Read Eyes of the Hammer (The Green Berets) for Free Online

ignorance. "That hasn't exactly been spelled out yet. Some of it has to do with a matter before the United Nations that comes up for preliminary vote at the beginning of next week."
    Hanks watched as Strom processed that. "The sea-bottom rights issue?"
    The director was impressed. "That's part of it."
    "What are they offering?"
    Hanks couldn't resist the barb. "I thought you could tell me that."
    Strom had to admit defeat. "I haven't heard anything, sir."
    Hanks was satisfied. "That's good, because this whole thing has got to be kept in real tight. Even if the offer isn't accepted, the very fact that Alegre has made it puts him in a precarious position. If word of this deal leaked, the government down there wouldn't last a week. The cartel would go to war.
    "We can't afford to have Alegre fall. He's not the greatest, but at least he's loyal and we can count on him in the crunch. We don't need any loose cannons in power down there."
    Hanks could tell he had Strom totally mystified and also extremely interested. Alegre's offer was presently known by only four people in the United States: the president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and Hanks, who had been informed of the proposed deal just twenty minutes earlier over the secure phone line by the secretary of state himself.
    Hanks leaned back in his chair. Enough games. "All right. Here's the deal that Alegre presented through the ambassador this morning. Basically the Colombians are offering to allow the United States to conduct covert, unilateral military raids into their country to destroy cocaine processing laboratories."
    Strom sat quiet for a few seconds digesting that. "What are the president's feelings on that, sir?"
    "The president bought off on it. As you can imagine, Defense wasn't too happy about it, since they're the ones stuck with the dirty work, but the president's so upset over this Springfield thing that he's lost a lot of his patience. The fact that Alegre was the one to offer this deal made the president very inclined to take it up. There still is no solid evidence on who was behind the Springfield attack, but everything points to the drug cartel."
    Strom's mind was obviously leaping to some of the implications for the CIA. "How are they going to know where to target?"
    "As part of this deal, the Colombian government will provide, through a contact to one of our agents already in country, locations for processing labs they know about."
    Hanks looked up. "You know Jameson in Bogota?" Strom vaguely nodded. "Well, he's going to be the one getting the intelligence. Once we get a location, we verify it using satellite imagery. That way we can be sure they aren't leading us on a wild goose chase."
    Strom shook his head. "We already did something like that several years ago and it didn't work. In 1986 the army sent some helicopters with pilots down to Colombia on a mission they called Operation Blast Furnace. Basically it involved using our helicopters with their troops. It was pretty much a failure." Strom obviously decided to temper the comparison. "However, this proposal does sound somewhat different."
    "It is," Hanks noted dryly. "They're offering to allow our people to hit the processing labs without any Colombian involvement. We have carte blanche. As far as Alegre is concerned we can use anything we want against the designated targets. The president's exact words were that we could wipe them off the face of the earth.' They're not talking about arrests here. They're talking direct military action."
    Hanks continued. "Our forces are authorized to violate Colombian air, water, and land space whenever and however they need to, to conduct these missions. All that Alegre asks is that we do it covertly. If word leaked that the government down there was allowing us to do this, he wouldn't last twelve hours before being toppled—both by the drug dealers and by the people. We all know how sensitive Latin American countries are to the presence of