Clear and Present Danger

  They didn’t call it Happy Hour at the base NCO club anymore, but nothing had really changed. Stuart had served his time in the U.S. Navy as a legal officer aboard an aircraft carrier—even in the Navy, a mobile city of six thousand people needed a lawyer or two—and knew about sailors and suds. So he’d visited a uniform store and gotten the proper outfit of a Coast Guard chief yeoman complete with the appropriate ribbons and just walked onto the base, heading for the NCO club where, as long as he paid for his drinks in cash, nobody would take great note of his presence. He’d been a yeoman himself while aboard USS Eisenhower, and knew the lingo well enough to pass any casual test of authenticity. The next trick, of course, was finding a crewman from the cutter Panache.

  The cutter was finishing up the maintenance period that always followed a deployment, preparatory to yet another cruise, and her crewmen would be hitting the club after working hours to enjoy their afternoon beers while they could. It was just a matter of finding the right ones. He knew the names, and had checked tape archives at the local TV stations to get a look at the faces. It was nothing more than good luck that the one he found was Bob Riley. He knew more about that man’s career than the other chiefs.

  The master chief boatswain’s mate strolled in at 4:30 after ten hot hours supervising work on various topside gear. He’d had a light lunch and sweated off all of that and more, and now figured that a few mugs of beer would replace all the fluids and electrolytes that he’d lost under the hot Alabama sun. The bar-maid saw him coming and had a tall one of Samuel Adams all ready by the time he selected a stool. Edward Stuart got there a minute and half a mug later.

  “Ain’t you Bob Riley?”

  “That’s right,” the bosun said before turning. “Who’re you?”

  “Didn’t think you’d remember me. Matt Stevens. You near tore my head off on the Mellon awhile back—said I’d never get my shit together.”

  “Looks like I was wrong,” Riley noted, searching his memory for the face.

  “No, you were right. I was a real punk back then, but you—well, I owe you one, Master Chief. I did get my shit together. Mainly ’causa what you said.” Stuart stuck out his hand. “I figure I owe you a beer at least.”

  It wasn’t all that unusual a thing for Riley to hear. “Hell, we all need straigthenin’ out. I got bounced off a coupla bulkheads when I was a kid, too, y’know?”

  “Done a little of it myself.” Stuart grinned. “You make chief an’ you gotta be respectable and responsible, right? Otherwise who keeps the officers straightened out?”

  Riley grunted agreement. “Who you workin’ for?”

  “Admiral Hally. He’s at Buzzard’s Point. Had to fly down with him to meet with the base commander. I think he’s off playing golf right now. Never did get the hang of that game. You’re on Panache, right?”

  “You bet.”

  “Captain Wegener?”

  “Yep.” Riley finished off his beer and Stuart waved to the bar-maid for refills.

  “Is he as good as they say?”

  “Red’s a better seaman ’n I am,” Riley replied honestly.

  “Nobody’s that good, Master Chief. Hey, I was there when you took the boat across—what was the name of that container boat that snapped in half ... ?”

  “Arctic Star. ” Riley smiled, remembering. “Jesus, if we didn’t earn our pay that afternoon.”

  “I remember watching. Thought you were crazy. Well, shit. All I do now is drive a word processor for the Admiral, but I did a little stuff in a forty-one boat before I made chief, working outa Norfolk. Nothing like Arctic Star, of course.”

  “Don’t knock it, Matt. One of those jobs’s enough for a couple years of sea stories. I’ll take an easy one any day. I’m gettin’ a little old for that dramatic stuff.”

  “How’s the food here?”

  “Fair.”

  “Buy you dinner?”

  “Matt, I don’t even remember what I said to you.”

  “I remember,” Stuart assured him. “God knows how I woulda turned out if you hadn’t turned me around. No shit, man. I owe you one. Come on.” He waved Riley over to a booth against the wall. They were quickly going through their third beer when Chief Quartermaster Oreza arrived.

  “Hey, Portagee,” Riley called to his fellow master chief.

