assault. They are designed to protect against nuclear blast, not a squad of engineer-soldiers. You can be sure of that.”
Hope you’re right on that one, fella, Chavez didn’t say aloud.
“You seem knowledgeable on this subject, Yuriy.” “Vanya, this mission is one Spetsnaz has practiced more than once. We Russians have thought from time to time about taking these missiles—how you say? Take them out of play, yes?”
“Not a bad idea at all, Yuriy. Not my kind of weapons,” Clark said. He really did prefer to do his killing close enough to see the bastard’s face. Old habits died hard, and a telescopic sight was just as good as a knife in that respect. Much better. A rifle bullet didn’t make people flop around and make noise the way a knife across the throat did. But death was supposed to be administered one at a time, not whole cities at once. It just wasn’t tidy or selective enough.
Chavez looked at his Team-2 troopers. They didn’t look overtly tense, but good soldiers did their best to hide such feelings. Of their number, only Ettore Falcone wasn’t a career soldier, but instead a cop from the Italian Carabinieri, which was about halfway between military and police. Chavez went over to see him.
“How you doing, BIG BiRD?” Ding asked.
“It is tense, this mission, no?” Falcone replied.
“It might be. You never really know until you get there.”
The Italian shrugged. “As with raids on mafiosi, sometimes you kick the door and there is nothing but men drinking wine and playing cards. Sometimes they have machinapistoli, but you must kick the door to find out.”
“You do a lot of those?”
“Eight,” Falcone replied. “I am usually the first one through the door because I am usually the best shot. But we have good men on the team there, and we have good men on the team here. It should go well, Domingo. I am tense, yes, but I will be all right. You will see,” BIG BiRD ended. Chavez clapped him on the shoulder and went off to see Sergeant-Major Price.
“Hey, Eddie.”
“Do we have a better idea for the mission yet?”
“Getting there. Looks like mainly a job for Paddy, blowing things up.”
“Connolly’s the best explosives man I’ve ever seen,” Price observed. “But don’t tell him that. His head’s swollen enough already.”
“What about Falcone?”
“Ettore?” Price shook his head. “I will be very surprised if he puts a foot wrong. He’s a very good man, Ding, bloody machine—a robot with a pistol. That sort of confidence rarely goes bad. Things are too automatic for him.”
“Okay, well, we’ve picked our target. It the north- and east-most silo. Looks like it’s on fairly flat ground, two four-inch pipes running to it. Paddy’ll blow those, and then try to find a way to pop the cover off the silo or otherwise find an access door—there’s one on the overhead. Then get inside, toss a grenade to break the missile, and we get the hell out of Dodge City.”
“Usual division of the squad?” Price asked. It had to be, but there was no harm in making sure.
Chavez nodded. “You take Paddy, Louis, Hank, and Dieter, and your team handles the actual destruction of the missile. I take the rest to do security and overwatch.” Price nodded as Paddy Connolly came over.
“Are we getting chemical gear?”
“What?” Chavez asked.
“Ding, if we’re going to be playing with bloody liquid-fueled missiles, we need chemical-warfare gear. The fuels for these things—you don’t want to breathe the vapor, trust me. Red-fuming nitric acid, nitrogen tetroxide, hydrazine, that sort of thing. Those are bloody corrosive chemicals they use to power rockets, not like a pint of bitter at the Green Dragon, I promise you. And if the missiles are fueled and we blow them, well, you don’t want to be close, and you definitely don’t want to be downwind. The gas cloud will be bloody lethal, like what you chaps use in America to execute murderers, but rather less pleasant.”
“I’ll talk to John about that.” Chavez made his way back forward.
Oh, shit,” Ed Foley observed when he took the call. ”Okay, John, I’ll get hold of the Army on that one. How long ’til you’re there?”
“Hour and a half to the airfield.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, sure, Ed, never been better.”
Foley was struck by the tone. Clark had been CIA’s official iceman for close to twenty years. He’d gone out on all manner of field operations without so much as a blink. But being over fifty—had it changed him, or did he just have