by Tom Clancy
“Chopper down there at the hospital pad,” Lieutenant Harrison said, seeing it as they angled past for the base. “Turnin’ and blinkin’.”
“Got it,” Malloy confirmed. They’d pass well clear even if the guy lifted off right now. “Nothing else at our level,” he added, checking aloft for the blinking lights of airliners heading in and out of Heathrow and Luton. You never stopped scanning if you wanted to live. If he got command of VHM-1 at Anacostia Naval Air Station in D.C., the traffic at Reagan National Airport meant that he’d be flying routinely through very crowded air space, and though he respected commercial airline pilots, he trusted them less than he trusted his own abilities—which, he knew, was exactly how they viewed him and everybody in green flight suits. To be a pilot for a living, you had to think of yourself as the very best, though in Malloy’s case he knew this to be true. And this kid Harrison showed some real promise, if he stayed in uniform instead of ending up a traffic reporter in West Bumfuck, Wherever. Finally, the landing pad at Hereford came into view, and Malloy headed for it. Five minutes and he’d be on the ground, cooling the turboshaft engines down, and twenty minutes after that, in his bed.
“Yes, he will do it,” Popov said. They were in a corner booth, and the background music made it a secure place to talk. “He has not confirmed it, but he will.”
“Who is he?” Henriksen asked.
“Sean Grady. Do you know the name?”
“PIRA . . . worked in Londonderry mainly, didn’t he?”
“For the most part, yes. He captured three SAS people and . . . disposed of them. Two separate incidents. The SAS then targeted him on three separate missions. Once they came very close to getting him, and they eliminated ten or so of his closest associates. He then cleaned out some suspected informers in his unit. He’s quite ruthless,” Popov assured his associates.
“That’s true,” Henriksen assured Brightling. “I remember reading what he did to the SAS guys he caught. Wasn’t very pretty. Grady’s a nasty little fucker. Does he have enough people to make this attempt?”
“I think yes,” Dmitriy Arkadeyevich replied. “And he held us up for money. I offered five, and he demanded six, plus drugs.”
“Drugs?” Henriksen was surprised.
“Wait, I thought the IRA didn’t approve of drug trafficking,” Brightling objected.
“We live in a practical world. The IRA worked for years to eliminate drug dealers throughout Ireland—mainly kneecappings, to make the action very public. That was a psychological and political move on his part. Perhaps now he entertains the idea as a continuing source of income for his operations,” Dmitriy explained. The morality of the issue didn’t seem very important to anyone at the table.
“Yeah, well, I suppose we can entertain that request,” Brightling said, with a small measure of distaste. “Kneecappings? What does that mean?”
“You take a pistol,” Bill explained, “and place it behind the knee, then you fire forward. It blows the kneecap to smithereens. Painful, and permanently crippling. It’s how they used to deal with informers and other people they didn’t like. The Protestant terrorists preferred a Black and Decker drill for the same purpose. It puts the word out on the street that you are not to be messed with,” Henriksen concluded.
“Ouch,” the physician in Brightling commented.
“That’s why they’re called terrorists,” Henriksen pointed out. “These days, they just kill them. Grady has a reputation for ruthlessness, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, he does,” Popov confirmed. “There’s no doubt that he will undertake this mission. He likes the concept and your suggestion for how it should be set up, Bill. There is also his ego, which is large.” Popov took a sip of his wine. “He wants to take the lead in the IRA politically, and that will mean doing something dramatic.”
“That’s the Irish for you—the land of sad loves and happy wars.”
“Will he succeed?” Brightling asked.
