Command Authority

by Tom Clancy,Mark Greaney

  While he worked, the other men disassembled computers, removing hard drives, put small bills of local currency into envelopes to pay off local support personnel, and performed other rushed duties involved with decommissioning a secret intelligence installation on the fly.

  It would take a full day of this work before they’d be able to load the Delta men, the CIA men, and the security contractors into the SUVs parked in the parking circle in front of the building and start the long drive back to the capital. Most of these men, as well as Bixby himself, would then fly out of Ukraine.

  The men of the Lighthouse weren’t needed in country now that the Lighthouse was shutting down, but Keith was leaving because it was assumed by all that he had been thoroughly burned to the Russian opposition by the second in command of the SSU.

  It was just past nine p.m. now, and Bixby worked alone. A walkie-talkie was on the table in front of him so he could listen to comms among the other sixteen men in the building. As he reached for a manila folder full of radio traffic transcripts, the voice of one of the Lighthouse CIA technical staff members came over his radio: “Keith. Can you come downstairs?”

  Keith fed the transcripts through the shredder while he answered with the other hand. “Unless it’s a really big deal, I’d rather you came up to me.”

  There was a brief pause. “Sorry, sir, but I’m afraid this qualifies.”

  “I’ll be down in a second.”

  Bixby flicked off the switch on the shredder and hurried downstairs.

  —

  In the lobby, Bixby found the Delta Force officer in charge of the small detachment. His call sign was Midas, but Bixby knew the man was a lieutenant colonel named Barry Jankowski who’d spent years as a highly decorated U.S. Army Ranger. He couldn’t help noticing that Midas had his H&K assault rifle hanging on his shoulder and a helmet on his head.

  He hadn’t been wearing either the last time Keith had seen him, a half-hour earlier.

  Not good.

  With him was Rex, the security contractor in charge of the Lighthouse. He, too, was armed, but he always wore his M4 carbine when he was on the job.

  “What’s going on?” Keith asked, as he left the stairwell.

  Rex said, “We’ve got trouble. One of the Ukrainian security guys was on his way in for his shift, and he got a call from a buddy on the local police force. The cop told him he shouldn’t come in to work tonight.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “He said word was spreading this was a NATO facility, and a protest is being organized. The local cops had been told to stay out of it.”

  “Shit,” Bixby said, then looked to Midas. “What do you think?”

  Midas answered, “I think we should pack up what we can, demo the rest, and get the fuck out of here. But it’s not my call.”

  Keith thought of all the classified equipment in the building. “We’ve got a hell of a lot of sensitive equipment left to break down. If we blow or burn the stuff while we’re here we’ll just draw attention to ourselves and we won’t get out of here. We’ve got antennas on the roof and more gear in the commo room. If we set charges, we can’t be sure we got it all, and you can be damn sure the Russians will pick this place apart when they get here.

  “We’ll keep working on the double, through the night. We won’t have time to completely disassemble all the satellite equipment on the roof—we’ll have to just unhook everything and cram it in the trucks.” He thought for a moment. “We’ll need a couple more vehicles to make it all fit.”

  Rex said, “I can call some locals for that.”

  Bixby shook his head. “Not if the cops are already talking about us. I don’t want anyone in the neighborhood to know we’re about to make a run for it.”

  Bixby mulled it over quickly. Who could he call to help? There were some nonofficial cover operators in the country, but they were all near the border, and they checked in only when it was secure to do so. He couldn’t see a way to ask them to come to the Lighthouse without burning more CIA assets.

  There were a small number of U.S. forces here in Ukraine, based mostly on Ukrainian military bases. But none were in the Crimean peninsula, and more important, he couldn’t just have a few U.S. Army Humvees roll through the gates without attracting the kind of attention that would make driving out of here quietly an impossibility.

  Then it came to him. John Clark and Domingo Chavez.

  He turned to Midas. “I’ll make a call and have a couple more trucks here tomorrow morning.”

