by Tom Clancy
It happened quickly, much too quickly, as the captain strode directly to the Arab leader. Hashimi now knew that a friend was dead, his skull caved in by what was supposed to be a non-lethal weapon. He prayed silently for the soul of his comrade and hoped that Allah would understand the courage required to face death in this way. He would. Hashimi was sure of that. The Israeli approaching him was a face known to him. Zadin, the name was, a man who'd been there before often enough, just one more Israeli face most often hidden behind a Lexan mask and drawn gun, one more man unable to see Arabs as people, to whom a Muslim was the launcher for a rock or a Molotov cocktail. Well, today he'd learn different, Hashimi told himself. Today he'd see a man of courage and conviction.
Benny Zadin saw an animal, like a stubborn mule, like — what? He wasn't sure what he saw, but it wasn't a man, wasn't an Israeli. They'd changed tactics, that was all, and the tactics were womanly. They thought this would stand in the way of his purpose? Just as his wife had told him that she was leaving for the bed of a better man, that he could have the children, that his threats to beat her were empty words, that he couldn't do that, wasn't man enough to take charge of his own household. He saw that beautiful empty face and wondered why he hadn't taught her a lesson; she'd just stood there, not a meter away, staring at him, smiling — finally laughing at his inability to do what his manhood had commanded him to do, and, so, passive weakness had defeated strength.
But not this time.
“Move!” Zadin commanded in Arabic.
“No.”
“I will kill you.”
“You will not pass.”
“Benny!” a level-headed member of the police screamed. But it was too late for that. For Benjamin Zadin, the deaths of his brothers at Arab hands, the way his wife had left, and the way these people just sat in his way was too much. In one smooth motion, he drew his service automatic and shot Hashimi in the forehead. The Arab youth fell forward, and the singing and clapping stopped. One of the other demonstrators started to move, but two others grabbed him, and held him fast. Others began praying for their two dead comrades. Zadin turned his gun hand to one of these, but though his finger pressed on the trigger, something stopped him a gram short of the release pressure. It was the look in the eyes, the courage there, something other than defiance. Resolution, perhaps… and pity, for the look on Zadin's face was anguish that transcended pain, and the horror of what he had done crashed through his consciousness. He had broken faith with himself. He had killed in cold blood. He had taken the life of someone who had threatened no man's life. He had murdered. Zadin turned to the rabbis, looking for something, he knew not what, and whatever he sought simply was not there. As he turned away, the singing began again. Sergeant Moshe Levin came forward and took the captain's weapon.
“Come on, Benny, let's get you away from this place.”
“What have I done?”
“It is done, Benny. Come with me.”
Levin started to lead his commander away, but he had to turn and look at the morning's handiwork. Hashimi's body was slumped over, a pool of blood coursing down between the cobblestones. The sergeant knew that he had to do or say something. It wasn't supposed to be like this. His mouth hung open, and his face swung from side to side. In that moment, Hashimi's disciples knew that their leader had won.
Ryan's phone rang at 2:03 Eastern Daylight Time. He managed to get it before the start of the second ring.
“Yeah?”
“This is Saunders at the Ops Center. Get your TV on. In four minutes, CNN is running something hot.”
“Tell me about it.” Ryan's hand fumbled for the remote controller and switched the bedroom TV on.
“You ain't gonna believe it, sir. We copied it off the CNN satellite feed, and Atlanta is fast-tracking it onto the network. I don't know how it got past Israeli censors. Anyway—”
“Okay, here it comes.” Ryan rubbed his eyes clear just in time. He had the TV sound muted to keep from disturbing his wife. The commentary was unnecessary in any case. “Dear God in heaven…”
“That about covers it, sir,” the senior watch officer agreed.
“Send my driver out now. Call the Director, tell him to get in fast. Get hold of the duty officer at the White House Signals Office. He'll alert the people on his end. We need the DDI, and the desks for Israel, Jordan — hell, that whole area, all the desks. Make sure State's up to speed—”
“They have their own—”
“I know that. Call them anyway. Never assume anything in this business, okay?”
“Yes, sir. Anything else?”
“Yeah, send me about four hours' more sleep.” Ryan set the phone down.
“Jack… was that—” Cathy was sitting up. She'd just caught the replay.
“It sure was, babe.”
“What's it mean?”
“It means the Arabs just figured out how to destroy Israel,” Unless we can save the place.
Ninety minutes later, Ryan turned on the West Bend drip machine behind his desk before running over the notes from the night duty staff. It would be a day for coffee. He'd shaved in the car on the way in, and a look at the mirror showed that he'd not done a very good job of it. Jack waited until he had a full cup before marching into the Director's office. Charles Alden was there with Cabot.
“Good morning,” the National Security Advisor said.
“Yeah,” the Deputy Director replied in a husky voice. “What do you suppose is good about it? The President know yet?”
“No, I didn't want to disturb him until we know something. I'll talk to him when he wakes up — sixish. Marcus, what do you think of your Israeli friends now?”
“Have we developed anything else, Jack?” Director Cabot asked his subordinate.
