by Tom Clancy
IN SAN FRANCISCO, it was computers, the most crowded show of all that day, with over twenty thousand people in the Moscone Convention Center, so many that this traveler feared he might not get outside to the garden area before the can released its contents. But he did, walking upwind to his hotel, four blocks away, his job complete.
THE RUG SHOP was just closing down when Aref Raman walked in. Mr. Alahad locked the front door and switched off the lights.
“My instructions?”
“You will do nothing without direct orders, but it is important to know if you are able to complete your mission.”
“Is that not plain?” Raman asked in irritation. “Why do you think ”
“I have my instructions,” Alahad said gently.
“I am able. I am ready,” the assassin assured his cutout. The decision had been made years before, but it was good to say it out loud to another, here, now.
“You will be told at the proper time. It will be soon.”
“The political situation ...”
“We are aware of that, and we are confident of your devotion. Be at peace, Aref. Great things are happening. I know not what they are, merely that they are under way, and at the proper time, your act will be the capstone of the Holy Jihad. Mahmoud Haji sends his greetings and his prayers.”
“Thank you.” Raman inclined his head at word of the distant but powerful blessing. It had been a very long time since he’d heard the man’s voice over anything but a television, and then he’d been forced to turn away, lest others see his reaction to it.
“It has been hard for you,” Alahad said.
“It has.” Raman nodded.
“It will soon be over, my young friend. Come to the back with me. Do you have time?”
“I do.”
“It is time for prayer.”
38
GRACE PERIOD
I’M NOT AN AREA SPECIALIST,” Clark objected. He’d been to Iran before.
Ed Foley would have none of that: “You’ve been on the ground there, and I think you’re the one who always talks about how there’s no substitute for dirty hands and a good nose.”
“He was just laying more of that on the kiddies at the Farm this afternoon,” Ding reported with a sly look. “Well, today it was about reading people by lookin’ in their eyes, but it’s the same thing. Good eye, good nose, good senses.” He hadn’t been to Iran, and they wouldn’t send Mr. C. alone, would they?
“You’re in, John,” Mary Pat Foley said, and since she was the DDO, that was that. “Secretary Adler may be flying over real soon. I want you and Ding to go over as SPOs. Keep him alive, and sniff around, nothing covert or anything. I want your read on what the street feels like. That’s all, just a quick recon.” It was the sort of thing usually done by watching footage on CNN, but Mary Pat wanted an experienced officer to take the local pulse, and it was her call.
If there were a curse in being a good training officer, it was that the people you trained often got promoted, and remembered their lessons—and worse, who’d taught them. Clark could recall both of the Foleys in his classes at the Farm. From the start, she’d been the cowboy—well, cowgirl—of the pair, with brilliant instincts, fantastically good Russian skills, and the sort of gift for reading people more often found in a professor of psychiatry... but somewhat wanting in caution, trusting a little too much on the baby blues and dumb blonde act to keep her safe. Ed lacked her passion but had the ability to formulate The Big Picture, to take a long view that made sense most of the time. Neither was quite perfect. Together they were a piece of work, and John took pride in having taught them his way. Most of the time.
“Okay. We have anything in the way of assets over there?”
“Nothing useful. Adler wants to eyeball Daryaei and tell him what the rules are. You’ll be quartered in the French embassy. The trip is secret. VC-20 to Paris, French transport from there. In and out in a hurry,” Mary Pat told them. “But I want you to spend an hour or two walking around, just to get a feel for things, price of bread, how people dress, you know the drill.”
“And we’ll have diplomatic passports, so nobody can hassle us,” John added wryly. “Yeah, heard that one before. So did everyone else in the embassy back in 1979, remember?”
“Adler’s Secretary of State,” Ed reminded him.
“I think they know that.” They know he’s Jewish, too, he didn’t add.
