His dad was a sergeant in the Allgemeine-SSworked at Sobiborcame over in forty-six, married a local girl and went into the smuggling business, died before anyone caught up with him. Breeding tells, Larson said. Carlos is a real prick, likes his women with bruises on them. His colleagues arent all that wild about him, but hes good at what he does.

Christmas, Mr. Clark observed. The radio made the next sound, five minutes later.

Bravo Whiskey, this is Zulu X-Ray, over.

Zulu X-Ray, this is Bravo Whiskey. I read you five-by-five. Over, Larson answered at once. His radio was the sort used by forward air controllers, encrypted UHF.

Status report, over.

We are in place. Mission is go. Say again, mission is go.

Roger, copy, we are go-mission. We are ten minutes out. Start the music.

Larson turned to Clark. Light her up.

The GLD was already powered up. Mr. Clark flipped the switch from standby to active. The GLD was more fully known as the Ground Laser Designator. Designed for use by soldiers on the battlefield, it projected a focused infrared (hence invisible) laser beam through a complex but rugged series of lenses. Bore-sighted with the laser system was a separate infrared sensor that told the operator where he was aimingessentially a telescopic sight. Great Feet had a fiberglass cargo box over its load area, and Clark trained the crosshairs on one of its small windows, using the fine-adjustment knobs on the tripod with some delicacy. The laser spot appeared as desired, but then he rethought his aiming point and took advantage of the fact that they were slightly higher than their target, respotting his aim on the center of the vehicles roof. Finally he turned on the videotape recorder that took its feed from the GLD. The big boys in D.C. wanted to count coup on this one.

Okay, he said quietly. The target is lit.

The music is playing, and it sounds just fine, Larson said over the radio.

Cortez was driving up the hill, having already passed a security checkpoint manned by two people drinking beer, he noted disgustedly. The road was about on a par with what hed grown up with in Cuba, and the going was slow. Theyd still blame him for being late, of course.

It was too easy, Jensen thought as he heard the reply. Tooling along at thirty thousand feet, clear night, no flak or missiles to evade. Even a contractors validation test wasnt this easy.

I got it, the B/N noted, staring down at his own scope. You can see a very, very long way at thirty thousand feet on a clear night, especially with a multimillion-dollar system doing the looking. Underneath the Intruder, the Target Recognition and Attack Multisensor pod noted the laser dot that was still sixty miles away. It was a modulated beam, of course, and its carrier signal was known to the TRAM. They now had positive identification of the target.

Zulu X-Ray confirms music sounds just fine, Jensen said over the radio. Over intercom: Next step.

On the port inboard weapon station, the bombs seeker head was powered up. It immediately noted the laser dot as well. Inside the aircraft, a computer was keeping track of the aircrafts position, altitude, course, and speed, and the bombardier-navigator programmed in the position of the target to an accuracy of two hundred meters. He could have dialed it in even closer, of course, but didnt need to. The bomb release would be completely automatic, and at this altitude the laser basket into which the bomb had to be dropped was miles wide. The computer took note of all these facts and decided to make an optimum drop, right in the most favorable portion of the basket.

Clarks eyes were now fixed to the GLD. He was perched on his elbows, and no part of his body was touching the instrument except for his eyebrow on the rubber cup that protected the eyepiece.

Any second now, the B/N said.

Jensen kept the Intruder straight and level, heading straight down the electronic path defined by various computer systems aboard. The entire exercise was now out of human hands. On the ejector rack, a signal was received from the computer. Several shotgun shellsthats precisely what was usedfired, driving down the ejector feet onto small steel plates on the upper side of the bombcase. The bomb separated cleanly from the aircraft.

The aircraft jerked upward a bit at the loss of just over eleven hundred pounds of weight.

Breakaway, breakaway, Jensen reported.

There, finally. Cortez saw the wall. His carhed have to buy a jeep if he were going to come here very oftenwas still losing its grip on the gravel, but hed be through the gate in a moment, and if he remembered right, the road inside the perimeter was paved decentlyprobably leftover materials from the helipad, he thought.

On the way, Larson told Clark.

