by Tom Clancy
Jack had learned to not press her about her own upbringing. Each time he had tried she had withdrawn from the conversation or changed the subject. For a moment he thought she would finally go into her family life on her own. But she did not.
“So,” she said, and he could tell that the subject had just been changed. “Does this place have a bathroom?”
At that moment her mobile phone chirped in her purse on Jack’s kitchen counter. She reached for it and looked at the number.
“Maybe you are getting a raise,” Jack joked, and Melanie laughed.
“Hi, Mary Pat.” Melanie’s smile faded from her face. “Okay. Okay. Oh … shit.”
When Melanie turned away from him, Jack sensed trouble. But he sensed more trouble ten seconds later when his own mobile rang in his pocket. “Ryan.”
“It’s Granger. How quick can you be at the office?”
Jack turned away and walked into his bedroom. “What’s up? Is it Clark?”
“No. It’s trouble. I need everyone in immediately.”
“Okay.”
He hung up the phone and found Melanie in his room behind him. “I’m so sorry, Jack, but I have to go in to the office.”
“What’s going on?”
“You know I can’t answer that. I hate that you’ll have to drive me all the way to McLean, but it is an emergency.”
Shit. Think, Jack. “Tell you what. That was my office that just called. They want me to come in for a bit, somebody’s worried about how we’re positioned for the Asian markets opening on Monday. Can I have you drop me at work and then you just take my truck?”
Ryan saw it in her eyes instantly. She knew he was lying. She covered; she did not press. It was likely she was more worried about whatever bad news Jack had yet to learn than she was that her boyfriend was a lying bastard.
“Sure. That will work.”
A minute later, they headed for the door.
They drove mostly in silence to Hendley Associates.
After Melanie dropped Jack off at his offices, she drove off into the night, and Ryan stepped in the back door.
Dom Caruso was already there, downstairs in the lobby, talking to the security men on staff.
Ryan walked up to him. “What’s going on?”
Dom walked up to his cousin and leaned into his ear. “Worst-case scenario, cuz.”
Ryan’s eyes widened. He knew what that meant. “Islamic bomb?”
Caruso nodded. “Internal CIA traffic says a Pakistani armaments train got hit last night local time. Two twenty-kiloton nukes got lifted, and are now in the hands of an unknown force.”
“Oh my God.”
69
The two twenty-kiloton nuclear bombs stolen from the Pakistani Air Force found themselves, just days later, in the skies over Pakistan. Rehan and his men had the bombs packed and crated into twelve-by-five-by-five-foot containers that were labeled “Textile Manufacturing, Ltd.” They were then placed on an Antonov An-26 cargo plane operated by Vision Air, a Pakistani charter airline.
Their intermediate destination was Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan.
As much as General Rehan would like to send the Dagestanis on their way, to get them out of his country and somewhere where they could publicize what they had done and threaten the world with their bombs and their missiles, he knew Georgi Safronov was smarter than all the other cell members and insurgency leaders and even any of the government operatives he had worked with in his career. Georgi knew as much about nuclear weapons as Rehan did, and the general knew he needed to put one hundred percent of his efforts behind an authentic preparation of Safronov’s operation.
To do that he would need two things: a private and secure place, outside Pakistan, to arm the bombs and fit the bombs into the Dnepr-1 payload containers, and someone with the technical know-how to do this.
Bilateral trade had increased precipitously between Tajikistan and Pakistan in the past four years, so travel from Pakistan to Dushanbe was commonplace. Dushanbe was also almost directly between Pakistan and the ultimate destination of the weapons, the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
The An-26 flew out of Lahore with its two cargo crates and its twelve passengers: Rehan, Safronov, Khan, seven of Rehan’s personal security, and two Pakistani nuclear munitions experts. The Jamaat Shariat forces traveled out of the country via a second Vision Air charter that would take them to Dushanbe, as well.
Rehan’s JIM Directorate had already spread bribes around Tajik customs and airport officials; there would be no impediments to either aircraft’s offloading its cargo and crew once on the ground. A Tajik with the Dushanbe city government who had a long history as a paid informant and foreign agent of the ISI would be waiting on touchdown with trucks and drivers and more crated cargo that had recently arrived from Moscow.
The Campus worked twenty-four/seven looking for the nuclear bombs. The CIA had picked up ISI chatter within hours of the hijacking, and Langley and the National Counterterrorism Center at Liberty Crossing spent the intervening days looking into ISI involvement.
NCTC had more information on Riaz Rehan, some of it courtesy of The Campus and much of it thanks to the work of Melanie Kraft, so Jack Ryan and his fellow analysts found themselves virtually looking over the shoulder of Kraft for much of the time. It made Ryan feel creepy, but if there was anything actionable that Melanie found in her research, The Campus was in a position to act immediately.
Tony Wills had been working with Ryan; more than once he had looked at Melanie Kraft’s research and commented, “Your girlfriend is smarter than you are, Ryan.”
Jack thought Wills was half right. She was smarter than he was, true, but he wasn’t sure she was his girlfriend.
