by Tom Clancy
The land was flat, similar to home in its topography, though far greener. The horizon was surprisingly far away, enough so that estimating distance seemed impossible on first glance. The sun was above the horizon, and it burned into his eyes until he remembered the sunglasses in his shirt pocket. They helped somewhat.
Mustafa remarked to himself on his current state of mind. He found the driving pleasant, the passing terrain pleasing to the eye, and the work, such as it was, easy. Every ninety minutes or so, he saw a marked police car, usually passing his Ford at a good clip, too fast for the policeman inside to eyeball him and his friends. It had been good advice to cruise right on the speed limit. They moved along nicely, but people regularly passed them, even the big trucks. Not breaking the law even a little made them invisible to the police whose main business was to punish those in too great a hurry. He was confident that their mission security was solid. Had it not been the case, they’d have been followed, or pulled over on a particularly deserted stretch of highway into a trap with guns and many, many enemies. But that hadn’t happened. An additional advantage of driving right on the speed limit was that anyone tailing them would stand out. It was just a matter of checking his mirror. No one lingered there for more than a few minutes. Any police shadow would be a man—it would have to be a man—in his twenties or thirties. Maybe two of them, one to drive and one to look. The men would be physically fit looking, with conservative haircuts. They’d tail for a few minutes before breaking contact, as someone else took the surveillance job over. They’d be clever, of course, but the nature of the mission made their procedures predictable. Some cars would disappear and reappear. But Mustafa was fully alert, and no car had appeared more than once. They might be tailed by aircraft, of course, but helicopters were easy to spot. The only real danger was a small fixed-wing aircraft, but he could not worry about everything. If it were written, then written it was, and there was no defense against that. For the moment, the road was clear and the coffee was excellent. It would be a fine day. OKLAHOMA CITY 36 MILES, the green road sign proclaimed.
NPR ANNOUNCED that it was Barbra Streisand’s birthday, a vital piece of information with which to begin the day, John Patrick Ryan, Jr., told himself as he rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom. A few minutes later, he saw that his clock-controlled coffeemaker had functioned properly and dripped two cups into the white plastic pot. He decided to hit McDonald’s this morning and get an Egg McMuffin and hash browns on the way to work. It wasn’t exactly a healthy breakfast, but it was filling, and at twenty-three he wasn’t overly worried about cholesterol and fat, as his father was, courtesy of his mother. Mom would already be dressed and ready to be driven to Hopkins (by her principal agent of the Secret Service) for her morning’s work, without coffee if she was operating today, because she worried that caffeine might give her hand a slight tremor—and drive her little knife into the poor bastard’s brain after skewering the eyeball like the olive in a martini (that was his father’s joke, which usually resulted in a playful slap from Mom). Dad would go to work on his memoirs, assisted by a ghostwriter (which he detested—but the publisher had insisted). Sally was in the pretend-doc stage of medical school; he didn’t know what she was doing at this moment. Katie and Kyle would be dressing for school. But Little Jack had to go to work. It had recently occurred to him that college had been his last real vacation. Oh, sure, every little boy and girl wants nothing more than to grow up and take proper charge of his or her life, but then you get there—and it’s too late to go back. This work-every-day thing was a drag. Okay, fine, you got paid for it—but he was already rich, the scion of a distinguished family. The money, in his case, was already made, and he wasn’t the kind of wastrel likely to piss it all away and become a self-unmade man, was he? He set his empty coffee cup in the dishwasher and went to the bathroom to shave.
That was another drag. Damn, a teenybopper was so pleased to see the first bunch of peach fuzz turn dark and bristly, and then you got to shave once or twice a week, usually before a date. But every damned morning—what a pain in the ass that was! He remembered watching his father do it, as young boys often do, and thinking how neat it was to be a grown man. Yeah, sure. Growing up just wasn’t worth the hassle. It was better to have a mom and dad to take care of all the administrative bullshit. And yet...
