Clear and Present Danger

  Clark sat quietly in the right seat, staring forward, his face composed and inhumanly serene while his mind turned over faster than the Beech’s twin props. In front of the windshield he kept seeing faces, some living, some dead. He remembered past combat actions, past dangers, past fears, past escapes in which those faces had played their parts. Most of all he remembered the lessons, some learned in classrooms and lectures, but the important ones had come from his own experience. John Terence Clark was not a man who forgot things. Gradually he refreshed his memory on all the important lessons for this day, the ones about being alone in unfriendly territory. Then came the faces who’d play their part today. He looked at them, a few feet before his eyes, saw the expressions he expected them to wear, measuring the faces to understand the people who wore them. Finally came the plan of the day. He contemplated what he wanted to do and balanced that against the probable objectives of the opposition. He considered alternative plans and things that might go awry. When all that was done, he made himself stop. You could quickly get to the point that imagination became an enemy. Each segment of the operation was locked into its own little box which he’d open one at a time. He’d trust to his experience and instinct. But part of him wondered if—when—those qualities would fail him.

  Sooner or later, Clark admitted to himself. But not today.

  He always told himself that.

  PJ’s mission briefing took two hours. He, Captain Willis, and Captain Montaigne worked out every detail—where they’d refuel, where the aircraft would orbit if something went wrong. Which routes to take if things went badly. Each crew member got full information. It was more than necessary; it was a moral obligation to the crew. They were risking their lives tonight. They had to know why. As always, Sergeant Zimmer had a few questions, and one important suggestion that was immediately incorporated in the plan. Then it was time to preflight the aircraft. Every system aboard each aircraft was fully checked out in a procedure that would last hours. Part of that was training for the new crewmen.

  “What do you know about guns?” Zimmer asked Ryan.

  “Never fired one of these babies.” Ryan’s hand stroked the handles of the minigun. A scaled-down version of the 20mm Vulcan cannon, it had a gang of six .30-caliber barrels that rotated clockwise under the power of an electrical motor, drawing shells from an enormous hopper to the left of the mount. It had two speed settings, 4,000 and 6,000 rounds per minute—66 or 100 rounds per second. The bullets were almost half tracers. The reason for that was psychological. The fire from the weapon looked like a laser beam from a science-fiction movie, the very embodiment of death. It also made a fine way to aim the weapon, since Zimmer assured him that the muzzle blast would be the most blinding thing short of staring into a noon sun. He checked Ryan out on the whole system: where the switches were, how to stand, how to aim.

  “What do you know about combat, sir?”

  “Depends on what you mean,” Ryan replied.

  “Combat is when people with guns are trying to kill you,” Zimmer explained patiently. “It’s dangerous.”

  “I know. I’ve been there a few times. Let’s not dwell on that, okay? I’m already scared.” Ryan looked over his gun, out the door of the aircraft, wondering why he’d been such a damned fool to volunteer for this. But what choice did he have? Could he just send these men off to danger? If he did, how did that make him different from Cutter? Jack looked around the interior of the aircraft. It seemed so large and strong and safe, sitting here on the concrete floor of the hangar. But it was an aircraft designed for life in the troubled air of an unfriendly sky. It was a helicopter: Ryan especially hated helicopters.

  “The funny thing is, probably no sweat on the mission,” Zimmer said after a moment. “Sir, we do our job right, it’s just a flight in and a flight back out.”

  “That’s what I’m scared of, Sarge,” Ryan said, laughing mostly at himself.

  They landed at Santagueda. Larson knew the man who ran the local flying service and talked him out of his Volkswagen Microvan. The two CIA officers drove north, and an hour later passed through the village of Anserma. They dallied here for half an hour, driving around until they found what they wanted to find: a few trucks heading in and out of a private dirt road and one expensive-looking car. CAPER had called it right, Clark saw, and it was the place he thought it was from the flight in. Having confirmed that, they moved out, heading north again for another hour and taking a side road into the mountains just outside of Vegas del Rio. Clark had his nose buried in a map, and Larson found a hilltop switchback at which to stop. That’s where the radio came out.

  “KIFE, this is VARIABLE, over.” Nothing, despite five minutes of trying. Larson drove farther west, horsing the Microvan around cow paths as he struggled to find another high spot for Clark to try again. It was three in the afternoon, and their fifth attempt until they got a reply.

  “KNIFE here. Over.”

  “Chavez, this is Clark. Where the hell are you?” Clark asked, in Spanish, of course.

  “Let’s talk awhile first.”

  “You’re good, kid. We really could have used you in 3rd SOG.”

  “Why should I trust you? Somebody cut us off, man. Somebody decided to leave us here.”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “Glad to hear it,” came the skeptical, bitter reply.

  “Chavez, you’re talking over a radio net that might be compromised. If you got a map, we’re at the following set of coordinates,” Clark told him. “There’s two of us in a blue Volkswagen van. Check us out, take all the time you want.”

