Teeth of the Tiger

CHAPTER 10 DESTINATIONS

For Mustafa and his friends, the ride to Las Cruces was a surprisingly welcome break, and though they didn't show it, there was obvious excitement now. They were in America. Here were the people they proposed to kill. The mission was now somehow closer to fulfillment, not by a mere handful of kilometers, but by a magical, invisible line. They were in the home of the Great Satan. Here were the people who had rained death upon their homeland, and upon the Faithful throughout the Muslim world, the people who so fawningly supported Israel.

At Deming, they turned east for Las Cruces. Sixty-two miles — a hundred kilometers — to their next intermediate stop, along I-10. There were billboards advertising road hotels and places to eat, tourist attractions of types routine and inconceivable, and more rolling land, and horizons which seemed far even as the car ate up the distances at a steady seventy miles per hour.

Their driver, as before, looked Mexican, and said nothing. Probably another mercenary. Nobody said anything, the driver because he didn't care, his passengers because their English was accented, and the driver might take note of it. This way he'd only remember that he'd picked up some people on a dirt road in southern New Mexico and driven them someplace else.

It was probably harder for the others in his party, Mustafa thought. They had to trust him to know what he was doing. He was the mission commander, the leader of a warrior band about to divide into four parts that would never reunite. The mission had been painstakingly planned. The only future communications would be via computer, and few enough of those. They'd function independently, but to a simple timetable and toward a single strategic objective. This plan would shake America as no other plan had ever done, Mustafa told himself, looking into a station wagon as it passed them. Two parents, and what appeared to be two little ones, a boy about four, and a smaller one perhaps a year and a half. Infidels, all of them. Targets.

His operational plan was all written down, of course, in fourteen-point Geneva type on sheets of plain white paper. Four copies. One for each team leader. The other data was in files on the personal computers that all of the men had in their small carry-bags, along with spare shirts and clean underwear and little else. They would not need much, and the plan was to leave very little behind in order to further befuddle the Americans.

It was enough to generate a thin smile at the passing countryside. Mustafa lit up a cigarette — he only had three left — and took a deep breath of tobacco smoke, and the air-conditioning blew cold air on him. Behind them, the sun was declining in the sky. They'd make their next — and last — stop in the darkness, which, he considered, was good tactical planning. He knew it was only an accident, but, if so, it meant that Allah Himself was smiling on their plan. As He ought to do, of course. They were all doing His work.

Another dull day's work done, Jack told himself on the way to his car. One bad thing about The Campus was that he couldn't discuss it with anybody. Nobody was cleared for this stuff, though it was not yet evident why. He could, surely, kick this around with his dad — the President was by definition cleared for anything, and ex-Presidents had the same access to information, if not by law, then by the rules of practicality. But, no, he couldn't do that. Dad would not be pleased by his new job. Dad could make a phone call and screw all of that up, and Jack had had enough of a taste to keep himself hungry for a few months at least. Even so, the ability to kick a few things around with somebody who knew what was going on would have been a blessing of sorts. Just someone to say, yes, it really is important, and, yes, you really are contributing to Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

Could he really make a difference? The world worked the way it worked, and he couldn't change it much. Even his father, for all the power that had come to him, had been unable to do that. How much less could he, a junior prince of sorts, be able to accomplish? But if the broken parts of the world were ever to be fixed, it would have to be at the hands of someone who didn't care if it were impossible or not. Probably someone too young and dumb to know that impossible things were…impossible. But neither his mother nor his father believed in that word, and that's the way they had raised him. Sally was graduating medical school soon, and she was going into oncology — the one thing their mother had regretted not doing with her own medical career — and she told everyone who asked that she was going to be there when the cancer dragon was finally slain once and for all. So, believing in impossibility was not part of the Ryan creed. He just didn't know how yet, but the world was full of things to learn, wasn't it? And he was smart and well educated, and having a sizable trust fund meant that he could go forward without fear of starving if he offended the wrong person. That was the most important freedom his father had bequeathed him, and John Patrick Ryan, Jr., was smart enough to know just how important it was — if not to grasp the responsibility that such freedom carried with it.

