by Tom Clancy
“It’s the isolated act of one deranged man!” Cabot announced angrily.
“Not so, sir. The one shot with a pistol was like you say, but the first victim was killed with two of those rubber bullets at a range of more than twenty yards—with two aimed shots from a single-shot weapon. That’s cold, and it wasn’t any accident.”
“Are we sure he’s dead?” Alden asked.
“My wife’s a doc, and he looked dead to her. The body spasmed and went limp, probably indicating death from massive head trauma. They can’t say this guy tripped and fell onto the curb. This really changes things. If the Palestinians are smart, they’ll double-down their bets. They’ll stay with this tactic and wait for the world to respond. If they do that, they can’t lose,” Jack concluded.
“I agree with Ryan,” Alden said. “There’ll be a UN resolution before dinner. We’ll have to go along with it, and that just might show the Arabs that nonviolence is a better weapon than rocks are. What will the Israelis say? How will they react?”
Alden knew what the answer was. This was to enlighten the DCI, so Ryan took the question. “First they’ll stonewall. They’re probably kicking themselves for not intercepting the tape, but it’s a little late for that. This was almost certainly an unplanned incident—I mean that the Israeli government is as surprised as we are—otherwise they would have grabbed the TV crew. That police captain is having his brain picked apart now. By lunchtime they’ll say that he’s crazy—hell, he probably is—and that this is an isolated act. How they do their damage control is predictable, but—”
“It’s not going to work,” Alden interrupted. “The President’s going to have to have a statement out by nine. We can’t call this a ‘tragic incident.’ It’s cold-blooded murder of an unarmed demonstrator by a state official.”
“Look, Charlie, this is just an isolated incident,” Director Cabot said again.
“Maybe so, but I’ve been predicting this for five years.” The National Security Advisor stood and walked to the windows. “Marcus, the only thing that has held Israel together for the past thirty years has been the stupidity of the Arabs. Either they never recognized that Israeli legitimacy is based entirely on their moral position or they just didn’t have the wit to care about it. Israel is now faced with an impossible ethical contradiction. If they really are a democracy that respects the rights of its citizens, they have to grant the Arabs broader rights. But that means playing hell with their political integrity, which depends on soothing their own extreme religious elements—and that crowd doesn’t care a rat’s ass about Arab rights, does it? But if they cave in to the religious zealots and stonewall, try to gloss over this thing, then they are not a democracy, and that imperils the political support from America without which they cannot survive economically or militarily. The same dilemma applies to us. Our support for Israel is based on their political legitimacy as a functioning liberal democracy, but that legitimacy just evaporated. A country whose police murder unarmed people has no legitimacy, Marcus. We can no more support an Israel that does things like this than we could have supported Somoza, Marcos, or any other tin-pot dictator—”
“Goddamn it, Charlie! Israel isn’t—”
“I know that, Marcus. They’re not. They’re really not. But the only way they can prove that is to change, to become true to what they have always claimed to be. If they stonewall on this, Marcus, they’re doomed. They’ll lean on their political lobby and find out it isn’t there anymore. If it goes that far, then they embarrass our government even more than it already is, and we’ll be faced with the possible necessity of overtly cutting them off. We can’t do that either. We must find another alternative.” Alden turned back from the window. “Ryan, that idea of yours is now on the front burner. I’ll handle the President and State. The only way we can get Israel out of this is to find some kind of a peace plan that works. Call your friend at Georgetown and tell him it’s no longer a study. Call it Project PILGRIMAGE. By tomorrow morning I need a good sketch of what we want to do and how we want to do it.”
“That’s awful fast, sir,” Ryan observed.
“Then don’t let me stop you, Jack. If we don’t move quickly on this, God only knows what might happen. You know Scott Adler at State?”
“We’ve talked a few times.”
“He’s Brent Talbot’s best man. I suggest you get together with him after you check with your friends. He can cover your backside on the State Department flank. We can’t trust that bureaucracy to do anything fast. Better pack some bags, boy, you’re going to be busy. I want facts, positions, and a gold-plated evaluation just as fast as you can generate it, and I want it done black as a coal mine.” That last remark was aimed at Cabot. “If this is going to work, we can’t risk a single leak.”
“Yes, sir,” Ryan said. Cabot just nodded.
Jack had never been in the faculty residence at Georgetown. It struck him as odd, but he shoved that thought aside as breakfast was served. Their table overlooked a parking lot.
“You were right, Jack,” Riley observed. “That was nothing to wake up to.”
“What’s the word from Rome?”
“They like it,” the President of Georgetown University replied simply.
“How much?” Ryan asked.
“You’re serious?”
“Alden told me two hours ago that this is now on the front burner.”
Riley accepted this news with a nod. “Trying to save Israel, Jack?”
Ryan didn’t know how much humor was in the question, and his physical state did not allow levity. “Father, all I’m doing is following up on something—you know, orders?”
“I am familiar with the term. Your timing was pretty good on floating this thing.”
“Maybe so, but let’s save the Nobel Prize for some other time, okay?”
“Finish your breakfast. We can still catch everybody over there before lunch, and you look pretty awful.”
