Clear and Present Danger полностью

Ryan was over West Virginia on a commercial flight, sitting in coach on an American Airlines DC-9. It was quite a comedown from the Air Force VIP group, but there hadn't been sufficient cause for that sort of treatment this time. He was accompanied by a security guard, which Jack was gradually getting used to. This one was a case officer who'd been injured on duty - he'd fallen off something and badly injured his hip. After recovering, he'd probably rotate back to Operations. His name was Roger Harris. He was thirty or so and, Jack thought, pretty smart.

"What did you do before you joined up?" he asked Harris.

"Well, sir, I -"

"Name's Jack. They don't issue a halo along with the job title."

"Would you believe? A street cop in Newark. I decided that I wanted to try something safer, so I came here. And then look what happened," he chuckled.

The flight was only half booked. Ryan looked around and saw that no one was close, and listening devices invariably had trouble with the whine of the engines.

"Where'd it happen?"

"Poland. A meet went down bad - I mean, something just felt bad and I blew it off. My guy got away clean and I boogied the other way. Two blocks from the embassy I hopped over a wall. Tried to. There was a cat, just a plain old alley cat. I stepped on it, and it screeched, and I tripped and broke my fucking hip like some little old lady falling in the bathtub." A rueful smile. "This spy stuff ain't like the movies, is it?"

Jack nodded. "Sometime I'll tell you about a time when the same sort of thing happened to me."

"In the field?" Harris asked. He knew that Jack was Intelligence, not Operations.

"Hell of a good story. Shame I can't tell it to anyone."

"So what are you gonna tell J. Robert Fowler?"

"That's the funny part. It's all stuff he can get in the papers, but it isn't official unless it comes from one of us."

The stewardess came by. It was too short a flight for a meal, but Ryan ordered a couple of beers.

"Sir, I'm not supposed to drink on duty."

"You just got a dispensation," Ryan told him. "I don't like drinking alone, and I always drink when I fly."

"They told me you don't like it up here," Harris observed.

"I got over that," Jack replied, almost truthfully.

"So what is going on?" Escobedo asked.

"Several things," Cortez answered slowly, carefully, speculatively, to show el jefe that he was still somewhat in the dark, but working hard to use his impressive analytical talents to find the correct answer. "I believe the Americans have two or perhaps three teams of mercenaries in the mountains. They are, as you know, attacking some of the processing sites. The objective here would appear to be psychological. Already the local peasants have shown reluctance to assist us. It is not hard to frighten such people. Do it enough and we have problems producing our product."

"Mercenaries?"

"A technical term, jefe . A mercenary, as you know, is anyone who performs services for money, but the term most often denotes paramilitary services. Exactly who are they? We know that they speak Spanish. They could be Colombian citizens, disaffected Argentines - you know that the norteamericanos used people from the Argentine Army to train the contras , correct? Dangerous ones from the time of the Junta. Perhaps with all the turmoil in their home country, they have decided to enter American employ on a semipermanent basis. That is only one of many possibilities. You must understand, jefe , that operations such as this must be plausibly deniable. Wherever they come from, they may not even know that they are working for the Americans."

"Whoever they may be, what do you propose to do about them?"

"We will hunt them down and kill them, of course," Cortez said matter-of-factly. "We need about two hundred armed men, but certainly we can assemble such a force. I have people scouting the area already. I need your permission to gather the necessary forces together to sweep the hills properly."

"You'll get it. And what of the Untiveros bombing?"

"Someone loaded four hundred kilos of a very high-grade explosive into the back of his truck. Very cleverly done, jefe . In any other vehicle it would have been impossible, but that truck..."

" S ! The tires each weighed more than that. Who did it?"

"Not the Americans, nor any of their hirelings," Cortez replied positively.

"But - "

"Jefe, think for a moment," F lix suggested. "Who could possibly have had access to the truck?"