  “I see the beer’s cold, Bob.”

  Riley waved to his companion. “This here’s Matt Stevens. We were on the Mellon together. Did I ever tell you about the Arctic Star job?”

  “Only about thirty times,” Oreza noted.

  “You wanna tell the story, Matt?” Riley asked.

  “Hey, I didn’t even see it all, you know—”

  “Yeah, half the crew was puking their guts out. I’m talking a real gale blowing. No way the helo could take off, and this container boat—the after half of her, that is; the fo’ard part was already gone—look like she was gonna roll right there an’ then ...”

  Within an hour, two more rounds had been consumed, and the three men were chomping their way through a disk of knockwurst and sauerkraut, which went well with beer. Stuart stuck with stories about his new Admiral, the Chief Counsel of the Coast Guard, in which legal officers are also line officers, expected to know how to drive ships and command men.

  “Hey, what’s with these stories I been hearing about you an’ those two drug pukes?” the attorney finally asked.

  “What d’ya mean?” Oreza asked. Portagee still had some remaining shreds of sobriety.

  “Hey, the FBI guys went in to see Hally, right? I had to type up his reports on my Zenith, y’know?”

  “What did them FBI guys say?”

  “I’m not supposed—oh, fuck it! Look, you’re all in the clear. The Bureau isn’t doing a fuckin’ thing. They told your skipper ‘go forth and sin no more,’ okay? The shit you got outa those pukes—didn’t you hear? Operation TARPON. That whole sting operation came from you guys. Didn’t you know that?”

  “What?” Riley hadn’t seen a paper or turned on a TV in days. Though he did know about the death of the FBI Director, he had no idea of the connection with his Hang-Ex, as he had taken to calling it in the goat locker.

  Stuart explained what he knew, which was quite a lot.

  “Half a billion dollars?” Oreza observed quietly. “That oughta build us a few new hulls.”

  “Christ knows we need ’em,” Stuart agreed.

  “You guys didn’t really—I mean, you didn’t really ... hang one of the fuckers, did you?” Stuart extracted a Radio Shack mini-tape recorder from his pocket and thumbed the volume switch to the top.

  “Actually it was Portagee’s idea,” Riley said.

  “Couldn’t have done it without you, Bob,” Oreza said generously.

  “Yeah, well, the trick was how to do the hangin’,” Riley explained. “You see, we had to make it look real if we was gonna scare the piss outa the little one. Wasn’t really all that hard once I thought it over. After we got him alone, the pharmacist mate gave him a shot of ether to knock him out for a few minutes, and I rigged a rope harness on his back. When we took him topside, the noose had a hook on the back, so when I looped the noose around his neck, all I hadda do was attach the hook to an eye I put on the harness, so we was hoistin’ him by the harness, not the neck. We didn’t really wanna kill the fucker—well, I did,” Riley said. “But Red didn’t think it was a real good idea.” The bosun grinned at the quartermaster.

  “The other trick was baggin’ him,” Oreza said. “We put a black hood over his head. Well, there was a gauze pad inside soaked in ether. The bastard screamed bloody murder when he smelled it, but it had him knocked out as soon as we ran his ass up to the yardarm.”

  “The little one believed the whole thing. Fucker wet his pants, it was beautiful! Sang like a canary when they got him back to the wardroom. Soon as he was outa sight, of course, we lowered the other one and got him woke back up. They were both half in the bag from smokin’ grass all day. I don’t think they ever figured out w
hat we did to them.”

  No, they didn’t. “Grass?”

  “That was Red’s idea. They had their own pot stash—looked like real cigarettes. We just gave ‘em back to ’em, and they got themselves looped. Throw in the ether and everything, and I bet they never figured out what really happened.”

  Almost right, Stuart thought, hoping that his tape recorder was getting this.

