by Tom Clancy
“You got that one right,” Chavez agreed with a laugh. “All those unused muscle groups, as the free-weight guys say.”
The best thing about the training camp was the food. For lunch in the field they had to eat MRE packs—“Meal Ready to Eat,” which was three lies for the price of one—but breakfast and supper selections were always well prepared in the camp’s oversized kitchen. Chavez invariably selected as large a bowl of fresh fruits as he could get away with, heavily laced with white sugar for energy, along with the usual Army coffee whose caffeine content always seemed augmented to give you that extra wake-up punch. He laid into his bowl of diced grapefruit, oranges, and damned near everything else with gusto while his tablemates attacked their greasy eggs and bacon. Chavez went back to the line for some hash-browns. He’d heard that carbohydrates were also good for energy, and now that he was almost accustomed to the altitude, the thought of grease for breakfast didn’t bother him that much.
Things were going well. Work here was hard, but there was nothing in the way of Mickey Mouse bullshit. Everyone here was an experienced pro, and they were being treated as such. No energy was being wasted on bed-making; the sergeants all knew how, and if a blanket corner wasn’t quite tucked in, peer pressure set things right without the need for shouting from a superior officer. They were all young men, as serious about their work as they knew how to be, but there was a spirit of fun and adventure. They still didn’t know exactly what they were training for. There was the inevitable speculation, whispering between bunks that gradually transformed to a symphony of snoring at night after agreement on some wildly speculative idea.
Though an uneducated man, Chavez was not a stupid one. Somehow he knew that all of the theories were wrong. Afghanistan was all over; they couldn’t be going there. Besides, everyone here spoke fluent Spanish. He mulled over it again while chewing a mouthful of kiwi fruit—a treat he hadn’t known to exist a week before. High altitude—they weren’t training them here for the fun of it. That eliminated Cuba and Panama. Nicaragua, perhaps. How high were the mountains there? Mexico and the other Central American nations had mountains, too. Everyone here was a sergeant. Everyone here had led a squad, and had done training at one level or other. Everyone here was a light infantryman. Probably they’d be dispatched on some special training mission, therefore, training other light-fighters. That made it counterinsurgency. Of course, every country south of the Rio Grande had one sort of guerrilla problem or other. They resulted from the inequities of the individual governments and economies, but to Chavez the explanation was simpler and to the point—those countries were all fucked up. He’d seen enough of that in his trips with his battalion to Honduras and Panama. The local towns were dirty—they’d made his home barrio seem paradise on earth. The police—well, he’d never thought that he would come to admire the LAPD. But it was the local armies that had earned his especial contempt. Bunch of lazy, incompetent bullies. Not much different from street gangs, as a matter of fact, except that they all carried the same sort of guns (the L.A. gangs tended toward individualism). Weapons skills were about the same. It didn’t require very much for a soldier to butt-stroke some poor bastard with his rifle. The officers—well, he hadn’t seen anyone to compare with Lieutenant Jackson, who loved to run with his men and didn’t mind getting all dirty and smelly like a real soldier. But inevitably it was the sergeants down there who earned his fullest contempt. It had been that paddy Sergeant McDevitt in Korea who’d shown Ding Chavez the light—skill and professionalism equaled pride. And, when you got down to it, pride truly earned was all there was to a man. Pride was what kept you going, what kept you from caving in on those goddamned mountainside runs. You couldn’t let down your friends. You couldn’t let your friends see you for something less than you wanted to be. That was the short version of everything he had learned in the Army, and he knew that the same could be said of all the men in this room. What they were preparing for, therefore, was to train others to do the same. So their mission was a fairly conventional Army mission. For some reason or other—probably political, but Chavez didn’t worry about political stuff; never made much sense anyway—it was a secret mission. He was smart enough to know that this kind of hush-hush preparation meant CIA. He was correct on that judgment. It was the mission he was wrong on.
