by Tom Clancy
THE AMAZING THING was that it had taken so long. Protecting an important person against assassination is a complex exercise at best, all the more so when that person went out of his way to create enemies. Ruthlessness helps. The ability to snatch people off the street, to make them disappear, was a deterrent of no small value. The further willingness to take away not just a single person, but an entire family—sometimes an entire extended family—and do the same was more effective still. One selected the people to be “disappeared,” an unhappy pseudo-verb that had originated in Argentina, through intelligence. That was a polite term for informers, paid in the coin of the realm or in power, which was better still. They would report conversations for their seditious content, to the point that a mere joke about someone’s mustache could entail the sentence of death for its raconteur; and soon enough, because institutions were institutions, informers had quotas to fill, and since the informers were themselves human beings with likes and dislikes, their reports as often as not reflected personal slights or jealousy, because the delegated power of life and death was as corrupting to the small as to the great. Eventually a corrupt system was itself corrupted, and the logic of terror reached its logical conclusion: a humble rabbit, cornered by a fox, has nothing to lose by striking out, and rabbits have teeth, and sometimes the rabbit gets lucky.
Because terror was not enough, there were passive measures as well. The task of assassinating an important man can be made difficult by the simplest of procedures, especially in a despotic state. A few lines of guards to limit approach. Multiple identical cars in which the target might travel—often as many as twenty in this case—denied one the ability to know which car to engage. The life of such a person was busy, and so it was both a convenience and a protective measure to have a double or two, to appear, and give a speech, and take the risk in return for a comfortable life as the staked goat on the public stage.
Next came the selection of the protectors—how did one pick truly reliable fish from a sea of hatred? The obvious answer here was to pick people from one’s extended family, then to give them a lifestyle that depended absolutely upon the survival of their leader, and finally to link them so closely with his protection and its necessary ramifications that his death would mean far more than the loss of a highly paid government job. That the guards’ lives depended on the guarded one was an effective incentive toward efficiency.
But really it all came down to one thing. A person was invincible only because people thought him to be so, and therefore that person’s security was, like all of the important aspects of life, a thing of the mind.
But human motivation is also a thing of the mind, and fear has never been the strongest emotion. Throughout history, people have risked their lives for love, for patriotism, for principle, and for God far more often than fear has made them run away. Upon that fact depends progress.
The colonel had risked his life in so many ways that he could scarcely remember them all, and done that just to be noticed, just to be asked to be a small part in a larger machine, then to rise within it. He’d taken a long time to get this close to the Mustache. Eight years, in fact. In that time he’d tortured and killed men, women, and children from behind blank and pitiless eyes. He’d raped daughters before their fathers’ eyes, mothers before their sons’. He’d committed crimes to damn the souls of a hundred men, because there was no other way. He’d drunk liquor in quantities to impress an infidel in order to defile that law of his religion. All of this he had done in God’s name, praying for forgiveness, desperately telling himself that it was written that his life should be so, that, no, he didn’t enjoy any of it, that the lives he took were sacrifices necessary to some greater plan, that they would have died in any case, and that in this way their deaths by his hand could serve a Holy Cause. He had to believe in all of that lest he go mad—he’d come close enough in any case, until his fixed purpose passed far beyond the meaning of “obsession,” and he became that which he did in every possible way, all with one objective, that he would get close enough and trusted enough for a single second’s work, to be followed instantly by his own death.
He knew he had become that which he and everyone around him were trained to fear above all things. All the lectures and the drinking sessions with his peers always came back to the same thing. They spoke of their mission and the dangers of that mission. And that always came down to one subject. The lone dedicated assassin, the man willing to throw away his own life like a gambling chip, the patient man who waited his chance, that was the enemy whom every protective officer in the world feared, drunk or sober, on duty or off, even in his dreams. And that was the reason for all the tests required to protect the Mustache. To get here, you had to be damned before God and men, because when you got here, you saw what really was.
The Mustache was what he called his target. Not a man at all, an apostate before Allah who desecrated Islam without a thought, a criminal of such magnitude as to deserve a newly designed room in Perdition. From afar the Mustache looked powerful and invincible, but not up close. His bodyguards knew better because they knew all. They saw the doubts and the fears, the petty cruelties inflicted on the undeserving. He’d seen the Mustache murder for amusement, maybe just to see if his Browning pistol worked today. He’d seen him look out the window of one of his white Mercedes autos, spot a young woman, point, give a command, then use the hapless girl for one night. The lucky ones returned home with money and disgrace. The unlucky floated down the Euphrates with their throats cut, not a few by the Mustache himself, if they’d resisted a little too well in the protection of their virtue. But powerful as he was, clever and cunning as he was, heartlessly cruel as he was, no, he was not invincible. And it was now his time to see Allah.
