Commander-In-Chief

by Tom Clancy

  Ryan shook his head. “I think I’ve got it. One more question, though. Is he making this offer in secret to the other leaders as well?”

  “He asks for you to relay the message to the others.”

  Jack just gave a soft nod. He said nothing. Just looked at the wall for a moment.

  Molchanova looked uncomfortable now. Finally she said, “Do you have a message you would like me to convey to President Volodin? If so, I promise you it will go from your mouth to his ear. I will not report on this, nor will I tell anyone about your message.”

  Ryan looked at her a long time before responding. “Yes.”

  She sucked in a small breath of air, her excitement obvious. Nodding, she said, “What is your message, Mr. President?”

  “My message is this: Passing offers through a reporter for a secret summit is no way for national leaders to conduct business. I’ve seen more professional statecraft in my dealings with tribesmen in Togo. If he wants to be treated like the leader of a First World nation, he should try acting like one.”

  Her eyes widened and her jaw tensed, but she did not reply.

  “You have my message, Miss Molchanova.”

  “Mr. President, I cannot tell him this.”

  Ryan shrugged. “Then don’t.” He gave the woman a little nod, turned on his heel, and left the hotel room.

  • • •

  Arnie Van Damm and Scott Adler were in Ryan’s suite when he arrived five minutes later. “I hope you both heard all that.”

  Van Damm said, “Every word. Some response you gave her. She’s probably shaking in her spiked leather boots, trying to figure out how to tell Volodin.”

  Ryan took off his suit coat and hung it from a chair, then sat down on a sofa across from the other men. “He wants to talk to certain NATO members. U.S., France, Germany, UK. Clearly about Central Europe. But he doesn’t want Central European nations present.”

  Van Damm asked, “Why?”

  Jack Ryan knew the answer. “If you’re not at the table, then you’re on the menu.”

  Van Damm said, “Holy Christ! He wants to carve up Europe, just like in the Cold War!”

  Ryan nodded. “It’s Yalta all over again.” The Yalta Conference at the end of World War II was a meeting between the victors to decide the geographical spoils of war.

  Adler said, “You’re not going to Switzerland, are you?”

  Ryan said, “Of course not. If he wants to propose a summit he can do it through official channels. If we have one, it will involve delegates designated by NATO. This isn’t 1945, and I’m not Roosevelt.”

  Adler said, “But he does think he’s Stalin.”

  Ryan said, “He thinks we think he’s Stalin. This whole damn thing was just a bluff to pump up his negotiating power when we sit down at the table.”

  Ryan looked out the window at the view over Copenhagen, and he shook his head in disbelief. “What an asshole.”

  • • •

  An hour later Ryan sat in the suite of German president Marion Schöngarth. The two of them ignored the coffee service in front of them, while Ryan relayed his conversation with the journalist from Channel Seven.

  When he finished, Schöngarth said, “He is after the redivision of Central Europe, a new redivision, to make up for what Russia lost after the Cold War. Thirty years ago they had no leverage to do anything but grant independence to virtually everyone who demanded it. But now, with Volodin in charge, he thinks he can reclaim some of what Russia lost.”

  Ryan agreed.

  She added, “He wants the Baltic, and to get it, he is leveraging everything. He is threatening Poland, but Poland is his bargaining chip. It’s as if he is saying, ‘If you give me the Baltic, I will turn my tanks away from Poland.’”

  “Exactly right.”

  She thought about the deeper ramifications. “But this means it’s all a bluff, correct? Everything he has done till now is just him trying to up the stakes, to frighten the West into a place where we would be more amenable to a deal.”

  Ryan shook his head slowly. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter if he is bluffing or not. Let’s say he doesn’t want to attack, he wants to win this with hybrid war simply by playing a game of geopolitical chicken with the West. If it fails, if we refuse to get out of his way, there is no way in hell he can ratchet down the saber rattling. He is expecting us to blink, but if we do not blink, he can’t back down. He has arrayed all this potential energy at Lithuania’s doorstep. How can he possibly set the stage for an attack, and then back away from it? He is a volatile individual who is using this volatility to leverage his power. He’s mobilized his troops, he’s brought his ships to combat readiness, and he’s gone on television and announced the Baltic nations are illegal nonstate actors. If we don’t back down, he will have to attack and hope that once the bodies start piling up, the West will lose its appetite for it.”

  Schöngarth said, “And it will only lead to one place.” She paused. “We’re about to go to war with Russia.”

  “It certainly appears that way.”

  She said, “The Russians have five hundred Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad. These missiles have nuclear warhead capability, although we don’t know if they are armed with nuclear devices. The official range of the Iskander is four hundred kilometers, which places it below the five-hundred-kilometer threshold for the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty. But most experts agree the Iskander can reach targets at seven hundred kilometers, with an accuracy of five meters. One decision by Valeri Volodin, and the German parliament can go up in smoke.”

  “I know,” Ryan said. “And right now there is a Russian nuclear missile submarine somewhere off the coast of the U.S. Its presence there renders our ballistic missile defense much less likely to be able to track and destroy an incoming Bulava rocket. It’s there because Volodin wanted the United States in the same boat as Europe when he made his deal for a territorial summit.”

