by Tom Clancy
It wasn’t just Paul Hood resigning that depressed him, though that was part of the problem. It was ironic. Two and a half years ago, Rodgers had found it difficult to report to the man — a civilian who had been attending fund-raisers with movie stars while Rodgers was chasing Iraq out of Kuwait. But Hood had proven himself a steady, politically savvy manager. Rodgers was going to miss the man and his leadership.
Dressed in a loose-fitting gray sweat suit and Nikes, Rodgers shifted carefully on the leather sofa. He slumped back slowly. Just two weeks before, he’d been captured by terrorists in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. The second- and third-degree burns he’d suffered during torture were still not completely healed. Neither were the internal wounds.
Rodgers’s gaze had wandered. He looked back at the TV, profound sadness in his light brown eyes. He was watching Vera Cruz, one of Cooper’s last films. He was playing a former Civil War officer who went south of the border to work as a mercenary and ended up embracing the cause of local revolutionaries. Strength, dignity, and honor — that was Coop.
That used to be Mike Rodgers, he reflected sadly.
He’d lost more than some flesh and his freedom in Lebanon. Being strung up in a cave and burned with a blowtorch had cost him his confidence. And not because he’d been afraid to die. He believed passionately in the Viking code, that the process of death began with the moment of birth, and that death in combat was the most honorable way of reaching one’s inevitable end. But he was nearly denied that. Extreme pain, like a high fever, robs the mind of orderliness. The calm and collected torturer becomes the voice of reason and tells the mind where to touch down. And Rodgers was perilously close to that point, to telling the terrorists how to operate the Regional Op-Center they’d captured.
That’s why Rodgers needed Gary Cooper. Not to heal his soul — he didn’t think that was possible. He’d seen his breaking point, and he could never lose that knowledge, that awareness of his own limitations. It reminded him of the first time he twisted his ankle playing basketball and it didn’t heal overnight. The sense of invulnerability was gone forever.
A broken spirit was worse.
What Mike Rodgers needed now was to try to prop up the confidence his captors had taken from him. Fortify himself enough to run Op-Center until the president decided on a replacement for Paul Hood. Then he could make decisions about his own future.
Rodgers looked back at the TV screen. Movies had always been a haven for him, a source of nourishment. When his alcoholic father used to punch the hell out of him — not just hit but punch, with his Yale class ring — young Mike Rodgers would get on his bicycle, go to the local movie theater, pay his twenty-five cents, and crawl into a Western or war film or historical epic. Over the years, he modeled his morality, his life, his career after the characters played by John Wayne and Charlton Heston and Burt Lancaster.
He couldn’t remember a time when any of them came close to breaking under torture, though. He felt very alone.
Coop had just rescued a Mexican girl who was being abused by renegade soldiers when the cordless phone rang. Rodgers picked it up.
“Hello?”
“Mike, thank God you’re in—”
“Paul?”
“Yeah. Listen,” Hood said. “I’m inside the United Nations Correspondents’ room across from the Security Council chambers. Four guards have just been gunned down in the corridor.”
Rodgers sat up. “By whom?”
“I don’t know,” Hood said. “But it looks like the people who did it went inside.”
“Where’s Harleigh?” Rodgers asked.
“She’s in there,” Hood said. “Most of the members of the Security Council and the entire string ensemble were in the chambers.”
Rodgers grabbed the remote, switched off the DVD, and turned on CNN. Reporters were live at the United Nations. It didn’t sound as if they knew much about what was going on.
“Mike, you know what the security setup is here,” Hood said. “If this is a multinational hostage situation, depending on who the perpetrators are, the UN could argue about jurisdiction for hours before they even address the issue of getting the people out.”
“Understood,” Rodgers said. “I’ll call Bob and put him on this. Are you on your cell phone?”
“Yes.”
“Keep me apprised when you can,” Rodgers said.
“All right,” Hood replied. “Mike—”
“Paul, we’re going to take care of this,” Rodgers assured him. “You know there’s usually some kind of cooling-down period immediately after a takeover. Demands stated, attempts to negotiate. We won’t waste any of that time. You and Sharon just have to try and stay calm.”
Hood thanked him and hung up. Rodgers turned up the volume on the TV, listening as he rose slowly. The newscaster had no idea who had driven the van or why they’d attacked the United Nations. There had been no official announcement, and no communication from the five people who’d apparently gone into the Security Council chambers.
Rodgers shut off the television. While the general headed to his bedroom to dress, he punched in Bob Herbert’s mobile phone number. Op-Center’s intelligence chief was at dinner with Andrea Fortelni, a deputy assistant secretary of state. Herbert hadn’t dated much in the years since his wife was killed in Beirut, but he was a chronic intel collector. Foreign governments, his own government, it didn’t matter. As in the Japanese movie Rashomon—which was the only thing besides sushi and The Seven Samurai that Rodgers enjoyed from Japan — there was rarely any truth in government affairs. Just different perspectives. And professional that Herbert was, he liked having as many perspectives as possible.
