Shaw, Murray, and several other senior FBI officials rode in the second aircraft, which was often used for similar missions, and had the appropriate hardware to keep the casket in place in the forward section of the cabin. It gave them a chance to stare at the polished oak box for the entire flight, without even a small window to distract them. Somehow that brought it home more than anything else might have done. It was a very quiet flight, only the whine of the turbofan engines to keep the living and the dead company.
But the aircraft was part of the President’s own fleet, and had all of the communications gear needed for that duty. An Air Force lieutenant came aft, asking for Murray, then led him forward to the communications console.
Mrs. Wolfe was in an aisle seat thirty feet aft of the senior executives. There were tears streaming down her face, and while she remembered that there was something she ought to tell Mr. Shaw, this wasn’t the time or place, was it? It didn’t really matter anyway – just that she’d made a mistake when the agent had interviewed her the previous afternoon. It was the shock of the event, really. It was so hard. Her life had known too many losses in the past few years, and the mental whiplash of the weekend had… what? Confused her? She didn’t know. But this wasn’t the right time. Today was a time to remember the best boss she’d ever had, a man who was every bit as thoughtful to her as he’d ever been to the agents who lionized him. She saw Mr. Murray walk forward for something or other, past the coffin that her hand had brushed on the way in, her last goodbye to the Director.
The call didn’t take more than a minute. Murray emerged from the small radio compartment, his face as much under control as it ever was. He didn’t look again at the casket, just looked aft, Moira saw, straight down the aisle before he took his place next to his wife.
“Oh, shit!” Dan muttered to himself after he was seated. His wife’s head snapped around. It wasn’t the sort of thing you say at a funeral. She touched his arm, but Murray shook his head. When he looked at his wife, the expression she saw was sadness, but not grief.
The flight lasted just over an hour. The honor guard came up from the rear of the aircraft to take charge of the Director, all polished and scrubbed in their dress uniforms. After they were out, the passengers exited to find the rest of the assembly waiting for them on the tarmac, watched by distant TV news cameras. The honor guard marched their burden behind two flags, that of their nation and the banner of the FBI, emblazoned with the “Fidelity-Bravery-Integrity” motto of the Bureau. Murray watched as the wind played with the flag, watched the words curl and flap in the breeze, and realized just how intangible such words really were. But he couldn’t tell Bill just yet. It would be noticed.
“Well, now we know why we wasted the airfield.” Chavez watched the ceremony in the squad bay of the barracks. It was all very clear to him now.
“But why’d they yank us out?” Vega asked.
“We’re going back, Oso. An’ the air’s gonna be thin where we’re goin’ back to.”
Larson didn’t need to watch the TV coverage. He hovered over a map, plotting known and suspected processing sites southwest of Medellín. He knew the areas – who didn’t? – but isolating individual locations… that was harder, but, again, it was a technological question. The United States had invented modern reconnaissance technology and spent almost thirty years perfecting it. He was in Florida, having flown to the States ostensibly to take delivery of a new aircraft, which had unaccountably developed engine problems.
“How long have we been doing this?”
“Only a couple of months,” Ritter answered.
Even with so thin a data base, it wasn’t all that hard. All of the towns and villages in the area were plotted, of course, even individual houses. Since nearly all had electricity, they were easy to spot, and once identified, the computer simply erased them electronically. That left energy sources that were not towns, villages, and individual farmsteads. Of these, some were regular or fairly so. It had been arbitrarily decided that anything that appeared more than twice in a week was too obvious to be of real interest, and these, too, were erased. That left sixty or so locations that appeared and disappeared in accordance with a chart next to the map and photographs. Each was a possible site where raw coca leaves began the refining process. They were not encampments for the Colombian Boy Scouts.
“You can’t track in on them chemically,” Ritter said. “I checked. The ether and acetone concentrations released into the air aren’t much more than you’d expect from the spillage of nail-polish remover, not to mention the usual biochemical processes in this sort of environment. It’s a jungle, right? Lots of stuff rots on the ground, and they give off all sorts of chemicals when they do. So all we have off the satellite is the usual infrared. They still do all their processing at night? I wonder why?”
Larson grunted agreement. “It’s a carry-over from when the Army was actively hunting them. They still do it mainly from habit, I suppose.”
“Well, it gives us something, doesn’t it?”
“What are we going to do with it?”
Murray had never been to a Jewish funeral. It wasn’t very different from a Catholic one. The prayers were in a language he couldn’t understand, but the message wasn’t very different. Lord, we’re sending a good man back to You. Thanks for letting us have him for a while. The President’s eulogy was particularly impressive, having been drafted by the best White House speechwriter, quoting from the Torah, the Talmud, and the New Testament. Then he started talking about Justice, the secular god that Emil had served for all of his adult life. When, toward the end, he talked about how men should turn their hearts away from vengeance, however, Murray thought that… it wasn’t the words. The speech was as poetically written as any he’d ever heard. It was just that the President started sounding like a politician at that point, Dan thought. Is that my own cynicism talking? the agent thought. He was a cop, and justice to him meant that the bastards who committed crimes had to pay. Evidently the President thought the same way, despite the statesmanlike stuff he was saying. That was fine with Murray.
The soldiers watched the TV coverage in relative silence. A few men worked knives across sharpening stones, but mainly they just sat there, listening to their President speak, knowing who had killed the man whose name few had heard until after he was dead. Chavez had been the first to make the correct observation, but it hadn’t been all that great a leap of imagination, had it? They accepted the as-yet-unspoken news phlegmatically. Here was merely additional proof that their enemy had struck out directly against one of the most important symbols of their nation. There was their country’s flag, draped across the coffin. There was the banner of the man’s own agency, but this wasn’t a job for cops, was it? So the soldiers traded looks in silence while their Commander-in-Chief had his say. When it was all over, the door to the squad bay opened, and there was their commander.
“We’re going back in tonight. The good news is, it’s going to be cooler where we’re going,” Captain Ramirez told his men. Chavez cocked an eyebrow at Vega.
USS Ranger sailed on the tide, assisted away from the dock by a flotilla of tugs while her escorts formed up, already out of the harbor and taking rolls from the broad Pacific swells. Within an hour she was clear of the harbor, doing twenty knots. Another hour, and it was time to begin flight operations. First to arrive were the helicopters, one of which refueled and took off again to take plane-guard station off the carrier’s starboard quarter. The first fixed-wing aircraft aboard were the Intruder attack bombers, led, of course, by the skipper, Commander Jensen. On the way out he’d seen the ammunition ship, USS Shasta, just beginning to get up steam. She’d join the underway-replenishment group that was to sail two hours behind the battle group. Shasta had the weapons that he’d be dropping. He already knew the sort of targets. Not the exact places yet, but he had the rough idea, and that, he realized as he climbed down from his aircraft, was all the idea he wanted to have. Worrying about “Collateral Damage” wasn’t strictly his concern, as somebody had told him earlier in the day. What an odd term, he thought. Collateral Damage. What an offhand way of condemning people whom fate had already selected to be in the wrong place. He felt sorry for them, but not all that sorry.