by Tom Clancy
The director of security for Hendley Associates was a forty-seven-year-old ex–Army Ranger named Bryce Jennings. Jennings was no stranger to the world of clandestine security. After the Army he spent a decade in the CIA protecting secure facilities for the Agency. In his security career he’d been bombed in Baghdad, shot at in Kabul, he’d fought off an attempted overrun of a special mission compound in Sana’a and another outside Manila, and he’d once help save the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia from an insider attack when a local police captain tried to kidnap him at gunpoint.
Jennings had seen a lot in his career, but he was happy to leave that behind now so that he could spend more time with his wife and young daughter back in the United States. He’d jumped at the chance to come back stateside to take this new position, but he solemnly guaranteed Gerry Hendley he would treat his responsibilities here in the building in Alexandria, Virginia, as seriously as he would were they in Alexandria, Egypt.
Ryan was buzzed in after a moment and he entered the small lobby and then dropped off his umbrella in a rack.
Bryce was behind the desk by the elevator. “Morning, Jack.” He’d tried calling him Mr. Ryan the first half-dozen or so days he’d greeted him, but Ryan corrected him each time. Finally Jennings relented, so now it was just Jack.
“Hey, Bryce,” Ryan said. “Nats and Phillies tonight if the rain moves out.”
“Damn right, I’ll be there. Phillies have been hitting, but we’ve got Gonzalez on the mound. No problem.”
Ryan was an Orioles fan himself, but he knew Jennings lived and breathed the Washington Nationals, and took his six-year-old daughter to every game he could when he wasn’t working.
As Ryan made his way to the elevator he said, “Good luck tonight, but the Orioles will be down for a double-header Saturday. You’d better pray for rain then.”
Jennings’s eyes narrowed, feigning seriousness. “You really ought to root for the home team, you know. Your dad, too.”
Jack entered the elevator and turned around. “Oh, we do. D.C. isn’t home for either of us, Bryce.”
Jennings shook his head as the doors closed.
After the Chinese attack on The Campus the sub rosa intelligence organization had become a smaller, leaner outfit, and their offices reflected this. Fewer than seventy-five men and women worked in the building, and half of these worked exclusively in the white side. The first two floors of the building were devoted exclusively to the financial trading business. The third floor housed IT for both entities, as well as conference rooms and a small break room. The top floor was the location of Gerry Hendley’s large executive office suite, as well as the offices of The Campus. An equipment locker and the company’s mainframe computer, as well as an operations center for The Campus, were housed in the secure basement of the property.
Jack’s elevator stopped on the second floor, and Gavin Biery stepped in and pushed the third-floor button. Gavin Biery was the IT director of The Campus, and as much as the operational side of the house hated to admit it, The Campus would not exist without him.
“Morning, Gav.”
“Welcome home, Ryan. You boys have a nice little vacay?”
Normally Biery supported Campus operations from his banks of computers here in Virginia, but the Vietnam op had come up quickly and Gavin hadn’t been involved. Even so, Gavin Biery was cleared for anything that happened to the Campus operators, so Ryan knew he didn’t need to keep quiet about the operation.
Jack said, “Oh, it was a blast. Our subject got murdered right in front of me. Ding and Sam got shot at, and Clark flattened a dude with a rental car. How was your weekend?”
The elevator dinged as it stopped, and the doors opened on Gavin’s floor. He stood there with his mouth half open, not sure if Ryan was serious.
Finally he said, “Sure am sorry I missed that op.”
Gavin had gone out with the team a few times in his career to provide computer support to their operations, and due to these limited forays into the field he considered himself something of a full-fledged spook. The rest of the team found this to be comical, although the computer geek had done an admirable job in the field.
“It’s your floor, Gav,” Jack said.
“Right,” Gavin replied as he stepped out into the third-floor hall, still not sure if Ryan was pulling his leg about what had happened overseas or not.
Jack headed to his fourth-floor office to drop his bag on his way to the kitchen, but as he walked up the hall he saw someone sitting on the edge of his desk. As he got closer he realized it was his cousin, Dominic Caruso. Jack hadn’t seen Dom in nearly three months. Dom was an operations officer here at The Campus, same as Jack, but the operators had all been off in different directions in specialized individual training, each on their own rotation around the world. Dom had stayed out on an evolution longer than the other men, and he and Jack hadn’t spoken or e-mailed each other in weeks.
The two men embraced. “Good to see you, cuz!” Caruso said.
After a post-embrace chest bump, a silly move they’d started doing as a joke, Ryan said, “You, too. Damn, Dom. You’ve been training a long time. Me and the other guys have actually been out working while you’ve been rolling around on a cushy judo mat somewhere.”
Caruso cocked his head. “Really? Gerry didn’t tell you?”
Now Ryan cocked his own head. “Tell me what?”
Caruso hesitated. Finally he said, “Never mind. If Gerry didn’t tell you, then you must not need to know.”
The truth was, Dom Caruso had been fighting his own battle in the past few weeks. A battle that had taken him from the Indian subcontinent to Central America and then to Europe, as he tried to stop a potentially devastating intelligence leak from falling into the hands of the Iranians. The rest of the team had been kept away from the situation, but Dom didn’t know until now that the others had not even been informed he’d been in harm’s way.
