Clear and Present Danger

  “I bet the mileage sucks,” Larson observed as it came through the gate. He handed the night-sight back.

  “He can afford it.” Clark watched it maneuver around the house. It was too much to hope for, but it happened. The dickhead parked the truck right next to the house, right next to the windows to the conference room. Perhaps he didn’t want to take his eyes off his new toy.

  Two men alighted from the vehicle. They were greeted at the veranda—Clark couldn’t remember the Spanish name for that—by their host with handshakes and hugs while armed men stood about as nervously as the President’s Secret Service detail. He could see them relax when their charges went inside, spreading out, mixing with their counterparts—after all, the Cartel was one big, happy family, wasn’t it?

  For now, anyway, Clark told himself. He shook his head in amazement at the placement of the truck.

  “Here comes the last one.” Larson pointed to headlights struggling up the gravel road.

  This car was a Mercedes, a stretch job, doubtless armored like a tank—Just like the ambassador’s car, Clark thought. How poetic. This VIP was also met with pomp and circumstance. There were now at least fifty guards visible. The wall perimeter was fully manned, with other teams constantly patrolling the grounds. The odd thing, he thought, was that there were no guards outside the wall. There had to be a few, but he couldn’t spot them. It didn’t matter. Lights went on in the room behind the truck. That did matter.

  “Looks like you guessed right, boy.”

  “That’s what they pay me for,” Larson pointed out. “How close do you think that truck—”

  Clark had already checked, keying the laser in on both the house and the truck. “Three meters from the wall. Close enough.”

  Commander Jensen finished tanking his aircraft, disconnecting from the KA-6 as soon as his fuel gauges pegged. He recovered the refueling probe and maneuvered downward to allow the tanker to clear the area. The mission profile could hardly have been easier. He eased the stick to the right, taking a heading of one-one-five and leveling off at thirty thousand feet. His IFF transponder was switched off at the moment, and he was able to relax and enjoy the ride, something he almost always did. The pilot’s seat in the Intruder is set rather high for good visibility during a bomb run—it did make you feel a little exposed when you were being shot at, he remembered. Jensen had done a few missions before the end of the Vietnam War, and he could vividly recall the 100-mm flak over Haiphong, like black cotton balls with evil red hearts. But not tonight. The seat placement now was like a throne in the sky. The stars were bright. The waning moon would soon rise. And all was right with the world. Added to that was his mission. It didn’t get any better than this.

  With only starlight to see by they could pick out the coast from over two hundred miles away. The Intruder was cruising along at just under five hundred knots. Jensen brought the stick to the right as soon as he was beyond the radar coverage from the E-2C, taking a more southerly heading toward Ecuador. On crossing the coast he turned left to trace along the spine of the Andes. At this point he flipped on his IFF transponder. Neither Ecuador nor Colombia had an air-defense radar network. It was an extravagance that neither country needed. As a result, the only radars that were now showing up on the Intruder’s ESM monitors were the usual air-traffic-control type. They were quite modern. A little-known paradox of radar technology was that these new, modern radars didn’t really detect aircraft at all. Instead they detected radar transponders. Every commercial aircraft in the world carried a small “black box”—as aircraft electronic equipment is invariably known—that noted receipt of a radar signal and replied with its own signal, giving aircraft identification and other relevant information which was then “painted” on the control scopes at the radar station—most often an airport down here—for the controllers to use. It was cheaper and more reliable than the older radars that did “skin-paints,” detecting the aircraft merely as nameless blips whose identity, course, and speed then had to be established by the chronically overworked people on the ground. It was an odd footnote in the history of technology that the new scheme was a step both forward and backward.

  The Intruder soon entered the air-control zone belonging to El Dorado International Airport outside Bogotá. A radar controller there called the Intruder as soon as its alphanumeric code appeared on his scope.

