“Stay in touch, Mitch. Say hi to the family. ‘Bye.”
“Shit,” Mitchell observed after he hung up. He’d just proved that Chavez didn’t exist anymore. That was decidedly strange. The Army wasn’t supposed to lose people, at least not like this. The sergeant didn’t know what to do next, except maybe talk to his lieutenant about it.
“We had another hit last night,” Ritter told Admiral Cutter. “Our luck’s holding. One of our people got scratched, but nothing serious, and that’s three sites taken out, forty-four enemy KIAs—”
“And?”
“And tonight, four senior Cartel members are going to have a sit-down, right here.” Ritter handed over a satellite photograph, along with the text of the intercept. “All people on the production end: Fernández, d’Alejandro, Wagner, and Untiveros. Their ass is ours.”
“Fine. Do it,” Cutter said.
Clark was examining the same photo at that moment, along with a few obliques that he’d shot himself and a set of blueprints for the house.
“You figure this room, right here?”
“I’ve never been in this one, but that sure looks like a conference room to me,” Larson said. “How close you have to be?”
“I’d prefer under four thousand meters, but the GLD is good to six.”
“How about this hilltop right here? We’ve got a clear line of sight into the compound.”
“How long to get there?”
“Three hours. Two to drive, one to walk. You know, you could almost do this from an airplane....”
“Yours?” Clark asked with a sly grin.
“Not on a bet!” They’d use a four-wheel-drive Subaru for the drive. Larson had several different sets of plates, and the car didn’t belong to him anyway. “I got the phone number and I got a cellular phone.”
Clark nodded. He was really looking forward to this. He’d done jobs against people like this before, but never with official sanction, and never this high up the line. “Okay, I gotta get final approval. Pick me up at three.”
Murray hustled over from his office as soon as he got the news. Hospitals never made people look glamorous, but Moira appeared to have aged ten years in the past sixty hours. Hospitals weren’t especially big on dignity, either. Her hands were in restraints. She was on suicide watch. Murray knew that it was necessary—could scarcely be more so—but her personality had taken enough battering already, and this didn’t make things any better.
The room was already bedecked with flowers. Only a handful of FBI agents knew what had transpired, and the natural assumption at the office was that she’d taken Emil’s death too hard. Which wasn’t far off, after all.
“You gave us quite a scare, kiddo,” he observed.
“It’s all my fault.” She couldn’t bring her eyes to look at him for more than a few seconds at a time.
“You’re a victim, Moira. You got taken in by one of the best in the business. It happens, even to the smarties. Trust me, I know.”
“I let him use me. I acted like a whore—”
“I don’t want to hear that. You made a mistake. That happens. You didn’t mean to hurt anybody, and you didn’t break any laws. It’s not worth dying for. It’s damned sure not worth dying over when you got kids to worry about.”
“What’ll they think? What’ll they think when they find out....”
“You’ve already given them all the scare they need. They love you, Moira. Can anything erase that?” Murray shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“They’re ashamed of me.”
“They’re scared. They’re ashamed of themselves. They think it’s partly their fault.” That struck a nerve.
“But it’s not! It’s all my fault—”
“I just told you it isn’t. Moira, you got in the way of a truck named Félix Cortez.”
“Is that his real name?”
“He used to be a colonel in the DGI. Trained at the KGB Academy, and he’s very, very good at what he does. He picked you because you’re a widow, a young, pretty one. He scouted you, figured out that you’re lonely, like most widows, and he turned on the charm. He probably has a lot of inborn talent, and he was educated by experts. You never had a chance. You got hit by a truck you never saw coming. We’re going to have a shrink come down, Dr. Lodge from Temple University. And he’s going to tell you the same thing I am, but he’s going to charge a lot more. Don’t worry, though. It comes under Workers Comp.”
“I can’t stay with the Bureau.”
“That’s true. You’re going to have to give up your security clearance,” Dan told her. “That’s no great loss, is it? You’re going to get a job at the Department of Agriculture, right down the street, same pay grade and everything,” Murray said gently. “Bill set it all up for you.”