Instead of cooking their own dinner, they decided to go to a local steak house that night. It was full of college kids from the University of Virginia. You could tell — they all looked bright, but not as bright as they thought they were, and they were all a little too loud, a little too confident in themselves. That was one of the advantages of being children — much as they would have detested that appellation — kids whose needs were still looked after by loving parents, albeit at a comfortable distance. To the two Caruso boys, it was a humorous look at what they'd themselves been only a few short years ago, before harsh training and experience in the real world had turned them into something else. Exactly what, they were not yet sure. What had seemed so simple in school had become infinitely complex after leaving the academic womb. The world was not digital, after all — it was an analog reality, always untidy, always with loose ends that could never be tied up neatly like shoelaces, and so it was possible to trip and fall with every incautious step. And caution only came with experience — with a few trip-and-falls that brought pain, only the worst of which taught remembered lessons. Those lessons had come early to the brothers. Not as early as they'd come to other generations, but still soon enough for them to realize the consequences of errors in a world that had never learned to forgive.

"Not a bad place," Brian judged, halfway through his filet mignon.

"Hard to mess up a decent piece of beef, no matter how dumb the cook is." This place obviously had a cook, not a chef, but the steak fries were pretty good for nearly raw carbohydrates, and the broccoli was fresh out of the freezer bag, Dominic thought.

"I really ought to eat better than this," the Marine major observed.

"Enjoy it while you can. We're not thirty yet, are we?"

That was good for a laugh. "Used to seem like an awfully big number, didn't it?"

"Where old age starts? Oh yeah. Well, you're pretty young for a major, right?"

Aldo shrugged. "I suppose. My boss liked me, and I had some good people working for me. I never did take a liking to MREs, though. They keep you going, but that's about all I can say for them. My gunny loved the things, said they were better than what he'd grown up in the Corps with."

"In the Bureau, you tend to live on Dunkin' Donuts and — well, they make about the best industrial coffee in America. It's hard to keep your belt loose on that kind of diet."

"You're in decent shape for a deskbound warrior, Enzo," Brian observed rather generously. At the end of the morning run, his brother occasionally looked as though he was about to drop. But a three-mile run was just like morning coffee for a Marine, something to open the eyes. "I still wish I knew exactly what we're training for," Aldo said after another bite.

"Bro, we're training to kill people, that's all we need to know. Sneak up without being seen, and then get the hell away without being noticed."

"With pistols?" Brian responded dubiously. "Kinda noisy, and not as sure as a rifle. I had a sniper with my team in Afghanistan. He did some bad guys at damned near a mile. Used a Barrett.50 rifle, big mother, like an old BAR on steroids. Shoots the.50 round from the Ma Deuce machine gun. Accurate as hell, and it makes for a definitive hit, y'know? Kinda hard to walk away with a half-inch hole in you." Especially since his sniper, Corporal Alan Roberts, a black kid from Detroit, had preferred head shots, and the.50 really did the job on heads.

"Well, maybe suppressed ones. You can silence a handgun fairly well."

"I've seen those. We trained with them at Recon School, but they're awful bulky for carrying under a business suit, and you still have to take them out and stand still and aim them at the target's head. Unless they send us to James Bond School to get courses in magic, we're not going to be killing many people with handguns, Enzo."

"Well, maybe we'll be using something else."

"So you don't know, either?"

"Hey, man, my checks still come from the Bureau. All I know is that Gus Werner sent me here, and that makes it most-of-the-way kosher… I think," he concluded.

"You mentioned him before. Who is he, exactly?"

"Assistant Director, head of the new Counter-Terrorism Division. You don't fuck with Gus. He was head of the Hostage Rescue Team, got all his other tickets punched, too. Smart guy, and tough as hell. I don't think he faints at the sight of blood. But he's also got a real head on his shoulders. Terrorism is the new thing at the Bureau, and Dan Murray didn't pick him for the job just because he can shoot a gun. He and Murray are tight, they go back twenty-plus years. Murray ain't no dummy, either. Anyway, if he sent me here, it's gotta be okay with somebody. So, I'll play along until they tell me to break the law."

"Me, too, but I'm still a little nervous."

Las Cruces had a regional airport for short hauls and puddle jumpers. Along with that came rent-a-car outlets. They pulled in, and it was time for Mustafa to get nervous. He and one of his colleagues would hire cars here. Two more would make use of a similar business in the town itself.

