True Faith and Allegiance

by Tom Clancy

  Jack surprised the man, who had just put his walkie-talkie down. “Excuse me? Do you know the way to San José?”

  The driver reached to the passenger seat quickly. Jack saw a black semiautomatic pistol lying there, and now he was certain he had correctly identified a getaway vehicle for the North Korean agents.

  Jack’s own gun pressed against the left temple of the driver. “Don’t know if you speak English, but I bet you speak terminal ballistics. Pick up the gun and I paint the dashboard with your brains.”

  The man brought his hand back to his lap.

  Jack got him out of the minivan, looked left and right quickly to make sure no police had seen him in the commission of his carjacking, and he got in.

  Leaving the North Korean agent standing there by the road, Jack fired the vehicle and launched forward. He turned hard to the right and plowed through the plastic and wooden barricades.

  “Be advised, the black minivan entering the square and heading your way is me! Check your fire!”

  —

  Ding Chavez could hear the North Koreans closing in on him, not more than twenty-five yards back now. The trees were thick but not impenetrable, and it was obvious the opposition was gaining on him as he tried to force the noncompliant man forward.

  After Jack’s transmission, Ding told him he’d make his way left toward the road and they’d link up somewhere around halfway between the National Monument and the northwest exit of Merdeka Square. He then whirled his prisoner hard to the left and pushed him on, in the direction of the road.

  The traitor said, “You have to listen to me! I can’t let—”

  A gunshot from deep in the trees behind them cracked; it tore through branches five feet over their heads.

  “Shit!” Ding shouted.

  He heard Dom Caruso’s labored voice in his earpiece. “Yo! Somebody’s shooting!”

  “No shit,” Ding replied. “One of the guys on our six missed high.”

  Another shot cracked off. Ding heard this round zip by even closer. His prisoner’s eyes were showing the effects of shock.

  Jack Ryan spoke over the net now. “I’m here, I’m looking for you guys.”

  Ding said, “Still in the trees. Not sure how much longer till we—”

  Just then, Ding and his prisoner broke out of the trees, even with the black minivan, parked on the street just one hundred feet away.

  “Got you!” Jack shouted. He slammed on his brakes, put the vehicle in park, and climbed out to open the side door.

  A pair of gunshots zinged close to Chavez and his prisoner. A third slammed into the left calf of the man in the black raincoat, and he tumbled into the grass.

  Chavez spun around, dropped to his knees, and raised his weapon. While doing this he said, “Dom! Suppress that fire!”

  —

  Dom Caruso was running along the sidewalk fifty yards southeast of the minivan, and he could see Chavez raising his gun back in the direction of the trees and the wounded prisoner rolling in the grass.

  He dropped to his knees himself, raised his Smith & Wesson, and took aim at the edge of the tree line. It would be a long shot to hit someone with his compact pistol, especially considering he had been at a full sprint for over a minute and his heart was racing, causing his front sight to bob and weave with his heartbeat. But his job was to suppress the enemy, to give them something else to worry about.

  He wasn’t here to win a sniper competition.

  As soon as he saw movement—a man in a T-shirt and shorts with a gun in his hand—he fired. Off to his left Ding Chavez did the same.

  —

  Jack scooped up the wounded prisoner in a fireman’s carry, while Chavez fired at the men in the trees. Jack lumbered with the traitor back to the minivan as fast as he could, trying his best to ignore the gunfire going on behind him. He literally threw the man off his shoulders and through the open rear door of the vehicle, then he drew his own pistol and aimed at the trees.

  “Ding, I’m covering! Move!”

  Jack fired three rounds at a flash of gunfire deep in the trees. As he did this he realized the man he’d scooped up didn’t have his backpack on him any longer. “Ding, the pack!”

  In front of him on his right Ding raced toward the minivan, not even slowing down while he swept his arm down and scooped up the backpack lying on the grass. He leapt in the back with the wounded man, and Jack emptied his magazine at dark targets in the trees. He wasn’t sure if he’d hit anyone, but now it was his job to drive.

