by Tom Clancy
The weapons had all been collected, and their serial numbers checked with a computerized database. The date of manufacture was easily established, and the makers’ records checked to see which distributor had purchased them, and from there which store had sold them. That trail proved cold indeed. The weapons were old ones, a fact belied by their new condition, which was established by visual inspection of the barrel and bolt mechanisms. They hardly had any wear at all. That tidbit of information went up the line even before they had a purchaser’s name.
“DAMN, I WISH Bill was here,” Murray said aloud, for the first time in his career feeling inadequate to a task. His division chiefs were arrayed around his conference table. From the first it was certain that this investigation would be a joint venture between the Criminal and Foreign Counter-Intelligence divisions, aided, as always, by Laboratory. Things were moving so rapidly that there wasn’t yet a Secret Service official to join them. “Thoughts?”
“Dan, whoever bought these guns has been in-country a long time,” FCI said.
“Sleeper.” Murray nodded agreement.
“Pat didn’t recognize their language. He would probably have recognized a European one. Has to be the Middle East,” Criminal said. This wasn’t exactly Nobel-class work, but even the FBI had to follow form in what it did. “Well, Western Europe, anyway. I suppose we have to consider the Balkan countries.” There was reluctant agreement around the table.
“How old are those guns again?” the Director asked.
“Eleven years. Long before the ban was passed,” Criminal answered for FCI. “They may have been totally unused until today, virgins, Dan.”
“Somebody’s set up a network that we didn’t know about. Somebody real patient. Whoever the purchaser turns out to be, I think we’ll find that it’s a nicely faked ID, and he’s already flown the coop. It’s a classic intelligence job, Dan,” FCI went on, saying what everybody was thinking. “We’re talking pros here.”
“That’s a little speculative,” the Director objected.
“When’s the last time I was wrong, Danny?” the assistant director asked.
“Not lately. Keep going.”
“Maybe the Lab guys can develop some good forensic stuff”—he nodded to the assistant director for the Laboratory Division—“but even then, what we’re going to end up with won’t be good enough to take into a court, unless we get real lucky and bag either the purchaser, or the other people who had to be involved in this mission.”
“Flight records and passports,” Criminal said. “Two weeks back for starters. Look for repeaters. Somebody re-conned the objective. Must have been since Ryan became President. That’s a start.” Sure, he didn’t go on, only about ten million records to check. But that was what cops did.
“Christ, I hope you’re wrong on the sleeper,” Murray said, after a further moment’s reflection.
“So do I, Dan,” FCI replied. “But I’m not. We’ll need time to ID his house, assembly point, whatever, interview his neighbors, check the real-estate records to come up with a cover name and try to proceed from there. He’s probably already gone, but that’s not the scary part, is it? Eleven years at least he’s been here. He was bankrolled. He was trained. He kept the faith all the way to today to help with that mission. All that time, and he still believed enough to help kill kids.”
“He won’t be the only one,” Murray concluded bleakly.
“I don’t think so.”
“WILL YOU COME with me, please?”
“I’ve seen you before, but—”
“Jeff Raman, sir.”
The admiral took his hand. “Robby Jackson.”
The agent smiled. “I know that, sir.”
It was a pleasant walk, though it would have been more so without the obvious presence of armed men. The mountain air was cool and clear, lots of stars blinking overhead.
“How’s he doing?” Robby asked the agent.
“Tough day. A lot of good people dead.”
“And some bad ones, too.” Jackson would always be a fighter pilot, for whom inflicted death was part of the job description. They turned into the Presidential Quarters.
Both Robby and Sissy were struck by the scene. Not parents themselves—Cecilia’s medical problem had not allowed it, despite the best of efforts—they didn’t fully understand how it was with kids. The most horrific events, if followed by a parent’s hug and other signs of security, were usually set aside. The world, especially for Katie, had resumed its proper shape. But there would be nightmares, too, and those would last for weeks, maybe longer, until the memories faded. Embraces were exchanged, and then also as usual, man paired with man and woman with woman. Robby got himself a glass of wine and followed Jack outside.
“How you doing, Jack?” By unspoken agreement, here and now Ryan wasn’t the President.
“The shock comes and goes,” he admitted. “It’s all come back from before. The bastards can’t just come after me—oh, no, they have to go for the soft targets. Those cowardly fucks!” Jack cursed as it came back again.
Jackson sipped at his glass. There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot to be said right now, but that would change.
“It’s my first time here,” Robby said, just to say something.
“My first time—would you believe we buried a guy up here?” Jack remarked, remembering. “He was a Russian colonel, an agent we had in their Defense Ministry. Hell of a soldier, hero of the Soviet Union, three or four times, I think, we buried him in his uniform with all the decorations. I read off the citations myself. That’s when we got Gerasimov out.”
“The KGB head. So, that’s true, eh?”
“Yep.” Ryan nodded. “And you know about Colombia, and you know about the submarine. How the hell did those newsies find out, though?”
Robby almost laughed aloud, but settled for a chuckle. “Holy God, and I thought my career was eventful.”
“You volunteered for yours,” Jack observed crossly.