"It is all prepared for you," the driver told them. He handed over two sheets of paper. "Here are the reservation numbers. You'll be driving Ford Crown Victoria four-door sedans. We could not get you station wagons as requested without going to El Paso, and that was not desirable. Use your Visa card in there. Your name is Tomas Salazar. Your friend is Hector Santos. Show them the reservation numbers and just do what they tell you to do. It is very easy." Neither man struck the driver as overly Latin in appearance, but the people at this rental office were both ignorant paddies who spoke little Spanish beyond "taco" and "cerveza."

Mustafa got out of the car and walked in, waving for his friend to follow.

Immediately, he knew it would be easy. Whoever owned this business, he hadn't troubled himself with recruiting intelligent people. The boy running the desk was hunched over it, reading a comic book with attention that looked a little too rapt.

"Hello," Mustafa said, with false confidence. "I have reservation." He wrote the number down on a pad and handed it to him.

"Okay." The attendant didn't show his annoyance at being diverted from the newest Batman adventure. He knew how to work the office computer. Sure enough, the computer spat out a rental form already filled out in most details.

Mustafa handed over his international driver's license, which the employee Xeroxed, and then he stapled the photocopy to his copy of the rental form. He was delighted that Mr. Salazar took all of the insurance options — he got extra money for encouraging people to do that.

"Okay, your car is the white Ford in slot number four. Just go out that door and turn right. The keys are in the ignition, sir."

"Thank you," Mustafa said in accented English. Was it really this easy?

Evidently, it was. He'd just got the seat in his Ford adjusted when Saeed showed up at slot number five for a light green twin to his sedan. Both had maps of the state of New Mexico, but they didn't need them, really. Both men started their cars and eased out of their parking slots and headed off to the street, where the SUVs were waiting. It was simple enough to follow them. The town of Las Cruces had traffic, but not all that much at the dinner hour.

There was another rental car agency just eight blocks north on what appeared to be the main street of Las Cruces. This one was called Hertz, which struck Mustafa as vaguely Jewish in character. His two comrades walked in, and, ten minutes later, walked back out and got in their leased cars. Again, they were Fords of the same make as his and Saeed's. With that done, perhaps the most hazardous mission they had to accomplish, it was time to follow the SUVs north for a few kilometers — about twenty, as it turned out — then off this road onto another dirt one. There seemed to be a lot of those here… just like home, in fact. Another kilometer or so, and there was a house standing alone, with only a truck parked nearby to suggest residency. There, all the vehicles parked and the occupants got out for what would be, Mustafa realized, their last proper meeting.

"We have your weapons here," Juan told them. He pointed to Mustafa. "Come with me, please."

The inside of this ordinary-looking wood-frame structure appeared to be a virtual arsenal. A total of sixteen cardboard boxes held sixteen MAC-10 sub-machine guns. Not an elegant firearm, the MAC is made of machine-steel stampings, with a generally poor finish on the metal. With each weapon were twelve magazines, apparently all loaded, and taped together end-to-end with black electrician's tape.

"The weapons are virgins. They have not been fired," Juan told them. "We also have suppressors for each of them. They are not efficient silencers, but they improve balance and accuracy. This gun is not as easily handled as the Uzi — but those are also more difficult to obtain here. For this weapon, its effective range is about ten meters. It is easily loaded and unloaded. It fires from an open bolt, of course, and the rate of fire is quite high." It would, in fact, empty a thirty-round magazine in less than three seconds, which was a little too fast for sensible use, but these people didn't seem overly particular to Juan.

They weren't. Each of the sixteen Arabs lifted a weapon and hefted it, as though to say hello to a new friend. Then one lifted a magazine pair—

"Stop! Halto!" Juan snapped at once. "You will not load these weapons inside. If you wish to test-fire them, we have targets outside."

"Will this not be too noisy?" Mustafa asked.

"The nearest house is four kilometers away," Juan answered dismissively. The bullets could not travel that far, and he assumed the noise could not either. In this, he was mistaken.

But his guests assumed he knew everything about the area, and they were always willing to shoot guns off, especially the rock-and-roll kind. Twenty meters from the house was a sand berm with some crates and cardboard boxes scattered about. One by one, they inserted the magazines into their SMGs and pulled back the bolts. There was no official command to fire. Instead, they took their lead from Mustafa, who grasped the strap dangling from the muzzle and pulled his trigger back.