And yet, he was doing important stuff now, and that did have its satisfactions, sort of. Once you got past all the housekeeping that accompanied it. Well. Clean shirt. Pick a tie and tie tack. Slide the jacket on. Out the door. At least he had a fun car to drive. He might get himself another. A ragtop, maybe. Summer was coming, and it would be cool to have the wind blowing in your hair. Until some pervert with a knife slashed the canvas top, and you had to call the insurance company and the car vanished into the shop for three days. When you got down to it, growing up was like going to the shopping mall to buy underwear. Everyone needed it, but there wasn’t much you could do with it except take it off.
The drive to work was about as routine as driving to school, except he didn’t have to worry about an exam anymore. Except that if he screwed up, he’d lose the job, and that black mark would follow him a lot longer than an “F” in sociology would. So, he didn’t want to screw up. The problem with this job was that every day was spent in learning, not in applying knowledge. The whole big lie about college was that it taught you what you needed to know for life. Yeah, right. It probably hadn’t done that for his dad—and for Mom, hell, she never stopped reading her medical journals to learn about new stuff. Not just American journals, either, English and French, too, because she spoke pretty good French and she said that French docs were good. Better than their politicians were, but, then again, anyone who judged America by its political leaders probably thought the U.S. of A. was a nation of fuckups. At least since his dad had checked out of the White House.
He was listening to NPR again. It was his favorite news station, and it beat listening to the current brand of popular music. He’d grown up listening to his mom on the piano, mostly Bach and his peers—maybe a little John Williams in a gesture toward modernity, though he wrote more for brass than the ivories.
Another suicide bomber in Israel. Damn, his dad had tried awfully hard to settle that one down, but despite some earnest efforts, even by the Israelis, it had all come undone. The Jews and Muslims just could not seem to get along. His dad and Prince Ali bin Sultan talked about it whenever they got together, and the frustration they displayed was painful to see. The prince hadn’t been screened for the kingship of his country—which was possibly good luck, Jack thought, since being a king had to be even worse than being President—but he remained an important figure whose words the current king listened to most of the time . . . which brought him to . . .
Uda bin Sali. There’d be more news on him this morning. Yesterday’s take from the British SIS, courtesy of the CIA pukes at Langley. CIA pukes? Jack asked himself. His own father had worked there, had served with distinction before moving up in the world, and had told his kids many times not to believe anything they saw in the movies about the intelligence business. Jack Jr. had asked him questions and mainly gotten unsatisfactory answers, and now he was learning what the business was really like. Mostly boring. Too much like accounting, like chasing after mice in Jurassic Park, though at least you had the advantage of being invisible to the raptors. Nobody knew that The Campus existed, and so long as that remained true everyone there was safe. That made for a comfortable feeling, but again, boring. Junior was still young enough to think excitement was fun.
Left off U.S. Route 29 and on to The Campus. The usual parking place. Smile and a wave at the security guard and up to his office. It was then that Junior realized he’d driven right past McDonald’s, and so he picked two Danish off the treat tray, and made a cup of coffee on his way to his cubbyhole. Light up the computer and go to work.
“Good morning, Uda,” Jack Jr. said to the computer screen. “What have you been up to?” The clock window
on the computer said 8:25 AM. That translated to early afternoon in London’s financial district. Bin Sali had an office in the Lloyd’s insurance building, which, Junior remembered from previous hops across the pond, looked like a glassed-in oil refinery. Upscale neighborhood and some very wealthy neighbors. The report didn’t say which floor, but Jack had never been in the building anyway. Insurance. Had to be the most boring job in the world, waiting for a building to burn down. So, yesterday Uda had made some phone calls, one of them to ... aha! “I know that name from somewhere,” the young Ryan told the screen. It was the name of a very rich Middle Eastern fellow who also had been known to play in the wrong playground on occasion, and who was also under surveillance by the Brit Security Service. So, what had they talked about?
There was even a transcript. The conversation had been in Arabic, and the translation . . . might as well have been instructions from the wife to buy a quart of milk on the way home from work. About that exciting and revealing—except that Uda had replied to a totally innocuous statement with “Are you sure?” Not the sort of thing you said to the wife when she said to get a quart of skim milk on the way home.