The Mustache emerged from the building onto the expansive porch, his bodyguards behind him, his right arm outstretched to salute the assembled multitude. The people in the square, hastily assembled, roared their adoration, which fed the Mustache as surely as sunlight fed the flower. And then, from three meters away, the colonel drew his automatic pistol from its leather holster, brought it up in one hand, and fired a single aimed round straight into the back of his target’s head. Those in the front of the crowd saw the bullet erupt from their dictator’s left eye, and there followed one of those moments in history, the sort when the entire earth seemed to stop its spin, hearts paused, and even the people who’d been screaming their loyalty to a man already dead would remember only silence.
The colonel didn’t bother with another shot. He was an expert marksman who practiced with his comrades almost every day, and his open, blank eyes had seen the impact of his round. He didn’t turn, and didn’t waste time in fruitless efforts at self-defense. There was no point in killing the comrades with whom he’d drunk liquor and raped children. Others would see to that soon enough. He didn’t even smile, though it was very funny indeed, wasn’t it, that the Mustache had one instant looked at the square full of the people whom he despised for their adoration of himself—then to look Allah in the face and wonder what had happened. That thought had perhaps two seconds to form itself before he felt his body jerk with the impact of the first bullet. There was no pain. He was too focused on his target, now on the flat paving stones of the porch, already a pool of blood draining rapidly from the ruined head. More bullets hit, and it seemed briefly strange that he could feel them yet not the pain of their passage, and in his last seconds he prayed to Allah for forgiveness and understanding, that all his crimes had been committed in the name of God and His Justice. To the last, his ears reported not the sound of the shots, but the lingering cries of the mob, not yet grasping that their leader was dead.
“WHO IS IT?” Ryan checked his clock. Damn, the extra forty minutes of sleep would have been nice.
“Mr. President, my name is Major Canon, Marine Corps,” the unknown voice announced.
“That’s nice, Major, who are you?” Jack blinked his eyes and forgot to be polite, but probably the officer understood.
“Sir, I’m the watch officer in Signals. We have a report with high confidence that the President of Iraq was assassinated about ten minutes ago.”
“Source?” Jack asked at once.
“Kuwait and Saudi both, sir. It was on Iraqi TV live, some sort of event, and we have people over there to monitor their TV. We have a tape being uplinked to us right now. The initial word is a pistol right in the head, at close range.” The tone of the officer’s voice wasn’t exactly regretful. Well, they finally popped that fucker! Of course, you couldn’t exactly say that to the President.
And you needed to figure who “they” was.
“Okay, Major, what’s the drill?” The answer came quickly enough. Ryan replaced the phone.
“Now what?” Cathy asked. Jack swung his feet out of bed before answering.
“The President of Iraq was just killed.”
His wife almost said, Good, but stopped. The death of such a person was not as distant a concept as it had once been. How odd to feel that way about someone who could best serve the world by leaving it.
“Is that important?”
“In about twenty minutes, they’ll tell me.” Ryan coughed before going on. “What the hell, I used to be competent in those areas. Yeah, it’s potentially very important.” With that he did what every man in America did in the morning. He headed to the bathroom ahead of his wife. For her part, Cathy lifted the remote and performed the other ordinarily male function of clicking on the bedroom TV, surprised to find that CNN didn’t have anything on but reports on which airports were operating behind schedule. Jack had told her a few times just how good the White House Signals Office was.
“Anything?” her husband asked, coming back out.
“Not yet.” Then it was her turn.
Jack had to think about where his clothes were, wondering how a President was supposed to dress. He found his robe—moved in from the Naval Observatory after having been moved there from Eighth and I, after having been removed from their home ... damn—and opened the bedroom door. An agent in the hall handed him three morning papers. “Thanks.”
Cathy saw that and stopped cold in her tracks, belatedly realizing that there had been people just outside her bedroom door all night. Her face turned away, forming the sort of smile generated by finding an unexpected mess in the kitchen.
“Jack?”
“Yes, honey?”
“If I kill you in bed some night, will those people with guns get me right away, or will it wait until morning?”
THE REAL WORK was being done at Fort Meade. The video had traveled from one monitoring station on the Kuwait-Iraq border and another in Saudi Arabia, known as PALM BOWL and STORM TRACK, respectively, the latter set up to record all signals out of Baghdad, and the former watching the southeastern part of the country, around Basra. From both places the information traveled by fiber-optic cable to the National Security Agency’s deceptively small building in King Khalid Military City (KKMC) and uplinked to a communications satellite, which then shot it back to NSA headquarters. There in the watch room, ten people summoned by one of the junior watch officers huddled around a TV monitor to catch the tape, while the more senior troops, in a separate glass-walled office, sipped their coffee soberly.
“Yes!” an Air Force sergeant observed on seeing the shot, “Nothin’ but net!” Several high fives were exchanged. The senior watch officer, who’d already called White House Signals, nodded his more restrained approval and relayed the original signal along the way, and ordered a digital enhancement, which would take a few minutes—only a few frames were all that important, and they had a massive Cray supercomputer to handle that.
RYAN REMARKED QUIETLY that while Cathy was getting the kids ready for school, and herself ready to operate on people’s eyes, here he was in Signals watching the instant replay of a murder. His designated national intelligence officer was still at CIA, finishing his morning intake of information, which he would then regurgitate to the President by way of the morning intelligence briefing. The post of National Security Advisor was currently vacant—one more thing to address today.
