"Oh, my God."
Moore nodded and walked to the door. "Nancy, tell security that it's us trying to work the safe. Looks like Jack changed the combination without telling us like he was supposed to." The DCI closed the door and turned back.
"He knows, Arthur."
"Maybe. How do we check it out?"
A minute later they were in Ritter's office. He'd shredded all of his documents, but not his memory. You didn't forget the name of someone with the Medal of Honor. Then it was just a matter of flipping open his AUTOVON phone directory and calling the 1st Special Operations Wing at Eglin AFB.
"I need to talk to Colonel Paul Johns," Ritter told the sergeant who'd picked up the phone.
"Colonel Johns is off TDY somewhere, sir. I don't know where."
"Who does?"
"The wing operations officer might, sir. This is a nonsecure line, sir," the sergeant reminded him.
"Give me his number." The sergeant did so, and Ritter's next call went out on, and to, a secure line.
"I need to find Colonel Johns," Ritter said after identifying himself.
"Sir, I have orders not to give that information out to anybody. That means nobody, sir."
"Major, if he's down in Panama again, I need to know it. His life may depend on it. Something is happening that he needs to know about."
"Sir, I have orders–"
"Stuff your orders, sonny. If you don't tell me, and that flight crew dies, it will be your fault! Now you make the call, Major, yes or no?"
The officer had never seen combat, and life-death decisions were theoretical matters to him – or had been until now.
"Sir, they're back where they were before. Same place, same crew. That's as far as I go, sir."
"Thank you, Major. You did the right thing. You really did. Now I suggest that you make written note of this call and its content." Ritter hung up. The phone had been on speaker.
"Has to be Ryan," the DCI agreed. "Now what do we do?"
"You tell me, Arthur."
"How many more people are we going to kill, Bob?" Moore asked. His greatest fear now was of mirrors, looking into them and seeing something less than the image he wanted to be there.
"You do understand the consequences?"
"Fuck the consequences," snorted the former chief judge of the Texas Court of Appeals.
Ritter nodded and punched a button on his phone. When he spoke, it was in his accustomed, decisive voice of command. "I need everything CAPER has developed in the last two days." Another button. "I want chief of Station Panama to call me in thirty minutes. Tell him to clear decks for the day – he's going to be busy." Ritter replaced the phone receiver in its cradle. They'd have to wait for a few minutes, but it wasn't the sort of occasion to wait in silence.
"Thank God," Ritter said after a moment.
Moore smiled for the first time this day. "Me, too, Robert. Nice to be a man again, isn't it?"
The security police brought him in at gunpoint, the man in the tan suit. He said his name was Luna, and the briefcase he carried had already been searched for weapons. Clark recognized him.
"What the hell are you doing here, Tony?"
"Who's this?" Ryan asked.
"Station chief for Panama," Clark answered. "Tony, I hope you have a very good reason."
"I have a telex for Dr. Ryan from Judge Moore."
"What?"
Clark took Luna's arm and guided him into the office. He didn't have much time. He and Larson were to take off within minutes.
"This better not be some fucking joke," Clark announced.
"Hey, I'm delivering the mail, okay?" Luna said. "Now stop playing the macho game. I'm the spic here, remember?" He handed Jack the first sheet.
TOP SECRET-EYES ONLY DDI
IMPOSSIBLE TO REESTABLISH UPLINK TO SHOWBOAT TEAMS. TAKE WHATEVER ACTION YOU DEEM APPROPRIATE TO RETRIEVE ASSETS IN COUNTRY. TELL CLARK TO BE CAREFUL. THE ENCLOSED MIGHT BE OF HELP. C DOESN'T KNOW. GOOD LUCK. M/R.
"Nobody ever said they were stupid," Jack breathed as he handed the sheet to Clark. The heading was meant as a separate message in and of itself, one that had nothing to do with distribution or security. "But does this mean what I think it does?"
"One less REMF to worry about. Make that two," Clark observed. He started flipping through the faxes. "Holy shit!" He set the pile down on the desk and paced a bit, staring out of the windows at the aircraft sitting in the hangar. "Okay," he said to himself. Clark had never been one to dally over making plans. He spoke to Ryan for several minutes. Then, to Larson: "Let's move ass, kid. We got a job to do."
"Spare radios?" Colonel Johns asked him as he left.
"Two spares, new batteries in all of 'em, and extra batteries," Clark replied.
"Nice to work with somebody's been around the block," PJ said. "Check-six, Mr. Clark."
"Always, Colonel Johns," Clark said as he headed to the door. "See you in a few hours."
The hangar doors opened. A small cart pulled the Beechcraft out into the sun, and the hangar doors closed. Ryan listened to the engines start up, and the sound diminished as the aircraft taxied away.
"What about us?" he asked Colonel Johns.
Captain Frances Montaigne came in. She looked as French as her ancestry, short, with raven-black hair. Not especially pretty, but Ryan's first impression was that she was a handful in bed – which stopped his thought processes cold as he wondered why that had occurred to him. It seemed odder still that she was a command pilot in a special-ops outfit.
"Weather's going dogshit on us, Colonel," she announced at once. "Adele is heading west again, doing twenty-five knots."
"Can't help the weather. Getting down and doing the snatch oughtn't to be too bad."
"Getting back might be kinda exciting, PJ," Montaigne observed darkly.
"One thing at a time, Francie. And we do have that alternate place to land."
"Colonel, even you aren't that crazy."
PJ turned to Ryan and shook his head. "Junior officers aren't what they used to be."
They stayed over water for most of the way down. Larson was as steady and confident as ever at the controls, but his eyes kept turning northeast. There was no mistaking it, the high, thin clouds that were the perennial harbinger of an approaching hurricane. Behind them was Adele, and she had already made another chapter in history. Born off the Cape Verdes, she'd streaked across the Atlantic at an average speed of seventeen knots, then stopped as soon as she'd entered the eastern Caribbean, lost power, gained it back, jinked north, west, even east once. There hadn't been one this crazy since Joan, years before. Small as hurricanes went, and nowhere near the brutal power of a Camille, Adele was still a dangerous storm with seventy-five-knot winds. The only people who flew near tropical cyclones were dedicated hurricane-hunter aircraft flown by people for whom merely mortal danger was boring. It was not a place for a twin-engine Beechcraft, even with Chuck Yeager at the controls. Larson was already making plans. In case the mission didn't go right, or the storm changed course yet again, he started picking fields to put down on, to refuel and head southeast around the gray maelstrom that was marching toward them. The air was smooth and still, deceptively so. The pilot wondered how many hours until it changed to something very different. And that was only one of the dangers he'd face.
Clark sat quietly in the right seat, staring forward, his face composed and inhumanly serene while his mind turned over faster than the Beech's twin props. In front of the windshield he kept seeing faces, some living, some dead. He remembered past combat actions, past dangers, past fears, past escapes in which those faces had played their parts. Most of all he remembered the lessons, some learned in classrooms and lectures, but the important ones had come from his own experience. John Terence Clark was not a man who forgot things. Gradually he refreshed his memory on all the important lessons for this day, the ones about being alone in unfriendly territory. Then came the faces who'd play their part today. He looked at them, a few feet before his eyes, saw the expressions he expected them to wear, measuring the faces to understand the people who wore them.