“DAMN,” CHAVEZ SAID. “It’s like Colombia.”
“Or Vietnam,” Clark agreed on being greeted with the tropical heat. There was an embassy official, and a repre-
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sentative of the Zaire government. The latter wore a uniform and saluted the arriving “officers,” which courtesy John returned.
“This way, if you please, Colonel.” The helicopter, it turned out, was French, and the service was excellent. America had dropped a lot of money into this country. It was payback time now.
Clark looked down. Triple-canopy jungle. He’d seen that before, in more than one country. In his youth, he’d been underneath, looking for enemies, and with enemies looking for him–little men in black pajamas or khaki uniforms, carrying AK-47s, people who wanted to take his life. Now he appreciated the fact that there was something down there even smaller, that was not carrying any weapon, and was targeted not merely on him, but at the heart of his country. It seemed so damned unreal. John Clark was a creature of his country. He’d been wounded in combat operations and other, more personal events, and every time was restored quickly to full health. There had been that one time, when he’d rescued an A-6 pilot up some river in North Vietnam whose name he couldn’t remember anymore. He’d gotten cut, and the polluted river had infected him, and that had been fairly unpleasant, but drugs and time had fixed it. He’d come away from all the experiences with a deeply held belief that his country produced doctors who could fix just about anything–not old age, and not cancer, yet, but they were working on it, and in due course they’d win their battles as he’d won most of his. That was an illusion. He had to admit that now. As he and his country had lost their struggle in a jungle like this one, a thousand feet below the racing helicopter, so now the jungle was reaching out, somehow. No. He shook that off. The jungle wasn’t reaching out. People had done that.
THE FOUR RO/RO ships formed up six hundred miles north-northwest of Diego Garcia. They were in a box formation, spaced a thousand yards abeam and a thousand yards fore and aft. The destroyer O’Bannon took position five thousand yards dead ahead. Kidd was ten thousand
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yards northeast of the ASW ship, with Anzio twenty miles in advance of the rest. The replenishment group with its two frigates was westbound and would join up around sunset.
It was a good opportunity for an exercise. Six P-3C Orion aircraft were based at Diego Garcia–the number had once been larger–and one of them was patrolling ahead of the mini-convoy, dropping sonobuoys, a complex undertaking for so rapidly moving a formation, and listening for possible submarines. Another Orion was well in advance, tracking the Indian navy’s two-carrier battle group from their radar emissions while staying well out of detection range. The lead Orion was not armed with anything but anti-sub weapons at the moment, and its mission was routine surveillance.
“YES, MR. PRESIDENT,” the J-3 said. Why aren’t you asleep, Jack? he couldn’t say.
“Robby, did you see this thing from Ambassador Williams?”
“It got my attention,” Admiral Jackson confirmed.
David Williams had taken his time drafting the communique. That had annoyed people at State, and caused two requests for his report which he had ignored. The former governor was drawing on all of his political savvy to consider the words the Prime Minister had chosen, her tone, her body language–the look in her eyes most of all. There was no substitute for that. Dave Williams had learned that lesson more than once. One thing he hadn’t learned was diplomatic verbiage. His report was straight-from-the-shoulder, and his conclusion was that India was up to something. He further noted that the Ebola crisis in America had not come up. Not a word of sympathy. That, he wrote, was probably a mistake in one sense, and a very deliberate act in another. India should have cared about it, or should have expressed concern even if she didn’t. Instead it had been ignored. If asked, the Prime Minister would have said that she hadn’t yet been informed, but that would be a lie, Williams added. In the age of CNN,