by Tom Clancy
Wei told them he would go quietly.
But Wei had decided that he would not go quietly.
He would not go at all.
The fifty-four-year-old Princeling had no desire to play the role of a prop in a political theater, used by his enemies as the scapegoat for the country’s downfall.
They could have him in death, they could do with his legacy what they wished, but he would not be around to watch it.
As the police contingent from the Ministry of Public Security drove toward the government compound, Wei spoke to the director of his personal security, and Fung agreed to supply him with a pistol and a tutorial on its use.
* * *
Wei held the big black QSZ-92 pistol to his head; his hand trembled slightly, but he found himself to be rather composed, considering the situation. As he closed his eyes and began pressing the trigger harder, he felt his tremors increase; the quivering grew in his body, beginning in his feet and traveling upward.
Wei worried he would shake the muzzle off target and miss his brain, so he pressed the gun harder into his temple.
A shout came from the hallway outside his office. It was Fung’s voice, excited.
Curious, Wei opened his eyes.
The office door flew open now, Fung ran in, and Wei’s body shook to the point he worried Fung would see his weakness.
He lowered the gun quickly.
“What is it?” Wei demanded.
Fung’s eyes were wide; he wore an incongruous smile on his face. He said, “General Secretary! Tanks! Tanks in the street!”
Wei lowered the gun carefully. What did this mean? “It’s just MPS. MPS has armored vehicles,” he responded.
“No, sir! Not armored personnel carriers. Tanks! Long lines of tanks coming from the direction of Tiananmen Square!”
“Tanks? Whose tanks?”
“Su! It must be General… excuse me, I mean Chairman Su! He is sending heavy armor to protect you. The MPS won’t dare arrest you in defiance of the PLA. How can they?”
Wei could not believe this turn of events. Su Ke Qiang, the Princeling four-star PLA general and the chairman of the Central Military Commission, and one of the men he had made a direct appeal to the evening before, had come to his aid at the last possible moment.
The president of China and the general secretary of the CPC slid the pistol across the desk to his principal protection agent. “Major Fung… It appears I will not be needing this today. Take it from me before I hurt myself.”
Fung took the pistol, engaged the safety, and slid it into the holster on his hip. “I am very relieved, Mr. President.”
Wei did not think that Fung really cared whether he lived or died, but in this heady moment the president stood and shook his bodyguard’s hand anyway.
Any allies, even conditional allies, were worth having on a day like this.
Wei looked out the window of his office now, across the compound and to a point in the distance beyond the walls of Zhongnanhai. Tanks filled the streets, armed People’s Liberation Army troops walked in neat rows alongside the armor, their rifles in the crooks of their arms.
As the rumbling of the approaching tanks shook the floor and rattled books, fixtures, and furniture in the office, Wei smiled, but his smile soon wavered.
“Su?” he said to himself in bewilderment. “Of all people to save me… why Su?”
But he knew the answer. Though Wei was happy and thankful for the intervention of the military, he realized, even in those first moments, that his survival made him weaker, not stronger. There would be a quid pro quo.
For the rest of his rule, Wei Zhen Lin knew, he would be beholden to Su and his generals, and he knew exactly what they wanted from him.
FIVE
John Clark stood at his kitchen sink; he looked out the window and watched mist form in his back pasture as a gray afternoon turned into a grayer evening. He was alone, for a few minutes more anyway, and he decided he could put off no longer what he’d been dreading all day.
Clark and his wife, Sandy, lived in this farmhouse on fifty acres of rolling fields and forestland in Frederick County, Maryland, close to the Pennsylvania state line. Farm life was still new to John; just a few years ago the thought of himself as a country gentleman sipping iced tea on his back porch would have made him either chuckle or cringe.
But he loved his new place, Sandy loved it even more, and John Patrick, his grandson, absolutely adored his visits out to the country to see Grandpa and Grandma.
Clark wasn’t one for lengthy reflection; he preferred to live in the moment. But as he surveyed his property and thought about the task at hand, he did have to admit that he had managed to put together a good personal life for himself.
But now it was time to see if his professional life was over.
It was time to remove his bandages and test the function of his wounded hand.
Again.
Eight months earlier his hand had been broken — no, his hand had been shattered—by unskilled but energetic torturers in a seedy warehouse in the Mitino district of northwest Moscow. He’d suffered nine fractures to bones in his fingers, palm, and wrist, and had spent much of his time since the injury either preparing for or recovering from three surgeries.
He was two weeks post his fourth time under the knife, and today was the first day his surgeon would allow him to test the strength and mobility of the appendage.
A quick look at the clock on the wall told him that Sandy and Patsy would be home in a few minutes. His wife and his daughter had driven together to Westminster for groceries. They told him to wait on the function test of his hand until they returned, so they could be present. They claimed they wanted to be there to celebrate his recovery with dinner and wine, but John knew the real reason: They did not want him going through this alone. They were worried about a poor outcome, and they wanted to be close for moral support if he was not able to move his fingers any better than he could before surgery.
