Clear and Present Danger

  “Yo, Timmy!” his brother called, just inside the door.

  “Hiya, Rob.” The two men embraced. Theirs was a close family, but Timmy hadn’t seen his big brother, Commander Robert Jefferson Jackson, USN, in almost a year. Robby’s mother had died years before. Only thirty-nine, she’d complained of a headache, decided to lie down for a few minutes, and never stirred again, the victim of a massive stroke. It had later been determined that she was an undiagnosed hypertensive, one of many American blacks cursed by the symptomless malady. Her husband, the Reverend Hosiah Jackson, mourned her loss along with the community in which both had raised their family. But pious man that Reverend Jackson was, he was also a father whose children needed a mother. Four years later he’d remarried, to a twenty-three-year-old parishioner, and started afresh. Timothy was the first child of his second union. His fourth son had followed a path similar to the first’s. An Annapolis graduate, Robby Jackson flew fighter aircraft for the Navy. Timmy had won an appointment at West Point, and looked forward to a career in the infantry. Another brother was a physician, and the fourth was a lawyer with political ambitions. Times had changed in Mississippi.

  It would have been hard for an observer to determine which brother was prouder of the other. Robby, with three gold stripes on his shoulder boards, bore on his breast pocket the gold star that denoted a former command at sea—in his case, VF-41, a squadron of F-14 Tomcat fighters. Now working in the Pentagon, Robby was on his way to command of a Carrier Air Wing, and after that perhaps his own carrier. Timothy, on the other hand, had been the family runt for quite a few years, but West Point had changed that with a vengeance. He had two solid inches on his older brother, and at least fifteen more pounds of muscle. There was a Ranger flash on his shoulder above the hourglass insignia of his division. Another boy had been turned into a man, the old-fashioned way.

  “Lookin’ good, boy,” Robby observed. “How ’bout a drink?”

  “Not too many, I’ve been up for a while.”

  “Long day?”

  “Long week, as a matter of fact,” Tim replied, “but I did get a nap yesterday.”

  “Nice of’em,” the elder Jackson observed with some fraternal concern.

  “Hey, if I wanted an easy life, I woulda joined the Navy.” The brothers had a good laugh on the way to the bar. Robby ordered John Jameson, a taste introduced to him by a friend. Tim settled for a beer. Conversation over dinner, of course, began with catching up on family matters, then turned to shop talk.

  “Not real different from what you do,” Timmy explained. “You try to get in close and smoke a guy with a missile before he knows you’re there. We try to get in close and shoot him in the head before he knows where we are. You know about that, don’t you, big brother?” Timmy asked with a smile that was touched with envy. Robby had been there once.

  “Once was enough,” Robby answered soberly. “I leave that close-quarter crap to idiots like you.”

  “Yeah, well, last night we were the forward element for the battalion. My lead squad went in beautiful. The OPFOR—excuse me, Opposing Force—was a bunch from the California Guard, mainly tanks. They got careless about how they set up, and Sergeant Chavez was inside the laager before they knew about it. You oughta see this guy operate. I swear, Rob, he’s nearly invisible when he wants to be. It’s going to be a bitch to replace him.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just transferred out this afternoon. I was going to lose him in a couple weeks anyway, but they lifted him early to go to Fort Benning. Whole bunch of good sergeants moved out today.” Tim paused for a moment. “All Spanish ones. Coincidence.” Another pause. “That’s funny, wasn’t León supposed to go to Fort Benning, too?”

  “Who’s León?”

  “Sergeant E-6. He was in Ben Tucker’s platoon—Ben and I played ball together at the Point. Yeah, he was supposed to be going to Ranger School as an instructor in a couple of weeks. I wonder why him and Chavez left together? Ah, well, that’s the Army for you. So how do you like the Pentagon?”

  “Could be worse,” Robby allowed. “Twenty-five more months, and thank God Almighty, I’ll be free at last. I’m in the running for a CAG slot,” the elder brother explained. He was at the career stage where things got really sticky. There were more good men than jobs to be filled. As with combat operations, one of the determining factors now was pure luck. Timmy, he saw, didn’t know about that yet.

