Tom Clancy Support and Defend

  “Not after I give you a black eye, they won’t.”

  32

  GIANNA, ETHAN, AND MOHAMMED lunched at a table set up by the poorly maintained swimming pool in the back of the large colonial home. Guards wandered the property or watched over them from the veranda.

  All three ate grilled sea bass, and Gianna and Ethan drank Chilean pinot grigio, while Mohammed sipped orange juice.

  He remained glued to his laptop, though Ethan had no idea what the young man could possibly be working on. The Venezuelan intelligence officer Leo had spent the entire morning since their arrival with his guests, but just before lunch he retreated for a conference call with Caracas. Between healthy sips of wine Ethan asked, “What’s the next step?”

  “Harlan and I will connect via Cryptocat this afternoon.

  He’s reaching out to his sources to see what is known in the FBI investigation into Eve’s death.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Really, for right now, there is little more for us to do but wait and try to relax.”

  Ethan was not going to relax, this he knew for certain. He topped off his glass of pinot, ignoring Bertoli’s.

  Gianna said, “There is some news out of Washington. As I was dressing for lunch in my room I watched CNN. I can’t see how it is related to your case, but it is very distressing, nonetheless.”

  “What is it?”

  “The bodies of two FBI employees were found floating in the Potomac River early this morning.”

  Ethan’s eyes widened in shock. “Wait . . . they can’t think I had anything to do with it, can they?”

  Mohammed just took a sip of orange juice.

  Bertoli said, “I don’t imagine they really think it, but I can’t say they won’t use it. It’s bad timing. I know how the Americans operate. They will be looking for other crimes to charge you with. Maybe these two men died in a robbery or something, and they want to blame you. Maybe there are no dead men, and this is all some ploy to charge you with a murder.” Mohammed spoke without looking up. “Murder of a federal law enforcement officer in America is punishable by death.” Ethan put his head down on the table. Bertoli rubbed the back of his neck while Mohammed calmly picked up his knife and cut into his sea bass.

  Dom and Adara flew a Copa Airlines flight out of Dulles at one p.m., and they worked quietly together on their surveillance plan during the entire five-hour flight down. They made a list of gear they would need to find, and they passed an iPad back and forth with an EagleView map of the area.

  They landed in Panama City and immediately climbed aboard an Air Panama Fokker 50 that would take them to Bocas del Toro. The fifty-seater was filled with locals mostly, but a few tourists were on the flight, as well, so Sherman didn’t feel like she stuck out too much.

  They touched down on the hot runway at Bocas del Toro Isla Colón International Airport, a little after six-thirty p.m. As they stepped of the plane and onto the broken tarmac of the little airfield, Dominic shouldered his backpack. Adara did the same with her pack; then she reached out and took Dom’s hand and held it as they walked toward the tiny terminal building.

  Dom didn’t make a comment about this, but just before they passed through the door toward the cabstand, Adara leaned close to him. “Couple of guys standing around the terminal who might be spotters. Can’t be too careful.”

  “No, you sure can’t.” He put his arm around her and led her toward a waiting taxi.

  Their hotel was the aptly named Hotel Bocas del Toro, it was positioned on the eastern tip of the island in the heart of downtown Bocas town, so close to the shore a portion of the three-story colonial style building actually hung over the water.

  Dom and Adara took a room on the third floor that faced Carenero Cay, an impossibly green slice of land sticking out of impossibly blue water with rusty tin roofs sticking out of the trees.

  They dropped their bags on a table and looked around at the small room. Neither made mention of the one bed as they headed out to the balcony and surveyed the neighborhood from the third floor. Once outside, Adara leaned toward Dom, so quickly it startled him and so closely he thought she was going to kiss him. Instead, she said, “Should we assume we’re being listened to?”

  Dom cracked a little smile. “No. Not here. We’re okay.”

  “Gerry told all of us in the flight crew that when we were working we should assume every hotel is bugged and to act accordingly.”

