Clear and Present Danger

  “You forget your place, Señor Cortez!” Escobedo snarled back.

  Félix bit off his own reply and managed to speak reasonably. “You think the norteamericanos are fools because they are unable to stop your smuggling. Their weakness is a political failing, not one of professional expertise. You do not understand that, and so I will explain it to you. Their borders are easy to violate because the Americans have a tradition of open borders. You confuse that with inefficiency. It is not. They have highly efficient police with the best scientific methods in the world—do you know that the Russian KGB reads American police textbooks? And copies their techniques? The American police are hamstrung because their political leadership does not allow them to act as they wish to act—and as they could act, in a moment, if those restrictions were ever eased. The American FBI—the federales—have resources beyond your comprehension. I know—they hunted me in Puerto Rico and came within a hair of capturing me along with Ojeda—and I am a trained intelligence officer.”

  “Yes, yes,” Escobedo said patiently. “So what are you telling me?”

  “Exactly what did this dead American do for you?”

  “He laundered vast sums of money for us, and it continues to generate clean income for us. He set up a laundering scheme that we continue to use and—”

  “Get your money out at once. If this yanqui was as efficient as you say, it is very likely that he left evidence behind. If he did so, then it is likely that those records were found.”

  “If so, then why have the federales not acted? They’ve had over a month now.” Escobedo turned around to grab a bottle of brandy. He rarely indulged, but this was a time for it. Pinta had been especially fine tonight, and he enjoyed telling Cortez that his expertise, while useful, was not entirely crucial.

  “Jefe, perhaps it will not happen this time, but someday you will learn that chances such as you took in this case are foolish.”

  Escobedo waved the snifter under his nose. “As you say, Colonel. Now, what about these new rules you speak of?”

  Chavez was already fully briefed, of course. They’d had a “walk-through /talk-through” on a sand table as part of their mission brief, and every man in the unit had the terrain and their way through it committed to memory. The objective was an airfield designated RENO. He’d seen satellite and low-oblique photos of the site. He didn’t know that it had been fingered by someone named Bert Russo, confirming an earlier intelligence report. It was a gravel strip about five thousand feet long, easy enough for a twin-engine aircraft, and marginally safe for a larger one, if it were lightly loaded—with grass, for instance, which was bulky but not especially heavy. The sergeant navigated by the compass strapped to his wrist. Every fifty yards he’d check the compass, sight on a tree or other object on the proper line of bearing, and head for it, at which time the procedure would begin again. He moved slowly and quietly, listening for any vaguely human noise and looking around with the night-vision scope that he wore on his head. His weapon was loaded and locked, but the selector switch was on “safe.” Vega, the second or “slack” man in the line, was the buffer between Chavez’s point position and the main body of the unit, fifty meters behind Vega. His machine gun made for a formidable buffer. If contact were made, their first thought would be evasion, but if evasion proved impossible, then they were to eliminate whatever stood in their path as quickly and violently as possible.

  After two hours and two kilometers, Ding picked a spot to rest, a preselected rally point. He raised his hand and twirled it around in a lasso-motion to communicate what he was doing. They could have pushed a little harder, but the flight, as all lengthy helicopter flights, had been tiring, and the captain hadn’t wanted to press too hard. They were not in fact expected to reach the objective until the following night. Every other word in the mission brief had been “Caution!” He remembered smirking every time he’d heard that. Now the amusement had left him. That guy Clark had been right. It was different in Indian Country. The price of failure here would not be the embarrassment of having your “MILES” beeper go off.

  Chavez shook his head to clear away the thought. He had a job. It was a job for which he was fully trained and equipped, and it was a job which he wanted to do.

  His rest spot was a small, dry knoll, which he scanned for snakes before sitting down. He made one last scan of the area before switching off his goggles to save battery time, and pulled out his canteen for a drink. It was hot, but not terribly so. High eighties, he thought, and the humidity was well up there also. If it was this hot at night, he didn’t want to think about the daytime heat. At least they’d be bellied up during daylight. And Chavez was accustomed to heat. At Hunter-Liggett he’d marched over hills through temperatures over a hundred-ten degrees. He didn’t much like it, but he could do it easily enough.

