The truck driver was not a man unaccustomed to violence. He’d been involved in the pre-Cartel fighting and had also killed a few M-19 sympathizers in the wars because of which the Cartel had actually been formed. He’d seen blood, therefore, and had spilled some himself.
But not like this. All fourteen of the men he’d driven in the previous night were lined up shoulder to shoulder in a neat little row on the ground. The bodies were already bloated, and animals had been picking at several of the open wounds. The two men he’d dispatched up the mountainside were more freshly dead. Though the driver didn’t fathom it, they’d been killed by a claymore mine triggered when they’d examined the bodies, and their bodies were newly shredded, with major sections missing where the ball-bearing-sized fragments had struck, and with the blood still trickling out. One’s face showed the surprise and shock. The other man was facedown, with a section about the size of a shoe box messily removed from his back.
The driver stood still for a minute or so, afraid to move in any direction, his quivering hands reaching for another cigarette, then dropping two which he was too terrified to reach for. Before he could get a third, he turned and moved carefully down the path. A hundred meters after that, he was running for his life as every bird call and every breeze through the trees sounded to him like an approaching soldier. They had to be soldiers. He was sure of that. Only soldiers killed with that sort of precision. “That was a splendid paper you delivered this afternoon. We hadn’t considered the Soviet ‘nationalities’ question as thoroughly as you have. Your analytical skills are as sharp as ever.” Sir Basil Charleston raised his glass in salute. “Your promotion was well earned. Congratulations, Sir John.”
“Thanks, Bas’. I just wish it could have happened another way,” Ryan said.
“That bad?”
Jack nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
“And Emil Jacobs, too. Bloody bad time for your chaps.”
Ryan smiled rather grimly. “You might say that.”
“So, what are you going to do about it?”
“I’m afraid there’s not much I can say about that,” Jack replied carefully. I don’t know, but I can’t exactly say that, can I?
“Quite so.” The head of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service nodded sagely. “Whatever your response is, I’m sure it will be appropriate.”
At that moment he knew that Greer had been right. He had to know such things or risk being taken for a fool by his counterparts here and everywhere else in the world. He’d get home in a few more days and talk things over with Judge Moore. Ryan was supposed to have some bureaucratic muscle now. Might as well flex it a little to see if it worked.
Commander Jackson woke after six hours’ sleep. He, too, enjoyed that greatest of luxuries aboard a warship, privacy. His rank and former station as a squadron commander put him high on the list of VIPs, and there happened to be a spare one-man stateroom in this floating city. His was just under the flight deck forward. Close to the bow catapults by the sound of things, which explained why one of Ranger’s own squadron commanders didn’t want it. On arrival, he’d made the necessary courtesy calls, and he didn’t have any official duties to attend to for another... three hours. After washing and shaving and morning coffee, he decided to do a few things on his own. Robby headed below for the carrier’s magazine.
This was a large compartment with a relatively low ceiling where the bombs and missiles were kept. Several rooms, really, with nearby shops so that the “smart” weapons could be tested and repaired by ordnance technicians. Jackson’s personal concern was with the AIM-54C Phoenix air-to-air missiles. There had been problems with the guidance systems, and one purpose of the battle-group exercise was to see if the contractor’s fix really worked or not.
Entry into the space was restricted, for obvious reasons. Robby identified himself to a senior chief petty officer, and it turned out that they’d both served on the Kennedy a few years before. Together they entered a work space where some “ordies” were playing with the missiles, with an odd-looking box hanging on the pointed nose of one.
“What d’ya think?” one asked.
“Reads out okay to me, Duke,” the one on the oscilloscope replied. “Let me try some simulated jamming.”
“That’s the bunch we’re prepping for the Shoot-Ex, sir,” the senior chief explained. “So far they seem to be working all right, but...”
“But wasn’t it you who found the problem in the first place?” Robby asked.
“Me and my old boss, Lieutenant Frederickson.” The chief nodded. The discovery had resulted in several million dollars in penalties to the contractor. And all the AIM-54C missiles in the fleet had been decertified for several months, taking away what should have been the most capable air-to-air missile in the Navy. He led Jackson to the rack of test equipment. “How many we supposed to shoot?”