  “I already have!” the radio told him.

  Clark’s head spun around to see a man with an AK-47 twenty feet away.

  “Let’s be real cool, people,” Sergeant Vega said. Three more men emerged from the treeline. One of them had a bloody bandage on his thigh. Chavez, too, had an AK slung over his shoulder, but he had held on to his silenced MP-5. He walked straight up to the van.

  “Not bad, kid,” Clark told him. “How’d you know?”

  “UHF radio. You had to transmit from a high spot, right? The map says there’s six of them. I heard you one other time, too, and I spotted you heading this way half an hour ago. Now what the fuck is going on?”

  “First thing, let’s get that casualty treated.” Clark stepped out and handed Chavez his pistol, butt first. “I got a first-aid kit in the back.”

  The wounded man was Sergeant Juardo, a rifleman from the 10th Mountain at Fort Drum. Clark opened the back of the van and helped load him aboard, then uncovered the wound.

  “You know what you’re doing?” Vega asked.

  “I used to be a SEAL,” Clark replied, holding up his arm so that they could see the tattoo. “Third Special Operations Group. Spent a lot of time in ’Nam, doing stuff that never made the TV news.”

  “What were you?”

  “Came out a chief bosun’s mate, E-7 to you.” Clark examined the wound. It was bad to look at, but not life-threatening as long as the man didn’t bleed out, which he’d managed not to do yet. So far it seemed that the infantrymen had done most of the right things. Clark ripped open an envelope and redusted the wound with sulfa. “You have any blood-expanders?”

  “Here.” Sergeant León passed over an IV bag. “None of us knows how to start one.”

  “It’s not hard. Watch how I do it.” Clark grabbed Juardo’s upper arm hard and told him to make a fist. Then he stabbed the IV needle into the big vein inside the elbow. “See? Okay, I cheat. My wife’s a nurse, and sometimes I get to practice at her hospital,” Clark admitted. “How’s it feel, kid?” he asked the patient.

  “Nice to be sitting down,” Juardo admitted.

  “I don’t want to give you a pain shot. We might need you awake. Think you can hack it?”

  “You say so, man. Hey, Ding, you got any candy?”

  Chavez tossed over his Tylenol bottle. “Last ones, Pablo. Make ’em last, man.”

  “Thanks, Ding.”

 
“We have some sandwiches in the front,” Larson said.

  “Food!” Vega darted that way at once. A minute later the four soldiers were wolfing it down, along with a six-pack of Cokes that Larson had picked up on the way.

  “Where’d you pick up the weapons?”

  “Bad guys. We were just about out of ammo for our -16s, and I figured we might as well try to fit in, like.”

  “You’re thinking good, kid,” Clark told him.

  “Okay, what’s the plan?” Chavez asked.

  “It’s your call,” Clark replied. “One of two things. We can drive you back to the airport and fly you out, take about three hours to get there, another three hours in the airplane, and it’s over, you’re back on U.S. territory.”

  “What else?”

  “Chavez, how’d you like to get the fucker who did this to you?” Clark knew the answer before he’d asked the question.

  Admiral Cutter was leaning back in his chair when the phone buzzed. He knew who it was from the line that was blinking. “Yes, Mr. President?”

  “Come in here.”

  “On the way, sir.”

  Summer is as slow a season for the White House as for most government agencies. The President’s calendar was fuller than usual with the ceremonial stuff that the politician in him loved and the executive in him abhorred. Shaking hands with “Miss Whole Milk,” as he referred to the steady stream of visitors—though, he occasionally wondered to himself if he’d ever meet a Miss Condom, what with the way sexual mores were changing of late. The burden was larger than most imagine. For each such visitor there was a sheet of paper, a few paragraphs of information so that the person would leave thinking that, gee, the President really knows what I’m all about. He’s really interested! Pressing flesh and talking to ordinary people was an important and usually pleasurable part of the job, but not now, a week short of the convention, still behind in the goddamned polls, as every news network announced at least twice a week.

  “What about Colombia?” the President asked as soon as the door was closed.

  “Sir, you told me to shut it down. It’s being shut down.”

  “Any problems with the Agency?”

  “No, Mr. President.”

  “How exactly—”

  “Sir, you told me you didn’t want to know that.”

  “You’re telling me it’s something I shouldn’t know?”

  “I’m telling you, sir, that I am carrying out your instructions. The orders were given, and the orders are being complied with. I don’t think you will object to the consequences.”

  “Really?”

  Cutter relaxed a bit. “Sir, in a very real sense, the operation was a success. Drug shipments are down and will drop further in the next few months. I would suggest, sir, that you let the press talk about that for the moment. You can always point to it later. We’ve hurt them. With Operation TARPON we have something we can point to all we wish. With CAPER we have a way of continuing to gather intelligence information. We will have some dramatic arrests in a few months as well.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “I’ve made those arrangements myself, sir.”

