by Tom Clancy
"Thank you. It's a free sky until somebody says different," Kemper reminded everybody.
Maybe it was an exercise, but the Indian battle group hadn't moved forty miles in the past day, instead traveling back and forth, east and west, crossing and recrossing its own course track. Exercises were supposed to be more free-form than that. What the situation told the captain of USS Anzio was that they'd staked out this piece of ocean as their own. And the Indians just happened to be between where COMEDY was and where it wanted to be.
Nothing was very secret about it, either. Everyone pretended that normal peacetime conditions were in effect. Anzio had her SPY-1 radar operating, pumping out millions of watts. The Indians were using theirs as well. It was almost like a game of chicken.
"Captain, we have bogies, we have unknown multiple air contacts bearing zero-seven-zero, range two-one-five miles. No squawk ident, they are not commercial. Designate Raid-One." The symbols came up on the center screen.
"No emitters on that bearing," ESM reported.
"Very well." The captain crossed his legs in his command chair. In the movies this was where Gary Cooper lit up a smoke. "Raid-One appears to be four aircraft in formation, speed four-five-zero knots, course two-four-five." Which made them inbounds, though not quite directly at COMEDY. "Projected CPA?" the captain asked. "They will pass within twenty miles on their current course, sir," a sailor responded crisply. "Very well. Okay, people, listen up. I want this place cool and businesslike. You all know thejob.
When there's reason to be excited, I will be the one to tell you," he told the CIC crew. "Weapons tight." Meaning that peacetime rules still applied, and nothing was actually ready to fire— a situation that could be remedied by turning a few keys.
"Anzio, this is Gonzo-Four, over," a voice called on the air-to-surface radio.
"Gonzo-Four, Anzio, over."
"Anzio," the aviator reported, "we got two Harriers playing tag with us. One just zipped by at about fifty yards. He's got white ones on the rails." Real missiles hanging under the wings, not pretend ones.
"Doing anything?" the air-control officer asked.
"Negative, just like he's playing a little."
"Tell him to continue the mission," the captain said. "And pretend he doesn't care."
"Aye, sir." The message was relayed. This sort of thing wasn't all that unusual. Fighter pilots were fighter pilots, the captain knew. They never grew up past the stage of buzzing by girls on their bikes. He directed his attention to Raid-One. Course and speed were unchanged. This wasn't a hostile act. The Indians were letting him know that they knew who was in their neighborhood. That was evident from the appearance of fighters in two places at the same time. It was definitely a game of chicken now.
What to do now? he wondered. Play tough? Play dumb? Play apathetic? People so often overlooked the psychological aspect of military operations. Raid-One was now 150 miles out, rapidly approaching the range of his SM-2 MR SAMs. "What d'ya think, Weps?" he asked his weapons officer.
"I think they're just trying to piss us off."
"Agreed." The captain flipped a mental coin. "Well, they're harassing the Orion. Let 'em know we see 'em," he ordered.
Two seconds later, the SPY search radar jacked up its power to four million watts, sent all of it down one degree of bearing at the inbound fighters, and increased the «dwell» on the targets, which meant they were being hit almost continuously. It was enough to peg the threat-detection gear they had to have aboard. Inside of twenty miles, it could even start damaging such equipment, depending on how delicate it was. That was called a "zorch," and the captain still had another two million watts of power up his sleeve. The joke was that if you really pissed off an Aegis, you might start producing two-headed kids.
"Kiddjust went to battle stations, sir," the officer of the deck reported.
"Good training time, isn't it?" Range to Raid-One was just over one hundred miles now. "Weps, light 'em up."
With that command, the ship's four SPG-51 target-illumination radars turned, sending pencil beams of X-band energy at the inbound fighters. These radars told the missiles how to find their targets. The Indian threat gear would pick that up, too. The fighters didn't change course or speed.
"Okay, that means we're not playing rough today. If they were of a mind to do something, they'd be maneuvering now," the captain told his crew. "You know, like turning the corner when you see a cop." Or they had ice water in their veins, which didn't seem likely.
