Commander-In-Chief

by Tom Clancy

  And while all this took place in the Baltic just to the northwest of Kaliningrad, due west of the oblast, far out in international waters, Russia’s secret weapon waited two hundred twenty feet below the surface. The Severodvinsk-class submarine Kazan, having just arrived on station from the Northern Fleet, had been ordered to sit to the side of the action on the first day of combat so that it could save itself for the bigger fish.

  The sonar technicians on board the Kazan tracked and classed dozens of active contacts, but they were concerned with only a few of them. To the south of their position, the Navy of Poland lingered not far from its territorial waters. Two larger Oliver Hazard Perry–class frigates and a Kaszub-class corvette were all significant threats to Russia’s Baltic Fleet, but so far they had not made any aggressive movements toward Kaliningrad, so the Kazan waited silently and patiently.

  Poland also had a submarine that could potentially pose a danger, but the GRU, Russian military intelligence, had recent pictures of it entering dry dock for a month of repairs.

  The captain of the Kazan had come all this way for a fight, and he was looking forward to the challenges ahead, but he did not find himself disappointed at all that he had been held in reserve while the older Varshavyankas of the Baltic Fleet earned the glory today in the largest naval battle in decades.

  No, not at all. Because he knew the real challenge would come in the form of the American surface Navy, as well as American antisubmarine aircraft in the sky above. He was saving himself for the Poles and the Americans, and if he did his job correctly, no one would know he was here until it was too late for either nation to do anything to stop him.

  The Varshavyankas of the Baltic Fleet would die in this war, he had no doubt in his mind. But he had every intention of surviving this and bringing his Kazan to port in Kaliningrad with a heroes’ welcome as soon as the West sued for peace.

  • • •

  Jack Ryan, Jr., passed through Belgian immigration after getting his passport stamped, then walked by the luggage carousels without stopping. He’d only brought a roll-aboard and a backpack along for the trip, so he shaved twenty minutes off his arrival.

  He was relieved to make it through customs without getting his bag searched, although it was loaded with only a few surveillance devices, like FLIR cameras, NVGs, and high-end binoculars. He figured any real check of his belongings would have pegged him as some sort of a nut, but nothing he had with him was in any way illegal, so he’d not been terribly worried. Still, he wanted to get started with his surveillance here, so he was glad to make it through without delay.

  Outside the arrivals hall, Jack smiled the biggest smile he’d displayed in two weeks. Dom and Ding were waiting for him, both standing next to a new black Audi Q3 SUV. Jack hadn’t seen either man in six weeks, so there was an energetic round of embraces and back slaps, then all the men loaded up into the Audi with Chavez behind the wheel, and they left the airport.

  “When did you guys arrive?” Jack asked.

  Caruso said, “Just long enough ago to pick up the wheels and unload at the safe house. We had some excitement getting out of Lithuania.”

  “How bad was it?” Jack asked.

  Ding replied, “Let’s put it this way. The G550 is grounded here till six bullet holes in the horizontal stabilizer get patched.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Russian Spetsnaz attacked the airport in Vilnius just as we were getting out of there.”

  Again, Jack felt the pain of not being with his mates when they needed him. It was similar to how he was feeling about Ysabel now. She was less than 120 miles away from him in a hospital, but he had no plans to go see her until this entire affair was over.

  She wasn’t safe around him, after all.

  Jack recovered and said, “Well, this op will probably be a little boring to you guys, considering what you just went through. We’re going to follow a smack addict around in the hopes he meets with some assholes I ran into last week in Luxembourg.”

  Chavez said, “We don’t mind a little quiet surveillance. Sherman rented us a place just a few blocks south of where Salvatore is staying at the Stanhope Hotel. We just have eyes on the front of the building from our poz, but of course Gavin still has us tied in to the hotel’s security camera. We’ve been monitoring him on a laptop while waiting for you to land, and we’re recording everything for playback, just in case something is missed.”

  “What’s he up to today?”

  “He hasn’t left his room.”

  Jack said, “Yeah, he was out late last night. I watched him on the plane for a while. Drinks in the lobby bar, then he went out the front door around ten. Don’t know what time he got back to the room.”

  “Three a.m.,” Chavez said. “But he wasn’t operational last night.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The bastard staggered in drunk. He was just boozing it up in a bar somewhere. Whatever he’s doing over here, apparently it involves him waiting around a lot. If he’s here to take pictures of some celeb, my guess is that celeb isn’t here yet. And if there is some bigger reason for his visit, he’s just in a holding pattern. Waiting on instructions, maybe.”

  • • •

  Once they were all in the third-floor walk-up apartment they were using for a safe house, the three men sat around a table. Chavez said, “We want to know what you’ve been up to, and we have some stories to tell you about what happened in the Baltic, but my read of this op gives me the impression we don’t really know what our timeline is here. For that reason we need to save the chitchat and get down to work.”

  Jack nodded. “Yeah. Salvatore has reserved his room at the hotel for three more days, but whatever he’s up to could happen anytime. We need to act before he goes operational. I have no idea when that will be, but I want to be able to track him. I have a GPS tracker and a RAT to put on his phone so we can listen in to his calls and read his texts.”

