by Tom Clancy
“God damn it!” he swore on the fifty-yard walk back to his office.
“Mr. President?” Ryan spun around. It was Robby, holding his briefcase. It seemed so out of place for an aviator to be toting one of those.
“I owe you an apology,” Jack said, before Robby could get another word out. “Sorry I blew up.”
Admiral Jackson popped his friend on the arm. “Next time we play golf, it’s a buck a hole, and if you’re going to get mad, do it at me, not them, okay? I’ve seen your temper before, man. Dial it back. A commander can only get pissed in front of the troops for show—leadership technique, we call it—not for real. Yelling at staff is something else. I’m staff,” Robby said. “Yell at me.”
“Yeah, I know. Keep me posted and—”
“Jack?”
“Yeah, Rob?”
“You’re doing fine, just keep it cool.”
“I’m not supposed to let people kill Americans, Robby. That’s not what I’m here for.” His hands balled into fists again.
“Shit happens, Mr. President. If you think you can stop it all, you’re just kidding yourself. And I don’t have to tell you that. You’re not God, Jack, but you are a pretty good guy doing a pretty good job. We’ll have more information for you as soon as we can put it together.”
“When things settle down, how about another golf lesson?”
“I am yours to command.” The two friends shook hands. It wasn’t enough for either of them at this moment, but it had to do. Jackson headed for the door, and Ryan turned back toward his office. “Mrs. Sumter!” he called on the way in. Maybe a smoke would help.
“SO WHAT GIVES, Mr. Secretary?” Chavez asked. The three-page fax off the secure satellite link told them everything the President had. He’d let them read it, too.
“I don’t know,” Adler admitted. “Chavez, that thesis paper you told me about?”
“What about it, sir?”
“You should have waited to write it. Now you know what it’s like up here. Like playing dodge ball as a kid, except it ain’t a rubber ball we’re trying to dodge, is it?” The Secretary of State tucked his notes into his briefcase and waved to the Air Force sergeant who was supposed to look after them. He wasn’t as cute as the French attendant had been.
“Yes, sir?”
“Did Claude leave us anything?”
“A couple of bottles from the Loire Valley,” the NCO replied, with a smile.
“You want to uncork one and get some glasses out?”
“Cards?” John Clark asked.
“No, I think I’m going to have a glass or two, and then I’m going to get a little sleep. Looks like I have another trip laid on,” SecState told them.
“Beijing.” No surprise, John thought.
“It won’t be Philadelphia,” Scott said, as the bottle and glasses arrived. Thirty minutes later, all three men pushed their seat backs down all the way. The sergeant closed the window shades for them.
This time Clark got some sleep, but Chavez did not. There was truth in what Adler had remarked to him. His thesis had savagely attacked turn-of-the-century statesmen for their inability to see beyond immediate problems. Now Ding did know a little better. It was hard to tell the difference between an immediate tactical problem and a truly strategic one when you were dodging the bullets on a minute-to-minute basis, and history books couldn’t fully convey the temper, the feel of the times on which they supposedly reported. Not all of it. They also gave the wrong impression of people. Secretary Adler, now snoring in his leather reclining seat, was a career diplomat, Chavez reminded himself, and he’d earned the trust and respect of the President—a man he himself deeply respected. He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t venal. But he was merely a man, and men made mistakes... and great men made big ones. Someday some historian would write about this trip they’d just taken, but would that historian really know what it had been like and, not knowing, how could he really comment on what had taken place?