The bomb was still traveling at five hundred knots. Once clear of the aircraft, gravity took over, arcing it down toward the ground. It actually accelerated somewhat in the rarefied air as the seeker head moved fractionally to correct for wind drift. The seeker head was made of fiberglass and looked like a round-nose bullet with some small fins attached. When the laser dot on which it tracked moved out of the center of its field of view, the entire seeker body moved itself and the plastic tail fins in the appropriate direction to bring the dot back where it belonged. It had to fall exactly twenty-two thousand feet, and the microchip brain in the guidance package was trying to hit the target exactly. It had plenty of time to correct for mistakes.

Clark didnt know what to expect, exactly. It had been too long a time since hed called air strikes in, and hed forgotten some of the detailswhen you had to call in air support, you generally didnt have time to notice the small stuff. He found himself wondering if thered be the whistlesomething he never remembered from his war service. He kept his eye on the target, still careful not to touch the GLD lest he screw things up. There were several men standing close to the truck. One lit a cigarette, and it appeared that several were talking about something or other. On the whole, it seemed like this was taking an awfully long time. When it happened, there was not the least warning. Not a whistle, not anything at all.

Cortez felt his front wheels bump upward as they got on solid pavement.

The GBU-15 laser-guided bomb had a guaranteed accuracy of under three meters, but that was under combat conditions, and this was a far easier test of the system. It landed within inches of its target point, striking the top of the truck. Unlike the first test shot, this bomb was impact-fused. Two detonators, one in the nose and one in the tail, were triggered by a computer chip within a microsecond of the instant when the seeker head struck the fiberglass top of the truck. There were mechanical backups to the electronic triggers. Neither proved necessary, but even explosives take time, and the bomb fell an additional thirty inches while the detonation process got underway. The bombcase had barely penetrated the cargo cover when the bomb filler was ignited by both detonators. Things happened more quickly now. The explosive filler was Octol, a very expensive chemical explosive also used to trigger nuclear weapons, with a detonation rate of over eight thousand meters per second. The combustible bombcase vaporized in a few microseconds. Then expanding gas from the explosion hurled fragments of the truck body in all directionsexcept upimmediately behind which was the rock-hard shock wave. Both the fragments and the shock wave struck the concrete-block walls of the house in well under a thousandth of a second. The effects were predictable. The wall disintegrated, transformed into millions of tiny fragments traveling at bullet speed, with the remainder of the shock wave still behind to attack other parts of the house. The human nervous system simply doesnt work quickly enough for such events, and the people in the conference room never had the first hint that their deaths were underway.

The low-light sensor on the GLD went white (with a touch of green). Clark cringed on instinct and looked away from the eyepiece to see an even whiter flash in the target area. They were too far away to hear the noise at once. It wasnt often that you could see sound, but large bombs make that possible. The compressed air of the shock wave was a ghostly white wall that expanded radially from where the truck had been, at a speed over a thousand feet per second. It took about twelve seconds for the noise to reach Clark and Larson. Everyone who had been in the conference room was dead by that time, of course, and the crump of the pressure wave sounded like the outraged cry of lost souls.

Christ, Larson said, awed by the event.

Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch? Clark asked. It was all he could do not to laugh. That was a first. Hed killed his share of enemies, and never taken joy from it. But the nature of the target combined with the method of the attack made the whole thing seem like a glorious prank. Son of a BITCH! The sober pause followed a moment later. His prank had just ended the lives of over twenty people, only four of whom were listed targets, and that was no joke. The urge to laugh died. He was a professional, not a psychopath.

Cortez had been less than two hundred meters from the explosion, but being downhill from it saved his life since most of the fragments sailed well over his head. The blast wave was bad enough, hurling his windshield backward into his face, where it fractured but didnt shatter, held together by the polymer filler of the safety-glass sandwich. His car was flipped on its back, but he managed to crawl free even before his mind had decided what his eyes had just witnessed. It was fully six seconds before the word explosion occurred to him. At that his reactions were far more rapid than that of the security guards, half of whom were dead or dying in any case. His first considered action was to draw his pistol and advance toward the house.

Except that there wasnt a house there anymore. He was too deafened to hear the screams of the injured. Several guards wandered aimlessly about with their guns held readyfor what, they didnt know. The ones from the far corner of the perimeter wall were the least affected. The body of the house had absorbed most of the blast, protecting them from everything but the projectiles, which had been quite lethal enough.