“The shooter is a police captain, according to the insignia. No name on him yet, no background. The Israelis have him in the jug somewhere and they're not saying anything. From the tape it looks like two definitely dead, probably a few more with minor injuries. Chief of Station has nothing he can report to us except that it really happened, and we have that on tape. Nobody seems to know where the TV crew is. We did not have any assets at the site when all this happened, so we're going exclusively from the news coverage.” Again, Ryan didn't add. The morning was bad enough. “ Temple Mount is shut down, guarded by their army now, nobody in or out, and they've closed access to the Wailing Wall also. That may be a first. Our embassy over there has not said anything, they're waiting for instructions from here. Same story for the others. No official reaction from Europe yet, but I expect that to change within the hour. They're at work already, and they got the same pictures from their Sky News service.”
It's almost four,“ Alden said, wearily checking his watch. ”In three hours people are going to have their breakfast upset — what a hell of a thing to see in the morning. Gentlemen, I think this one's going to be big. Ryan, you called it. I remember what you said last month."
“Sooner or later, the Arabs had to wise up,” Jack said. Alden nodded agreement. It was gracious of him, Jack noted. He'd said the same thing in one of his books several years earlier.
“I think Israel can weather this, they always have—” Jack cut his Director off.
“No way, boss,” Ryan said. Someone had to straighten Cabot out. “It's what Napoleon said about the moral and the physical. Israel depends absolutely on having the moral high-ground. Their whole cachet is that they are the only democracy in the region, that they are the guys in white hats. That concept died about three hours ago. Now they look like Bull — whoever it was — in Selma, Alabama, except he used water hoses. The civil-rights community is going to go berserk.” Jack paused to sip at his coffee. “It's a simple question of justice. When the Arabs were throwing rocks and cocktails, the police could say that they were using force in response to force. Not this time. Both the deaders were sitting down and not threatening anybody.”
“It's the isolated act of one deranged man!” Cabot announced angrily.
“Are we sure he's dead?” Alden asked.
“My wife's a doc, and he looked dead to her. The body spasmed and went limp, probably indicating death from massive head trauma. They can't say this guy tripped and fell onto the curb. This really changes things. If the Palestinians are smart, they'll double-down their bets. They'll stay with this tactic and wait for the world to respond. If they do that, they can't lose,” Jack concluded.
“I agree with Ryan,” Alden said. “There'll be a UN resolution before dinner. We'll have to go along with it, and that just might show the Arabs that non-violence is a better weapon than rocks are. What will the Israelis say? How will they react?”
Alden knew what the answer was. This was to enlighten the DCI, so Ryan took the question. “First they'll stonewall. They're probably kicking themselves for not intercepting the tape, but it's a little late for that. This was almost certainly an unplanned incident — I mean that the Israeli government is as surprised as we are — otherwise they would have grabbed the TV crew. That police captain is having his brain picked apart now. By lunchtime they'll say that he's crazy — hell, he probably is — and that this is an isolated act. How they do their damage control is predictable, but—”
“It's not going to work,” Alden interrupted. The President's going to have to have a statement out by nine. We can't call this a 'tragic incident.' It's cold-blooded murder of an unarmed demonstrator by a state official."
“Look, Charlie, this is just an isolated incident,” Director Cabot said again.
“Maybe so, but I've been predicting this for five years.” The National Security Advisor stood and walked to the windows. “Marcus, the only thing that has held Israel together for the past thirty years has been the stupidity of the Arabs. Either they never recognized that Israeli legitimacy is based entirely on their moral position or they just didn't have the wit to care about it. Israel is now faced with an impossible ethical contradiction. If they really are a democracy that respects the rights of its citizens, they have to grant the Arabs broader rights. But that means playing hell with their political integrity, which depends on soothing their own extreme religious elements — and that crowd doesn't care a rat's ass about Arab rights, does it? But if they cave in to the religious zealots and stonewall, try to gloss over this thing, then they are not a democracy, and that imperils the political support from America without which they cannot survive economically or militarily. The same dilemma applies to us. Our support for Israel is based on their political legitimacy as a functioning liberal democracy, but that legitimacy just evaporated. A country whose police murder unarmed people has no legitimacy, Marcus. We can no more support an Israel that does things like this than we could have supported Somoza, Marcos, or any other tin-pot dictator—”
“God damn it, Charlie! Israel isn't—”
“I know that, Marcus. They're not. They're really not. But the only way they can prove that is to change, to become true to what they have always claimed to be. If they stonewall on this, Marcus, they're doomed. They'll lean on their political lobby and find out it isn't there anymore. If it goes that far, then they embarrass our government even more than it already is, and we'll be faced with the possible necessity of overtly cutting them off. We can't do that either. We must find another alternative.” Alden turned back from the window. “Ryan, that idea of yours is now on the front burner. I'll handle the President and State. The only way we can get Israel out of this is to find some kind of a peace plan that works. Call your friend at Georgetown and tell him it's no longer a study. Call it Project PILGRIMAGE. By tomorrow morning I need a good sketch of what we want to do, and how we want to do it.”