  “The only bugs in this place are the centipedes on the wall.” Sherman turned and looked at the wall just inches behind her. A prehistoric-looking insect the length of a Magic Marker crawled along next to the French doors between the balcony and the room. Adara turned her nose up a little, but otherwise ignored it.

  Dom said, “Aren’t you supposed to freak out or something?”

  “Because I am female?”

  Not only did Dom not answer, but he regretted asking the question in the first place.

  Adara said, “I was in Afghanistan. We had camel spiders the size of diner plates climbing around our latrine. Bugs don’t phase me.”

  “Then this place is going to feel like the Ritz.”

  Dominic called David on his satellite phone, and the Mossad officer passed on an address on the far side of Colón Island and told Dom he had a meeting there with a local Mossad contact, but not until eleven p.m. As soon as the call ended, Dom and Adara went downstairs and headed to the nearby docks. Here they split up; Adara’s job was to find a boat available for rent, and Dom’s task was to purchase the scuba gear and other equipment he would need for his surveillance tomorrow.

  Dom walked into and then back out two dive shops. At the first one they didn’t have any equipment of the quality he required, and at the second he did find top-of-the-line equipment that would suit his needs, but there was a significant problem.

  The buoyancy-control device—the vest a diver wears that holds his tank and other equipment and helps controls his buoyancy in the water—came only in red or bright purple. Dom was no slave to fashion, but he suspected swimming into harm’s way wearing a big brightly colored vest might not afford him the low-profile infiltration he was looking for.

  The third dive shop, however, had exactly what he needed.

  He rented a pair of full oxygen tanks, a three-millimeter neoprene wetsuit, a black BCD, a weight belt, a regulator, fins, a mask, and a dive knife with an ankle sheath.

  He paid an extra fifty dollars in U.S. currency to have the equipment delivered to his hotel, and then he went off in search of other gear. He found a little camping store that catered to sea kayakers to set up camps on the beaches of the little uninhabited islands around the archipelago, and here he bought a canteen, rope, a waterproof backpack, plastic bags, binoculars, and a dozen other odds and ends that he thought might come in handy while doing surveillance on the potential Venezuelan safe house.

  When Dom had everything he needed, all packed in the waterproof backpack, he returned to the hotel. Adara was already sitting on the balcony with a cold Balboa beer in her hand, studying nautical charts of the area she’d bought at the boat rental shop. Dom looked over the maps. To him it looked like a complicated mess of channels and splotchy misshapen spits of land, all crisscrossed with lines and numbers. “Can you read that?”

  “Child’s play,” she said as she motioned to a cooler on the balcony. Dom pulled another beer out and sat down next to her. “Want to see the boat?”

  “You got us a boat already?”

  “I can do more than pass out peanuts on a plane, you know.”

  “I do know. Where is it?”

  “Look down. Black hull, white body.”

  Dom looked off the balcony and saw the boat bobbing in a slip along the hotel dock, three stories below. It was a MasterCraft MariStar 235, it was not large at twenty-five feet, but big enough for the two of them and all the gear, and the perfect size for going into the inlets around the Venezuelan safe house if they needed to.

  “Is it fast?” Dom ask
ed.

  “6.0L V8 400 horsepower engine. It’ll put out enough power for our needs. It’s a ski boat, so won’t win any races with a real speedboat, but it won’t stick out either. I’ve seen a half-dozen just like it in the water around here in the past hour.”

  Dom nodded in approval, and then the two of them began looking over the charts together to start working on an infiltration plan.

  WITH A FEW HOURS to kill before their eleven p.m. meeting with David’s local Mossad contact, the two Americans walked down to a restaurant on the water to grab dinner. It was a slow night at the Ultimo Refugio, and they found a secluded table on the open back deck. They both ordered beers and fried fish, and for the first half-hour they did their best to keep the conversation off the operation that would commence at first light tomorrow.

  Finally, Adara said, “This is going to sound like a cliché to say this, but someone needs to say it to you, because I don’t think you’re going to figure it out on your own. Killing this guy won’t bring that family in India back.”