Hendley knew what Dom had been involved in, but apparently he’d kept the others in the dark. Operational security. He could already hear Hendley saying it as an explanation, and it did make sense, although it made Dom feel even more like he’d been swinging in the wind alone on his last operation.
Ryan said, “Tell me about it. You get into anything interesting?”
“Later,” Dom replied, not sure if he would say anything about it at all now. “I heard you guys were out on a job. Anything cool happen?”
Jack shrugged, then put his arm around Caruso’s shoulders. “Let’s grab a cup of coffee and I’ll fill you in.”
—
John Clark arrived in his fourth-floor office just after eight, and as soon as he put his briefcase down he picked up his phone and called Jack Ryan, Jr.’s office down the hall.
Jack answered on the second ring. “Hey, John.”
“I’m guessing Dom is in there shooting the shit with you.”
Jack chuckled. “We have a little catching up to do.”
“Right. Before you do that, send him down to me.”
“You got it.”
A minute later Caruso entered Clark’s office and shut the door behind him. The two men shook hands.
Clark said, “I meant to call you before you came in, but we had an in extremis situation come up last week.”
“Yeah, I heard. No details yet, but Jack was getting around to it. He doesn’t seem to be aware of what I’ve been up to.”
“Gerry and I have decided to keep some of the work we do here compartmentalized. You were working your last job as a singleton. When an operator is in the field as a singleton, there is no need to know among the other operators.”
Dom said, “I understand that.”
“Good.” The matter was settled, Caruso wouldn’t talk about his operation to the rest of the team. “How do you feel? Ready to get back to work?”
“Absolutely. I’m good to g
o.”
Clark said, “I need to fill you in on what went down in Vietnam. We have a nine a.m. meeting where we might get further marching orders on the subject.”
Dom pulled up a chair. “Let’s hear it.”
10
One year earlier
A motorcade of five armored luxury vehicles rolled up to the same outer perimeter checkpoint that mining director Hwang passed an hour earlier. The lead car handed over some credentials to the uniformed guard and soon all five vehicles were moving again along the virtually empty blacktop road, much faster than the entourage from the Korea Natural Resources Trading Corporation. They sailed through the other checkpoints without even slowing down, rising through the wooded hills toward their destination.
The motorcade stopped at the entrance to Residence No. 55, and eighteen men in total disgorged from it, all wearing gray military uniforms signifying them as officers of the Korean People’s Army. Their credos were checked here again by a large unit of armed guards, but only briefly, and soon the entourage had passed through the doors of the palace.
At the nucleus of this group was Lieutenant General Ri Tae-jin, a fit fifty-two-year-old who wore a chest full of medals and walked pridefully, chin first and shoulders back. His face was blank, void of emotion, though in the stony gaze a perceptive person might well notice an air of sadness.
Six of his staff remained in the entry hall; they were just along as escort, but they were not needed for today’s meeting. And six more stopped off in an inner chamber for consultation with politburo members in concurrent talks at the residence. Five men followed Ri through another guarded doorway, heading for the personal residence of the Supreme Leader.
They ascended a flight of stairs and entered the long main gallery hall, and here Ri glanced at a clock on the wall and saw he was right on time for his meeting with the Dae Wonsu, which meant to him he would probably have to sit and wait for only an hour or so. Ji-hoon’s father hadn’t been punctual himself, really, but Ji-hoon seemed to take exceptional pleasure in making people wait for him.
Halfway down the main gallery hall Ri and his entourage encountered a smaller group of men in civilian dress approaching from the living quarters of the Supreme Leader. There were five men in this group, and they were led by one of the residence’s beautiful young attendants. The lieutenant general identified one man in the group as the senior member because the attendant spoke to him, and the others walked behind. As he passed the man their eyes met, and Ri saw he was a small man with a bald head, a few years older than himself.
It bothered General Ri greatly that he did not recognize the man, because he’d obviously just left an audience with the Supreme Leader. If this bald-headed fellow had the ear of the Dae Wonsu and he wasn’t, at least, a general, then he was most definitely an important person. And if he wasn’t even in the military, Ri felt he had no excuse for not knowing the man’s file backward and forward.
Ri was the nation’s newly installed foreign intelligence chief, which meant there was no reason he would necessarily know every visitor to Residence No. 55—that would be a job for the Ministry of State Security, the domestic arm of North Korean intelligence—but with every generalship in the Korean People’s Army came the responsibility of deft political relationship-making. Ri knew the important people in this town, in this government.
But he didn’t know this little man.
As he walked he tilted his head toward an aide, who spoke without being spoken to, because he knew what his general wanted.
Softly he said, “Hwang Min-ho. Installed last week as the new director of Korea Natural Resources Trading.”
Ri nodded, as though he already knew this. He had heard the name, and he knew of the appointment. Ri had also heard of the order to have Hwang’s boss snatched from his house in his bedclothes and helicoptered up to a reeducation camp, and he imagined that bastard would be dead inside six weeks.