  “I wish we really could have hung ‘em,” Riley said after a few seconds. “Matt, you ain’t never seen anything like what that yacht looked like. Four people, man—butchered ’em like cattle. Ever smell blood? I didn’t know you could. You can,” the bosun assured him. “They raped the wife and the little girl, then cut ’em up like they was—God! You know, I been having nightmares from that? Nightmares—me! Jesus, that’s one sea story I wish I could forget. I got a little girl that age. Those fuckers raped her an’ killed her, and cut her up an’ fed her to the fuckin’ sharks. Just a little girl, not even big enough to drive a car or go out on a date.

  “We’re supposed to be professional cops, right? We’re supposed to be cool about it, don’t get personally involved. All that shit?” Riley asked.

  “That’s what the book says,” Stuart agreed.

  “The book wasn’t written for stuff like this,” Portagee said. “People who do this sort of thing—they ain’t really people. I don’t know what the hell they are, but people they ain’t. You can’t do that kinda shit and be people, Matt.”

  “Hey, what d’you want me to say?” Stuart asked, suddenly defensive, and not acting a part this time. “We got laws to deal with people like that.”

  “Laws ain’t doin’ much good, are they?” Riley asked.

  The difference between the people he was obliged to defend and the people he had to impeach, Stuart told himself through the fog of alcohol, was that the bad ones were his clients and the good ones were not. And now, by impersonating a Coast Guard chief, he too had broken a law, just as these men had done, and like them, he was doing it for some greater good, some higher moral cause. So he asked himself who was right. Not that it mattered, of course. Whatever was “right” was lost somewhere, not to be found in lawbooks or canons of ethics. Yet if you couldn’t find it there, then where the hell was it? But Stuart was a lawyer, and his business was law, not right. Right was the province of judges and juries. Or something like that. Stuart told himself that he shouldn’t drink so much. Drink made confused things clear, and the clear things confused.

  The ride in was far rougher this time. Westerly winds off the Pacific Ocean hit the slopes of the Andes and boiled upward, looking for passes to go through. The resulting turbulence could be felt at thirty thousand feet, and here, only three hundred feet AGL—above ground level—the ride was a hard one, all the more so with the helicopter on its terrain-following autopilot. Johns and Willis were strapped in tight to reduce the effects of the rough ride, and both knew that the people in back were having a bad time indeed as the big Sikorsky jolted up and down in twenty-foot bounds at least ten times per minute. PJ’s hand was on the stick, following the motions of the autopilot but ready to take instant command if the system showed the first sign of failure. This was real flying, as he liked to say. That generally meant the dangerous kind.

  Skimming through this pass—it was more of a saddle, really—didn’ t make it any easier. A ninety-six-hundred-foot peak was to the south, and one of seventy-eight hundred feet to the north, and a lot of Pacific air was being funneled through as the Pave Low roared at two hundred knots. They were heavy, having tanked only a few minutes earlier just off Colombia’s Pacific Coast.

  “There’s Mistrato,” Colonel Johns said. The computer navigation system had already veered them north to pass well clear of the town and any roads. The two pilots were also alert for anything on the ground that hinted at a man or a car or a house. The route had been selected off satellite photographs, of course both daylight and nighttime infrared shots, but there was always the chance of a surprise.

  “Buck, LZ One in four minutes,” PJ called over the intercom.

  “Roger.”

  They were flying over Risaralda Province, part of the great valley that lay between two enormous ridgelines of mountains flung into the sky by a subductal fault in the earth’s crust. PJ’s hobby was geology. He knew how much effort it took to bring his aircraft to this altitude, and he boggled at the forces that could push mountains to the same height.

  “LZ One in sight,” Captain Willis said.

  “Got it.” Colonel Johns took the stick. He keyed his microphone. “One minute. Hot guns.”

  “Right.” Sergeant Zimmer left his position to head aft. Sergeant Bean activated his minigun in case there was trouble. Zimmer slipped and nearly fell on a pool of vomit. That wasn’t unusual. The ride smoothed out now that they were in the lee of the mountains, but there were some very sick kids in back who would be glad to get on firm, unmoving ground. Zimmer had trouble understanding that. It was dangerous on the ground.

