by Tom Clancy
“So, what’s shakin’?” Bob asked.
“Looking for a missin’ girl,” Jeff replied. “Know this face?” He handed the printed flyer over.
“Yeah, Annie something, likes Kendall Jackson Reserve Chardonnay. Used to be a regular. Haven’t seen her in a while, though.”
“How about this one?” The second flyer went across the bar. Bob looked at it for a second or two.
“Mary . . . Mary Bannister. I remember that, ’cuz it’s like the thing on a set of steps, like you know? Haven’t seen her in a while, either.”
The patrolman could hardly believe his luck. “What do you know about them?”
“Wait a minute, you said they’re missing, like kidnapped or something?”
“That’s right, man.” Jeff sipped his coffee. “FBI is on this one.” He tapped the Bannister photo. “The other one we turned.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. Don’t know much about them. Used to see ’em both here couple days a week, they dance and stuff, you know, like single girls do, trolling for guys.”
“Okay, tell you what, some people will be in here to talk to you about ’em. Think about it, will ya?” The cop had to consider the possibility that Bob was the one who’d made them disappear, but there were chances you had to take in an investigation, and that likelihood was pretty damned slim. Like many New York waiters and bartenders, this guy was an aspiring actor, which probably explained his memory.
“Yeah, sure, Jeff. Damn, kidnapped, eh? Don’t hear very much about that stuff anymore. Shit,” he concluded.
“Eight million stories in the Naked City, man. Later,” the patrolman said, heading for the door. He felt as though he’d done a major portion of his day’s work, and as soon as he got outside, he used his epaulet-mounted radio microphone to call the newly developed information into his precinct house.
Grady’s face was known in the U.K., but not the red beard and glasses, which, he hoped, would obscure his visage enough to reduce the chance of being spotted by an alert police constable. In any case, the police presence wasn’t as heavy here as in London. The gate into the base at Hereford was just as he’d remembered it, and from there it wasn’t a long drive to the community hospital, where he examined the roads, shoulders, and parking areas and found them to his liking, as he shot six rolls of film with his Nikon. The plan that started building in his mind was simple, as all good plans were. The roads seemed to work in his favor, as did the open ground. As always, surprise would be his primary weapon. He’d need that, since the operation was so close to the U.K.’s best and most dangerous military organization, but the distances told him the time factor. Probably forty minutes on the outside, thirty on the inside to make the plan work. Fifteen men, but he could get fifteen good men. The other resources money could purchase, Grady thought, as he sat in the hospital parking lot. Yes, this could and would work. The only question was daylight or nighttime. The latter was the usual answer, but he’d learned the hard way that counter-terror teams loved the night, because their night-vision equipment made the time of day indistinguishable in a tactical sense—and people like Grady were not trained to operate as well in the dark. It had given the police an enormous advantage recently at Vienna, Bern, and Worldpark. So, why not try it in broad daylight? he wondered. It was something to discuss with his friends, Grady concluded, as he restarted the car and headed back toward Gatwick.
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it since Jeff showed me the pictures,” the bartender said. His name was Bob Johnson. He was now dressed for the evening, in a white tuxedo shirt, black cummerbund, and bowtie.
“You know this woman?”
“Yeah.” He nodded positively. “Mary Bannister. The other one is Anne Pretloe. They used to be regulars here. Seemed nice enough. They danced and flirted with the men. This place gets pretty busy at night, ’specially on weekends. They used to come in around eight or so, then leave at eleven or eleven-thirty.”
“Alone?”
“When they left? Most of the time, but not always. Annie had a guy she liked. His name’s Hank, don’t know the last name. White, brown hair, brown eyes, about my size, growing a gut, but not really overweight. I think he’s a lawyer. He’ll probably be in tonight. He’s pretty regular here. Then there was another guy . . . maybe the last time I saw her here . . . what the hell’s his name . . . ?” Johnson looked down at the bar. “Kurt, Kirk, something like that. Now that I think of it, I saw Mary dancing with him, too, once or twice. White guy, tall, good-lookin’, haven’t seen him in a while, liked whiskey sours made with Jim Beam, good tipper.” A bartender always remembered good and bad tippers. “He was a hunter.”
