by Marc Cameron
“And Tabrizi,” Ryan said.
They exited the cave at the same time, Tabrizi carrying a clipboard, while Kazem carried a satchel over his shoulder. They walked to the stone building and went inside.
“I can’t be sure,” Ysabel said, “but I think that was Ayatollah Ghorbani in there. And he is bound hand and foot.”
“He must not be part of the conspiracy,” Dovzhenko said.
“Not all of it, anyway,” Ryan said. A plan was already forming in his mind.
Ysabel saw his face. “What?” she asked. “I know that look.”
Ryan took the satellite phone out of his pocket and unfolded the antenna, relieved when he got a signal. “First things first. We need to call in another strike.”
“Oh, no,” Dovzhenko said. “We are much too close. Your bombs will kill us all.”
Ryan shook his head. “I’m not suicidal. As soon as we know for sure the missile is here, we haul ass down the road.”
There was no time for anything but a direct call, so he punched in the number for the prepaid he knew Foley had with her as an added layer of security for these conversations. She answered immediately, then passed the phone to his father. It was good to hear the old man’s voice, but Jack refrained from calling him “Dad” in front of the Russian. He told him his plan, and then read him the GPS coordinates he got from the borrowed cell phone. “We’re moving forward to do a little recon,” he said. “I’ll call back in ten and give you a sitrep. If you don’t hear from me in fifteen, you should go ahead and send it.”
He thought he heard the old man choke up a little, so he added. “You’ll hear from me. I promise.”
Ryan ended the call and folded the antenna down at the same time Kazem and Tabrizi came out of the stone building. They were leading a man with his hands tied in front of him. He had a long white beard and wore the robes and turban of a cleric. Ysabel was right. It was Ayatollah Ghorbani.
Instead of returning to the cave and driving the launch truck outside in the open, Kazem pushed the cleric to a wooden table at the base of the light tree. Ghorbani railed at him, but the generator made it impossible to hear what he was saying. In any case, both Kazem and Tabrizi ignored him. Kazem set the leather case on the table and then opened the flap. All of them recognized it as the launch-control device.
“What is he doing?” Ysabel said. “He can’t launch from inside the cave.”
Tabrizi was staring at a phone in her open palm. She raised her free hand, held it there for a moment, and then, still focused on the phone, suddenly let it fall.
Jack looked at the road that disappeared over the next hill and realized too late what was happening. He raised his rifle and fired, killing Reza Kazem at the same moment he finished entering the code into the launch controller.
A searing light flashed in the adjacent valley. The Russian Gorgon streaked upward through the night sky in a bloom of orange and black. The guards, momentarily startled by the gunfire and the missile blast, regained their senses enough to return fire. Dovzhenko and Ysabel fired while Jack rolled onto his back and yanked the cell phone out of his pocket. He’d started a silent count the moment the missile fired and now justified the time with the passing seconds.
Rolling to his gun, he joined the fight, shooting one of the guards at the mouth of the cave as rounds snapped and cracked overhead. Dovzhenko shot Tabrizi as she picked up one of the fallen rifles. The other guard near the opening of the cave was already dead. The third fell a moment later, brought down by Ysabel. Jack had learned long ago that protracted gunfights were rare. This one ended quickly—and badly for the untrained guards. The sound of the humming generator settled across the valley along with the odor of burned metal from the rocket.
Ghorbani stood alone, blinking under the bright construction lights.
No other shooters ran from the cave, but Dovzhenko moved laterally, ordering the Ayatollah to walk toward him just in case.
Ryan moved the other way, keeping to the trees as he pulled the sat phone from his pocket. Ghorbani didn’t need to know he’d ever been there.
Foley picked up immediately.
“Missile launch at 12:06:32 Iran time,” Jack said. “We couldn’t stop it.”
65
“Dr. Van Orden,” Mary Pat Foley said, letting the cell phone fall to her side. Her face had gone pale. “How long will it take for a Russian 51T6 to reach a satellite passing overhead?”
