Clear and Present Danger

  “This baby really shoots, sir.”

  “It’s yours. How good are you with a pistol?”

  “Just fair. I don’t usually—”

  “Yeah, I know. Well, you’ll all get practice. Pistol ain’t really good for much, but there’s times when it comes in right handy.” Johnson turned to address the whole squad. “All right, you four come on up. We want everyone to know how all these here weapons work. Everybody’s gotta be an expert.”

  Chavez relinquished his weapon to another squad member and walked back from the firing line. He was still trying to figure things out. Infantry combat is the business of death, at the personal level, where you could usually see what you were doing and to whom you were doing it. The fact that Chavez had not actually done it yet was irrelevant; it was still his business, and the organization of his unit told him what form the mission would take. Special ops. It had to be special ops. He knew a guy who’d been in the Delta Force at Bragg. Special operations were merely a refinement of straight infantry stuff. You had to get in real close, usually you had to chop down the sentries, and then you hit hard and fast, like a bolt of lightning. If it wasn’t over in ten seconds or less—well, then things got a little too exciting. The funny part to Chavez was the similarity with street-gang tactics. There was no fair play in soldiering. You sneaked in and did people in the back without warning. You didn’t give them a chance to protect themselves—none at all. But what was called cowardly in a gang kid was simply good tactics to a soldier. Chavez smiled to himself. It hardly seemed fair, when you looked at it like that. The Army was just better organized than a gang. And, of course, its targets were selected by others. The whole point to an Army, probably, was that what it did made sense to someone. That was true of gangs, too, but Army activity was supposed to make sense to someone important, someone who knew what he was really doing. Even if what he was doing didn’t make much sense to him—a frequent occurrence for soldiers—it did make sense to somebody.

  Chavez wasn’t old enough to remember Vietnam.

  Seduction was the saddest part of the job.

  With this, as with all parts of his profession, Cortez had been trained to be coldly objective and businesslike. but there wasn’t a way to be coldly intimate—at least not if you wanted to accomplish anything. Even the KGB Academy had recognized that. There had been hours of lectures on the pitfalls, he remembered with an ironic smile—Russians trying to tell a Latin about romantic entanglements. Probably the climate worked against them. You adapted your approach to the individual peculiarities of your target subject, in this case a widow who at forty-six retained surprising good looks, who had enough remaining of her youth to need companionship after the children retired for the evening or went out on their own dates, whose bed was a lonely place of memories grown cold. It wasn’t his first such subject, and there was always something brave about them, as well as something pathetic. He was supposed to think—as his training had taught him—that their problems were their business and his opportunity. But how does a man become intimate with such a woman without feeling her pain? The KGB instructors hadn’t had an answer to that one, though they did give him the proper technique. He, too, had to have suffered a recent loss.

  His “wife” had also died of cancer, he’d told her. He’d married late in life, the story went, after getting the family business back on track—all that time working, flying around to secure the business his father had spent his life founding—and then married his Maria only three years before. She’d become pregnant, but when she’d visited the doctor to confirm the joyous news, the routine tests ... only six months. The baby hadn’t had a chance, and Cortez had nothing left of Maria. Perhaps, he’d told his wineglass, it was God’s punishment on him for marrying so young a girl, or for his many dalliances as a foot-loose playboy.

  At that point Moira’s hand had come across the table to touch his. Of course it wasn’t his fault, the woman told him. And he looked up to see the sympathy in the eyes of someone who’d asked herself questions not so different from those he’d just ostensibly addressed to himself. People were so predictable. All you had to do was press the right buttons—and have the proper feelings. When her hand had come to his, the seduction was accomplished. There had been a flush of warmth from the touch, the feeling of simple humanity. But if he thought of her as a simple target, how could he return the emotions—and how could he accomplish the mission? He felt her pain, her loneliness. He would be good to her.

  And so he was, now two days later. It would have been comical except for how touching it was, how she’d prepared herself like a teenage girl on a date—something she hadn’t done for over twenty years; certainly her children had found it entertaining, but there had been enough time since the death of their father that they didn’t resent their mother’s needs and had smiled bemused encouragement at her as she walked out to her car. A quick, nervous dinner, then the short ride to his hotel. Some more wine to get over the nerves that were real for both of them, if more so for her. But it had certainly been worth the wait. She was out of practice, but her responses were far more genuine than those he got from his usual bedmates. Cortez was very good at sex. He was proud of his abilities and gave her an above-average performance: an hour’s work, building her up slowly, then letting her back down as gently as he knew how.

  Now they lay side by side, her head on his shoulder, tears dripping slowly from her eyes in the silence. A fine woman, this one. Even dying young, her husband had been a lucky man to have a woman who knew that silence could be the greatest passion of all. He watched the clock on the end table. Ten minutes of silence before he spoke.