Herbert was also a man who was devoted to his friends and coworkers. When Rodgers called to tell him what had happened, Herbert said he’d be at Op-Center within the half hour. Rodgers told him to have Matt Stoll come in as well. They might need to get into UN computers, and Matt was a peerless hacker. Meanwhile, Rodgers said that he’d call Striker and put them on yellow alert, in case they were needed. Along with the rest of Op-Center, the elite, twenty-one-person rapid-deployment force was based at the FBI Academy in Quantico. They could get to the United Nations in well under an hour if necessary.
Rodgers hoped the precautions would not be necessary. Unfortunately, terrorists who started out with murder had nothing to lose by killing again. Besides, for nearly half a century, terrorism had proven impervious to conciliatory, United Nations-style diplomacy.
Hope, he thought bitterly. What was it some play-wright or scholar had once written? That hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn’t permanent.
Rodgers finished dressing, then hurried into the fading light and climbed into his car. His own concerns were forgotten as he headed south along the George Washington Memorial Parkway to Op-Center.
To help rescue a girl from renegades.
ELEVEN
Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland
Saturday, 8:37 P.M.
Forty years ago, at the peak of the Cold War, the nondescript, two-story building in the northeast corner of Andrews Air Force Base was a ready room. It was the staging area for elite flight crews known as the Ravens. In the event of a nuclear attack, it would have been the job of the Ravens to evacuate key government and military officials from Washington, D.C., and relocate them in an underground facility in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
But the ivory-colored building was not a monument to another era. There were gardens in the dirt patches where soldiers used to drill, and the seventy-eight people who worked here were not all in uniform.
They were handpicked tacticians, generals, diplomats, intellience analysts, computer specialists, psychologists, reconnaissance experts, environmentalists, attorneys, and press liaisons who worked for the National Crisis Management Center.
After a two-year tooling-up period overseen by interim director Bob Herbert, the former ready room became a high-tech Operations Center designed to interface with and assist the White
House, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the State Department, the Department of Defense, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Interpol, and numerous foreign intelligence agencies in the management of domestic and international crises. However, after single-handedly defusing the crises in North Korea and Russia, Op-Center proved itself uniquely qualified to monitor, initiate, or manage operations worldwide.
All of that had happened during Paul Hood’s watch.
General Mike Rodgers stopped his Jeep at the security gate. An Air Force guard stepped from the booth. Though Rodgers was not in uniform, the young sergeant saluted and raised the iron bar. Rodgers drove through.
Although it was Paul Hood who had run the show, Rodgers had been a hands-on participant in every decision and in several of the military actions. He was eager to handle the crisis at hand, especially if they could work this in the way he knew best: independently and covertly.
Rodgers parked and jogged as quickly as his tight bandages would allow. He passed through the keypad entry on the ground floor of Op-Center. After greeting the armed guards seated behind the bulletproof Lexan, Rodgers hurried through the first-floor administrative level. The real activity of Op-Center took place in the secure, below-ground facility.
Emerging in the heart of Op-Center, known as the bullpen, Rodgers moved quickly through the checkerboard of cubicles to the executive wing. The offices were arrayed in a semicircle on the north side of the facility. He bypassed his own office and went directly to the conference room, which attorney Lowell Coffey III had dubbed “the Tank.”
The walls, floor, door, and ceiling of the Tank were all covered with sound-absorbing strips of mottled gray and black Acoustix; behind the strips were several layers of cork, a foot of concrete, and more Acoustix. In the midst of the concrete, on all six sides of the room, was a pair of wire grids that generated vacillating audio waves. Electronically, nothing could enter or leave the room. In order to receive calls from his cell phone, Rodgers had to stop and program the phone to forward calls to his office and then to here.
Bob Herbert was already there, along with Coffey, Ann Farris, Liz Gordon, and Matt Stoll. All had been off duty but came in so that the weekend night crew could continue to attend to regular Op-Center business. The concern everyone felt was palpable.
“Thanks for coming,” Rodgers said as he swung into the room. He shut the door behind him and took his seat at the head of the oblong mahogany table. There were computer stations at either end of the table and telephones at each of the twelve chairs.
“Mike, you spoke with Paul?” Ann asked.
“Yes.”
“How is he?” she asked.
“Paul and Sharon are both worried,” Rodgers said curtly.
The general kept his conversations with Ann as short as possible with as little eye contact as possible. He didn’t care for the press, and he didn’t like spinning it. His idea of press relations was to tell the truth or to say nothing. But above all, he didn’t approve of Ann’s fascination with Paul Hood. It was partly a moral issue — Hood was married — and partly a practical one. They all had to work together. Sexual chemistry was unavoidable, but “Dr.” Farris never took off her lab coat when she was around Hood.
If Ann noticed, she didn’t react.
“I told Paul we’d let him know when we have something,” Rodgers said. “But I don’t want to call unless it’s absolutely necessary. If Paul doesn’t get evacuated, he may try to get closer to the situation. I don’t want the phone beeping while he’s got his ear to a closed door.”
“Besides which,” Stoll said, “that line’s not exactly secure.”
Rodgers nodded. He looked over at Herbert. “I phoned Colonel August on the way over. He’s got Striker on yellow alert and is checking the DOD database for everything they’ve got on the United Nations complex.”