“The concept is a clever one. But remember that to him success means elimination of the primary targets, the two women, and then a few of the reaction team of soldiers. After that, he will doubtless flee the area and try to return to Ireland and safety. Just surviving an operation of this type is successful enough for his political purposes. To fight a full military action would be madness for him, and Grady is not a madman,” Dmitriy told them, not really sure he believed it. Weren’t all revolutionaries mad? It was difficult to understand people who let visions take control of their lives. Those who’d succeeded, Lenin, Mao, and Gandhi in this century, were the ones who’d used their visions effectively, of course—but even then, which of the three had really succeeded? The Soviet Union had fallen, the People’s Republic of China would eventually succumb to the same political-economic realities that had doomed the USSR, and India was still an economic disaster that somehow managed to hover in stagnation. By that model, Ireland was more surely doomed by the possible success of the IRA than it was by its economic marriage to Britain. At least Cuba had the tropical sun to keep it warm. To survive, with no natural resources to speak of, Ireland needed a close economic tie to someone, and the closest was the U.K. But that was off the dinner topic.
“So, you expect him to try a hit-and-run,” Bill asked.
Dmitriy nodded. “Nothing else makes tactical sense. He hopes to live long enough to utilize the money we’ve offered him. Assuming you will approve the increase he requires.”
“What’s another million or so?” Henriksen asked, with a suppressed grin.
So both of them regarded such a large sum as trivial, Popov saw, and again he was struck in the face with the fact that they were planning something monstrous—but what?
“How do they want it? Cash?” Brightling asked.
“No, I told them it would be deposited in a numbered Swiss account. I can arrange that.”
“I have enough already laundered,” Bill told his employer. “We could set that up tomorrow if you want.”
“And that means I fly to Switzerland again,” Dmitriy observed sourly.
“Getting tired of flying?”
“I have traveled a great deal, Dr. Brightling.” Popov sighed openly. He was jet-lagged, and it showed for once.
“John.”
“John.” Popov nodded, seeing some actual affection in his boss for the first time, somewhat to his surprise.
“I understand, Dmitriy,” Henriksen said. “The Australia trip was a pain in the ass for me.”
“What was it like to grow up in Russia?” Brightling asked.
“Harder than America. There was more violence in the schools. No serious crime,” Popov explained. “But lots of fights between the boys, for example. Dominance fights, as boys will. The authorities usually looked the other way.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“Moscow. My father was also an officer in State Security. I was educated in Moscow State University.”
“What major?”
“Language and economics.” The former had proven very useful. The latter had been totally valueless, since the Marxist idea of economics had not exactly proven to be an effective one.
“Ever get out of the city? You know, like Boy Scouts do here, that sort of stuff?”
Popov smiled, wondering where this was going, and why they were asking it. But he played along. “One of my happiest memories of childhood. I was in the Young Pioneers. We traveled out to a state farm and worked there for a month, helping with the harvest, living with nature, as you Americans say.” And then, at age fourteen, he’d met his first love, Yelena Ivanovna. He wondered where she was now. He succumbed to a brief attack of nostalgia, as he remembered her feel in the darkness, his first conquest . . .
Brightling noted the distant smile and took it for what he wanted it to be. “You liked that, eh?”
Clearly they didn’t want to hear that story. “Oh, yes. I have often wondered what it was like to live out there in a place like that, the sun on your back all the time, working in the so
il. My father and I used to walk into the woods, hunting for mushrooms—that was a common pastime for Soviet citizens in the sixties, walking in the woods.” Unlike most Russians, they’d driven there in his father’s official car, but as a boy he’d liked the woods as a place of adventure and romanticism, as all boys do, and enjoyed the time with his father as well.
“Any game in the woods there?” Bill Henriksen asked.
“One would see birds, of course, many kinds, and occasionally elk—you call them moose here, I think—but rarely. State hunters were always killing them. Wolves are their main target. They hunt them from helicopters. We Russians do not like wolves as you do here in America. Too many folk tales of rabid ones killing people, you see. Mostly lies, I expect.”
Brightling nodded. “Same thing here. Wolves are just big wild dogs, you can train them as pets if you want. Some people do that.”
“Wolves are cool,” Bill added. He’d often thought about making one a pet, but you needed a lot of land for that. Maybe when the Project was fulfilled.
