the Sum Of All Fears (1991)

by Tom - Jack Ryan 05 Clancy

  Upstairs in the Oval Office the President was looking over his hastily revised schedule. A committee of new Eagle Scouts would have to be disappointed, as would the new Wisconsin Cheese Queen, or whatever the young lady's title was, and a multitude of business people whose importance in their own small ponds quite literally paled when they entered the side door into the President's workshop. His appointments secretary was getting the word out. Some people whose visits were genuinely important were being shoehorned into every spare minute of the next thirty-six hours. That would make the President's next day and a half as hectic as it ever got, but that, too, was part of the job.

  "Well?" Fowler looked up to see Elizabeth Elliot grinning at him through the open door to the secretary's anteroom.

  Well, this is what you wanted, isn't it? Your presidency will forever be remembered as the one in which the Middle East problems were settled once and for all. If--Liz admitted to herself in a rare moment of objective clarity--it all works out, which is not a given in such disputes as this.

  "We have done a service to the whole world, Elizabeth." By "we" he actually meant "I," Elliot knew, but that was fair enough. It was Bob Fowler who'd endured the months of campaigning on top of his executive duties in Columbus, the endless speeches, kissing babies and kissing ass, stroking legions of reporters whose faces changed far more rapidly than their brutally repetitive questions. It was an endurance race to get into this one small room, this seat of executive power. It was a process that somehow did not break the men--pity it was still only men, Liz thought--who made it safely here. But the prize for all the effort, all the endless toil, was that the person who occupied it got to take the credit. It was a simple historical convention that people assumed the President was the one who directed things, who made the decisions. Because of that, the President was the one who got the kudos and the barbs. The President was responsible for what went well and for what went badly. Mostly that concerned domestic affairs, the blips in the unemployment figures, interest rates, inflation (wholesale and retail), and the all-powerful Leading Economic Indicators, but on rare occasions, something really important happened, something that changed the world. Reagan, Elliot admitted to herself, would be remembered by history as the guy who happened to be around when the Russians decided to cash in their chips on Marxism, and Bush was the man who collected that particular political pot. Nixon was the man who'd opened the door to China, and Carter the one who had come so tantalizingly close to doing what Fowler would now be remembered for. The American voters might select their political leaders for pocketbook issues, but history was made of more important stuff. What earned a man a few paragraphs in a general-history text and focused volumes of scholarly study were the fundamental changes in the shape of the political world. That was what really counted. Historians remembered the ones who shaped political events--Bismarck, not Edison--treating technical changes in society as though they were driven by political factors, and not the reverse, which, she judged, might have been equally likely. But historiography had its own rules and conventions that had little to do with reality, because reality was too large a thing to grasp, even for academics working years after events. Politicians played within those rules, and that suited them because following those rules meant that when something memorable happened, the historians would remember them.

  "Service to the world?" Elliot responded after a lengthy pause. "Service to the world. I like the sound of that. They called Wilson the man who kept us out of war. You will be remembered as the one who put an end to war."

  Fowler and Elliot both knew that scant months after being reelected on that platform, Wilson had led America into its first truly foreign war, the war to end all wars, optimists had called it, well before Holocaust and nuclear nightmares. But this time, both thought, it was more than mere optimism, and Wilson's transcendent vision of what the world could be was finally within the grasp of the political figures who made the world into the shape of their own choosing.

  The man was a Druse, an unbeliever, but for all that he was respected. He bore the scars of his own battle with the Zionists. He'd gone into battle, and been decorated for his courage. He'd lost his mother to their inhuman weapons. And he'd supported the movement whenever asked. Qati was a man who had never lost touch with the fundamentals. As a boy he'd read the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao. That Mao was, of course, an infidel of the worst sort--he'd refused even to acknowledge the idea of a God and persecuted those who worshiped--was beside the point. The revolutionary was a fish who swam in a peasant sea, and maintaining the goodwill of those peasants--or in this case, a shopkeeper--was the foundation of whatever success he might enjoy. This Druse had contributed what money he could, had once sheltered a wounded freedom fighter in his home. Such debts were not forgotten. Qati rose from his desk to greet the man with a warm handshake and the perfunctory kisses.

