Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

ous railway engineers had looked at the valley and decided to build else-

where. The narrow gorge-in places not even “ten meters across at its

base-had been cut by a river, long since dammed, aritkwhat remained was

essentially a rock trench, like something left over from a war. Or in prepara-

tion/or one, he thought. It was pretty obvious, after all, despite the fact that

he’d never been told anything but to keep his mouth shut about the whole

project. The only way out of this place was straight up or sideways. A heli-

copter could do the former, and a train could do the latter, but to accomplish

1)1 HI 01 II ON OK

anything else required tampering with the laws of ballistics, which was a

very difficult task indeed.

As he watched, a huge Kowa scoop-loader dumped another bucketload of

crushed rock into a hopper car. It was the last car in the train’s “consist,”

and soon the diesel switch engine would haul its collection of cars out to the

mainline, where a standard-gauge electric locomotive would take over.

“Finished,” the man told him, pointing down into the hole. At the bot-

tom, a man held the end of a long tape measure. Forty meters exactly. The

hole had been measured by laser already, of course, but tradition required

that such measurements be tested by the human hand of a skilled worker,

and there at the bottom was a middle-aged hard-rock miner whose face

beamed with pride. And who had no idea what this project was all about.

“Hai,” the superintendent said with a pleased nod, and then a more for-

mal, gracious bow to the man at the bottom, which was dutifully and proudly

returned. The next train in would carry an oversized cement mixer. The pre-

assembled sets of rebar were already stacked around this hole-and, indeed,

all the others, ready to be lowered. In finishing the first hole, this team had

beaten its nearest competitor by perhaps six hours, and its furthest by no

more than two days-irregularities in the subsurface rock had been a prob-

lem for Hole Number 6, and in truth they’d done well to catch up as closely

as they were now. He’d have to speak to them, congratulate them for their

Herculean effort, so as to mitigate their shame at being last. Team 6 was his

best crew, and it was a pity that they’d been unlucky.

“Three more months, we will make the deadline,” the site foreman said

confidently.

“When Six is also finished, we will have a party for the men. They have

earned it.”

“This isn’t much fun,” Chavez observed.

“Warm, too,” Clark agreed. The air-conditioning system on their Range

Rover was broken, or perhaps it had died of despair. Fortunately, they had

lots of bottled water.

“But it’s a dry heat,” Ding replied, as though it mattered at a hundred

fourteen degrees. One could think in Celsius, instead, but that offered relief

only as long as it took to take in another breath. Then you were reminded of

the abuse that the superheated air had to be doing to your lungs, no matter

how you kept score. He unscrewed the top from a plastic bottle of spring

water, which was probably a frigid ninety-five, he estimated. Amazing how

cool it tasted under the circumstances.

“Chilldown tonight, all the way to eighty, maybe.”

“Good thing I brought my sweater, Mr. C.” Chavez paused to wipe off

some sweat before looking through the binoculars again. They were good

ones, but they didn’t help much, except to give a better view of the shimmer-

I OM ( I A N( Y

ing air thai roiled like the surface of a stormy, invisible sea. Nothing lived

out here except for the occasional vulture, and surely by now they had

cleaned off the carcasses of everything that had once made the mistake of

being born out here. And he’d once thought the Mojave Desert was bleak,

Chavez told himself. At least coyotes lived there.

It never changed, Clark thought. He’d been doing jobs like this one

for … thirty years? Not quite but close. Jesus, thirty years. He still hadn’t

had the chance to do it in a place where he could really fit in, but that didn’t

seem terribly important right now. Their cover was wearing thin. The back

of the Rover was jammed with surveying equipment and boxes of rock sam-

ples, enough to persuade the local illiterates that there might be an enormous

molybdenum deposit out there in that solitary mountain. The locals knew

what gold looked like-who didn’t?-but the mineral known affectionately

to miners as Molly-be-damned was a mystery to the uninitiated in all but its

market value, which was considerable. Clark had used the ploy often

enough. A geological discovery offered people just the perfect sort of luck to

appeal to their invariable greed. They just loved the idea of having some-

thing valuable sitting under their feet, and John Clark looked the part of a

mining engineer, with his rough and honest face to deliver the good and very

confidential news.

He checked his watch. The appointment was in ninety minutes, around

sunset, and he’d shown up early, the better to check out the area. It was hot

and empty, neither of which came as much of a surprise, and was located

twenty miles from the mountain they would be talking about, briefly. There

was a crossroads here, two tracks of beaten dirt, one mainly north-south, the

other mainly east-west, both of which somehow remained visible despite the

blowing sand and grit that ought to have covered up all traces of human

presence. Clark didn’t understand it. The years-long drought couldn’t have

helped, but even with occasional rain he had to wonder how the hell anyone

had lived here. Yet some people had, and for all he knew, still did, when

there was grass for their goats to eat… and no men with guns to steal the

goats and kill the herdsmen. Mainly the two CIA field officers sat in their

car, with the windows open, drank their bottled water, and sweated after they

ran out of words to exchange.

The trucks showed up close to dusk. They saw the dust plumes first, like,

the roostertails of motorboats, yellow in the diminishing light. In such an7

empty, desperate country, how was it possible that they knew how to make

trucks run? Somebody knew how to keep them running, and that seemed

very remarkable. Perversely, it meant that all was not lost for this desolate

place. If bad men could do it, then good men could do it as well. And that

was the reason for Clark and Chavez to be there, wasn’t it?

The first truck was well in advance of the others. It was old, probably a

military truck originally, though with all the body damage, the country of

origin and the name of the manufacturer were matters of speculation. It cir-

1)1 HI 01 HONOR

cled their Rover at a radius of about a hundred meters, while the eyes of the

crew checked them out at a discreet, careful distance, including one man on

what looked like a Russian 12.7mm machine gun mounted in the back. “Po-

licemen,” their boss called them-once it was “technicals.” After a while,

they stopped, got out and just stood there, watching the Rover, holding their

old, dirty, but probably functional 63 rifles. The men would soon be less

important. It was evening, after all, and the caq was out. Chavez watched a

man sitting in the shade of his truck a hundred meters away, chewing on the

weed.

“Can’t the dumb sunzabitches at least smoke it?” the exasperated field

officer asked the burning air in the car.

“Bad for the lungs, Ding. You know that.” Their appointment for the

evening made quite a living for himself by flying it in. In fact, roughly two

fifths of the country’s gross domestic product went into that trade, support-

ing a small fleet of aircraft that flew it in from Somalia. The fact offended

both Clark and Chavez, but their mission wasn’t about personal offense. It

was about a long-standing debt. General Mohammed Abdul Corp-his rank

had largely been awarded by reporters who didn’t know what else to call

him-had, once upon a time, been responsible for the deaths of twenty

American soldiers. Two years ago, to be exact, far beyond the memory hori-

zon of the media, because after he’d killed the American soldiers, he’d gone

back to his main business of killing his own countrymen. It was for the latter

cause that Clark and Chavez were nominally in the field, but justice had

many shapes and many colors, and it pleased Clark to pursue a parallel

agenda. That Corp was also a dealer in narcotics seemed a special gift from a

good-humored God.

“Wash up before he gets here?” Ding asked, tenser now, and showing it

just a little bit. All four men by the truck just sat there, chewing their caq and