The immediate results were agreeable. The MAC-10 made the appropriate noise, jumping up and right as all such weapons did, but since this was his first time and this was just range shooting, he managed to walk his rounds into a cardboard box about six meters to his left front. In seemingly no time at all, the bolt slammed shut on an empty chamber, having fired and ejected thirty Remington 9mm pistol cartridges. He thought of extracting the magazine and reversing it to enjoy another two or three seconds of blazing bliss, but he managed to control himself. There would be another time for that, in the not-too-distant future.

"The silencers?" he asked Juan.

"Inside. They screw on the muzzle, and it's better to screw them on — easier to control how they spray their bullets, you see." Juan spoke with some authority. He'd used the MAC-10 to eliminate business competitors and other unpleasant people in Dallas and Santa Fe over the years. Despite that, he looked on his guests with a certain unease. They grinned too much. They were not as he was, Juan Sandoval told himself, and the sooner they went on their way, the better. It would not be so for the people at their destinations, but that was not his concern. His orders came from on high. Very on high, his immediate superior had made clear to him the week before. And the money had been commensurate. Juan had no particular complaint, but, as a good reader of people, he had a red light flashing behind his eyes.

Mustafa followed him back in and picked up the suppressor. It was perhaps ten centimeters in diameter, and half a meter or so long. As promised, it screwed onto the thread on the gun's muzzle, and on the whole, it did improve the weapon's balance. He hefted it briefly and decided that he'd prefer to use it this way. Better to reduce muzzle climb, and make for more accurate shooting. The reduction in noise had little bearing on his mission, but accuracy did. But the suppressor made an easily concealed weapon unacceptably bulky. So, he unscrewed it for now, and replaced the silencer in its carry-bag. Then he went outside to gather his people. Juan followed him back out.

"Some things you need to know," he told the team leaders. Juan went on in a slow, measured voice: "The American police are efficient, but they are not all-powerful. If, during your driving, one pulls you over, all you need to do is to speak politely. If he asks you to get out of the car, then get out as he says. He is allowed by American laws to see if you have a weapon on your person — to search you with his hands — but if he asks you to search your car, simply say no, I do not wish you to do that — and by their laws he may not search your car. I will say this again: If an American policeman asks to search your car, you need only say no, and then he may not do it. Then drive away. When you drive, do not go faster than the number on the highway signs. If you do that, you will probably not be disturbed in any way. If you go faster than the speed limit, all you do is to give the police a reason to pull you over. So, do not do that. Exercise patience at all times. Do you have any questions?"

"What if a policeman is too aggressive, can we—"

Juan knew that question was coming. "Kill one? Yes, it is possible to do so, but then you will have many more police chasing you. When a police officer pulls you over, the very first thing he will do is radio his location, and the license number of your car, and a description, to his headquarters. So, even if you kill him, his comrades will look for you in a matter of minutes — and in large numbers. It is not worth the satisfaction of killing the policeman. You will only invite more trouble on yourselves. American police forces have many cars, and even aircraft. Once they start looking for you, they will find you. So, your only defense against that is to escape notice. Do not speed. Do not break their traffic laws. Do that and you will be safe. Violate those laws, and you will be caught, guns or not. Do you understand this?"

"We understand," Mustafa assured him. "Thank you for your assistance."

"We have maps for all of you. They are good maps, from the American Automobile Association. You all have cover stories, yes?" Juan asked, hoping to get this over as quickly as he could.

Mustafa looked at his friends for additional inquiries, but they were too eager to get on with their business to be sidetracked now. Satisfied, he turned to Juan. "Thank you for your help, my friend."

Friend be damned, Juan thought, but he took the man's hand and walked them around to the front of the building. Bags were quickly transferred from the SUVs to the sedans, and then he watched them pull off, heading back to State Route 185. It was only a few miles to Radium Springs, and the entrance onto I-25 North. The foreigners gathered one last time, to shake hands — and even share a few kisses, Juan was surprised to see. Then they split up into four teams of four men each and entered their rental cars.

