Clear and Present Danger

  Cortez looked up from washing his hands to see the man who had obtained those intelligence tidbits and decided that he didn’t like the man who had done it. He shrugged off the feeling. It wasn’t the first time. Certainly it wouldn’t be the last.

  The shot went off at 23:41 hours. The Titan-IIID’s two massive solid-rocket boosters ignited at the appointed time, over a million pounds of thrust was generated, and the entire assembly leapt off the pad amid a glow that would be seen from Savannah to Miami. The solid boosters burned for 120 seconds before being discarded. At this point the liquid-fuel engines on the booster’s center section ignited, hurling the remaining package higher, faster, and farther downrange. All the while onboard instruments relayed data from the booster to ground station at the Cape. In fact, they were also radioing their data to a Soviet listening post located on the northern tip of Cuba, and to a “fishing trawler” which kept station off Cape Canaveral, and also flew a red flag. The Titan-IIID was a bird used exclusively for military launches, and Soviet interest in this launch resulted from an unconfirmed GRU report that the satellite atop the launcher had been specially modified to intercept very weak electronic signals—exactly what kind the report didn’t specify.

  Faster and higher. Half of the remaining rocket dropped off now, the second-stage fuel expended, and the third stage lit off about a thousand miles downrange. In the control bunkers at the Cape, the engineers and technicians noted that everything was still going as planned, as befitted a launch vehicle whose ancestry dated back to the late 1950s. The third stage burned out on time and on profile. The payload, along with the fourth, or transstage, now awaited the proper time to ignite, kicking the payload to its intended geosynchronous height, from which it would hover over a specific piece of the earth’s equator. The hiatus allowed the control-room crew to top off their coffee, make necessary pit stops, and review the data from the launch, which, they all agreed, had been about as perfect as an engineer had any right to expect.

  The trouble came half an hour later. The transstage ignited early, seemingly on its own, boosting the payload to the required height, but not in the expected place; also, instead of being perfectly placed in a stationary position, the payload was left in an eccentric path, meandering in a lopsided figure-eight that straddled the equator. Even if it had been over the right longitude, the path would negate its coverage of the higher latitudes for brief but annoying periods of time. Despite everything that had gone right, all the thousands of parts that had functioned exactly as designed, the launch was a failure. The engineering crew who managed the lower stages shook their heads in sympathy with those whose responsibility had been the transstage, and who now surveyed launch control in evident dejection. The launch was a failure.

  The payload didn’t know that. At the appointed time, it separated itself from the transstage and began to perform as it had been programmed. Weighted arms ten meters in length extended themselves. Gravity from an earth over twenty thousand miles away would act on them through tidal forces, keeping the satellite forever pointed downward. Next the solar panels deployed to convert sunlight into electricity, charging the onboard batteries. Finally, an enormous dish antenna began to form. Made of a special metal-ceramic-plastic material, its frame “remembered” its proper configuration, and on being heated by sunlight unfolded itself over a three-hour period until it formed a nearly perfect parabolic dish fully thirty meters in diameter. Anyone close enough to view the event would have noticed the builder’s plate on the side of the satellite. Why this was done was itself an anachronism, since there would never be anyone close enough to notice, but it was the custom. The plate, made of gold foil, designated the prime contractor as TRW, and the name of the satellite as Rhyolite-J. The last of an obsolete series of such satellites, it had been built in 1981 and sat in storage—at the cost of over $100,000 per year—awaiting a launch that had never actually been expected, since CIA and NSA had developed newer, less cumbersome electronic-reconnaissance birds that used advanced signal-gathering equipment. In fact, some of the new equipment had been attached to this obsolete bird, made even more effective by the massive receiving dish. Rhyolite had been originally designed to eavesdrop on Soviet electronic emissions, telemetry from missile tests, side-lobes from air-defense radars, scatterings from microwave towers, even for signals from spy devices dropped off by CIA officers and agents at sensitive locations.

