Read Jack Ryan 12 - The Teeth of the Tiger for Free Online

training, he'd found, had worked just about as well as his officers had told him it would in all the classes and field exercises. It had been an important and rather gratifying discovery. The Marine Corps actually did make sense. Damn.
    “Yes, sir,” was all he said in reply, however, adding, “And thank you for your help, sir.”
    “I'm a little old for that sort of thing, but it's nice to see that I still know how” And it had been quite enough, Hardesty didn't add. Combat was still a kid's game, and he was no longer a kid. “Any thoughts about it, Captain?” he asked next.
    “Not really, sir. I did my after-action report.”
    Hardesty had read it. “Nightmares, anything like that?”
    The question surprised Caruso. Nightmares? Why would he have those? “No, sir,” he responded with visible puzzlement.
    “Any qualms of conscience?” Hardesty went on.
    “Sir, those people were making war on my country. We made war back. You ought not to play the game if you can't handle the action. If they had wives and kids, I'm sorry about that, but when you screw with people, you need to understand that they're going to come see you about it.”
    “It's a tough world?”
    “Sir, you'd better not kick a tiger in the ass unless you have a plan for dealing with his teeth.”
    No nightmares and no regrets,
    
    Hardesty thought. That was the way things were supposed to be, but the kinder, gentler
    
    
     United States of America
    
    
     didn't always turn out its people that way. Caruso was a warrior. Hardesty rocked back in his seat and gave his guest a careful look before speaking.
    “Cap'n, the reason you're here . . . you've seen it in the papers, all the problems we've had dealing with this new spate of international terrorism. There have been a lot of turf wars between the Agency and the Bureau. At the operational level, there's usually no problem, and there isn't all that much trouble at the command level—the FBI director, Murray, is solid troop, and when he worked Legal Attaché in
    
    
     London
    
    
     he got along well with our people.”
    “But it's the midlevel staff pukes, right?” Caruso asked. He'd seen it in the Corps, too. Staff officers who spent a lot of their time snarling at other staff officers, saying that their daddy could beat up the other staff's daddy. The phenomenon probably dated back to the Romans or the Greeks. It had been stupid and counterproductive back then, too.
    “Bingo,” Hardesty confirmed. “And you know, God Himself might be able to fix it, but even He would have to have a really good day to bring it off. The bureaucracies are too entrenched. It's not so bad in the military. People there shuffle in and out of jobs, and they have this idea of 'mission,' and everybody generally works to accomplish it, especially if it helps them all hustle up the ladder individually. Generally speaking, the farther you are from the sharp end, the more likely you are to immerse yourself in the minutiae. So, we're looking for people who know about the sharp end.”
    “And the mission is—what?”
    “To identify, locate, and deal with terrorist threats,” the spook answered.
    “'Deal with'?” Caruso asked.
    “Neutralize—shit, okay, when necessary and convenient, kill the son of a bitches. Gather information on the nature and severity of the threat, and take whatever action is necessary, depending on the specific threat. The job is fundamentally intelligence-gathering. The Agency has too many restrictions on how it does business. This special sub-group doesn't.”
    “Really?” That was a considerable surprise.
    Hardesty nodded soberly. “Really. You won't be working for CIA. You may use Agency assets as resources, but that's as far as it goes.”
    “So, who am I working for?”
    “We have a little way to go before we can discuss that.” Hardesty lifted what had to be the Marine's personnel folder. “You score in the top three percent among the Marine officers in terms of intelligence.