Jack Ryan 8 - Debt of Honor Read Online Free PDF

doing in college?” Ding murmured as the next collection of dust plumes grew closer.
    Clark
    
     didn't respond. It was distantly unseemly that his daughter found his field partner exotic and interesting…and charming,
    
     Clark
    
     admitted to himself. Though Ding was actually shorter than his daughter—Patsy took after her tall and rangy mom—and possessed of a decidedly checkered background, John had to allow for the fact that Chavez had worked as hard as anyone he'd ever known to make himself into something that life had tried very hard to deny him. The lad was thirty-one now. Lad?
    
    
     Clark
    
     asked himself. Ten years older than his little girl, Patricia Doris Clark. He could have said something about how they lived a rather crummy life in the field, but Ding would have replied that it was not his decision to make, and it wasn't.
    
    
     Sandy
    
    
     hadn't thought so either.
    What
    
     Clark
    
     couldn't shake was the idea that his Patricia, his baby, might be sexually active with—Ding? The father part of him found the idea disturbing, but the rest of him had to admit that he'd had his own youth once. Daughters, he told himself, were God's revenge on you for being a man: you lived in mortal fear that they might accidentally encounter somebody like yourself at that age. In Patsy's case, the similarity in question was just too striking to accept easily.
    “Concentrate on the mission, Ding.”
    “Roger that, Mr. C.”
    
     Clark
    
     didn't have to turn his head. He could see the smile that had to be poised on his partner's face. He could almost feel it evaporate, too, as more dust plumes appeared through the shimmering air.
    “We're gonna get you, motherfucker,” Ding breathed, back to business and wearing his mission face again. It wasn't just the dead American soldiers. People like Corp destroyed everything they touched, and this part of the world needed a chance at a future. That chance might have come two years earlier, if the President had listened to his field commanders instead of the U.N. Well, at least he seemed to be learning, which wasn't bad for a President.
    The sun was lower, almost gone now, and the temperature was abating. More trucks. Not too many more, they both hoped. Chavez shifted his eyes to the four men a hundred yards away. They were talking back and forth with a little animation, mellow from the caq. Ordinarily it would be dangerous to be around drug-sotted men carrying military weapons, but tonight danger was inverting itself, as it sometimes did. The second truck was clearly visible now, and it came up close. Both CIA officers got out of their vehicle to stretch, then to greet the new visitors, cautiously, of course.
         The General's personal guard force of elite “policemen” was no better than the ones who had arrived before, though some of this group did wear unbuttoned shirts. The first one to come up to them smelled of whiskey, probably pilfered from the General's private stock. That was an affront to Islam, but then so was trafficking in drugs. One of the things
    
     Clark
    
     admired about the Saudis was their direct and peremptory method for processing that category of criminal.
    “Hi.”
    
     Clark
    
     smiled at the man. “I'm John Clark. This is Mr. Chavez. We've been waiting for the General, like you told us.”
    “What you carry?” the “policeman” asked, surprising
    
     Clark
    
     with his knowledge of English. John held up his bag of rock samples, while Ding showed his pair of electronic instruments. Alter a cursory inspection of the vehicle, they were spared even a serious frisking—a pleasant surprise.
    Corp arrived next, with his most reliable security force, if you could call it that. They rode in a Russian ZIL-type jeep. The “General” was actually in a Mercedes that had once belonged to a government bureaucrat, before the government of this country had disintegrated. It had seen better times, but was still the best automobile in the country,