  The jet landed after a flight of just under three hours. Once on the ground it taxied to the cargo terminal at the small airport. Chavez didn’t know which one. He awoke still short of the sleep he needed when the plane’s door was wrenched open. His first impression was that there wasn’t much air here. It seemed an odd observation to make, and he wrote it off to the usual confusion following a nap.

  “Where the hell are we?” another sergeant asked.

  “They’ll tell you outside,” the attendant replied. “Y’all have a nice time here.” The smile that accompanied the answer was too charming to merit a further challenge.

  The sergeants collected their bags and shuffled out of the aircraft, finding yet another van waiting for them. Chavez got his question answered before he boarded it. The air was very thin here, all right, and in the west he saw why. The last glow of sunset illuminated the jagged outline of mountains to the west. Easterly course, three hours’ flight time, and mountains: he knew at once they were somewhere in the Rockies, even though he’d never really been there. His last view of the aircraft as the van rolled off showed a fueling truck moving toward it. Chavez didn’t quite put it together. The aircraft would be leaving in less than thirty minutes. Few people would have noticed that it had even been there, much less trouble themselves to wonder why.

  Clark’s hotel room was a nice one, befitting his cover. There was an ache at the back of his head to remind him that he was still not fully adjusted to the altitude, but a couple of Tylenol caplets went to work on that, and he knew that his job didn’t involve much in the way of physical activity. He ordered breakfast sent up and went through some setting-up exercises to work the kinks out of his muscles. The morning jog was definitely out, however. Finished, he showered and shaved. Service was good here. Just as he got his clothes on, breakfast arrived, and by nine o’clock he was ready for work. Clark took the elevator down to the lobby, then went outside. The car was waiting. He got in the front.

  “Buenos días,” the driver said. “There may be rain this afternoon.”

  “If so, I have my coat.”

  “A cold rain, perhaps.”

  “The coat has a liner,” Clark said, finishing the code sequence.

  “Whoever thought that one up was bright enough,” the man said. “There is rain in the forecast. The name’s Larson.”

  “Clark.” They didn’t shake hands. It just wasn’t done. Larson, which probably wasn’t his real name either, Clark thought, was about thirty, with dark hair that belied his vaguely Nordic surname. Locally, Carlos Larson was thought to be the son of a Danish father and a Venezuelan mother, and he ran a flying school, a service much in demand. He was a skilled pilot who taught what he knew and didn’t ask many questions, which appealed to his clientele. He didn’t really need to ask questions—pilots, especially student pilots, talk a good deal—and he had a good memory for every sort of detail, plus the sort of professional expertise that invited lots of requests for advice. It was also widely believed that he’d financed his business by making a few highly illegal flights, then semiretired to a life of luxury. This legend created bona fides for the people in whom he had interest, but did so without making him any sort of adversary. He was a man who’d done what was needed to get what he wanted, and now lived the sort of life that he’d wanted to live. That explained the car, which was the most powerful BMW made, and the expensive apartment, and the mistress, a stewardess for Avianca whose real job was as a courier for CIA. Larson thought it all a dream assignment, the more so because the stewardess really was his lover, a fringe benefit that might not
have amused the Agency’s personnel directorate. The only thing that bothered him was that his placement in Colombia was also unknown to the station chief. A relatively inexperienced agent, Larson—Clark would have been surprised to learn that that was his real name—knew enough about how the Agency worked to realize that separate command loops generally denoted some sort of special operation. His cover had been established over a period of eighteen months, during which he’d been required to do not very much in return. Clark’s arrival was probably the signal that all of that was about to change. Time to earn his pay.

  “What’s the plan of the day?” Clark asked.

  “Do a little flying. We’ll be down before the weather goes bad,” Larson added.

  “I know you have an instrument rating.”

  “I will take that as a vote of confidence,” the pilot said with a smile as he drove toward the airport. “You’ve been over the photos, of course.”

