by Tom Clancy
But there ought to be someone better, Jack thought, as the clock wound to his first appointment of the day, and it wasn’t his fault that there wasn’t. He checked his appointment sheet. The whole day was political bullshit ... except it wasn’t bullshit. Everything he did in this office affected the lives of American citizens in one way or another, and that made it important, to them and to him. But who had decided to make him the national daddy? What the hell made him so damned smart? The people behind his back, as he thought of it, outside the overly thick windows of the Oval Office, all expected him to know how to do the right thing, and over the dinner table or a low-stakes card game, they’d bitch and moan and complain about the decisions he’d made that they didn’t like, as though they knew better—which was easy to say out there. In here it was different. And so, Ryan had to apply himself to every little decision, even menus for school lunches—that one was a real son of a bitch. If you gave kids what they liked to eat, nutritionists would complain that they really ought to eat healthy twigs and berries, but for the most part, parents would probably opt for burgers and fries, because that’s what the kids would eat, and even healthy food, uneaten, did them little good. He’d talked that one over with Cathy once or twice, but he really didn’t need to. She let their own kids eat pizza whenever they wished, claiming that pizza was high in protein, and that a kid’s metabolism could eat almost anything without ill effect, but when cornered, she’d admit that put her at odds with some of her fellow professors at Johns Hopkins. And so what was Jack Ryan, President of the United States, Doctor of Philosophy in History, Bachelor of Arts in Economics, and a Certified Public Accountant (Ryan couldn’t even remember why he had bothered taking that exam), supposed to think, when experts—including the one he was married to—disagreed? That was worth another snort, when his desk buzzer went off and Mrs. Sumter announced that his first appointment of the day was here. Already Jack was wishing for a bummed cigarette, but he couldn’t do that until he had a break in his schedule, because only Mrs. Sumter and a few of his Secret Service detail were allowed to know that the President of the United States suffered, intermittently, from that vice.
Jesus, he thought, as he did so often when the workday began, how did I ever get stuck in here? Then he stood and faced the door, conjuring up his welcoming Presidential smile as he tried to remember who the hell was coming in first to discuss farm subsidies in South Dakota.
The flight, as usual, was out of Heathrow, this one in a Boeing 737, because it wasn’t all that long a hop to Moscow. The Rainbow troopers filled the entire first-class section, which would please the cabin staff, though they didn’t know it yet, because the passengers would be unusually polite and undemanding. Chavez sat with his father-in-law, politely watching the safety-briefing video, though both knew that if the airplane hit the ground at four hundred knots, it really wouldn’t help all that much to know where the nearest emergency exit was. But such things were rare enough to be ignored. Ding grabbed the magazine from the pocket in front and flipped through it in the hope of finding something interesting. He’d already bought all the useful items from the “flying mall” magazine, some to his wife’s pitying amusement.
“So, the little guy’s walking better?” Clark asked.
“You know, the enthusiasm he has for it is kinda funny, the big grin every time he makes it from the TV to the coffee table, like he’s won the marathon, got a big gold medal, and a kiss from Miss America on his way to Disney World.”
“The big things are made up of a lot of little things, Domingo,” Clark observed, as the aircraft started its takeoff run. “And the horizon’s a lot closer when you’re that short.”
“I suppose, Mr. C. Does seem kinda amusing, though ... and kinda cute,” he allowed.
“Not bad duty being the father of a little guy, is it?”
“I got no complaints,” Chavez agreed, leaning his seat back now that the gear was up.
“How’s Ettore working out?” Back to business, Clark decided. This grandpa stuff had its limitations.
“He’s in better shape now. Needed about a month to get caught up. He took some razzing, but he handled it just fine. You know, he’s smart. Good tactical instincts, considering he’s a cop and not a soldier.”
“Being a cop in Sicily isn’t like walking a beat on Oxford Street in London, you know?”