“Huh?” Agent Sullivan asked.
“Huntin’ for babes, man. That’s why guys come to a place like this, you know?”
This guy was a godsend, Sullivan and Chatham thought. “But you haven’t seen him in a while?”
“The guy Kurt? No, couple of weeks at least, maybe more.”
“Any chance that you could help us put a picture together?”
“You mean the artists’ sketch thing, like in the papers?” Johnson asked them.
“That’s right,” Chatham confirmed.
“I suppose I can try. Some of the gals who come in here might know him, too. I think Marissa knew him. She’s a regular, in here nearly every night, shows up around seven, seven-thirty.”
“I guess we’re going to be here awhile,” Sullivan thought aloud, checking his watch.
It was midnight at RAF Mildenhall. Malloy lifted the Night Hawk off the ramp and set off west for Hereford. The controls felt just as tight and crisp as ever, and the new widget worked. It turned out to be a fuel-gauge widget, digitized to tell him with numbers rather than a needle how much fuel he had. The switch also toggled back and forth between gallons (U.S., not Imperial) and pounds. Not a bad idea, he thought. The night was relatively clear, which was unusual for this part of the world, but there was no moon, and he had opted to use his night-vision goggles. These turned darkness into greenish twilight, and though they reduced his visual acuity from 20/20 down to about 20/40, that was still a major improvement on being totally blind in the dark. He kept the aircraft at three hundred feet, to avoid power lines, which scared the hell out of him, as they did all experienced helicopter pilots. There were no troops in the back, only Sergeant Nance, who still wore his pistol in order to feel more warriorlike—side arms were authorized for special-operations troops, even those who had little likelihood of ever using them. Malloy kept his Beretta M9 in his flight bag rather than a shoulder holster, which he found melodramatic, especially for a Marine.
“Chopper down there at the hospital pad,” Lieutenant Harrison said, seeing it as they angled past for the base. “Turnin’ and blinkin’.”
“Got it,” Malloy confirmed. They’d pass well clear even if the guy lifted off right now. “Nothing else at our level,” he added, checking aloft for the blinking lights of airliners heading in and out of Heathrow and Luton. You never stopped scanning if you wanted to live. If he got command of VHM-1 at Anacostia Naval Air Station in D.C., the traffic at Reagan National Airport meant that he’d be flying routinely through very crowded air space, and though he respected commercial airline pilots, he trusted them less than he trusted his own abilities—which, he knew, was exactly how they viewed him and everybody in green flight suits. To be a pilot for a living, you had to think of yourself as the very best, though in Malloy’s case he knew this to be true. And this kid Harrison showed some real promise, if he stayed in uniform instead of ending up a traffic reporter in West Bumfuck, Wherever. Finally, the landing pad at Hereford came into view, and Malloy headed for it. Five minutes and he’d be on the ground, cooling the turboshaft engines down, and twenty minutes after that, in his bed.
“Yes, he will do it,” Popov said. They were in a corner booth, and the background music made it a secure place to talk. “He has not confirmed it, but he will.”
“Who is he?” Henriksen asked.
&
nbsp; “Sean Grady. Do you know the name?”
“PIRA . . . worked in Londonderry mainly, didn’t he?”
“For the most part, yes. He captured three SAS people and . . . disposed of them. Two separate incidents. The SAS then targeted him on three separate missions. Once they came very close to getting him, and they eliminated ten or so of his closest associates. He then cleaned out some suspected informers in his unit. He’s quite ruthless,” Popov assured his associates.
“That’s true,” Henriksen assured Brightling. “I remember reading what he did to the SAS guys he caught. Wasn’t very pretty. Grady’s a nasty little fucker. Does he have enough people to make this attempt?”
“I think yes,” Dmitriy Arkadeyevich replied. “And he held us up for money. I offered five, and he demanded six, plus drugs.”
“Drugs?” Henriksen was surprised.
