by Tom Clancy
The satellite uplink trucks were in two batches. There were eleven network vehicles, all parked just at the stadium wall. Two hundred meters away were thirty-one more, smaller Ku-band uplinks for what looked like regional TV stations, as opposed to the bigger networks’ vans. The first storm had passed, and what looked like a tank division’s worth of heavy equipment was sweeping up the snow from the stadium’s enormous parking lot.
There was the spot, Ghosn thought, right next to the ABC “A” unit. There was a good twenty meters of open space. The absence of security astounded him. He counted only three police cars, just enough to keep drunks away from men trying to get their work done. So secure the Americans felt. They’d tamed the Russians, crushed Iraq, intimidated Iran, pacified his own people, and now they were as totally relaxed as a people could be. They must love their comforts, Ibrahim told himself. Even their stadia had roofs and heat to keep the elements out.
“Gonna knock those things over like dominoes,” Marvin observed from the driver’s seat.
“Indeed we will,” Ghosn agreed.
“See what I told you about security?”
“I was wrong to doubt you, my friend.”
“Never hurts to be careful.” Russell started another drive around the perimeter. “We’ll come in this gate right here, and just drive right up.” The headlights of the van illuminated the few flakes of this second storm. It was too cold to snow a lot, Russell had explained. This Canadian air mass was heading south. It would warm up as it hit Texas, dropping its moisture there instead of on Denver, which had half a meter, Ghosn estimated. The men who cleared the roads were quite efficient. As with everything else, the Americans liked their conveniences. Cold weather—build a stadium with a roof. Snow on the highways—get rid of it. Palestinians—buy them off. Though his face didn’t show it, he had never hated America more than at this moment. Their power and their arrogance showed in everything they did. They protected themselves against everything, no matter how big or small, knew that they did, and proclaimed it to themselves and the whole world.
Oh, God, to bring them down!
The fire was agreeably warm. The President’s cabin at Camp David was in the classic American pattern, heavy logs laid one atop the other, though on the inside, they were reinforced with Kevlar fiber, and the windows were made of rugged polycarbonate to stop a bullet. The furniture was an even more curious mix of ultramodern and old-comfortable. Before the couch he sat on were three printers for the major news services because his predecessors liked to see the wire copy, and there were three full-sized televisions, one of which was usually tuned to CNN. But not tonight. Tonight it was on Cinemax. Half a mile away was a discreetly-sited antenna farm that tracked all of the commercial satellites, along with most of the military ones, a benefit of which was access to every commercial satellite channel—even the X-rated ones, which Fowler didn’t bother with—creating the world’s most expensive and exclusive cable system.
Fowler poured himself a beer. It was a bottle of Dortmunder Union, a popular German brew that the Air Force flew over—being President did carry some useful and unofficial perks. Liz Elliot drank a French white while the President’s left hand toyed with her hair.
The movie was a sappy comedic romance that appealed to Bob Fowler. The female lead, in fact, reminded him of Liz in looks and mannerisms. A little too snappy, a little too domineering, but not without redeeming social value. Now that Ryan was gone—well, on the way to be gone—maybe things would settle down.
“We’ve certainly done well, haven’t we?”
“Yes, we have, Bob.” She paused for a sip of wine. “You were right about Ryan. Better to let him go honorably.” So long as he’s gone, along with that little shrew he married.
“I’m glad to hear you say that. He’s not a bad guy, just old-fashioned. Out of date.”
“Obsolete,” Liz added.
“Yeah,” the President agreed. “Why are we talking about him?”
“I can think of better things.” She turned her face into his hand and kissed it.
“So can I,” the President murmured as he set his glass down.
“The roads are covered,” Cathy reported. “I think you made the right decision.”
“Yeah, there was just a bad one on the Parkway just outside the gate. I’ll be home tomorrow night. I can always steal one of the four-by-fours they have downstairs.”
“Where’s John?”
“He’s not here right now.”
“Oh,” Cathy observed. And what might he be up to?
“While I’m here, I might as well get some work done. Call you in the morning.”
“Okay, ’bye.”
“That’s one aspect of this place that I won’t miss,” Jack told Goodley. “Okay, what have you developed?”
“We’ve been able to verify all the meetings through September.”
“You look like you’re ready to drop. How long have you been up?”
“Since yesterday, I guess.”
“Must be nice to be still in your twenties. Grab a piece of the couch outside,” Ryan ordered.
“What about you?”
“I want to read over this stuff again.” Jack tapped the file on his desk. “You’re not into this one yet. Go get some Zs.”
“See you in the morning.”
The door closed behind Goodley. Jack started to read through the NIITAKA documents, but soon lost concentration. He locked the file in his desk and found a piece of his own couch, but sleep wouldn’t come. After a few minutes of staring at the ceiling, Ryan decided that he might as well stare at something less boring. He switched on the TV. Jack worked the controller to catch a news broadcast, but he hit the wrong button and found himself staring at the tail end of a commercial on Channel 20, an independent Washington station. He almost corrected the mistake when the movie came back. It took a moment. Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner ... black and white ... Australia.
