Clear and Present Danger

  “Christ.”

  There was a knock at his door. Ryan found one of Sir Basil’s aides standing there. He handed over an envelope and left.

  When you get home, do tell Bob that the job was nicely done. Bas.

  Jack folded the note back into the envelope and slid it into his coat pocket. He was correct, of course. Ryan was sure of it. Now he had to decide if it was right or not. He soon learned that it was much easier to second-guess such decisions when they were made by others.

  They had to move, of course. Ramirez had them all doing something. The more work to be done, the fewer things had to be thought about. They had to erase any trace of their presence. They had to bury Rocha. When the time came, if it did, his family, if any, would get a sealed metal casket with one hundred fifty pounds of ballast inside to simulate the body that wasn’t there. Chavez and Vega got the job of digging the grave. They went down the customary six feet, not liking the fact that they were going to leave one of their own behind like this. There was the hope that someone might come back to recover their comrade, but somehow neither expected that the effort would ever be made. Even coming from a peacetime army, neither was a stranger to death. Chavez remembered the two kids in Korea, and others killed in training accidents, helicopter crashes and the like. The life of the soldier is dangerous, even when there are no wars to fight. So they tried to rationalize it along the lines of an accidental death. But Rocha had not died by accident. He’d lost his life doing his job, soldiering at the behest of the country which he had volunteered to serve, whose uniform he’d worn with pride. He’d known what the hazards were, taken his chances like a man, and now he was being planted in the ground of a foreign land.

  Chavez knew that he’d been irrational to assume that something like this would never happen. The surprise came from the fact that Rocha, like the rest of the squad members, had been a real pro, smart, tough, good with his weapons, quiet in the bush, an intense and very serious soldier who really liked the idea of going after druggies—for reasons he’d never explained to anyone. Oddly, that helped. Rocha had died doing his job. Ding figured that was a good enough epitaph for anyone. When the hole was finished, they lowered the body as gently as they could. Captain Ramirez said a few words, and the hole was filled in partway. As always, Olivero sprinkled his CS tear-gas powder to keep animals from digging it up, and the sod was replaced to erase any trace of what had been done. Ramirez made a point of recording the position, however, in case anyone ever did come back for his man. Then it was time to move.

  They kept moving past dawn, heading for an alternate patrol base five miles from the one that Rocha now guarded alone. Ramirez planned to rest his men, then lead them on another mission as soon as possible. Better to have them working than thinking too much. That’s what the manuals said.

  An aircraft carrier is as much a community as a warship, home for over six thousand men, with its own hospital and shopping center, church and synagogue, police force and videoclub, even its own newspaper and TV network. The men work long hours, and the services they enjoyed while off duty were nothing more than they deserved—and more to the point, the Navy had found that the sailors worked far better when they received them.

  Robby Jackson rose and showered as he always did, then found his way to the wardroom for coffee. He’d be having breakfast with the captain today, but wanted to be fully awake before he did so. There was a television set mounted on brackets in the corner, and the officers watched it just as they did at home, and for the same reason. Most Americans start off the day with TV news. In this case the announcer wasn’t paid half a million dollars per year, and didn’t have to wear makeup. He did have to write his own copy, however.

  “At about nine o’clock last night-twenty-one hundred hours to us on the Ranger—an explosion ripped through the home of one Esteban Untiveros. Señor Untiveros was a major figure in the Medellín Cartel. Looks like one of his friends wasn’t quite as friendly as he thought. News reports indicate that a car bomb totally destroyed his expensive hilltop residence, along with everyone in it.

  “At home, the first of the summer’s political conventions kicks off in Chicago next week. Governor J. Robert Fowler, the leading candidate for his party’s nomination, is still a hundred votes short of a majority and is meeting today with representatives from...”

  Jackson turned to look around. Commander Jensen was thirty feet away, motioning to the TV and chuckling with one of his people, who grinned into his cup and said nothing.

  Something in Robby’s mind simply went click.

  A Drop-Ex.

  A tech-rep who didn’t want to talk very much.

  An A-6E that headed to the beach on a heading of one-one-five toward Ecuador and returned to Ranger on a heading of two-zero-five. The other side of that triangle must—might—have taken the bird over ... Colombia.

  A report of a car bomb.

  A bomb with a combustible case. A smart-bomb with a combustible case, Commander Jackson corrected himself.

  Well, son of a bitch....

  It was amusing in more than one way. Taking out a drug dealer didn’t trouble his conscience very much. Hell, he wondered why they didn’t just shoot those drug-courier flights down. All that loose politician talk about threats to national security and people conducting chemical warfare against the United States—well, shit, he thought, why not have a for-real Shoot-Ex? You wouldn’t even have to spend money for target drones. There was not a man in the service who wouldn’t mind taking a few druggies out. Enemies are where you find them—where National Command Authority said they were, that is—and dealing with his country’s enemies was what Commander Robert Jefferson Jackson, USN, did for a living. Doing them with a smart-bomb, and making it look like something else, well, that was just sheer artistry.