“Wait, I thought the IRA didn’t approve of drug trafficking,” Brightling objected.
“We live in a practical world. The IRA worked for years to eliminate drug dealers throughout Ireland—mainly kneecappings, to make the action very public. That was a psychological and political move on his part. Perhaps now he entertains the idea as a continuing source of income for his operations,” Dmitriy explained. The morality of the issue didn’t seem very important to anyone at the table.
“Yeah, well, I suppose we can entertain that request,” Brightling said, with a small measure of distaste. “Kneecappings? What does that mean?”
“You take a pistol,” Bill explained, “and place it behind the knee, then you fire forward. It blows the kneecap to smithereens. Painful, and permanently crippling. It’s how they used to deal with informers and other people they didn’t like. The Protestant terrorists preferred a Black and Decker drill for the same purpose. It puts the word out on the street that you are not to be messed with,” Henriksen concluded.
“Ouch,” the physician in Brightling commented.
“That’s why they’re called terrorists,” Henriksen pointed out. “These days, they just kill them. Grady has a reputation for ruthlessness, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, he does,” Popov confirmed. “There’s no doubt that he will undertake this mission. He likes the concept and your suggestion for how it should be set up, Bill. There is also his ego, which is large.” Popov took a sip of his wine. “He wants to take the lead in the IRA politically, and that will mean doing something dramatic.”
“That’s the Irish for you—the land of sad loves and happy wars.”
“Will he succeed?” Brightling asked.
“The concept is a clever one. But remember that to him success means elimination of the primary targets, the two women, and then a few of the reaction team of soldiers. After that, he will doubtless flee the area and try to return to Ireland and safety. Just surviving an operation of this type is successful enough for his political purposes. To fight a full military action would be madness for him, and Grady is not a madman,” Dmitriy told them, not really sure he believed it. Weren’t all revolutionaries mad? It was difficult to understand people who let visions take control of their lives. Those who’d succeeded, Lenin, Mao, and Gandhi in this century, were the ones who’d used their visions effectively, of course—but even then, which of the three had really succeeded? The Soviet Union had fallen, the People’s Republic of China would eventually succumb to the same political-economic realities that had doomed the USSR, and India was still an economic disaster that somehow managed to hover in stagnation. By that model, Ireland was more surely doomed by the possible success of the IRA than it was by its economic marriage to Britain. At least Cuba had the tropical sun to keep it warm. To survive, with no natural resources to speak of, Ireland needed a close economic tie to someone, and the closest was the U.K. But that was off the dinner topic.
“So, you expect him to try a hit-and-run,” Bill asked.
Dmitriy nodded. “Nothing else makes tactical sense. He hopes to live long enough to utilize the money we’ve offered him. Assuming you will approve the increase he requires.”
“What’s another million or so?” Henriksen asked, with a suppressed grin.
So both of them regarded such a large sum as trivial, Popov saw, and again he was struck in the face with the fact that they were planning something monstrous—but what?
“How do they want it? Cash?” Brightling asked.
“No, I told them it would be deposited in a numbered Swiss account. I can arrange that.”
“I have enough already laundered,” Bill told his employer. “We could set that up tomorrow if you want.”
“And that means I fly to Switzerland again,” Dmitriy observed sourly.
“Getting tired of flying?”
“I have traveled a great deal, Dr. Brightling.” Popov sighed openly. He was jet-lagged, and it showed for once.
“John.”
“John.” Popov nodded, seeing some actual affection in his boss for the first time, somewhat to his surprise.
“I understand, Dmitriy,” Henriksen said. “The Australia trip was a pain in the ass for me.”
“What was it like to grow up in Russia?” Brightling asked.
“Harder than America. There was more violence in the schools. No serious crime,” Popov explained. “But lots of fights between the boys, for example. Dominance fights, as boys will. The authorities usually looked the other way.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“Moscow. My father was also an officer in State Security. I was educated in Moscow State University.”
“What major?”
“Language and economics.” The former had proven very useful. The latter had been totally valueless, since the Marxist idea of economics had not exactly proven to be an effective one.