  The German president said, “Then you are in a similar situation as we are, Mr. President.”

  “Similar, but not the same. There is no threat of conventional attack against us like there is here, I recognize this. But I will put every single troop we have in Europe into Lithuania to stop this madman.”

  Just then, Arnie Van Damm apologized to the German president and leaned in to Ryan’s ear. “The French president is on the phone. You need to take it.”

  Ryan excused himself and stepped over to a table with a phone already off the cradle. “Hello, Henri’.”

  The French president said, “Hello, Jack. I wanted to tell you personally. We will stand in the way of the deployment of NATO forces into Lithuania.”

  Ryan wasn’t surprised, but he felt defeated. He’d spent most of a week on this goal, and it had failed.

  The Frenchman said, “The Baltic States are untenable as NATO nations. When Russia was in NATO, well, yes, it made perfect sense. But with Russia as a threat, and small unprotected nations, all of which more naturally fall under the influence of Russia than they do under Western ideals . . . well . . . I am only concerned about Poland. We will make a counterproposal that NATO’s readiness in Poland be upgraded. This will render an attack there less likely.”

  Ryan said, “And an attack in Lithuania more likely. We will be telling Volodin the Baltic is his as long as he doesn’t try for Poland.”

  The French president said, “This is my decision. I have the backing of several other member states.”

  I’m sure you do, Ryan thought. He thanked the president for his call and said good-bye; there was nothing else he could do now.

  He stepped back over to the German president, told her the news. In minutes he and his entourage were on their way back to his suite.

  They did not speak during the walk, because the halls and elevators had not been declared clean by counterintelligence technicians. But the moment they
got back in Ryan’s suite, Adler asked, “What are you going to do now?”

  Ryan said, “I’m going to go to Sweden. I want to appeal to non-NATO states to get some support for our actions. Show them we care about their concerns.”

  Scott Adler broke in here. “You thought that was a tough crowd. Sweden has all but shut down their military. They aren’t going to want to do anything to upset the apple cart any more than Volodin is already doing. The fact Russia knocked their plane out of the sky has them pissed off, but other than a small but decent air force, they aren’t much of a power anymore.”

  “How bad is it?” he asked.

  “Sweden has a good air force, but that’s it. Our view of Sweden’s current defense condition is not optimistic.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning it is our belief that if Sweden decided to begin an aggressive program to build up its military, then in five years it would have the capability to defend itself in place . . . for one week.”

  Ryan said, “So Russia could steam west across the Baltic from Kaliningrad, or south from the North Sea, and they could claim Sweden as their own.”

  “At will, Mr. President.”

  President Jack Ryan rubbed his eyes under his glasses, pressing hard, as if to stanch the overwhelming frustration. “We’ll go to them and ask for overflight rights. Air base access. Supply support for our Navy in the Baltic. We’ll ask for their air force to support our mission in Lithuania. If we pull the trigger and deploy, then we’ll need all the help we can get.”

  “That’s not much, Mr. President.”

  “Well, it’s all they have. I’d like to get Sweden into NATO down the road. If they help us now, I think both Sweden and the rest of NATO could see their way forward to allowing this to happen.”

  59

  Clark dreamt of the pain before he woke to feel it. In his dream he had been at home in bed; Sandy might have been next to him but he could not turn to look. A truck had driven into his bedroom, slowly and without seeming to care, and it had driven onto his bed, pinning him down. His legs were crossed, one on top of the other, so they hurt the worst, but his back was twisted by the big tires, and the heat from the exhaust pipe burned the side of his head, just behind his right ear.

  This was an awful dream, to be sure, but he preferred it to how he felt when he woke. His mind took in the feeling, his body alive with the pain, and his arms and legs were just as slow to operate as they had been when he’d been dreaming.

  He was looking up through the companionway, so he saw a bit of the faint glow from a mostly moonless night, but other than that he was still shrouded in darkness.

  He had no idea how long he’d been lying here, and he also had no idea how badly he’d been hurt, but the worst of it was the side of his head behind his right ear, so he forced his right hand up to touch it, praying the swelling would be on the outside of his skull, and not inside, where he ran the real risk of death, even hours after the injury occurred.

  He touched his fingers to the center of the pain and he did, indeed, feel a massive knot there, which would have been good news, but Clark wasn’t feeling any better about it, because as he’d moved his hand to his head he’d managed to splash himself in the face with seawater.

  If he hadn’t just suffered a concussion, if he hadn’t just woken up from an unconscious state brought on by a violent blow to the head, then Clark would have recognized much more quickly that he was lying in pain in the bowels of a sinking boat. As it happened, it took him several seconds to work this out; only the taste of the water on his lips and the sense his ears were now filling with the wetness and blocking out the noises around him impressed on him how bad his situation had become.

  Now the pain in his head and his back and his legs was all of minor importance. No matter how bad he hurt, no matter what condition he found himself in when he began to move, he had only one objective.

  John Clark was a Navy man, true, but he found himself under no obligation whatsoever to go down with his ship.

