Clear and Present Danger

“Serving two-to-three in the Pentagon at the moment. I fly fighter planes when I’m not driving a desk.”

  “Must be nice to do all your work sitting down,” the major observed.

  “No.” Robby chuckled. “The best part is I can get the hell outa Dodge right quick if I got to.”

  “Roger that, Captain. What brings you to Panama?”

  “We got a carrier group operating offshore. I was down to watch. You?”

  “Regular training rotation for one of our battalions. Jungle and tight country is where we work. We hide a lot,” the major explained.

  “Guerrilla stuff?”

  “Roughly similar tactics. This was mainly a reconnaissance exercise, trying to get inside to gather information, conduct a few raids, that sort of thing.”

  “How’d it go?”

  The major grunted. “Not as well as we hoped. We lost some good people out of some important slots—same with you, right? People rotate in, rotate out, and it takes awhile to get the new ones up to speed. Anyway, the reconnaissance units in particular lost some good ones, and it cost us some. That’s why we train,” the major concluded. “Never stops.”

  “It’s different with us. We deploy as a unit and usually don’t lose anybody that way until we come back home.”

  “Always figured the Navy was smart, sir.”

  “Is it that bad? My brother told me he lost a really good—squad leader? Anyway, is it that big a deal?”

  “Can be. I had a guy named Muñoz, really good man for going in the bushes and finding stuff out. Just disappeared one day, off doing some special-ops shit, they told me. The guy who’s in his slot now just isn’t that good. It happens. You live with it.”

  Jackson remembered the name Muñoz, but couldn’t remember where from. “How do I arrange transport down to Monterey?”

  “Hell, it’s right next door. You want to catch a ride with us, Captain? We don’t have all the amenities of the Navy, of course.”

  “We do occasionally rough it, Major. Hell, once I didn’t even get my bedsheets changed for three whole days. Same week, they made us eat hot dogs for dinner—never forget that cruise. Real bitch that one was. I presume your jeeps have air conditioning?” The two men looked at each other and laughed.

  Ryan was given a suite of rooms one floor up from the Governor’s entourage, actually paid for by the campaign, which was quite a surprise. That made security easier. Fowler now had a full Secret Service detail, and would keep it until November, and if he were successful, for four years after that. It was a very nice, modern hotel with thick concrete floors, but the sound of the parties down below made its way through.

  There came a knock on Jack’s door just as he got out of the shower. The hotel had a monogrammed robe hanging there. Ryan put it on to answer the door. It was a fortyish woman dressed to kill—in red, again the current “power” color. No expert on women’s fashions, he wondered how the color of one’s clothing imparted anything other than visibility.

  “Are you Dr. Ryan?” she asked. It was the way she asked that Jack immediately disliked, rather as though he were a disease carrier.

  “Yes. Who might you be?”

  “I’m Elizabeth Elliot,” she replied.

  “Ms. Elliot,” Jack said. She looked like a Mizz. “You have me at a disadvantage. I don’t know who you are.”

  “I’m the assistant adviser for foreign policy.”

  “Oh. Okay. Come on in, then.” Ryan pulled the door all the way open and waved her in. He should have remembered. This was “E.E.,” professor of political science at Bennington, whose geopolitical views, Ryan thought, made Lenin look like Theodore Roosevelt. He’d walked several feet before he realized that she hadn’t followed. “You coming in or aren’t you?”

  “Like this?” She just stood there for another ten seconds before speaking again. Jack continued to towel off his hair without saying anything, more curious than anything else.

  “I know who you are,” she said defiantly. What the hell she was defying, Jack didn’t know. In any case, Ryan had had a long day and was still suffering jetlag from his European trip, added to which was one more hour of Central Time Zone. That partly explained his reply.

  “Look, doc, you’re the one who caught me coming out of the shower. I have two children, and a wife, who also graduated Bennington, by the way. I’m not James Bond and I don’t fool around. If you want to say something to me, just be nice enough to say it. I’ve been on the go for the past week, and I’m tired, and I need my sleep.”