“The CIA did a pretty thorough job of mapping the place while it was going up,” Herbert said. “I’m sure there’ll be a lot on file.”
Well-dressed attorney Lowell Coffey III was seated to Rodgers’s left. “You understand, Mike, that the United States has absolutely no jurisdiction anywhere on the grounds of the United Nations,” he pointed out. “Not even the NYPD can go in there without being asked.”
“I understand,” Rodgers said.
“Do you care?” Liz Gordon asked.
Rodgers looked at the husky staff psychologist who was seated next to Coffey. “Only about Harleigh Hood and the other kids in the Security Council chamber,” he replied.
Liz looked like she wanted to say something. She didn’t. She didn’t have to. Rodgers could see the disapproval in her expression. When he came back from the Middle East, she’d talked to him about not taking out his anger and despair on other targets. He didn’t think he was. These people, whoever they were, had earned his anger on their own.
Rodgers turned to Herbert, who was sitting to his right. “Is there any intel on whoever did this?”
Herbert sat forward in his wheelchair. “Nothing,” said the balding intelligence chief. “The perps came in with a van. We got the license number off the TV and chased it down to the rental car agency. The guy it was rented to, Ilya Gaft, is a fake.”
“He had to show a driver’s license to the clerk,” Rodgers said.
Herbert nodded. “And it checked out with the Department of Motor Vehicles until we asked for his file. There wasn’t one. A counterfeit license is pretty easy to get.”
Rodgers nodded.
“There was triple security on board for this soiree,” Herbert said. “I had a look at the comparable figures from last year’s bash. The problem is, they were all concentrated pretty much at the three drive-through checkpoints and in the square north of the United Nations. These perps apparently blew their way through the concrete barrier using a rocket launcher, then drove across the countyard and right into the damned building. Shot everyone they came up against before holing up inside the Security Council.”
“And there’s been no word from them?” Rodgers asked.
“Not a whisper,” Herbert said. “I called Darrell over in Spain. He called someone at Interpol in Madrid who is close to people at UN security. They got in touch immediately. As soon as they hear anything about what’s inside the van or the kind of weapons these guys used, we’ll know.”
“What about the UN? Have they said anything about this publicly?” Rodgers asked Ann.
“Nothing,” she told him. “No spokesperson has come out.”
“No statement to the press?”
Ann shook her head. “The UN Information Service is not a rapid-response force.”
“The United Nations’s not a rapid-response anything,” Herbert said disgustedly. “The guy Darrell’s friend at Interpol called — he’s a personal aide to a Colonel Rick Mott, who’s the head of United Nations security. The aide said that they hadn’t even collected the spent shells from outside the Security Council chamber yet, let alone checked them for fingerprints or provenance. And that was about thirty-five minutes after this whole thing started. They were just getting themselves organized to look at tapes from the security cameras and then go into a meeting with the secretary-general.”
“They’re good at meetings,” Rodgers said. “What about other tapes?” he asked Ann. “The news services must’ve gone after every tourist on the street, trying to get video of the attack.”
“Good idea,” she said. “I’ll have Mary make some calls, though at that hour, there probably weren’t very many tourists out.”
Ann picked up the phone and asked her assistant to run a check of what the networks and cable news services might have collected.
“You know,” Coffey said, “I’m pretty sure the police have surveillance cameras on some streets in New York. I’ll call the city’s district attorney and find out.” The attorney reached inside his blue blazer and slipped out his digital pocket address book.
Rodgers was staring at the table. Both Ann and Coffey were on the phone. But not enough was happening. They needed to do more.
“Matt,” Rodgers said, “the attackers had to have accessed the DMV computer at some point to put the fake license in.”
“That’s a pretty easy hack,” Stoll said.
“Fine. But is there any way we can track the hack backward to whoever did it?” Rodgers asked.
“No,” said the portly Stoll. “A trace like that is something you have to set up. You wait until they strike and then follow the signal back. Even then, a good hacker can run the signal through terminals in other cities. Hell, he can bounce it off a couple of satellites if he wants. Besides, for all we know, these people had someone on the inside.”
“That’s true,” Herbert said.
Rodgers continued to stare. He needed a history, a pattern, anything they could use to start building a profile. And he needed it fast.
“They’ve held these parties every year for five years,” Herbert said. “Maybe someone cased the thing last year. We should probably have a look at the guest list, see if anyone—”
Just then Rodgers’s phone beeped. He grabbed it, wincing as he strained the bandages around his right side. “Rodgers here.”
“It’s Paul,” said the caller.
Rodgers motioned for everyone to be quiet, then punched the speaker button. “We’re here,” he said. “In the Tank.”
“What are you hearing?”
“Nothing,” Rodgers told him. “No statements, no demands. How are you doing?”
“The phone rang a minute ago,” Hood said. “They’re sending up an evac team. Before they do, I want to try and see what’s going on.”
Rodgers didn’t like the idea of Paul moving around unannounced. Skittish security forces just arriving on the scene could mistake him for a terrorist. But Paul knew that. Paul also knew that if Striker were going to do anything to help get Harleigh and the other kids out, they needed intel.