Clear and Present Danger

  So what the hell are we risking our lives for? he asked himself. He ought to have asked that question in Panama, but like his three fellow officers, he’d been caught up in the institutional rage accompanying the assassination of the FBI Director and the others. Besides, he was only a captain, and he was more an order-follower than an order-giver. As a professional officer, he was used to being given orders from battalion or brigade commanders, forty-or-so-year-old professional soldiers who knew what the hell they were doing, most of the time. But his orders now were coming from someplace else—where? Now he wasn’t so sure—and he’d allowed himself to be lulled in the complacency that assumed whoever generated the orders knew what the hell he was doing.

  Why didn’t you ask more questions!

  Ramirez had seen success in his mission tonight. Prior to it his thought had been directed toward a fixed goal. But he’d achieved that goal, and seen nothing beyond it. He ought to have realized that earlier. Ramirez knew that now. But it was too late now.

  The other part of the trap was even more troubling. He had to tell his men that everything was all right. They’d done as well as any commander could have asked. But—

  What the hell are we doing here? He didn’t know, because no one had ever told him, that he was not the first young captain to ask that question all too late, that it was almost a tradition of American arms for bright young officers to wonder why the hell they were sent out to do things. But almost always they asked the question too late.

  He had no choice, of course. He had to assume, as his training and experience told him to assume, that the mission really did make sense. Even though his reason—Ramirez was far from being a stupid man—told him otherwise, he commanded himself to have faith in his command leadership. His men had faith in him. He had to have the same faith in those above himself. An army could work no other way.

  Two hundred meters ahead, Chavez felt the stickiness on the back of his shirt and asked himself other questions. It had never occurred to him that he’d have to carry the dead, bleeding body of an enemy halfway up a mountain. He’d not anticipated how this physical reminder of what he had done would wear on his conscience. He’d killed a peasant. Not an armed man, not a real enemy, but some poor bastard who had just taken a job with the wrong side, probably just to feed his family, if he had one. But what else could Chavez have done? Let him get away?

  It was simpler for the sergeant. He had an officer who told him what to do. Captain Ramirez knew what he was doing. He was an officer, and that was his job: to know what was going on and give the orders. That made it a little easier as he climbed back up the mountain to the RON site, but his bloodied shirt continued to cling to his back like the questions of a nagging conscience.

  Tim Jackson arrived back at his office at 2230 hours after a short squad-training exercise right on the grounds of Fort Ord. He’d just sat down in his cheap swivel chair when the phone rang. The exercise hadn’t gone well. Ozkanian was a little slow catching on in his leadership of second squad. This was the second time in a row that he’d screwed up and made his lieutenant look bad. That offended Sergeant Mitchell, who had hopes for the young officer. Both knew that you didn’t make a good squad sergeant in less than four years, and only then if you had a man as sharp as Chavez had been. But it was Ozkanian’s job to lead the squad, and Mitchell was now explaining a few things to him. He was doing so in the way of platoon sergeants, with vigor, enthusiasm, and a few speculative observations about Ozkanian’s ancestry. If any.

  “Lieutenant Jackson,” Tim answered after the second ring.

  “Lieutenant, this is Colonel O’Mara at Special Ops Command.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “I hear you’ve been making some noise about a staff sergeant named Chavez. Is that correct?” Jackson looked up to see Mitchell walk in, his cabbage-patch helmet tucked under his sweaty arm and a whimsical smile on his lips. Ozkanian had gotten the message this time.

  “Yes, sir. He didn’t show up where he’s supposed to be. He’s one of mine, and—”

  “Wrong, Lieutenant! He’s one of mine now. He’s doing something that you do not need to know about, and you will not, repeat not burn up any more phone lines fucking around into something that does not concern you. IS THAT CLEAR, LIEUTENANT?”

  “But, sir, excuse me, but I—”

  “You got bad ears or something, son?” The voice was quieter now, and that was really frightening to a lieutenant who’d already had a bad day.

  “No, sir. It’s just that I got a call from—”

  “I know about that. I took care of that. Sergeant Chavez is doing something that you do not need to know about. Period. End. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The line clicked off.

  “Shit,” Lieutenant Jackson observed.

  Sergeant Mitchell hadn’t caught any words from the conversation, but the buzz from the phone line had made it to the doorway he was standing in.

  “Chavez?”

  “Yeah. Some colonel at Special Ops—Fort MacDill, I guess—says that they have him and he’s off doing something. And I don’t need to know about that. Says he took care of Fort Benning for us.”

  “Oh, horseshit,” Mitchell observed, taking his place in the seat opposite the lieutenant’s desk, after which he asked: “Mind if I sit down, sir?”

  “What do you suppose is going on?”

  “Beats the hell outa me, sir. But I know a guy at MacDill. Think I’ll make a phone call tomorrow. I don’t like one of my guys getting lost like that. It’s not supposed to work like that. He didn’t have no place chewing your ass either, sir. You’re just doin’ your job, looking after your people that way, and you don’t come down on people for doing their job. In case nobody ever told you, sir,” Mitchell explained, “you don’t chew some poor lieutenant’s ass over something like this. You make a quiet call to the battalion commander, or maybe the S-1, and have him settle things nice ’n quiet. Lieutenants get picked on enough by their own colonels without needin’ to get chewed on by strange ones. That’s why things go through channels, so you know who’s chewing’ ya’.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” Jackson said with a smile. “I needed that.”