Breakfast ended at the normal time. The men rose from their tables, taking their trays and dishes to the stacking table before proceeding outside. Most made pit stops and many, including Chavez, changed into clean, dry T-shirts. The sergeant wasn’t overly fastidious, but he did prefer the crisp, clean smell of a newly washed shirt. There was an honest-to-God laundry service here. Chavez decided that he’d miss the camp, altitude and all. The air, if thin, was clean and dry. Each day they’d hear the lonely wail of diesel horns from the trains that entered the Moffat Tunnel, whose entrance they’d see on their twice-daily runs. Often in the evening they’d catch the distant sight of the double-deck cars of an Amtrak train heading east to Denver. He wondered what hunting was like here. What did they hunt? Deer, maybe? They’d seen a bunch of them, big mule deer, but also the curious white shapes of mountain goats racing up sheer rock walls as the soldiers approached. Now, those fuckers were really in shape, Julio had noted the previous day. But Chavez dismissed the thought after a moment. The animals he hunted had only two legs. And shot back if you weren’t careful.
The four squads formed up on time. Captain Ramirez called them to attention and marched them off to their separate area, about half a mile east of the main camp at the far end of the flat bottom of the high valley. Waiting for them was a black man dressed in T-shirt and dark shorts, both of which struggled to contain bulging muscles.
“Good morning, people,” the man said. “I am Mr. Johnson. Today we will begin some real mission-oriented training. All of you have had training in hand-to-hand combat. My job is to see how good you are, and to teach you some new tricks that your earlier training may have left out. Killing somebody silently isn’t all that hard. The tricky part is getting close enough to do it. We all know that.” Johnson’s hands slipped behind his back as he talked on for a moment. “This is another way to kill silently.”
His hands came into view holding a pistol with a large, canlike device affixed to the front. Before Chavez had told himself that it was a silencer, Johnson brought it around in both hands and fired it three times. It was a very good silencer, Ding noted immediately. You could barely hear the metallic clack of the automatic’s slide—quieter, in fact, than the tinkle of glass from the three bottles that disintegrated twenty feet away—and you couldn’t hear the sound of the shot at all. Impressive.
Johnson gave them all a mischievous grin. “You don’t get your hands all bruised, either. Like I said, you all know hand-to-hand, and we’re going to work on that. But I’ve been around the block a few times, just like you people, and let’s not dick around the issue. Armed combat beats unarmed any day of the week. So today we’re going to learn a whole new kind of fighting: silent armed combat.” He bent down and flipped the blanket off a submachine gun. It, too, appeared to have a silencer on the muzzle. Chavez reproached himself for his earlier speculation. Whatever the mission was, it wasn’t about training.
Vice Admiral James Cutter, USN, was a patrician. At least he looked like one, Ryan thought—tall and spare, his hair going a regal silver, and a confident smile forever fixed on his pink-scrubbed face. Certainly he acted like one—or thought he did, Jack corrected himself. It was Ryan’s view that truly important people didn’t go out of their way to act like it. It wasn’t as though being the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs was the same as a peerage. Ryan knew a few people who actually had them. Cutter came from one of those old swamp-Yankee families which had grown rocks on their New England farmsteads for generations, then turned to the mercantile trade, and, in Cutter’s case, sent its surplus sons to sea. But Cutter was the sort of sailor for whom the sea was a means to an end. More than half of his career had
been spent in the Pentagon, and that, Ryan thought, was no place for a proper sailor. He’d had all the necessary commands, Jack knew. First a destroyer, then a cruiser. Each time he’d done his job well—well enough to be noticed, which must have been the important part. Plenty of outstanding officers’ careers stopped cold at captain’s rank because they’d failed to be noticed by a high-enough patron. What had Cutter done to make him stick out from the crowd ... ?
Polished up the knocker faithfully, perhaps? Jack wondered as he finished his briefing.
Not that it mattered now. The President had noticed him on Jeff Pelt’s staff, and on Pelt’s return to academia—the International Relations chair at the University of Virginia—Cutter had slipped into the job as neatly as a destroyer coming alongside the pier. He sat behind his desk in a neatly tailored suit, sipping his coffee from a mug with uss BELKNAP engraved on it, the better to remind people that he’d commanded that cruiser once. In case the casual visitor missed that one—there were few casual visitors to the National Security Adviser’s office—the wall on the left was liberally covered with plaques of the ships he’d served on, and enough signed photographs for a Hollywood agent’s office. Naval officers call this phenomenon the I LOVE ME! wall, and while most of them have one, they usually keep it at home.