  “And just how did you do that?” the President asked, and stopped. “Something else I don’t want to know?”

  Cutter nodded.

  “I assume that everything you’ve done is within the law,” the President said for the benefit of the tape recorder he had running.

  “You may make that assumption, sir.” It was an artful reply in that it could mean anything, or nothing, depending on one’s point of view. Cutter also knew about the tape recorder.

  “And you’re sure that your instructions are being carried out?”

  “Of course, Mr. President.”

  “Make sure again.”

  It had taken far longer than the bearded consultant expected. Inspector O’Day held the printout in his hands, and it might as well have been Kurdish. The sheet was half covered with paragraphs entirely composed of ones and zeroes.

  “Machine language,” the consultant explained. “Whoever programmed this baby was a real pro. I recovered about forty percent of it. It’s a transposition algorithm, just like I thought.”

  “You told me that last night.”

  “It ain’t Russian. It takes in a message and enciphers it. No big deal, anybody can do that. What’s really clever is that the system is based on an independent input signal that’s unique to the individual transmission—over and above the encipherment algorithm that’s already built into the system.”

  “You want to explain that?”

  “It means a very good computer lash-up—somewhere—governs how this baby operates. It can’t be Russian. They don’t have the hardware yet, unless they stole a really sexy one from us. Also, the input that adds the variable into the system probably comes from the NAVSTAR satellites. I’m guessing here, but I think it uses a very precise time mark to set the encryption key, one that’s unique to each up-and-down transmission. Clever shit. That means NSA. The NAVSTAR satellites use atomic clocks to measure time with great precision, and the really sexy part of the system is also encrypted. Anyway, what we have here is a clever way of scrambling a signal in a way that you can’t break or duplicate even if you know how it was done. Whoever set this baby up has access to everything we got. I used to consult with NSA, and never even heard of this puppy.”

  “Okay, and when the disk is destroyed ... ?”

  “The link is gone, man. I mean, gone. If this is what it seems to be, you have an uplink facility that controls the algorithm, and ground stations that copy it down. You wipe this algorithm off, like somebody did, and the guys you used to be talking to can’t communicate with you anymore, and nobody else can communicate with them either. Systems don’t get any more secure than that.”

  “You can tell all that? What else?”

  “Half of what I just told you is informed speculation. I can’t rebuild the algorithm. I can just tell you how it probably worked. The bit on the NAVSTAR is supposition, but good supposition. The transposition processing is partly recovered, and it has NSA written all over it. Whoever did it really knows how to write computer code. It’s definitely ours. It’s probably the most sophisticated machine code we have. Whoever got to use it must have some serious juice. And whoever it is, he scrubbed it. It can never be used again. Whatever operation it was used for must be over.”

  “Yeah,” O’Day said, chilled by what he had just learned. “Good work.”

  “Now all you have to do is write a note to my prof and tell him why I missed an exam this morning.”

  “I’ll have somebody do that,” O’Day promised him on the way out the door. He headed for Dan Murray’s office, and was surprised to see that he was out. The next stop was with Bill Shaw.

  Half an hour later it was clear that a crime had probably been committed. The next question was what to do about it.

  The helicopter took off light. Mission requirements were fairly complex—more so than in the previous insertions—and speed was important this time. As soon as the Pave Low got to cruising altitude, it tanked from the MC-130E. There was no banter this time.

  Ryan sat in back, strapped into his place while the MH-53J bounced and buffeted in the wash of the tanker. He wore a green flight suit and a similarly green helmet. There was also a flak jacket. Zimmer had explained to him that it would stop a pistol round, probably, secondary fragments almost certainly, but that he shouldn’t depend on it to stop a rifle bullet. One more thing to worry about. Once clear of the tanker for the first time—they’d have to tank again before making landfall—Jack turned around to look out the door. The clouds were nearly overhead now, the outlying reaches from Adele.

  Juardo’s wound complicated matters and changed plans somewhat. They loaded him into Clark’s seat on the Beech, leaving him with a radio and spare batteries. Then Clark and the rest drove back toward Anserma. Larson was still checking the weather, which was changing on an hour-to-hour basis.
He was due to take off in ninety minutes for his part of the mission.

  “How you fixed for rounds?” Clark asked in the Microvan.

  “All we need for the AKs,” Chavez replied. “About sixty each for the subs. I never knew how useful a silenced gun was.”

  “They are nice. Grenades?”

  “All of us?” Vega asked. “Five frags and two CS.”

  “What are we going into?” Ding asked next.

  “It’s a farmhouse outside Anserma.”

  “What’s the security there like?”

  “I don’t know squat yet.”

  “Hey, wait a minute, what are you getting us into?” Vega demanded.

  “Relax, Sarge. If it’s too heavy to handle, we back off and leave. All I know is we’re going in for a close look. Chavez and I can handle that. By the way, there’s spare batteries in the bag down there. Need ’em?”