by Tom Clancy
“Tough day?” Paul Robberton asked.
“I’ve had worse,” Ryan answered. But this crisis was too new for so confident an evaluation. “Does your wife mind ... ?”
“She’s used to having me away, and we’ll get a routine figured out in a day or so.” The Secret Service agent paused. “How’s the Boss doing?”
“As usual he gets the hard parts. We all dump on him, right?” Jack admitted, looking out the window as they turned off Route 50. “He’s a good man, Paul.”
“So are you, doc. We were all pretty glad to get you back.” He paused. “How tough is it?” The Secret Service had the happy circumstance of needing to know almost everything, which was just as well, since they overheard almost everything anyway.
“Didn’t they tell you? The Japanese have built nukes. And they have ballistic launchers to deliver them.”
Paul’s hands tightened on the wheel. “Lovely. But they can’t be that crazy.”
“On the evening of December 7, 1941, USS Enterprise pulled into Pearl Harbor to refuel and rearm. Admiral Bill Halsey was riding the bridge, as usual, and looked at the mess from the morning’s strike and said, ‘When this war is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell.’ ” Ryan wondered why he’d just said that.
“That’s in your book. It must have been a good line for the guys around him.”
“I suppose. If they use their nukes, that’s what’ll happen to them. Yeah, they have to know that,” Ryan said, his fatigue catching up with him.
“You need about eight hours, Dr. Ryan, maybe nine,” Robberton said judiciously. “It’s like with us. Fatigue really messes up your higher-brain functions. The Boss needs you sharp, doc, okay?”
“No argument there. I might even have a drink tonight,” Ryan thought aloud.
There was an extra car in the driveway, Jack saw, and a new face that looked out the window as the official car pulled into the parking pad.
“That’s Andrea. I already talked with her. Your wife had a good lecture today, by the way. Everything went just fine.”
“Good thing we have two guest rooms.” Jack chuckled as he walked into the house. The mood was happy enough, and it seemed that Cathy and Agent Price were getting along. The two agents conferred while Ryan ate a light dinner.
“Honey, what’s going on?” Cathy asked.
“We’re involved in a major crisis with Japan, plus the Wall Street thing.”
“But how come—”
“Everything that’s happened so far has been at sea. It hasn’t broken the news yet, but it will.”
“War?”
Jack looked up and nodded. “Maybe.”
“But the people at Wilmer today, they were just as nice—you mean they don’t know either?”
Ryan nodded. “That’s right.”
“That doesn’t make any sense!”
“No, honey, it sure doesn’t.” The phone rang just then, the regular house phone. Jack was the closest and picked it up. “Hello?”
“Is this Dr. John Ryan?” a voice asked.
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
“George Winston. 1 don’t know if you remember, but we met last year at the Harvard Club. I gave a little speech about derivatives. You were at the next table over. By the way, nice job on the Silicon Alchemy IPO.”
“Seems like a while ago,” Ryan said. “Look, it’s kinda busy down here, and—”
“I want to meet with you. It’s important,” Winston said.
“What about?”
“I’ll need fifteen or twenty minutes to explain it. I have my G at Newark. I can be down whenever you say.” The voice paused. “Dr. Ryan, I wouldn’t be asking unless I thought it was important.”
Jack thought about it for a second. George Winston was a serious player. His rep on the Street was enviable: tough, shrewd, honest. And, Ryan remembered, he’d sold control of his fleet to somebody from Japan. Somebody named Yamata—a name that had turned up before.
“Okay, I’ll squeeze you in. Call my office tomorrow about eight for a time.”
“See you tomorrow then. Thanks for listening.” The line went dead. When he looked over at his wife, she was back at work, transcribing notes from her carry-notebook to her laptop computer, an Apple Powerbook 800.
“I thought you had a secretary for that,” he observed with a tolerant smile.
