by Tom Clancy
... and there might be no stopping it at all. Nobody knew the possible consequences of a deliberate mass infection in a highly mobile society. The implications might be truly global. But probably not. Almost certainly not, Moudi judged, looking down at the glass culture trays behind thick wire-glass panels, through the plastic of his mask. The first generation of this disease had come from an unknown host and killed a young boy. The second generation had claimed but a single victim, due to fate and luck and his own competence as a physician. The third generation would grow before his eyes. How far that might spread was undetermined, but it was generations Four, Five, Six, and perhaps even Seven which would determine the fate of an entire country—which happened to be the enemy of his own.
It was easier now. Jean Baptiste had had a face and a voice and a life which had touched his own. He could not make that mistake again. She’d been an infidel, but a righteous one, and she was now with Allah, because Allah was truly merciful. He’d prayed for her soul, and surely Allah would hear his prayers. Few in America or elsewhere could possibly be as righteous as she had been, and he knew well that Americans hated his country and distrusted his religious faith. They might have names and faces, but he didn’t see them here and he never would, and they were all ten thousand kilometers away, and it was easy to switch the television off.
“Yes,” Moudi agreed. “Testing for it will be easy enough.”
“LOOK,” GEORGE WINSTON was telling a knot of three new senators, “if the federal government made cars, a Chevy pickup would cost eighty thousand dollars and have to stop every ten blocks to fill up the tank. You guys know business. So do I. We can do better.”
“It is really that bad?” the (alphabetically) senior senator from Connecticut asked.
“I can show you the comparative-productivity numbers. If Detroit ran this way, we’d all be driving Japanese cars,” Winston replied, jabbing his finger into the man’s chest, and reminding himself to get rid of his Mercedes 500SEL, or at least garage it for a while.
“It’s like having one cop car to cover East L.A.,” Tony Bretano was saying to five more, two of them from California. “I don’t have the forces I need to cover one MRC. That’s major regional conflict,” he explained to the new people and their spouses. “And we’re supposed to—on paper, I mean—we’re supposed to be able to cover two of them at the same time, plus a peacekeeping mission somewhere else. Okay? Now, what I need at Defense is a chance to reconfigure our forces so that the shooters are the most important, and the rest of the outfit supports them, not the other way around. Accountants and lawyers are useful, but we have enough of them at Treasury and Justice. My side of the government, we’re the cops, and I don’t have enough cops on the street.”
“But how do we pay for that?” Colorado the younger asked. The senior senator from the Rocky Mountain State had been at a fund-raiser in Golden that night.
“The Pentagon isn’t a jobs program. We have to remember that. Now, next week I’ll have a full assessment of what we need, and then I’m going to come to the Hill, and together we’ll figure how to make that happen at the least possible cost.”
“See, what did I tell you?” Arnie van Damm said quietly, passing behind Ryan’s back. “Let them do it for you. You just stay pleasant.”
“What you said was right, Mr. President,” the new senator from Ohio professed to believe, sipping a bourbon and water now that the cameras were off. “You know, once in school, I did a little history paper on Cincinnatus, and...”
“Well, all we have to do is remember to put the country first,” Jack told him.
“How do you manage to do your job and—I mean,” the wife of the senior senator from Wisconsin explained, “you still do your surgery?”
“And teaching, which is even more important,” Cathy said with a nod, wishing she were upstairs and doing her patient notes. Well, there was the helicopter ride in tomorrow. “I will never stop doing my work. I give blind people their sight back. Sometimes I take the bandages off myself, and the look on their faces is the best thing in the world. The best,” she repeated.
“Even better than me, honey?” Jack asked, placing his arm around her shoulder. This might even be working, he thought. Charm them, Arnie and Callie had told him.
THE PROCESS HAD already started. The colonel assigned to guard the five mullahs had followed them into the mosque, where, moved by the moment, he’d worshiped with them. At the conclusion of the devotions, the senior of their number had spoken to him, quietly and politely, touching on a favored passage in the Holy Koran, so as to establish some common ground. It brought to the colonel a memory of his youth and his own father, a devout and honorable man. It was the usual thing in dealing with people, no matter the place or the culture. You got them talking, read their words, and chose the proper path for continuing the conversation. The mullah, a member of the Iranian clergy for over forty years, had counseled people on their faith and on their troubles for all that time, and so it was not hard for him to establish a rapport with his captor, a man supposedly sworn to kill him and his four colleagues should those orders arrive from his superiors. But in picking a man deemed faithful, the departing generals had chosen a little too wisely, because men who display true loyalty are men of thoughts and principles, and such men are ever vulnerable to ideas demonstrably better than those to which they adhere. There could be no real contest. Islam was a religion with a long and honorable history, neither of which attribute attached to the dying regime which the colonel had sworn to uphold.
“It must have been a hard thing, fighting in the swamps,” the mullah told him a few minutes later, as the conversation turned to relations between the two Islamic countries.