“Yeah, guess so,” Chavez agreed. “But on the simulator he hasn’t made a single shoot/no-shoot mistake yet, and that’s not bad. The only other guy who hasn’t blown one is Eddie Price.” The computerized training simulator back at Hereford was particularly ruthless in its presentation of possible tactical scenarios, to the point that in one a twelve-year-old picked up an AK-74 and hosed you if you didn’t pay close enough attention. The other nasty one was the woman holding the baby who’d just happened to pick up a pistol from a dead terrorist and turn innocently to face the incoming Men of Black. Ding had taken her down once, to find a Cabbage Patch doll on his desk the next morning with a packet of McDonald’s ketchup spread across the face. The RAINBOW troopers had a lively, if somewhat perverse, institutional sense of humor.
“So, what exactly are we supposed to be doing?”
“The old Eighth Chief Directorate of the KGB, their executive protective service,” John explained. “They’ve got worries about domestic terrorists—from the Chechens, I guess, and other internal nationalities who want out of the country. They want us to help train up their boys to deal with them.”
“How good are they?” Ding asked.
RAINBOW SIX shrugged. “Good question. The personnel are former KGB types, but with Spetsnaz training, so, probably career people as opposed to two-year in-and-outs in the Red Army. All probably titular commissioned officers, but with sergeants’ duties. I expect they’ll be smart, properly motivated, probably in decent physical shape, and they’ll understand the mission. Will they be as good as they need to be? Probably not,” John thought. “But in a few weeks we ought to be able to point them in the right direction.”
“So mainly we’re going to be training up their instructors?”
Clark nodded. “That’s how I read it, yeah.”
“Fair enough,” Chavez agreed, as the lunch menu appeared. Why was it, he wondered, that airline food never seemed to have what you wanted? This was dinner food, not lunch food. What the hell was wrong with a cheeseburger and fries? Oh, well, at least he could have a decent beer. The one thing he’d come to love about life in the UK was the beer. There wouldn’t be anything like it in Russia, he was sure.
Sunrise in Beijing was as drab as the polluted air could make it, Mark Gant thought. For some reason he’d slipped out of synch with the local time, despite the black capsule and planned sleep. He’d found himself awake just at first light, which fought through air that was as bad as Los Angeles on its worst-ever day. Certainly there was no EPA in the PRC, and this place didn’t even have much in the way of automobiles yet. If that ever happened, China might solve its local population problem with mass gassing. He hadn’t been around enough to recognize this as a problem of Marxist nations—but there weren’t many of them left to be examples, were there? Gant had never smoked—it was a vice largely removed from the stock-trading community, where the normal working stress was enough of a killer that they needed few others—and this degree of air pollution made his eyes water.
He had nothing to do and lots of time in which to do it—once awake he was never able to escape back into sleep—so he decided to flip on his reading light and go over some documents, most of which he’d been given without any particular expectation that he would read them. The purpose of diplomacy, Commander Spock had once said on Star Trek, was to prolong a crisis. Certainly the discourse meandered enough to make the Mississippi River look like a laser beam, but like the Father of Waters, it eventually had to get downstream, or downhill, or wherever the hell it was that rivers went. But this morning—what had awakened him? He looked out the window, seeing the orange-pink smudge beginning
to form at the horizon, backlighting the buildings. Gant found them ugly, but he knew he just wasn’t used to them. The tenements of Chicago weren’t exactly the Taj Mahal, and the wood-frame house of his youth wasn’t Buckingham Palace. Still, the sense of different-ness here was overpowering. Everywhere you looked, things seemed alien, and he wasn’t cosmopolitan enough to overcome that feeling. It was like a background buzz in the Muzak, never quite there, but never gone away either. It was almost a sense of foreboding, but he shook it off. There was no reason to feel anything like that. He didn’t know that he would be proven wrong very soon.
Barry Wise was already up in his hotel room, with breakfast coming—the hotel was one of an American chain, and the breakfast menu approximately American as well. The local bacon would be different, but even Chinese chickens laid real eggs, he was sure. His previous day’s experiment with waffles hadn’t worked out very well, and Wise was a man who needed a proper breakfast to function throughout the day.
