by Tom Clancy
“As opposed to taking out the druggies and their shooters? That’s murder, too, isn’t it? Or it would be, if the President hadn’t said that the gloves were off. You said it’s a war. The President told us to treat it as a war. Okay, we are. I’m sorry there were extraneous people around, but, damn it, there always are. If there were a way to bag these jokers without hurting innocent people, we’d use it—but there isn’t.” To say that Ritter was amazed didn’t begin to explain matters. This guy was supposed to be a professional military officer. The taking of human life was part of his job description. Of course, Ritter told himself, Cutter’d spent most of his career driving a desk in the Pentagon—he probably hadn’t seen much blood since he learned how to shave. A pussycat hiding in tiger’s stripes. No, Ritter corrected himself. Just a pussy. Thirty years in uniform and he’d allowed himself to forget that real weapons killed people somewhat less precisely than in the movies. Some professional officer. And he was advising the President on issues of national security. Great.
“Tell you what, Admiral. If you don’t tell the newsies, neither will I. Here’s the intercept. Cortez says it was a car bomb. Clark must have rigged it just the way we hoped.”
“But what if the local police do an investigation?”
“First of all, we don’t know if the local cops will even be allowed there. Second, what makes you think they have the resources to figure it out? I worked pretty hard setting this up to look like a car-bombing, and it looks like Cortez got faked out. Third, what makes you think that the local cops’ll give a flying fuck one way or another?”
“But the media!”
“You’ve got media on the brain. You’re the one who’s been arguing for turning us loose on these characters. So now you’re changing your mind? It’s a little late for that,” Ritter said disgustedly. This was the best op his Directorate had run in years, and the guy whose idea it had been was now wetting his pants.
Admiral Cutter wasn’t paying enough attention to Ritter’s invective to be angry. He’d promised the President a surgical removal of the people who had killed Jacobs and the rest. He hadn’t bargained for the deaths of “innocent” people. More importantly, neither had WRANGLER.
Chavez was too far south to have heard the explosion. The squad was staked out on another processing site. Evidently the sites were set up in relays. As he watched, two men were erecting the portable bathtub under the supervision of several armed men, and he could hear the grunts and gripes of others who were climbing up the mountainside. Four peasants appeared, their backpacks containing jars of acid. They were accompanied by two more riflemen.
Probably the word hadn’t gotten out yet, Ding thought. He’d been certain that what the squad had done the other night would discourage people from supplementing their income this way. The sergeant didn’t consider the possibility that they had to run such risks to feed their families.
Ten minutes later the third relay of six brought the coca leaves, and five more armed men. The laborers all had collapsible canvas buckets. They went off to a nearby stream for water. The boss guard ordered two of his people to walk into the woods to stand sentry, and that’s where things went wrong. One of them walked straight toward the assault element, fifty meters away.
“Uh-oh,” Vega observed quietly.
Chavez tapped four dashes on his radio button, the danger signal.
I see it, the captain replied with two dashes. Then three dashes. Get ready.
Oso got his machine gun up and flipped off the safety.
Maybe they’ll drop him quietly, Chavez hoped.
The guys with the buckets were just coming back when Chavez heard a scream over to his left. The riflemen below him reacted at once. Vega started firing then.
The sudden shooting from another direction confused the guards, but they reacted as people with automatic weapons invariably reacted to surprise—they started shooting in all directions.
“Shit!” Ingeles snarled, and fired his grenade into the objective. It landed among the jars and exploded, showering everyone in the area with sulfuric acid. Tracers flew everywhere, and people dropped, but it was too confused, too unplanned for the soldiers to keep track of what was happening. The shooting stopped in a few seconds. Everyone in view was down. The assault group appeared soon thereafter, and Chavez ran down to join them. He counted bodies and came up three short.
“Guerra, Chavez, find ‘em!” Captain Ramirez ordered. He didn’t have to say Kill ’em!
But they didn’t. Guerra stumbled across one and killed him on the spot. Chavez came up dry, neither seeing nor hearing anything. He found the stream and one bucket, three hundred meters from the objective. If they’d been right there when the shooting started, that meant they had four or five minutes head start in the country they’d grown up in. Both soldiers spent half an hour rushing and stopping, looking and listening, but two men were away clean.
When they got back to the objective they learned that this was the good news. One of their men was dead. Rocha, one of their riflemen, had taken a burst full in the chest from one of the guards and died instantly. The squad was very quiet.
Jackson was also in an angry mood. The aggressor force had beaten him. Ranger’s fighters hadn’t gotten it right. His tactical scheme had come apart when one of the squadrons turned the wrong way, and what should have been a masterful trap had turned into a clear avenue for the “Russians” to blaze in and get close enough to the carrier to launch missiles. That was embarrassing, if not completely unexpected. New ideas took time to work out, and maybe he had to rethink some of his arrangements. Just because it had all worked on the computer simulation didn’t mean that the plan was perfect, Jackson reminded himself. He continued to stare at the radar screen, trying to remember the patterns and how they had moved. While he watched, a single blip reappeared on the screen, heading southwest toward the carrier. He wondered who that was as the Hawkeye prepared for landing.