“A little over three minutes,” Van Orden said.
“Mr. President,” Foley said, “we’re launch plus fifty-four seconds and counting.”
General Paul had Air Force Satellite Control Network near Colorado Springs on an open line in anticipation of this very event.
“Why don’t we move all our satellites if we’re not sure of the target?” Ryan asked.
“We could move any or all of ours, Mr. President,” Van Orden said. “But it’s a risk moving all that metal at once. It will take some time to do calculations so we don’t cause a collision ourselves. And we might move the wrong ones first.”
“Okay, gentlemen,” Ryan said. “I’m thinking you have about ninety seconds to pick me the correct satellite.”
Hardy sat at the conference table, hunched over a laptop computer with access to satellite information that was not available outside those with a specific need to know. His voice was calm and cool though he was surrounded by men and women who outranked him by factors of ten. “A launch actually helps us,” he said. “These Russian missiles travel at 5,328 miles per hour, while satellites orbit the earth at around 17,500 miles per hour. The 51T6 as we know it has max altitude of five hundred miles. Even if this is some new variant and we give it an extra hundred miles . . . To score a head-on kinetic kill, they’d have to account for”—he drummed his fingers on the table—“eight hundred forty miles of movement from the time the missile launched until it reaches . . .” He scanned the computer screen. “That leaves only five satellites within range.”
“Anytime now,” Ryan prodded.
“Two of them are Chinese, one Russian, one from Thailand, but none of them are big enough but this one—an ISR bird that I’ve never heard of.” Hardy looked up. He turned the computer toward the chairman. “This is it, General Paul. It has to be.”
“Let’s get it done,” Ryan said.
The chairman of the joint chiefs relayed the message to AFSCN at 12:09:12 Iran time, two minutes and forty seconds after missile launch.
“We don’t have long to wait,” van Damm said, stating the obvious.
Midshipman Hardy closed the laptop and then his eyes. His lips moved slightly, whispering a quiet prayer. Dr. Van Orden gave him a paternal pat on the shoulder. No one spoke. Few breathed. Everyone in the room, including Ryan, mumbled prayers of their own. All eyes eventually fell to General Paul. Fifty-four seconds later, the general leaned back in his chair and held up a thumb.
“Looks like we’re good, Mr. President,” he said. “AFSCN tracked an unidentified missile launched from Iran as it passed within a quarter of a mile from our ISR bird. Satellite signals are still being received five by five.”
Ryan got to his feet, prompting everyone else in the Situation Room to stand. “Midshipman Hardy,” he said. “Dr. Van Orden. I know it’s kind of a letdown after all this, but how about you come to my place for dinner?” He grinned. “It’s not far.”
66
Two days later, Senator Michelle Chadwick was in her kitchen, filling two bowls with butter-pecan ice cream. She wore a fawn-colored negligée and a pair of fuzzy slippers. “L’état c’est moi,” she said, licking the scoop before she dropped it in the sink. “No, Jack Ryan, you are not the state.” Her run-in with the President had left her feeling celebratory. Sure, he’d somehow convinced Yermilov to pull his troops back from the Ukrainian border, but the public still didn’t trust him. His smarmy ass thought he was so much smarter t
han everyone else. No, that wasn’t it. He thought he was better. More honest. Less corruptible. Less prone to the temptations mere mortals fell prey to. There was no one thing that Michelle Chadwick didn’t like about Jack Ryan—there were a million of them.
“Hey!” Corey yelled from the bedroom.
“Hold your horses,” she yelled. “I’m just getting the ice cream.”
“Forget the ice cream,” Corey said. “You’re going to want to see this.”
“What?” Chadwick said a moment later, flopping down on the bed beside her boy toy and handing him the bowl with the lesser amount of butter pecan.
When she looked up at the television, she nearly bit off the end of her spoon.
When Jack Ryan said he’d take their case to the highest court in the land, he’d not been talking about the Supreme Court. That son of a bitch meant the American people.