“She can’t think about these things when she writes up my notes. 1 can.” Cathy was afraid to relate Bernie’s news on the Lasker. She’d picked up several bad habits from her husband. One of them was his Irish-peasant belief in luck, and how you could spoil luck by talking about it. “I had an interesting idea today, just after the lecture.”
“And you wrote it right down,” her husband observed. Cathy looked up with her usual impish smile.
“Jack, if you don’t write it down—”
“Then it never happened.”
30
Why Not?
The dawn came up like thunder in this part of the world, or so the poem went. Sure as hell the sun was hot, Admiral Dubro told himself. It was almost as hot as his temper. His demeanor was normally pleasant, but he had simmered in both tropical heat and bureaucratic indifference for long enough. He supposed that the policy weenies and the planning weenies and the political weenies had the same take on things: he and his battle force could dance around here indefinitely without detection, doing their Ghostbusters number and intimidating the Indians without actual contact. A fine game, to be sure, but not an endless one. The idea was to get your battle force in close without detection and then strike at the enemy without warning. A nuclear-powered carrier was good at that. You could do it once, twice, even three times if the force commander had it together, but you couldn’t do it forever, because the other side had brains, too, and sooner or later a break would go the wrong way.
In this case it wasn’t the players who’d goofed. It was the water boy, and it hadn’t even been much of an error. As his operations people had reconstructed events, a single Indian Sea Harrier at the very end of its patrol arc had had his look-down radar on and gotten a hit on one of Dubro’s oilers, which were now racing northeast to refill his escort ships whose bunkers were nearly two thirds empty after the speed run south of Sri Lanka. An hour later another Harrier, probably stripped of weapons and carrying nothing but fuel tanks, had gotten close enough for a visual. The replenishment-group commander had altered course, but the damage was done. The placement of the two oilers and their two-frigate escort could only have meant that Dubro was now east-by-south of Dondra Head. The Indian fleet had turned at once, satellite photos showed, split into two groups, and headed northeast as well. Dubro had little choice but to allow the oilers to continue on their base course. Covertness or not, his oil-fueled escorts were dangerously close to empty bunkers, and that was a hazard he could not afford. Dubro drank his wake-up coffee while his eyes burned holes in the bulkhead. Commander Harrison sat across from the Admiral’s desk, sensibly not saying much of anything until his boss was ready to speak.
“What’s the good word, Ed?”
“We still have them outgunned, sir,” the Force Operations Officer replied. “Maybe we need to demonstrate that.”
Outgunned? Dubro wondered. Well, yes, that was true, but only two thirds of his aircraft were fully mission-capable now. They’d been away too long from base. They were running out of the stores needed to keep the aircraft operating. In the hangar bay, aircraft sat with inspection hatches open, awaiting parts that the ship no longer had. He was depending on the replenishment ships for those, for the parts flown into Diego Garcia from stateside. Three days after delivery, he’d be back to battery, after a fashion, but his people were tired. Two men had been hurt on the flight deck the day before. Not because they were stupid. Not because they were inexperienced. Because they’d been doing it too damned long, and fatigue was even more dangerous to the mind than to the body, especially in the frenetic environment of a carrier’s flight deck. The same was tru
e of everyone in the battle force, from the lowliest striker to ... himself. The strain of continuous decision-making was starting to tell. And all he could do about that was to switch to decaf.
“How are the pilots?” Mike Dubro asked.
“Sir, they’ll do what you tell them to do.”
“Okay, we do light patrolling today. I want a pair of Toms up all the time, at least four more on plus-five, fully armed for air-to-air. Fleet course is one-eight-zero, speed of advance twenty-five knots. We link up with the replenishment group and get everyone topped off. Otherwise, we do a stand-down. I want people rested insofar as that is possible. Our friend is going to start hunting tomorrow, and the game is going to get interesting.”
“We start going head-to-head?” the ops officer asked.