What the hell was this all about? Dmitriy wondered, still playing along. “I always wanted to see a bear, but there are none of them left in the Moscow area. I saw them only at the zoo. I loved bears,” he added, lying. They’d always frightened the hell out of him. You heard scores of bear stories as a child in Russia, few of them friendly, though not as antinature as the wolf stories. Large dogs? Wolves killed people in the steppes. The farmers and peasants hated the damned things and welcomed the state hunters with their helicopters and machine guns, the better to hunt them down and slaughter them.
“Well, John and I are Nature Lovers,” Bill explained, waving to the waiter for another bottle of wine. “Always have been. All the way back to Boy Scouts—like your Young Pioneers, I suppose.”
“The state was not kind to nature in the Soviet Union. Much worse than the problems you’ve had here in America. Americans have come to Russia to survey the damage and suggest ways to fix the problems of pollution and such.” Especially in the Caspian Sea, where pollution had killed off most of the sturgeon, and with it the fish eggs known as caviar, which had for so long been a prime means of earning foreign currency for the USSR.
“Yes, that was criminal,” Brightling agreed soberly. “But it’s a global problem. People don’t respect nature the way they should,” Brightling went on for several minutes, delivering what had to be a brief canned lecture, to which Dmitriy listened politely.
“That is a great political movement in America, is it not?”
“Not as powerful as many would like,” Bill observed. “But it’s important to some of us.”
“Such a movement would be useful in Russia. It is a pity that so much has been destroyed for no purpose,” Popov responded, meaning some of it. The state should conserve resources for proper exploitation, not simply destroy them because the local political hacks didn’t know how to use them properly. But then the USSR had been so horridly inefficient in everything it did—well, except espionage, Popov corrected himself. America had done well, he thought. The cities were far cleaner than their Russian counterparts, even here in New York, and you only needed to drive an hour from any city to see green grass and tidy productive farms. But the greater question was: why had a conversation that had begun with the discussion of a terrorist incident drifted into this? Had he done anything to invite it? No, his employer had abruptly steered it in this direction. It had not been an accident. That meant they were sounding him out—but on what? This nature drivel? He sipped at his wine and stared at his dinner companions. “You know, I’ve never really had a chance to see America. I would like very much to see the national parks. What is the one with the geysers? Gold stone? Something like that?”
“Yellowstone, it’s in Wyoming. Maybe the prettiest place in America,” Henriksen told the Russian.
“Nope, Yosemite,” Brightling countered. “In California. That’s the prettiest valley in the whole world. Overrun with goddamned tourists now, of course, but that’ll change.”
“Same story at Yellowstone, John, and, yeah, that’ll change, too. Someday,” Bill Henriksen concluded.
They seemed pretty positive about the things that would change. But the American state parks were run by the federal government for all citizens, weren’t they? They had to be, because they were tax-supported. No limited access for the elite here. Equality for all—something he’d been taught in Soviet schools, except here they actually lived it. One more reason, Dmitriy thought, why one country had fallen, and the other had grown stronger.
“What do you mean ‘that’ll change’?” Popov asked.
“Oh, the idea is to lessen the impact of people on the areas. It’s a good idea, but some other things have to happen first,” Brightling replied.
“Yeah, John, just one or two,” Henriksen agreed, with a chuckle. Then he decided that this feeling-out process had gone far enough. “Anyway, Dmitriy, how will we know when Grady wants to go forward?”
“I will call him. He left me a mobile-phone number which I can use at certain times of the day.”
“Trustful soul.”
“For me, yes. We have been friends since the 1980s, back when he was in the Bekaa Valley. And besides, the phone is mobile, probably bought with a false credit card by someone else entirely. These things are very useful to intelligence officers. They are difficult to track unless you have very sophisticated equipment. America has them, and so does England, but other nations, no, not very many of them.”