  “Roger, El Dorado,” Commander Jensen replied at once. “This is Four-Three Kilo. We are Inter-America Cargo Flight Six out of Quito, bound for LAX. Altitude three-zero-zero, course three-five-zero, speed four-nine-five. Over.”

  The controller verified the track with his radar data and replied in English, which is the language of international air travel. “Four-Three Kilo, roger, copy. Be advised no traffic in your area. Weather CAVU. Maintain course and altitude. Over.”

  “Roger, thank you, and good night, sir.” Jensen killed the radio and spoke over his intercom to his bombardier-navigator. “That was easy enough, wasn’t it? Let’s get to work.”

  In the right seat, set slightly below and behind the pilot’s, the naval flight officer got on his own radio after he activated the TRAM pod that hung on the Intruder’s center-line hardpoint.

  At T minus fifteen minutes, Larson lifted his cellular phone and dialed the proper number. “Señor Wagner, por favor.”

  “Momento,” the voice replied. Larson wondered who it was.

  “Wagner,” another voice replied a moment later. “Who is this?”

  Larson took the cellophane from off a pack of cigarettes and crumpled it over the receiver while he spoke garbled fragments of words, then finally: “I can’t hear you, Carlos. I will call back in a few minutes.” Larson pressed the kill button on the phone. This location was at the far edge of the cellular system anyway.

  “Nice touch,” Clark said approvingly. “Wagner?”

  “His dad was a sergeant in the Allgemeine-SS—worked at Sobibor—came over in forty-six, married a local girl and went into the smuggling business, died before anyone caught up with him. Breeding tells,” Larson said. “Carlos is a real prick, likes his women with bruises on them. His colleagues aren’t all that wild about him, but he’s good at what he does.”

  “Christmas,” Mr. Clark observed. The radio made the next sound, five minutes later.

  “Bravo Whiskey, this is Zulu X-Ray, over.”

  “Zulu X-Ray, this is Bravo Whiskey. I read you five-by-five. Over,” Larson answered at once. His radio was the sort used by forward air controllers, encrypted UHF.

  “Status report, over.”

  “We are in place. Mission is go. Say again, mission is go.”

  “Roger, copy, we are go-mission. We are ten minutes out. Start the music.”

  Larson turned to Clark. “Light her up.”

  The GLD was already powered up. Mr. Clark flipped the switch from standby to active. The GLD was more fully known as the Ground Laser Designator. Designed for use by soldiers on the battlefield, it projected a focused infrared (hence invisible) laser beam through a complex but rugged series of lenses. Boresighted with the laser system was a separate infrared sensor that told the operator where he was aiming—essentially a telescopic sight. “Great Feet” had a fiberglass cargo box over its load area, and Clark trained the crosshairs on one of its small windows, using the fine-adjustment knobs on the tripod with some delicacy. The laser spot appeared as desired, but then he rethought his aiming point and took advantage of the fact that they were slightly higher than their target, respotting his aim on the center of the vehicle’s roof. Finally he turned on the videotape recorder that took its feed from the GLD. The big boys in D.C. wanted to count coup on this one.

  “Okay,” he said quietly. “The target is lit.”

  “The music is playing, and it sounds just fine,” Larson said over the radio.

  Cortez was driving up the hill, having already passed a security checkpoint manned by two people drinking beer, he noted disgustedly. The road was about on a par with what he’d grown
up with in Cuba, and the going was slow. They’d still blame him for being late, of course.

  It was too easy, Jensen thought as he heard the reply. Tooling along at thirty thousand feet, clear night, no flak or missiles to evade. Even a contractor’s validation test wasn’t this easy.

  “I got it,” the B/N noted, staring down at his own scope. You can see a very, very long way at thirty thousand feet on a clear night, especially with a multimillion-dollar system doing the looking. Underneath the Intruder, the Target Recognition and Attack Multisensor pod noted the laser dot that was still sixty miles away. It was a modulated beam, of course, and its carrier signal was known to the TRAM. They now had positive identification of the target.