“Mr. Shaw? But—why?”
“ ’Cause you’re a good guy, Moira, not a bad guy. Okay?”
“So what exactly are we going to do?” Larson asked.
“Wait and see,” Clark replied, looking at the road map. There was a place called Don Diego not too far from where they were going. He wondered if somebody named Zorro lived there. “What’s your cover story in case somebody sees us together?”
“You’re a geologist, and I’ve been flying you around looking for new gold deposits.”
“Fine.” It was one of the stock cover-stories Clark used. Geology was one of his hobbies, and he could discuss the subject well enough to fool a professor in the subject. In fact, that’s exactly what he’d done a few times. That cover would also explain some of the gear in the back of the four-wheel-drive station wagon, at least to the casual or unschooled observer. The GLD, they’d explain, was a surveying instrument, which was pretty close.
The drive was not terribly unusual. The local roads lacked the quality of paving common in America, and there weren’t all that many guard rails, but the main hazard was the way the locals drove, which was a little on the passionate side, Clark thought. He liked it. He liked South America. For all the social problems, the people down here had a zest for life and an openness that he found refreshing. Perhaps the United States had been this way a century before. The old West probably had. There was much to admire. It was a pity that the economy hadn’t developed along proper lines, but Clark wasn’t a social theorist. He, too, was a child of his country’s working class, and in the important things working people are the same everywhere. Certainly the ordinary folk down here had no more love for the druggies than he did. Nobody likes criminals, especially the sort that flaunt their power, and they were probably angry that their police and army couldn’t do anything about it. Angry and helpless. The only “popular” group that had tried to deal with them was M-19, a Marxist guerrilla group—actually more an elitist collection of city-bred and university-educated intellectuals. After kidnapping the sister of a major cocaine trafficker, the others in the business had banded together to get her back, killing over two hundred M-19 members and actually forming the Medellín Cartel in the process. That allowed Clark to admire the Cartel. Bad guys or not, they had made a Marxist revolutionary group back off by playing the urban guerrilla game by M-19’s own rules. Their mistake—aside from being in a business which Clark abhorred—had been in assuming that they had the ability to play against another, larger enemy by the same set of rules, and that their new enemy wouldn’t respond in kind. Turnabout was fair play, Clark thought. He settled back in his seat to catch a nap. Surely they’d understand.
Three hundred miles off the Colombian coast, USS Ranger turned into the wind to commence flight operations. The battle group was composed of the carrier, the Aegis-class cruiser Thomas S. Gates, another missile cruiser, four missile-armed destroyers and frigates, and two dedicated antisubmarine destroyers. The underway replenishment group, with a fleet oiler, the ammunition ship Shasta, and three escorts, was fifty miles closer to the South American coast. Five hundred miles to seaward was another similar group returning from a lengthy deployment at “Camel Station” in the Indian
Ocean. The returning fleet simulated an oncoming enemy formation—pretending to be Russians, though nobody said that anymore in the age of glasnost.
The first aircraft off, as Robby Jackson watched from Pri-Fly, the control position high up on the carrier’s island structure, were F-14 Tomcat interceptors, loaded out to maximum takeoff weight, squatting at the catapults with cones of fire trailing from each engine. As always, it was exciting to watch. Like a ballet of tanks, the massive, heavily loaded aircraft were choreographed about the four acres of flight deck by teenaged kids in filthy, color-coded shirts who gave instructions in pantomime while keeping out of the way of the jet intakes and exhausts. It was for them a game more dangerous than racing across city streets at rush hour, and more stimulating. Crewmen in purple shirts fueled the aircraft, and were called “grapes.” Other kids, red-shirted ordnancemen called “ordies,” were loading blue-painted exercise weapons aboard aircraft. The actually shooting part of the Shoot-Ex didn’t start for another day. Tonight they’d practice interception tactics against fellow Navy aviators. Tomorrow night, Air Force C-130s would lift out of Panama to rendezvous with the returning battle group and launch a series of target drones which, everyone hoped, the Tomcats would blast from the sky with their newly repaired AIM-54C Phoenix missiles. It was not to be a contractor’s test. The drones would be under the control of Air Force NCOs whose job it was to evade fire as though their lives depended on it, for whom every successful evasion involved a stiff penalty to be paid in beer or some other medium of exchange by the flight crew who missed.
