Command Authority

by Tom Clancy

  Just days after Gerry Hendley agreed to the reactivation of The Campus, the five operations officers flew to Kiev, Ukraine, on board the Hendley Associates Gulfstream G550. As cover, The Campus used a company created and maintained for the purposes of providing legends to Campus operators in the field. The company, OneWorld Productions, billed itself as a new-media organization based in Vancouver, which reported on world affairs from a left-of-center perspective and distributed its stories to news outlets around the globe via the Internet.

  OneWorld Productions had a website, an actual office location with a receptionist in Vancouver, and had even published some pieces of reportage, although very close scrutiny of its online videos would reveal they were actually created by freelance journalists who had no idea all their work was for the purposes of backstopping a private intelligence agency.

  In addition to a veteran pilot and copilot, the Hendley Associates Gulfstream operated with help from their director of transportation, a no-nonsense ex–Navy medic named Adara Sherman. When in the air she served as a flight attendant, but she also worked as a team medic in the field, a security officer, and a general facilitator of all things having to do with both the flight and ground transport.

  Once Adara cleared the dinner plates out of the way, she helped the men go through some of the equipment they would be using on their mission. Of course they had cameras, iPads, and satellite phones with two-way communications capabilities—all items that any group of journalists wouldn’t be caught without—but they also had brought along several other items that would not hold up so well to close scrutiny by Ukrainian customs personnel.

  There was a case full of slap-ons, metallic boxes each not much larger than a box of matches, which held mini–GPS receivers. These gadgets were great for tracking vehicles via apps on the men’s phones and iPads.

  Also with them—and these certainly were not contraband, although they would be damn hard to explain—were several hobby-grade electric-powered radio-controlled cars specially designed as delivery vehicles for the slap-ons.

  The team had no firearms with them other than Adara’s short-barreled carbine and pistol, and a second of each, all concealed under one of many hidden access panels in the jet, where they would remain. That said, the four operations men of The Campus would have a few other weapons available to them while they were in Kiev. They each carried a multi-tool with a hidden four-inch switchblade. The pens they would carry in their pockets were made of hardened plastic and could easily penetrate clothing and skin, they wore necklaces made out of a covered wire that could be employed as a garrote, and even their satellite phones had an external battery that supplied very little extra juice to the phone, but actually served as a powerful stun gun that could incapacitate someone at contact distance.

  With Adara’s help, they hid the more clandestine items in the aircraft’s access panels just so they could pass through a customs inspection on landing. Then the men spent some more time on their laptops reviewing FalconView, a high-tech map system available to military and intelligence, and also available to The Campus, since Gavin Biery had accessed the files back before he’d lost access to the feed between Fort Meade and Langley. But even though their FalconView had not been updated in a few months, Gavin was certain it would still be a hell of a lot more helpful than Google Maps.

  As they raced across the Atlantic at more than four hundred knots, Clark looked at the aircraft’s position on the main monitor in the plush cabin. He said, “Touchdown in five and a half hours. Let’s try and catch a few hours’ sleep. We’re going to need to hit the ground running tomorrow.”

  —

  Jack Ryan, Jr., and Sandy Lamont walked up Redcliffe Street in Saint John’s, Antigua. There were still quite a few people about now at 10:30 p.m., and enough of them were white tourists so that Jack and Sandy didn’t stick out too badly, although Jack was worried about staying low-profile around here for long, especially with an untrained partner.

  They found the building with the shingle for Randolph Robinson; it was just an open ground-floor covered parking lot large enough for a dozen or so cars, and above it a single story of office suites. There was a gated fence around the property, but Jack quickly saw how he could easily scale the fence at a corner post.

  Ryan looked into the darkened empty lot and saw three large garbage containers sitting lined up against the stairwell. The lid was up on one of them, and he could see paper stacked on other trash.

  The two men turned a corner and found a food truck with a large group of people sitting around on milk cartons, eating salted fish and drinking coconut water. They each bought a drink, and then they kept walking so they could talk.