THE FLIGHT INTO Barstow, California, was how the exercise always started. Buses and trucks rolled up to the airplanes, and the troops came down the stairs for the short drive up the only road into the NTC. General Diggs and Colonel Hamm watched from their parked helicopter as the soldiers formed up. This group was from the North Carolina National Guard, a reinforced brigade. It wasn’t often that the Guard came to Fort Irwin, and this one was supposed to be pretty special. Because the state was blessed with very senior senators and congressmen—well, until recently—over the years, the men from Carolina had gotten the very best in modern equipment, and been designated a round-out brigade for one of the Regular Army’s armored divisions. Sure enough, they strutted like real soldiers, and their officers had been prepping for a year in anticipation of this training rotation. They’d even managed to get their hands on additional fuel with which they’d trained a few extra weeks. Now the officers formed their men up in regular lines before putting them on the transport, and from a distance of a quarter mile, Diggs and Hamm could see their officers talking to their men over the noise of the arriving aircraft.
“They look proud, boss,” Hamm observed.
They heard a distant shout, as a company of tankers told their captain they were ready to kick some ass. A news crew was even out there to immortalize the event for local TV.
“They are proud,” the general said. “Soldiers should be proud, Colonel.”
“Only one thing missing, sir.”
“What’s that, Al?”
“Baaaaaaaaa, ” Colonel Hamm said around his cigar. “Lambs to the slaughter.” The two officers shared a look. The first mission of the OpFor was to take away that pride. The Blackhorse Cav had never lost so much as a single simulated engagement to anything other than a regular formation—and that rarely enough. Hamm didn’t plan to start this month. Two battalions of Abrams tanks, one more of Bradleys, another of artillery, a cavalry company, and a combat-support battalion against his three squadrons of Opposing Force. It hardly seemed fair. For the visitors.
THEY WERE ALMOST done. The most annoying work of all was mixing the AmFo, which turned out to be a pretty good upper-body workout for the Mountain Men. The proper proportions of the fertilizer (which was mainly an ammonia-based chemical compound) and the diesel fuel came from a book. It struck both men as amusing that plants should like to eat a deadly explosive. The propellant used in artillery rounds was also ammonia-based, and once upon a time, in post—World War I Germany, a chemical plant making fertilizer had exploded and wiped out the neighboring village. The addition of diesel fuel was partly to provide an additional element of chemical energy, but mainly to act as a wetting agent, the better for the internal shock wave to propagate within the explosive mass and hasten the detonation. They used a large tub for the mixing, and an oar, like a canoe’s, to stir the mass into the proper consistency (that came from a book also). The result was a large glob of mud-like slurry which formed into blocks of a sort. These they lifted by hand.
It was dirty and smelly and a little dangerous inside the drum of the cement truck. They took turns doing the filling. The access hatch, which was designed to admit semiliquid cement, was just over three feet in diameter. Holbrook had rigged an electric fan to blow fresh air into the drum, because the fumes from the fresh AmFo mix were unpleasant and possibly dangerous—it gave them headaches, which was warning enough. It was the work of over a week, but now the drum was as filled as they needed it to be, about three-quarters, when the last block was nested in with all the rest. Every layer had been somewhat uneven, and the void spaces were fi
lled with a mix that was more liquid and had been handed in by bucket, so that the circular body of the drum was as full as two men working alone could make it. If one could have seen through the steel, it would have looked like a pie chart, the unfilled part a V-shape, facing upwards.
“I think that does it, Pete,” Ernie Brown said. “We have about another hundred pounds or so, but—”
“No place for it to go,” Holbrook agreed, climbing out. He clambered down the ladder and the two walked outside, sat in lawn chairs and got some fresh air. “Damn, I’m glad that’s done!”
“You bet.” Brown rubbed his face and took a deep breath. His head hurt so badly that he wondered if his face might come off. They’d stay out here for a long while, until they got all those goddamned fumes out of their lungs.
“This has got to be bad for us,” Pete said.