He agreed to their request at the time, but now he realized he needed to do this by himself. He was too anxious to wait, he was too proud to strain and struggle in front of his wife and daughter, but more than this, he knew he would need to push himself much further than his daughter, the doctor, or his wife, the nurse, would allow.
They were worried he might hurt himself, but John wasn’t worried about pain. He’d learned to process pain better than almost anyone in the world. No, John worried he might fail. He’d do whatever he physically could to avoid it, and he had a feeling it would not be pretty to watch. He’d test his strength and mobility by pushing himself as far as humanly possible.
Standing at the kitchen counter, he unwrapped his bandages and removed the small metal splints from between his fingers. Turning away from the window, he left the dressings on the counter and moved to the living room. There he sat on his leather chair and raised his hand to examine it. The surgical scars, both new and old, were small and not particularly dramatic, but he knew they belied the incredible damage done to his hand. His orthopedic surgeon at Johns Hopkins was regarded as one of the best in the world, and he had performed the surgery through tiny incisions, using laparoscopic cameras and fluoroscopic images to help him find his way to the damaged bones and scar tissue.
John knew that even though his hand did not look too bad, his chances for a complete recovery were less than fifty percent.
Perhaps if the blunt trauma had been just a little higher on the hand, then the joints of the fingers would have less scar tissue, the doctors had said. Perhaps if he had been a little younger, his ability to heal would be enough to ensure a complete recovery, they hinted without saying.
John Clark knew there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about either issue.
He pushed the poor prognosis out of his mind and steeled himself for success.
He picked a racquetball off the coffee table in front of him and he looked it over — his eyes fixed with resolve.
“Here we go.”
Clark
slowly began closing his fingers around the ball.
Almost immediately he realized he was still unable to completely mobilize his index finger.
His trigger finger.
Shit.
Both the proximal and middle phalanx bones had been virtually crushed by the torturer’s hammer, and the interphalangeal joint, already slightly arthritic from a lifetime of trigger pulling, was now severely damaged.
As his other fingertips pressed into the little blue ball, his trigger finger merely twitched.
He pushed this setback, and the sharp burning sensation that came with it, out of his mind and squeezed harder.
It hurt more. He grunted with the pain but kept trying to crush the little racquetball in his fist.
His thumb seemed as good as new, his last two fingers compressed the ball nicely, and his middle finger formed around it, its mobility restored by the surgery, though it did not seem to retain much strength.
He squeezed tighter on the ball, and a sharp ache in the back of his hand grew. Clark winced, but squeezed harder. The index finger had stopped twitching and relaxed, the frail muscles exhausted, and it went almost ramrod straight.
His hand hurt from the wrist all the way to his fingertips while he squeezed now.
He could live with the pain, and he could live with a slight lack of grip strength.
But the trigger finger was all but nonfunctional.
John relaxed his hand and the pain lessened. Sweat had formed on his forehead and around his collar.
The ball dropped to the hardwood floor and bounced across the room.
Yes, this was just his first test after the surgery, but he knew. He knew without a doubt that his hand would never be the same.
John’s right hand was damaged now, but he knew he could shoot a gun left-handed. Every Navy SEAL, and every CIA Special Activities Division paramilitary operations officer, spends more time on weak-hand shooting than most law enforcement officers do on strong-hand shooting, and John had spent nearly forty years as either a SEAL or a CIA operator. Weak-hand fire was necessary training for every shooter, because every shooter ran a real risk of getting wounded on or near his gun hand.
There is a widely held theory behind this phenomenon. When faced with the imminent danger of a gunfight, a potential victim tends to focus acutely on that which is threatening him. Not just the threat of the attacker, but the threat of the weapon itself. The little fire-breathing, lead-spitting tool that is trying to reach out and rip the intended victim apart. For this reason it is disproportionately common for people involved in gunfights to take damage to their dominant firing hand or arm. The other gunfighter is looking at and focusing on the gun as he fires back, so it only stands to reason that much of his fire is directed right at the gun itself.
Weak-hand shooting is, therefore, an absolutely crucial skill to develop by anyone who might find him- or herself up against an armed opponent.
Clark knew he could fire a gun accurately again with his left hand if he stepped up his practice.
But it wasn’t just the hand. It was the rest of him, too.
“You’re old, John,” he said to himself as he stood up and walked out to the back porch. He looked out on the pasture again, watched the mist roll across the dewy grass, saw a red fox dart out of the trees and race across open ground. Pooled rainwater splashed into the air behind it as it skittered back into the forest.
Yeah, Clark told himself. He was old for operational work.
But not that old. John was roughly the same age as both Bruce Springsteen and Sylvester Stallone, and they were still going strong in careers that required no small amount of physicality, even if there was no danger involved. And he’d recently read an article in the paper about a sixty-year-old Marine staff sergeant fighting in Afghanistan, walking daily mountain patrols in enemy territory with men young enough to be his grandchildren.
John thought he’d love to drink a beer with that guy, two tough sons of bitches sharing stories about the old days.