  “Yeah, about three days’ worth. I’m just old-fashioned enough that I like to eyeball things myself. Maps and photos don’t tell you everything.”

  “They told me the mission profile is just to fly around straight and level, no buzzing or circling to get people mad.” The nice thing about having a flying school was that its aircraft were expected to be all over the place, but if one showed specific interest in specific people, they might take note of your registration number, and they might come down to the airport to ask why. The people who lived in Medellin were not known to ask such questions politely. Larson was not afraid of them. So long as he maintained his cover, he knew that he had little to worry about. At the same time, he was a pro, and pros are careful, especially if they want to last.

  “Sounds okay to me.” Clark knew the same things. He’d gotten old in a dangerous business by taking only the necessary risks. Those were bad enough. It wasn’t very different from playing the lottery. Even though the odds were against one’s hitting the number, if you played the game long enough, the right—or wrong—number would appear, no matter how careful you were. Except in this lottery the prize wasn’t money. It was an unmarked, shallow grave, and you got that only if the opposition remembered something about religion.

  He couldn’t decide if he liked the mission or not. On the one hand, the objective was worthy enough. On the other ... But Clark wasn’t paid to make that sort of evaluation. He was paid to do, not to think very much about it. That was the main problem with covert operations. You had to risk your life on the judgment of others. It was nice to know why, but the decision-makers said knowing why often had the effect of making the job all the more dangerous. The field operators didn’t always believe that. Clark had that problem right now.

  The Twin-Beech was parked in the general-aviation section of El Dorado International Airport. It didn’t require too much in the way of intelligence to make an accurate assessment of what the aircraft were used for. There were too many expensive cars, and far too many expensive aircraft to be explained by the Colombian gentry. These were toys for the newly rich. Clark’s eyes swept over them, his face showing neutral interest.

  “Wages of sin ain’t bad, are they?” Larson chuckled.

  “What about the poor bastards who’re paying the wages?”

  “I know about that, too. I’m just saying that they’re nice airplanes. Those Gulfstreams—I’m checked out on ’em—that’s one sweet-handlin’ bird.”

  “What do they cost?” Clark asked.

  “A wise man once said, if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.”

  “Yeah.” Clark’s mouth twisted into a smile. But some things carry a price that’s not measured in dollars. He was already getting into the proper frame of mind for the mission.

  Larson preflighted the Beech in about fifteen minutes. He’d just flown in ninety minutes earlier, and few private pilots would have bothered to run through the whole checklist, but Larson was a good pilot, which meant he was before all things a careful one. Clark took the right-side cockpit seat, strapping in as though he were a student pilot on his first hop. Commercial traffic was light at this hour, and it was easy to taxi into the takeoff pattern. About the only surprise was the long takeoff roll.

  “It’s the altitude,” Larson explained over the intercom headset as he rotated off the runway. “It makes the controls a little mushy at low speed, too. No problem. Like driving in the snow—you just have to pay attention.” He moved the lever to bring the gear up, leaving the aircraft at full power to claw up to altitude as quickly as possible. Clark scanned the instruments and saw nothing obviously awry, though it did seem odd to show nine thousand feet of altitude when you could still pick out individual people on the ground.

  The aircraft banked to the left, taking a northwesterly heading. Larson backed off on the throttles, commenting that you also had to pay close attention to engine temperatures here, though the cooling systems on the twin Continental engines were beefed up to allow for it. They were heading toward the country’s mountainous spine. The sky was clear and the sun was bright.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “It is that,” Clark agreed. The mountains were covered with emerald-green trees whose leaves shimmered with moisture from the night’s rain. But Clark’s trained eyes saw something else. Walking these hills would be a cast-iron bitch. About the only good thing to be said was that there was good cover under which people could conceal themselves. The combination of steep hills and thin air would make this place an arduous one. He hadn’t been briefed on what exactly was going to happen, but he knew enough to be glad that the hard part of the job would not be his.

