by Tom Clancy
“Arnie, I couldn’t go to anybody for guidance on that one, okay? Admiral Greer was dead. Moore and Ritter were compromised. The President was up to his eyeballs in it; at the time I thought he was running the show through Cutter--he wasn’t; he got finessed into it by that incompetent political bastard. I didn’t know where to go, so I went to the FBI for help. I couldn’t trust anybody but Dan Murray and Bill Shaw, and one of our people at Langley on the operational side. Bill—did you know he was a J.D.?—worked me through the law part of it, and Murray helped with the recovery operation. They had an investigation started on Cutter. It was a code-word op, I think they called it ODYSSEY, and they were about to go to a U.S. magistrate for criminal conspiracy, but Cutter killed himself. There was an FBI agent fifty yards behind him when he jumped in front of the bus. You’ve met him, Pat O’Day. Nobody ever broke the law except for Cutter. The operations themselves were within the Constitution—at least that’s what Shaw said.”
“But politically ... ”
“Yeah, even I’m not that ignorant. So here I am, Arnie. I didn’t break the law. I served my country’s interests as best I could under the circumstances, and look what good it’s done me.”
“Damn. How is it that Bob Fowler never was told?”
“That was Sam and Al. They thought it would have poisoned Fowler’s presidency. Besides, I don’t really know what the two of them said to the President, do I? I never wanted to know, I never found out, and all I have is speculation—pretty good speculation,” Ryan admitted, “but that’s all.”
“Jack, it’s not often I don’t know what to say.”
“Say it anyway,” the President ordered.
“It’s going to get out. The media has enough now to put some pieces together, and that will force Congress to launch an investigation. What about the other stuff?”
“It’s all true,” Ryan said. “Yeah, we got our hands on Red October, yeah, I got Gerasimov out myself. My idea, my operation, nearly got my ass killed, but there you go. If we hadn’t, then Gerasimov was poised to launch his own coup to topple Andrey Narmonov and then there might still be a Warsaw Pact, and the bad old days might never have gone away. So we compromised the bastard, and he didn’t have any choices but to get on the airplane. He’s still pissed despite all we did to get him set up over here, but I understand his wife and daughter like America just fine.”
“Did you kill anybody?” Arnie asked.
“In Moscow, no. In the sub—he was trying to self-destruct the submarine. He killed one of the ship’s officers and shot up two others pretty bad, but I punched his ticket myself—and I had nightmares about it for years.”
In another reality, van Damm thought, his President would be a hero. But reality and public politics had little in common. He noted that Ryan hadn’t recounted his story about Bob Fowler and the aborted nuclear launch. The chief of staff had been around for that one, and he knew that three days later, J. Robert Fowler had come nearly apart at the realization at how he’d been saved from mass murder on a Hitlerian scale. There was a line in Hugo’s Les Misérables that had struck the older man when he’d first read the book in high school: “What evil good can be.” Here was another case. Ryan had served his country bravely and well more than once, but not one of the things he’d done would survive public scrutiny. Intelligence, love of country, and courage merely added up to a series of events which anyone could twist out of recognition into scandal. And Ed Kealty knew how to do just that.
“How do we spin-control all this?” the President asked.
“What else do I need to know?”
“The files on Red October and Gerasimov are at Langley. The Colombian thing, well, you know what you need to know. I’m not sure even I have the legal right to unseal the records. On the other hand, you want to destabilize Russia? This will do it.”
RED OCTOBER, GOLOVKO thought, then he looked up at the high ceiling of his office. “Ivan Emmetovich, you clever bastard. Zvo tvoyu maht!”
The curse was spoken in quiet admiration. From the first moment he’d met Ryan, he’d underestimated him, and even with all the contacts, direct and indirect, that had followed, he had to admit, he’d never stopped doing it. So that was how he’d compromised Gerasimov! And in so doing, he’d saved Russia, perhaps—but a country was supposed to be saved from within, not without. Some secrets were supposed to be kept forever, because they protected everyone equally. This was such a secret. It would embarrass both countries now. For the Russians, it was the loss of a valuable national asset through high treason—worse still, something their intelligence organs had not discovered, which was quite incredible on reflection, but the cover stories had been good ones, and the loss of two hunter submarines in the same operation had made the affair something that the Soviet navy had every desire to forget—and so they hadn’t looked far beyond the cover story.
Sergey Nikolay’ch knew the second part better than the first. Ryan had forestalled a coup d’état. Golovko supposed that Ryan might as easily have told him what was happening and left it to the Soviet Union’s internal organs—but, no. Intelligence services turned everything to their advantage, and Ryan would have been mad not to have done so here. Gerasimov must have sung like a canary—he knew the Western aphorism—and given up everything he’d known; Ames, for one, had been identified that way, he was sure, and Ames had been a virtual diamond mine for KGB.
And you always told yourself that Ivan Emmetovich was a gifted amateur, Golovko thought.
But even his professional admiration was tempered. Russia might soon need help. How could she go for that help to someone who, it would now be known, had tampered with his country’s internal politics like a puppeteer? That realization was worth another oath, not spoken in admiration of anything.
