by Tom Clancy
NBC SHARED THEIR tape with the whole world. As competitive as the news business was, a consciousness of public responsibility did pervade the profession, and the tape of the President’s brief conversation went out an hour later on television sets across the globe.
She’d been right from the first instant, the Prime Minister told herself. He was far out of his depth. He couldn’t even stand up straight. His words rambled. He let his wife speak for him—and she was frantic, emotional, weak. America’s time as a major power was ending, because the country lacked firm leadership. She didn’t know who had caused this plague to happen, but it was easy to guess. It had to be the UIR. Why else had he called them together in western China? With her fleet at sea guarding the approaches to the Persian Gulf, she was doing her part. She was sure she would be rewarded for it in due course.
“YOUR PRESIDENT IS distracted,” Zhang said. “Understandably so.”
“Such a great misfortune. You have our deepest sympathy,” the Foreign Minister added. The three, plus the translator, had also just seen the tape.
Adler had been slow in getting the news of the epidemic, but he was up to speed now. He had to set it all aside, however. “Shall we proceed?”
“Does our distant province agree to our compensation demand?” the Foreign Minister asked.
“Unfortunately not. They take the position that the entire incident results from your extended maneuvers. Viewed abstractly, that point of view is not entirely without merit,” the Secretary of State told them in diplo-speak.
“But the situation is not abstract. We are conducting peaceful exercises. One of their pilots saw fit to attack our aircraft, and in the process another of their foolish aviators destroyed an airliner. Who is to say if it was an accident or not?”
“Not an accident?” Adler asked. “What possible purpose could there be for such a thing?”
“Who can say with these bandits?” the Foreign Minister asked in return, stirring the pot a little more.
ED AND MARY Pat Foley came in together. Ed was carrying a large rolled poster or something, Jack saw as he sat in the Cabinet Room, still wearing greens with HOPKINS stenciled on them. Next came Murray, with Inspector O’Day in his wake. Ryan stood to go to him.
“I owe you, sorry I didn’t get to see you sooner.” He took the man’s hand.
“That was pretty easy compared to this,” Pat said. “And my little girl was there, too. But, yeah, glad I was there. I won’t have any nightmares about that shoot.” He turned. “Oh, hi, Andrea.”
Price smiled for the first time that day. “How’s your daughter, Pat?”
“Home with the sitter. They’re both okay,” he assured her.
“Mr. President?” It was Goodley. “This is pretty hot.”
“Okay, then shall we get to work? Who starts?”
“I do,” the DCI said. He slid a sheet of paper across the table. “Here.”
Ryan took it and scanned it. It was some sort of official form, and the words were all in French. “What’s this?”
“It’s the immigration and customs clearance form for an airplane. Check the ID box, top-left corner.”
“HX-NJA. Okay, so?” SWORDSMΛN asked. His chief of staff sat at his side, keeping his peace. He felt the tension that the executives had brought into the room.
The blowup of Chavez’s photo at Mehrabad Airport was actually larger than a poster, and had been printed up mainly as a joke. Mary Pat unrolled it, and laid it flat on the table. Two briefcases were used to keep it from rolling back up. “Check the tail,” the DDO advised.
“HX-NJA. I don’t have time for Agatha Christie, people,” the President warned them.
“Mr. President.” This was Dan Murray. “Let me walk you through this, but I’ll say up front, that photo is something I could take into court and get a conviction with.
“The customs form identifies a business jet, a Gulfstream G-IV belonging to this Swiss-based corporation.” A piece of paper went down on the conference table. “Flown by this flight crew.” Two photos and fingerprint cards. “It left Zaire with three passengers. Two were nuns, Sister Jean Baptiste and Sister Maria Magdalena. They were both nurses at a Catholic hospital down there. Sister Jean treated Benedict Mkusa, a little boy who contracted Ebola and died of it. Somehow, Sister Jean caught it, too, and the third passenger, Dr. Mohammed Moudi—we don’t have a photo of him yet; we’re working on it—decided to fly the sick one to Paris for treatment. Sister Maria tagged along, too. Dr. Moudi is an Iranian national working with the WHO. He told the boss-nun that she might have a chance there and said that he could whistle up a private jet to get her there. With me so far?”