  “Thank you, Moira ... I didn’t know ... it’s been.” He cleared his throat. “This is the first time since ... since ...” Actually it had been a week since the last one, which had cost him thirty thousand pesos. A young one, a skilled one. But—

  The woman’s strength surprised him. He was barely able to take his next breath, so powerful was her embrace. Part of what had once been his conscience told him that he ought to be ashamed, but the greater part reported that he’d given more than he’d taken. This was better than purchased sex. There were feelings, after all, that money couldn’t buy; it was a thought both reassuring and annoying to Cortez, and one which amplified his sense of shame. Again he rationalized that there would be no shame without her powerful embrace, and the embrace would not have come unless he had pleased her greatly.

  He reached behind himself to the other end table and got his cigarettes.

  “You shouldn’t smoke,” Moira Wolfe told him.

  He smiled. “I know. I must quit. But after what you have done to me,” he said with a twinkle in his eye, “I must gather myself.” Silence.

  “Madre de Dios, ” he said after another minute.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Another mischievous smile. “Here I have given myself to you, and I hardly know who you are!”

  “What do you want to know?”

  A chuckle. A shrug. “Nothing important—I mean, what could be more important than what you have already done?” A kiss. A caress. More silence. He stubbed out the cigarette at the halfway point to show that her opinion was important to him. “I am not good at this.”

  “Really?” It was her turn to chuckle, his turn to blush.

  “It is different, Moira. I—when I was a young man, it was understood that when—it was understood that there was no importance, but ... now I am grown, and I cannot be so ...” Embarrassment. “If you permit it, I wish to know about you, Moira. I come to Washington frequently, and I wish ... I am tired of the loneliness. I am tired of ... I wish to know you,” he said with conviction. Then, tentatively, haltingly, hopeful but afraid, “If you permit it.”

  She kissed his cheek gently. “I permit it.”

  Instead of his own powerful hug, Cortez let his body go slack with relief not wholly feigned. More silence before he spoke again.

  “You should know about me. I am wealthy. My b
usiness is machine tools and auto parts. I have two factories, one in Costa Rica, the other in Venezuela. The business is complicated and—not dangerous, but ... it is complicated dealing with the big assemblers. I have two younger brothers also in the business. So ... what work do you do?”

  “Well, I’m an executive secretary. I’ve been doing that kind of work for twenty years.”

  “Oh? I have one myself.”

  “And you must chase her around the office ...”

  “Consuela is old enough to be my mother. She worked for my father. Is that how it is in America? Does your boss chase you?” A hint of jealous outrage.

  Another chuckle. “Not exactly. I work for Emil Jacobs. He’s the Director of the FBI.”

  “I do not know the name.” A lie. “The FBI, that is your federales, this I know. And you are the chief secretary for them all, then?”

  “Not exactly. Mainly my job is to keep Mr. Jacobs organized. You wouldn’t believe his schedule—all the meetings and conferences to keep straight. It’s like being a juggler.”

  “Yes, it is that way with Consuela. Without her to watch over me ...” Cortez laughed. “If I had to choose between her and one of my brothers, I would choose her. I can always hire a factory manager. What sort of man is this—Jacobs, you say? You know, when I was a boy, I wanted to be a policeman, to carry the gun and drive the car. To be the chief police officer, that must be a grand thing.”

  “Mainly his job is shuffling papers—I get to do a lot of the filing, and dictation. When you are the head, your job is mainly doing budgets and meetings.”

  “But surely he gets to know the—the good things, yes? The best part of being a policeman—it must be the best thing, to know the things that other people do not. To know who are the criminals, and to hunt them.”

  “And other things. It isn’t just police work. They also do counterespionage. Chasing spies,” she added.

  “That is CIA, no?”

  “No. I can’t talk about it, of course, but, no, that is a Bureau function. It’s all the same, really, and it’s not like television at all. Mainly it’s boring. I read the reports all the time.”

  “Amazing,” Cortez observed comfortably. “All the talents of a woman, and also she educates me.” He smiled encouragement so that she would elaborate. That idiot who’d put him onto her, he remembered, suggested that he’d have to use money. Cortez thought that his KGB training officers would have been proud of his technique. The KGB was ever parsimonious with funds.

  “Does he make you work so hard?” Cortez asked a minute later.

  “Some of the days can go long, but really he’s pretty good about that.”

  “If he makes you work too hard, we will speak, Mr. Jacobs and I. What if I come to Washington and I cannot see you because you are working?”

  “You really want ... ?”

  “Moira.” His voice changed its timbre. Cortez knew that he’d pressed too hard for a first time. It had gone too easily, and he’d asked too many questions. After all, lonely widow or not, this was a woman of substance and responsibility—therefore a woman of intellect. But she was also a woman of feelings, and of passion. He moved his hands and his head. He saw the question on her face: Again? He smiled his message: Again.

  This time he was less patient, no longer a man exploring the unknown. There was familiarity now. Having established what she liked, his ministrations had direction. Within ten minutes she’d forgotten all of his questions. She would remember the smell and the feel of him. She would bask in the return of youth. She would ask herself where things might lead, but not how they had started.

  Assignations are conspiratorial by their nature. Just after midnight he returned her to where her car was parked. Yet again she amazed him with her silence. She held his hand like a school-girl, yet her touch was in no way so simple. One last kiss before she left the car—she wouldn’t let him get out.

