Free Tom Clancy's Act of Valor by Dick Couch, George Galdorisi Page B

and the headache that this meddlesome woman and her CIA handler had caused him, he added, “And after she talks, you may do what you want with her.”
    “As you say,
Patron
,” Tommy replied with a twisted grin.
    Christo rung off and exhaled deeply, suspecting it would take a while to get what was needed from Morales. He sensed that she might be a tough one. The women, he mused. They were always the tough ones. He paused a moment to reflect on the passion and stubbornness of the ideologically committed. Fools, he concluded—an irritant but nothing more. He sighed and stared passively out the window of the Town Car into the bland Brovary landscape.
    At the compound, Tommy cupped his hand and slammed it against Morales’s left ear.
    “Diga me,”
Tommy shouted. He was close enough to spray spittle across her cheek.
    “Diga me,”
he shouted even louder and aimed another blow at the near-lifeless Morales.
    *  *  *
     
    High above the dense, emerald-colored jungle canopy, a King Air 350 twin-engine turboprop flew at fifteen thousand feet. It was stacked with the finest high-end monitoring equipment U.S. taxpayers could buy, all focused on the compound directly below.
    The American Surveillance Technical Officer—or STO—monitoring the plane’s equipment had his headphones on as he huddled against a rack of electronic listening gear. He put his hands over the headphone ear cups to seal out the whine of the aircraft’s twin PT6A-60A engines. The STO nodded his head slowly as he listened.
    Finally satisfied that he had heard all he needed to hear, his hands flashed to his laptop and raced over the keys. After no more than a few minutes of typing, he hit the SEND key. His message, and a copy of the intercept, was encrypted and uploaded to an orbiting communications satellite.

FOUR
    Prior to 9/11 and the ramped-up tempo of operations that evolved in Iraq and Afghanistan, the work of U.S. Special Operations Command and their ground-combat components revolved around proficiency training here at home and joint training exercises with allies overseas. Periodically, they were called into action for short engagements like the incursions into Panama, Grenada, and Somalia. Even the Gulf War was short-lived. The pre-9/11 life of a special operator was one of continuous training and perhaps, if he were lucky, an isolated mission tasking. Things began to get interesting during the 1990s as terrorists were tracked and chased, but SEALs, Green Berets, and Rangers, like most of the conventional forces, remained a garrison force and a force in waiting.
    To keep forces poised in a forward-deployed position, the United States had gone to great lengths and expense to maintain bases around the world. Yet the United States had few such bases in Central and South America. One reason for this was that, aside from the issue of drugs, there was no threat from this region. The other was that the Central and South America FT StdAfghanisns did not particularly want
Norte Americano
bases on their soil. So U.S. force projection into this area was done offshore from units of the fleet or from hastily constructed, temporary land bases, usually at some leased complex near some little-used outlying airstrip. This was where the Bandito squad found themselves shortly after their departure from Coronado.
    They occupied a portion of a disused industrial park next to an abandoned airstrip, surrounded by dense tropical vegetation. Occasionally, some unidentified aircraft set down and quickly took off at the nearby strip, usually at night, but there were no aviation services. Their own C-130J delivered them at night and quickly departed. A single dirt road serviced the airstrip. They occupied two warehouses that had cracked concrete floors and leaky roofs but were nestled inside a surprisingly secure chain-link enclosure. Periodically, they were visited by two dated tanker trucks that alternately delivered water and diesel fuel. All business was done in cash,