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

wore beards and mustaches. So did most of those detained as terrorist suspects. He was merely conforming to the culture of those from whom he wished to extract information. Miller’s record of successful interrogations now exceeded his considerable operational success. It was said that he could get a hardened criminal to dime out his own mother and to feel good about having given her up. When he was an operational SEAL, he was in high demand in the platoons. Now every task unit wanted Miller in their intel shop. Both Engel and Nolan considered it something of a coup to have him in support of their detached squad. That they were given Miller was a further indication that there could be some activity in or around Central America that might require an on-call, special-operations response element.
    “Any idea what’s going on down there?” Engel asked the senior chief.
    Miller considered this, thoughtfully pulling his hand down his beard in a professorial gesture. He wore his hair longish and combed it straight back over his head. His deep green eyes seemed to be backlit. During interrogations, they became incandescent and piercing, and he used them on his opponent like he had once used the targeting laser on his automatic weapon.
    “It could be just about anything,” he finally replied. “Drugs, extortion, a kidnapping. I’ll know a little more tomorrow morning once I’ve had a chance to run the agency alphabet trapline. But something’s got someone’s attention, that’s for sure.”
    After more than ten years of war, the military special operators and the diverse appendages of the national intelligence apparatus had finally become synched. They now talked to one another, and the talk led to cooperation—the kind of cooperation that had resulted in the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Miller had good contacts at the CIA, FBI, DEA, NSA, and DIA, and with their human and technical collec Chniof tion organizations. The intelligence community and the military were also now linked by sophisticated and secure communications networks. Early Monday morning, Miller would be pushing his agency and military contacts in Central and South America for any breaking leads. Usually, but not always, bits of information came from the opposition’s use of unencrypted cell phones or some other technical collector. There was also the occasional agent on the payroll of some hardworking CIA case officer who came up with some obscure but related fact. And that fact could be linked to another fact and to still another until the mosaic produced operable intelligence in the form of a target folder. This was called operations-intelligence, or ops-intel, fusion, and it was making life dangerous for terrorists worldwide.
    “It’s like this, fellows,” the senior chief continued, “over in the sandbox, in the jihad-land, it’s all about religion and tribalism. Down south, it’s all about money. The money comes from drugs. There are the drug-support industries like gunrunning, the bribing of officials, assassination, and so on, but the big bucks come from producing drugs and moving drugs to the U.S. and European markets. It’s a sixty-billion-dollar-a-year industry. The U.S. military mission down south has to do with training—training the Colombians and the Salvadorians to fight drugs. But we don’t fight drugs down there, they do, or at least that’s the idea. We’ve had the Green Berets and some of our special boat teams helping with this training, but not a SEAL direct-action element in this mix, which, gentlemen, is what you are.”
    “What
we
are,” Engel interrupted. “You’re a part of this team.”
    “Thanks, sir. The money from drugs only comes when the product gets moved north. So the druggies have some very efficient and sophisticated ways to get the stuff across our southern border. And God knows there are plenty of illegals moving south to north. The big concern has always been that the jihadists and the druggies might