“Yeah.” Dubro nodded. He checked his watch. Nighttime in Washington. The people with brains would be heading for bed now. He’d soon make another demand for instructions, and he wanted the smart ones to pass it along, preferably with a feel for the urgency of his situation. Pay-or-play time was grossly overdue, and all he could be sure of now was that it would come unexpectedly—and after that, Japan? Harrison and his people were already spending half of their time on that.
The tradecraft, again, was of the bad-TV variety, and the only consolation was that maybe the Russians were right. Maybe Scherenko had told them the truth. Maybe they were not in any real danger from the PSID. That seemed a very thin reed to Clark, none of whose education had encouraged him to trust Russians to do anything pleasant to Americans.
“The wheel may be crooked,” he whispered to himself—in English, damn it! In any event, what they’d done was laughably simple. Nomuri had parked his car in the same lease-garage that the hotel maintained for its guests, and now Nomuri had a key to Clark’s rental car, and over the left-side visor was a computer disk. This Clark retrieved and handed to Chavez, who slid it into their laptop. An electronic chime announced the activation of the machine as Clark headed out into the traffic. Ding copied the file over to the hard-disk and erased the floppy, which would soon be disposed of. The report was verbose. Chavez read it silently before turning the car radio on, then relayed the high points in whispers over the noise.
“Northern Resource Area?” John asked.
“Da. A curious phrase,” Ding agreed, thinking. It occurred to him that his diction was better in Russian than English, perhaps because he’d learned English on the street, and Russian in a proper school from a team of people with a genuine love for it. The young intelligence officer dismissed the thought angrily.
Northern Resource Area, he thought. Why did that sound familiar? But they had other things to do, and that was tense enough. Ding found that while he liked the paramilitary end of being a field officer, this spy stuff was not exactly his cup of tea. Too scary, too paranoid.
Isamu Kimura was at the expected meeting site. Fortunately his job allowed him to be in and out a lot, and to sit down with foreigners as a matter of routine. One benefit was that he had an eye for safe places. This one was on the docks, thankfully not overly busy at the moment, but at the same time a location where such a meeting would not be overly out of character. It was also a hard one to bug. There were still harbor sounds to mask quiet conversation.
Clark was even more uneasy, if that were possible. With any covert recruitment there was a period during which open contact was safe, but the safety diminished linearly over time at a rapid but unknown rate, and there were other considerations. Kimura was motivated by—what? Clark didn’t know why Oleg Lyalin had been able to recruit him. It wasn’t money. The Russians had never paid him anything. It wasn’t ideology. Kimura wasn’t a Communist in his political creed. Was it ego? Did he think he was worthy of a better post that someone else had taken? Or, most dangerously of all, was he a patriot, the eccentric personal sort who judged what was good for his country in his own mind? Or, as Ding might have observed, was he just fucked up? Not a very elegant turn of phrase, but in Clark’s experience not an unknown state of affairs, either. The simple version was that Clark didn’t know; worse, any motivation for treason simply justified betraying your country to another, and there was something in him that refused to feel comfortable with such people. Perhaps cops didn’t like dealing with their informants either, John told himself. Small comfort, that.
“What’s so important?” Kimura asked, halfway down a vacant quay. The idle ships in Tokyo Bay were clearly visible, and he wondered if the meeting place had been selected for just that reason.
“Your country has nuclear weapons,” Clark told him simply.
“What?” First the head turned, then the feet stopped, then a very pale look came over his face.
“That’s what your ambassador in Washington told the American president on Saturday. The Americans are in a panic. At least that’s what Moscow Center has told us.” Clark smiled in a very Russian way. “I must say that you’ve won my professional admiration to have done it so openly, especially buying our own rockets to be the delivery vehicles. I must also tell you that the government of my country is decidedly displeased by this development.”
“The rockets could easily be aimed at us.” Chavez added dryly, “They make people nervous.”
“I had no idea. Are you sure?” Kimura started walking again, just to get his blood flowing.
“We have a highly placed source in the U.S. government. It is not a mistake.” Clark’s voice, Ding noted, was coldly businesslike: Ah, your car has a scratch on the bumper. I know a good man to fix it.
