Patriot games - Tom Clancy [158]
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16
Objectives And Patriots
ike most professional officers, Lieutenant Commander Robby Jackson had little use for the press. The irony of it was that Jack had tried many times to tell him that his outlook was wrong, that the press was as important to the preservation of American democracy as the Navy was. Now, as he watched, reporters were hounding his friend with questions that alternated between totally inane and intrusively personal. Why did everyone need to know how Jack felt about his daughter's condition? What would any normal person feel about having his child hovering near death-did they need such feelings explained? How was Jack supposed to know who'd done the shooting-if the police didn't know, how could he?
"And what's your name?" one finally asked Robby. He gave the woman his name and rank, but not his serial number.
"What are you doing here?" she persisted.
"We're friends. I drove him up here." You dumbass.
"And what do you think of all this?"
"What do you think I think? If that was your friend's little girl up there, what the hell would you think?" the pilot snapped back at her.
"Do you know who did it?"
"I fly airplanes for a living. I'm not a cop. Ask them."
"They're not talking."
Robby smiled thinly. "Well, score one for the good guys. Lady, why don't you leave that man alone? If you were going through what he is, do you think you would want a half-dozen strangers asking you these kind of questions? That's a human being over there, y'know? And he's my friend and I don't like what you people are doing to him."
"Look, Commander, we know that his wife and daughter were attacked by Terrorists-"
"Says who?" Jackson demanded.
"Who else would it be? Do you think we're stupid?" Robby didn't answer that. "This is news-it's the first attack by a foreign terrorist group on American soil, if we're reading this right. That is important. The people have a right to know what happened and why," the reporter said reasonably.
She's right, Robby admitted reluctantly to himself. He didn't like it, but she was right. Damn.
"Would it make you feel any better to know that I do have a kid about that age? Mine's a boy," she said. The reporter actually seemed sympathetic.
Jackson searched for something to dislike about her. "Answer me this: if you have a chance to interview the people who did this, would you do it?"
"That's my job. We need to know where they're coming from."
"Where they're comin' from, lady, is they kill people for the fun of it. It's all part of their game." Robby remembered intelligence reports he'd seen while in the Eastern Med. "Back a couple of years ago-you never heard this from me, okay?"
"Off the record," she said solemnly.
"I was on a carrier off Beirut, okay? We had intelligence reports-and pictures-of people from Europe who flew in to do some killing. They were mainly kids, musta been from good families-I mean, from the way they dressed. No shit, this is for real, I saw the friggin' pictures. They joined up with some of the crazies, got guns, and just started blasting away, at random, for the pure hell of it. They shot from those high-rise hotels and office buildings into the streets. With a rifle you can hit from a thousand yards away. Something moves-boom, they blast it with automatic weapons fire. Then they got to go home. They were killing people, for fun! Maybe some of them grew up to be real terrorists, I don't know. It was pretty sickening stuff, not the sort of thing you forget. That's the kind of people we're talking about here, okay?
"I don't give a good goddamn about their point of view, lady! When I was a little kid in Alabama, we had problems with people like that, those assholes in the Klan. I don't give a damn about their point of view, either.