Tom Clancy - Locked On

“Get it. Bring it in here.” He disappeared back into his office, and the college girl scurried to do as she was told. The third of the room that was in earshot of the exchange stopped working and stared, watched the woman grab her Mac and rush back toward Thayer’s office as if they were regarding a condemned criminal on the way to the gallows.

Benton Thayer did not ask the girl her name or what she did. Instead he instructed her to put the thumb drive into her MacBook Pro and open the folder. She did this with slightly quivering fingers that were still sticky with spilled sugary coffee. As the single folder opened, revealing several files, Thayer told her to wait outside.

The young lady was all too happy to oblige.

Satisfied now that his own machine would not be damaged by a corrupt thumb drive, Benton Thayer began going through the files that had been surreptitiously delivered to him.

There was no explanation, no electronic version of a cover sheet. But the file was titled “John Clark.” Thayer knew a couple of guys named John Clark, it was a common name, but when he opened the file and saw a series of photos, he realized he did not know this man.

Then he began clicking through pages and pages of data on the man. A dossier of sorts. A personal history. U.S. Navy. SEAL team. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam — Studies and Observations Group. Thayer had no idea what that was, but it sounded shady as hell to him.

Then CIA. Special Activities Division.

Targeted killings. Sanctioned denied operations.

Thayer shrugged. Okay, this guy is a spook, and a spooky spook, but why should I care?

Then specific operations were laid out. He thumbed through them quickly. He could tell these were not CIA documents, but they seemed to contain detailed information about Clark’s Agency career.

It was a complicated mess of information. Information that might be interesting to someone. Human Rights Watch? Amnesty International? But Benton Thayer? He was growing bored looking through it. He carried on an internal dialogue with the mysterious person who delivered him this thumb drive. Jesus. Like I give a shit. Get to the point.

Then he stopped. Huh? Is this the point?

Photos with Clark and a younger John Patrick Ryan. Details of their relationship, spanning a quarter-century.

So the guy is old, and he’s ex-CIA. Ryan is old and ex-CIA. They knew each other? That’s all you’ve got, mystery man?

And then, after a rundown of John Clark’s years in Rainbow, a single document that seemed to be out of place. An allegation of a murder Clark committed in Germany, thirty years ago.

Why isn’t this in its place in the timeline? Thayer read it carefully. From all the information present, he got the impression that this intel was coming from a source outside of the United States.

He flipped to the next page.

A document detailing a presidential pardon given in secret to Clark for assassinations carried out at CIA.

“So…” Thayer muttered to himself. “CIA chief Ryan orders Clark to kill people, then President Ryan papers over the crimes after the fact.”

“Holy shit!”

Thayer pickedThayer p up the phone, pushed a pair of buttons. “It’s Thayer. I need to see him tonight, just as soon as he gets out of Marine One and back into the White House.”

Traffic on the Boya — Miran Shah road had been light throughout the day, and it turned near nonexistent at night. Some transport vehicles, Taliban on motorcycles, and a few brightly colored buses with small mirrors hanging from the sides like Christmas ornaments. But the men in the observation post saw nothing that seemed at all out of the ordinary. Mohammed al Darkur said that his prisoner had mentioned that ISI officers were coming into the area via aircraft, which meant they had to land at Miran Shah, and they had to travel this road to get to the camp.

But in the first thirty-six hours of the surveillance, Driscoll and the others had come up empty.

Still, al Darkur photographed each and every vehicle that passed. He had no way to be certain some high-ranking ISI officer, even General Riaz Rehan himself, would not dress himself up like a goat herder to make his way to the Haqqani training camps, so after each vehicle passed their position, al Darkur and his men reviewed the high-res images.

But so far they had seen no indication that the ISI, or even some foreign force, for that matter, was operating in the area.

Just after midnight, Driscoll was manning a night-vision camera on a tripod facing down to the road while the other three men lay on their cots in the hallway behind him. A jingle bus had passed a minute ago; the dust it kicked up still hung in the air above the Miran Shah — Boya highway.

Sam rubbed his eyes for a moment, and then looked back.

Instantly he pushed his face tighter into the eyecup of the optic. There, on the road below him, four darkened pickup trucks had pulled to a stop and men rolled out of the back of the beds. They carried rifles, their clothing was black, and they moved stealthily up the rocky hillside, directly toward the ISI safe house.

“We’re getting hit!” shouted Driscoll. Mohammed was at his side with his radio in his hand a moment later. He used his binoculars, saw the dozen or so men down a hundred yards below them, and turned to one of his captains. “Contact the base. Tell them we need a priority exfiltration, now!” His subordinate headed for his radio, and al Darkur turned back to Driscoll.

“If we take the trucks, they will destroy us with those RPGs on the road.”

But Sam was not listening — he was thinking. “Mohammed. Why would they assault like that?”

“What do you mean?”

“They have to know we are watching the road. Why did they go to the road, the low ground, and not the high ground behind us?”

Al Darkur thought about it but only for a moment. “We are already surrounded.”

“Exactly. That’s a blocking force below us; the attack will come from—”

An explosion rocked the rear wall of the compound. It was thirty yards from where al Darkur and Driscoll stood in the hallway, but still it knocked them to the ground.

The ISI major began shouting commands into his radio and he climbed back to his feet. Sam grabbed hiks M4 and ran toward the stairs, took them three at a time as he rushed to meet the enemy who would be trying to breach the rear wall.

Sam hit the ground floor and kept running for the back of the building. He passed two 7th Commando men in a room on his left. They trained the lights of their weapons out a ground-floor window, blanketing the eastern portion of the compound with white light, desperate to find targets. Driscoll continued toward the exit to the rear grounds, and hoped like hell the sentries posted at the back gate were still in the fight, keeping Haqqani’s men pinned down in the surrounding brush and hills.

Chattering gunfire came from the front of the safe house as the enemy moved through the rocks up the hill toward the front entrance.

As Sam ran full speed toward the open rear door, preparing to shoot across the pitch-black grounds toward the gate, al Darkur came over the speaker of Sam’s walkie-talkie. He spoke English now. “Sam! Our rear wall sentries are not checking in. The enemy must already be inside the compound!”

Driscoll’s momentum took him through the doorway as he processed this information. He’d not made it five feet out into the night when bright flashes of light flickered from the gate twenty meters ahead, and booming Kalashnikov fire echoed off the outer walls of the house. Driscoll stumbled in the dust, turned, and retreated back to the doorway in a crouch.