“War is evil. I never took pleasure in killing,” the colonel admitted. It was rather like being a Catholic in the confessional, and all at once the man’s eyes teared up, and he related some of the things he’d done over the years. He could see now that while he’d never taken such pleasure, he had hardened his heart to it, finally not distinguishing the innocent from the guilty, the just from the corrupt, and done what he’d been told because he’d been told, not because it had been in any way the right thing to do. He saw that now.
“Man falls often, but through the words of the Prophet we may always find our way back to a merciful God. Men are forgetful of their duties, but Allah is never forgetful of His.” The mullah touched the officer’s arm. “I think your prayers are not finished this day. Together we will pray to Allah, and together we will find peace for your soul.”
After that, it had been very easy indeed. On learning that the generals were even now leaving the country, the colonel had two good reasons for cooperating. He had no wish to die. He was quite willing to follow the will of his God in order to stay alive and serve. In demonstration of his devotion, he assembled two companies of soldiers to meet with the mullahs and get their orders. It was very easy for the soldiers. All they had to do was follow the orders of their officers. To do anything else was a thought that never occurred to any of them.
It was now dawn in Baghdad, and at a score of large houses, doors were kicked in. Some occupants they found awake. Some were drunkenly asleep. Some were packed to leave and trying to figure a place to go and a way to get there. All were a little too late in their understanding of what was going on around them, in a place where a minute’s error was the difference between prosperous life and violent death. Few resisted, and the one man who came closest to doing so successfully was cut nearly in half by a twenty-round burst from an AK-47, along with his wife. Mostly they were led barefoot from their homes into waiting trucks, heads down to the sidewalk, knowing the way this particular drama would end for them.
THESE TACTICAL RADIO nets were not encrypted, and the faint VHF signals were monitored, this time at STORM TRACK, which was closer to Baghdad. Names were spoken, more than once in every case as the pickup teams reported back to their dispatchers, which made life easy for the ELINT teams close to the border and at Kin
g Khalid Military City. The watch officers called in their supervisors, and CRITIC-priority dispatches were shot off via satellite.
RYAN HAD JUST walked the last of the new senators to the door when Andrea Price walked up.
“My shoes are killing me, and I have a procedure at—” Cathy stopped talking.
“FLASH Traffic coming in now, sir.”
“Iraq?” Jack asked.
“Yes, Mr. President.”
The President kissed his wife. “I’ll be up in a little while.”
Cathy had no choice but to nod and head to the elevator, where one of the ushers was waiting to take the First Couple upstairs. The kids would already be in bed. Their homework was all done, probably in some cases with the help of their bodyguards. Jack turned right, trotted down the stairs, then right again, left to get outside of the building, then back inside the West Wing and the Situation Room.
“Talk to me,” the President commanded.
“It’s started,” Ed Foley’s face said on the wall-mounted TV. And all they could do was watch.
IRAQI NATIONAL TELEVISION greeted a new day and a new reality. This was clear when the newsreaders commenced their daily presentation with an invocation of Allah’s name, not for the first time, but never with this degree of fervor. “Gimme that ol’ time religion, it’s good enough for me—now,” observed the chief master sergeant at PALM BOWL, because the transmission was national, and repeated from the transmitters in nearby Basra. He turned and waved. “Major Sabah?”
“Yes, Chief, yes,” the Kuwaiti officer replied with a nod as he came over. He hadn’t had much in the way of doubt before. His superiors had expressed reservations. They always did, they were never quite as close to the pulse of their enemy as the major was, thinking politics instead of ideas. He checked his watch. They’d be in their offices in two hours after the normal morning routine, and that didn’t matter now. Hurrying wouldn’t change anything. The dam had broken, and the water would spill out. The time to stop it had passed, assuming that such a chance had ever existed.
The Iraqi military had taken over, the TV news broadcast said. This was announced as though the situation were unique. A council of revolutionary justice had been formed. Those guilty of crimes against the people (a good catchall term which meant very little but was understood by all) were being arrested, and would face the judgment of their countrymen. The nation needed calm most of all, the TV told them. Today would be a national holiday. Only those in essential public-service jobs were expected to go to work. For the rest of the country’s citizens, it was advised that they consider this a day of prayer and reconciliation. For the rest of the world, the new regime promised peace. The rest of the world would have all day to think about that.
DARYAEI HAD ALREADY done a good deal of thinking about it. He’d managed three hours of sleep before awakening for morning prayers. He found that as he aged he needed less and less. Perhaps the body understood that, with little time remaining, there was no longer time for rest, though there was for dreams, and he’d dreamed of lions in the early hours of this day. Dead lions. The lion had also been the symbol of the Shah’s regime, and truly Badrayn had been correct. Lions could be killed. The real ones had once been native to Iran—Persia, in the old style—and had been hunted down to extinction in classical times. The symbolic ones, the Pahlavi dynasty, had similarly been eradicated with a combination of patience and ruthlessness. He’d played a role in that. It hadn’t always been pretty. He’d ordered and supervised an atrocity, the fire-bombing of a crowded theater filled with people more interested in Western decadence than their Islamic faith. Hundreds had died horribly, but—but it had been necessary, a needed part of the campaign to bring his country and his people back to the True Path, and while he regretted that particular incident, and regularly prayed in atonement for the lives taken, no, he didn’t regret it. He was an instrument of the Faith, and the Holy Koran itself told of the need for war, Holy War, in defense of the Faith.
