by Tom Clancy
“That’s what I’m scared of, Sarge,” Ryan said, laughing mostly at himself.
They landed at Santagueda. Larson knew the man who ran the local flying service and talked him out of his Volkswagen Microvan. The two CIA officers drove north, and an hour later passed through the village of Anserma. They dallied here for half an hour, driving around until they found what they wanted to find: a few trucks heading in and out of a private dirt road and one expensive-looking car. CAPER had called it right, Clark saw, and it was the place he thought it was from the flight in. Having confirmed that, they moved out, heading north again for another hour and taking a side road into the mountains just outside of Vegas del Rio. Clark had his nose buried in a map, and Larson found a hilltop switchback at which to stop. That’s where the radio came out.
“KIFE, this is VARIABLE, over.” Nothing, despite five minutes of trying. Larson drove farther west, horsing the Microvan around cow paths as he struggled to find another high spot for Clark to try again. It was three in the afternoon, and their fifth attempt until they got a reply.
“KNIFE here. Over.”
“Chavez, this is Clark. Where the hell are you?” Clark asked, in Spanish, of course.
“Let’s talk awhile first.”
“You’re good, kid. We really could have used you in 3rd SOG.”
“Why should I trust you? Somebody cut us off, man. Somebody decided to leave us here.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Glad to hear it,” came the skeptical, bitter reply.
“Chavez, you’re talking over a radio net that might be compromised. If you got a map, we’re at the following set of coordinates,” Clark told him. “There’s two of us in a blue Volkswagen van. Check us out, take all the time you want.”
“I already have!” the radio told him.
Clark’s head spun around to see a man with an AK-47 twenty feet away.
“Let’s be real cool, people,” Sergeant Vega said. Three more men emerged from the treeline. One of them had a bloody bandage on his thigh. Chavez, too, had an AK slung over his shoulder, but he had held on to his silenced MP-5. He walked straight up to the van.
“Not bad, kid,” Clark told him. “How’d you know?”
“UHF radio. You had to transmit from a high spot, right? The map says there’s six of them. I heard you one other time, too, and I spotted you heading this way half an hour ago. Now what the fuck is going on?”
“First thing, let’s get that casualty treated.” Clark stepped out and handed Chavez his pistol, butt first. “I got a first-aid kit in the back.”
The wounded man was Sergeant Juardo, a rifleman from the 10th Mountain at Fort Drum. Clark opened the back of the van and helped load him aboard, then uncovered the wound.
“You know what you’re doing?” Vega asked.
“I used to be a SEAL,” Clark replied, holding up his arm so that they could see the tattoo. “Third Special Operations Group. Spent a lot of time in ’Nam, doing stuff that never made the TV news.”
“What were you?”
“Came out a chief bosun’s mate, E-7 to you.” Clark examined the wound. It was bad to look at, but not life-threatening as long as the man didn’t bleed out, which he’d managed not to do yet. So far it seemed that the infantrymen had done most of the right things. Clark ripped open an envelope and redusted the wound with sulfa. “You have any blood-expanders?”
“Here.” Sergeant León passed over an IV bag. “None of us knows how to start one.”
“It’s not hard. Watch how I do it.” Clark grabbed Juardo’s upper arm hard and told him to make a fist. Then he stabbed the IV needle into the big vein inside the elbow. “See? Okay, I cheat. My wife’s a nurse, and sometimes I get to practice at her hospital,” Clark admitted. “How’s it feel, kid?” he asked the patient.
“Nice to be sitting down,” Juardo admitted.
“I don’t want to give you a pain shot. We might need you awake. Think you can hack it?”
“You say so, man. Hey, Ding, you got any candy?”
Chavez tossed over his Tylenol bottle. “Last ones, Pablo. Make ’em last, man.”
“Thanks, Ding.”
“We have some sandwiches in the front,” Larson said.
“Food!” Vega darted that way at once. A minute later the four soldiers were wolfing it down, along with a six-pack of Cokes that Larson had picked up on the way.
“Where’d you pick up the weapons?”
“Bad guys. We were just about out of ammo for our -16s, and I figured we might as well try to fit in, like.”
“You’re thinking good, kid,” Clark told him.
“Okay, what’s the plan?” Chavez asked.
“It’s your call,” Clark replied. “One of two things. We can drive you back to the airport and fly you out, take about three hours to get there, another three hours in the airplane, and it’s over, you’re back on U.S. territory.”
“What else?”
“Chavez, how’d you like to get the fucker who did this to you?” Clark knew the answer before he’d asked the question.
Admiral Cutter was leaning back in his chair when the phone buzzed. He knew who it was from the line that was blinking. “Yes, Mr. President?”
“Come in here.”
“On the way, sir.”
Summer is as slow a season for the White House as for most government agencies. The President’s calendar was fuller than usual with the ceremonial stuff that the politician in him loved and the executive in him abhorred. Shaking hands with “Miss Whole Milk,” as he referred to the steady stream of visitors—though, he occasionally wondered to himself if he’d ever meet a Miss Condom, what with the way sexual mores were changing of late. The burden was larger than most imagine. For each such visitor there was a sheet of paper, a few paragraphs of information so that the person would leave thinking that, gee, the President really knows what I’m all about. He’s really interested! Pressing flesh and talking to ordinary people was an important and usually pleasurable part of the job, but not now, a week short of the convention, still behind in the goddamned polls, as every news network announced at least twice a week.
