About the only thing that the movies got right, Clark thought, was that they often had spies meeting in bars. Bars were useful things in civilized countries. They were places for men to go and have a few, and meet other men, and strike up casual conversations in dimly lit, anonymous rooms, usually with the din of bad music to mute out their words beyond a certain, small radius. Larson arrived a minute late, sliding up to Clark’s spot. This cantina didn’t have stools, just a real brass bar on which to rest one’s foot. Larson ordered a beer, a local one, which was something the Colombians were good at. They were good at a lot of things, Clark thought. Except for the drug problem this country could really be going places. This country was suffering – as much as? No, more than his own. Colombia’s government was having to face the fact that it had fought a war against the druggies and was losing… unlike America? the CIA officer wondered. Unlike America, the Colombian government was threatened? Yeah, sure, he told himself, we’re so much better off than this place.
“Well?” he asked when the owner moved to the other end of the bar.
Larson spoke quietly, in Spanish. “It’s definite. The number of troops the big shots have out on the street has dropped way the hell off.”
“Gone where?”
“A guy told me southwest. They were talking about a hunting expedition in the hills.”
“Oh, Christ,” Clark muttered in English.
“What gives?”
“Well, there’s about forty light-infantry soldiers…” he explained on for several minutes.
“We’ve invaded?” Larson looked down at the bar. “Jesus Christ, what lunatic came up with that idea?”
“We both work for him – for them, I suppose.”
“Goddammit, there is one thing we cannot do to these people, and that’s fucking it!”
“Fine. You fly back to D.C. and tell the DDO. If Ritter still has a brain, he’ll pull them out quick, before anybody really gets hurt.” Clark turned. He was thinking very hard at the moment, and didn’t like some of the ideas he was getting. He remembered a mission in “Eye” Corps, when… “How about you and me take a look down that way tomorrow?”
“You really want me to blow my cover, don’t you?” Larson observed.
“You got a bolt-hole?” Clark meant what every field officer sets up when he goes covert, a safe place to run to and hide in if it becomes necessary.
Larson snorted. “Is the Pope Polish?”
“What about your lady friend?”
“We don’t take care of her, too, and I’m history with this outfit.” The Agency encouraged loyalty to one’s agents, even when one didn’t sleep with them, and Larson was a man with the normal affection for his year-long lovers.
“We’ll try to cover it like a prospecting trip, but after this one, on my authorization, your cover is officially blown, and you will return to D.C. for reassignment. Her, too. That’s an official order.”
“I didn’t know you had -”
Clark smiled. “Officially I don’t, but you’ll soon discover that Mr. Ritter and I have an understanding. I do the field work and he doesn’t second-guess me.”
“Nobody has that much juice.” All Larson got for a reply was a raised eyebrow and a look into eyes that appeared far more dangerous than he had ever appreciated.
Cortez sat in the one decent room in the house. It was the kitchen, a large one by local standards, and he had a table on which to set his radios and his maps, and a ledger sheet on which he kept a running tally. So far he had lost eleven men in short, violent, and for the most part noiseless encounters – and gotten nothing in return. The “soldiers” he had in the field were still too angry to be afraid, but that wholly suited his purpose. There was a clear acetate cover on the main tactical map, and he used a red grease pencil to mark areas of activity. He had made contact with two – maybe three – of the American teams. He determined contact, of course, by the fact that he had lost eleven men. He chose to believe that he’d lost eleven stupid ones. That was a relative measure, of course, since luck was always a factor on the battlefield, but by and large history taught that the dumb ones die off first, that there was a Darwinian selection process on the field of combat. He planned to lose another fifty or so men before doing anything different. At that point he’d call for reinforcements, further stripping the lords of their retainers. Then he would call his boss and say that he’d identified two or three fellow lords whose men were behaving rather oddly in the field – he already knew whom he would accuse, of course – and the next day he would warn one of those – also preselected – that his own boss was behaving rather oddly, and that his – Cortez’s – loyalty was to the organization as a whole which paid him, not to single personalities. His plan was for Escobedo to be killed off. It was necessary, and not especially regrettable. The Americans had already killed off two of the really smart members, and he would help to eliminate the remaining two intellects. The surviving lords would need Cortez, and would know that they needed him. His position as chief of security and intelligence would be upgraded to a seat around the table while the rest of the Cartel was restructured in accordance with his ideas for a streamlined and more secure organization. Within a year he’d be first among equals; another year and he’d merely be first. He wouldn’t even have to kill the rest off. Escobedo was one of the smart ones, and he’d proven so easy to manipulate. The rest would be as children, more interested in their money and their expensive toys than with what the organization could really accomplish. His ideas in that area were vague. Cortez was not one to think ten steps ahead. Four or five were enough.
He reexamined the maps. Soon the Americans would become alert to the danger of his operation and would react. He opened his briefcase and compared aerial photographs with the maps. He now knew that the Americans had been brought in and were supported probably by a single helicopter. That was so daring as to be foolish. Hadn’t the Americans learned about helicopters on the plains of Iran? He had to identify likely landing zones… or did he?
Cortez closed his eyes and commanded himself to return to first principles. That was the real danger in operations like this. One got so caught up in what was going on that one lost sight of the overall situation. Perhaps there was another way. The Americans had already helped him. Perhaps they might help him again. How might he bring that about? What could he do to and for them? What might they do for him? It gave him something to ponder for the rest of the sleepless night.
Bad weather had prevented them from testing out the new engine the previous night, and for the same reason they had to wait until 0300 local time to try this night. The Pave Low was not allowed to show itself by day under any circumstances, without a direct order from on high.
A cart pulled the chopper out of the hangar, and the rotor was unfolded and locked into place before the engines were started. PJ and Captain Willis applied power, with Sergeant Zimmer at his engineer’s console. They taxied normally to the runway and started their takeoff in the way of helicopters, with an uneven lurch as the reluctant tons of metal and fuel climbed into the air like a child on his first ladder.
It was hard to say what happened first. A terrible screech reached the pilot’s ears, coming through the protective foam of his Darth Vader helmet. At the same time, perhaps a millisecond earlier, Zimmer shouted a warning too loudly over the intercom circuit. Whatever happened first, Colonel Johns’ eyes flicked down to his instrument panel and saw that his Number One engine dials were all wrong. Willis and Zimmer both killed the engine while PJ slewed the chopper around, thankful that he was only fifty feet off the pavement. In less than three seconds, he was back on the ground, powering his single working engine down to idle.
“Well?”
“The new engine, sir. It just came apart on us – looks like a total compressor failure. Sounds worse. I’m going to have to give it a look to see if it damaged anything else,” Zimmer reported.
“Did you have any problem putting it in?”
“Negative. It went just like the book says, sir. That’s the second time with this lot of engines, sir. The contractor’s fucking up somewhere with those new composite turbine blades. That’s going to down-check the whole engine run until we identify the problem, ground every bird that’s using them, us, the Navy, Army, everybody.” The new engine design used turbine-compressor blades made from ceramic instead of steel. It was lighter – you could carry a little more gas – and cheaper – you could buy a few more engines – than the old way, and contractor tests had shown the new version to be just as reliable – until they had reached line service, that is. The first failure had been blamed on an ingested bird, but two Navy choppers using this engine had gone down at sea without a trace. Zimmer was right. Every aircraft with this engine installed would be grounded until the problem was understood and fixed.