deputy director if she played her cards right.
But she wasn’t much of a cardplayer.
She missed the field to be sure, and lamented the “mom body” that came with sitting behind a desk—and her affinity for daily lattes from the Starbucks in the CIA food court. She wasn’t particularly out of shape, but she wasn’t in shape, either. Monica had never been the stereotypical slender female operator of the Hollywood spy genre. She’d been a bit on the chunky side when she was recruited. She was worried at first, but made it through The Farm fine, realizing quickly that a few extra pounds of fighting weight made defensive tactics easier to handle. She knew her way around firearms but rarely carried one, though her husband and two sons routinely chided her for not doing so for her own protection. Her adult sons had both known she was a CIA officer from the time they were in high school—old enough to keep a secret—and still they believed there was more gunplay in the life of an intelligence officer than there actually was. Both seemed to think that every CIA officer, including their mother, was a part of the ground branch—the paramilitary guys that the world equated with the CIA overseas. It made her smile. While the Russians, Chi-Comms, Iranians, and jihadis were all watching the bearded white guys who ate barbed wire for breakfast, the slightly chunky black woman slipped by unnoticed.
It was good work, but twenty-six years was enough. Now she was going to give back, to teach high school. Her friends with teenagers joked that she was leaving intelligence work to go into law enforcement.
Hendricks’s family was accustomed to service. Her husband taught history at Georgetown. Her eldest son was an officer in the Army, in his final year of residency to become a trauma surgeon at Fort Sam Houston. Her youngest was in his second year with the Secret Service, stationed in the Seattle Field Office.
She’d grown up in a middle-class home outside Dallas, where her father was an engineer designing integrated circuits for Texas Instruments. She’d been a child at the end of the Civil Rights movement. Her parents kept themselves to themselves for the most part and were not politically active. She graduated high school in the late eighties with a handful of token minorities in her senior class—the doctor from India’s kid, some Hispanic families. Monica had balked when her mother insisted she take a second language but found she had a knack for Spanish—the only language besides Latin offered by her high school. She took it all four years—and Latin, too, because the puzzles the languages provided seemed to fit well with the way her brain worked. She had plenty of kids to practice her Spanish with, but there were few kids like her. Reggie Good, the fastest wide receiver on the football team, was black, and in a Texas high school, football transcended color—up to a point. There were a few unwritten rules. She was a popular academic kid. Pretty, but not skinny enough to be a cheerleader. She could go out with virtually any boy in the school, no matter the color, so long as it was nothing serious. Reggie could date her, and possibly a couple of the Hispanic girls, but the line against him dating white girls was clearly drawn.