“So did you, my friend.”
“Think so?” Ryan went back inside for a refill. He returned with the night-vision goggles and switched them on, scanning the surroundings. “I didn’t volunteer for having my family guarded by a company of Marines. There’s three of them down there, flak jackets, helmets, and rifles—and why? Because there’s people in the world who want to kill us. Why? Because—”
“I’ll tell you why. Because you’re better than they are, Jack. You stand for things, and they’re good things. Because you’ve got balls, and you don’t run away from shit. I don’t want to hear this, Jack,” Robby told his friend. “Don’t give me this ‘oh, my God’ stuff, okay? I know who you are. I’m a fighter pilot because I chose to be one. You’re where you are because you chose, too. Nobody ever said it was supposed to be easy, okay?”
“But—”
“But, my ass, Mr. President. There’s people out there who don’t like you? Okay, fine. You just figure out how to find them, and then you can ask those Marines out there to go take care of business. You know what they’ll say. You may be hated by some, but you’re respected and loved by a lot more, and I’m telling you now, there’s not one person in our country’s uniform who isn’t willing to dust anybody who fucks with you and your family. It’s not just what you are, it’s who you are, okay?”
Who am I? SWORDSMAN asked himself. At that moment, one of his weaknesses asserted itself.
“Come on.” Ryan walked over to the west. He’d just seen a sudden flare of light, and thirty seconds later, at the corner of another cabin, he found a Navy cook smoking a cigarette. President or not, he wasn’t going to be overly proud tonight. “Hello.”
“Jesus!” the sailor blurted, snapping to attention and dropping his smoke into the grass. “I mean, hello, Mr. President.”
“Wrong the first time, right the second time. Got a smoke?” POTUS asked, entirely without shame, Robby Jackson noted.
“You bet, sir.” The cook fished one out and lit it.
“Sail
or, if the First Lady sees you do that again, she’ll have the Marines shoot you,” Jackson warned.
“Admiral Jackson!” Those words made the kid brace again. “I think the Marines work for me. How’s dinner coming?”
“Sir, the pizza is being cut right now. Baked it myself, sir. They oughta like it,” he promised.
“Settle down. Thanks for the cigarette.”
“Anytime, sir.” Ryan shook his hand and wandered off with his friend.
“I needed that,” Jack admitted, somewhat shamefully, taking a long drag.
“If I had a place like this, I’d use it a lot. Almost like being at sea,” Jackson went on. “Sometimes you go outside, stand on one of the galleries off the flight deck, and just sort of enjoy the sea and the stars. The simple pleasures.”
“It’s hard to turn it off, isn’t it? Even when you went communing with the sea and the stars, you didn’t turn it off, not really.”
“No,” the admiral admitted. “It makes thinking a little easier, makes the atmosphere a little less intense, but you’re right. It doesn’t really go away.” And it didn’t now, either.
“Tony said India’s navy’s gone missing on us.”
“Both carriers at sea, with escorts and oilers. We’re looking for them.”
“What if there’s a connection?” Ryan asked.
“With what?”
“The Chinese make trouble in one place, the Indian navy goes to sea again, and this happens to me—am I being paranoid?” SWORDSMAN asked.
“Probably. Could be the Indians put out when they finished their repairs, and maybe to show us that we didn’t teach them all that big a lesson. The China thing, well, it’s happened before, and it’s not going anywhere, especially after Mike Dubro gets there. I know Mike. He’ll have fighters up and poking around. The attempt on Katie? Too early to say, and it’s not my field. You have Murray and the rest for that. In any case, they failed, didn’t they? Your family’s in there, watching TV, and it’ll be a long time before somebody tries anything else.”
IT WAS BECOMING an all-nighter all over the world. In Tel Aviv, where it was now after four in the morning, Avi ben Jakob had called in his top terrorism experts. Together they went over the photos transmitted from Washington and were comparing them with their own surveillance photographs that had been taken over the years in Lebanon and elsewhere. The problem was that many of their photos showed young men with beards—the simplest method of disguise known to man—and the photos were not of high quality. By the same token, the American-transmitted images were not exactly graduation pictures, either.
“Anything useful?” the director of Mossad asked.
Eyes turned to one of the Mossad’s experts, a fortyish woman named Sarah Peled. Behind her back, they called her the witch. She had some special gift for ID’ing people from photographs, and was right just over half the time in cases where other trained intelligence officers threw up their hands in frustration.
“This one.” She slid two photos across the table. “This is a definite match.”
Ben Jakob looked at the two side by side—and saw nothing to confirm her opinion. He’d asked her many times what keyed her in on such things. Sarah always said it was the eyes, and so Avi took another look, comparing the eyes of one with the eyes of the other photo. All he saw were eyes. He turned the Israeli photo over. The printed data on the back said that he was a suspected Hezbollah member, name unknown, age about twenty in their photo, which was dated six years earlier.
“Any others, Sarah?” he asked.
“No, none at all.”
“How confident are you on this one?” one of the counterintelligence people asked, looking at the photos himself now and, like Avi, seeing nothing.
“One hundred percent, Benny. I said ‘definite,’ didn’t I?” Sarah was often testy, especially with unbelieving men at four in the morning.