The Pakistanis did an admirable job hiding the loss of the two nuclear devices from their own public and from the world’s press for forty-eight hours. During this time they scrambled to find the culprits and locate the bombs, but the Pakistani Federal Investigation Agency came up empty. There was an immediate fear that it had been an inside job, and there was a related fear that the ISI was involved. But the ISI and the PDF were infinitely more powerful than the FIA, so these fears were not effectively explored as part of the investigation.
But when the news finally got out that there had been a massive terrorist act within Pakistan on a rail line, the Pakistani press put together, through their sources in the government, that nuclear devices had been on board the train. When it was confirmed, within hours, that the two devices, type and yield unspecified, had been hijacked by parties unknown, it came with a very public and very specific promise from the highest corridors of power in the military, civilian government, and the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission that the theft of the weapons was of no great consequence. It was explained that the devices were equipped with fail-safe arming codes that one would need to render the devices active.
All the parties who said this publicly firmly believed what they were saying, and it was true, although one of the parties did leave out a critical morsel of information that was highly relevant.
The director of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission did not tell his peers in the government and military, and he did not tell the public at large, that two of his top weaponization physicists, two men able to bypass the arming codes and reconfigure the detonation systems, had gone missing at the exact moment the bombs were lost.
The next morning the two crates claiming to be property of Textile Manufacturing, Ltd, sat on a dusty concrete floor in the center of a warehouse at a school bus fleet maintenance yard on Kurban Rakhimov, in the northern part of Dushanbe. General Rehan and Georgi Safronov both were very happy with the choice of facility for this portion of the mission. The property was massive and fenced and gated on all sides, blocking the view from the tree-lined streets of the more than fifty foreign men working and patrolling the grounds inside. Dozens of trucks and school busses sat in various states of operational condition, which made the Dagestani and Pakistani trucks invisible, even from the air
. And the large maintenance building was large enough for several busses, which made it more than large enough for the huge bombs. Further, there was a large array of hoists and rolling stands to lift and move the massive school bus engines that were scattered around the facility.
Of the people present, the only ones doing anything more than standing around were the two scientists who worked for PAEC, Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission. They were missing back in Pakistan, and the few people who knew about their disappearance but did not know the men themselves suspected they had been kidnapped by a terrorist force. But those who knew them and knew of the missing nukes did not think for a moment that anyone was forcing them to do anything. That they were Islamic radicals was widely known among their peers. On this matter some had been accepting, and some had been uncomfortable yet quiet.
Both of these groups of people suspected these men were involved.
The two scientists, Dr. Nishtar and Dr. Noon, were united in their belief that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons were not the property of the civilian government, nor were they fabricated and stockpiled, at great cost and at great risk they would hasten to add, only to be used as some sort of hypothetical deterrent. An invisible chess piece.
No. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons belonged to the Ummah, the community of Muslims, and they could and should be used for the good of all believers.
And the two scientists believed in Riaz Rehan, and they trusted that now was the right time because he said that now was the right time.
The dour foreign men from the Caucasus all around them in the school bus maintenance facility were of the faithful, even if they were not Pakistani Muslims. Drs. Noon and Nishtar did not understand all of what was going on, but they were quite clear on their mission. They were to arm the weapons, they were to oversee the loading of the weapons into the rocket payload containers, and then they were to return to Pakistan with the ISI general, where they would remain in hiding until Rehan told them it was safe to come out in public and take their bow as heroes of the state.
Noon and Nishtar had been working for more than three hours in the cold warehouse, taking moments to warm their hands over a coal brick stove that had been lit in the corner so that their fingers would remain pliant for the intricate work of removing the nuclear devices from their MK84 bomb casings, necessary for them to fit in the payload containers. A group of Rehan’s personal security force stood by, ready to help with engine hoists and rolling racks. Safronov offered up Jamaat Shariat men for this work but Rehan refused, told him to keep his gunmen inside the perimeter gates but ready for any threat from the outside. Once the bombs left Dushanbe, Rehan explained, they would be Safronov’s, but for now Rehan retained possession and his people would handle them.
As Noon and Nishtar checked some data on a laptop on a table next to the first payload container, Rehan and Safronov stepped up behind them. The general reached out and put his thick hands on the two men’s backs. They continued to work. “Doctors, how is your progress?”
Dr. Nishtar answered while he peered into the container, looking at the configuration of the warhead. “Minutes more for this one, and then we begin on the second weapon. We have bypassed the launch code mechanisms, and we have installed the radio altimeter fuses.”
“Show us.”
Noon pointed out a device bolted to the side of the bomb. It looked like a metal briefcase, and it contained several mechanical parts wired together, as well as a computer keypad and an LED readout. He said, “There is a radio altimeter that is already set. When the devices reach an altitude of sixty thousand feet it will arm the weapon, and when it descends to one thousand feet it will detonate. There is a backup barometer on the detonator, as well as a manual override for a timed detonation, which you will not need for a warhead launch. Also, we will rig a tamper trigger on the door of the payload container, so that if anyone tries to open it to remove the weapon, the nuclear bomb will detonate.”
Georgi smiled and nodded, appreciative of the men’s work on behalf of the Dagestani cause. “And you will do the same for the other device?”
