Clear and Present Danger

  “We will not let this one slip past with us standing by and deploring the event,” the President said quietly as he looked up. “They killed my friend. They killed my ambassador. They have directly challenged the sovereign power of the United States of America. They want to play with the big boys,” the President went on in a voice that was grotesquely calm. “Well, they’re going to have to play by the big boys’ rules. Peter,” he said to the AG, “there is now an informal Presidential Finding that the drug Cartel has initiated an undeclared war against the government of the United States. They have chosen to act like a hostile nation-state. We will treat them as we would treat a hostile nation-state. As President, I am resolved to carry the fight to the enemy as we would carry it to any other originator of state-sponsored terrorism.”

  The AG didn’t like that, but nodded agreement anyway. The President turned to Moore and Ritter.

  “The gloves come off. I just made the usual wimpy-ass statement for my press secretary to deliver, but the fucking gloves come off. Come up with a plan. I want these bastards hurt. No more of this ‘sending a message’ crap. I want them to get the message whether the phone rings or not. Mr. Ritter, you have your hunting license, and there’s no bag limit. Is that sufficiently clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” the DDO answered. Actually, it wasn’t. The President hadn’t said “kill” once, as the tape recorders that were surely somewhere in this room would show. But there were some things that you didn’t do, and one of them was that you did not force the President to speak clearly when clarity was something he wished to avoid.

  “Find yourselves a cabin and come up with a plan. Peter, I want you to stay here with me for a while.” The next message: the Attorney General, once having acceded to the President’s desire to Do Something, didn’t need to know exactly what was going to be done. Admiral Cutter, who was more familiar with Camp David than the other two, led the way to one of the guest cabins. Since he was in front, Moore and Ritter could not see the smile on his face.

  Ryan was just getting to his office, having driven himself in, a habit which he had just unlearned. The senior intelligence watch officer was waiting for him in the corridor as Jack got off the elevator. The briefing took a whole four minutes, after which Ryan found himself sitting in the office with nothing at all to do. It was strange. He was now privy to everything the U.S. government knew about the assassination of its people—not much more than what he’d heard on the car radio coming in, actually, though he now had names to put on the “unnamed sources.” Sometimes that was important, but not this time. The DCI and DDO, he learned at once, were up at Camp David with the President.

  Why not me? Jack asked himself in surprise.

  It should have occurred to him immediately, of course, but he was not yet used to being a senior executive. With nothing to do, his mind went along that tangent for several minutes. The conclusion was an obvious one. He didn’t need to know what was being talked about—but that had to mean that something was already happening, didn’t it ... ? If so, what? And for how long?

  By noon the next day, an Air Force C-141B Starlifter transport had landed at El Dorado International. Security was like nothing anyone had seen since the funeral of Anwar Sadat. Armed helicopters circled overhead. Armored vehicles sat with their gun tubes trained outward. A full battalion of paratroops ringed the airport, which was shut down for three hours. That didn’t count the honor guard, of course, all of whom felt as though they had no honor at all, that it had been stripped away from their army and their nation by ... them.

  Esteban Cardinal Valdéz prayed over the coffins, accompanied by the chief rabbi of Bogotá’s small Jewish community. The Vice President attended on behalf of the American government, and one by one the Colombian Army handed the caskets over to enlisted pallbearers from all of the American uniformed services. The usual, predictable speeches were made, the most eloquent being a brief address by Colombia’s Attorney General, who shed unashamed tears for his friend and college classmate. The Vice President boarded his aircraft and left, followed by the big Lockheed transport.

  The President’s statement, already delivered, spoke of reaffirming the rule of law to which Emil Jacobs had dedicated his life. But that statement seemed as thin as the air at El Dorado International even to those who didn’t know better.

  In the town of Eight Mile, Alabama, a suburb of Mobile, a police sergeant named Ernie Braden was cutting his front lawn with a riding mower. A burglary investigator, he knew all the tricks of the people whose crimes he handled, including how to bypass complex alarm systems, even the sophisticated models used by wealthy investment bankers. That skill, plus the information he picked up from office chatter—the narcs’ bullpen was right next to the burglary section—enabled him to offer his services to people who had money with which to pay for the orthodonture and education of his children. It wasn’t so much that Braden was a corrupt cop as that he’d simply been on the job for over twenty years and no longer gave much of a damn. If people wanted to use drugs, then the hell with them. If druggies wanted to kill one another off, then so much the better for the rest of society. And if some arrogant prick of a banker turned out to be a crook among crooks, then that also was too bad; all Braden had been asked to do was shake the man’s house to make sure that he’d left no records behind. It was a shame about the man’s wife and kids, of course, but that was called playing with fire.

