by Tom Clancy
The police lieutenant had both of them in an interrogation room. Their customary defiance was a wilted flower. The guns had been recovered less than fifty yards from the crime scene. Though there had been no usable fingerprints on either—fire—arms do not always lend themselves to this purpose—the four rounds recovered from McIlvane’s body did match up with both; the Pattersons had been apprehended four blocks away; their hands bore powder signatures from having fired guns of some sort; and their motive for eliminating the pimp was well known. Criminal cases didn’t get much better than that. The only thing the police didn’t have was a confession. The twins’ luck had finally run out. Even their lawyer had told them that. There was no hope of a plea-bargain-the local prosecutor hated them even more than the police did—and while they stood to do hard time for murder, the good news was that they probably wouldn’t get the chair, since the jurors probably would not want to execute people for killing a drug-dealing pimp who’d put two of his whores in the hospital and probably killed a few more. This was arguably a crime of passion, and under American law such motives are generally seen as mitigating circumstances.
In identical prison garb, the Pattersons sat across the table from the senior police officer. The lieutenant couldn’t even tell them apart, and didn’t bother asking which was which, because they would probably have lied about it out of pure spite.
“Where’s our lawyer?” Henry or Harvey asked.
“Yeah,” Harvey or Henry emphasized.
“We don’t really need him here for this. How’d you boys like to do a little favor for us?” the lieutenant asked. “You do us a little favor and maybe we can do you a little favor.” That settled the problem of legal counsel.
“Bullshit!” one of the twins observed, just as a bargaining position, of course. They were at the straw-grasping stage. Prison beckoned, and while neither had ever served a serious stretch, they’d done enough county time to know that it wouldn’t be fun.
“How do you like the idea of life imprisonment?” the lieutenant asked, unmoved by the show of strength. “You know how it works, seven or eight years before you’re rehabilitated and they let you out. If you’re lucky, that is. Awful long time, eight years. Like that idea, boys?”
“We’re not fools. Watchu here for?” the other Patterson asked, indicating that he was ready to discuss terms.
“You do a job for us, and, well, something nice might happen.”
“What job’s that?” Already both brothers were amenable to the arrangement.
“You seen Ramón and Jesús?”
“The pirates?” one asked. “Shit.” In the criminal community as with any other, there is a hierarchy of status. The abusers of women and children are at the bottom. The Pattersons were violent criminals, but had never abused women. They only assaulted men—men much smaller than themselves for the most part, but men nonetheless. That was important to their collective self-image.
“Yeah, we seen the fucks,” the other said to emphasize his brother’s more succinct observation. “Actin’ like king shit last cupla days. Fuckin’ spics. Hey, man, we bad dudes, but we ain’t never raped no little girl, ain’t never killed no little girl neither— and they be gettin’ off, they say? Shit! We waste a fuckin’ pimp likes to beat on his ladies, and we lookin’ at life. What kinda justice you call that, mister po-liceman? Shit!”
“If something were to happen to Ramón and Jesus, something really serious,” the lieutenant said quietly, “maybe something else might happen. Something beneficial to you boys.”
“Like what?”
“Like you get to see Noreen and Doreen on a very regular basis. Maybe even settle down.”
“Shit!” Henry or Harvey said.
“That’s the best deal in town, boys,” the lieutenant told them.
“You want us to kill the motherfuckers?” It was Harvey who asked this question, disappointing his brother, who thought of himself as the smart one.
The lieutenant just stared at them.
“We hear you,” Henry said. “How we know you keep your word?”
“What word is that?” The lieutenant paused. “Ramón and Jesus killed a family of four, raped the wife and the little girl first, of course, and they probably had a hand in the murder of a Mobile police officer and his wife. But something went wrong with the case against them, and the most they’ll get is twenty years, walk in seven or eight, max. For killing six people. Hardly seems fair, does it?”
By this time both twins had gotten the message. The lieutenant could see the recognition, an identical expression in both pairs of eyes. Then came the decision. The two pairs of eyes were guarded for a moment as they considered how to do it. Then they became serene. Both Pattersons nodded, and that was that.
“You boys be careful now. Jail can be a very dangerous place.” The lieutenant rose to summon the jailer. If asked, he’d say that—after getting their permission to talk to them without a lawyer present, of course—he’d wanted to ask them about a robbery in which the Pattersons had not been involved, but about which they might have some knowledge, and that he had offered them some help with the DA in return for their assistance. Alas, they’d professed no knowledge of the robbery in question, and after less than five minutes of conversation, he’d sent them back to their cell. Should they ever refer to the actual content of the conversation, it would be the word of two career criminals with an open-and-shut murder charge hanging over their heads against the word of a police lieutenant. At most that would result in a page-five story in the Mobile Register, which took rather a stern line on violent crime. And they could scarcely confess to a double murder whether done at police behest or not, could they?
