Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [152]
“What does this mean for the operational side of things?” Chavez asked.
Sam Granger answered, “More business, we hope. A lot of the new stuff we’ll be generating won’t be verifiable in the hypothetical. That means beating the bushes and running down leads. A lot of it might be scut work, but it adds up. Don’t get me wrong, we’d all love a home run, but you don’t stumble ass-backward into them. You’ve got to work for them.”
“When do we start?” Jack asked.
“Right now,” Hendley replied. “First order of business is making sure we’re all on the same page. Let’s lay out what we know, what we suspect, and what we still have to find out.” He checked his watch. “We’ll break for lunch, then meet back here.”
Jack popped his head into Clark’s office. “Whatever you did, John, you sure as hell got Hendley’s attention.”
Clark shook his head. “I didn’t do anything but nudge him where he was already headed. He’s sharp. He would’ve gotten there eventually. Come on in. Got a minute to sit?”
“Sure.” Jack took a seat across the desk.
“Heard you want to get your hands dirty.”
“What? Oh, yeah. He told you, huh?”
“Asked me to train you.”
“Well, that’d be fine with me. More than fine, really.”
“Why do you want to do this, Jack?”
“Didn’t Hendley tell—”
“I want to hear it from you.”
Jack shifted in his chair. “John, I sit here every day, reading traffic, trying to make sense of information that could be something, or nothing, and sure, I know it’s important and it’s got to be done, but I want to do something, y’know?”
Clark nodded. “Like MoHa.”
“Yeah, like that.”
“It’s not always clean like that.”
“I know.”
“Do you? I’ve done it, Jack—face-to-face and hand to hand. Most of the time it’s ugly and messy, and you never forget. The faces fade, so do the places and circumstances, but the act—the deed itself—sticks with you. If you’re not ready to deal with that, it can eat you up.”
Jack took a deep breath, eyes on the floor. Was he ready? He could sense the truth of what Clark was saying, but at this point it was an abstract. He knew none of it was like the movies, or in novels, but knowing what something was not like was useless, kind of like describing the color red by saying it didn’t look like blue. No point of reference—or almost no point of reference, he reminded himself. There’d been MoHa.
As if reading his mind, Clark said, “And make no mistake: MoHa was an aberration, Jack. You fell into that, didn’t have a chance to think about it, and you were sure the guy was bad. It’s not always that cut-and-dried. In fact, it’s rarely that way. You have to get comfortable with uncertainty. Can you do that?”
“To tell you the truth, John, I don’t know. I can’t give you an answer. I know that’s not the right answer, but—”
“Actually, that’s exactly the right answer.”
“Huh?”
“When I was going through the entry process into BUD/s—Basic Underwater Demolition School—everybody had to meet with a psychologist. I was in the lobby waiting, and a buddy of mine came out. I asked him what it was like. He said the doctor had asked him if he thought he could kill a man. My buddy, anxious to kick ass, said, ‘Hell, yes.’ When my turn came and the doctor asked me the same question, I told him I thought so but I wasn’t a hundred percent sure. One of us made it in; the other didn’t.”
I’ll be damned, Jack thought. Thinking of John Clark as some fresh-faced raw recruit rather than a godlike special operator was a hard concept to wrap your head around. Everyone started somewhere.
Clark continued, “You show me a guy who answers ‘Hell, yes’ to those kinds of questions and I’ll show you a nutcase, a liar, or someone who hasn’t given it enough thought.
“Tell you what: Ask Ding sometime. First time he had to put someone down, it’d been a near thing right up until the moment he’d pulled the trigger. He knew he could do it, and he was ninety-nine percent sure he was going to do it, but until he dropped the hammer there was still a little voice in his head.”
“And what about you?”
“The same.”
“That’s hard to believe,” Jack replied.
“Believe