  Braden rationalized the damage done to society simply by continuing to investigate his burglaries, and even catching a real hood from time to time, though that was rare enough. Burglary was a pretty safe crime to commit. It never got the attention it deserved. Neither did the people whose job it was to track them down—probably the most unrewarded segment of the law-enforcement profession. He’d been taking the lieutenant’s exam for nine years, and never quite made it. Braden needed or at least wanted the money that the promotion would bring, only to see the promotions go to the hotshots in Narcotics and Homicide while he slaved away ... and why not take the goddamned money? More than anything else, Ernie Braden was tired of it all. Tired of the long hours. Tired of the crime victims who took their frustration out on him when he was just trying to do his job. Tired of being unappreciated within his own community of police officers. Tired of being sent out to local schools for the pro forma anticrime lectures that nobody ever listened to. He was even tired of coaching little-league baseball, though that had once been the single joy of his life. Tired of just about everything. But he couldn’t afford to retire, either. Not yet, anyway.

  The noise from the Sears riding mower crackled through the hot, humid air of the quiet street on which he and his family lived. He wiped a handkerchief across his sweaty brow and contemplated the cold beer he’d have as soon as he was finished. It could have been worse. Until three years ago he’d pushed a goddamned Lawn-Boy across the grass. At least now he could sit down as he did his weekly chore, cutting the goddamned grass. His wife had a real thing about the lawn and garden. As if it mattered, Braden grumbled.

  He concentrated on the job at hand, making sure that the spinning blades had at least two sweeps over every square inch of the green crap that, this early in the season, grew almost as fast as you cut it. He didn’t notice the Plymouth minivan coming down the street. Nor did he know that the people who paid him his supplementary income were most unhappy with a recent clandestine effort he’d made on their behalf.

  Braden had several eccentricities, as do many men and most police officers. In his case, he never went anywhere unarmed. Not even to cut the grass. Under the back of his greasy shirt was a Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special, a five-shot stainless steel revolver that was as close as he’d ever get to something with “chief” written on it. When he finally noticed the minivan pull up behind his Chevy Citation, he took little note of it, except that there were two men in it, and they seemed to be looking at him.

  His cop’s instinct didn’t entirely fail him, however. They were looking real hard at him. That made h
im look back, mainly in curiosity. Who’d be interested in him on a Saturday afternoon? When the passenger-side door opened and he saw the gun, that question faded away.

  When Braden rolled off the mower, his foot came off the brake pedal, which had the opposite effect as in a car. The mower stopped in two feet, its blades still churning away on the bluegrass-and-fescue mix of the policeman’s front yard. Braden came off just at the ejection port of the mower assembly, and felt tiny bits of grit and sand peppering his knees, but that, too, was not a matter of importance at the moment. His revolver was already out when the man from the van fired his first round.

  He was using an Ingram Mac-10, probably a 9-millimeter, and the man didn’t know how to use it well. His first round was roughly on target, but the next eight merely decorated the sky as the notoriously unstable weapon jerked out of control, not even hitting the mower. Sergeant Braden fired two rounds back, but the range was over ten yards, and the Chiefs Special had only a two-inch barrel, which gave it an effective combat range measured in feet, not yards. With the instant and unexpected stress added to his poorly selected weapon, he managed to hit the van behind his target with only one round.

  But machine-gun fire is a highly distinctive sound—not the least mistakable for firecrackers or any other normal noise—and the neighborhood immediately realized that something very unusual was happening. At a house across the street a fifteen-year-old boy was cleaning his rifle. It was an old Marlin .22 lever-action that had once belonged to his grandfather, and its proud owner had learned to play third base from Sergeant Braden, whom he thought to be a really neat guy. The young man in question, Erik Sanderson, set down his cleaning gear and walked to the window just in time to see his former coach shooting from behind his mower at somebody. In the clarity that comes in such moments, Erik Sanderson realized that people were trying to kill his coach, a police officer, that he had a rifle and cartridges ten feet away, and that it Would Be All Right for him to use the rifle to come to the aid of the policeman. The fact that he’d spent the morning plinking away at tin cans merely meant that he was ready. Erik Sanderson’s main ambition in life was to become a U.S. Marine, and he seized the chance to get an early feel for what it was all about.

  While the sound of gunfire continued to crackle around the wooded street, he grabbed the rifle and a handful of the small copper-colored rimfire cartridges and ran out to the front porch. First he twisted the spring-loaded rod that pushed rounds down the magazine tube which hung under the barrel. He pulled it out too far, dropping it, but the young man had the good sense to ignore that for the moment. He fed the .22 rounds into the loading slot one at a time, surprised that his hands were already sweaty. When he had fourteen rounds in, he bent down to get the rod, and two rounds fell out the front of the tube. He took the time to reload them, reinserted the rod, twisting it shut, then slammed his hand down and up on the lever, loading the gun and cocking the exposed hammer.

  He was surprised to see that he didn’t have a shot, and ran down the sidewalk to the street, taking a position across the hood of his father’s pickup truck. From this point he could see two men, each firing a submachine gun from the hip. He looked just in time to see Sergeant Braden fire off his last round, which missed as badly as the first four had. The police officer turned to run for the safety of his house, but tripped over his own feet and had trouble getting up. Both gunmen advanced on Braden, loading new magazines into their weapons. Erik Sanderson’s hands were trembling as he shouldered his rifle. It had old-fashioned iron sights, and he had to stop and remind himself how to line them up as he’d been taught in Boy Scouts, with the front-sight post centered in the notch of the rear-sight leaf, the top of the post even with the top of the leaf as he maneuvered it on a target.