  The mountain ranges in Colombia run on a southwest-to-northeast vector. Larson picked a convenient pass to fly over, but the winds off the nearby Pacific Ocean made the crossing bumpy.

  “Get used to it. Winds are picking up today because of the weather front that’s moving in. They really boil around these hills. You ought to see what real bad weather is like.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks! Not much in the way of places to land in case things—”

  “Go bad?” Larson asked. “That’s why I pay attention to the checklist. Besides, there are more little strips down there than you might imagine. Of course, you don’t always get a welcome when you decide to use one. Don’t sweat it. I just put new engines on this bird a month ago. Sold the old ones to one of my students for his old King Air. It belongs to the Bureau of Customs now,” Larson explained.

  “Did you have any part in that?”

  “Negative! Look, they expect me to know why all these kids are taking lessons. I’m not supposed to be dumb, right? So I also teach them standard evasion tactics. You can read them in any decent book, and they expect me to be able to do that. Pablo wasn’t real big on reading. Hell of a natural pilot, though. Too bad, really, he was a nice enough kid. They bagged him with fifty keys. I understand he didn’t talk much. No surprise there. Gutsy little bastard.”

  “How well motivated are these folks?” Clark had seen lots of combat once, and he knew that the measure of an enemy is not to be found by counting his weapons.

  Larson frowned at the sky. “Depends on what you mean. If you change the word from ‘motivated’ to ‘macho,’ that about covers it. You know, the cult of manliness, that sort of thing. Part of it’s kinda admirable. These people have a funny sense of honor. For example, the ones I know socially treat me just fine. Their hospitality is impressive, especially if you show a little deference, which everyone does. Besides, I’m not a business rival. What I mean is, I know these people. I’ve taught a bunch of them to fly. If I had a money problem, I could probably go to them for help and get it. I’m talking like half a million in cash on a handshake—and I’d walk out of the hacienda with the cash in a briefcase. I’d have to make some courier flights to square things, of course. And I’d never have to pay the money back. On the other hand, if I screwed them, well, they’d make damned sure that I paid for that, too. They have rules. If you live by them, you’re fairly safe. If no
t, you’d better have your bags packed.”

  “I know about the ruthlessness. What about the brains?”

  “They’re as smart as they have to be. What smarts they don’t have, they buy. They can buy anything, anybody. Don’t underestimate them. Their security systems are state-of-the-art, like what we put on ICBM silos—shit, maybe better than that. They’re protected as tightly as we protect the President, except their shooters are less restrained by rules of engagement. I suppose the best indicator on how smart they are is the fact that they’ve banded together to form the cartel. They’re smart enough to know that gang wars cost everybody, so they formed a loose alliance. It ain’t perfect, but it works. People who try to break into the business mostly end up dead. Medellin is an easy town to die in.”

  “Cops? Courts?”

  “The locals have tried. Lots of dead cops, lots of dead judges to prove it,” Larson said with a shake of the head. “Takes a lot for people to keep plugging away when they can’t see any results. Then toss in the money angle. How often can a man walk away from a suitcase full of tax-free hundred-dollar bills? Especially when the alternative is certain death for himself and his family. The cartel is smart, my friend, and it’s patient, and it has all the resources it needs, and it’s ruthless enough to scare a veteran Nazi. All in all, that’s some enemy.” Larson pointed to a gray smudge in the distance. “There’s Medellin. Drugs ’R’Us, all in that one little city in the valley. One nuke could settle things, say about two megatons, air-burst four thousand feet AGL. I wonder if the rest of the country would really mind ... ?”

  That earned Larson a glance from his passenger. Larson lived here, knew a lot of these people, and even liked some, as he’d just said. But his hatred for them occasionally peeked through his professional detachment. The best sort of duplicity. This kid had a real future in the Agency, Clark decided. Brains and passion both. If he knew how to maintain a proper balance of the two, he could go places. Clark reached into his bag for a camera and a pair of binoculars. His interest wasn’t in the city itself.