Jack Ryan Books 1-6

by Tom Clancy

  The aircraft was a VC-135, the military version of the old 707. It was windowless, which the passengers always enjoyed, but had a large cargo door that was necessary for loading Director Jacobs aboard for his last trip to Chicago. The President was in another aircraft, scheduled to arrive at O’Hare International a few minutes ahead of this one. He would speak both at the temple and the graveside.

  Shaw, Murray, and several other senior FBI officials rode in the second aircraft, which was often used for similar missions, and had the appropriate hardware to keep the casket in place in the forward section of the cabin. It gave them a chance to stare at the polished oak box for the entire flight, without even a small window to distract them. Somehow that brought it home more than anything else might have done. It was a very quiet flight, only the whine of the turbofan engines to keep the living and the dead company.

  But the aircraft was part of the President’s own fleet, and had all of the communications gear needed for that duty. An Air Force lieutenant came aft, asking for Murray, then led him forward to the communications console.

  Mrs. Wolfe was in an aisle seat thirty feet aft of the senior executives. There were tears streaming down her face, and while she remembered that there was something she ought to tell Mr. Shaw, this wasn’t the time or place, was it? It didn’t really matter anyway—just that she’d made a mistake when the agent had interviewed her the previous afternoon. It was the shock of the event, really. It was so—hard. Her life had known too many losses in the past few years, and the mental whiplash of the weekend had ... what? Confused her? She didn’t know. But this wasn’t the right time. Today was a time to remember the best boss she’d ever had, a man who was every bit as thoughtful to her as he’d ever been to the agents who lionized him. She saw Mr. Murray walk forward for something or other, past the coffin that her hand had brushed on the way in, her last goodbye to the Director.

  The call didn’t take more than a minute. Murray emerged from the small radio compartment, his face as much under control as it ever was. He didn’t look again at the casket, just looked aft, Moira saw, straight down the aisle before he took his place next to his wife.

  “Oh, shit!” Dan muttered to himself after he was seated. His wife’s head snapped around. It wasn’t the sort of thing you say at a funeral. She touched his arm, but Murray shook his head. When he looked at his wife, the expression she saw was sadness, but not grief.

  The flight lasted just over an hour. The honor guard came up from the rear of the aircraft to take charge of the Director, all polished and scrubbed in their dress uniforms. After they were out, the passengers exited to find the rest of the assembly waiting for them on the tarmac, watched by distant TV news cameras. The honor guard marched their burden behind two flags, that of their nation and the banner of the FBI, emblazoned with the “Fidelity—Bravery—Integrity” motto of the Bureau. Murray watched as the wind played with the flag, watched the words curl and flap in the breeze, and realized just how intangible such words really were. But he couldn’t tell Bill just yet. It would be noticed.

  “Well, now we know why we wasted the airfield.” Chavez watched the ceremony in the squad bay of the barracks. It was all very clear to him now.

  “But why’d they yank us out?” Vega asked.

  “We’re going back, Oso. An’ the air’s gonna be thin where we’re goin’ back to.”

  Larson didn’t need to watch the TV coverage. He hovered over a map, plotting known and suspected processing sites southwest of Medellín. He knew the areas—who didn’t?—but isolating individual locations ... that was harder, but, again, it was a technological question. The United States had invented modern reconnaissance technology and spent almost thirty years perfecting it. He was in Florida, having flown to the States ostensibly to take delivery of a new aircraft, which had unaccountably developed engine problems.

  “How long have we been doing this?”

  “Only a couple of months,” Ritter answered.

  Even with so thin a data base, it wasn’t all that hard. All of the towns and villages in the area were plotted, of course, even individual houses. Since nearly all had electricity, they were easy to spot, and once identified, the computer simply erased them electronically. That left energy sources that were not towns, villages, and individual farmsteads. Of these, some were regular or fairly so. It had been arbitrarily decided that anything that appeared more than twice in a week was too obvious to be of real interest, and these, too, were erased. That left sixty or so locations that appeared and disappeared in accordance with a chart next to the map and photographs. Each was a possible site where raw coca leaves began the refining process. They were not encampments for the Colombian Boy Scouts.

