One thing about military people was that they were predictable.
They’d want a place from which they could watch the length of the airstrip, and also keep an eye on the refueling shack. That meant one of two corners, Cortez judged, and he walked off toward the northwest one. He spent a half hour prowling the bushes in silence with a confused man behind him.
“Here is where they were,” Félix said to himself. The dirt just behind the mound of dirt was smoothed down. Men had lain there. There was also the imprint from the bipod of a machine gun.
He couldn’t tell how long they’d watched the strip, but he suspected that here was the explanation for the disappearing aircraft. Americans? If so, what agency did they work for? CIA? DEA? Some special-operations group from the military, perhaps?
And why were they pulled out?
And why had they made their departure so obvious?
What if the guards were not dead? What if the Americans had bought them off?
Cortez stood and brushed the mud off his trousers. They were sending a message. Of course. After the murder of their FBI Director – he hadn’t had time to talk to el jefe about that act of lunacy yet – they wanted to send a message so that such things were not to be repeated.
That the Americans had done anything at all was unusual, of course. After all, kidnapping and/or killing American citizens was about the safest thing any international terrorist could do. The CIA had allowed one of their station chiefs to be tortured to death in Lebanon – and done nothing. All those Marines blown up – and the Americans had done nothing. Except for the occasional attempt at sending a message. The Americans were fools. They’d tried to send messages to the North Vietnamese for nearly ten years, and failed, and still they hadn’t learned better. So this time, instead of doing nothing at all, they’d done something that was less useful than nothing. To have so much power and have so little appreciation of it, Cortez thought. Not like the Russians. When some of their people had been kidnapped in Lebanon, the KGB’s First Directorate men had snatched their own hostages off the street and returned them – one version said headless, another with more intimate parts removed – immediately after which the missing Russians had been returned with something akin to an apology. For all their crudeness, the Russians understood how the game was played. They were predictable, and played by all the classic rules of clandestine behavior so that their enemies knew what would not be tolerated. They were serious. And they were taken seriously.
Unlike the Americans. As much as he warned his employer to be wary of them, Cortez was sure that they wouldn’t answer even something as outrageous as the murder of senior officials of their government.
That was too bad, Cortez told himself. He could have made it work for him.
“Good evening, boss,” Ryan said as he took his seat.
“Hi, Jack.” Admiral Greer smiled as much as he could. “How do you like the new job?”
“Well, I’m keeping your chair warm.”
“It’s your chair now, son,” the DDI pointed out. “Even if I do get out of here, I think it’s time to retire.”
Jack didn’t like the way he pronounced the word if.
“I don’t think I’m ready yet, sir.”
“Nobody’s ever ready. Hell, when I was still a naval officer, about the time I actually learned how to do the job, it was time to leave. That’s the way life is, Jack.”
Ryan thought that one over as he surveyed the room. Admiral Greer was getting his nourishment through clear plastic tubes. A blue-green gadget that looked like a splint kept the needles in his arm, but he could see where previous IV lines had “infiltrated” and left ugly bruises. That was always a bad sign. Next to the IV bottle was a smaller one, piggybacked with the D5W. That was the medication he was being given, the chemotherapy. It was a fancy name for poison, and poison was exactly what it was, a biocide that was supposed to kill the cancer a little faster than it killed the patient. He didn’t know what this one was, some acronym or other that designated a compound developed at the National Institutes of Health instead of the Army’s Chemical Warfare Center. Or maybe, Jack thought, they cooperated on such concoctions. Certainly Greer looked as though he were the victim of some dreadful, vicious experiment.
But that wasn’t true. The best people in the field were doing everything they knew to keep him alive. And failing. Ryan had never seen his boss so thin. It seemed that every time he came – never less than three times per week – he’d lost additional weight. His eyes burned with defiant energy, but the light at the end of this painful tunnel was not recovery. He knew it. So did Jack. There was only one thing he could do to ease the pain. And this he did. Jack opened his briefcase and took out some documents.
“You want to look these over.” Ryan handed them over.
They nearly tangled on the IV lines, and Greer grumbled his annoyance at the plastic spaghetti.
“You’re leaving for Belgium tomorrow night, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Give my regards to Rudi and Franz from the BND. And watch the local beer, son.”
Ryan laughed. “Yes, sir.”
Admiral Greer scanned through the first folder. “The Hungarians are still at it, I see.”
“They got the word to cool it down, and they have, but the underlying problem isn’t going to go away. I think it’s in the interests of everyone concerned that they should cool it. Our friend Gerasimov has given us some tips on how to get word to a few people ourselves.”
Greer nearly laughed at that. “It figures. How is the former KGB Director adapting to life in America?”
“Not as well as his daughter is. Turns out that she always wanted a nose job. Well, she got her wish.” Jack grinned. “Last time I saw her she was working on a tan. She restarts college next fall. The wife is still a little antsy, and Gerasimov is still cooperating. We haven’t figured out what to do with him when we’re finished, though.”
“Tell Arthur to show him my old place up in Maine. He’ll like the climate, and it ought to be easy to guard.”
“I’ll pass that along.”
“How do you like being let in on all the Operations stuff?” James Greer asked.
“Well, what I’ve seen is interesting enough, but there’s still ‘need-to-know’ to worry about.”
“Says who?” the DDI asked in surprise.
“Says the Judge,” Jack replied. “They have a couple of things poppin’ that they don’t want me in on.”
“Oh, really?” Greer was quiet for a moment. “Jack, in case nobody ever told you, the Director, the Deputy Director – they still haven’t refilled that slot, have they? – and the directorate chiefs are cleared for everything. You are now a chief of directorate. There isn’t anything you aren’t supposed to know. You have to know. You brief Congress.”
Ryan waved it off. It wasn’t important, really. “Well, maybe the Judge doesn’t see things that way and -”
The DDI tried to sit up in bed. “Listen up, son. What you just said is bullshit! You have to know, and you tell Arthur I said so. That ‘need-to-know’ crap stops at the door to my office.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll take care of that.” Ryan didn’t want his boss to get upset. He was only an acting chief of directorate, after all, and he was accustomed to being cut out of operational matters which, for the past six years, he’d been quite content to leave to others. Jack wasn’t ready to challenge the DCI on something like this. His responsibility for the Intelligence Directorate’s output to Congress, of course, was something he would make noise over.
“I’m not kidding, Jack.”
“Yes, sir.” Ryan pointed to another folder. He’d fight that battle after he got back from Europe. “Now, this development in South Africa is especially interesting and I want your opinion…”
15. Deliverymen
CLARK WALKED OFF the United flight in San Diego and rented a car for the drive to the nearby naval base. It didn’t take very long. He felt the usual pang of nostalgia when he saw the towering gray-blue hulls. He’d once been a part of this team, and though he’d been young and foolish then, he remembered it fondly as a time in which things were simpler.
USS Ranger was a busy place. Clark parked his car at the far end of the area used by the enlisted crewmen and walked toward the quay, dodging around the trucks, cranes, and other items of mobile hardware that cycled in and out from their numerous tasks. The carrier was preparing to sail in another eight hours, and her thousands of sailors were on-loading all manner of supplies. Her flight deck was empty save for a single old F-4 Phantom fighter which no longer had any engines and was used for training new members of the flight-deck crew. The carrier’s air wing was scattered among three different naval air stations and would fly out after the carrier sailed. That fact spared the pilots of the wing from the tumult normal to a carrier’s departure. Except for one.