Ryan didn’t like Cutter very much. He hadn’t liked Pelt either, but the difference was that Pelt was almost as smart as he thought he was. Cutter was not even close. The three-star Admiral was in over his head, but had not the sense to know it. The bad news was that while Ryan was also a Special Assistant To, it was not To the President. That meant he had to report to Cutter whether he liked it or not. With his boss in the hospital, that task would be a frequent occurrence.
“How’s Greer?” the man asked. He spoke with a nasal New England accent that ought to have died a natural death long before, though it was one thing that Ryan didn’t mind. It reminded him of his undergraduate days at Boston College.
“They’re not through with the tests yet.” Ryan’s voice betrayed his worries. It looked like pancreatic cancer, the survival rate for which was just about zero. He’d checked with Cathy about that, and had tried to get his boss to Johns Hopkins, but Greer was Navy, which meant going to Bethesda. Though Bethesda Naval Medical Center was the Navy’s number-one hospital, it wasn’t Johns Hopkins.
“And you’re going to take over for him?” Cutter asked.
“That is in rather poor taste, Admiral,” Bob Ritter answered for his companion. “In Admiral Greer’s absence, Dr. Ryan will represent him from time to time.”
“If you handle that as well as you’ve handled this briefing, we ought to get along just fine. Shame about Greer. Hope things work out.” There was about as much emotion in his voice as one needed to ask directions.
You’re a warm person, aren’t you? Ryan thought to himself as he closed his briefcase. I bet the crew of the Belknap just loved you. But Cutter wasn’t paid to be warm. He was paid to advise the President. And Ryan was paid to brief him, not to love him.
Cutter wasn’t a fool. Ryan had to admit that also. He was not an expert in the area of Ryan’s own expertise, nor did he have Pelt’s cardsharp’s instinct for political wheeling and dealing behind the scene—and, unlike Pelt, Cutter liked to operate without consulting the State Department. He sure as hell didn’t understand how the Soviet Union worked. The reason he was sitting in that high-back chair, behind that dark-oak desk, was that he was a reputed expert in other areas, and evidently those were the areas in which the President had most of his current interest. Here Ryan’s intellect failed him. He came back to his brief on what KGB was up to in Central Europe instead of following that idea to its logical conclusion. Jack’s other mistake was more basic. Cutter knew that he wasn’t the man Jeff Pelt had been, and Cutter wanted to change all that.
“Nice to see you again, Dr. Ryan. Good brief. I’ll bring that matter to the President’s attention. Now if you’ll excuse us, the DDO and I have something to discuss.”
“See you back at Langley, Jack,” Ritter said. Ryan nodded and left. The other two waited for the door to close behind him. Then the DDO presented his own brief on Operation SHOWBOAT. It lasted twenty minutes.
“So how do we coordinate this?” the Admiral asked Ritter.
“The usual. About the only good thing that came out of the Desert One fiasco was that it proved how secure satellite communications were. Ever see the portable kind?” the DDO asked. “It’s standard equipment for the light forces.”
“No, just the ones aboard ship. They’re not real portable.”
“Well, it has a couple of pieces, an X-shaped antenna and a little wire stand that looks like it’s made out of a couple of used coat hangers. There’s a new backpack only weighs fifteen pounds, including the handset, and it even has a Morse key in case the sender doesn’t want to talk too loud. Single sideband, super-encrypted UHF. That’s as secure as communications get.”
“But what about keeping them covert?” Cutter was worried about that.
“If the region was heavily populated,” Ritter explained tiredly, “the opposition wouldn’t be using it. Moreover, they operate mainly at night for the obvious reason. So our people will belly-up during the day and only move around at night. They are trained and equipped for that. Look, we’ve been thinking about this for some time. These people are very well trained already, and we’re—”
“Resupply?”
