Dead or Alive (8 page)

“Damn,” Clark muttered, getting out of the truck. He’d come pretty far for an old Navy chief bosun’s mate, but he’d taken a lot of strange steps along the way. Not knowing quite what to do, he figured he had to review the troops, as it were, and shake hands with all of them on the way to the MH-60K helicopter.

It took more time than he’d expected. Nearly every person there got a word or two with the handshake. They all deserved it. His mind went back to 3rd SOG, a lifetime before. These were as good as those, hard to believe though that might be. He’d been young, proud, and immortal back then. And remarkably, he hadn’t died of being immortal, as so many good men had. Why? Luck, maybe. No other likely explanation. He’d learned caution, mostly in Vietnam. Learned from seeing men who’d not been lucky go down hard from making some dumb mistake, often as simple as not paying attention. Some chances you had to take, but you tried to run them through your mind first and take only the necessary chances. Those were plenty bad enough.

Alice Foorgate and Helen Montgomery both gave him hugs. They’d been superb secretaries, and those were hard to find. Clark had been half tempted to try to find them jobs in the United States, but the Brits probably valued them as much as he had and would’ve put up a fight.

And finally Alistair Stanley, the incoming boss, was standing at the end.

“I’ll take good care of them, John,” he promised. They shook hands. There was not much else to be said. “Still no word on the next posting?”

“I expect they’ll tell me before the next check comes.” The government was usually good about getting the paperwork done. Not much else, of course, but paperwork, surely.

With nothing left to be said, Clark walked to the helicopter. Ding, Patsy, and J.C. were already strapped in, along with Sandy. J.C. especially loved flying, and he’d get a gut full in the next ten hours. On lifting off they turned southeast for Heathrow Terminal Four. Landing on their own pad, a van took them to the aircraft, and so they were absolved of passing through the magnetometers. It was a British Airways 777. The same type they’d flown over on four years earlier, then with the Basque terrorists aboard. They were in Spain, though in which prison and how the conditions were they’d never asked. Probably not the Waldorf Astoria.

 

 

 

A
re we fired, John?” Ding asked as the aircraft rotated off the Heathrow tarmac.

“Probably not. Even if we are, they’re not going to call it that. They might make you a training officer down at The Farm. Me . . . ? Well, they can keep me on the payroll a year or two, maybe I can hold down a desk in the operations center until they take my parking sticker away. We’re too senior to fire. Not worth the paperwork. They’re afraid we might talk to the wrong reporter.”

“Yeah, you still owe Bob Holtzman a lunch, don’t you?”

John almost spilled his preflight champagne at that reminder. “Well, I did give my word, didn’t I?”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, then Ding said, “So we make a courtesy call on Jack?”

“We kinda sorta gotta, Domingo.”

“I hear you. Hell, Jack Junior’s out of school now, isn’t he?”

“Yeah. Not sure what he’s doing, though.”

“Some rich-kid job, I bet. Stocks and bonds, money shit, I bet.”

“Well, what were you doing at that age?”

“Learning how to handle a dead drop from you, down at The Farm, and studying nights at George Mason University. Sleepwalking, mostly.”

“But you got your master’s, as I recall. Lot more than I ever got.”

“Yeah. I got a piece of paper that says I’m smart. You left dead bodies all over the world.” Fortunately, it was virtually impossible to bug an airliner’s cabin.

“Call it foreign-policy laboratory work,” Clark suggested, checking the first-class menu. At least British Airways pretended to serve decent food, though why airlines didn’t just stock up on Big Macs and fries still mystified him. Or maybe a Domino’s pizza. All the money they’d save—but the McDonald’s in the UK just didn’t seem to have the right beef. In Italy it was even worse. But their national dish was veal Milanese, and that had a Big Mac beat. “You worried?”

“About having a job? Not really. I can always make real money consulting. You know, the two of us could start up a company, executive security or like that, and really clean up. I’d do the planning, and you’d do the actual protection. You know, just stand there and stare at people in that special ‘don’t fuck with me’ way you do.”

“Too old for that, Domingo.”

“Ain’t nobody dumb enough to kick an old lion in the ass, John. I’m too short to scare bad guys away.”

“Bullshit. I wouldn’t mess with you for the fun of it.”

Chavez had rarely received that magnitude of compliment. He was overly sensitive about his diminutive height—his wife was an inch taller—but it had its tactical value. Over the years, several people had underestimated him and then come within his reach. Not professionals. Those could read his eyes and see the danger that lay behind them. When he bothered to turn the lights on. It rarely came to that, though one street tough in east London had gotten impolite outside a pub. He’d been awakened later with a pint of beer and a playing card tucked in his pocket. It was the queen of clubs, but the back of the card had been a glossy black. Such instances were rare. England remained a civilized country for the most part, and Chavez never went looking for trouble. He’d learned that lesson over the years. The black deck of cards was an unauthorized souvenir for the Men of Black. The newspapers had picked up on it, and Clark had come down hard on the men who carried the cards. But not that hard. There was security, and there was panache. The boys he’d left behind in Wales had both, and that, really, was okay, as long as the troops knew where the line was.

“What do you think our best job was?”

“Gotta be the amusement park. Malloy did a great job of setting your team down on the castle, and the takedown you did was damned near perfect, especially since we couldn’t rehearse it.”

“Damn, those were good troops,” Domingo agreed with a smile. “My old Ninjas didn’t even come close, and I thought they were as good as soldiers got.”

“They were, but experience counts for a lot.” Every one of the Rainbow team was at least an E-6 or equivalent, which took some years in uniform to achieve. “A lot of smarts comes along with time, and it’s not the sort of thing you get out of a book. Then we trained the hell out of them.”

“Tell me about it. If I run any more, I’ll need two new legs.”