  Sandy said, “You can’t possibly filch all that garbage.”

  “We don’t have to.” Jack held up his phone.

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “I jump the fence, then I turn on my video camera. I grab a stack of papers and move through them as fast as I can. I just have to get a tenth-of-a-second look at each one. Then I send the video file to an archiving application I have. It will use optical character recognition to look at every frame of the video and archive every last number and word in a way I can search and reference it later.”

  “That’s bloody marvelous. How much time do we need?”

  Before Jack could answer, a black pickup truck drove by, and the driver and front-seat passenger eyed him slowly and carefully. Jack was certain it was the same vehicle he had seen earlier in the afternoon.

  Sandy hadn’t noticed, but Jack didn’t mention it, because the last thing he needed right now was a spooked partner. He could have canceled his plans for the evening, but instead he just told himself he’d keep a close watch on the road in case they came back.

  His eyes followed the truck till it disappeared around the corner, and then he answered Sandy’s question: “Depends on how much paper is in those cans. I’d say fifteen minutes, tops.”

  “What if somebody catches us?”

  Jack shrugged. “Can you run?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then let’s not let anyone catch us.”

  As they neared the building, Lamont asked, “How is it you know all this stuff?”

  Jack said, “I’m not an attorney, I’m not a CPA, and I don’t have a ton of experience like everyone else at Castor and Boyle.” He held up his phone. “Little tricks like this are force multipliers. They help me leverage my strength.”

  The actual collection of the data in the garbage cans went surprisingly smoothly. Jack climbed the fence when no one was in sight, then dropped down and raced to the cans. Two of the cans had no papers, but the other contained hundreds of documents, envelopes, and other relevant material. He reached deep into the can to hide his light from the street, then began quickly shuffling through the pages, keeping his phone pointed at them.

  Sandy walked the street out front. He was connected to Ryan through their phones, and other than his need to remind Ryan every couple of minutes that he should hurry up, he did a fine job as a lookout.

  Ryan made it back onto the street in ten minutes flat, and the two men walked west back toward their hotel.

  Sandy asked, “So are you covered in fish guts and other garbage?”

  “Randolph Robinson keeps a clean office. Some of his stuff was shredded, but like most people, he’s too lazy to shred it all. I got hundreds of documents, envelopes, pamphlets, and handwritten notes. Don’t know if any of it will do us any good, but it sure as hell won’t hurt.”

  They were halfway back to their hotel when Jack saw the trouble up ahead. The same black pickup truck—he could tell because it appeared to be about five years newer than the average vehicle on the street—sat parked just beyond the intersection. Inside were at least four men. Jack couldn’t be certain from this distance the exact number, but he could tell the guys he saw earlier had gone to pick up at least two more buddies.

  Jack was pretty sure that was bad news.

  Ryan kne
w better than to head back to the hotel. The last thing he wanted was for these guys to know where he was sleeping.

  There was a lively two-level bar between Ryan and the truck ahead. Jack said, “How ’bout a nightcap.”

  Sandy did not have to be persuaded.

  21

  As Jack Ryan, Jr., and Sandy Lamont crossed the street toward the entrance, Ryan noticed a second truck pass through the intersection just next to the bar. Its taillights immediately lit up, and Jack looked in the glass of a gift shop across the street just in time to see the vehicle turn down the alleyway behind the bar.

  “Oh, shit,” Ryan said softly. Sandy was ahead of him and did not hear.

  Jack realized he and Sandy would be surrounded once they got inside the building. He thought it over, considered just continuing on back to the hotel and calling the police, but for all he knew, the men watching him were the police.

  Ultimately, he decided to rely on the cover of the crowd, and he hoped like hell these guys, whoever they were, wouldn’t do anything inside the bar with all the witnesses.

  The bar was just a dive. There was a DJ on a podium and a little dance floor and then a bar area, and to the left of the bar was a rear exit.

