by Tom Clancy
“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 converted Boeing 747 rotated off the Andrews runway just before sunset. 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 frontline 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, insanitary 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 funnelled 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 in 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 anti-aircraft 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 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.”
Fowler woke up about halfway across the Atlantic. Well, that was a first, he told himself. He'd never managed to do it in an airplane before. He wondered if any US President had, or done it on the way to see the Pope, or with his National Security Advisor. He looked out the windows. It was bright this far north — the aircraft was close to Greenland — and he wondered for a moment if it were morning or still night. That was almost a metaphysical question on an airplane, of course, which changed the time far faster than a watch could.
Also metaphysical was his mission. This would be remembered. Fowler knew his history. This was something unique. It had never happened before. Perhaps it was the beginning of the process, perhaps the end of it, but what he was up to was simply expressed. He would put an end to war. J. Robert Fowler's name would be associated with this treaty. It was the initiative of his Presidential administration. His speech at the UN had called the nations of the world to the Vatican. His subordinates had run the negotiations. His name would be the first on the treaty documents. His armed forces would guarantee the peace. He had truly earned his place in history. That was immortality, the kind that all men wanted but few earned. Was it any wonder that he was excited? he asked himself with dispassionate reflectivity.
A president's greatest fear was gone now. He'd asked himself that question from the first moment, the first fleeting self-directed thought, while still a prosecutor chasing after the capo of the Cleveland family of La Cosa Nostra — if you're the President, what if you have to push the button? Could he have done it? Could he have decided that the security of his country required the deaths of thousands — millions — of other human beings? Probably not, he judged. He was too good a man for that. His job was to protect people, to show them the way, to lead them along a beneficial path. They might not always understand that he was right and they wrong, that his vision was the correct one, the logical one. Fowler knew himself to be cold and aloof on such matters, but he was always right. Of that he was certain. He had to be certain, of himself and his motivations. Were he ever wrong, he knew, his conviction would be mere arrogance, and he'd faced that charge often enough. The one thing he was unsure about was his ability to face a nuclear war.
But that was no longer an issue, was it? Though he'd never admit it publicly, Reagan and Bush had ended that chance, forcing the Soviets to face their own contradictions, and facing them, to change their ways. And it had all happened in peace, because men really were more logical than beasts. There would continue to be hot spots, but so long as he did his job right they would not get out of hand — and the trip he was making now would end the most dangerous problem remaining in the world, the one with which no recent administration could cope. What Nixon and Kissinger had
failed to do, what had defied the valiant efforts of Carter, the half-hearted attempts of Reagan, and the well-meaning gambits of Bush and his own predecessor, what all had failed to do, Bob Fowler would accomplish. It was a thought in which to bask. Not only would he find his place in the history books, but he would also make the rest of his presidency that much easier to manage. This would also put the seal on his second term, a forty-five state majority, solid control of Congress, and the remainder of his sweeping social programs. With historic accomplishments like this one came international prestige and immense domestic clout. It was power of the best kind, earned in the best way, and the sort that he could put to the best possible use. With a stroke of a pen — actually several pens, for that was the custom — Fowler became great, a giant among the good, and a good man among the powerful. Not once in a generation did a single man have such a moment as this. Maybe not once in a century. And no one could take it away.
The aircraft was traveling at 43,000 feet, moving at a ground speed of 633 knots. The placement of his cabin allowed him to look forward, as a President should look, and down at a world whose affairs he was managing so well. The ride was silky smooth, and Bob Fowler was going to make history. He looked over to Elizabeth, lying on her back, her right hand up around her head, and the covers down at her waist, exposing her lovely chest to his eyes. While most of the rest of the passengers fidgeted in their seats, trying to get some sleep, he looked. Fowler didn't want to sleep right now. The President had never felt more like a man, a great man to be sure, but at this moment, just a man. His hand slid across her breasts. Elizabeth 's eyes opened wide and she smiled, as though in her dreams she had read his thoughts.