“Sure as hell gonna be bad for somebody. Good idea on the bullets,” he added. There were two oil drums full of them inside, probably too many, but that was okay.
“What’s a brownie without some walnuts?” Holbrook asked.
“You bastard!” Brown laughed so hard he nearly came out of the chair. “Oh, Jesus, my head hurts!”
APPROVAL FOR FRENCH cooperation on the meeting came from the Quai d’Orsay with remarkable speed. France had diplomatic interests with every country bordering on the Gulf that connected to all manner of commercial relationships, from tanks to pharmaceuticals. French troops had deployed in the Persian Gulf War to find themselves fighting against French products, but that sort of thing wasn’t all that unusual. It made for lots of markets. Approval of the mission was phoned to the American Ambassador at nine in the morning, who telexed Foggy Bottom in less than five minutes, where it was relayed to Secretary Adler while he was still in his bed. Action officers made other notifications, first of all to the 89th Military Airlift Wing at Andrews Air Force Base.
Getting the Secretary of State out of town quietly was never the easiest of tasks. People tended to notice empty offices of that magnitude, and so an easy cover story was laid on. Adler was going to consult with European allies on several issues. The French were far better able to control their media, a task which was more than anything else a matter of timing.
“Yeah?” Clark said, lifting the phone at the Marriott closest to Langley.
“It’s on for today,” the voice said.
A blink. A shake of the head. “Super. Okay, I’m packed.” Then he rolled back over for some more sleep. At least there didn’t have to be a mission brief for this one. Keep an eye on Adler, take a walk, and come home. There wasn’t any real worry about security. If the Iranians—UIR-ians was a phrase he hadn’t come to terms with yet—wanted to do something, two men with pistols wouldn’t be able to do much about it except hand their weapons over unused, and either locals or Iranian security would keep the hostile peons away. He was going to be there for show, because it was something you did, for some reason or other.
“We goin’?” Chavez asked from the other bed.
“Yep.”
“Bueno. ”
DARYAEI CHECKED HIS desk clock, subtracting eight, nine, ten, and eleven hours, and wondering if anything had gone wrong. Second thoughts were the bane of people in his position. You made your decisions and took the action, and only then did you really worry, despite all the planning and thought that might have gone into what you did. There was no royal road to success. You had to take risks, a fact never appreciated by those who merely thought about being a chief of state.
No, nothing had gone wrong. He’d received the French Ambassador, a very pleasant unbeliever who spoke the local language so beautifully that Daryaei wondered what it might be like to have him read some of his country’s poetry. And a courtly man, ever polite and deferential, he’d posed his secondhand request like a man arranging a marriage of family alliance, his hopeful smile also conveying the wishes of his government. The Americans would not have made the request if they’d had any pre-warning of Badrayn’s people and their mission. No, in a case like that, the meeting would have been on neutral ground—Switzerland was always a possibility—for informal but direct contact. In this case, they would send their own Foreign Minister into what they had to consider to be enemy country—and a Jew at that! Friendly contact, friendly exchange of views, friendly offers of friendly relations, the Frenchman had said, pitching the meeting, doubtless hoping that if it went well, then France would be remembered as the country that fostered a new friendship—well, maybe a “working relationship”—and if the meeting went badly, then all that would be remembered was that France had tried to be an honest broker. Had Daryaei known about ballet, he would have used it as a visual image for the exchange.
Damn the French, anyway, he thought. Had their warrior chief Martel not stopped ‘Abd-ar-Rahman in 732 at Poitiers, then the whole world might be ... but even Allah couldn’t change history. Rahman had lost that battle because his men had grown greedy, fallen away from the purity of the Faith. Exposed to the riches of the West, they’d stopped fighting and started looting, and given Martel’s forces the chance to re-form and counterattack. Yes, that was the lesson to be remembered. There was always time for looting. You had to win the battle first. First destroy the enemy’s forces, and then take that which you wanted to take.