“Ever get out of the city? You know, like Boy Scouts do here, that sort of stuff?”
Popov smiled, wondering where this was going, and why they were asking it. But he played along. “One of my happiest memories of childhood. I was in the Young Pioneers. We traveled out to a state farm and worked there for a month, helping with the harvest, living with nature, as you Americans say.” And then, at age fourteen, he’d met his first love, Yelena Ivanovna. He wondered where she was now. He succumbed to a brief attack of nostalgia, as he remembered her feel in the darkness, his first conquest . . .
Brightling noted the distant smile and took it for what he wanted it to be. “You liked that, eh?”
Clearly they didn’t want to hear that story. “Oh, yes. I have often wondered what it was like to live out there in a place like that, the sun on your back all the time, working in the soil. My father and I used to walk into the woods, hunting for mushrooms—that was a common pastime for Soviet citizens in the sixties, walking in the woods.” Unlike most Russians, they’d driven there in his father’s official car, but as a boy he’d liked the woods as a place of adventure and romanticism, as all boys do, and enjoyed the time with his father as well.
“Any game in the woods there?” Bill Henriksen asked.
“One would see birds, of course, many kinds, and occasionally elk—you call them moose here, I think—but rarely. State hunters were always killing them. Wolves are their main target. They hunt them from helicopters. We Russians do not like wolves as you do here in America. Too many folk tales of rabid ones killing people, you see. Mostly lies, I expect.”
Brightling nodded. “Same thing here. Wolves are just big wild dogs, you can train them as pets if you want. Some people do that.”
“Wolves are cool,” Bill added. He’d often thought about making one a pet, but you needed a lot of land for that. Maybe when the Project was fulfilled.
What the hell was this all about? Dmitriy wondered, still playing along. “I always wanted to see a bear, but there are none of them left in the Moscow area. I saw them only at the zoo. I loved bears,” he added, lying. They’d always frightened the hell out of him. You heard scores of bear stories as a child in Russia, few of them friendly, though not as antinature as
the wolf stories. Large dogs? Wolves killed people in the steppes. The farmers and peasants hated the damned things and welcomed the state hunters with their helicopters and machine guns, the better to hunt them down and slaughter them.
“Well, John and I are Nature Lovers,” Bill explained, waving to the waiter for another bottle of wine. “Always have been. All the way back to Boy Scouts—like your Young Pioneers, I suppose.”
“The state was not kind to nature in the Soviet Union. Much worse than the problems you’ve had here in America. Americans have come to Russia to survey the damage and suggest ways to fix the problems of pollution and such.” Especially in the Caspian Sea, where pollution had killed off most of the sturgeon, and with it the fish eggs known as caviar, which had for so long been a prime means of earning foreign currency for the USSR.
“Yes, that was criminal,” Brightling agreed soberly. “But it’s a global problem. People don’t respect nature the way they should,” Brightling went on for several minutes, delivering what had to be a brief canned lecture, to which Dmitriy listened politely.
“That is a great political movement in America, is it not?”
“Not as powerful as many would like,” Bill observed. “But it’s important to some of us.”
“Such a movement would be useful in Russia. It is a pity that so much has been destroyed for no purpose,” Popov responded, meaning some of it. The state should conserve resources for proper exploitation, not simply destroy them because the local political hacks didn’t know how to use them properly. But then the USSR had been so horridly inefficient in everything it did—well, except espionage, Popov corrected himself. America had done well, he thought. The cities were far cleaner than their Russian counterparts, even here in New York, and you only needed to drive an hour from any city to see green grass and tidy productive farms. But the greater question was: why had a conversation that had begun with the discussion of a terrorist incident drifted into this? Had he done anything to invite it? No, his employer had abruptly steered it in this direction. It had not been an accident. That meant they were sounding him out—but on what? This nature drivel? He sipped at his wine and stared at his dinner companions. “You know, I’ve never really had a chance to see America. I would like very much to see the national parks. What is the one with the geysers? Gold stone? Something like that?”