Bravo Whiskey, this is Zulu X-Ray requesting BDA, over. BDA was bomb-damage assessment. Larson keyed his microphone one last time.

I evaluate CEP as zero, I repeat, zero, with high-order detonation. Score this one-four-point-oh. Over.

Roger that. Out. Jensen switched his radio off again. You know, he said over the intercom, I can remember back when I was a lieutenant I made a Med cruise on Kennedy and us officers were afraid to go into some spaces because the troops were fuckin around with drugs.

Yeah, the bombardier/navigator answered. Fuckin drugs. Dont worry, skipper. I aint likely to have a conscience attack. Hey, the White House says its okay, that means that its really okay.

Yep. Jensen lapsed back into silence. Hed proceed on his current heading until he was out of El Dorados radar coverage, then turn southwest for the Ranger. It really was a pretty night. He wondered how the air-defense exercise was going. . . .

Cortez had little experience with explosions, and the vagaries of such events were new to him. For example, the fountain in front of the house was still running. The electrical power cables to the casa were buried and unharmed, and the breaker box inside hadnt been totally destroyed. He lowered his face into the water to clear it. When he came back up, he felt almost normal except for the ache in his head.

There had been a dozen or so vehicles inside the wall when the explosion happened. About half of them were shredded, and their gas tanks had ruptured, illuminating the area with isolated fires. Untiveros new helicopter was a smashed wreck against the fractured wall. There were other people rushing about. Cortez stood still and started thinking.

He remembered seeing a truck, one with huge wheels, parked right next to . . . He walked over that way. Though the entire three-hectare area around the house was littered with rubble, here it was clear, he saw as he approached. Then he saw the crater, fully two meters deep and six meters wide.

Car bomb.

A big one. Perhaps a thousand kilos, he thought, looking away from the hole while his brain went to work.

I think thats all we really need to see, Clark observed. He made a last look through the eyepiece of the GLD and switched it off. Repacking took less than three minutes.

Who do you suppose that is? Larson asked while he put his backpack on. He handed the Noctron over to Clark.

Must be the guy who showed up late in the BMW. Suppose hes important or something?

Dont know. Maybe next time.

Right. Clark led the way down the hill.

It was the Americans, of course. CIA, without doubt. Theyd made some financial arrangements and somehow managed to place a ton of explosives in the back of that monstrous truck. Cortez admired the touch. It was Fernndezs truckhed heard about it but never seen it. Now I never will, he thought. Fernndez had loved his new truck and had kept it parked right in front of . . . That had to be it. The Americans had gotten lucky. Okay, he thought, how did they do it? They wouldnt have gotten their own hands involved, of course. So they must have arranged for someone else . . . who? Somebodyno, more than one, at least four or five from M-19 or FARC . . . ? Again, that made sense. Might it have been indirect? Have the Cubans or KGB arrange it. With all the changes between East and West, might CIA have managed to get such cooperation? Unlikely, Flix thought, but possible. A direct attack on high government officials such as the Cartel had executed was the sort of thing to generate the most unlikely of bedfellows.

Was the bomb placement here an accident? Might the Americans have learned of the meeting?

There were voices from inside the rubble pile that had once been a castle. Security people were nosing around, and Cortez joined them. Untiveros family had been here. His wife and two children, and a staff of eight or more people. Probably treated them like serfs, Cortez thought. The Cartel chieftains all did. Perhaps hed offended one greatlygone after a daughter, maybe. They all did that. Droit du seigneur. A French term, but one which the chieftains understood. The fools, Cortez told himself. Was there no perversion beneath them?

Security guards were already scrambling through the rubble. It was amazing that anyone could be alive in there. His hearing was coming back now. He caught the shrill screams of some poor bastard. He wondered what the body count would be. Perhaps. Yes. He turned and walked back to his overturned BMW. It was leaking gasoline out the filler cap, but Cortez reached in and got his cellular phone. He walked twenty meters from the car before switching it on.

Jefe, this is Cortez. There has been an explosion here.

It was ironic, Ritter thought, that his first notification of the missions success should come from another CAPER intercept. The really good news, the NSA guys reported, was that they now had a voiceprint on Cortez. That greatly improved their chances of locating him. It was better than nothing, the DDO thought as his visitor arrived for the second time today.

