Jack Ryan Books 1-6

by Tom Clancy

  “What am I supposed to do about you?”

  “The three girls this morning, are they—”

  “They’re safe. We’ll look after them. You and your friends did nicely with Pam Madden and Doris Brown. Not your fault it didn’t work out. Well, maybe a little.” The officer paused. “I have to take you in, you know.”

  “What for?”

  “For murder, Mr. Kelly.”

  “No.” Kelly shook his head. “It’s only murder when innocent people die.”

  Ryan’s eyes narrowed. He saw only the outline of the man, really, with the yellowing sky behind him. But he’d heard what he said, and part of him wanted to agree with it.

  “The law doesn’t say that.”

  “I’m not asking you to forgive me. I won’t be any more trouble to you, and I’m not going to any jail.”

  “I can’t let you go.” But his weapon wasn’t out, Kelly saw. What did that mean?

  “I gave you that Officer Monroe back.”

  “Thank you for that,” Ryan acknowledged.

  “I don’t just kill people. I’ve been trained to do it, but there has to be a reason somewhere. I had a good enough reason.”

  “Maybe. Just what do you think you accomplished?” Ryan asked. “This drug problem isn’t going away.”

  “Henry Tucker won’t kill any more girls. I accomplished that. I never expected to do any more, but I took that drug operation down.” Kelly paused. There was something else this man needed to know. “There’s a cop at that building. I think he was dirty. Tucker and Piaggi shot him. Maybe he can come out of this a hero. There’s a load of stuff there. It won’t look too bad for your department that way.” And thank God I didn’t have to kill a cop—even a bad one. “I’ll give you one more. I know how Tucker was getting his stuff in.” Kelly elaborated briefly.

  “I can’t just let you go,” the detective said again, though part of him wished it were otherwise. But that couldn’t be, and he would not have made it so, for his life had rules, too.

  “Can you give me an hour? I know you’ll keep looking. One hour. It’ll make things better for everybody.”

  The request caught Ryan by surprise. It was against everything he stood for—but then, so were the monsters the man had killed. We owe him something . . . would I have cleared those cases without him? Who would have spoken for the dead. . . and besides, what could the guy do—where could he go? . . . Ryan, have you gone nuts? Yes, maybe he had . . .

  “You’ve got your hour. After that I can recommend you to a good lawyer. Who knows, a good one might just get you off.”

  Ryan rose and headed for the side door without looking back. He stopped at the door just for a second.

  “You spared when you could have killed, Mr. Kelly. That’s why. Your hour starts now.”

  Kelly didn’t watch him leave. He hit his engine controls, warming up the diesels. One hour should just about do it. He scrambled out on the deck, slipping his lines, leaving them attached to the dock piles, and by the time he got back inside the salon, the diesels were ready for turning. They caught at once, and he pivoted the boat, heading out into the harbor. As soon as he was out of the yacht basin he firewalled both throttles, bringing Springer to her top speed of twenty-two knots. With the channel empty, Kelly set his autopilot and rushed to make the necessary preparations. He cut the corner at Bodkin Point. He had to. He knew who they’d send after him.

  “Coast Guard, Thomas Point.”

  “This is the Baltimore City Police.”

  Ensign Tomlinson took the call. A new graduate of the Coast Guard Academy at New London, he was here for seasoning, and though he ranked the Chief Warrant Officer who ran the station, both the boy and the man understood what this was all about. Only twenty-two, young enough that his gold officer’s bars still had the original shine, it was time to turn him loose on a mission, Paul English thought, but only because Portagee would really be running things. Forty-One-Bravo, the second of the station’s big patrol craft, was warmed up and ready. The young ensign sprinted out, as though they might leave without him, much to the amusement of CWO English. Five seconds after the lad had snapped on his life vest, Forty-One-Bravo rumbled away from the dock, turning north short of the Thomas Point Light.

  The man sure didn’t give me any slack, Kelly thought, seeing the cutter closing from starboard. Well, he’d asked for an hour, and an hour he’d received. Kelly almost flipped on his radio for a parting salute, but that wouldn’t have been right, and more was the pity. One of his diesels was running hot, and that was also a pity, though it wouldn’t be running hot much longer.