Unlike most American TV correspondent/reporters, Wise looked for his own stories. His producer was a partner, not a boss-handler. He credited that fact for his collection of Emmy awards, though his wife just grumbled about dusting the damned things behind the basement bar.
He needed a fresh new story for today. His American audience would be bored with another talking-head-plus-B-roll piece on the trade negotiations. He needed some local color, he thought, something to make the American people feel as one with the Chinese people. It wasn’t easy, and there’d been enough stories on Chinese restaurants, which was the only Chinese thing with which most Americans were familiar. What, then? What did Americans have in common with the citizens of the People’s Republic of China? Not a hell of a lot, Wise told himself, but there had to be something he could use. He stood when breakfast arrived, looking out the picture windows as the waiter wheeled the cart close to the bed. It turned out that they’d goofed on his order, ham instead of bacon, but the ham looked okay and he went with it, tipping the waiter and sitting back down.
Something, he thought, pouring his coffee, but what? He’d been through this process often enough. The writers of fiction often chided reporters for their own sort of “creativity,” but the process was real. Finding stuff of interest was doubly hard for reporters, because, unlike novelists, they couldn’t make things up. They had to use reality, and reality could be a son of a bitch, Barry Wise thought. He reached for his reading glasses in the drawer of the night table and was surprised to see ...
Well, it wasn’t all that surprising. It was a matter of routine in any American hotel, a Bible left there by the Gideon Society. It was only here, probably, because the hotel was American-owned and -operated, and they had a deal with the Gideon people ... but what a strange place to find a Bible. The People’s Republic wasn’t exactly overrun with churches. Were there Christians here? Hmph. Why not find out? Maybe there was a story in that.... Better than nothing, anyway. With that semi-decided, he went back to breakfast. His crew would be waking up about now. He’d have his producer look around for a Christian minister, maybe even a Catholic priest. A rabbi was too much to hope for. That would mean the Israeli embassy, and that was cheating, wasn’t it?
How was your day, Jack?" Cathy asked.
The night was an accident. They had nothing to do, no political dinner, no speech, no reception, no play or concert at the Kennedy Center, not even an intimate party of twenty or thirty on the bedroom level of the residence portion of the White House, which Jack hated and Cathy enjoyed, because they could invite people they actually knew and liked to those, or at least people whom they wanted to meet. Jack didn’t mind the parties as such, but he felt that the bedroom level of The House (as the Secret Service called it, as opposed to the other House, sixteen blocks down the street) was the only private space he had left—even the place they owned at Peregrine Cliff on Chesapeake Bay had been redone by the Service. Now it had fire-protection sprinklers, about seventy phone lines, an alarm system like they used to protect nuclear-weapon storage sites, and a new building to house the protective detail who deployed there on the weekends when the Ryans decided to see if they still had a house to retreat to when this official museum got to be too much.
But tonight there was none of that. Tonight they were almost real people again. The difference was that if Jack wanted a beer or drink, he couldn’t just walk to the kitchen and get it. That wasn’t allowed. No, he had to order it through one of the White House ushers, who’d either take the elevator down to the basement-level kitchen, or to the upstairs bar. He could, of course, have insisted and walked off to make his own, but that would have meant insulting one of the ushers, and while these men, mainly black (some said they traced their lineage back to Andrew Jackson’s personal slaves), didn’t mind, it seemed unnecessarily insulting to them. Ryan had never been one to have others do his work, however. Oh, sure, it was nice to have his shoes shined every night by some guy who didn’t have anything else to do, and who drew a comfortable government salary to do it, but it just seemed unmanly to be fussed over as if he were some sort of nobleman, when in fact his father had been a hardworking homicide detective on the Baltimore city police force, and he’d needed a government scholarship (courtesy of the United States Marine Corps) to get through Boston College without having his mom take a job. Was it his working-class roots and upbringing? Probably, Ryan thought. Those roots also explained what he was doing now, sitting in an easy chair with a drink in his hand, watching TV, as though he were a normal person for a change.
