Tom Clancy's Op-center Balance of Power - Tom Clancy [33]
The police officers took Adolfo's name, address, and telephone number and allowed him to leave. By that time Adolfo had pretended to calm enough to wish them well on the investigation. Then he went to the wheelhouse of his fishing boat and throttled up. The engine chugged deeply as Adolfo turned the old vessel toward the harbor.
As Adolfo sailed the choppy waters, he plucked one of the handrolled cigarettes from his pants pocket. He lit it and drew deeply, feeling a greater sense of satisfaction than he had ever known. This was not his first mission for the cause. In the past year he had prepared a letter bomb for a newspaper and had rigged a TV reporter's car to explode when the gas cap was removed. Both of those had been successful. But this was his most important job and it had gone perfectly. Even better, he'd pulled it off alone. The General had asked Adolfo to do it by himself for two reasons. First, if Adolfo had been caught the cause would only have lost one soldier in the region. Second, if Adolfo had failed then the General would know who to blame. That was important. With so many important tasks ahead there was no room for incompetency.
Adolfo guided the boat swiftly toward shore, his right hand on the wheel and his left hand holding the well-worn string of the old bell that hung outside the wheelhouse. He'd fished these waters since he was a small boy working on his father's vessel. The low, foggy sound of that bell was one of the two things that brought those days back to him vividly. The other was the smell of the harbor whenever he drew near. The ocean smell intensified the closer Adolfo came to shore. That had always seemed odd to him until he mentioned it to his brother. Norberto explained that the things that cause the smells-the salt, the dead fish, the rotting seaweed-always wash toward the land. That was why beaches smelled more like the sea than the sea did.
"Father Norberto," Adolfo sighed. "So learned yet so misguided." His older brother was a Jesuit priest who had never wanted to be anything else. After his ordination seven years ago he was given the local parish, St. Ignatius, as his ministry. Norberto knew a lot about many things. The members of his parish lovingly called him "the Scholar." He could tell them why the ocean smelled or why the sun turned orange when it set or why you could see clouds even though they were made of drops of water. What Norberto didn't know much about was politics. He had once joined a protest march against the Spanish government, which was accused of financing death squads that killed hundreds of people in the middle 1980's. But that wasn't so much a political crusade as a humanistic one. He also didn't know about church politics. Norberto hated being away from his parish. Two or three times a year Father General González-the most powerful Jesuit prelate in Spain-held audiences or hosted dinners for church dignitaries in Madrid. Norberto did not go to these functions unless commanded, which he seldom was. Norberto's disinterest in his own advancement allowed the power and funding in this province to go to Father Iglesias in nearby Bilbao.
Adolfo was the expert in politics, something Norberto didn't admit. The brothers rarely argued about anything; they had looked out for one another since they were boys. But politics was the one area where they disagreed passionately. Norberto believed in a unified nation. He had once said bitterly, "It is bad enough that Christendom is divided." He wished for what he called "God's Spaniards" to live in harmony.
Unlike Norberto, Adolfo did not believe in either God or Spaniards. If there were a God, he reasoned, the world would be doing better. There wouldn't be conflict or need. As for that creature called a "Spaniard," Spain