Clear and present danger - Tom Clancy [220]
More amusing was the fact that Robby thought he knew what had happened. That was the trouble with secrets. They were impossible to keep. One way or another, they always got out. He wouldn't tell anyone, of course. And that really was too bad, wasn't it?
But why bother keeping it a secret? Robby wondered. The way the druggies killed the FBI Director - that was a declaration of war. Why not just go public and say, We're coming for you! In a political year, too. When had the American people ever failed to support their President when he declared the necessity to go after people?
But Jackson's job was not political. It was time to see the skipper. Two minutes later he arrived at the CO's stateroom. The Marine standing guard opened the door for him, and Robby found the captain reading dispatches.
"You're out of uniform!" the man said sternly.
"What - excuse me, Cap'n?" Robby stopped cold, looking to see that his fly was zipped.
"Here." Ranger's CO rose and handed over the message flimsy. "You just got frocked, Robby - excuse me, Captain Jackson. Congratulations, Rob. Sure beats coffee for startin' off the day, doesn't it?"
"Thank you, sir."
"Now if we can just get those charlie-fox fighter tactics of yours to work…"
"Yes, sir."
"Ritchie."
"Okay, Ritchie."
"You can still call me 'sir' on the bridge and in public, though," the captain pointed out. Newly promoted officers always got razzed. They also had to pay for the "wetting down" parties.
The TV news crews arrived in the early morning. They, too, had difficulty with the road up to the Untiveros house. The police were already there, and it didn't occur to any of the crews to wonder if these police officers might be of the "tame" variety. They wore uniforms and pistol belts and seemed to be acting like real cops. Under Cortez's supervision, the real search for survivors had been completed already, and the two people found taken off, along with most of the surviving security guards and almost all of the firearms. Security guards per se were not terribly unusual in Colombia, though fully automatic weapons and crew-served machine guns were. Of course, Cortez was also gone before the news crews arrived, and by the time they started taping, the police search was fully underway. Several of the crews had direct satellite feeds, though one of the heavy groundstation trucks had failed to make the hill.
The easiest part of the search, lovingly recorded for posterity by the portacams, began in what had been the conference room, now a three-foot pile of gravel. The largest piece of a Production Committee member found (that title was also not revealed to the newsies) was a surprisingly intact lower leg, from just below the knee to a shoe still laced on the right foot. It would later be established that this "remain" belonged to Carlos Wagner. Untiveros's wife and two young children had been in the opposite side of the house on the second floor, watching a taped movie. The VCR, still plugged in and on play, was found right before the bodies. Yet another TV camera followed the man - a security guard temporarily without his AK-47 - who carried the limp, bloody body of a dead child to an ambulance.
"Oh, my God," the President said, watching one of the several televisions in the Oval Office. "If anybody figures this out…"
"Mr. President, we've dealt with this sort of thing before," Cutter pointed out. "The Libyan bombing under Reagan, the air strikes into Lebanon and -"
"And we caught hell for it every time! Nobody cares why we did it, all they care about is that we killed the wrong people. Christ, Jim, that