Clear and Present Danger

  “Not this truck, señor, I—”

  It was just one more thing to surprise him, but it would be the last. Clark’s hand came up and fired into the man’s forehead at a range of five feet. Before the leader had even started to fall, the second was also dead from the same cause. Without pause he moved around the right side of the truck. He hopped up on the running board and saw that there was just a driver. He, too, took a silenced round in the head. By this time Larson was out of the car. Approaching Clark from the rear, he came close to getting a round for his trouble.

  “Don’t do that!” Clark said as he safed his pistol.

  “Christ, I just—”

  “You announce your presence in a situation like this. You almost died ’cause you didn’t. Remember that. Come on.” Clark hopped onto the back of the truck and pulled back the tarp.

  Most of the dead were locals, judging by their clothes, but there were two faces that Clark vaguely recognized. It took a moment for him to remember....

  “Captain Rojas. Sorry, kid,” he said quietly to the body.

  “Who?”

  “He had command of Team BANNER. One of ours. These fuckers killed some of our people.” His voice seemed quite tired.

  “Looks like our guys did all right, too—”

  “Let me explain something to you about combat, kid. There are two kinds of people in the field: your people and other people. The second category can include noncombatants, and you try to avoid hurting them if you have the time, but the only ones who really matter are your own people. You got a handkerchief?”

  “Two.”

  “Give ’em to me, then load those two in the truck.”

  Clark pulled the cap of the gas tank that hung under the cab. He tied the handkerchiefs together and fed them in. The tank was full and the cloth was immediately saturated with gasoline.

  “Come on, back to the car.” Clark disassembled his pistol and put it back in the rock box, then closed the back hatch and got back into the front seat. He punched the cigarette lighter. “Pull up close.”

  Larson did so, getting there about the time the lighter popped out. Clark took it out and touched it to the soaked handkerchiefs. They ignited at once. Larson didn’t have to be told to take off. They were around the next bend before the fire started in earnest.

  “Back to the city, fast as you can,” Clark ordered next. “What’s the fastest way to get to Panama?”

  “I can have you there in a couple of hours, but it means—”

  “Do you have the radio codes to get onto an Air Force base?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “You are now out of country. Your cover is completely blown,” Mr. Clark said. “Get a message to your girl before she gets back. Have her desert, or jump ship, or whatever you call it with an airline so that she doesn’t have to come back here. She’s blown, too. Both your lives are in danger-no-shit danger. There might have been somebody watching us. Somebody might have noticed that you drove me down here. Somebody might have noticed that you borrowed this car twice. Probably not, but you don’t get old in this business by taking unnecessary chances. You have nothing more to contribute to this operation, so get your asses clear.”

  “Yes, sir.” They reached the highway before Larson spoke again. “What you did ...”

  “What about it?”

  “You were right. We can’t let people do that and—”

  “You’re wrong. You don’t know why I did that, do you?”

  Clark asked. He spoke like a man teaching a class, but gave only one of the reasons. “You’re thinking like a spy, and this is no longer an intelligence operation. We have people, soldiers, running and hiding up in those hills. What I did was to create a diversion. If they think our guys came down to avenge their dead, it may pull some of the bad guys down off the mountain, get them to look in the wrong place, take some of the heat off our guys. Not much, but it’s the best I could do.” He paused for a moment. “I won’t say it didn’t feel good. I don’t like seeing our people killed, and I fucking well don’t like not being allowed to do anything about it. That’s been happening for too many years—Middle East, everywhere—we lose people and don’t do a goddamned thing about it. This time I just had an excuse. It’s been a long time. And you know something—it did feel good,” Clark admitted coldly. “Now shut up and drive. I have some thinking to do.”