The E-2C made a perfect trap, catching the number-three wire and rolling forward to clear the deck for the next aircraft. Robby dismounted in time to see the next one land. It was an Intruder, the same one he’d noticed before boarding the Hawkeye a few hours earlier. The squadron commander’s personal bird, he noticed. The one that had flown toward the beach. But that wasn’t important. Commander Jackson immediately headed for the CAG’s office to start the debrief.
Commander Jensen also taxied clear of the landing area. The Intruder’s wings folded up to minimize its deck space as it took its parking place forward. By the time he and his B/N dismounted, his plane captain was there waiting for them. He’d already pulled the videotape from its compartment in the nose instrument bay. This he handed to the skipper—squadron commanders are given that title—before leading them into the island and safety. The “tech-rep” was there to meet them, and Jensen handed the tape over to him.
“Four-oh, the man said,” the pilot reported. Jensen just kept walking.
The “tech-rep” carried the tape cassette to his cabin, where he put it in a metal container with a lock. He sealed it further with multicolored tape and affixed a Top Secret label to both sides. It was then placed in yet another shipping box, which the man carried to a compartment on the O-3 level. There was a COD flight scheduled out in thirty minutes. The box would go on it in a courier’s pocket and get flown to Panama, where an Agency field officer would take custody of it and fly to Andrews Air Force Base for final delivery to Langley.
19.
Fallout
INTELLIGENCE SERVICES PRIDE themselves on getting information from Point A to Points B, C, D, and so forth with great speed. In the case of highly sensitive information, or data that can be gathered only by covert means, they are highly effective. But for data that is open for all the world to see, they generally fall well short of the commercial news media, hence the fascination of the American intelligence community—and probably many others—with Ted Turner’s Cable News Network.
As a result, Ryan was not overly surp
rised to see that his first notice of the explosion south of Medellín was captioned as having been copied from CNN and other news services. It was breakfast time in Mons. His quarters were in the American VIP section of the NATO complex and had access to CNN’s satellite service. He switched the set on halfway through his first cup of coffee to see a TV shot obviously taken from a helicopter with a low-light rig. The caption underneath said, MEDELLÍN, coLOMBIA.
“Lord,” Jack breathed, setting his cup down. The chopper didn’t get very close, probably worried about being shot at by the people milling about on the ground, but it didn’t need to be all that clear. What had been a massive house was now a disordered array of rubble set next to a hole in the ground. The ground signature was unmistakable. Ryan had said car bomb to himself even before the voice-over of the reporter gave the same evaluation. That meant the Agency wasn’t involved, Jack was sure. Car bombs were not the American way. Americans believed in single aimed bullets. Precision firepower was an American invention.
His feelings changed on reflection, however. First, the Agency had to have the Cartel leadership under some sort of surveillance by now, and surveillance was something that CIA was exceedingly good at. Second, if a surveillance operation was underway, he ought to have heard of the explosion through Agency channels, not as a copy of a news report. Something did not compute.
What was it Sir Basil had said? Our response would surely be appropriate. And what does that mean? The intelligence game had become rather civilized over the past decade. In the 1950s, toppling governments had been a standard exercise in the furtherance of national policy. Assassinations had been a rare but real alternative to more complex exercises of diplomatic muscle. In the case of CIA, the Bay of Pigs fiasco and bad press over some operations in Vietnam—which had been a war after all, and wars were violent enterprises at best—had largely terminated such things for everyone. It was odd but true. Even the KGB rarely involved itself in “wet work” any longer—a Russian phrase from the thirties, denoting the fact that blood made one’s hands wet—instead leaving it to surrogates like the Bulgarians, or more commonly to terrorist groups who performed such irregular services as a quid pro quo for arms and training assistance. And remarkably enough, that, too, was dying out. The funny part was that Ryan believed such vigorous action was occasionally necessary—and likely to become all the more so now that the world was turning away from open warfare and drifting to a twilight contest of state-sponsored terrorism and low-intensity conflict. “Special-operations” forces offered a real and semicivilized alternative to the more organized and destructive forms of violence associated with conventional armed forces. If war is nothing more or less than sanctioned murder on an industrial scale, then was it not more humane to apply violence in a much more focused and discrete way?
That was an ethical question that didn’t need contemplation over breakfast.
But what was right and what was wrong at this level? Ryan asked himself. It was accepted in law, ethics, and religion that a soldier who killed in war was not a criminal. That only begged the question: What is war? A generation earlier that question had been an easy one. Nation-states would assemble their armies and navies and send them off to do battle over some damned-fool issue or other—afterward it would usually appear that there had been a peaceful alternative—and that was morally acceptable. But war itself was changing, wasn’t it? And who decided what war was? Nation-states. So, could a nation-state determine what its vital interests were and act accordingly? How did terrorism enter into the equation? Years earlier, when he’d been a target himself, Ryan had determined that terrorism could be seen as the modern manifestation of piracy, whose practitioners had always been seen as the common enemies of mankind. So, historically, there was a not-quite-war situation in which military forces could be used directly.
