Tom Clancy - Locked On

Son of a bitch.

Paul Laska decided, at that very moment, that he would not spend one more goddamned dime on that loser Ed Kealty.

No, he would divert his funds, his power, into one thing.

The destruction of John Patrick Ryan, either before he took his inevitable seat in the Oval Office or during his administration.

One full day after the Paris operation, all the Campus operators, John Clark included, sat in the conference room on the ninth floor of Hendley Associates in West Odenton, Maryland. All five men were still tired and sore from the op, but they’d each had a chance to go home and sleep for a few hours before heading into the office for the after-action debriefing.

Clark had slept more than the others, but that was only because of the meds. On the aircraft, Adara Sherman had vadministered painkillers that knocked him out until touchdown, and then he’d been picked up by Gerry Hendley and Sam Granger themselves and driven to the private office of a surgeon Hendley had retained in Baltimore for just such an eventuality. In the end, Clark hadn’t needed surgery, and the doctor was effusive in his praise of the work of the person or persons who’d given the injury its initial cleaning and bandaging.

He had no way of knowing the person who had treated the wounded man had worked on more than her share of gunshot wounds in Iraq and Afghanistan, and most of those GSWs were much more serious than the hole left by the 9-millimeter round that pinged off of Clark’s ulna. Other than administering an X-ray that revealed a hairline fracture of the bone, then handing over a removable cast, a sling, and a course of antibiotics, Hendley’s surgeon had little to do other than to remember to keep quiet about the entire matter.

Hendley and Granger then drove Clark home. Both John’s wife, Sandy, a retired nurse, and his daughter, Patsy, a doctor herself, were there waiting for him. They checked his wound over, yet again, ignoring his protests that he was fine and the complaints about the seemingly constant pulling and changing of the medical tape holding his dressing. Finally John managed to crash a few hours before driving himself back to work for the morning after-action briefing.

Gerry started the briefing by entering the room, pulling off his coat and draping it over the chair at the head of the table. He blew out a long sigh and said, “Gentlemen, I, for one, miss the days of poison pens.”

The first several “wet” missions The Campus had undertaken, the operators had employed succinylcholine injector pens that were an efficient means for taking a life. A quick turn of the nub of the pen to reveal the syringe tip, then a stroll past the target, and finally a quick jab in the target’s ass. The assassin had, in all but a couple of cases, just walked on uIrinnnoticed while the target himself continued on down the street, wondering what had just bit or stung him.

Until moments later, when the target succumbed to a sudden heart attack, and died there, his colleagues standing over him with no idea what was wrong, and no idea the man gasping for air had just been murdered before their eyes.

It was quick and it was clean, and that was Gerry’s point. No one fought back against a heart attack. No one even pulled their guns or their knives, because no one realized they were under attack.

“Would that it always worked like that,” Gerry said to the room.

Next each of the operators talked about what they did, what they saw, what they thought about what they did and saw. They went around the room like this for most of the morning, and other than some self-criticisms over small things, the general consensus was that they had all done extremely well to react and respond to the drastic change in the operation at, literally, the last minute.

And they also all agreed that they had been damn lucky, John Clark’s forearm not withstanding.

Campus head of operations Sam Granger had kept quiet through most of the discussion. He had not been on the scene, after all. After the five operators had finished, he stood up and addressed the table. “We’ve gone over what happened, but now it’s time to talk about fallout. Comebacks. Because even though you guys saved the DCRI officers and took down a known terrorist leader and five of his confederates, that does not mean the FBI won’t be fast-roping down on Hendley Associates if the word gets out that we were involved.”

A smile from Dom and Sam Driscoll, the two most “go with the flow” operators in the unit. The other men were a little more serious about the implications. Granger said, “I’ve been monitoring the media reports of the incident, and there is speculation already that this is some sort of terrorist catfight that French security found themselves in the middle of. It is not being reported that DCRI was rescued from assassination by unknown armed individuals. As shitty as it was for you guys at the time that this was such a complicated takedown, it was even more confused from the side of the DCRI. They just saw men crashing into their room and shooting at each other. I can’t imagine what they were thinking.”

Sam motioned to Rick Bell, the chief of analysis at The Campus. “Fortunately, I don’t have to. Rick has tasked his analysts downstairs to look into what French authorities know, or think they know, about what’s going on.”

Rick stood and addressed the boardroom. “DCRI and judicial police are both investigating this, but DCRI has not granted interviews of its people on the scene to the police investigators, so the judicial police aren’t getting anywhere with their inquiry. DCRI does recognize there were two different sets of actors here, not a single cell that went berserk and shot it out with each other. They haven’t gotten much further than that yet, but they are going to dig a lot deeper.

“That they will continue to investigate is the bad news, but it’s nothing that we didn’t expect. The good news is, as far as video evidence, you guys seem to be in the clear. There are a couple of distant grainy shots from street cameras. Jack crossing the Avenue George V on his way around the corner to the Hôtel de Sers, and one of John going in the front of the Four Seasons and then coming back out. Also Ding and Dom turning the corner with the gear under their jackets. But the best facial-recog software in the world doesn’t have algorithms that can solve for the disve tutortion masks and the sunglasses all you guys are wearing during the ops.”

Rick sat back down, and Sam Granger again addressed the room: “That isn’t to say some tourist with a cell phone cam didn’t get a close-up shot of one of you. But if that happened, so far, it has not come out.”

There were a few nods in the room, but no one spoke.

Rick said, “Okay. Now let’s talk about what you guys helped prevent. According to intercepted communications from French security officials, al Qahtani and his men had over five hundred rounds of live ammo between them. There were no suppressors on their machine pistols. Those bastards were going to shoot their way in and then shoot their way out. You men saved six security officers, but you probably saved another twenty cops and civilians as well.”

“What about Rokki?” Chavez asked.

“He’s gone. One hundred sirens on the street saw to that.”

Granger said, “I am of the opinion that Hosni Rokki and his men were just MacGuffins. They were not there to commit any sort of terrorist act. They were not there because they were pissed off about the burka ban. Instead, I think Rokki just came to town under orders of al Qahtani to draw out French security officers, so that al Qahtani and the real terror squad, who were already in place, could ID them and murder them.”