“And this is the jet.”
“Correct, Mr. President. This is the jet. Except for one thing. This jet supposedly crashed into the sea after taking off after a refueling stop in Libya. We have a ton of paperwork about that. Except for one thing.” He tapped the poster again. “That photo was taken by Domingo Chavez—”
“You know him,” Mary Pat put in.
“Go on. When did Ding shoot the frame?”
“Clark and Chavez accompanied Secretary Adler to Tehran, just last week.”
“The aircraft was reported lost some time before that. It was even tracked by one of our destroyers when it squawked emergency. No trace was ever found, however,” Murray went on. “Ed?”
“When Iraq came apart, Iran allowed the senior military leadership to skip. They all had golden parachutes. Our friend Daryaei let them jump out of the airplane. He even provided transport, all right? This started the day after the jet disappeared,” Foley told them. “They were flown to Khartoum, in the Sudan. Our station chief there is Frank Clayton, and he drove to the airport and shot these pictures to confirm our intelligence information.” The DCI slid them across.
“Looks like the same airplane, but what if somebody just played with the numbers—letters, whatever?” Ryan asked.
“Next indicator,” Murray said. “There were two Ebola cases in Khartoum.”
“Clark and Chavez talked to the attending physician a few hours ago,” Mary Pat added.
“Both the patients flew on this airplane. We have photos of them getting off. So,” the FBI Director said, “now, we have an airplane with a sick person aboard. The airplane disappears—but it turns up less than twenty-four hours later somewhere else, and two of the passengers come down with the same illness that the nun had. The passengers came from Iraq, via Iran, to the Sudan.”
“Who owns the airplane?” Arnie asked.
“It’s a corporation. We should have further details in a few hours from the Swiss. But the flight crew is Iranian. We have info on them because they learned how to fly over here,” Murray explained. “And, finally, we have our friend Daryaei here on the same airplane. Looks like it’s been taken out of international service. Maybe Daryaei is using it to hop around his new country now. So, Mr. President, we have the disease, the airplane, and the owner, all tied up. Tomorrow we’ll work with Gulfstream to see if the aircraft has any unique characteristics that we can identify in addition to the registration code. We’ll have the Swiss pull info on the ownership and the flight logs for the rest of their fleet.
“We now know who did this, sir,” Murray concluded. “This chain of evidence is hard to beat.”
“There are more details to flesh out,” Mary Pat said. “Background on this Dr. Moudi. Tracking down some monkey shipments—they use monkeys to study the disease. How they staged the faked airplane crash you believe it? The bastards even made an insurance claim.”
“We’re going to suspend this meeting for a moment. Andrea?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Get Secretary Bretano and Admiral Jackson in here.”
“Yes, sir.” She left the room.
Ed Foley waited for the door to close behind her. “Uh, Mr. President?”
“Yeah, Ed?”
“There is one other thing. I haven’t even told Dan this yet. We now know that th
e UIR—really, our friend Mahmoud Haji Daryaei—is behind this. Chavez brought something up before we sent him and John off. The other side could well expect us to trace this back to them. Operational security for something like this is almost impossible to achieve.”
“So?”
“So, two things, Jack. First, whatever they’re planning, they may think it’s irreversible, and therefore it doesn’t matter whether we figure this out or not. Second, let’s remember how they knocked off Iraq. They got somebody all the way inside.”
Those were two very big thoughts. Ryan started pondering the first one. Dan Murray’s head turned to his roving inspector and they traded looks on the second.
“Christ, Ed,” the FBI Director said a moment later.
“Think it through, Dan,” the DCI said. “We have a President. We have a Senate. We have a third of the House. We do not have a Vice President yet. The presidential succession is still dicey, no really powerful figures, and the top level of the government is still gutted. Toss in this epidemic, which has the whole country tied up in knots. To almost anybody outside, we look weak and vulnerable.”