  Sandy led the way, and as soon as they made it to the bar in the back of the room, Jack told Sandy to go ahead and order for them both. He turned his back to the bar and kept his eyes on the front door, but he also checked the back entrance every few seconds.

  Jack began playing this through in his head. He figured the men were some sort of local heat, hired by the lawyers and corporate services companies generally, but not tied to his situation specifically.

  Of course, he had to entertain the possibility he was wrong about this, and these dudes were here because he was the son of the President of the United States, and they had something more dangerous in mind.

  But he decided the first scenario was more likely. He and Sandy had been a little lackadaisical in their surveillance. Ryan realized if he were operating with John Clark or Ding Chavez, he would have put all sorts of operational security measures in place that would have avoided just such an event. But he’d come down here thinking this was some dry and drab business intelligence exercise, and he had nothing more to worry about than getting the runaround from a secretary who wouldn’t let him take a business card off a desk.

  Two men entered and stood at the front door. One had dreads, the other short hair and big muscles. They talked to the bouncer for just a moment, then started looking around. They made eye contact with Ryan seconds later, and they stood their ground by the door.

  Jack looked to the back entrance now. There was no one there, but he felt sure that even a third-rate crew of hired Rasta stoners from some shanty island village would know enough to cover the back door to box their quarry in.

  Jack gave up on the hope the men wouldn’t confront him in the public setting, and he moved on to the hope that they were here only for intimidation. “Sandy, I need to tell you something, and I need you to stay very calm when I do.”

  Sandy passed Jack a beer, and he brought his piña colada up to his mouth and began drinking it through a straw. The Englishman’s mannerisms didn’t give Ryan much hope he’d have a hell of a lot of assistance in the next few minutes, since he wasn’t aware of many bar fights won by men who ordered piña coladas.

  Ryan had to look at Sandy’s eyes over the pineapple spear. He said, “There are a couple of guys at the door watching us. They’ve been following us for a while.”

  Sandy started to turn his head. Jack said, “No. Don’t do that. I just need you to be ready to move toward that back door.”

  “You’re bloody serious?” He turned his head around slowly, a poor attempt to be covert while looking.

  “I’m guessing someone saw us in front of CCS’s office earlier in the day. Who knows, there might be some other below-board operation in that building who runs this outfit, hires them out to lean on anyone they don’t like the look of. I don’t expect any real trouble, but they are going to make a show, just to scare us.”

  Sandy saw them now. Two men at the front door. One had dreadlocks, his shirt was open to the waist, and he had a thick nest of necklaces around his neck. The other wore a soccer jersey; he had short hair and his black jersey barely constrained his thick muscles. “Yeah, well, they are already succeeding. What are we going to do?”

  He began sucking on his drink, as if the ounce of rum in it was going to calm his nerves.

  “We’re going to finish our drinks and head out the back. I think they will confront us, but let me do the talking. We’ll be fine.”

  “Why do you want to go into a bloody alley?”

  Jack had an answer to this. He didn’t want anyone seeing what he might have to do. He’d worked hard to have a low-profile life, and he was willing to risk an ass-kicking to maintain it.

  “We’ll be fine. Trust me.” As he said it, he realized he was pushing his luck with this, but he had the confidence in his physical abilities as well as his ability to talk his way out of whatever might arise.

  Sandy said, “Jack, have you forgotten who you are? You can pull out your phone, dial some secret number that I know you have memorized and, Bob’s your uncle, an aircraft carrier will appear in the harbor and whisk us both off to safety.”

  Jack would have laughed at Lamont’s master plan, except he was getting his mind in gear for what was starting to look like an inevitable confrontation.

  “I’m not calling anybody,” he said, his voice taking on a grave tone. “You and I are going to walk out the back door, head up the alley, and then go to our hotel.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then I will come up with another awesome plan.”

  “Right. Of course.”

  —

  A minute later, Jack and Sandy entered the alley. It wasn’t as dark as he had feared it would be; there were a couple of light poles as well as a glow coming from a clapboard-wall casino building that ran the length of the block on the other side of the single-lane alley.