PUBLIC WATERWAYS ARE free for the passage of all, and so the Navy couldn’t do anything more than prevent the charter boat from getting too close to the Eight-Ten Dock. Soon it was joined by another, then more still, until a total of eleven cameras were pointing at the covered graving dock, now empty with the demise of most of America’s missile submarines, and also empty of another which had briefly lived there, not American, or so the story went.
It was possible to access the Navy’s personnel records via computer, and some were doing that right now, checking for former crewmen of USS Dallas. An early-morning call to COMSUBPAC concerning his tenure as commanding officer of Dallas got no farther than his public affairs officer, who was well-schooled in no-commenting sensitive inquiries. Today he’d get more than his fair share. So would others.
“THIS IS RON Jones.”
“This is Tom Donner at NBC News.”
“That’s nice,” Jonesy said diffidently. “I watch CNN myself.”
“Well, maybe you want to watch our show tonight. I’d like to talk to you about—”
“I read the Times this morning. It’s delivered up here. No comment,” he added.
“But—”
“But, yes, I used to be a submariner, and they call us the Silent Service. Besides, that was a long time ago. I run my own business now. Married, kids, the whole nine yards, y’know?”
“You were lead sonar man aboard USS Dallas when—”
“Mr. Donner, I signed a secrecy agreement when I left the Navy. I don’t talk about the things we did, okay?” It was his first encounter with a reporter, and it was living up to everything he’d ever been told to expect.
“Then all you have to do is tell us that it never happened.”
“That what never happened?” Jones asked.
“The defection of a Russian sub named Red October.”
“You know the craziest thing I ever heard as a sonar man?”
“What’s that?”
“Elvis.” He hung up. Then he called Pearl Harbor.
WITH DAYLIGHT, THE TV trucks rolled through Winchester, Virginia, rather like the Civil War armies that had exchanged possession of the town over forty times.
He didn’t actually own the
house. It could not even be said that CIA did. The land title was in the name of a paper corporation, in turn owned by a foundation whose directors were obscure, but since real-property ownership in America is a matter of public record, and since all corporations and foundations were also, that data would be run down in less than two days, despite the tag on the files which told the clerks in the county courthouse to be creatively incompetent in finding the documents.
The reporters who showed up had still photos and taped file footage of Nikolay Gerasimov, and long lenses were set up on tripods to aim at the windows, a quarter mile away, past a few grazing horses which made for a nice touch on the story: CIA TREATS RUSSIAN SPYMASTER LIKE VISITING KING.
The two security guards at the house were going ape, calling Langley for instructions, but the CIA’s public affairs office-itself rather an odd institution—didn’t have a clue on this one, other than falling back on the stance that this was private property (whether or not that was legally correct under the circumstances was something CIA’s lawyers were checking out) and that, therefore, the reporters couldn’t trespass.
It had been years since he’d had much to laugh about. Sure, there had been the occasional light moment, but this was something so special that he’d never even considered its possibility. He’d always thought himself an expert on America. Gerasimov had run numerous spy operations against the “Main Enemy,” as the United States had once been called in the nonexistent country he’d once served, but he admitted to himself that you had to come here and live here for a few years to understand how incomprehensible America was, how nothing made sense, how literally anything could happen, and the madder it was, the more likely it seemed. No imagination was sufficient to predict what would happen in a day, much less a year. And here was the proof of it.
Poor Ryan, he thought, standing by the window and sipping his coffee. In his country—for him it would always be the Soviet Union—this would never have happened. A few uniformed guards and a hard look would have driven people off, or if the look alone didn’t, then there were other options. But not in America, where the media had all the freedom of a wolf in the Siberian pines—he nearly laughed at that thought, too. In America, wolves were a protected species. Didn’t these fools know that wolves killed people?
“Perhaps they will go away,” Maria said, appearing at his side.
“I think not.”
“Then we must stay inside until they do,” his wife said, terrified at the development.
He shook his head. “No, Maria.”
“But what if they send us back?”
“They won’t. They can’t. One doesn’t do that with defectors. It’s a rule,” he explained. “We never sent Philby, or Burgess, or MacLean back—drunks and degenerates. Oh, no, we protected them, bought them their liquor, and let them diddle with their perversions, because that’s the rule.” He finished his coffee and walked back to the kitchen to put the cup and saucer in the dishwasher. He looked at it with a grimace. His apartment in Moscow and his dacha in the Lenin Hills—probably renamed since his departure—hadn’t had an appliance like that one. He’d had servants to do such things. No more. In America convenience was a substitute for power, and comfort the substitute for status.
Servants. It could all have been his. The status, the servants, the power. The Soviet Union could still have been a great nation, respected and admired across the world. He would have become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He could then have initiated the needed reforms to clear out the corruption and get the country moving again. He would probably have made a full rapprochement with the West, and made a peace, but a peace of equals it would have been, not a total collapse. He’d never been an ideologue, after all, though poor old Alexandrov had thought him so, since Gerasimov had always been a Party man—well, what else could you be in a one-party state? Especially if you knew that destiny had selected you for power.