The lieutenant was an honorable man, and immediately went to work to hold up his end of the bargain in anticipation of the fact that the Pattersons would do the same. Of the four bullets removed from the body of Elrod McIlvane, one was unusable for ballistic-matching purposes due to its distortion—unjacketed lead bullets are very easily damaged—and the others, though good enough for the criminal case, were borderline. The lieutenant ordered the bullets removed from evidence storage for re-examination, along with the examiner’s notes and the photographs. He had to sign for them, of course, to maintain “chain of evidence.” This legal requirement was written to ensure that evidence used in a trial, once taken from the crime scene or else- where and identified as significant, was always in a known location and under proper custody. It was a safeguard against the illicit manufacture of incriminating evidence. When a piece of evidence got lost, even if it were later recovered, it could never be used in a criminal case, since it was then tainted. He walked down to the laboratory area, but found the technicians leaving to go home. He asked the ballistics expert if he could recheck the Patterson Case bullets first thing Monday morning, and the man replied, sure, one of the matches was a little shaky, but, he thought, close enough for trial purposes. He didn’t mind doing a recheck, though.
The policeman walked back to his office with the bullets. The manila envelope which held them was labeled with the case number, and since it was still in proper custody, duly signed for by the lieutenant, chain of evidence had not yet been violated. He made a note on his desk blotter that he didn’t want to leave them in his desk over the weekend, and would take them home, keeping the whole package locked in his combination-locked briefcase. The lieutenant was fifty-three years old, and within four months of retirement with full benefits. Thirty years of service was enough, he thought, looking forward to getting full use from his fishing boat. He could scarcely retire in good conscience leaving two cop-killers with eight years of soft time.
The influx of drug money to Colombia has produced all manner of side effects and one of them, in a stunningly ironic twist, is that the Colombian police had obtained a new and very sophisticated crime lab. Residue from the Untiveros house was run through the usual series of chemical tests, and within a few hours it had been determined that the explosive agent had been a mixture of cyc
lotetramethylenetetranitramine and trinitrotoluene. Known more colloquially as HMX and TNT, when combined in a 70-30 mixture, the chemist wrote, they formed an explosive compound called Octol, which, he wrote on, was a rather expensive, very stable, and extremely violent high explosive made principally in the United States, but available commercially from American, European, and one Asian chemical company. And that ended his work for the day. He handed over his report to his secretary, who faxed it to Medellín, where another secretary made a Xerox copy, which found its way twenty minutes later to Félix Cortez.
The report was yet another piece in the puzzle for the former intelligence officer. No local mining operation used Octol. It was too expensive, and simple nitrate-based explosive gels were all that commercial applications required. If you needed a larger explosive punch to loosen rocks, you simply drilled a wider hole and crammed in more explosives. The same option did not exist, however, for military forces. The size of an artillery shell was limited by the diameter of the gun barrel, and the size of a bomb was limited by the aerodynamic drag it imposed on the aircraft that carried it. Therefore, military organizations were always looking for more powerful explosives to get better performance from their size-limited weapons. Cortez lifted a reference book from his library shelf and confirmed the fact that Octol was almost exclusively a military explosive ... and was used as a triggering agent for nuclear devices. That evoked a short bark of a laugh.
It also explained a few things. His initial reaction to the explosion was that a ton of dynamite had been used. The same result could be explained by less than five hundred kilos of this Octol. He pulled out another reference book and learned that the actual explosive weight in a two-thousand-pound bomb was under one thousand pounds.
But why were there no fragments? More than half the weight of a bomb was in the steel case. Cortez set that aside for the moment.
An aircraft bomb explained much. He remembered his training in Cuba, when North Vietnamese officers had briefed his class on “smart-bombs” that had been the bane of their country’s bridges and electrical generating plants during the brief but violent Linebacker-II bombing campaign in 1972. After years of costly failures, the American fighter-bombers had destroyed scores of heavily defended targets in a matter of days, using their new precision-guided munitions.
If targeted on a truck, such a bomb would give every appearance of a car bomb, wouldn’t it?
But why were there no fragments? He reread the lab report. There had also been cellulose residue which the lab tech explained away as the cardboard containers in which the explosives had been packed.
Cellulose? That meant paper or wood fibers, didn’t it? Make a bomb out of paper? Cortez lifted one of his reference books—Jane’s Weapons Systems. It was a heavy book with a hard, stiff cover ... cardboard, covered with cloth. It really was that simple, wasn’t it? If you could make paper that strong for so prosaic a purpose as a book binding ...
Cortez leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette to congratulate himself—and the norteamericanos. It was brilliant. They’d sent a bomber armed with a special smart-bomb, targeted it on that absurd truck, and left nothing behind that could remotely be called evidence. He wondered who had come up with this plan, amazed that the Americans had done something so intelligent. The KGB would have assembled a company of Spetznaz commandos and fought a conventional infantry battle, leaving all manner of evidence behind and “delivering the message” in a typically Russian way, which was effective but lacking in subtlety. The Americans for once had managed the sort of subtlety worthy of a Spaniard—of a Cortez, Félix chuckled. That was remarkable.
Now he had the “How.” Next he had to figure out the “What For.” But of course! There had been that American newspaper story about a possible gang war. There had been fourteen senior Cartel lords. Now there were ten. The Americans would try to reduce that number further by ... what? Might they assume that the single bombing incident would ignite a savage war of infighting? No, Cortez decided. One such incident wasn’t enough. Two might be, but not one.
