Maden Mike - Tom Clancy Firing Point

He felt a dark despair falling back over him again and thought about the bottle of Golden Blue Korean whiskey he had stowed away in his cabin. His drinking had gotten worse this trip, and it was probably time to back off. His last fitness report by that maricón captain had warned him about his drinking but that asshole didn’t understand the pain he was feeling.

Loyola took another deep breath of salt air, and forced his mind to forget his troubles. For all of the pain of being a sailor, there was nothing like standing out on the bridge on a night like this. He’d sailed around the world a dozen times, and seen things on land and at sea that no civilian would ever see. Not bad for a street kid who used to hustle cigarettes and lottery tickets in the filthy Lima slums.

Loyola took another long, thoughtful pull. Yes, perhaps he would try to find some kind of job at the port, nearer the boy. Maybe even teach him how to play fútbol, as his father had taught him. And with the money he’d already saved up, perhaps a house out in the country where the boy—

A thundering blast deep beneath the vessel threw Loyola to the deck, slamming his skull against the steel bulkhead. Stunned, Loyola crawled to his knees as the breaking hull tore apart with a scream of shattering metal. He was tossed against the rails of the bridge wing, cracking his ribs, but his desperate hands wrapped around the nearest post to keep from falling several stories into the ocean. The air filled with the wail of alarms and klaxons.

He tried to blink away the blood pouring into his eyes from the wound in his broken scalp. He watched in horror as the bow and six hundred feet of ship behind it broke away and plunged headlong into the sea. The rear section where he lay surged ahead, still under power, and crashed into the upended hull in front. Steel containers spilled out of their holds and into the water, and a dozen screaming crewmen along with them.

Secondary explosions ignited the incendiary chemicals, enveloping the shuddering wreckage in unquenchable fire. Within minutes the entire ship and its cargo were lost, sent plunging into the depths of the warm Pacific.

There were no survivors.

OCTOBER 24

2

BARCELONA, SPAIN

Jack stood at the bar of L’avi, his favorite restaurant in Barcelona. It was located in the El Born district of the old city, called the Ciutat Vella in Català, the language of Catalonia, the semi-autonomous region of Spain. It was also a locals’ favorite, which was saying something, because catalanes really knew how to eat and drink, and did so quite often, late into the night.

Jack took another sip of sweet, red Spanish vermut . Van Delden’s suicide was a distant memory, thanks to his time in Spain. It had been a week since Jack woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night reliving it. Now numbed to the horror of the Dutchman’s excruciating death, Jack still couldn’t help but wonder what kind of organization inspired that kind of fearsome loyalty.

Jack had loved his time in Madrid but he was utterly captivated by Barcelona. He could see himself living in this city, despite recent events. Spontaneous mass protests of hundreds of thousands of people had shut Barcelona down several times in the days before he arrived but lately all was quiet. Jack sensed there was still something in the air.

Most protesters favored Catalonian independence from Madrid, but not all. Independence wasn’t the only issue. The rage that had driven freedom-loving people into the streets was the recent sentencing of Catalonian independence politicians to long prison terms by Madrid. Spain still lived under the long shadow of Franco’s Fascist dictatorship. Though Spain was now a democratic republic, heavily armed riot police battling barricades of unarmed Catalonian civilians elicited hard memories from the earlier times. It was an emotional response, not a rational one, Jack thought, but modern politics was only about emotions in the Western world these days, including here.

The protests changed nothing. Madrid still held all the cards because it held the monopoly of force. Barcelona was a city on the edge of another eruption, which made it all the more interesting as a place to be.

At six-one, Jack’s broad-shouldered frame towered over most of the locals who crowded the place at lunchtime, which throughout Spain lasted until at least three o’clock. The energy level in here was somewhere between a late-night disco and a rock concert.

Jack could hardly hear himself think above the din of excited diners jabbering away in a half-dozen languages, particularly Català—its own unique mix of Spanish, Italian, and French. Català was one of the many things that made Catalonia separate and distinct, which was why Franco had outlawed the language during his regime.

Jack had little more of the language than si us plau or gràcies in his vocabulary, but even using those few words was enough to elicit a smile from appreciative locals, particularly those favoring independence from Madrid. If all else failed, Jack knew the words for the tapas he loved best—especially bombas and pa amb tomàquet . In a worst-case scenario, a finger jabbed onto a menu item along with a smile would always do the trick.

Today was Jack’s last day in Spain. Despite the highly social atmosphere, he was by himself. The life he lived as a covert operative wasn’t amenable to long-term relationships, at least, not for him.

He’d seen the pretty blonde at the other end of the bar when he first came in, and saw her check him out. She wore no wedding ring and appeared to be by herself. She had a Bluetooth stuck in her ear and engaged in a very occasional conversation with someone on the other end of the call. Between shots of bubbly cava and bites of crispy croquetas de jamón , she tossed subtle, sidelong glances at him in the mirror that stood behind the counter.

Even if she was interested in him, he was already packed for his American Airlines flight back home tomorrow. He only traveled with a laptop and a buffalo leather satchel crammed with a few days’ worth of clothes. He preferred washing his things to throwing them out and buying new ones, unlike a famous fictional character he admired.

The only thing he needed to remember to grab in the morning was his dog-eared copy of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which was the reason for his stop in Barcelona. He’d first read the book in college and its last, prophetic pages had haunted him for years. When Gerry Hendley told him to take a few weeks off after his last mission with The Campus in South Korea, he decided to revisit the idea of Spain, and in particular, the Spanish Civil War. He loved being an off-the-books operator for The Campus—the “black side” operations of the financial firm Hendley Associates, carrying out missions for the American government that otherwise couldn’t be handled through normal channels.

But lately, Jack had been considering the words of an old Jesuit professor he’d bumped into in London a few years back. His subconscious was nibbling on the edges of an idea to go back to school and get his doctorate in history, just like his dad.

Maybe.

Nothing on this trip persuaded him to quit The Campus. The work was too important and too damned exciting. But he also had to admit he had been utterly captivated by his time in Spain and experiencing it through a historian’s eyes, rather than through the green glow of night-vision optics while chasing tangos. It was one thing to read about a great historical city like Barcelona but something else altogether to stand inside a nine-hundred-year-old church with the bones of Crusader knights entombed beneath the stones at your feet.