  That didn’t matter to the people at the Cape. An Air Force public affairs officer released a statement to the general effect that the (classified) launch had not achieved proper orbit. This was verified by the Soviets, who had fully expected the satellite to take a place over the Indian Ocean when, in fact, it was now oscillating over the Brazilian-Peruvian border, from which it couldn’t even see the Soviet Union. Curious, they thought, that the Americans had even allowed it to switch itself on, but from yet another “fishing trawler” off the California coast, they monitored intermittent scatterings of encrypted transmissions from the satellite down to some earth station or other. Whatever it was sending down, however, was of little concern to the Soviet Union.

  Those signals were received at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where technicians in yet another nondescript communications van, with a satellite dish set outside, began calibrating their instruments. They didn’t know that the launch was supposedly a failure. They just knew that everything about it was secret.

  The jungle, Chavez thought. It smelled, but he didn’t mind the smell so much as the snakes. Chavez had never told anyone about it, but he hated and feared snakes. All kinds of snakes. He didn’t know why—and it troubled him that fear of snakes was associated with women, not men—but even the thought of the slithering, slimy things made his skin crawl, those legless lizards with flicking tongues and lidless eyes. They hung from branches and hid under fallen trees, waiting for him to pass so that they could strike at whatever part of his anatomy offered itself. He knew that they would if they got the chance. He was sure that he would die if they did. So he kept alert. No snake would get him, not so long as he stayed alert. At least he had a silenced weapon. That way he could kill them without making noise. Fuckin’ snakes.

  He finally made the road, and he really ought to have stayed in the mud, but he wanted to lie down on a dry, clear place, which he first scanned with his AN/PVS-7 night scope. No snakes. He took a deep breath, then removed the plastic canteen from its holder. They’d been on the move for six hours, covering nearly five miles—which was really pushing it—but they were supposed to get to this road before dawn, and get there unseen by the OPFOR—the opposing force—who were warned of their presence. Chavez had spotted them twice, each time, he thought, a pair of American MPs, who weren’t really soldiers, not to his way of thinking. Chavez had led his squad around them, moving through the swamp as quietly as ... as a snake, he told himself wryly. He could have double-tapped all four of them easily enough, but that wasn’t the mission.

  “Nice job, Ding.” Captain Ramirez came down beside him. They spoke in whispers.

  “Hell, they were asleep.”

  The captain grinned in the darkness. “I hate the fuckin’ jungle. All these bugs.”

  “Bugs ain’t so bad, sir. It’s the snakes I don’t like.”

  Both men scanned the road in both directions. Nothing. Ramirez clapped the sergeant on the shoulder and went to check on the rest of the squad. He’d scarcely left when a figure emerged from the treeline three hundred yards away. He was moving directly toward Chavez. Uh-oh.

  Ding moved backward under a bush and set down his submachine gun. It wasn’t loaded anyway, not even with the wax practice bullets. A second one came out, but he walked the other way. Bad tactics, Chavez thought. Pairs are supposed to support each other. Well, that was too bad. The last sliver of moon was dropping below the top level of the triple-canopy forest, and Chavez still had the advantage of his night scope as the figure walked toward him. The man walked quietly—at least he knew how to do that—and slowly, keeping his eyes on th
e edge of the road and listening as much as looking. Chavez waited, switching off the scope and removing it from his head. Then he removed his fighting knife from its sheath. Closer, only about fifty yards now, and the sergeant coiled up, drawing his legs under his chest. At thirty feet, he stopped breathing. If he could have willed his heart to stop, he’d have done that to reduce the noise. This was for fun. If this had been for-real, a 9mm bullet would now reside in the man’s head.

  The sentry walked right past Ding’s position, looking but not seeing the form under the bush. He made it another step before he heard a swishing sound, but then it was too late. By that time, he was facedown on the gravel, and he felt the hilt of a knife at the back of his neck.

  “Ninja owns the night, boy! You’re history.”