“What about Colombia?” the President asked as soon as the door was closed.
“Sir, you told me to shut it down. It’s being shut down.”
“Any problems with the Agency?”
“No, Mr. President.”
“How exactly—”
“Sir, you told me you didn’t want to know that.”
“You’re telling me it’s something I shouldn’t know?”
“I’m telling you, sir, that I am carrying out your instructions. The orders were given, and the orders are being complied with. I don’t think you will object to the consequences.”
“Really?”
Cutter relaxed a bit. “Sir, in a very real sense, the operation was a success. Drug shipments are down and will drop further in the next few months. I would suggest, sir, that you let the press talk about that for the moment. You can always point to it later. We’ve hurt them. With Operation TARPON we have something we can point to all we wish. With CAPER we have a way of continuing to gather intelligence information. We will have some dramatic arrests in a few months as well.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I’ve made those arrangements myself, sir.”
“And just how did you do that?” the President asked, and stopped. “Something else I don’t want to know?”
Cutter nodded.
“I assume that everything you’ve done is within the law,” the President said for the benefit of the tape recorder he had running.
“You may make that assumption, sir.” It was an artful reply in that it could mean anything, or nothing, depending on one’s point of view. Cutter also knew about the tape recorder.
“And you’re sure that your instructions are being carried out?”
“Of course, Mr. President.”
“Make sure again.”
It had t
aken far longer than the bearded consultant expected. Inspector O’Day held the printout in his hands, and it might as well have been Kurdish. The sheet was half covered with paragraphs entirely composed of ones and zeroes.
“Machine language,” the consultant explained. “Whoever programmed this baby was a real pro. I recovered about forty percent of it. It’s a transposition algorithm, just like I thought.”
“You told me that last night.”
“It ain’t Russian. It takes in a message and enciphers it. No big deal, anybody can do that. What’s really clever is that the system is based on an independent input signal that’s unique to the individual transmission—over and above the encipherment algorithm that’s already built into the system.”
“You want to explain that?”
“It means a very good computer lash-up—somewhere—governs how this baby operates. It can’t be Russian. They don’t have the hardware yet, unless they stole a really sexy one from us. Also, the input that adds the variable into the system probably comes from the NAVSTAR satellites. I’m guessing here, but I think it uses a very precise time mark to set the encryption key, one that’s unique to each up-and-down transmission. Clever shit. That means NSA. The NAVSTAR satellites use atomic clocks to measure time with great precision, and the really sexy part of the system is also encrypted. Anyway, what we have here is a clever way of scrambling a signal in a way that you can’t break or duplicate even if you know how it was done. Whoever set this baby up has access to everything we got. I used to consult with NSA, and never even heard of this puppy.”
“Okay, and when the disk is destroyed ... ?”
“The link is gone, man. I mean, gone. If this is what it seems to be, you have an uplink facility that controls the algorithm, and ground stations that copy it down. You wipe this algorithm off, like somebody did, and the guys you used to be talking to can’t communicate with you anymore, and nobody else can communicate with them either. Systems don’t get any more secure than that.”
“You can tell all that? What else?”
“Half of what I just told you is informed speculation. I can’t rebuild the algorithm. I can just tell you how it probably worked. The bit on the NAVSTAR is supposition, but good supposition. The transposition processing is partly recovered, and it has NSA written all over it. Whoever did it really knows how to write computer code. It’s definitely ours. It’s probably the most sophisticated machine code we have. Whoever got to use it must have some serious juice. And whoever it is, he scrubbed it. It can never be used again. Whatever operation it was used for must be over.”
“Yeah,” O’Day said, chilled by what he had just learned. “Good work.”
“Now all you have to do is write a note to my prof and tell him why I missed an exam this morning.”
“I’ll have somebody do that,” O’Day promised him on the way out the door. He headed for Dan Murray’s office, and was surprised to see that he was out. The next stop was with Bill Shaw.
Half an hour later it was clear that a crime had probably been committed. The next question was what to do about it.
The helicopter took off light. Mission requirements were fairly complex—more so than in the previous insertions—and speed was important this time. As soon as the Pave Low got to cruising altitude, it tanked from the MC-130E. There was no banter this time.
Ryan sat in back, strapped into his place while the MH-53J bounced and buffeted in the wash of the tanker. He wore a green flight suit and a similarly green helmet. There was also a flak jacket. Zimmer had explained to him that it would stop a pistol round, probably, secondary fragments almost certainly, but that he shouldn’t depend on it to stop a rifle bullet. One more thing to worry about. Once clear of the tanker for the first time—they’d have to tank again before making landfall—Jack turned around to look out the door. The clouds were nearly overhead now, the outlying reaches from Adele.
