Jack Ryan, Books 7-12 Read Online Free PDF

exchange.
    The trucks showed up close to dusk. They saw the dust plumes first, like the roostertails of motorboats, yellow in the diminishing light. In such an empty, desperate country, how was it possible that they knew how to make trucks run? Somebody knew how to keep them running, and that seemed very remarkable. Perversely, it meant that all was not lost for this desolate place. If bad men could do it, then good men could do it as well. And that was the reason for Clark and Chavez to be there, wasn’t it?
    The first truck was well in advance of the others. It was old, probably a military truck originally, though with all the body damage, the country of origin and the name of the manufacturer were matters of speculation. It circled their Rover at a radius of about a hundred meters, while the eyes of the crew checked them out at a discreet, careful distance, including one man on what looked like a Russian 12.7mm machine gun mounted in the back. “Policemen,” their boss called them—once it was “technicals.” After a while, they stopped, got out and just stood there, watching the Rover, holding their old, dirty, but probably functional G3 rifles. The men would soon be less important. It was evening, after all, and the caq was out. Chavez watched a man sitting in the shade of his truck a hundred meters away, chewing on the weed.
    “Can’t the dumb sunzabitches at least smoke it?” the exasperated field officer asked the burning air in the car.
    “Bad for the lungs, Ding. You know that.” Their appointment for the evening made quite a living for himself by flying it in. In fact, roughly two fifths of the country’s gross domestic product went into that trade, supporting a small fleet of aircraft that flew it in from Somalia. The fact offended both Clark and Chavez, but their mission wasn’t about personal offense. It was about a long-standing debt. General Mohammed Abdul Corp—his rank had largely been awarded by reporters who didn’t know what else to call him—had, once upon a time, been responsible for the deaths of twenty American soldiers. Two years ago, to be exact, far beyond the memory horizon of the media, because after he’d killed the American soldiers, he’d gone back to his main business of killing his own countrymen. It was for the latter cause that Clark and Chavez were nominally in the field, but justice had many shapes and many colors, and it pleased Clark to pursue a parallel agenda. That Corp was also a dealer in narcotics seemed a special gift from a good-humored God.
    “Wash up before he gets here?” Ding asked, tenser now, and showing it just a little bit. All four men by the truck just sat there, chewing their caq and staring, their rifles lying across their legs, the heavy machine gun on the back of their truck forgotten now. They were the forward security element, such as it was, for their General.
    Clark shook his head. “Waste of time.”
    “Shit, we’ve been here six weeks.” All for one appointment. Well, that was how it worked, wasn’t it?
    “I needed to sweat off the five pounds,” Clark replied with a tense smile of his own. Probably more than five, he figured. “These things take time to do right.”
    “I wonder how Patsy is 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 any man he’d ever known to make himself into something that fate 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