  Midas said, “Good deal. We’ve got guys on the roof watching for any developments in the streets. The rest of us will keep packing up in the meantime.”

  —

  John Clark was just climbing into the plush bedding in his deluxe room in the Fairmont Grand Hotel when his sat phone rang.

  “Clark.”

  “Hey, buddy.”

  Clark recognized Keith Bixby. He had to chuckle. It already sounded like the CIA man was going to ask for another favor. “Hey, pal,” he replied.

  “I hate to push my luck with you, but I’ve got a problem and I could really use some quick help.”

  “Name it.”

  “It involves an eleven-hour drive through the night into a situation that is going from somewhat shaky to downright dangerous. You up for that?”

  Clark replied, “I’ll notify my guys. I guess I better call room service and get some coffee up here.”

  Bixby explained the situation in brief, and within minutes Clark was on the phone with Ding in the safe-house flat across town.

  35

  Jack Ryan, Jr., had spent the entire day in his office at Castor and Boyle setting up a new IBM i2 Analyst’s Notebook database. This file pertained to his new assignment, the theft of funds from a Norwegian freighter company that had purchased some ships from a Russian firm but, upon delivery, realized they had been sold rusty hulks. Not only was the case cut-and-dried and uninteresting, but the total value of the crime was several orders of magnitude less than the Galbraith–Gazprom affair. Jack had found himself bored by noon, and by two p.m. he was already sneaking peeks at a Gazprom affiliate mind map he’d made on Analyst’s Notebook the previous week.

  His phone rang, and he reached for it automatically.

  “Ryan.”

  “Hey, Jack. Am I interrupting anything?”

  Ryan was surprised to hear from his father. “Hey, Dad! Not at all. Just dealing with the Russians.”

  “You and me both.”

  Junior said, “Yeah, I heard. Has Dan figured out who poisoned Golovko yet?”

  “Yes, but it’s one of those things that creates more questions than answers.”

  Jack Junior looked up at his mind map; it looked like multicolored spaghetti noodles in a bowl. “I hear you.”

  “Mom said you called the other night. Sorry I didn’t get to talk to you.”

  “That’s okay. I know you have been running around dealing with Sergey and Ukraine. I hope you guys are doing okay.”

  “We’re fine. We’re back in the residence, and it’s the same as ever. They tore the john out of the living room bathroom. Can you believe that?”

  “Unreal. Look, Dad. I’m sorry I haven’t checked in. Just real busy at work.”

  “It’s okay, sport. Been pretty busy at work myself.”

  The younger Ryan chuckled.

  “So how’s life?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Living in London is great, right?” Jack Junior could hear the excitement in his dad’s voice, almost as if he was enjoying himself vicariously through his son’s experience, reliving his own time here so long ago.

  Junior just muttered out an unenergetic “Yeah.”

  There was a pause. Jack Senior said, “It is great, right?”

  “I guess I’m still settling in a little.”

  “Is something wrong? Is there a problem?”

  “No, Dad. Everything is fine.”

  Jack Senior paused again. “You know you can talk about
anything, right?”

  “Of course. And I will. It’s all good. Work is just frustrating.”

  “Okay.” The father left it alone, though he could hear tension in his son’s voice. He asked, “I was wondering if you had time to do me a favor.”

  Now Jack Junior lightened up. “Name it. It would be good to think about something else for a bit.”

  “You remember Basil Charleston, don’t you?”

  “Of course. It’s been a long time. He must be well into his eighties by now.”

  “And that’s the problem. I have a couple of questions for him, and I would love to talk to him in person, but I have a funny feeling he’s not going to be able to hear me over the phone. The last time I called him it was hit-and-miss.”

  “Does he still have his place in Belgravia?”

  “He does.”

  “I can swing by, it’s not far at all. What do you want me to ask him?”

