by Tom Clancy
“Where the hell are we?” another sergeant asked.
“They’ll tell you outside,” the attendant replied. “Y’all have a nice time here.” The smile that accompanied the answer was too charming to merit a further challenge.
The sergeants collected their bags and shuffled out of the aircraft, finding yet another van waiting for them. Chavez got his question answered before he boarded it. The air was very thin here, all right, and in the west he saw why. The last glow of sunset illuminated the jagged outline of mountains to the west. Easterly course, three hours’ flight time, and mountains: he knew at once they were somewhere in the Rockies, even though he’d never really been there. His last view of the aircraft as the van rolled off showed a fueling truck moving toward it. Chavez didn’t quite put it together. The aircraft would be leaving in less than thirty minutes. Few people would have noticed that it had even been there, much less trouble themselves to wonder why.
Clark’s hotel room was a nice one, befitting his cover. There was an ache at the back of his head to remind him that he was still not fully adjusted to the altitude, but a couple of Tylenol caplets went to work on that, and he knew that his job didn’t involve much in the way of physical activity. He ordered breakfast sent up and went through some setting-up exercises to work the kinks out of his muscles. The morning jog was definitely out, however. Finished, he showered and shaved. Service was good here. Just as he got his clothes on, breakfast arrived, and by nine o’clock he was ready for work. Clark took the elevator down to the lobby, then went outside. The car was waiting. He got in the front.
“Buenos días,” the driver said. “There may be rain this afternoon.”
“If so, I have my coat.”
“A cold rain, perhaps.”
“The coat has a liner,” Clark said, finishing the code sequence.
“Whoever thought that one up was bright enough,” the man said. “There is rain in the forecast. The name’s Larson.”
“Clark.” They didn’t shake hands. It just wasn’t done. Larson, which probably wasn’t his real name either, Clark thought, was about thirty, with dark hair that belied his vaguely Nordic surname. Locally, Carlos Larson was thought to be the son of a Danish father and a Venezuelan mother, and he ran a flying school, a service much in demand. He was a skilled pilot who taught what he knew and didn’t ask many questions, which appealed to his clientele. He didn’t really need to ask questions—pilots, especially student pilots, talk a good deal—and he had a good memory for every sort of detail, plus the sort of professional expertise that invited lots of requests for advice. It was also widely believed that he’d financed his business by making a few highly illegal flights, then semiretired to a life of luxury. This legend created bona fides for the people in whom he had interest, but did so without making him any sort of adversary. He was a man who’d done what was needed to get what he wanted, and now lived the sort of life that he’d wanted to live. That explained the car, which was the most powerful BMW made, and the expensive apartment, and the mistress, a stewardess for Avianca whose real job was as a courier for CIA. Larson thought it all a dream assignment, the more so because the stewardess really was his lover, a fringe benefit that might not have amused the Agency’s personnel directorate. The only thing that bothered him was that his placement in Colombia was also unknown to the station chief. A relatively inexperienced agent, Larson—Clark would have been surprised to learn that that was his real name—knew enough about how the Agency worked to realize that separate command loops generally denoted some sort of special operation. His cover had been established over a period of eighteen months, during which he’d been required to do not very much in return. Clark’s arrival was probably the signal that all of that was about to change. Time to earn his pay.
“What’s the plan of the day?” Clark asked.
“Do a little flying. We’ll be down before the weather goes bad,” Larson added.
“I know you have an instrument rating.”
“I will take that as a vote of confidence,” the pilot said with a smile as he drove toward the airport. “You’ve been over the photos, of course.”
“Yeah, about three days’ worth. I’m just old-fashioned enough that I like to eyeball things myself. Maps and photos don’t tell you everything.”
“They told me the mission profile is just to fly around straight and level, no buzzing or circling to get people mad.” The nice thing about having a flying school was that its aircraft were expected to be all over the place, but if one showed specific interest in specific people, they might take note of your registration number, and they might come down to the airport to ask why. The people who lived in Medellin were not known to ask such questions politely. Larson was not afraid of them. So long as he maintained his cover, he knew that he had little to worry about. At the same time, he was a pro, and pros are careful, especially if they want to last.