  “Are you always this impolite?”

  Jesus! “Dr. Elliot, if you want to play with the big kids in D.C., Lesson Number One is, Business is Business. You want to tell me something, tell. You want to ask me something, ask.”

  “What the hell are you doing in Colombia?” she snapped at him.

  “What are you talking about?” Jack asked in a more moderate tone.

  “You know what I’m talking about. I know that you know.”

  “In that case would you please refresh my memory?”

  “Another drug lord just got blown up,” she said, casting a nervous glance up and down the corridor as though a passerby might wonder if she was negotiating price with someone. There is a lot of that at political conventions, and E.E. was not physically unattractive.

  “I have no knowledge of any such operation being conducted by the American government or any other. That is to say, I have zero information on the subject of your inquiry. I am not omniscient. Believe it or not, even when you are sanctified by employment in the Central Intelligence Agency, you do not automatically know everything that happens on every rock, puddle, and hilltop in the world. What does the news say?”

  “But you’re supposed to know,” Elizabeth Elliot protested. Now she was puzzled.

  “Dr. Elliot, two years ago you wrote a book about how pervasive we are. It reminded me of an old Jewish story. Some old guy on the shtetl in Czarist Russia who owned two chickens and a broken-down horse was reading the hate rag of the antisemites—you know, the Jews are doing this, the Jews are doing that. So a neighbor asked him why he got it, and the old guy answered that it was nice to see how powerful he was. That’s what your book was, if you’ll pardon me: about one percent fact and ninety-nine percent invective. If you really want to know what we can and cannot do, I can tell you a few things, within the limits of classification. I promise that you’ll be as disappointed as I regularly am. I wish we were half as powerful as you think.”

  “But you’ve killed people.”

  “You mean me personally?”

  “Yes!”

  Maybe that explained her attitude, Jack thought. “Yes, I have killed people. Someday I’ll tell you about the nightmares, too.” Ryan paused. “Am I proud of it? No. Am I glad that I did it? Yes, I am. Why? you ask. My life, the lives of my wife and daughter, or the lives of other innocent people were at risk at the times in question, and I did what I had to do to protect my life and those other lives. You do remember the circumstances, don’t you?”

  Elliot wasn’t interested in those. “The Governor wants to see you at eight-fifteen.”

  Six hours’ sleep was what that meant to Ryan. “I’ll be there.”

  “He is going to ask you about Colombia.”

  “Then you can make points with your boss by giving him the answer early: I do not know.”

  “If he wins, Dr. Ryan, you’re—”

  “Out?” Jack smiled benignly at her. “You know, this is like something from a bad movie, Dr. Elliot. If your man wins, maybe you will have the power to fire me. Let me explain to you what that means to me.

  “You will then have the power to deny me a total of two and a half hours in a car every working day; the power to fire me from a difficult, stressful job that keeps me away from my family much more than I would like; and the power to compel me to live a life commensurate with the money that I earned ten or so years ago; the power to force me to go back to writing my history books, or maybe to teach again, which
is why I got my doctorate in the first place. Dr. Elliot, I’ve seen loaded machine guns pointed at my wife and daughter, and I managed to deal with that threat. If you want to threaten me in a serious way, you’ll need something better than taking my job away. I’ll see you in the morning, I suppose, but you should know that my briefing is only for Governor Fowler. My orders are that no one else can be in the room.” Jack closed, bolted, and chained the door. He’d had too many beers on the airplane, and knew it, but nobody had ever pushed Ryan’s buttons that hard before.

  Dr. Elliot took the stairs down instead of the elevator. Unlike most of the people in the entourage, Governor Fowler’s chief aide was cold sober—he rarely drank in any case—and already at work planning a campaign that would start in a week instead of the customary wait until Labor Day. “Well?” he asked E.E.

  “He says he doesn’t know. I think he’s lying.”

  “What else?” Arnold van Damm asked.

  “He’s arrogant, offensive, and insulting.”