  “Zulu X-Ray confirms music sounds just fine,” Jensen said over the radio. Over intercom: “Next step.”

  On the port inboard weapon station, the bomb’s seeker head was powered up. It immediately noted the laser dot as well. Inside the aircraft, a computer was keeping track of the aircraft’s position, altitude, course, and speed, and the bombardier-navigator programmed in the position of the target to an accuracy of two hundred meters. He could have dialed it in even closer, of course, but didn’t need to. The bomb release would be completely automatic, and at this altitude the laser “basket” into which the bomb had to be dropped was miles wide. The computer took note of all these facts and decided to make an optimum drop, right in the most favorable portion of the basket.

  Clark’s eyes were now fixed to the GLD. He was perched on his elbows, and no part of his body was touching the instrument except for his eyebrow on the rubber cup that protected the eyepiece.

  “Any second now,” the B/N said.

  Jensen kept the Intruder straight and level, heading straight down the electronic path defined by various computer systems aboard. The entire exercise was now out of human hands. On the ejector rack, a signal was received from the computer. Several shotgun shells—that’s precisely what was used—fired, driving down the “ejector feet” onto small steel plates on the upper side of the bombcase. The bomb separated cleanly from the aircraft.

  The aircraft jerked upward a bit at the loss of just over eleven hundred pounds of weight.

  “Breakaway, breakaway,” Jensen reported.

  There, finally. Cortez saw the wall. His car—he’d have to buy a jeep if he were going to come here very often—was still losing its grip on the gravel, but he’d be through the gate in a moment, and if he remembered right, the road inside the perimeter was paved decently—probably leftover materials from the helipad, he thought.

  “On the way,” Larson told Clark.

  The bomb was still traveling at five hundred knots. Once clear of the aircraft, gravity took over, arcing it down toward the ground. It actually accelerated somewhat in the rarefied air as the seeker head moved fractionally to correct for wind drift. The seeker head was made of fiberglass and looked like a round-nose bullet with some small fins attached. When the laser dot on which it tracked moved out of the center of its field of view, the entire seeker body moved itself and the plastic tail fins in the appropriate direction to bring the dot back where it belonged. It had to fall exactly twenty-two thousand feet, and the microchip brain in the guidance package was trying to hit the target exactly. It had plenty of time to correct for mistakes.

  Clark didn’t know what to expect, exactly. It had been too long a time since he’d called air strikes in, and he’d forgotten some of the details—when you had to call in air support, you generally didn’t have time to notice the small stuff. He found himself wondering if there’d be the whistle—something he never remembered from his war service. He kept his eye on the target, still careful not to touch the GLD lest he screw things up. There were several men standing close to the truck. One lit a cigarette, and it appeared that several were talking about something or other. On the whole, it seemed like this was taking an awfully long time. When it happened, there was not the least warning. Not a whistle, not anything at all.

  Cortez felt his front wheels bump upward as they got on solid pavement.

  The GBU-15 laser-guided bomb had a “guaranteed” accuracy of under three meters, but that was under combat conditions, and this was a far easier test of the system. It landed within inches of its target point, striking the top of the truck. Unlike the first test shot, this bomb was impact-fused. Two detonators, one in the nose and one in the tail, were triggered by a computer chip within a microsecond of the instant when the seeker head struck the fiberglass top of the truck. There were mechanical backups to the electronic triggers. Neither proved necessary, but even explosives take time, and the bomb fell an additional thirty inches while the detonation process got underway. The bombcase had barely penetrated the cargo cover when the bomb filler was ignited by both detonators. Things happened more quickly now. The explosive filler was Octol, a very expensive chemical explosive also used to trigger nuclear weapons, with a detonation rate of over eight thousand meters per second. The combustible bombcase vaporized in a few microseconds. Then expanding gas from the explosion hurled fragments of the truck body in all directions—except up—immediately behind which was the rock-hard shock wave. Both the fragments and the shock wave struck the concrete-block walls of the house in well under a thousandth of a second. The effects were predictable. The wall disintegrated, transformed into millions of tiny fragments traveling at bullet speed, with the remainder of the shock wave still behind to attack other parts of the house. The human nervous system simply doesn’t work quickly enough for such events, and the people in the conference room never had the first hint that their deaths were underway.

