Clear and present danger - Tom Clancy [338]
"Thank God," Ritter said after a moment.
Moore smiled for the first time this day. "Me, too, Robert. Nice to be a man again, isn't it?"
The security police brought him in at gunpoint, the man in the tan suit. He said his name was Luna, and the briefcase he carried had already been searched for weapons. Clark recognized him.
"What the hell are you doing here, Tony?"
"Who's this?" Ryan asked.
"Station chief for Panama," Clark answered. "Tony, I hope you have a very good reason."
"I have a telex for Dr. Ryan from Judge Moore."
"What?"
Clark took Luna's arm and guided him into the office. He didn't have much time. He and Larson were to take off within minutes.
"This better not be some fucking joke," Clark announced.
"Hey, I'm delivering the mail, okay?" Luna said. "Now stop playing the macho game. I'm the spic here, remember?" He handed Jack the first sheet.
TOP SECRET-EYES ONLY DDI
IMPOSSIBLE TO REESTABLISH UPLINK TO SHOWBOAT TEAMS. TAKE WHATEVER ACTION YOU DEEM APPROPRIATE TO RETRIEVE ASSETS IN COUNTRY. TELL CLARK TO BE CAREFUL. THE ENCLOSED MIGHT BE OF HELP. C DOESN'T KNOW. GOOD LUCK. M/R.
"Nobody ever said they were stupid," Jack breathed as he handed the sheet to Clark. The heading was meant as a separate message in and of itself, one that had nothing to do with distribution or security. "But does this mean what I think it does?"
"One less REMF to worry about. Make that two," Clark observed. He started flipping through the faxes. "Holy shit!" He set the pile down on the desk and paced a bit, staring out of the windows at the aircraft sitting in the hangar. "Okay," he said to himself. Clark had never been one to dally over making plans. He spoke to Ryan for several minutes. Then, to Larson: "Let's move ass, kid. We got a job to do."
"Spare radios?" Colonel Johns asked him as he left.
"Two spares, new batteries in all of 'em, and extra batteries," Clark replied.
"Nice to work with somebody's been around the block," PJ said. "Check-six, Mr. Clark."
"Always, Colonel Johns," Clark said as he headed to the door. "See you in a few hours."
The hangar doors opened. A small cart pulled the Beechcraft out into the sun, and the hangar doors closed. Ryan listened to the engines start up, and the sound diminished as the aircraft taxied away.
"What about us?" he asked Colonel Johns.
Captain Frances Montaigne came in. She looked as French as her ancestry, short, with raven-black hair. Not especially pretty, but Ryan's first impression was that she was a handful in bed - which stopped his thought processes cold as he wondered why that had occurred to him. It seemed odder still that she was a command pilot in a special-ops outfit.
"Weather's going dogshit on us, Colonel," she announced at once. "Adele is heading west again, doing twenty-five knots."
"Can't help the weather. Getting down and doing the snatch oughtn't to be too bad."
"Getting back might be kinda exciting, PJ," Montaigne observed darkly.
"One thing at a time, Francie. And we do have that alternate place to land."
"Colonel, even you aren't that crazy."
PJ turned to Ryan and shook his head. "Junior officers aren't what they used to be."
They stayed over water for most of the way down. Larson was as steady and confident as ever at the controls, but his eyes kept turning northeast. There was no mistaking it, the high, thin clouds that were the perennial harbinger of an approaching hurricane. Behind them was Adele, and she had already made another chapter in history. Born off the Cape Verdes, she'd streaked across the Atlantic at an average speed of seventeen knots, then stopped as soon as she'd entered the eastern Caribbean, lost power, gained it back, jinked north, west, even east once. There hadn't been one this crazy since Joan, years before. Small as hurricanes went, and nowhere near the brutal power of a Camille, Adele was still a dangerous storm with seventy-five-knot winds. The only people who flew near tropical cyclones were dedicated hurricane-hunter aircraft flown by people for whom merely mortal