Clear and present danger - Tom Clancy [66]
"This baby really shoots, sir."
"It's yours. How good are you with a pistol?"
"Just fair. I don't usually -"
"Yeah, I know. Well, you'll all get practice. Pistol ain't really good for much, but there's times when it comes in right handy." Johnson turned to address the whole squad. "All right, you four come on up. We want everyone to know how all these here weapons work. Everybody's gotta be an expert."
Chavez relinquished his weapon to another squad member and walked back from the firing line. He was still trying to figure things out. Infantry combat is the business of death, at the personal level, where you could usually see what you were doing and to whom you were doing it. The fact that Chavez had not actually done it yet was irrelevant; it was still his business, and the organization of his unit told him what form the mission would take. Special ops. It had to be special ops. He knew a guy who'd been in the Delta Force at Bragg. Special operations were merely a refinement of straight infantry stuff. You had to get in real close, usually you had to chop down the sentries, and then you hit hard and fast, like a bolt of lightning. If it wasn't over in ten seconds or less - well, then things got a little too exciting. The funny part to Chavez was the similarity with street-gang tactics. There was no fair play in soldiering. You sneaked in and did people in the back without warning. You didn't give them a chance to protect themselves - none at all. But what was called cowardly in a gang kid was simply good tactics to a soldier. Chavez smiled to himself. It hardly seemed fair, when you looked at it like that. The Army was just better organized than a gang. And, of course, its targets were selected by others. The whole point to an Army, probably, was that what it did made sense to someone. That was true of gangs, too, but Army activity was supposed to make sense to someone important, someone who knew what he was really doing. Even if what he was doing didn't make much sense to him - a frequent occurrence for soldiers - it did make sense to somebody.
Chavez wasn't old enough to remember Vietnam.
Seduction was the saddest part of the job.
With this, as with all parts of his profession, Cortez had been trained to be coldly objective and businesslike, but there wasn't a way to be coldly intimate - at least not if you wanted to accomplish anything. Even the KGB Academy had recognized that. There had been hours of lectures on the pitfalls, he remembered with an ironic smile - Russians trying to tell a Latin about romantic entanglements. Probably the climate worked against them. You adapted your approach to the individual peculiarities of your target subject, in this case a widow who at forty-six retained surprising good looks, who had enough remaining of her youth to need companionship after the children retired for the evening or went out on their own dates, whose bed was a lonely place of memories grown cold. It wasn't his first such subject, and there was always something brave about them, as well as something pathetic. He was supposed to think - as his training had taught him - that their problems were their business and his opportunity. But how does a man become intimate with such a woman without feeling her pain? The KGB instructors hadn't had an answer to that one, though they did give him the proper technique. He, too, had to have suffered a recent loss.
His "wife" had also died of cancer, he'd told her. He'd married late in life, the story went, after getting the family business back on track - all that time working, flying around to secure the business his father had spent his life founding - and then married his Maria only three years before. She'd become pregnant, but when she'd visited the doctor to confirm the joyous news, the routine tests… only six months. The baby hadn't had a chance, and Cortez had nothing left of Maria. Perhaps, he'd told his wineglass, it was God's punishment on him for marrying so young a girl,