by Tom Clancy
“God rest her soul,” Dominic said softly.
Jack looked out the window at the cloud layer below. “That’s on us. Our fault. They killed her because we got involved.”
Chavez sighed. “Incomplete intelligence, Jack. We were the tip of the spear, but the shaft of the spear let us down. If we knew more, if we had more time, we could have done something that—”
Jack replied flatly, “Yeah, but the shaft of the spear didn’t get her killed. We did.”
Chavez said, “Mary Pat said there is some kind of breach they can’t wrap their heads around. This looks like part of that. That woman was dead the second CIA found out the DPRK was going to get documents from the USA.”
“Fuck!” Jack said, slamming the table in front of him.
Chavez left the younger men with their thoughts, and went back up to Kincaid. The man was still their prisoner, and he was just distraught enough to try something crazy if a very sympathetic, but also very capable, man was not standing close by for the rest of the long flight back to D.C.
They had another thirteen hours of this flight, and he doubted there would be much talk out of any one of them the entire way.
—
After a refueling stop in Mexico City that turned into a twenty-four-hour delay due to bad weather, the old Antonov carrying Abu Musa al-Matari, his two subordinates, and a massive supply of ordnance landed at Ardmore Downtown Executive Airport, in Ardmore, Oklahoma, at two-twenty a.m. A single customs agent had been waiting for the aircraft, and only a single controller in the tower was working to bring this NAFTA flight in from South America.
The paperwork and forms had been filed in advance, the cargo had been listed as a return of defective farming machinery, and all there was for the customs agent to do was board the aircraft, check over the documentation of the crew, along with their personal passports, and conduct a quick inspection of the cargo.
The controller in the tower, the customs inspector, a refueling team at the fixed-base operator, and a single security guard in a patrol car far on the other side of the tarmac were the only people on airport grounds other than two vehicles here to meet the plane.
The An-32 did not have enough fuel to make it back to South America, but the refuelers were pumping gas before the stairs dropped from the hatch of the aircraft.
A twenty-six-foot U-Haul truck waiting for the arrival of the turboprop pulled forward, just aft of the aircraft. A Ford Explorer stopped right next to the U-Haul. One woman and five men climbed out of the vehicles and headed for the cargo hatch.
The customs inspector climbed aboard and immediately encountered the pilot and copilot standing in the front galley. He shook hands with the men, handed over their signed paperwork, verifying the cargo was indeed as represented on the manifest, and that the documentation of the two pilots was in order.
He never looked at the cargo, so he saw no rocket launchers or rifles or suicide vests, and he never looked inside the rear galley, so he did not see the three Islamic State operatives sitting there fingering Glock 17s on their hips.
An envelope containing $25,000 was handed over to the customs inspector, and he took it before quickly descending the stairs. He did not even look at the half-dozen or so people unloading fifty-pound crates from the cargo hold into a U-Haul truck.
He really did not want to know what was going on.
—
By four a.m. the Russian-built and Bolivian-owned Antonov was on its takeoff roll back into the morning sky; the entire Chicago cell, plus Tripoli, Algiers, and Musa al-Matari, was leaving the city of Ardmore in the two vehicles, and two tons of deadly equipment had made its way safely into the United States.
The vehicles weren’t heading for Chicago. No, now they began a long cross-country road trip that would take them several days. They had to distribute equipment to the other four teams, and it was determined this could be most safely done by driving the goods to cities within a few hours’ drive of each cell, renting storage units, and simply dropping off the crates. Then the keys would be FedExed to the leaders of the cells.
By midafternoon the truck had dropped a dozen crates in Alpharetta, Georgia, and by noon of the following day, a ten-by-ten-foot storage unit in Richmond, Virginia, had a dozen black plastic crates stacked inside. They delivered more crates to Ann Arbor, dropped their own crates in Naperville, Illinois, and here al-Matari, Algiers, and Tripoli left the group and set off for a safe house rented in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago.
The Chicago cell continued on to San Francisco to deliver the last of the weaponry to the Santa Clara cell.
Al-Matari had been given a driver’s license owned by a bearded and bespectacled thirty-eight-year-old American citizen of Palestinian descent, and he had to agree that when he grew his facial hair out this man could be his doppelgänger. With this and credit cards in the man’s name, he could go where he liked, and his two Islamic State operatives could do the same with their own documentation, not that they actually expected the American police to pull them over.
They had worked behind the lines many times in their careers, and they had lived in Europe long enough to pass themselves off as Westerners, in attitude, if not in looks. They’d do their best to stay away from the authorities, but if they were questioned, their legends were backstopped and there were others here in the country who could vouch for them.
Al-Matari had worked too hard to leave anything to chance. When it became time for his men and women to begin their attacks, he would be prepared, and no random encounter by a cop was going to derail his plan.