  “You got me, sure as hell,” the man whispered in reply.

  Chavez rolled him over. It was a major, and his headgear was a beret. Maybe the OPFOR wasn’t MPs after all.

  “Who are you?” the victim asked.

  “Staff Sergeant Domingo Chavez, sir.”

  “Well, you just killed a jungle-warfare instructor, Chavez. Good job. Mind if I get a drink? It’s been a long night.” Chavez allowed the man to roll into the bushes, where he, too, took a pull off his canteen. “What outfit you from—wait a minute, 3rd of the 17th, right?”

  “We own the night, sir,” Chavez agreed. “You been there?”

  “Going there, for a battalion staff job.” The major wiped some blood from his face. He’d hit the road a little hard.

  “Sorry about that, sir.”

  “My fault, Sergeant, not yours. We have twenty guys out there. I never thought you’d make it this far without being spotted.”

  The sound of a vehicle came down the road. A minute later the wide-set lights of a Hummer—the new and larger incarnation of the venerable jeep—appeared, announcing that the exercise was over. The “dead” major marched off to collect his men, while Captain Ramirez did the same.

  “That was the final exam, people,” he told the squad. “Get a good day’s sleep. We go in tonight.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Cortez said. He’d hopped the first flight from Dulles to Atlanta. There he met an associate in a rented car, and now they discussed their information in the total anonymity of an automobile driving at the posted limit on the Atlanta beltway.

  “Call it psychological warfare,” the man answered. “No plea-bargain, no nothing. It’s being handled as a straight murder trial. Ramón and Jesus will not get any consideration.”

  Cortez looked at the passing traffic. He didn’t give a damn about the two sicarios, who were as expendable as any other terrorists and who didn’t know the reason for the killings. What he was considering now was a series of seemingly disjointed and unconnected bits of information on American interdiction operations. An unusual number of courier aircraft were disappearing. The Americans were treating this legal case in an unusual way. The Director of the FBI was doing something that he didn’t like, and that his personal secretary didn’t know about yet. “The rules are changing.” That could mean anything at all.

  Something fundamental. It had to be. But what?

  There were a number of well-paid and highly reliable informants throughout the American government, in Customs, DEA, the Coast Guard, none of whom had reported a single thing. The law-enforcement community was in the dark—except for the FBI Director, who didn’t like it, but would soon go to Colombia....

  Some sort of intelligence operation was—no. Active Measures? The phrase came from KGB, and could mean any of several things, from feeding disinformation to reporters to “wet” work. Would the Americans do anything like that? They never had. He glowered at the passing scenery. He was an experienced intelligence officer, and his profession was to determine what people were doing from bits and pieces of random data. That he was working for someone he detested was beside the point. This was a matter of pride and besides, he detested the Americans even more.

  What were they doing now?

  Cortez had to admit to himself that he didn’t know, but in one hour he’d board a plane, and in six hours he’d have to tell his employer that he didn’t know. That did not appeal to him.

  Something fundamental. The rules are changing. The FBI Director didn’t like it. His secretary didn’t know. The trip to Colombia was clandestine.

  Cortez relaxed. Whatever it was, it was not an immediate threat. The Cartel was too secure. There would be time to analyze and respond. There were many people in the smuggling chain who could be sacrificed, who would fight for the chance, in fact. And after a time, the Cartel would adapt its operations to the changing conditions as it always had. All he had to do was convince his employer of that simple fact. What did el jefe really care about Ramón and Jesus or any of the underlings who ran the drugs and did the killings that became necessary? It was continuing the supply of drugs to the consumers that mattered.