“Sounds okay to me.” Clark knew the same things. He’d gotten old in a dangerous business by taking only the necessary risks. Those were bad enough. It wasn’t very different from playing the lottery. Even though the odds were against one’s hitting the number, if you played the game long enough, the right—or wrong—number would appear, no matter how careful you were. Except in this lottery the prize wasn’t money. It was an unmarked, shallow grave, and you got that only if the opposition remembered something about religion.
He couldn’t decide if he liked the mission or not. On the one hand, the objective was worthy enough. On the other ... But Clark wasn’t paid to make that sort of evaluation. He was paid to do, not to think very much about it. That was the main problem with covert operations. You had to risk your life on the judgment of others. It was nice to know why, but the decision-makers said knowing why often had the effect of making the job all the more dangerous. The field operators didn’t always believe that. Clark had that problem right now.
The Twin-Beech was parked in the general-aviation section of El Dorado International Airport. It didn’t require too much in the way of intelligence to make an accurate assessment of what the aircraft were used for. There were too many expensive cars, and far too many expensive aircraft to be explained by the Colombian gentry. These were toys for the newly rich. Clark’s eyes swept over them, his face showing neutral interest.
“Wages of sin ain’t bad, are they?” Larson chuckled.
“What about the poor bastards who’re paying the wages?”
“I know about that, too. I’m just saying that they’re nice airplanes. Those Gulfstreams—I’m checked out on ’em—that’s one sweet-handlin’ bird.”
“What do they cost?” Clark asked.
“A wise man once said, if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.”
“Yeah.” Clark’s mouth twisted into a smile. But some things carry a price that’s not measured in dollars. He was already getting into the proper frame of mind for the mission.
Larson preflighted the Beech in about fifteen minutes. He’d just flown in ninety minutes earlier, and few private pilots would have bothered to run through the whole checklist, but Larson was a good pilot, which meant he was before all things a careful one. Clark took the right-side cockpit seat, strapping in as though he were a student pilot on his first hop. Commercial traffic was light at this hour, and it was easy to taxi into the takeoff pattern. About the only surprise was the long takeoff roll.
“It’s the altitude,” Larson explained over the intercom headset as he rotated off the runway. “It makes the controls a little mushy at low speed, too. No problem. Like driving in the snow—you just have to pay attention.” He moved the lever to bring the gear up, leaving the aircraft at full power to claw up to altitude as quickly as possible. Clark scanned the instruments and saw nothing obviously awry, though it did seem odd to show nine thousand feet of altitude when you could still pick out individual people on the ground.
The aircraft banked to the left, taking a northwesterly heading. Larson backed off on the throttl
es, commenting that you also had to pay close attention to engine temperatures here, though the cooling systems on the twin Continental engines were beefed up to allow for it. They were heading toward the country’s mountainous spine. The sky was clear and the sun was bright.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“It is that,” Clark agreed. The mountains were covered with emerald-green trees whose leaves shimmered with moisture from the night’s rain. But Clark’s trained eyes saw something else. Walking these hills would be a cast-iron bitch. About the only good thing to be said was that there was good cover under which people could conceal themselves. The combination of steep hills and thin air would make this place an arduous one. He hadn’t been briefed on what exactly was going to happen, but he knew enough to be glad that the hard part of the job would not be his.
The mountain ranges in Colombia run on a southwest-to-northeast vector. Larson picked a convenient pass to fly over, but the winds off the nearby Pacific Ocean made the crossing bumpy.
“Get used to it. Winds are picking up today because of the weather front that’s moving in. They really boil around these hills. You ought to see what real bad weather is like.”
