Clear and Present Danger

  “Bingo,” a technician said. His gloved hand held up a computer disk. Even with the gloves, he held it on opposite corners and dropped it into an extended plastic baggie. O’Day took the bag and walked upstairs to latent prints.

  Two senior technicians were working overtime tonight. They’d cheated somewhat, of course. They already had a copy of Admiral Cutter’s fingerprints from the central print index—all military personnel are printed as a matter of course upon their enlistment—along with their entire bag of tricks, which included a laser.

  “What was it in?” one of them asked.

  “On top of some newspapers,” O’Day replied.

  “Aha! No extraneous grease, and good insulation against the heat. There may be a chance.” The technician removed the disk from the clear bag and went to work. It took ten minutes, while O’Day paced the room.

  “I got a thumbprint with eight points on the front side, and what is probably a smudged ring finger on the back side with one good point and one very marginal one. There is one completely different set, but it’s too smudged to identify. It’s a different pattern, though, has to be a different person.”

  O’Day figured that that was more than he’d had the right to expect under the circumstances. A fingerprint identification ordinarily required ten individual points—the irregularities that constituted the art of fingerprint identification—but that number had always been arbitrary. The inspector was certain that Cutter had handled this computer disk, even if a jury might not be completely sure, if that time ever came. Now it was time to see what was on it, and for that he headed to a different lab.

  Since personal computers had entered the marketplace, it was only a matter of time until they were used in criminal enterprises. To investigate such use, the Bureau had its own department, but the most useful people of all were private consultants whose real business was “hacking,” and for whom computers were marvelous toys and their use the most entertaining of games. To have an important government agency pay them for playing the game was their equivalent of a pro-football career. The one O‘Day found waiting for him was one of the champs. He was twenty-five, and still a student at a local community college despite over two hundred hours of credits, the lowest grade for which had been a B+. He had longish red hair and a beard, both of which needed washing. O’Day handed it over.

  “This is a code-word case,” he said.

  “That’s nice,” the consultant said. “This is a Sony MFD-2DD microfloppy, double-sided, double-density, 135TPI, probably formatted for 800K. What’s supposed to be on it?”

  “We’re not sure, but probably an encipherment algorithm.”

  “Ah! Russian communications systems? The Sovs getting sophisticated on us?”

  “You don’t need to know that,” O’Day pointed out.

  “You guys are no fun at all,” the man said as he slid the disk into the drive. The computer to which it was attached was a new Apple Macintosh IIx, each of whose expander slots was occupied by a special circuit board, two of which the technician had personally designed. O’Day had heard that he’d work on an IBM only if someone put a gun to his head.

  The programs he used for this task had been designed by other hackers to recover data from damaged disks. The first one was called Rescuedata. The operation was a delicate one. First the read heads mapped each magnetic zone on the disk, copying the data over to the eight-megabyte memory of the IIx and making a permanent copy on the hard drive, plus a floppy-disk copy. That allowed him to eject the original, which O’Day immediately reinserted in the baggie.

  “It’s been wiped,” the man said next.

  “What?”

  “It’s been wiped, not erased or initialized, but wiped. Probably with a little toy magnet.”

  “Shit,” O’Day observed. He knew enough about computers to realize that the magnetically stored data was destroyed by magnetic interference.

  “Don’t get excited.”

  “Huh?”

  “If this guy had initialized the disk, we’d be screwed, but he just swiped a magnet around. Some of the data is gone, but some probably isn’t. Give me a couple of hours and maybe I can get some of this data back for you—there’s a smidge right there. It’s in machine language, but I don’t recognize the format ... looks like a transposition algorithm. I don’t know any of that cryppie stuff, sir. Looks fairly complex.” He looked around. “This is going to take some time.”

  “How long?”

  “How long to paint the Mona Lisa? How long to build a cathedral, How long ...” O‘Day was out of the room before he heard the third one. He dropped the disk off in the secure file in his office, then headed for the gym for a shower and a half hour in the whirlpool. The shower removed the stink, and while the whirlpool went to work on the aches, O’Day reflected that the case against the son of a bitch was shaping up rather nicely.

  “Sir, they just ain’t there.”

  Ramirez handed the headset back and nodded. There was no denying it now. He looked over to Guerra, his operations sergeant.

  “I think somebody forgot about us.”

  “Well, that’s good news, Cap’n. What are we gonna do about it?”

  “Our next check-in time is zero-one-hundred. We give ’em one more chance. If nothing by then, I guess we move out.”

  “Where to, sir?”

  “Head down off the mountain, see if we can borrow some transport and—Christ, I don’t know. We probably have enough cash we can use to fly out of here—”

  “No passports, no ID.”

  “Yeah. Make it to the Embassy in Bogotá?”

  “That violates about a dozen different orders, sir,” Guerra pointed out.

  “First time for everything,” Captain Ramirez observed. “Have everybody eat their last rations, rest up as best they can. We stand-to in two hours, and stay alert all night. I want Chavez and León to patrol down the hill, say two klicks’ worth.” Ramirez didn’t have to say what he was worried about. As unlikely as intellect told them it had to be, he and Guerra were on the same wavelength.