“. . . the danger of lies, telling them, believing in the echo chamber of social media,” Ryan said, from behind his desk in the Oval Office. “We could, as some nations have done, curtail free speech or criminalize sensationalism that is masked as satire. Congress could pass legislation that called for heavy fines or even prison terms for spreading lies—even when these lies are done with a wink and a nod toward entertainment. There is no question that many lies damage real people. And if real people are hurt, should not the government step in?
“My fellow Americans, you . . . we, are smarter than that. I believe we deserve better.”
As Ryan spoke, the screen split in half. Both images showed him sitting behind his desk, giving the same speech, but in one he wore a charcoal suit, in the other his suit was black. The screen split again into four and then six images. Ryan gave the same speech but in different suits and from different venues. One of them depicted expertly manipulated footage from the commencement address he’d given at the United States Military Academy at West Point the year before.
“Unfortunately,” all the Jack Ryan images said in unison, “technology makes deception far too easy.”
“Son of a bitch,” Chadwick whispered.
Corey put a hand on her knee. “What do you think he’s—”
“Shut up,” Chadwick said, pushing his hand away. “Just shut up.”
* * *
—
In the Oval Office, the real President Ryan stepped in front of the green screen to sit on the edge of the Resolute desk. Behind him, the images of him in various venues wearing different suits froze, and Ryan continued his address uninterrupted. The demonstration of manipulated videos was far better than any explanation he could have given.
“It is not always up to those in government to decide everything that is true and what is a lie. That responsibility falls to us as individuals. In this age of digital manipulation and artificial intelligence, voices can be mimicked so well that those closest to us believe it is the real thing. There are far too many who would use technology against us—too many foreign powers, and too many here at home, whose primary goal is not to joke or prank but to destroy and degrade. We cannot allow ourselves to be deceived. We must study, read, make informed decisions by weighing things for ourselves before we rush to judgment. And I’m not just talking to you, I’m talking to myself as well. Together, we must be vigilant . . .”
In the hallway outside the Oval, adjacent to the Roosevelt Room, Special Agent Marsh leaned in close to Gary Montgomery as Ryan wound up his address.
“POTUS never mentioned the actual doctored videos of him talking about hoarding vaccine or backing a coup in Cameroon. He never said a word about Russian bots.”
Montgomery grinned. “Like he said, Americans are smarter than that.” He paused, eyebrows furrowed, lips pursed. “Most of them, anyway . . .”
* * *
—
Two old men, fishing along the Sofiyskaya Embankment, were the first to see the body. One of the men was a former apparatchik and kept a bent and bony finger on the pulse of the present administration. Hungry fish had already begun their work, but he recognized the lipless corpse at once as Maksim Dudko, aide to President Yermilov. “What have you done, comrade,” he whispered to himself, “to end up fish food in the Moscow River?” Better not to know, he thought, and used his walking stick to push the bloated thing back into the swirling current.
* * *
—
Jack, Dovzhenko, and Ysabel crossed into Afghanistan with Atash Yazdani and his son, following the same smugglers’ route they’d used to enter Iran. The Wind of 120 Days, still blowing hot and strong, gave them cover from border security force surveillance.
Considering what happened on their last trip through Herat and the likelihood that they’d made some lifelong enemies, Ryan opted to fly on to Dubai. There were still plenty of Russian and Iranian operatives in the UAE, but the U.S. intelligence community was also strong there and provided more places to lie low than western Afghanistan.
Two case officers from CIA, who were also registered nurses, took custody of the Yazdanis. Public Law 110 would ensure that both father and son got new names and a new place to live. Medical treatments for Ibrahim’s cystic fibrosis would begin as soon as he’d seen a pulmonary specialist. Atash Yazdani would eventually be given help finding a new career, but as an engineer in Iran’s rocket and missile forces, he had enough information to keep debriefers from several U.S. intelligence agencies busy for months.