  “So are you, Beth.” They both laughed. They didn’t really like each other, but political campaigns make for the strangest of bedfellows. The campaign manager was reading over a briefing paper about Ryan from Congressman Alan Trent, new chairman of the House Select Committee for Intelligence Oversight. E.E. hadn’t seen it. She had told him, though he already knew (though neither of them knew what it had really all been about), that Ryan had confronted Trent in a Washington social gathering and called him a queer in public. Trent had never forgiven or forgotten an insult in his life. Nor was he one to give gratuitous praise. But Trent’s report on Ryan used words like bright, courageous, and honest. Now what the hell, van Damm wondered, did that mean?

  It was going to be their third no-hit night, Chavez was sure. They’d been out since sundown and had just passed through the second suspected processing site—the signs had been there. The discoloration of the soil from acid spills, the beaten earth, discarded trash, everything to show that men had been there and probably went there regularly—but not tonight, and not for the two preceding nights. Ding knew that he ought to have expected it. All the manuals, all the lectures of his career, had emphasized the fact that combat operations were some crazy mixture of boredom and terror, boredom because for the most part nothing happened, terror because “it” could happen at any second. Now he understood how men got sloppy out in the field. On exercises you always knew what—well, you knew that something would happen. The Army rarely wasted time on no-contact exercises. Training time cost too much. And so he was faced with the irksome fact that real combat operations were less exciting than training, but infinitely more dangerous. The dualism was enough to give the young man a headache.

  Aches were something he already had enough of. He was now gobbling a couple of his Tylenol caplets every four hours because of muscle aches and low-order sprains—and simple tension and stress. A young man, he was learning that the combination of strenuous exercise and real mental stress made you old in a hurry. In fact he was no more tired than an office worker after a slightly long day at his desk, but the mission and the environment combined to amplify everything he felt. Joy or sadness, elation or depression, fear or invincibility were all much greater down here. In a word, combat operations were not fun. But then, why did he—not like it, not that, really, but... what? Chavez shook the thought away. It was affecting his concentration.

  And though he didn’t know it, that was the answer. Ding Chavez was a born combat soldier. Just as a trauma surgeon took no pleasure from seeing the broken bodies of accident victims, Chavez would easily have preferred sitting on a barstool next to a pretty girl or watching a football game with his friends. But the surgeon knew that his skills at the table were crucial to the lives of his patients, and Chavez knew that his skills on point were crucial to the mission. This was his, place. On the mission, everything was so wonderfully clear—except when he was confused, and even that was clear in a different, very strange way. His senses searched out through the trees like radar, filtering out the twitters of birds and the rustle of animals—except when there was a special message in that sort of noise. His mind was a perfect balance of paranoia and confidence. He was a weapon of his country. That much he understood, and fearful though he was, fighting off boredom, struggling to keep alert, concerned for his comrades, Chavez was now a breathing, thinking machine whose single purpose was the destruction of his nation’s enemies. The job was hard, but he was the man for it.

  But there was still nothing out here to be found this night. The trails were cold. The processing sites unoccupied. Chavez stopped at a preplanned rally point and waited for the rest of the squad to catch up. He switched off his night goggles—you only used them about a third of the time in any case—and had himself a drink of water. At least the water was good here, coming off clear mountain streams.

  “Whole lot of nothin’, Captain,” he told Ramirez when the officer arrived at his side. “Ain’t seen nothing, ain’t heard nothing.”

  “Tracks, trails?”

  “Nothing less’n two, maybe three days old.”

  Ramirez knew how to determine the age of a trail, but couldn’t do it as well as Sergeant Chavez. He breathed in a way that almost seemed relieved.

  “Okay, we start heading back. Take a couple more minutes to relax, then lead off.”

  “Right. Sir?”

  “Yeah, Ding?”

  “This area’s dryin’ up on us.”

  “You may be right, but we’ll wait a few more days to be sure,” Ramirez said. Part of him was glad that there had been no contact since the death of Rocha, and that part was blanking out warning signals that he ought to have been getting. Emotion was telling him that something was good, while intelligence and analysis should have told him that something was bad.