  As he got behind the wheel he could see Dom Caruso on the sidewalk, fifty yards straight in front of him, changing out his magazine and firing again on the North Koreans. Jack said, “I’m on you in ten seconds!” And then he floored the Mitsubishi.

  He heard bullets tear through the metal of the vehicle as he raced on, and the shattering of glass in the back.

  “You okay back there?” he asked, careful not to use any names this close to their prisoner.

  Chavez replied, “You just get us out of this and we’re fine. He’s got a GSW to his leg, but he’ll make it.”

  Jack saw Dom Caruso stand from his crouch and begin running toward the minivan that was quickly approaching him. But Jack saw something Caruso did not. Behind him on his left, the POLISI car was racing across the street, directly toward Caruso from his left side. They were going to try to get in front of this shooter and cut him off.

  Jack shouted, “Hang on back there!” He turned his wheel to the right, raced past a confused Caruso, and slammed the front of his Mitsubishi into the front-left quarter-panel of the police car, spinning it forty-five degrees and smashing the front left tire.

  Jack’s airbag deployed, smacking him in the face. Cops inside the vehicle would probably be dazed from the impact, and they’d certainly be pissed, but this was a hell of a lot better than the Campus team getting arrested and held in Indonesia on weapons and kidnapping charges.

  Dom turned around and ran back to the Mitsubishi and dove into the open back door, on top of Ding and the prisoner, who by now was crushed facedown on the floorboard. Dom closed the door behind him, Jack waved away the chalky dust from the deployment of his airbag, and he pushed his minivan forward through the damaged police car, while the snaps of handgun rounds continued striking the vehicle.

  “Heads down!” Jack yelled.

  As he drove past the cop car he looked down at the stunned and dazed police, through their cracked windshield.

  “Sorry, guys,” he said, but they couldn’t hear him.

  —

  He floored it now, charging east, and then he made a hard left and raced northeast to the exit of the square.

  In the backseat the prisoner was pulled into a sitting position. He moaned in pain for a moment, then he shouted, “Listen to me! You have to—”

  Chavez put the barrel of his pistol in the man’s open mouth. “Trust me, you’ll have plenty of people who want to hear you talk. I’m just not one of them.” Chavez now turned to Dom. “This guy is a screamer. He tried to lead the DPRK goons to us in the trees.”

  Dom Caruso said, “I’m gettin’ the tape!”

  “Good deal,” replied Chavez.

  Seconds later Dom used electrical tape from his personal medical kit to tape the man’s mouth shut. Ding then rolled the man on his stomach and looked over his calf wound more closely, used gauze and tape from his own kit to stop the bleeding. It wasn’t bad at all, but it would be messy if he didn’t stanch the flow.

  —

  From the front Jack said, “Something just occurred to me. Either I’m the luckiest dude in the world for finding this van at the particular corner of the park I exited, or they have other vehicles around the square. That means they have other guys mobile who can chase us.”

  Chavez said, “And they know what kind of vehicle we’re in, seeing how it’s theirs and
all.”

  “Yeah,” Jack conceded. “Good point. I’m going to go back to the parking lot to the west. We’ll transfer into our rental to take back to the airport.”

  “Do it, but watch out for trouble.”

  “Sure,” Jack quipped. “We sure wouldn’t want anything bad to happen.”

  19

  The Hendley Associates Gulfstream G550 took off from Soekarno-Hatta International Airport just fifty-one minutes after Jack Ryan crashed into the Jakarta police department patrol car.

  Helen and Country were still in the process of climbing out to the northeast, barely a thousand feet off the ground, when Chavez, Ryan, and Caruso moved close around the zip-tied American prisoner. He was bandaged and stable, but his gag remained in place.

  They’d searched him on the way to the airport, and he had no identification with him whatsoever. Certainly he’d left his wallet at the embassy or his home to make the pass with the North Koreans in case something went wrong.