“I feel pretty awful,” Ryan admitted.
“Everybody should stop drinking about forty,” Riley observed. “After forty you really can’t handle it anymore.”
“You didn’t,” Jack noted.
“I’m a priest. I have to drink. What exactly are you looking for?”
“If we can get preliminary agreement from the major players, we want to get negotiations going ASAP, but this end of the equation has to be done very quietly. The President needs a quick evaluation of his options. That’s what I’m doing.”
“Will Israel play?”
“If they don’t, they’re fucked—excuse me, but that’s exactly where things are.”
“You’re right, of course, but will they have the sense to recognize their position?”
“Father, all I do is gather and evaluate information. People keep asking me to tell fortunes, but I don’t know how. What I do know is that what we saw on TV is going to ignite the biggest firestorm since Hiroshima, and we sure as hell have to try to do something before it burns up a whole region.”
“Eat. I have to think for a few minutes, and I do that best when I’m chewing on something.”
It was good advice, Ryan knew a few minutes later. The food soaked up the coffee acid in his stomach, and the energy from the food would help him get through the day. Inside an hour, he was on the move again, this time to the State Department. By lunch he was on his way home to pack, managing to nap for three hours along the way. He stopped back at Alden’s White House office for a session that dragged far into the night. Alden had really taken charge there, and the skull session in his office covered a huge amount of ground. Before dawn Jack headed off to Andrews Air Force Base. He was able to call his wife from the VIP Lounge. Jack had hoped to take his son to a ball game over the weekend, but for him there wouldn’t be a weekend. A final courier arrived from CIA, State, and the White House, delivering two hundred pages of data that he’d have to read on the way across the Atlantic.
4
PROMISED LAND
The U.S. Air
Force’s Ramstein air base is set in a German valley, a fact which Ryan found slightly unsettling. His idea of a proper airport was one on land that was flat as far as the eye could see. He knew that it didn’t make much of a difference, but it was one of the niceties of air travel to which he’d become accustomed. The base supported a full wing of F-16 fighter-bombers, each of which was stored in its own bombproof shelter which in its turn was surrounded by trees—the German people have a mania for green things that would impress the most ambitious American environmentalists. It was one of those remarkable cases in which the wishes of the tree-huggers coincided exactly with military necessity. Spotting the aircraft shelters from the air was extremely difficult, and some of the shelters—French—built—had trees planted on top of them, making camouflage both aesthetically and militarily pleasing. The base also housed a few large executive aircraft, including a converted 707 with “The United States of America” painted on it. Resembling a smaller version of the President’s personal transport, it was known locally as “Miss Piggy,” and was assigned to the use of the commander of USAF units in Europe. Ryan could not help but smile. Here were over seventy fighter aircraft tasked to the destruction of Soviet forces which were now drawing back from Germany, housed on an environmentally admirable facility, which was also home to a plane called Miss Piggy. The world was truly mad.
On the other hand, traveling Air Force guaranteed excellent hospitality and VIP treatment worthy of the name, in this case at an attractive edifice called the Cannon Hotel. The base commander, a full colonel, had met his VC-20B Gulfstream executive aircraft and whisked him off to his Distinguished Visitor’s quarters where a slide-out drawer contained a nice collection of liquor bottles to help him to conquer jet lag with nine hours of drink-augmented sleep. That was just as well, because the available television service included a single channel. By the time he awoke at about six in the morning, local, he was almost in synch with the time zones, stiff and hungry, having almost survived another bout with travel shock. He hoped.
Jack didn’t feel like jogging. That was what he told himself. In fact he knew that he couldn’t have jogged half a mile with a gun to his head. And so he walked briskly. He soon found himself being passed by early-morning exercise nuts, many of whom had to be fighter pilots, they were so young and lean. Morning mist hung in the trees that were planted nearly to the edge of the blacktopped roads. It was much cooler than at home, with the still air disturbed every few minutes by the discordant roar of jet engines—“the sound of freedom”—the audible symbol of the military force that had guaranteed the peace of Europe for over forty years—now resented by the Germans, of course. Attitudes change as rapidly as the times. American power had achieved its goal and was becoming a thing of the past, at least as far as Germany was concerned. The inner-German border was gone. The fences and guard towers were down. The mines were gone. The plowed strip of dirt that had remained pristine for two generations to betray the footprints of defectors was now planted with grass and flowers. Locations in the East once examined in satellite photos or about which Western intelligence agencies had sought information at the cost of both money and blood were now walked over by camera-toting tourists, among whom were intelligence officers more shocked than bemused at the rapid changes that had come and gone like the sweep of a spring tide. I knew that I was right about this place, some thought. Or, How did we ever blow that one so badly?