  Chavez didn’t quite catch that one either. There was a distant rumble at the edge of his consciousness, like the strangely noticeable quiet that precedes an earthquake, or the first hint of clouds on a clear horizon. Ding was too young and inexperienced to notice. He had the talents. He was the right man in the right place, but he hadn’t been there long enough. He didn’t know that, either.

  But there was work to do. He led off five minutes later, climbing back up the mountainside, avoiding all trails, taking a path different from any path they had taken to this point, alert to any present danger but oblivious to a danger that was distant but just as clear.

  The C-141B touched down hard, Robby thought, though the soldiers didn’t seem to notice. In fact, most of them were asleep and had to be roused. Jackson rarely slept on airplanes. It was, he thought, a bad habit for a pilot to acquire. The transport slowed and taxied around every bit as awkwardly as a fighter on the tight confines of a carrier’s deck until finally the clamshell cargo doors opened at the tail.

  “You come along with me, Captain,” the major said. He stood and hefted his rucksack. It looked heavy. “I had the wife bring my personal car here.”

  “How’d she get home?”

  “Car pool,” the major explained. “This way the battalion commander and I can discuss the exercise some more on the way down to Ord. We’ll drop you off at Monterey.”

  “Can you take me right into the Fort? I’ll kick my little brother’s door down.”

  “Might be out in the field.”

  “Friday night? I’ll take the chance.” Robby’s real reason was that his conversation with the major had been his first talk with an Army officer in years. Now that he was a captain, the next step was making flag. If he wanted to make that—Robby was as confident as any other fighter pilot, but the step from captain to rear admiral (lower half) is the most treacherous in the Navy—having a somewhat broader field of knowledge wouldn’t hurt. It would make him a better staff officer, and after his CAG job, if he got it, he’d go back to being a staff puke again.

  “Okay.”

  The two-hour drive down from Travis Air Force Base to Fort Ord—Ord has only a small airfield, not large enough for tran
sports—was an interesting one, and Robby was in luck. After two hours of swapping sea stories for war stories and learning things that he’d never known about, he found that Tim was just arriving home from a long night on the town. The elder brother found that the couch was all he needed. It wasn’t what he was used to, of course, but he figured he could rough it.

  Jack and his bodyguard arrived at the Governor’s suite right on time. He didn’t know any of the Secret Service detail, but they’d been told to expect him, and he still had his CIA security pass. A laminated plastic ID about the size of a playing card with a picture and a number, but no name, it ordinarily hung around his neck on a chain like some sort of religious talisman. This time he showed it to the agents and tucked it back into his coat pocket.

  The briefing was set up as that most cherished of political institutions, the working breakfast. Not as socially important as a lunch, much less a dinner, breakfasts were for some reason or other perceived to be matters of great import. Breakfasts were serious.

  The Honorable J. (for Jonathan, which he didn’t like) Robert (call me Bob) Fowler, Governor of Ohio, was a man in his middle fifties. Like the current President, Fowler was a former state’s attorney with an impressive record of law enforcement behind him. He’d ridden the reputation of the man who’d cleaned up Cleveland into six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, but you didn’t go from that House to the White House, and the Senate seats in his state were too secure. So he’d become Governor six years before, and by all reports an effective one. His ultimate political goal had been formed over twenty years before, and now he’d made it to the finals.

  He was a trim five-eleven, with brown eyes and hair showing the first signs of gray over the ears. And he was weary. America demands much of her presidential candidates. Marine Corps boot camp was a tryst by comparison. Ryan looked at a man almost twenty years his senior who for the past six months had lived on too much coffee and bad political-dinner food, yet somehow managed to smile at all the bad jokes told by people he didn’t like and, most remarkably of all, to make a speech given no less than four times per day sound new and fresh and exciting to everyone who heard it. He also had about as much appreciation of foreign policy, Ryan thought, as Jack did of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which wasn’t a hell of a lot.