“At about nine o’clock last night – twenty-one hundred hours to us on the Ranger – an explosion ripped through the home of one Esteban Untiveros. Señor Untiveros was a major figure in the Medellín Cartel. Looks like one of his friends wasn’t quite as friendly as he thought. News reports indicate that a car bomb totally destroyed his expensive hilltop residence, along with everyone in it.
“At home, the first of the summer’s political conventions kicks off in Chicago next week. Governor J. Robert Fowler, the leading candidate for his party’s nomination, is still a hundred votes short of a majority and is meeting today with representatives from…”
Jackson turned to look around. Commander Jensen was thirty feet away, motioning to the TV and chuckling with one of his people, who grinned into his cup and said nothing.
Something in Robby’s mind simply went click.
A Drop-Ex.
A tech-rep who didn’t want to talk very much.
An A-6E that headed to the beach on a heading of one-one-five toward Ecuador and returned to Ranger on a heading of two-zero-five. The other side of that triangle must – might – have taken the bird over… Colombia.
A report of a car bomb.
A bomb with a combustible case. A smart-bomb with a combustible case, Commander Jackson corrected himself.
Well, son of a bitch…
It was amusing in more than one way. Taking out a drug dealer didn’t trouble his conscience very much. Hell, he wondered why they didn’t just shoot those drug-courier flights down. All that loose politician talk about threats to national security and people conducting chemical warfare against the United States – well, shit, he thought, why not have a for-real Shoot-Ex? You wouldn’t even have to spend money for target drones. There was not a man in the service who wouldn’t mind taking a few druggies out. Enemies are where you find them – where National Command Authority said they were, that is – and dealing with his country’s enemies was what Commander Robert Jefferson Jackson, USN, did for a living. Doing them with a smart-bomb, and making it look like something else, well, that was just sheer artistry.
More amusing was the fact that Robby thought he knew what had happened. That was the trouble with secrets. They were impossible to keep. One way or another, they always got out. He wouldn’t tell anyone, of course. And that really was too bad, wasn’t it?
But why bother keeping it a secret? Robby wondered. The way the druggies killed the FBI Director – that was a declaration of war. Why not just go public and say, We’re coming for you! In a political year, too. When had the American people ever failed to support their President when he declared the necessity to go after people?
But Jackson’s job was not political. It was time to see the skipper. Two minutes later he arrived at the CO’s stateroom. The Marine standing guard opened the door for him, and Robby found the captain reading dispatches.
“You’re out of uniform!” the man said sternly.
“What – excuse me, Cap’n?” Robby stopped cold, looking to see that his fly was zipped.
“Here.” Ranger’s CO rose and handed over the message flimsy. “You just got frocked, Robby – excuse me, Captain Jackson. Congratulations, Rob. Sure beats coffee for startin’ off the day, doesn’t it?”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Now if we can just get those charlie-fox fighter tactics of yours to work…”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ritchie.”
“Okay, Ritchie.”
“You can still call me ‘sir’ on the bridge and in public, though,” the captain pointed out. Newly promoted officers always got razzed. They also had to pay for the “wetting down” parties.
The TV news crews arrived in the early morning. They, too, had difficulty with the road up to the Untiveros house. The police were already there, and it didn’t occur to any of the crews to wonder if these police officers might be of the “tame” variety. They wore uniforms and pistol belts and seemed to be acting like real cops. Under Cortez’s supervision, the real search for survivors had been completed already, and the two people found taken off, along with most of the surviving security guards and almost all of the firearms. Security guards per se were not terribly unusual in Colombia, though fully automatic weapons and crew-served machine guns were. Of course, Cortez was also gone before the news crews arrived, and by the time they started taping, the police search was fully underway. Several of the crews had direct satellite feeds, though one of the heavy groundstation trucks had failed to make the hill.
The easiest part of the search, lovingly recorded for posterity by the portacams, began in what had been the conference room, now a three-foot pile of gravel. The largest piece of a Production Committee member found (that title was also not revealed to the newsies) was a surprisingly intact lower leg, from just below the knee to a shoe still laced on the right foot. It would later be established that this “remain” belonged to Carlos Wagner. Untiveros’s wife and two young children had been in the opposite side of the house on the second floor, watching a taped movie. The VCR, still plugged in and on play, was found right before the bodies. Yet another TV camera followed the man – a security guard temporarily without his AK-47 – who carried the limp, bloody body of a dead child to an ambulance.
“Oh, my God,” the President said, watching one of the several televisions in the Oval Office. “If anybody figures this out…”
“Mr. President, we’ve dealt with this sort of thing before,” Cutter pointed out. “The Libyan bombing under Reagan, the air strikes into Lebanon and -”
“And we caught hell for it every time! Nobody cares why we did it, all they care about is that we killed the wrong people. Christ, Jim, that was a kid! What are we going to say? ‘Oh, that’s too bad, but he was in the wrong place*?”
“It is alleged,” the TV reporter was saying, “that the owner of this house was a member of the Medellín Cartel, but local police sources tell us that he was never officially charged with any crime, and, well…” The reporter paused in front of the camera. “You saw what this car bomb did to his wife and children.”
“Great,” the President growled. He lifted the controller and punched off the TV set. “Those bastards can do whatever the hell they want to our kids, but if we go after them on their turf, all of a sudden they’re the goddamned victims! Has Moore told Congress about this yet?”
“No, Mr. President. CIA doesn’t have to tell them until forty-eight hours after such an operation begins, and, for administrative purposes, the operation didn’t actually begin until yesterday afternoon.”
“They don’t find out,” the President said. “If we tell ’em, then it’ll leak sure as hell. You tell Moore and Ritter that.”
“Mr. President, I can’t -”
“The hell you can’t! I just gave you an order, mister.” The President walked to the windows. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” he muttered.
Cutter knew what the real issue was, of course. The opposition’s political convention would begin shortly. Their candidate, Governor Bob Fowler of Missouri, was leading the President in the polls. That was normal, of course. The incumbent had run through the primaries without serious opposition, resulting in a dull, predetermined result, while Fowler had fought a tooth-and-nail campaign for his party’s nomination and was still an eyelash short of certain nomination. Voters always responded to the lively candidates, and while Fowler was personally about as lively as a dishrag, his contest had been the interesting one. And like every candidate since Nixon and the first war on drugs, he was saying that the President hadn’t made good on his promise to restrict drug traffic. That sounded familiar to the current occupant of the Oval Office. He’d said the same thing four years earlier, and ridden that issue, and others, into the house on Pennsylvania Avenue. So now he’d actually tried something radical. And this had happened. The government of the United States had just used its most sophisticated military weapons to murder a couple of kids and their mother. That’s what Fowler would say. After all, it was an election year.
“Mr. President, it would be unsound to terminate the operations we have running at this point. If you are serious about avenging the deaths of Director Jacobs and the rest, and serious about putting a dent in drug trafficking, you cannot stop things now. We’re just about to show results. Drug flights into the country are down twenty percent,” Cutter pointed out. “Add that to the money-laundering bust and we can say that we’ve achieved a real victory.”
“How do we explain the bombing?”
“I’ve been thinking about that, sir. What if we say that we don’t know, but it could be one of two things. First, it might be an attack by M-19. That group’s political rhetoric lately has been critical of the drug lords. Second, we could say that it results from an internecine dispute within the Cartel itself.”