Clear and present danger - Tom Clancy [43]
"Well?" Ritter asked.
They sat on the shaded veranda of an old planter's house on the island of St. Kitts. Clark wondered what they'd planted here once. Probably sugarcane, though there was nothing now. What had once been a plantation manor was obviously supposed to look like the island retreat of a top-drawer capitalist and his collection of mistresses. In fact it belonged to CIA, which used it as an informal conference center, a particularly nice safe house for the debriefing of VIP defectors, and other, more mundane uses - like a vacation spot for senior executives.
"The background info was fairly accurate, but it underestimated the physical difficulties. I'm not criticizing the people who put the package together. You just have to see it to believe it. It's very tough country." Clark stretched in the wicker chair and reached for his drink. His personal seniority at the Agency was many levels below Ritter's, but Clark was one of a handful of CIA employees whose position was unique. That, plus the fact that he often worked personally for the Deputy Director (Operations), gave him the right to relax in the DDO's presence. Ritter's attitude toward the younger man was not one of deference, but he did show Clark considerable respect. "How's Admiral Greer doing?" Clark asked. It was James Greer who'd actually recruited him, many years before.
"Doesn't look very good. Couple of months at most," Ritter replied.
"Damn." Clark stared into his drink, then looked up. "I owe that man a lot. Like my whole life. They can't do anything?"
"No, it's spread too much for that. They can keep him comfortable, that's about all. Sorry. He's my friend, too."
"Yes, sir, I know." Clark finished off his drink and went back to work. "I still don't know exactly what you have in mind, but you can forget about going after them in their houses."
"That tough?"
Clark nodded. "That tough. It's a job for real infantry with real support, and even then you're going to take real casualties. From what Larson tells me, the security troops these characters have are pretty good. I suppose you might try to buy a few off, but they're probably well paid already, so that might just backfire." The field officer didn't ask what the real mission was, but he assumed it was to snatch some warm bodies and whisk them off stateside, where they'd arrive gift-wrapped in front of some FBI office, or maybe a U.S. courthouse. Like everyone else, he was making an incorrect guess. "Same thing with bagging one on the move. They take the usual precautions - irregular schedules, irregular routes, and they have armed escorts everywhere they go. So bagging one on the fly means having good intel, which means having somebody on the inside. Larson is as close to being inside as anybody we've ever run, and he's not close enough. Trying to get him in closer will get him killed. He's gotten us some good data - Larson's a pretty good kid - and the risks of trying that are just too great. I presume the local people have tried to -"
"They have. Six of them ended up dead or missing. Same thing with informers. They disappear a lot. The locals are thoroughly penetrated. They can't run any sort of op for long without risking their own. You do that long enough and people stop volunteering."
Clark shrugged and looked out to seaward. There was a white-hulled cruise ship inbound on the horizon. "I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised at how tough these bastards are. Larson was right, what brains they don't already have they can buy. Where do they hire their consultants?"
"Open market, mainly Europe, and -"
"I mean the intel pros. They must have some real spooks."
"Well, there's Félix Cortez. That's only a rumor, but the name's come up half a dozen times in the past few months."
"The DGI colonel who disappeared," Clark observed. The DGI was Cuba's intelligence service, modeled on the Soviet KGB. Cortez had been reported working