by Tom Clancy
He felt somewhat secure right now, in this place, with this semi-disguise and this low-profile action, but he knew he wouldn’t last long before he was spotted.
Though he sat with others in the pharmacy, he wasn’t getting a prescription filled himself. Instead he was watching the mirrors high at the back of the store, looking for anyone following him.
For ten minutes he watched and waited.
But he saw nothing.
Next he bought a throwaway phone at the pharmacy and wandered the store while he took it out of its packaging and turned it on. He then thumbed a two-line text message to Domingo Chavez. He had no way of knowing if Ding was under surveillance himself, or exactly how far this had all spread, so he’d avoided Ding and The Campus since finding out the FBI was looking for him the previous evening. But he and Chavez had established codes between the two of them, should a situation arise where one could not be certain the other was clean.
A group of loud and rough-looking African-American teenagers entered Clark’s aisle and immediately went silent. They gave him a long look, sizing him up like predators sizing up prey. Clark had been fumbling with his new phone, but he stopped what he was doing, stared back at the six youths just to let them know he was aware of their presence and their interest in him. This was more than enough to get the young toughs to move on to easier pickings, and John focused again on his work.
John received a text message. 9 p.m. BWI OK?
John nodded at the phone, then tapped back. OK.
Three minutes later he walked north on Stricker Street, removing the battery from the phone as he did so. He tossed his empty coffee cup, the phone, and the battery, in a drain culvert, and continued walking.
* * *
Seconds before nine o’clock that evening, Domingo Chavez stood on the dark ramp in front of Maryland Charter Aviation Services. A cold rain fell on him, wetting the brim of his ball cap and causing a steady drip in front of his eyes. His windbreaker shielded him from the wet, but not the cold.
Fifty yards off his left shoulder, the Hendley Associates Gulfstream G550 sat parked and ready, though at present it had filed no flight plan. Captain Reid and First Officer Hicks sat in the cockpit, and Adara Sherman readied the cabin, though they had no idea where they might be heading.
Ding looked at his Luminox watch. The tritium gas — filled tubes glowed in the dark here, just outside the residual lighting emitted by the aircraft fifty yards away.
Nine o’clock on the nose.
Just then a figure appeared out of the darkness. Clark wore a black hooded coat and carried no luggage at all. He looked like he could be an airport ground employee.
“Ding,” he said with a curt nod.
“How you holding up, John?”
“I’m okay.”
“Long day?”
“Nothing I haven’t been through a hundred times before. Doesn’t usually happen in my own country, though.”
“This is fucking bullshit.”
“No argument here. Any news?”
Chavez shrugged. “Just a little. The White House is using you to get to Ryan. No idea if they know about The Campus or that you have been working at Hendley Associates since retirement from the Agency. The indictment has been sealed, and no one is talking. If the existence of The Campus is known, or suspected, Kealty’s people are tight-lipped about it. They are going about this like it’s some cold-case file that just got a shake, and your name fell out.”
“How ’bout the family?”
“Sandy is fine. We are all fine. I’ll watch out for them, and if someone comes for me, the Ryans will take over. Everyone sends their love and support.”
Clark nodded, sighed out a burst of steam that shone in lights from the auxiliary power unit.
Ding motioned to the Gulfstream. “And Hendley sent this. He wants you to go into hiding.”
“I’m not going into higoing inding.”
Chavez nodded thoughtfully. “You’re going to need some help, then.”
“No, Ding. I need to do this alone. I want you with The Campus. There is too much going on right now. I’ll figure out who is behind this on my own.”
“I understand you want to keep the shop insulated, but let me come with you. Cathy Ryan will make sure Sandy is okay while we’re gone. We make a hell of a team, and you are going to need me to watch your back.”
Clark shook his head. “Appreciate it, but The Campus needs you more than I do. The OPTEMPO is too high for both of us to be gone. I’ll check in on back channels if I need a hand.”
Chavez didn’t like it. He wanted to be there for his friend. But he said, “Roger, John. The 550 will take you wherever you want to go.”
“You have a clean passport on board for me?”
Now Ding smiled. “I do. Multiples. But I have something else on board in case you need to make a serious covert penetration, to enter an area without leaving any paper trail whatsoever.”
Clark understood. “Does Captain Reid know about that?”
“She does, and she will comply. Miss Sherman will get you set up.”
“Guess I’d better get going, then.”
“Good luck, John. I don’t want you to forget. Anytime. Anyplace. You say the word and I appear on your shoulder. You got that?”
“I got it, and I appreciate it.” The men shook hands, and then they embraced. Seconds later, John Clark headed to the Gulfstream while Domingo Chavez watched him walk off in the rain.
The Hendley Associates Gulfstream flew to Bangor, Maine. This was not its final destination, but it served as a temporary staging area, a place to refuel and to wait until the next afternoon, when they would leave the country for Europe. John Clark did not leave the aircraft, though the crew did check into a local hotel to spend the balance of the evening and the next morning.
Their original flight plan showed them heading to Geneva, but they would amend that in flight. The departure customs check at Bangor was a breeze, even though Clark’s face had been on the news for the past twenty-four hours. His false mustache and toupee along with his thick-lens costume eyeglasses made him unrecognizable as the man on television.