“Enough to tell whether the fix works or not,” Robby replied. The chief grunted.
“That could be quite a Shoot-Ex, sir.”
“Drones are cheap!” Robby pointed out in a most outrageous lie. But the chief knew what he meant. It was cheaper than going to the Indian Ocean and maybe having a shoot-out with Iranian F-14A Tomcats (they had them, too) and then finding out that the goddamned missiles didn’t work properly. That was a most efficient way of killing off pilots whose training went for a million dollars a pop. The good news was that the fix was working, at least as far as the test equipment could tell. To make sure, Robby told the chief, between ten and twenty of the Phoenix-Cs would be shot off, plus a larger number of Sparrows and Side-winders. Jackson started to leave. He’d seen what he needed to see, and the ordies all had work to do.
“Looks like we’re really going to be emptying this here locker out, sir. You know about the new bombs we’re checking out?”
“No. I met with a tech-rep on the COD flight in. He didn’t talk a hell of a lot. So what the hell is new? Just a bomb, right?”
The senior chief laughed. “Come on, I’ll show you the Hush-A-Bomb.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you ever watch Rocky and Bullwinkle, sir?”
“Chief, you have really lost me.”
“Well, when I was a kid I used to watch Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle the Moose, and one of the stories was about how Boris and Natasha—they were the bad guys, Commander—were trying to steal something called Hush-A-Boom. That was an explosive that blew stuff up without making any noise. Looks like the guys at China Lake came up with the next-best thing!”
The chief opened a door to the bomb-storage area. The streamlined shapes—they didn’t have any fins or fuses attached until they were taken topside—sat on storage pallets securely chained down to the steel deck. On a pallet close to the rectangular elevator that delivered them topside was a group of blue-painted bombs. The blue color made them exercise units, but from the tag on the pallet it was clear that they were also loaded with the customary explosive filler. Robby Jackson was a fighter pilot, and hadn’t dropped very many bombs, but that was just another side of his profession. The weapons he looked at appeared to be standard two-thousand-pound low-drag cases, which translated to nine hundred eighty-five pounds of high explosives, and just over a thousand pounds of steel bombcase. The only difference between a “dumb” or “iron” bomb and a guided “smart” bomb was the attachment of a couple of hardware items: a seeker head on the nose, and movable fins on the tail. Both units attached to the normal fusing points, and in fact the fuses were part of the guidance-package attachments. For obvious reasons these were kept in a different compartment. On the whole, however, the blue bombcases appeared grossly ordinary.
“So?” he asked.
The chief tapped the nearest bombcase with his knuckle. There was an odd sound. Odd enough that Robby did the same.
“That’s not steel.”
“Cellulose, sir. They made the friggin’ things outa paper! How you like that?”
“Oh.” Robby understood. “Stealth.?
??
“These babies gotta be guided, though. They ain’t gonna make fragments worth a damn.” The purpose of the steel bombcase, of course, is to transform itself into thousands of high-speed razors, ripping into whatever lay within their ballistic range after detonation. It wasn’t the explosion that killed people—which was, after all, the reason to build bombs—but rather the fragments they generated. “That’s why we call it the Hush-A-Bomb. Fucker’s gonna be right loud, sir, but after the smoke clears you’re gonna wonder what the hell it was.”
“New wonders from China Lake,” Robby observed. What the hell good was a bomb that—but then, it was probably something for the new Stealth tactical bomber. He didn’t know all that much about Stealth yet. It wasn’t part of his brief in the Pentagon. Fighter tactics were, and Robby went off to go over his notes with the air-group commander. The first part of the battle-group exercise would begin in just over twenty-four hours.
The word got to Medellin fairly quickly, of course. By noon it was known that two refining operations had been eliminated and a total of thirty-one people killed. The loss of manpower was incidental. In each case more than half had been local peasants who did the coolie work, and the rest had been scarcely more important permanent employees whose guns kept the curious away, generally by example rather than persuasion. What was troubling was the fact that if word of these events got out, there might be some difficulties in recruiting new people to do the refining.