  "Welcome, my friend."

  "Thank you for seeing me, Commander." The shopkeeper seemed very nervous, and Qati wondered what the problem was.

  "Please, take a chair. Abdullah," he called, "would you bring coffee for our guest?"

  "You are too kind." "Nonsense. You are our comrade. Your friendship has not wavered in--how many years?"

  The shopkeeper shrugged, smiling inwardly that this investment was about to pay off. He was frightened of Qati and his people--that was why he had never crossed them. He also kept Syrian authorities informed of what he'd done for them, because he was wary of those people, too. Mere survival in that part of the world was an art form, and a game of chance.

  "I come to you for advice," he said after his first sip of coffee.

  "Certainly." Qati leaned forward in his chair. "I am honored to be of help. What is the problem, my friend?"

  "It is my father."

  "How old is he now?" Qati asked. The farmer had occasionally given his men gifts also, most often a lamb. Just a peasant, and an infidel peasant at that, but he was one who shared his enemy with Qati and his men.

  "Sixty-six--you know his garden?"

  "Yes, I was there some years ago, soon after your mother was killed by the Zionists," Qati reminded him.

  "In his garden there is an Israeli bomb."

  "Bomb? You mean a shell."

  "No, Commander, a bomb. What you can see of it is half a meter across."

  "I see--and if the Syrians learn of it ..."

  "Yes. As you know, they explode such things in place. My father's house would be destroyed." The visitor held up his left forearm. "I cannot be of much help rebuilding it, and my father is too old to do it himself. I come here to ask how one might go about removing the damned thing."

  "You have come to the right place. Do you know how long it has been there?"

  "My father says that it fell the very day this happened to me." The shopkeeper gestured with his ruined arm again.

  "Then surely Allah smiled on your family that day."

  Some smile, the shopkeeper thought, nodding.

  "You have been our most faithful friend. Of course we can help you. I have a man highly skilled in the business of disarming and removing Israeli bombs--and then he takes the guts from them and makes bombs for our use." Qati stopped and held up an admonishing finger. "You must never repeat that."

  The visitor jerked somewhat in his chair. "For my part, Commander, you may kill all of them you wish, and if you can do it from a bomb the pigs dropped into my father's garden, I will pray for your safety and success."

  "Please excuse me, my friend. No insult was intended. I must say such things, as you can understand." Qati's message was fully understood.

  "I will never betray you," the shopkeeper announced forcefully.

  "I know this." Now it was time to keep faith with the peasant sea. "Tomorrow I will send my man to your father's home. Insh'Allah, " he said, God willing.

  "I am in your debt, Commander." Sometime between now and the new year, he hoped.

  8

  THE PANDORA PROCESS

  The conve
rted Boeing 747 rotated off the Andrews runway just before sumet. President Fowler had had a bad day and a half of briefings and unbreakable appointments. He would have two more even worse; even presidents are subject to the vagaries of ordinary human existence, and in this case, the eight-hour flight to Rome was coupled with a six-hour time change. The jet lag would be a killer. Fowler was a seasoned-enough traveler to know that. To attenuate the worst of it, he'd fiddled with his sleep pattern yesterday and today so that he'd be sufficiently tired to sleep most of the way across, and the VC- 25A had lavish accommodations to make the flight as comfortable as Boeing and the United States Air Force could arrange. An easy-riding aircraft, the -25A had its presidential accommodations in the very tip of the nose. The bed--actually a convertible sofa--was of decent size, and the mattress had been selected for his personal taste. The aircraft was also large enough that a proper separation between the press and the administration people was possible--nearly two hundred feet, in fact; the press was in a closed-off section in the tail--and while his press secretary was dealing with the reporters aft, Fowler was discreetly joined by his National Security Advisor. Pete Connor and Helen D'Agustino shared a look that an outsider might take to be blank, but which spoke volumes within the close fraternity of the Secret Service. The Air Force Security Policeman assigned to the door just stared at the aft bulkhead, trying not to smile.

