Том Клэнси - The Teeth of the Tiger

“Great. Okay, I’ll set it up. Unless I call back and say no, you come on in here.”

“Roger that one, Jack. See ya.”

“Bye,” Brian heard, and hit the kill button. “You know, Enzo, this doesn’t sound real smart to me.”

“He’s there. He’s on the scene, and he’s got eyes. We can always back out if we have to.”

“Fair enough, I guess. Map says we’re coming up on a tunnel in about five miles.” The clock on the dash said 4:05. They were making good time, but heading straight at a mountain just past the town or city of Badgastein. Either they needed a tunnel or a big team of goats to clear that hill.

JACK LITup his computer. It took him ten minutes to figure out how to use the phone system for that purpose, but he finally got logged on, to find his mailbox brimming with bits and bytes targeted at him. There was an attaboy from Granger for the completed mission in Vienna, though he hadn’t had a thing to do with it. But below that was an assessment from Bell and Wills on 56MoHa. For the most part, it was disappointing. Fifty-six was an operations officer for the bad guys. He either did things or planned things, and one of the things he’d probably done or planned had gotten a lot of people killed in four shopping malls back at home, and so this bastard needed to meet God. There were no specifics about what he’d done, how he’d been trained, how capable he was, or whether or not he was known to carry a gun, all of which was information he’d like to see, but after reading the decrypted e-mails he reencrypted them and saved them in his ACTION folder to go over with Brian and Dom.

THE TUNNELwas like something in a video game. It went on and on to infinity, though at least the traffic inside wasn’t piled up in a fiery mass as had happened a few years before in the Mont Blanc tunnel between France and Switzerland. After a period of time that seemed to last half of forever, they came out the other side. It looked to be downhill from here.

“Gas plaza ahead,” Brian reported. Sure enough, there was an ELF sign half a mile away, and the Porsche’s tank needed filling.

“Gotcha. I could use a stretch and a piss.” The service plaza was pretty clean by American standards, and the eatery was different, without the Burger King or Roy Rogers you expected in Virginia – the men’s room plumbing was all in Ordnung, however – and the gas was sold by the liter, which well disguised the price until Dominic did the mental arithmetic: “Jesus, they really charge for this stuff!”

“Company card, man,” Brian said soothingly, and tossed over a pack of cookies. “Let’s boogie, Enzo. Italy awaits.”

“Fair enough.” The six-cylinder engine purred back to life, and they went back on the road.

“Good to stretch your legs,” Dominic observed as he went to his top gear.

“Yeah, it helps,” Brian agreed. “Four hundred fifty miles to go, if my addition’s right.”

“Walk in the park. Call it six hours, if the traffic’s okay.” He adjusted his sunglasses and shook his shoulders some. “Staying in the same hotel with our subject – damn.”

“I’ve been thinking. He doesn’t know dick about us, maybe doesn’t even know he’s being hunted. Think about it: two heart attacks, one in front of a witness; and a traffic accident, also with a witness he knows. That’s pretty bad luck, but no overt suggestion of hostile action, is there?”

“In his place, I’d be a little nervous,” Dominic thought aloud.

“In his place, he probably already is. If he sees us in the hotel, we’re just two more infidel faces, man. Unless he sees us more than once, we’re down in the grass, not up on the scope. Ain’t no rule says it has to be hard, Enzo.”

“I hope you’re right, Aldo. That mall was scary enough to last me a while.”

“Concur, bro.”

This wasn’t the towering part of the Alps. That lay to the north and west, though it would have been bad on the legs had they been walking it, as the Roman legions had done, thinking their paved roads were a blessing. Probably better than mud, but not that much, especially humping a backpack that weighed about as much as his Marines had carried into Afghanistan. The legions had been tough in their day, and probably not all that different from the guys who did the job today in camouflaged utilities. But back then they’d had a more direct way of dealing with bad guys. They’d killed their families, their friends, their neighbors, and even their dogs, and, more to the point, they were known for doing all that. Not exactly practical in the age of CNN, and, truth be told, there were damned few Marines who would have tolerated participating in wholesale slaughter. But taking them out one at a time was okay, so long as you were sure you weren’t killing off innocent civilians. Doing that shit was the other side’s job. It was really a pity they could not all come out on a battlefield and have it out like men, but, in addition to being vicious, terrorists were also practical. There was no sense committing to a combat action in which you’d not merely lose, but be slaughtered like sheep in a pen. But real men would have built their forces up, trained and equipped them, and then turned them loose, instead of sneaking around like rats to bite babies in their cribs. Even war had rules, promulgated because there were worse things than war, things that were strictly forbidden to men in uniform. You did not hurt noncombatants deliberately, and you tried hard to avoid doing it by accident. The Marines were now investing considerable time, money, and effort in learning city fighting, and the hardest part of it was avoiding civilians, women with kids in strollers – even knowing that some of those women had weapons stashed next to little Johnny, and that they’d love to see the back of a United States Marine, say two or three meters away, just to be sure of bullet placement. Playing by the rules had its limitations. But for Brian that was a thing of the past. No, he and his brother were playing the game by the enemy’s rules, and as long as the enemy didn’t know it would be a profitable game. How many lives might they have saved already by taking down a banker, a recruiter, and a courier? The problem was that you could never know. That was complexity theory as applied to real life, and it was a priori impossible. Nor would they ever know what good they’d be doing and what lives they might be saving when they got this 56MoHa bastard. But not being able to quantify it didn’t mean it wasn’t real, like that child killer his brother had dispatched in Alabama. They were doing the Lord’s work, even if the Lord was not an accountant.

At work in the field of the Lord, Brian thought. Certainly these alpine meadows were green and lovely enough, he thought, looking for the lonely goatherd. Odalayeee-oh . . .

“HE’S WHERE?”Hendley asked.

“The Excelsior,” Rick Bell answered. “Says he’s right up the hall from our friend.”

“I think our boy needs a little advice on fieldcraft,” Granger observed darkly.

“Think it through,” Bell suggested. “The opposition doesn’t know a thing. They’re as likely to be worried about the guy who picks up the wash as about Jack or the twins. They have no names, no facts, no hostile organization – hell, they don’t even know for sure that anybody’s out to get them.”

“It’s not very good fieldcraft,” Granger persisted. “If Jack gets eyeballed–”

“Then what?” Bell asked. “Okay, fine, I know I’m just an intel weenie, not a field spook, but logic still applies. They do not and cannot know anything about The Campus. Even if Fifty-six MoHa is getting nervous, it will be undirected anxiety, and, hell, he’s probably got a lot of that in his system anyway. But you can’t be a spook and be afraid of anybody, can you? As long as our people are in the background noise, they have nothing to worry about – unless they do something real dumb, and these kids are not that kind of dumb, if I read them right.”