Juardo’s wound complicated matters and changed plans somewhat. They loaded him into Clark’s seat on the Beech, leaving him with a radio and spare batteries. Then Clark and the rest drove back toward Anserma. Larson was still checking the weather, which was changing on an hour-to-hour basis. He was due to take off in ninety minutes for his part of the mission.
“How you fixed for rounds?” Clark asked in the Microvan.
“All we need for the AKs,” Chavez replied. “About sixty each for the subs. I never knew how useful a silenced gun was.”
“They are nice. Grenades?”
“All of us?” Vega asked. “Five frags and two CS.”
“What are we going into?” Ding asked next.
“It’s a farmhouse outside Anserma.”
“What’s the security there like?”
“I don’t know squat yet.”
“Hey, wait a minute, what are you getting us into?” Vega demanded.
“Relax, Sarge. If it’s too heavy to handle, we back off and leave. All I know is we’re going in for a close look. Chavez and I can handle that. By the way, there’s spare batteries in the bag down there. Need ’em?”
“Fuckin’ A!” Chavez pulled out his night scope and replaced the batteries at once. “Who’s in the house?”
“Two people we especially want. Number One is Félix Cortez,” Clark said, giving some background. “He’s the guy running the operation against the SHOWBOAT teams—that’s the code name for this operation, in case nobody bothered to tell you. He also had a hand in the murder of the ambassador. I want his ass and I want it alive. Number Two is one Señor Escobedo. He’s one of the big shots in the Cartel. A lot of people want his ass.”
“Yeah,” León said. “We ain’t got no big shots yet.”
“So far we’ve gotten five or six of the bastards. That was my end of the operation.” Clark turned to look at Chavez. He had to say that to establish his credibility.
“But how, when—”
“We’re not supposed to talk all that much, children,” Clark told them. “You don’t go around advertising about killing folks no matter who told you it was okay.”
“Are you really that good?”
Clark just shook his head. “Sometimes. Sometimes not. If you guys weren’t damned good, you wouldn’t be here. And there are times when it’s just pure dumb luck.”
“We just walked into one,” León said. “I don’t even know what went wrong, but Captain Rojas just—”
“I know. I saw some pricks load his body into the back of a truck—”
León went rigid. “And what—”
“Did I do?” Clark asked. “There were three of them. I put them in the truck, too. Then I torched the truck. I’m not real proud of that, but I think I took some of the heat off you BANNER guys when I did. Wasn’t much, but it was all I could do at the time.”
“So who pulled the chopper back on us?”
“Same guy who chopped off the radio. I know who it is. After this is all over, I want his ass, too. You don’t send people out in the field and then pull this crap on ’em.”
“So what are you going to do?” Vega wanted to know.
“I’ll slap him firmly on both wrists. Now listen, people, you worry about tonight. One job at a time. You’re soldiers, not a bunch of teenage broads. Less talkin’ and more thinkin’.”
Chavez, Vega, and León took the cue. They started checking their gear. There was enough room in the van to strip and clean weapons. Clark pulled into Anserma at sundown. He found a quiet spot about a mile from the house and left the van. Clark took Vega’s night goggles, and then he and Chavez went out to take a walk.
There had been farming here recently. Clark wondered what it had been, but that and the fact that it was close to the village meant that the trees had been thinned out for cooking fires. They were able to move fast. Half an hour later they could see the house, separated from the woods by two hundred meters of open ground.
“Not good,” Clark observed from his place on the ground.
“I count six, all with AKs.”
> “Company,” the CIA officer said, turning to see where the noise was coming from. It was a Mercedes, and therefore could have belonged to anyone in the Cartel. Two more cars came with it, one ahead and one behind. A total of six guards got out to check the area.
“Escobedo and LaTorre,” Clark said from behind the binoculars. “Two big shots to see Colonel Cortez. I wonder why ...”
“Too many, man,” Chavez said.
“You notice there wasn’t any password or anything?”
“So?”
“It’s possible, if we play it right.”
“But how ...”
“Think creatively,” Clark told him. “Back to the car.” That took another twenty minutes. When they got there, Clark adjusted one of his radios.
“CAESAR, this is SNAKE, over.”
The second refueling was accomplished within sight of the beach. They’d have to tank at least once more before heading back to Panama. The other alternative didn’t seem especially likely at the moment. The good news was that Francie Montaigne was driving her Combat Talon with her usual aplomb, its four big propellers turning in a steady rhythm. Its radio operators were already talking to the surviving ground teams, taking that strain off the helicopter crew. For the first time in the mission, the air team was allowed to function as it had been trained. The MC-130E would coordinate the various pieces, coaching the Pave Low into the proper areas and away from possible threats in addition to keeping PJ’s chopper filled up with gas.
In back, the ride had settled down. Ryan was up and walking around. Fear became boring after a while, and he even managed to use the Port-A-Pot without missing. The flight crew had accepted him at least as an approved interloper, and for some reason that meant a lot to him.
“Ryan, you hear me?” Johns asked.
Jack reached down to the mike button. “Yeah, Colonel.”
“Your guy on the ground wants us to do something different.”
“Like what?”