  More amusing was the fact that Robby thought he knew what had happened. That was the trouble with secrets. They were impossible to keep. One way or another, they always got out. He wouldn’t tell anyone, of course. And that really was too bad, wasn’t it?

  But why bother keeping it a secret? Robby wondered. The way the druggies killed the FBI Director—that was a declaration of war. Why not just go public and say, We’re coming for you! In a political year, too. When had the American people ever failed to support their President when he declared the necessity to go after people?

  But Jackson’s job was not political. It was time to see the skipper. Two minutes later he arrived at the CO’s stateroom. The Marine standing guard opened the door for him, and Robby found the captain reading dispatches.

  “You’re out of uniform!” the man said sternly.

  “What—excuse me, Cap’n?” Robby stopped cold, looking to see that his fly was zipped.

  “Here.” Ranger’s CO rose and handed over the message flimsy. “You just got frocked, Robby—excuse me, Captain Jackson. Congratulations, Rob. Sure beats coffee for startin’ off the day, doesn’t it?”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Now if we can just get those charlie-fox fighter tactics of yours to work....”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Ritchie.”

  “Okay, Ritchie.”

  “You can still call me ‘sir’ on the bridge and in public, though,” the captain pointed out. Newly promoted officers always got razzed. They also had to pay for the “wetting down” parties.

  The TV news crews arrived in the early morning. They, too, had difficulty with the road up to the Untiveros house. The police were already there, and it didn’t occur to any of the crews to wonder if these police officers might be of the “tame” variety. They wore uniforms and pistol belts and seemed to be acting like real cops. Under Cortez’s supervision, the real search for survivors had been completed already, and the two people found taken off, along with most of the surviving security guards and almost all of the firearms. Security guards per se were not terribly unusual in Colombia, though fully automatic weapons and crew-served machine guns were. Of course, Cortez was also gone before t
he news crews arrived, and by the time they started taping, the police search was fully underway. Several of the crews had direct satellite feeds, though one of the heavy ground-station trucks had failed to make the hill.

  The easiest part of the search, lovingly recorded for posterity by the portacams, began in what had been the conference room, now a three-foot pile of gravel. The largest piece of a Production Committee member found (that title was also not revealed to the newsies) was a surprisingly intact lower leg, from just below the knee to a shoe still laced on the right foot. It would later be established that this “remain” belonged to Carlos Wagner. Untiveros’s wife and two young children had been in the opposite side of the house on the second floor, watching a taped movie. The VCR, still plugged in and on play, was found right before the bodies. Yet another TV camera followed the man—a security guard temporarily without his AK-47—who carried the limp, bloody body of a dead child to an ambulance.

  “Oh, My God,” the President said, watching one of the several televisions in the Oval Office. “If anybody figures this out ...”

  “Mr. President, we’ve dealt with this sort of thing before,” Cutter pointed out. “The Libyan bombing under Reagan, the air strikes into Lebanon and—”

  “And we caught hell for it every time! Nobody cares why we did it, all they care about is that we killed the wrong people. Christ, Jim, that was a kid! What are we going to say? ‘Oh, that’s too bad, but he was in the wrong place’?”

  “It is alleged,” the TV reporter was saying, “that the owner of this house was a member of the Medellín Cartel, but local police sources tell us that he was never officially charged with any crime, and well ...” The reporter paused in front of the camera. “You saw what this car bomb did to his wife and children.”

  “Great,” the President growled. He lifted the controller and punched off the TV set. “Those bastards can do whatever the hell they want to our kids, but if we go after them on their turf, all of a sudden they’re the goddamned victims! Has Moore told Congress about this yet?”

  “No, Mr. President. CIA doesn’t have to tell them until forty-eight hours after such an operation begins, and, for administrative purposes, the operation didn’t actually begin until yesterday afternoon.”

  “They don’t find out,” the President said. “If we tell ’em, then it’ll leak sure as hell. You tell Moore and Ritter that.”

  “Mr. President, I can’t—”

  “The hell you can’t! I just gave you an order, mister.” The President walked to the windows. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” he muttered.

  Cutter knew what the real issue was, of course. The opposition’s political convention would begin shortly. Their candidate, Governor Bob Fowler of Ohio, was leading the President in the polls. That was normal, of course. The incumbent had run through the primaries without serious opposition, resulting in a dull, predetermined result, while Fowler had fought a tooth-and-nail campaign for his party’s nomination and was still an eyelash short of certain nomination. Voters always responded to the lively candidates, and while Fowler was personally about as lively as a dishrag, his contest had been the interesting one. And like every candidate since Nixon and the first war on drugs, he was saying that the President hadn’t made good on his promise to restrict drug traffic. That sounded familiar to the current occupant of the Oval Office. He’d said the same thing four years earlier, and ridden that issue, and others, into the house on Pennsylvania Avenue. So now he’d actually tried something radical. And this had happened. The government of the United States had just used its most sophisticated military weapons to murder a couple of kids and their mother. That’s what Fowler would say. After all, it was an election year.

