Elliot wasn’t interested in those. “The Governor wants to see you at eight-fifteen.”
Six hours’ sleep was what that meant to Ryan. “I’ll be there.”
“He is going to ask you about Colombia.”
“Then you can make points with your boss by giving him the answer early: I do not know.”
“If he wins, Dr. Ryan, you’re -”
“Out?” Jack smiled benignly at her. “You know, this is like something from a bad movie, Dr. Elliot. If your man wins, maybe you will have the power to fire me. Let me explain to you what that means to me.
“You will then have the power to deny me a total of two and a half hours in a car every working day; the power to fire me from a difficult, stressful job that keeps me away from my family much more than I would like; and the power to compel me to live a life commensurate with the money that I earned ten or so years ago; the power to force me to go back to writing my history books, or maybe to teach again, which is why I got my doctorate in the first place. Dr. Elliot, I’ve seen loaded machine guns pointed at my wife and daughter, and I managed to deal with that threat. If you want to threaten me in a serious way, you’ll need something better than taking my job away. I’ll see you in the morning, I suppose, but you should know that my briefing is only for Governor Fowler. My orders are that no one else can be in the room.” Jack closed, bolted, and chained the door. He’d had too many beers on the airplane, and knew it, but nobody had ever pushed Ryan’s buttons that hard before.
Dr. Elliot took the stairs down instead of the elevator. Unlike most of the people in the entourage, Governor Fowler’s chief aide was cold sober – he rarely drank in any case – and already at work planning a campaign that would start in a week instead of the customary wait until Labor Day. “Well?” he asked E.E.
“He says he doesn’t know. I think he’s lying.”
“What else?” Arnold van Damm asked.
“He’s arrogant, offensive, and insulting.”
“So are you, Beth.” They both laughed. They didn’t really like each other, but political campaigns make for the strangest of bedfellows. The campaign manager was reading over a briefing paper about Ryan from Congressman Alan Trent, new chairman of the House Select Committee for Intelligence Oversight. E.E. hadn’t seen it. She had told him, though he already knew (though neither of them knew what it had really all been about), that Ryan had confronted Trent in a Washington social gathering and called him a queer in public. Trent had never forgiven or forgotten an insult in his life. Nor was he one to give gratuitous praise. But Trent’s report on Ryan used words like bright, courageous, and honest. Now what the hell, van Damm wondered, did that mean?
It was going to be their third no-hit night, Chavez was sure. They’d been out since sundown and had just passed through the second suspected processing site – the signs had been there. The discoloration of the soil from acid spills, the beaten earth, discarded trash, everything to show that men had been there and probably went there regularly – but not tonight, and not for the two preceding nights. Ding knew that he ought to have expected it. All the manuals, all the lectures of his career, had emphasized the fact that combat operations were some crazy mixture of boredom and terror, boredom because for the most part nothing happened, terror because “it” could happen at any second. Now he understood how men got sloppy out in the field. On exercises you always knew what – well, you knew that something would happen. The Army rarely wasted time on no-contact exercises. Training time cost too much. And so he was faced with the irksome fact that real combat operations were less exciting than training, but infinitely more dangerous. The dualism was enough to give the young man a headache.
Aches were something he already had enough of. He was now gobbling a couple of his Tylenol caplets every four hours because of muscle aches and low-order sprains – and simple tension and stress. A young man, he was learning that the combination of strenuous exercise and real mental stress made you old in a hurry. In fact he was no more tired than an office worker after a slightly long day at his desk, but the mission and the environment combined to amplify everything he felt. Joy or sadness, elation or depression, fear or invincibility were all much greater down here. In a word, combat operations were not fun. But then, why did he not like it, not that, really, but… what? Chavez shook the thought away. It was affecting his concentration.
And though he didn’t know it, that was the answer. Ding Chavez was a born combat soldier. Just as a trauma surgeon took no pleasure from seeing the broken bodies of accident victims, Chavez would easily have preferred sitting on a barstool next to a pretty girl or watching a football game with his friends. But the surgeon knew that his skills at the table were crucial to the lives of his patients, and Chavez knew that his skills on point were crucial to the mission. This was his, place. On the mission, everything was so wonderfully clear – except when he was confused, and even that was clear in a different, very strange way. His senses searched out through the trees like radar, filtering out the twitters of birds and the rustle of animals – except when there was a special message in that sort of noise. His mind was a perfect balance of paranoia and confidence. He was a weapon of his country. That much he understood, and fearful though he was, fighting off boredom, struggling to keep alert, concerned for his comrades, Chavez was now a breathing, thinking machine whose single purpose was the destruction of his nation’s enemies. The job was hard, but he was the man for it.
But there was still nothing out here to be found this night. The trails were cold. The processing sites unoccupied. Chavez stopped at a preplanned rally point and waited for the rest of the squad to catch up. He switched off his night goggles – you only used them about a third of the time in any case – and had himself a drink of water. At least the water was good here, coming off clear mountain streams.
“Whole lot of nothin’, Captain,” he told Ramirez when the officer arrived at his side. “Ain’t seen nothing, ain’t heard nothing.”
“Tracks, trails?”
“Nothing less’n two, maybe three days old.”
Ramirez knew how to determine the age of a trail, but couldn’t do it as well as Sergeant Chavez. He breathed in a way that almost seemed relieved.
“Okay, we start heading back. Take a couple more minutes to relax, then lead off.”
“Right. Sir?”
“Yeah, Ding?”
“This area’s dryin’ up on us.”
“You may be right, but we’ll wait a few more days to be sure,” Ramirez said. Part of him was glad that there had been no contact since the death of Rocha, and that part was blanking out warning signals that he ought to have been getting. Emotion was telling him that something was good, while intelligence and analysis should have told him that something was bad.
Chavez didn’t quite catch that one either. There was a distant rumble at the edge of his consciousness, like the strangely noticeable quiet that precedes an earthquake, or the first hint of clouds on a clear horizon. Ding was too young and inexperienced to notice. He had the talents. He was the right man in the right place, but he hadn’t been there long enough. He didn’t know that, either.
But there was work to do. He led off five minutes later, climbing back up the mountainside, avoiding all trails, taking a path different from any path they had taken to this point, alert to any present danger but oblivious to a danger that was distant but just as clear.
The C-141B touched down hard, Robby thought, though the soldiers didn’t seem to notice. In fact, most of them were asleep and had to be roused, Jackson rarely slept on airplanes. It was, he thought, a bad habit for a pilot to acquire. The transport slowed and taxied around every bit as awkwardly as a fighter on the tight confines of a carrier’s deck until finally the clamshell cargo doors opened at the tail.
“You come along with me, Captain,” the major said. He stood and hefted his rucksack. It looked heavy. “I had the wife bring my personal car here.”
“How’d she get home?”
“Car pool,” the major explained. “This way the battalion commander and I can discuss the exercise some more on the way down to Ord. We’ll drop you off at Monterey.”