  In his backpack they had found three binders full of papers, all of which were clearly marked classified, although the ones Jack had thumbed through briefly were all under the classification Confidential, the lowest level.

  Jack and the other Campus men were surprised to find that all this was over documents that were less than Top Secret.

  The three men took a few minutes to go through the papers, then Chavez ripped the electrical tape off the man’s mouth. Before the prisoner could even speak, Chavez asked, “What’s your name?”

  The man looked confused. He said, “Ben. Ben Kincaid. Benjamin Terrance Kincaid. Did you—”

  Chavez started to tape the man’s mouth back up. “All I need to know. It’s going to be a long flight, so take a nap,” he said, but before he could push the tape tight, Kincaid managed to push it away with his tongue, long enough to say one thing.

  “Jennifer! Let me talk to—”

  Chavez stopped. More curious than anything else, he lowered the tape.

  “Jennifer?”

  Kincaid said, “Please, sir. I just need to know she’s safe.”

  Chavez looked at Jack and Dom, then back to Kincaid. “Who the hell is Jennifer?”

  Kincaid stared wide-eyed at the three men. “Who is Jennifer? Who? She’s my wife!”

  Chavez rolled his eyes. “Dude, nobody even knew who you were until you just told us. We just knew the DPRK was meeting some embassy shithead passing secrets.”

  Kincaid’s face morphed into a look of abject terror. “But that means . . . you’ve . . . you’ve pulled her out, right? You got Jennifer out of there. Tell me you pulled her out. Tell me she’s safe!”

  Again the Campus men looked at one another in confusion.

  Chavez said, “Calm down! Out of . . . out of where?”

  Kincaid screamed, pulled at his bindings like a maniac. “Fuck! You don’t even know what’s going on here! Jennifer is CIA. On nonofficial cover. She’s in danger!”

  Chavez blinked hard. “Your wife is CIA?”

  “Damn it! Damn you all! She’s somewhere in Belarus, and they will kill her now that this has happened!”

  This didn’t make any sense to Jack. “If your wife is a NOC, how do you even know where she is? She isn’t supposed to tell you any of that.”

  “Are you guys fucking idiots? She didn’t tell me! I haven’t heard from her in three months. She told me it would be a six-month assignment.”

  “Then how—”

  “Because those fuckers in Jakarta, the men you said were North Korean, they showed me pictures of her in the field. They said they could make one phone call and she’d be killed by the group she infiltrated. According to them, she was working as an accountant for some shady Mafia outfit out of Belarus. If the pass didn’t go off as planned this morning, then they would call the Belarusians, and they would—”

  Chavez leapt to his feet. “I’ll be right back!”

  —

  Up at the front near the galley, he called Mary Pat Foley. She answered in seconds with “I hear there was a shoot-out in Jakarta. Are you guys okay?”

  Chavez spoke quickly, “Listen carefully. This man is Ben Kincaid. His wife is—”

  Mary Pat gasped. “Jen Kincaid. God Almighty. She’s one of Jay Canfield’s top officers.”

  “Yeah, well the DPRK guys told Ben they knew her identity and where she’s working right now. They said if he didn’t play ball today, they’d drop a dime on her to the goons around her and get her killed. Don’t know if that’s all BS or if it’s true.”

  Mary Pat said, “Where did they say she was?”

  “Somewhere in Belarus, working for a—”

  Mary Pat interrupted hastily. “I’ll put you on hold and check with Jay.” The phone clicked, and Chavez could tell Mary Pat was crystal clear on the gravity of this situation.

  Chavez put the phone down, a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. In the back of the cabin he could hear Kincaid going back and forth between openly weeping and cussing out Jack and Dominic.

  The two Campus men just looked up at Chavez, hoping like hell they hadn’t just made a bad situation worse.

  A minute later Mary Pat was back on the line. “Canfield confirmed it. Jennifer Kincaid is in Minsk right now, working deep cover in a legitimate company owned by a very dangerous criminal organization.”