Ryan looked up as Andrea came back in. “Wait a minute. They made a play for Katie. Why do that if they want me out of the way?”
“What’s this?” Price asked.
“The other side has demonstrated a frightening capability. One,” Foley said, “they got all the way into the Iraqi President’s security detail and blew him away. Two, the operation last week was run by a sleeper agent who’s been here more than a decade, and in that time did nothing at all, but when he woke up, he cared enough to assist in an attempt on a child.”
Murray had to agree with that: “That’s occurred to us, too. The Intelligence Division is thinking about it right now.”
“Wait a minute,” Andrea objected. “I know every person on the Detail. For God’s sake, we lost five of them defending SANDBOX!”
“Agent Price,” Mary Pat Foley said. “You know how many times CIA’s been burned by people we knew all about—people I knew. Hell, I lost three agents to one of those fucking moles. I knew them, and I knew the guy who shopped ’em. Don’t tell me about paranoia. We are up against a very capable enemy here. And it only takes one.”
Murray whistled as the argument took its full form. His mind had been racing for the past few hours in one direction. Now it had to race in another.
“Mrs. Foley, I ”
“Andrea,” Inspector O’Day said, “this isn’t personal. Take a step back and think about it. If you had the resources of a nation-state, if you were patient, and if you had people who were really motivated, how would you do it?”
“How did they do Iraq?” Ed Foley took up the argument. “Would you have thought that was possible?”
The President looked around the room. Fabulous, now they’re telling me not to trust the Secret Service.
“It all makes sense if you think like the other guy,” Mary Pat told them. “It’s part of their tradition, remember?”
“Okay, but what do we do about it?” Andrea asked, her face openly stunned at the possibility.
“Pat, you have a new assignment,” Murray told his subordinate. “With the President’s permission, that is.”
“Granted,” POTUS breathed.
“Rules?” O’Day wanted to know.
“None, none at all,” Price told him.
IT WAS APPROACHING noon over the United Islamic Republic. Maintenance was going well on the six heavy divisions based in the south-central part of the country. Nearly all the tracks on the mechanized fighting vehicles had been replaced. A healthy spirit of competition had developed between the former Iraqi divisions and those moved down from Iran. With their vehicles restored to full fighting order, the troopers drew ammunition to bring all of the T-80 tanks and BMP infantry carriers to full basic loads.
The battalion commanders looked over the results of their training exercise with satisfaction. Their newly acquired GPS locators had been like magic, and now the Iraqis understood one of the reasons why the Americans had treated them so harshly in 1991. With GPS one didn’t need roads at all. The Arabic culture had long termed the desert a sea, and now they could navigate on it like sailors, moving from point to point with a confidence they had never known before.
Corps and divisional staff officers knew why this was so important. They had just been issued new maps, and with them a new mission. They also learned that their three-corps mechanized force had a name, the Army of God. By tomorrow, sub-unit commanders would be briefed in on that, and many other things.
IT TOOK AN hour for them to get in. Admiral Jackson had been sleeping in his office, but Secretary Bretano had gone home after a marathon session of reviewing deployments within the country. The White House dress code had been relaxed, they saw. The President, also red-eyed, was wearing doctor clothes.
Dan Murray and Ed Foley repeated their brief.
Jackson took it well: “All right. Now we know what we’re up against.”
Bretano did not: “This is an overt act of war.”
“But we’re not the objective,” the DCI told him. “It’s Saudi Arabia, and all the other Gulf states. It’s the only thing that makes sense. He figures that if he takes over those states, we can’t nuke him—it would turn off the oil for the whole world.” The DCI almost had it right, but not quite.
“And he has India and China in his pocket,” Robby Jackson went on. “They’re just running interference, but it’s good interference. Ike’s in the wrong place. The Indians have their carriers blocking the Straits of Hormuz. We can’t get the MPS ships in without air cover. Zap, he moved those three corps down. The Saudis’ll fight, but they’re outmanned. It’s over in a week, maybe less. Not a bad operational concept,” the J-3 concluded.