Ryan shook his head. It was more than amazing. The question of the two Germanys had been the centerpiece of East-West conflict since before his birth, had appeared to be the one unchanging thing in the world, the subject of enough white papers and Special National Intelligence Estimates and news stories to fill the entire Pentagon with pulp. All the effort, all the examination of minutiae, the petty disputes—gone. Soon to be forgotten. Even scholarly historians would never have the energy to look at all the data that had been thought important—crucial, vital, worthy of men’s lives—and was now little more than a vast footnote to the end of the Second World War. This base had been one such item. Designed to house the aircraft whose task it was to clear the skies of Russian planes and crush a Soviet attack, it was now an expensive anachronism whose residential apartments would soon house German families. Ryan wondered what they’d do with the aircraft shelters like that one there.... Wine cellars, maybe. The wine was pretty good.
“Halt!” Ryan stopped cold in his tracks and turned to see where the sound had come from. It was an Air Force security policeman—woman. Girl, actually, Ryan saw, though her M-16 rifle neither knew nor cared about plumbing fixtures.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“ID, please.” The young lady was quite attractive, and quite professional. She also had a backup in the trees. Ryan handed over his CIA credentials.
“I’ve never seen one of these, sir.”
“I came in last night on the VC-20. I’m staying over at the Inn, room 109. You can check with Colonel Parker’s office.”
“We’re on security alert, sir,” she said next, reaching for her radio.
“Just do your job, miss—excuse me, Sergeant Wilson. My plane doesn’t leave till ten.” Jack leaned against a tree to stretch. It was too nice a morning to get excited about anything, even if there were two armed people who didn’t know who the hell he was.
“Roger.” Sergeant Becky Wilson switched off her radio. “The Colonel’s looking for you, sir.”
“On the way back, I turn left at the Burger King?”
“That’s right, sir.” She handed his ID back with a smile.
“Thanks, Sarge. Sorry to bother you.”
“You want a ride back, sir? The Colonel’s waiting.”
“I’d rather walk. He can wait, he’s early.” Ryan walked away from a buck sergeant who now had to ponder the importance of a man who kept her base commander sitting on the front step of the Cannon. It took ten brisk minutes, but Ryan’s directional sense had not left him, despite the unfamiliar surroundings and a six-hour time differential.
“Morning, sir!” Ryan said as he vaulted the wall into the parking lot.
“I set up a little breakfast with COMUSAFE staff. We’d like your views on what’s happening in Europe.”
Jack laughed. “Great! I’m interested in hearing yours.” Ryan walked off toward his room to dress. What makes them think I know anything more than they do? By the time his plane left, he’d learned four things he hadn’t known. Soviet forces withdrawing from what had formerly been called East Germany were decidedly unhappy with the fact that there was no place for them to withdraw to. Elements of the former East German army were even less happy about their enforced retirement than Washington actually knew; they probably had allies among ex-members of the already de-established Stasi. Finally, though an even dozen members of the Red Army Faction had been apprehended in Eastern Germany, at least that many others had gotten the message and vanished before they, too, could be swept up by the Bundeskriminalamt, the German federal police. That explained the security alert at Ramstein, Ryan was told.
The VC-20B lifted off from the airfield just after ten in the morning, headed south. Those poor terrorists, he thought, devoting their lives and energy and intellect to something that was vanishing more swiftly than the German countryside below him. Like children whose mother had died. No friends now. They’d hidden out in Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic, blissfully unaware of the coming demise of both communist states. Where would they hide now? Russia? No chance. Poland? That was a laugh. The world had changed under them, and was about to change again, Ryan thought with a wistful smile. Some more of their friends were about to watch the world change. Maybe, he corrected himself. Maybe ...
“Hello, Sergey Nikolayevich,” Ryan had said as the man had entered his office, a week before.
“Ivan Emmetovich,” the Russian had replied, holding out his hand. Ryan remembered the last time they’d been this close, on the runway of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. Golovko had held a gun in his
hand then. It had not been a good day for either, but as usual, it was funny the way things had worked out. Golovko, for having nearly, but not quite, prevented the greatest defection in Soviet history, was now First Deputy Chairman of the Committee for State Security. Had he succeeded, he would not have gone quite so far, but for being very good, if not quite good enough, he’d been noticed by his own President, and his career had taken a leap upward. His security officer had camped in Nancy’s office with John Clark, as Ryan had led Golovko into his.
“I am not impressed.” Golovko looked around disapprovingly at the painted gypsum-board drywall. Ryan did have a single decent painting borrowed from a government warehouse, and, of course, the not-exactly-required photo of President Fowler over by the clothes tree on which Jack hung his coat.
“I do have a nicer view, Sergey Nikolayevich. Tell me, is the statue of Iron Feliks still in the middle of the square?”
“For the moment.” Golovko smiled. “Your Director is out of town, I gather.”
“Yes, the President decided that he needed some advice.”
“On what?” Golovko asked with a crooked smile.
“Damned if I know,” Ryan answered with a laugh. Lots of things, he didn’t say.
“Difficult, is it not? For both of us.” The new KGB Chairman was not a professional spook either—in fact that was not unusual. More often than not, the director of that grim agency had been a Party man, but the Party was becoming a thing of history also, and Narmonov had selected a computer expert who was supposed to bring new ideas into the Soviet Union’s chief spy agency. That would make it more efficient. Ryan knew that Golovko had an IBM PC behind his desk in Moscow now.