“The tone of voice suggests hidden meaning,” the Brit analyst had opined gently at the bottom of the report.
Then, later in the day, Uda had left his office early and entered another pub and met with the same guy he’d been talking to on the phone. So, the conversation hadn’t been innocuous after all? But, though they hadn’t managed to overhear the conversation in a pub booth, neither had the phone chat specified a meeting or a meeting place . . . and Uda didn’t spend much time in that particular pub.
“’Morning, Jack,” Wills greeted as he came in and hung up his suit jacket. “What’s happening?”
“Our friend Uda is wiggling like a live fish.” Jack punched the PRINT command and handed the printout across to his roomie even before he’d had a chance to sit down.
“It seems to suggest that possibility, doesn’t it?”
“Tony, this guy is a player,” Jack said with some conviction in his voice.
“What did he do after the phone conversation? Any unusual transactions?”
“I haven’t checked yet, but if there is, then he was ordered to do it by his friend, and then they met so that he could confirm it over a pint of John Smith’s Bitter.”
“You’re making a leap of imagination. We try to avoid that here,” Wills cautioned.
“I know,” Junior growled. It was time to check out the previous day’s money-moving.
“Oh, you’re to be meeting somebody new today.”
“Who’s that?”
“Dave Cunningham. Forensic accountant, used to work for Justice—organized-crime stuff. He’s pretty good at spotting financial irregularities.”
“Does he think I found something interesting?” Jack asked with hope in his voice.
“We’ll see when he gets here—after lunch. He’s probably looking over your stuff right now.”
“Okay,” Jack responded. Maybe he’d caught the scent of something. Maybe this job really did have an element of excitement to it. Maybe they’d give him some purple ribbon for his adding machine. Sure.
THE DAYS were down to a routine. Morning run and PT, followed by breakfast and a talk. In substance, no different from Dominic’s time at the FBI Academy, or Brian’s at the Basic School. It was this similarity that distantly troubled the Marine. Marine Corps training was directed at killing people and breaking things. So was this.
Dominic was somewhat better at the surveillance part of it, because the FBI Academy taught it out of a book the Marines didn’t have. Enzo was also pretty good with his pistol, though Aldo preferred his Beretta to his brother’s Smith & Wesson. His brother had whacked a bad guy with his Smith, whereas Brian had done his job with an M16A2 rifle at a decently long range—fifty meters, close enough to see the looks on their faces when the bullets struck home, and far enough that a returning snapshot would not be close enough to be a serious worry. His gunny had chided him on not grabbing some dirt when the AKs had been turned in his direction, but Brian had learned an important lesson in his only exposure to combat. He’d found that, in that moment, his mind and his thinking went into hyperdrive, the world around him seemed to slow down, and his thinking had become extraordinarily clear. In retrospect, it had surprised him that he hadn’t seen bullets in flight, his mind had been operating so fast—well, the last five rounds in the AK-47 magazine were usually tracers, and he had seen those in flight, though never in his immediate direction. His mind often went back to that busy five or six minutes, critiquing himself for things he might have done better, and promising that he would not repeat those errors of thinking and command, though Gunny Sullivan had been very respectful to his captain later during Caruso’s after-action review with his Marines at their firebase.
“How was the run today, fellas?” Pete Alexander asked.
“Delightful,” Dominic answered. “Maybe we should try it wearing fifty-pound backpacks.”
“That could be arranged,” Alexander replied.
“Hey, Pete, we used to do that in Force Recon. It ain’t fun,” Brian objected at once. “Turn down the sense of humor, bro,” he added for his brother.
“Well, it’s good to see you’re still in shape,” Pete observed comfortably. He didn’t have to do the morning runs, after all. “So what’s up?”
“I still wish I knew more about our goal here, Pete,” Brian said, looking up from his coffee.
“You’re not the most patient guy in the world, are you?” the training officer shot back.
“Look, in the Marine Corps we train every day, but even when it isn’t clear exactly what we’re training for, we know we’re Marines, and we aren’t getting set up to sell Girl Scout cookies in front of the Wal-Mart.”
“What do you think you’re getting set up for now?”