At five p.m. on Wednesday, the G550 took off on runway 33, banked to the northeast, and began the long flight over the Atlantic.
Clark had spent the day researching his target on a laptop on board the plane. He checked maps, train timetables, weather, yellow pages, white pages, and a never-ending list of German federal, state, and municipal government employee databases. He was looking for a man, a man who might very well be dead, but a man who would be crucial in helping him uncover information about those targeting him.
The sixty-four-year-old former Navy SEAL slept a few hours while in flight, until his eyes opened to the sight of the short blond hair and gentle smile of Adara Sherman looking over him.
“Mr. Clark? It’s time, sir.”
He sat up and looked out the window, saw nothing but clouds below them and a moon above.
“What’s the weather like?”
“Cloud cover above eight thousand feet. Temperature in the thirties on the deck.”
Clark smiled. “Long underwear, then.”
Sherman smiled back. “Most definitely. Can I bring you a cup of coffee?”
“That would be great.”
She turned for the galley, and Clark recognized for the first time how worried she was about what they were about to do.
Fifteen minutes later, Captain Helen Reid came over the cabin intercom. “We are at nine thousand feet. Beginning depressurization now.”
Almost immediately Clark could feel pain in his ears and sinus cavity as the cabin depressurized. Clark had already dressed, but Adara Sherman put on her heavy double-breasted wool coat while sitting on the sofa next to him. She was careful to button all the buttons and to cinch the waist belt, and then secure it with a double knot. It was a fashionable coat by DKNY, but it looked a bit odd lashed down on her body like this.
While she slipped her
hands into her gloves she asked, “How long since you’ve jumped out of a plane, Mr. Clark?”
“I’ve been jumping out of planes since before you were born.”
“How long have you been avoiding answering difficult questions?”
Clark laughed. “About as long as I’ve been jumping. I’ll admit it. I haven’t done this in some time. I suppose it’s like falling off a log.”
Worry lines rimmed Sherman’s eyes behind her glasses. “It’s like falling off a log that is traveling at one hundred twenty miles an hour, seven thousand feet above the ground.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Would you like to go over the procedure again?”
“No. I’ve got it. I appreciate your attention to detail.”
“How is the arm?”
“It’s not on my top-ten list of problems, so I guess it’s fine.”
“Good luck, sir. I speak for the crew when I say we hope you will call us anytime you need us.”
“Thank you, Miss Sherman, but I can’t expose anyone else to what I have to do. I hope to see you again when this is over, but I won’t be using the plane during my operation.”
“I understand.”
Captain Reid came over the PA. “Five minutes, Mr. Clark.”
John stood with difficulty. Strapped to his chest was a small canvas bag. It carried a wallet with cash, a money belt, two false sets of documents, a phone with a charger, a suppressed.45-caliber SIG pistol, four magazines of hollow-point ammunition, and a utility knife.
And strapped to his back was an MC-4 Ram Air parachute system.
First Officer Chester “Country” Hicks stepped out of the cockpit, shook John’s hand, and together Hicks, Clark, and Adara moved to the rear of the cabin. There, Sherman raised the small internal baggage door, creating cabin access to the baggage compartment. Sherman and Hicks buckled themselves into wide canvas straps attached to the cabin chairs and then they crawled, one at a time, into the tiny baggage hold. They had moved all the luggage into the cabin and lashed it to chairs earlier in the flight, so they had enough room to maneuroom to ver while on their knees.
Adara moved to the right side of the external baggage door, Hicks took the left side. Clark remained in the cabin of the aircraft, as the space was tight enough with two bodies in the cargo hold. He just dropped to his knees and waited.
A minute later, First Officer Hicks glanced at his watch. He nodded to Sherman, and then the two of them pulled on the external baggage door from the inside. The hatch itself was only thirty-six by thirty-eight inches, but it was very difficult to open. The external door was flush with the fuselage, just below the left engine, and the airflow over the skin of the aircraft created a vacuum suction that the two crew members in the cargo compartment had to defeat with brute force. Finally they got the door pulled in, a squeal as cold night wind rushed into the compartment. Once the door was inside, they slid it up like a tiny garage door, and this opened the thirty-six-by-thirty-eight-inch port to the outside.
The port-side jet engine was just feet away, and this created a raging noise that they had to scream over to be heard.
Captain Reid had dropped them below the cloud cover as they approached their destination airport, Tegel in Berlin. The earth below was black, with only a sprinkling of lights here and there. The hamlet of Kremmen, northwest of Berlin, would be the closest concentration of development, but Clark and Reid had chosen a drop zone west of there, because it contained a large number of flat open fields rimmed by a forest that would be virtually empty on an early Thursday morning.
Clark kept his eyes on Hicks in the luggage compartment in front of him. When the first officer looked up from his watch and pointed to Clark, John began counting backward from twenty. “Twenty, one thousand. Nineteen, one thousand. Eighteen, one thousand…”
He turned around, got on his hands and knees, and backed into the baggage hold. At “Ten, one thousand,” he could feel Adara and Chester’s hands holding the straps of his parachute rig, and he could tell the toes of his boots were just outside the aircraft. Captain Reid would have slowed to one hundred twenty knots or so, but still the jet noise and the pressure of the wind on his legs were intense.
