Something bothered Chavez, but he didn’t know what it was. He stopped for a moment, looking around, searching with all his senses over to his left for about thirty seconds. Nothing. For the first time tonight he found himself wishing for his night goggles. Ding shook it off. Maybe a squirrel or some other night forager. Not a man, certainly. No one could move in the dark as well as a Ninja, he smiled to himself, and got back to the business at hand. He reached his position several minutes later, just behind a scrawny pine tree, and eased down to a kneeling position. Chavez slid the cover off the green face of his digital watch, watching the numbers march slowly toward the appointed moment. There was the sentry, moving in a circle around the fire, never more than thirty feet from it, trying to keep his eyes turned away from it to protect his night vision. But the light reflected off the rocks and the pines would damage his perceptions badly enough – he looked straight at Chavez twice, but saw nothing.
Time.
Chavez brought up his MP-5 and loosed a single round into the target’s chest. The man flinched with the impact, grasped the spot where he’d been hit, and dropped to the ground with a surprised gasp. The MP-5 made only a slight metallic clack, like a small stone rolling against another, but in the still mountain night, it was something out of the ordinary. The drowsy one by the fire turned around, but only made it halfway when he too was struck. Chavez figured himself to be on a roll and was taking aim on one of the sleeping men when the distinctive ripping sound of Julio’s squad automatic weapon jolted them from their slumber. All three leapt to their feet, and were dead before they got there.
“Where the hell did you come from?” the dead sentry demanded. The place on his chest where the wax bullet had struck was very sore, all the more so from surprise. By the time he was standing again, Ramirez and the others were in the camp.
“Kid, you are very good,” a voice said behind Chavez, and a hand thumped down on his shoulder. The sergeant nearly jumped out of his skin as the man walked past him into the encampment. “Come on.”
A rattled Chavez followed the man to the fire. He cleared his weapon on the way – the wax bullets could do real harm to a man’s face.
“We’ll score that one a success,” the man said. “Five kills, no reaction from the bad guys. Captain, your machine-gunner got a little carried away. I’d go easier on the rock and roll; the sound of an automatic weapon carries an awful long way. I’d also try to move in a little closer, but – I guess that rock there was about the best you could do. Okay, forget that one. My mistake. We can’t always pick the terrain. I liked your discipline on the approach march, and your movement into the objective was excellent. This point man you have is terrific. He almost picked me up.” The last struck Chavez as faint praise indeed.
“Who the fuck are you!” Ding asked quietly.
“Kid, I was doing this sort of thing for real when you were playing with guns made by Mattel. Besides, I cheated.” Clark held up his night goggles. “I picked my route carefully, and I froze every time you turned your head. What you heard was my breathing. You almost had me. I thought I blew the exercise. Sorry. My name’s Clark, by the way.” A hand appeared.
“Chavez.” The sergeant took it.
“You’re pretty good, Chavez. Best I’ve seen in a while. I especially like the footwork. Not many have the patience you do. We could have used you in the 3rd SOG.” It was Clark’s highest praise, and rarely given.
“What’s that?”
A grunt and a chuckle. “Something that never existed – don’t worry about it.”
Clark walked over to examine the two men Chavez had shot. Both were rubbing identical places on their flak jackets, right over their hearts.
“You know how to shoot, too.”
“Anybody can hit with this.”
Clark turned to look at the young man. “Remember, when it’s for real, it’s not quite the same.”
Chavez recognized genuine meaning in that statement. “What should I do different, sir?”
“That’s the hard part,” Clark admitted as the rest of the squad approached the fire. He spoke as a teacher to a gifted pupil. “Part of you has to pretend it’s the same as training. Another part has to remember that you don’t get many mistakes anymore. You have to know which part to listen to, ’cause it changes from one minute to the next. You got good instincts, kid. Trust ’em. They’ll keep you alive. If things don’t feel right, they probably aren’t. Don’t confuse that with fear.”
“Huh?”
“You’re going to be afraid out there, Chavez. I always was. Get used to the idea, and it can work for you ‘stead of against you. For Christ’s sake, don’t be ashamed of it. Half the problem out in Indian Country is people afraid of being afraid.”
“Sir, what the hell are we training for?”
“I don’t know yet. Not my department.” Clark managed to conceal his feelings on that score. The training wasn’t exactly in accord with what he thought the mission was supposed to be. Ritter might be having another case of the clevers. There was nothing more worrisome to Clark than a clever superior.
“You’re going to be working with us, though.”
It was an exceedingly shrewd observation, Clark thought. He’d asked to come out here, of course, but realized that Ritter had maneuvered him into asking. Clark was the best man the Agency had for this sort of thing. There weren’t many men with similar experience anywhere in government service, and most of those, like Clark, were getting a little old for the real thing. Was that all? Clark didn’t know. He knew that Ritter liked to keep things under his hat, especially when he thought he was being clever. Clever men outsmart themselves, Clark thought, and Ritter wasn’t immune from that.
“Maybe,” he admitted reluctantly. It wasn’t that he minded associating with these men, but Clark worried about the circumstances that might make it necessary, later on. Can you still cut it, Johnny boy?
“So?” Director Jacobs asked. Bill Shaw was there, too.
“So he did it, sure as hell,” Murray replied as he reached for his coffee. “But taking it to trial would be nasty. He’s a clever guy, and his crew backed him up. If you read up on his file, you’ll see why. He’s some officer. The day I went down, he rescued the crew of a burning fishing boat – talk about perfect timing. There were scorch marks on the hull, he went in so close. Oh, sure, we could get them all apart and interview them, but just figuring out who was involved would be tricky. I hate to say this, but it probably isn’t worth the hassle, especially with the senator looking over our shoulder, and the local U.S. Attorney probably won’t spring for it either. Bright wasn’t all that crazy about it, but I calmed him down. He’s a good kid, by the way.”
“What about the defense for the two subjects?” Jacobs asked.
“Slim. On the face of it the case against them is pretty damned solid. Ballistics has matched the bullet Mobile pulled out of the deck to the gun recovered on the boat, with both men’s fingerprints on it – that was a real stroke of luck. The blood type around where the bullet was found was AB-positive, which matches the wife. A carpet stain three feet away from that confirms that she was having her period, which along with a couple of semen stains suggests rape rather strongly. Right now they’re doing the DNA match downstairs on semen samples recovered from the rug – anybody here want to bet against a positive match? We have a half-dozen bloody fingerprints that match the subjects ten points’ worth or more. There’s a lot of good physical evidence. It’s more than enough to convict already,” Murray said confidently, “and the lab boys haven’t got halfway through their material yet. The U.S. Attorney is going to press for capital punishment. I’ll think he’ll get it. The only question is whether or not we allow them to trade information for a lighter sentence. But it’s not exactly my case.” That earned Murray a smile from the Director.
“Pretend it is,” Jacobs ordered.
“We’ll know in a week or so if we need anything they can tell us. My instincts say no. We ought to be able to figure out who the victim was working for, and that’ll be the one who ordered the hit – we just don’t know why yet. But it’s unlikely that the subjects know why either. I think we have a couple of sicarios who hoped to parlay their hit into an entree to the marketing side of the business. I think they’re throwaways. If that’s correct, they don’t know anything that we can’t figure out for ourselves. I suppose we have to give them a chance, but I would recommend against mitigation of sentence. Four murders – bad ones at that. We have a death-penalty statute, and to this brick-agent, I think the chair would fit them just fine.”