  “I told Ozkanian that he ought to concentrate a little more on leadin’ his squad instead of trying to be Sergeant Rock. I think this time he’ll listen. He’s a pretty good kid, really. Just needs a little seasoning.” Mitchell stood. “See you at PT tomorrow, sir. Good night.”

  “Right. ‘Night, Sergeant.” Tim Jackson decided that sleep made more sense than paperwork and headed off to his car. On the drive to the BOQ, he was still pondering the call he’d gotten from Colonel O’Mara, whoever the hell he was. Lieutenants didn’t interact with bird-colonels very much—he’d made his (required) New Year’s Day appearance at the brigade commander’s home, but that was it. New lieutenants were supposed to maintain a low profile. On the other hand, one of the many lessons remembered from West Point was that he was responsible for his men. The fact that Chavez hadn’t arrived at Fort Benning, that his departure from Ord had been so ... irregular, and that his natural and responsible inquiry into his man’s situation had earned him nothing more than a chewing only made the young officer all the more curious. He’d let Mitchell make his calls, but he’d stay out of it for the moment, not wanting to draw additional attention to himself until he knew what the hell he was doing. In this Tim Jackson was fortunate. He had a big brother on Pentagon duty who knew how things were supposed to work and was pushing hard for O-6—captain’s or colonel’s—rank, even if he was a squid. Robby could give him some good advice, and advice was what he needed.

  It was a nice, smooth flight in the COD. Even so, Robby Jackson didn’t like it much. He didn’t like sitting in an aft-facing seat, but mainly he didn’t like being in an airplane unless he had the stick. A fighter pilot, test pilot, and most recently commander of one of the Navy’s elite Tomcat squadrons, he knew that he was about the best flyer in the world, a
nd didn’t like trusting his life to the lesser skills of another aviator. Besides, on Navy aircraft the stewardesses weren’t worth a damn. In this case it was a pimply-faced kid from New York, judging by his accent, who’d managed to spill coffee on the guy next to him.

  “I hate these things,” the man said.

  “Yeah, well, it ain’t Delta, is it?” Jackson noted as he tucked the folder back in his bag. He had the new tactical scheme committed to memory. As well he might. It was mainly his idea.

  The man wore khaki uniform clothing, with a “U.S.” insignia on his collar. That made him a tech-rep, a civilian who was doing something or other for the Navy. There were always some aboard a carrier—electronics specialists or various sorts of engineers who either provided special service to a new piece of gear or helped train the Navy personnel who did. They were given the simulated rank of warrant officer, but treated more or less as commissioned officers, eating in the officers’ mess and quartered in relative luxury—a very relative term on a U.S. Navy ship unless you were a captain or an admiral, and tech-reps did not rate that sort of treatment.

  “What are you going out for?” Robby asked.

  “Checking out performance on a new piece of ordnance. I’m afraid I can’t say any more than that.”

  “One of them, eh?” “’Fraid so,” the man said, examining the coffee stain on his knee.

  “Do this a lot?”

  “First time,” the man said. “You?”

  “I fly off boats for a living, but I’m serving time in the Pentagon now. OP-05’s office, fighter-tactics desk.”

  “Never made a carrier landing,” the man added nervously.

  “Not so bad,” Robby assured him. “Except at night.”

  “Oh?” The man wasn’t too scared to know that it was dark outside.

  “Yeah, well, carrier landings aren’t all that bad in daylight. Flying into a regular airfield, you look ahead and pick the spot you’re gonna touch on. Same thing on a carrier, just the runway’s smaller. But at night you can’t really see where you’re gonna touch. So that makes it a little twitchy. Don’t sweat it. The gal we got driving—”

  “A girl?”

  “Yeah, a lot of the COD drivers are girls. The one up front is pretty good, instructor pilot, they tell me.” It always made people safer to think that the pilot was an instructor, except: “She’s breaking in a new ensign tonight,” Jackson added maliciously. He loved to needle people who didn’t like flying. It was always something he bothered his friend Jack Ryan about.

  “New ensign?”

  “You know, a kid out of P-cola. Guess he wasn’t good enough for fighters or attack bombers, so he flies the delivery truck. They gotta learn, right? Everybody makes a first night carrier landing. I did. No big deal,” Jackson said comfortably. Then he checked to make sure his safety belts were nice and tight. Over the years he’d found that one sure way of alleviating fear was to hand it over to someone else.

  “Thanks.”

  “You part of the Shoot-Ex?”

  “Huh?”

  “The exercise we’re running. We get to shoot some real missiles at target drones. ‘Shoot-Ex.’ Missile-Firing Exercise.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, I was hoping you were a guy from Hughes. We want to see if the fix on the Phoenix guidance package really works or not.”

  “Oh, sorry—no. I work with something else.”