“Oh, yeah,” Ryan said to himself. It was On the Beach. He hadn’t seen that in years, a Cold War classic from ... Nevil Shute, wasn’t it? A Gregory Peck movie was always worth the trouble. Fred Astaire, too.
The aftermath of a nuclear war. Jack was surprised at how tired he was. He’d been getting his rest lately, and ... ... he went to sleep, but not all the way. As sometimes happened to him, the movie entered his mind, though the dream was in color, and that was better than the black-and-white print on the TV, his mind decided, then decided further to watch the movie in its entirety. From the inside. Jack Ryan began to take over various roles. He drove Fred Astaire’s Ferrari in the bloody and last Australian Grand Prix. He sailed to San Francisco in the USS Sawfish, SSN-623 (except, part of his mind objected, that 623 was the number of a different submarine, USS Nathan Hale, wasn’t it?). And the Morse signal, the Coke bottle on the windowshade, that wasn’t very funny at all, because it meant that he and his wife would have to have that cup of tea, and he really didn’t want to do that because it meant he had to put the pill in the baby’s formula so that he could be sure that the baby would die and his wife wasn’t up to it—understandable, his doctor was a wife—and he had to take the responsibility because he was the one who always did and wasn’t it a shame that he had to leave Ava Gardner on the beach watching him sail so that he and his men could die at home if they made it which they probably wouldn’t and the streets were so empty now. Cathy and Sally and Little Jack were all dead and it was all his fault because he made them take their pills so that they wouldn’t die of something else that was even worse but that was still dumb and wrong even though there wasn’t much of a choice was there so instead why not use a gun to do it and “What the fuck!” Jack snapped upright as though driven by a steel spring. He looked at his hands, which were shaking rather badly, until they realized that his mind was under conscious control now. “You just had a nightmare, boy, and this one wasn’t the helicopter with Buck and John.
“It was worse.”
Ryan reached for his cigarettes and lit one
, standing up after he did so. The snow was still coming down. The scrapers weren’t keeping pace with it, down on the parking lot. It took time to shake one of these off, watching his family die like that. So many of the goddamned things. I’ve gotta get away from this place! There were just too many memories, and not all of them were good. The wrong call he’d made before the attack on his family, the time in the submarine, being left on the runway at Sheremetyevo Airport and looking at good old Sergey Nikolayevich from the wrong side of a pistol, and worst of all that helicopter ride out of Colombia. It was just too much. It was time to leave. Fowler and even Liz Elliot were doing him a favor, weren’t they?
Whether they knew it or not.
Such a nice world lay out there. He’d done his part. He’d made parts of it a little better, and had helped others to do more. The movie he’d just lived in, hell, it might have come to pass in one way or another. But not now. It was clean and white out there, the lights over the parking lot just illuminating it enough, so much better than it usually looked. He’d done his part. Now it was someone else’s turn to try his or her hand at the easier stuff.
“Yeah.” Jack blew his smoke out at the window. First, he’d have to break this habit again. Cathy would insist. And then? Then an extended vacation, this coming summer, maybe go back to England—maybe by ship instead of flying? Take the time to drive around Europe, maybe blow the whole summer. Be a free man again. Walk the beach. But then he’d have to get a job, do something. Annapolis—no, that was out. Some private group? Maybe teach? Georgetown, maybe?
“Espionage 101.” He chuckled to himself. That was it, he’d teach how to do all the illegal stuff.
“How the hell did James Greer ever last so long in this crummy racket?” How had he handled the stress? That was one lesson he’d never passed on.
“You still need sleep, man,” he reminded himself. This time he made sure the TV was off.
34
PLACEMENT
Ryan was surprised to see that the snow hadn’t stopped. The walkway outside his top-floor office window had almost two feet piled up, and the maintenance crews had failed completely to keep up with things through the night. High winds were blowing and drifting snow across the roads and parking lots more quickly than it could be removed, and even the snow that they did manage to move simply found another inconvenient place to blow over. It had been years since a storm like this had hit the Washington area. The local citizenry was already beyond panic into desperation, Jack thought. Cabin fever would already be setting in. Food stocks would not easily be replaced. Already some husbands and some wives were looking at their spouses and wondering how hard to cook they might be.... It was one thing to laugh about as he went to get water for his coffee machine. He grabbed Ben Goodley’s shoulder on the way out of the office.
“Shake it loose, Dr. Goodley.”
The eyes opened slowly. “What time is it?”
“Seven-twenty. What part of New England are you from originally?”
“New Hampshire, up north, place called Littleton.”
“Well, take a look out the window and it might remind you of home.”
By the time Jack returned with fresh water, the younger man was standing at the windows. “Looks like about a foot and a half out there, maybe a little more. So, what’s the big deal? Where I come from this is called a flurry.”
“In D.C. it’s called The Ice Age. I’ll have coffee ready in a few minutes.” Ryan decided to call the security desk of the lobby. “What’s the situation?”
“People calling in saying they can’t make it. But what the hell—most of the night staff couldn’t get out. The G.W. Parkway is closed. So’s the Beltway on the Maryland side, and the Wilson Bridge—again.”