We missed Cortez, he told Admiral Cutter. But we got dAlejandro, Fernndez, Wagner, and Untiveros, plus the usual collateral damage.

What do you mean?

Ritter looked again at the satellite photo of the house. Hed have to get a new one to quantify the damage. I mean there were a bunch of security guards around, and we probably got a bunch of them. Unfortunately there was also Untiveross familywife, a couple of kids, and various domestic servants.

Cutter snapped erect in his chair. You didnt tell me anything about that! This was supposed to be a surgical strike.

Ritter looked up in considerable annoyance. Well, for Christs sake, Jimmy! What the hell do you expect? You are still a naval officer, arent you? Didnt anybody ever tell you that there are always extraneous people standing around? We used a bomb, remember? You dont do surgery with bombs, despite what all the experts say. Grow up! Ritter himself took no pleasure from the extraneous deaths, but it was a cost of doing businessas the Cartels own members well understood.

But I told the President The President told me that I had a hunting license, and no bag limit. This is my op to run, remember?

It wasnt supposed to be this way! What if the papers get hold of it? This is cold-blooded murder!

As opposed to taking out the druggies and their shooters? Thats murder, too, isnt it? Or it would be, if the President hadnt said that the gloves were off. You said its a war. The President told us to treat it as a war. Okay, we are. Im sorry there were extraneous people around, but, damn it, there always are. If there were a way to bag these jokers without hurting innocent people, wed use itbut there isnt. To say that Ritter was amazed didnt begin to explain matters. This guy was supposed to be a professional military officer. The taking of human life was part of his job description. Of course, Ritter told himself, Cutterd spent most of his career driving a desk in the Pentagonhe probably hadnt seen much blood since he learned how to shave. A pussycat hiding in tigers stripes. No, Ritter corrected himself. Just a pussy. Thirty years in uniform and hed allowed himself to forget that real weapons killed people somewhat less precisely than in the movies. Some professional officer. And he was advising the President on issues of national security. Great.

Tell you what, Admiral. If you dont tell the newsies, neither will I. Heres the intercept. Cortez says it was a car bomb. Clark must have rigged it just the way we hoped.

But what if the local police do an investigation?

First of all, we dont know if the local cops will even be allowed there. Second, what makes you think they have the resources to figure it out? I worked pretty hard setting this up to look like a car-bombing, and it looks like Cortez got faked out. Third, what makes you think that the local copsll give a flying fuck one way or another?

But the media!

Youve got media on the brain. Youre the one whos been arguing for turning us loose on these characters. So now youre changing your mind? Its a little late for that, Ritter said disgustedly. This was the best op his Directorate had run in years, and the guy whose idea it had been was now wetting his pants.

Admiral Cutter wasnt paying enough attention to Ritters invective to be angry. Hed promised the President a surgical removal of the people who had killed Jacobs and the rest. He hadnt bargained for the deaths of innocent people. More importantly, neither had WRANGLER.

Chavez was too far south to have heard the explosion. The squad was staked out on another processing site. Evidently the sites were set up in relays. As he watched, two men were erecting the portable bathtub under the supervision of several armed men, and he could hear the grunts and gripes of others who were climbing up the mountainside. Four peasants appeared, their backpacks containing jars of acid. They were accompanied by two more riflemen.

Probably the word hadnt gotten out yet, Ding thought. Hed been certain that what the squad had done the other night would discourage people from supplementing their income this way. The sergeant didnt consider the possibility that they had to run such risks to feed their families.

Ten minutes later the third relay of six brought the coca leaves, and five more armed men. The laborers all had collapsible canvas buckets. They went off to a nearby stream for water. The boss guard ordered two of his people to walk into the woods to stand sentry, and thats where things went wrong. One of them walked straight toward the assault element, fifty meters away.

Uh-oh, Vega observed quietly.

Chavez tapped four dashes on his radio button, the danger signal.

I see it, the captain replied with two dashes. Then three dashes. Get ready.

Oso got his machine gun up and flipped off the safety.

Maybe theyll drop him quietly, Chavez hoped.

The guys with the buckets were just coming back when Chavez heard a scream over to his left. The riflemen below him reacted at once. Vega started firing then.