  Ryan was in his office, still quiet, still thinking. Judge Moore was finding all sorts of excuses to be away. Ritter was spending a lot of time out of the office. Jack couldn’t ask questions and demand answers if they weren’t here. That also made Ryan the senior executive present, and gave him all sorts of extraneous paper to shuffle and telephone calls to return. Maybe he could make that work for him. Of one thing he was certain. He had to find out what the hell was happening. It was also plain that Moore and Ritter had made two mistakes of their own. First, they thought that Ryan didn’t know anything. They ought to have known better. He’d only gotten this far in the Agency because he was good at figuring things out. Their second mistake was in their likely assumption that his inexperience would prevent him from pressing too hard even if he did start figuring things out. Fundamentally they were both thinking like bureaucrats. People who spent their lives in bureaucracies were typically afraid of breaking rules. That was a sure way to get fired, and it cowed people to think of tossing their careers away. But that was an issue Jack had decided on long before. He didn’t know what his profession was. He’d been a Marine, a stockbroker, an assistant professor of history, and then joined CIA. He could always go back to teaching. The University of Virginia had already talked to Cathy about becoming a full professor at their medical school, and even Jeff Pelt wanted Ryan to come and liven up the history department as a visiting lecturer. It would be nice to teach again, Jack thought. It would certainly be easier than what he was doing here. Whatever he saw in his future, he didn’t feel trapped by his job. And James Greer had given him all the guidance he needed: Do what you think is right.

  “Nancy.” Jack keyed his intercom. “When is Mr. Ritter going to be back?”

  “Tomorrow morning. He had to meet with somebody down at The Farm.”

  “Okay, thanks. Could you call my wife and leave a message that I’m going to be pretty late tonight?”

  “Surely, Doctor.”

  “Thanks. I need the file on INF verification, the OSWR preliminary report.”

  “Dr. Molina is out at Sunnyvale with the Judge,” Nancy said. Tom Molina was the head of the Office of Strategic Weapons Research, which was back-checking two other departments on the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty verification procedures.

  “I know. I just want to look the report over so I can discuss it with him when he gets back.”

  “Take about fifteen minutes to get it.”

  “No rush,” Jack replied and killed the intercom. That document could tie up King Solomon himself for three days, and it gave him a wholly plausible excuse for staying late. Congress had gotten antsy about some technical issues as both sides worked to destroy the last of their launchers. Ryan and Molina would have to testify there in the next week. Jack pulled the writing panel out from the side of his desk, knowing what he’d do after Nancy and the other clerical people left.

  Cortez was a very sophisticated political observer. That was one reason he’d made colonel so young in an organization as bureaucratized as the DGI. Based on the Soviet KGB model, it had already grown a collection of clerks and inspectors and security officers to make the American CIA look like a mom-and-pop operation—which made the relative efficiencies of the agencies all the more surprising. For all their advantages, the Americans lacked political will, always fighting over issues that ought to have been quite clear. At the KGB Academy, one instructor had compared them to the Polish parliament of old, a collection of over five hundred barons, all of whom had had to agree before anything happened—and because of which nothing ever happened, allowing Poland to be raped by anyone with the ability to
make a simple decision.

  The Americans had acted in this case, however, acted decisively and well. What had changed?

  What had changed—what had to have changed in this case—was that the Americans were breaking their own laws. They had responded emotionally ... no, that wasn’t fair, Félix told himself. They had responded forcefully to a direct and arrogant challenge, just as the Soviets would have reacted, though with minor tactical differences. The emotional aspect to the reaction was that they had done the proper thing only by violating their incredible intelligence-oversight laws. And it was an election year in America....

  “Ah,” Cortez said aloud. It really was that simple, wasn’t it? The Americans, who had already helped him, would do so again. He just had to identify the proper target. That took only ten minutes more. So fitting, he thought, that his military rank had been that of colonel. For a century of Latin American history, it was always the colonels who did this sort of thing.