  “You can’t track in on them chemically,” Ritter said. “I checked. The ether and acetone concentrations released into the air aren’t much more than you’d expect from the spillage of nail-polish remover, not to mention the usual biochemical processes in this sort of environment. It’s a jungle, right? Lots of stuff rots on the ground, and they give off all sorts of chemicals when they do. So all we have off the satellite is the usual infrared. They still do all their processing at night? I wonder why?”

  Larson grunted agreement. “It’s a carry-over from when the Army was actively hunting them. They still do it mainly from habit, I suppose.”

  “Well, it gives us something, doesn’t it?”

  “What are we going to do with it?”

  Murray had never been to a Jewish funeral. It wasn’t very different from a Catholic one. The prayers were in a language he couldn’t understand, but the message wasn’t very different. Lord, we’re sending a good man back to You. Thanks for letting us have him for a while. The President’s eulogy was particularly impressive, having been drafted by the best White House speech-writer, quoting from the Torah, the Talmud, and the New Testament. Then he started talking about Justice, the secular god that Emil had served for all of his adult life. When, toward the end, he talked about how men should turn their hearts away from vengeance, however, Murray thought that ... it wasn’t the words. The speech was as poetically written as any he’d ever heard. It was just that the President started sounding like a politician at that point, Dan thought. Is that my own cynicism talking? the agent thought. He was a cop, and justice to him meant that the bastards who committed crimes had to pay. Evidently the President thought the same way, despite the statesmanlike stuff he was saying. That was fine with Murray.

  The soldiers watched the TV coverage in relative silence. A few men worked knives across sharpening stones, but mainly they just sat there, listening to their President speak, knowing who had killed the man whose name few had heard until after he was dead. Chavez had been the first to make the correct observation, but it hadn’t been all that great a leap of imagination, had it? They accepted the as-yet-unspoken news phlegmatically. Here was merely additional proof that their enemy had struck out directly against one of the most important symbols of their nation. There was their country’s flag, draped across the coffin. There was the banner of the man’s own agency, but this wasn’t a job for cops, was it? So the soldiers traded looks in silence while their Commander-in-Chief had his say. When it was all over, the door to the squad bay opened, and there was their commander.

  “We’re going back in tonight. The good news is, it’s going to be cooler where we’re going,” Captain Ramirez told his men. Chavez cocked an eyebrow at Vega.

  USS Ranger sailed on the tide, assisted away from the dock by a flotilla of tugs while her escorts formed up, already out of the harbor and taking rolls from the broad Pacific swells. Within an hour she was clear of the harbor, doing twenty knots. Another hour, and it was time to begin flight operations. First to arrive were the helicopters, one of which refueled and took off again to take plane-guard station off the carrier’s starboard quarter. The first fixed-wing aircraft aboard were the Intruder attack bombers, led, of course, by the skipper, Commander Jensen. On the way out he’d seen the ammunition ship,
USS Shasta, just beginning to get up steam. She’d join the underway-replenishment group that was to sail two hours behind the battle group. Shasta had the weapons that he’d be dropping. He already knew the sort of targets. Not the exact places yet, but he had the rough idea, and that, he realized as he climbed down from his aircraft, was all the idea he wanted to have. Worrying about “Collateral Damage” wasn’t strictly his concern, as somebody had told him earlier in the day. What an odd term, he thought. Collateral Damage. What an offhand way of condemning people whom fate had already selected to be in the wrong place. He felt sorry for them, but not all that sorry.