  Dom nodded. “I’ve been told.”

  “But you’ll do it anyway.”

  “If I can.”

  Adara sipped her beer slowly. Dom could see she wanted to say something, but she was trying to decide if it would be her place to do so.

  “What?”

  “You have survivor’s guilt. About the Yacobys and about Brian.”

  Dom shook his head. “No, I don’t. I know I did my best, both in India and in Libya.”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with what you did. It has to do with the randomness of it all. The fact you survived an incident, and others didn’t.” She looked at him. “Your brother. The Yacoby children.”

  “Survivor’s guilt.” Dom said it softly. “Makes me sound like a head case.”

  “You’re not crazy. It’s perfectly natural. You don’t understand why you are here and they aren’t. You think it’s unfair that you won the roll of the dice.”

  Yes. Dom realized this was exactly what he had been thinking ever since Brian was killed. The feelings had subsided a little in the past two years, but after India they had comeback twice as hard.

  “Are you a shrink, too, Sherman?”

  She shook her head with a smile. “No. Not at all.”

  “Then how were you able to diagnose me?”

  “Because I have the same thing, and I’ve had it longer than you.”

  “Something happened over there in Afghanistan? When you were a corpsman?”

  She nodded. “A lot of somethings.” Before Dom could ask anything else, she said, “Can we just leave it at that?”

  “Yeah. Sure. I understand.”

  There was uncomfortable silence between them for a few minutes. Both ordered more drinks. Dom asked, “How did you get linked up with The Campus?”

  “A patient.”

  “A patient?”

  “A young oh-one.”

  “What’s an oh-one?”

  “Sorry. A Marine second lieutenant. I was a navy corpsman assigned to a Marine Combat Engineer Battalion in the Korangal Valley. An oh-one from an infantry unit nearby took an AK round to the head. I was the first corpsman to him, he was bleeding out and I managed to stop the bleeding.”

  Dominic tipped his glass to her. “Good for you. You saved his life.”

  Adara looked away, out at the placid water. The sunset was behind them, but the channel glowed from the last rays of the day. “No. No happy ending, I’m afraid. He made it back stateside, but he died anyway.”

  “Shit. I’m sorry. What did he have to do with The Campus?”

  “The lieutenant’s dad was a colonel, he sent me an e-mail a month or so after his son died, told me how grateful he was that his boy had been able to come home and die among his family.” She smiled, still looking at the moonlit channel. “I guess if you look hard enough you can find a silver lining in almost everything. Anyway, we stayed in touch over the years.

  He retired and went to work for MITRE Corp on a top-secret government contract. When I got out of the Corps he offered me a job. I was going to go to nursing school, but his offer was pretty good. I got vetted, got my top-secret clearance, and then he took me to Maryland and introduced me to Gerry Hendley.

  The job was working on the Hendley Associates aircraft.”

  “Do you regret not going to nursing school?”

  “I’ll still go. One day. Besides . . .” She smiled at Dom across the table. “You and the other guys are giving me a lot of realworld practical training. Every one of you has managed to get yourselves hurt.”

  Dom chuckled. “It’s the only way you’ll give us any attention.”

  It was a joke, but Adara gave him a serious look. “Do me a favor. Try not to get hurt down here.”

  An unfriendly parrot perched on the railing next to their table. Adara fed the bird a couple pieces of fish, but that only made it more annoying, so Dom shooed the bird away. “I’ll do my best. And I promise I’ll keep you out of danger.” Dom ordered a third round.

  “Are you trying to get me drunk?”

  Dom downed his shot. “I’m trying to get me drunk. You are just collateral damage.”

  Adara tipped her little glass to Caruso. “That’s a great line.

  Does that work on the girls around D.C.?”

  Dom poured another. “Not really.”

  “If you have a hangover in the morning, it’s going to make your job a lot harder.”

  Dom said, “Four beers isn’t going to kick my ass.”

  “Four?” They’d had only three.

  Dom looked at his watch. “We have time.”