What’s going on? Ding asked himself. Iran gets real frisky and knocks over Iraq and starts a new country, and just as America is trying to deal with that, something else happens. An event minor in the great scheme of things, perhaps—but you never knew that until it was all over, did you? How could you tell? That was always the problem. Statesmen over the centuries had made mistakes because when you were stuck in the middle of things, you couldn’t step outside and take a more detached look. That’s what they were paid to do, but it was pretty hard, wasn’t it? He had just finished his master’s thesis, and he’d get hooded later this year, and officially proclaimed an expert in international relations. But that was a lie, Ding thought, settling back into his own seat. A flippant observation he’d once made on another long flight came back to him. All too often international relations was simply one country fucking another. Domingo Chavez, soon-to-be master in international relations, smiled at the thought, but it wasn’t very funny, really. Not when people got killed. Especially not when he and Mr. C. were front-line worker-bees. Something happening in the Middle East. Something else happening with China... four thousand miles away, wasn’t it? Could those two things be related? What if they were? But how could you tell? Historians assumed that people could tell if only they’d been smart enough. But historians didn’t have to do the work...
“NOT HIS BEST performance,” Plumber said, sipping his iced tea.
“Twelve hours, not even that much, to get a handle on something halfway ’round the world, John,” Holtzman suggested.
It was a typical Washington restaurant, pseudo-French with cute little tassels on a menu listing overpriced dishes of mediocre quality—but, then, both men were on expense accounts.
“He’s supposed to handle himself better,” Plumber observed.
“You’re complaining that he can’t lie effectively?”
“That’s one of the things a President is supposed to do—”
“And when we catch him at it ...” Holtzman didn’t have to go on.
“Who ever said it was supposed to be an easy job, Bob?”
“Sometimes I wonder if we’re really supposed to make the job harder.” But Plumber didn’t bite.
“Where do you suppose Adler is?” the NBC correspondent wondered aloud.
“That was a good question this morning,” the Post reporter granted, lifting his glass. “I have somebody looking into that.”
“So do we. All Ryan had to do was say he was preparing to meet with the PRC ambassador. That would have covered things nicely.”
“But it would have been a lie.”
“It would have been the right lie. Bob, that’s the game. The government tries to do things in secret, and we try to find out. Ryan likes this secrecy stuff a little too much.”
“But when we burn him for it, whose agenda are we following?”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, John. Ed Kealty leaked all that stuff to you. I don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out. Everybody knows it.” Bob picked at his salad.
“It’s all true, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” Holtzman admitted. “And there’s a lot more.”
“Really? Well, I know you had a story working.” He didn’t add that he was sorry to have scooped the younger man, mainly because he wasn’t.
“Even more than I can write about.”
“Really?” That got John Plumber’s attention. Holtzman was one of the younger generation in relation to the TV correspondent, and one of the older generation for the newest class of reporters—which regarded Plumber as a fuddy-duddy even as they attended his seminars at Columbia University’s journalism program.
“Really,” Bob assured him.
“Like?”
“Like things that I can’t write about,” Holtzman repeated. “Not for a long time, anyway. John, I’ve been on part of this story for years. I know the CIA officer who got Gerasimov’s wife and daughter out. We have a little deal. In a couple years he tells me how it was done. The submarine
story is true and—”
“I know. I’ve seen a photograph of Ryan on the boat. Why he doesn’t let that one leak is beyond me.”
“He doesn’t break the rules. Nobody ever explained to him that it’s okay to do that—”
“He needs more time with Arnie—”
“As opposed to Ed.”
“Kealty knows how the game is played.”
“Yes, he does, John, maybe a little too well. You know, there’s one thing I’ve never quite been able to figure out,” Bob Holtzman remarked.
“What’s that?”
“The game we’re in, are we supposed to be spectators, referees, or players?”
“Bob, our job is to report the truth to our readers—well, viewers for me.”
“Whose facts, John?” Holtzman asked.
“A FLUSTERED AND angry President Jack Ryan ...” Jack picked up the remote and muted the CNN reporter who’d zapped him with the China question. “Angry, yes, flustered, n—”
“Also yes,” van Damm said. “You bungled the thing on China, and where Adler is—where is he, by the way?”
The President checked his watch. “He should be getting into Andrews in about ninety minutes. Probably over Canada now, I guess. He comes straight here, and then probably off again to China. What the hell are they up to?”
“You got me,” the chief of staff admitted. “But that’s why you have a national security team.”