Reeducation complete, he thought to himself as he walked on.
The general wondered about this Hwang. “I want his file. Contact MSS. Generate a reason.” His voice echoed off the wooden flooring, and Hwang might have heard him had the footfalls of a dozen men and women not echoed along with it.
—
A few minutes later Ri had left the last vestiges of his entourage behind, and now he sat alone in a gilded office. He knew Choi had a dozen of these offices at a dozen palaces in the country, and he’d been to many meetings in this and other similar rooms, but never had he been left by himself in one.
This was strange.
He did not know why he had been summoned here today and then sequestered from his aides. Perhaps it was a formality, a way to welcome him into his new position at the Reconnaissance General Bureau, although that didn’t seem plausible. If that had been the case, surely there would be attendants and transcriptionists and photographers galore ready to witness the event.
So this was something else. But what? Ri had served in the military intelligence field for more than a quarter-century already, and he was a brilliant man, but at the moment he couldn’t come up with a scenario that made sense.
Although the man he would soon have an audience with held the power of life and death over every civilian in the nation, he wasn’t worried about himself in the least. He knew that if Choi wanted him dead, he wouldn’t be meeting with him personally.
Those things happened by proxy, as Ri Tae-jin was painfully well aware.
—
Lieutenant General Ri had received exactly two orders from the office of the Supreme Leader in the one week he had been in charge of the RGB. The first order was that Ri carry out the arrest of his predecessor. This he did reluctantly; he had worked with General Gang for more than a decade and quite liked the old man.
Gang’s “crime” was the recent failure of a long-range ballistic missile test. ICBMs like the one that had exploded over the ocean were the responsibility of the Korean People’s Army Missile Guidance Bureau, and General Gang’s Reconnaissance General Bureau wasn’t directly involved in making missiles fly. Several directors at MGB were arrested, but RGB was implicated as well, because a long-standing RGB plan to steal guidance software from a French aerospace company via a hacking operation had recently failed. Choi lumped that failure together with the unsuccessful missile test, and he ordered the directors of both the MGB and the RGB hauled out of their offices in disgrace.
The second message from Choi came down to Ri later that same day. It was a short, direct missive ordering Ri to put General Gang to death within twenty-four hours to pay for his disgrace.
At the bottom of the page, one additional word had been added to the order.
The word specified the manner of the execution.
Dogs.
Ri had sat alone in his office for fifteen minutes, stunned and sickened, with the order held loosely in his fingertips, until a ringing phone brought him back to life. It was a senior minister from Choi’s office—his words carried the weight of the Dae Wonsu—asking if the order had been understood.
There was no problem there; Ri understood the order perfectly. His old mentor was to be fed to a pack of seven starving dogs that were maintained at Chongjin labor camp for just such a purpose. He confirmed to the minister the order would be followed with utmost haste.
But there was something else. The minister directed Ri himself to monitor the execution in order to ensure it was carried out to the letter of the instructions.
Ri said he understood and would comply, but he knew the real reason he would have to travel to Chongjin and watch his friend and mentor die a horrific death before his eyes. He was being forced to watch the event because as the new director, his cooperation was to be encouraged, and the best way for that, Choi and his ministers had decided, was by him learning in detail what would happen to him if he failed in his duties.
It took a tremendous amount of horror
to impress the new director of the North Korean foreign intelligence service, but since the day of his director’s death by the gnashing teeth of seven dogs a week earlier, Lieutenant General Ri Tae-jin had had a recurring nightmare of the event. In his dream he was never the one in the pit, although that could easily be the reality if Choi lost confidence in his ability to execute the duties of his office. Instead, he was a witness to the execution.
His nightmare was virtually the same as the actual event.
As he sat in the gilded ceremonial office Ri’s mind drifted to the dog pit, and then it moved to one further horror. It became known at the RGB soon after Gang’s death that his family had been executed as well. His wife, his three adult children, and their wives and even their small children had all been taken to Chongjin and shot in the dead of night. No criminal complaint had been read to them, no explanation at all for why they had to die.
Ri had trouble pushing his impure thoughts about his society out of his head, but they cleared quickly when a group of transcriptionists, generals, bodyguards, and then finally the Dae Wonsu himself entered. Choi carried a snifter of Cognac in one hand and a handkerchief in the other. He wore his black Mao suit; Ri had seen him in nothing else save for a uniform he sometimes wore for purely military events. Ri also saw that Choi’s eyes were typically active, flashing around the room, both on the general in front of him and at random objects. Choi looked at a clock, a container of water, a painting of his father on the wall.
Without preamble he said, “You had no involvement over the failed operation to obtain the guidance software from France.”
Ri did not know if it was a question or a statement. He shook his head. “None, Dae Wonsu. I was not involved in our cyber-operations at all.”
Choi seemed to know this already. “General Gang’s failures do not cast a shadow over you. You have my full confidence.”
Ri bowed four times and thanked his Supreme Leader, who seemed content to watch him bow. Then Choi said, “Missile Guidance Bureau must do better, but General Gang had an opportunity to provide them with assistance, and he failed.”