by Tom Clancy
“No assets we can use on the ground,” Mary Pat was saying.
“Good intercepts, though,” Goodley went on. “NSA is really coming through for us. The whole Ba’ath leadership is in the jug, and I don’t think they’re going to be coming out, at least not standing up.”
“So Iraq is fully decapitated?”
“A military ruling council, colonels and junior generals. Afternoon TV showed them with an Iranian mullah. No accident,” Bert Vasco said positively. “The least that comes out of this is a rapprochement with Iran. At most, the two countries merge. We’ll know that in a couple of days—two weeks at the outside.”
“The Saudis?” Ryan asked.
“They’re having kittens, Jack,” Ed Foley replied at once. “I talked with Prince Ali less than an hour ago. They cobbled together an aid package that would just about have paid off our national debt in an effort to buy the new Iraqi regime—did it overnight, biggest goddamned letter of credit ever drafted—but nobody’s answering the phone. That has ’em shook in Riyadh. Iraq’s always been willing to talk business. Not now.”
And that would be what frightened all the states on the Arabian Peninsula, Ryan knew. It wasn’t well appreciated in the West that the Arabs were businessmen. Not ideologues, not fanatics, not lunatics, but businessmen. Theirs was a maritime trading culture that predated Islam, a fact remembered in America only in remakes of Sinbad the Sailor movies. In that sense they were very like Americans, despite the difference in language, clothing, and religion, and just like Americans they had trouble understanding people who were not willing to do business, to reach an accommodation, to make some sort of exchange. Iran was such a country, changed from the previous state of affairs under the Shah by the Ayatollah Khomeini into a theocracy. They’re not like us was the universal point of concern for any culture. They’re not like us ANYMORE would be a very frightening development for Gulf States who’d always known that, despite political differences, there had always been an avenue of commonality and communication.
“Tehran?” Jack asked next. Ben Goodley took the question unto himself.
“Official news broadcasts welcome the development—the routine offers of peace and renewed friendship, but nothing beyond that at this point,” Goodley said. “Officially, that is. Unofficially, we’re getting all sorts of intercept traffic. People in Baghdad are asking for instructions, and people in Tehran are giving them. For the moment they’re saying to let the situation develop apace. The revolutionary courts come next. We’re seeing a lot of Islamic clergy on TV, preaching love and freedom and all that nice stuff. When the trials start, and people start backing into walls to pose for rifle-fire, then there’s going to be a total vacuum.”
“Then Iran takes over, probably, or maybe runs Iraq like a puppet on a string,” Vasco said, flipping through the latest set of intercepts. “Goodley may be right. I’m reading this SIGINT stuff for the first time. Excuse me, Mr. President, but I’ve been concentrating on the political side. This stuff is more revealing than I expected it to be.”
“You’re saying it means more than I think it does?” the NIO asked.
Vasco nodded without looking up. “I think it might. This is not good,” the desk officer opined darkly.
“Later today, the Saudis are going to ask us to hold their hand,” Secretary Adler pointed out. “What do I tell them?”
Ryan’s reply was so automatic that it startled him. “Our commitment to the Kingdom is unchanged. If they need us, we’re there, now and forever.” And with two sentences, Jack thought a second later, he had committed the full power and credibility of the United States of America to a non-democratic country seven thousand miles away. Fortunately, Adler made it easier for him.
“I fully agree, Mr. President. We can’t do anything else.” Everyone else nodded agreement, even Ben Goodley. “We can do that quietly. Prince Ali understands, and he can make the King understand that we’re not kidding.”
“Next stop,” Ed Foley said, “we have to brief Tony Bretano in. He’s pretty good, by the way. Knows how to listen,” the DCI-designate informed the President. “You plan to do a cabinet meeting about this?”
Ryan shook his head. “No. I think we should play this one cool. America is observing regional developments with interest, but there’s nothing for us to get excited about. Scott, you handle the press briefing through your people.”
“Right,” SecState replied.
“Ben, what do they have you doing at Langley now?”
“Mr. President, they went and made me a senior watch officer for the Operations Center.”
“Good briefing,” Ryan told the younger man, then turned to the DCI. “Ed, he works for me now. I need an NIO who speaks my language.”
“Gee, do I at least get a decent relief pitcher back?” Foley replied with a laugh. “This kid’s a good prospect, and I expect to be in the pennant race this fall.”
“Nice try, Ed. Ben, your hours just got worse. For now, you can have my old office around the corner. The food’s a lot better here,” the President promised.
Throughout it all, Aref Raman stood still, leaning against the white-painted walls while his eyes flickered automatically from one visitor to another. He was trained not to trust anyone, with the possible exceptions of the President’s wife and kids. No one else. Of course, they all trusted him, including the ones who had trained him not to trust anyone, because everybody had to trust somebody.