“I know as much as they do, and I don’t know shit,” Jack breathed, leaning back in his chair. “We’ve got to increase our human-intelligence capability. The President can’t be stuck here all the time not knowing what’s going on. I can’t make decisions without information, and all we have now are guesses—except for what Robby told us. That’s a hard data-point, but it doesn’t make sense, because it doesn’t fit in with anything else.”
“You have to learn to wait, Mr. President. Even if the press doesn’t, you do, and you have to learn to focus on what you can do when you can do it. Now,” Arnie went on, “we have the first set of House elections coming up next week. We have you scheduled to go out and make speeches. If you want the right kind of people in Congress, then that’s what you have to go out and do. I have Callie preparing a couple of speeches for you.”
“What’s the focus?”
“Tax policy, management improvement, integrity, all your favorites. We’ll have the drafts to you tomorrow morning. Time to spend some more time out among the people. Let them love you some, and you can love them back some more.” The chief of staff earned himself a wry look. “I’ve told you before, you can’t be trapped in here, and the radios on the airplane work just fine.”
“A change of scenery would be nice,” POTUS admitted.
“You know what would really be good now?”
“What’s that?”
Arnie grinned. “A natural disaster, gives you the chance to fly out and look presidential, meet people, console them and promise federal disaster relief and—”
“God damn it!” It was so loud the secretaries heard it through the three-inch door.
Arnie sighed. “You gotta learn to take a joke, Jack. Put that temper of yours in a box and lock it the hell up. I just set you off for fun, and I’m on your side, remember?” Arnie headed back to his office, and the President was alone again.
Yet another lesson in Presidency 101. Jack wondered when they would stop. Sooner or later he’d have to act presidential, wouldn’t he? But he hadn’t quite made it yet. Arnie hadn’t said that, exactly, and neither had Robby, but they didn’t have to. He still didn’t belong. He was doing his best, but his best wasn’t good enough—yet, his mind added. Yet? Maybe never. One thing at a time, he thought. What every father said to every son, except they never warned you that one at a time was a luxury some people couldn’t afford. Fourteen dead Americans on a runway on an island eight thousand miles away, killed on purpose probably, for a purpose he could scarcely guess at, and he was supposed to set that fact aside and get on with other things, like a trip back out to meet the people he was supposed to preserve, protect, and defend, even as he tried to figure out how he’d failed to do so for fourteen of them. What was it you needed in order to do this job? Turn off dead citizens and fix on other things? You had to be a sociopath to accomplish that, didn’t you? Well, no. Others had to—doctors, soldiers, cops. And now him. And control his temper, salve his frustration, and focus on something else for the rest of the day.
MOVIE STAR LOOKED down at the sea, six kilometers below, he estimated. To the north he could see an iceberg on the blue-gray surface, glistening in the bright sunlight. Wasn’t that remarkable? As often as he’d flown, he’d never seen one of those before. For someone from his part of the world, the sea was strange enough, like a desert, impossible to live on, though a different way. Strange how it looked like the desert in all but color, the surface crinkling in almost-regular parallel lines just like dunes, but uninvitingly. Despite his looks—about which he was quite vain; he liked the smiles he got from flight attendants, for example—almost nothing was inviting to him. The world hated him and his kind, and even those who made use of his services preferred to keep him at arm’s length, like a vicious but occasionally useful dog. He grimaced, looking down. Dogs were not favored animals in his culture. And so here he was, back on another airplane, alone, with his people on other aircraft in groups of three, heading to a place where they would be decidedly not welcome, sent from a place where they were scarcely more so.
Success would bring him—what? Intelligence officers would seek to identify and track him, but the Israelis had been doing that for years, and he was still alive. What was he doing this for? Movie Star asked himself. It was a little late for that. If he canceled the mission, then he wouldn’t be welcome anywhere at all. He was supposed to be fighting for Allah, wasn’t he? Jihad. A holy war. It was a religious term for a military-religious act, one meant to protect the Faith, but he didn’t really believe that anymore, and it was vaguely frightening to have no country, no home, and then... no faith? Did he even have that anymore? He asked himself, then admitted that if he had to ask—he didn’t. He and his kind, at least the ones who survived, became automatons, skilled robots—computers in the modern age. Machines that did things at the bidding of others, to be thrown away when convenient, and below him the surface of the sea or the desert never changed. Yet he had no choice.