  It was a kind of race now, and there was a complication, a large French freighter standing out to sea, right where Kelly needed to be, and he would soon be caught between her and the Coast Guard.

  “Well, here we are,” Ritter said, dismissing the security guard who’d followed them like a shadow all afternoon. He pulled a ticket from his pocket. “First class. The booze is free, Colonel.” They’d been able to skip passport control on the strength of an earlier phone call.

  “Thank you for your hospitality.”

  Ritter chuckled. “Yeah, the U.S. government’s flown you three quarters of the way around the world. I guess Aeroflot can handle the rest.” Ritter paused and went on formally. “Your behavior to our prisoners was as correct as circumstances allowed. Thank you for that.”

  “It is my wish that they get home safely. They are not bad men.”

  “Neither are you.” Ritter led him to the gate, where a large transfer vehicle waited to take him out to a brand-new Boeing 747. “Come back sometime. I’ll show you more of Washington.” Ritter watched him board and turned to Voloshin.

  “A good man, Sergey. Will this injure his career?”

  “With what he has in his head? I think not.”

  “Fine with me,” Ritter said, walking away.

  They were too closely matched. The other boat had a slight advantage, since it was in the lead, and able to choose, while the cutter needed her half-knot speed advantage to draw closer so painfully slowly. It was a question of skill, really, and that, too, was down to whiskers of difference from one to the other. Oreza watched the other man slide his boat across the wake of the freighter, surfing it, really, sliding her onto the front of the ship-generated wave and riding it to port, gaining perhaps half a knot’s momentary advantage. Oreza had to admire it. He couldn’t do anything else. The man really was sailing his boat downhill as though in a joke against the laws of wind and wave. But there was nothing funny about this, was there? Not with his men standing around the wheelhouse carrying loaded guns. Not with what he had to do to a friend.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Oreza snarled, easing the wheel to starboard a little. “Be careful with those goddamned guns!” The other crewmen in the wheelhouse snapped the covers down on their holsters and ceased fingering their weapons.

  “He’s a dangerous man,” the man behind Oreza said.

  “No, he isn’t, not to us!”

  “What about all the people he—”

  “Maybe the bastards had it comin’!” A little more throttle and Oreza slid back to port. He was at the point of scanning the waves for smooth spots, moving the forty-one-foot patrol boat a few feet left and right to make use of the surface chop and so gain a few precious yards in his pursuit, just as the other was doing. No America’s Cup race off of Newport had ever been as exciting as this, and inwardly Oreza raged at the other man that the purpose of the race should be so perverse.

  “Maybe you should let—”

  Oreza didn’t turn his head. “Mr. Tomlinson, you think anybody else can conn the boat better’n me?”

  “No, Petty Officer Oreza,” the Ensign said formally. Oreza snorted at the windowglass. “Maybe call a helicopter from the Navy?” Tomlinson asked lamely.

  “What for, sir? Where you think he’s goin’, Cuba, maybe? I have double his bunkerage and half a knot more speed, and he’s only three hundred yards ahead. Do the math,
sir. We’re alongside in twenty minutes any way you cut it, no matter how good he is.” Treat the man with respect, Oreza didn’t say.

  “But he’s dangerous,” Ensign Tomlinson repeated.

  “I’ll take my chances. There . . .” Oreza started his slide to port now, riding through the freighter’s wake, using the energy generated by the ship to gain speed. Interesting, this is how a dolphin does it . . . that got me a whole knot’s worth and my hull’s better at this than his is . . . Contrary to everything he should have felt, Manuel Oreza smiled. He’d just learned something new about boat-handling, courtesy of a friend he was trying to arrest for murder. For murdering people who needed killing, he reminded himself, wondering what the lawyers would do about that.

  No, he had to treat him with respect, let him run his race as best he could, take his shot at freedom, doomed though he might be. To do less would demean the man, and, Oreza admitted, demean himself. When all else failed there was still honor. It was perhaps the last law of the sea, and Oreza, like his quarry, was a man of the sea.

