Clear and present danger - Tom Clancy [214]
Car bomb.
A big one. Perhaps a thousand kilos, he thought, looking away from the hole while his brain went to work.
"I think that's all we really need to see," Clark observed. He made a last look through the eyepiece of the GLD and switched it off. Repacking took less than three minutes.
"Who do you suppose that is?" Larson asked while he put his backpack on. He handed the Noctron over to Clark.
"Must be the guy who showed up late in the BMW. Suppose he's important or something?"
"Don't know. Maybe next time."
"Right." Clark led the way down the hill.
It was the Americans, of course. CIA, without doubt. They'd made some financial arrangements and somehow managed to place a ton of explosives in the back of that monstrous truck. Cortez admired the touch. It was Fernandez's truck - he'd heard about it but never seen it. Now I never will, he thought. Fernandez had loved his new truck and had kept it parked right in front of… That had to be it. The Americans had gotten lucky. Okay, he thought, how did they do it? They wouldn't have gotten their own hands involved, of course. So they must have arranged for someone else… who? Somebody - no, more than one, at least four or five from M-19 or PARC… ? Again, that made sense. Might it have been indirect? Have the Cubans or KGB arrange it. With all the changes between East and West, might CIA have managed to get such cooperation? Unlikely, Félix thought, but possible. A direct attack on high government officials such as the Cartel had executed was the sort of thing to generate the most unlikely of bedfellows.
Was the bomb placement here an accident? Might the Americans have learned of the meeting?
There were voices from inside the rubble pile that had once been a castle. Security people were nosing around, and Cortez joined them. Untiveros' family had been here. His wife and two children, and a staff of eight or more people. Probably treated them like serfs, Cortez thought. The Cartel chieftains all did. Perhaps he'd offended one greatly - gone after a daughter, maybe. They all did that. Droit du seigneur. A French term, but one which the chieftains understood. The fools, Cortez told himself. Was there no perversion beneath them?
Security guards were already scrambling through the rubble. It was amazing that anyone could be alive in there. His hearing was coming back now. He caught the shrill screams of some poor bastard. He wondered what the body count would be. Perhaps. Yes. He turned and walked back to his overturned BMW. It was leaking gasoline out the filler cap, but Cortez reached in and got his cellular phone. He walked twenty meters from the car before switching it on.
"Jefe, this is Cortez. There has been an explosion here."
It was ironic, Ritter thought, that his first notification of the mission's success should come from another CAPER intercept. The really good news, the NSA guys reported, was that they now had a voiceprint on Cortez. That greatly improved their chances of locating him. It was better than nothing, the DDO thought as his visitor arrived for the second time today.
"We missed Cortez," he told Admiral Cutter. "But we got d'Alejandro, Fernández, Wagner, and Untiveros, plus the usual collateral damage."
"What do you mean?"
Ritter looked again at the satellite photo of the house. He'd have to get a new one to quantify the damage. "I mean there were a bunch of security guards around, and we probably got a bunch of them. Unfortunately there was also Untiveros's family - wife, a couple of kids, and various domestic servants."
Cutter snapped erect in his chair. "You didn't tell me anything about that! This was supposed to be a surgical strike."
Ritter looked up in considerable annoyance. "Well, for Christ's sake, Jimmy! What the hell do you expect? You are still a naval officer, aren't you? Didn't anybody ever tell you that there are always extraneous people standing around? We used a bomb, remember? You don't do surgery with bombs, despite what all the 'experts'