Command Authority

by Tom Clancy

  “I do not know.”

  “Is that something they have ever done before?”

  “Nein. Nothing like this. Tonight we had two GSG Nine and one Landespolizei officer killed. Three GSG Nine and three Landespolizei were wounded. We have never suffered such losses against the RAF.”

  It was several minutes more before Eastling and Ryan were allowed up to the third-floor flat. As they crossed the studio space to the stairs, they passed a lightly injured commando still receiving initial treatment from his teammates, and they saw blood, bullet holes, and broken glass all over the room.

  Upstairs, the Germans used the big flashlights on the tops of their guns to look for a light switch. They found one by the door, but the light above had been shot out or blown up by a grenade in the battle. Eastling himself turned on a lamp in the attached kitchen and pointed it toward the main room, casting long shadows across everything.

  Ryan waved his hand through the air to clear smoke still hanging, and he got his first good look at the room.

  The first body he came across was that of a young woman. She was ten feet from the entrance to the stairs, lying on her back and disfigured by the bullet wounds over her upper torso and head. In the lamplight diffused by smoke, she looked ghostlike. An automatic weapon was several feet away from her. Jack thought it likely this was her gun and it had been kicked out of her reach as the commandos took the room.

  He followed some men with flashlights down a hallway and into the bedrooms, and here he saw a total of eight more bodies. Four had guns still in their hands or near where they lay, and four more did not. The walls of one of the bedrooms were so peppered with holes there were places you could reach through into the living room. It was clear to Ryan much of this battle had taken place without the two warring sides even seeing each other.

  Jack looked at Eastling. “No survivors among the RAF?”

  Eastling shook his head in disappointment. “None at all.”

  “Shit.”

  All the dead were photographed where they lay and then dragged into the living room and lined up on the floor. While this took place, the police were already beginning their investigation.

  Jack and Nick started looking around themselves, but after just a few minutes the radio squawked. “Herr Eastling? Herr Ryan? Can you come to the last bedroom down the hall, please?”

  Eastling and Ryan walked to the smallest room in the house, the back bedroom. No bodies had been discovered in here, so they had all but ignored it on their first pass, but now, as Ryan stepped into the room and followed the path of flashlights, he realized why he and Eastling and been ushered in. There were two pictures on a small dressing table; they were smashed, and one was pocked with bullet holes now, but they clearly showed a young woman who matched the ID photo of Marta Scheuring.

  “Scheuring’s room,” said one of the BfV men.

  A search of the ten-foot-by-ten-foot space was already under way. There wasn’t much to look through, just a bed, a few tables, a pile of clothes in a basket in the corner, and a small closet stuffed with coats and other clothing.

  It took no time at all for the BfV men to find a hollow space beneath several loose floorboards under the bed. A BfV investigator pulled a silver aluminum briefcase from the compartment. It was secured with a simple three-number combination, but the German put it on the bed and opened the lock with a tiny pick while Ryan and Eastling peered over his shoulder.

  Inside the case were several notebooks and files. The detective shone his flashlight on the contents for the benefit of the Englishman and the American.

  “Well, hullo,” Eastling said, as he looked at it.

  Ryan leaned in and directed the detective’s flashlight toward a group of photographs.

  The first thing Ryan saw was a black-and-white photograph of Tobias Gabler, the first banker killed in Zug. The image looked as though it had been taken from a distance, but it was unmistakably the same man Ryan had seen in the news reports on Gabler’s murder. Under this was a picture of Marcus Wetzel. Ryan had no idea what Morningstar looked like, but the photo was helpfully marked with a white sticker upon which Marcus Wetzel’s name had been typed.

  Underneath this photo was a map of Zug, Switzerland.

  Next in the case was a one-page typewritten message on a sheet of white paper. At the top of the page was an H&K rifle over a red star, above which the letters RAF were displayed in white.

  The German said, “It is a communiqué. It looks official, I have seen these before.”

  “Would you mind translating it?” Eastling asked.