  “Shit. How the hell could the North Koreans know any of that?”

  “I have no idea, but we’ve run into some similar breaches of undefined origin in the past couple weeks. There is a wide-ranging and ongoing compromise we don’t understand.”

  “What about Jennifer?”

  “We aren’t going through any normal processes. Canfield has men racing to her right this second to get her out of there. To hell with her cover, her future in clandestine service. We’ll get teams around her and pull her out before anyone has time to do anything to her.”

  Chavez looked at his watch. “Damn, Mary Pat. We’ve had this guy in our hands for over an hour. He was noncompliant, and we were just trying to get out of the country safely without him compromising us. So we gagged him. The North Koreans have an hour head start.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” she said softly. Then, “Look, you know how these things go. The operatives you ran into aren’t going to be the ones to expose Jen in Minsk. They would call their handlers, who themselves would have to kick it upstairs. The contact with the Belarusian group couldn’t possibly take place in under an hour.”

  Chavez said, “I wish you sounded as confident as the words you’re saying.”

  Mary Pat paused, then said, “Yeah. Well, all you and I can do right now is pray Jay’s men get to her in time.”

  Chavez hung up, put on a confident face, and returned to the group.

  Kincaid looked at him, tears streaming down his face. “What’s happening?”

  “It’s getting taken care of.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means Langley is in the process of pulling your wife out right now.”

  Kincaid nodded slowly, not quite believing, and then he looked out the window for a moment. He said, “That intelligence that you protected. The stuff I was handing over. Do you even know what it was?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dom said.

  “The hell it doesn’t! I wasn’t handing out launch codes. I wasn’t passing off the travel routes of the ambassador. No . . . It was a media list. A fucking list of the names of the reporters and producers we go to here in Indonesia to speak on background about issues. Most all of those names and organizations in that binder can be assumed by the press that comes out from them. This was nothing. Nothing! Plus, the men who contacted me said they were South Koreans.”

  Dom was incredulous. “Why would South Koreans threaten to kill your wife?”

  “They claimed they had business conta
cts here in Jakarta who were making a play for political office. I knew they were dangerous men, but I didn’t know they were from the DPRK.”

  Jack said, “It doesn’t matter. You shared classified material.”

  “About nothing consequential, and to save my wife’s life.”

  Jack said, “They were getting their hooks into you. That’s all. Once you’d passed over intel, any intel, doesn’t matter what, they could come back to you, hold your previous treason over your head, and turn up the heat on you to get more and more.”

  Chavez nodded. “That’s how it works, Ben. Now, just sit there and chill out. As soon as we hear that your wife is safe, I’ll let you know.”

  —

  They had just taken off from a refueling stop in Tokyo when the secure phone rang at the front of the cabin. Chavez went to it, took a call, and sat down.

  In the middle of the cabin Jack, Dom, and Ben all stared at him, searching his body language for any good news.

  Instead, they all got a read on the phone call at the same time. Chavez lowered his head, rubbed his eyes slowly. He nodded, hung up the phone, and just sat there at the bulkhead.

  All eyes in the back of the aircraft remained locked on him.

  Finally Chavez said, “Dom, will you do me a favor and untie him? Mr. Kincaid, can you come up here, please?”

  Ben Kincaid’s face reddened, his eyes misted, but he said nothing. Dom cut off the zip ties securing him to his chair, and the Department of State employee walked slowly to the front of the plane, like a man walking to the electric chair.

  Dom and Jack didn’t even look at each other. They sat there quietly, until Jack said, “Shit.”

  Dom nodded. “Yeah. Hell of a thing.”

  —

  Ten minutes later Chavez headed to the rear, leaving Kincaid at the front of the plane, doubled over in a cabin chair and sobbing softly. He sat down with Jack and Dom; the look in his face was as if he’d lost a loved one. “Jennifer Kincaid’s body was kicked out of a car at the front gate of the U.S. embassy in Minsk. Her throat was slashed so badly her head was barely attached.”