The sudden shooting from another direction confused the guards, but they reacted as people with automatic weapons invariably reacted to surprisethey started shooting in all directions.

Shit! Ingeles snarled, and fired his grenade into the objective. It landed among the jars and exploded, showering everyone in the area with sulfuric acid. Tracers flew everywhere, and people dropped, but it was too confused, too unplanned for the soldiers to keep track of what was happening. The shooting stopped in a few seconds. Everyone in view was down. The assault group appeared soon thereafter, and Chavez ran down to join them. He counted bodies and came up three short.

Guerra, Chavez, find em! Captain Ramirez ordered. He didnt have to say Kill em!

But they didnt. Guerra stumbled across one and killed him on the spot. Chavez came up dry, neither seeing nor hearing anything. He found the stream and one bucket, three hundred meters from the objective. If theyd been right there when the shooting started, that meant they had four or five minutes head start in the country theyd grown up in. Both soldiers spent half an hour rushing and stopping, looking and listening, but two men were away clean.

When they got back to the objective they learned that this was the good news. One of their men was dead. Rocha, one of their riflemen, had taken a burst full in the chest from one of the guards and died instantly. The squad was very quiet.

Jackson was also in an angry mood. The aggressor force had beaten him. Rangers fighters hadnt gotten it right. His tactical scheme had come apart when one of the squadrons turned the wrong way, and what should have been a masterful trap had turned into a clear avenue for the Russians to blaze in and get close enough to the carrier to launch missiles. That was embarrassing, if not completely unexpected. New ideas took time to work out, and maybe he had to rethink some of his arrangements. Just because it had all worked on the computer simulation didnt mean that the plan was perfect, Jackson reminded himself. He continued to stare at the radar screen, trying to remember the patterns and how they had moved. While he watched, a single blip reappeared on the screen, heading southwest toward the carrier. He wondered who that was as the Hawkeye prepared for landing.

The E-2C made a perfect trap, catching the number-three wire and rolling forward to clear the deck for the next aircraft. Robby dismounted in time to see the next one land. It was an Intruder, the same one hed noticed before boarding the Hawkeye a few hours earlier. The squadron commanders personal bird, he noticed. The one that had flown toward the beach. But that wasnt important. Commander Jackson immediately headed for the CAGs office to start the debrief.

Commander Jensen also taxied clear of the landing area. The Intruders wings folded up to minimize its deck space as it took its parking place forward. By the time he and his B/N dismounted, his plane captain was there waiting for them. Hed already pulled the videotape from its compartment in the nose instrument bay. This he handed to the skippersquadron commanders are given that titlebefore leading them into the island and safety. The tech-rep was there to meet them, and Jensen handed the tape over to him.

Four-oh, the man said, the pilot reported. Jensen just kept walking.

The tech-rep carried the tape cassette to his cabin, where he put it in a metal container with a lock. He sealed it further with multicolored tape and affixed a Top Secret label to both sides. It was then placed in yet another shipping box, which the man carried to a compartment on the O-3 level. There was a COD flight scheduled out in thirty minutes. The box would go on it in a couriers pocket and get flown to Panama, where an Agency field officer would take custody of it and fly to Andrews Air Force Base for final delivery to Langley.

Fallout INTELLIGENCE SERVICES PRIDE themselves on getting information from Point A to Points B, C, D, and so forth with great speed. In the case of highly sensitive information, or data that can be gathered only by covert means, they are highly effective. But for data that is open for all the world to see, they generally fall well short of the commercial news media, hence the fascination of the American intelligence communityand probably many otherswith Ted Turners Cable News Network.

As a result, Ryan was not overly surprised to see that his first notice of the explosion south of Medelln was captioned as having been copied from CNN and other news services. It was breakfast time in Mons. His quarters were in the American VIP section of the NATO complex and had access to CNNs satellite service. He switched the set on halfway through his first cup of coffee to see a TV shot obviously taken from a helicopter with a low-light rig. The caption underneath said, MEDELLN, COLOMBIA.

Lord, Jack breathed, setting his cup down. The chopper didnt get very close, probably worried about being shot at by the people milling about on the ground, but it didnt need to be all that clear. What had been a massive house was now a disordered array of rubble set next to a hole in the ground. The ground signature was unmistakable. Ryan had said car bomb to himself even before the voice-over of the reporter gave the same evaluation. That meant the Agency wasnt involved, Jack was sure. Car bombs were not the American way. Americans believed in single aimed bullets. Precision firepower was an American invention.