  Chavez asked, “You know how you want to get that on him?”

  “I thought about a direct approach. Confronting him about Rome, slipping the RAT and the GPS beacon on him while I did it. The only problem is—”

  Chavez finished the sentence. “That your presence here might scare him enough to get him to blow off his mission. In which case we’d lose the chance to find out what he’s up to.”

  “Exactly,” Jack said. “I might be able to strong-arm him into giving me the intelligence I need, but there’s a chance he won’t talk, or he’ll just lie.”

  Caruso said, “I have an idea, but we’ll have to wait for his next drink binge.”

  Chavez replied, “We’ll use today to get set up. Tell us your plan.”

  • • •

  Salvatore drained the last of his Stella Artois into his mouth and wiped foam from his lips; then he picked up his backpack off the floor and slung it onto his shoulder. He slid off the barstool and headed out the door of the little bistro.

  He leaned against a signpost on the curb, looking at the large selections of brasseries, wine bars, beer pubs, Italian eateries, and even hamburger joints in view, trying to decide where to go next. It was just eleven p.m., so the Italian thought he’d hit one more bar, or perhaps two, here in the European Quarter of Brussels before returning to his room.

  He realized he needed to relieve himself, so he turned into the next bar he saw, a rustic place on a pedestrian-only strip. He stepped inside, saw a few old men at the bar and a bunch of empty tables, and he passed them all, following a sign directing him downstairs to the men’s room.

  He took a narrow masonry staircase down to the basement, followed a turn around stacked kegs of beer, and pushed open the accordion door to the tiny men’s room. He stepped up to the one dirty toilet, unzipped his fly, and closed his eyes.

  He didn’t hear any noise until the accordion door opened behind him. The restroom was large enough
for only one person, so he started to tell the other man to fuck off, but before he could even see who was behind him the light flipped off and he was shoved past the toilet and up against the wall.

  He felt the knife against his lower back.

  The man whispered angrily into his ear, but it was something in a foreign tongue he did not understand. Salvatore said, “English? English?” and the man quickly barked at him again.

  “Your money! Give me your money!” the man said.

  Salvatore couldn’t believe he was being mugged at knifepoint. He felt his wallet pulled from his pants, his pack ripped from his back, and he heard the sound of someone rifling through his belongings. He kept his eyes slammed shut, he didn’t say a word, and he fought the urge to piss down the wall he was pinned against.

  And then, as quickly as the man had appeared, he was gone. First Salvatore felt the pressure of the man holding him against the wall removed, and then his wallet was tossed in the basin of the sink on his right. Last, the knife was pulled away from his back. Before Salvatore could even think about turning around to look, he heard the noise of his backpack being dropped to the ground in the basement outside the bathroom.

  A minute later he left the bar with his backpack over his shoulder. He’d not complained to the manager and he surely hadn’t reported the robbery. He was here in town for reasons that precluded his filing police reports.

  Twenty minutes later, when he was sitting back in his hotel room, he checked his wallet and saw all his money was indeed gone. But his credit cards were there, as well as his Italian driver’s license. He opened his backpack and saw that he’d been relieved of a few euros he’d kept in an outer pocket, but his cameras were still there, as was his mobile. This would have comforted most people, but the Italian didn’t care as much about either of these things as he did the other item in his bag. Frantically his hand fought his way to the bottom of his pack, and he pulled out his bag of smack. He breathed his first sigh of relief since the mugging when he saw his heroin had not been touched.

  • • •

  Dom Caruso ran a thirty-minute surveillance-detection route after his operation to plant the tracker on Salvatore’s backpack and the surveillance software on his mobile phone. His route took him past both Chavez and Ryan, who each sat alone in outdoor late-night cafés drinking beer.

  Once the team was convinced Dom was in the clear, they all returned to their safe house on Rue du Commerce.

  Dom said, “It’s not the most understated way to plant a bug on someone, but it will work. I had him convinced I was just a street criminal who had followed him into the john.”

  Chavez said, “You made a good call and did a good job.”

  “Thanks,” Dom said, then held up a wad of euros. “And I scored sixty-five euros. Do we need to tell Gerry, or can I order us a couple of pizzas for dinner tomorrow?”

  It was a joke, at which Chavez laughed, but Jack was already watching Salvatore’s position on his laptop. “He’s back in his room at the Stanhope.” He then checked the app on his phone that informed him of any use of the man’s mobile. “The RAT did its job. We’ve got visibility on both audio and text messaging, but he hasn’t used either yet.”

  “What about photos, e-mails, that sort of stuff?” Chavez asked.

  Jack looked at all the apps on Salvatore’s phone, visible now on Jack’s laptop. “There’s not a single picture on his phone from Brussels. But he’s got cameras with him, so that doesn’t mean he’s not up here doing some sort of recon. And he doesn’t even have an e-mail app on this thing. Either he’s one hell of a Luddite—”

  Dom said, “Or he’s practicing operational security.”