Age is just a number, John had always said.
But the body? The body was real, and as the number of years ticked ever higher, the mileage put on a man in John Clark’s profession wore the body down as certainly as a swiftly moving stream cuts a depression through a valley. Springsteen and Stallone and the other geezers out there jumping around for a living had jobs that did not require one-fiftieth the hardship that Clark had endured, and no amount of rationalizing could change that.
Clark heard his wife’s SUV pull up in the gravel drive. He sat down on a rocker on the back porch and waited for them to come in.
A man in his mid-sixties sitting on the porch of a quiet farmhouse created a vision of peace and tranquility. But the image was deceptive. Inside the mind of John Clark, his prevailing thought was that he would like to get his good hand around the throat of that son of a bitch Valentin Kovalenko, the opportunistic Russian snake who did this to him, and then he’d like to test the strength and mobility of that hand on that bastard’s windpipe.
But that would never happen.
“John?” Sandy called from the kitchen.
The girls came in through the kitchen door behind him. John wiped the last vestiges of his sweat from his forehead, and he called, “I’m out here.”
* * *
A moment later Patsy and Sandy sat outside on the porch with him, waiting for him to speak. They’d each spent a minute chastising him for not waiting on their return. But any frustration melted away quickly when they read his mood. He was somber. Mother and daughter leaned forward anxiously, worried looks on both their faces.
“It moves. It grips… a bit. Maybe after some PT it will improve a little more.”
Patsy said, “But?”
Clark shook his head. “Not the outcome we’d hoped for.”
Sandy moved to him, sat in his lap, and hugged him tightly.
“It’s okay,” he said, comforting her. “Could have been a hell of a lot worse.” Clark thought for a moment. His torturers had been about a second away from driving a scalpel through his eye. He had not told Sandy or Patsy about this, of course, but it did pop into his head every now and then when he was dealing with his battered hand. He had a damn lot to be thankful for, and he knew it.
He continued. “I’m going to concentrate on PT for a while. The docs have done their part to fix me up; time for me to do mine.”
Sandy released the hug, sat up, and looked John in the eye.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying it’s time for me to pack it in. I’ll talk to Ding first, but I’m going to go in and see Gerry on Monday.” He hesitated a long time before saying, “I’m done.”
“Done?”
“I’m going to retire. Really retire.”
Though she clearly tried to hide it, John saw a relief in Sandy’s face that he had not seen in years. In decades. It was virtually the same as joy.
She had never complained about his work. She’d spent decades enduring his late-night dashes out of the house with no information as to where he was headed, his spending weeks away at a time, sometimes coming home bloodied and bruised and, more distressing to her, silent for days before he lightened up, his mind left the mission that he’d just returned from, and he could once again smile and relax and sleep through the night.
Their years in the UK with NATO’s counterterror unit Rainbow had been some of the best times of her life. His hours were almost normal and their time together had been well spent. But still, even during their time in the UK, she knew that the fate of dozens of young men rested on his shoulders, and she knew this weighed heavily on him.
With their return to the States and his employment at Hendley Associates, once again Sandy saw the stress and strain on his body and mind. He was an operator in the field again — she knew this without a doubt, though he rarely went into details about his activities away from home.
The previous year her husband had been dubbed an international outlaw by the American pr
ess, he’d gone on the run, and she’d worried day and night while he was away. The matter had been put to bed in the press quickly and cleanly with a public apology by the outgoing U.S. President and John’s life had been given back to him, but when he’d come back from wherever he’d been off to, it was not to come home. It was, instead, to go into the hospital. He’d been beaten badly, to within an inch of his life, one of his surgeons had told Sandy quietly in a waiting room while John was under anesthesia, and though he’d come out of his ordeal with a damaged right hand, she thanked God every day that he’d come out of it at all.
John talked it over with the two women in his life for a few minutes more, but any doubts he had about his decision were put to rest the instant he saw the relief in Sandy’s eyes.
Sandy deserved this. Patsy deserved this, too. And his grandchild deserved a grandfather who would be around for a while. Long enough to cheer him on at baseball games, long enough to stand proudly at his graduation, long enough, just maybe, to watch him walk down the aisle.
John knew that, considering the line of work he’d been in since Vietnam, he’d lived most of his life on borrowed time.
That was over now. He was out.
Clark was surprised to find himself at peace with his decision to retire, though he imagined he would harbor one regret — that he never got a chance to wrap his hand around the throat of Valentin Kovalenko.
Oh, well, he thought as he gave a gentle hug to his daughter and headed into the kitchen to help with dinner. Wherever Kovalenko was right now, John was near certain he wasn’t exactly enjoying himself.
SIX
Matrosskaya Tishina is a street in northern Moscow, but it also serves as shorthand for a facility with a much longer name. Federal Budget Institution IZ-77/1 of the Office of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia in the City of Moscow does not roll so trippingly off the tongue, so those referring to the massive detention facility on Matrosskaya Tishina normally just refer to the street itself.