  It was devilishly close. Portagee was just too damned good at driving his boat, and for that reason all the harder to risk what he’d planned. Kelly did everything he knew how. Planing Springer diagonally across the ship’s wake was the cleverest thing he’d ever done afloat, but that damned Coastie matched it, deep hull and all. Both his engines were redlined now, and both were running hot, and this damned freighter was going just a little too fast for things. Why couldn’t Ryan have waited another ten friggin’ minutes? Kelly wondered. The control for the pyro charge was next to him. Five seconds after he hit that, the fuel tanks would blow, but that wasn’t worth a damn with a Coast Guard cutter two hundred goddamned yards back.

  Now what?

  “We just gained twenty yards,” Oreza noted with both satisfaction and sorrow.

  He wasn’t even looking back, the petty officer saw. He knew. He had to know. God, you’re good, the Quartermaster First Class tried to say with his mind, regretting all the needling he’d inflicted upon the man, but he had to know that it had only been banter, one seaman to another. And in running the race this way he, too. was doing honor to Oreza. He’d have weapons there, and he could have turned and fired to distract and annoy his pursuers. But he didn’t, and Portagee Oreza knew why. It would have violated the rules of a race such as this. He’d run the race as best he could, and when the time came he’d accept defeat, and there would be both pride and sadness for both men to share, but each would still have the respect of the other.

  “Going to be dark soon,” Tomlinson said, ruining the petty officer’s reverie. The boy just didn’t understand, but he was only a brand-new ensign. Perhaps he’d learn someday. They mostly did, and Oreza hoped that Tomlinson would learn from today’s lesson.

  “Not soon enough, sir.”

  Oreza scanned the rest of the horizon briefly. The French-flagged freighter occupied perhaps a third of what he could see of the water’s surface. It was a towering hull. riding high on the surface and gleaming from a recent painting. Her crew knew nothing of what was going on. A new ship, the petty officer’s brain noted, and her bulbous bow made for a nice set of bow waves that the other boat was using to surf along.

  The quickest and simplest solution was to pull the cutter up behind him on the starboard side of the freighter, then duck across the bow, and then blow the boat up . . . but . . . there was another way, a better way . . .

  “Now!” Oreza turned the wheel perhaps ten degrees, sliding to port and gaining fully fifty yards seemingly in an instant. Then he reversed his rudder, leaped over another five-foot roller, and prepared to repeat the maneuver. One of the younger seamen hooted in sudden exhilaration.

  “You see, Mr. Tomlinson? We have a better hull form for this sort of thing than he does. He can beat us by a whisker in flat seas, but not in chop. This is what we’re made for.” Two minutes had halved the distance between the boats.

  “You sure you want this race to end, Oreza?” Ensign Tomlinson asked.

  Not so dumb after all, is he? Well, he was an officer, and they were supposed to be smart once in a while.

  “All races end, sir. There’s always a winner and always a loser,” Oreza pointed out, hoping that his friend would understand that, too. Portagee reached in his shirt pocket for a cigarette and lit it with his left hand while his right—just the fingertips, really—worked the wheel, making tiny adjustments as demanded by the part of his brain that read and reacted to every ripple on the surface. He’d told Tomlinson twenty minutes. He’d been pessimistic. Sooner than that, he was sure.

  Oreza scanned the surface again. A lot of boats out, mostly heading in, not one of them recognizing the race for what it was. The cutter didn’t have her police lights blinking. Oreza didn’t like the things: they were an insult to his profession. When a cutter of the United States Coast Guard pulled alongside, you shouldn’t need police lights, he thought. Besides, this race was a private thing, seen and understood only by professionals, the way things ought to be, because spectators always degraded things, distracted the players from the game.

  He was amidships on the freighter now, and Portagee had swallowed the bait . . . as he had to, Kelly thought. Damn but that guy was good. Another mile and he’d be alongside, reducing Kelly’s options to precisely zero, but he did have his plan now, seeing the ship’s bulbous bow. partly exposed. A crewman was looking down from the bridge, as on that first day with Pam, and his stomach became hollow for a moment, remembering. So long ago. so many things in between. Had he done right or wrong? Who would judge? Kelly shook his head. He’d let God do that. Kelly looked back for the first time in this race. measuring distance, and it was damnably close.