Mustafa settled in his car. He set his cigarette packs on the seat next to him, made sure that the mirrors were properly aligned for his eyes, and buckled his seat belt — he'd been told that not buckling was as likely as speeding to get himself pulled over. Above all things, he didn't want to be pulled over by a policeman. Despite the briefing instructions he'd received from Juan, it was a risk he felt no desire to run. Passing by, a cop might not recognize them for what they were, but face-to-face was something else again, and he had no illusions about how Americans thought of Arabs. For that reason, all copies of the Holy Koran were tucked away in the trunk.

It would be a long time, Abdullah would spell him at the wheel, but the first stint would be his. North on I-25 to Albuquerque, then east on I-40 almost all the way to their target. Over three thousand kilometers. He'd have to start thinking in miles now, Mustafa told himself. One point six kilometers to a mile. He'd have to multiply every number by that constant, or just disregard metric altogether as far as his car was concerned. Whatever, he drove north on Route 185 until he saw the leaf-green sign and the arrow for I-25 North. He settled back in his seat, checked traffic as he merged, and increased speed to sixty-five miles per hour, setting the Ford's cruise control right on that number. After that, it was just a matter of steering, and watching all of the anonymous traffic which, like him and his friends, was headed north to Albuquerque…

Jack didn't know why it was hard to go to sleep. It was past eleven in the evening, he'd seen his nightly take of TV, and had his two or three — tonight it had been three — drinks. He should have been sleepy. He was sleepy, as a matter of fact, but sleep wasn't coming. And he didn't know why. Just close your eyes and think happy thoughts, his mom had told him as a little boy. But thinking happy thoughts was the hard part now that he wasn't a kid anymore. He'd entered into a new world that had few enough of those in it. His job was to examine the known and suspected facts concerning people he'd probably never meet, try to decide if they wanted to kill other people he'd never meet, then pass the information on to other people who might or might not try to do something about it. Exactly what they would try to do he did not know, though he had his suspicions… and ugly suspicions they were. Roll over, refluff the pillow, try to find a cool spot in the pillowcase, head back down, get some sleep…

… it wasn't happening. It would, eventually. It always did, seemingly half a second before the clock radio went off.

God damn it! he raged at the ceiling.

He was hunting terrorists. Most of them believed something good — no, something heroic — about themselves as they went about their crimes. To them it wasn't a crime at all. For Muslim terrorists, it was the illusion that they were doing God's work. Except the Holy Koran didn't really say that. It particularly disapproved of killing innocent people, noncombatants. How did that really work? Did Allah greet suicide bombers with a smile, or something else? In Catholicism, personal conscience was sovereign. If you truly believed you were doing the right thing, then God couldn't slam you for it. Was Islam the same in its rules? Besides, since there was only one God, maybe the rules were the same for everybody. Problem was, which set of religious rules came closest to what God really thought? And how the hell did you tell which was which? The Crusades had done some pretty vile things. But that was a classic case of someone giving a religious title for a war that was really about economics and simple ambition. A nobleman just didn't want to appear to be fighting for money— and with God on your side, there was nothing you couldn't do. Swing the sword, and whatever neck you severed was okay. The bishop said so.

Right. The real problem was that religion and political power made a shitty mix, though one easily adopted by the young and enthusiastic, for whom adventure was something that just pulled at your sleeve. His father had talked about that, sometimes, over dinner on the Residence Level of the White House, explaining that one of the things you had to tell young soldier and Marine recruits was that even war had rules, and that breaking them carried stiff penalties. American soldiers learned that pretty easily, Jack Sr. had told his son, because they came from a society in which undisciplined violence was harshly punished, which was better than abstract principle for teaching right and wrong. After a smack or two, you kinda picked up the message.

He sighed, and rolled over again. He was really too young to think about such Great Questions of Life, even though his degree from Georgetown suggested otherwise. Colleges typically did not tell you that ninety percent of your education came after you hung the parchment on the wall. People might ask for a rebate.

It was past closing time at The Campus. Gerry Hendley was in his top-floor office, going over data that he hadn't been able to fit into the normal working day. It was the same for Tom Davis, who had reports from Pete Alexander.

"Trouble?" Hendley asked.

"The twins are still thinking a little too much, Gerry. We should have anticipated it. They're both smart, and they're both people who play within the rules, for the most part, so when they see themselves being trained to violate those rules it worries them. The funny part, Pete says, is that the Marine's the one who's worrying so much. The FBI one is playing along much better."