“Whoa!” Major Canon breathed.
The President nodded, then reverted to his former life as an intelligence officer. “Okay, tell me what we know.”
“Sir, we know that somebody got killed, probably the Iraqi President.”
“Double?”
Canon nodded, “Could be, but STORM TRACK is now reporting a lot of VHF signals that started all of a sudden, police and military nets, and the activity is radiating out from Baghdad.” The Marine officer pointed to his computer monitor, which displayed real-time “take” from the NSA’s many outposts. “Translations will take a little time, but I do traffic analysis for a living. It looks pretty real, sir. I suppose it could be faked, but I wouldn’t—there!”
A translation was coming up, identified as emanating from a military command net. He’s dead, he’s dead, stsnd your regiment to and be prepared to move into the city imediately—recipient is Replican Gurds Special Operations regiment at Salman Pak—reply is: Yes I will yes I will, who is giving the oders, what are my orders—
“Typos and all,” Ryan noted.
“Sir, it’s hard for our people to translate and type it at the same time. Usually we clean it up before ”
“Relax, Major. I only use three fingers myself. Tell me what you think.”
“Sir, I’m only a junior officer here, that’s why I draw the midwatch and—”
“If you were stupid, you wouldn’t be here.”
Canon nodded. “He’s deader ’n hell, sir. Iraq needs a new dictator. We have the imagery, we have unusual signal traffic that fits the pattern of an unusual event. That’s my estimate.” He paused and went on to cover himself, like a good spook. “Unless it’s a deliberate exercise to smoke out disloyal people inside his government. That’s possible, but unlikely. Not in public like this.”
“Kamikaze play?”
“Yes, Mr. President. Something you can only do once, and dangerous the first time.”
“Agreed.” Ryan walked to the coffee urn—the White House Office of Signals was mainly a military operation, and they made their own. Jack got two cups and came back, handing one to Major Canon, rather to the horror of everyone else in the room. “Fast work. Send a ‘thanks’ to the guys working this, okay?”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Who do I talk to to get things happening around here?”
“We got the phones right here, Mr. President.”
“I want Adler in here ASAP, the DCI ... who else? State and CIA desks for Iraq. DIA estimate of the state of their military. Find out if Prince Ali is still in town. If he is, ask him to please stand by. I want to talk to him this morning if possible. I wonder what else ... ?” Ryan’s voice trailed off.
“CENTCOM, sir. He’ll have the best military-intelligence troops down at Tampa, most familiar with the area, I mean.”
“Get him up here—no, we’ll do that by landline, and we give him time to get briefed in.”
“We’ll get it all going for you, sir.” Ryan patted the officer on the shoulder and headed out of the room. The heavy door closed behind him before Major Charles Canon spoke again. “Hey, NCA knows his shit.”
“Is it what I heard?” Price asked, coming up the corridor.
“Do you ever sleep?” Then he thought about it. “I want you in on this.”
“Why me, sir, I’m not—”
“You’re supposed to know about assassinations, right?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Then right now you’re more valuable to me than a spook.”
THE TIMING COULD have been better. Daryaei had been surprised by the information just delivered. Not in the least bit displeased by it—except maybe the timing. He paused for a moment, whispering a prayer first of thanks to Allah, then for the soul of the unknown assassin assassin? he asked himself. Perhaps “judge” would be a better term for the man, one of many who’d been in
filtrated into Iraq ages ago, while the war had still been going on. Most had merely disappeared, probably shot one way or another. The overall mission had been his idea, not nearly dramatic enough for the “professionals” working in his intelligence service. Largely leftovers from the Shah’s Savak—trained by the Israelis in the 1960s and 1970s—they were effective, but they were mercenaries at heart however much they might protest their religious fervor and their loyalty to the new regime. They’d proceeded along “conventional” lines for the unconventional mission, trying bribes of various sorts or testing the waters for dissidents, only to fail at every turn, and for years Daryaei had wondered if the target of all that attention might have Allah’s perverse blessings somehow or other but that had been the counsel of despair, not of reason and faith, and even Daryaei was subject to human weakness. Surely the Americans had tried for him also, and probably in the same way, trying to identify military commanders who might like to try out the seat of power, trying to initiate a coup d’état such as they had done often enough in other parts of the world. But, no, this target was too skilled for that, and at every turn he’d become more skilled, and so the Americans had failed, and the Israelis, and all the others. All but me.
It was tradition, after all, all the way back to antiquity. One man, operating alone, one faithful man who would do whatever was necessary to accomplish his mission. Eleven such men had been dispatched into Iraq for this specific purpose, told to go deep under cover, trained to forget everything they had ever been, entirely without contact or control officers, and all records of their existence destroyed so that even an Iraqi spy in his own agencies could not discover the mission without a name. Within an hour, some of his own cronies would come into this office, praising God and lauding their leader for his wisdom. Perhaps so, but even they didn’t know all the things he had done, or all the people he’d dispatched.