His feelings changed on reflection, however. First, the Agency had to have the Cartel leadership under some sort of surveillance by now, and surveillance was something that CIA was exceedingly good at. Second, if a surveillance operation was underway, he ought to have heard of the explosion through Agency channels, not as a copy of a news report. Something did not compute.

What was it Sir Basil had said? Our response would surely be appropriate. And what does that mean? The intelligence game had become rather civilized over the past decade. In the 1950s, toppling governments had been a standard exercise in the furtherance of national policy. Assassinations had been a rare but real alternative to more complex exercises of diplomatic muscle. In the case of CIA, the Bay of Pigs fiasco and bad press over some operations in Vietnamwhich had been a war after all, and wars were violent enterprises at besthad largely terminated such things for everyone. It was odd but true. Even the KGB rarely involved itself in wet work any longera Russian phrase from the thirties, denoting the fact that blood made ones hands wetinstead leaving it to surrogates like the Bulgarians, or more commonly to terrorist groups who performed such irregular services as a quid pro quo for arms and training assistance. And remarkably enough, that, too, was dying out. The funny part was that Ryan believed such vigorous action was occasionally necessaryand likely to become all the more so now that the world was turning away from open warfare and drifting to a twilight contest of state-sponsored terrorism and low-intensity conflict. Special-operations forces offered a real and semicivilized alternative to the more organized and destructive forms of violence associated with conventional armed forces. If war is nothing more or less than sanctioned murder on an industrial scale, then was it not more humane to apply violence in a much more focused and discrete way?

That was an ethical question that didnt need contemplation over breakfast.

But what was right and what was wrong at this level? Ryan asked himself. It was accepted in law, ethics, and religion that a soldier who killed in war was not a criminal. That only begged the question: What is war? A generation earlier that question had been an easy one. Nation-states would assemble their armies and navies and send them off to do battle over some damnedfool issue or otherafterward it would usually appear that there had been a peaceful alternativeand that was morally acceptable. But war itself was changing, wasnt it? And who decided what war was? Nation-states. So, could a nation-state determine what its vital interests were and act accordingly? How did terrorism enter into the equation? Years earlier, when hed been a target himself, Ryan had determined that terrorism could be seen as the modern manifestation of piracy, whose practitioners had always been seen as the common enemies of mankind. So, historically, there was a not-quite-war situation in which military forces could be used directly.

And where did that put international drug traffickers? Was it a civil crime, to be dealt with as such? What if the traffickers could subvert a nation to their own commercial will? Did that nation then become mankinds common enemy, like the Barbary Pirates of old?

Damn, Ryan observed. He didnt know what the law said. An historian by training, his degrees didnt help. The only previous experience with such trafficking had been at the hands of a powerful nation-state, fighting a real war to enforce its right to sell opium to people whose government objectedbut who had lost the war and with it the right to protect its own citizens against illegal drug use.

That was a troubling precedent, wasnt it?

Jacks education compelled him to look for justification. He was a man who believed that Right and Wrong really existed as discrete and identifiable values, but since law books didnt always have the answers, he sometimes had to find his answers elsewhere. As a parent, he regarded drug dealers with loathing. Who could guarantee that his own children might not someday be tempted to use the goddamned stuff? Did he not have a duty to protect his own children? As a representative of his countrys intelligence community, what about extending that protective duty to all his nations children? And what if the enemy started challenging his country directly? Did that change the rules? In the case of terrorism, he had already reached that answer: Challenge a nation-state in that way, and you run a major risk. Nation-states, like the United States, had capabilities that are almost impossible to comprehend. They had people in uniform who did nothing but practice the fine art of visiting death on their fellowman. They had the ability to deliver fearsome tools of that art. Everything from drilling a bullet into one particular mans chest from a thousand yards away to putting a two-thousand-pound smart-bomb right through somebodys bedroom window. . . .

Christ.

There was a knock at his door. Ryan found one of Sir Basils aides standing there. He handed over an envelope and left.

When you get home, do tell Bob that the job was nicely done. Bas.