  “It’s cool, Cap’n,” the sergeant assured him. “We’re going to be all right, just as soon as those REMFs get their shit together.”

  The mission briefing took fifteen minutes. The men were angry and restive at the losses they had taken, not fully appreciative of the danger that lay ahead, only of their rage at what had already happened to their numbers. Such bravado, Cortez thought, such machismo. The fools.

  The first target was only thirty kilometers away—for the obvious reasons he wanted to deal with the nearest one first—and twenty-two of them could be covered by truck. They had to wait for darkness, of course, but sixteen trucks rolled out, each with fifteen or so men aboard. Cortez watched them depart, muttering to one another as they pulled out of sight. His own people stayed behind, of course. He had so far recruited ten men, and their loyalty was to him alone. He’d recruited well, of course. No nonsense about who their parents were or how faithfully they had killed. He’d selected them for their skills. Most were dropouts from M-19 and FARC, men for whom five years of playing at guerrilla warfare had been enough. Some had received training in Cuba or Nicaragua and had basic soldier skills—actually terrorist skills, but that put them ahead of the “soldiers” of the Cartel, most of whom had never received formal training at all. They were mercenaries. Their only interest in Cortez was in the money he’d paid them, but he’d also promised them more. More to the point, there was nowhere else for them to go. The Colombian government had no use for them. The Cartel would not have trusted them. And they had forsworn their loyalty to the two Marxist groups which were so politically bankrupt that they allowed themselves to be hired out by the Cartel. That left Cortez. He was the man they would kill for. He hadn’t confided in them, since he didn’t yet trust them to do any more than that, but all great movements began with small groups of people whose methods were as murky as their objectives, who knew only loyalty to a single man. At least that’s what Cortez had
been taught. He didn’t fully believe that himself, but it was enough for the moment. He had no illusions about leading a revolution. He was merely executing—what was it called? A hostile takeover. Yes, that was right. Cortez chuckled to himself as he walked back inside and started looking at his maps.

  “Good thing neither one of us is a smoker,” Larson said as the wheels came up. In the cabin behind them was an auxiliary fuel tank. They had a two-hour flight down to their patrol area, and two hours back, with three hours of loiter time on station. “You suppose this is going to work?”

  “If it doesn’t, somebody’s going to pay,” Clark replied. “What about the weather?”

  “We’ll sneak back in ahead of it. Don’t make any bets on tomorrow, though.”

  Chavez and León were two kilometers away from the team’s farthest listening post. Both carried silenced weapons. León hadn’t been the point scout for BANNER, but had woodcraft skills that Chavez liked. The best news of all was that they found nothing. Captain Ramirez had briefed them on what he was worried about. So far they hadn’t detected it, which was fine with the two sergeants. They’d gone down to the north initially, then gradually come south while covering an arc of several kilometers, looking for signs, listening for noise. They were just turning for the climb back to the LZ when Chavez stopped and turned.

  It was a metallic sound. He waved for León to freeze and pivoted his head around, hoping—what? he asked himself. Hoping that he’d really heard something? Hoping that he’d imagined it? He switched his goggles and scanned downhill. There was a road down there somewhere. If somebody came calling, it would be from that direction.

  It was hard to tell at first. There was thick overhead cover here, and the relative absence of light forced him to turn the brightness control to the maximum. That made the picture fuzzy, like a pre-cable TV signal from a distant city, and what he was looking for was far off—at least five hundred meters, which was as far as he could see down a thinned-out area of the forest. The tension only made him more alert, but that made his imagination work all the harder, and he had to guard against seeing things that weren’t there.

  But something was there. He could feel it even before the noise returned. There were no more metallic sounds, but there was ... there was the over-loud whisper of leaves, and then it was a calm night again in the lee of the mountain. Chavez looked over to León, who also had his goggles on, was also looking that way, a green image on the tube. The goggled face turned toward Chavez and nodded. There was no emotion in the gesture, just the professional communication of an unpleasant thought. Chavez knelt to activate his radio.

  “Six, this is Point,” Ding called.

  “Six here.”

  “We’re at the turn-back point. We got movement down here, about half a klick below us. We’re gonna wait to see what it is.”

  “Roger. Be careful, Sergeant,” Ramirez said.

  “Will do. Out.” León came over to join him.

  “How d‘you want to play this?” ’Berto asked.

  “Let’s stay close, try not to move too much till we see what they’re up to.”

  “You got it. Better cover about fifty meters uphill.”

  “Go ahead, I’ll be right behind you.” Chavez took one more look downhill before following his comrade up to a stand of thick trees. Still nothing he could really identify on the speckled screen. Two minutes later he was at the new perch.

  ’Berto saw it first and pointed down a trail. The moving specks were larger than the noise generated by the viewing system. Heads. Four or five hundred meters off. Coming straight up the hill.

  Okay, Chavez said to himself. Let’s get a count. He felt himself relaxing. This was business. He’d done it all before. The great unknown was now behind him. There would be a fight. He knew how to do that.