20
The meeting in the Oval Office wasn’t on the books, but President Jack Ryan received a call at six a.m. from Chief of Staff Arnie Van Damm telling him that Mary Pat Foley, Jay Canfield, Dan Murray, and Secretary of Defense Bob Burgess would like to speak with him as soon as he could be made available. When he got the call he was eating breakfast with Cathy; she had to leave early for a surgery at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and he was flying out that afternoon to California to survey the ongoing devastation wrought by a series of wildfires.
His two youngest children, Katie and Kyle, were both in high school, which meant they were still sound asleep, and would remain so until well past the time their alarms told them to get up and get ready.
Ryan told Arnie he’d meet with his advisers at seven a.m. if they could all make it. This was basically his entire national security staff, and he hadn’t seen anything on CNN that told him for sure what they’d want to talk about, so he was extra-curious.
He was also extra-experienced, and his experience told him the news he’d get in an hour was not going to be good.
—
Fifteen minutes after the meeting began, Ryan held his head in his hands, his elbows on his desk. Across from him, Mary Pat Foley, Dan Murray, and Jay Canfield had just personally delivered the news about Jakarta and the fallout of the operation.
After a long delay, he looked back up to them. “Obviously her husband knows she’s dead. Any other family?”
Canfield said, “Both parents are deceased. No children. Ben and Jen were both looking forward to returning to the USA, both getting posted to D.C., and starting a family here. We would have pulled Jen out in another ninety days or so, and she would have been done with covert work after that.”
“Why didn’t Ben Kincaid come to us from the start? The minute he was threatened with the intel?”
Murray said, “Haven’t spoken with him yet, the private flight that brought him back just landed at Reagan. But I’ve done enough of these counterintelligence espionage cases to make an educated guess as to why. He was scared. He probably thought the more dangerous course of action was informing on the people threatening him and running the risk the Koreans would go through with their promise to have his wife killed. He knew the Koreans had his wife over the barrel and they passed themselves off, and pass
ed their needs off, as relatively benign. They just wanted some low-level classified material, and he thought he could hand that over and get his wife out of danger in the short term.”
“Naive,” Ryan said, criticizing the man, but his voice wasn’t as critical as his words. He felt for the man and his situation.
Murray said, “This guy wasn’t a spook. He’d never had anything like this happen to him. He reacted, and he reacted poorly.”
The President replied, “I guess we reacted poorly, too.”
Murray nodded. “When we couldn’t get the first team in without the compromise, maybe we should have spent more time worrying about the source and scope of the compromise, and less time worrying about busting Kincaid.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. These were North Koreans. They would have exploited the situation far beyond those first binders he was to pass over.”
Ryan said, “Will he be prosecuted?”
Murray replied, “I’ll talk to Adler. He’s done at State, that’s for sure, but turning this into a big federal prosecution doesn’t do anybody any good. Best bet is we all just move on.”
Canfield nodded. He was nearly despondent with the news of Jennifer Kinkaid’s death. “Stopping the pass was the right thing to do. Now we have to find out who the fuck is revealing the identities and locations of our covert personnel to the whole world.”
“To that end, what’s happening?” Ryan asked.
Canfield’s eyes cleared a little. “NSA is running with that ball right now. We are providing them everything they need.”
Murray nodded, said, “Ditto.”
Mary Pat said, “I’m getting daily progress reports. So far, they haven’t found commonalities between those exposed that look like they could be relevant. These weren’t people who knew each other, or even part of the same organization, other than the two CIA officers involved so far. They didn’t go through the same training programs, live in the same town, attend the same universities.”
Ryan said, “A database where all government employees’ records are kept?”
“Sure, that exists, but we’ve seen no hint of anything being hacked before, and even if it had been, the way the records are stored for certain covert occupations would mean a bad actor would have to go through, literally, millions of records. An officer working under nonofficial cover with the CIA isn’t in IRS records under that name, for example, and that wouldn’t explain how the fingerprints were obtained for the scanners in Iran and Indonesia, or how the hell Jen Kincaid was found in Belarus or Commander Hagen was found at a restaurant in New Jersey. No . . . Whatever the hell is going on doesn’t seem like some sort of computer hack.”
Ryan nodded distantly. He looked to Canfield. “I want to be there for the star ceremony.” He was speaking of the ceremony at CIA headquarters to honor a fallen officer.
Canfield said, “Mr. President, since she was a NOC, we can’t—”
“I know there won’t be an official release of her name. I’ll come quietly. No press, no fuss. And I want Ben Kincaid there.”
Murray cocked his head. “Jack . . . he’s still a prisoner.”
“Who will be treated gently. He’ll come to CIA, in your custody.”
“But—”
“Dan,” Ryan said, and Murray knew when to stop.
Soon everyone got up quietly to leave the room. The meeting had accomplished nothing other than the delivery of some very bad news, but as they headed for the door, Ryan asked a question out of curiosity.
“The team that pulled Kincaid out. Who were they?”
Mary Pat turned back to the President and blinked hard a few times. Finally she said, “Do you mind if I stick around for a moment?”
Ryan shook his head; Canfield, Burgess, and Murray left; and Mary Pat walked back over to the President’s desk.