  His legs were probably just bruised; his right shin and his left knee had caught the stairs in the companionway. Clark didn’t need a slow-mo replay of the event to know this. His back was killing him, it had seized in spasm, and he didn’t know how the hell he was going to swim when one of the largest chains of muscles in his body refused to cooperate with the orders sent from his brain, but that was a problem he’d have to sort out in a minute or two. For now it was about getting out of the saloon, then out of the cockpit, and finally off the deck before this fifty-two-foot Irwin rolled over and took him down with it.

  He pulled himself out of the water and up the companionway stairs in the darkness. To his right, circuits blew on his radio and weather center with pops and snaps and flashes of light as the seawater reached thigh-high.

  John had watched boats sink before, and he knew the speed of the descent was unpredictable. A boat filling with a foot of water a minute could double or triple this rate instantly as the water found more non-waterproof openings, more ways to fill the air below the waterline. This very phenomenon was happening now, in fact. He’d been conscious no more than two minutes, and already the water had risen from a few inches over the deck of the saloon to three feet.

  He made it up to the cockpit; here he put weight on both his legs and stood up for the first time. He felt weak and unsteady, his head was heavy like he’d been drugged, but he knew this was due to the blow to the head.

  But not entirely. As he wobbled through the cockpit trying to find his gun and his mobile phone he realized the sailboat had begun a heavy list to port. He fought against it for a moment while he kept looking for the two items he did not want to leave the boat without, but quickly he came to his depleted senses and decided his luck of late had been far too bad for him to push it one second more.

  Wearing only a pair of linen pants and boat shoes, he made his way out onto the main deck and leapt into the black water, fought against the agony in his back as he tried to swim away from the boat, at least far enough to avoid being slammed in the head by one of the masts as it came down.

  He gave up on a breaststroke or a crawl, settled for a one-arm sidestroke because of his back pain, and was glad to see his faculties hadn’t been damaged so much he could not still cover water rapidly and efficiently.

  He took a break from his swim to shore, just long enough to watch a few more pops of electrical circuits blow on the deck, then the mast light flashed on and off in a shower of sparks.

  Then the boat rolled over like a dying animal, revealing its keel in the low light of the moon.

  Beyond the sad display a hundred yards away from him, he saw something that excited him for a moment. The lights of a boat in the distance. It was moving, but with no other reference points it was hard to tell if it was coming or going.

  Quickly he told himself to curb his enthusiasm. The lights in the distance weren’t going to be his salvation. He recognized the configuration of the masts from the masthead lights, and he realized he was watching the Spinnaker II round the northern tip of West Seal Dog Island. From the fact he could only make out the white light on the stern, he felt sure it was departing, motoring away to the northeast, perhaps for Anegada Island.

  Not a sound made its way across the water to Clark’s position as the catamaran left his view.

  The lights disappearing in the dark took with them a mother and a child held against their will, their lives the key to unlocking a puzzle with global ramifications.

  Clark started up his sidestroke again, telling himself to keep his mind on his personal situation. It occurred to him that he had no way to prove anything untoward had happened here. His wounds would just make him look like some aging boat renter who slipped on his companionway as he rushed down to see about a leak. The fact that his bilge alarm had not gone off, screaming at 140 decibels, would mean nothing to most investigators, because for
all they knew, the old renter of the Irwin probably hadn’t tested it before setting out.

  Well before first light, the battered and bruised body of a man—alive but too exhausted and broken to swim—floated the last two hundred yards through the gentle surf, washing ashore like trash in the water.

  Clark crawled up the sand, through the morning coral and shell deposits, catching seaweed on his arms and knees as he did so.

  He was exhausted and he was injured, and at the moment he was bereft of a plan. But as he sat there spitting sand out of his mouth, he told himself he’d get back in the fight. He didn’t need a hospital. He just needed the three most important things he’d lost tonight—his phone, his target, and his motherfucking gun.

  • • •

  Jack Ryan, Jr., sat quietly, his body as still as a statue, his eyes locked on Salvatore as he sat at the lobby bar in the Stanhope Hotel. The Italian paparazzo had a drink on the bar in front of him and his mobile in his hand.

  Jack stared intently at the man’s face and did his best to gauge his mood, his intentions. Was he bored, intense, excited, scared? Was this just another day at the office for him, or was he being sent on some mission?

  Jack leaned in, getting as close to the man’s face as he could while still focusing.

  Nothing. It was too hard to tell anything, looking at a man on a computer monitor.

  Jack was sitting at his cubicle, and the security camera feed from the hotel was running on his center monitor in real time, pulled in by Gavin Biery’s IT team.

  This wasn’t surveillance, what Jack was doing. In fact, he thought it was a joke. Unless and until Salvatore got up and did something obvious, Jack knew he’d have no idea what the hell was going on.

  Jack had spent most of the workday looking into Salvatore in one form or another. He started with the man’s history. In his career Salvatore had gone many places, taken and sold thousands of photographs all over Europe, almost all of them of famous people who were just trying to go about their day. It was typical celebrity smash-mouth paparazzo work. But in all these travels, Jack had not found one example of Salvatore working in Brussels.