  Clark arrived in Bogotá late that afternoon. No one met him, and he rented a car as he usually did. One hour out of the airport he stopped to park on a secondary road. He waited several annoying minutes for another car to pull up alongside. The driver, a CIA officer assigned to the local station, handed him a package and drove off without a word. Not a large package, it weighed about twenty pounds, half of which was a stout tripod. Clark set it gently on the floor of the passenger compartment and drove off. He’d been asked to “deliver” quite a few messages in his time, but never quite so emphatically as this. It was all his idea. Well, he thought, mostly his idea. That made it somewhat more palatable.

  The VC-135 lifted off two hours after the funeral. It was too bad they didn’t have a wake in Chicago. That was an Irish custom, not one for the children of Eastern European Jews, but Emil would have approved, Dan Murray was sure. He would have understood that many a beer or whiskey would be lifted to his memory tonight, and somewhere, in his quiet way he’d laugh in the knowledge of it. But not now. Dan had gotten his wife to maneuver Mrs. Shaw onto the other side of the airplane so that he could sit next to Bill. Shaw noticed that immediately, of course, but waited until the aircraft leveled off to make the obvious question.

  “What is it?”

  Murray handed over the sheet he pulled off the aircraft’s facsimile printer a few hours earlier.

  “Oh, shit!” Shaw swore quietly. “Not Moira. Not her.”

  16.

  Target List

  I’M OPEN TO suggestions,” Murray said. He regretted his tone at once.

  “Christ’s sake, Dan!” Shaw’s face had gone gray for a moment, and his expression was now angry.

  “Sorry, but—damn it, Bill, do we handle it straight or do we candy-ass our way around the issue?”

  “Straight.”

  “One of the kids from WFO asked her the usual battery of questions, and she said that she didn’t tell anybody ... well, maybe so, but who the hell did she call in Venezuela? They rechecked going back a year, no such calls ever before. The boy I left behind to run things did some further checking—the number she called is an apartment, and the phone there rang someplace in Colombia within a few minutes of Moira’s call.”

  “Oh, God.” Shaw shook his head. From anyone else he would merely have felt anger, but Moira had worked with the Director since before he’d returned to D.C., from his command of the New York Field Division.

  “Maybe it’s an innocent thing. Maybe even a coincidence,” Murray allowed, but that didn’t improve Bill’s demeanor very much.

  “Care to do a probability assessment of that statement, Danny?”

  “No.”

  “Well, we’re all going back to the office after we land. I’ll have her into my place an hour after we get back. You be there, too.”

  “Right.” It was time for Murray to shake his head. She’d shed as many tears at the graveside as anyone else. He’d seen a lifetime’s worth of duplicity in his law-enforcement career, but to think that of Moira was more than he could stomach. It has to be a coincidence. Maybe one of her kids has a pen pal down there. Or something like that, Dan told himself.

  The detectives searching Sergeant Braden’s home found what they were looking for. It wasn’t much, just a camera case. But the case had a Nikon F-3 body and enough lenses that the entire package had to be worth eight or nine thousand dollars. More than a Mobile detective sergeant could afford. While the rest of the officers continued the search, the senior detective called Nikon’s home office and checked the number on the camera to see if the owner had registered it for warranty purposes. He had. And with the name that was read off to him, the officer knew that he had to call the FBI office as well. It was part of a federal case, and he hoped that somehow they could protect the name of a man who had certainly been a dirty cop. Dirty or not, he did leave kids behind. Perhaps the FBI would understand that.

  He was committing a federal crime to do this, but the attorney considered that he had a higher duty to his clients. It was one of those gray areas which decorate not so much legal textbooks, but rather the volumes of written court decisions. He was sure a crime had been committed, was sure that nothing was being done to investigate it, and was sure that its disclosure was important to the defense of his clients on a case of capital murder. He didn’t expect to be caught, but if he were, he’d have something to take to the professional ethics panel of the state bar association. Edward Stuart’s professional duty to his clients, added to his personal distaste for capital punishment, made the decision an inevitable one.