  The forty-one boat was squatting back on her stern, pitched up perhaps fifteen degrees, her deep-displacement hull cutting through the choppy wake. She rocked left and right through a twenty-degree arc, her big down-rated marine diesels roaring in their special feline way. And it was all in Oreza’s hands, throttles and wheels at his skilled fingertips while his eyes scanned and measured. His prey was doing exactly the same, milking every single turn from his own engines, using his skill and experience. But his assets added up short of Portagee’s, and while that was too bad, that’s how things were.

  Just then Oreza saw the man’s face, looking back for the first time.

  It’s time, my friend. Come on, now, let’s end this honorably. Maybe you’ll get lucky and you’ll get out after a while and we can be friends again.

  “Come on, cut power and turn to starboard,” Oreza said, hardly knowing he spoke, and each man of his crew was thinking exactly the same thing, glad to know that they and their skipper were reading things the same way. It had been only a half-hour race, but it was the sort of sea story they would remember for their whole careers.

  The man’s head turned again. Oreza was barely half a ship-length back now. He could easily read the name on the transom, and there was no sense stringing it out to the last foot. That would spoil the race. It would show a meanness of spirit that didn’t belong on the sea. That was something done by yachtsmen, not professionals.

  Then Kelly did something unexpected. Oreza saw it first, and his eyes measured the distance once, then twice, and a third time, and in every case the answer came up wrong, and he reached for his radio quickly.

  “Don’t try it!” the petty officer shouted onto the “guard” frequency.

  “What?” Tomlinson asked quickly.

  Don’t do it! Oreza’s mind shouted, suddenly alone in a tiny world, reading the other’s mind and revolting at the thought it held. This was no way for things to end. There was no honor in this.

  Kelly eased his rudder right to catch the bow wave, his eyes watching the foaming forefoot of the freighter. When the moment was right, he put the rudder over. The radio squawked. It was Portagee’s voice, and Kelly smiled hearing it. What a good guy he was. Life would be so lonely without men such as he.

  Springer lurched to starboar
d from the force of the radical turn, then even more from the small hill of water raised by the freighter’s bow. Kelly held on to the wheel with his left hand and reached with his right for the air tank around which he’d strung six weight belts. Jesus, he thought instantly as Springer went over ninety degrees, I didn’t check the depth. What if the water’s not deep enough—oh, God. . . oh, Pam. . . .

  The boat turned sharply to port. Oreza watched from only a hundred yards away, but the distance might as well have been a thousand miles for all the good it did, and his mind saw it before reality caught up: already heeling hard to the right from the turn, the cruiser rode up high on the curling bow-wave of the freighter and, crosswise to it, rolled completely over, her white hull instantly disappearing in the foaming forefoot of the cargo ship . . .

  It was no way for a seaman to die.

  Forty-One-Bravo backed down hard, rocking violently with the passage of the ship’s wake as she came to a stop. The freighter stopped at once, too, but it took fully two miles, and by that time Oreza and his cutter were poking through the wreckage. Searchlights came on in the gathering darkness, and the eyes of the coastguardsmen were grim.

  “Coast Guard Forty-One, Coast Guard Forty-One, this is U.S. Navy sailboat on your port beam, can we render assistance, over?”

  “We could use some extra eyes, Navy. Who’s aboard?”

  “Couple of admirals, the one talking’s an aviator, if that helps.”

  “Join in, sir.”

  He was still alive. It was as much a surprise to Kelly as it would have been to Oreza. The water here was deep enough that he and the air tank had plummeted seventy feet to the bottom. He fought to strap the tank to his chest in the violent turbulence of the passing ship overhead. Then he fought to swim clear of the descending engines and heavy gear from what had seconds earlier been an expensive cruiser. Only after two or three minutes did he accept the fact that he’d survived this trial by ordeal. Looking back, he wondered just how crazy he’d been to risk this, but for once he’d felt the need to entrust his life to judgment superior to his own, prepared to take the consequences either way. And the judgment had spared him. Kelly could see the Coast Guard hull over to the east . . . and to the west the deeper shape of a sailboat, pray God the right one. Kelly disengaged four of the weight belts from the tank and swam towards it, awkwardly because he had it on backwards.