"Going to eyeball the formation?" Weps asked.
"That's what I'd do. Take some pictures, see what's here," Kemper thought.
"A lot of things happening at once, sir."
"Yep," the captain agreed, watching the display. He lifted the growler phone.
"Bridge," the OOD answered.
"Tell your lookouts I want to know what they are. Photos, if possible. How's visibility topside?"
"Surface haze, not bad aloft, sir. I've got men on the Big Eyes now."
"Very well."
"They'll go past us to the north, turn left, and come down our port side," the captain predicted.
"Sir, Gonzo-Four reports a very close pass a few seconds ago," air control said.
"Tell him to stay cool."
"Aye, Cap'n." The situation developed quickly after that. The fighters circled COMEDY twice, never closer than five nautical miles. The Indian Harriers spent another fifteen minutes around the patrolling Orion, then had to return back to their carrier to refuel, and another day at sea continued with no shots fired and no overtly hostile acts, unless you counted the fighter play, and that was pretty routine. When all was settled down, the captain of USS Anzio turned to his communications officer.
"I need to talk to CmCLANT. Oh, Weps?" Kemper added.
"Yes, sir?"
"I want every combat system on this ship fully checked out."
"Sir, we just ran a full check twelve hours—"
"Right now, Weps," he emphasized quietly.
"AND THAT'S GOOD news?" Cathy asked.
"Doctor, that's real simple," Alexandre said in reply. "You watched some people die this morning. You will watch more die tomorrow, and that stinks. But thousands is better than millions, isn't it? I think this epidemic is going to burn out." He didn't add that it was somewhat easier for him. Cathy was an eye cutter. She wasn't used to dealing with death. He was infectious diseases, and he was used to it. Easier? Was that the word? "We'll know in a couple of days from statistical analysis of the cases."
The President nodded silently. Van Damm spoke for him: "What's the count going to be?"
"Less than ten thousand, according to the computer models at Reed and Detrick. Sir, I am not being cavalier about this. I'm saying that ten thousand is better than ten million."
"One death is a tragedy, and a million is a statistic," Ryan said finally.
"Yes, sir. I know that one." The good news didn't make Alexandre all that happy. But how else to tell people that a disaster was better than a catastrophe?
"Iosef Vissarionovich Stalin," SWORDSMAN told them. "He did have a way with words."
"You know who did it," Alex observed.
"What makes you say that?" Jack asked.
"You didn't react normally to what I told you, Mr. President."
"Doctor, I haven't done much of anything normally over the past few months. What does this mean about the no-travel order?"
"It means we leave it in place for at least another week. Our prediction is not carved in stone. The incubation period for the disease is somewhat variable. You don't send the fire trucks home as soon as the last flame disappears. You sit there and watch for another possible flare-up. That will happen here, too. What's worked to this point is that people are frightened to death. Because of that, personal interactions are minimized, and that's how you stop one of these things. We keep 'em that way. The new cases will be very circumscribed. We attack those like we did with smallpox. Identify the cases, test everyone with whom they've had con
tact, isolate the ones with antibodies, and see how they do. It's working, okay? Whoever did this miscalculated. The disease isn't anywhere near as contagious as they thought—or maybe the whole thing was just a psychological exercise. That's what bio-war is. The great plagues of the past really happened because people didn't know how diseases spread. They didn't know about microbes and fleas and contaminated water. We do. Everybody does, you learn it in health class in school. Hell, that's why we haven't had any medics infected. We've had lots of practice dealing with AIDS and hepatitis. The same precautions that work with those also work with this."
"How do we keep it from happening again?" van Damm asked.
"I told you that already. Funding. Basic research on the genetic side, and more focused work on the diseases we know about. There's no particular reason why we can't develop safe vaccines for Ebola and a lot of others."
"AIDS?" Ryan asked.