But most troubling of all was the simple fact that nobody knew what was going on. Was the Colombian Army going back into the hills? Was it M-19, breaking its word, or FARC, doing the same thing? Or something else? No one knew. That was most annoying, since they paid a good deal of money to get information. But the Cartel was a group of people, and action was taken only after consensus was reached. It was agreed that there must be a meeting. But then people began to worry if that might be dangerous. After all, clearly there were armed people about, people with little regard for human life, and that was also troubling for the senior Cartel officials. Most of all, these people had heavy weapons and the skill to use them. It was decided, therefore, that the meeting should be held at the most secure location possible.
FLASH
TOP SECRET ***** CAPER
1914Z
SIGINT REPORT
INTERCEPT 1993 INIT 1904Z FRQ 887.020MHZ
INIT: SUBJECT FOXTROT
RECIP: SUBJECT UNIFORM
F: IT IS AGREED. WE’LL MEET AT YOUR HOUSE TOMORROW NIGHT AT [2000L].
U: WHO WILL COME?
F: [SUBJECT ECHO] CANNOT ATTEND, BUT PRODUCTION IS NOT HIS CONCERN ANYWAY. [SUBJECT ALPHA], [SUBJECT GOLF], AND [SUBJECT WHISKEY] WILL COME WITH ME. HOW IS YOUR SECURITY?
U: AT MY [EMPHASIS] CASTLE? [LAUGHTER.] FRIEND, WE COULD HOLD OFF A REGIMENT THERE, AND MY HELICOPTER IS ALWAYS READY. HOW ARE YOU COMING?
F: HAVE YOU SEEN MY NEW TRUCK?
U: YOUR GREAT FEET [MEANING UNKNOWN]? NO I HAVE NOT SEEN YOUR MARVELOUS NEW TOY.
F: I GOT IT BECAUSE OF YOU, PABLO. WHY DON’T YOU EVER REPAIR THE ROAD TO YOUR CASTLE?
U: THE RAIN KEEPS DESTROYING IT. YES, I SHOULD PAVE IT, BUT I USE A HELICOPTER TO GET HERE.
F: AND YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT MY TOYS! [LAUGHTER.] SEE YOU TOMORROW NIGHT, FRIEND.
U: GOODBYE.
END CALL. DISCONNECT SIGNAL. END INTERCEPT.
The intercept was delivered to Bob Ritter’s office within minutes of its receipt. So here was the chance, the whole purpose of the exercise. He got his own signals out at once, without checking with Cutter or the President. After all, he was the one with the hunting license.
Aboard Ranger, the “tech-rep” got the encrypted message less than an hour later. He immediately placed a telephone call to the office of Commander Jensen, then headed off to see him personally. It wasn’t all that hard. He was an experienced field officer and particularly good with maps. That was very useful on a carrier where even experienced sailors got lost in the gray-painted maze all the time. Commander Jensen was surprised he got there so quickly, but already had his personal bombardier-navigator in his office for the mission briefing.
Clark got his signal about the same time. He linked up with Larson and immediately arranged a flight down the valley south of Medellin to make a final reconnaissance of the objective.
Whatever problems his conscience gave Ding Chavez washed out when he did his shirt. There was a nice little creek a hundred meters from their patrol base, and one by one the squad members washed their things out and cleaned themselves up as best they could without soap. After all, he reasoned, poor, dumb peasant or not, he was doing something that he shouldn’t have been doing. To Chavez the main concern was that he’d used up a magazine and a half of ammo, and the squad was short one claymore mine which, they’d heard a few hours earlier, went off exactly as planned. Their intel specialist was a real whiz with booby traps. Finished with his abbreviated personal hygiene routine, Ding returned to the unit perimeter. They’d lay up tonight, putting a listening post out a few hundred meters and running a routine patrol to make sure that there was nobody hunting them, but this would be a night of rest. Captain Ramirez had explained that they didn’t want to be too active in this area. It might spook the game sooner than they wanted.
18.