  “Mr. President, it would be unsound to terminate the operations we have running at this point. If you are serious about avenging the deaths of Director Jacobs and the rest, and serious about putting a dent in drug trafficking, you cannot stop things now. We’re just about to show results. Drug flights into the country are down twenty percent,” Cutter pointed out. “Add that to the money-laundering bust and we can say that we’ve achieved a real victory.”

  “How do we explain the bombing?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that, sir. What if we say that we don’t know, but it could be one of two things. First, it might be an attack by M-19. That group’s political rhetoric lately has been critical of the drug lords. Second, we could say that it results from an internecine dispute within the Cartel itself.”

  “How so?” he asked without turning around. It was a bad sign when WRANGLER didn’t look you in the eye, Cutter knew. He was really worried about this. Politics were such a pain in the ass, the Admiral thought, but they were also the most interesting game in town.

  “Killing Jacobs and the rest was an irresponsible action on their part. Everyone knows that. We can leak the argument that some parts of the Cartel are punishing their own peers for doing something so radical as to endanger their whole operation.” Cutter was rather proud of that argument. It had come from Ritter, but the President didn’t know that. “We know that the druggies aren’t all that reticent about killing off family members—it’s practically their trademark. This way we can explain what ‘they’ are doing. We can have our cake and eat it, too,” he concluded, smiling at the President’s back.

  The President turned away from the windows. His mien was skeptical, but ... “You really think you can bring that off?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. It also allows us at least one more RECIPROCITY attack.”

  “I have to show that we’re doing something,” the President said quietly. “What about those soldiers we have running around in the jungle?”

  “They have eliminated a total of five processing sites. We’ve lost two people killed, and have two more wounded, but not seriously. That’s a cost of doing business, sir. These people are professional soldiers. They knew what the risks were going in. They are proud of what they are doing. You won’t have any problems on that score, sir. Pretty soon the word’s going to get out that the local peasants ought not to work for the druggies. That will put a serious dent in the processing operations. It’ll be temporary—only a few months, but it’ll be real. It’ll be something you can point to. The street price of cocaine is going to go up soon. You can point to that, too. That’s how we gauge success or failure in our interdiction operations. The papers will run that bit of news before we have to announce it.”

  “So much the better,” the President observed with his first smile of the day. “Okay—let’s just be more careful.”

  “Of course, Mr. President.”

  Morning PT for the 7th Division commenced at 0615 hours. It was one explanation for the puritanical virtue of the unit. Though soldiers, especially young soldiers, like to drink as much as any other segment of American society, doing physical training exercises with a hangover is one step down from lingering death. It was already warm at Fort Ord, and by seven o’clock, at the finish of the daily three-mile run, every member of the platoon had worked up a good sweat. Then it was time for breakfast.

  The officers ate together this morning and table talk was on the same subject being contemplated all over the country.

  “About fucking time,” one captain noted.

  “They said it was a car bomb,” another pointed out.

  “I’m sure the Agency knows how to arrange it. All the experience from Lebanon an’ all,” a company XO offered.

  “Not as easy as you think,” the battalion S-2, intelligence officer, observed. A former company commander in the Rangers, he knew a thing or two about bombs and booby traps. “But whoever did it, it was a pretty slick job.”

  “Shame we can’t go down there,” a lieutenant said. The junior officers grunted agreement. The senior ones were quiet. Plans for that contingency had been the subject of division and corps staff discussion for some years. Deploying units for war—and that’s exactly what it was—was not to be discussed lightly, though the general consen
sus was that it could be done ... if the local governments approved. Which they would not, of course. That, the officers thought, was understandable but most unfortunate. It was difficult to overstate the level of loathing in the Army for drugs. The senior battalion officers, major and above, could remember the drug problems of the seventies, when the Army had been every bit as hollow as critics had said it was, and it hadn’t been unknown for officers to travel in certain places only with armed guards. Conquering that particular enemy had required years of effort. Even today every member of the American military was liable to random drug testing. For senior NCOs and all officers, there was no forgiveness. One positive test and you were gone. For E-5s and below, there was more leeway: one positive test resulted in an Article 15 and a very stern talking to; a second positive, and out they went. The official slogan was a simple one: NOT IN MY ARMY! Then there was the other dimension. Most of the men around this table were married, with children whom some drug dealer might approach sooner or later as a potential client. The general agreement was that if anyone sold drugs to the child of a professional soldier, that dealer’s life was in mortal danger. Such events rarely took place because soldiers are above all disciplined people, but the desire was there. As was the ability.