  “Thank you, Juan,” she said quietly.

  Cortez spoke from the heart. “Moira, because of you I am again a man. You have done more for me. When next I come to Washington, we must—”

  “We will.”

  He followed her most of the way home, to let her know that he wished to protect her, breaking off before getting so close to her home that her children—surely they were waiting up—would notice. Cortez drove back to the apartment with a smile on his face, only partly because of his mission.

  Her co-workers knew at once. With little more than six hours’ sleep, Moira bounced into the office wearing a suit she hadn’t touched in a year. There was a sparkle in her eye that could not be hidden. Even Director Jacobs noticed, but no one said anything. Jacobs understood. He’d buried his wife only a few months after Moira’s loss, and learned that such voids in one’s life could never quite be filled with work. Good for her, he thought. She still had children at home. He’d have to go easier on her schedule. She deserved another chance at a real life.

  8.

  Deployment

  THE AMAZING THING was how smoothly things had gone, Chavez thought. After all, they were all sergeants, but whoever had set this thing up had been a clever man because there had been no groping around for which man got which function. There was an operations sergeant in his squad to assist Captain Ramirez with planning. There was a medical corpsman, a good one from the Special Forces who already had his weapons training. Julio Vega and Juan Piscador had once been machine-gunners, and they got the SAWs. The same story applied to their radioman. Each member of the team fit neatly into a preselected slot, all were sufficiently trained that they respected the expertise of one another, and further cross-training enhanced that respect even more. The rugged regime of exercises had extended the pride with which each had arrived, and within two weeks the team had meshed together like a finely made machine. Chavez, a Ranger School graduate, was point man and scout. His job was to probe ahead, to move silently from one place of concealment to another, to watch and listen, then report his observations to Captain Ramirez.

  “Okay, where are they?” the captain asked.

  “Two hundred meters, just around that corner,” Chavez whispered in reply. “Five of them. Three asleep, two awake. One’s sitting by the fire. The other one’s got an SMG, walking around some.”

  It was cool in the mountains at night, even in summer. A distant coyote howled at the moon. There was the occasional whisper from a deer moving through the trees, and the only sound associated with man was the distant noise of jets. The clear night made for surprisingly good visibility, even without the low-light goggles with which they were normally equipped. In the thin mountain air, the stars overhead didn’t sparkle, but shone as constant, discrete points of light. Ordinarily Chavez would have noticed the beauty, but this was a work night.

  Ramirez and the rest of the squad were wearing four-color camouflage fatigues of Belgian manufacture. Their faces were painted with matching tones from sticks of makeup (understandably the Army didn’t call it that) so that they blended into the shadows as perfectly as Wells’ invisible man. Most importantly, they were totally at home in the darkness. Night was their best and most powerful friend. Man was a day-hunter. All of his senses, all of his instincts, and all of his inventions worked best in the light. Primordial rhythms made him less efficient at night—unless he worked very hard to overcome them, as these soldiers had. Even American Indian tribes living in close partnership with nature had feared the night, had almost never fought at night, had not even guarded their encampments at night—thus giving the U.S. Army its first useful doctrine for operations in darkness. At night man built fires as much for vision as for warmth, but in doing so reduced that vision to mere feet, whereas the human eye, properly conditioned, can see quite well in the darkness.

  “Only five?”

  “That’s all I counted, sir.”

  Ramirez nodded and gestured for two more men to come forward. A few quiet orders were given. He went with the other two, moving to the right to get above the encampment. Chavez went
back forward. His job was to take the sentry down, along with the one dozing at the fire. Moving quietly in the dark is harder than seeing. The human eye is better at spotting movement in the dark than in identifying stationary objects. He put each foot down carefully, feeling for something that might slide or break, thus making noise—the human ear is much underestimated. In daylight his method of moving would have appeared comical, but stealth has its price. Worst of all, he moved slowly, and Ding was no more patient than any man still in his twenties. It was a weakness against which he’d trained himself. He walked in a tight crouch. His weapon was up and ready to guard against surprise, and as the moment approached, his senses were fully alerted, as though an electric current ran across his skin. His head swiveled slowly left and right, his eyes never quite locking on anything, because when one stares at an object in the dark ness, it tends to disappear after a few seconds.

  Something bothered Chavez, but he didn’t know what it was He stopped for a moment, looking around, searching with al his senses over to his left for about thirty seconds. Nothing. For the first time tonight he found himself wishing for his night goggles. Ding shook it off. Maybe a squirrel or some other night forager. Not a man, certainly. No one could move in the dark as well as a Ninja, he smiled to himself, and got back to the business at hand. He reached his position several minutes later, just behind a scrawny pine tree, and eased down to a kneeling position. Chavez slid the cover off the green face of his digital watch watching the numbers march slowly toward the appointed moment. There was the sentry, moving in a circle around the fire never more than thirty feet from it, trying to keep his eyes turnec away from it to protect his night vision. But the light reflected off the rocks and the pines would damage his perceptions badly enough—he looked straight at Chavez twice, but saw nothing