Perhaps the people who were sending him on the mission would win, and he would have some sort of reward. He kept telling himself that, after all, even though there was nothing in his living experience to support the belief—and if he’d lost his faith in God, then why was it that he could remain faithful to a profession that even his employers regarded with distaste?
Children. He’d never married, never fathered one to his knowledge. The women he’d had, perhaps—but, no, they were debauched women, and his religious training had taught him to despise them even as he made use of their bodies, and if they produced offspring, then the children, too, would be cursed. How was it that a man could chase an idea for all his life and then realize that here he was, looking down at the most inhospitable of scenes—a place where neither he nor any man could live—and be more at home here than anyplace else? And so he would assist in the deaths of children. Unbelievers, political expressions, things. But they were not. They were innocent of any guilt at that age, their bodies not yet formed, their minds not yet taught the nature of good and evil.
Movie Star told himself that such thoughts had come to him before, that doubts were normal to men on difficult tasks, and that each previous time he’d set them aside and gotten on with it. If the world had changed, then perhaps—
But the only changes that had taken place were contrary to his lifelong quest, and was it that having killed for nothing, he had to keep killing in the hope of achieving something? Where did that path lead? If there were a God and there were a Faith, and there were a Law, then—
Well, he had to believe in something. H
e checked his watch. Four more hours. He had a mission. He had to believe in that.
THEY CAME BY car instead of helicopter. Helicopters were too visible, and maybe this way nobody would notice. To make things more covert still, the cars came to the East Wing entrance. Adler, Clark, and Chavez walked into the White House the same way Jack had on his first night, hustled along by the Secret Service, and they managed to arrive unseen by the press. The Oval Office was a little crowded. Goodley and the Foleys were there, as well, along with Arnie, of course.
“How’s the jet lag, Scott?” Jack asked first, meeting him at the door.
“If it’s Tuesday, it must be Washington,” the Secretary of State replied.
“It isn’t Tuesday,” Goodley observed, not getting it.
“Then I guess the jet lag is pretty bad.” Adler took his seat and brought out his notes. A Navy mess steward came in with coffee, the fuel of Washington. The arrivals from the UIR all had a cup.
“Tell us about Daryaei,” Ryan commanded.
“He looks healthy. A little tired,” Adler allowed. “His desk is fairly clean. He spoke quietly, but he’s never been one to raise his voice in public, to the best of my knowledge. Interestingly, he was getting into town about the same time we were.”
“Oh?” Ed Foley said, looking up from some of his own notes.
“Yeah, he came in on a business jet, a Gulfstream,” Clark reported. “Ding got a few pictures.”
“So, he’s hopping around some? I guess that makes sense,” POTUS observed. Strangely, Ryan could identify with Daryaei’s problems. They weren’t all that different from his own, though the Iranian’s methods could hardly have been more different.
“His staffs afraid of him,” Chavez added impulsively. “Like something from an old World War II Nazi movie. The staff in his outer office was pretty wired. If somebody had yelled ‘boo,’ they would have hit the ceiling.”
“I’d agree with that,” Adler said, not vexed at the interruption. “His demeanor with me was very old-world, quiet, platitudes, that sort of thing. The fact of the matter is that he said nothing of real significance—maybe good, maybe bad. He’s willing to have continued contacts with us. He says he desires peace for everybody. He even hinted at a certain degree of goodwill for Israel. For a lot of the meeting, he lectured me on how peaceful he and his religion are. He emphasized the value of oil and the resulting commercial relationships for all parties involved. He denied having any territorial ambitions. No surprises in any of it.”