"That's a toughie. That virus is an agile little bastard. No attempt for a vaccine has even come close yet. No, on that side, basic genetic research to determine how the biologic mechanism works, and from that to get the immune system to recognize it and kill it—some sort of vaccine; that's what a vaccine is. But how to make it work, well, we haven't figured that one yet. We'd better. In twenty years, we might have to write Africa off. Hey," the Creole said, "I got kin over there, y'know?
"That's one way to keep it from happening again. You, Mr. President, are already working on the other way. Who was it?"
He didn't have to tell anybody how secret it was: "Iran. The Ayatollah Mahmoud Haji Daryaei and his merry men."
Alexandre reverted to officer in the United States Army: "Sir, you can kill all of them you want, as far as I'm concerned."
IT WAS INTERESTING to see Mehrabad International Airport in daylight. Clark had never experienced Iran as a friendly country. Supposedly, before the fall of the Shah, the people had been friendly enough, but he hadn't made the trip soon enough for that. He'd come in covertly in 1979 and again in 1980, first to develop information for, and then to participate in, the attempt to rescue the hostages. There were no words to describe what it was like to be in a country in a revolutionary condition. His time on the ground in the Soviet Union had been far more comfortable. Enemy or not, Russia had always been a civilized country with lots of rules and citizens who broke them. But Iran had ignited like a dry forest in a lightning storm. "Death to America" had been a chant on everyone's lips, and that, he remembered, was about as scary as things got when you were in the middle of the mob singing i that song. One little mistake, just contacting an agent who'd been turned, would have been his death, rather a frightening thought to a man with young children, spook or no spook. Locally they shot some criminals, but spies they mostly hanged. It seemed a gratuitously cruel way to take a man's life.
Some things had changed in the intervening years. Some had not. There was still a suspicion of foreigners here at the customs post. The clerk was backed up by armed men, and their job was to prevent the entry of people like him. For the new UIR, as for the previous country, every new face was a potential spy.
"Klerk," he said, handing over his passport, "Ivan Sergeyevich." What the hell, the Russian cover identity had worked before, and he already had it memorized. Better yet, his Russian was letter-perfect. He'd passed as a Soviet citizen before a uniformed official more than once.
"Chekov, Yevgeniy Pavlovich," Chavez told the next clerk over.
They were, again, news correspondents. Rules prohibited CIA officers from covering themselves as American reporters, but that didn't apply to the foreign media.
"The purpose of your visit?" the first clerk asked.
"To learn about your new country," Ivan Sergeyevich replied. "It must be very exciting for everyone." For their work in Japan, they'd brought camera gear, and a useful little gadget that looked like, and indeed was, a bright light. Not this time.
"He and I are together," Yevgeniy Pavlovich told his clerk.
The passports were brand-new, though one could not have told it from casual inspection. It was one of the few things Clark and Chavez didn't have to worry about. R VS tradecraft was every bit as good as the former KGB's had been. They made some of the best fake documents in the world. The pages were covered with stamps, many overlapping, and were creased and dog-eared from years of apparent use. An inspector grabbed their bags and opened them. He found clothing, clearly much used, two books, which he flipped through to see if they were pornographic, two cameras of medium quality, their black enamel well-chipped but the lenses new. Each had a carry-on bag with note pads and mini-tape recorders. The inspectors took their time, even after the clerks had done their work, finally passing their country's visitors through with a palpable reluctance.
"Spasiba," John said pleasantly, getting his bags and moving off. Over the years, he'd learned not to conceal his relief completely. Normal travelers were intimidated. He had to be, too, lest he stand apart from them. The two CIA officers went outside to catch a cab, standing together in line silently as the rank of taxis ate up the new arrivals. When they were two back, Chavez dropped his travel bag, and the contents spilled out. He and Clark let two people jump ahead of them in line while he repacked the bag. That almost certainly guaranteed a random cab, unless they were all being driven by spooks.