  They didn’t call it Happy Hour at the base NCO club anymore, but nothing had really changed. Stuart had served his time in the U.S. Navy as a legal officer aboard an aircraft carrier—even in the Navy, a mobile city of six thousand people needed a lawyer or two—and knew about sailors and suds. So he’d visited a uniform store and gotten the proper outfit of a Coast Guard chief yeoman complete with the appropriate ribbons and just walked onto the base, heading for the NCO club where, as long as he paid for his drinks in cash, nobody would take great note of his presence. He’d been a yeoman himself while aboard USS Eisenhower, and knew the lingo well enough to pass any casual test of authenticity. The next trick, of course, was finding a crewman from the cutter Panache.

  The cutter was finishing up the maintenance period that always followed a deployment, preparatory to yet another cruise, and her crewmen would be hitting the club after working hours to enjoy their afternoon beers while they could. It was just a matter of finding the right ones. He knew the names, and had checked tape archives at the local TV stations to get a look at the faces. It was nothing more than good luck that the one he found was Bob Riley. He knew more about that man’s career than the other chiefs.

  The master chief boatswain’s mate strolled in at 4:30 after ten hot hours supervising work on various topside gear. He’d had a light lunch and sweated off all of that and more, and now figured that a few mugs of beer would replace all the fluids and electrolytes that he’d lost under the hot Alabama sun. The bar-maid saw him coming and had a tall one of Samuel Adams all ready by the time he selected a stool. Edward Stuart got there a minute and half a mug later.

  “Ain’t you Bob Riley?”

  “That’s right,” the bosun said before turning. “Who’re you?”

  “Didn’t think you’d remember me. Matt Stevens. You near tore my head off on the Mellon awhile back—said I’d never get my shit together.”

  “Looks like I was wrong,” Riley noted, searching his memory for the face.

  “No, you were right. I was a real punk back then, but you—well, I owe you one, Master Chief. I did get my shit together. Mainly ’causa what you said.” Stuart stuck out his hand. “I figure I owe you a beer at least.”

  It wasn’t all that unusual a thing for Riley to hear. “Hell, we all need straigthenin’ out. I got bounced off a coupla bulkheads when I was a kid, too, y’know?”

  “Done a little of it myself.” Stuart grinned. “You make chief an’ you gotta be respectable and responsible, right? Otherwise who keeps the officers straightened out?”

  Riley grunted agreement. “Who you workin’ for?”

  “Admiral Hally. He’s at Buzzard’s Point. Had to fly down with him to meet with the base commander. I think he’s off playing golf right now. Never did get the hang of that game. You’re on Panache, r
ight?”

  “You bet.”

  “Captain Wegener?”

  “Yep.” Riley finished off his beer and Stuart waved to the bar-maid for refills.

  “Is he as good as they say?”

  “Red’s a better seaman ’n I am,” Riley replied honestly.

  “Nobody’s that good, Master Chief. Hey, I was there when you took the boat across—what was the name of that container boat that snapped in half ... ?”

  “Arctic Star. ” Riley smiled, remembering. “Jesus, if we didn’t earn our pay that afternoon.”

  “I remember watching. Thought you were crazy. Well, shit. All I do now is drive a word processor for the Admiral, but I did a little stuff in a forty-one boat before I made chief, working outa Norfolk. Nothing like Arctic Star, of course.”

  “Don’t knock it, Matt. One of those jobs’s enough for a couple years of sea stories. I’ll take an easy one any day. I’m gettin’ a little old for that dramatic stuff.”

  “How’s the food here?”

  “Fair.”

  “Buy you dinner?”

  “Matt, I don’t even remember what I said to you.”

  “I remember,” Stuart assured him. “God knows how I woulda turned out if you hadn’t turned me around. No shit, man. I owe you one. Come on.” He waved Riley over to a booth against the wall. They were quickly going through their third beer when Chief Quartermaster Oreza arrived.