  “Okay.” Robby pulled a paperback from his pocket and started reading. Now that he was sure there was somebody on the COD more uncomfortable than he was, he could concentrate on the book. He wasn’t really frightened, of course. He just hoped that the new nugget sitting in the copilot’s right seat wouldn’t splatter the COD and its passengers all over the ramp. But there wasn’t much that he could do about that.

  The squad was tired when they got back to the RON site. They took their positions while the captain made his radio call. One of each pair immediately stripped his weapon down for cleaning, even those few who hadn’t gotten a shot off.

  “Well, Oso and his SAW got on the scoreboard tonight,” Vega observed as he pulled a patch through the twenty-one-inch barrel. “Nice work, Ding,” he added.

  “They weren’t very good.”

  “Hey, ’mano, we do our thing right, they don’t have the chance to be very good.”

  “It’s been awful easy so far, man. Might change.”

  Vega looked up for a moment. “Yeah. That’s right.”

  At geosynchronous height over Brazil, a weather satellite of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had its low-resolution camera pointed forever downward at the planet it had left eleven months before and to which it would never return. It seemed to hover almost in a fixed position, twenty-two thousand six hundred miles over the emerald-green jungles of the Amazon valley, but in fact it was moving at a speed of about seven thousand miles per hour, its easterly orbital path exactly matching the rotation speed of the earth below. The satellite had other instruments, of course, but this particular color-TV camera had the simplest of jobs. It watched clouds that floated in the air like distant balls of cotton. That so prosaic a function could be important was so obvious as to be hard to recognize. This satellite and its antecedents had saved thousands of lives and were arguably the most useful and efficient segment of America’s space program. The lives saved were those of sailors for the most part, sailors whose ships might otherwise stray into the path of an undetected storm. From its perch, the satellite could see from the great Southern Ocean girdling Antarctica to beyond the North Cape of Norway, and no storm escaped its notice.

  Almost directly below the satellite, conditions still not fully understood gave birth to cyclonic storms in the broad, warm Atlantic waters off the West Coast of Africa, from which they were carried westward toward the New World, where they were known by the West Indian name, hurricane. Data from the satellite was downlinked to NOAA’s National Hurricane Center at Coral Gables, Florida, where meteorologists and computer scientists were working as part of a multiyear project to determine how the storms began and why they moved as they did. The busy season for these scientists was just beginning. Fully a hundred people, some with their doctor’s degrees years behind them, others summer interns from a score of universities, examined the photographs for the first storm of the season. Some hoped for many, that they might study and learn from them. The more experienced scientists knew that feeling, but also knew that those massive oceanic storms were the most destructive and deadly force of nature, and regularly killed thousands who lived too close to the sea. They also knew that the storms would come in their own good time, for no one had a provable model for explaining exactly why they formed. All man could do was see them, track them, measure their intensity, and warn those in their path. The scientists also named them. The names were chosen years in advance, always starting at the top of the alphabet and proceeding downward. The first name on the list for the current year was Adele.

  As the camera watched, clouds grew skyward five hundred miles from the Cape Verde islands, cradle of hurricanes. Whether it would become an organized tropical cyclone or simply be just another large rainstorm, no one could say. It was still early in the season. But it had all the makings of a big season. The West African desert was unusually hot for the spring, and heat there had a demonstrable connection with birth of hurricanes.

  The truck driver appeared at the proper time to collect the men and the paste processed from the coca leaves, but they weren’t there as expected. He waited an hour, and still they weren’t there. There were two men with him, of course, and these he sent up to the processing site. The driver was the “senior” man of the group and didn’t want to be bothered climbing those cursed mountains anymore. So while he smoked his cigarettes, they climbed. He waited another hour. There was quite a bit of traffic on the highway, especially big diesel trucks whose mufflers and pollution controls were less well attended to than was the case in other, more prosperous regions—besides
, their removal made for improved fuel economy in addition to the greater noise and smoke. Many of the big tractor-trailer combinations roared past, vibrating the roadbed and rocking his own truck in the rush of air. That was why he missed the sound. After waiting a total of ninety minutes, it was clear that he’d have to go up himself. He locked the truck, lit yet another cigarette, and began his way up the path.

  The driver found it hard going. Though he’d grown up in these hills, and could remember a boyhood in which a thousand-foot climb was just another footrace with his playmates, he’d been driving the truck for some time, and his leg muscles were more accustomed to pushing down pedals than this sort of thing. What would once have taken forty minutes now took over an hour, and with the place almost in sight he was venomously angry, too angry and too tired to pay attention to things that ought to have been obvious by now. He could still hear the traffic sounds on the road below, could hear the birds twittering in the trees around him, but nothing else when he should have been hearing something. He paused, bending over to catch his breath when he got his first warning. It was a dark spot on the trail. Something had turned the brown earth to black, but that could have been anything, and he was in a hurry to see what the problem was up the hill and didn’t ponder it. After all, there hadn’t been any problem lately with the army or the police, and he wondered why the refining work was done so far up the mountainside in any case. It was no longer necessary.

  Five minutes more and he could see the little clearing, and only now he noticed that there were no sounds coming from it, though there was an odd, acrid smell. Doubtless the acid used in the prerefining process, he was sure. Then he made the last turn and saw.