Jack’s part in all this was still a ticklish issue, so it was decided that CIA case officer Adam Yao, who’d worked with Ryan before, would make initial contact with Erik Dovzhenko, debrief him, get a feel for his veracity, and then put him on the FLUTTER before accepting him into the fold as double agent GP/VICAR.
Russia had provided nuclear missiles to Iran from the beginning, but as far as they knew, Dovzhenko was unaware of anything beyond the plot by Reza Kazem and General Alov to shoot down an American satellite. Ayatollah Ghorbani corroborated his report, with the stories of his daring rescue from the insane dissident who had murdered General Alov and kept him captive. Dovzhenko was a heroic, if plodding, SVR operative just doing his job. He’d pursued other dissidents into Afghanistan, where he’d lost them among the Taliban. Rather than returning directly to the embassy in Tehran, he was to fly back to Moscow along with his new friend, Ysabel Kashani.
They’d arrived in Dubai eight hours earlier than Dovzhenko had told his supervisors, and, after a lengthy surveillance detection run, met Yao in a suite at the Crowne Plaza Dubai. The CIA case officer stood in the corner of the room, chatting with Dovzhenko, making small talk—and observations on his new, though battle-tested recruit.
Jack and Ysabel stood in the front alcove by the door to give the two men a little more privacy.
Ysabel had changed from her headscarf and smock into jeans and a blue silk blouse that perfectly accented her olive skin.
She scuffed the tile floor with the tip of a white tennis shoe. “You okay?” she asked.
Jack nodded, meaning it, but feeling a little down just the same.
“I was pretty hard on you,” she said.
“So,” Ryan said, attempting to change the subject. “You’re going to work in Russia.”
She nodded. “For a while. That’s my expertise.”
“Dovzhenko is a good dude,” Ryan said. “Brave. Solid.”
“He is.” Ysabel looked up. “But we’re not . . .”
“I know,” Ryan said. “I’m just saying he’s a good dude, that’s all. And if you were . . . you know . . . that would be okay.”
“Listen,” Ysabel said. “Do you know the story of the Bibi Khanum Mosque in Samarkand?”
Ryan chuckled. “Can’t say that I do.”
“Well,” Ysabel said, “Tamerlane hired a Persian architect to design and build a mosque for his favorite wife, Bibi Khanum. It is said that this architect and Bibi Khanum fell so deeply in love that when the
Persian kissed her, it burned her cheek, leaving the imprint of his lips.”
Ryan raised a brow. “Okay.”
“What I’m saying, Jack”—Ysabel waved a hand low in front of her lap—“is don’t look for someone who only sets you on fire here. Find someone who burns your cheek with a simple kiss.”
Dovzhenko walked up before Ryan could respond.
“Hope I am not interrupting,” he said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder. “My case officer had to make a few calls.”
“Not at all,” Ryan said. “I was just on my way out. The fewer people that see me with you, the better.”
“Understood,” Dovzhenko said.
Ysabel leaned in, kissing Ryan on the cheek and then giving a little shrug. “See,” she said. “No burn there, my friend.”
Dovzhenko looked sideways at her. “What?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“It was an honor,” Ryan said.
“The honor was mine,” Dovzhenko said. “Two weeks ago, we may have tried to kill each other, and now . . .”
“You’re sure about this?” Ryan asked. “SVR counterintelligence line is going to work overtime trying to trip you up the moment you get off the plane.”
Dovzhenko glanced quickly to the left and right, and then leaned in with a secret. “We should probably not mention this to your friend, but if there is one thing I learned from my mother, it is how to beat a polygraph.”
Dovzhenko smiled and shook Ryan’s hand, drawing him close and patting him on the back in a brotherhood hug. “I feel like our paths will cross again, my friend.”
“Seriously,” Ryan said. “Maybe you should let us check this out through our channels before you return to Moscow. It may not be safe.”
“Ah, Jack Ryan, Jr.,” Dovzhenko said with a wry smile. “You know better than I, happiness does not come from safety.”
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