  What would Fidel say? Cortez nearly laughed out loud at the thought. For as long as that bearded ideologue had breathed, he’d hated the norteamericanos as an evangelist hated sin, enjoyed every small sting he’d been able to inflict on them, dumped his criminals and lunatics on the unsuspecting Carter—Anyone could have taken advantage of that fool, Cortez thought with amusement—played every possible gambit of guerrilla diplomacy against them. He really would have enjoyed this one. Now Félix just had to figure a way to pass the message along. It was a high-risk play on his part, but he’d won every toss to this point, and the dice were hot in his hand.

  Perhaps it had been a mistake, Chavez reflected. Perhaps leaving the head on the man’s chest had merely enraged them. Whatever the cause, the Colombians were prowling the woods with gusto now. They hadn’t caught Team KNIFE’S trail, and the soldiers were working very hard not to leave one, but one thing was clear to him: there would be a knock-down, drag-out firefight, and it wouldn’t be long in coming.

  But that wasn’t clear to Captain Ramirez. His orders were still to evade and avoid, and he was following them. Most of the men didn’t question that, but Chavez did—or more precisely, wanted to. But sergeants don’t question captains, at least not very often, and then only if you were a first sergeant and had the opportunity to take the man aside. If there was going to be a fight, and it sure as hell looked that way, why not set it up on favorable terms? Ten good men, armed with automatic weapons and grenades, plus two SAWs, made for one hell of an ambush. Give them a trail to follow, lead them right into the killzone. They were still carrying a couple of claymores. With luck, they’d drop ten or fifteen men in the first three seconds. Then the other side—those few who ran away fast enough—wouldn’t be pissed. They’d be pissing in their pants. Nobody would be crazy about hot pursuit then. Why didn’t Ramirez see that? Instead he was keeping everyone on the move, wearing them out, not looking for a good place to rest up, prepare a major ambush, duke it out, and then take off again. There was a time for caution. There was a time to fight. What that most favored word in any military lexicon, “initiative,” meant was who did the deciding on which time was which. Chavez knew it on instinct. Ramirez, he suspected, was thinking too much. About what, Chavez didn’t know, but the captain’s thinking was starting to worry the sergeant.

  Larson returned the car and drove Clark to the airport in his own BMW. He’d miss the car, he realized, as they walked to his aircraft. Clark was carrying all of his classified or sensitive equipment out with him, and nothing else. He hadn’t stopped to pack, not even his razor, though his Beretta 92-F, with silencer, was again tucked into the small of his back. He walked coolly and normally, but Larson now knew what tension looked like in Mr. Clark. He appeared even more relaxed than usual, even more offhand, even more absentminded, all the more to appear harmless to the people around him. This, Larson told himself, was one very dangerous cat. The pilot played back the shooting at the truck, the way he’d put the two gunmen at ease, confused them, asked for their help. He’d never known that the Agency had people like this, not after the Church Committee hearings.

  Clark climbed up into the aircraft, tossing his gear in the back, and managed to look a little impatient as Larson ran through his preflight procedures. He didn’t return to normal until the wheels were retracted.

  “How long to Panama?”

  “Two hours.”

  “Take us out over the water as soon as you can.”

  “You’re nervous?”

  “Now—only about your flying,” Clark said over his headset. He looked over and smiled. “What I’m worried about is thirty or so kids who may just be hung out to dry.”

  Forty minutes later they left Colombian airspace. Once over the Bay of Panama, Clark reached back for his gear, then forced open the door and dumped it into the sea.

  “You mind if I ask ... ?”

  “Let’s assume for the moment that this whole operation is coming apart. Just how much evidence do you want to be carrying into the Senate hearing room?” Clark paused. “Not much danger of that, of course, but what if people see us carrying stuff and wonder what it is and why we’re carrying it?”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “Keep thinking, Larson. Henry Kissinger said it: Even paranoids have enemies. If they’re willing to hang those soldiers out, what about us?”

  “But ... Mr. Ritter—”

  “I’ve known Bob Ritter for quite a while. I have a few questions for him. I want to see if he has good enough answers. It’s for goddamned sure he didn’t keep us informed of things we needed to know. Maybe that’s just another example of D.C. perspective. Then again, maybe it’s not.”