  The low-light sensor on the GLD went white (with a touch of green). Clark cringed on instinct and looked away from the eyepiece to see an even whiter flash in the target area. They were too far away to hear the noise at once. It wasn’t often that you could see sound, but large bombs make that possible. The compressed air of the shock wave was a ghostly white wall that expanded radially from where the truck had been, at a speed over a thousand feet per second. It took about twelve seconds for the noise to reach Clark and Larson. Everyone who had been in the conference room was dead by that time, of course, and the crump of the pressure wave sounded like the outraged cry of lost souls.

  “Christ,” Larson said, awed by the event.

  “Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?” Clark asked. It was all he could do not to laugh. That was a first. He’d killed his share of enemies, and never taken joy from it. But the nature of the target combined with the method of the attack made the whole thing seem like a glorious prank. Son of a BITCH! The sober pause followed a moment later. His “prank” had just ended the lives of over twenty people, only four of whom were listed targets, and that was no joke. The urge to laugh died. He was a professional, not a psychopath.

  Cortez had been less than two hundred meters from the explosion, but being downhill from it saved his life since most of the fragments sailed well over his head. The blast wave was bad enough, hurling his windshield backward into his face, where it fractured but didn’t shatter, held together by the polymer filler of the safety-glass sandwich. His car was flipped on its back, but he managed to crawl free even before his mind had decided what his eyes had just witnessed. It was fully six seconds before the word “explosion” occurred to him. At that his reactions were far more rapid than that of the security guards, half of whom were dead or dying in any case. His first considered action was to draw his pistol and advance toward the house.

  Except that there wasn’t a house there anymore. He was too deafened to hear the screams of the injured. Several guards wandered aimlessly about with their guns held ready—for what, they didn’t know. The ones from the far corner of the perimeter wall were the least affected. The body of the house had absorbed most of the blast, protecting them from everything but the projectiles, which had been quite lethal enough.

  “Bravo Whiskey, this is Zulu X-Ray requesting BDA, over.” BDA was bomb-damage assessment. Larson
keyed his microphone one last time.

  “I evaluate CEP as zero, I repeat, zero, with high-order detonation. Score this one-four-point-oh. Over.”

  “Roger that. Out.” Jensen switched his radio off again. “You know,” he said over the intercom, “I can remember back when I was a lieutenant I made a Med cruise on Kennedy and us officers were afraid to go into some spaces because the troops were fuckin’ around with drugs.”

  “Yeah,” the bombardier/navigator answered. “Fuckin’ drugs. Don’t worry, skipper. I ain’t likely to have a conscience attack. Hey, the White House says it’s okay, that means that it’s really okay.”

  “Yep.” Jensen lapsed back into silence. He’d proceed on his current heading until he was out of El Dorado’s radar coverage, then turn southwest for the Ranger. It really was a pretty night. He wondered how the air-defense exercise was going....

  Cortez had little experience with explosions, and the vagaries of such events were new to him. For example, the fountain in front of the house was still running. The electrical power cables to the casa were buried and unharmed, and the breaker box inside hadn’t been totally destroyed. He lowered his face into the water to clear it. When he came back up, he felt almost normal except for the ache in his head.

  There had been a dozen or so vehicles inside the wall when the explosion happened. About half of them were shredded, and their gas tanks had ruptured, illuminating the area with isolated fires. Untiveros’ new helicopter was a smashed wreck against the fractured wall. There were other people rushing about. Cortez stood still and started thinking.