  “How we doin’, Chavez?”

  “Muy bien, Capitán,” Chavez replied. “I figure we’ve made two miles, maybe two and a half—three klicks. That’s Checkpoint WRENCH right over there, sir.”

  “Seen anything?”

  “Negative. Just birds and bugs. Not even a wild pig or anything ... you suppose people hunt here?”

  “Good bet,” Ramirez said after a moment’s thought. “That’s something we’ll want to keep in mind, Ding.”

  Chavez looked around. He could see one man, but the rest blended in with the ground. He’d worried about the khaki clothing—not as effective camouflage as what he was accustomed to—but in the field it seemed to disappear just fine. Ding took another drink, then shook his canteen to see how noisy it was. That was a nice thing about the plastic canteens. Water sloshing around wasn’t as noisy as with the old aluminum ones. It was still something to worry about. Any kind of noise was, in the bush. He popped a cough drop to keep his mouth moist and made ready to head out.

  “Next stop, Checkpoint CHAINSAW. Captain, who thinks those dumbass names up?”

  Ramirez chuckled quietly. “Why, I do, Sergeant. Don’t feel bad. My ex didn’t much like my taste either, so she went and married a real-estate hustler.”

  “Ain’t broads a bitch?”

  “Mine sure was.”

  Even the captain, Chavez thought. Christ, nobody has a girl or a family behind.... The thought was distantly troubling, but the issue at hand was getting past WRENCH to CHAINSAW in less than two hours.

  The next hop involved crossing a road—what they called a road. It was a straight dirt-gravel track that stretched off to infinity in both directions. Chavez took his time approaching and crossing it. The rest of the squad halted fifty meters from the roadway, allowing the point man to move left and right of the crossing point to make sure it was secure. That done, he made a brief radio transmission to Captain Ramirez, in Spanish:

  “The crossing is clear.” His answer was a double click of static as the captain keyed the transmit key on his radio, but without saying anything. Chavez answered in kind and waited for the squad to cross.

  The terrain here was agreeably flat, enough so that he was wondering why their training had been in towering, airless mountains. Probably because it was well hidden, he decided. The forest, or jungle, was thick, but not quite as bad as it had been in Panama. There was ample evidence that people occasionally farmed here, probably slash-and-burn operations, judging from the numerous small clearings. He’d seen half a dozen crumbling shacks where some poor bastard had tried to raise a family, or farm for beans, or something that hadn’t worked out. The poverty that such evidence spoke of was depressing to Chavez. The people who lived in this region had names not unlike his, spoke a language differing only in accent from that spoken in his childhood home. Had his great-grandfather not decided to come to California and pick lettuce, might he have grown up in such a place? If so, how might he have turned out? Might Ding Chavez have ended up running drugs or being a shooter for the Cartel bigshots? That was a truly disturbing thought. His personal pride was too great to consider the possibility seriously, but its basic truth hovered at the edges of
his conscious thoughts. There was poverty here, and poor people seized at whatever opportunity presented itself. How could you face your children and say that you could not feed them without doing something illegal? You could not, of course. What would a child understand other than an empty belly? Poor people had poor options. Chavez had found the Army almost by accident, and had found in it a true home of security and opportunity and fellowship and respect. But down here ... ?

  Poor bastards. But what about the people from his own barrio? Their lives poisoned, their neighborhoods corrupted. Who was to blame for it all?

  Less thinkin’ and more workin’ , ’mano, he told himself. Chavez switched on his night scope for the next part of the trek.