So the Americans had commando teams prowling the mountains south of Medellin, had dropped one bomb, and were doing something else to curtail the drug flights. That became clear as well. They were shooting the airplanes down, of course. They had people watching airfields and forwarding their intelligence information elsewhere for action. It was a fully integrated operation. The most incredible thing of all was that it was actually working. The Americans had decided to do something that worked. Now, that was miraculous. For all the time he had been an intelligence officer, CIA had been reasonably effective at gathering information, but not for actually doing something.
Félix rose from his desk and walked over to his office bar. This called for serious contemplation, and that meant a good brandy. He poured a triple portion into a balloon glass, swirling it around, letting his hand warm the liquid so that the aromatic vapors would caress his senses even before he took the first sip.
The Chinese language was ideographic—Cortez had met his share of Chinese intelligence types as well—and its symbol for “crisis” was a combination of the symbols denoting “danger” and “opportunity.” The dualism had struck him the first time he’d heard it, and he’d never forgotten it. Opportunities like this one were exceedingly rare, and equally dangerous. The principal danger, he knew, was the simple fact that he didn’t know how the Americans were developing their intelligence information. Everything he knew pointed to a penetration agent within the organization. Someone high up, but not as high as he wished to be. The Americans had compromised someone just as he had so often done. Standard intelligence procedure, and that was something CIA excelled at. Someone. Who? Someone who had been deeply offended, and wanted to get even while at the same time acquiring a seat around the table of chieftains. Quite a few people fell into that category. Including Félix Cortez. And instead of having to initiate his own operation to achieve that goal, he could now depend on the Americans to do it for him. It struck him as very odd indeed that he was trusting the Americans to do his work, but it was also hugely amusing. It was, in fact, almost the definition of the perfect covert operation. All he had to do was let the Americans carry out their own plan, and stand by the sidelines to watch it work. It would require patience and confidence in his enemy—not to mention the degree of danger involved—but Cortez felt that it was worth the effort.
In the absence of knowing how to get the information to the Americans, he decided, he’d just have to trust to luck. No, not luck. They seemed to be getting the word somehow, and they’d probably get it this time, too. He lifted his phone and made a call, something very uncharacteristic for him. Then, on reflection, he made one other arrangement. After all, he couldn’t expect that the Americans would do exactly what he wanted exactly when he wanted. Some things he had to do for himself.
Ryan’s plane landed at Andrews just after seven in the evening. One of his assistants—it was so nice having assistants—took custody of the classified documents and drove them back to Langley while Jack tossed his bags in the back of his XJS and drove home. He’d get a decent night’s sleep to slough off the effects of jet lag, and tomorrow he’d be back at his desk. First order of business, he told himself as he took the car onto Route 50, was to find out what the Agency was up to in South America.
Ritter shook his head in wonder and thanksgiving. CAPER had come through for them again. Cortez himself this time, too. They just hadn’t twigged to the fact that their communications were vulnerable. It wasn’t a new phenomenon, of course. The same thing had happened to the Germans and Japanese in World War II, and had been repeated time and again. It was just something that Americans were good at. And the timing could hardly have been better. The carrier was available for only thirty more hours, barely time enough to get the message to their man on Ranger. Ritter typed up the orders and mission requirements on his personal computer. They were printed, sealed in an envelope, and handed to one of his senior subordinates, who c
aught an Air Force supply flight to Panama.
Captain Robby Jackson was feeling a little better. If nothing else, he thought he could just barely feel the added weight of the fourth stripe on the shoulders of his undress-white shirt, and the silver eagle that had replaced the oak leaf on the collar of his khakis was so much nicer a symbol for a pilot, wasn’t it? The below-the-zone promotion meant that he was seriously in the running for CAG, command of his own carrier air wing—that would be his last real flying job, Jackson knew, but it was the grandest of all. He’d have to check out in several different types of aircraft, and would be responsible for over eighty birds, their flight crews, and the maintenance personnel, without which the aircraft were merely attractive ornaments for a carrier’s flight deck.
The bad news was that his tactical ideas hadn’t worked out as well as planned, but he consoled himself with the knowledge that all new ideas take time. He’d seen that a few of his original ideas were flawed, and the fixes suggested by one of Ranger’s squadron commanders had almost worked—had actually improved the idea markedly. And that, too, was normal. The same could also be said of the Phoenix missiles, whose guidance-package fixes had performed fairly well; not quite as well as the contractor had promised, but that wasn’t unusual either, was it?
Robby was in the carrier’s Combat Information Center. No flight operations were underway at the moment. The battle group was in some heavy weather that would clear in a few hours, and while the maintenance people were tinkering with their airplanes, Robby and the senior air-defense people were reviewing tapes of the fighter engagements for the sixth time. The “enemy” force had performed remarkably well, diagnosing Ranger’s defense plans and reacting to them quickly and effectively to get its missile-shooters within range. That Ranger’s fighters had clobbered them on the way out was irrelevant. The whole point of the Outer Air Battle was to clobber the Backfires on the way in.