“Thanks, but no thanks! Not much in the way of places to land in case things—”
“Go bad?” Larson asked. “That’s why I pay attention to the checklist. Besides, there are more little strips down there than you might imagine. Of course, you don’t always get a welcome when you decide to use one. Don’t sweat it. I just put new engines on this bird a month ago. Sold the old ones to one of my students for his old King Air. It belongs to the Bureau of Customs now,” Larson explained.
“Did you have any part in that?”
“Negative! Look, they expect me to know why all these kids are taking lessons. I’m not supposed to be dumb, right? So I also teach them standard evasion tactics. You can read them in any decent book, and they expect me to be able to do that. Pablo wasn’t real big on reading. Hell of a natural pilot, though. Too bad, really, he was a nice enough kid. They bagged him with fifty keys. I understand he didn’t talk much. No surprise there. Gutsy little bastard.”
“How well motivated are these folks?” Clark had seen lots of combat once, and he knew that the measure of an enemy is not to be found by counting his weapons.
Larson frowned at the sky. “Depends on what you mean. If you change the word from ‘motivated’ to ‘macho,’ that about covers it. You know, the cult of manliness, that sort of thing. Part of it’s kinda admirable. These people have a funny sense of honor. For example, the ones I know socially treat me just fine. Their hospitality is impressive, especially if you show a little deference, which everyone does. Besides, I’m not a business rival. What I mean is, I know these people. I’ve taught a bunch of them to fly. If I had a money problem, I could probably go to them for help and get it. I’m talking like half a million in cash on a handshake—and I’d walk out of the hacienda with the cash in a briefcase. I’d have to make some courier flights to square things, of course. And I’d never have to pay the money back. On the other hand, if I screwed them, well, they’d make damned sure that I paid for that, too. They have rules. If you live by them, you’re fairly safe. If not, you’d better have your bags packed.”
“I know about the ruthlessness. What about the brains?”
“They’re as smart as they have to be. What smarts they don’t have, they buy. They can buy anything, anybody. Don’t underestimate them. Their security systems are state-of-the-art, like what we put on ICBM silos—shit, maybe better than that. They’re protected as tightly as we protect the President, except their shooters are less restrained by rules of engagement. I suppose the best indicator on how smart they are is the fact that they’ve banded together to form the cartel. They’re smart enough to know that gang wars cost everybody, so they formed a loose alliance. It ain’t perfect, but it works. People who try to break into the business mostly end up dead. Medellin is an easy town to die in.”
“Cops? Courts?”
“The locals have tried. Lots of dead cops, lots of dead judges to prove it,” Larson said with a shake of the head. “Takes a lot for people to keep plugging away when they can’t see any results. Then toss in the money angle. How often can a man walk away from a suitcase full of tax-free hundred-dollar bills? Especially when the alternative is certain death for himself and his family. The cartel is smart, my friend, and it’s patient, and it has all the resources it needs, and it’s ruthless enough to scare a veteran Nazi. All in all, that’s some enemy.” Larson pointed to a gray smudge in the distance. “There’s Medellin. Drugs ’R’Us, all in that one little city in the valley. One nuke could settle things, say about two megatons, air-burst four thousand feet AGL. I wonder if the rest of the country would really mind ... ?”
That earned Larson a glance from his passenger. Larson lived here, knew a lot of these people, and even liked some, as he’d just said. But his hatred for them occasionally peeked through his professional detachment. The best sort of duplicity. This kid had a real future in the Agency, Clark decided. Brains and passion both. If he knew how to maintain a proper balance of the two, he could go places. Clark reached into his bag for a camera and a pair of binoculars. His interest wasn’t in the city itself.
“Nice places, aren’t they?”