  He moved standing straight up, not crouched as one would expect. His feet caressed the ground carefully, making sure that there wasn’t a twig to snap, and he avoided bushes that might have leaves or thorns to grasp at his clothing and make their own rustling noise. Wherever possible he cut across clearings, skirting the treelines to keep from being silhouetted against the cloudy sky. But the main enemy at night was noise, not sight. It was amazing how acute your hearing got in the bush. He thought he could hear every bug, every birdcall, each puff of breeze in the leaves far over his head. But there were no human sounds. No coughs or mutters, none of the distinctive metallic noises that only men make. While he didn’t exactly relax, he moved with confidence, just like on field-training exercises, he realized. Every fifty meters he’d stop and listen for those behind him. Not a whisper, not even Oso with his machine gun and heavy load. In their quiet was safety.

  How good was the opposition? he wondered. Well equipped, probably. With the sort of money they had, you could buy any sort of weapons—in America or anyplace else. But trained soldiers? No way.

  So how good are they? Ding asked himself. Like the members of his old gang, perhaps. They’d cultivate physical toughness, but not in a structured way. They’d be bullies, tough when they had the edge in weapons or numbers. Because of that they wouldn’t be skilled in weapons use or fieldcraft; they’d rely on intimidation, and they’d be surprised when people failed to be intimidated. Some might be good hunters, but they wouldn’t know how to move as a team. They wouldn’t know about overwatch, mutual support, and grazing fire. They might know ambushes, but the finer points of reconnaissance would be lost on them. They would not have proper discipline. Chavez was sure that when they got to their objective, he’d find men smoking on guard. The arts of soldiering took time to acquire—time and discipline and desire. No, he was up against bullies. And bullies were cowards. These were mercenaries who acted for money. Chavez, on the other hand, took great pride that he performed his duties for love of country and, though he didn’t quite think of it in those terms, for love of his fellow soldiers. His earlier uneasiness at the departure of the helicopter faded away. Though his mission was reconnaissance—intelligence-gathering—he found himself hoping that he’d have his chance to use the MP-5 SD2.

  He reached CHAINSAW right on schedule. There the squad rested again, and Chavez led off to the final objective for the night’s march, Checkpoint RASP. It was a small wooded knoll, five kilometers from their objective. Ding took his time checking RASP out. He looked especially for evidence of animals that might be hunted, and the tracks of men who might be doing the hunting. He found nothing. The squad arrived twenty minutes after he called them in by radio, having “hooked” and reversed their path to make sure that there were no trailers. Captain Ramirez examined the site as carefully as Chavez had done and came to the same positive conclusion. The squad members paired off to find places to eat and sleep. Ding teamed with Sergeant Vega, taking a security position along the most likely threat axis—northeast—to site one of the squad’s two SAW machine guns. The squad medic—Sergeant Olivero—took a man to a nearby stream to replenish canteens, taking special care that everyone used his water-purification tablets. A latrine site was agreed upon, and men used that as well to dump the trash left over from their daily rations. But cleaning weapons came first, even though they hadn’t been used. Each pair of soldiers cleaned their weapons one at a time, then worried about food.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” Vega said as the sun climbed over the trees.

  “Nice and flat,” Chavez agreed with a yawn. “Gonna be a hot fucker down here, though.”

  “Have one o’ these, ’mano.” Vega passed over an envelope of Gatorade concentrate.

  “All right!” Chavez loved the stuff. He tore open the envelope and dumped the contents into his canteen, swishing it around to get the powder mixed in properly. “Captain know about this?”

  “Nah—why worry him?”

  “Right.” Chavez pocketed the empty envelope. “Shame they don’t make instant beer, isn’t it?” They traded a chuckle. Neither man would do something so foolish, but both agreed that a cold beer wasn’t all that bad an idea in the abstract.

  “Flip you for first sleep,” Vega said next. It turned out that he had a single U.S. quarter for the task. They’d each been issued five hundred dollars’ equivalent in local currency, but all in paper, since coins make noise. It came up heads. Chavez got to stand watch on the gun while Vega curled up for sleep.

  Ding settled down in the position. Julio had selected a good one. It was behind a spreading bush of one kind or another, with a shallow berm of dirt in front of him that could stop bullets but didn’t obstruct his view, and the SAW had a good field of fire out to nearly three hundred meters. Ding checked that the weapon had a round chambered, but that the selector switch was also on “safe.” He took out his binoculars to survey the area.