That's awful fast, sir," Ryan observed.
“Then don't let me stop you, Jack. If we don't move quickly on this, God only knows what might happen. You know Scott Adler at State?”
“We've talked a few times.”
“He's Brent Talbot's best man. I suggest you get together with him after you check with your friends. He can cover your backside on the State Department flank. We can't trust that bureaucracy to do anything fast. Better pack some bags, boy, you're going to be busy. I want facts, positions, and a gold-plated evaluation just as fast as you can generate it, and I want it done black as a coal mine.” That last remark was aimed at Cabot. “If this is going to work, we can't risk a single leak.”
“Yes, sir,” Ryan said. Cabot just nodded.
Jack had never been in the faculty residence at Georgetown. It struck him as odd, but he shoved that thought aside as breakfast was served. Their table overlooked a parking lot.
“You were right, Jack,” Riley observed. “That was nothing to wake up to.”
“What's the word from Rome?”
“They like it,” the president of Georgetown University replied simply.
“How much?” Ryan asked.
“You're serious?”
“Alden told me two hours ago that this is now on the front burner.”
Riley accepted this news with a nod. “Trying to save Israel, Jack?”
Ryan didn't know how much humor was in the question, and his physical state did not allow levity. “Father, all I'm doing is following up on something — you know, orders?”
“I am familiar with the term. Your timing was pretty good on floating this thing.”
“Maybe so, but let's save the Nobel Prize for some other time, okay?”
“Finish your breakfast. We can still catch everybody over there before lunch, and you look pretty awful.”
“I feel pretty awful,” Ryan admitted.
“Everybody should stop drinking about forty,” Riley observed. “After forty you really can't handle it anymore.”
“You didn't,” Jack noted.
“I'm a priest. I have to drink. What exactly are you looking for?”
“If we can get preliminary agreement from the major players, we want to get negotiations going ASAP, but this end of the equation has to be done very quietly. The President needs a quick evaluation of his options. That's what I'm doing.”
“Will Israel play?”
“If they don't, they're fucked — excuse me, but that's exactly where things are.”
“You're right, of course, but will they have the sense to recognize their position?”
“Father, all I do is gather and evaluate information. People keep asking me to tell fortunes, but I don't know how. What I do know is that what we saw on TV is going to ignite the biggest firestorm since Hiroshima, and we sure as hell have to try to do something before it burns up a whole region.”
“Eat. I have to think for a few minutes, and I do that best when I'm chewing on something.”
It was good advice, Ryan knew a few minutes later. The food soaked up the coffee acid in his stomach, and the energy from the food would help him get through the day. Inside an hour, he was on the move again, this time to the State Department. By lunch he was on his way home to pack, managing to nap for three hours along the way. He stopped back at Alden's White House office for a session that dragged far into the night. Alden had really taken charge there, and the skull session in his office covered a huge amount of ground. Before dawn Jack headed off to Andrews Air Force Base. He was able to call his wife from the VIP Lounge. Jack had hoped to take his son to a ball game over the weekend, but for him there wouldn't be a weekend. A final courier arrived from CIA, State, and the White House, delivering two hundred pages of data that he'd have to read on the way across the Atlantic.
4
PROMISED LAND
The U.S. Air Force's Ramstein air base is set in a German valley, a fact which Ryan found slightly unsettling. His idea of a proper airport was one on land that was flat as far as the eye could see. He knew that it didn't make much of
a difference, but it was one of the niceties of air travel to which he'd become accustomed. The base supported a full wing of F-i6 fighter-bombers, each of which was stored in its own bomb-proof shelter which in its turn was surrounded by trees — the German people have a mania for green things that would impress the most ambitious American environmentalists. It was one of those remarkable cases in which the wishes of the tree-huggers coincided exactly with military necessity. Spotting the aircraft shelters from the air was extremely difficult, and some of the shelters — French-built — had trees planted on top of them, making camouflage both aesthetically and militarily pleasing. The base also housed a few large executive aircraft, including a converted 707 with The United States of America“ painted on it. Resembling a smaller version of the President's personal transport, it was known locally as ”Miss Piggy," and was assigned to the use of the commander of USAF units in Europe. Ryan could not help but smile. Here were over seventy fighter aircraft tasked to the destruction of Soviet forces which were now drawing back from Germany, housed on an environmentally admirable facility, which was also home to a plane called Miss Piggy. The world was truly mad.
On the other hand, traveling Air Force guaranteed excellent hospitality and VIP treatment worthy of the name, in this case at an attractive edifice called the Cannon Hotel. The base commander, a full colonel, had met his VC-20B Gulfstream executive aircraft and whisked him off to his Distinguished Visitor's quarters where a slide-out drawer contained a nice collection of liquor bottles to help him to conquer jetlag with nine hours of drink-augmented sleep. That was just as well, because the available television service consisted of a single channel. By the time he awoke at about six in the morning, local, he was almost in sync with the time zones, stiff and hungry, having almost survived another bout with travel shock. He hoped.