Clark snorted. “You’re still a pup. But I’ll tell ya this: I’ve never seen a better bunch of triggers, and I’ve seen a fair share. Christ, it’s like they were born with H-and-P’s in their hands. How about it, Ding, got a personal champ?”

“Have to measure it with an O-scope and calipers. I’d take Eddie Price for brains. Weber or Johnston on a rifle, hell, there ain’t nothing to choose from. For short guns, that little Frenchie, Loiselle . . . He could have scared Doc Holliday out of Tombstone. But you know, all you can really do is put a bullet in the X-ring. Dead is dead. We could all do it, close or far, day or night, awake or asleep, drunk or sober.”

“Which is why we’re paid the big money.”

“Shame they’re pulling back on the reins.”

“A damned shame.”

“Why, goddamn it? I just don’t get it.”

“Because the European terrorists have gone to ground. We shut them down, Ding, and in the process worked ourselves out of a full-time job. At least they didn’t pull the plug altogether. Given the nature of politics, we’ll call that a success and ride into the sunset.”

“With a pat on the back and an attaboy.”

“You expect gratitude from democratic governments?” John asked with a slight grimace. “You poor, naive boy.”

The European Union bureaucrats had been the main reason. No European countries tolerated capital punishment anymore—what the common folk might have wanted was not considered, of course—and one such representative of the people had said aloud and repeatedly that the Rainbow team had been too ruthless. Whether or not he insisted on humane capture and medical treatment for rabid dogs had never quite been asked. The people had never disapproved of team actions in any country, but their kind and gentle bureaucrats had gotten their panties in a wad, and those faceless people had the real political power. Like every place else in the civilized world.

“You know, in Sweden it’s illegal to raise calves the efficient way. You have to give them social contact with other critters. Next you won’t be able to cut their balls off until they get laid at least once,” Chavez grumped.

“Seems reasonable to me. That way they’ll know what they’re missing.” Clark chuckled. “One less thing for the cowboys to have to do. Probably not a fun job for a man to do that to somebody else.”

“Jesus said the meek shall inherit the earth, and that’s fine with me, but it’s still nice to have cops around.”

“You hear me arguing with you? Rock your seat back and have a glass of wine and get some sleep, Domingo.”

And if some asshole tries to hijack this airplane, we’ll deal with him,
Clark didn’t add.

One could always hope. One last jolt of action before going out to pasture.

S
O WHAT’S COOKING?” Brian Caruso asked his cousin.

“Same stew, different day, I expect,” Jack Ryan Jr. replied.

“‘Stew’?” Dominic, the other Caruso, replied. “Don’t you mean shit?”

“Trying to be optimistic.”

All three armed with their first cups of coffee of the day, they walked down the corridor to Jack’s office. It was 8:10 a.m., about time for another day to start at The Campus.

“Any word on our friend the Emir?” Brian asked, taking a gulp of coffee.

“Nothing firsthand. He’s not stupid. He even has his e-mails relayed through a series of cutouts now, some of them through ISP accounts that open and close within hours, and even then the account financials turn out to be dead ends. The Pakistan badlands is the best current guess. Maybe next door. Maybe wherever he can buy a safe spot. Hell, at this point I’m tempted to look in our own broom closet.”

It was frustrating, Jack thought. His first adventure into field operations had been a slam dunk. Or beginner’s luck, maybe? Or fate. He’d gone to Rome as Brian and Dominic’s intel support, nothing more, and had by sheer chance spotted MoHa in the hotel. From there things had moved fast, too damned fast, and then it’d been him and MoHa in the bathroom . . .

He wouldn’t be as frightened the next time, Jack told himself with enormous—and false—confidence. He remembered the killing of MoHa as clearly as the first time he’d gotten laid. Most vivid of all was the look on the man’s face when the succinylcholine had taken hold. Jack might have felt regret for the killing except for the adrenaline rush of the moment, and for what Mohammed had been guilty of. He’d found no regret in his soul for that action. MoHa had been a murderer himself, someone who had taken it upon himself to deliver death to innocent civilians, and Jack hadn’t missed a wink of sleep over it.

It had helped that he’d been among family. He and Dominic and Brian shared a grandfather, Jack Muller, his mom’s father. Their fraternal grandfather, now eighty-three, was first-generation Italian, having emigrated from Italy to Seattle, where for the past sixty years he’d lived and worked at the family-owned and -run restaurant.

Grandpa Muller, former Army veteran and Merrill Lynch VP, had a strained relationship with Jack Ryan Sr., having decided that his son-in-law’s abandonment of Wall Street for government service was sheer idiocy—idiocy that had eventually led to his daughter and granddaughter, Little Sally, nearly losing their lives in a car crash. But for his son-in-law’s ill-advised return to the CIA, the incident would have never happened. Of course, no one except Grandpa Muller believed that, including Mom and Sally.

It also helped, Jack Junior had decided, that Brian and Dominic were relatively new to this as well. Not new to the danger—Brian a Marine and Dominic an FBI agent—but to the “Wilderness of Mirrors,” as James Jesus Angleton had called it. They’d adapted well and quickly, having taken out three URC soldiers in short order—four at the Charlottesville Mall shooting and three in Europe with the Magic Pen. Still, Hendley hadn’t hired them because they were good triggers. “Smart shooters” was the phrase Mike Brennan, his USSS principal, had often used, and it sure as hell fit his cousins.

“Gimme
your
best guess,” Brian said now.

“Pakistan, but close enough that his people can hop across the border. Somewhere with plenty of evacuation routes. He’s in a place with electricity, but portable generators are easy to come by, so that doesn’t mean much. Maybe a phone line, too. They’ve gotten away from satellite phones. Learned that one the hard way—”

“Yeah, when they read about it in the
Times,
” Brian growled.