Clear and present danger - Tom Clancy [280]
Larson spoke quietly, in Spanish. "It's definite. The number of troops the big shots have out on the street has dropped way the hell off."
"Gone where?"
"A guy told me southwest. They were talking about a hunting expedition in the hills."
"Oh, Christ," Clark muttered in English.
"What gives?"
"Well, there's about forty light-infantry soldiers…" he explained on for several minutes.
"We've invaded?" Larson looked down at the bar. "Jesus Christ, what lunatic came up with that idea?"
"We both work for him - for them, I suppose."
"Goddammit, there is one thing we cannot do to these people, and that's fucking it!"
"Fine. You fly back to D.C. and tell the DDO. If Ritter still has a brain, he'll pull them out quick, before anybody really gets hurt." Clark turned. He was thinking very hard at the moment, and didn't like some of the ideas he was getting. He remembered a mission in "Eye" Corps, when… "How about you and me take a look down that way tomorrow?"
"You really want me to blow my cover, don't you?" Larson observed.
"You got a bolt-hole?" Clark meant what every field officer sets up when he goes covert, a safe place to run to and hide in if it becomes necessary.
Larson snorted. "Is the Pope Polish?"
"What about your lady friend?"
"We don't take care of her, too, and I'm history with this outfit." The Agency encouraged loyalty to one's agents, even when one didn't sleep with them, and Larson was a man with the normal affection for his year-long lovers.
"We'll try to cover it like a prospecting trip, but after this one, on my authorization, your cover is officially blown, and you will return to D.C. for reassignment. Her, too. That's an official order."
"I didn't know you had -"
Clark smiled. "Officially I don't, but you'll soon discover that Mr. Ritter and I have an understanding. I do the field work and he doesn't second-guess me."
"Nobody has that much juice." All Larson got for a reply was a raised eyebrow and a look into eyes that appeared far more dangerous than he had ever appreciated.
Cortez sat in the one decent room in the house. It was the kitchen, a large one by local standards, and he had a table on which to set his radios and his maps, and a ledger sheet on which he kept a running tally. So far he had lost eleven men in short, violent, and for the most part noiseless encounters - and gotten nothing in return. The "soldiers" he had in the field were still too angry to be afraid, but that wholly suited his purpose. There was a clear acetate cover on the main tactical map, and he used a red grease pencil to mark areas of activity. He had made contact with two - maybe three - of the American teams. He determined contact, of course, by the fact that he had lost eleven men. He chose to believe that he'd lost eleven stupid ones. That was a relative measure, of course, since luck was always a factor on the battlefield, but by and large history taught that the dumb ones die off first, that there was a Darwinian selection process on the field of combat. He planned to lose another fifty or so men before doing anything different. At that point he'd call for reinforcements, further stripping the lords of their retainers. Then he would call his boss and say that he'd identified two or three fellow lords whose men were behaving rather oddly in the field - he already knew whom he would accuse, of course - and the next day he would warn one of those - also preselected - that his own boss was behaving rather oddly, and that his - Cortez's - loyalty was to the organization as a whole which paid him, not to single personalities. His plan was for Escobedo to be killed off. It was necessary, and not especially regrettable. The Americans had already killed off two of the really smart members, and he would help to eliminate the remaining two intellects. The surviving lords would need Cortez, and would know that they needed him. His position as chief of security and intelligence would be upgraded to a seat around the table while the rest of the Cartel was restructured in accordance with his ideas for