Teeth of the Tiger

'You're making a leap of imagination. We try to avoid that here,' Wills cautioned.

'I know,' Junior growled. It was time to check out the previous day's money-moving.

'Oh, you're to be meeting somebody new today.'

'Who's that?'

'Dave Cunningham. Forensic accountant, used to work for Justice — organized-crime stuff. He's pretty good at spotting financial irregularities.'

'Does he think I found something interesting?' Jack asked with hope in his voice.

'We'll see when he gets here — after lunch. He's probably looking over your stuff right now.'

'Okay,' Jack responded. Maybe he'd caught the scent of something. Maybe this job really did have an element of excitement to it. Maybe they'd give him some purple ribbon for his adding machine. Sure.

* * *

The days were down to a routine. Morning run and PT, followed by breakfast and a talk. In substance, no different from Dominic's time at the FBI Academy, or Brian's at the Basic School. It was this similarity that distantly troubled the Marine. Marine Corps training was directed at killing people and breaking things. So was this.

Dominic was somewhat better at the surveillance part of it, because the FBI Academy taught it out of a book the Marines didn't have. Enzo was also pretty good with his pistol, though Aldo preferred his Beretta to his brother's Smith & Wesson. His brother had whacked a bad guy with his Smith, whereas Brian had done his job with an M16A2 rifle at a decently long range — fifty meters, close enough to see the looks on their faces when the bullets struck home, and far enough that a returning snapshot would not be close enough to be a serious worry. His gunny had chided him on not grabbing some dirt when the AKs had been turned in his direction, but Brian had learned an important lesson in his only exposure to combat. He'd found that, in that moment, his mind and his thinking went into hyperdrive, the world around him seemed to slow down, and his thinking had become extraordinarily clear. In retrospect, it had surprised him that he hadn't seen bullets in flight, his mind had been operating so fast — well, the last five rounds in the AK-47 magazine were usually tracers, and he had seen those in flight, though never in his immediate direction. His mind often went back to that busy five or six minutes, critiquing himself for things he might have done better, and promising that he would not repeat those errors of thinking and command, though Gunny Sullivan had been very respectful to his captain later during Caruso's after-action review with his Marines at their firebase.

'How was the run today, fellas?' Pete Alexander asked.

'Delightful,' Dominic answered. 'Maybe we should try it wearing fifty-pound backpacks.'

'That could be arranged,' Alexander replied.

'Hey, Pete, we used to do that in Force Recon. It ain't fun,' Brian objected at once. 'Turn down the sense of humor, bro,' he added for his brother.

'Well, it's good to see you're still in shape,' Pete observed comfortably. He didn't have to do the morning runs, after all. 'So what's up?'

'I still wish I knew more about our goal here, Pete,' Brian said, looking up from his coffee.

'You're not the most patient guy in the world, are you?' the training officer shot back.

'Look, in the Marine Corps we train every day, but even when it isn't clear exactly what we're training for, we know we're Marines, and we aren't getting set up to sell Girl Scout cookies in front of the Wal-Mart.'

'What do you think you're getting set up for now?'

'To kill people without warning, with no rules of engagement that I can recognize. It looks a lot like murder.' Okay, Brian thought, he'd said it out loud. What would happen next? Probably a drive back to Camp Lejeune and the resumption of his career in the Green Machine. Well, it could be worse.

'Okay, well, I guess it's time,' Alexander conceded. 'What if you had orders to terminate somebody's life?'

'If the orders are legitimate, I carry them out, but the law — the system — allows me to think about how legit the orders are.'

'Okay, a hypothetical. Let's say you are ordered to terminate the life of a known terrorist. How do you react?' Pete asked.

'That's easy. You waste him,' Brian answered immediately.

'Why?'

'Terrorists are criminals, but you can't always arrest them. These people make war on my country, and if I'm ordered to make war back, fine. That's what I signed on to do, Pete.'

'The system doesn't always allow us to do that,' Dominic observed.

'But the system does allow us to waste criminals on the spot, in flagrante delicto, like. You did it, and I haven't heard about any regrets, bro.'

'And you won't. It's the same for you. If the President says to do somebody, and you're in uniform, he's the Commander in Chief, Aldo. You have the legal right — hell, the duty — to kill anybody he says.'

'Didn't some Germans make that argument back in 1946?' Brian asked.

'I wouldn't worry too much about that. We'd have to lose a war for that to be a concern. I don't see that happening anytime soon.'

'Enzo, if what you just said is true, then if the Germans had won World War Two, nobody'd need to care about those six million dead Jews. Is that what you're saying?'

'People,' Alexander interrupted, 'this isn't a class in legal theory.'

'Enzo's the lawyer here,' Brian pointed out.

Dominic took the bait: 'If the President breaks the law, then the House of Representatives impeaches him and the Senate convicts him, and he's out on the street, and then he's subject to criminal sanctions.'

'Okay. But what about the guys who carry out his orders?' Brian responded.

'That all depends,' Pete told them both. 'If the outgoing President has given them presidential pardons, what liability do they have?'

That answer jerked Dominic's head back. 'None, I suppose. The President has sovereign power to pardon under the Constitution, the way a king did back in the old days. Theoretically, a president could pardon himself, but that would be a real legal can of worms. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. In effect, the Constitution is God, and there is no appeal from that. You know, except when Ford pardoned Nixon, it's an area that has never really been looked into. But the Constitution is designed to be reasonably applied by reasonable men. That may be its only weakness. Lawyers are advocates, and that means they're not always reasonable.'

'So, theoretically speaking, if the President gives you a pardon for killing somebody, you cannot be punished for the crime, right?'

'Correct.' Dominic's face screwed in on itself somewhat. 'What are you telling me?'

'Just a hypothetical,' Alexander answered, backing up perceptibly. In any case, it ended the class on legal theory, and Alexander congratulated himself for telling them an awful lot and nothing at all at the same time.

* * *

The city names were so alien to him, Mustafa remarked quietly to himself. Shawnee. Okemah. Weleetka. Pharaoh. That was strangest of all. They were not in Egypt, after all. That was a Muslim nation, albeit a confused one, with politics that didn't recognize the importance of the Faith. But that would be turned around sooner or later. Mustafa stretched in his seat and reached for a smoke. Half a tank of gas still. This Ford surely had a capacious fuel tank in which to burn Muslim oil. They were such ungrateful bastards, the Americans. Islamic countries sold them oil, and what did America give in return? Weapons to the Israelis to kill Arabs with, damned little else. Dirty magazines, alcohol, and other corruption to afflict even the Faithful. But which was worse, to corrupt, or to be corrupted, to be a victim of unbelievers? Someday all would be put right, when the Rule of Allah spanned the world. It would come, someday, and he and his fellow warriors were even now on the leading wave of Allah's Will. Theirs would be martyrs' deaths, and that was a proud thing. In due course their families would learn of their fates — they could probably depend on Americans for that — and mourn their deaths, but celebrate their faithfulness. The American police agencies loved to show their efficiency after the battle was already lost. It was enough to make him smile.

* * *

Dave Cunningham looked his age. He was pushing sixty pretty hard, Jack judged. Thinning gray hair. Bad skin. He'd quit smoking, but not soon enough. But his gray eyes sparkled with the curiosity of a weasel in the