  “Ja. It says, ‘The nature of these attacks speak the language of reaction. We in the Red Army Faction will not allow those who traffic in the illegal monies that lubricate the wars against the people of Central America and Africa to live freely and in peace. We will show our solidarity with the guerrillas of the world and fight against the bankers who profit from the illegitimate wars in the name of the failed capitalist system.’”

  When the BfV man finished, he turned to Ryan and Eastling. “It goes on to say Tobias Gabler and Marcus Wetzel were killed because they were high-profile bankers who dealt with the accounts of German industrialists.”

  Ryan asked, “And this looks real to you?”

  The German shrugged. “It looks real.”

  “But?”

  “But Herr Wetzel was killed over twenty-four hours ago. Herr Gabler days before that. Normally this would have been distributed already. I don’t understand why it hasn’t been.”

  Eastling said, “Maybe Scheuring was supposed to distribute it herself, but since she was burned to a crisp in Switzerland, she never got a chance.”

  The BfV officer shook his head. “If this was a real RAF operation, someone from their propaganda wing would send this to the media. Not the actual bomber.”

  The German began discussing the communiqué with some of his colleagues, so Jack and Nick walked out into the hallway.

  Ryan said, “All nice and neat in one package.”

  Eastling clearly was thinking the same thing. He struggled with his words, finally saying, “It does look suspiciously convenient for us, I’ll give you that.”

  Ryan said, “This is a plant if I’ve ever seen one.”

  The English counterintelligence officer seemed to recover from his doubt. He stopped in the narrow dark hall and turned to Jack. “Have you ever seen one?”

  Ryan had to admit that he had not. He did not investigate crime scenes, but he was a hell of an analyst, and he had dealt with all sorts of opposition disinformation campaigns. This “evidence” did not pass Jack Ryan’s sniff test.

  They went back in the living room and stood over the bodies. The detectives were trying to match faces to booking photos of known RAF members. So far, they’d ID’d five of the dead, but they had no record of the other four. One of the detectives sent his partners into the bedrooms to look for purses and wallets to try to figure out who they were.

  As Jack and Nick looked over the corpses lined up on the floor of the living room, Jack said, “These people, along with another guy two blocks up the street, managed to shoot nine cops and commandos? I don’t believe that for a second.”

  Eastling shook his head. “They walked right into some sort of a trap. Might be a leak in German security.”

  “There is another possibility.”

  “What’s that?”

  Jack said, “Think about it. What if it was the Russians? If the RAF was being set up for what happened in Switzerland, the Russians would have to ensure that no one in the cell would be taken into custody to proclaim their innocence. What better way to make sure nobody talks to the police than turning the arrest into a full-on gun battle? All you would need to make that happen is a shooter with a line of sight on the scene. Once the German commandos started dropping, there weren’t going to be any RAF survivors to proclaim their innocence.”

  Eastling sighed, but Ryan saw definite cracks in the certainty that had been on display before
the briefcase turned up. “You have nothing but conjecture. We don’t know who was in the sniper’s hide. Could have been an RAF gunman who heard the shooting and decided to fight back from that location.”

  Jack just shook his head. He couldn’t prove anything, but his gut told him he and Eastling were up against forces much larger than those of a German left-wing terrorist cell.

  66

  Present day

  Jack Ryan, Jr., and Victor Oxley made it back to London just before five p.m. Of course, Ryan knew better than to return to his flat. Instead, he rented a room at a motor lodge on Wellesley Road in Croydon. Oxley had recommended it, explaining that he came to London from time to time and always stayed there, and he assured Ryan it was an out-of-the-way and suitable place for a “no questions asked” encounter, which was, Oxley pointed out, just what the situation called for now.

  They had made one stop along the way. After growing tired of Oxley’s pestering, Jack pulled into the parking lot of a supermarket and fanned some bills out of his wallet, passing them over to the former spy. Oxley ducked into the market and returned ten minutes later with two shopping bags.

