they?
Kelly ran over the assault plan in his mind. The insertion would put the Recon Marines on the ground one ridge away from sender green. Thirty minutes for the Marines to approach the camp. M-79 grenades to eliminate the guard towers. Two Huey Cobra gunships - known with lethal elegance as 'snakes' to the troops, and that appealed to him - would hose the barracks and provide heavy fire support - but the grenadiers on the team, he was sure, could take out the towers in a matter of five seconds, then pour willie-pete into the barracks and burn the guard force alive with deadly fountains of white flame, doing without the snakes entirely if they had to. Small and lean as this operation was, the size of the objective and the quality of the team made for unplanned safety factors. He thought of it as overkill, a term that didn't just apply to nuclear weapons. In combat operations, safety lay in not giving the other guy a chance, to be ready to kill him two, three, a dozen times over in as little time as possible. Combat wasn't supposed to be fair. To Kelly, things were looking very good indeed.
'What if they have mines?' Albie worried.
'On their own turf?' Kelly asked. 'No sign of it from the photographs. The ground isn't disturbed. No warning signs to keep their people away.'
Their people would know, wouldn't they?'
'On one of the photos there's some goats grazing just outside the wire, remember?'
Albie nodded with some embarrassment. 'Yeah, you're right. I remember that.'
'Let's not borrow trouble,' Kelly told him. He fell silent for a moment, realizing that he had been a mere E-7 chief petty officer, and now he was talking as an equal - more accurately as a superior to an O-3 captain of Recon Marines. That ought to have been - what? Wrong? If so, then why was he doing so well at it, and why was the captain accepting his words? Why was he MrClark to this experienced combat officer? 'We're going to do it.'
'I think you're right, Mr Clark. And how do you get out?'.
'As soon as the choppers come in, I break the Olympic record coming down that hill to the LZ. I call it a two- minute ran.'
'In the dark?' Albie asked.
Kelly laughed. 'I run especially fast in the dark, Captain.'
'Do you know how many Ka-Bar knives there are?'
From the tone of Douglas's question, Lieutenant Ryan knew the news had to be bad. 'No, but I suppose I'm about to find out.'
'Sunny's Surplus just took delivery of a thousand of the goddamn things a month ago. The Marines must have enough and so now the Boy Scouts can buy them for four ninety-five. Other places, too. I didn't know how many of the things were out there.'
'Me, neither,' Ryan admitted. The Ka-Bar was a very large and bulky weapon. Hoods carried smaller knives, especially switchblades, though guns were becoming increasingly common on the streets.
What neither man wanted to admit openly was that they were stymied again, despite what had appeared to be a wealth of physical evidence in the brownstone. Ryan looked down at the open file and about twenty forensic photographs. There had almost certainly been a woman there. The murder victim - probably a hood himself, but still officially a victim - had been identified immediately from the cards in his wallet, but the address on his driver's license had turned out to be a vacant building. His collection of traffic violations had been paid on time, with cash. Richard Farmer had brushed with the police, but nothing serious enough to have merited a detailed inquiry. Tracking his family down had turned up precisely nothing. His mother - the father was long dead - had thought him a salesman of some sort. But somebody had nearly carved his heart out with a fighting knife, so quickly and decisively that the gun on the body hadn't been touched. A full set of fingerprints from Farmer merely generated a new card. The central FBI register did not have a match. Neither did the local police, and though Farmer's prints would be compared with a wide selection of unknowns, Ryan and Douglas didn't expect much. The bedroom had provided three complete sets of Farmer's, all on window glass, and semen stains had matched his blood type - O. Another set of stains had been typed as AB, which could mean the killer or the supposed (not quite certain) missing owner of the Road-runner. For all they knew the killer might have taken the time to have a quickie with the suspected female - unless homosexuality was involved, in which case the suspected female might not exist at all.
There were also a selection of partial prints, one of a girl (supposition, from their size), and one of a man (also supposition), but they were so partial that he didn't expect much in the way of results. Worst of all, by the time the latent-prints team had gotten to check out the car parked outside, the blazing August sun had heated the car up so much that what might have been something to match prints with the registered owner of the car, one William Peter Grayson, had merely been a collection of heat-distorted blobs. It wasn't widely appreciated that matching partial prints with less than ten points of identification was difficult at best.
A check of the FBI's new National Crime Information Computer had turned up nothing on Grayson or Farmer. Finally, Mark Charon's narcotics team had nothing on the names Farmer or Grayson. It wasn't so much a matter of being back to square one. It was just that square seventeen didn't lead them anywhere. But that was often the way of things in homicide investigation. Detective work was a combination of the ordinary and the remarkable, but more of the former than the latter. Forensic sciences could tell you much. They did have the imprint of common-brand sneaker from tracks in the brownstone - brand new, a help. They did know the approximate stride of the killer, from which they had generated a height range of from five-ten to six-three, which, unfortunately, was taller than Virginia Charles had estimated - something they, however, discounted. They knew he was Caucasian. They knew he had to be strong. They knew that he was either very, very lucky or highly skilled with all manner of weapons. They knew that he probably had at least rudimentary skills in hand-to-hand combat - or, Ryan sighed to himself, had been lucky; after all, there had been only one such encounter, and that with an addict with heroin in his bloodstream. They knew he was disguising himself as a bum.
All of which amounted to not very much. More than half of male humanity fell into the estimated height range. Considerably more than half of the men in the Baltimore metropolitan area were white. There were millions of combat veterans in America, many from elite military units - and the fact of the matter was that infantry skills were infantry skills, and you didn't have to be a combat vet to know them, and his country had had a draft for over thirty years, Ryan told himself. There were perhaps as many as thirty thousand men within a twenty-mile radius who fit the description and skill-inventory of his unknown suspect. Was he in the drug business himself? Was he a robber? Was he, as Farber had suggested, a man on some sort of mission? Ryan leaned heavily to the latter model, but he could not afford to discount the other two. Psychiatrists, and detectives, had been wrong before. The most elegant theories could be shattered by a single inconvenient fact. Damn. No, he told himself, this one was exactly what Farber said he was. This wasn't a criminal. This was a killer, something else entirely.
'We just need the one thing,' Douglas said quietly, knowing the look on his lieutenant's face.
'The one thing,' Ryan repeated. It was a private bit of shorthand. The one thing to break a case could be a name, an address, the description or tag number of a car, a person who knew something. Always the same, though frequently different, it was for the detective the crucial piece in the jigsaw puzzle that made the picture clear, and for the suspect the brick which, taken from the wall, caused everything to fall apart. And it was out there. Ryan was sure of it. It had to be there, because this killer was a clever one, much too clever for his own good. A suspect like this who eliminated a single target could well go forever undetected, but this one was not satisfied with killing one person, was he? Motivated neither by passion nor by financial gain, he was committed to a process, every step of which involved complex dangers. That was what would do him in. The detective was sure of it. Clever as he was, those complexities would continue to mount one upon the other until something important fell loose from the pile. It might even have happened already, Ryan thought, correctly.
'Two weeks,' Maxwell said.
'That fast?' James Greer leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. 'Dutch, that's really fast.'
'You think we should fiddle around?' Podulski asked.
'Damn it, Cas, I said it was fast. I didn't say it was wrong. Two weeks' more training, one week of travel and setup?' Greer asked, getting a nod. 'What about weather?'
'The one thing we can't control,' Maxwell admitted. 'But weather works both ways. It makes flying difficult. It