It was just a matter of timing, really, and one of the things his American education and professional training had conferred upon him was the patience to wait for the chance to make the proper move. But other events on the other side of the globe were bringing that moment closer. Behind expressionless eyes Raman thought that maybe he needed guidance. His mission was no longer the random event he’d promised to fulfill twenty years earlier. That he could do almost any time, but he was here now, and while anyone could kill, and while a dedicated person could kill almost anyone, only a truly skilled assassin could kill the proper person at the proper moment in pursuit of a larger goal. So deliciously ironic, he thought, that while his mission came from God, every factor in its accomplishment had come directly from the Great Satan himself, embodied in the life of one man who could best serve Allah by departing this life at just the proper moment. Picking the moment would be the hard part, and so after twenty years, Raman decided that he might just have to break cover after all. There was a danger in that, but, he judged, a slight one.
“YOUR OBJECTIVE IS a bold one,” Badrayn said calmly. Inwardly he was anything but calm. It was breathtaking.
“The meek do not inherit the earth,” Daryaei replied, having for the first time explained his mission in life to someone outside his own inner circle of clerics.
It was a struggle for both of them to act like gamblers around a poker table, while they discussed a plan that would change the shape of the world. For Daryaei it was a concept toward which he’d labored and thought and planned for more than a generation, the culmination of everything he’d ever done in life, the fulfillment of a dream, and such a goal as to put his name aside that of the Prophet himself—if he achieved it. The unification of Islam. That was how he typically expressed it in his inner circle.
Badrayn merely saw the power. The creation of a new superstate centered on the Persian Gulf, a state with immense economic power, a huge population, self-sustaining in every detail and able to expand across Asia and Africa, perhaps fulfilling the wishes of the Prophet Mohammed, though he didn’t pretend to know what the founder of his religion would or would not have wished. He left that to men like Daryaei. For Badrayn the game was simply power, and religion or ideology merely defined the team identities. His team was this one because of where he’d been born, and because he’d once looked closely at Marxism and decided it was insufficient to the task.
“It is possible,” Badrayn said after a few more seconds of contemplation.
“The historical moment is unique. The Great Satan”—
he didn’t really like to fall into ideological cant in discussions of statecraft, but sometimes there was no avoiding it—“is weak. The Lesser Satan is destroyed, with its Islamic republics ready to fall into our laps. They need an identity, and what better identity could there be than the Holy Faith?”
And that was entirely true, Badrayn agreed with a silent nod. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its replacement with the so-called Confederation of Independent States had merely generated a vacuum not yet filled. The southern tier of “republics” were still economically tied to Moscow, rather like a series of carts hitched to a dying horse. They’d always been rebellious, unsettled mini-nations whose religion had set them apart from the atheist empire, and now they were all struggling to establish their own economic identity so that they could once and for all separate themselves from the center of a dead country to which they’d never truly belonged. But they couldn’t sustain themselves economically, not in the modern age. They all needed another patron, another guide into the new century. That new leadership had to mean money, and lots of it, plus the unifying banner of religion and culture long denied them by Marxism-Leninism. In return, the republics would provide land and people. And resources.
“The obstacle is America, but you do not need me to tell you that,” Badrayn observed unnecessarily. “And America is too large and powerful to destroy.”
“I’ve met this Ryan. But first, you tell me what you think of him.”
“He’s no fool, and no coward,” Badrayn said judiciously. “He has shown physical bravery, and he is well versed in intelligence operations. He is well educated. The Saudis trust him, as do the Israelis.” Those two countries mattered at this moment. So did a third: “The Russians know and respect him.”
“What else?”
“Do not underestimate him. Do not underestimate America. We have both seen what happens to those who do,” Badrayn said.
“But America’s current state?”
“What I have seen tells me that President Ryan is working hard to reconstitute the government of his country. It is a huge task, but America is a fundamentally stable country.”
“What about the problem in the succession?”
“This I do not understand,” Badrayn admitted. “I haven’t seen enough news reports to understand the issues.”
“I have met Ryan,” Daryaei said, finally revealing his own thoughts. “He is an assistant, nothing more. He appears strong, but is not. Were he a man of strength, he would deal with this Kealty directly. The man commits treason, does he not? But this is not important. Ryan is one man. America is one country. Both can be attacked, at the same time, from more than one direction.”
“Lion and hyenas,” Badrayn noted, then explained himself. Daryaei was so pleased with the idea that he didn’t object to his own place in the metaphor.
“Not one great attack, but many small ones?” the cleric asked.
“It has worked before.”
“And what of many large ones? Against America, and against Ryan. For that matter, what if Ryan were to fall? What would happen then, my young friend?”