Ryan didn’t even need her to say anything. From her actions he knew his son had been involved.
“Is he okay?”
“Jack’s fine, Mr. President. They all are. I’m sure they are taking the fallout from their successful operation hard, but it was a successful operation from the standpoint of what we sent them in to do. Nobody at The Campus did anything wrong.”
Ryan nodded distantly.
She added, “If we’d known who we were going over there to snatch, it would have been handled very differently, obviously.”
“Right,” he said. “Thanks, Mary Pat.” He looked at her. “Find this leak, and find Musa al-Matari. You do those two things, and America will be a lot safer.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
Mary Pat left, and the President of the United States picked up the phone on his desk.
—
Jack Ryan, Jr., had been sound asleep, flat on his back in his condo in Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia. The flight around the world and back had come to an end just two hours earlier, the prisoner was delivered to a team of Dan Murray’s boys at dawn, and Jack said good-bye to his colleagues and took an Uber back to his place overlooking the Potomac.
He’d spent fifteen minutes in the shower, another fifteen minutes staring at ESPN, and then he hit the sack.
Now he woke to the sound of his mobile ringing next to his head. He found it, saw it was not even eight a.m., and realized he’d slept no more than an hour.
Half asleep still, he coughed and said, “Ryan?”
“Hey, sport.” It was his dad.
Jack rolled to a sitting position on his bed, rubbed his eyes, and wondered what had happened. His dad called on rare occasions, but never first thing in the morning. He was President, after all. Presidents usually had stuff to do as soon as they got to work.
“Something wrong?” Jack said.
“Not on my end. How are you?”
Jack knew better than to talk about his operations at The Campus with his dad. “Just fine. I’m . . . I’ve got the day off today, so I was just sleeping in.”
“Sorry to wake you.” There was a pause. “Long-haul flights like that can be a real pain.”
So . . . his dad knew. Mary Pat had told him, obviously, which meant she’d been asked directly, because she knew better than to introduce that stress into Jack’s father’s life.
Jack said, “Yeah. We’re all sick about what happened.”
“Son, sometimes things fall apart, despite all our best intentions.”
Jack said, “Dad, I find it’s probably better for both of us if I don’t talk about—”
Jack Senior said, “I don’t care about any of that. I care about you. I care about the effect this can have on you, because you somehow hold yourself responsible.”
“I am responsible. It’s not about denying. It’s about accepting it, figuring out how I can do better next time.”
“You were let down by the intelligence you received. An incomplete picture.”
“Everyone keeps saying that. I know that’s true, but I also know that I got into this to be a damn analyst in the first place. The guy that would go out and get the best intel product possible, to avoid disasters like this. Somewhere along the way I turned into something else. Maybe I got sucked into the world of operations. I started to see myself as another team guy, when I should be doing what I do best. But right now I blame myself, not because of what I did in Jakarta, but because of what I didn’t do back home. Maybe if I’d been analyzing this situation instead of shooting at North Koreans, I might have—”
Ryan Senior interrupted. “You shot at North Koreans?”
Oh, shit, Jack thought. “I assumed you knew. We had to. It was nothing.”
“That’s not nothing, son.”
“My point is maybe I should go back to just being an analyst. Maybe I could play a bigger role that way.”
The father would like nothing more in the world than for the son to leave ops behind and go back to being an analyst behind a desk in a D.C.-a
rea office. But he also knew he was exactly the wrong person to push that on Jack Junior. He himself had been a teacher who turned into an analyst who turned into . . . what? A reluctant operative? But had he really been so reluctant? The elder Ryan understood the lure of direct involvement, too. The adrenaline, the single-minded sense of purpose with life-and-death actions.
Yeah, he’d love Jack Junior to turn away from that before something horrible happened to him, but that was a decision for Jack Junior.
He said, “Your mom and I, Sally, Katie, and Kyle . . . we love you and support you, whatever you do. You know I want you safe, but I also want you happy. Feeling like you are fulfilling your life’s mission, whatever you determine that to be. Your mom and I trust you to do the right thing, and what happened yesterday was a terrible outcome. I am just calling to tell you I know how you feel, and you have to put it past you.”
Jack asked, “Who the hell blew his cover to the DPRK?”
Ryan Senior sighed. “We don’t know, but we do know it goes much bigger than the DPRK, the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, and the State Department. This is something we are seeing across the government in the past few weeks. Getting to the bottom of it is everyone’s top priority.” Ryan caught himself. “Well . . . I hope it is. There is something else in extremis brewing, something unrelated, but something that can easily divert resources.”
Jack Junior knew better than to ask his dad too many questions, or to circumvent his own boss by making any promises about what The Campus would or could do to help. Instead, he said, “Well . . . You are doing a damn good job, Dad. Just hang in there. A couple years from now we’ll be out on a boat fishing and talking about how cool and important we used to be.”
Jack Senior laughed. It was nice to hear his son joke around a little. “I look forward to that day.”