Without remorse - Tom Clancy [256]
As entertaining as it might be for the Americans to rescue their people with this boxwood green operation, as much as it might show the Vietnamese again that they should cooperate more closely with the Soviet Union, that they really were a client state, it would also mean that the knowledge locked in those American minds would be lost to his country, and it was knowledge they must have.
How long, he wondered, could he let this one wait? The Americans moved quickly, but not that quickly. The mission had been approved at White House level only a week or so earlier. All bureaucracies were alike, after all. In Moscow it would take forever. Operation kingpin had gone on forever, else it would have succeeded. Only the good luck of a low-level agent in the Southern United States had allowed them to warn Hanoi, and then almost too late - but now they had real forewarning.
Politics. You just couldn't separate that from intelligence operations. Before, they'd all but accused him of delaying matters - he shouldn't give them that excuse again. Even client states need to be treated as comrades. The General lifted his phone to make a luncheon date. He'd bring his contact over to the embassy, just to be sure that he had some decent food to eat.
CHAPTER 29
Last Out
There was a vicarious exhilaration in watching them. The twenty-five Marines worked out, finishing with a single-file run that looped around the helicopters parked oft the deck. Sailors looked on quietly. The word was out now. The sea sled had been seen by too many, and like professional intelligence officers, sailors at their mess tables assembled the few facts and garnished them with speculation. The Marines were going into the North. After what, nobody knew, but everyone wondered. Maybe to trash a missile site and bring back some important piece of hardware. Maybe to take down a bridge, but most likely the target was human. The Vietnamese party bosses, perhaps.
'Prisoners,' a bosun's mate third-class said, finishing his hamburger, called a 'slider' in the Navy. 'It's gotta be,' he added, motioning his head to the newly arrived medical corpsmen who ate at their own isolated table. 'Six corpsmen, four doctors, awful lot of talent, guys. What d'ya suppose they're here for?'
'Jesus,' another sailor observed, sipping at his milk. 'You're right, man.'
'Feather in our cap if it comes off,' noted another.
'Dirty weather tonight,' a quartermaster put in. 'The fleet-weather chief was smiling about it - and I seen him puke his guts out last night. I guess he can't handle anything smaller'n a carrier.' USS Ogden did have an odd ride, which resulted from her configuration, and running broadside to the gusting westerly winds had only worsened it. It was always entertaining to see a chief petty officer lose his lunch - dinner in this case - and a man was unlikely to be happy about weather conditions that made him ill. There had to be a reason for it. The conclusion was obvious, and the sort of thing to make a security officer despair.
'Jesus, I hope they make it.'
'Let's get the flight deck fodded again,' the junior bosun suggested. Heads nodded at once. A work gang was quickly assembled. Within an hour there would be not so much as a matchstick on the black no-skid surface.
'Good bunch of kids, Captain,' Dutch Maxwell observed, watching the walkdown from the starboard