“Of course.”
“Excellent,” Rehan said as his hands patted the men on their shoulders. “Carry on.”
Safronov left the warehouse minutes later, but Rehan lagged behind. He returned to the two nuclear scientists and said, “I have one small request for you both.”
“Anything, General,” said Dr. Noon.
Ninety minutes later, General Rehan embraced Georgi Safronov outside the maintenance garage, and he shook the hand of each one of the Dagestani fighters. He called them brave brothers, and he promised them that if they should be martyred he would name streets in his country in their honor.
Then Rehan, Khan, the PAEC officials, and Rehan’s protection detail departed through the front gates of the bus farm in four vehicles, removing with them every trace of their work, and leaving behind the Dagestani fighters and the two Dnepr-1 payload containers.
Minutes after that, the Dagestanis themselves departed, the gifts from Pakistan loaded carefully into their tractor-trailers for the long drive to the north.
John Clark spent an entire morning on a stakeout on a tiny park bench in Pushkin Square, central Moscow. Two inches of fresh snowfall surrounded him, but the sky was clear and bright. He took full tactical advantage of the temperatures by wearing a heavy coat with a thick fur hood. He imagined that if his own wife sat next to him on this park bench she would have no idea as to his identity.
And that was coming in handy at the moment. Two muscular Frenchmen were also in the park, also looking at the same location Clark had come to stake out. He’d spotted them and a pair of their colleagues the day before. The others were stationed in a van up on Uspenskiy Pereulok, a van that they’d kept running throughout the day and night. Clark had noticed the steaming exhaust on one of his “lazy eight” strolls through the neighborhood, just one of dozens of anomalies his fertile tactical mind had seen in the streets surrounding his target’s house. The other anomalies he had, after checking them out, eliminated as potential tip-offs to watchers, but the two Frenchmen in the park, and the van that ran all day long in its parking spot, meant the men after him were using his target as bait.
It did not work for them in Tallinn, but here in Moscow, they would be determined to not fail again.
Clark used peripheral vision to watch the front door of the apartment of Oleg Kovalenko. The old Russian spy had not left his home at all the day before, but that had not surprised John Clark much. A pensioner his age would not want to stroll the icy streets of Moscow unless it was necessary; there were likely tens of thousands of elderly shut-ins filling tiny apartments throughout the frozen city this weekend.
The day before he’d bought a mobile phone with prepaid credits in a shopping center. He’d found Kovalenko’s phone number in the phone book, and he’d considered just calling the man and asking him for a minute of his time somewhere safe. But Clark had no way of knowing if the ex–KGB officer’s phone had been bugged by the French, so he discarded that plan.
Instead he had spent most of the day looking for a way into the Russian’s apartment that would not tip off the Frenchmen. He got an idea around two in the afternoon, when an old woman in a purple cap pushed an old metal rolling cart out of the front entrance of the building and headed west through the square. He followed her into a market, where she bought several staples. In the checkout line Clark stood next to her, used his rusty Russian to strike up a friendly conversation. He was apologetic about his language abilities, explaining he was an American newspaper reporter in town working on a story about how “real” Muscovites deal with harsh winters.
Clark offered to pay for her groceries if she would sit down with him for a quick interview.
Svetlana Gasanova was thrilled with the opportunity for company with a handsome young foreigner, and she insisted on taking him back to her flat—she lived right up the street, after all—and making him a cup of tea.
The watche
rs in the park were not looking for a couple entering the apartment, and Clark was bundled up in his coat and hood to the point where they could not have identified him without standing six inches from his nose. He even carried a bag of groceries to give the impression he belonged in the building.
John Clark spent a half-hour chatting with the old pensioner. His Russian was strained every minute of his time in her flat, but he smiled a lot and nodded a lot, and he drank the jam-sweetened tea she made for him while she talked about the gas company, her landlord, and her bursitis.
Finally, after four p.m., the woman seemed to grow tired. He thanked her for her hospitality, took down her address, and promised to send her a copy of the newspaper. She led him to the door of her flat and he promised to return for a visit on his next trip into Moscow.
He headed to the stairwell, tossed the woman’s address in an ashtray, and went upstairs instead of down.
Clark did not knock at Oleg Kovalenko’s door. He had noticed when he entered Ms. Gasanova’s flat that the heavy oaken doors in this old building were secured with large, easy-to-defeat pin tumbler locks. John had created lock picks days earlier by buying a small set of dental instruments at a pawnshop here in Moscow and then bending them to approximate lock picks he had used in the past in Russia.
From a pouch in his coat pocket he retrieved his homemade facsimiles of a half-diamond pick, a rake pick, and a tension wrench.
Checking up and down the wooden-floored hallway to make certain no one was around, he put the picks in his mouth, then manipulated the tension wrench inside the keyhole, turning it counterclockwise slightly and holding the tension on the wrench with his right pinky finger. Then, with his left hand, he took the rake pick from his mouth and slid it above the tension wrench, inside the keyhole. Using both hands while maintaining the pressure on his pinky finger he slid the pick in and out over the spring-loaded pins, pushing them down into place.