  “About thirty years ago, there was a string of murders in Europe. At the time, some people thought it was a KGB agent called Zenith who was responsible. We’ve discovered some uncorroborated intelligence tucked away in an old file that suggests Zenith and Roman Talanov were one and the same.”

  “Holy shit,” the younger Ryan said.

  “That’s basically my thought, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I need to know more about this. To that end, the code word ‘Bedrock’ came up in the Zenith murders. We don’t know if that relates to a person, a place, or maybe an operation. We’d like to know just what Bedrock is. And if anyone will remember, it would be Sir Basil.”

  The elder Ryan explained that it looked like Charleston had handwritten a reference to Bedrock in the file, and he said he’d have his secretary e-mail the file to Jack Junior immediately.

  “Surely that’s going to be classified intelligence. Why would he talk to me?”

  Jack Senior said, “Basil won’t have a problem talking to you. He knows you used to work for Gerry.”

  Jack Junior knew the phone conversation between him and his father was secure, and he knew his father was aware of this fact as well. Nevertheless, his dad was speaking to him with a little code. The fact Charleston knew the younger Ryan had “worked for Gerry” clearly meant he knew about The Campus. This surprised the younger Ryan.

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely. He knows you were an analyst there, and he knows the sort of work Gerry was involved with.”

  “Okay. Next question. Did this take place back around the time we were living in the UK?”

  “Yes, exactly that time. I remember this episode well, as a matter of fact. You were in diapers.”

  “No offense, Dad, but that was a long time ago. Do you think there’s any chance Basil is going to remember the case, especially since there is no other record of Bedrock at SIS?”

  “Jack, you know better than most, not every important operation gets written down for posterity. If Bedrock was important enough to stay off-book, then I think it’s likely Basil will know all about it.”

  “You’ve got a point. I’ll ask him. Do you really think there is any chance this Talanov character was involved?”

  “No way of knowing. I’ve learned not to rely too much on one single tidbit of intelligence. It takes more to convince me.”

  “But you are curious enough to have me track down Bedrock.”

  “Right,” Jack Senior said, then caught himself. “Track down? Wait. I just said talk to Basil. I don’t need you to do anything else.”

  “Right,” the younger Ryan said.

  “So tell me, what’s going on at work?”

  “I am up to my neck in shady Russians over here. They are swindling clients out of fortunes and businesses and intellectual property. They are lying with a straight face and using the court system to steal and intimidate.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  “You wouldn’t believe.” Jack Junior caught himself. “What am I saying? You used to go toe-to-toe with the KGB.”

  President Ryan said, “Very true. Do you enjoy the work, at least?”

  The younger Ryan sighed. “It’s frustrating. I’ve spent the last few years thinking about justice. Chasing down bad guys and stopping them. But here I am chasing down the bad guys, but the most I can hope for is that some court that has no real jurisdiction over the bad guys will order that some assets are seized, and that probably will never happen.”

  “Justice moves slowly.”

  “In this case, it doesn’t move at all. My boss, Hugh Castor, is apparently afraid to pin any corruption directly on the siloviki in the Kremlin. I understand he doesn’t want to get bogged down in court over there, or have his people harassed by the authorities, but we are letting the real criminals off too lightly.

  “I can’t help but think about what I could do to some of these worthless bastards to make them change their ways. If Ding and John and Sam and Dom were here, I wouldn’t be reading old ownership transfer agreements, that’s for damn sure.”

  “I understand. There were a couple of times in my analytical career where I felt like I had connected the dots that needed to be connected, but there was not enough follow-through from those above me to make a difference. There is very little more frustrating than that.”

  Jack Senior said, “I’ll e-mail you the document I’d like you to show Basil. That, and what I’ve already told you, might be enough for you to prod his memory. I won’t go into the rest of it, because it’s a long story, and I don’t even remember all the details myself.”

  “No problem. I’ll talk to Basil and let you know what he says. Sounds like fun.”