  "So, Ibrahim, what of our visitor?" Qati asked.

  "He is strong, fearless, and quite cunning, but I don't know

  what possible use we have for him," Ibrahim Ghosn replied. He related the story of the Greek policeman.

  "Broke his neck?" At least the man was not a plant ... that is, if the policeman had really died, and this was not an elaborate ruse of the Americans, Greeks, Israelis, or God only knew who.

  "Like a twig."

  "His contacts in America?"

  "They are few. He is hunted by their national police. His group, he says, killed three of them, and his brother was recently ambushed and murdered by them."

  "He is ambitious in his choice of enemies. His education?"

  "Poor in formal terms, but he is clever."

  "Skills?"

  "Few that are of use to us."

  "He is an American," Qati pointed out. "How many of those have we had?"

  Ghosn nodded. "That is true, Commander."

  "The chance that he could be an infiltrator?"

  "I would say slim, but we must be careful."

  "In any case, I have something I need you to do." Qati explained about the bomb.

  "Another one?" Ghosn was an expert at this task, but he was not exactly excited about being stuck with it. "I know the farm--that foolish old man. I know, I know, his son fought against the Israelis, and you like the cripple."

  "That cripple saved the life of a comrade. Fazi would have bled to death had he not received shelter in that little shop. He didn't have to do that. That was at a time when the Syrians were angry with us."

  "All right. I have nothing to do for the rest of the day. I need a truck and a few men."

  "This new friend is strong, you say. Take him with you."

  "As you say, Commander."

  "And be careful!"

  "Insh'Allah. " Ghosn was almost a graduate of the American University of Beirut--almost because one of his teachers had been kidnapped, and two others had used that as an excuse to leave the country. That had denied Ghosn the last nine credit hours needed for a degree in engineering. Not that he really needed it. He'd been at the top of his class, and learned well enough from the textbooks without having to listen to the explanations of instructors. He'd spent quite a bit of time in labs of his own making. Ghosn had never been a front-line soldier of the movement. Though he knew how to use small arms, his skills with explosives and electronic devices were too valuable to be risked. He was also youthful in appearance, handsome, and quite fair-skinned, as a result of which he traveled a lot. An advance man of sorts, he often surveyed sites for future operations, using his engineer's eye and memory to sketch maps, determine equipment needs, and provide technical support for the actual operations people, who treated him with far more respect than an outsider might have expected. Of his courage there was no doubt. He'd proven his bravery more than once, defusing unexploded bombs and shells that the Israelis had left in Lebanon, then reworking the explosives recovered into bombs of his own. Ibrahim Ghosn would have been a welcome addition to any one of a dozen professional organizations anywhere in the world. A gifted, if largely self-taught engineer, he was also a Palestinian whose family had evacuated Israel at the time of the country's founding, confidently expecting to return as soon as the Arab armies of the time erased the invaders quickly and easily. But that happy circumstance had not come about, and his childhood memories were of crowded, unsanitary camps where antipathy for Israel had been a creed as important as Islam. It could not have been otherwise. Disregarded by the Israelis as people who had voluntarily left their country, largely ignored by other Arab nations who might have made their lot easier but had not, Ghosn and those like him were mere pawns in a great game whose players had never agreed upon the rules. Hatred of Israel and its friends came as naturally as breathing, and finding ways to end the lives of such people was his task in life. It had never occurred to him to wonder why.

  Ghosn got the keys for a Czech-built GAZ-66 truck. It wasn't as reliable as a Mercedes, but a lot easier to obtain--in this case it had been funneled to his organization through the Syrians years before. On the back was a home-built A-frame. Ghosn loaded the American in the cab with himself and the driver. Two other men rode on the loadbed as the truck pulled out of the camp.