Robby watched twelve aircraft launch before heading down to the flight deck. Already dressed in his olive-green flight suit, he carried his personal flight helmet. He’d ride tonight in one of the E-2C Hawkeye airborne-early-warning aircraft, the Navy’s own diminutive version of the larger E-3A AWACS, from which he’d see if his new tactical arrangement worked any better than current fleet procedures. It had in all the computer simulations, but computers weren’t reality, a fact often lost upon people who worked in the Pentagon.
The E-2C crew met him at the door to the flight deck. A moment later the Hawkeye’s plane captain, a First-Class Petty Officer who wore a brown shirt, arrived to take them to the aircraft. The flight deck was too dangerous a place for pilots to walk unattended, hence the twenty-five-year-old guide who knew these parts. On the way aft Robby noticed an A-6E Intruder being loaded with a single blue bombcase to which guidance equipment had been attached, converting it into a GBU-15 laser-guided weapon. It was, he saw, the squadron-skipper’s personal bird. That, he thought, must be part of the system-validation test, called a Drop-Ex. It wasn’t that often you got to drop a real bomb, and squadron commanders like to have their fair share of fun. Robby wondered for a moment what the target was—probably a raft, he decided—but he had other things to worry about. The plane captain had them at their aircraft a minute later. He said a few things to the pilot, then saluted him smartly and moved off to perform his next set of duties. Robby strapped into the jump seat in the radar compartment, again disliking the fact that he was in an airplane as a passenger rather than a driver.
After the normal preflight ritual, Commander Jackson felt vibration as the turboprop engines fired up. Then the Hawkeye started moving slowly and jerkily toward one of the waist catapults. The engines were run up to full power after the nosewheel attachment was fixed to the catapult shuttle and the pilot spoke over the intercom to warn his crew that it was time. In three stunning seconds, the Grumman-built aircraft went from a standing start to one hundred forty knots. The tail sank as it left the ship, then the aircraft leveled out and tipped up again for its climb to twenty thousand feet. Almost immediately, the radar controllers in back started their systems checks, and in twenty minutes the E-2C was on station, eighty miles from the carrier, its rotodome turning, sending radar beams through the sky to start the exercise. Jackson was seated so as to observe the entire “battle” on the radar screens, his helmet plugged into the command circuit so that he could see how well the Ranger’s air wing executed his plan, while the Hawkeye flew a racetrack pattern in the sky.
From their position they could also see the battle group, of course. Half an hour after taking off, Robby noted a double launch from the carrier. The radar-computer system tracked both new contacts as a matter of course. They climbed to thirty thousand feet and rendezvoused. A tanker exercise, he realized at once. One of the aircraft immediately returned to the carrier, while the other flew east-southeast. The intercept exercise began in earnest right about then, but every few seconds Robby noted the course of the new contact, until it disappeared off the screen, still heading toward the South American mainland.
“Yes, yes, I will go,” Cortez said. “I am not ready yet, but I will go.” He hung up his phone with a curse and reached for his car keys. Félix hadn’t even had the chance to visit one of the smashed refining sites yet and they wanted him to address the—“The Production Committee,” el jefe called it. That was amusing. The fools were so bent on taking over the national government that they were starting to use quasi-official terminology. He swore again on the way out the door. Drive all the way down to that fat, pompous lunatic’s castle on the hill. He checked his watch. It would take two hours. And he would get there late. And he would not be able to tell them anything because he hadn’t had time to learn anything. And they would be angry. And he would have to be humble again. Cortez was getting tired of abasing himself to these people. The money they paid him was incredible, but no amount of money was worth his self-respect. That was something he should have thought about before he signed up, Cortez reminded himself as he started his car. Then he swore again.
