Clear and present danger - Tom Clancy [44]
"Larson know about this?"
"Yeah. He caught the name at a party. Of course, it would help if we knew what the hell Cortez looks like, but all we have is a description that fits half the people south of the Rio Grande. Don't worry. Larson knows how to be careful, and if anything goes wrong, he's got his own airplane to get out of Dodge with. His orders are fairly specific on that score. I don't want to lose a trained field officer doing police work." Ritter added, "I sent you down for a fresh appraisal. You know what the overall objective is. Tell me what you think is possible."
"Okay. You're probably right to go after the airfields and to keep it an intelligence-gathering operation. Given the necessary surveillance assets, we could finger processing sites fairly easily, but there's a lot of them and their mobility demands a rapid reaction time to get there. I figure that'll work maybe a half-dozen times, max, before the other side wises up. Then we'll take casualties, and if the bad guys get lucky, we might lose a whole assault force - if you've got people thinking in those terms. Tracking the finished product from the processing sites is probably impossible without a whole lot of people on the ground - too many to keep it a covert op for very long - and it wouldn't buy us very much anyway. There are a lot of little airfields on the northern part of the country to keep an eye on, but Larson thinks that they may be victims of their own success. They've been so successful buying off the military and police in that district that they might be falling into a regular pattern of airfield use. If the insertion teams keep a low profile, they could conceivably operate for two months - that may be a little generous - before we have to yank them out. I need to see the teams, see how good they are."
"I can arrange that," Ritter said. He'd already decided to send Clark to Colorado. Clark was the best man to evaluate their capabilities. "Go on."
"What we're setting up will go all right for a month or two. We can watch their aircraft lift off and call it ahead to whoever else is wrapped up in this." This was the only part of the op that Clark knew about. "We can inconvenience them for that long, but I wouldn't hope for much more."
"You're painting a fairly bleak picture, Clark."
Clark leaned forward. "Sir, if you want to run a covert operation to gather usable tactical intelligence against an adversary who's this decentralized in his own operations - yes, it's possible, but only for a limited period of time and only for a limited return. If you increase the assets to try and make it more effective, you're going to get blown sure as hell. You can run an operation like that, but it can't be for long. I don't know why we're even bothering." That wasn't quite true. Clark figured, correctly, that the reason was that it was an election year, but that wasn't the sort of observation a field officer was allowed to make - especially when it was a correct one.
"Why we're bothering isn't strictly your concern," Ritter pointed out. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to, and Clark was not a man to be intimidated.
"Fine, but this is not a serious undertaking. It's an old story, sir. Give us a mission we can do, not one we can't. Are we serious about this or aren't we?"
"What do you have in mind?" Ritter asked.
Clark told him. Ritter's face showed little in the way