Line of Control - Tom Clancy [114]
But finding a cave and building a fire would be a better use of their energies than hanging on to a slope and trying to draw the Indian army toward them. Unfortunately, Rodgers knew the colonel too well. August would probably regard retreat as abandonment of a friend as well as a strategic position. Neither of those was acceptable to August.
The plateau was also the place where the Strikers had died.
That made it sacred ground to August. There was no way he would simply turn and walk away from it. Rodgers understood that because he felt the same way. It made no sense to fight for geography without strategic value. But once blood had been spilled there, one fought for the memory of fallen comrades. It validated the original sacrifice in a way that only combat soldiers could understand.
Rodgers took a moment to walk along the bottom of the glacier. It did not seem to matter where he started. He had to pull himself up one of the "toes" and start walking.
There were collapsible steel bipoint ice cram pons in his vest.
Rodgers removed them and slipped them over his rigid boots. The two-pronged claws on the bottoms would allow for a surer grip on the ice.
He strapped them on and removed the pitons from another pocket. He would hold them in his fists and use them to assist his climb. He would not take the time to hammer them in unless he had to.
Before he left, Rodgers secured the flashlight in his left hand shoulder strap. There were powerful cadmium batteries in the specially made lights. The bulb itself was a low intensity scatter-beam in front of a highly polished mirror.
They would definitely last through the night. As he rested the toe of his left boot on the "toe" of the glacier, he took one last look up the mountain of ice.
"I'm going to beat you," he muttered.
"I'm going to get up there and finish the job my team started."
Rodgers's eyes continued up through the darkness. He saw the stars, which were dimly visible through the wispy clouds.
Time seemed to vanish and Rodgers suddenly felt as if he were every warrior who had ever undertaken a journey, from the Vikings to the present. And as he jabbed the base of one crampon into the ice and reached up with a piton, Mike Rodgers no longer saw stars. He saw the eyes of those warriors looking down on him.
And among them the eyes of the Strikers looking after him.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX.
Washington, D. C. Thursday, 12:00 p. m.
The embassy of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is located in a small, high-gated estate on Massachusetts Avenue in northwest D. C. Ron Plummer drove his Saab to the gate, where a voice on the other end of the intercom buzzed him through. He headed up the curving concrete driveway to a second security checkpoint at the back of the mansion.
Plummer pulled up to the white double doors and was greeted by a security guard. The man was dressed in a black business suit. He wore sunglasses, a headset, and a bulletproof vest under his white shirt. He carried a handgun in a shoulder holster. The man checked Plummer's ID then directed him to a visitor's spot in the small lot. The guard waited while Plummer parked.
As he hurried back to the mansion, Ron Plummer ran a hand through his untamed, thinning brown hair and adjusted his thick, black-framed glasses. The thirty-nine-year-old former CIA intelligence analyst for Western Europe was not just feeling the pressure of his own part in this drama. The political and economics officer was also aware of how many things had to go right or the Indian subcontinent would explode.
The National Crisis Management Center had not had a lot of dealings with the Pakistani embassy. The only reason the ambassador. Dr. Is mail Simathna, personally knew them was because of Paul Hood and Mike Rodgers. After the men had ended the hostage stalemate at the United Nations, Simathna asked them to visit the embassy. Plummer was invited to join them. The ambassador claimed to be paying his respects to a brave and brilliant American intelligence unit. Among the many