“What about the weather?” he asked PJ.
“That fucking storm’s jinking around like a Weasel on a SAM hunt. Nobody knows where the hell it’s going, but it ain’t there yet, and I’ve flown in weather before,” Colonel Johns replied.
“Okay.” The pilot walked off. There were some cots set in the next room. He landed on one and was asleep in a minute.
“Going in on the ground?” Ryan asked.
“What do you expect me to do – leave them there? Ain’t we done enough of that?” Clark looked away. His eyes were red, and only PJ knew that it wasn’t from strain and lack of sleep. “Sorry, Jack. There’s some of our people there. I have to try. They’d try for me. It’s cool, man. I know how to do it.”
“How?” PJ asked.
“Larson and I’ll fly in around noon, get a car and drive down. I told Chavez – that’s the kid I talked to – to get around them and head east, down the mountain. We’ll try to pick them up, drive ’em to the airport, and just fly them out.”
“Just like that?” Ryan asked incredulously.
“Sure. Why not?”
“There’s a difference between being brave and being an idiot,” Ryan said.
“Who gives a fuck about being brave? It’s my job.” Clark walked off to get some sleep.
“You know what you’re really afraid of?” Johns said when he’d left. “You’re afraid of remembering the times that you could have done it and didn’t. I can give you a play-by-play of every failure I’ve had in twenty-some years.” The colonel was wearing his blue shirt with command wings and all the ribbons. He had quite a few.
Jack’s eyes fixed on one, pale blue with five white stars. “But you…”
“It’s a nice thing to wear, and it’s nice to have four-stars salute me first and treat me like I’m something special. But you know what matters? Those two guys I got out. One’s a general now. The other one flies for Delta. They’re both alive. They both have families. That’s what matters, Mr. Ryan. The ones I didn’t get out, they matter, too. Some of them are still there, because I wasn’t good enough or fast enough or lucky enough. Or they weren’t. Or something. I should have gotten them out. That’s the job,” Johns said quietly. “That’s what I do.”
We sent them in there, Jack told himself. My agency sent them in there. And some of them are dead now, and we let somebody tell us not to do anything about it. And I’m supposed to be…
“Might be dangerous going in tonight.”
“Possible. Looks that way.”
“You have three minis aboard your chopper,” Ryan said after a moment. “You only have two gunners.”
“I couldn’t whistle another one up this fast and -”
“I’m a pretty fair shot,” Jack told him.
28. Accounting
CORTEZ SAT AT the table, doing his sums. The Americans had done marvelously well. Nearly two hundred Cartel men had gone up the mountain. Ninety-six had returned alive, sixteen of those wounded. They’d even brought a live American down with them. He was badly hurt, still bleeding from four wounds, and he hadn’t been well handled by the Colombian gunmen. The man was young and brave, biting off his screams, shaking with the effort to control himself. Such a courageous young man, this Green Beret. Cortez would not insult his bravery with questions. Besides, he was incoherent, and Cortez had other things to do.
There was a medical team here to treat “friendly” casualties. Cortez walked out to it and picked up a disposable syringe, filling it with morphine. He returned and stabbed the needle into a vein on the soldier’s uninjured arm, pushing down on the plunger after it was in. The soldier relaxed at once, his pain extinguished by a wonderful, brief sensation of well-being. Then his breathing just stopped, and his life, too, was extinguished. Most unfortunate. Cortez could really have used men like this one, but they rarely worked for anything other than a flag. He walked over to his phone and called the proper number.
“Jefe, we eliminated one of the enemy forces last night… Yes, jefe, there were ten of them as I suspected, and we got them all. We go after another team tonight… There is one problem, jefe. The enemy fought well, and we took many casualties. I need more men for tonight’s mission. Sí, thank you, jefe. That will do nicely. Send the men to Riosucio, and have the leaders report to me this afternoon. I will brief them here. Oh? Yes, that will be excellent. We’ll be waiting for you.”
With luck, Cortez thought, the next American team would fight equally as well. With luck he could eliminate two-thirds of the Cartel’s stable of gunmen in a single week. Along with their bosses, also tonight. He was on the downslope now, Cortez thought. He’d gambled dangerously and hard, but the tricky ones were behind him.
It was an early funeral. Greer had been a widower, and estranged from his wife long before that. The reason for the estrangement was next to the rectangular hole in Arlington, the simple white headstone of First Lieutenant Robert White Greer, USMC, his only son, who’d graduated from the Naval Academy and gone to Vietnam to die. Neither Moore nor Ritter had ever met the young man, and James had never kept a photo of him around the office. The former DDI had been a sentimental man but never a maudlin one. Yet he had long ago requested burial next to the grave of his son, and because of his rank and station an exception had been made and the place kept available for an event that for all men was as inevitable as it was untimely. He’d indeed been a sentimental man, but only in ways that mattered. Ritter thought that there were many explanations before his eyes. The way James had adopted several bright young people and brought them into the Agency, the interest he’d taken in their careers, the training and consideration he’d given them.
It was a small, quiet ceremony. James’ few close friends were there, along with a much larger number of people from the government. Among the latter were the President – and, much to Bob Ritter’s rage, Vice Admiral James A. Cutter, Jr. The President himself had spoken at the chapel service, noting the death of a man who had served his country continuously for more than fifty years, having enlisted in the U.S. Navy at seventeen, then entered the Academy, then reached two-star rank, achieving a third star for his flag after assuming his position at CIA. “A standard of professionalism, integrity, and devotion to his country that few have equaled and none have excelled” was how the President summarized the career Vice Admiral James Greer.
And that bastard Cutter sat right there in the front row as he said it, too, Ritter told himself. He found it especially sickening as he watched the honor guard from the 3rd Infantry Regiment fold the flag that had been draped over the casket. There was no one to hand it to. Ritter had expected it to go to –
But where was Ryan? He moved his head, trying to look around. He hadn’t noticed before because Jack hadn’t come from Langley with the rest of the CIA delegation. The flag went to Judge Moore by default. Hands were shaken, words exchanged. Yes, it really was a mercy that he’d gone so rapidly at the end. Yes, men like this didn’t appear every day. Yes, this was the end of the Greer line, and that was too bad, wasn’t it? No, I never met his son, but I heard… Ritter and Moore were in the Agency Cadillac ten minutes later, heading back up the George Washington Parkway.
“Where the hell was Ryan?” the DCI asked.
“I don’t know. I figured he’d drive himself in.”
Moore was not so much angered as upset by the impropriety. He still had the flag in his lap, holding it as gently as a newborn baby without knowing why – until he realized that if there really was a God, as the Baptist preachers of his youth had assured him, and if James had really had a soul, he held its best legacy in his hands. It felt warm to the touch, and though he knew that it was merely his imagination or at most the residual heat absorbed from the morning sun, the energy radiating from the flag that James had served from his teens seemed to accuse him of treachery. They had just watched a funeral this morning, but two thousand miles away there were other people whom the Agency had sent to do a job and who would not receive even the empty reward of a grave amidst others of their kind.
“Bob, what the hell have we done?” Moore asked. “How did we ever get into this?”