  33

  JUST BEFORE ELEVEN P.M. a belching taxi took them through Bocas Town, past rusty tin-roofed shacks and beat-up but brightly painted Victorian and colonial buildings. Street vendors selling handmade junk appeared at the windows of the taxi, no doubt triggered by Adara Sherman’s shock of blond hair that announced the presence of a tourist.

  The taxi dropped them off at an address David had provided earlier, on the northwestern edge of the town, and the two Americans stood alone in the street in front of a small supermarket for a few minutes, unsure if they should go in or wait outside. Before they could decide, an old two-door hatchback parked in an alley across the street flashed its lights, and after a look between them, Dom and Adara began walking toward it.

  A woman in her forties climbed out from behind the wheel as the Americans approached. She introduced herself only as Maria. Dom and Adara shook her hand, but they offered no introductions at all.

  Dom was on guard, he looked around the alley, deciding it was secluded enough for a clandestine transaction such as this, but it was hardly a safe place to hang out for very long. He had the titanium diving knife strapped to his calf, but otherwise he was unarmed. This woman looked incredibly nervous, and that, along with the unsecure location, made Dom more than a little edgy himself.

  Maria lit a cigarette, then offered one to the two Americans, who both declined. She said, “I’m sorry. I’m a little tense. I got the call this afternoon. Normally, when they need something . . . Well, it’s been years since they’ve needed something. And it wasn’t anything like this.”

  Adara Sherman was confused, but Dom understood. “You are Sayan, right?”

  “Yes, of course. You don’t think I do this sort of thing for a living, do you?”

  Sayan were volunteers for Mossad, local assistants, not formal employees of the organization, but Jews living around the world ready to be called upon to perform duties on behalf of the Israeli spy service. Sayan could be doctors or shopkeepers or travel agents or truck drivers, they were normally people motivated by their duty to the nation of Israel.

  Dom recognized that her anxious mannerisms were due to the fact she’d probably been pulled off her job as a lawyer or a city town administrator or something similar and then sent out to procure weapons for a couple foreign operatives. Looking at her in this light, Dom decided her anxiety was perfectly r
easonable.

  Adara said, “Don’t worry, Maria. You are doing great. We appreciate your help.”

  Dom tried to get the meeting back on track. He didn’t want to stand here in this dark lot any longer than he had to. “You brought some things for us?”

  She lifted the hatchback, revealing a large external-frame backpack. Dom opened it and pulled out a beat-up-looking M9 Beretta pistol, U.S. Army issue, and an M16 rifle that had been partially disassembled to fit inside. The rifle was U.S. military issue, as well, but Dom could tell it was very old. The military didn’t use this version of the M16 any longer and hadn’t in years. “Did you get these guns from a museum?”

  Maria smoked nervously behind him. “The request was highly unusual. I did my best. We are a little island. Not many opportunities to—”

  Adara said, “These will be just fine. What about ammunition?”

  Maria cocked her head. “The bullets are already in the guns.”

  Adara looked at Dom, then asked, “Spare ammunition?”

  “What? I’m sorry. That was not specified. As I said, it wasn’t easy getting these guns.”

  Dom checked the magazines in the weapons. “Both weapons are fully loaded. Ball ammo.” He ejected a round from each and looked them over in interior light in the back of the vehicle. “Really old ball ammo. U.S. military. But the cartridges seem to be in good condition.”

  Dom inspected the guns over a little more. “Oh, wow. These are from the war.”

  “What war?” Adara asked.

  “The U.S. invasion. Nineteen eighty-nine. Jesus, lady. That was a quarter-century ago.”

  The Sayan looked more annoyed than embarrassed. “I’m sure they work fine. Lots of security guards in supermarkets and banks use American guns. Again, I was given just hours to accomplish this task. I don’t just sit down here waiting to be called on by Tel Aviv to buy illegal weapons.”

  “We understand,” said Adara. Her voice considerably softer and more conciliatory than Dom had made his. “There is some synthetic motor oil in the boat. We can clean and lube these tonight.”