“How far do we go on this?” another staff member asked.
“Ryan is a friend of our country, and President of the United States. We go as far as we can. I want inquiries to go out. All contacts, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran, everywhere.”
“SWINE.” BONDARENKO RAN a hand through his hair. His tie was long since gone. His watch told him it was Saturday, but he didn’t know what that day was anymore.
“Yes,” Golovko agreed.
“A black operation—a ‘wet’ one, you used to call it?” the general asked.
“Wet and incompetent,” the RVS chairman said crossly. “But Ivan Emmetovich was lucky, Comrade General. This time.”
“Perhaps,” Gennady Iosefovich allowed.
“You disagree?”
“The terrorists underestimated their opponents. You will recall that I recently spent time with the American army. Their training is like nothing else in the world, and the training of their presidential guard must be equally as expert. Why is it that people so often underestimate the Americans?” he wondered.
That was a good question, Sergey Nikolay’ch recognized, nodding for the chief of operations to go on.
“America often suffers from a lack of political direction. That is not the same as incompetence. You know what they are like? A vicious dog held on a short leash—and because he cannot break the leash, people delude themselves that they need not fear him, but within the are of that leash he is invincible, and a leash, Comrade Chairman, is a temporary thing. You know this Ryan fellow.”
“I know him well,” Golovko agreed.
“And? The stories in their press, are they true?”
“All of them.”
“I tell you what I think, Sergey Nikolay’ch. If you regard him as a formidable adversary, and he has that vicious dog on the leash, I would not go far out of my way to offend him. An attack on a child? His child?” The general shook his head.
That was it, Golovko realized. They were both tired, but here was a moment of clarity. He’d spent too much time reading over the political reports from Washington, from his own embassy, and directly from the American media. They all said that Ivan Emmetovich ... was that the key? From the beginning he’d called Ryan that, thinking to honor the man with the Russian version of his name and the Russian patronymic. And an honor it was in Golovko’s context ...
“You are thinking what I am thinking, da?” the general asked, seeing the man’s face and gesturing for him to speak.
“Someone has made a calculation ...”
“And it is not an accurate one. I think we need to find out who has done so. I think a systematic attack on American interests, an attempt to weaken America, Comrade Chairman, is really an attack against our interests. Why is China doing what she is doing, eh? Why did they force America to change her naval dispositions? And now this? American forces are being stretched, and at the same time a strike at the very heart of the American leader. This is no coincidence. Now we can stand aside and do nothing more than observe, or—”
“There is nothing we can do, and with the revelations in the American press—”
“Comrade Chairman,” Bondarenko interrupted. “For seventy years, our country has confused political theory with objective fact, and that was almost our undoing as a nation. There are objective conditions here,” he went on, using a phrase beloved of the Soviet military—a reaction, perhaps, to their three generations of political oversight. “I see the patterns of a clever operation, a coordinated operation, but one which has a fatal flaw, and that flaw is a misestimation of the American President. Do you disagree?”
Golovko gave that a few seconds of thought, noting also that Bondarenko might just be seeing something real—but did the Americans? It was so much harder to see something from the inside than the outside. A coordinated operation? Back to Ryan, he told himself.
“No. I made that mistake myself. Ryan appears much less than what he is. The signs are all there, but people don’t see them.”
“When I was in America, that General Diggs told me the story of the time terrorists attacked Ryan’s house. He took up arm
s and defeated them, courageously and decisively. From what you say, it appears he is also highly effective as an intelligence officer. His only flaw, if one may call it that, is that he is not politically adept, and politicians invariably take that for weakness. Perhaps it is,” Bondarenko allowed. “But if this is a hostile operation against America, then his political weaknesses are far less important than his other gifts.”
“And?”
“Help the man,” the general urged. “Better that we should be on the winning side, and if we do not help, then we might be on the other. Nobody will attack America directly. We are not so fortunate, Comrade Chairman.” He was almost right.
44
INCUBATION
RYAN AWOKE AT DAWN, wondering why. The quiet. Almost like his home on the Bay. He strained to listen for traffic or other sounds, but there were none. Moving out of the bed was difficult. Cathy had decided to have Katie in with them, and there she was in her pink sleeper, looking angelic as toddlers did, still babies at that age whatever others might say. He had to smile, then made his way to the bathroom. Casual clothes had been set out in the dressing room, and he put them on, with a pair of sneaks and a sweater, to head outside.
The air was brisk, with traces of frost on the boxwoods, and the sky clear. Not bad. Robby was right. This wasn’t a bad place to come to. It put a distance between himself and other things, and he needed that right now.
“Morning, sir.” It was Captain Overton.
“Not bad duty, is it?”
The young officer nodded. “We do the security. The Navy does the petunias. It’s a fair division of labor, Mr. President. Even the Secret Service guys can sleep in here, sir.”
Ryan looked around and saw why. There were two armed Marines immediately around the cabin, and three more within fifty yards. And those were just the ones he could see.
“Get you anything, Mr. President?”
“Coffee’ll do for a start.”
“Follow me, sir.”