"I would have expected it to go the other way."

"So did I. And Pete." Davis reached for his ice water. He never drank coffee this late at night. "Anyway, Pete says he's unsure how it's going to play out, but he has no choice other than to continue the training. Gerry, I should have warned you more about this. I figured we'd have this problem. Hell, it's our first time. The sort of people we want — like I said, they're not psychopaths. They will ask questions. They will want to know why. They will have second thoughts. We can't recruit robots, can we?"

"Like when they tried to whack Castro," Hendley observed. He'd read into the classified files on that mad, failed adventure. Bobby Kennedy had ramrodded Operation MONGOOSE. They'd probably decided over drinks, or maybe after some touch football, to play that game. After all, Eisenhower had used CIA for similar purposes during his presidency, so why shouldn't they? Except that a former lieutenant in the Navy who'd lost his command to ramming, and a lawyer who'd never practiced law, did not instinctively know all the things that a career soldier who'd gone to five stars fully understood from the very beginning. And besides, they'd had the power. The Constitution itself had made Jack Kennedy Commander in Chief, and with that sort of power invariably came the urge to make use of it, and so reshape the world into something more amenable to his personal outlook. And so, CIA had been ordered to make Castro go away. But CIA had never had an assassination department, and had never trained people to perform such missions. And so, the Agency had gone to the Mafia, whose commission members had little reason to admire Fidel Castro — who had shut down what had been about to become their most profitable venture ever. It'd been so sure a thing that some of the organized-crime big shots had invested their own, personal, money in the Havana casinos, only to have them closed down by the communist dictator.

And did not the Mafia know how to kill people?

Well, in fact, no, they had never been very efficient at it — especially at killing people able to fight back — Hollywood movies to the contrary. And even so, the government of the United States of America had tried to use them as contractors for the assassination of a foreign chief of state — because CIA didn't know how to make such a thing happen. It was, in retrospect, somewhat ludicrous. Somewhat? Gerry Hendley asked himself. It had come within an inch of exposure as a government-engineered train wreck. Enough to force President Gerry Ford into drafting his executive order that made such action illegal, and that order had lasted until President Ryan had decided to take out the religious dictator of Iran with two smart bombs. Remarkably, the time and circumstances had disabled the news media from commenting on the killing. It had been done, after all, by the United States Air Force, with properly marked — albeit stealthy — bomber aircraft in a time of an undeclared but very real war in which weapons of mass destruction had been used against American citizens. Those factors had combined to make the entire operation not only legitimate but laudable, as ratified by the American people at the following election. Only George Washington had garnered a larger plurality at the polls, a fact which still made the senior Jack Ryan uneasy. But Jack had known the import of the killing of Mahmoud Haji Daryaei, and so, before leaving office, had talked Gerry into establishing The Campus.

But Jack didn't tell me how hard this would be, Hendley reminded himself. That was how Jack Ryan had always operated: Pick good people, give them a mission and the tools to accomplish it, then let them do it with minimal guidance from on high. It was what had made him a good boss, and a pretty good president, Gerry thought. But it didn't make life much easier on his subordinates. Why the hell had he taken the assignment? Hendley asked himself. But then came a smile. How would Jack react when he found out his own son was part of The Campus? Would he see the humor of it?

Probably not.

"So, Pete says just to play it out?"

"What else can he say?" Davis asked in reply.

"Tom, ever wish you were back on your dad's farm in Nebraska?"

"It's awful hard work, and kind of dull out there." And there was no way you were going to keep Davis down on the farm after he'd been a CIA field officer. He might be a pretty good bond trader now in his "white" life, but Davis was no more white in his true avocation than he was in his skin color. He liked the action in the "black" world too much.

"What do you think of the Fort Meade stuff?"

"My gut tells me we're due for something. We've stung them. They'll want to sting us back."

"You think they can recover? Haven't our troops in Afghanistan bit into them pretty hard?"

"Gerry, some people are too dumb, or too dedicated, to notice being hurt. Religion is a powerful motivator. And even if their shooters are too dumb to know the import of what they're doing—"

"— they're smart enough to carry out missions," Hendley agreed.

"And isn't that why we're here?" Davis asked.