Without remorse - Tom Clancy [272]
'Well, I'm not gonna cry over the death of a doper. Good day all around, Mark.'
'How's that, Frank?' Charon sat down and stole a cigarette.
'Got a call from Pittsburgh today. Seems there may be a witness for the Fountain Murder that Em and Tom are handling.'
'No shit? That's good news. What do we have?'
'Somebody, probably a girl from how the guy was talking, who saw Madden and Waters get it. Sounds like she's talking to her minister about it and he's trying to coax her into opening up.'
'Great,' Charon observed, concealing his inward chill as well as he'd hid his elation at his first contract murder. One more thing to clean up. With luck that would be the end of it.
The helicopter flared and made a soft landing on USS Ogden. As soon as it was down, people came back out on the flight deck. Deck crewmen secured the aircraft in place with chains while they approached. The Marines came out first, relieved to be safe, but also bitterly disappointed at the way the night had turned out. The timing was nearly perfect, they knew. This was their programmed time to return to the ship, with their rescued comrades, and they'd looked forward to this moment as a sports team might anticipate the joys of a winning locker room. But not now. They'd lost and they still didn't know why.
Irvin and another Marine climbed out, holding a body, which really surprised the assembled flag officers as Kelly alighted next. The helicopter pilot's eyes grew wide as he watched. There had been two bodies in the meadow. But mainly he was relieved at achieving another semisuccessful rescue mission into North Vietnam.
'What the hell?' Maxwell asked as the ship commenced a turn to the east.
'Uh, guys, let's get this guy inside and isolated right now!' Ritter said.
'He's unconscious, sir.'
'Then get a medic, too,' Ritter ordered.
They picked one of Ogden's many empty troop-berthing spaces for the debrief. Kelly was allowed to wash his face, but nothing else. A medical corpsman checked out the Russian, pronouncing him dazed but healthy, both pupils equal and reactive, no concussion. A pair of Marines stood guard over him.
'Four trucks,' Kelly said. 'They just drove right in. A reinforced platoon - weapons platoon, probably, they showed up while the assault team was inbound, started digging in right away - about fifty of 'em. I had to blow it off.'
Creer and Ritter traded a look. No coincidence.
Kelly looked at Maxwell. 'God, I'm sorry, sir.' He paused. 'It would not have been possible to execute the mission. I had to leave the hill because they were putting listening posts out. I mean, even if we were able to deal with that -'
'We had gunships, remember?' Podulski growled.
'Back off, Cas,' James Greer warned.
Kelly looked long at the Admiral before responding to the accusation. 'Admiral, the chances of success were exactly zero. You guys gave me the job of eyeballing the objective so that we could do it on the cheap, right? With more assets, maybe we could have done it - the Song Tay team could have done it. It would have been messy, but they had enough firepower to bring it off, coming right into the objective like they did.' He shook his head again. 'Not this way.'
'You're sure? ' Maxwell asked.
Kelly nodded. 'Yes, sir. Sure as hell.'
'Thank you, Mr Clark,' Captain Albie said quietly, knowing the truth of what he'd just heard. Kelly just sat there, still tensed from the night's events.
'Okay,' Ritter said after a moment. 'What about our guest, Mr Clark?'
'I fucked up,' Kelly admitted, explaining how the car had gotten so close. He reached into his pockets. 'I killed the driver and the camp commander - I think that's what he was. He had all this on him.' Kelly reached into his pockets and handed over the documents. 'Lots of papers on the Russian. I figured it wasn't