And where did that put international drug traffickers? Was it a civil crime, to be dealt with as such? What if the traffickers could subvert a nation to their own commercial will? Did that nation then become mankind’s common enemy, like the Barbary Pirates of old?
“Damn,” Ryan observed. He didn’t know what the law said. An historian by training, his degrees didn’t help. The only previous experience with such trafficking had been at the hands of a powerful nation-state, fighting a “real” war to enforce its “right” to sell opium to people whose government objected—but who had lost the war and with it the right to protect its own citizens against illegal drug use.
That was a troubling precedent, wasn’t it?
Jack’s education compelled him to look for justification. He was a man who believed that Right and Wrong really existed as discrete and identifiable values, but since law books didn’t always have the answers, he sometimes had to find his answers elsewhere. As a parent, he regarded drug dealers with loathing. Who could guarantee that his own children might not someday be tempted to use the goddamned stuff? Did he not have a duty to protect his own children? As a representative of his country’s intelligence community, what about extending that protective duty to all his nation’s children? And what if the enemy started challenging his country directly? Did that change the rules? In the case of terrorism, he had already reached that answer: Challenge a nation-state in that way, and you run a major risk. Nation-states, like the United States, had capabilities that are almost impossible to comprehend. They had people in uniform who did nothing but practice the fine art of visiting death on their fellowman. They had the ability to deliver fearsome tools of that art. Everything from drilling a bullet into one particular man’s chest from a thousand yards away to putting a two-thousand-pound smart-bomb right through somebody’s bedroom window....
“Christ.”
There was a knock at his door. Ryan found one of Sir Basil’s aides standing there. He handed over an envelope and left.
When you get home, do tell Bob that the job was nicely done. Bas.
Jack folded the note back into the envelope and slid it into his coat pocket. He was correct, of course. Ryan was sure of it. Now he had to decide if it was right or not. He soon learned that it was much easier to second-guess such decisions when they were made by others.
They had to move, of course. Ramirez had them all doing something. The more work to be done, the fewer things had to be thought about. They had to erase any trace of their presence. They had to bury Rocha. When the time came, if it did, his family, if any, would get a sealed metal casket with one hundred fifty pounds of ballast inside to simulate the body that wasn’t there. Chavez and Vega got the job of digging the grave. They went down the customary six feet, not liking the fact that they were going to leave one of their own behind like this. There was the hope that someone might come back to recover their comrade, but somehow neither expected that the effort would ever be made. Even coming from a peacetime army, neither was a stranger to death. Chavez remembered the two kids in Korea, and others killed in training accidents, helicopter crashes and the like. The life of the soldier is dangerous, even when there are no wars to fight. So they tried to rationalize it along the lines of an accidental death. But Rocha had not died by accident. He’d lost his life doing his job, soldiering at the behest of the country which he had volunteered to serve, whose uniform he’d worn with pride. He’d known what the hazards were, taken his chances like a man, and now he was being planted in the ground of a foreign land.
Chavez knew that he’d been irrational to assume that something like this would never happen. The surprise came from the fact that Rocha, like the rest of the squad members, had been a real pro, smart, tough, good with his weapons, quiet in the bush, an intense and very serious soldier who really liked the idea of going after druggies—for reasons he’d never explained to anyone. Oddly, that helped. Rocha had died doing his job. Ding figured that was a good enough epitaph for anyone. When the hole was finished, they lowered the body as gently as they could. Captain Ramirez said a few words, and the hole was filled in partway. As always, Olivero sprinkled his CS tear-gas powder to k
eep animals from digging it up, and the sod was replaced to erase any trace of what had been done. Ramirez made a point of recording the position, however, in case anyone ever did come back for his man. Then it was time to move.
They kept moving past dawn, heading for an alternate patrol base five miles from the one that Rocha now guarded alone. Ramirez planned to rest his men, then lead them on another mission as soon as possible. Better to have them working than thinking too much. That’s what the manuals said.
An aircraft carrier is as much a community as a warship, home for over six thousand men, with its own hospital and shopping center, church and synagogue, police force and videoclub, even its own newspaper and TV network. The men work long hours, and the services they enjoyed while off duty were nothing more than they deserved—and more to the point, the Navy had found that the sailors worked far better when they received them.
Robby Jackson rose and showered as he always did, then found his way to the wardroom for coffee. He’d be having breakfast with the captain today, but wanted to be fully awake before he did so. There was a television set mounted on brackets in the corner, and the officers watched it just as they did at home, and for the same reason. Most Americans start off the day with TV news. In this case the announcer wasn’t paid half a million dollars per year, and didn’t have to wear makeup. He did have to write his own copy, however.
“At about nine o’clock last night-twenty-one hundred hours to us on the Ranger—an explosion ripped through the home of one Esteban Untiveros. Señor Untiveros was a major figure in the Medellín Cartel. Looks like one of his friends wasn’t quite as friendly as he thought. News reports indicate that a car bomb totally destroyed his expensive hilltop residence, along with everyone in it.