Threat Vector jrj-4

by Tom Clancy

  The thunderstorm helped with the escape. There were helicopters in the air, Chavez could hear them churning the black, soupy sky as they drove to the northwest, but their view of the ground was limited and there was so much carnage and congestion at the scene, just figuring out what the hell had happened took most of an hour.

  The Americans and the ten surviving Chinese were back in the barn before noon. There were some wounds — Sam had a broken hand that he had not even felt when he was hit. Caruso had taken a ricochet off a rock that grazed his hip and bled heavily but wasn’t serious, and one of the surviving Chinese had been shot in the forearm.

  Together they all treated their wounds and hoped like hell neither PLA nor the police would find them before nightfall.

  SEVENTY-NINE

  President of the United States Jack Ryan sat at his desk in the Oval Office, looked down to his prepared text, and cleared his throat.

  To the right of the camera, just ten feet in front of his face, the director said, “Five, four, three…” He held up two fingers, then one finger, and then he pointed to Jack.

  Ryan did not smile for the camera; there was a perfect tone to hit, and the longer he played this damn game the more he recognized that the rules, while still annoying as hell, sometimes were there for a reason. He did not want to show outrage, relief, satisfaction, or anything else other than measured confidence.

  “Good evening. Yesterday I ordered American strike aircraft to launch a limited attack on a location in southern China that was thought by American military and intelligence experts to be the nerve center overseeing the cyberattacks against the United States. Brave American pilots, sailors, and special-operations personnel were involved in the attack, and I am happy to report the attack was an unqualified success.

  “In the past twenty-four hours we have seen major reversals in the potent assault on America’s infrastructure and business capabilities. While we are a long way from repairing the extreme damage perpetrated on us by the Chinese regime, with the help of American government and business experts, working together across the full spectrum of attacks executed against us, we will see this crisis through and put in place measures to ensure this never happens again.

  “In the attack in China, many Americans lost their lives, and several more were captured by Chinese forces and are currently being held prisoner. Here in the United States, deaths and injuries from the loss of electrical power, the loss of communications services, and the disruption of transportation networks will take some time to calculate.

  “Additionally, eight American military personnel were killed in the opening salvo of the operation against us perpetrated by the Chinese, when the American Reaper drone was hijacked two months ago and missiles were fired on our soldiers and our allies.

  “I have told you about the loss of American life. The loss of life to the Taiwanese, the Indians, the Vietnamese, the Filipinos, and the Indonesians by Chinese aggression also plays a large role in measuring this calamity.

  “America and its allies have suffered needlessly, and we are all angry. But we do not want war, we want peace. I have consulted with Secretary of Defense Robert Burgess and others at the Pentagon to find a way to resolve this crisis with China that will preserve lives, not cost lives.

  “To that end, starting at dawn tomorrow, the United States Navy will begin a partial blockade of oil shipments to China entering the Strait of Malacca, the gateway from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea. China receives eighty percent of all its oil via this narrow waterway, and beginning tomorrow, we will restrict fifty percent of this oil.

  “The leadership of China has an immediate choice to make. They can move their warships out of the South China Sea, remove their troops from the islands and shoals they occupied in the past month, and cease all centerline incursions in the Strait of Taiwan. As soon as they do this, the oil will once again flow unrestrained through the Strait of Malacca.

  “On the other hand, if China continues to attack its neighbors, or launches an attack of any kind — land, sea, air, space, or cyber — on the United States of America, we will retaliate in kind, and we will shut off all of the oil to China through the Strait of Malacca.”

  Ryan looked up from his text. His jaw stiffened. “All of it. Every last drop.”

  He paused, then adjusted his glasses and glanced back down at his copy. “The United States has been a good friend and business partner to the People’s Republic of China for over forty years. We have had our differences, but we retain our respect for the good people of China.

  “Our quarrel now is with elements in the People’s Liberation Army and the Communist Party of China. Clearly, we are not the only ones dissatisfied with the actions of the military’s leadership. Indeed, there are factions within the PLA who are not happy with the aggressive actions China has taken.

  “A few hours ago in Beijing, the chairman of the Central Military Commission and chief architect of the coordinated attacks by China on its neighbors and the United States was assassinated. Early reports suggest members of his own military were involved in the attack on his motorcade. There could be no greater underscoring of the dissatisfaction with the military’s current path than the audacious killing of Chairman Su by his own men.

  “President Wei has an important choice to make, and his choice will affect the lives of one-point-four billion Chinese. I call on President Wei to make the correct choice, cease all hostilities, call his military back to their bases, and work tirelessly to rectify the damage caused by China’s actions over the past few months.

  “Thank you, and good night.”

  * * *

  Wei Zhen Lin sat at his desk, his palms down on the blotter, and he looked straight ahead.

  The Politburo Standing Committee wanted his head. Clearly, Wei thought, they wanted Su’s head, but since Su was dead already, they were more than willing to destroy Wei as a substitute in order to channel their rage and distance themselves from the policies — economic, social, and military — that had failed so completely.

