Without remorse - Tom Clancy [261]
'Nice to see you again,' Dr Farber said. Monday was an easy day for him. He'd seen his last patient of the day and was heading out for after-lunch tennis with his sons. The cops had barely caught him heading out of his office.
'What do you know about UDT guys?' Ryan asked, walking out into the corridor with him.
'Frogmen, you mean? Navy?'
'That right. Tough, are they?'
Farber grinned around his pipe. 'They're the first guys on the beach, ahead of the Marines. What do you think?' He paused. Something clicked in his mind. 'There's something even better now.'
'What do you mean?' the detective lieutenant asked.
'Well, I still do a little work for the Pentagon. Hopkins does a lot of things for the government. Applied Physics Lab, lots of special things. You know my background.' He paused. 'Sometimes I do psychological testing, consulting - what combat does to people. This is classified material, right? There's a new special-operations group. It's a spin-off of UDT. They call them SEALs now, for Sea Air Land - they're commandos, real serious folks, and their existence is not widely known. Not just tough. Smart. They're trained to think, to plan ahead. Not just muscle. Brains, too.'
'Tattoo,' Douglas said, remembering. 'He has a tattoo of a seal on his arm.'
'Doc, what if one of these SEAL guys had a girl who was brutally murdered?' It was the most obvious of questions, but he had to ask it.
'That's the mission you were looking for,' Farber said, heading out the door, unwilling to reveal anything else, even for a murder investigation.
'That's our boy. Except for one thing,' Ryan said quietly to the closed door. 'Yeah. No evidence. Just one hell of a motive.'
Nightfall. It had been a dreary day for everyone at sender green except for Kelly. The parade ground was mush, with fetid puddles, large and small. The soldiers had spent most of the day trying to keep dry. Those in the towers had adjusted their position to the shifting winds. Weather like this did things to people. Most humans didn't like being wet. It made them irritable and dull of mind, all the more so if their duty was also boring, as it was here. In North Vietnam, weather like this meant fewer air attacks, yet another reason for the men down below to relax. The increasing heat of the day had energized the clouds, adding moisture to them which the clouds just as quickly gave back to the ground.
What a shitty day, all the guards would be saying to one another over their dinner. All would nod and concentrate on their meals, looking down, not up, looking inward, not outward. The woods would be damp. It was far quieter to walk on wet leaves than dry ones. No dry twigs to snap. The humid air would muffle sound, not transmit it. It was, in a word, perfect.
Kelly took the opportunity of the darkness to move around some, stiff from the inactivity. He sat up under his bush, brushing off his skin and eating more of his ration concentrates. He drained down a full canteen, then stretched his arms and legs. He could see the LZ, and had already selected his path to it, hoping the Marines wouldn't be trigger-happy when he ran down towards them. At twenty-one hundred he made his final radio transmission.
Light Green, the technician wrote on his pad. Activity Normal.
'That's it. That's the last thing we need.' Maxwell looked at the others. Everyone nodded.
'Operation boxwood green, Phase Four, commences at twenty-two hundred. Captain Franks, make signal to Newport News.'
'Aye aye, sir.'
On Ogden, flight crews dressed in their fire-protective suits, then walked aft to preflight their aircraft. They found sailors wiping all the windows. In the troop spaces, the Marines were donning their striped utilities. Weapons were clean. Magazines were full with fresh ammo just taken from airtight containers. The individual grunts paired off, each man applying camouflage paint to his counterpart. No smiles or joking now. They were as serious as actors on opening night, and the delicacy of the makeup work gave a strange counterpoint to the nature of