“So that’s why they thought they could get away with it.” Kimura didn’t have to say any more, and it was plain that a piece of the puzzle had just dropped into place in his mind. He took a few breaths before speaking again: “This is madness.”
And those were three of the most welcome words John had heard since calling home from Berlin to hear that his wife had safely delivered their second child. Now it was time for real hardball. He spoke without smiling, fully into his role as a senior Russian intelligence officer, trained by the KGB to be one of the best in the world:
“Yes, my friend. Any time you frighten a major power, that is truly madness. Whoever is playing this game, I hope they know how dangerous it is. Please heed my words, Gospodin Kimura. My country is gravely concerned. Do you understand? Gravely concerned. You’ve made fools of us before America and the entire world. You have weapons that can threaten my country as easily as they can threaten America. You have initiated action against the United States, and we do not see a good reason for it. That makes you unpredictable in our eyes, and a country with nuclear-tipped rockets and political instability is not a pleasant prospect. This crisis is going to expand unless sensible people take proper action. We are not concerned about your commercial disagreements with America, but when the possibility of real war exists, then we are concerned.”
Kimura was still pale at the prospect.
“What is your rank, Klerk-san?”
“I am a full colonel of the Seventh Department, Line PR, the First Chief Directorate of the Committee for State Security.”
“I thought—”
“Yes, the new name, the new designation, what rubbish,” Clark observed with a snort. “Kimura-san, I am an intelligence officer. My job is to protect my country. I’d expected this posting to be a simple, pleasant one, but now I find myself—did 1 tell you about our Project RYAN?”
“You mentioned it once, but—”
“Upon the election of the American President Reagan—I was a captain then, like Chekov here—our political masters looked at the ideological beliefs of the man and feared that he might actually consider a nuclear strike against our country. We immediately launched a frantic effort to discern what those chances were. We eventually decided that it was a mistake, that Reagan, while he hated the Soviet Union, was not a fool.
“But now,” Colonel Klerk went on, “what does my country see? A nation with covertly developed nuclear weapons. A nation that has for no good r
eason chosen to attack a country that is more business partner than enemy. A nation which more than once has attacked Russia. And so the orders I received sound very much like Project RYAN. Do you understand me now?”
“What do you want?” Kimura asked, already knowing the answer.
“I want to know the location of those rockets. They left the factory by rail. I want to know where they are now.”
“How can I possibly—” Clark cut him off with a look,
“How is your concern, my friend. I tell you what 1 must have.” He paused for effect. “Consider this, Isamu: events like this acquire a life of their own. They suddenly come to dominate the men who started them. With nuclear weapons in the equation, the possible consequences—in a way you know about them, and in a way you do not. I do know,” Colonel Klerk went on. “I’ve seen the briefings of what the Americans were once able to do to us, and what we were able to do to them. It was part of Project RYAN, yes? To frighten a major power is a grave and foolish act.”
“But if you find out, then what?”
“That I do not know. 1 do know that my country will feel much safer with the knowledge than without. Those are my orders. Can I force you to help us? No, I cannot. But if you do not help us, then you help to place your country at risk. Consider that,” he said with the coldness of a coroner. Clark shook his hand in an overtly friendly way and walked off.
“Five-point-seven, five-point-six, five-point-eight from the East German judge ...” Ding breathed when they were far enough away. “Jesus, John, you are a Russian.”
“You bet your ass, kid.” He managed a smile.
Kimura stayed on the dock for a few minutes, looking out across the bay at the dormant ships. Some were car carriers, more were conventional container ships, with seamanlike lines to slice through the waves as they plied their commerce on the seas. This seemingly ordinary aspect of civilization was almost a personal religion for Kimura. Trade drew nations together in need, and in needing one another they ultimately came to find a good reason to keep the peace, however acrimonious their relations might be otherwise. Kimura knew enough history to realize that it didn’t always work that way, however.