Clear and Present Danger

When he came back up, he felt almost normal except for the ache in his head.

There had been a dozen or so vehicles inside the wall when the explosion happened. About half of them were shredded, and their gas tanks had ruptured, illuminating the area with isolated fires. Untiveros' new helicopter was a smashed wreck against the fractured wall. There were other people rushing about. Cortez stood still and started thinking.

He remembered seeing a truck, one with huge wheels, parked right next to... He walked over that way. Though the entire three-hectare area around the house was littered with rubble, here it was clear, he saw as he approached. Then he saw the crater, fully two meters deep and six meters wide.

Car bomb.

A big one. Perhaps a thousand kilos , he thought, looking away from the hole while his brain went to work.

'I think that's all we really need to see,' Clark observed. He made a last look through the eyepiece of the GLD and switched it off. Repacking took less than three minutes.

'Who do you suppose that is?' Larson asked while he put his backpack on. He handed the Noctron over to Clark.

'Must be the guy who showed up late in the BMW. Suppose he's important or something?'

'Don't know. Maybe next time.'

'Right.' Clark led the way down the hill.

It was the Americans, of course. CIA, without doubt. They'd made some financial arrangements and somehow managed to place a ton of explosives in the back of that monstrous truck. Cortez admired the touch. It was Fernandez's truck - he'd heard about it but never seen it. Now I never will , he thought. Fernandez had loved his new truck and had kept it parked right in front of... That had to be it. The Americans had gotten lucky. Okay, he thought, how did they do it? They wouldn't have gotten their own hands involved, of course. So they must have arranged for someone else... who? Somebody - no, more than one, at least four or five from M- 19 or PARC...? Again, that made sense. Might it have been indirect? Have the Cubans or KGB arrange it. With all the changes between East and West, might CIA have managed to get such cooperation? Unlikely, F lix thought, but possible. A direct attack on high government officials such as the Cartel had executed was the sort of thing to generate the most unlikely of bedfellows.

Was the bomb placement here an accident? Might the Americans have learned of the meeting?

There were voices from inside the rubble pile that had once been a castle. Security people were nosing around, and Cortez joined them. Untiveros' family had been here. His wife and two children, and a staff of eight or more people. Probably treated them like serfs, Cortez thought. The Cartel chieftains all did. Perhaps he'd offended one greatly - gone after a daughter, maybe. They all did that. Droit du seigneur . A French term, but one which the chieftains understood. The fools, Cortez told himself. Was there no perversion beneath them?

Security guards were already scrambling through the rubble. It was amazing that anyone could be alive in there. His hearing was coming back now. He caught the shrill screams of some poor bastard. He wondered what the body count would be. Perhaps. Yes. He turned and walked back to his overturned BMW. It was leaking gasoline out the filler cap, but Cortez reached in and got his cellular phone. He walked twenty meters from the car before switching it on.

' Jefe , this is Cortez. There has been an explosion here.'

It was ironic, Ritter thought, that his first notification of the mission's success should come from another CAPER intercept. The really good news, the NSA guys reported, was that they now had a voiceprint on Cortez. That greatly improved their chances of locating him. It was better than nothing, the DDO thought as his visitor arrived for the second time today.

'We missed Cortez,' he told Admiral Cutter. 'But we got d'Alejandro, Fern ndez, Wagner, and Untiveros, plus the usual collateral damage.'

'What do you mean?'

Ritter looked again at the satellite photo of the house. He'd have to get a new one to quantify the damage. 'I mean there were a bunch of security guards around, and we probably got a bunch of them. Unfortunately there was also Untiveros's family - wife, a couple of kids, and various domestic servants.'

Cutter snapped erect in his chair. 'You didn't tell me anything about that! This was supposed to be a surgical strike.'

Ritter looked up in considerable annoyance. ' Well, for Christ's sake, Jimmy! What the hell do you expect? You are still a naval officer, aren't you? Didn't anybody ever tell you that there are always extraneous people standing around? We used a bomb , remember? You don't do surgery with bombs, despite what all the 'experts' say. Grow up!' Ritter himself took no pleasure from the extraneous deaths, but it was a cost of doing business - as the Cartel's own members well understood.

'But I told the President -'

'The President told me that I had a hunting license, and no bag limit. This is my op to run, remember?'

'It wasn't supposed to be this way! What if the papers get hold of it? This is cold-blooded murder!'

'As opposed to taking out the druggies and their shooters? That's murder, too, isn't it? Or it would be, if the President hadn't said that the gloves were off. You said it's a war. The President told us to treat it as a war. Okay, we are. I'm sorry there were extraneous people around, but, damn it, there always are. If there were a way to bag these jokers without hurting innocent people, we'd use it - but there isn't.' To say that Ritter was amazed didn't begin to explain matters. This guy was supposed to be a professional military officer. The taking of human life was part of his job description. Of course, Ritter told himself, Cutter'd spent most of his career driving a desk in the Pentagon - he probably hadn't seen much blood since he learned how to shave. A pussycat hiding in tiger's stripes. No, Ritter corrected himself. Just a pussy. Thirty years in uniform and he'd allowed himself to forget that real weapons killed people somewhat less precisely than in the movies. Some professional officer. And he was advising the President on issues of national security. Great.

'Tell you what, Admiral. If you don't tell the newsies, neither will I. Here's the intercept. Cortez says it was a car bomb. Clark must have rigged it just the way we hoped.'

'But what if the local police do an investigation?'

'First of all, we don't know if the local cops will even be allowed there. Second, what makes you think they have the resources to figure it out? I worked pretty hard setting this up to look like a car-bombing, and it looks like Cortez got faked out. Third, what makes you think that the local cops'll give a flying fuck one way or another?'

'But the media!'

'You've got media on the brain. You're the one who's been arguing for turning us loose on these characters. So now you're changing your mind? It's a little late for that,' Ritter said disgustedly. This was the best op his Directorate had run in years, and the guy whose idea it had been was now wetting his pants.

Admiral Cutter wasn't paying enough attention to Ritter's invective to be angry. He'd promised the President a surgical removal of the people who had killed Jacobs and the rest. He hadn't bargained for the deaths of 'innocent' people. More importantly, neither had WRANGLER.

Chavez was too far south to have heard the explosion. The squad was staked out on another processing site. Evidently the sites were set up in relays. As he watched, two men were erecting the portable bathtub under the supervision of several armed men, and he could hear the grunts and gripes of others who were climbing up the mountainside. Four peasants appeared, their backpacks containing jars of acid. They were accompanied by two more riflemen.

Probably the word hadn't gotten out yet, Ding thought. He'd been certain that what the squad had done the other night would discourage people from supplementing their income this way. The sergeant didn't consider the possibility that they had to run such risks to feed their families.

Ten minutes later the third relay of six brought the coca leaves, and five more armed men. The laborers all had collapsible canvas buckets. They went off to a nearby stream for water. The boss guard ordered two of his people to walk into the woods to stand sentry, and that's where things went wrong. One of them walked straight toward the assault element, fifty meters away.

'Uh- oh,' Vega observed quietly.

Chavez tapped four dashes on his radio button, the danger signal.