  He was horrified to be too late. Both men blew his little-league coach to shreds with extended bursts at point-blank range. Something snapped inside Erik’s head at that moment. He sighted on the head of the nearer gunman and jerked off his round.

  Like most young and inexperienced shooters, he immediately looked up to see what had happened. Nothing. He’d missed—with a rifle at a range of only thirty yards, he’d missed. Amazed, he sighted again and squeezed the trigger, but nothing happened. The hammer was down. He’d forgotten to cock the rifle. Swearing something his mother would have slapped him to hear, he reloaded the Marlin .22 and took exquisitely careful aim, squeezing off his next shot.

  The murderers hadn’t heard his first shot, and with their ears still ringing from their own shots, they didn’t hear the second, but one man’s head jerked to the side with the wasp’s-sting impact of the round. The man knew what had happened, turned to his left, and fired off a long burst despite the crushing pain that seized his head in an instant. The other one saw Erik and fired as well.

  But the young man was now jacking rounds into the breech of his rifle as fast as he could fire them. He watched in rage as he kept missing, unconsciously flinching as bullets came his way, trying to kill both men before they could get back into their car. He had the satisfaction of seeing them duck behind cover, and wasted his last three rounds trying to shoot through the car body to get them. But a .22 can’t accomplish that, and the minivan pulled away.

  Erik watched it pull away, wishing he’d loaded more rounds into his rifle, wishing that he could try a shot through the back window before the car turned right and disappeared.

  The young man didn’t have the courage to go over and see what had happened to Sergeant Braden. He just stayed there, leaning across the truck, cursing himself for letting them get away. He didn’t know, and would never believe, that he had, in fact, done better than many trained police officers could have done.

  In the minivan, one of the gunmen took more note of the bullet in his chest than the one in his head. But it was the head shot that would kill him. As the man bent down, a lacerated artery let go completely and showered the inside of the car with blood, much to the surprise of the dying man, who had but a few seconds to realize what had happ—

  Another Air Force flight, as luck had it, also a C-141B, took Mr. Clark out of Panama, heading for Andrews, where rapid preparations were being made for the arrival ceremony. Before the funeral flight arrived, Clark was in Langley talking to his boss, Bob Ritter. For the first time in a generation, the Operations Directorate had been granted a presidential hunting license. John Clark, carried on the personnel rolls as a case-officer instructor, was the CIA chief hunter. He hadn’t been asked to exercise that particular talent in a very long time, but he still knew how.

  Ritter and Clark didn’t watch the TV coverage of the arrival. All that was part of history now, and while both men had an interest in history, it was mainly in the sort that is never written down.

  “We’re going to take another look at the idea you handed me at St. Kitts,” the Deputy Director (Operations) said.

  “What’s the objective?” Clark asked carefully. It wasn’t hard to guess why this was happening, or the originator of the directive. That was the reason for his caution.

  “The short version is revenge,” Ritter answered.

  “Retribution is a more acceptable word,” Clark pointed out. Lacking in formal education though he was, he did read a good deal.

  “The targets represent a clear and present danger to the security of the United States.”

  “The President said that?”

  “His words,” Ritter affirmed.

  “Fine. That makes it all legal. Not any less dangerous, but legal.”

  “Can you do it?”

  Clark smiled in a distant, smoky way. “I run my side of the op my way. Otherwise, forget it. I don’t want to die from oversight. No interference from this end. You give me the target list and the assets I need. I do the rest, my way, my schedule.”

  “Agreed,” Ritter nodded.

  Clark was more than surprised by that. “Then I can do it. What about the kids we have running around in the jungle?”

  “We’re pulling them out t
onight.”

  “To be reinserted where?” Clark asked.

  Ritter told him.

  “That’s really dangerous,” the case officer observed, though he was not surprised by the answer. It had probably been planned all along. But, if it had ...

  “We know that.”

  “I don’t like it,” Clark said after a moment’s thought. “It complicates things.”

  “We don’t pay you to like it.”

  Clark had to agree to that. He was honest enough with himself, though, to admit that part of it he did like. A job such as this, after all, had gotten him into the protective embrace of the Central Intelligence Agency in the first place, so many years before. But that job had been on a free-agent basis. This one was legal, but arguably. Once that would not have mattered to Mr. Clark, but with a wife and kids, it did now.

  “Do I get to see the family for a couple of days?”

  “Sure. It’ll take awhile to get things in place. I’ll have all the information you need messengered down to The Farm.”

  “What do we call this one?”

  “RECIPROCITY.”

  “I guess that about covers it.” Clark’s face broke into a grin. He walked out of the room toward the elevator. The new DDI was there, Dr. Ryan, heading to Judge Moore’s office. They’d never quite met, Clark and Ryan, and this wasn’t the time, though their lives had already touched on two occasions.

  14.

  Snatch and Grab

  “I MUST THANK your Director Jacobs,” Juan said.

  “Perhaps we will meet someday.” He’d taken his time with this one. Soon, he judged, he’d be able to extract any information he wanted from her with the same intimate confidence that might be expected of husband and wife—after all, true love did not allow for secrets, did it?