“Helicopter,” Ritter said. “Special-ops people down in Florida.”
“I still think we should use Marines.”
“The Marines have a different mission. We’ve been over this, Admiral. These kids are better trained, they’re better equipped, most of them have been into areas like this one, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to get them into the program without anybody noticing,” Ritter explained for what must have been the twentieth time. Cutter wasn’t one to listen to the words of others. His own opinions were evidently too loud. The DDO wondered how the President fared, but that question needed no answer. A presidential whisper carried more weight than a scream from anyone else. The problem was, the President so often depended on idiots to make his wishes a reality. Ritter would not have been surprised to learn that his opinion of the National Security Adviser matched that of Jack Ryan; it was just that Ryan could not know why.
“Well, it’s your operation,” Cutter said after a moment. “When does it start?”
“Three weeks. Just had a report last night. Things are going along just fine. They already had all the basic skills we needed. It’s only a matter of honing a few special ones and adding a few refinements. We’ve been lucky so far. Haven’t even had anybody hurt up there.”
“How long have you had that place, anyway?”
“Thirty years. It was supposed to have been an air-defense radar installation, but the funding got cut off for some reason or other. The Air Force turned it over to us, and we’ve been using it to train agents ever since. It doesn’t show up on any of the OMB site lists. It belongs to an offshore corporation that we use for various things. During the fall we occasionally lease it out as a hunting camp, would you believe? It even shows a profit for us, which is another reason why it doesn’t show on the OMB list. Is that covert enough? Came in real useful during Afghanistan, though, doing the same thing we’re doing now, and nobody ever found out about it....”
“Three weeks.”
Ritter nodded. “Maybe a touch longer. We’re still working on coordinating the satellite intelligence, and our assets on the ground.”
“Will it all work?” Cutter asked rhetorically.
“Look, Admiral, I’ve told you about that. If you want some magical solution to give to the President, we don’t have it. What we can do is sting them some. The results will look good in the papers, and, hell, maybe we’ll end up saving a life or two. Personally, I think it’s worth doing even if we don’t get much of a return.”
The nice thing about Ritter, Cutter thought, was that he d
idn’t state the obvious. There would be a return. Everyone knew what that was all about. The mission was not an exercise in cynicism, though some might see it as such.
“What about the radar coverage?”
“There are only two aircraft coming on line. They’re testing a new system called LPI—Low Probability of Intercept—radar. I don’t know all the details, but because of a combination of frequency agility, reduced side-lobes, and relatively low power output, it’s damned hard to detect the emissions from the set. That will invalidate the ESM equipment that the opposition has started using. So we can use our assets on the ground to stake out between four and six of the covert airfields, and let us know when a shipment is en route. The modified E-2s will establish contact with them south of Cuba and pace them all the way in till they’re intercepted by the F-15 driver I told you about. He’s a black kid—hell of a fighter jock, they say. Comes from New York. His mother got mugged by a druggie up there. It was a bad one. She got all torn up, and eventually died. She was one of those ghetto success stories that you never hear about. Three kids, all of them turned out pretty well. The fighter pilot is a very angry kid at the moment. He’ll work for us, and he won’t talk.”
“Right,” Cutter said skeptically. “What about if he develops a conscience later on and—”
“The boy told me that he’d shoot all the bastards down if we wanted him to. A druggie killed his mother. He wants to get even, and he sees this as a good way. There are a lot of sensitive projects underway at Eglin. His fighter is cut loose from the rest as part of the LPI Radar project. It’s two Navy airplanes carrying the radar, and we’ve picked the flight crews—pretty much the same story on them. And remember—after we have lock-on from the F-15, the radar aircraft shuts down and leaves. So if Bronco—that’s the kid’s name—does have to splash the inbound druggie, nobody’ll know about it. Once we get them on the ground, the flight crews will have the living shit scared out of them. I worked out the details on that part myself. If some people have to disappear—I don’t expect it—that can be arranged, too. The Marines there are all special-ops types. One of my people will pretend he’s a fed, and the judge we take them to is the one the President—”