  “How do things look, Sergeant?” Captain Ramirez asked quietly.

  “Nothing moving at all, sir. Why don’t you catch some Zs? We’ll keep watch for ya’.” Officers, Ding knew, have to be looked after. And if sergeants didn’t do it, who would?

  Ramirez surveyed the position. It had been well selected. Both men had eaten and refreshed themselves as good soldiers do, and would be well rested by sundown—over ten hours away. The captain patted Chavez on the shoulder before returning to his own position.

  “All ready, sir,” the communications sergeant—Ingeles—reported. The satellite-radio antenna was set up. It was only two bits of steel, about the size and shape of grade-school rulers, linked together in a cross, with a bit of wire for a stand. Ramirez checked his watch. It was time to transmit.

  “VARIABLE, this is KNIFE, over.” The signal went twenty-two thousand miles to a geosynchronous communications satellite, which relayed it back down toward Panama. It took about one-third of a second, and two more seconds passed before the reply came down. The circuit was agreeably free of static.

  “KNIFE, this is VARIABLE. Your signal is five by five. Over.”

  “We are in position, Checkpoint RASP. All is quiet, nothing to report, over.”

  “Roger, copy. Out.”

  In the hilltop communications van, Mr. Clark occupied a seat in the corner by the door. He wasn’t running the operation—far from it—but Ritter wanted his tactical expertise available in case it was needed. On the wall opposite the racks of communications gear was a large tactical map which showed the squads and their various checkpoints. All had made them on schedule. At least whoever had set this operation up had known—or listened to people who did—what men in the bush could and could not do. The expectations for time and distance were reasonable.

  That’s nice for a change, Clark thought. He looked around the van. Aside from the two communicators, there were two senior people from the Directorate of Operations, neither of whom had what Clark would call expertise in this particular sort of operation—though they were close to Ritter and dependable. Well, he admitted, people with my sort of experience are mostly retired now.

  Clark’s heart was out there in the field. He’d never operated in the Americas, at least not in the jungles of the Americas, but for all that he’d “been there”—out in the boonies, alone as a man could be, your
only lifeline back to friendly forces a helicopter that might or might not show, tethered by an invisible thread of radio energy. The radios were far more reliable now; that was one positive change. For what it was worth. If something went wrong, these radios would not, however, bring in a flight of “fast-movers” whose afterburning engines rattled the sky and whose bombloads shook the ground fifteen minutes after you called for help. No, not this time.

  Christ, do they know that? Do they really know what that fact means?

  No, they don’t. They can’t. They’re all too young. Kids. They’re all little kids. That they were older, bigger, and tougher than his own children was for the moment beside the point. Clark was a man who’d operated in Cambodia and Vietnam—North and South. Always with small teams of men with guns and radios, almost always trying to stay hidden, looking for information and trying to get the hell away without being noticed. Mostly succeeding, but some of them had been very, very close.

  “So far, so good,” the senior Operations guy observed as he reached for a coffee mug. His companion nodded agreement.

  Clark merely raised an eyebrow. And what the hell do you two know about this?

  The Director, Moira saw, was excited about TARPON. As well he might be, she thought as she made her notes. It would take about a week, but already the seizure notices were being scratched in. Four Justice Department specialists had spent more than a day going through the report Mark Bright had delivered. Electronic banking, she realized, had made the job much easier. Somewhere in the Department of Justice there was someone who could access the computerized records of every bank in the world. Or maybe not in Justice. Maybe one of the intelligence agencies, or maybe a private contractor, because the legality of the matter was slightly vague. In any case, comparing records of the Securities and Exchange Commission with the numerous bank transactions, they had already identified the drug money used to finance the projects in which the “victim”—at least his family had been real victims, Moira told herself—had sought to launder it. She’d never known the wheels of justice to turn so quickly.