  President Wei felt the stab of regret that Su had not just done what Wei had asked. With some saber rattling and bluster regarding the South China Sea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, Wei felt certain, he could have made the region happy to align itself with the strong economy and future prospects of the People’s Republic of China.

  But no, Su wanted to have it all, to make a proper war out of it, to defeat the United States Navy and send it running for cover back home.

  The man was a fool. Wei felt that, had he been chosen to lead the Central Military Commission, he would have done a better job than Su Ke Qiang.

  But wishing things would have been different was a waste of time, and Wei had no time to waste.

  He heard the heavy vehicles of the Ministry of Public Security outside his window. They had come to arrest him, just as they had done a few months earlier, except this time Su wouldn’t show up to save him.

  Save him? No, Su had not saved him back then. Su had only delayed Wei’s fall long enough to further tarnish his legacy.

  With a heart full of anger, regret, and insolence at those who still did not understand him, President and General Secretary Wei Zhen Lin took his right hand off the blotter, wrapped it around the grip of the pistol, and then quickly put the weapon to the side of his head.

  * * *

  In the end, he made a mess of it. He flinched with the anticipation of the gun’s report, and the barrel jerked forward and down. He shot himself through the right cheekbone, and the bullet tore through his face, passing through his sinus cavity and exiting on the left side.

  He fell onto the floor, grabbing at the indescribable pain, writhing around behind his desk, kicking over his chair and flailing in his own blood.

  One of his eyes had filled with tears and blood, but the other remained clear, and through it he saw Fung standing over him, shocked and irresolute.

  “Finish it!” he cried, but the words were unclear. The agony of the wound and the sha
me of rolling around on the floor of his office after failing such a simple task tore through his soul like the bullet had torn through his face.

  “Finish it!” he yelled again, and again he knew he could not be understood.

  Fung just stood above him.

  “Please!”

  Fung turned away, disappeared around the desk, and through his own screams and pleas Wei heard Fung shut the office door behind him.

  It took the president four minutes to choke to death on his own blood.

  EPILOGUE

  China released the captured pilots after only three days, quietly putting them on chartered flights to Hong Kong, where they were picked up by DoD aircraft and flown home.

  Brandon “Trash” White was back in Hong Kong already. He had spent the first day after his crash in a small apartment in Shenzhen with the masked American named Jack and the Asian CIA man who called himself Adam, and here he was visited by a doctor from Hong Kong whom Adam seemed to know. The man treated Trash’s wounds and prepared him for travel, and then, during the night, Jack and Trash crossed a river on a raft and then walked an hour through rice paddies before being picked up on the other side by Adam himself.

  From there, Trash went to a Hong Kong hospital, where he was met by Defense Intelligence Agency personnel and ferried to Pearl Harbor. He would heal, and he would be back in the cockpit of the F/A-18 soon enough, although he imagined it would never again feel the same flying without Cheese as his flight lead.

  * * *

  John Clark, Domingo Chavez, Sam Driscoll, and Dominic Caruso spent nine days in Beijing, moving from safe house to safe house, being passed from Pathway of Liberty to Red Hand and back again, until a large cash payment, hand-delivered by Ed Foley to an old man in New York’s Chinatown, really got things moving.

  In the middle of the night the four Americans were taken to a building housing Russian pilots for Rosoboronexport, Russia’s state-owned weapons exporter, and they were covertly put aboard a Yakovlev heading to Russia after dropping off cluster bombs for the Chinese.

  Clark had negotiated the return trip through Stanislav Biryukov, the head of the FSB. It went off without a hitch, though John knew that the favor Biryukov had owed him had now been paid in full, so he could not count on him again to be anything more than the head of a sometimes-enemy spy agency.

  * * *

  Valentin Kovalenko spent nearly a week locked in a room in a safe house belonging to Hendley Associates. He saw no one other than a couple of security men who brought him food and newspapers, and he spent his days staring at the walls and wanting to return home to his family.

  But he never believed it would happen.

  He feared, he expected, he was certain, that when John Clark returned he would walk into the room with a pistol in his hand and shoot Valentin Kovalenko in the head.

  And Kovalenko could not say he blamed him.

  But one afternoon a security man who called himself Ernie unlocked the door, handed Kovalenko a thousand dollars in cash, and said, “I have a message from John Clark.”

  “Yes?”

  “Get lost.”

  “Okay.”

  Ernie turned and walked out of the room. Seconds later, Valentin heard a car start and pull out of the driveway.

  The bewildered Russian stepped out of the building a minute later to find himself in a condominium complex somewhere in suburban D.C. Slowly he walked toward the street, wondering if he would be able to hail a cab, and where exactly he should tell the cabbie to take him.

  * * *

  After returning from Hong Kong on the Hendley Associates Gulfstream, Jack Ryan, Jr., went straight to the Alexandria apartment of Melanie Kraft. He’d called ahead, giving her time to decide whether or not she would be there when he arrived, and to decide what she would tell him about her past.