“Outstanding. Okay, this is important, so listen up—that means anybody who makes it in is probably KGB-trained. Shoot ’em.” Goodley could hear the laughter on the phone from ten feet away. “Keep me posted on the weather situation. And reserve me a four-by-four, the GMC, in case I have to go somewhere.” Jack hung up and looked at Goodley. “Rank hath its privileges. Besides, we have a couple of them.”
“What about people who have to get in?”
Jack watched the coffee start to come out of the machine. “If the Beltway and G.W. are closed, that means that two-thirds of our people can’t get in. Now you know why the Russians have invested so much money in weather-control programs.”
“Doesn’t anybody down here—”
“No, people down here pretend that snow is something that happens on ski slopes. If it doesn’t stop soon, it’ll be Wednesday before anything starts moving in this town.”
“It’s really that bad here?”
“You’ll see for yourself, Ben.”
“And I left my cross-country skis up in Boston.”
“We didn’t hit that hard,” the Major objected.
“Major, the breaker board seems to disagree with you,” the crew chief replied. He pushed the breaker back in position. The small black plastic tab hesitated for a moment, then popped right back out. “No radio because of this one, and no hydraulics ’cause of that one. I’m afraid we’re grounded for a while, sir.”
The metering pins for the landing gear had arrived at two in the morning, on the second attempt. The first, aborted, attempts had been by car, until someone had decided that only a military vehicle could make it. The parts had arrived by HMMWV, and even that had been held up by the various stopped cars on the highways between Washington and Camp David. Repairs on the helicopter were supposed to have started in another hour or so—it was not a difficult job—but suddenly they were more complicated.
“Well?” the Major asked.
“Probably a couple of loose wires in there. I gotta pull the whole board, sir, inspect the whole thing. That’s a whole day’s work at best. Better tell ’em to warm up a backup aircraft.”
The Major looked outside. This was not a day he wanted to fly anyway. “We’re not supposed to go back until tomorrow morning. When’ll it be fixed?”
“If I start now ... say around midnight.”
“Get breakfast first. I’ll take care of the backup bird.”
“Roge-o, Major.”
“I’ll have them run some power out here for a heater, and a radio, too.” The Major knew the crew chief was from San Diego.
The Major trudged back to the cabin. The helicopter pad was on a high spot, and the wind was trying very hard to blow it clear of snow. As a result there was only six inches to worry about. Down below, the drifts were as much as three feet deep. The grunts out walking the woods must be having a fine time, he thought.
“How bad?” the pilot asked, shaving.
“Circuit panel is acting up. The chief says he needs all day to get it back on line.”
“We didn’t hit that hard,” the Colonel objected.
“I already said that. Want me to make the call?”
“Yeah, go ahead. Have you checked the threat board?”
“The world’s at peace, Colonel, sir. I checked.”
The “threat board” was mainly an expression. The alert level of the government agencies that dealt with various problems depended on the expected level of danger in the world. The greater the possible danger, the more assets were kept ready to deal with them. At the moment there was no perceived threat to the United States of America, and that meant that only a single aircraft was kept ready to backstop the President’s VH-3. The Major placed the call to Anacostia.
“Yeah, let’s keep dash-two warm. Dash-one is down with electrical problems ... no, we can handle it here. Oughta be back on line by midnight. Right. ’Bye.” The Major hung up just in time for Pete Connor to enter their cabin.
“What gives?”
“Bird’s broke,” the Colonel replied.
“I didn’t think we hit that hard,” Connor objected.
“Well, that makes it official,” the Major observed. “The only one who thinks we did hit that hard’s the friggin’ airplane.”
>
“The backup’s on alert status,” the Colonel said as he finished shaving. “Sorry, Pete. Electrical problem, maybe had nothing to do with the touchdown. The backup can be here in thirty-five minutes. Our threat board is blank. Anything we need to know about?”
Connor shook his head. “No, Ed. We know of no particular threat.”
“I can bring the backup bird here, but it means exposing it to the weather. We can take better care of it down at Anacostia. That’s your call, sir.”
“You can leave it down there.”
“The Boss still wants to watch the game up here, right?”
“Correct. We all get a day off. Lift off for D.C. tomorrow about six-thirty. Problem with that?”
“No, ought to be fixed before then.”
“Okay.” Connor left and walked back to his cabin.
“What’s it like out there?” Daga asked.
“About how it looks,” Pete said. “The chopper’s broke.”
“I wish they’d be more careful,” Special Agent Helen D’A-gustino observed as she brushed her hair.
“Not their fault.” Connor lifted the phone to the Secret Service command center, located a few blocks west of the White House. “This is Connor. The chopper is down with a mechanical problem. Backup is being kept at Anacostia because of weather conditions. Anything on the board I need to know about?”
“No, sir,” the junior agent responded. On his status board, in LED characters he could see that the President of the United States—designated POTUS on his display—was shown to be at Camp David. The First Lady of the United States—FLO—TUS—space was blank. The Vice President was at his official residence on the ground of the U.S. Naval Observatory off Massachusetts Avenue, Northwest, along with his family. “Everything’s nice and calm, far as we know.”