  They pulled back onto the road, heading for the lodge, and this was when Jack learned Oxley had bought a fifth of Irish whiskey, a liter of cola, and two large bottles of beer. As for food, he’d picked up some snack cakes and a stick of sausage that looked to Jack as if it might have been as old as Oxley himself.

  As Jack suspected when Oxley described the place, the motor lodge was a complete dump. There was peeling paint, and burns on the carpet and mold on the walls, but each room was over its own tiny one-car garage, clearly for the express purpose of hiding the vehicles of whoever was staying inside.

  They pulled into their allotted garage and closed the door, then Jack and Victor heaved the Russian mob enforcer out of the trunk of the Mercedes. Victor yanked the man’s jacket up over his head so he couldn’t see. They then frog-walked him up a flight of stairs out of the garage and into the hotel room.

  The bathroom was tiny and filthy, but it was a good place to stash a Russian gang member for a few minutes. There was exposed piping along the walls, and Oxley expertly tied the man in a fashion that kept his hands high behind his back so that he could not maneuver more than a couple inches without causing himself incredible pain in his shoulders. Oxley then took a pillow with a suspicious stain on it from the bed, removed the pillowcase, and hooded the man with it.

  They shut the Russian in the bathroom, and then Jack turned up the television in the bedroom. He and the fifty-nine-year-old Brit stepped out onto a tiny balcony that overlooked a busy six-lane road.

  Oxley was angry the lodge did not have a single piece of glassware for his use, but he made do by drinking a few long gulps out of the bottle of cola and then filling the bottle back up to the top of the neck with Irish whiskey. They sat on cheap aluminum chairs on the balcony while Jack watched the man drink and eat for a few minutes, using every last vestige of his patience, telling himself that the more satiated and sauced the ex–English spy was, the more he might talk.

  Finally Jack said, “All right, Oxley. I want to question that asshole in the bathroom, but first I would like some answers from you. Do you feel like talking?”

  The white-bearded Englishman seemed relaxed; Jack was sure it had something to do with all the whiskey in his cola. He shrugged, said, “First, start by calling me Ox. Second, know this. I’d rather not talk to you at all, but I don’t fancy armed Russian thugs chasing me till the end of my days, so I’m willing to work with you to get this all sorted. Still, there are things I can say, and there are things I’ll take with me to me grave.”

  Jack opened a bottle of beer and took a sip. “Fair enough. Let’s start with something easy. When did you get back from Russia?”

  After a moment, Oxley said, “I returned from the Motherland about twenty years ago.”

  “What have you been doing the past twenty years? Can you talk about that?”

  “I’ve been around. Here and there. Collecting government assistance, mostly.”

  “Unemployed?”

  “On and off the dole, lad. Do what I can.” He shrugged. “But not much more.”

  Now Ox asked a question: “How is it that the son of the bleedin’ American President knows about me?”

  Jack said, “My father wanted info on Bedrock, and he thought Sir Basil Charleston would know. I was over here anyway, so I went to ask him. Basil told me you were Bedrock. I tracked you from there, using SAS contacts.”

  “Good ol’ Basil.”

  “He thinks you want him dead.”

  Oxley cocked his head. “Does he, now?” Oxley shook his head with a chuckle. “No. Charleston wasn’t part of the dirty tricks I was involved with. Old Basil didn’t do me any favors, but I can’t say he’s all bad.”

  “He said you operated behind the Curtain. You fit in like a native.”

  “My mum was from Omsk, in Siberia. She defected with her parents through Berlin, back before the wall. She met an English Army officer and they moved to the UK. Settled in Portsmouth. Dad became a fisherman, he wasn’t home much. My mum became part of the local Russian émigré community, so I grew up speaking more Russian at home than I did English.”

  Oxley gulped from his bottle. “And why on earth was your father interested in an old story like Bedrock?”

  Jack had brought along the photocopied page from the Swiss police report. He pulled it out of his jacket and handed it over to Oxley.

  Oxley looked at the page, then reached into his pocket and scrounged around for a moment for a pair of reading glasses. He put them on and looked at the page again.