  “Six, this is Point, estimate company strength, heading right up to you.”

  “Anything else?”

  “They’re moving kinda slow. Careful, like.”

  “How long can you stay there?”

  “Maybe a couple minutes.”

  “Stay as long as it’s safe, then move. Try to pace them for another klick or so. We want to get as many as possible into the sack.”

  “Roger.”

  “These numbers suck, man,” León whispered.

  “We sure as hell want to whittle ‘em down some ’fore we run, don’t we?” Chavez returned his eyes to the advancing enemy. He saw no obvious organization. They were taking their time, moving slowly up the hill, though he could easily hear them now. They moved in little bands of three or four, probably groups of friends, he thought, like street gangs did. You wanted a friend at your back.

  Street gang, he thought. They didn’t bother with colors down here like in his barrio, just those damned AK-47s. No real plan, no fire and maneuver teams. He wondered if they had radios to coordinate with. Probably not. He realized, a little late, that they did know where they were going. He didn’t understand how they knew, but it only meant that they were heading into one hell of an ambush. But there were still a lot of ’em. An awful lot.

  “Time to move,” Ding told ’Berto.

  They raced uphill, or went as fast as their training allowed, choosing one good observation point after another and keeping their commander posted on their position and the enemy’s. Ahead of them, up the hill, the squad had nearly two hours to reorient itself and prepare its ambush. Chavez and León copied his radio message on their own sets. The squad was moving forward to meet the attackers well in front of the primary defensive line. It was set between two particularly steep sections, anchored at those points with the SAWs, covering an approach route less than three hundred meters wide. If the enemy was dumb enough to come through there, well, that was their problem, wasn’t it? So far they had taken a direct route to the LZ. Maybe they’d been told that KNIFE probably was there, not certainly, Chavez thought, as he and León picked their spot, just below one of the SAWs.

  “Six, this is Point, we are in position. Enemy is three hundred meters below us.”

  Click-click.

  “I see ‘em,” another voice called over the radio net. “Grenade One sees ’em.”

  “Medic has ’em.”

  “SAW One has ’em.”

  “Grenade Two. We got ’em.”

  “KNIFE, this is Six. Let’s everybody be cool,” Ramirez said calmly. “Looks like they’re coming right in the front door. Remember the signal, people....”

  It took another ten minutes. Chavez switched off his scope both to save batteries and to get his eyes back to normal. His mind played and replayed the squad fire-plan. He and León had specific areas of responsibility. Each soldier was supposed to limit his fire to an individual arc. All the arcs interlocked and overlapped somewhat, but they were supposed to hunt in their own little patch and not hose down the entire area. Even the two SAWs on line were so limited. The third was well behind the firing line with the small reserve force, ready to support the squad as it pulled back or to react to something unexpected.

  They were within a hundred meters of the line now. The front rank of the advancing enemy was perhaps eighteen or twenty men, with others struggling behind to keep up. They moved slowly, careful of their footing, weapons held at port across their chests. Chavez counted three in his area of responsibility. León kept watch downhill as he brought his weapon up.

  In the old days it was done with volley fire. Napoleonic infantry formed up shoulder-to-shoulder in ranks of two or four, leveling their muskets on command and firing on one another in one dreadful blast of power and ball. The purpose was shock. The purpose still is. Shock to unsettle those enemies fortunate enough to escape instant death, shock to tell them that this was not a place they wanted to be, shock to interfere with their performance, to stop them, to confuse them. It is no longer done with massed columns of muskets. Today it is done by letting them get very, very close, but the impact remains as much psychological as physical.

  Click-click-click. Ge
t ready, Ramirez ordered. Across the line, the riflemen snugged their weapons into their shoulders. The machine guns came up on their bipods. Safeties went off. In the center of the line, the captain wrapped his hand around a length of communications wire. It was fifty yards long, and attached to its other end was a tin can containing a few pebbles. Slowly, carefully, he pulled the wire taut. Then he yanked it hard.

  The sudden sound froze the moment in time. It was as if everything stopped for an instant that seemed to last for hours. The men in front of the light-fighters turned instinctively toward the sound in their midst, away from the unknown threat that lay to their front and their flanks, away from the fingers that had just begun to press down.

  The moment ended with the white muzzle flashes of the squad. The leading fifteen attackers dropped in an instant. Behind them five more died or were wounded before fire was returned. Then the firing from above stopped. The attackers responded late. Many of them emptied whole magazines in the general direction of uphill, but the soldiers were down in their holes, denying the attackers targets.

  “Who fired? Who fired? What is going on here?” It was the voice of Sergeant Olivero, whose accent was perfect.

  Confusion is the ally of the prepared. More men rushed forward into the killing zone to see what was happening, wondering who had shot at whom. Chavez and all the others counted to ten before coming back up. Ding had two men within thirty meters of his position. On “Ten!” he dropped one with a three-round burst and wounded the other. Maybe a dozen more enemies were down now.

  Click-click-click-click-click. “Everybody move out,” Ramirez called over the radios.