  “Exactly,” Jack said. “He didn’t impress me with his tradecraft at all in Rome, but this might be a different kind of op. We’ll just have to keep watching him to see what he gets himself into.”

  70

  Vlad Kozlov stood in the doorway of Terry Walker’s bedroom, remaining stone-faced while Walker tearily said good night to his wife and son over the walkie-talkie.

  The routine had been set since Kozlov’s second night here in the islands. Each evening at seven-thirty he and his four security men would deliver Walker and Limonov back to the rented villa on the top of Saint Bernard’s Hill, where Kozlov immediately checked in with the two men maintaining the safe house. Then all six Steel Securitas men would split into two-man teams. Two would sleep while two held inner security in the villa and two more patrolled the grounds.

  Limonov would eat something and retire to his room, then Kozlov would enter Walker’s room, hand him the walkie-talkie for three minutes for him to communicate with his family. Once three minutes was up, he’d take the device and leave the room, locking Walker inside for the night.

  Tonight had been no different from all the others until he returned to the kitchen to pour himself a vodka from the freezer. As soon as he lifted it to his lips, his phone rang.

  “Allo?”

  He recognized the voice of President Valeri Volodin. “Give me a report.”

  Kozlov hadn’t heard from the Russian president personally since before he and Limonov had left London.

  He cleared his throat quickly. “Things are proceeding as planned, Mr. President.”

  “Walker is giving you no trouble?”

  “None.”

  “And Limonov? He is proceeding as advertised?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So . . . no problems at all?”

  “No, sir. Well . . . yes. We did have a security issue, but it has been dealt with.”

  “I pay you so that we do not have security issues.”

  “My apologies, Mr. President, but you pay me to deal with them. A man, an American, took a special interest in the boat where we are holding the family of Walker. I sent mercenaries to warn him off, but he persisted. When it became clear he was going to be a problem, we eliminated the problem very quietly.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Undetermined, but we made sure he was alone. He is out of the picture now, there is nothing to worry about.”

  Volodin barked angrily. “Don’t be a fool, Kozlov, he will have confederates who will come looking for him.”

  “If they do, they will not suspect us, and they will not find us.”

  “Listen to me! I order you to bring in more help. You know this is a matter of particular interest to me. If anything happens to this operation—”

  “Nothing can or will happen, Mr. President.”

  “You interrupt me again and I will have Grankin send someone down to slice your tongue out of your mouth.”

  A short pause. “Izvaneetya.” Sorry.

  “If anything happens to this operation, I will hold you responsible. You can imagine what that means.”

  “I can, Mr. President. I will contact specialists who will add support, another layer of support, to assist in our operation here in the British Virgin Islands.”

  “You will do it now.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  • • •

  The Sikorsky MH-60 Romeo helicopter moved slowly, just barely more than a hover five hundred feet over the blue water of the eastern Baltic. The gray of the helo blended with the gray skies above, a nice feature for an aircraft that did not want to advertise its location to anyone on the surface, or anyone below the surface looking through a periscope.

  This helicopter, call sign Casino One-One, did not own the sky here; it shared it with its sister helicopter, Casino One-Two, which patrolled twenty-three miles to the west.

  The role of both helos was submarine detection, classification, tracking, and ultimately, destruction. To achieve this aim, every few minutes Casino One-One descended to within five hundred feet of the surface, lowered an AN/AQS-22 airborne low-frequency sonar from an umbilical, and dipped it below the ocean surface. The active
sonar signal searched the waters for the two submarines identified the evening before.

  So far neither helo had turned up any contacts beyond the surface ships in the area, of which there were many.

  Each time Casino One-One turned back to the east on its pattern, the two-man, one-woman crew could plainly see the rescue mission continuing in the waters closer to the Lithuanian coast. Four ships had been sunk in a three-hour period the previous evening, and seeing evidence of the slaughter that had taken place on the ocean surface the night before instilled in the flight crew of Casino One-One a special dedication to the mission at hand.

  They lived on a surface ship, after all, and their home was coming this way.

  The James Greer (DDG-102) had no role in the rescue-and-recovery mission of the four Lithuanian naval vessels; that was left to others. The guided missile destroyer was the most dangerous threat to the Russian subs in the water, so it, and its two MH-60 Romeos, would focus on detecting, controlling, and engaging the enemy.

  There were some assumptions made in this search by the American warship. For one, Russia’s Baltic Fleet was known to have a Lada submarine, but it was currently undergoing repairs at the port of Kaliningrad. This meant the two advanced Kilo submarines, called Varshavyankas by the Russians, were the likely culprits of the five torpedo attacks of the previous two days.

  Knowing the identities of the targets meant knowing their offensive and defensive capabilities. The Kilo fired Type 53-65 torpedoes, which had an effective range of 25,000 meters. This meant the two MH-60 Romeos had to dip the waters in a wide arc more than fifteen miles in front of its destroyer to ensure their ship was safe from lurking hunters.

  At present the Greer was nearly twenty miles to the northwest of its two helicopters, so the MH-60 Romeos served as the vanguard with room to spare.