He walked from his office into the next room. There on the wall was a map of his new country and its neighbors, and a comfortable seat from which to view it. There came the usual error from looking at maps. Distances were truncated. Everything seemed so close, all the more so after all the lost time of his life. Close enough to reach. Close enough to grasp. Nothing could go wrong now. Not with everything so close.
LEAVING WAS EASIER than arriving. Like most Western countries, America was more concerned with what people might bring in than with what they might take out—and properly so, the first traveler thought, as his passport was processed at JFK. It was 7:05 A.M., and Air France Flight 1, a supersonic Concorde, was waiting to take him part of the way home. He had a huge collection of auto brochures, and a story he’d spent some time concocting should anyone ask about them, but his cover wasn’t challenged, or even examined. He was leaving, and that was okay. The passport was duly stamped. The customs agent didn’t even ask why he had come one day and left the next. Business travelers were business travelers. Besides, it was early in the morning, and nothing important happened before ten.
The Air France first-class lounge served coffee, but the traveler didn’t want any. He was almost done. Only now did his body want to tremble. It was amazing how easily it had gone. Badrayn’s mission brief had told them how easy it would be, but he hadn’t quite believed it, used, as he was, to dealing with Israeli security with their numberless soldiers and guns. After all the tension he’d felt, like being wrapped tightly with rope, it was all diminishing now. He’d slept poorly in his hotel the previous night, and now he’d get on the aircraft and sleep all the way across. On getting back to Tehran, he’d look at Badrayn and laugh and ask for another such mission. On passing the buffet, he saw a bottle of champagne, and poured himself a glass. It made him sneeze, and it was contrary to his religion, but it was the Western way to celebrate, and indeed he had something to celebrate. Twenty minutes later, his flight was called, and he walked off to the jetway with the others. His only concern now was jet lag. The flight would leave at eight sharp, then arrive in Paris at 5:45 P.M.! From breakfast to dinner without the intervening midday meal. Well, such was the miracle of modern travel.
THEY DROVE SEPARATELY to Andrews, Adler in his official car, Clark and Chavez in the latter’s personal auto, and while the Secretary of State was waved through the gate, the CIA officers had to show ID, which at least earned them a salute from the armed airman.
“You really don’t like the place, do you?” the junior officer asked.
“Well, Domingo, back when you were taking the training wheels off your bike, I was in Tehran with a cover so thin you could read an insurance policy through i
t, yelling ‘Death to America!’ with the gomers and watching our people being paraded around blindfolded by a bunch of crazy kids with guns. For a while there, I thought they were going to be lined up against a wall and hosed. I knew the station chief. Hell, I recognized him. They had him in the bag, too, gave him a rough time.” Just standing there, he remembered, only fifty yards away, not able to do a damned thing ...
“What were you doing?”
“First time, it was a quick recon for the Agency. Second time, it was to be part of the rescue mission that went tits-up at Desert One. We all thought it was bad luck at the time, but that operation really scared me. Probably better it failed,” John concluded. “At least we got them all out alive in the end.”
“So, bad memories, you don’t like the place?”
Clark shrugged. “Not really. Never figured them out. The Saudis I understand—I like ’em a lot. Once you get through the crust, they make friends for life. Some of the rules are a little funny to us, but that’s okay. Kinda like old movies, sense of honor and all that, hospitality,” he went on. “Anyway, lots of good experiences there. Not on the other side of the Gulf. Just as soon leave that place alone.” Ding parked his car. Both men retrieved their bags as a sergeant came up to them.
“Going to Paris, Sarge,” Clark said, holding up his ID again.
“You gentlemen want to come with me?” She waved them toward the VIP terminal. The low, one-story building had been cleared of other distinguished visitors. Scott Adler was on one of the couches, going over some papers.
“Mr. Secretary?”
Adler looked up. “Let me guess, this one is Clark, and this one is Chavez.”
“You might even have a future in the intelligence business.” John smiled. Handshakes were exchanged.