“Well, call him as soon as you think proper. We want this one to run, don’t we, John?”
“Yes,” Dr. Brightling said definitively. “Bill, set up the money for the transfer tomorrow. Dmitriy, go ahead and set up the bank account.”
“Yes, John,” Popov replied, as the dessert cart approached the table.
Grady, they saw, was excited about this mission. It was approaching two in the Dublin morning. The photos had been developed by a friend of the movement, and six of them blown up. The large ones were pinned to the wall. The small ones lay in appropriate places on a map unfolded on the worktable.
“They will approach from here, right up this road. Only one place for them to park their vehicles, isn’t there?”
“Agreed,” Rodney Sands said, checking angles.
“Okay, Roddy, then we do this . . .” Grady outlined the plan.
“How do we communicate?”
“Cellular phones. Every group will have one, and we’ll select speed-dial settings so that we can trade information rapidly and efficiently.”
“Weapons?” Danny McCorley asked.
“We have plenty of those, lad. They will respond with five men, perhaps as many as ten, but no more than that. They’ve never deployed more than ten or eleven men to a mission, even in Spain. We’ve counted them on the TV tapes, haven’t we? Fifteen of us, ten of them, and surprise works for us in both phases.”
The Barry twins, Peter and Sam, looked skeptical at first, but if the mission was run quickly . . . if it ran according to the schedule . . . yes, it was possible.
“What about the women?” Timothy O’Neil asked.
“What about them?” Grady asked. “They are our primary targets.”
“A pregnant woman, Sean . . . it will not look good politically.”
“They are Americans, and their husbands are our enemies, and they are bait for getting them close. We will not kill them at once, and if circumstances permit, they might well be left alive to mourn their loss, lad,” Grady added, just to assuage the conscience of the younger man. Timmy wasn’t a coward, but he did have some lingering bourgeois sentimentality.
O’Neil nodded submission. Grady wasn’t a man to cross, and was in any case their leader. “I lead the group into the hospital, then?”
Grady nodded. “Yes. Roddy and I will remain outside with the covering group.”
“Very well, Sean,” Timmy agreed, committing himself to the mission now and forever.
CHAPTER 26
&
nbsp; CONCLUSIONS
One problem with an investigation like this was that you risked alerting the subject, but that couldn’t always be helped. Agents Sullivan and Chatham circulated around the bar until nearly midnight, finding two women who knew Mary Bannister, and one who knew Anne Pretloe. In the case of the former, they got the name of a man with whom Bannister had been seen dancing—a bar regular who hadn’t shown up that night, but whose address they’d get rapidly enough from his telephone number, which was known, it seemed, to quite a few of the women here. By midnight they were ready to leave, somewhat annoyed to have spent so much time in a lively bar drinking nothing more potent than Coca-Cola, but with a few new leads to run down. It was so far a typical case. Special Agent Sullivan thought of it like walking through a supermarket looking for dinner, picking over the shelves randomly, selecting things to eat, never knowing how the selections would turn out in the kitchen.
“ ’Morning, baby,” Ding said, before he rolled out of bed, as always starting his day off with a kiss.
“Hi, Ding.” Patsy tried to roll over, but it was difficult, almost as much as sleeping on her back, unable to move with her belly full of child. It couldn’t come soon enough, Patricia Clark Chavez thought, despite the discomfort the delivery was sure to inflict upon her. She felt his hand slide over the stretched skin of what had once been a flat, trim abdomen.
“How’s the little guy?”
“Waking up, feels like,” she answered with a distant smile, wondering what he or she would look like. Ding was convinced it had to be a boy. It seemed he would accept no other possibility. Must be a Latino thing, she figured. A physician, she knew different. Whatever it was, however, it would almost certainly be healthy. The little thing inside her had been active since she’d felt the first “bloop,” as she called it, at three months. “There he goes,” she reported, when he/she turned over inside the sea of amniotic fluid.