But, no. Destiny had betrayed him, in the person of John Patrick Ryan, on a cold, snowy Moscow night, sitting, he recalled, in a streetcar barn, sitting in a resting tram. And so now he had comfort and security. His daughter would soon be married to what the Americans called “old money,” what other countries called the nobility, and what he called worthless drones--the very reason the Communist Party had won its revolution. His wife was content with her appliances and her small circle of friends. And his own anger had never died.
Ryan had robbed him of his destiny, of the sheer joy of power and responsibility, of being the arbiter of his nation’s path—and then Ryan had taken to himself that same destiny, and the fool didn’t know how to make use of it. The real disgrace was to have been done in by such a person. Well, there was one thing to be done, wasn’t there? Gerasimov walked into the mud room that led out the back, selected a leather jacket, and walked outside. He thought for a moment. Yes, he’d light a cigarette, and just walk up the driveway to where they were, four hundred meters away. Along the way he would consider how to couch his remarks, and his gratitude to President Ryan. He’d never stopped studying America, and his observations on how the media thought would now stand him in good stead, he thought.
“DID I WAKE you up, Skipper?” Jones asked. It was about four in the morning at Pearl Harbor.
“Not hardly. You know, my PAO is a woman, and she’s pregnant. I hope all this crap doesn’t put her into early labor.” Rear Admiral (Vice Admiral selectee, now) Mancuso was at his desk, and his phone, on his instructions, wasn’t ringing without a good reason. An old ship-mate was such a reason.
“I got a call from NBC, asking about a little job we did in the Atlantic.”
“What did you say?”
“What do you think, Skipper? Zip.” In addition to the honor of the situation, there was also the fact that Jones did most of his work with the Navy. “But—”
“Yeah, but somebody is gonna talk. Somebody always does.”
“They know too much already. The Today Show is doing a live shot from Norfolk, the Eight-Ten Dock. You can guess what they’re saying.”
Mancuso thought about flipping his office TV on, but it was still too early for the NBC morning news show—no. He did flip it on and selected CNN. They were doing sports now, and the top of the hour was coming.
“Next they might ask about another job we did, the one involving a swimmer.”
“Open line, Dr. Jones,” COMSUBPAC warned.
“I didn’t say where, Skipper. It’s just something you’ll want to think about.”
“Yeah,” Mancuso agreed.
“Maybe you can tell me one thing.”
“What’s that, Ron?”
“What’s the big deal? I mean, sure, I won’t talk and neither will you, but somebody will, sure as hell. Too good a sea story not to tell. But what’s the big deal, Bart? Didn’t we do the right thing?”
“I think so,” the admiral replied. “But I guess people just like a story.”
“You know, I hope Ryan runs. I’ll vote for him. Pretty cool stuff, bagging the head of the KGB and—”
“Ron!”
“Skipper, I’m just repeating what they’re saying on TV, right? I have no personal knowledge of that at all.” Damn, Jonesy thought, what a sea story this one is. And it’s all true.
At the other end of the line the “Breaking News” graphic came up on Mancuso’s TV screen.
“YES, I AM Nikolay Gerasimov,” the face said on screens all over the world. There were at least twenty reporters clustered on the other side of the stone fence, and the hard part was hearing one of the shouted questions.
“Is it true that you were—”
“Are you—”
“Were you—”
“Is it true that—”
“Silence, please.” He held up his hand. It took fifteen seconds or so. “Yes, I was at one time the chairman of KGB. Your President Ryan induced me to defect, and I have lived in America ever since, along with my family.”
“How did he get you to defect?” a
reporter shouted.
“You must understand that the intelligence business is, as you say, rough. Mr. Ryan plays the game well. At the time there was ongoing power struggle. CIA opposed my faction in favor of Andrey Il’ych Narmonov. So, he came to Moscow under cover of advisor to START talks. He claimed that he wanted to give me information to make the meeting happen, yes?” Gerasimov had decided that downgrading his English skills would make him seem more credible to the cameras and microphones. “Actually, you can say he trap me with accusation that I was going to create, how you say, treason? Not true, but effective, and so I decide to come to America with my family. I come by airplane. My family come by submarine.”
“What? Submarine?”
“Yes, was submarine Dallas.” He paused and smiled rather grimly. “Why are you so hard on President Ryan? He serve his country well. A master spy,” Gerasimov said admiringly.
“WELL, THERE GOES that story.” Bob Holtzman muted his television and turned to his managing editor.
“Sorry, Bob.” The editor handed the copy back. It was to have run in three days. Holtzman had done a masterful job of assembling his information, and then taken the time to integrate it all into a cohesive and flattering picture of the man whose office was only five blocks from his own. It was about spin, that most favored of Washington words. Somebody had changed the spin, and that was that. Once the initial story went out, it was impossible even for an experienced journalist like Holtzman to change it, especially if his own paper didn’t support him.
“Bob,” the editor said with a measure of embarrassment, “your take on this is different than mine. What if this guy’s a cowboy? I mean, okay, getting the submarine was one thing, Cold War and all that, but tampering with internal Soviet politics—isn’t that close to an act of war?”