London.
The official debrief of the operation with Stanley, Weber, and the others would come later, probably via secure webcam once Clark and Chavez had settled back into life in the United States. Including them in the debrief was as much a courtesy as it was a necessity, and probably a little more of the former. He and Ding were officially separated from Rainbow, and Stanley had been right there in Tripoli, so aside from the “lessons learned” postmortem they did for each mission, Clark had little to offer the official report.
“How you feeling?” John Clark asked his wife now.
“I’ll sleep it off.” Westbound jet lag was always easier to deal with. The eastbound kind could be a killer. She stretched. Even first-class seats on British Airways had their limitations. Air travel, while convenient, is rarely good for you. “Got the passports and stuff?”
“Right here, babe,” Ding assured her, tapping his jacket pocket. J.C. must have been one of the youngest Americans ever to have a black diplomatic passport. But Ding also had his.45 Beretta automatic pistol, and the gold badge and ID card that said he was a deputy U.S. marshal, which was very useful indeed for an armed man in an international airport. He even still had his British carry permit-rare enough that the Queen practically had to sign it. The former allowed them to speed through customs and immigration.
After customs, they found in the public reception area a nondescript man holding a cardboard card with CLARK written on it, and the party of five moved to where he was.
“How was the flight?” The usual question.
“Fine.” The usual answer.
“I’m parked outside. Blue Plymouth Voyager with Virginia tags. You’ll be staying at the Key Bridge Marriott, two top-floor suites.”
“And tomorrow?” John asked.
“You’re scheduled for eight-fifteen.”
“Who are we seeing?” Clark asked.
The man shrugged. “It’ll be on the seventh floor.”
Clark and Chavez traded an
“How was England?” The receptionist/driver asked on the way out.
“Civilized. Some of it was pretty exciting,” Chavez told him, but then realized that the official greeter was a junior field officer who hadn’t a clue what they’d been doing in Old Blighty. Probably just as well. He didn’t have the look of former military, though you couldn’t always tell.
“You catch any rugby while you were over there?” their escort asked.
“A little. You have to be nuts to play that without pads,” Clark offered. “But they are a little peculiar over there.”
“Maybe they’re just tougher than we are.”
The ride toward D.C. was uneventful, helped by the fact that they were just ahead of the evening rush hour and not going all the way into the city. The effects of jet lag struck even these experienced travelers, and by the time they got to the hotel, the presence of bellmen seemed a very good idea. Inside five minutes they were on the top floor in adjoining suites, and J.C. was already looking at the king-size bed he’d have to himself. Patsy gave the same sort of look to the bathtub-it was smaller than the monsters the Brits built, but there was room to sit down, and a limitless supply of hot water just on the other side of the tap. Ding picked a chair and got the remote, and settled in to get reacquainted with American television.
Next door, John Clark left the unpacking to Sandy and raided the minibar for a miniature of Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7. The Brits didn’t understand bourbon or its Tennessee cousin, and the first stiff shot, even without ice, was a rare delight.
“What’s tomorrow?” Sandy asked.
“Have to have a meeting on the seventh floor.”
“Who with?”
“He didn’t say. Probably a deputy assistant director of operations. I haven’t kept track of the lineup at Langley. Whoever he is, he’ll tell me about the great retirement package they have set up for me. Sandy, I think it’s about time for me to hang it up.”
He couldn’t add that he’d never really considered the possibility of living this long. So his luck hadn’t quite run out? Remarkable. He’d have to buy himself a laptop and get serious about an autobiography. But for the moment: stand up, stretch, pick up his suit jacket and hang it in the closet before Sandy yelled at him for being a slob again. On the lapel was the sky-blue ribbon and five white stars that denoted the Medal of Honor. Jack Ryan had arranged that for him, after looking into his Navy service record and a lengthy document written by Vice Admiral Dutch Maxwell, God rest his soul. He’d been away when Maxwell had checked out at eighty-three-he’d been in Iran, of all places, trying to see if a network of agents had been completely rolled up by Iranian security. That process had begun, but John had managed to get five of them out of the country alive, via the UAE, along with their families. Sonny Maxwell was still flying, a senior captain for Delta, father of four. The medal was for getting Sonny out of North Vietnam. It now seemed like something that had happened during the last ice age. But he had this little ribbon to show for it, and that beat a kick in the balls. Somewhere packed away were the mess jacket and black shoes of a chief bosun’s mate, along with the gold Budweiser badge of a Navy SEAL. In most Navy NCO clubs he wouldn’t have been allowed to buy his own beers, but Jesus, today the chiefs looked so damned young. Once they’d seemed like Noah himself.
But the good news was that he wasn’t dead yet. And he could look forward to honorable retirement, and maybe doing that autobiography, if Langley ever let him publish it. Not very likely. He knew a lot of things that ought not to be known, and he’d done one or two things that probably ought not to have been done, though at the time his life had ridden on that particular horse. Things like that didn’t always make sense to the people who sat at desks in the Old Headquarters Building, but for them the big part of the day was finding a good parking place and whether or not the cafeteria had spice cake on the dessert stack.
He could see Washington, D.C., out the window. The Capitol Building, the Lincoln Memorial, and George’s marble obelisk, plus the surpassingly ugly buildings that housed various government departments.
To John Terrence Clark it was just a whole city composed of headquarters pukes for whom reality was a file folder in which the papers were supposed to be properly filled out, and if a man had to shed blood to make it that way, well, that was a matter of only distant interest. Hundreds of thousands of them. Most of them had wives-or husbands-and kids, but even so it was hard not to regard them with distaste-and, on occasion, with outright hatred. But they had their world, and he had his. They might overlap, but they never really met.
“Glad to be back, John?” Sandy asked.
“Yeah, sorta.” Change was hard but inevitable. As far as where his life would go from here… time would tell.
The next morning Clark turned right off the George Washington Parkway, looping to the left and through the gatehouse, whose armed guard had his tag number on his list of “okay to admit” strangers. John was allowed to park in the visitors’ area just in front and to the left of the big canopy.
“So how long before they tell us to find new employment, John?” Domingo asked.
“I give it maybe forty minutes. They’ll be polite about it, I’m sure.”
And with that assessment, they exited his rented Chevy and walked to the front door, there to be met by an SPO, or security and protective officer, whom they didn’t know.
“Mr. Clark, Mr. Chavez. I’m Pete Simmons. Welcome home.”
“Good to be back,” John responded. “You are…?”
“I’m an SPO, waiting for a field assignment. Got out of The Farm two months ago.”
“Who was your training officer?”
“Max DuPont.”
“Max hasn’t retired yet? Good man.”
“Good teacher. He told us a few stories about you two, and we saw the training film you did back in ’02.”
