Clear and present danger - Tom Clancy [168]
"Right." Clark replaced the phone.
"When?" Sandy asked.
"Tomorrow."
"How long?"
"A couple of weeks. Not as long as a month." Probably, he didn't add.
"Is it -"
"Dangerous?" John Clark smiled at his wife. "Honey, if I do my job right, no, it's not dangerous."
"Why is it," Sandra Burns Clark wondered, "that I'm the one with gray hair?"
"That's because I can't go into the hair parlor and have it fixed. You can."
"It's about the drug people, isn't it?"
"You know I can't talk about that. It would just get you worried anyway, and there's no real reason to worry," he lied to his wife. Clark did a lot of that. She knew it, of course, and for the most part she wanted to be lied to. But not this time.
Clark returned his attention to the television. Inwardly he smiled. He hadn't gone after druggies for a long, long time, and he'd never tried to go this far up the ladder - back then he hadn't known how, hadn't had the right information. Now he had everything he needed for the job. Including presidential authorization. There were advantages to working for the Agency.
Cortez surveyed the airfield - what was left of it - with a mixture of satisfaction and anger. Neither the police nor the army had come to visit yet, though eventually they would. Whoever had been here, he saw, had done a thorough, professional job.
So what am I supposed to think? he asked himself. Did the Americans send some of their Green Berets in? This was the last of five airstrips that he'd examined today, moved about by a helicopter. Though not a forensic detective by training, he had been thoroughly schooled in booby traps and knew exactly what to look for. Exactly what he would have done.
The two guards who'd been here, as at the other sites, were simply gone. That surely meant that they were dead, of course, but the only real knowledge he had was that they were gone. Perhaps he was supposed to think that they had set the explosives, but they were simple peasants in the pay of the Cartel, untrained ruffians who probably hadn't even patrolled around the area to make certain that…
"Follow me." He left the helicopter with one of his assistants in trail. This one was a former police officer who did have some rudimentary intelligence; at least he knew how to follow simple orders.
If I wanted to keep watch of a place like this… I'd think about cover, and I'd think about the wind, and I'd think about a quick escape…
One thing about military people was that they were predictable.
They'd want a place from which they could watch the length of the airstrip, and also keep an eye on the refueling shack. That meant one of two corners, Cortez judged, and he walked off toward the northwest one. He spent a half hour prowling the bushes in silence with a confused man behind him.
"Here is where they were," Félix said to himself. The dirt just behind the mound of dirt was smoothed down. Men had lain there. There was also the imprint from the bipod of a machine gun.
He couldn't tell how long they'd watched the strip, but he suspected that here was the explanation for the disappearing aircraft. Americans? If so, what agency did they work for? CIA? DEA? Some special-operations group from the military, perhaps?
And why were they pulled out?
And why had they made their departure so obvious?
What if the guards were not dead? What if the Americans had bought them off?
Cortez stood and brushed the mud off his trousers. They were sending a message. Of course. After the murder of their FBI Director - he hadn't had time to talk to el jefe about that act of lunacy yet - they wanted to send a message so that such things were not to be repeated.
That the Americans had done anything at all was unusual, of course. After all, kidnapping and/or killing American citizens was about the safest thing any international terrorist could do. The CIA had allowed one of their station chiefs to be tortured to death in Lebanon - and done nothing. All those Marines blown up - and the Americans had done nothing. Except for the occasional attempt