  Jack Senior laughed a little. “I can’t promise you any more excitement than spending a few minutes chatting with an octogenarian in his study, but I guess it’s something.”

  “It is something, Dad. You know I love stories about the old days.”

  The President’s voice darkened. “Not this one, son. This story did not have a happy ending at all.”

  36

  Thirty years earlier

  Jack Ryan woke to the patter of light rain, although he barely noticed it. This was England, after all; the absence of rain this time of year would have been unique. He reached out with a long, slow stretch and found his wife’s warm shoulder in the dark. Cathy was sound asleep still, which, at twenty minutes before six in the morning, seemed to Jack to be perfectly reasonable.

  Their alarm was set for a quarter till the hour, so Jack took his time waking up. Finally he reached over and turned off the alarm before rolling out of bed. He shuffled into the kitchen to start the coffee and headed out to the front porch to get the paper.

  The street was perfectly quiet. The Ryans lived in Chatham, in North Kent, some thirty miles from London. He and Cathy were the only couple on Grizedale Close who had to commute all the way to the capital, so theirs was more often than not the first house on the street with its lights on and movement inside each morning.

  The neighbors all knew Cathy was a surgeon at Hammersmith Hospital, and they thought Jack had some boring job at the U.S. embassy. And while that was officially true, the truth would have inspired much more gossip over the hedges on Grizedale Close.

  The young American was, in fact, an analyst in the CIA.

  Jack noticed the milkman had delivered his usual half-gallon of whole milk. His daughter, Sally, would drink every drop of it before the next delivery. He picked the milk off the porch, and then searched for a moment before finding the newspaper in the bushes near the door. The copy of the International Herald Tribune was wrapped in a plastic bag to protect it from the weather, indicating the paperboy had better sense than he had aim.

  Ryan went back inside and woke Cathy, then made his way to the kitchen. After pouring himself a cup of coffee, Jack snapped open the paper and took his first sip of the morning.

  Below the fold on the front page, a picture grabbed his attention. A body covered in a tarp lay in a street. From the look of the buildings, he guessed it was It
aly or perhaps Switzerland.

  He read the headline below the photo.

  “Swiss Banker Shot Dead, Four Others Wounded.”

  Jack scanned the details of the article. It seemed the banker’s name was Tobias Gabler, and he worked at Ritzmann Privatbankiers, a venerable family-owned bank based in the Swiss canton of Zug. Gabler was killed, and several others were injured, when someone opened fire from the window of a building into a street full of pedestrians.

  So far, the police had no one in custody.

  Ryan looked up from the paper when Cathy strolled into the kitchen in her pink housecoat. She kissed Jack on the top of the head, and then she shuffled on to the coffeemaker.

  “No surgery?” Jack asked. She never drank coffee when she had any surgery planned for the day.

  “Nope,” she said, as she poured herself a cup. “Just some follow-up appointments. A jittery hand while I’m fitting someone for glasses won’t be the end of the world.”

  Jack had no idea how his wife could go to work most mornings and slice into eyeballs. Better her than me, he told himself.

  —

  On the way to the shower, Jack peeked in on his five-year-old daughter, Sally. She was sleeping, but he knew she would be up and wide awake by the time he got out of the bathroom. He liked to get at least one nice, peaceful look at his little girl while she wasn’t darting around like a moving target, and first thing in the morning was his only opportunity.

  He next peeked in on Jack Junior. His toddler was sound asleep, facedown in his crib on the top of his covers, his diapered butt sticking up in the air. Jack smiled. His little boy would be walking soon, and that little crib wouldn’t keep him for much longer.

  Jack started the shower and then took a moment to look at himself in the mirror. Ryan was six-one, in fair shape, although he’d let both his diet and his exercise slip in the past few months here in the UK. Two small kids in the house meant keeping a flexible schedule, which got in the way of his workouts, and it also meant there was an abundance of snacks and cereals and treats in the pantry, one or two of which seemed to call to Ryan every day.