Force Majeure
THE EASIEST THING for Sergeant Mitchell to do was to call his friend at Fort MacDill. He’d served with Ernie Davis in the 101st Air Assault Division, lived right next to him in a duplex, and crumpled many an empty beer can after charcoaled franks and burgers in the backyard. They were both E-7s, well schooled in the ways of the Army, which was really run by the sergeants, after all. The officers got more money and all of the worries while the long-service NCOs kept things on an even keel. He had an Army-wide phone directory at his desk and called the proper AUTOVON number.
“Ernie? Mitch.”
“Yo, how’s life out in wine country?”
“Humpin’ the hills, boy. How’s the family?”
“Doing fine, Mitch. And yours?”
“Annie’s turning into quite a little lady. Hey, the reason I called, I wanted to check up to make sure one of our people got out to you. Staff Sergeant named Domingo Chavez. You’d like him, Ernie, he’s a real good kid. Anyway, the paperwork got fucked up on this end, and I just wanted to make sure that he showed up in the right place.”
“No problem,” Ernie said. “Chavez, you said?”
“Right.” Mitchell spelled it.
“Don’t ring a bell. Wait a minute. I gotta switch phones.” A moment later Ernie’s voice came back, accompanied by the clicking sound that denoted a computer keyboard. What was the world coming to? Mitchell wondered. Even infantry sergeants had to know how to use the goddamned things. “Run that name past me again?”
“Chavez, first name Domingo, E-6.” Mitchell read off his service number, which was the same as his Social Security number.
“He ain’t here, Mitch.”
“Huh? We got a call from this Colonel O’Mara of yours—”
“Who?”
“Some bird named O’Mara. My ell-tee took the call and got a little flustered. New kid, still got a lot to learn,” Mitchell explained.
“I never heard of no Colonel O’Mara. I think maybe you got the wrong post, Mitch.”
“No shit?” Mitchell was genuinely puzzled. “My ell-tee must have really booted this one. Okay, Ernie, I’ll take it from here. You give my love to Hazel now.”
“Roge-o, Mitch. You have a good one, son. ’Bye.”
“Hmph.” Mitchell stared at the phone for a moment. What the hell was going on? Ding wasn’t at Benning, and wasn’t at MacDill. So where the fuck was he? The platoon sergeant flipped to the number for the Military Personnel Center, located in Alexandria, Virginia. The sergeants’ club is a tight one, and the community of E-7s was especially so. His next call was to Sergeant First Class Peter Stankowski. It took two tries to get him.
“Hey, Stan! Mitch here.”
/> “You looking for a new job?” Stankowski was a detailer. His job was to assign his fellow sergeants to new jobs. As such, he was a man with considerable power.
“Nah, I just love being a light-fighter. What’s this I hear about you turning track-toad on us?” Stankowski’s next job, Mitchell had recently learned, was in the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, where he’d lead his squad from inside an M-2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
“Hey, Mitch, my knees are goin’. Ever think it might be nice to fight sittin’ down once in a while? Besides, that twenty-five-millimeter chain gun makes for a nice equalizer. What can I do for you?”
“Trying to track somebody down. One of my E-6s checked out a couple of weeks back, and we have to ship some shit to him, and he ain’t where we thought he was.”
“Oooo-kay. Wait while I punch up my magic machine and we’ll find the lad for you. What’s his name?” Stankowski asked. Mitchell gave him the information.
“Eleven-Bravo, right?” 11-B was Chavez’s Military Occupation Specialty, or MOS. That designated Chavez as a light infantryman. Mechanized infantry was Eleven-Mike.
“Yep.” Mitchell heard some more tapping.
“C-h-a-v-e-z, you said?”
“Right.”
“Okay, he was supposed to go to Benning and wear the Smokey Bear hat—”
“That’s the guy!” Mitchell said, somewhat relieved.
“—but they changed his orders an’ sent him down to MacDill.”
But he ain’t at MacDill! Mitchell managed not to say.
“That’s a spooky bunch down there. You know Ernie Davis, don’t you? He’s there. Why don’t you give him a call?”
“Okay,” Mitchell said, really surprised by that one. I just did! “When you going to Hood?”
“September.”
“Okay, I’ll, uh, call Ernie. You take it easy, Stan.”