  “You don’t really think—”

  “I don’t know what to think. Call in,” Clark ordered. There was no sense getting Larson thinking about it. He hadn’t been in the Agency long enough to understand the issues.

  The pilot nodded and did what he was told. He switched his radio over to a seldom-used frequency and began transmitting. “Howard Approach, this is special flight X-Ray Golf Whiskey Delta, requesting permission to land, over.”

  “Whiskey Delta, this is Howard Approach, stand by,” replied some faceless tower controller, who then checked his radio codes. He didn’t know who XGWD was, but those letters were on his “hot” list. CIA, he thought, or some other agency that put people where they didn’t belong, which was all he needed to know. “Whiskey Delta, squawk one-three-one-seven. You are cleared for a direct visual approach. Winds are one-nine-five at ten knots.”

  “Roger, thank you. Out.” At least one thing had gone well today, Larson thought. Ten minutes later he put the Beech on the ground and followed a jeep to a parking place on the ramp. Air Force Security Police were waiting for them there, and whisked both officers over to Base Operations. The base was on security-alert drill; everyone was wearing green and most had sidearms. This included the operations staff, most of whom were in flight suits to look militant.

  “Next flight stateside?” Clark asked a young female captain. Her uniform “poopy suit” bore the silver wings of a pilot, and Clark wondered what she flew.

  “We have a -141 inbound to Charleston,” she replied. “But if you want to get on it—”

  “Young lady, check your ops orders for this.” Clark handed over his “J. T. Williams” passport. “In the SI section,” he added helpfully.

  The captain rose from her seat and pulled open the top drawer of her classified file cabinet, the one with the double combination lock. She extracted a red-bordered ring binder and flipped to the last divider. This was the “Special Intelligence” section, which identified certain things and people that were more closely guarded than mere “top” secrets. It took only a couple of seconds before she returned.

  “Thank you, Colonel Williams. The flight leaves in twenty minutes. Is there anything that you and your aide require, sir?”

  “Have Charleston arrange to have a puddle-jumper standing by to take us to D.C., if you would, please, Captain. Sorry to have to drop in on
you so unexpectedly. Thank you for your assistance.”

  “Any time, sir,” she replied, smiling at this polite colonel.

  “Colonel?” Larson asked on the way out the door.

  “Special Ops, no less. Pretty good for a beat-up old chief bosun’s mate, isn’t it?” A jeep had them to the Lockheed Starlifter in five minutes. The tunnel-like cargo compartment was empty. This was an Air Force Reserve flight, the loadmaster explained. They dropped some cargo off but were deadheading back home. That was fine with Clark, who stretched out as soon as the bird lifted off. It was amazing, he thought as he dozed off, all the things his countrymen did well. You could transition from being in mortal danger to being totally safe in a matter of hours. The same country that put people into the field and failed to support them properly treated them like VIPs—so long as they had the right ID notification in the right book, as though that could make it all better. It was crazy, the things we could do, and the things we couldn’t. A moment later he was snoring next to an amazed Carlos Larson. He didn’t wake until just before the landing, five hours later.

  As with any other government agency, CIA had regular business hours. By 3:30, those who came in early on “flex-time” were already filing out to beat the traffic, and by 5:30 even the seventh floor was quiet. Outside Jack’s office, Nancy Cummings put the cover over her IBM typewriter—she used a word processor, too, but Nancy still liked typewriters—and hit a button on her intercom.

  “Anything else you need me for, Dr. Ryan?”

  “No, thank you. See you in the morning.”

  “Okay. Good night, Dr. Ryan.”

  Jack turned in his chair, back to staring out at the trees that walled the complex off from outside view. He was trying to think, but his mind was a blank void. He didn’t know what he’d find. Part of him hoped that he’d find nothing. He knew that what he would do was going to cost him his career at the Agency, but he didn’t really give much of a damn anymore. If this was what his job required, then the job wasn’t really worth having, was it?