Line of Control - Tom Clancy [65]
The commands were issued by noncommissioned officers stationed in the center of each platoon. They could be overruled by the company lieutenants and by Puri himself, who would be leading the operation from the center of the wide sweep. In the event of an emergency, the men had radios they could use.
Puri picked up the phone. He ordered his aide to assemble his lieutenants in the briefing room. The major said he would be there in five minutes. He wanted top-level security for the meeting: no phones or radios present, no laptop computers, no notepads.
Puri chewed his tobacco a moment more before rising.
Hussain had told him that the Pakistani cell had evaded capture and was thought to be heading to Pakistan. Four other bases along the line of control were activating units in an effort to intercept the terrorists.
Each of the base leaders had been given the same order: to take the cell, dead or alive.
That option did not include their lone hostage, an Indian woman from Kashmir. Commander Hussain said that the SFF did not expect the woman to survive her ordeal. He did not say that she had been mistreated.
His tone said something else altogether.
He wanted her not to survive.
Major Puri turned toward the door and left the shelter. The morning light was cold and hazy. He had checked the weather report earlier. It was snowing up in the mountains.
That always produced haze here in the lower elevations.
Nothing was clear, not even the walls of the trench itself.
Nor his own vision.
Major Puri had not expected to play that part either. The role of assassin. As he headed for the meeting it struck him as odd that a single life should matter. What he did here would contribute to the deaths of millions of people in just a day or two. What did one more mean?
Was he upset because she was Indian? No. Indians would die in the conflagration as well. Was he upset because she was a woman? No.
Women would certainly die.
He was upset because he would probably be there when she died. He might even be the one to execute the commander's order.
He would have to look into her eyes. He would be watching the woman as she realized that she was about to die.
In 1984, when India was rocked by inter caste violence, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered a series of attacks on armed Sikh separatists in Amritsar. Over a thousand people were killed. Those deaths were unfortunate, the inevitable result of armed conflict. Several months later, Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated by Sikhs who were members of her own bodyguard. Her murder was a cold-blooded act and a tragedy.
It had a face.
Major Puri knew that this had to be done. But he also knew that he wished someone else would do it. Soldiering was a career he could leave behind. The job of combatant was temporary. But once he killed, even in the name of patriotism, that act would stay with him for the rest of his life.
And the next.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.
Washington, D. C. Wednesday, 11:45 p. m.
Paul Hood was glad when Bob Herbert came to see him.
Hood had shut his office door, opened a box of Wheat Thins, and worked on the Op-Center budget cuts for the better part of the evening. He had left word with Bugs Benet that he was not to be disturbed unless it were urgent. Hood did not feel like end-of-the-day chitchat. He did not want to have to put on a public face. He wanted to hide, to lose himself in a project-any project.
Most of all Hood did not feel like going home. Or what passed for home these days, an undistinguished fifth-floor suite at the Days Inn on Mercedes Boulevard. Hood had a feeling that it would be a long time, if ever, before he regarded anything but the Hood house in Chevy Chase, Maryland, as home. But he and his wife, Sharon, were separated and his presence at the house created strife for her. She said he