“To kill people without warning, with no rules of engagement that I can recognize. It looks a lot like murder.” Okay, Brian thought, he’d said it out loud. What would happen next? Probably a drive back to Camp Lejeune and the resumption of his career in the Green Machine. Well, it could be worse.
“Okay, well, I guess it’s time,” Alexander conceded. “What if you had orders to terminate somebody’s life?”
“If the orders are legitimate, I carry them out, but the law—the system—allows me to think about how legit the orders are.”
“Okay, a hypothetical. Let’s say you are ordered to terminate the life of a known terrorist. How do you react?” Pete asked.
“That’s easy. You waste him,” Brian answered immediately.
“Why?”
“Terrorists are criminals, but you can’t always arrest them. These people make war on my country, and if I’m ordered to make war back, fine. That’s what I signed on to do, Pete.”
“The system doesn’t always allow us to do that,” Dominic observed.
“But the system does allow us to waste criminals on the spot, in flagrante delicto, like. You did it, and I haven’t heard about any regrets, bro.”
“And you won’t. It’s the same for you. If the President says to do somebody, and you’re in uniform, he’s the Commander in Chief, Aldo. You have the legal right—hell, the duty—to kill anybody he says.”
“Didn’t some Germans make that argument back in 1946?” Brian asked.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about that. We’d have to lose a war for that to be a concern. I don’t see that happening anytime soon.”
“Enzo, if what you just said is true, then if the Germans had won World War Two, nobody’d need to care about those six million dead Jews. Is that what you’re saying?”
“People,” Alexander interrupted, “this isn’t a class in legal theory.”
“Enzo’s the lawyer here,” Brian pointed out.
Dominic took the bait: “If the President breaks the law, then the House of Representatives impeaches him and the Senate convicts him, and he’s out on the street,
and then he’s subject to criminal sanctions.”
“Okay. But what about the guys who carry out his orders?” Brian responded.
“That all depends,” Pete told them both. “If the outgoing President has given them presidential pardons, what liability do they have?”
That answer jerked Dominic’s head back. “None, I suppose. The President has sovereign power to pardon under the Constitution, the way a king did back in the old days. Theoretically, a president could pardon himself, but that would be a real legal can of worms. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. In effect, the Constitution is God, and there is no appeal from that. You know, except when Ford pardoned Nixon, it’s an area that has never really been looked into. But the Constitution is designed to be reasonably applied by reasonable men. That may be its only weakness. Lawyers are advocates, and that means they’re not always reasonable.”
“So, theoretically speaking, if the President gives you a pardon for killing somebody, you cannot be punished for the crime, right?”
“Correct.” Dominic’s face screwed in on itself somewhat. “What are you telling me?”
“Just a hypothetical,” Alexander answered, backing up perceptibly. In any case, it ended the class on legal theory, and Alexander congratulated himself for telling them an awful lot and nothing at all at the same time.
THE CITY names were so alien to him, Mustafa remarked quietly to himself. Shawnee. Okemah. Weleetka. Pharaoh. That was strangest of all. They were not in Egypt, after all. That was a Muslim nation, albeit a confused one, with politics that didn’t recognize the importance of the Faith. But that would be turned around sooner or later. Mustafa stretched in his seat and reached for a smoke. Half a tank of gas still. This Ford surely had a capacious fuel tank in which to burn Muslim oil. They were such ungrateful bastards, the Americans. Islamic countries sold them oil, and what did America give in return? Weapons to the Israelis to kill Arabs with, damned little else. Dirty magazines, alcohol, and other corruption to afflict even the Faithful. But which was worse, to corrupt, or to be corrupted, to be a victim of unbelievers? Someday all would be put right, when the Rule of Allah spanned the world. It would come, someday, and he and his fellow warriors were even now on the leading wave of Allah’s Will. Theirs would be martyrs’ deaths, and that was a proud thing. In due course their families would learn of their fates—they could probably depend on Americans for that—and mourn their deaths, but celebrate their faithfulness. The American police agencies loved to show their efficiency after the battle was already lost. It was enough to make him smile.