  “It’s bloody German.”

  “Yes. But your code name is on there in pencil that someone erased. Next to a story from the Swiss police of a man who was detained after the bombing of a restaurant in Rotkreuz, Switzerland.”

  Oxley nodded very slowly, almost imperceptibly.

  “So you remember.”

  Oxley looked off into space, as if recalling a moment in the distant past. “I was ordered to track down a rumor in the East about a killer the KGB called Zenith.”

  Jack wondered if Basil had been untruthful about Bedrock’s lack of involvement with Zenith, or if he’d just forgotten. Ryan said, “Zenith was in Western Europe. Why did you go to the East?”

  “The first rumors about Zenith came from the Czechoslovakians. Two of their investigators working on a case in Prague were found floating facedown in the Vltava River. A Russian staying at a hotel in the area disappeared in a hurry without paying his bill. A search of the man’s room turned up some luggage. In it was a KGB cipher book with some writing on the inside flap. The Czechs managed to break enough of the code to decipher the word ‘Zenith.’ Whether or not that was the code name of the owner of the book with the Russians, no one knew, but ‘Zenith’ stuck nonetheless.

  “The Czechoslovakians went to the KGB, but the Russians said they knew nothing about anyone named Zenith, nor did they admit to having any operatives in Prague.”

  Jack said, “Yeah, well, the KGB lied a lot.”

  “True,” Oxley said, “and I’m sure the Prague police were thinking the same thing, but suddenly the back alleys off Wenceslas Square started to look like a KGB convention. Russian spies rained down on the city, and all of them were hunting for this Zenith character.”

  “And the UK learned this from a source in Prague?”

  “MI5 got wind. Don’t ask me how. Before it was all over, he killed twice more in Czechoslovakia, and four men in Hungary.”

  “All cops?”

  “No. In Budapest he killed employees with the State Bank of Hungary, as well as a smuggler.”

  “A smuggler?” Jack asked.

  “Human smuggler. He was a bloke that helped defectors over the border. It was common in Hungary back then,” Oxley said. “Anyway, from our intelligence we got the impression Zenith was not KGB. He was some sort of a rogue. The KGB thought he was an
ex–GRU man, who was now being run by a Western power. We were worried we would be implicated in his actions.”

  “Why would the UK be implicated in his actions?”

  Oxley’s chuckle was low and raspy. “Because we had an asset operating behind the Iron Curtain ourselves, doing a similar type of work.”

  Jack’s eyebrows rose. Things were starting to make sense. “You?”

  “Maybe you aren’t quite as daft as I took you for.” Oxley played with his reading glasses, moving them through his fingers slowly. He said, “Yeah. I was in Prague when Zenith was active there. I was in cover as a Russian, I was there alone, so naturally I was interviewed by the Czechs. I talked my way out of it, but when the killings continued in Hungary, some dim bulb in London thought I might get tied to the crimes. Zenith might hurt relations, right when we were hoping for a thaw. This was at the height of the arms race, but we liked the way things were heading. Poland was well on its way to democracy, Reagan and Thatcher had the Soviet Union by the knackers. There were still many battles to fight, but a new age was dawning. Zenith was upsetting the apple cart.”

  “So you were sent to kill Zenith so that the KGB couldn’t blame the West for a rogue assassin running around whacking everybody?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I couldn’t bloody find him. Neither could KGB.”

  “But why did you go to Switzerland?”

  “I was following some KGB geezers in Budapest who were themselves hunting Zenith. I was hoping they might lead me to him. I was quite surprised when they traveled to the West, to Zug, to visit a bank.”

  “And then people started getting killed there, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “Zenith killed them?”

  Oxley shrugged, a slow, tired gesture on his big frame; a long stream of air escaped through his nose. He watched the cars roll by on the road below the balcony. “Depends on who you believe.”

  Ryan looked at Oxley. “Call me crazy, but right now, I believe you.”

  Victor Oxley smiled a little. “Then, yes. Zenith killed the lot of them.”