At “Five, one thousand”—Clark had to shout it so the others could hear — Hicks let go of Clark’s harness, and Sherman did the same, but she followed it with a quick squeeze on his shoulder.
At “Three, one thousand” he backed farther out into the dark, cold wind. It was tough doing this backward, but headfirst would have been dangerous, and feet-first, scooting out on his butt or back, would have increased the chances that his chute rig would catch on something inside the aircraft.
“One, one thousand. Go!” Clark pushed his body out of the aircraft; immediately he felt his right side slam against the threshold of the external baggage door, bruising his ribs. But he fell away and free of the Gulfstream as it raced off in the night toward the lights of Berlin in the distance, leaving behind John Clark as he turned end over end, spinning downward toward fields of winter wheat some seven thousand feet below.
46
The oval table in the conference room on the ninth floor of Hendley Associates was ringed with stern-faced men that Thursday morning. Sam Driscoll’s and John Clark’s seats were empty, but Domingo, Dominic, and Jack faced Gerry Hendley and Sam Granger. Rick Bell, Campus chief of analysis, begged off the meeting because he weas focusing his energies on analyzing CIA and FBI traffic regarding the Clark investigation.
Gerry assented to Bell’s request, as it was in everyone’s best interest that they got some sort of heads-up in the event black trucks full of FBI tactical officers were on their way to the front door of their building.
For the past two days, Hendley Associates had been open for business, but the operators and much of the intelligence-analysis staff had been instructed to stay home. Instead the company functioned as a perfectly aboveboard trading and arbitrage shop, in case any of the intelligence the government was using in its sealed indictment on Clark also included information tipping off investigators about the real reasons behind Hendley Associates.
When no one came knocking on Tuesday or on Wednesday, Hendley, Bell, and Granger made the decision to bring their men in to work on Thursday. They had a very active and important investigation under way, with Sam Driscoll already out in the field, and plans to send the other operatives to Dubai to set up covert surveillance on Rehan’s property there.
The first question of the morning was whether or not they could continue on with their investigation, or if they wanted to just pull up stakes, lie low for a while, and somehow try to support Clark.
Dominic Caruso took a long sip of coffee and said, “We need to be here, in the States, and ready to move to support Clark. Do we even know where he is?”
Granger said, “The Gulfstream dropped him off just outside of Berlin. They will be back at BWI this evening, and can fly you out to Dubai, via Amsterdam, tomorrow night.”
Ryan said, “Look, I understand the Dubai surveillance is important. But in light of recent events… Shit. We can’t just leave John alone on this.”
Domingo shook his head. “He doesn’t need us. He doesn’t want us around. He’s going to try and wiggle out of this mess on his own while we work our op. Don’t lose sight of what we’re working on, Jack. This is damn important.”
“I know.”
“Look, John may be a bit long in the tooth, but he’s also the most BTDT operator on the planet.”
“BTDT?”
“Been there, done that. Trust me, John Clark can handle himself. And if he needs support in the field he will contact us. Look. You know I’d die for that man, but I also do what he tells me, especially at a time like this. I’m staying out of his way, going on with my job, and you are, too. Okay,’mano?”
Jack didn’t like it. He couldn’t understand how Ding could be so relaxed after everything that had happened. Still, he understood that Chavez had earned the right to call t
he shots on something involving John Clark. The two had been partners for twenty years, and Chavez was Clark’s son-in-law, as well.
“Okay, Ding.”
“Good. Now, we’ve got today and tomorrow to get ready for our operation in Dubai, so that’s what we’ll do. Cool?”
Caruso and Ryan were struggling with what they took as something of an abandonment of their mentor, but they could not argue with Chavez’s logic. Clark could always send for them. Even in Dubai.
It would be hard for the men to concentrate on the Rehan op, especially not knowing what might be still to come on the DOJ’s Clark investigation, but they had a job to do, so they got downthey got to it.
The Oval Office of the President of the United States was not the actual command center for the FBI’s operation to capture John Terrence Kelley, aka John Clark, but one could be forgiven for having that impression. Throughout Tuesday and into Wednesday, Ed Kealty saw a steady stream of repeat visits from Benton Thayer, Charles Alden, Mike Brannigan, Wes McMullen, and others focused on bringing in Clark.
But by Wednesday afternoon the FBI had decided their elusive bird had flown the coop. Kealty ordered Brannigan, Alden, and Thayer all into his office at the same time. By the President’s way of thinking, he needed to turn up the heat on his own people. To that end, he subjected the group sitting on the couches to a ten-minute tongue-lashing that ended with a question delivered in a tenor just short of a scream.
“How the hell does one man slip away like that?”
Charles Alden said, “With respect, sir. That is what he does.”
Kealty replied, “Ryan could be helping him run. Alden, go back to CIA and dig deeper. If you can find a tighter connection to Ryan and Clark, then we can implicate Ryan in Clark’s flight.”