Clear and Present Danger

'How long?'

'How long to paint the Mona Lisa? How long to build a cathedral, How long...' O'Day was out of the room before he heard the third one. He dropped the disk off in the secure file in his office, then headed for the gym for a shower and a half hour in the whirlpool. The shower removed the stink, and while the whirlpool went to work on the aches, O'Day reflected that the case against the son of a bitch was shaping up rather nicely.

'Sir, they just ain't there.'

Ramirez handed the headset back and nodded. There was no denying it now. He looked over to Guerra, his operations sergeant.

'I think somebody forgot about us.'

'Well, that's good news, Cap'n. What are we gonna do about it?'

'Our next check-in time is zero-one-hundred. We give 'em one more chance. If nothing by then, I guess we move out.'

'Where to, sir?'

'Head down off the mountain, see if we can borrow some transport and - Christ, I don't know. We probably have enough cash we can use to fly out of here -'

'No passports, no ID.'

'Yeah. Make it to the Embassy in Bogot ?'

'That violates about a dozen different orders, sir,' Guerra pointed out.

'First time for everything,' Captain Ramirez observed. 'Have everybody eat their last rations, rest up as best they can. We stand-to in two hours, and stay alert all night. I want Chavez and Le n to patrol down the hill, say two klicks' worth.' Ramirez didn't have to say what he was worried about. As unlikely as intellect told them it had to be, he and Guerra were on the same wavelength.

'It's cool, Cap'n,' the sergeant assured him. 'We're going to be all right, just as soon as those REMFs get their shit together.'

The mission briefing took fifteen minutes. The men were angry and restive at the losses they had taken, not fully appreciative of the danger that lay ahead, only of their rage at what had already happened to their numbers. Such bravado, Cortez thought, such machismo. The fools .

The first target was only thirty kilometers away - for the obvious reasons he wanted to deal with the nearest one first - and twenty-two of them could be covered by truck. They had to wait for darkness, of course, but sixteen trucks rolled out, each with fifteen or so men aboard. Cortez watched them depart, muttering to one another as they pulled out of sight. His own people stayed behind, of course. He had so far recruited ten men, and their loyalty was to him alone. He'd recruited well, of course. No nonsense about who their parents were or how faithfully they had killed. He'd selected them for their skills. Most were dropouts from M-19 and PARC, men for whom five years of playing at guerrilla warfare had been enough. Some had received training in Cuba or Nicaragua and had basic soldier skills - actually terrorist skills, but that put them ahead of the 'soldiers' of the Cartel, most of whom had never received formal training at all. They were mercenaries. Their only interest in Cortez was in the money he'd paid them, but he'd also promised them more. More to the point, there was nowhere else for them to go. The Colombian government had no use for them. The Cartel would not have trusted them. And they had forsworn their loyalty to the two Marxist groups which were so politically bankrupt that they allowed themselves to be hired out by the Cartel. That left Cortez. He was the man they would kill for. He hadn't confided in them, since he didn't yet trust them to do any more than that, but all great movements began with small groups of people whose methods were as murky as their objectives, who knew only loyalty to a single man. At least that's what Cortez had been taught. He didn't fully believe that himself, but it was enough for the moment. He had no illusions about leading a revolution. He was merely executing - what was it called? A hostile takeover. Yes, that was right. Cortez chuckled to himself as he walked back inside and started looking at his maps.

'Good thing neither one of us is a smoker,' Larson said as the wheels came up. In the cabin behind them was an auxiliary fuel tank. They had a two-hour flight down to their patrol area, and two hours back, with three hours of loiter time on station. 'You suppose this is going to work?'

'If it doesn't, somebody's going to pay,' Clark replied. 'What about the weather?'

'We'll sneak back in ahead of it. Don't make any bets on tomorrow, though.'

Chavez and Le n were two kilometers away from the team's farthest listening post. Both carried silenced weapons. Le n hadn't been the point scout for BANNER, but had woodcraft skills that Chavez liked. The best news of all was that they found nothing. Captain Ramirez had briefed them on what he was worried about. So far they hadn't detected it, which was fine with the two sergeants. They'd gone down to the north initially, then gradually come south while covering an arc of several kilometers, looking for signs, listening for noise. They were just turning for the climb back to the LZ when Chavez stopped and turned.

It was a metallic sound. He waved for Le n to freeze and pivoted his head around, hoping - what? he asked himself. Hoping that he'd really heard something? Hoping that he'd imagined it? He switched his goggles and scanned downhill. There was a road down there somewhere. If somebody came calling, it would be from that direction.

It was hard to tell at first. There was thick overhead cover here, and the relative absence of light forced him to turn the brightness control to the maximum. That made the picture fuzzy, like a pre-cable TV signal from a distant city, and what he was looking for was far off-at least five hundred meters, which was as far as he could see down a thinned-out area of the forest. The tension only made him more alert, but that made his imagination work all the harder, and he had to guard against seeing things that weren't there.

But something was there. He could feel it even before the noise returned. There were no more metallic sounds, but there was... there was the over-loud whisper of leaves, and then it was a calm night again in the lee of the mountain. Chavez looked over to Le n, who also had his goggles on, was also looking that way, a green image on the tube. The goggled face turned toward Chavez and nodded. There was no emotion in the gesture, just the professional communication of an unpleasant thought. Chavez knelt to activate his radio.

'Six, this is Point,' Ding called.

'Six here.'

'We're at the turn-back point. We got movement down here, about half a klick below us. We're gonna wait to see what it is.'

'Roger. Be careful, Sergeant,' Ramirez said.

'Will do. Out.' Le n came over to join him.

'How d'you want to play this?' 'Berto asked.

'Let's stay close, try not to move too much till we see what they're up to.'

'You got it. Better cover about fifty meters uphill.'

'Go ahead, I'll be right behind you.' Chavez took one more look downhill before following his comrade up to a stand of thick trees. Still nothing he could really identify on the speckled screen. Two minutes later he was at the new perch.

'Berto saw it first and pointed down a trail. The moving specks were larger than the noise generated by the viewing system. Heads. Four or five hundred meters off. Coming straight up the hill.

Okay , Chavez said to himself. Let's get a count . He felt himself relaxing. This was business. He'd done it all before. The great unknown was now behind him. There would be a fight. He knew how to do that.

'Six, this is Point, estimate company strength, heading right up to you.'

'Anything else?'

'They're moving kinda slow. Careful, like.'

'How long can you stay there?'

'Maybe a couple minutes.'

'Stay as long as it's safe, then move. Try to pace them for another klick or so. We want to get as many as possible into the sack.'

'Roger.'

'These numbers suck, man,' Le n whispered.

'We sure as hell want to whittle 'em down some 'fore we run, don't we?' Chavez returned his eyes to the advancing enemy. He saw no obvious organization. They were taking their time, moving slowly up the hill, though he could easily hear them now. They moved in little bands of three or four, probably groups of friends, he thought,