Another gift of Persia (some said India) to the world was the game of chess, which he had learned as a child. The very word for the end of the game, checkmate, came from the Persian shah mat—“the king is dead”—something he had himself helped to achieve in real life, and while Daryaei had long since stopped playing mere games, he remembered that a good player thought not move by move, but four, or even more, moves ahead. One problem with chess, as with life, was that the next move could sometimes be seen, especially when the other player was skilled—to assume him to be anything else could be dangerous. But by playing ahead, it was far more difficult to see what was coming, until the very end, at which point the opponent could see clearly but, maneuvered out of position, depleted of his players, power, and options, he had no choice but to resign the game. Such had been the case in Iraq until this morning. The other player—actually, many of them—had resigned and run away, and Daryaei had been pleased to allow it. It was even more delicious when the other player could not run, but the point was winning, not satisfaction, and winning meant thinking farther and faster than the other player, so that the next move was a surprise, so that the other player was harried and confused, would be forced to take time to react, and in a chess match, as in life, time was limited. It was all a thing of the mind, not the body.
So it was with lions, it would seem. Even one so powerful could be outmaneuvered by lesser creatures if the time and the setting were right, and that was both the lesson and the task of the day. Finished with his prayers, Daryaei called for Badrayn. The younger man was a skilled tactician and gatherer of information. He needed the direction of one schooled in strategy, but with that guidance he would be very useful indeed.
IT HAD BEEN conclusively decided in an hour’s conversation with his country’s leading experts that the President could do absolutely nothing at all. The next move was simply to wait and watch and see. Any citizen could do it, but America’s leading experts could wait and watch and see a little faster than anyone else, or so they told themselves. That would all be done for the President, of course, and so Ryan walked out of the Situation Room, up the steps, and outside to see wet, cold rain falling on the South Lawn beyond the overhang of the walkway. The coming day promised to be blustery, with March arriving, typically, like a lion, then to be replaced by a lamb. Or so the aphorism went. At the moment it just looked gloomy, however nurturing the rain might be to ground recovering from a cold, bitter winter.
“This will finish off the last of the snow,” Andrea Price said, surprising herself by speaking unbidden to her principal.
Ryan turned and smiled. “You work harder than I do, Agent Price, and you’re a—”
“Girl?” she asked with a weary smile.
“My chauvinism must be showing. I beg your pardon, ma’am. Sorry, I was just wishing for a cigarette. Quit years ago—Cathy bullied me into it. More than once,” Jack admitted with good humor. “It can be tough, being married to a doctor.”
“It can be tough, being married.” Price was wedded to her job, with two failed relationships to prove it. Her problem, if one could call it that, was in possessing the same devotion to duty that only men were supposed to have. It was a simple enough fact, but one which first a lawyer and then an advertising executive had failed to grasp.
“Why do we do it, Andrea?” Ryan asked.
Special Agent Price didn’t know, either. The President necessarily was a father figure to her. He was the man supposed to have the answers, but after years on the Detail, she knew better. Her father had always had such answers, or so it had seemed in her youth. Then she’d grown, finished her education, joined the Service, worked her way rapidly up a steep and slippery ladder, and in the process lost her way in life somehow. Now she was at the pinnacle of her profession, alongside the nation’s “father,” only to learn that life didn’t allow people to know what they wanted and needed to know. Her job was hard enough. His was infinitely worse, and maybe it was better for the President to be something other than the decent and honorable
gentleman John Patrick Ryan was. Maybe a son of a bitch could survive better here ...
“No answer?” Ryan smiled at the rain. “I think you’re supposed to say that somebody has to do it. Jesus, I just tried to seduce thirty new senators. You know that? Seduce,” Jack repeated. “Like they were girls or something, and like I was that kind of guy—and I don’t have a fucking clue.” The voice stopped cold and the head shook in surprise at what he’d said. “Sorry, excuse me.”
“That’s okay, Mr. President. I’ve heard the word before, even from other presidents.”
“Who do you talk to?” Jack asked. “Once upon a time, I’d talk to my father, my priest, to James Greer when I worked for him, or Roger, until a few weeks ago. Now they all ask me. You know, they told me at Quantico, at the Basic Officers’ School, that command could be lonely. Boy, they weren’t kidding. They really weren’t kidding.”
“You have one hell of a good wife, sir,” Price pointed out, envying both of them for that.
“There’s always supposed to be somebody smarter than you. The person you go to when you’re just not sure. Now they come to me. I’m not smart enough for that.” Ryan paused, just then hearing what Price had told him. “You’re right, but she’s busy enough, and I’m not supposed to burden her with my problems.”