Teeth of the Tiger

'Know why you're here?' Broughton asked.

'No, sir, they didn't tell me that.'

'How do you like Force Recon?'

'I like it just fine, sir,' Caruso replied. 'I think I have the best NCOs in the whole Corps, and the work keeps me interested.'

'You did a nice job in Afghanistan, says here.' Broughton held up a folder with red-and-white-striped tape on the edges. That denoted top-secret material. But special-operations work often fell into that category, and, sure as hell, Caruso's Afghanistan job had not been something for the NBC Nightly News.

'It was fairly exciting, sir.'

'Good work, says here, getting all your men out alive.'

'General, that's mostly because of that SEAL corpsman with us. Corporal Ward got shot up pretty bad, but Petty Officer Randall saved his life, and that's for sure. I put him in for a decoration. Hope he gets it.'

'He will,' Broughton assured him. 'And so will you.'

'Sir, I just did my job,' Caruso protested. 'My men did all—'

'And that's the sign of a good young officer,' the M-2 cut him off. 'I read your account of the action, and I read Gunny Sullivan's, too. He says you did just fine for a young officer in his first combat action.' Gunnery Sergeant Joe Sullivan had smelled the smoke before, in Lebanon and Kuwait, and a few other places that had never made the TV news. 'Sullivan worked for me once,' Broughton informed his guest. 'He's due for promotion.'

Caruso bobbed his head. 'Yes, sir. He's sure enough ready for a step up in the world.'

'I've seen your fit-rep on him.' The M-2 tapped another folder, this one not with TS formatting. 'Your treatment of your men is generous in its praise, Captain. Why?'

That made Caruso blink. 'Sir, they did very well. I could not have expected more under any circumstances. I'll take that bunch of Marines up against anybody in the world. Even the new kids can all make sergeant someday, and two of them have 'gunny' written all over them. They work hard, and they're smart enough that they start doing the right thing before I have to tell them. At least one of them is officer material. Sir, those are my people, and I am damned lucky to have them.'

'And you trained them up pretty well,' Broughton added.

'That's my job, sir.'

'Not anymore, Captain.'

'Excuse me, sir? I have another fourteen months with the battalion, and my next job hasn't been determined yet.' Though he'd happily stay in Second Force Recon forever. Caruso figured he'd screen for major soon, and maybe jump to battalion S-3, operations officer for the division's reconnaissance battalion.

'That Agency guy who went into the mountains with you, how was he to work with?'

'James Hardesty, says he used to be in the Army Special Forces. Age forty or so, but he's pretty fit for an older guy, speaks two of the local languages. Doesn't wet his pants when bad things happen. He — well, he backed me up pretty well.'

The TS folder went up again in the M-2's hands. 'He says here you saved his bacon in that ambush.'

'Sir, nobody looks smart getting into an ambush in the first place. Mr. Hardesty was reconnoitering forward with Corporal Ward while I was getting the satellite radio set up. The bad guys were in a pretty clever little spot, but they tipped their hand. They opened up too soon on Mr. Hardesty, missed him with their first burst, and we maneuvered uphill around them. They didn't have good enough security out. Gunny Sullivan took his squad right, and when he got in position, I took my bunch up the middle. It took a total of ten to fifteen minutes, and then Gunny Sullivan got our target, took him right in the head from ten meters. We wanted to take him alive, but that wasn't possible the way things played out.' Caruso shrugged. Superiors could generate officers, but not the exigencies of the moment, and the man had had no intention of spending time in American captivity, and it was hard to put the bag on someone like that. The final score had been one badly shot-up Marine, and sixteen dead Arabs, plus two live captives for the Intel pukes to chat with. It had ended up being more productive than anyone had expected. The Afghans were brave enough, but they weren't madmen — or, more precisely, they chose martyrdom only on their own terms.

'Lessons learned?' Broughton asked.

'There is no such thing as too much training, sir, or being in too good a shape. The real thing is a lot messier than exercises. Like I said, the Afghans are brave enough, but they are not trained. And you can never know which ones are going to slug it out, and which ones are going to cave. They taught us at Quantico that you have to trust your instincts, but they don't issue instincts to you, and you can't always be sure if you're listening to the right voice or not.' Caruso shrugged, but he just went ahead and spoke his mind. 'I guess it worked out okay for me and my Marines, but I can't really say I know why.'

'Don't think too much, Captain. When the shit hits the fan, you don't have time to think it all the way through. You think beforehand. It's in how you train your people, and assign responsibilities to them. You prepare your mind for action, but you never think you know what form the action is going to take. In any case, you did everything pretty well. You impressed this Hardesty guy — and he is a fairly serious customer. That's how this happened,' Broughton concluded.

'Excuse me, sir?'

'The Agency wants to talk to you,' the M-2 announced. 'They're doing a talent hunt, and your name came up.'

'To do what, sir?'

'Didn't tell me that. They're looking for people who can work in the field. I don't think it's espionage. Probably the paramilitary side of the house. I'd guess that's the new counterterror shop. I can't say I'm pleased to lose a promising young Marine. However, I have no say in the matter. You are free to decline the offer, but you do have to go up and talk to them beforehand.'

'I see.' He didn't, really.

'Maybe somebody reminded them of another ex-Marine who worked out fairly well up there…' Broughton half observed.

'Uncle Jack, you mean? Jesus — excuse me, sir, but I've been dodging that ever since I showed up at the Basic School. I'm just one more Marine O-3, sir. I'm not asking for anything else.'

'Good,' was all Broughton felt like saying. He saw before him a very promising young officer who'd read the Marine Corps Officer's Guide front to back, and hadn't forgotten any of the important parts. If anything he was a touch too earnest, but he'd been the same way once himself. 'Well, you're due up there in two hours. Some guy named Pete Alexander, another ex-Special Forces guy. Helped run the Afghanistan operation for the Agency back in the 1980s. Not a bad guy, so I've heard, but he doesn't want to grow his own talent. Watch your wallet, Captain,' he said in dismissal.

'Yes, sir,' Caruso promised. He came to his feet, into the position of attention.

The M-2 graced his guest with a smile. 'Semper Fi, son.'

'Aye, aye, sir.' Caruso made his way out of the office, nodded to the gunny, never said a word to the half- colonel, who hadn't bothered looking up, and headed downstairs, wondering what the hell he was getting into.

* * *

Hundreds of miles away, another man named Caruso was thinking the same thing. The FBI had made its reputation as one of America's premier law-enforcement agencies by investigating interstate kidnappings, beginning soon after passage of the Lindbergh Law in the 1930s. Its success in closing such cases had largely put an end to kidnapping-for-money — at least for smart criminals. The Bureau closed every single one of those cases, and professional criminals had finally caught on that this form of crime was a sucker's game. And so it had remained for years, until kidnappers with objectives other than money had decided to delve into it.

And those people were much harder to catch.

Penelope Davidson had vanished on her way to kindergarten that very morning. Her parents had called the local police within an hour after her disappearance, and soon thereafter the local sheriff's office had called the FBI. Procedure allowed the FBI to get involved as soon as it was possible for the victim to have been taken across a state line. Georgetown, Alabama, was just half an hour from the Mississippi state line, and so the Birmingham office of the FBI had immediately jumped on the case like a cat on a mouse. In FBI nomenclature, a kidnapping case is called a '7,' and nearly every agent in the office got into his car and headed southwest for the small farming-market town. In the mind of each agent, however, was the dread of a fool's errand. There was a clock on kidnapping cases.