Oath of Office

Ding was not, by nature, a whiner, but just once he’d like to come to some beautiful corner of the world and take a little look around — bring his bride instead of an armed-up team of operatives. She deserved to get out a little, especially since she hardly even knew what he did, let alone where he did it. Growing up with a father like John Clark imbued you with a certain understanding of the way of life. She and Ding had come to an agreement early in their marriage that he’d tell her what he could, and she wouldn’t ask questions. It made a conversational dance around the dinner table when JP was younger, but Patsy became adept at jumping in front of any topic that would turn Ding into a liar.

It would be most cool if he could bring them both to this little Portuguese village, but first he had to see to a certain murderous couple — and whoever happened to be trying to whack them at this moment on one of the low hills east of town. Chavez’s money was on the Russians, most likely GRU. They’d done a deal with da Rocha and, for some reason, now wanted to back out.

Clark’s plan had been to watch and learn, gleaning whatever they could over the course of a few days from watching the activity on da Rocha’s computer. Now that they knew where he was, they would get a couple of rooms, act the part of tourists, and see what they could see.

It had been a good plan until ten minutes ago — when they’d seen the body.

Gavin tweaked the malware running in the background of da Rocha’s computer so it “phoned home” to him and Midas now that Jack was gallivanting around Afghanistan. The software allowed them to search e-mails, documents, and bank accounts — and to do things to them so long as da Rocha wasn’t looking at the screen when they did it. The keystroke-logging feature gave them real-time observation of what da Rocha was doing — which appeared to have a great deal to do with weapons. Most important, though, the hidden program told them where he was.

It was midafternoon by the time the team reached the crossroads village of Alpalhão in central Portugal. Surrounded by fertile fields of wheat and olive groves, the village had fewer than fifteen hundred full-time residents.

Clark had decided they should do a little recon of the location as soon as they got to town, to get a feel for it before finding rooms for the night. The GPS on da Rocha’s computer indicated he was located at the end of a tree-lined dirt lane. A copse of pines hid all but the roofline and a few glimpses of white from the road. Adara was the first to see the pair of legs jutting out from the pine trees as she and Midas passed the entrance to the villa lane from the south.

“This changes everything,” Clark said over the net. “I’d really like to talk to this guy, but if that happens to be Russians paying him a visit, I’m not hopeful.”

“Want me to launch the drone?” Midas said.

“Let’s gear up first,” Clark said.

Midas and Adara continued north, while Chavez and Clark hung back in the shadow of a large cork oak. They were all traveling heavy now, having brought their weapons aboard the Hendley Gulfstream when they’d first come to Portugal to watch Hugo Gaspard. Clark carried his venerable Wilson Combat .45, the single action being easier for him to operate with the previously damaged tendons in his dominant hand. Everyone else carried Smith & Wesson M&P Shields in nine-millimeter. With a capacity of only nine rounds including the one in the chamber, the little pistols weren’t exactly optimum sidearms for a frontal assault. But as Ding had learned from hard experience, when it came to hunting men, no pistol was an ideal weapon. When given a choice, long guns were always primary when there was offensive work to be done.

Both Clark and Adara carried short-barreled Colt M4s on single-point slings around their necks. The 5.56 caliber NATO ammo allowed them to accurately reach out well past four hundred meters. Midas carried an H&K MP7 with three 40-round magazines of 4.6x30, a small but zippy little round meant to rip through body armor that the nine-millimeter MP5 could not. Chavez carried the street howitzer, a Remington Tac-14 twelve-gauge with a ball-like bird’s-head grip and a fourteen-inch barrel. The gun was highly maneuverable and devastating at close range.

In addition to their weapons loadout, each carried a Cordura wallet containing a personal trauma kit of clotting gauze, an Israeli bandage, a SWAT-T tourniquet, and a fourteen-gauge needle.

Midas launched the Snipe Nano six minutes after they arrived, taking it up three hundred feet above ground level so it was less likely to be heard.

Adara kept her eyes peeled outbound while the rest of the team watched on the screen as four guys in dark clothing moved slowly toward a buttressed white stucco villa. A man and a woman, probably da Rocha and Fournier, lounged outside by a pool. There looked to be at least two sentries posted near the rear of the house on either end of the pool deck.