Cathy’s life was actually the least changed in the family, except that every morning she flew to work on a Marine Corps VH-60 Blackhawk helicopter, to which the taxpayers and the media didn’t object—not after SANDBOX, also known as Katie Ryan, had been attacked in her daycare center by some terrorists. The kids were off watching televisions of their own, and Kyle Daniel, known to the Secret Service as SPRITE, was asleep in his crib. And so, that Dr. Ryan—code name SURGEON—was sitting in her own chair in front of the TV, going over her patient notes and checking a medical journal as part of her never-ending professional education.
“How are things at work, honey?” SWORDSMAN asked SURGEON.
“Pretty good, Jack. Bernie Katz has a new granddaughter. He’s all bubbly about it.”
“Which kid?”
“His son Mark—got married two years ago. We went, remember?”
“That’s the lawyer?” Jack asked, remembering the ceremony, in the good old days, before he’d been cursed into the Presidency.
“Yeah, his other son, David, is the doctor—up at Yale, on the faculty, thoracic surgeon.”
“Have I met that one?” Jack couldn’t remember.
“No. He went to school out west, UCLA.” She turned the page in the current New England Journal of Medicine, then decided to dog-ear it. It was an interesting piece on a new discovery in anesthesia, something worth remembering. She’d talk about it at lunch with one of the professors. It was her custom to lunch with her colleagues in different fields, to keep current on what was going on in medicine. The next big breakthrough, she thought, would be in neurology. One of her Hopkins colleagues had discovered a drug that seemed to make damaged nerve cells regrow. If it panned out, that was a Nobel Prize. It would be the ninth hanging on the trophy wall of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her work with surgical lasers had won her a Lasker Public Service Award—the highest such award in American medicine—but it hadn’t been fundamental enough for a trip to Stockholm. That was fine with her. Ophthalmology wasn’t that sort of field, but fixing people’s sight was pretty damned rewarding. Maybe the one good thing about Jack’s elevation and her attendant status as First Lady was that she’d have a real shot at the Directorship of the Wilmer Institute if and when Bernie Katz ever decided to hang it up. She’d still be able to practice medicine—that was something she never wanted to give up—and also be able to oversee research in her field, decide who got the grants, where the really important exploratory wo
rk was, and that, she thought, was something she might be good at. So, maybe this President stuff wasn’t a total loss.
Her only real beef was that people expected her to dress like a supermodel, and while she had always dressed well, being a clotheshorse had never appealed to her. It was enough, she figured, to wear nice formal gowns at all the damned formal affairs she had to attend (and not get charged for it, since the gowns were all donated by the makers). As it was, Women’s Wear Daily didn’t like her normal choice of clothing, as though her white lab coat was a fashion statement—no, it was her uniform, like the Marines who stood at the doors to the White House, and one she wore with considerable pride. Not many women, or men, could claim to be at the very pinnacle of their profession. But she could. As it was, this had turned into a nice evening. She didn’t even mind Jack’s addiction to The History Channel, even when he grumbled at some minor mistake in one of their shows. Assuming, she chuckled to herself, that he was right, and the show was wrong.... Her wineglass was empty, and since she didn’t have any procedures scheduled for the next day, she waved to the usher for a refill. Life could have been worse. Besides, they’d had their big scare with those damned terrorists, and with good luck and that wonderful FBI agent Andrea Price had married, they’d survived, and she didn’t expect anything like that to happen again. Her own Secret Service detail was her defense against that. Her own Principal Agent, Roy Altman, inspired the same sort of confidence at his job that she did at hers, Cathy judged.
“Here you go, Dr. Ryan,” the usher said, delivering the refilled glass.
“Thank you, George. How are the kids?”
“My oldest just got accepted to Notre Dame,” he answered proudly.
“That’s wonderful. What’s she going to major in?”