  They turned to walk back to the hotel, but had made it only a few feet when two men stepped out of the shadows in front of them.

  “Good Lord,” Sandy whispered.

  These guys were young and fit. Jack pegged them as part of some local gang. They had tattoos on their arms that were obvious because they wore tank tops.

  Jack smiled and continued walking toward them. He scanned their hands and their waistbands for weapons, but he saw nothing. “Evening. Something we can do for you gents?”

  The taller of the two spoke with a thick West Indies accent. “You want to be telling us just why the fuck you are so interested in the office building you were snapping pictures of earlier today?”

  “Don’t know what you are talking about. We’re tourists.”

  “Ya ain’t no tourists, man. You’re down here sticking your noses where they don’t belong, and we don’t like that.”

  Sandy spoke up; his voice was cracked with fear. “Look, mate. We aren’t here for any trouble.”

  Another West Indian–accented voice spoke up, this one from behind. “Trouble’s here for you.”

  Sandy spun around in near terror now. Ryan had heard the door open behind them from the bar, so he just turned calmly and checked to confirm it was the two men he’d seen with the bouncer. His mind was switching into a different gear, he was calm, resigned to the fact these men were going to need to be dealt with, but taking some comfort in the fact his opposition seemed to be supremely confident they had the situation well in hand.

  Jack knew he could use that confidence against them.

  The man with the dreadlocks spoke now: “We’re here to make sure you boys go back home to wherever you came from and never return.”

  “No problem at all,” said Sandy.

  Dreadlock smiled, his teeth bright white in the lights of the alleyway. “We’re not gonna take assurances, white boy. We’re gonna put you two in the hospital so
you remember your mistake in comin’ here.”

  Dreadlocks was the leader of the group, that was plain to Ryan. He was just out of arm’s length now, and while he didn’t have any weapons, Jack knew he had to operate as if all four of them could produce some weapon quickly.

  Sandy’s hands were up in surrender now. “Completely unnecessary, gentlemen, I can assure you, your message has been received loud and—”

  Sandy broke into a run. All four men moved toward him reflexively, and this opened up Jack’s options. One of the tank-top men crossed right in front of him, so Jack fired out a right jab into the man’s jaw, knocking him unconscious and dropping him in the street. The other tank-top man recognized the threat; he was a few steps farther away, so he stopped his pursuit of the blond and spun toward the dark-haired and bearded American. While doing so he reached for a fixed-blade knife in a scabbard in the small of his back and punched out with his other hand.

  Jack closed the distance quickly, and he caught a glancing blow on the bridge of his nose. But before the Antiguan could draw his weapon, Jack was on him. He took him by his right forearm, put the man in a tight wristlock, and pushed his arm away at a forty-five-degree angle. As the man in the tank top screamed out, Jack stomped down on the inside of his knee, dropping the man onto his back in writhing agony next to his unconscious partner.

  The other two Antiguans turned away from Lamont to aid their colleagues. They approached Ryan with their own blades drawn; they shouted at him as they advanced up the alleyway.

  Jack softened his knees and lowered into a crouch. As the short-haired man in the soccer jersey neared and swung his knife, Jack ducked under his swing, spun around, slammed his back into the onrushing attacker, and grabbed the man’s downward-arcing arm. He twisted the arm, snapping it at the elbow, and the knife dropped to the ground.

  Dreadlocks tried to stab Ryan, but Ryan had put the man in the soccer jersey between himself and this final attacker. He controlled the wounded man by holding his arms high and pushing into him with his back, and this stifled the last armed man’s attempts to deliver a blow. Once the man with dreadlocks lowered his knife to switch hands, Jack pulled down on his prisoner’s arms, dislocating one of the man’s shoulders, and then he thrust backward, sending the man in the jersey into the air and crashing into his leader. This took Dreadlocks even more out of the offense and onto the defense. By the time he got his underling out of his way, the tall American was on top of him, swatting the knife away and blasting him with a three-punch combination to his face.