  Marvin Russell examined the terrain with the interest of a hunter in a new territory. The heat was oppressive, but really no worse than the Badlands during a bad summer wind, and the vegetation--or lack of it--wasn't all that different from the reservation of his youth. What appeared to others as bleak was just another dusty place to an American raised on one. Except here they didn't have the towering thunderstorms--and the tornados they spawned--of the American Plains. The hills were also higher than the rolling Badlands. Russell had never seen mountains before. Here he saw them, high and dry and hot enough to make a climber gasp. Most climbers, Marvin Russell thought. He could hack it. He was in shape, better shape than these Arabs.

  The Arabs, on the other hand, seemed to be believers in guns. So many guns, mostly Russian AK-47s at first, but soon he was seeing heavy antiaircraft guns and the odd battery of surface-to-air missiles, tanks, and self-propelled field guns belonging to the Syrian Army. Ghosn noted his guest's interest and started explaining things.

  "These are here to keep the Israelis out," he said, casting his explanation in accordance with his own beliefs. "Your country arms the Israelis and the Russians arm us." He didn't add that this was becoming increasingly tenuous.

  "Ibrahim, have you been attacked?"

  "Many times, Marvin. They send their aircraft. They send commando teams. They have killed thousands of my people. They drove us from our land, you see. We are forced to live in camps that--"

  "Yeah, man. They're called reservations where I come from." That was something Ghosn didn't know about. "They came to our land, the land of our ancestors, killed off the buffalo, sent in their army, and massacred us. Mainly they attacked camps of women and children. We tried to fight back. We killed a whole regiment under General Custer at a place called the Little Big Horn--that's the name of a river--under a leader named Crazy Horse. But they didn't stop coming. Just too many of them, too many soldiers, too many guns, and they took the best of our land, and left us shit, man. They make us live like beggars. No, that's not right. Like animals, like we're not people, even, 'cause we look different, speak different, got a different religion. They did all that 'cause we were in a place they wanted to have, and they just moved us out, like sweepin' away the garbage."

  "I didn't know about that," Ghosn said, amazed that his were not the only people to be
treated that way by the Americans and their Israeli vassals. "When did it happen?"

  "Hundred years ago. Actually started around 1865. We fought, man, we did the best we could, but we didn't have much of a chance. We didn't have friends, see? Didn't have friends like you got. Nobody gave us guns and tanks. So they killed off the bravest. Mainly they trapped the leaders and murdered them--Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull died like that. Then they squeezed us and starved us until we had to surrender. Left us dusty, shitty places to live, sent us enough food to keep us alive, but not enough to be strong. When some of us try to fight back, try to be men--well, I told you what they did to my brother. Shot him from ambush like he was an animal. Did it on television, even, so's people would know what happened when an Indian got too big for his britches."

  The man was a comrade, Ghosn realized. This was no infiltrator, and his story was no different from the story of a Palestinian. Amazing.

  "So why did you come here, Marvin?"

  "I had to leave before they got me, man. I ain't proud of it, but what else could I do--you want me to wait till they could ambush me?" Russell shrugged. "I figured I'd come someplace, find people like me, maybe learn a few things, learn how I could go back, maybe, teach my people how to fight back some." Russell shook his head. "Hell, maybe it's all hopeless, but I ain't gonna give in--you understand that?"

  "Yes, my friend, I understand. It has been so with my people since before I was born. But you, too, must understand: it is not hopeless. So long as you stand up and fight back, there is always hope. That is why they hunt you--because they fear you!"

  "Hope you're right, man." Russell stared out the open window, and the dust stung his eyes, 7,000 miles from home. "So, what are we doing?"

  "When you fought the Americans, how did your warriors get weapons?"

  "Mainly we took what they left behind."

  "So it is with us, Marvin."