“The bio-attack’s pretty clever, too. I think they got more than they bargained for. Almost every base and unit we have is out of business at the moment,” SecDef observed, catching up fast on the operational side.
“Mr. President, when I was a boy in Mississippi, I remember the Klukkers used to say, when you see a mad dog, don’t kill the poor thing—toss it in somebody’s back-yard. You know, some sheet-head actually did that to us once, ’cause my pap was real big on getting people registered to vote.”
“What did you do, Rob?”
“Pap blew it away with his Fox double,” Admiral Jackson replied. “And continued the mission. We have to move fast if we’re going to move. Problem is, what with?”
“How long before the MPS ships get to Saudi?”
“Just under three days, but there’s somebody in the way. CINCLANT’S cut orders for that surface group to scoot down the Suez, and they can be at the strait in time, but we gotta get those tank-carriers past the Indians first. Those four boats are escorted by one cruiser, two ’cans, and two frigates, and if we lose them, nearest equipment re-supply’s in Savannah, sir.”
“What do we have in storage in Saudi?” Ben Goodley asked.
“Enough for a heavy brigade. Same in Kuwait. The third brigade-set is afloat and standing in harm’s way.”
“Kuwait’s first in line,” the President said. “What can we get there?”
“If we’re balls-to-the-wall, we can fly the 10th ACR out of Israel to mate up with the POMCUS site south of Kuwait City. That we can do in twenty-four hours. The Kuwaitis’ll handle transport. They have a quiet understanding with Israel on that. We helped broker it,” Robby said. “The plan’s called BUFFALO FORWARD.”
“Anybody think that’s a bad idea?” Jack asked.
“One armored cavalry regiment—I don’t think it’s enough to deter them, sir,” Goodley said.
“The man’s right,” the J-3 agreed.
Ryan looked around the table. Knowing was one thing. Being able to act was something else. He could order a strategic nuclear attack on Iran. He had B-2A stealth bombers at Whiteman Air Force Base, and with the information he’d been given in the past two hours, getting CINC-STRIKE to validat
e the order under the two-man rule would not be a problem. The “Spirits,” as the B-2s were called, could be there in less than eighteen hours, and turn that nation into a smoking, poisoned ruin.
But he couldn’t do that. Even if he had to, he probably couldn’t. Though American Presidents had long been faced with the necessity of telling the world that, yes, we will launch our missiles and bombers if we have to, it was a duty Ryan never expected to carry out. Even this attack on his country, the use of weapons of mass destruction—to America the equivalent of nuclear arms—had been the decision of one man, and carried out by a relative handful. Could he flatten whole cities in response, kill the innocent as Daryaei had done, because the other guy had done it first? And live with himself afterward? There had to be something better, some other option. Killing Daryaei was one.
“Ed?”
“Yes, Mr. President?”
“Where are Clark and Chavez right now?”
“Khartoum, still, awaiting instructions.”
“Think they can get into Tehran again?”
“Won’t be easy, sir.” He turned to his wife.
“The Russians have helped us in the past. I can ask. What would their mission be?”
“Find out if they can get in first. We’ll figure out the mission in a little while. Robby?”
“Yes, Mr. President?”
“The 10th Regiment moves to Kuwait at once.”
Jackson took a deep and skeptical breath. “Aye aye, sir.”
THERE WAS THE intermediary step of getting the approval of the Kuwaiti government. The Ambassador handled that. It did not prove to be hard. Major Sabah had kept his government informed of developments in their new neighbor to the north, and the satellite photos of the re-tracking of the UIR tanks turned the trick. With their own military fully activated, the Kuwait government telexed a formal request for America to commence an extended training exercise in the western part of their nation. This moved fast. The rulers of the small nation had fresh memories of earlier mistakes. Their only proviso was that the movement be made secretly, and America did not object. Within four hours, the plush, brand-new airliners of the national airline started lifting off, headed southwest over Saudi Arabia, and later turned north, up the Gulf of Aqaba.