  Over coffee at the bistro table in her tiny kitchen, he told her what she already knew. He was working for an intelligence organization running sub rosa, working in the interest of the United States, but free of the constraints of a government bureaucracy.

  She’d had several days to process this since the Chinese attack at Hendley Associates; she saw the benefit of such an organization, while simultaneously seeing the obvious dangers that went along with it.

  Then it was her turn in the confessional. She explained how her father had been compromised and how she’d learned of it, then decided she would not allow him to destroy her life with his mistake.

  He understood her difficult situation, but he was unable to make her believe that this FBI man, Darren Lipton, must have been an agent for Center and not actually working on a real investigation.

  “No, Jack. There was another guy with FBI. Lipton’s boss. Packard. I still have his card in my purse. He confirmed everything. Plus, they had the court order. They showed it to me.”

  Ryan shook his head. “Center was running you since he intercepted phone calls from Charles Alden discussing how you were working for him, providing information about me and Hendley Associates to discredit John Clark.”

  “Lipton is real. He knows about my father and—”

  “He knows because Center told him! Center could have got that information from hacking into Pakistani intelligence files. His operation could do that easily.”

  He saw that she did not believe him; she felt her entire life was about to fall down on her head when the FBI charged her for lying about her father’s espionage.

  Jack said, “One way we can clear this up right now.”

  “How?”

  “We go pay Lipton a visit.”

  * * *

  It took a day to find him. He’d taken a leave of absence from work, and both Jack and Melanie worried he’d fled the country. But Ryan got Biery to hack into the man’s bank records, and when he found out Lipton took out four hundred dollars from an ATM at a DoubleTree hotel in Crystal City just minutes earlier, Jack and Melanie headed over.

  By the time they got there Biery had the room number for them, and minutes later Jack used a master keycard Melanie pilfered from a maid.

  Ryan and Kraft came through the door and saw a half-naked Lipton and a fully nude hooker, and Jack told the girl to get her things, her four hundred bucks, and hit the road.

  Lipton seemed scared seeing Ryan and the girl here, but he seemed in no great hurry to dress. Jack threw a pair of khakis at him. “For the love of God, dude, put these on.”

  Lipton slipped into the pants, but did not put a shirt on over his wife-beater.

  “What do you want with me?” he asked.

  Jack said, “Center is dead, if you didn’t already know.”

  “Who?”

  “Center. Dr. K. K. Tong.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Look, asshole! I know you were working for Center. We’ve got all the transcripts of your conversations, and we’ve got Kovalenko, who can finger you.”

  Lipton sighed. “The Russian with the beard?”

  “Yep.”

  It was a lie, but Lipton fell for it.

  He gave up the ruse. “Center was my handler, but I don’t know K. K. Tong. I had no idea I was working for the Russians, otherwise I wouldn’t—”

  “You were working for the Chinese.”

  Darren Lipton winced. “Even worse.”

  “Who was Packard?” Melanie asked.

  Lipton shrugged. “He’s just some other poor schmuck that Center had by the balls. Just like me. He wasn’t FBI. I got the impression he was a detective. Maybe D.C., maybe Maryland or Virginia. Center sent him to me when the phony court order didn’t convince you to bug the phone. I dressed the guy up, gave him a fifteen-minute primer on the situation, and he did the good cop to my bad.”

  “But you asked me to go to the J. Edgar Hoover Building to meet him. What if I said yes?”

  Lipton shook his head. “I knew you wouldn’t walk through the front door of the Hoover Building.”

  Melanie was so furious she had been played by this son
of a bitch that, in a moment of fury, she hit him in the mouth. Instantly blood appeared on his lower lip.

  Lipton licked at the blood, then winked at Kraft.

  Her face reddened even more, and she growled. “Jesus! I forgot. He gets off on that.”

  Ryan looked at Melanie, understood what she meant, then turned to Lipton.

  Jack said, “Get off on this,” and he threw the most vicious right jab of his life, connecting with the FBI man’s fleshy face. Lipton’s head snapped back, and the big man went down in a heap. His jaw was swollen and purple within seconds.

  Jack knelt down over him. “You have one week to resign from the FBI. Do it, or we come back for you. Do you understand?”

  Lipton nodded weakly, looked up at Ryan, and nodded again.

  * * *

  The funerals for the Hendley Associates employees killed by the Divine Sword commandos took place all over Virginia, Maryland, and D.C. All of the Campus operators attended, as did Gerry Hendley.

  Jack went to the funerals alone. He and Melanie had achieved some sort of détente in their relationship; they both understood why they had lied to each other, but trust was a precious commodity in a love affair, and trust had been thoroughly breached by both of them.

  For whatever justifications, their relationship was tarnished, and they found they had little to say to each other.

  * * *

  Jack was not surprised to see Mary Pat Foley and her husband, Ed, at Sam Granger’s funeral in Baltimore. When the Saturday-afternoon services were completed, Jack asked for a moment alone with the director of national intelligence. Ed excused himself to go chat with Gerry Hendley, and Mary Pat’s security officer lagged far behind his boss and the President’s son as the two walked alone through the cemetery.