The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [12]
His current home was a farm dating back to the eighteenth century, where he raised Appaloosa horses-riding and mediocre golf were his only remaining hobbies-and lived the quiet life of a gentleman farmer. He also worked at The Campus seven or eight hours per day, commuting back and forth in a chauffeured stretch Cadillac.
Fifty-two now, tall, slender and silver-haired, he was well known without being known at all, perhaps the one lingering aspect of his political past.
"You did well in the mountains," Jim Hardesty said, waving the young Marine to a chair.
"Thank you, sir. You did okay, too, sir."
"Captain, anytime you walk back through your front door after it's all over, you've done well. I learned that from my training officer. About sixteen years ago," he added.
Captain Caruso did the mental arithmetic and decided that Hardesty was a little older than he looked. Captain in the U.S. Army Special Forces, then CIA, plus sixteen years made him closer to fifty than forty. He must have worked very hard indeed to keep in shape.
"So," the officer asked,"what can I do for you?"
"What did Terry tell you?" the spook asked.
"He told me I'd be talking with somebody named Pete Alexander."
"Pete got called out of town suddenly," Hardesty explained.
The officer accepted the explanation at face value. "Okay, anyway, the general said you Agency guys are on some kind of talent hunt, but you're not willing to grow your own," Caruso answered honestly.
"Terry is a good man, and a damned fine Marine, but he can be a little parochial."
"Maybe so, Mr. Hardesty, but he's going to be my boss soon, when he takes over Second Marine Division, and I'm trying to stay on his good side. And you still haven't told me why I'm here."
"Like the Corps?" the spook asked. The young Marine nodded.
"Yes, sir. The pay ain't all that much, but it's all I need, and the people I work with are the best."
"Well, the ones we went up the mountain with are pretty good. How long did you have them?"
"Total? About fourteen months, sir."
"You trained them pretty well."
"It's what they pay me for, sir, and I had good material to start with."
"You also handled that little combat action well," Hardesty observed, taking note of the distant replies he was getting.
Captain Caruso was not quite modest enough to regard it as a "little" combat action. The bullets flying around had been real enough, which made the action big enough. But his training, he'd found, had worked just about as well as his officers had told him it would in all the classes and field exercises. It had been an important and rather gratifying discovery. The Marine Corps actually did make sense. Damn.
"Yes, sir," was all he said in reply, however, adding,"And thank you for your help, sir."
"I'm a little old for that sort of thing, but it's nice to see that I still know how." And it had been quite enough, Hardesty didn't add. Combat was still a kid's game, and he was no longer a kid. "Any thoughts about it, Captain?" he asked next.
"Not really, sir. I did my after-action report."
Hardesty had read it. "Nightmares, anything like that?"
The question surprised Caruso. Nightmares? Why would he have those? "No, sir," he responded with visible puzzlement.
"Any qualms of conscience?" Hardesty went on.
"Sir, those people were making war on my country. We made war back. You ought not to play the game if you can't handle the action. If they had wives and kids, I'm sorry about that, but when you screw with people, you need to understand that they're going to come see you about it."
"It's a tough world?"
"Sir, you'd better not kick a tiger in the ass unless you have a plan for dealing with his teeth."
No nightmares and no regrets, Hardesty thought. That was the way things were supposed to be, but the kinder, gentler United States of America didn't always turn out its people