“Within their system of government, chaos would result. But I would counsel caution. I would also recommend allies. The more hyenas and the more directions, the better to harry the lion. As for attacking Ryan personally,” Badrayn went on, wondering why his host had said that, and wondering if it was an error, “the President of the United States is a difficult target, well protected and well informed.”
“So I am told,” Daryaei replied, behind dark eyes devoid of expression. “What other countries would you recommend as our allies?”
“Have you paid close attention to the conflict between Japan and America?” Badrayn asked. “Did you ever wonder why some large dogs did not bark at all?” It was a funny thing about large dogs. They were always hungry. More than once now, however, Daryaei had talked about Ryan and his protection. One dog was the hungriest of all. It would make for an interesting pack.
“MAYBE IT JUST malfunctioned.”
The Gulfstream representatives were sitting in a room with Swiss civil-aviation officials, along with the chief of flight operations of the corporation which owned the jets. His written records showed that the aircraft had been properly maintained by a local firm. All parts had come from the approved suppliers. The Swiss corporation which did the maintenance had ten years of accident-free history behind it, regulated in turn by the same government agency which oversaw the investigation.
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” the Gulfstream rep agreed. The flight-data recorder was a robust piece of hardware, but they didn’t always survive crashes, because every crash was different. A careful search by USS Radford had failed to turn up the locator pings. Absent that, the bottom was too deep for an undirected search, and then there was the issue of the Libyans, who didn’t want ships poking around their waters. Had the missing aircraft been an airliner, the issue might have been pushed, but a business jet with a crew of two and three reported passengers—one of them with a deadly plague—wasn’t important enough. “Without the data, there isn’t much to be said. Engine failure was reported, and that could mean bad fuel, bad maintenance—”
“Please!” the maintenance contractor objected.
“I’m speaking theoretically,” Gulfstream pointed out. “Or even pilot error of some sort or other. Without hard data, our hands are pretty well tied.”
“The pilot had four thousand hours in type. The co-pilot had over two thousand,” the owner’s representative said for the fifth time this afternoon.
They were all thinking the same thing. The aircraft manufacturer had a superb safety record to defend. There were relatively few airliner manufacturers for the big carriers to choose from, and as important as safety was for them, it was even more so for the builders of business jets, for whom competition was stiffer. The buyers of such corporate toys had long memories, and without hard information to hang their hats on about the few crashes which took place, all they remembered was a missing aircraft with missing passengers.
The maintenance contractor had no wish to be firmly associated with a fatal accident, either. Switzerland had a lot of airfields, and a lot of business aircraft. A bad maintainer could lose business as well, not to mention the trouble from the Swiss government for violating its stringent civil-aviation rules.
The corporate owner had the least to lose in terms of reputation, but amour propre would not allow him to assume responsibility without real cause.
And there was no real cause for any of them to take the blame, not without the flight-data recorder. The men looked at one another around the table, thinking the same thought: good people did make mistakes, but rarely did they wish to admit them, and never when they didn’t have to. The government representative had gone over the written records and been satisfied that the paperwork was all correct. Beyond that there was nothing any of them could do except talk to the engine manufacturer and try to get a sample of the fuel. The former was easy. The latter was not. In the end, they’d know little more than they knew now. Gulfstream might lose a plane or two in sales. The maintenance contractor would undergo increased government scrutiny. The corporation would have to buy a new jet. To show loyalty, it would be another G-class business jet and with the same maintenance contractor. That would please everybody, even the Swiss government.
BEING A ROVING Inspector paid more than being a street agent, and it was more fun than sitting behind a desk all the time, but Pat O’Day still chafed at spending most of his day reading over written reports generated by agents or their secretaries. More junior people cross-checked the data for inconsistencies, though he did the same, keeping careful penciled notes on his own yellow pad, which his secretary would collate for his summary reports to Director Murray. Real agents, O’Day believed implicitly, didn’t type. Well, that’s what his instructors at Quantico would have said, probably. He finished his meetings early down at Buzzard’s Point and decided that his office in the Hoover Buildin
g didn’t need him. The investigation was indeed at the point of diminishing returns. The “new” information was all interviews, every single one of which confirmed information already developed and already verified by voluminous cross-referenced documents.
“I’ve always hated this part,” ADIC Tony Caruso said. It was the point when the United States Attorney had everything he needed to get a conviction, but, being a lawyer, never had enough—as though the best way to convict a hood were to bore the jury to death.
“Not even a sniff of contrary data. This one’s in the bag, Tony.” The two men had long been friends. “Time for me to get something new and exciting.”
“Lucky you. How’s Megan?”
“New day-care center, started today. Giant Steps, on Ritchie Highway.”
“Same one,” Caruso observed. “Yeah, I guess it would be.”