Clear and Present Danger

"Yes, sir, I know." Clark finished off his drink and went back to work. "I still don't know exactly what you have in mind, but you can forget about going after them in their houses."

"That tough?"

Clark nodded. "That tough. It's a job for real infantry with real support, and even then you're going to take real casualties. From what Larson tells me, the security troops these characters have are pretty good. I suppose you might try to buy a few off, but they're probably well paid already, so that might just backfire." The field officer didn't ask what the real mission was, but he assumed it was to snatch some warm bodies and whisk them off stateside, where they'd arrive gift-wrapped in front of some FBI office, or maybe a U.S. courthouse. Like everyone else, he was making an incorrect guess. "Same thing with bagging one on the move. They take the usual precautions - irregular schedules, irregular routes, and they have armed escorts everywhere they go. So bagging one on the fly means having good intel, which means having somebody on the inside. Larson is as close to being inside as anybody we've ever run, and he's not close enough. Trying to get him in closer will get him killed. He's gotten us some good data - Larson's a pretty good kid - and the risks of trying that are just too great. I presume the local people have tried to -"

"They have. Six of them ended up dead or missing. Same thing with informers. They disappear a lot. The locals are thoroughly penetrated. They can't run any sort of op for long without risking their own. You do that long enough and people stop volunteering."

Clark shrugged and looked out to seaward. There was a white-hulled cruise ship inbound on the horizon. "I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised at how tough these bastards are. Larson was right, what brains they don't already have they can buy. Where do they hire their consultants?"

"Open market, mainly Europe, and -"

"I mean the intel pros. They must have some real spooks."

"Well, there's F lix Cortez. That's only a rumor, but the name's come up half a dozen times in the past few months."

"The DGI colonel who disappeared," Clark observed. The DGI was Cuba's intelligence service, modeled on the Soviet KGB. Cortez had been reported working with the Macheteros, a Puerto Rican terrorist group that the FBI had largely run to ground in the past few years. Another DGI colonel named Filiberto Ojeda had been arrested by the Bureau, after which Cortez had disappeared. So he'd decided to remain outside his country's borders. Next question: had Cortez decided to opt for this most vigorous branch of the free-enterprise system or was he still working under Cuban control? Either way, DGI was Russian-trained. Its senior people were graduates of the KGB's own academy. They were, therefore, opponents worthy of respect. Certainly Cortez was. His file at the Agency spoke of a genius for compromising people to get information.

"Larson know about this?"

"Yeah. He caught the name at a party. Of course, it would help if we knew what the hell Cortez looks like, but all we have is a description that fits half the people south of the Rio Grande. Don't worry. Larson knows how to be careful, and if anything goes wrong, he's got his own airplane to get out of Dodge with. His orders are fairly specific on that score. I don't want to lose a trained field officer doing police work." Ritter added, "I sent you down for a fresh appraisal. You know what the overall objective is. Tell me what you think is possible."

"Okay. You're probably right to go after the airfields and to keep it an intelligence-gathering operation. Given the necessary surveillance assets, we could finger processing sites fairly easily, but there's a lot of them and their mobility demands a rapid reaction time to get there. I figure that'll work maybe a half-dozen times, max, before the other side wises up. Then we'll take casualties, and if the bad guys get lucky, we might lose a whole assault force - if you've got people thinking in those terms. Tracking the finished product from the processing sites is probably impossible without a whole lot of people on the ground - too many to keep it a covert op for very long - and it wouldn't buy us very much anyway. There are a lot of little airfields on the northern part of the country to keep an eye on, but Larson thinks that they may be victims of their own success. They've been so successful buying off the military and police in that district that they might be falling into a regular pattern of airfield use. If the insertion teams keep a low profile, they could conceivably operate for two months - that may be a little generous - before we have to yank them out. I need to see the teams, see how good they are."

"I can arrange that," Ritter said. He'd already decided to send Clark to Colorado. Clark was the best man to evaluate their capabilities. "Go on."