Tom Clancy Support and Defend (Campus) - Hardcover

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1

DOMINIC CARUSO was only thirty-two years old, and by any fair measure physically fit, but still he found it difficult keeping stride with the fifty-year-old man running several paces ahead of him. In the past hour the pair had done five miles of roadwork broken up by a half-mile swim, and the conditions here weren’t helping. Dom sucked as much of the fetid air as he could get into his lungs just to keep going. It was the middle of the night and still hot as hell, and the jungle path was dark save for a little hazy moonlight that filtered through the palms above.

Dom’s running partner seemed to be having no trouble finding his way in the darkness, but Dom caught the toe of his shoe on the exposed root of a jacaranda tree, and he fell headlong to his hands and knees.

“Son of a bitch.” He said it under labored breath.

His trainer looked back at him but kept running. Dom thought he detected a smile on the older man’s face. His voice was low and heavily accented. “Do you need an ambulance?”

“No, I just—”

“Then get the fuck up.” The older man chuckled, then added, “C’mon, D, soldier on.” He turned away and picked up the pace.

“Right.” Dom climbed back to his feet, wiped warm mud on his shorts, and took off in pursuit.

A month ago there was no way in hell the American could have run a ten-K in eighty-five-degree heat and ninety-five percent humidity, especially not in the middle of the night after a full day of training in martial arts. But since his arrival here in India he’d made advances in his physical and mental strength faster than he could have imagined, and he owed this all to Arik Yacoby, the man now forty feet ahead of him.

The muddy jungle path ended at a paved road, and Arik turned to the left and began sprinting along it. Dominic gave chase even though he thought they should have been going to the right; he was the visitor, after all, and he trusted that Yacoby knew his way around these roads better than he.

Yacoby wasn’t a local, but he’d lived here a few years, and by his elite physical condition it was obvious he’d run these trails and roads hundreds of times.

Dom knew very little about Arik Yacoby’s past: only that he was Israeli, an émigré to India, and he had once been a member of the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces. Dom had no trouble picturing Arik as an elite soldier; his fitness and discipline and the confident and determined glint in his steely eyes announced this fact to anyone who knew what to look for.

Dom had come here to India to train with the man for six weeks. Yacoby held a fourth-degree black belt in Krav Maga, a martial art developed for the Israeli military. Dom’s hand-to-hand training with Arik had been intense in and of itself, but these additional nighttime PT sessions had added another facet to the grueling experience.

They’d swum, they’d run, they’d climbed—often all in the same night. It seemed to Dom as if Arik felt it his duty to impart not just the skills of hand-to-hand combat, but every physical and mental aspect of serving in the Israeli Special Forces.

Everything short of the use of firearms, that is. This was India, and although Arik Yacoby was now a permanent resident of Paravur, he was no cop, and no soldier, and he therefore could not obtain a gun legally.

But Dom didn’t think Yacoby’s lack of a firearm made him in any way less dangerous.

This India quest to study Krav Maga was the third evolution of five in a four-month training course for Dominic Caruso. Just before coming here, Dom had spent three weeks mountain climbing in the Yukon, led in one-on-one tutelage by a veteran Canadian alpinist. And before that, he’d spent two weeks in Reno, Nevada, studying sleight of hand and other applications of misdirection from a master magician.

After his Krav Maga training in India, Dom was slated to fly to Pennsylvania to work with a former U.S. Marine sniper on his long-distance shooting, and then from there he would go straight to Sapporo, Japan, to learn from a master in edged-weapon combat.

At each of these evolutions Dom tapped the experience of his expert trainers in the one-on-one courses and peppered them with literally thousands of questions. The trainers, on the other hand, didn’t ask him much of anything. They didn’t know his real name—Arik just referred to him as D—they didn’t know his organization, they didn’t know his background. All they knew, all they needed to know, was that Dom came with the blessing of important people connected to the U.S. intelligence community.

There was certainly an assumption by the trainers that Dom was CIA or DIA or JSOC or some other acronym that meant trouble, and Caruso himself did nothing to dispel that notion. But he was none of these things, nor was he an employee of any official government agency. Instead, Dominic Caruso was an operations officer for an entity known as The Campus. It was an off-the-books intelligence organization with a direct-action arm. Only a few in official government ranks knew of its existence, and these few made the connections to the one-on-one elite training cadre around the world, so Dom and his fellow Campus officers could learn from martial artists, mountain climbers, snipers, divers, extreme athletes, language and cultural experts, or masters in any other discipline that might be necessary for them to succeed in their black operations.

Before his time in The Campus, Dom had been a special agent in the FBI. This gave him a tremendous amount of practical training, but the FBI Training Academy at Quantico didn’t send its recruits up mountains or have them skulking through tropical swamps.

Caruso had learned much at each of his stops on his extracurricular training circuit, but his time here with Arik Yacoby had been the best of the evolutions so far, thanks, in large part, to Yacoby and his family. Arik’s yoga-instructor wife, Hanna, had taken him into her home like a long-lost relative, and their two young boys, Moshe and Dar, aged one and three, had treated him like a human jungle gym, playfully climbing over him each night as the adults sat in the living room of Arik’s rustic village farmhouse and talked over dinner and beer.

Dominic was an unreformed bachelor, and he was surprised by how much he had enjoyed this glimpse into family life.

This evening, Dom had finished dinner with Arik and his family, and then retired to his room to do his “homework,” reading up on the philosophies of Krav Maga. He’d nodded off before eleven, but just after midnight Yacoby appeared at his door and told him he had three minutes to put on his swimming shorts and running shoes and to get outside.

These night ops, as Yacoby called them, were designed to help condition Caruso’s body to adapt to working on command, even when he’d had little sleep or his biorhythms were telling him it was time to shut down.

Dom’s body had adapted to this regimen, although reluctantly, while Arik himself seemed to genuinely enjoy the late-night runs and swims.

Three minutes after Yacoby woke Caruso up, the two men began their run. They headed away from the house and up a road that led out of the cluster of farms and bungalows in the Jewish neighborhood, and into the palm trees. They turned west toward the ocean and then north, away from the closest village and along a jungle trail that at times turned nearly impossible to negotiate because of the complete darkness of the double canopy of coconut palms and banana trees.

They reached the banks of Paravur Lake and Yacoby stepped into the water with hardly a break in stride, and then he...