They Came to Kill

3

In the walnut-paneled luxury of an office in Washington, D.C., a senior officer of the Central Intelligence Agency discussed the assassination of a field agent in Beirut. He spoke with a State Department officer of corresponding rank. Both men, career civil servants, wore the uniform of the bureaucrat: three-piece suit, tie, gold cuff links. Their uniforms differed only in color. One man's suit was gray, the other's blue. The State Department paper Viking swiveled in his desk chair, considering the information his counterpart in the Agency was relaying to him.

"A standard surveillance operation. Absolutely no expectation of danger — other than the threat of random violence in that awful place, of course. Our man — his name was Clayton — and his assistants maintained strict procedural discipline. No one outside of the field unit knew of the assignment. Let me emphasize that — no one. If there was a breach of security, it came from someone within the group."

The State Department mandarin interrupted with a question. "Is there any chance your man simply drove into a firefight between rival militias? That he was an innocent bystander, in a sense?"

"Clayton had a good many years of experience in his work and he wouldn't have blundered into some crossfire between two ragtag gangs. The initial report indicates a carefully plotted ambush. The two cars received intense automatic-weapons fire and several hits from rocket-propelled grenades."

"Any indication of who supplied the weapons?"

"What?"

"The machine guns, the rockets. Who sponsored this? The Soviets? The Syrians? Or — perhaps this is an utterly Machiavellian thought — is it possible our Israeli friends decided to bloody our nose? With the intent of course of putting responsibility and therefore the blame on the Soviets and their allies?"

"We haven't had a chance to analyze the intent."

"When will you have the evidence from the scene? The forensic evidence?"

"We may never have that evidence. We simply do not have the manpower to send an investigative unit. And I don't know if the spent casings and bullets and whatever other evidence we could find would help us. Every weapon from every nation in the world shows up in Beirut. I think this situation requires interrogation of the personnel involved. To be exact, the Marine who survived."

"A Marine? Does the Agency employ servicemen now?"

"A Marine Corps captain. At least he was. He's now on detached duty with us. He served in the Multinational Peacekeeping Force. Before his Beirut duty, he'd studied Arabic. He became indispensible for our contacts with the fundamentalist Muslim groups, the various Shia gangs."

"What is his ethnic background?"

"Texas."

"Would I know his family? Are they prominent in society?"

The Agency officer laughed. "I doubt it! He's just a shack-town kid who made good in the Marine Corps."

"He's a negro? Is that why he relates to those Mohammedans?"

"No, he's white..."

"Strange."

"He had two years of college on his own before he enlisted. Then he worked hard and scored well on all tests and finally got into officer's training school through the backdoor. Learned passable Arabic somehow. And French. He proved himself in a difficult situation we had in California. Then he volunteered for the Beirut duty. He proved to be a remarkably effective liaison officer."

"How did he survive the attack?"

"He was in the third car. Clayton and the others were in the first and second. Powell saw the ambush and simply drove away."

"Leaving the others to die?"

"Exactly. When he returns to Washington, we'll question him very closely."

"What do you know about his links to Muslim gangs?"

"I know that he's our best man in Beirut, so far as the Shits go — as I call the Shutes. In fact, dismissing him will cost you the single most productive source of street-level information the State Department has in West Beirut. He knows every fundamentalist chieftain and every officer on the staffs of the raghead militias, which proved invaluable during the stationing of the Marine Beirut Force..."

"But which is of negligible value now." The State Department officer looked at his watch. "We really don't want anything to do with those groups. Not on a diplomatic level. For counterterrorism, yes. But his reports don't focus on that, if my memory is correct."

"No, his reports certainly don't. He almost seems to be pleading their case sometimes. Telling us of neocolonialist privileges and discrimination and institutionalized inequality..."

"As if we don't know the realities of demographics and politics there. Should we continue this over lunch?"

"Why? Until we've interrogated him, we'll know nothing more."

"A very unfortunate turn of events."

"True. Mr. Clayton had a promising future with the Agency. We'll miss the loss of his talents. But we will not miss the questionable talents — and the lectures on democracy — of Captain Powell."