Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [64]
The sun was so hot it almost stung Clark’s skin, and sucking the superheated air into his lungs caused them to burn a bit. There was a slight breeze fluttering the flags on the hangar roof but not nearly enough to provide any cooling.
“Hell, at least they sent somebody, huh?” Chavez muttered to Clark as they walked.
“Always look on the bright side, eh, Ding?”
“You got it, mano.”
Within an hour of being pulled off the plane at Heathrow and getting the dump from Alistair Stanley, Clark, Chavez, and the remainder of the on-call R6 shooters were aboard a British Airways jet bound for Italy.
As did all military teams, Rainbow had its fair share of personnel turnover as men returned to their home country’s unit, most of them for well-earned promotions after their work on Rainbow. Of the eight Stanley had picked for the op, four were originals: Master Chief Miguel Chin, Navy SEAL; Homer Johnston; Louis Loiselle; and Dieter Weber. Two Americans, a French-man, a German. Johnston and Loiselle were their snipers, and each was scary-good, their rounds rarely finding anything but X-ring.
In fact, all of them were good shooters. He wasn’t in the least worried about them; you didn’t get to Rainbow without, one, having a lot of time in service, and two, being the best of the best. And you certainly didn’t stay in Rainbow without passing muster with Alistair Stanley, who was, though polite to the core, a real ass-kicker. Better to sweat in training than to bleed on an op, Clark reminded himself. It was an old SEAL adage, one that any Special Forces service worth a damn adhered to as if it were the word of God.
After a brief stop in Rome they were shuttled to a waiting Piaggio P180 Avanti twin-engine turboprop kindly supplied by the 28th Army Aviation “Tucano” Squadron for the final hop to Taranto, where they sat and drank Chinotto, Italy’s herbal answer to American Sprite, while getting a history lesson from the base’s public-affairs officer on the history of Taranto, the Marina Militare, and its predecessor, the Regia Marina. After four hours of this, Stanley’s satellite phone went off. The politics had been settled. How they’d talked Qaddafi out of sending in his shock troops Clark didn’t know, and he didn’t care. Rainbow was green-lit.
An hour later they reboarded the Avanti for the five-hundred-mile hop across the Med to Tripoli.
Clark followed Chavez to the truck and climbed aboard. Sitting across the wooden bench seat from him was a man in civilian clothes.
“Tad Richards,” the man said, shaking Clark’s hand, “U.S. embassy.”
Clark didn’t bother asking the man’s position. The answer would likely involve a combination of words like attaché, cultural, junior, and state department, but he was in fact a member of CIA station Libya, which worked out of the embassy in the Corinthia Bab Africa Hotel. Like the People’s Militia lieutenant who’d greeted them, Richards looked too fresh by half. Probably his first overseas posting, Clark decided. Didn’t matter, really. As long as the man had the intel dump for them.
With the crunching of gears and a plume of diesel exhaust, the truck lurched forward and started moving.
“Sorry for the delay,” Richards said.
Clark shrugged, noting that the man hadn’t asked for names. Maybe a little sharper than I thought. He said, “I gather the colonel is less than enthusiastic about hosting us.”
“You gather correctly. Not sure of the hows, but the phones have been nuts for the past eight hours. Army’s got extra security posted around the hotel.”
This made sense. Whether a real threat or not, the Libyan government’s enhanced “protection” of the U.S. embassy was certainly a signal: The people of Libya were so unhappy about having Western soldiers on their soil that attacks on American assets were