Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [120]
“No pins or plates, though, so I got that going for me. How about you?”
“Don’t know. Docs are being cagey. Surgery went fine, no vascular damage, which woulda been bad mojo. Joint and bone’s a lot easier to fix, I guess. You hear from the guys?”
“Yeah, they’re good. Sitting on their asses, and rightly so.”
“Young and Peterson?”
“Both fine. Light duty for a few weeks. Listen, Sam, something’s going down.”
“Your face tells me it ain’t a visit from Carrie Underwood.”
“’Fraid not. CID. Two agents back at Battalion.”
“Both of us?”
Wilson nodded. “They’ve pulled our after-actions. Anything I should know about, Sam?”
“No, sir. Got a parking ticket outside the gym last month, but other than that I’ve been a good boy.”
“All kosher in the cave?”
“Standard shit, Major. Just like I wrote it.”
“Well, anyway, they’ll be up this afternoon. Play it straight. Should work out.”
It didn’t take more than a couple of minutes for Driscoll to realize what the CID goons were after: his head. Who and why, he didn’t know, but somebody had pointed the bone at him for what went on in the cave.
“And how many sentries did you encounter?”
“Two.”
“Both killed?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, so then you made your way into the cave proper. How many of the occupants were armed?” one of the investigators asked.
“After we policed everything up, we counted—”
“No, we mean upon your entry into the cave. How many of them were armed?”
“Define ‘armed.’”
“Don’t be a smart-ass, Sergeant. How many armed men did you encounter when you entered the cave?”
“It’s in my report.”
“Three, correct?”
“That sounds right,” Driscoll replied.
“The rest were asleep.”
“With AKs under the pillows. You guys don’t get it. You’re talking about prisoners, right? It doesn’t work that way, not out in the real world. You get yourself into a firefight inside a cave with just one bad guy, and you end up with dead Rangers.”
“You didn’t attempt to incapacitate the sleeping men?”
Driscoll smiled at that. “I’d say they were thoroughly incapacitated.”
“You shot them in their sleep.”
Driscoll sighed. “Boys, why don’t you just say what you came to say?”
“Have it your way. Sergeant, there’s sufficient evidence in your after-action report alone to charge you with the murder of unarmed combatants. Add to that the statements of the rest of your team—”
“Which you haven’t officially taken yet, right?”
“Not yet, no.”
“Because you know this is a load of crap, and you’d prefer it if I lay my head on the block nice and gentle and not make a fuss. Why’re you doing this? I was doing my job. Do your home-work. What we did up there is standard procedure. You don’t give gomers a chance to draw down on you.”
“And apparently you didn’t give them a chance to surrender, did you?”
“God almighty … Gentlemen, these idiots don’t surrender. When it comes to fanaticism, they make kamikaze pilots look downright spineless. What you’re talking about doing would’ve gotten some of my men killed, and that I won’t have.”
“Sergeant, are you now admitting you preemptively executed the men inside that cave?”
“What I’m saying is we’re done talking until I see a TDS lawyer.”
35
GOOSE CHASE,” Brian Caruso said, staring out the car’s passenger window at the scenery. “Worse places to do it, though, I guess.” Sweden was damned pretty, with lots of green and, as far as they’d seen since leaving Stockholm, spotless highways. Not a scrap of trash to be seen. They were ninety miles north of the Swedish capital; twelve miles to the northeast, the waters of the Gulf of Bothnia sparkled under a partially overcast sky. “Where do you suppose they keep the bikini team?” the Marine asked now.
Dominic laughed. “They’re all computer-generated, bro. Nobody’s ever seen them in person.”
“Bullshit; they’re real. How far is this place? What’s it called? Söderhamn?”
“Yeah. About a hundred fifty miles.”
Jack and Sam Granger had given them the briefing, and while the Caruso Brothers agreed with the chief of ops’s “long shot” assessment of the job, they also liked the idea