The drug chieftains were growing increasingly security-conscious. The hilltops around the city were all being cleared of trees. Clark counted over a dozen new homes already. Homes, he thought with a snort. Castles was more like it. Walled fortresses. Enormous dwelling structures surrounded by low walls, surrounded in turn by hundreds of yards of clear, steep slopes. What people found picturesque about Italian villages and Bavarian castles was always the elegant setting. Always on the top of a hill or mountain. You could easily imagine the work that went into such a beautiful place—clearing the trees, hauling the stone blocks up the slopes, and ending up with a commanding view of the countryside that extended for miles. But the castles and villages hadn’t been built in such places for fun, and neither had these houses. The heights meant that no one could approach them unobserved. The cleared ground around those houses was known in terse military nomenclature as a killing zone, a clear field of fire for automatic weapons. Each house had a single road up to a single gate. Each house had a helipad for a fast evacuation. The wall around each was made of stone that would stop any bullet up to fifty caliber. His binoculars showed that immediately inside each wall was a gravel or concrete path for guards to walk. A company of trained infantrymen would have no easy time assaulting one of these haciendas. Maybe a helicopter assault, supported by mortars and gunships ... Christ, Clark thought to himself, what am I thinking about?
“What about house plans?”
“No problem. Three architectural firms have designed these places. Security isn’t all that good there. Besides, I’ve been in that one for a party—just two weeks ago, as a matter of fact. I guess that’s one area they’re not too smart in. They like to show their places off. I can get you floor plans. The satellite overheads will show guard strength, vehicle garaging, all that sort of thing.”
“They do.” Clark smiled.
“Can you tell me exactly what you’re here for?”
“Well, they want an evaluation of the physical characteristics of the terrain.”
“I can see that. Hell, I could do that easy enough from memory.” Larson’s question was not so much curiosity as his slight offense at not being asked to do this job himself.
“You know how it is at Langley,” was the statement Clark used to dismiss the observation.
You’re a pilot, Clark didn’t say. You’ve never humped a field pack in the boonies. I have. If Larson had known his background, he could have made an intelligent guess, but what Clark did for the Agency, and what he’d done before joining, were not widely known. In fact, they were hardly known at all.
“Need-to-know, Mr. Larson,” Clark said after another moment.
“Roger that
,” the pilot agreed over the intercom.
“Let’s do a photo pass.”
“I’ll do a touch-and-go at the airport first. We want to make it look good.”
“Fair enough,” Clark agreed.
“What about the refining sites?” Clark asked after they headed back to El Dorado.
“Mainly southwest of here,” Larson answered, turning the Beech away from the valley. “I’ve never seen one myself—I’m not in that part of the business, and they know it. If you want to scout them out, you go around at night with imaging IR equipment, but they’re hard to track in on. Hell, they’re portable, easy to set up, and easy to move. You can load the whole assembly on a medium truck and set it up ten miles away the next day.”
“Not that many roads....”
“What you gonna do, search every truck that comes along?” Larson asked. “Besides, you can man-pack it if you want. Labor’s cheap down here. The opposition is smart, and adaptable.”
“How much does the local army get involved?” Clark had been fully briefed, of course, but he also knew that a local perspective might not agree with Washington’s—and might be correct.
“They’ve tried. Biggest problem they have is sustaining their forces—their helicopters don’t spend twenty percent of their time in the air. That means they don’t do many ops. It means that if anyone gets hit he might not get medical attention very fast—and that hurts performance when they do run ops. Even then—you can guess what the government pays a captain, say. Now imagine that somebody meets that captain at a local bar, buys him a drink, and talks to him. He tells the captain that he might want to be in the southwestern corner of his sector tomorrow night—well, anywhere but the northeastern sector, okay? If he decides to patrol one part of his area, but not another, he gets a hundred thousand dollars. Okay, the other side has enough money that they can pay him up front just to see if he’ll cooperate. Seed money, kind of. Once he shows he can be bought, they settle down to a smaller but regular payment. Also, the other side has enough product that they can let him do some real seizures once in a while, once they know he’s theirs, to make him look good. Someday that captain grows up and becomes a colonel who controls a lot more territory.... It’s not because they’re bad people, it’s just that things are so fucking hopeless. Legal institutions are fragile down here and—hell, look at the way things are at home, for Christ’s sake. I—”