Clear and present danger - Tom Clancy [260]
"Get Jensen up here?" Robby wondered.
"I thought of that. Too obvious. Might get Jensen in too much trouble. But I've got to find out where the hell his orders came from. Ranger's out for another ten days or so, right?"
"I believe so, sir."
"Has to be an Agency job," Josh Painter observed quietly. "Authorized higher up than that, but it has to be Agency."
"For what it's worth, sir, I got a good friend who's pretty senior there. I'm godfather for one of his kids."
"Who's that?"
"Jack Ryan."
"Oh, yeah, I've met him. He was with me on Kenneday for a day or two back when - you're sure to remember that cruise, Rob." Painter smiled. "Right before you took that missile hit. By that time he was off on HMS Invincible."
"What? Jack was aboard then? But - why the hell didn't he come down to see me?"
"You never did find out what that op was all about, did you?" Painter shook his head, thinking of the Red October affair. "Maybe he can tell you about it. I can't."
Robby accepted it without questioning and turned back to the matter at hand. "There's a land side to this operation, too, Admiral," he said, and explained on for another couple of minutes.
"Charlie-Fox," Painter said when he was done. That was the Navy's shorthand and sanitized version of an expression that had begun in the Marine Corps to denote a confused and self-destructive military operation: Cluster-Fuck. "Robert, you get your ass on the first plane back to D.C. and tell your friend that his operation is going to hell in a basket. Jesus, don't those Agency clowns ever learn? If this gets out, and from what you're telling me, it's sure as hell going to, it's going to hurt us. It's going to hurt the whole country. We don't need this kind of shit, not in an election year with that asshole Fowler running. Also tell him that the next time the Agency decides to play soldier, it might help if they asked somebody who knows something about it ahead of time."
The Cartel had an ample supply of people who were accustomed to carrying guns, and assembling them took only a few hours. Cortez was detailed to run the operation. He'd coordinate it from the village of Anserma, which was in the center of the area in which the "mercenary" teams seemed to be operating. He hadn't told his boss everything he knew, of course, nor did he reveal his full objective. The Cartel was a cooperative enterprise. Nearly three hundred men had been brought in by cars, trucks, and buses, personal retainers from all of the Cartel chieftains, all of them reasonably fit and accustomed to violence. Their presence here reduced the security details of the remaining drug lords. That would allow Escobedo a sizable advantage as he tried to discover which of his colleagues was making the "power play", while Cortez dealt with the "mercenaries." He had every intention of running the American soldiers to ground and killing them, of course, but there was no special hurry in that. Félix had every reason to suspect that he was up against elite troops, even American Green Berets, formidable opponents for whom he had due respect. Casualties among his force, therefore, be expected: Félix wondered how many he'd have to kill off in order to alter the overall balance of power within the Cartel to his personal advantage.
There was no point in telling the assembled multitude, of course. These harsh, brutal men were used to brandishing their weapons like the Japanese samurai warriors of all those bad movies that they liked to watch, and like those actors playing at killers, these men were accustomed to having people cower before them, the omnipotent, invincible warriors of the Cartel, armed with their AK-47s, swaggering down village streets. Comical scum, Cortez thought.
It was all rather comical, really. Cortez would not mind a bit. It was to be a diverting and entertaining exercise, something