Power and Empire

Midas chuckled and shook his head. “He’s talking about the venue restaurant, not your ice cream parlor.”

Adara blushed and then glanced down at her notepad again. “Parrilla Aires Criollos.” She pronounced the double l’s like y’s, as someone from Mexico would.

“Parizha!” Ding Chavez corrected without opening his eyes. He coughed, licking his lips and turning slightly in his seat like he might drift off to sleep again. “Argentines speak Castilian Spanish. Parizha Aires Criozhos.”

“Damn it!” Adara said. “I knew that.”

Jack grinned. “How long have you been awake?”

“Since lemon-cucumber ice cream,” Chavez said. He opened one eye a crack and shook his head at Sherman. “Don’t tell me that’s seriously a thing.”

“Anyway,” Adara said, “of course we’ll stay glued to Vincent Chen, but I’m thinking the dinner is a likely place to gather intel. Maybe we can go there tonight and put up a listening device or two.”

“I’m on board with that,” Midas said.

Jack looked out the window at the plane’s shadow drifting over a lumpy layer of clouds. “Or maybe Chen’s just interested in one of the players — not the dinner meeting.”

“That’s true,” Adara said.

“Whatever the case may be,” Chavez said. “The Chinese delegation being here is too big a coincidence.” He leaned forward, rubbing his face with both hands. “Lisanne, you’ve squared away a couple rental cars?”

“I have,” Robertson said. “They’ll be waiting for you at the airport when we land.”

“Thank you,” Chavez said. “We’ll pull small arms from the bulkheads after we clear customs.”

Midas gave him a hearty thumbs-up.

“Roger that, boss.”

In the past, it had been a relatively rare occurrence for Campus members to carry firearms on a surveillance op — whether in or out of the United States. It was uncommon for intelligence officers to go armed, and Gerry Hendley thought it put them in too much jeopardy of getting jammed up by the local police. But surveillance often morphed into something more sinister, and the times that the team needed and didn’t have a firearm seemed to happen with greater and greater frequency.

Chavez had taken his concerns to John Clark — who carried his 1911 ninety-nine percent of the time anyway — and Clark took the issue to Gerry. He reasoned that the work Campus operators did was often “extralegal,” whether on American soil or in another country. There was no reason they should not routinely be prepared to protect themselves during the course of their duties. There were times — certain operations during which a weapon would have proven more dangerous than not — but those would be the exception. Clark’s recommendation, along with a review of the last dozen operations, made Hendley easy to convince.

Unless otherwise directed, Campus operators were to be armed.

Unless Otherwise Directed, or UNODIR, was a technique often used from the bottom up, where a field commander or team leader might slip an operational plan outlining his intentions into the CO’s box — at the last minute and marked UNODIR. The team leader could claim due diligence, though, more often than not, the CO didn’t see the ops plan until after the mission was complete. But a UNODIR order coming down from above signified much more than simply allowing Campus operators to go armed most of the time. UNODIR meant that the bosses trusted them to act independently. As former Delta commander Midas Jankowski happily noted: “They’ve taken off our choke chains and let us decide who we’re going to bite.”

As before, what each Campus operator carried was dictated by personal preference. Ops such as a surveillance in Argentina would require deep concealment. For that, everybody chose the Smith & Wesson M&P Shield in nine-millimeter. In the United States, Caruso and Ryan sometimes carried the same weapon in .40 caliber, but nine-millimeter ammunition was easier to come by in most parts of the world. With a total capacity of nine rounds, the pistols were easy to tuck into a Thunderwear or SmartCarry holster. Both units consisted of a small, flat, and breathable textile pouch on a Velcro belt, worn below the waist and centered low over the groin. These were not designed to be “quick-draw” holsters, but each operator had extensive practice presenting and firing their weapons from this mode of carry. When the need arose, they could do so quickly and safely — almost as fast as they could with an inside-the-waistband or more traditional belt holster.

No one argued that diminutive M&Ps were optimum primary weapons for going offensive against man-sized targets. Every Campus operator knew from harsh experience that for that they’d use a long gun. But virtually any pistol was better than being a naked clawless bear, so they were happy to have them — along with the hard-earned trust of their superiors.

Yet trust didn’t mean the lack of pre-op briefing. Ding Chavez was no micromanager — but he was a leader, and he wanted to be certain everyone on his team was on the same page.