The newest CAPER intercept was number 2091 and was an intercept from a mobile phone to the home of Subject ECHO. The text came up on Ritter’s personal computer printer. Then came 2092, not thirty seconds later. He handed both to his special assistant.
“Cortez... going right there? Christmas in June.”
“How do we get the word to Clark?” Ritter wondered.
The man thought for a moment. “We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t have a secure voice channel we can use. Unless—we can get a secure VOX circuit to the carrier, and from there to the A-6, and from the A-6 to Clark.”
It was Ritter’s turn to swear. No, they couldn’t do that. The weak link was the carrier. The case officer they had aboard to oversee that end of the mission would have to approach the carrier’s commanding officer—it might not start there, but it would sure as hell end there—and ask for a cleared radio compartment to handle the messages by himself on an ears-only basis. That would risk too much, even assuming that the CO went along. Too many questions would be asked, too many new people in the information loop. He swore again, then recovered his senses. Maybe Cortez would get there in time. Lord, wouldn’t it be nice to tell the Bureau that they’d nailed the bastard! Or, more properly, that someone had, plausibly deniably. Or maybe not. He didn’t know Bill Shaw very well, and didn’t know how he might react.
Larson had parked the Subaru a hundred yards off the main road in a preselected spot that made detection unlikely. The climb to their perch was not a difficult one, and they arrived well before sundown. The photos had identified a perfect place, right on the crest of a ridge, with a direct line of sight toward a house that took their breath away. Twenty thousand square feet it was—a hundred-foot square, two stories, no basement—set within a fenced six-acre perimeter four kilometers away, perhaps three hundred feet lower than their position. Clark had a pair of seven-power binoculars and took note of the guard force while light permitted. He counted twenty men, all armed with automatic weapons. Two crew-served heavy machine guns were sited in built-for-the-purpose strongpoints on the wall. Bob Ritter had called it right on St. Kitts, he thought: Frank Lloyd Wright meets Ludwig the Mad. It was a beautiful house, if you went for the neoclassical-Spanish-modern style, fortified in hi-tech fashion to keep the unruly peasa
nts away. There was also the de rigueur helicopter pad with a new Sikorsky S-76 sitting on it.
“Anything else I need to know about the house?” Clark asked.
“Pretty massive construction, as you can see. I’d worry about that. This is earthquake country, you know. Personally, I’d prefer something lighter, wood-post and beam, but they like concrete construction—to stop bullets and mortar rounds, I suppose.”
“Better and better,” Clark observed. He reached into his backpack. First he removed the heavy tripod, setting it up quickly and expertly on solid ground. Then came the GLD, which he attached and sighted in. Finally, he removed a Varo Noctron-V night-sighting device. The GLD had the same capability, of course, but once it was set up he didn’t want to fool with it. The Noctron had only five-power magnification—Clark preferred the binocular lens arrangement—but was small, light, and handy. It also amplified ambient light about fifty thousand times. This technology had come a long way since his time in Southeast Asia, but it still struck him as a black art. He remembered being out in the boonies with nothing better than a Mark-1 eyeball. Larson would handle the radio traffic, and had his unit all set up. Then there was nothing left to do but wait. Larson produced some junk food and both men settled down.
“Well, now you know what ‘Great Feet’ means,” Clark chuckled an hour later. The cryppies should have known. He handed the Noctron over.
“Gawd! Only difference between a man and a boy...”
It was a Ford three-quarter-ton pickup with optional four-wheel drive. Or at least that was how it had left the factory. Since then it had visited a custom-car shop where four-foot-diameter tires had been attached. It wasn’t quite grotesque enough to be called “Big Foot,” after the monster trucks so popular at auto shows, but it had the same effect. It was also quite practical, and that was the really strange part. The road up to the casa did need some serious help, but this truck didn’t notice—though the chieftain’s security pukes did, struggling to keep up with their boss’s new and wonderful toy.