  His mind came back to the vanishing airplanes. Historically, the Americans had managed to intercept one or two per month, that small a number despite all their radars and aircraft. But recently—four in the last two weeks, wasn’t it?—had disappeared. What did that mean? Unknown to the Americans, there had always been “operational” losses, a military term that meant nothing more mysterious than flying accidents. One of the reasons that his boss had taken Carlos Larson on was to mitigate that wastage of resources, and it had, initially, shown promise—until very recently. Why the sudden jump in losses? If the Americans had somehow intercepted them, the air crews would have shown up in courtrooms and jails, wouldn’t they? Cortez had to dismiss that thought.

  Sabotage, perhaps? What if someone were placing explosives in the aircraft, like the Arab terrorists did ... ? Unlikely ... or was it? Did anyone check for that? It wouldn’t take much. Even minor damage to a low-flying aircraft could face the pilot with a problem whose solution required more time than he had in altitude. Even a single blasting cap could do it, not even a cubic centimeter ... he’d have to check that out. But, then, who would be doing it? The Americans? But what if it became known that the Americans were placing bombs on aircraft? Would they take that political risk? Probably not. Who else, then? The Colombians might. Some senior Colombian military officer, operating entirely on his own ... or in the pay of the yanquis? That was possible. It couldn’t be a government operation, Cortez was sure. There were too many informants there, too.

  Would it have to be a bomb? Why not contaminated gasoline? Why not minor tampering with an engine, a frayed control cable ... or a flight instrument. What was it that Larson had said about having to watch instruments at low level? What if some mechanic had altered the setting on the artificial horizon ... ? Or merely arranged for it to stop working ... something in the electrical system, perhaps? How hard was it to make a small airplane stop flying? Whom to ask? Larson?

  Cortez grumbled to himself. This was undirected speculation, decidedly unprofessional. There were countless possibilities. He knew that something was probably happening, but not what it was. And only probably, he admitted to himself. The unusually large number of missing aircraft could merely be a statistical anomaly—he didn’t believe that, but forced himself to consider the possibility. A series of coincidences—there was not an intelligence academy in the world that encouraged its students to believe in coincidences, and yet how many strange coincidences had he encountered in his professional career?

  “The rules are changing,” he muttered to himself.

  “What?” the driver asked.

  “Back to the airport. My Caracas flight leaves in less than an hour.”

  “Sí, jefe. ”

  Cortez lifted off on time. He had to travel to Venezuela first for the obvious reasons. Moira might get curious, might want to see his ticket, might ask his flight number, and besides, American agents would be less interested in people who flew there than those who flew directly to Bogotá. Four hours later he made his Avianca connection to El Dorado International Airport, wh
ere he met a private plane for the last hop over the mountains.

  Equipment was issued as always, with a single exception. Chavez noted that nobody was signing for anything. That was a real break from routine. The Army always had people sign for their gear. If you broke it or lost it, well, though they might not make you pay for it, you had to account for it in one way or another.

  But not now.

  The load-outs differed slightly from one man to the next. Chavez, the squad scout, got the lightest load, while Julio Vega, one of the machine-gunners, got the heaviest. Ding got eleven magazines for his MP-5 submachine gun, a total of 330 rounds. The M-203 grenade launchers that two squad members had attached to their rifles were the only heavy firepower they’d be carrying in.

  His uniform was not the usual stripe-and-splotch Army fatigue pattern, but rather rip-stop khaki because they weren’t supposed to look like Americans to the casual observer, if any. Khaki clothing was not the least unusual in Colombia. Jungle fatigues were. A floppy green hat instead of a helmet, and a scarf to tie over his hair. A small can of green spray paint and two sticks of facial camouflage “makeup.” A waterproof map case with several maps; Captain Ramirez got one also. Twelve feet of rope and a snaplink, issued to everyone. A short-range FM radio of an expensive commercial type that was nonetheless better and cheaper than the one the Army used. Seven-power compact binoculars, Japanese. American-style web gear of the type used by every Army in the world, actually made in Spain. Two one-quart canteens to hang on the web belt, and a third two-quart water bottle for his rucksack, American, commercial. A large supply of water-purification tablets—they’d resupply their own water, which wasn’t a surprise.