The trick was to look normal in all respects. Not too stupid. Never too smart. To get disoriented and ask for directions, but not too often. To stay in cheap hotels. And in their particular case, to pray that none of the people who'd seen them during their brief visit to this city crossed their path. The mission was supposed to be a simple one. That was usually the idea. You rarely sent intelligence officers out on complex missions—they'd have the good sense to refuse. The simple ones were hairy enough once you got out there.
"IT'S CALLED TASK Group COMEDY," Robby told him. "They got their doorbell rung this morning." The J-3 explained on for a few minutes.
"Playing rough?" the President asked.
"Evidently, they gave the P-3 a real air show. I've done that myself a few times, back in my young-and-foolish days. They want us to know they're there, and they're not intimidated. The group commander is Greg Kemper. I don't know him, but his rep's pretty good. CINCLANT likes him. He's asking for a ROE change."
"Not yet. Later today."
"Okay. I would not expect a night attack, but remember dawn there is midnight here, sir."
"Arnie, what's the book on the P.M.?"
"She and Ambassador Williams don't exchange Christmas presents," the chief of staff replied. "You met her in the East Room a while back."
"Warning her off risks having her call Daryaei," Ben Goodley reminded them all. "If you confront her, she'll weasel on you."
"And? Robby?"
"If we get past the Indians, but she warns Daryaei? They can try to block the strait. The Med force will turn the corner in a few hours and join up fifty miles off the entrance. We'll have air cover. It could be exciting, but they should make it. Mines are the scary part. The strait there is pretty deep for them. Closer into Dhahran is another story. The longer the UIR's in the dark, the better, but they may already know what COMEDY is made up of."
"Or maybe not," van Damm thought. "If she thinks she can handle it herself, she might just try to show him what kind of balls she has."
THE TRANSFER WAS called Operation CUSTER. All forty aircraft were aloft now, each carrying roughly 250 soldiers in a sky train six thousand miles long. The lead aircraft were now six hours out from Dhahran, leaving Russian airspace and overflying Ukraine.
The F-15 pilots had traded waves with a handful of Russian fighters which had come up to say hello. They were tired now. Their rumps were like painful lead from all the time in the same seat—the airliner pilots behind them could get up and move around; they even had toilets, quite a luxury for a fighter pilot who had an appliance called a relief tube. Arms tightened up. Muscles were sore from staying in the same position. It was to the point that tanking from
their KC-135s was becoming difficult, and gradually they came to the opinion that an air-to-air engagement an hour out from their destination might not be much fun at all. Most drank coffee, tried to shift hands on the stick, and stretched as much as they could.
The soldiers were mainly sleeping, still ignorant of the nature of their mission. The airlines had stocked their aircraft normally, and the troops indulged what would be their last chance to have a drink for some time to come. Those who had deployed to Saudi in 1990 and 1991 told their, war stories, chief among which was the memory that the Kingdom wasn't a place you went to for the nightlife.
NEITHER WAS INDIANA, Brown and Holbrook had found, at least not now. They had at least been smart enough to get into a motel before the general panic, and here they were trapped. This motel, like the ones they'd used in Wyoming and Nebraska, catered to truckers. It had a large restaurant, the old-fashioned sort with a counter and booths, and now with masked waitresses and customers who didn't group closely together to socialize. Instead, they ate their meals and went back to their rooms, or to sleep in their trucks. There was a daily dance of sorts. The trucks had to be moved, lest staying in the exact same spot damage the tires. Everyone listened to the radio for hourly news broadcasts. The rooms, the restaurant, and even some of the trucks had televisions for further information and distraction. There was boredom, the tense sort familiar to soldiers but not known to the two Mountain Men.
"Goddamned government," a furniture hauler said. He had family two states away.
"I guess they showed us who was boss, eh?" Ernie Brown said, for general consumption.
Later, data would show that not a single interstate trucker had caught the virus. Their existence was too solitary for that. But their working lives depended on movement, both because they earned their living that way and because they had chosen to do so. Sitting still was not in their nature. Being told to sit still was even less so.
"What the hell," another driver added. He couldn't think of anything else to say. "Goddamned glad I got outa Chicago when I did. That news is scary."