  The first squad was up as the helicopter flared to make its first landing, and as before, the moment it touched down, they ran out the back. Zimmer made his count, watched to be certain that everyone got off safely, and notified the pilot to lift off as soon as they were clear.

  Next time, Chavez told himself, next time I fucking walk in and out! He had had some rough chopper rides in his time, but nothing like that one. He led off to the treeline and waited for the remainder of the squad to catch up.

  “Glad to be on the ground?” Vega asked as soon as he got there.

  “I didn’t know I ate that much,” Ding groaned. Everything he’d eaten in the last few hours was still aboard the helicopter. He opened a canteen and drank a pint of water just to wash away the vile taste.

  “I usta love roller coasters,” Oso said. “No more, ’mano!”

  “Fuckin’ A!” Chavez remembered standing in line for the big ones at Knott’s Berry Farm and other California theme parks. Never again!

  “You okay, Ding?” Captain Ramirez asked.

  “Sorry, sir. That never happened to me—ever! I’ll be okay in a minute,” he promised his commander.

  “Take your time. We picked a nice, quiet spot to land.” I hope.

  Chavez shook his head to clear it. He didn’t know that motion sickness started in the inner ear, had never known what motion sickness was until half an hour earlier. But he did the right thing, taking deep breaths and shaking his head to get his equilibrium back. The ground wasn’t moving, he told himself, but part of his brain wasn’t sure.

  “Where to, Cap’n?”

  “You’re already heading in the right direction.” Ramirez clapped him on the shoulder. “Move out.”

  Chavez put on his low-light goggles and started moving off through the forest. God, but that was embarrassing. He’d never do anything that dumb again, the sergeant promised himself. With his head still telling him that he was probably moving in a way that his legs couldn’t possibly cause, he concentrated on his footing and the terrain, rapidly moving two hundred meters ahead of the main body of the squad. The first mission into the swampy lowlands had just been practice, hadn’t really been serious, he thought now. But this was the real thing. With that thought foremost in his mind, he batted away the last remnants of his nausea and got down to work.

  Everyone worked late that night. There was the investigation to run, and routine office business had to be kept current as well. By the time Moira came into Mr. Shaw’s office, she’d managed to organize everything he’d need to know, and it was also time to tell him what she’d forgotten. She wasn’t surprised to see Mr. Murray there, too. She was surprised when he spoke first.

  “Moira, were you interviewed about Emil’s trip?” Dan asked.

  She nodded. “Yes. I forgot something. I wanted to tell you this morning, Mr. Shaw, but when I came in early you were asleep. Connie saw me,” she assured him.

  “Go on,” Bill said, wondering if he should feel a little better about that or
not.

  Mrs. Wolfe sat down, then turned to look at the open door. Murray walked over to close it. On the way back he placed his hand on her shoulder.

  “It’s okay, Moira.”

  “I have a friend. He lives in Venezuela. We met ... well, we met a month and a half ago, and we—this is hard to explain.” She hesitated, staring at the rug for a moment before looking up. “We fell in love. He comes up to the States on business every few weeks, and with the Director away, we wanted to spend a weekend—at The Hideaway, in the mountains near Luray Caverns?”

  “I know it,” Shaw said. “Nice place to get away from it all.”

  “Well, when I knew that Mr. Jacobs was going to be away and we had a chance for a long weekend, I called him. He has a factory. He makes auto parts—two factories, actually, one in Venezuela and one in Costa Rica. Carburetors and things like that.”

  “Did you call him at his home?” Murray asked.

  “No. He works such long hours that I called him at his factory. I have the number here.” She handed over the scrap of Sheraton note paper that he’d written it down on. “Anyway, I got his secretary—her name’s Consuela—because he was out on the shop floor, and he called me back, and I told him that we could get together, so he came up—we met at the airport Friday afternoon. I left early after Mr. Jacobs did.”

  “Which airport?”

  “Dulles.”

  “What’s his name?” Shaw asked.