The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [56]
"So, what do you think?"
"Aldo, I'm willing to listen some more. There's a saying in Texas that there's more men need killin' than horses need stealin'."
The reversal of roles struck Brian as more than a little surprising. After all, he was the gong ho Marine. Enzo was the guy who was trained to give people their constitutional rights before he slapped the cuffs on.
That they were both able to take a life without having bad dreams later was obvious to the brothers, but this went a little farther than that. This was premeditated murder. Brian usually went into the field with an exquisitely trained sniper under his command, and he knew what they did wasn't far removed from murder, either. But being in uniform made it different. It put some sort of blessing on it. The target was an enemy and on the battlefield it was everyone's job to look after his own life, and if he failed to do it, well, that was his failing, not that of the man who killed him. But this would be more than that. They'd be hunting individual people down with the deliberate intent of killing them, and that wasn't what he'd been brought up and trained to do. He'd be dressed in civilian clothes-and killing people under those circumstances made him a spy, not an officer of the United States Marine Corps. There was honor in the latter, but damned little in the former, or so he'd been trained to think. The world no longer had a Field of Honor, and real life wasn't a duel in which men had identical weapons and an open field on which to make use of them. No, he'd been trained to plan his operation in a way that gave his enemy no chance at all, because he had men under his command whose lives he was sworn to preserve. Combat had rules. Harsh rules, to be sure, but rules even so. Now he was being asked to set those rules aside and become-what? A paid assassin? The teeth of some notional wild beast? The masked avenger from some old movie on Nick at Nite? This didn't fit into his tidy picture of the real world.
When he'd been sent to Afghanistan, he hadn't-hadn't what? He hadn't disguised himself as a fishmonger on a city street. There'd been no city street in those goddamned mountains. It had been more like a big-game hunt, one in which the game had weapons of its own. And there was honor in such a hunt, and for his efforts he'd gotten the approval of his country: a combat decoration for bravery that he might or might not display.
All in all, it was a lot to consider over his second cup of morning coffee.
"Jesus, Enzo," he breathed.
"Brian, you know what the dream of every cop is?" Dominic asked.
"To break the law and get away with it?"
Dominic shook his head. "I had this talk with Gus Werner. No, not to break the law, but just once to be the law. To be God's Own Avenging Sword, was the way he put it-to strike down the guilty without lawyers and other bullshit to get in the way, to see justice done all by yourself. It doesn't happen very often, they say, but, you know, I got to do it down in Alabama, and it felt pretty good. You just have to be sure you're bagging the right mutt."
"How can you be sure?" Aldo asked.
"If you're not, you back off the mission. They can't hang you for not committing murder, bro."
"So, it is murder?"
"Not if the mutt has it coming, it isn't." It was an aesthetic point, but an important one to someone who had already committed murder under the shelter of the law, and had had no bad dreams about it.
"Immediately?"
"Yes. How many men do we have already?" Mohammed asked.
"Sixteen."
"Ah." Mohammed took a sip of a fine French white from the Loire Valley. His guest was drinking Perrier and lemon. "Their language skills?"
"Sufficient, we think."
"Excellent. Tell them to make preparations to travel. We'll fly them in to Mexico. There they will meet with our new friends, and travel to America. And once there, they can do their work."
"Insh' Allah," he observed. God willing.
"Yes, God willing," Mohammed said in English, reminding his guest of what language he should be using.
They were in a sidewalk restaurant overlooking